these boys are now fertilizing daffodils

poetry was popular in Hell, the shades

recited lines they had memorized—forgetful

even of who they were, but famished for life.

from  “Eurydice and Stalin” by Robert Pinsky

writing music: angst (playlist)

PLAYLIST: WRITING MUSIC

Can also be called “relationships gone wrong” playlist or “there are a lot of things I wish I did better” playlist or “unstuffing my heart” playlist; listen to these songs while you’re writing through character-relationship conflicts, through uninitiated longing, through hesitation, through self-doubt, through characters’ awarenesses of their own flaws and their hesitation to act because of it. Listen while you’re getting to write a character who’s in pain because of how closely she can listen to her heart. Regret, heartache, missed opportunity, restlessness. 

But angst can also be, like, being in love with somebody. Angst can be anything (if you just belieeeeeevvvvve). 

Some of these listed below are my favorite songs in general. I remember listening to “Drops in the River” when I was driving up the I-5 from San Diego alone during the summer of 2012, looking out at the ocean with the windows rolled down, blue hair all over the place, just feeling really…. Well. You’ll know if you listen. Laura Marling is just perfect in every way and I like her music so much that I can’t think of anything actually helpful to say about it (at the moment), but there’s a theme amongst her songs of hosting darkness that’s really powerful. “Within” by Daft Punk is the one, though, that I can pretty much count on whenever, wherever, if I need to get down to a tough scene. I think it’s universally…true. And, at the end of my second year of college, I wrote an entire novella in two weeks listening to  “Sim Sala Bim,” so you can be sure it’s good. 

These are only a few of the songs I have in a writing playlist at the moment; I’ll continue to post suggestions as I continue to work. 

1. “The Beast” by Laura Marling

2. “Lonely Lonely” by Feist

3. “Within” by Daft Punk 

4. “Where Can I Go?” by Laura Marling

5. “Drops in the River” by Fleet Foxes

6. “When Were you Happy?” by Laura Marling

7. “When Doves Cry” by Alex Clare

8. “Too Close” by Vitamin String Quartet (Alex Clare cover)

9. “눈, 코, 입” by AkMu (Taeyang cover - THESE PPL ARE SO GOOD ;;) 

10. “Honey Honey” by Feist

11. “Sim Sala Bim” by Fleet Foxes

12. “I Don’t Trust Myself ” by John Mayer
13. “演員” (yǎnyuán | Actor) by Soft Lipa

writing music: 我們都有問題 by Soft Lipa (蛋堡)

The title of this song—我們都有問題—means “we have a problem,” but I’ve seen it referred to as “Our Problems” as well. Soft Lipa is a Taiwanese rapper who caught my attention in 2010 when I moved into the dorms at UCI and I heard his song called 收斂水 (“Lotion”) through the walls. Took me forever to find it and I only did because, like so many rappers do, SL branded 收斂水 with his name, singing “xì kàn zhè páizi xiězhe Soft Lipa” before the second chorus (line translates to “look, the sign says Soft Lipa”). 

“Lotion” is a great song, actually pretty sweet considering American hip-hop’s typical themes, basically instructing the listener on how to live well—“nǐ chúle xūyào bǎoyǎng de rǔyè /  wǒ hǎo xiǎng tuījiàn nǐ línghún de shōuliǎn shuǐ” (also, you need to use lotion / I want to recommend to you this lotion for your soul)—to take care of herself, to live purely (“occasionally you’ll want makeup, but think back to the simple”), to remember to relax, and basically to purify herself after descending into the clamor and pollution of daily life. The chorus translates to something like: 

“when you need to relax, play this song

after the nightclubs, play this song

after a bath, play this song

on leisurely afternoons, play this song”

For as sweet as “Lotion” is, it’s the kind of song I want to listen to—well—when I want to relax, not when I need to get down to writing. And writing is work—this is a strange idea to some people, because it looks like I just sit in front of a computer all day kind of moving my hands so why do I get so exhausted afterwards? First, it’s difficult to sit still and force yourself to work on one thing for hours, and you can only do it if you have a pretty strong 1) mental resolve or 2) emotional tether to what you’re writing. Either way it’s hard work.

I chose to highlight 我們都有問題 because of its chorus lines: 

我們都很好 (we are good) 

我們都不好 (we are not good)

The song is basically about people who are in a relationship that’s both good and not good—they know they have “problems” but they ignore them, pretending they don’t have them—need each other, though. Before the chorus there’s a couple lines that translate to “we say we don’t have problems,” but then it moves into the chorus with an “actually, I just want to tell you—”. The song is confession, mourning something, but is also tender about it. 

In Asian culture, there’s a big disparity between “face” and what’s inside—and this song is kind of heartbreaking in the way that it wants to break down those boundaries between what the heart really feels and what the face is allowed to express, ultimately embodying that sort of restlessness in the chorus lines “we are good / we are not good.” It’s just a reminder to me that the two things can exist at once. 

There’s something kind of cool about the word “we” or “us” in Chinese—the singular first person is 我 (wǒ), and the plural first person is actually just 我 + 們 (men—pronounced more like “mun”), 們 indicating plural. So “we” isn’t so removed from “I” like it is in English, but it’s an extension of the singular first person in actual language. 

Every story is, essentially, about characters, and how they relate to other characters. Even a story about a lonely person is a story about a person and their world, and all the other people with whom they don’t interact. Not necessarily for the exact story of the song, but for the feeling it gives me, this kind of restlessness and sadness, but also a tenderness and timidness…. It’s so important, when you’re writing, to do your best at pushing something beyond the easy, the obvious, the two-dimensional. You were put on this planet with your own set of eyes; there’s something only you can see about whatever it is you’re writing, but in order to do that, you have to be on high alert to everything your heart’s saying. This song can heighten these things in me: either the intensity of my emotions themselves, or my ability to understand my own impulses and thoughts. 

book review: Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

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MURAKAMI HARUKI: SPUTNIK SWEETHEART

This book is...soft. I started reading Murakami with A Wild Sheep Chase and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles and had just read Kafka on the Shore the summer before I read Sputnik Sweetheart. There's something different about SS.... It's a quieter work--hurts more after putting it down, sticks with you afterwards, showing up when you don't expect it to, reminding you why it matters. 

I've wondered about Murakami's writing structure before, the way he styles plot, symbols, and interweaves character narratives into a thicket that you have to kind of slice through and then repair on your own, like cutting out stitches in a knitted scarf and then trying to tie them back together--but it felt good for this story; the narrative distance from events ties everything together into something you can interact with more easily, though Murakami isn't a writer to actually write out all the answers his stories raise. The best thing you can do if you read this book is to go into it having convinced yourself not to resist your reactions to what it's doing--Japanese, magical-realistic narratives are simultaneously in-your-face and pretty subtle, and Sputnik Sweetheart, for everything that's startling about it, is emotionally intelligent, and a little sneaky. The title--Sputnik Sweetheart--is both sweet because of its appearance as a phrase in the story itself, but also serves as a summary of the book's emotional story. 

Miu, whose transcendent and traumatic experience in the ferris wheel leaves her stranded between two worlds with white hair that regenerates every day as reminder that the past happened, might be like Laika on board Sputnik itself, gazing out, maybe, into space, down at earth--but also, Sumire might be like Laika, Sumire whose heart is a hoarder, whose return from the other world isn't metaphor, isn't symbol for something bigger, just is--K might be Laika, K, whose world is pinned down and measured out by Sumire but who finds himself launched into, maybe, emptiness like space when she disappears, spending that time gazing out at stars only to have his vision reoriented on earth when she returns.... Murakami writes about outsiders, people who are always going places, writes about airplanes and trains and walks down ocean paths and swims down into the ocean on moonlit nights. All motion, and also no motion, is forward motion in space--what's there to orient you? Life doesn't move linearly in Murakami's narratives, and it's not circular--not orderly and regularly patterned like a knitted scarf, either. Life is like the bundle of of a protein, like the erratic flickering in and out of physical space of the electrons in an atom's cloud, motion so small and irregular that to the eye too far away, it looks like it's standing still.

*I posted this review on Goodreads first, but at Dad's suggestion am now posting it here (ᅌᴗᅌ* )

writing music: 숲 by Epik High

I keep track of the music I write to in iTunes, but I often find it useful when others share the music they write to, and what they’re writing when they listen to it. I’m currently editing the piece I last posted about, editing in new scenes and fleshing out a few others. 

I love this song—숲 (pronounced “soop,” meaning “forest” or “woods” in Korean) by Epik High. It makes me think about low light, and being alone somewhere. I listen to it between more active scenes or before I start revisions to get myself in a good mindset for going back to a place I’d been before, left, and might have forgotten. I’m ready to discover a little more about my characters and their landscape after I’ve listened to this one. I don’t know how to say it better—maybe that it opens my heart a little, so that I become more aware of my own voices.

Epik High is a hip-hop group, so a lot of their other music is different, but “Epilogue,” their last album before hiatus in 2010 while the members served their mandatory military service,  has a couple other interesting instrumental songs, “Blossom” and “서랍”, pronounced “suh-rahp,” which means “drawer.” I also like to write low-light scenes (night time, early morning...) to “Harajuku Days” and “쉿” (pronounced “shwit,” like the English “shh!”) from the album “Lovescream” and “Icarus Walks” from “Breakdown.”  

Medicine

I get in these moods. There’s one story I’ve written recently that I really really like, that means a lot to me, and I realized that this is the first time it’s happened for a story I’ve written for school. There are stories that you write because they’re interesting to you, and they sort of bug you like, when are you going to write me? you should write me. Then there are other stories that just sort of rocket around in your heart for a while, growing bigger and accumulating over time; at some point, whatever point, the point they need to be born, their voice is quieter, but it hurts more: you need to write me. You need me. 

Stories I’ve written for school so far have been ideas I’ve had—curiosities I’ve humored. What about this: a character who’s so shy that when a boy talks to her for the first time she cries about it later? What about this: a talkative student getting obsessed with a quiet one and trying to figure out the secret to quietness? What about this: a couple on their first marriage anniversary trip to London? What about this: a pothead who bounces through addictions, marijuana to love to Scrabble? 

But the fifth one—I can’t even talk about why I wrote it because the subject is so tender to me. I’ve just written this paragraph and deleted it several times. In the end, I find I can’t write it at all, so I’ll just move on…. 

What I’ve got now as my fifth story, the title story of my honors thesis project, is thirty pages of prose in which I expose my own preoccupation with a language and culture I’ve never actually encountered, my self-consciousness over it, the story of a girl and her childhood friend who bring home an international student from their college across the country for spring break. They drive down PCH to see the sunrise over the ocean on a morning in late March. That’s it. That’s the story, intercut with flashback and rumination. But writing it was embarrassing. I had to acknowledge several things about myself and my interest in this particular language and culture that I wouldn’t want to, normally, put into words, nonetheless into characters, to whom a writer owes the highest duty and care…. 

So I get in these moods. I write something that’s deeply, desperately important to me, and then I want to keep it where nobody can see it. I want to keep everything I write in which I bare my heart secret. But then I think about all the things I’ve read that have moved me even just a little bit, or that have totally changed my life, that have helped me decide that I need to keep writing when it’s seemed hopeless, when I’ve looked back and just hated everything I’d done, when my faults assume preeminence over the things I manage to do well…. And I think about what my life might be like without those things in them, and wonder if I could possibly serve that role in somebody else’s life. 

I went through this tumultuous period of not caring whether or not I’d end up as a good person after I’d realized some things about myself that I’d been ignoring before—but I’m over that. I want to be good; I’d like to live well, to be useful. What use are the gifts God’s given to me—if I can say that of myself, that writing is a God-given gift?—if I can’t work up the courage to share them? Maybe this is difficult to understand. People at work I talk to about my writing don’t understand why I’d go through the process of writing a book and then not try to put it out into the world. I guess if you don’t write, if you’re looking at it from that angle, to publish a book seems to be the reason people write books. But I like this explanation:

“Writing a book is horrible,” George Orwell said, “an exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” 

I love to write. I like what language can do, what I can ask language to do, how I can push every sentence to the limit of my ability to express a certain idea in the exact way I want to express it. Language is like this, mutable to personality and improbably capable. I believe in language more than I believe in anything else—that gets me into trouble more often than not. For example—people say “actions speak louder than words” so often that growing up I took it for granted and, thinking of myself as a person of above-average capability in this world, I didn’t ever think that, when faced with opportunities in which I had to make a thought or an intention into action, it would be so hard. 

I’m shy; I’ve never asked myself seriously not to be, so I continue to be. It’s really difficult for me to do things, though I intend things all the time. So I’m just saying all this because I love to write, but the best writing, the kind that arises out of some need on the part of the writer, the story that emerges because the writer absolutely needs it to exist…to write that story, it’s incredibly painful. I think that maybe to other people, by the evidence of how much I persist in making mistakes and bypassing correct decisions, it looks like maybe I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But I do know; and I know that apathy concerning reforming myself is just another of my multitudinous faults. 

So what writing does for me is it allows me a very small outlet through which to make good out of my mistakes. Stories need to exist in the world—if I can write them despite being a subpar human—in fact, if I can write them off the energy that arises when I encounter and engage with my own failures and insecurities—then maybe my stories can help me learn how to be better. 

But I’m still in a mood about it. I still have second thoughts about completing the thesis because if I do it means other people get to read it. Are going to read it. Can I do that? Put my heart on the page that way and invite others in? That is not something I am accustomed to doing; so my heart’s a little rocky sometimes, despite being emotion liquefaction mostly. 

“He oft finds med’cine, who his griefe imparts” (Spenser)

Winter Break Reading Recommendations

I ask fellow literature majors for reading recommendations all the time, and usually I get responses like you have to read Middlemarch! you have to read The Faerie Queene! you have to read War and Peace! and I love long books, but here are some of my recs for things I am 100% sure you'll have time to finish over a three-week period amongst other holiday activities :) personal absolute favorites bolded. 

poetry

• DU FU: A Life in Poetry, Translated by David Young (ISBN 978-0-375-71160-2)
• Dearest Creature by Amy Gerstler (ISBN 978-0143116356)
• The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck (ISBN 978-0880013345)
  
• School of the Arts by Mark Doty (ISBN 978-0060752460)
• On the Other Side, Blue by Collier Nogues (ISBN 978-1935536079)
• Small Porcelain Head by Allison Benis White (ISBN 978-1935536277)
• Room Service by Ron Carlson (ISBN 978-1597092333)
• Dreams and Dust by Don Marquis (this one is difficult to find because he's largely out of print right now, but my copy's ISBN is 978-1409917991)
• Fragile Acts by Allan Peterson (ISBN 978-1936365807)
• The Light the World Appears in by James Kimble (this one is also difficult to find, my uni library had a copy! ISBN 978-0941179058) 
• The Light Around the Body by Robert Bly (ISBN 978-0060907860)
• Self-Portrait with Crayon by Allison Benis White (ISBN 978-1880834831)
• Odas a las cosas / Odes to Common Things by Pablo Neruda (highly encourage you to read these in Spanish if you can!! ISBN 978-0821220801)
• Cien sonetos de amor por Pablo Neruda (you actually need to read these in Spanish: translations often miss the mark. ISBN 978-9875803008)
• The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (you might not have time to finish this one, but I can't ever recommend poetry without including this poet's work. He's incredible, beautiful. ISBN 978-0811218818)

short fiction (i.e. "short stories" / compilations of short fiction)

• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas (ISBN 978-0811202077)
• Widow by Michelle Latiolais (ISBN 978-1934137307)
• "Milk" & "Blood" by Ron Carlson (+link to "Milk" & "Blood" is in The News of the World ISBN 978-0393331783)
• Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger (ISBN 9780316767729) 
• "Dog Run Moon" by Callan Wink (in New Yorker, September 26, 2011, p.104-)
• "The Liar" by Tobias Wolff (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237) 
• "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237)
• "Weekend" by Ann Beatie (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237)
• "The Lover of Horses" by Tess Gallagher (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237)
• "A Poetics for Bullies" by Stanley Elkin (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237) 
• "Akhnilo" by James Salter (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237)
• "Winter Dreams" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (in Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 044037864)
• "The Open Window" by "Saki" (H.H. Munro) (in Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 044037864)
• In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (ISBN 978-0684822761)
• St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell (ISBN 978-0307276674)

fiction

• All Quiet on the Western Front by E.M. Remarque (ISBN 0899662927 preferred but any translation is fine)
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (ISBN 978-0143039976)
• Tinkers by Paul Harding (ISBN 978-1934137123)
• Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout (ISBN  978-0553763065)

non-fiction / essay

• A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis (ISBN 978-0802724700)
• Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (ISBN 0803263325) 
• Quite Early One Morning by Dylan Thomas (I HAVEN'T READ THIS ONE YET BUT IT'S DYLAN THOMAS COME ON ISBN 9780811202084)
• Proofs and Theories by Louise Gluck (ISBN 9780880014427)
• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (ISBN 978-0393310399)

non-fiction / autobiography

• The Language of Blood by Jane Jeong Trenka (ISBN 978-1555974268)
• Final Exam by Pauline W. Chen (ISBN 978-0307275370)