Американский Бродяга

爸爸 in Oz

W came by last night to sort out a “summer reading” assignment for the incoming MA students. I wasn’t keen on the idea at all—grad students are grown-ups and should be free to spend their time off reading any damn thing they please—and, what’s more, we had trouble agreeing on an appropriate text. (W’s tastes in Eng. Lit are as rigid as his tastes in everything else, gravitating toward anything vaguely Jamesian. In fact, there’s something very Jamesian about everything connected with W.)

Having exhausted various other possibilities, W eventually brought the discussion around to children’s lit, and the possibility of assigning The Wizard of Oz or The Wind in the Willows. I was skeptical—these same hip young things into “Young Anguish” are going to warm to Anglo-American tales about talking animals?—and I must have pulled one of my patented faces, which W was quick to misinterpret: “Have you even read The Wizard of Oz?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” I hastened to correct him, “my father read us all of the Oz books. I love them. I just don’t think the students would.”

W.’s tone changed immediately: “How wonderful to have such a father!”

Well, yes, indeed…though I can’t say I gave it much thought at the time. Reading bedtime stories is just what fathers do, isn’t it? What kind of father wouldn’t know a Wogglebug from a Glass Cat (Hint: one “has pink brains, and you can see them work”)? Who else but a dad could get the voices of Eeyore and Piglet right? And who could ever think of going to sleep without a story? If this isn’t they way things are, “Udger, Budger I’m a Mudger.”

But, as W has noted on many occasions, he has no such father; their relationship, one gathers, has never been warm. How sad. A timely reminder, a few days after Father’s Day, that fathers—rather like Pooh’s bees—come in the “right sort” and the “wrong sort,” and that I’ve been blessed all along to have the right sort.

(W, it turns out, is the merest Oz dilettante…not even knowing a Quadling from a Gillikin, forsooth!)

5-second Reviews: Creepy, Omnipresent Fúwá Edition

Foxboro Hot Tubs—Stop, Drop and Roll !!!: Green Day (incognito) show their debt to Nuggets-style 60’s garage rock. Fans only, but this is actually better than several of the legit GD albums. Key tracks: Dark Side of Night; Ruby Room.

Aimee Mann—@#&*%! Smilers: Yeah, I get the criticism that her albums are beginning to sound “samey.” Don’t care. She’s still one of the two or three top pop tunesmiths in the biz. Key tracks: Freeway; 31 Today.

Mudcrutch—Mudcrutch: Best Tom Petty album in many a year. If you know the lyrics to “Last Dance with Mary Jane,” you’ll want to give it a listen; otherwise, you’re likely to shrug your shoulders. Key tracks: Shady Grove; Crystal River.

Elvis Costello & the Imposters—Momofuku: Elvis, you were my first college crush. Imperial Bedroom forever changed the way I listen to music. But even with one of your (increasingly rare) raawk albums, the thrill is gone, the music muddy, the lyrics (painfully) overwritten. Pump it up until you can feel it / Pump it up when you don’t really need it. Otherwise, don’t even bother. Key tracks: Flutter & Wow; Go Away.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy—The Letting Go: Inspired by a review of this guy’s latest to investigate BPB’s back catalogue. This is the gem, from 2006. Ethereal Celtic-tinged backing vocals by Dawn McCarthy provide lovely counterpoint to Will Oldham’s meditative tales of loves lost and lorn. Key tracks: No Bad News; Then the Letting Go

Fleet Foxes—Fleet Foxes: The best fake-Decembrists album I’ve ever heard. This may sound slightly like faint praise, but I currently can’t get “Your Protector” out of my head, and “Blue Ridge Mountains” and “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” are nearly as good. Recommended.

The Old 97’s—Blame It on Gravity: The Old 97’s are one of those bands where, really, you only need one album, max. Doesn’t matter so much which one. But this isn’t the one I’d choose, by a long shot. Key tracks: The Color of a Lonely Heart; Dance With Me.

Hòuhǎidàshāyú—后悔大鲨鱼 / Proximity Butterfly—The Antikythera Mechanism: Not-particularly-inspiring further investigations into Chinese rock. Queen Sea Big Shark sound like they’re trying to be the surf-rock soundtrack to a Chinese Quentin Tarantino film: an intriguing project, potentially, but—call me loopy—if you’re not even remotely fluent in English mightn’t it be better to sing in Mandarin? Proximity Butterfly (a truly random purchase) are a bunch of lǎowài living in Chengdu that sound like the unholy love child of Perry Farrell and Peter Gabriel. Not nearly as terrible as you’d expect…but nothing anybody not dating one of the band members actually needs to hear either. Great album name and cover art, though.

Modern Problems (or 他是谁?)

Here’s a 2008 dilemma for you: What do you do if you run into someone you have “de-friended” on Facebook?

Such was my experience last Saturday night when I joined R. for a belated celebration of her birthday at a (well-known, but actually surprisingly bad) Cantonese place near the Lama Temple. Among the eight at the table was a Chinese friend of hers who’d friended me (=”become my FB friend”) after we were on the same team at a pub quiz last fall. Accepting the “friend” invitation seemed harmless enough at the time—indeed, to refuse would have seemed churlish—but after awhile I began to be irritated at receiving too frequent, chirpy “status updates” about this guy I’d only met once, briefly, and hadn’t particularly cottoned to. There’s definitely something odd in FB’s tendency to preserve even the most casual acquaintances in digital amber—the passing faces in the crowd of life given exactly the same weight as those with whom you’ve shared meaningful experiences.

So, one day I quietly deleted him and several other such ephemera from my friends list, in much the same spirit one would toss an old playbill or concert program, or, as Graham Greene once put it, a souvenir “bought for a forgotten reason on a forgotten holiday.” But now, some 7 months on, here he is again, disinterred from my mental landfill. And, of course, it’s all a bit awkward. Does he know I de-friended him? (When an actual friend of mine temporarily suspended her FB account, it was months and months before I noticed.) If so, does he care? Should I care that he cares? But most of all I sat there thinking how fundamentally absurd it was that I should even be considering whether or not I offended this guy I don’t even know.

As it happens, this was the very same day I opened one of my webmail address books and chanced across a name that stopped me in my tracks: Vanessa Johnson. I thought about it long and hard, but still could not, for the life of me, imagine who Vanessa Johnson might be. Where had I known her? When? The only candidate I could come up with was a certain Vanessa I dimly remembered from my drudgery at B&N several years ago, but, even if that’s the right Vanessa, I couldn’t begin to fathom why I’d have her e-mail. So out she went. But having started, I didn’t stop there: there were no more absolute mystery persons, but a lot of what I ruthlessly decided was clutter: travelers I’d met in South America; web-acquaintances from a site I used to frequent; folks I’d known in Russia who’ve drifted out of touch…or were never really in touch in the first place. Saying that they’re “dead to me” sounds brutal, but reflects a truth: I actually wish them well, wherever they are and whatever they’re doing, but I know that I’ll never have any occasion to contact them. At least 30 names were consigned thereby to personal oblivion…and 30 more could have easily gone but for a certain saudade. (Cynical as I am becoming, I’m not completely immune to the siren call of the past.)

Die, O Evil Dài (袋)!

Among the words I learned this week is 袋 (dài), meaning “bag”…as in the plastic, disposable sort that, up till now, were as ubiquitous here as anywhere else on the planet. Indeed, I suppose the reason I never had to learn the word previously is that it’s never even been a question whether or not you wanted a bag—sticking a purchase, no matter how trivial, in a flimsy plastic sheath was simply a reflexive action wherever you shopped unless you actively intervened.

This week, however, a new law passed last January went into effect and—somewhat to my astonishment—is actually being obeyed. (One never knows, really, which laws the Chinese will choose to pay attention to. The general impression garnered from Chinese roads, for instance, is of a country with far too little governance, not too much.) This law bans plastic bags less than 0.025 mm thick, and mandates a set fee for any other bags (from 2-5 毛, depending on type).

Good for the Chinese. Although I understand a similar ban has been enacted in San Francisco, it’s hard to imagine a nationwide ban in the States ever surviving the inevitable assault of trampling herds of DC lobbyists defending every American’s god-given right to free unbiodegradable “convenience” (otherwise, Lord knows what might happen to that new pair of jeans in the 40 steps from the Mervyn’s exit to your car…)

Of course, the truly green-spirited will do the right thing without any prodding from the government: Everyone with a Trader Joe’s tote raise your hand! But most of us sinners can use the occasional kick in the pants to break us of bad habits. For similar reasons, I heartily agree with Tom Friedman that if $4/gallon gas is what it takes to break Americans of their spendthrift, short-sighted SUV habit, then $4 gas is a boon. “Bottom-up” reform is a lovely theory, but “top-down” often works a great deal better in practice.

工合? I'm not so gung-ho.

Spent hours this afternoon with W going through possibilities for next year’s faculty. (It’s a mark of confidence, and appreciated as such.)

Some tips for future would-be applicants:

• Two adjectives are not necessarily better than one. Three are not better than two. Familiarize yourself with the meaning of the word ‘tautology.’
• If you’re “not sure” you wish to apply, then don’t.
• If you wish to teach English, it’s helpful to know the difference between “my experience” and “my experiences” and which one is appropriate to a résumé.
• Spelling counts.
• If it sounds even remotely like bullshit to you, imagine how it sounds to us. Really. Note that the contact name is not that of some Chinese bureaucrat, but of a native speaker of English.
• Expressing some small enthusiasm for literature might be a plus when such is the explicit focus of the job announcement. Especially if your prior experience is in accountancy, say.
• If you and your gay lover (?) are applying for positions at even the most progressive of Chinese universities, it would perhaps be wiser to send separate cover letters rather than a single one that begins (ungrammatically) “myself and my friend.” This goes double if said friend’s only prior claim to fame is as a “foam sculptor.”
• If you hate practicing law in the United States, you are not alone. In fact, there are a striking number of you willing to give up (what one presumes to be) comfortable salaries to work for savory vinegar-soaked peanuts in China. (This is actually something applicants to law school, rather than to us, might wish to bear in mind.)

a mountain of molehills

Oops, HRC has done it again: common sense should dictate that “assassination” and “why I am still in the race” clearly don’t belong in the same vocalized thought process. This doesn’t validate the screaming tabloid headlines pillorying Hillary as some kind of ghoul waiting for tragedy to take place, but, when, over and over and over, the same kind of mistake keeps occurring, the pattern cannot be ignored. Taken individually, none of HRC’s gaffes, exaggerations, veiled threats, appeals to illogic, magical thinking, sitdowns-with-the-devil and pandering are worth half the print spilled on them. Taken together, however, they are devastating. Keith Olbermann’s Personal Comment on the matter, while extremely shrill, gets one thing quite right: Clinton has already been cut an enormous amount of slack. Too much.

For me, personally, the electoral Rubicon of Bad Analogy was crossed when, a couple weeks ago, she compared the FL and MI voluntary “disenfranchisement” to the election fraud, intimidation and violence in Zimbabwe. For the last 8 years we’ve endured precisely this kind of sloppy thinking and take-no-prisoners rhetoric; we simply can’t afford 4-8 years more. I know many folks who voted for her in all good conscience—and, as recently as February, this seemed to me a perfectly reasonable matter of personal druthers—but no longer. I am now entirely persuaded that Clinton is temperamentally unfit to be commander-in-chief, and devoutly hope Obama can avoid the poison pill of a “unity” ticket. (Score one for my mother, a member of Hillary’s core demographic, but one who has always held her in disdain for reasons that couldn’t be explained. Alas, now they can.)

Mr. Candour?

Started to write not one, but two posts about the foibles of W and M respectively, thrown into alto-relievo these past 10 days. And what foiblely foibles they are…precisely the kind of thing I’ve frequently written about in the past, in (what I hope has been) a gently satirical Austen-esque vein of poking fun at the quirks of human nature.

Yet, I realized two things last night. Firstly, I can post no such things in this forum: even semi-anonymous, it’s far too public, far too easy to eventually connect the dots. And secondly, perhaps more significantly, I realized that my strong urge to be candid about them arises precisely out of my limited candor with them. I’m friends with both, but within well-defined, rock-hard boundaries. So, like Mrs. Candour in The School for Scandal—which I’ve recently assigned in my drama class—my motives for truth-telling have to be more than a little suspect.

Of course, there’s nothing remarkable in such circumscribed friendships. Everyone we “know,” we know to different degrees. But it’s a striking feature of my life in Beijing that there’s been exactly one person, B, to whom I routinely speak my mind…and that’s something I need to see change as I contemplate the now-certainty of a second year here (with W and M remaining as neighbors; whereas B and the others have soundly decided they have other fish to fry).