“If the Moon is Warm Enough”: Some Winter Reading
I’ve started teaching again, so my reading has slowed but also deepened. The ups, the caffeinated frenzies, are reserved for the days when I need to be public, externalized, and articulate. The rest of the time is for slow-cooking chicken stews, warm lamplight, and other people’s words.
While I was on vacation last month I read Zena Hitz’s memoir, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. She wasn’t the one who said, “Read like no one’s watching,” but her book is essentially a treatise on that statement. She describes a close call with academia: that is, she almost became such a performative intellectual that she forgot how pleasurable it is to actually think, not just perform dictation. What if we have to think and rethink forever? Would that be OK?
I liked Hitz’s book for its manifold anecdotes from famous luminaries’ lives, all of which provide portraits of people choosing an intellectual life despite all manner of real life barriers: prison, violence, poverty, oppression. But I loved it for its candor about floundering. Its shameless recounting of her personal fight to rekindle her love of knowledge, learning, and thinking for herself. (And yes, I do think we fight for that in this country because our education system is disastrous.)
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This recent wave of reading has helped me to think about the relationship between humor and anger. It started small, with a one-page story by Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish Nobel laureate. It’s called “Vocabulary,” and it first appeared in her 1962 book of poems, Salt, but I encountered it in her 1996 collection, View with a Grain of Sand, which came out the year she received the Nobel. The book was recommended to me by a poetry teacher. It’s bursting with smirks and images and poignancy. I wish I could read Polish.
“Vocabulary” opens with an unidentified, but apparently French, “she” asking, “La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn’t it terribly cold there?” The rest is like a bitter root vegetable that roasts to perfection. “‘Madame,’ I want to reply, ‘my people’s poets do all their writing in mittens. I don’t mean to imply they never remove them; they do, indeed, if the moon is warm enough. In stanzas composed of raucous whooping, for only such can drown the windstorms’ constant roar, they glorify the simple lives of our walrus herders. Our Classicists engrave their odes with inky icicles on trampled snowdrifts. …He who wishes to drown himself must have an ax at hand to cut the ice.’”
At first glance then, it is a commentary on the power dynamics within Europe — or, more stereotypically, on the specific snootiness of France. But I think for all its sardonic wit, this prose-poem is in fact a reflection on the poet’s deep rootedness in her language. “That’s what I meant to say,” the piece continues. “But I’ve forgotten the word for walrus in French. And I’m not sure of icicle and ax.” Without the words, the vocabulary, how do we tell someone who we are? How do we convey the beauty of our language? It’s of course ironic that I read her beautiful words — and am convinced of their authority — through the mesh of translation. The whole thing ends with a clincher of crystalline irony:
“La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn’t it terribly cold there?”
“Pas du tout,” I answer icily.
Then there is satire. I have fond memories of a particular group of 11th graders years ago who had a blast with a satire assignment I gave them, based on our study of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. They were meant to write skits that used some of the elements of humor that we observed in his work: different kinds of irony, plus things like understatement. They blew me away with their stories, which lampooned everything from the competitive culture on campus, to first dates, to exorbitantly priced winter coats. We laughed from the belly, and now, instead of remembering how claustrophobic our classroom was, or how difficult it was to get them to be gracious with each other (competitive culture, perhaps?), I mostly remember the twinkle in our eyes as we enjoyed their silly and acerbic creations.
I don’t reach for satire very often, but thank goodness I found Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel, Disorientation. The novel, a categorical takedown of academia’s Orientalism and white supremacy, is a literary heist plot led by PhD candidate Ingrid Yang, whose stalling research on a (fictional) “father of Chinese American poetry” Xiao-Wen Chou turns into a gasp-worthy tour through the not-so-thinly veiled racism of the ivory tower.
The book is educational without feeling like it’s “for” the very people it skewers. Take for instance where Ingrid herself first learns about the history of yellowface: from an article, written by her avowed nemesis, Vivian Vo, who also studies Xiao-Wen Chou but in Postcolonial Studies, as opposed to Ingrid’s home department, East Asian Studies.
Vivian’s article is titled, “Inhabiting the Other: Yellowface as Corporeal Colonization.” “What a snide, holier-than-thou tone, Ingrid thought.”
“Though she was alone in her apartment, she looked around before surreptitiously clicking on the download button as if she were downloading porn. Then she settled back in her chair to enjoy a hearty portion of schadenfreude. She would scoff, cackle and sputter. …But a curious thing happened as Ingrid read. Her scoffs became fewer and far between. Her cackles more like whimpers. Her sputtering not out of condescension but bewilderment. By the end of the article, a seed of doubt had been planted in her. Could it be yellowface wasn’t an act of dress-up, of playing make-believe…? Was it really, as Vivian posited, ‘an act of violence against the plundered and erased Asian body’?”
A satire always risks subsuming its characters in its punchlines and absurdities (and boy, do the absurdities sparkle in this novel), but Chou’s characters, like Ingrid and her friend Eunice, are given permission and space to have clown-like habits (Ingrid is “addicted to antacids,” for instance) and postures without remaining flat in their Candide-esque mentalities. Chou satirizes the ignorance within her own community without reifying the racist infantilization and weaponized ignorance of the white readers -- whose orientalist imaginations are systematically read for filth in the novel. This masterful balancing act inheres in the decision to center a diverse cast of Asian American women characters who manage always to be both comedic and deeply human. The joke is never on them, unless it’s a setup for a bigger revelation of white nonsense later down the road.
Their foolishness is a path to wisdom, lined with land mines intentionally placed and disguised by the gaslighty white academics (and boyfriends) that clutter their lives. It’s a book about “culture wars” on college campuses, but only insomuch as those wars serve as a distraction from what’s really going on in the rotting underbelly of these elitist institutions. I doubt I’ll encounter a more timely and totalizing satire of academia for a long time, and I hope this book finds its fandom fast.
I think these two particular doses of highly intelligent snark — of anger made into art — have been a balm during this waking nightmare that is the latest news cycle. Ignorance and stereotyping — “Isn’t it cold there?” — undergird every horrific act of violence, from Tyre Nichols’s murder to Putin’s war in Ukraine to near-daily gun massacres. These two writers turned their anger into art so that we might linger in it, feel it a little longer. It’s too easy to go numb, especially in the dark of winter.
Some other winter reading:
Here by Richard McGuire, an absolutely stunning feat of comics that follows the space of a living room across all of human history. Yes, all — there is a page dated 110,000 BCE next to one stamped 2113. (They look uncannily similar.) On a single page, we catch glimpses of 500,000 BCE, 1932, 1923, and 2008. We meet characters, sometimes for only a moment, other times for pages and pages, generations and generations, or throughout a scene. If you like comics even a little bit — like what they can do with time, the site of so much control for a cartoonist — you will be astounded by McGuire’s storytelling.
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante. Haven’t seen the adaptation yet. Still sitting with the way her book made me feel, which is how the others have made me feel: like less the freak I always suspected I was. Somehow her neurotic young women characters affirm the darkness by filling it with their light.
Flux by Jinwoo Chong — much more soon on this speculative thriller featuring a Theranos-esque scam company and a young man struggling to let go of his favorite TV show after its lead actor faces major abuse allegations. I wrote a review of Flux for The Rumpus and got to interview Jinwoo by phone, so I’ll be publishing an edited version of our conversation here next month when the article comes out. Stay tuned!
