Here's to 2008

Sure, there is a lot to be feared and despair about in 2008, but good news also abound. America will get a new president, and a potentially very good one at that. Wall Street is in tatter but the lessons to be learned should point towards better economic policy, not only by governments but by companies, their leaders and by individuals like us.

On a personal note, I have graduated after two years of rigorous coursework and learned a lot more. I have made new good friends and taken on internships that have served me well professionally. 

I am also lucky to find a job in Thailand so that I could be with P and her family could not have been more kind and hospital and I am thankful.

2009 will bring challenges, professionally and personally, and it will require determination, good planning and diligence to overcome them and move higher in my life trajectory. Let's do it.

A new discovery

A friend of mine told me recently she was frustrated by the choices of her book club. She said very few living authors excite her anymore, and that she once again has to rely on the masters and their classics.

While reading New York Times today, I came across a name I've never heard and was instantly attracted. He's no longer alive, but just reading about his work and his life alone has already deeply enthralled me.

Here's a fine piece on Chilean writer, Roberto Bolano.

The face in the mirror
Late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño was a chronicler of Latin America's dashed utopias

By Marcelo Ballvé

MORE THAN A year has passed since the death in 2003 of Roberto Bolaño, the maverick Chilean writer who elbowed his way into world literature's top ranks in his life's final decade. Bolaño was an unlikely candidate for literary laurels: born dyslexic, he was a high school dropout and a lifelong wanderer. His death last summer at the age of 50 came at the height of his career, soon after he had cemented his reputation, and it occasioned an outpouring of tributes in newspapers and literary journals across Europe and Latin America, as well as a few obituaries in U.S. newspapers.

But readers here did not have a chance to read him in translation until last year, some six months after he succumbed to liver disease, when New Directions put out By Night in Chile, a critically acclaimed, magisterial short novel narrated by Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a conservative priest and literary critic who gradually confesses his complicity in the Pinochet era's evils. Now the same publisher has put out Distant Star, which examines the feats of a fascist aviator and poet, Carlos Weider, who writes verses at cruising altitude with his plane's exhaust and exhibits photos of torture victims as art.

The length and spare prose of these works (neither exceeds 160 pages in translation) made them natural choices for publication in English ahead of Los detectives salvajes (The savage detectives), the novel that made Bolaño's reputation. This is a 609-page book that will be difficult to translate. It's written in idiomatic Spanish and laced with slang from at least five countries. Its 1998 publication convinced many critics that Bolaño had succeeded where so many of his contemporaries failed. Bolaño's work had finally eclipsed, at least partially, the juggernaut generation of Latin American literature, the famed "Latin American boom" writers, titans like Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez, all of whom were born in the 1920s and 1930s. Especially after the publication of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967 (when Bolaño was only 14), these writers came to dominate Latin American fiction.

Bolaño wasn't the first to break decisively with the boom writers' stylistic tic (magic realism) and thematic obsession (history with a capital H), but he was the first to blaze a wide enough trail into new territory so others can follow. Bolaño has left young Spanish-language writers a real gift: freedom to experiment, to tell stories without glancing over their shoulders at the old Olympians.

II

Bolaño, to shape his fictional worlds, mined his experiences wandering through the rubble of the postrevolutionary Americas and then Europe, where he moved in 1977, eventually settling in Blanes, a town of 30,000 people on the Spanish coast near Barcelona. His fiction can be described as a chronicle of Latin America's dashed utopias. Himself a child of Chile's failed revolution, Bolaño nearly lost his life as a 17-year-old during Augusto Pinochet's Central Intelligence Agency-assisted coup against Socialist martyr Salvador Allende. Violating curfew, Bolaño tried to help the forces battling the coup and ended up under arrest. He escaped the fate of so many others, who were erased from existence, thanks to dumb luck. One of the officers who took him in was a childhood friend and let him go.

Like the big bang, the 1973 coup swirls at the origin of Bolaño's work. After leaving Chile, he became an ethnographer of his own milieu, the transatlantic diaspora of Latin American writers, poets, and intellectuals. In Bolaño's depiction, they are almost all embittered and haunted, some of them drug-addled, others stubbornly, nostalgically holding on to their visions of political or artistic Shangri-las. These are people like revolutionary mercenary Juan Stein, one of Distant Star's most memorable figures. He leaves Chile and like a ghost begins to appear and disappear on the cold war battlefields of Central America, alongside Cuban internationals in Africa – or, as the novel puts it, "all the places where there was a battle to be fought, all the places in the world where Latin Americans, desperate, generous, crazed, courageous, and abhorrent, destroyed and reconstructed and then again destroyed reality ..."

But Bolaño also made incursions into the other side, exploring the nightmares Latin Americans battled or fled from. Bolaño wrote that with Distant Star he attempted "an approximation, a modest one, of pure evil." In Weider, the book's central figure, Bolaño concentrates all the poison of an era. Throughout, Weider is not depicted simply as an automaton doing the despicable will of a military government. When Weider kills, he does so with the blessing of the Pinochet regime, but he acts for his own personal, mangled reasons, with bizarre poetic convictions as his moral compass. The book is structured like a detective novel, with the narrative arc tracing the narrator's attempts to locate Weider many years after the coup, partly through literary sleuthing in European neo-Nazi publications. As the search progresses, the novel's chapters swirl toward a final confrontation and a settling of accounts.

By Night in Chile also takes a dark look at the business of literature, exploring the subterranean labyrinths connecting it with political violence. This tour comes via the deathbed confession by priest and critic Father Urrutia. Near the novel's end, Bolaño suddenly reveals the menace lurking in Urrutia's oblique descriptions of the Pinochet era: the mansion where a patroness holds well-attended literary salons turns out to also house a torture and interrogation center in the basement. In one of the priest's last visits to the mansion, the hostess, having fallen into disgrace (with her American husband exposed as a murderer), challenges the priest to go down to see the torture chamber. The priest demurs. The patroness, in a state of shock, recounts how sometimes, as her husband tortured victims below, the TV set in the house would inexplicably blink and the lights flicker. "That's how literature is made in Chile," she says. Urrutia says to himself, "That is how literature is made in Chile, but not just in Chile, in Argentina and Mexico too, in Guatemala and Uruguay, in Spain and France and Germany, in green England and carefree Italy."

III

For Bolaño, Latin America is not only a geographical expanse; it is a state of mind. It is the pieces, the ghosts, exiles took with them as they scattered around the world. In the short story "El ojo Silva" ("Silva the Eye"), Bolaño writes in the opening sentence:

It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as the Eye, always tried to escape from violence even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around twenty years old when Salvador Allende died.

Bolaño always dealt with the impacts of violence in the private realm. He didn't work epically; he avoided historical denouements. The struggles and massacre of Colombia's plantation workers in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Fuentes's evocations of the Mexican Revolution, Vargas Llosa's dissection of a ferocious backwoods millenarian movement in The War at the End of the World – grand tapestries of this kind are absent in his work. History makes occasional appearances in the foreground (Pinochet's cameo in By Night in Chile) but never dominates the narrative. Unlike the boom writers, whose focus typically was not the characters themselves but their participation in defining historic events or in family epics with the resonance of myth, Bolaño focused single-mindedly on his indelible characters, the critics, poets, and writers who populate his pages. They grapple with the problems of their generation, but through private quests for peace after all the blackness and turbulence.

Silva the Eye, for example, is a "man of the left" who runs away from the battle in Chile only to have to confront it in Asia. Whether they fought or not, his characters, like the author himself, are scarred and defeated veterans of the hemisphere's dirty wars. Bolaño, accepting the Romulo Gallegos Prize (a Spanish-language equivalent to Britain's Man Booker Prize) for Los detectives salvajes, said that everything he had written could be seen as farewell letters, or love letters, written to a failed generation: "We were stupid and generous, the way young people are, who give everything and don't ask for anything in return, and now nothing remains of those young people.... Latin America is sown with their bones."

IV

But they come to life in Bolaño's pages. When Bolaño said "nothing remains" of them, he was not only speaking about those disappeared in a literal sense, those who were killed after taking up arms or entering the political arena; he was also speaking figuratively, referring to those who were changed so much that their lives are defined by a before and an after, a transition often shaped by the process of exile, but not always. Part of Los detectives salvajes deals with characters whom Bolaño called "Mexicans lost in Mexico" – internal exiles.

Bolaño spun his characters' muddled testimonies into fiction. His usual narrative technique was to write as if his characters or narrators, typically speaking in the first person, were giving a deposition on their personal histories to an invisible stenographer, or as if they were talking to a detective taking witness statements. Or, as is the case with By Night in Chile's protagonist, making a last confession. "My silences are immaculate," Father Urrutia says before beginning his story. Of course, this statement is a lie. Also suspect are the words of a military officer who testifies on behalf of Weider in a trial recounted in Distant Star: "He only did what all Chileans had to do." Despite such prevarications, most of Bolaño's characters end by making their confessions, and when the words come tumbling out, it's clear none are likely to enjoy a moment of "clean" silence or a crystal conscience, not even those who fought on the "right side."

The testimonial itself is a genre that in the aftermath of brutal dictatorships in Latin America became a mechanism against forgetting, with several countries publishing books like Argentina's Nunca más (Never again) collecting horror stories from the Dirty War. In Bolaño's fiction the scope of the testimonial is expanded as it collects material from the unexamined corners of inner lives, from characters' experiences on the fringes, the margins of the actual "action." His characters are not generals or patriarchs, leaders or dictators. They are victims, witnesses, obscure operatives, bystanders; what they know is usually fragmentary or unreliable. One of his most well-realized characters is Auxilio Lacouture, an Uruguayan poetess who appears elsewhere but is the central figure of the shorter novel Amuleto and who "witnesses" the infamous and violent military takeover of Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM) in 1968 while hiding in a toilet stall. By describing history's flotsam and jetsam instead of the storm itself, by zeroing in on the individual instead of the collective, Bolaño showed that Latin America's story had branches, offshoots, deviations, and detours that still needed looking into.

And because Bolaño liked to write the way people speak, which is plainly, there's seldom anything ornamental in his prose. The baroque depictions of landscape and action the boom writers partly derived from their worship of Faulkner are nowhere to be found. If there's anything baroque in Bolaño's art, it can only be sighted when viewing his work as a whole. His longer works – Los detectives salvajes, La literatura Nazi en América – sprout fictions, episodes, and characters (including Bolaño's alter ego, Arturo Belano) that travel between stories, intermingling with figures from history, from Bolaño's own life, and from literature.

V

Bolaño's characters are usually involved in some kind of literary activity, and many (like the protagonists of Distant Star) are poets. It's typical of Bolaño's iconoclastic spirit to identify with the literary form that is distinctly out of fashion as far as the literary marketplace, the book reviews, and best-seller lists are concerned. In By Night in Chile Pablo Neruda makes an appearance and is treated with less than reverence. Poetry is also a lens through which to view nonliterary characters. In one episode, Father Urrutia describes how he is enlisted to give classes in Marxism to the Chilean military junta so that they can "better understand the enemy." Many of the generals dutifully take notes but are prone to skip classes and can't stay awake when they do attend, or they interrupt with non sequiturs. After one class, when the only other general in attendance falls asleep, Pinochet invites Urrutia for a night walk in his gardens. Urrutia gets carried away by the beauty of the moon "sailing alone through infinite space" and recites two poems. Pinochet isn't impressed. "General Pinochet didn't express the slightest interest," Urrutia says. But he tries again, reciting another poem into the fragrant air, accompanied by night birds' songs. Pinochet's reply is brusque: "Nice poetry," he says. Poetry and Pinochet don't mix.

In Los detectives salvajes the main characters are Belano and Ulises Lima, who is based on deceased Mexican poet Mario Santiago, one of Bolaño's best friends in the 1970s. Together Santiago and Bolaño founded a poetry movement they called "infrarealism," which becomes "visceral realism" in the novel. At the heart of the book is a pilgrimage the two make to Sonora's deserts, searching for visceral realism's founder, a Mexican poetess from the 1930s named Césarea Tinarejo. The novel celebrates eccentric characters like Tinarejo, Belano, and Lima, who practice literature on society's margins with little or no recognition or success. Simultaneously, it is an exercise in deflating some of Mexico's most outsize literary reputations, especially that of Nobel Prize-winning poet and essayist Octavio Paz, author of Labyrinth of Solitude. One of the vividly drawn secondary characters is Clara Cabeza, Paz's secretary. Through her description of clerical tasks she undertakes as an employee of Paz's literary empire, Bolaño gently lampoons the idea of literary reputations that become their own industries:

I was Octavio Paz's secretary. You wouldn't believe all the work I had. From writing letters, to finding this or that un-findable manuscript, to telephoning contributors to the magazine, to getting books that were only available at one or two universities in the United States. After two years of working with Don Octavio I had chronic migraines that attacked me at around eleven in the morning and didn't go away, no matter how many aspirins I took, until six in the afternoon.

In interviews Bolaño tended to savage writers he didn't like. About Isabel Allende – who lives in northern California and is easily the best-selling Chilean writer in the world – Bolaño said, "She simply doesn't know how to write." For Bolaño, Allende is the epitome of how the cult of the best-seller ruined the boom generation's legacy. Writer after writer plundered the same material: baroque family trees, colonial and postcolonial upheavals, supernatural occurrences. Magic realism, Bolaño said, "stinks." As far as the boom's central trinity – García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and Fuentes – is concerned, Bolaño said he felt no debt and only acknowledged Argentina's now-overlooked Julio Cortázar as an influence, although he noted that Cortázar really came earlier, having been born in 1914. One of Bolaño's problems with Vargas Llosa and García Márquez was that in his view both were seduced and corrupted by power: Vargas Llosa through his failed run for the Peruvian presidency and championing of economic liberalism, García Márquez through his long friendship with Fidel Castro and reluctance to criticize human rights abuses in Cuba. When Bolaño said magical realism "stinks," he was referring to moral decay too, the idea that literary stardom brought responsibilities and, in Bolaño's view, many Latin American writers failed the test, whatever their accomplishments.

VI

Bolaño wasn't shy about revealing that he lived a hard life in his wanderings. His nutrition, dental care, and smoking habit were bad enough that he lost nearly all his teeth on the way, and he joked he left them scattered throughout Latin America the same way Hansel and Gretel left a trail of bread crumbs in the forest. Ill health may have brought about his early death, but it was also a catalyst for his success. It wasn't until he was diagnosed with liver disease in 1992, when he was already nearly 40, that he was able to focus sufficiently on his writing to produce the stream of books that made him famous. When he died, he was feverishly working on a mammoth novel titled 2666, which was published posthumously in November to rave reviews in Spain and Latin America. The book, more than 1,000 pages long, deals partly with the unexplained murders of hundreds of women in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

The book will only deepen Bolaño's influence, which is already considerable. He made such an impression on Spaniard Javier Cercas that Bolaño became a main character in his novel The Soldiers of Salamis (Bloomsbury USA, 2003), which was widely praised by U.S. book reviewers. Argentines Rodrigo Fresán and Alan Pauls, along with Mexican Juan Villoro, still in their 40s, were favorites of Bolaño. He tended to name them, along with his contemporary, Argentine César Aira, whose novel The Hare (Serpent's Tail, 1998) is available in English, as a new cohort of authors transforming their region's literature – but doing so on independent tacks, sharing little beyond originality.

Fresán, who was one of Bolaño's closest friends, said in his eulogy that Bolaño, like Jorge Luis Borges, would become ubiquitous, an influence – whether detectable or not – in countless books. Bolaño shared many affinities with the Latin American master who prefigured the boom, including a love for pulpy literary genres: fantasy, science fiction, and detective stories. Bolaño's favorite metaphor for his work was that of the author as detective. Armed with testimonies from his beloved "failed generation," Bolaño devoted himself to a search for the missing, for the souls lost in Latin America's darkness. Bolaño's poem "A Ride Through Literature" contains perhaps the best self-portrait he published: "I dreamed I was an old and sick detective who searched for people who had been lost for a long while. Sometimes I looked casually in the mirror and recognized Roberto Bolaño."

Marcelo Ballvé is a San Francisco writer and critic who is presently in Buenos Aires on a writing fellowship.

Source: http://www.sfbg.com/39/17/lit_bolano.html

Roberto Bolano (1953-2003)

Great performance

Sometimes a great performance elevates a so-so movie into a very good movie. That's what Mario Coitillard did in La Vie En Rose! 

Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

T'was Grace that taught my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
'Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far
and Grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me.
His word my hope secures.
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease,
I shall possess within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

When we've been here ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun.
We've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we've first begun.

おひさしぶり

八月の末から、仕事が始まり、忙しくて、ブログを更新するのができなくなってしまった。

九月の末、モンゴルに出張し、戻ってから、レポートの準備のため、忙しい。

Moving On

No, I am not talking about the political type (though that has evolved as well). Almost exactly five years ago from today, I started my job in a tiny, sleepy fishing village in northeastern Japan. I still remember arriving at my town after nightfall and being treated to dinner at a local "Chinese" restaurant. After eating, my supervisor and me walked out of the restaurant, and in front of it is the Pacific Ocean, its water no longer visible in the dark but the sound of its wave lapping the dock unmistakable. I turned, and looked, and the night was punctuated only by yellow street lamps. I would not call it scary, but it is a bit unsettling that I was going into the "real world " right after graduation in an isolated corner in a foreign country. Looking back now, it was almost surreal in the sense how quick two years went by and how much more has happened since then. Life goes on.

Memory, some says, is prone to reconstruction. Be that as it may, the surreal quality of my two years in Japan actually fades with time and becomes more and more solid. I guess it is because a fine experience is usually followed immediately by a rapture that tends to disfigure what has been, but as one moves on to things, better or worse, it makes one appreciate the flow of life and what is has in store just around the corner.

Today, I started my new job in Bangkok. This time, I don't speak the language; I didn't have a job guaranteed when I landed; I have no apartment waiting for me, but I have more now. I have learned (and unlearned) more. I have more years under my belt. And, I have P and also her kind and hospital family. So another page has been turned and it is just the prologue.

Journey

《行路难》

李白

金樽清酒斗十千，玉盘珍馐值万钱。
停杯投箸不能食，拔剑四顾心茫然。
欲渡黄河冰塞川，将登太行雪满山。
闲来垂钓碧溪上，忽复乘舟梦日边。
行路难，行路难，多歧路，今安在。
长风破浪会有时，直挂云帆济沧海。

O Nippon

A friend I've met in Japan while on JET came to visit SF this week. I am glad to be able to introduce to Mr. R, a sharp Canadian who hates but even more curious about America, to his southern neighbor. He enjoyed visiting New York and shed some of the stereotypes he had held previously, and he is even more impressed by the relaxedness of the Bay Area.

It may never occur to us that guiding out-of-towners in our own city brings to us beauty that would otherwise have gone unrecognized. The Golden Gate Bridge is still the same structure, but seeing it again with someone who is so amazed by his first sighting of it makes for a uniquely satisfying experience.

When the experience of great scenery and fantastic journey is shared, the joy is magnified by the very fact of a communal connection. That is why when Ms. M, Mr. R and I, all former ALTs, had such fond conversations of our time in Japan. Despite the distance or circumstances that may yet to separate us again, we can be reassured that we have already been conjoined by our shared affection.

Some Don't Like It Hot

The shadow is my friend on a scorching 95-degree day. So are museums. Ms. B and I went to the Contemporary Jewish Museum. It is not a particularly big museum (nor are the current exhibitions impressive), but with its brightly painted walls, visible steel frames, and exposed red bricks, it provides a refreshing and cool interior. The museum cafe is to your right as you enter and you don't need to pay admission to sit and eat there. After a cup of capuccino at the cafe, we walked down Mission to the Ferry Building, which has become one of our favorite hang-out spots since it opened a few years back. We have particularly taken to the French rotisserie opposite from the Slanted Door and enjoying eating outside.

Sur La Table, the home and kitchenware store at the FB, provides a feast to the eyes and leads you to fantasies of owning your own house and buying everything you like for it. But the melon slicer (and other similar "inventions") is really a testament to laziness than creativity.

San Francisco Revisited

Sunday marks the grand opening of the new Contemporary Jewish Museum in downtown San Francisco. It is a free-admission day, but the tickets were all booked up when I showed up in the morning. Funny enough, an old lady in front of me, in the same situation, asked me to join her in her attempt to pull some "strings." It turned out that she knows some Jewish big names in the Bay Area and was also serving as a guide for her friend, a Benedictine monk from Florence, Italy. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get in but we did get a discounted ticket to come back another day. The old lady mused how often Italians resort to "connections," real or imagined, to get ahead in line.

To read more about the CJM, see the New York Times' article.

In Memoriam and Hope

Freedom XIV


By Khalil Gibran

And an orator said, "Speak to us of Freedom."
And he answered:
At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom,
Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them.
Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff.
And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfillment.
You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief,
But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.
And how shall you rise beyond your days and nights unless you break the chains which you at the dawn of your understanding have fastened around your noon hour?
In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle the eyes.
And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free?
If it is an unjust law you would abolish, that law was written with your own hand upon your own forehead.
You cannot erase it by burning your law books nor by washing the foreheads of your judges, though you pour the sea upon them.
And if it is a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed.
For how can a tyrant rule the free and the proud, but for a tyranny in their own freedom and a shame in their won pride?
And if it is a care you would cast off, that care has been chosen by you rather than imposed upon you.
And if it is a fear you would dispel, the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared.
Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape.
These things move within you as lights and shadows in pairs that cling.
And when the shadow fades and is no more, the light that lingers becomes a shadow to another light.
And thus your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.

自　　由

纪伯伦

于是一个辩士说，请给我们谈自由。
他回答说：
在城门边，在炉火光前，我曾看见你们俯伏敬拜自己的"自由"，
甚至于像那些囚奴，在诛戮他们的暴君之前卑屈，颂赞。
噫，在庙宇的林中，在城堡的影里，我曾看见你们中之最自由者，把自由像枷铐似地戴上。
我心里忧伤，因为只有那求自由的愿望也成了羁饰，你们再不以自由为标竿、为成就的
时候，你们才是自由了。
当你们的白日不是没有牵挂，你们的黑夜也不是没有愿望与忧愁的时候，你们才是自由了。
不如说是当那些事物包围住你的生命，而你却能赤裸地无牵挂地超腾的时候，你们才是自由了。

但若不是在你们了解的晓光中，折断了缝结你们昼气的锁链，你们怎能超脱你们的白日和黑夜呢？
实话说，你们所谓的自由，就是最坚牢的锁链，虽然那链环闪烁在日光中炫耀了你们的眼目。

自由岂不是你们自身的碎片？你们愿意将它抛弃换得自由么？
假如那是你们所要废除的一条不公平的法律，那法律却是你们用自己的手写在自己的额上的。
你们虽烧毁你们的律书，倾全海的水来冲洗你们法官的额，也不能把它抹掉。
假如那是个你们所要废黜的暴君，先看他的建立在你心中的宝座是否毁坏。
因为一个暴君怎能辖制自由和自尊的人呢？除非他们自己的自由是专制的，他们的自尊是可羞的。
假如那是一种你们所要抛掷的牵挂，那牵挂是你自取的，不是别人勉强给你的。
假如那是一种你们所要消灭的恐怖，那恐怖的座位是在你的心中，而不在你所恐怖的人的手里。

真的，一切在你里面运行的事物，愿望与恐怖，憎恶与爱怜，追求与退避，都是永恒地互抱着。
这些事物在你里面运行，如同光明与黑影成对地胶粘着。
当黑影消灭的时候，遗留的光明又变成另一种光明的黑影。
这样，当你们的自由脱去他的镣铐的时候，他本身又变成更大的自由的镣铐了。

Ciao, New York

I was riding the subway and looked up to see a passage on one of the advertisement. It is an elegant tribute to New York and the style seemed quite familiar. It is by none other than my favorite writer, E.B. White, from his "Here is New York."

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter--the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last--the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.

Room with a View

I suddenly miss my undergraduate apartments. My reading table in both of them was lined against a window looking out to the street. Aside from the practical reason that light should be coming towards you from the front, there is a calm in being able to look up and gaze out onto the space outside. It is rejuvenating.

夜罗马

Rome at Night

By IAN FISHER

Published April 20, 2008 in the New York Times

ROME after dark was once a perilous place, according to the satirist Juvenal, the dangers ranging from robbers to cutthroats to flying chamber pots.

“There’s death in every open window as you pass along at night,” he wrote some 1,800 years ago. “You may well be deemed a fool, improvident of sudden accident, if you go out to dinner without having made your will.”

Dinner is perfectly safe these days, with street crime low and sewage securely underground. Night now does not really darken Rome so much as illuminate the many parts that matter, a real-life chiaroscuro of the city where Caravaggio lived and painted. With the daytime heat cut in summer, diners at Da Giggetto in the Jewish Ghetto can ponder both their artichokes and the boney, floodlit columns of the Octavian Gate, which stood there a century and a half before Christ was born. Not far away, the Colosseum — where Enlightenment-age tourists wandered at night with notions of Rome maybe even more romantic than ours — rises with singular heft, each stone arch glowing in the night.

Rome at night is, in short, a city lit like a theater, and, especially in the warmer months, should be enjoyed like one. In fact, Georgina Masson, who wrote the 1965 classic “Companion Guide to Rome,” recommended the night as the time Rome should first be seen. The first of her book’s walking tours starts where Rome began, the Capitoline Hill — where Michelangelo designed a piazza, she said, like a “stage set” — overlooking the nubby ruins of the Forum. “Seen by day it requires something of the knowledge of the archaeologist and the imagination of a poet,” she wrote. “But at night ... it is not nearly so difficult to picture the stately ranks of colonnaded temples crowned with the gilded statues and the basilicas rearing their great hulk against the night sky.”

It’s hardly a new thought (it is literally one of the oldest), but in my nearly four years here as the bureau chief of The New York Times, I have found that there is no better place than Capitoline Hill to see, in one dramatic sweep, so much of Rome’s history — especially, as Ms. Masson advises, if one starts at sunset.

A superb walk through time might start on the far side of the hill, on Via dei Fori Imperiali. To the south, the Colosseum glows. Up Via di San Pietro in Carcere is Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio, with a replica of the equestrian statue of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius (the original is in the Capitoline Museum) unlit but no less heroic at night, a lone horseman in the center of the city, as has often been noted, at the center of the world. If the Forum is antiquity, the egg-shaped piazza and three palaces are among the finest of Renaissance buildings, stripped of detail at night, revealing more their harmony and, if you are that sort, romance.

A walk down Michelangelo’s steps leads to more of this mix of ages: across the street stands the mini-Colosseum of the Theater of Marcellus, and to the right, the ruins of the Octavian Gate.

Here, as elsewhere in Rome, the approach to lighting seems much like Italy’s approach to food: there is so much to work with that it seems pointless to dress things up; the light accents, simply, what is already there. But here, also, the dark side of the city’s history intrudes, as it often does: this is where in 1943, some 2,000 Jews, who had lived in Rome since antiquity, were rounded up and sent to death camps.

Beyond the ruins, on Via del Portico d’Ottavia, the Jewish Ghetto still thrives, with many of the shops buzzing into the evening hours, and nearby is the tiny Piazza Mattei, where four bronze boys play in the Fountain of the Turtles. Stop, at Largo Argentina, where the columns of the Republican Victory Temples, more than 2,000 years old, jut into the night sky (though it is harder then to see the scores of unwanted cats given sanctuary there). It is a good place to end this mini-nocturnal tour of Rome’s history because it was there — not at the Forum — where Julius Caesar was killed, on March 15, 44 B.C, as evening approached (according to some accounts).

History, though, is not the only reason to walk at night. As residents well know, Rome, which evolved not on a triumphal scale, but on a very human one, is simply a lovely place to stroll. Romans are out in numbers to enjoy the summer nights, so visitors can feel assured they are doing generally as the Romans do.

One place to experience this local life is at Piazza del Popolo, once Rome’s northern gate. Every night, but especially on warm weekends, crowds of Italians stroll and shop, with their teenagers working hard to be cool as they wander about the piazza. Our family has gone there often, allowing ourselves to be pulled into the human wave that drifts south on Via del Corso.

The obvious destination from there is Piazza di Spagna, which is full of people day and night. For all the over-the-top adjectives about the piazza and its famous steps — which attracted Goethe, Joyce, Byron, Shelley and Keats, who died there in 1821 at No. 26, now a museum — it is worth noting a contrary view. In December 1872, Henry James arrived on his second visit to Rome and, despite being ill, decided on an evening stroll. He did not care much for Piazza di Spagna.
“It was all silent and deserted, and the great flight of steps looked surprisingly small,” he wrote. “Everything seemed meager, dusky, provincial. Could Rome, after all, be such an entertaining place?”

But James has been overruled, with the crowds these days voting with their feet. Unlike many parts of the city, notable for their views, Piazza di Spagna is largely its own enclosed universe, which feels even more insular at night, with a vertical exit signaled by the illuminated Fountain of the Barcaccia, a fanciful fishy barge, up the Spanish Steps to a glowing obelisk in front of the double towers of the church of the Trinità dei Monti.

For a more literal sense of the Roman night as theater, or really cinema, go south to the Trevi Fountain. This is one place given over pretty much to tourists at all hours, in truly unwieldy numbers, but it cannot be missed as art, spectacle and cultural icon. In front of your eyes Neptune stands gleaming mightily as he tames the waters, a metaphor for the great feat of the aqueducts that brought water to the city. But inside many minds, no doubt, runs the famous night scene in Fellini’s “Dolce Vita” of Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni stepping into the fountain. A dip, though, even if you look as great as they did, will land you in trouble, no matter how hot it is.

And it does get hot, reaching 90 degrees or more in July and August. Many Romans flee to the beach, but the city’s government has taken care that those who stay behind, native or not, enjoy the hours when it is more comfortable to wander, with outdoor plays, movies, concerts and restaurants. In whatever season — and it rarely gets too cold — there is much to do at night, with perhaps the most spectacular activity being the most costly.

For 250 euros (about $400 at $1.60 to the euro) a person, tourists can visit the Vatican Museum in small groups led by personal guides after hours. Galleries packed to a slow shuffle by day are, at night, emptied like drawing rooms of dreams. The Sistine Chapel is shared by as few as a dozen others, and no one yells if you take a picture.

“It’s overwhelming,” said Angela Desmond from Washington, on a tour with Italy With Us (http://www.italywithus.com/). “You have it all to yourself.”

Somehow the world’s most famous chapel plays its part in defining the contrasts of Rome that are sharpest at night: the ceiling is Creation, and so newborn light and hope; the Last Judgment on the wall, torment and death. When you step back outside, nighttime Rome conjures images of Leonardo da Vinci smuggling cadavers of executed prisoners for illicit dissections that informed some of the loveliest paintings ever.

If these metaphors are too high-flown — and the price for a private tour too steep — a free stroll around St. Peter’s Square is altogether different on a summer night. By day, the piazza is hot and clogged with long lines for the free look at St. Peter’s Basilica. By night, the cobblestones of Via della Conciliazione, stretching to Bernini’s colonnade and Michelangelo’s dome and the obelisk dragged to Rome by the emperor Caligula, are all quiet, empty, luminous. You can even check if Pope Benedict XVI is awake by looking for lights from his bedroom in the two top right windows facing the square in the Apostolic Palace, and contemplate what a shame it is that the Vatican has abandoned its most dramatic nighttime spectacle: for years on Easter, the complex was lighted with thousands of small paper lanterns, to apparently spectacular effect.

“The gathering shades of night rendered the illumination every moment more brilliant,” an account from Easter 1818 reads. “The whole of this immense church — its columns, capitals, cornices and pediments ... all were designed in lines of fire.”

The setting may not be as showy, but a nighttime visit to the Janiculum Hill is no less magical. It is the most spectacular view of Rome — an organic and unimaginably wide panorama from the bright marble of the Vittoriano monument at Piazza Venezia to the dome of the Pantheon to the big bronze angel watching over Castel Sant’Angelo.

Though many restaurants and shops close in the summer, especially in August, the city makes up for it by opening many famous sites for concerts, movies and the like. Among the best is Castel Sant’Angelo, the stout half-barrel near the Tiber, built as the Emperor Hadrian’s tomb, then in the Middle Ages transformed into a castle conveniently close to St. Peter’s (via a hidden passageway in the Vatican walls) when troubled popes needed refuge. It normally closes in early evening, but in the summer, it is opened for concerts, readings and late-night dining. A temporary beach, with actual sand, is laid down next door. The view from the top including a terrace designed by Michelangelo, is stunning, with the Vatican’s dome on one side, all of Rome’s center on the other and the river below.

The main summer festival unfolds on Tiber Island. Every evening between June and September, the island — the only one on the river inside central Rome, where plague victims and criminals were once condemned — sprouts with restaurants, bars and markets for clothes, books and handicrafts. The temperature, and nighttime view up to Rome from the river basin, can be enjoyed via beer, hookah or a simple stroll. The island is also the site of the city’s summer film festival. The screen is outdoors, and viewers sit in plastic chairs rather than camped out on blankets.

For English-speaking visitors, an amusing summer diversion is a performance of the Miracle Players, a theater troupe that since 1999 has put on weekly tongue-in-cheek historical plays with the ruins of the Forum their stage. Last summer they presented “Caesar — more than just a salad,” a brisk 40-minute romp of the emperor’s life, peppered with 100 quotes from ancient sources but inspired more by Monty Python.

During the performance, I found my eyes drifting to the wider stage: the Forum at sunset. The play unfolds next to the Mamertine Prison, the site where by tradition St. Peter was held before his crucifixion (though there are historical doubts), and next to the grand arch of the emperor Septimus Severus. The view stretches from there, in shifting shades of rose and yellow as the sun goes down, across the Forum to the Colosseum.

If you tire of avoiding eye contact with summer street musicians performing “O Sole Mio” — and you will — the city also puts on regular concerts. The best is the summer jazz festival at Villa Celimontana, running now for over a decade in a gorgeous Renaissance palace, in the shadows of the Colosseum and the Baths of Caracalla. Though the event attracts many international artists, last year featured many Italians, such as the singer and composer Maria Pia De Vito and the drummer Roberto Gatto.

If, at last, the summer heat becomes too much and the desire strikes to escape the city, there really is no choice other than a trip to the nearby Alban Hills, to the town of Frascati, just 15 miles southeast of Rome’s center.

The routine is well established by Romans seeking a few cooler hours in the hills where emperors did the same. First, go to Piazza del Mercato. From the scores of little shops and stands buy sliced porchetta, which is the great local grilled pig, cheese, bread, olives, artichokes and whatever else looks good. Walk to one of the many cantine nearby that sell chilly Frascati wine. Sit down with your food at rickety outdoor tables and order a liter or so of wine. Then enjoy, as you think whatever romantic thoughts you might, the diamonds of lovely light that illuminate distant, nighttime Rome.

巴黎，我爱你

Just watched a cute and satisfying movie Paris Je'Taime, a collection of 18 5-minute shorts by an array of acclaimed directors from across the globe. It is an attempt to capture the mood of the city and perhaps allow a glimpse into the spectrum of human emotions (it is a hard thing to do in 5-min). There are some hits and misses (Chris Doyle's segment is definitely a miss).

The last segment, about an American tourist traversing the city alone and narrated by her in her heavily accented French, is almost transcendant. In a park, sitting alone on a bench in a park on a sunny day, eating a sandwich, and looking at the scope of human activities around her--something overcomes her and she says:

Sitting there, alone in a foreign country, far from my job and everyone I know, a feeling came over me. It was like remembering something I’d never known before or had always been waiting for, but I didn’t know what. Maybe it was something I’d forgotten or something I’ve been missing all my life. All I can say is that I felt, at the same time, joy and sadness, but not too much sadness because I felt alive. Yes, alive.

Interrupted

I was in the library today working on my paper and then people started to move huge crates around me in preparation for an evening event, so I was booted out. As a result, my motivation streak got truncated and I went home and worked on something else.

Beyond the classroom

Went to four events on campus this week. Each featured fantastic speakers who are leading figures in their respective field.

I consider this as an invaluable part of my education, which does not only take place in the classroom. It is great to get as much exposure as possible to the issues pertinent to my interests.

Report on China's Oil and Arms Trade with Sudan

Finally, Human Rights First has published its report on China's oil and arms trade with Sudan and its role in the bloodshed in Darfur. Yours truly made a small contribution to the research as an intern there.

Read the full report here: http://www.humanrightsfirst.info/pdf/080311-cah-investing-in-tragedy-report.pdf

A casual evening

Mr. T had us over to his apartment for a potluck dinner. I pan-fried some pre-marinaded chicken thighs from the supermarket (got the fire alarm going) and P made her signature Thai fried rice.

T's apartment is right across the street from school and is very clean, freshly painted, and cozy. He prepared a simple but tasty salad with pan-seared tofu. And we had a great dinner over fantastic wine from Spain.

Snow storm

It's our first anniversary but we are snowed in!

Watched Chungking Express, about lonely peoples trying to make connection. Not as good as In the Mood for Love.