Years of Poems and Spirits

Saw plenty of Limbaugh coverage recently. But two images stuck in my mind. I definitely like the New Yorker one better. In fact, I left this cover on the kitchen counter, just to enlighten my mood every morning.

The Newsweek one is good. But is a little too serious, and trying too hard to make a point. As Eisenhower once said about Joe McCarthy, “you don’t want to get into a pissing contest with a skunk”.

Heard Diane Rehm interviewed Yiyun Li this morning. I first came across her short novel in the New Yorker. Didn’t quite get it:

He was raised by his mother alone, as she was by her father. She wondered if his mother, who had set up their date, had told him about that

I was like, WTF? Who is the second “she” here? Still, Li’s name stuck–she must be good at something to get picked out among 300 submissions for that week.

Diane’s interview is about her recent novel, The Vagrants. It was a pretty captivating conversation. So much so that at the end of the show I bought a copy on Amazon.

Couple of things stick out …

1. She finds English her first “writing language”, although she still struggles with proper tense in spoken English (与我心有戚戚焉)
2. Some of the callers to the show are apparently China dilettantes. I think they are more interested in her than her work, and a sense of bewilderment was brimming from their questions. How does she connect to those readers? Is she selling the exoticism of the “ugly” Chinese culture/recent history? The views she expresses and the framework she adopts in discussion are typical of that a Western liberal. Yet her story reminds me so much of the book 《活着》
3. She has a very engaging personal story (never written in Chinese before, wanted to improve her English, attended a creative writing’s class and fell in love with story telling. Got published in less than three years, etc.) She teaches in UC Davis, does she know 北岛？How would that couple think of her?

Are there cases where a social scientist becomes a novelist? What if he finds social theories or rational analysis so inept when it comes to being relevant? People like reading stories anyway. They particularly like to read into stories. That is why the Old Testement is full of stories, allegories and parables. That is why a good story teller–even if a liar–is always popular everywhere he/she goes. Isn’t it?

Heard Nina Totenberg’s piece on Dick Cheney. She is such a masterful narrator that from her piece out comes the relief of a character central to one of the messiest and most divisive period in the U.S. history.

I hate Dick Cheney. He is at a very different level than other politicians I found disagreeable, such as GWB, Gingerich, even Lieberman or Helms. Those characters may be colorful but none is as subversive or conniving as Cheney. He is determined to use his knowledge of the rules and laws of a Republic to turn it into an Empire. If Jefferson were alive today, he surely would say: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of people like Dick Cheney. ”

Rantings aside, I am still not clear on how some of the transgressions instigated by Cheney passed all the institutional checks, most notably, the Congress? Some things may be more complicated than I thought. The other day, I saw Charlie Rose interviewed Michael McConnell, who argued that wiretapping foreigners on American soil is not materially different from bugging by CIA (in foreign land only by law), which is always legal. It strikes me as a reasonable argument. Is this all? If so, how come it is reflected so poorly in the media? Or why would media define it as a wholesale invasion of privacy? Or why that characterization sticked?

Anyway, I am getting the Angler book to find out more.