summer reading notes 3 - edX class on japanese books 1

'Japanese books: from manuscript to print' - Melissa McCormick, Harvard 

Module 1 - Intro

• Books interred inside the Buddhist sculpture of Prince Shotoku (Shotoku Shaishi, figure from C7 Japan)
• Portrays him at age 2, when he stands up and pays homage to Budha, manifesting a relic (eyeball of Buddha) in hands
• Sacred biography - miraculous events through his life = mythical presence
• Thought to be a reincarnation of Buddha - very popular sculpture motif in C13
• This sculpture - can be dated to 1292 by objects inside
• Oldest of its kind
• Much detail to make him childlike
• Eyes are reflective - catch the light Gell - Art & Agency
• = also an icon / iconic presence
• Body would have glowed - pale/white with blue/green head
• Now candle smoke darkens him afterlife of the object
• Lotus seed in his hand - 'relic'
• Sculpture split in half (wari hagi) to fit objects inside the cavity
• Common practice among E-Asian Buddhist sculptures
• This reminds me of a Buddhist statue that had internal 'organs' inside made of silk -- don't remember where I encountered it anymore!!! A temple in Japan maybe?? 

How the sculpture came to Boston

• Purchased in 1930s by Ellery Sedgwick (editor of Atlantic magazine)
• Sedgwick encountered it in a temple in 1930, came back looking for it in 1936 and hired a dealer to find it But how lol... sounds violent
• Came to MFA Boston and curator found objects inside, 1937

Objects inside

• Some in linen bags - but don't know how they might have all fit
• 5 miniature sculptures, 1 shrine sculpture, 1 set of relic beads inside a scroll, then put in a bag and placed in belly
• Aizen - religious king who burns passions/repels Mongol invaders - in chest (heart)
• Important to monk Eizon (c13) who helped propagate the Shotoku cult
• Pamphlets folded creased, unsure where in the body they were
• Separate fragments of paper including ordination slips, depicting Chinese and Sanskrit characters
• Slips given to people ordained as lay monks/nuns, who commit to following the Buddhist way
• Highly personal - one is inscribed on the back with a personal vow
• People wanted something of themselves inside the sculpture, carried through into future lives
• Text as sacred, words sacred in themselves
• Prints of Buddha: from Ippen (an itinerant monk who travelled across Japan and made Buddhism accessible)
• Kamakura period (1185-1333): widespread interest in Shotoku

The scroll (kansusou)

• Unrolled from right to left
• Sheets of paper glued together - made of mulbery fibres (kozo), very soft, absorbant, light, thin
• Writing bleeds through so you could annotate on the back and see this from the front -- unique to scroll
• 'Shinnyokan': Contemplation of Suchness
• Kanji and katakana
• Personal copy - includes pronounciation notes for kanji
• End of scroll has: date (1282), no mounting material (very informal)
• No cover, unlike other highly sacred texts/scrolls (sutras)
• Including migaeshi-e: picture appended to start of sutra

The pasted page (detchoso)

• Small books made of dry, crispy paper: paper is ganpi fibre mixed with other materials like clay and vegetable fibres
• Binding: folded paper glued together into pages
• Writing on this object is 'kana': syllabic alphabet, phonetic, vernacular
• Very personal
• Range of formality in objects - some more like sutras, more ordered, with silk binding
• Well-used: everyday devotion

Lotus Sutra

• Hanging scroll from Heian period (794-1186): Lotus Sutra fragment cut out of scroll and mounted vertically
• Patterned/ornamented paper: making surface sacred
• Contains paintings in margins
• Lotus Sutra text demands worship/veneration: rewards if you practice, punishment if not

Pocket binding

• Papers folded and sewn at open edge, creating 'pockets' out of each page
• Simple binding using twisted paper as 'string' = 'monk's binding'
• Pockets prevented ink bleeds from showing due to double layer
• Could also hide/contain extra sheets of paper

Accordion style book

• Paper folded into multiple sections - small and compact
• The book in the Shotoku sculpture was given to Library of Congress so looking at a similar one: an accordion Lotus Sutra remounted as 8 scrolls: lavish, elaborate
• Woodblock printed in China (1160) then imported to Japan - Pan-Asian bookmaking tradition
• Includes illustration of Hell, where you would go if you disobeyed Sutra: transformed into animals, beaten
• Accordion creases can still be seen - damage, helped by new scroll format
• Only Buddhist books were woodblock printed in Japan until C17

End of module 1

theory / praxis / 'kindness worker'

There's a lot of discourse on 'echo chambers' being the death of political conversation but I really do think that echo chambers can do a lot of harm on Twitter. I started following MLs because they had a lot of really valuable leftist perspectives, and the more of them I followed the more it appeared that they were the ONLY leftists with the ONLY "correct" perspective, which is especially mindboggling when you think about their philosophy itself, which is very much centered around combating US imperialism and warmongering with China (a good thing to resist obviously) by dying on the hill of the nation-state (perplexing???)

I think I give way too much equal benefit of the doubt to people. Some ML will tweet something while on the toilet and I'll spend hours using my full brain power to try and understand their perspective. Because I haven't read a lot of theory at all when it comes to socialism/communism I want to stay really open minded and understand why people think the way they do, but I think I spend too much time trying to decode ML ideas - like, way more time than actually doing anything useful. They have such a strong us-or-them ideology that you can get really easily sucked in. 

I did the LeftValues quiz and my results were: 

Revolutionary 70.6% - 29.4% Reform 

Scientific 47.1% - 52.9% Utopian (I'm neutral on this as I don't really know anything about dialectics)

Central 45.0% - 55.0% Decentral (I also have no idea, I've never really thought about this)

Internationalist 62.5% - 37.5% National (I'm surprised this isn't more skewed towards internationalism considering the MLs really didn't like it when I said borderless solidarity struggles were more interesting than uncritical jingoism and licking repressive state boot for free online) 

Party 46.2% - 53.8% Union (Yeah I also am pretty neutral on this - I'm definitely very ambivalent about the idea of a 'vanguard party') 

Production 23.6% - 76.4% Ecological

Conservative 27.9% - 72.1% Progressive

And it said I was into Council Communism and Eco-Marxism; it also said I was 0% Marxist-Leninist

The rapid way that you get sucked into this kind of stuff was demonstrated when I told people I was 0% ML and it made me interested in reading Lenin in order to understand why the quiz thought I disagreed with him; people were all like "ML is what tankies call themselves, they are Stalinists" and i was like wow so there are communists who aren't tankies??? Where have they been?? Why did I get stuck with the tankies????? and I'm glad that when I was 16 and angsty about my identity, wanting to reconnect with my Chinese roots, confused by the sinophobic media, I wasn't on Twitter because I would definitely have just become a tankie instead of letting myself do the soul-searching and introspection by myself, and through Sine Theta, in a space not dominated by other people's writings, so that I could come to independent conclusions (especially through my own first-person observations) about anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, police and prison abolition, border abolition. I told someone that I don't really know what kind of "-ist" I am, but I know that I want a world governed by kindness and compassion, where we all take care of each other by providing everything people need for free and allowing communities to thrive. 

I think it's important for everyone to come to an anti-capitalist perspective on their own and THEN to go and read theory / think about different schools of thought when it comes to how to combat capitalism/implement socialism. It means that you're secure in yourself and your thinking and don't get swayed easily by mob mentality/peer pressure/tribalism. I know that my convictions are right when it comes to these fundamentals. 

Anyway, so I'm still reading a lot of different stuff and trying to just inhale information. 

I'm not not open to MLs (for now, as I'm asking a ton of questions to someone who is an ML and has offered to have a discussion) but I'm just thoroughly confused by this investment in nationalism. I'm also thinking about the inherent privilege of diaspora and being overseas - the second you leave the country and are economically tied to things abroad you have divorced yourself from the reality of China! Even migrants who smuggle themselves into the UK to pick cockles in the sea are using that money to build empty mansions back in Fujian. Diaspora MLs will get super excited about the prospect of moving "back" to China via getting a job or doing a degree, both of which would put them in the 1% of China -- they speak English, they have all of this prestige from being overseas. They obviously won't see the harsh, unequal reality of China. If there are 60 million people in China who live on less than 1000RMB per month, how can China still be this Marxist utopia that needs total defense online?? 1000RMB means nothing to any normal middle-class family. How can such inequality be allowed in a state that still gets defended as a bastion of socialism? Why the binary thinking that if you think a single critical thought about the PRC, you're evil and a reactionary or a 'fake leftist'? 

I read Vijay Prashad's interview with Qiao Collective today and on this, he says that Marxism/dialectics isn't about binaries and either/or. He says it doesn't matter whether China is communist or capitalist (which I think it does, because MLs spend so much energy upholding China's so-called communism to the point where they'll either deny the existence of the Uyghur camps or even celebrate them as successful counterterrorism measures which is... baffling) but that it's important that China adapted to modern industry in order to develop the nation and better serve the people. But this is confusing to me, because it's precisely the 'people' that were sacrificed in order to make China rich - the peasants who precariously migrated to the South to work in factories without the ability to chagne their residencies for better treatment, who got AIDS because they had to sell their blood to survive. Clearly the PRC is not going to suddenly stop all this in 2025 and confiscate all of Jack Ma's wealth and then redistribute it to these guys. It feels like the judgement of who/what is "real left" and who/what is "fake left" who manipulate leftist language/vocabulary for reactionist intentions -- never mind what those intentions actually are, I almost never see any kind of evidence/analysis of what makes some leftists fake and others real, lke the CCP, which is apparently truly communist even though its actions are all capitalist??? 

So yeah I have a lot of thinking and reading to do but I'm glad that talking to different people has allowed me to get away from this dangerous tankie path, and that my common sense has led me to fundamentally question the ML tendency to jingoism. Knowing that other leftists exist has really helped lol.

summer reading notes 2 - quick list

jotting down some stuff i hope to read in july (in order): 

tina campt

'the intimacies of 4 continents' by lisa lowe

'decolonisation is not a metaphor' by tuck and yang

thomas sankara

saidiya hartman

the 'asian diasporic visual cultures and histories' journal

lenin (apparently i'm 0% marxist leninist)

ho chi minh

summer reading notes 1: guano

My habit is to take handwritten notes but I plan on doing a lot of random summer reading so I'll need a better system of being able to find stuff again ages from now. Transcribing onto here. 

Goffe, Tao Leigh, '"Guano in their Destiny": Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture', Amerasia Journal, 45:1 (2019), pp. 27-49. 

• Guano (seagull droppings - mountains of waste) = multimillion dollar industry in mid-C19 (specifically 1845-1880)
• 100,000 Chinese indentured laborers in Peru
• Known as 'white gold' - popular until rise of chemical fertiliser in 1909
• Tusán: Chinese in Peru
• Up to 20% of Peruvians could have Chinese ancestry
• Chinese presence and absence
• Creolisation (Glissant) vs Indigenisation (Wynter): who has claim to stolen land?
• "The mutilation of flesh and (...) the decay of bones as foundational to contending with the enslaved and indentured presence in the Americas" (28)
• Hortense Spillers
• "Theft of the body and volition" (28)
• 'Sedimentation': "Layering of racialised experiences" , "model for imagining histories of relation and transformation in intimate connection to the land." (28)
• Potential for decoloniality and how asians fit into it
• The indentured body is not property (enslaved) but it also can't own property (not fully 'human')  - the Chinese body enters the landscape
• Guano work as refuse (waste) and refusal (not wanting to work)
• Mutiny on ships
• Reading archives and looking for subversion from workers (who are silent in documents)
• *** Tina Campt - black vernacular photography historian ***
• Decontinentalising - no more USA-centric analysis
• Instead: Peru's Chincha Islands
• Centering islands not mainland: archipelagic (remapping, alternative geographies)
• + Caribbean archipelago: 'archipelagical thinking' can help us link these sites of similar histories to account for certain absences (29) - a chain, enmeshed, not comparative
• Blackbirding: kidnapping indigenous Australasians to do guano work, 1860s
• "A relational approach to the colonial archive is critical because it is not an attempt to collapse difference among distinct and specific histories, but rather to understand histories of violence as entangled and conterminous, abutting each other in the strata of the hemisphere" (29)
• "Racial sedimentation is the process by which different ethnic groups become ossified in the bedrock of the hemisphere" (29)
• Race is constructed, fixed through labor
• "Fixed in nature, signifyin an unresolved yet ambivalent state that conforms to neither human nor nonhuman agency." (29)
• Guano ironically most and least valuable
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Jackson (Soledad Brother) - transformation of people into fertiliser as metaphor for racialisation through labor, which in turn fuels capitalism and colonialism
• USA built on their backs - their destiny is guano, on which elites walk and build
• Guano islands are contested - USA Guano Islands Act of 1856 let people annex uninhabited islands for US
• Resulted in 200+ islands claimed
• Chinese laboreres as solution post-emancipation (1854) but also social problem
• Lisa Lowe, Saidiya Hartman: "What (...) are the ethics of reproducing violence or romance in narrating past lives?" (30)
• "The human body is central to this intimate materiality and it is at these material limits that we must be critical of the category of human in the way that Caribbean diasporic intellectuals such as Sylvia Wynter have been." (30)
• Listening for not listening to
• 'Chinese abolitionism' movement began in 1874 when people found out about conditions in Cuba, Peru
• Important distinction between indenture and slavery: "guise of consent" in indenture contract (33)
• False promise of eventual freedom
• Photo of Chinese guano diggers by Alexander Gardner, 1865
• Laborers' bodies barely visible - they are the cliff landscape
• Danger of falling into pits
• Islands = little chance for escape
• Series Rays of Sunlight from South America - romanticisation of unbearable conditions: heat, toxic fumes
• 'Guano art' (c. 1880) - art in a bottle made with different color guanos
• Style of Andrew Clemens sand art C19
• Did CHinese workers make this? Was this a refusal to work?
• Maybe American/Euro sailors, who sometimes waited 8 months for guano to be loaded onto ship (35)
• Guano plot device in 'Dr No' James Bond novel, set on guano island in Jamaica as Dr No's lair
• 'Coolie' as central to different ideas of freedom: in US, it was 'slavery by another name'; in Caribbean, it represented transition towards free labor (38)
• Triangulation of race: Black, white, Asian
• James Bond/UK spies international adventures --> Empire
• Dr No (half Chinese and frustrated by racial identity) has 'Chigroes' as henchmen to oversee workers - understanding of racialised labor divisions in guano
• Anachronism of guano in c20: temporal play
• Discourse about / surrounding guano constantly erase Chinese human labor: focus on birds, nature -- the humans are refuse(d)
• Today, Caribbean islands are offshore banks and "sites of suspicion regarding flows of Chinese currency" (39)
• Anxiety about Chinese takeover of Wall St 'colonisation' of Caribbean
• Indenture ships - chaotic, messy due to inacurrate records of names, misunderstanding of inter-ethnic dynamics etc. Not 'free labor' since this would be much clearer/more efficient with more voluntary behavior from workers
• "Caribbean Chinese surnames are often the hyphenated whole names of the male migrant who first arrived in the Caribbean" (41)
• Defy Euro and Sino conventions - new genealogy
• Jamaica's St Mary and Portland records used 'bodily marks' to identify people which tells stories of violence
• Cramming bodies onto ships to save space - but they need space to breathe: in 1855, 300 Chinese on a ship to Peru died of suffocation (43)
• "Indenture was designed to be distinct legally from enslavement, though it had similar infrastructure, methods, and materials" (43)
• 'Brookes' slave ship diagrams shows bodies but indenture ships don't
• "The ship is a space of racial enclosure, and thus, it is also a violent space of the transfiguration of race" (43)
• Fragments to create an archive to try and imagine the workers ' lives
• "Guano transforms the laborer in to a living dead subjectivity - 'living corpses' - that is the liminality of indenture." (45)

bad poems #10

before i came to the uk i thought all british food was bad
and especially beans on toast just looked positively disgusting because it oozed with ketchup
but then i started to really enjoy beans
i would always have english breakfast and scoop up all the beans
one time the lady at the cafeteria gave me a whole plate of beans
i made tiktoks about beans
but then i started taking too long to eat the beans and they would get cold
and i dont like cold beans
so i stopped liking beans

SSRIs

It's my last "Friday of Week 1 of Michaelmas Term" because I'm in final year now, although I guess there's a distinct possibility I'll be staying for my Master's so I suppose I can't be too sure about this being my last Friday of Week 1 of Michaelmas Term. I was going to make this post on Tumblr talking about my day yesterday but I figured i could do it here instead since it's been a while and I feel quite a lot better than I did last time, thank you antidepressants and third year for helping me to truly, truly stop worrying and love the bomb.

I haven't got an essay due until next week so I've been focusing on grad school applications this week. Yesterday morning I had yogurt, granola, and strawberries for breakfast and headed to the SSL café with my Keepcup. I had a latte and soon my friend Eleni dropped by on her way to a tutorial and we chatted - she always has so many things to say, when we talk (which so far hasn't been that often, I don't know her very well yet) I always feel like my brain is going 100km per hour to keep up with her. Rachel dropped in as well. I edited some pieces for Sine Theta and generally checked things off the to-do list I'd scribbled onto a post-it and taped to my laptop keyboard.

Lunch was a simple soba with pok choy and chicken (paprika, garlic, cumin, mirin) - sweet and good, but it was one of those moments where I took a really long time to eat it and it got cold and an hour passed and I just didn't feel like it anymore, so I did end up throwing a bit of it away at the end. I packed up to go back to the café and do more work, but then remembered that my tutor Julia had said I could call her to discuss US grad schoolk so I sat down to do that - she was so, so, so kind and encouraging and actually insisted on reading my (very bad) first draft for Yale so that was awesome. After talking with her I felt really excited and inspired to write my next draft which is what I did for the whole afternoon until it was time for my evening activities.

I first went with Rachel to the Queer Studies Network mixer, which was a networking thing for academics. I had a lot of wine (a cup each of white and red) which on an empty stomach meant I was soon slurring my speech. After slightly embarrassing myself for an hour or so I had to go meet with Sophie to attend the Industry magazine launch, which we promptly left after arrival once we had run into Dan (whom I had finally met last week for the first time when we were teaching Fiction and Non-Fic editing at the Isis masterclass and really hit it off because we both just decided to act like we already knew each other and skip the introductions and awkward small talk) and Kwan Ann, whom I was finally now meeting for the first time after being mutuals on Twitter for a while. She made an uncomfortable joke about Sine Theta rejecting her twice, which was awkward but what can I do, it's nothing personal. We tried to check out a "jazz night" advertised at a townie pub (there was no music), then went to another pub on Cornmarket where we got a fancy bottle of wine to share. We picked the wine with the coolest name, which was La Forge. After polishing that one off, we headed off to Spoons and got some pitchers of a blue cocktail that tasted a bit like childhood cough medicine as well as some chips. Gabriel sent me a Pimm's which was adorable and very much appreciated. We talked for a really long time and eventually split up at midnight. It started raining soon after we went outside, and after we all split up I took out my umbrella and just listened to the patter of rain coming down heavy. I had a hole in the heel of my Converse that I had unsuccessfully tried to remedy with duct tape last week, and my shoes started filling up with water. I squelched back to my room and it was so quiet on St Cross Road that I could cross the street whenever I wanted. I had some hot water and went to bed.

I can't sleep, again, so I'm here to tapoter un peu so that hopefully all the thoughts running around in my brain have somewhere to go instead of my head.

I've started rereading Do Not Say We Have Nothing and it is still exquisite. In novels people are always quoting stuff, like they know a ton of Literature by heart. Obviously I know that, especially in the past, people were probably able to quote stuff a lot, but there's a part for instance in this book where Zhuli, in a moment of crisis, thinks of a quote from Faust that she heard orally just the other day. In contrast I feel like words come in from one ear and out the other. I'll remember ideas and events (though as the start of my previous post attested I seem to forget really important stuff as well) but I could never just quote a whole chunk of text from something I read or heard in passing.

The closest thing I have to that is this single-line poem from Yanyi, which I'm not even sure I have word for word: "There are places I can't go, like outside my body." It really struck me when I read it and I've thought about it a few times in the few days since I've read it, not only in terms of my heart palpitations but also how I hate things like mindfulness/yoga/Headspace/meditation because they make me acutely aware of my body which is an extremely uncomfortable feeling and also how I often imagine myself in the third person as I'm experiencing events.

I actually don't really have that much to write about, which is annoying. There's a rabbit hole about social media I could go down but I'm not sure if I really have the energy to do it right now. But I know that if I clamber upstairs back into bed I'm going to start wildly jumping from topic to topic in my head again, so now I'm not super sure what to do. I suppose I could go back to reading but I'm kind of scared to get sucked back in too much and sleep too late and be tired all of tomorrow.