I was talking to some buddies about why all of us agreed to move to New York City instead of, say, somewhere clean, friendly and beautiful. Like an island in the Pacific where we can all be marine biologists, doing field research in the day and hanging out at a beach-side bar at night. But of course we all know that English majors don't live near beaches. That's what southern Californians do, duuude.
One favorite adages from elementary school in Taiwan was 仁者樂山，智者樂水 -- which roughly translates into "the virtuous enjoy the mountains; the wise delight in the water/sea." I'm not sure if that makes any sense, but I always preferred the sea when growing up, so that's as good of an excuse for self-flattery as any. It helped that we were a stone's throw away from South East Asian beach countries like Malaysia, Thailand, Palau, etc.
So after spending a lot of Friday night floundering in Midtown and blowing serious cash, I needed some sunshine to clear my mind. So I brought along The Savage Detective and my sketchbook and hopped the A train to the Rockaway beaches. It did me immense good, I think.
Solitude is easy to find in even the most crowded places of New York, but true privacy is miles away. Even at the beach, I had to walk a solid couple of miles to get away from the volleyball crowds, hot dog grills, boom boxes and neon plastic toys. I was looking for a windswept dune where I can lie in the sand, read and nap alone. Should've known that beaches during summertime were garish places. Anyway, the above view is the closest I got to that. I think I'm gonna check out Robert Moses island/state park next time.
I also listened to a lot of beach-appropriate music (Oasis, 929樂團), which made me unreasonably happy.
Yeah, anyway, I miss the sea. Maybe I should go live in Australia or something. AWWWSTRAYLIAH! Dingows ayte mai baybeees!
“This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship –- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally lower you into your grave. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear talked about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. . .”
"There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics."
I know you've all read variants of this article before (at least if you regularly read stuff from Arts & Letters Daily) but read it anyway, especially if you're wondering why college was just easier, more careerist, more socially confirmist and self-congratulatory and less of a mindtrip than your high school self expected it to be. After all, aren't superb college educations supposed to be nothing short of worldview-shattering?
I mean sure, if your college's alumni magazine shoved a microphone in your face, you're gonna do your best to be pro-social and summon up a quotable laundry list of ways in which your college taught you how to think. Which might be very true, but less true than we're willing to admit publicly. We're all very good at rationalizing. And obsessing over the distinction between mediocrity and true excellence is for only for unsexy and freakish people like Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, right?
Sometimes it seems like the Ivy League definition of excellence is this: desire what every normal/average/mediocre person desires (money/power/fame/social clout), only be faster and more efficient at acquiring them. Be excellent and efficacious sheep.
I've always told my friends that as happy as I was on campus, and as much as college has patched me up socially to become a more presentable, "real world"-savvy person, I feel like I've abandoned some spark of raw talent/intellectual thirst/solitary thought/creative weirdness in high school. Instead, I've traded them for resume-ready "skill sets" like networking skills and enhanced ability for small talk.
Hadn't Ms. McDowell warned us about this all along?
Thanks to Aimee Moon for bringing this link to my attention.
Had my first meeting with Suzanne at KGB Bar Lit in the Lower East Side on Sunday. Monica Powell read excerpts from her debut novel, The Answer is Always Yes, while Andrew Foster Altschul read from Lady Lazarus. They're both young urban "rockstar" writers who display just the right degree of pomo to be hilarious and entertaining to the twentysomething crowd. I dig the vibe. There seems to be a set of regulars who go in for readings. A lot of the people there are authors on the cusp of their first published novels. Some serious Savage Detectives sense of literary camaraderie, sans prostitutes. I feel kinda like Garcia Madero, the young naive guy hanging at its periphery.
To the Dartmouth CW folks: Joshua Furst was among the audience. He's the author that read Sabotage Cafe and then argued with the poetry folks afterwards, if you remember. I said hi to him and told him that people at Dartmouth either hated his guts or thought he was 12 types of awesome, and he seemed massively pleased to have such a polarizing effect on our department and cracked up in remembering "some playwright girl" who looked like she wanted to stab him in his sleep.
So it looks like I'll be doing web design and writing book reviews for them during the week and reporting into KGB on the weekends. Part-time work, basically. My other internship with A Public Space lit mag doesn't start until Thurs, but I picked up their latest issue at St. Mark's Bookstore and almost crapped my pants from sheer overdose of awesome. They ran a series of photographs of graffiti written in U.S. marine barrack bathroom stalls in Afghanistan.
I'm sitting in a cramped Holiday Express room in Park Slope, Brooklyn, NYC, trying to figure out how the fuck I'm gonna find my way in this city. My parents are packing up stuff around me. They're returning to Taiwan tomorrow.
So I've handled the past week or so with more poise than I ever remember myself having. About time I got my shit together. I don't even have the right to call myself a college kid anymore, which has been my main identifier for the past four years. What am I now?
The above featured room has been gutted and packed by my own hands, which (as is true in all move-outs) was a downer process.
Not gonna get too sentimental here -- the time has passed for that -- but here are some highlights from the past week:
-Saw the sunrise on commencement day with a bunch of buddies. Smoked cigars and swigged scotch as the sun rose over the green. Hemingway would be proud.
-Clau is a Shiesty Cum Laude in the style of Tomi Jun, except more drunk. Congrats, man.
-When people really started to leave, I was too tired to muster anything more than a "Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ this is not happening." Again, I don't want to be sloppy sentimental here, though get a drink or two in me and I'll be just that.
-Brought my parents hiking in New Hampshire. We climbed a fire tower, which offered a view of the campus from afar. It really hit me to see it from that distance.
-Listened to DOC music/frosh year favs on the drive down to NYC: The Darkness, Sublime, Modest Mouse, The Strokes, The Killers, Weezer, Ben Folds 5, etc., which found me irrationally happy and hopeful for the move down. Then I checked into my dorm in Brooklyn, which seems like another college orientation all over again. To preserve my dignity, I considered lying about being a high school grad/college frosh to people just for kicks ("Omigawd I'm like soooo psyched for college!"), but I couldn't keep a straight face, so I gave up on the charade pretty early on. While I was getting my dorm key, I ran into Ayla, who's apparently living 7 floors below me for the summer. Then we went to check out my room with Ayla and the most awkward roomie intro took place. See, I forgot to knock on the door before unlocking and moving in. My roomie (a UMichigan film major/aspiring filmmaker) happened to be lying in bed and watching Fast Food Nation on one TV screen, and really hardcore porn on the other. He was in no particular hurry in shutting off the porn either.
Been hanging out in the room and he seems like a chill dude though. We had our post-awk walk-in chat about how annoyingly young and giddily drunk most of our dorm neighbors are. "I'm not here to do that," he said. Amen.
-Spent a few days walking around NYC with my family and eating nice (Zagat rating 25+) food while they're here to finance it. Kanoyama turned out to be awesome. This photo was taken at SoHo.
-Went to see The Airborne Toxic Event with Adam. Not only does ATE's name reference Don DeLillo's White Noise pretty hardcore, but they're also highly danceable new band that I've reading about on blogs for a while. I'm convinced they're gonna make it pretty big, since they're literate enough to be "indie," but their sound is mainstream enough for radio play... sometimes a little too normal/SoCal/90's alt rock, in fact, but I can forgive these flaws because they don't taken themselves too seriously either. They also have an Asian guitarist (major points for that), and I absolutely love the lyrics to the song I recorded above. It's has a very night-out-in-the-city kinda vibe, which I'm always a sucker for.
I was walking down Fifth Avenue with my parents when I saw my college's crest on a random building. Apparently it's an invite-only club for alums. I didn't even try to get in because one peek into its mahogany-lined halls told me it was a den of snooty white-haired ibankery.
Whew.
That's it for now folks. Thank you all for waiting so patiently for me to grow up for the past four years. I can't say I'm a completely put-together person just yet, nor do I think I ever will be, but I think I'm a different person than I was coming to the States. Who knows what this city will bring for me--
I'm both heartened and ashamed to say that Douglas McGray's New York Times travel article on Taipei is more beautiful, accurate, expansive and observant about the city than anything I've written for my summer magazine. Though he tends to drum up the doom-and-gloom of Chinese competition a bit too much.
2008年2月3日 星期日
Interesting article about the diasporic mentality of Taiwanese people: 心情分享：我所同情與敬佩的移民心態
