Since I have just finished a 40-page draft, and taken care of some housekeeping issues, I felt like I had earned some rights to goof around. What makes me feel incredible stupid is that every chapter of my dissertation revolves around a rather self-evident, if not at all silly, idea, that is, it appears self-evident only after I have worked on it to show it with evidence. Of course, how can this book not be about paranoia? And this film! Sure, it hinges on fetishism. That is the crux of his aesthetics, which we can all see! I understand daily affairs of the business and financial world, or indeed, any human endeavor, is akin to what I am doing now. See, everybody loves tablet computing! Didn’t you find this asset to be toxic? But my corporate counterparts make some serious money, while doing something just as dumb.
I also tried catching up with the radio version of “This American Life” while jogging, something that I have given up during the writing phase. An average episode is already excellent, but I stumbled upon two better-than-average episodes: True Urban Legends and Parent Trap. One segment in True Urban Legends is on Republican Steve Poinzer‘s political ambition. Ira Glass, of course, did not say anything directly to that effect, but we are told a story about how he was clueless and potentially, according to some, exploited a community and a school by mischaracterizing them. Poinzer responded to the story. After listening to both sides, I cannot believe Poinzer at all. No wonder he is Republican, suffering from, to quote Churchill, “terminological inexactitude.” I would rather trust someone who lies about having sex in the Oval Office.
Parent Trap is bittersweet. The episode is a bunch of stories about parents who mean well for their kids (as well as one chimpanzee), and do something to the kids in order to advance their own agendas. The centerpiece is about a daughter receiving a handwritten letter from her deceased mother, once every year on her birthday, for 17 years, plus one that is supposed to be delivered on her wedding day. The first ones, arriving when the narrator felt lonely in college, were empowering. The letters were a conscious mix of “prep talk, parental affection, and moral instructions,” to quote the show. But it was also the last part that started to throw the narrator into emotional turmoil. She constantly thought she would disappoint and fail her mother, and she could not accept her mother’s idea of what a good life would be like, and so on. Religious faith played a big part in haunting the narrator too. Well, you can imagine, her mother was a devout Mormon, and the narrator, not. The daughter was glad that last letter was miraculously lost and she never received it on her wedding day.
My reaction to the beginning was “Aww” and found it very touching. I immediately identify with the narrator because I wish my father did leave me something in writing, addressed to me. A firm believer in fate, he was convinced his life was a tough one and therefore he would not go easily. Boy, was he wrong. But then his absence gave me this gift of freedom. He engendered my life, and gave me, now a young adult, practically no expectations in terms of what one generation wants or projects for the next. I guess if he were alive, I would have still been able to do what I am doing now, but our relationship might be a bit strained by my choice. The narrator on “This American Life,” on the other hand, had a hard time winding up mourning and move on, as she did so at snail’s pace. If every year on your special day, an authority tells you to do this and not do that, and you cannot respond or argue because the author is already dead, it will be quite a torturous way to grow up alongside a pile of lettre[s] morte[s], which is the title of a novel by Linda Lê, a Franco-Vietnamese writer I am studying in my dissertation. In the novel, the narrator agonizes over receiving the last letters from an ailing father in Vietnam. I have a lot of empathy for the narrator in “This American Life,” and I admire her courage to stand up against the epistolary ridiculousness and to lead an independent life as she sees fit.
I deeply despise Hong Kong’s Christian Right, whose purpose in life is to encroach on my freedom. They take a literalist approach to the Bible, a cultural artifact from a couple thousand years ago and use it to justify their oppressive tactics. The latest follies include a pastor asking his flock to support the government appointed and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party, and a Hong Kong group claiming to have found the relics from the Noah’s Ark in Turkey. They have to be nuts to rely on a literal interpretation of a collection of ancient texts. I like how the hosts on Hong Kong’s MyRadio quoted some source to poke fun at the Noah’s Ark discovery: tell me why the marsupials did jump all the way from Australia to board the Ark in the Middle East, and then travel back to Australia. Believe in all the bullshit you want, but do not impose your theocratic bullshit on me. Mara is everywhere, and as an engaged Buddhist, I have to stop evil from spreading like a social cancer. What a bunch of morons.
If I had children, I would still leave something written to them after my death. “My dear Son / My dear daughter,” the correspondence begins, but it would read like the Governor-General of Canada‘s speeches. Something vague and general enough, and some fundamental values that every sane person would agree upon. Who wouldn’t agree we should empower the youth? Love, family, education, care for one another, the Commonwealth, that sort of symbolic things. Nonpartisan and impartial, while leaving the “dirty dealings” for the ministers and the politicians to say. To the Monarch, how her subjects should live their lives and organize politically should be totally up to them. The same goes with parents. Give your children something to hold onto, but give them the final say. This is the wisdom and beauty of the Canadian Monarchy!
On the Ridge of Pratt 