emily > Recent Status Updates

‘Those open windows were surrealistic doorways to the street that you could walk right through—if you felt like it. But all I felt like doing was to stand there in the cool twilight, gazing out across the East River at the oval spectre of the Pfizer sign—It was my favourite way to end a day—my disintegrating penthouse slum—In the morning—after exchanging addresses—to meet again—I took off for the New Mexican border—'

‘Frugality was a longtime habit w/ him—partial to certain foods—she described his stoic habits—and how, although he loved eggs fried w/ Chinese cedar sprouts, when—market price when cedar sprouts—came into season, he was shocked & would not permit them to buy it—Talking with her father-in-law—there was a melancholy of the dreamy kind—which drowsiness crept—For breakfast—congee—pickled vegetables & crispy fried beans’

‘—fruits—conceal in the sweetness of their pulp subtle messages of asperity and sourness—The solar energy coursed along dense networks of blood and chlorophyll—living and dying in all the fibers—that absorb the sun—assimilated ceaselessly—in the universal cannibalism—its imprint on every amorous relationship and erases the lines between our bodies and sopa de frijoles, huachinango a la vera cruzana, and enchiladas.’

‘I used to read a lot at one point, after discovering the library on Tenth Street by the park. Not having the faintest idea what to read, somehow I stumbled across a whole series of African adventure books, none of them classics, and most from the point of view of a lion. I really fell in love with these stories. I wanted to be a lion—either that or have a lion accept me even though I was human.’

‘Here, a mutual obliviousness at work. Obliviousness, rather than acceptance/understanding—it felt congenial—He liked to talk—to cackle. She didn’t like to talk at all. She went along w/ things—imperiously—Her look—brought to mind—a cat receiving the tribute of its worshippers in ancient Egypt. Or a person enduring a bumpy ride in a sedan chair. He did treat her like the object of a one-man cult. He was all wonder.’

‘Accustomed to—vast spaces—the north, he found Shanghai oppressive—crowds made the air stale—Another train was leaving—Where was it bound? He knew—his destination would be farther, greater—he would have to wander more than a decade—maybe two/three decades, a lifetime. He might never settle down. But he believed that once he arrived at his true destination, he would have no doubts, troubles, or sense of rootlessness.’

‘—adorned like—women of the Bible—there was—something about her made-up eyes that said—decipher me, my love—or I’ll have to devour you—she again wondered whether or not to meet him—in her confused hesitation—what reassured her was something that had—often calmed—supported her—knowledge that everything that exists—w/ absolute exactness—ultimately whatever she ended up doing/not doing would not escape that exactness—’

‘—hoarsely: “Whiskey—soda.” He—sink into a daze—Drinking too much is not good—but when it’s—like that—it has to count as a classy case of degeneracy—she looked at him—saw how embarrassed he was—thought it was because he wasn’t used to speaking English and couldn’t formulate a response. To keep things going she said : “It’s really cold today—I lived in Harbin when I was little—used to speak Chinese—I’ve forgotten it”’

‘Air-conditioning made the humidity and heat of—Southeast Asia only barely tolerable. He couldn’t understand how—people had ever lived in this region without it—His knack was translating the abstractions of math into concrete movements that the body had evolved to process. Instead of forcing humans to learn like a Turing machine—he turned machine-learning math into choreography so that the body could think by doing’

‘—strange when somebody talks to you like that. When they’re lying, but somehow you’re on the spot. Was he trying to impress us? But that could hardly be the case—you couldn’t value someone’s good opinion while thinking they would buy this kind of crap—A living witness was required for the attitudes of this self-pollinating entity. A living listener—required—you were it—even as the ‘living’ element was—disregarded.’

‘What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of barcodes—letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language be illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way by night, in their great underground shops, they can organise readings of their own barcoded poetry. Move. Get going. Blessed is he who leaves.’

‘These questions were all one question : Why did she marry him?’

"It was just what you did—What you can’t understand is the terrible pressure there was—to get married, to be married."

"You wanted to blend in?"

‘I never had—desire to quiz—father about his life; to interrogate his reasoning—after all he was no mystery—His nature had to generate satisfaction—That was it. Getting one over—Apropos London, for instance’

‘As—emperor—also—doctor—Kangxi wasn’t half bad. Lu Xun studied medicine—At first—didn’t believe—Chinese medicine. Later—studied Western medicine but took Chinese medicine when—ill—recorded : Drinking ginger juice to treat stomach problems—Drinking acanthopanax liquor for shoulder pain. China is an exasperating country. It—invented many things—only to see them improved upon—exploited by foreigners—while it struggles—’

‘—first thing that happens—disfigures space; it makes everything more cramped and more massive and unscalable. Details disappear and objects lose their features—becoming squat and indistinct; how strange that by day they may be spoken of as ‘beautiful’ or ‘useful’; now they look like shapeless bodies—hard to guess what they’d be for. Everything is hypothetical—She reads of disoriented whales swimming up onto beaches’

‘—in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms—Cao Cao—head opened—brain operated on—Hua Tuo invented—powdered anaesthetic mafeisan more than seventeen hundred years ago. He had his patients ingest it with alcohol and fall into a deep sleep—In Zhuangzi’s writing, the cow is almost invisible—Peng bird was restricted by time—meanwhile—smaller birds could take flight whenever they pleased—elm—sandalwood—restricted by space—’

‘The Lives of Gargantua and Pantagruel—The 2 Chinese translations each have their—merits—It’s fascinating to see different translation methods when one compares translations. For instance—one version translates an after-meal sweet treat as “candied papaya” and one as “papaya jam.” People don’t usually eat jam after a meal—it should be “candied papaya.” These translations—from the same text—turned out so differently—'

‘‘A person who knows what he’s asking is someone who can expect an answer—what you need is that proverbial pinch that tips the scales.’ He—didn’t know—proverbs that had to do with scales & pinches. She had taken her husband’s last name—but her first name was fairly exotic—He thought she would burst into tears—but she just took another crouton—crumbled it onto—her salad. ‘Did you know I am a botanist by training?’’

‘Breasts are the subject matter—though I suppose the content may be rather different from what you’re envisioning. More than 2 and a 1/2 years ago—on a bright summer day—this narrator had been swimming without a care in the world—There are no melodramatic or sensationalist characters or plot twists. If this isn’t the book you’re looking for, carry on and good luck—Chinese—always been—secretive about sickness—’

‘Airports also have a soundtrack, a symphony of airplane engines, a couple of simple sounds that extend into a space devoid of rhythm, an Orthodox twin-engine choir, gloomy minor, infrared, infrablack, largo, based on a single chord that bores even itself. A requiem that opens with the potent introitus of take-off and closes with an amen descending into landing.’

‘I’m interested in whatever shape this may take—mistakes in the making—Anything that deviates from the norm—Shapes that don’t heed symmetry—not interested in the patterns so scrutinised by statistics that everyone celebrates w/ familiar/satisfied smiles—My weakness is for teratology & for freaks. I believe—unswervingly—agonisingly—that it is in freaks that Being breaks through to the surface—reveals its true nature—’

‘—slide from one truth to—next—always dissatisfied—life—made up of complete little lives—of whole—closed circles—isolated themselves frm one another—started over on—same human plane—different fundamental notes—Or—different supplementary ones—basic ones forever—same? It was always useless to have been happy/unhappy—I carry on—inaugurating myself—Why so independent—why not merge into—one block—providing me w/ ballast?’

‘—chameleon quality of his Virgoan—eyes—earthy darkness perhaps—Finally—cornbread—done—we lost ourselves for a spell in the warm—golden stuff—burying—faces—steaming pillows of grain—butter running in rivulets—we collapsed—slouching on wooden chairs in the lamplight—gazing wistfully at—debris of crumbs in—pan as a freight train went by—the 10 o’clock—its plaintive far-spiraling whistle screaming through the night—’

‘I was drinking his Irish whiskey—he added ‘Yes—some of the best people—losers. I’ve known—terrible brilliant men—all brilliance on the outside—all morality inside—a second line of defence.’ How he hates morality—this octogenarian. For him morality is a foreign imposition brought on the point of the bayonet—this man—the last—romantics—All life—a risk—that is no reason for panic—normal course of things—ends in death—’

‘Music—vibrated—so intimate—revealed itself—she heard someone repeat—slightest nuances—sounds—surprised—how she had been invaded—scattered. She didn’t feel its harmony anymore when it became popular—it was no longer hers. Or even when she heard the piece several times—which destroyed the similarity—because her thoughts never repeated themselves—while music could be renewed—she didnt identify profoundly w/ all sounds’

‘—fever—result of—days wandering here and there—repudiating—loving the same things a thousand times over. Of those nights—dark—silent—tiny stars winking up high. The woman—on the bed—vigilant eye in the half-light. The hazy white bed swimming in darkness. Tiredness slithering through her body—lucidity fleeing the octopus—She—preferred a thousand times over that it was raining—would have been—much easier to sleep—’

‘I got my master’s to kill time—because I love watching movies—life fucked me sideways—I never aspired to hold power—only to sit beside it. But—temptation is hard to resist—Sometimes you risk everything to put food on the table—I gripped my Saint Jude scapular—put my life in the devil’s hands—Lokote says—God doesn’t come through on this kinda thing. La vida loca has its consequences—you’d better chase those dreams—’

‘There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air—She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her—of joy that kills.’

‘I didn’t know home tests could only give false negatives, never false positives. I wasn’t ready to bring a kid into this fucked-up world—Rodés was playing—pretty much sums up my life—trapped in an infinite loop of bad decisions w/ consequences that are never not dramatic. I take the same road over & over—even when it looks like I have things under control—something tells me—I don’t. You might think I’m exaggerating’

'Deep down the animal—disgusted her—she still had—desire to please—to be loved by someone as powerful as her dead aunt. To then walk all over her—to disown her without a second thought. Because the best phrase—goodness makes me want to be sick—It smelled of raw meat kept for too long. Without entirely rotting in spite of everything. It was freshened up from time to time—seasoned—enough to keep—lukewarm—quiet meat.'

‘Incommunicability is thought to be the theme of our time—to renew—tradition to which he belongs—And to believe in continuity is to be modern—is to be—for us who can respect nothing else—revolutionary—The static single viewpoint in painting & sculpture can no longer satisfy—expectations deriving from our new knowledge of history—physical structure—psychology. We now think in terms of processes rather than substances’