Entitled Mediocrity

"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?

The best article of its kind I've read so far: The Disadvantanges of an Elite Education.

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.

KGB

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.

Pal-pi-ta-TIONSSS

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--

NYT in Taipei

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.

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

I learned from last year's camera battery failure and went to this year's Taipei 101 fireworks well-prepared.





I didn't really feel up to elbowing people for breathing space this year, so I watched the T101 fireworks from the Living Mall. A separate firework was going on above me while I was watching the Taipei 101 countdown, which pretty much resulted in a walnut-sized chunk of ash meteoring onto my forehead while my friend and I were trying to evacuate from the park.

It was a good time even though only Eric could meet me (Sherry was trapped in traffic when the countdown went off (!)). Evacuating was even more fun since we were climbing over walls to cut through foot traffic, and the weird comments/attention we got for doing that was hilarious ("What are these high schoolers doing? Are they doing that Russian wall-jump thing?").

2008
never thought this year would come-
Happy new year!

Norwegian Woods

One of my goals for my brief winter homecoming is to stock up on existing literature on Taipei street culture. My thesis project will be a Winesburg Ohio/Dubliners/台北人-esque "novel" of urban short stories set in Taipei, so I thought it wise to read up on (and interact with) what other Taiwanese writers have already written about the city.

I'm reading 黃凡 now and he's absolutely amazing. One of the problems I saw in Chinese literature in general is that, up till the '80s, it was almost an exclusively rural, political and/or diasporic genre. In other words, "serious" Chinese writers seem to distinguish themselves by rejecting urban modernity as bourgeois, petty. There are notable exceptions of course (圍城/Fortress Besieged and pre-communist Shanghai lit) but this was my damaging and slightly ignorant impression of Chinese lit in high school, that Chinese-language lit had nothing to say about the "petty bourgeois" daily realities of urban life in modern Asia. It did not help that my high school had a dated reading curriculum that included irrelevant texts like Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth.

Anyway, 黃凡 pretty much pioneered the urban/pomo novel in Taiwan. Instead of writing about 民族性 ("Chinese ethnic temperament"), the angst of East-meets-West hybridity, etc. (all those hallowed and laughably self-serious metanarratives of old school Chinese writers) he writes about Taipei's DIY craze in the '80s, architects with Napoleon complexes, the History of Sewage Pipes, etc. Petty shit, but written in hilarious prose.

What the hell, I didn't set out to write some ode to 黃凡. Where was I?

---------------------(back on topic)

The picture you see above is the (in)famous Norwegian Woods cafe in the Gongguan/ NTUniversity district of South Taipei. I've read it mentioned in Pots Weekly and 舒國治's "Taipei Wanderer" essays (among many other places) as a sort of cornerstone in Taipei's arts scene, so I decided to pay it a visit yesterday afternoon. It was easily the most intimidating cafe I've ever been to.

The cafe owner's a renown town personality. He's a book/music critic and huge coffee nerd, and if he doesn't like you he'll pretty much tell you that they "don't serve the kind of coffee you're looking for" and he'll show you the door.

When I walked in, the clients stared and pretty much decided immediately that I was not a familiar customer. The barista took her time serving me coffee (though the coffee was really good). The people in there were kind of absurd, cigarettes dangling between their fingers and piles of philosophy text/translated novels sitting next to their laptops. Most importantly, they were all typing furiously on their laptop computers. When I surveyed the room, everyone was writing on their blogs (!). I knew the blogging and online 散文/prose writing culture was huge in Taipei, but what the hell.

Also, this is what I deduced about the man who sat behind me:



Jokes aside, people there seem to be seriously working rather than trying to be hip/charming. So it was more a case of artists in hipster's clothes rather than vice versa?

I don't know. I'll have to check again next year to decide.