Chinese Literature

It's interesting that both "Journey to the West" (AKA "Monkey") and "The Dream of the Red Chamber" (AKA "The Story of the Stone") begin on mountaintops with stone imagery and religious connotations before going respectively to their action adventures or soap opera romances. What is the effect of that on readers? I think that the members of our World Lit class, as Westerners who are also far removed in time from these sixteenth and seventeenth century texts, find the transition a bit confusing. Both stories in the end (which we didn't read) come back somewhat to their beginnings, with the pilgrims in "Monkey" finding enlightenment and the main male character of "Stone" passing his exams and becoming a more "masculine" Confucian gentleman before finally returning to his own enlightened state as an inscribed stone on the mountaintop. This frame structure and the episodic nature of these long, rambling novels make them difficult to keep up with. Another difficulty for me is the unfamiliarity of the names. I kept forgetting them in class discussion and feeling foolish. But in Chinese, they have meaning, and often provide puns that add depth and irony. For example, the family name is JIA, a pun on "fiction" in the Chinese language of the original, making "Jia Bao Yu" mean "Fictional Precious Jade"--a pun that is enhanced by the couplet about fiction and truth in the opening chapter. It makes me wonder if the author thought of the name first, then let his mind go to imagine an origin for someone with that name!

Chinese Literature

Here's a link to a video that shows some of the characters in the Chinese classic our anthology calls "The Story of the Stone"--also known as "The Dream of the Red Chamber" and (in Chinese) "Hong Lou Meng": www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-CGF24Y6eA

My favorite poem by Philip Levine

The Mercy

The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island Eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy." She remembers trying to eat a banana without first peeling it and seeing her first orange in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her with a red bandana and taught her the word, "orange," saying it patiently over and over. A long autumn voyage, the days darkening with the black waters calming as night came on, then nothing as far as her eyes could see and space without limit rushing off to the corners of creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish to find her family in New York, prayers unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness before she woke, that kept "The Mercy" afloat while smallpox raged among the passengers and crew until the dead were buried at sea with strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom. "The Mercy," I read on the yellowing pages of a book I located in a windowless room of the library on 42nd Street, sat thirty-one days offshore in quarantine before the passengers disembarked. There a story ends. Other ships arrived, "Tancred" out of Glasgow, "The Neptune" registered as Danish, "Umberto IV," the list goes on for pages, November gives way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore. Italian miners from Piemonte dig under towns in western Pennsylvania only to rediscover the same nightmare they left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels all night by train with one suitcase and an orange. She learns that mercy is something you can eat again and again while the juice spills over your chin, you can wipe it away with the back of your hands and you can never get enough. Philip Levine

Philip Levine

Several people in several classes have read Philip Levine's "What Work Is"--see Matthew Khalil's blog, for example. Here are links to that poem and others, some read by the poet.

http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/levine.php

World Lit--Still Reading "Monkey"

A student doing math research has posted information about the Lo Shu legend of the magic square on this web page: http://mathforum.org/alejandre/magic.square/loshu.html . Wu Ch'eng-en probably assumes his readers will get this allusion when Sandy makes his boat with his skull collection and Kuan-yin's red gourd. Interestingly, a classic Japanese story is called "The Floating World"--the idea being that we should approach life that way, just letting it float us gently down the stream. I wonder what magic squares have to do with going with the flow? Could it be that when we are all lined up inside, so that the numbers come out the same no matter what, that we feel that lift of being truly free?

I think one of my core values feels something like that as I fumble around for it in my mind right now. We often wonder what would have happened if we'd made a different decision, some minute move to the left or right, taken the road not taken, kicked off the butterfly effect, how our lives would have been different. But I wonder. Could it be that eventually all roads would have led to the same place, the place we were supposed to be? How fatalistic--how Calvinist--does that sound! But it doesnt feel that way--feels downright Arminian! Gets to the paradox of how human free will and God's omniscience and timelessness can coexist--and explains how I can get from the fascination with an Asian concept that I don't quite get to the familiar comfort of Christianity by way of a circuitous mathematical pathway that seemed wandering and circular but was as sure as the straight line of a magic square.

WE DID NOT FEAR THE FATHER

English 110 and English 205 readers of Charles Fort's "We Did Not Fear the Father" will relate to the image linked below. It shows the poet as a father, maybe twenty years ago, in Wilmington.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwwayneup/3046905939/

World Lit: Journey to the West

The more I read "The Journey to the West" the more I enjoy it. The instructor's guide to the Norton Anthology of World Lit makes an important point: "In Chinese the phrase 'monkey of the mind' refers to the mind's ungovernability--its constant speculations, strategems, and shifts" (2). Tripitaka, on the other hand, finds strength in weakness and from the Buddhist point of view is the one who gets it right. But--Dear Monkey!--how we love his energy and his tricks!

ENGLISH 205 DISCUSSION

English 205 is a course titled "Approaches to the Study of Literature" that I teach pretty much every semester. I am really excited about this class because we're in a room with some great equipment for accessing the Internet and doing all sorts of fancy stuff. I want students to remind me Monday 1/12 to take them to the OED Online at our college library, since that's a scholarly source that came up in class today that I want to introduce them to. Today we read Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" together and looked at a critical essay about it--and a reference to the OED gave an opening to mention it. I'd like to follow up on that, since I threw it out there, and maybe we'll go ahead and talk a bit about using the databases, as well.

Our discussion of Hemingway kicks us off nicely and relates well to the next reading, which will be F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. My favorite story about Hemingway and Fitzgerald is the one Hemingway tells in A Moveable Feast (probably pure fiction in what purports to be nonfiction) where the two are in a men's room and they compare sizes. Of course, since he is telling the story, Hemingway is bigger. Goes along with the submerged sexuality (part of that iceberg he talked about) in the story.

Another dragon picture?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Abu-ghraib-leash.jpg

Ucello Painting

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/education/teachers_notes/uccello.htm

Ucello and Fanthorpe

http://homepage.mac.com/mseffie/assignments/paintings&poems/uccello.html

Father From Asia

Father, you turn your hands toward me.
Large, hollow bowls, they are empty
stigmata of poverty. Light pours
through them, and I back away,
for you are dangerous, father
of poverty, father of ten children,
father of nothing, from whose life
I have learned nothing for myself.
You are the father of childhood,
father from Asia, father of sacrifice.
I renounce you, keep you in my sleep,
keep you two oceans away, ghost
who eats his own children,
Asia who loved his children,
who didn't know abandonment,
father who lived at the center of the world, whose life I dare not remember,
for memory is a wheel that crushes,
and Asia is dust, is dust.

--Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Link to Mary Oliver poem "Singapore"

http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Singapore.html

Li-Young Lee's "Persimmons"

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down.
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.

Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat
but watched the other faces.

My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.

Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.

This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.

He's so happy that I've come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.

Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?

This is persimmons, Father.

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.

Monkey Journey to the West

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/arts/music/26monk.html

Here's a web site with an article and some visuals of Monkey.

World Lit--Monkey: Journey to the West

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D4yFuHxkdI&NR=1

Our first assigned reading in World Lit--after everyone succeeds in finding the cheapest set of the 2nd edition of the Norton Anthology of World Literature Volumes D, E, and F--will be the Chinese tale about the monk Tripitaka's trip from China to India to get the sacred Buddhist writings. Along the way, he is helped by Monkey, who pretty much steals the show, and Pigsy, Sandy, bodhisattvas, and other characters. To get a breathtaking visual image of one stage interpretation of this classic, go to this You Tube site. While there, explore other postings related to Monkey. While stories from India about the Monkey King in the Ramayana are earlier than our time span for this course (after 1600 or thereabouts) you might look for references to these, as well, since they certainly provide an intertextual connection.