writings that stayed with me
sometimes you read something on the internet and it would stay with you long after—long enough that at the end of the year, you’d feel compelled to dig them up and revisit in a blogpost.
consider this a digital atlas of the online spaces my mind has visited in 2022.
Kay Sage, The Upper Limit of the Sky (1944)
Sheila Heti, A Diary in Alphabetical Order, New York Times
a diary series arranged alphabetically that Heti published as a NYT column at the beginning of 2022. i remember checking it each week with such fervor and anticipation like it’s my favorite ao3 fanfic.
afterwards i read two of her books and her recent project on The Paris Review but the diary is still by far her most intriguing and rewarding work for me. (sorry Pure Colour enthusiast my beloved @赋格)
perhaps Heti’s wacky self indulgence is only enjoyable in fragmented, tiny portions, not unlike microdosing.
Meeting the same people you knew ten years ago, you’re seeing how much worse you’ve all become — more dull, more cynical about each other, less pleasant to be around.
My main wish for my life right now is not to think about men all the time, to ever more think about men less and less, and to look around at the world, and at my books — at the books I want to write and the work I want to do — and at other things too, and just really get over my neuroses about everything, and stop smoking and be healthy and confident inside, and to feel my own will, which is my soul, and to be able to have some control over how I react, and to be in the world in a more thoughtful way, and to come out of childhood and be a woman.
My 20s are gone. My utter awfulness. My whole life changes.
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Caitlin Flanagan, Joan Didion’s Magic Trick, The Atlantic
so much has been written about Didion since her death—seems like every writerly person with a newsletter was reflecting on her cultural legacy and their own relationship to her at some point this year, especially in recent months with the auction and whatnot.
this one where Flanagan takes a road trip through California to visit all the places Didion had lived reads like a personal essay of someone in mourning as much as a travel piece, which is possibly what made it so enjoyable.
At a certain point in her decline, I was gingerly asked if I would write an obituary. No, I would not. I was not on that particular train. I was on the train of trying to keep her alive.
I wanted to feel close to her—not to the mega-celebrity, very rich, New York Joan Didion. I wanted to feel close to the girl who came from Nowhere, California (have you ever been to Sacramento?), and blasted herself into the center of everything. I wanted to feel close to the young woman who’d gone to Berkeley, and studied with professors I knew, and relied on them—as I had once relied on them—to show her a path.
The thing to do was get in the car and drive. I would go and find her in the places where she’d lived.
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Jean Garnett, Scenes from an Open Marriage, The Paris Review
i’ll admit i clicked on the title mainly out of voyeuristic curiosity, but what came through was a gratifying and honest exploration of modern marriage, its potentials and its policing of individual autonomy, especially women’s autonomy, and especially when it’s coupled with parenthood.
p.s. don’t make the same mistake i did by googling the drummer husband. deeply regrettable.
My husband’s extramarital activity was (and is) convenient. His date nights gave me much that I had yearned for, lusted after: relief from the distraction of guilt, space and solitude, time to write.
Maybe this was my erotic life now, these late-night vigils at my laptop, hitting a joint just until the spectating bitch-self got stupid, then taking some notes, wolfing popcorn and smearing butter on the keys, testing the rhythm of a line, the pressure of a word in that spot, seeing how it felt, right there.
But words are words and flesh is flesh, its phantom vibrations notifying me every now and then, and I needed to act out, make some other use of my freedom.
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Tynan Stewart, Waste Not, Real Life
a friend (赋格) first told me about Lomi, a sleek $499 machine that sits pretty on one’s kitchen countertop and promises to compost food scraps at the push of a button. few weeks later i came upon this piece, debunking Lomi’s false promise and the tech industry’s troubling desire to defy death and decay.
All this should help us see what Lomi actually provides: Not composting so much as support for a particularly sterile vision of life untouched by decay yet somehow still blessed with renewal. For those who can afford it, Lomi secures an illusory peace of mind and a dubious assurance that their food waste is being “magically” transformed into an ecologically friendly product. It doesn’t matter that a properly managed compost pile shouldn’t smell. The very idea of decay is gross, something to be technologically disguised, if not eliminated.
Not only does Lomi promise that more of the same — “convenient” consumer technology marketed to individual households — can fix Earth’s interlocking ecological crises. It also highlights a troubling fantasy among tech developers and investors: that we should assimilate decay, decomposition, and death into capitalist innovation under the auspices of “defeating” these inevitable endpoints of life.
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常羽辰，巴别塔之后，《黑齿》杂志
赋格 sent me this one day (lol i have other friends i swear) and my mind was immediately blown. it was unfathomable to me, prior to reading this, that one could write in both Chinese and English in the same piece—the same paragraph, even—and still be taken seriously, not be considered a bye-lingual failure. it resonated with me at a time when i was struggling (still am, evidently) to write in Chinese, which increasingly felt like a form of translation rather than creation and became so daunting that it prevented me from writing at all.
plus this magazine has incredible web graphic design.
我想写下许多感想，但迟迟无法落笔。除了世界的动荡和自身的拖延之外，漫长的犹豫在于我不能决定落笔是用中文还是英语。两个选项都有自然和不自然的地方：英语的自然在于输入与输出的统一，中文的自然仍深埋在我的基因血液里；然而如今我已经不能分辨哪一种自然更自然。相应地，两个选项都隐含了翻译——不仅是文章完成后交付到译者手中时，作为工种的翻译——写作、言说、甚至呼吸的每一刻对我来说都是翻译，或者说都是弥合裂痕的努力。
In fact, a close friend once commented that they viewed me as utterly blunt, and I thought to myself with an air of melancholy: they will never know how crafty I can be in packaging my true intentions when speaking Chinese. In this foreign linguistic territory, I have no luxury of ornamentation, no access to abundance, nor am I equipped for subtlety.
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Ling Ma, Peking Duck, The New Yorker
multiple people in my online and irl circles were raving about this story, repeatedly, so i finally read it, and yes it’s everything people praise it for: it’s multi-layered and structurally ambitious, and it examines the falsities of ‘language’ and ‘narrative’ in ways that are illuminating but also extremely relatable.
Ice cream is my favorite food. I write these words in the journal my mother gives me to record my first days in the U.S. English is just a play language to me, the words tethered to their meanings by the loosest, most tenuous connections. So it’s easy to lie. I tell the truth in Chinese, I make up stories in English. I don’t take it that seriously.
Thom always speaks first. “The way English is rendered in this piece, it’s kind of artificial. I mean, the first-person narration reads too smoothly and is too well articulated for a protagonist who’s not fluent in English.”
Others in workshop echo some of Thom’s sentiments about the inherent awkwardness of rendering the experiences of such a character in English, but there’s no consensus on how to solve this issue. Someone suggests that it could be written in Chinglish instead, but another student counters that this would play into stereotypes. “Using Chinglish would exaggerate the character’s inarticulateness, and flatten her into an immigrant trope.”
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Sam Jaffe Goldstein, Find Something To Hide As Soon As Possible; an interview with Anne Boyer, The End of the World Review (substack)
someone recommended this substack which led to my discovery of an interview with none other than Anne Boyer.
at one point during the translation of Boyer’s The Undying, we hoped she could write something for the Chinese edition—perhaps her thoughts on covid considering the book was originally published pre-pandemic—but it never came to fruition. this interview is everything i imagine she would have written in response, and her writing here is poetic and poignant as always.
Q: We are inundated with information about coronavirus and have spent months arguing over what data we can and cannot trust. Is our obsession with data getting in the way of telling the story of this pandemic?
A: Something is wrong, but I don't know if it’s our obsession with data. The thing-ification and fragmentation the data does to us is perhaps growing into a visible contradiction, in that trusting the numbers is no longer a widely shared value, but I do not know where this leads. What has me really despondent is the lack of collective public mourning, the absence of memorial, ritual, recognition, rage. If anything, in this case, the data should help us conceptualize the magnitude of our loss. Maybe data has become so cheap now that we cannot feel the preciousness of what it represents. The covid dead don’t seem to, in the public imagination, come near the death of Princess Di, Prince, or whatever celebrity. We could fill up acres with fresh graves, and yet there is no shared time or place in which we all come together to mourn.
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Elias Canetti, Fifty Disguises: Selections from The Book Against Death, The Paris Review
excerpts from Canetti’s lifelong project to write about/against death, which spanned over more than half a century—a century filled with so much death and suffering. i was deeply touched by his unyielding conviction and sense of urgency.
That the letters of the alphabet still mean something, that they still have their form and weight and the power to manifest something in this destroyed landscape of belief rife with bodies; that they still remain signs rather than having disintegrated like life itself; that they have not grown invisible out of shame, and that every good sentence they are forced to compose still holds potential; that an innocent man does not hang the moment any are crossed out on this page—or could it be that they are even more damned than we are and haven’t a clue?