Smart Links 10/21/11

This awesome hammock boat is courtesy of the kiddos at UC Davis. Happy Friday, folks!

I saw this fierce set of talons yesterday. Inquire on Mulberry Street, NY, in case you've lost an alligator foot.

Who killed Che?

Forget Ironman. Aspire to overcome the Death Race, a 45 mile course that involves crawling under barbed wire, lugging bags of pennies, and chopping wood. Pw to view the video is: run.

Victor LaValle, a judge for this year's National Book Award, talks smack in response to Laura Miller's Salon article on why the NBA is now irrelevant in literature.

Knit a sweater. Save a penguin. Seriously.

Oh, Canada - only in your lovely country would Occupy Wall Street protesters and policemen have some old fashioned fun with water guns.

When you "Like" a company on Facebook, it could drive up its stock, according to a Pace University/Famecount study.

A Review of Xu Bing and Square Word Art

What I love about language
Is what I love about fog:
What comes between us and things
Grants them shine.

- "Fog Suite", Mark Doty

This fall, the Wallach Art Gallery is showing a fantastic collection from Xu Bing, one of China’s most prominent contemporary artists. Despite the growing number of talented Chinese artists exhibiting internationally, Xu Bing’s work stands out for its provocative meditations on language. Using calligraphy, Xu Bing questions the possibilities and limitations of language and its writing systems. Within language, we invest all our cultural norms, expectations, politics, and histories, and Xu Bing plays with these linguistic systems of signification to astonishing effect.

Entitled “Square Word Art Calligraphy”, the exhibit provides an expansive survey of Xu Bing’s square word art, a style of writing which he invented. Using Chinese stroke patterns to create English letters, Bing transforms English words into Chinese doppelgangers. English letters are compacted into a square, and are made to resemble Chinese characters. They are best read top down and left to right, similar to how Chinese characters are typically written. Those who read Chinese may recognize similar stroke patterns in the words but are unable to read the word; those who read English may dismiss it as unreadable (which at first, very much seems so). The mutual sense of estrangement and then re-familiarization in reading square words provides a provocative window in testing linguistic boundaries.

In case you can’t see the English letters, here’s my nifty tracing of the words. (Hint: It's supposed to read, Square Word, Xu Bing.)

Square Word art calligraphy is an artistic sleight of hand. It is a play on not only linguistic, but cultural expectations. I went to an artist talk with Xu Bing several weeks ago, and he explained that when he paints square words, he is not sure if he is writing English or Chinese. He compared the process to that of an arranged marriage, except the spouses purposefully don’t match. In contextualizing his work, Xu Bing was an unexpectedly thorough speaker, covering extensive ground from the Cultural Revolution, China in the 80s, the effect of Western art in China, the stunted art scene in cosmopolitan Chinese cities, and his time in New York with Ai Wei Wei.

Bing, a bit bookish with his wavy hair and round glasses, was born in Chongqing and lived in New York in the 90s. In 2008, he was appointed the vice president of the China Central Academy of Arts and is now based in Beijing. His first major work was “Book from the Sky” (天書), a mammoth compilation of books, scrolls, and paintings written in a Chinese looking script that Bing invented. The script was created to resemble Chinese characters, but was in fact devoid of any meaning. In creating a set of signifiers with no signified, the piece suggested that the Chinese government had evacuated all culture and meaning from society, leaving only a fictitiously legible memory of its past. The evacuation of meaning from textual characters implicated the use of the Chinese writing system as a source and medium of political power. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Xu Bing left for the United States shortly after the piece was shown in Beijing.

This is Xu Bing's "Book from the Sky".

Over the years, Xu Bing has created a stunning portfolio of calligraphic and sculptural pieces. He is perhaps most well known for his square word art, which the Wallach Art Gallery surveys extensively in this new exhibit. The first gallery room is presented as a make shift tableau of a Chinese calligraphy room. There are low rosewood tables with rice paper booklets of calligraphy paper and tiny bottles of ink. Visitors are encouraged to sit down on the floor pillows or wooden seats in tracing Bing’s square word calligraphy with a brushes and ink. At the front, there is a blackboard with Bing’s alphabet written in chalk, next to an American flag. The television that’s on plays an educational video of how to write calligraphy, in which the woman’s emotionless voice serves as a sad substitute for a live teacher.

Past the initial classroom setting, the visitor is invited to read Xu Bing’s square word art as best they can. In the neighboring space, expansive paintings hang over the walls, and it becomes clear how easily it is to see these words as Chinese writings. Xu Bing noted during the artist talk that he noticed how children seem to have the easiest time reading the words. He attributes this to the fact that as people grow older, they become entrenched in fixed notions of culture, ethnicity, and language, and it becomes increasingly difficult to see the world in a new way. This ability to see past typical, if not stereotypical, markers of culture and language is one which the Australian government assesses, as they recently contacted Xu Bing on using some of his work in an IQ test. And a first glimpse at his square word calligraphy is indeed an exercise in expanding one’s cultural expectations of legibility. The visual similarity to Chinese can be jarring for the English speaker, but the moment of semantic understanding is one of victory and enchantment. Reading the words is like reading a puzzle; it can be equally frustrating and rewarding, but it is a lovely bewilderment.

Here's Xu Bing's "alphabetic" guide to writing square words.

Although Xu Bings manipulates linguistic expectations, and indeed situates Chinese/English as an antithesis, it is important to remember that it would be inaccurate to understand Chinese and English as completely opposite forms of writing. The myth that Chinese is an ideographic system of writing is one imagined by early European travelers and repeatedly perpetuated by modern writers. Although Chinese did indeed originate from pictographs, don’t let the few remaining characters that vaguely resemble images (sun日, moon月, forest林) fool you! The vast majority of modern Chinese characters don’t resemble anything in particular. In fact, Chinese is in fact a phonetic system of writing, and if you ever had the chance to ask the prominent linguist John DeFrancis, he would say that there was never such a thing as an ideographic language. Moreover, the irony in square words is the fact that in the digital age, Chinese is an increasingly Romanized language through pin yin. Chinese is, like all others, an evolving language.

Want to try reading some? Here's Xu Bing's rendition of Robert Frost's poem, "After Apple Picking".

And here's an example of how Xu Bing transformed the letters y and z into a Chinese version.

The sense of satisfaction in reading the square words arises, in part, from the stereotype of inscrutable Chinese symbols. For those who cannot read Chinese, the moment of legibility is one of conquering the surfaces of un-readability. In juxtaposing English and Chinese, Xu Bing ostensibly creates, as mentioned earlier, a “marriage of opposites”, as English is commonly portrayed as an alphabetic writing system, whereas Chinese is described as an ideographic system of symbols. The over-romanticized distance between English and Chinese is an incredibly overworked binary, but the idea seductively persists. The luscious strokes of Chinese calligraphy are a compelling visual departure from the careful print of English letters. The square words, in their masked legibility, suddenly become readable, as if Chinese has somehow just dropped its maddening shroud of inscrutability.

But what, or who, are we reading in these square words?

Xu Bing renders familiar American/European writers into his disingenuous Chinese script. He paints poems from Yeats, Pound, Bob Dylan, and Robert Frost, in addition to writings from Chinese writers like Zhu Xi. In capturing Chinese and English speaking writers through this medium, Xu Bing’s work comments on how cultures engage in reading others. Xu Bing’s work in this form has sometimes been reductively cast as an east meets west moment, in which his art is seen to function as some kind of cultural broker. But it is definitely more than just a bland blend of languages. As an aesthetic play on Chinese and English words, these square words implicate more than language, but ethnicity itself, as one’s native language always implicates one’s ethnicity. The simultaneity of his work as part Chinese and part English points towards the familiar yet uneasy tension that many Asian Americans may be familiar with – that unsettling feeling that we are read first as ethnic others, and not ourselves.

The square words, despite all their quixotic romance, are not a reflection of some happy hybrid in the Western world. Instead, they are meant to alienate readers in their seemingly impossible legibility. After all, language is an alienating experience. It is one of the most common boundaries between us and them. This is perhaps the most obvious takeaway from the gallery. For English speakers, the rooms full of Chinese looking script are beautiful yet unreadable; for Chinese speakers, the words are familiar and yet meaningless. The sense of estrangement in reading the square words is not unlike the sense of estrangement in learning, seeing, or hearing a new language. However, square words, despite all their Chinese trappings, are clearly English words, and this important aspect suggests an act of deception. The words are copy cats, although it is unclear if they are mimicking English or Chinese. Are they English words masquerading as Chinese, or vice versa?

In considering Xu Bing’s square words in this way, we see how writing systems quickly take on the loaded baggage of ethnic encounters. The play on linguistics is a play on cultural expectations, of being mis-read as some other. I bring this up because the square words remind me in many ways of recurring issues affecting Chinese Americans and Asian Americans. For Chinese Americans, as in often seen in other ethnic groups in Western societies, fidelity to one’s “original” ethnicity (or ancestry) often functions as a litmus test for how authentically ethnic one is. Yet they are often caught in a double bind: they are either not Chinese enough (twinkie, banana, sell out) or they are too Chinese (ESL kid, perpetual foreigner). In both cases, Chinese Americans must mimic Chinese or American sensibilities and play their parts convincingly in order to successfully inhabit both cultures. Otherwise, they run the risk of becoming illegible altogether in failing to be recognized by their Chinese or American communities.

Like the square words, Chinese Americans are semantically trapped between cultures. The term, Chinese American, refers to geographical boundaries, even though the generations of kids following the ongoing waves of Chinese immigration may have never been to China or Asia. With the fall of Orientalist studies, ethnic studies became regional studies, but the seemingly innocuous ethnic qualifier via geography carried with it its own set of issues – namely, that the very term/category of Chinese American imposes an obligation to live up to that name, a dilemma which speaks to the heart of why bi-cultural Americans often feel so conflicted in their identities. This (sometimes) hyphenated term, Chinese American, demands that those who categorically fall in its camp must demonstrate and mimic ethnicity precisely because of this semantic, geographic tie. The square words, like hyphenated terms within identity politics, demonstrate a kind of purgatorial space, a stressed connection that seeks to sustain tenuous links to an ancestral place and the current situation. This underlying tension, the subtle demand that hyphenated Americans perform their ethnicity, points towards one last thought: that Chinese Americans, in failing to fully occupy their “Chinese-ness”, are always copies of the original Chinese person in China, that the Chinese who are born abroad are mere look a-likes and never the real thing.

Xu Bing was born and raised in China, yet his work speaks to many issues propelling ethnic studies. He animates the tension between cultures, languages, and semantic signifiers to beautiful effect, radically transforming the form of a language to the contours of another. In seeing Xu Bing’s work, it becomes clear how the grammatical you and I are literally built into language.

Language is an opening; it is a barrier. It is a far off place; it is home. In these beautifully disingenuous square words, we see phantoms of the other, moving, hiding, dancing through language.

Truth to Power

For regular updates on news, marches, and updates on what's happening, check out their site.

Brown people in Occupy Wall Street. OccupyTheHood:"If white people got the cold, we got the flu". Bonus points to the people who donated not only food, clothing, shoes, but tampons to the protest!

Over 3000 protesters occupied Washington Square Park today. I dig the guy with the ball and chain of student loans.

Occupy Wall Street is about anti-greed and anti-corporate exploitation. It is about rectifying the stark imbalance of wealth distribution in America so that the "99%" can survive and live healthy lives too, not just the "1%" of the rich. If you are for the American middle class, helping people provide for their families, and forcing corporations to remain accountable for their actions, then you should be for Occupy Wall Street. Societies need banks to function, but they don't need banks and corporations that recklessly exploit and manipulate the economy for the sake of company profits. We teach children in school that greed is bad. Why then do we nonchalantly disguise greed as the ultimate "incentive" when it comes to the economy? There is a difference between wanting to live comfortable, livable lives with a stable income, and attempting to shamelessly exploit and manipulate an entire economy for the sake of relentless profits among a handful of companies' bottom line. The first is earning a living, the second is plain greed. We all need banks to live our lives, but we need to recognize that the financial system, ranging from banks, credit cards, student loans, to stock trading, must be fundamentally transformed, or in other words, engage in responsible and ethical business practices, so that society itself, its customers, the "99%", can survive. The current recession has already proven that the current financial system is not sustainable. The prosperity of a tiny percentage should not be used as a justification for the poverty of the rest. Systems of power can never critique themselves. Change must come from the outside, from those who have suffered the losses.

"But nothing, however profitable, goes on forever." C.L.R James The Black Jacobins

Smart Links 10/7/11

Terrorists in love.

Monsanto, that terrifying bio-tech company, gets sued for bio-piracy.

Shoplifters of the world, unite!

Ok, so what if vaccinations "caused" autism? It definitely doesn't, but let's see what would happen if it did.

Gene Luen Yang, author of the award winning "ABC", has a new book out, "Level up". I saw him read from it last night, and it was great. Apparently it was inspired by his brother, who despite a formidable gag reflex to all things gross, wants to be a gastroenterologist.

Google vs. librarians.

Introducing Emily Books, an e-book only bookstore.

If you needed more reasons why the current healthcare system is unsustainable, check out how doctors can help save the system.

And how cute is this little girl shuffling in China? With her dad!

Happy Friday!

Learning languages

"The words of the world want to make sentences."
- Gaston Bachelard

My grandmother does not know, but her talent for languages is the one I wished I inherited the most. She speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, several other Chinese dialects, and has picked up English quite well over the years, in addition to bits of Vietnamese. During the 50s, she worked as a radio host during the string of wars in China, broadcasting the news in a spectrum of dialects. Moving all across China and eventually Asia, my grandmother found solace in the most ordinary of conversations even as she found herself trapped in a war thousands miles away from her kids and home. She tells me, sometimes over her home cooked dinners, other times in the car on the freeway, that she learned languages by just talking to people, as if developing fluency was as easy as saying, hello! As if it was as easy as asking the Vietnamese fisherman how much the silver flecked sea bass cost, wondering to her Cantonese neighbor how to cook a good braised chicken, telling the Sichuanese postman to send bundles of letters. Of course, learning a language was as easy to her as inhaling air.

Although my sisters and I grew up hearing words in Mandarin float around our house like ghosts, none of us could speak it, let alone write Chinese. At dinners with family friends, we made sad attempts and scowly faces when our parents coerced some Chinese words out of us. It was simply not cool, simply not done, the idea of speaking any other language than English. My grandmother, an avid polyglot even in her 70s, would sigh and chastise our parents for our poor command of her native tongue. We spoke like foreigners, a horrible, shameful thing, but after all we were children of California, of naive comfort and contentment.

So it was only when I began travelling to other countries that I began to appreciate the complexity and convenience of learning languages. To learn how to say hello! and thank you! in local speech became imperative, a part of the whole travel bug. It became rude, in fact, to not at least try to inquire about the deep purple pomegranate juice in Catalan, to order a soulful bowl of pho in Vietnamese, to ask for directions to the castle in Slavic.

The seductive pull of deciding to learn a new language, however, always means the eventual morning after of realizing how intensely overwhelming the challenge actually is. And unlike my grandmother, the challenge of learning languages is pointedly problematic for me, because my recalcitrant brain refuses to think in any other language than English. It becomes an obstinate slave to my will, offering immediate, albeit nonsensical translations of unfamiliar words. When I decided to learn Mandarin, the words tumbled out of my mouth like leaden objects. It was like exploring a new world in the clammy dark, groping for familiar sounds and cadence. It meant feeling stupid, naked and unaware in those foreign landscapes. Somewhere between my brain and mouth, the words lost their meaning. People could only guess at my true intent – perhaps she wants a small coffee, not large? I’m not sure why she bought MSG at the night market. It is a mystery. Learning the language meant over-exposing myself to a linguistic world that I had always shied away from. It involved playing the part of the willing fool, the English dummy, the ethnic fraud, the funny Chinese girl imitating Chinese sounds.

And yet, when I finally accrued enough confidence to read and speak without fear, it seemed to me that I had literally entered a new country. When travelling in Taiwan some time ago, I was in a bookstore leafing through the fiction aisles, as if I was at home in New York. And it was just that, the awareness that I was casually book browsing on a Friday night as if I was home, that made me see the Chinese characters as a bright opening instead of a dark barrier. Book hunting, a habit so ingrained that I forget I am prone to losing hours like pocket change among the stacks, became for me a catalyst in fully inhabiting a familiarizing myself to a place in other words. I no longer felt that uncomfortable sense of alienation when taking the subway, ordering from the paper menu, or asking for directions. Instead of feeling like an uneasy guest in someone’s house, it seemed like I was suddenly appointed a time share, or had become a new co-owner of the whole estate. I now emotionally and psychologically responded to the blinking signs, the stacks of newspapers, the talking heads on television, knowing they were now talking to me. It was only after the repeated errors of linguistically fumbling in the dark, that the payoff became exceptionally clear, in a way beyond the practical need to communicate.

I now understood why my grandmother, who for so long seemed to collect languages like stamps, felt that it was so easy. It wasn’t that learning languages didn’t require hard work. Having lived through war, my grandmother came to experience how learning a language was like accepting an invitation to belong, so that you could feel perhaps a little more at home, no matter where you were.