A record of the stuff I've read! #1

It's a cold rainy Monday morning as I open this document. The sky is grey and the air exceptionally cold. It's the prime time to get productive work done. Focused. My mind isn't fighting off the heat and I can keep my head down and work. It's a cold Sunday evening as I finish it now. 

Hey! I thought it'll be cool if I pen down some interesting things I've read this week. I don't know how long I can keep this up, but I at least want to say that I've started. Without further ado, let's get started!

Travel literature in China— it's nice to see that it's sort of universal to move from a formal way of recording information and travel to a more informal style. 

Jade Mountains is a book about Chinese travel literature. It talks about the Youji, a type of travel account inscribed into rocks, written typically by scholars on their travels to share about the place and the people they hang out with. 

There's a ceremonial purpose to these things, where sometimes they're carved on stone to commemorate a new building or give a name to a nice lake. They contain information about the lake like why the name is chosen and stuff like that, as a sort of accompaniment for people to appreciate the thing itself. Travelling, for them, is about spreading information about natural sights, like the account to India.

Later on, we start to see an increasing personal edge where a political exile would write about his hatred of his position while saying the nature around him is beautiful. There is an autobiographical edge to it because it implies that writing is inherently personal no matter how objective.

I like the idea of active verbs guiding readers through the journey, including how it's used to describe the landscape to make things more lively.

Overall, it's an interesting first choice to read for the project, and it anchored my ideas on what travel literature looked like in a different country and context.

“The Letters of Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac” is exactly as it sounds like: a series of letters Cassady wrote to Kerouac. The type of letters the editors pick out are about Cassady updating Kerouac about his life and wife, alongside encouraging him to write more and eventually come visit him. 

Cassady's fictional counterpart, Dean Morirarity, is a hardass obsessed only with going fast and travelling. Yet, the real Cassady is supportive and cares very deeply about his friends. It's hard to believe that the one who inspired the character Dean to abandon Sal and his first wife is the same one who included Kerouac as part of his big family.

Sweet moments aside, I enjoyed his frank way of writing. One point I enjoyed was his point on the 'idiot'. 

Idolising the idiot.

He isn't idealising stupidity in a conventional sense. To him, the idiot is someone who's openly in touch with his feelings, a symbol associated with "[y]our exultation, sheer idiotic joy and doing anything you like in the world, manifests the freedom Faust gained" and any wrongdoing "may well be fate as personified by Mephistopheles" (103).

Throughout On the Road, Dean is someone who famously claims that he doesn't like to get hung up over things he can't control. He wants to be in the moment, to zip past things and have fun. To embrace this side of yourself means to not be ashamed of yourself and indulge in what makes you happy. 

Further on in the letter, Cassady brings up a child named Lucien, someone Kerouac's familiar with. Lucien's a snob (Cassady's words), to put it lightly, he's a beloved "golden boy" but he has a weak character like having "a complete servility to jail-begot fears" (104). Cassady describes his weakness as saying that Lucien "persists in the naïve belief that smugly grasping at bourgeois strengths can substitute entirely for Bohemian freedom." (104).

In this sense, Lucien represents someone who isn't living his true self. He has potential to be a good person but consistently chooses not to be because he needs to feel control. What Cassady's saying here, is that true happiness comes from embracing 'your own soul' rather than hoping external things will change.

Then, there's something interesting he says that "You see his faults, but still retain an idealised image because you need it as stimulus" (104). This implies that because you're faced with someone you love, you too will fall in the trap of living falsely, of clinging to the belief that something external will change on its own without any effort. Out of love? Perhaps, but at least as an inspiration. 

Interestingly, Cassady urges us to talk to him, to form a connection and communicate.

Perhaps that's the point: to focus on what's truly here rather than what could've been. The archetype of the 'idiot' is a crucial reminder to live clearly without pretence.

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From this point, my summaries would be quick and not too detailed. The aim of such essays is to quickly recount, in broad strokes, the things I've read. Anyway, this book is called Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging by Gary L. Atkins.

Despite the book being about events that happened a century before the beginnings of the texts I've chosen, I think it's a good starting point to see where America's somewhat contradictory 'national character' (for lack of a better word) came from. I can see where the faint strain of America's sexual freedom comes from, as resistance against a heavily moral society.

Sure, none of my characters are gay, but I liked the idea of marginalised people finding community together and developing a culture on the fringe. 

The most powerful communities are those built on trust in the face of a political system, where people choose to come together and find camaraderie within them. It so happened that the people in question are gay, but I can see this logic occurring in other marginalised communities. People aren't just looking to resist; they want a chance to be themselves, too. They want a home. I think that's beautiful.

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On that note, the other text I've read is a book called Arabic Exile Literature in Europe: Defamiliarizing Forced Migration by Johanna Sellman. 

It examines the idea of citizenship, how new possibilities of belonging are grounded in the imagination across the liminal nature of a border. Literature, in particular, is highlighted as being the stage for conflicts and the basis for new ideas.

Just a quick rundown of points I find interesting:

The idea of borders, as being arbitrary yet holding real significant impacts. They reflect a trend in globalisation where people are more able to travel but in response, authorities are quick to enact boundaries to control this movement. These boundaries emphasises an inequality, where only the privileged can move through them easily while the rest are trapped in a liminal space.

It's this liminal space where new identities can be forged, be it in nature or in the imagination. Regardless, people can forge their own definittion of citizenship outside of conventional means.

The book also talks about the idea(lisation) of exile. Being in exile promises a personal detachment, where you're no longer bound to your previous country for belonging, and thus freedom. Yet, it also gives instability, anxiety and fear over the loss of an identity. It's an interesting tension. Perhaps it's the price for freedom? I'll talk about this more in another post when I talk about an article I read called, "‘The Art of Being Home’: Home and Travel in Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Poetry" by Boey Kim Cheng.