End of Year Annual Report 2011

Didn't quite make it to 50 books. (Darn it.) Got to 49 only because of the six volumes of manga I read. New authors I discovered whose writing I loved: Guy Gavriel Kay, Sarah Monette, and Lois Bujold McMaster. Best non-fiction book: Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America's Poets ed. by Alexander Neubauer.

I watched 17 movies. My top three are all Japanese: Solanin, Instant Numa and Detroit Metal City. The first is based on the manga and is heartbreaking. The second is just crazy crazy, and the third is super funny in spite of the music. Best documentary: Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer.

A lot of new dramas I got into this year. My favorite Japanese drama is Keizoku Spec 2. My favorite Korean drama is Secret Garden. American ones: Chuck, Psych and (BBC) Sherlock. I also got into a bit of White Collar and Fringe (just the last couple of seasons).

In terms of fanfic, the fandoms I spent most time on: Stargate Atlantis, BBC Sherlock, X-Men First Class, Hawaii Five-O, and Inception.

New band I started listening to: Airborne Toxic Event. Top three songs for the year are all by the same band (Asian Kung Fu Generation); they are "Solanin," "Mustang," and "All Right Pt. 2." New websites: 8tracks.com and radiolab.org. (Plus all those food/art/style blogs such as: shewhoeats, waterhalo, hipstermusings, etc.) Favorite new illustrator: Yelena Bryksenkova.

I bought a new laptop, and got my first free pair of glasses at work. I made my first rubber stamp: a mushroom. I sponsored a child in India. Got into podcasts. Attended one wedding (Janrose) and missed another (Nesmarie).

And the top 5 life changing events this year: I got certified with a raise after Frank left for Toronto; I got heartburn which enforced a diet and started losing weight; I started a poetry log, sporadically but regularly updated; I joined CYWA on FB and might be published in 2 places?; and I took the citizenship exam!

P.S.
I spent the first day of the year hunting down the first sunrise.

I spent the last day of the year browsing through stalls at the Vancouver Flea Market. I bought old pictures, postcards and stamps. And then I went to my favorite store Regional Assembly of Text and bought two rolls of washi tape, 3 postcards, and a five year memory book. I also bought a set of Pantone postcards, just because I love colors.

I also made two small notebooks using my new paper trimmer, my beloved long-arm stapler, long bond and an old cardboard I got from an old job. I showed them gleefully to my little sisters, and then they both asked for one. Oops.

Yesterday I made the poetry zine, one for my colleague and the other for my sister. I decorated them with stamps. I'm going to make more and more and more...

Something old...

I sent off the three postcards for the names assigned to me through postcrossing. I got back into it after a long hiatus because I had this sudden urge to collect postal stamps, which was the end-result of a renewed interest in the wonders of correspondence.

Some links: send more mail, because I really felt it, letter writers alliance, 300 love letters.

And new ones to explore: passion for letters and the letter writing revolution.

I mourn all the letters my father tore up just before we left home. I don't know if my mom kept her diary or the letters she wrote my dad, or the ones she got from her parents and sisters, but I mourn the loss anyway. I had some stamps that were my mother's, back when my dad was a seaman, I guess. I wonder where they ended up?

So I'm beginning a collection from the ground up, picking up a sheet of three stamps (local, us and intl.) from the post office. I just liked the graphic design. And then I'll eagerly await letters from all over. And maybe get some more penpals to keep them coming. I'm collecting them for art value, not future worth.

Now I want to go back to a flea market to root through old papers and things.

I'm a little bit of a rat.

P.S. Almost bid on a typewriter, but I couldn't log on to ebay. And now I'm not sure I want it. Oh well.

Flow

Stumbling onto Nicholas Felton and his personal annual reports has me groping to make sense of my own life in quantifiable terms. It also led me back to thinking of index cards as an organizational tool, such as in hawkexpress' POIC. I tried a bit of that, but couldn't sustain it enough to build a useful deck.

Still, this has me planning my own 2011 Annual Report, with a timeline and lists of events and accomplishments, not as a design exercise but as a summation of what has passed which should bleed into the next year. It's far more satisfying than the vague motions that otherwise mark the turnover into the following year.

I also printed three copies of a notebook made from folding a single sheet of paper, something I've been doing with the excess paper at work. There's a website called Pocketmod, where you can make your own, complete with customized graph/lined pages and weekly/daily templates, though it requires a bit of trimming.

All throughout this year, I found myself making up my own planner templates. For the first six months, I printed a monthly calendar on cardstock, writing a word a day. And then I stopped. Later on, I made up weekly templates where I wrote my goals, such as a number of poems to write, number of minutes to walk on the treadmill and so on. So we'll see what I come up with, and if it sticks.

For now, I'm thinking of a single board beside my couch/bed, to do a manual checklist of my yearly goals. I'm so analog...

Oh, to be a hipster

But although I tend to have a lot of obscure names alongside the mainstream ones on my list of favorite things, I'm really, really too much of a slob to be deemed a hipster. I don't get the art of the ironic shirt. (Except one time we all wore I <3 Cebu shirts while we were in Bohol, so that's the sarcastic shirt.) I shop at thrift stores, but only because the mall's too boring and expensive, and I like inviting serendipity into my life, but my sartorial choices are neither ironic nor fashionable. They're just comfortable, occasionally pretty and dirt cheap.

I've loved mostly the same old bands since ten years ago, though the new ones tend to be more folk rock or old 80's singers that I've only now begun to appreciate. And I'm a liberal arts graduate who tries my best to be more environmental. I also love zines, and spend too much money on them. And I hate monopolies, so I've never had an ipod, or shopped at itunes. (Walmart and Amazon are a little harder to abjure, because who can resist all those cheap stuff?)

So what's so bad about being a hipster? Most people seem to be reacting against the pretension of cool, and the elitism that follows. Their idea of the hipster is a person who strives to differentiate himself or herself from the mainstream, but is still a follower of certain alternative trends. So is there no genuine originality out there?

For me, it's not the cool factor, I just think having eclectic tastes make me more interesting, because otherwise I'm boring as fuck. (With a dilapidated vocabulary to match.) It doesn't make me better or worse, and I love finding out what other people are passionate about, because that makes them interesting to me. We don't always fit the labels others give us, or even the labels we give ourselves. So give it a break, haters.

I mean how weird would it be to become self-conscious about my plastic glasses and my messenger bag because those are hipster totems? Labels are occasionally funny, occasionally useful, but oftentimes used to exclude or denigrate.

If there's a label that I want for myself, it would be of a poet, but that doesn't quite fit, so I'm still working on it. Oh, and I was a math nerd. (Embrace it.)

Another day for book-buying

unexpectedly. I bought "A Passionate Patience" from Amazon, because I've been looking for this book awhile. I almost bought another book, but it was seventy dollars, before shipping and handling and import fees and I just couldn't do it... APP is a book where Filipino poets talk about their process. I've only scanned it during grad school and I've been yearning for it ever since.

I also bought an online comic book as a present for my sister, and I got a free pdf of a poetry chapbook from someone in CYWA. Someday, I'll get thick enough skin to publish my own chapbook, with the same sort of casual arrogance and self-deprecating humor.

I didn't read it through yet and I don't know enough about contemporary Filipino poetry to judge, but I would describe the collection as exuberant. The best of the lot, however, remains those that use concrete images and vivid language; the rest uses diction that obscures rather than clarifies, and it is like a beautiful fog that slips through my fingers.

My own work feels like that sometimes. And my own life.

Encircled by Stars

I was walking home last night when I looked up and saw the full moon. And then I saw star after star, and I whirled around trying to look for more. I must have looked quite the fool, standing out in the cold twirling in place with my face up, facing the deep indigo of the sky, looking for answers in the abyss between each pinpoint of light.

Let's just say that clear nights are a rarity here. And also, star-gazing always gives me a little perspective. Why do we like feeling small in such a universe? All our cares we lift up to the wind to be borne away, and empty and weightless we carry on our insignificant lives.

Today: A Retrospective

I took my citizenship exam this morning. My parents, my sister and I went there an hour early. I had slept less than six hours, but I was more or less alert, though by now my eyebags were like overripe grapes, dark and ripe.

My sister was cramming on the way, as per usual, while I reread a Trisha Ashley book. My parents didn't have to take it, so they just went for the interview and left early. While waiting for the test to begin, I read poetry, because I didn't have any review materials, and because I needed to ply my mind with beautiful distractions.

Some new poets whose work I liked: Don Welch, Gwendolyn Brooks and Donald Finkel.

Useless to ask what this was
before it crusted. It has the face
of Frost over Auden. But it doesn't
worry. It takes itself in folds.
--from "Bark," Don Welch

The test itself was easy-peasy, and I'm pretty sure I got every question right.

Afterwards, my sister and I went for brunch at Tim Horton's, before I accompanied her to school, reading a bit of Kingsolver's The Lacuna while she revised an essay. She took me to the library to print it out, and I spent too long paging through the journals, longing to be able to browse there to my heart's content.

When we got home--after detours to buy all sorts of edibles--I finished the Ashley book, before baking Food for the Gods, which is basically a date and walnut bar. It's my first time making this and it turned out alright, though not quite that taste I was craving.

And then whiling the night away online, as per usual;

Gave in

and bought a used copy of The Urge to Jump by Trisha Ashley from amazon even though it's twenty dollars plus shipping. I just want to reread it so badly. What other books do I have that I feel so strongly about? (Or maybe I just feel so strongly because it is out of print and desperation mounts.)

I was thinking about what Orson said about making up your own canon. My own favorite books are pretty uneven in terms of quality. I love them terribly, but not necessarily push them onto other people, except those whose tastes are aligned to mine. Maybe I also suspect my own reasons for loving them.

The Urge to Jump, for instance, I love for the language. I've reread it several times and there's always things left to discover, particularly since it's written by a British woman living in Wales who talks of things that go over my head. It's just witty beyond all telling. The story's summary according to her website is:

Sappho stopped counting birthdays when she reached thirty, but now she's approaching the big four-oh! Realizing she has almost become a single eccentric female, she gets the urge to do something dramatic before it's too late, and one of the few things she has not tried is motherhood.

Which does not even tell us that Sappho is a fantasy writer, finally moving into a house of her own, with a couple of quirky friends living nearby, and yes, a romantic love interest added almost as an afterthought to her already full life. It's the love story I want to live, frankly.

It seems to me rare to find a romance novel heroine that never compromises herself for a man. I've read other books by the same author but none of them come close to this one. I like Singled Out and Every Woman for Herself, though. I also like that there are small details connecting some books to others.

Vow: I will buy every copy of The Urge to Jump (below the 20$ price) if I ever find any at secondhand bookshops. Also, I will buy other Ashley books. She needs wider readership!

(I don't need anything for Christmas now. Just hope that it comes soon...)

The Real Canon

by Orson Scott Card
(from Uncle Orson Reviews Everything)

I recently took one of the Great Courses on the Western Literary Canon. For those who aren't literature students, the "literary canon" is not book-launching artillery. Or maybe it is. The "canon" refers to a term from religion -- it means that something (or someone) is officially certified. So a person who is declared a saint is "canonized," and also the official scripture is said to be "in the canon."

Extending this to literature, the "canon" means the works that the academic community regards as essential for any educated person to be familiar with.

The trouble is that what academia considers to be the "canon" has become absurd.

Once, there were works that everybody knew because education followed similar paths. When grammar-school students all had to struggle through translating Caesar's account of his Gallic Wars from Latin into English, and then reading Cicero, Virgil, and others in the original, naturally all educated people recognized famous Latin tag lines.
It was a mark of education, not that you had memorized "Veni, vidi, vici," but that you actually understood that it meant "I came, I saw, I conquered," and that it was a clever but perfectly natural and understandable way of delivering the message.

But educated people also read books which they selected themselves. There was no English literature department in any university in the 1800s; it was still controversial to have an English department at Oxford, for instance, when Tolkien helped design the course of study for English students.

After all, why in the world would you need a university to teach you how to read the literature of your own language? So English students were required to learn Old English and Middle English, so they could study great works that were written in versions of English that we no longer speak.

Who in the world would need a teacher to explain Dickens or Austen, Poe or Twain? They're perfectly clear to modern readers. And the only reason you'd need an English teacher to explain Hawthorne is because he's such an unbearably bad writer that you'd rather not read his books yourself.

So the "canon" consisted of books that readers, critics, and writers came to love and respect and pass from hand to hand. Professors didn't tell you that you had to read Dickens -- you simply had to in order to be part of the culture of your time, rather the way that if you haven't read any Harry Potter books you're viewed with pity by anybody who actually reads for pleasure.

Nobody declared Harry Potter to be "officially good" literature. Rowling's books were selected by volunteers. And that's how it used to be.

Jane Austen, for instance, was merely one of many popular writers when her novels first appeared. But she quickly became a favorite among other writers, in part because she developed techniques that nobody else was using, which eventually evolved into the third-person-limited viewpoint that absolutely dominates popular literature today.
And Austen's books were memorable, so that people passed them from hand to hand and from generation from generation. There was no academic support for this, but her books remained in print perpetually because it was always profitable to publish them. They found readers because readers loved them and wanted other people to share the powerful and pleasurable experience of reading them.

That's how, for a time, the canon grew. A combination of joy and admiration, along with the prestige of the person who gave, lent, or recommended the book to you, gave life to the literary canon.

And then they started teaching contemporary literature in the universities, and the whole process was kidnapped by idiots.

Gone was the "love and joy" portion of canon formation. In fact, the more popular a book was, the more despised it became among academics. Why? Because academia swallowed the entire bunkum of Modernism, which sneered at "middle-class" values and thought of "high" literature as something deliberately put out of the reach of the common rabble.

The result was pretentious twaddle like James Joyce's Ulysses, which can only be understood with the magic decoder ring which Joyce thoughtfully provided to friends, and which they passed on to the professors.

By declaring Ulysses to be the greatest work of literature of the 20th century, academics attempted to guarantee their continuing employment. If you can't be an educated person without reading and pretending to understand, care about, and admire Ulysses, then you must obviously take college classes from English professors.

But the whole scheme has backfired, because when we finish learning how to read and understand Ulysses, most of us realize that it's twaddle. Whatever insights into the human condition James Joyce had to offer were trivial compared to the labor of receiving them.

And it's not just James Joyce. Students of literature spend endless labor learning to read work after work of modern and post-modern literature, and then learn the precious and silly vocabulary of deconstruction and the patronizing talking-down of multiculturalism, and in the end, what have they done?

They've opened Al Capone's vault and found it empty, and their English professors stand there like Geraldo Rivera, desperately trying to explain that it's still very important to have opened the vault, even though nothing of value was in it.

The result is that enrollment in English departments has plummeted. It used to be that a major in English was good preparation for a career in law or business, because you learned the roots and bones of English so you could write -- no, communicate -- with clarity and grace.

Now, you learn to write with obscurity and hypocritical pretension, and without independent thought. You come out of English programs knowing nothing of grammar and incapable of writing well, with your head stuffed full of literature that nobody cares about.

I mean really -- do you take Stephen Dedalus or Leopold Bloom into your heart and life?

OK, maybe a few hundred academics do. But it's nothing like the way millions of people have embraced Harry Potter. Or, for that matter, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Pip, David Copperfield, Jo and Meg and Beth and Amy, Elizabeth and Jane Bennett and Darcy and Bingley, Scarlett and Rhett and Melanie and Ashley, Judah Ben-Hur, Frodo and Gollum and Sam, Paul Muad-dib, Hari Selden, Sherlock Holmes, Douglas Spaulding, Tarzan, Conan, Robinson Crusoe, Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister, and animals named Buck and Flicka and Bambi and Lassie.

Maybe you didn't know some of these names, or the works they came from, but I'll bet you knew a lot of them, and not just those whose names are in the titles.

So while academics and critics -- people who live by impressing others with their erudition and elitism -- almost universally declare Ulysses to be the greatest work of the 20th century, volunteer readers -- people who love literature for the joy of it -- repeatedly declare that The Lord of the Rings is the greatest work.

Some of us think that only William Shakespeare and Jane Austen rival J.R.R. Tolkien for brilliance of talent and magnitude of achievement.

Here's the lovely thing: Eventually, the literary canon bends to the popular one. Academics almost universally sneered at Lord of the Rings when it first appeared -- even though the author was the very academic who had rescued Beowulf from oblivion and made it that absolutely essential root of English-literature studies.
They hated LOTR because anybody could read it, without help. They declared it to be shallow and worthless and badly written.

But in fact those epithets applied far more aptly to many if not most of the works they taught as "great" contemporary literature. The Man Booker Prize is usually given to pretentious ephemera whose writing only thinly disguises the emptiness beneath it, but the slightly-more-popular prizes rarely do any better.

And anyone who says Tolkien's writing is less than brilliant simply does not understand language or writing. The Old-English-style poetry of almost every word Tom Bombadil says is a delight to those who recognize it, and Shakespeare and Hardy are the only writers I know who rival Tolkien for his ability to contrast heroic, courtly, common, and coarse language in the same work, the same chapter, the same scene.

Nobody in all of English literature is a better master of English prose than J.R.R. Tolkien.

Take this passage from Lord of the Rings:

"And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed. And he sang to them, now in the Elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness."

Even if you haven't read the book and have no idea of what this moment actually means, that is simply gorgeous, fluid prose. Who has written about the power of language more beautifully than this, exemplifying what he describes?
The people are better judges of great storytelling and, yes, even great writing, than the academics. In the long run, the fads of the volunteer readers are more likely to identify great and lasting works of literature than the fads of the academics.

I'm not talking about bestsellers. There are genres whose best sellers become bestsellers simply because there are so many readers who seek out that genre for their entertainment.

But is anyone still passing along the works of Irving Wallace as must-reads? His work was popular in its time, but its time has passed; it does not take away from its meaning as a marker of culture, but it will never enter the popular canon.
But writers like Dickens and Twain -- and, in the long run, Austen and Alcott and Mitchell and Tolkien and Lewis and Bradbury -- force their way into the academic canon. How? Because while the professors of one generation might sneer at their work, there will come a generation of professors who became readers preciselybecause of the love and joy and admiration they got from these writers.

They remain perpetually dissatisfied with academic rules and theories that do not make room for works that these professors still love. And eventually, they create new rules and theories that welcome the beloved works, while eventually shrinking and eventually displacing entirely the once-admired works that were never beloved by volunteer readers.

However, there's another process at work in canon-formation: The Rescue. Moby-Dicksank like a rock when it first appeared, but it was rescued by mature readers who realized that it was not just a great literary achievement but also a delightful, witty, mean, hard-hitting, powerfully told, memorable story.

Beowulf was a rescue, after all. Even Shakespeare, after years of eclipse, was rescued by a wiser generation. Often great works are pushed "down" into children's literature -- where science fiction and fantasy and women's fiction are often sneeringly placed by academics and critics too stupid to see past their prejudices -- only to be rescued by later generations.

After all, it was as a child that I was first given Alcott, Austen, Mitchell, Bradbury, Dickens, Defoe, and Twain; I was given them by people who loved both me and those books, and they were great and memorable gifts that have stayed with me my whole life.

Here is my rule: Never sneer at another person's taste in reading. Never make another person ashamed of a story that they love. You don't know what hunger that book is satisfying. And the book you despise today may be part of their personal canon in ways that you are simply unable to understand.

Meanwhile, if you're a reader, a lover of books, why not take on a little project? As you gather with family this Thanksgiving holiday, take out a notebook and paper and ask: What are the books you love? What are the books that you have urged on your friends and begged them to read?

Offer no word of judgment or criticism, and permit no one else to offer any. If someone says Twilight and you hate the book, keep your opinion to yourself and write it down.

Write them all down. Every book that has been loved.

The danger is that some will suggest books that they think will make them look smart -- the main reason for pretending to admire most books in the academic canon. Somebody will say "Plato" and someone else will say "Virgil."

It happens that I do love Plato, though I disagree with him on so many things; Virgil, though, I regard as a bit of a talented hack -- does anyone really care about the story of Aeneas? I suppose so. Write down the pretentious ones as well.

Leave the notebook open for people to add titles and authors as they come to mind, for many a beloved book lies deep in the memory and only pops up from time to time.

I think of Nordhoff & Hall's Bounty Trilogy, the third volume of which, Pitcairn's Island, struck me to the heart as a great tragedy, and the second volume of which, Men Against the Sea, became my exemplar of how the villain of one story can be the hero of the next, without changing even a shred of the character.

Create your family's Canon of Beloved Literature, and then distribute it. Post it on your blog. Send it out with your Christmas letter. Give books from it to people you love and care about. Make sure all the books on the list are on your Kindle or Nook or iPad, and sample the ones you haven't read.

We, not the professors, are the creators of the real canon. Let's take conscious control of the thing. As they lose their students, let's gain readers for the books we love. Then, when the professors wise up and start teaching from our canon, they'll get their students back. We will have saved them. Aren't we nice?

----
Mormon/homophobic or not, I still really respect this guy's definitions of what constitutes a good book or movie. And I like this idea of making up your own canon of books that you have loved.