Writer
Alexander to Aristotle, greeting. You have not done well to publish your books of oral doctrine; for what is there now that we excel others in, if those things which we have been particularly instructed in be laid open to all? For my part, I assure you, I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion. Farewell.
…Alexander the Great, in a letter to his childhood teacher, Aristotle, as reported by Plutarch in his Life of Alexander.
That’s how we lost Khlebnikov. I was very upset about this because Khlebnikov had been a quiet man, very similar to me in character. He was the only one in the squadron who owned a samovar. On days when there was a break in the fighting, the two of us drank hot tea. We were rattled by the same passions. Both of us looked upon the world as a meadow in May over which women and horses wander.
…”The Story of a Horse,” from Isaac Babel‘s Red Cavalry, which, and I say this with complete honesty, is among the two or three most astonishing, most blinding, most important things I’ve ever read in my life.
The worst of Bath was the number of its plain women. He did not mean to say that there were no pretty women, but the number of the plain was out of all proportion. He had frequently observed, as he walked, that one handsome face would be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he had stood in a shop in Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, one after another, without there being a tolerable face among them. It had been a frosty morning, to be sure, a sharp frost, which hardly one woman in a thousand could stand the test of. But still, there certainly were a dreadful multitude of ugly women in Bath; and as for the men! they were infinitely worse. Such scarecrows as the streets were full of!
…from Persuasion, by Jane Austen, the apparent queen of low blows. Woof. Remind me to never visit Bath.
Amidst the reshaping of Hong Kong’s social, cultural, political and ideological landscape, how do we reenvisage a city that exists in our memories? For those who have left their hometown—or the place they once called home—the question, “What does it mean to be a Hongkonger?” marks a constant shift between conflicting realities, identities and perceptions. Beyond the act of remembering, how do we reimagine our relationship with Hong Kong in the present and the future?
Beyond honored to see my work featured in this brilliant anthology from Chinese University of Hong Kong, about a place that I miss, alongside luminaries like Xu Xi and Jennifer Wong who are the English voice of the city (as it is, as it was).
I lived in and on the edge of Hong Kong for fourteen years. It’s a kind of home that would never let me call it such. It made me grumpy. It often caught fire. It gave me an endless well of stories, and to be considered a Hong Kong writer, even in this tiny fleeting way, is a rare and surreal reward.
Looking Back at HK is available now from CUHK, and will be on Amazon via Columbia University Press in Jan. 2020.
“Rose Tattoo,” lead track from the Dropkick Murphys‘ 2012 album, Signed and Sealed in Blood, contains the following lyrics:
This one’s for my family name
With pride I’ll wear it to the grave
In 2021, what percentage of Americans would make that statement?
How many would choose their family name over their political party? If they had a choice, how many would print something else on their gravestones?
How many around the world?
Perhaps these questions shouldn’t be presented to the young.
The Boeotian and Chalcidian peoples were tamed
by the sons of Athenians in works of war,
Who quelled their arrogance in dark bonds of iron,
And set up these horses as a tithe for Pallas.
…from Herodotus‘s Histories, Book 5, 5.78, describing the inscription on a bronze chariot dedicated at the gateway of the Acropolis in the 5th century BC.
There’s something about a world where men conclude war with works of poetry and sculpture.
Something.
Seppellire lassù in montagna,
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao,
seppellire lassù in montagna
sotto l’ombra di un bel fior
The nearly 250 interviews within the Paris Review “The Art of Fiction” series contain, I suspect, the only education any hopeful writer of fiction ever needs. Perhaps far more. It is a remarkable achievement. There are no MFAs more valuable.
Were one to read each interview, and the authors’ work, it would take lifetimes, and be ridiculous. But to read the work of every author they reference, their inspirations – the Chekhovs, Balzacs, Wolfes, Sophocleses, Maupassants, and one another – an unusually devoted and introverted teenager might complete this effort by the end of high school. Then, they’d walk away terrified, either persuaded to never write again, or to never do anything else.
The numbering conventions are sometimes odd. The interview styles vary. But for the $49 price of a year’s subscription, this series offers a modern library of Alexandria, worth more than a dozen literature degrees, and hopefully this list will make it easier to browse.
Happy reading,
1. E. M. Forster
2. François Mauriac
3. Graham Greene
4. Irvin Shaw (Part 1 and 2)
5. William Styron
6. Alberto Moravia
7. Joyce Cary
8. Ralph Ellison
9. Georges Simenon
10. James Thurber
11. Nelson Algren
12. William Faulkner
13. Dorothy Parker
14. Isak Dinesen
15. Françoise Sagan
16. Thornton Wilder
17. Truman Capote
18. Robert Penn Warren
19. Frank O’Conner
20. Angus Wilson
21. Ernest Hemingway
22. Henry Green
22. James Jones
23. Lawrence Durrell
24. Aldous Huxley
25. Boris Posternak
26. Ilya Ehrenburg
27. Mary McCarthy
28. Henry Miller
29. Katherine Anne Porter
30. Evelyn Waugh
31. S.J. Perelman
32. Norman Mailer
33. Louis-Ferdinand Céline
34. Jean Cocteau
35. Simone de Beauvoir
36. William S. Burroughs
37. Saul Bellow
38. Blaise Cendrars
39. Jorge Luis Borges
40. Vladimir Nabokov
41. Jack Kerouac
42. Isaac Bashevis Singer
43. John Updike
44. John Dos Passos
45. John Steinbeck
46. Jerzy Kosinski
47. Eudora Welty
48. Anthony Burgess
49. Christopher Isherwood
50. Gore Vidal
51. Joseph Heller
52. Bernard Malamud
53. J. P. Donleavy
59. Kingsly Amis
60. P. G. Wodehouse
61. Stanley Elkin
62. John Cheever
62. Erskine Caldwell
63. P. L. Travers
63. William Goyen
64. Kurt Vonnegut
64. Jean Rhys
65. William Gass
65. Rebecca West
66. Donald Barthelme
66. Marguerite Young
67. Paul Bowles
67. Jessamyn West
68. Carlos Fuentes
68. Anthony Powell
69. James M. Cain
69. Gabriel García Márquez
70. Margaret Drabble
71. Malcolm Cowley
71. Joan Didion
71. William Maxwell
72. Joyce Carol Oates
73. John Gardner
74. Heinrich Böll
75. Guillermo Cabrera Infante
76. Raymond Carver
77. Nadine Gordimer
78. James Baldwin
79. Elie Wiesel
80. Arthur Koestler
81. Milan Kundera
82. Edna O’Brien
83. Julio Cortázar
84. Philip Roth
85. J.G. Ballard
86. John Barth
87. Elizabeth Hardwick
88. Rosamund Lehmann
89. Thomas McGuane
90. Robert Stone
91. Alaine Robbe-Grillet
92. John Hersey
93. John Irving
94. E.L. Doctorow
95. Cynthia Ozick
96. Francine du Plessix Gray
97. Walker Percy
98. Anita Brookner
99. Peter Taylor
100. Hortense Calisher
101. William Gaddis
102. Dorris Lessing
103. Marguerite Yourcenar
104. Jim Harrison
105. Edmund White
106. John Mortimer
107. Robertson Davies
108. William Trevor
109. John Fowles
110. Elizabeth Spencer
111. William Kennedy
112. Josef Škvorecký
113. Max Frisch
114. Manuel Puig
115. Nathalie Sarraute
116. Mary Lee Settle
117. Iris Murdoch
118. Wallace Stegner
119. Maya Angelou
120. Mario Vargas Llosa
121. Margaret Atwood
122. V.S. Pritchett
123. Tom Wolfe
124. Günter Grass
125. Wright Morris
126. Harold Brodkey
127. Reynolds Price
128. Claude Simon
129. Naguid Mahfouz
130. Italo Calvino
131. Grace Paley
132. Mark Helprin
133. James Salter
134. Toni Morrison
135. Don Delillo
136. Ken Kesey
137. Alice Munro
138. Louis Auchincloss
139. Chinua Achebe
140. Primo Levi
141. P.D. James
142. Patrick O’Brian
143. Susan Sontag
144. Richard Price
145. Camilo José Cela
146. William F. Buckley Jr.
147. Richard Ford
148. Amos Oz
149. John le Carré
150. Jeanette Winterson
151. Martin Amis
152. Russell Banks
153. Ismail Kadare
154. V.S. Naipaul
155. José Saramago
156. William Styron
157. Peter Matthiessen
158. Shelby Foote
159. Tahar Ben Jelloun
160. Mavis Gallant
161. T. Coraghessan Boyle
162. Gustaw Herling
163. William T. Vollmann
164. Beryl Bainbridge
165. Julian Barnes
166. Rick Moody
167. Lorrie Moore
168. A. S. Byatt
169. Budd Schulberg
170. Luisa Valenzuela
171. John Edgar Wideman
172. Louis Begley
173. Ian McEwan
174. Guy Davenport
175. Richard Powers
176. Amy Hempel
177. Jonathan Lethem
178. Paul Auster
179. Jim Crace
180. Andrea Barrett
181. Paula Fox
182. Haruki Murakami
183. Tobias Wolff
184. Barry Hannah
185. Shirley Hazzard
186. Salman Rushdie
187. Orhan Pamuk
188. Peter Carey
189. Stephen King
190. Javier Marías
191. Harry Mathews
192. Jorge Semprún
193. Norman Mailer
194. David Grossman
195. Kenzaburo Oe
196. Kazuo Ishiguro
197. Umberto Eco
198. Marilynne Robinson
199. Annie Proulx
200. John Banville
201. James Ellroy
202. Ha Jin
203. Ray Bradbury
204. David Mitchell
205. Norman Rush
206. Michel Houellebecq
207. Jonathan Franzen
208. Louise Erdrich
209. Ann Beattie
210. Samuel R. Delany
211. William Gibson
212. Nicholson Baker
213. Dennis Cooper
214. Alan Hollinghurst
215. Jeffrey Eugenides
216. Bret Easton Ellis
217. Roberto Calasso
218. Deborah Eisenberg
219. Mark Leyner
220. Imre Kertész
221. Ursula K. Le Guin
222. Edward P. Jones
223. Joy Williams
224. Aharon Appelfeld
225. Herta Müller
226. Hilary Mantel
227. Lydia Davis
228. Elena Ferrante
229. Jane Smiley
230. Dag Solstad
231. Jay McInerney
232. Alasdair Gray
233. Elias Khoury
234. Walter Mosley
235. Percival Everett
236. Ali Smith
237. Dany Laferrière
238. Elena Poniatowska
239. Charles Johnson
240. László Krasznahorkai
241. Penelope Lively
242. Sam Lipsyte
243. Pat Barker
244. Alice McDermott
245. George Saunders
246. Rachel Cusk
247. Enrique Vila-Matas
248. Allan Gurganus
249. Arundhati Roy
250. To be continued
If Canadian folk-rock band The Shademakers (and frontman David Seymour) had come out fifteen years later, they’d be opening for Steve Earle, terrorizing Nashville, and stomping coffee mugs off of NPR’s Tiny Desk.
There’s a helluva distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
…Dorothy Parker, in The Art of Fiction No. 13 from The Paris Review, which very well might be the funniest thing I’ve read this year.
New York scarcely safe from buffaloes. I can’t handle it.
…”A Dustland Fairytale,” track number five (and my personal favorite) from The Killers‘ 2008 album, Day & Age, performed as a poetically arranged duet with The Boss.
Springsteen’s appearance with The Wallflowers at the 1997 MTV VMAs is still his most legendary on-stage collaboration. And part of me wishes deeply that he’d barreled up to share the same mic with Brandon Flowers. But the intergenerational overlaid image of the two frontmen at 2:49…yeah, that’s enough…and it makes this performance of this unique song even more of a wonder.
Not even the recent anti-government protests or the threat of contracting the coronavirus can keep this Hong Kong legend from doing what he loves best. And epidemic or not, he’s not about to change how he looks.
“Elvis doesn’t wear a mask,” he says.
Elvis Presley impersonator Melvis on the ferry to Wan Chai, Hong Kong. Born Kwok Lam-sang in Indonesia, he has been performing Presley songs in Hong Kong Island bars for nearly 30 years. Photo: James Wendlinger
On December 29th of last year, Melvis died of kidney failure. His life was chronicled by the SCMP, the New York Times, and a hundred newspapers in between, the way a true legend deserves.
I submit that there is nothing that anybody in the world has ever done that is more civilized or sophisticated than to dance elegantly, which is to state with your total physical being an affirmative attitude toward the sheer fact of existence.
…writer and music critic, Albert Murray, describing swing jazz in From the Briarpatch Files
Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.
…René Mathis, agent of the French Secret Service in Ian Fleming‘s Casino Royale.
If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses’ madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.
…Socrates was as weesh as they come, but in Phaedrus, Plato got this right.
She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengeance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother’s sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor – was consuming herself.
….from The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
…from W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939“
I wouldn’t call Musashi ordinary.
But he is. That’s what’s extraordinary about him. He’s not content with relying on whatever natural gifts he may have. Knowing he’s ordinary, he’s always trying to improve himself. No one appreciates the agonizing effort he’s had to make. Now that his years of training have yielded such spectacular results, everybody’s talking about his ‘god-given talent.’ That’s how men who don’t try very hard comfort themselves.
…Musashi, by Eiji Yoshikawa
It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
Zeus, who guided men to think,
who has laid it down that wisdom
comes alone through suffering.
Still there drips in sleep against the heart
grief of memory; against
our will temperance comes.
From the gods who sit in grandeur
grace is somehow violent.
…Strophe C, lines 181-182, Agamemnon by Aeschylus, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore
To con-vey one’s mood
In sev-en-teen syll-able-s
Is ve-ry dif-fic
…John Cooper Clarke, by way of Nick Cave‘s remarkable Red Hand Files
1. Listen to the birds
That’s where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren’t going anywhere.
2. Your guitar is not really a guitar
Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you’re good, you’ll land a big one.
3. Practice in front of a bush
Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn’t shake, eat another piece of bread.
4. Walk with the devil
Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the “devil box.” And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you’re brining over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.
5. If you’re guilty of thinking, you’re out
If your brain is part of the process, you’re missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.
6. Never point your guitar at anyone
Your instrument has more clout than lightning. Just hit a big chord then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field.
7. Always carry a church key
That’s your key-man clause. Like One String Sam. He’s one. He was a Detroit street musician who played in the fifties on a homemade instrument. His song “I Need a Hundred Dollars” is warm pie. Another key to the church is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty — making you want to look up her dress the whole time to see how he’s doing it.
8. Don’t wipe the sweat off your instrument
You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music.
9. Keep your guitar in a dark place
When you’re not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don’t play your guitar for more than a day, be sure you put a saucer of water in with it.
10. You gotta have a hood for your engine
Keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house, the hot air can’t escape. Even a lima bean has to have a piece of wet paper around it to make it grow.
Hector Mannix, waterworks clerk, San Juan, has entered a lion,
Boysie, two golden mangoes bobbing for breastplates, barges
like Cleopatra down her river, making style.
“Join us,” they shout. “Oh God, child, you can’t dance?”
But somewhere in that whirlwind’s radiance
a child, rigged like a bat, collapses, sobbing.
…from “Mass Man,” in Derek Walcott‘s The Gulf and Other Poems.
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is “merely relative,” is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.
…Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey
Art by Giuseppe Milo
Blue snow. They’d taken her to see it as a child, that magical weather born from the Min river that floats up, not down, past the cypress and past the peaks and eventually paints the sky. Snowflakes that choose not to fall.
I wrote this story some years ago, and was honored to see it win a small flash fiction prize in Hong Kong. It grew over time, and to see it published today in Issue 41 of Literary Orphans, an exquisite magazine partially dedicated to what Yasunari Kawabata called “palm-of-the-hand stories,” is an even greater honor.
Thus, my sad little three-minute tale: Blue Snow.
