The anxiety of affluence

What a knockout of a piece this is!

What makes hip-hop such a durable form is its capacity to scramble fiction and fact; the artifice and the realities that art conceals or amplifies become one. In this way, Watch the Throne feels astonishingly different. It captures two artists who no longer need dreams; art cannot possibly prophesy a better future for either of them. All of this — the luxury goods, the art collection, private compounds, the Oprah-level American Dream — is their reality. This isn't to discount all the personal travails or the fantastic demons unimaginable to the nonfamous. But to speak passionately about contradiction offers narrative cover for the truth that one simply knows better, and the album's anxieties feel like an hour-long quest for the authority to rule from above, a justification to luxuriate. —Hua on Kanye and Jay-Z in Grantland

Disambiguations™ for February 3, 2011

I. At the Rumpus, Rachel Khong has a wonderful piece on one of my favorite books—Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary. I like this: "The novel is about sadness, obsession, and giant sea turtles, but mostly it’s about how to be okay." What a book!

II. Hua Hsu on cassettes (in Artforum)—I laughed out loud reading about the gradations:

Even in the 1980s, when the cassette tape represented the apex of consumer technology, its advances—the workmanlike auto-reverse button; various gradations of Dolby; “IEC Type II High (CrO2) Position,” whatever that means—seemed puny, stopgaps to tide us over until we could engineer more elegant solutions.

III. A.O. Scott in the NYT on the documentary Into Eternity, about a subterranean waste storage site in progress called Onkalo ("hiding place"):

Who or what will even be around when the danger of the spent fuel stashed at Onkalo finally lapses? Intelligent robots? Highly evolved molds and fungi? Some kind of alien life form for which plutonium is a source of nutrition? As one of Mr. Madsen’s interview subjects notes, most science fiction looks ahead only a hundred years or so, and thus is not terribly helpful.

The mindbending profundity is broken only by the necessary clarification that director Michael Madsen is "a Danish Conceptual artist, not the American tough-guy actor."

IV. Felt like I had a list of interesting vocab/word-usage-y things, but all I can remember is this bit, from an NYT piece on car-pooling (via Jenny):

People car-pool here with strangers in a practice called “slugging” — the term comes from fake bus tokens, because bus drivers sometimes mistake car-poolers, who often wait near bus stops, for bus riders. Each waiting spot has its own destination, like the Pentagon or L’Enfant Plaza, and drivers call them out as they drive up.

V. Some upcoming appearances—next Tuesday (2/8) at 7:30 I'll be reading and panelling (new word?) at Fordham (113 W. 60th St.) with Arthur Phillips, Mary Elizabeth Williams, and Jim Dwyer. The topic: "Living and Writing New York." In April I'll be reading some nonfiction—but what??—with Deb Olin Unferth, whose memoir Revolution is just out. (More details on both these events here.) Looking forward and slightly backward, there's something in March and another thing in May that I might be doing.

Novel underdogs

At The Atlantic, Hua writes about North Korea's soccer team:

Of course, after proclaiming this ["North Korea will win the World Cup"], he [the NK football association VP] added that it would be "because of the great support of our Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il that our national team will make this great achievement." Which is exactly the kind of statement—there are plenty more here—that makes the North Korean team the most novel underdogs of them all. Not only do they find themselves in the figuratively-speaking "Group of Death" (with one useless player, no less), they are near-delusional in their outlook.

(Via Arlo)


Speaking of matters Huavian, I don't know if I mentioned this before—the attractively persistent editors of PEN America squeezed a spirited (Hua)/sleep-deprived (yrs truly) e-mail exchange out of Hua and moi about all sorts of topics...I think we talk about e-mail...and Sebald...and...other stuff...Our heated exchange is in the current issue (#12), under the title "Linked Rooms." But the things we said are too controversial to be offered online!

Wait, I've looked at our actual e-mail exchange, and this will give you a rough idea of my lightheadedness. (I'm not sure if this passage made it into the published version.) Speaking of the first Mac I used, which was indeed the very first model (128K), I reminisce:

The only game was a program for slots and keno—a good way to unwind in the midst of an English paper, and how refreshing the primitive sound of "coins" when one hit the jackpot!

Hsu-Park-Lim: An Eternal Golden Braid — Cha exhibit — holiday ideas

(From last Saturday's Page Turner Asian Am Litfest...that's Ken Chen, moderator/AAWW director, on the far left.)

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An interesting review by Jana Hsu (no relation to Hua I assume!) of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha exhibit "Earth," up at the Berkeley Art Museum; the piece mentions the recent Cha book Exilee/Temps Morts, to which I contributed an essay.

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Penguin Group authors were asked "what to give and what to get" this holiday season. I heart this hilarious Janice Lee suggestion:

Personal Days by Ed Park is The Office in book form: laugh-out-loud funny and perfect for so many people: your college-age nephew, your twenty-something friend in advertising, your thirty-something friend who's a full-time mom, your friend in his forties who just got laid off, and so on. In fact, I can't think of anyone it wouldn't be great for, except your friends without a sense of humor. Don't give it to them.

Disambiguations™ for September 24, 2009

I. I've updated ed-park.com, for the first time in months! A few readings sprinkled throughout the fall...

II. The NYT on The New Literary History of America—our own Hua was on the editorial board. Hua explains:

Each essay is loosely fixed to a moment of "making"--the fashioning of a new idea, the publication of a book, a turning point-of-a-speech, a conversation that would outline a movement, the birth of cool, or simply a fleeting spark of a thought that would continue on as someone else's design for life. As such, our sense of the literary was canonical yet, at times, weird and wide-ranging--the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous and the publication of Linda Lovelace's autobiography seem to be the two non-"literary" entries critics have gravitated toward.

Other Disamiguation-fave contributors include Douglas Wolk, Howard Hampton, Joshua Clover, and more...

III. Dennis talks to Lars Von Trier via satellite.

IV. Andrew Gelman on Steve Hely's How I Became a Famous Novelist (a book I keep thinking about).

V. Jenny remembers Barbara Johnson and reproduces her syllabus from 1992. (Also follow for a link to Lindsay Waters' remembrance.)

VI. The Significant Objects project is still going strong—here's Stephen Elliott ("The Adderall Diaries" = play on "The Basketball Diaries"?) on some Hawaiian utensils:

I bought these Hawaiian utensils, a wooden spoon and fork, while living in Alaska in the mid-eighties with my first wife. We were living outside the Eskimo village Wales on the western edge of the state, three miles outside of Tin City Air Force Station. The Air Force station was the location of a long-range radar for air surveillance. It was originally built in the 1950s but Reagan gave it a serious upgrade during his successful bid to destabilize the Russians. From the top of a snowdrift you could see boats pulling into ports larger than many football stadiums, carrying steel arms more than a mile in length.

D.T.M.'s in the news

The nation’s largest states, Texas and California, already have “minority” majorities. By 2023, if current demographic trends continue, nonwhites — black, Hispanic and Asian — will constitute a majority of Americans under 18. By 2042, they’ll constitute a national majority. As Hua Hsu noted earlier this year in The Atlantic, “every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation.” —Ross Douthat, NYT

Great white way

I. I bought The Atlantic yesterday (since it features two pieces by Dzyds)—I realize I like reading while eating, so this is much better than reading it online (no crumbs in the keyboard). (In a magazine-buying frenzy, I also picked up the new Boston Review, for an excellent appreciation of Thomas Disch by John Crowley, and other good-seeming stuff...even though of course BR is online, too...I did a lot of reading and eating yesterday.)(You should always buy The Believer; have you read the Theo Schell-Lambert piece yet???? You need to read it today. And you cannot read it online!) This bit in Hua's excellent piece, "The End of White America?"...

For [Stuff White People Like creator Christian] Lander, whiteness has become a vacuum. The “white identity” he limns on his blog is predicated on the quest for authenticity—usually other people’s authenticity. “As a white person, you’re just desperate to find something else to grab onto. You’re jealous! Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished they’d grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language. White culture is Family Ties and Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses—like, this is white culture. This is all we have.”

II. ...reminded me of this amazing rant:

—Why are you quoting John O'Hara to me at eight o'clock in the morning? said Isidor. —Well, there is a point, said MacK, I was looking at it last night. He's part of this White Culture which I'm just completely at the end of my—I'm flabbergasted and unable to comprehend any longer why and how anyone can continue to defend it, celebrate it, reinvent it—what does this great white culture, this white civilization, which all the idiots want to cherish, to keep pristine from the blacks and the Japanese and the Europeans and the gays and the Jews and the women—of what does it consist? I mean, let's really think—John O'Hara? Pearl Jam? Lawrence Welk? Elementary school book and Bible watercolor depictions of the past? CBS? —Not leaving out your great employer, said Isidor.
—The Carpenters, said MacK, Fenimore Cooper, John Grisham? Red Skelton? Hallmark? Microsoft? Mobil? Bill Clinton? Jane Fonda, Walt Disney, American Gladiators? Pat Robertson, Gene Scott? John Willie? Loni Anderson? Jaclyn Smith? The AFL? I'm asking you, man, said MacK, I mean I'm asking all of the religionists and cross-burners and anti-abortionists and professional athletes and cheerleaders and militiamen prancing through the woods in camo, waving Bowie knives and their third grade spelling, I'm asking the gymnastic child-abuse coaches—this is what you've got? THIS?

—Todd McEwen, Who Sleeps With Katz

III. ...and also this:

The Harvester is such a nutty book that by the time you come to this passage it seems like just another of its forays into the crackpottery of its period. According to her biographer, Judith Reick Long, Gene Stratton-Porter never revised or cut; her novels—like the Harvester's hysterical sermon—just came pouring out of her. But racial theories were no passing fancy with her. They became the central theme of a noxious novel called Her Father's Daughter, written in 1921, after she had moved to Los Angeles and enthusiastically embraced the hatred for Chinese and Japanese immigrants by which early-twentieth-century California was seized. Its seventeen-year-old heroine, Linda Strong, talks like this:

The white man has dominated by his colour so far in the history of the world, but it is written in the Books that when the men of colour acquire our culture and combine it with their own methods of living and rate of production, they are going to bring forth greater numbers, better equipped for the battle of life, than we are. When they have got our last secret, constructive or scientific, they will take it, and living in a way that we would not, reproducing in numbers we don't, they will beat us at any game we start, if we don't take warning while we are in the ascendancy, and keep there.

[...]

The plot of Her Father's Daughter revolves around a Japanese A-student in a Los Angeles high school, named Oka Sayye, who is actually a forty-year-old man planted there by the Japanese government for God knows what reason, but who is clearly such a threat to the white world that in the end he has to be remorselessly pushed off a cliff by the heroine's Irish housekeeper. I'm not kidding. —Janet Malcolm, "Capitalist Pastorale," New York Review of Books

Ouroboros-Fortified Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for January 15, 2009

I. New York magazine gives the nod to Light Industry proprietors (and, most importantly, Dzyds) Ed and L.G. Thos. — as does Artforum! This pic is from Artforum (that's Thomas and Ed on the left...other dudes are Michael Azerrad and Jeff Krulik):

{{{Heyyy—they'll take it!}}}

II. Defunct parks! Pantoums are from Malaysia!
(Via L.G. Thos.)

III. The Atlantic this month should be retitled "THE DIZZIES"??? Hua has the cover story, "The End of White America?"—two quotes for today:

A) “Have I read The Great Gatsby?” Combs said to a London newspaper in 2001. “I am the Great Gatsby."

B) Similarly, Smirnoff struck marketing gold in 2006 with a viral music video titled “Tea Partay,” featuring a trio of strikingly bad, V-neck-sweater-clad white rappers called the Prep Unit. “Haters like to clown our Ivy League educations / But they’re just jealous ’cause our families run the nation,” the trio brayed, as a pair of bottle-blond women in spiffy tennis whites shimmied behind them. There was no nonironic way to enjoy the video; its entire appeal was in its self-aware lampooning of WASP culture: verdant country clubs, “old money,” croquet, popped collars, and the like.

And Dzyd Ta-Nehisi writes on Michelle Obama:

There has been much chatter about Barack Obama as the answer to America’s racial gap, as a biracial black man whose roots stretch from Hawaii to Kenya, with an Ivy League pedigree and the seal of the South Side. But he is not the only one entering the White House who has seen both sides, who intuitively grasps the heroic American narrative of work ethic and family, and how that narrative historically failed black people. He is not the only one who walks in both worlds. Indeed, if you’re looking for a bridge, if you’re looking for someone to connect the heart of black America with the heart of all of America, to allow us all to look at the American dream in the same way, if you’re looking for common ground, then it’s true, we should be talking about Obama. But we should make sure we’re talking about the right one.

III. Have you read enough about Gordon Lish & co. yet? Dzyd Carla weighs in on (former Lish student) Christine Schutt.

IV. Only hyperconnect?

My brain has developed a little differently from most other people’s. Aside from my high-functioning autism, I also suffered from epileptic seizures as a young child. In my book, I propose a link between my brain’s functioning and my creative abilities based on the property of ‘hyper-connectivity’. —Scientific American

V. Hare-o-boros!



And, um....another one.
(Via Erasing)

Waiting for Goddard

Dzys Team Member Hua has the cover story in the new Atlantic. Here's how "The End of White America?" begins:

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” he remarks. He is in polite company, gathered with friends around a bottle of wine in the late-afternoon sun, chatting and gossiping. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?” They hadn’t. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

(Clicking through Goddard takes you to...)

Dizzies Newsfeeds for December 2

"Things happen to me with accents on 'em!": Dizzyhead Hua in the N.Y. Sun on the delightful-sounding All About H. Hatterr...Selfdivider with another great post, this one on Percival Lowell, Theodore Roosevelt, and King Kojong...The Stubblemeister has a great NYTBR piece on the story behind the placement of cigarette ads in paperbacks (from A.E. Van Vogt to The Bluest Eye; oddly, the title bar on my browser says, simply, "Essay about Cigarette Advertisements in Paperback Books"!); as a bonus, he fills his blog with a wealth of related links, and Levi picks up the scent, chasing down the possible meaning behind a pseudonym used by a book reviewer tapped by the industry to write a positive review of Smoking and Society: Toward a More Balanced Assessment, and finally pointing us Luc Sante–ward..now that's what I call Dizzyhead synergy!...Snowing in New York, time for the Psychic Envelopes' "Winter Losses" (what happened to "Indian Summer"?!)...Over at Erasing, the Batman–Proust connection...Finally saw that Gossip Girl episode Hua was blogging about, wow, in some ways the best one yet?...(More Gossip Girl stuff in today's Times: "Not that we’re obsessed or anything”)...Gotta get my hair cut...xoxo...You know you love me....GOSSIP ED....wha....

Dizzies Newsfeeds for November 7

There's a blog called Vertigo—and it's about Sebald! (Via Selfdivider)...Dizzyhead Hua is on Wikipedia...How about this Barthelme review done in the style of D.B.?...Dizzyhead Andrew is mainstream America...Tomorrow: Come to "Make It News," a symposium at Columbia's J-School as poets, journalists, and critics talk about poetry, journalism, and criticism! Update: For a preview of topics TBD, check out Dizzyhead Jessica's feature, up at the Poetry Foundation site...A 10-year-old speaks 11 languages and resembles Robert Donat (via Paperpools)...Meanwhile a worker putting floral patterns on NYC taxi hoods, with the great name Hamed Fall (like a jumbled hall of fame), is "a Senegalese-born former taxi driver who speaks French, a bit of Arabic, Wolof and Fulani"...I myself speak a little bit of English...rimshot, please...We just bought milk but the milk is almost gone, at least I can read Levi on milk. Here he quotes from Peter Ackroyd's London: A Biography:

It was certainly true that, as Addison wrote in 1711, "People know the Wares [tradesmen] deal in rather by their Tunes than by their Words." The words were often indistinct or indistinguishable: the mender of old chairs was recognised by his low and melancholy note, while the retailer of broken glass specialised in a sort of plaintive shriek quite appropriate to his goods. . . . There was also in the passage of years, or centuries, the steady clipping or abbreviation of jargon. "Will you buy any milk today, mistress" became "Milk maids below," then "Milk below," then "Milk-o" and, finally, "Mieu" or "Mee-o." . . . Pierce Egan, author of Life in London," recalled "one man from whom I could never make out more than happy happy happy now."

"Some of the references were almost too perfect"

"It was as if they had a list of keywords." Dizzyhead Hua talks about the Top Shelf 8/8/88 vintage hip-hop album/hoax (which he wrote about for the NYT)...his segment starts about 3/8 of the way in.

"They had forgotten there was a hoax to perpetrate." —Hua

The year 1988 was kind of a blur for me

Hot of the presses—in the Times, Dizzies Team Member Hua (has the blog stopped?!) listens to Top Shelf 8/8/88, a hip-hop CD of dubious provenance.

Afrika Baby Bam of the Jungle Brothers, who contributed the track “Back in the Jungle,” which he said was recorded in 2003, dismissed concerns about the authenticity of the project. “We still remember the culture and tradition,” he said. “How much more do you need, outside of the actual date, to make a record as authentic as you would have made on Aug. 8, 1988?”

Other Dizzies Newsfeeds™: Vocabulary via Edmund Gosse via Levi: jobation is "a lengthy and tedious rebuke"...quinduncs are "gossips or busybodies"...Levi's also got some delightful posts on Ring Lardner and Proust via Powell...Am excited for these 145 short-shorts from McSweeney's, three books by Dave Eggers, Deb Olin Unferth, and (Psychic E. singer!) Sarah Manguso....I don't play a lot of video/computer games, but this Fancy Pants adventure is simple and cheering...A new New-York Ghost is out, the nearly one-year-anniversary edition...How long will it last?!...Press release/reminder, I'll be at the Brooklyn Book Festival tomorrow—here is the official listing...it's at "Mainstage (Borough Hall Plaza)":

5:00 p.m. EVERYONE'S A (FORMER) CRITIC.
Three music and arts critics known for their humor discuss what it means to be a critic and the art of writing beyond the review. Featuring popular essayist, memoirist, critic and soon-to-be novelist Chuck Klosterman, Rolling Stone music critic and new memoirist Rob Sheffield, and Believer editor and former Village Voice editor/critic Ed Park whose comic novel Personal Days will be released in 2008.

Forever now

Dizzyhead Hua put together the virtual catalogue of essays for the Asian American International Film Festival. I've contributed this interview with Gina Kim, director of Never Forever.

Fangs for the memories

My latest Astral Weeks column is up at the L.A. Times. This month I cover Liz Williams's Detective Inspector Chen novels and David Wellington's fangfest 13 Bullets.

But enough about me: Dizzyhead Hua rhapsodizes over a single LCD Soundsystem song over at Slate, and the Oxford American features two Dizzyhead contributions: Devin McKinney on William Bradford Huie and Andy "Citizen Truth" Selsberg on what it means to eat like a man. (And still seen on the stands recently: The first part of B. Kite's "Rivette-iad," in Cinema Scope.)

Bowling for foie gras

Brit in...Buffalo?



[Photo by Adrian Kinloch.]

At Umamimart, Dizzyhead Hua turns out to be a great food writer and illustrator.

Theories and solutions

Romance gets held up by theory in my former student Crystal's debut offering—


...and Dizzyhead Hua—a/k/a "birthday boy"!—takes the saucy route to the limit, and teaches us a little bit about an entire continent in the process.

Are you gonna eat my way?

Like many Dizzyheads, I try to restrict my dining experiences to places approved by popular rock musicians—so imagine my delight when I read Dizzyhead Hua's post on a Berlin eatery that has Lenny Kravitz's seal of approval!

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Issue #22 of McSweeney's contains three magnetized volumes in an attractive slipcase. One volume is entitled From the Notebook, containing contemporary writers' takes on "the unwritten stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald," extrapolated from scraps (sometimes just a couple of words) that he jotted down. Some excellent writers here—I was happy (and surprised!) to see Rachel Ingalls among them. Her story, "A Gift of the Gods," comes from the FSF tidbit: "The Dancer Who Found She Could Fly."

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Also: Send in your "title bout" entries—

"I" Tunes

Last week, Dizzyhead Hua invited me to write about my songs of summer—and in a strange fit of compositional productivity I banged out some thoughts in roughly an hour. Visit his blog to listen and read more...As Charlie Rose would say, "I am honored to call him my friend..."

[UPDATE: Realized today that the Robyn Hitchcock song I love so much isn't called "Element of Light," but "Airscape"! Thanks to the other Robyn fan, Jenny D, for helping me figure this out...]



Photo: The historic ukulele-vase exchange between Arlo Ogg and me

Blowing your mind — Origin myth — Download this song

I liked Aimee Mann's piece in the Times on Sgt. Pepper—appealingly written:

My ignorance extended to the opening song, which I took at face value as a real live introduction of the singer Billy Shears, who, whoever he was, became my favorite, with his dopey baritone, in humble gratitude for his pals — bless them, it all was so innocent, those marmalade skies and winking meter maids (whatever they were). The darkest moments were with the runaway girl — although a throwaway line in “Getting Better” (“I was cruel to my woman, I beat her...”) gave me pause. He beat her? What the heck? But hey — things were getting better all the time, so ... I shrugged and let it go.
And then things took a weird turn: a nightmare cacophony of strings, someone blowing his mind out in a car — what was that? Did he get shot in the head? What were the holes in Albert Hall? Things had gotten creepy and dark, and it lost me. I started skipping that last song.

(I remember being mystified at that line in "A Day in the Life"...and about Billy Shears!) Last night I read the recent New Yorker piece on Paul McCartney, not thinking I'd be too interested ...but it was pretty good, and I got a little choked up reading about how the Beatles formed, etc., a story I've read dozens of times, maybe a tiny bit of new info (a new quote or something) each time round—it's like an origin myth...it is worthy of our continued attention!

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REALIZED: I've been doing a lot of Beatles posts lately—just wanted to alert readers to this incredible artifact on Dizzies Team Member Hua's blog: Gilberto Gil covering "Sgt. Pepper"!