Author name: eugene

Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs is a novel of ideas, small, elegant ideas about art and protest, and one of the most striking literary works to emerge from the Occupy movement . . . The possible futility, complicity, and co-optation of protest are the ideas Dear Cyborgs circles around without ever giving up on the idea that resistance is essential . . . I had expected the decade’s wave of protests to yield a raft of conventional social novels—some earnest, some satirical, perhaps not a few reactionary—but in Dear Cyborgs Lim has delivered something far more idiosyncratic, intricate, and useful: a novel that resists and subverts conventions at every turn.

Christian Lorentzen in New York Magazine

spoilers contained, should you believe in such, in these smart, honest (double) takes of DEAR CYBORGS. thank to Jw McCormack and Rosiė Clàrke.

here’s my favorite bit:

“I was certainly misled by the superhero element!”

read the rest here.

“I was a few pages from the end of Eugene Lim’s wondrous new novel, DEAR CYBORGS, when I flipped back to the beginning and started again… His writing is confident and tranquil; he has a knack for making everyday life seem strange—or, in the case of DEAR CYBORGS, for making revolution seem like the most natural thing possible. His writing is transfixing from page to page, filled with digressive meditations on small talk and social protest, superheroes, terrorism, the art world, and the status of being marginal… there’s an intoxicating, whimsical energy on every page.”

Read the rest of Hua Hsu’s review in the New Yorker.

I pledge allegiance to @Joe_Frank as do the radio wizards at @KCRWorganist. On their latest episode — which covers hypnosis, thich nhat hanh, alan watts, and david blaine — I do a PSA for our collective virtual reality (at 32:13). why not give the whole a listen?

How does music resemble food? How can sound work like medicine? To treat chronic digestive pain, producer Ross Simonini tried everything until visiting hypnotherapist Daniel Ryan, who uses only the sound of his voice through a technique shared by orators, monks, musicians, parents—and magician David Blaine.

We also learn about the psychoacoustics of lawn sprinklers with Susan Rogers, a sound engineer who’s recorded albums for David Byrne, Barenaked Ladies, Tricky, and, most famously, Prince’s albums Purple Rain and Sign o’ the Times. Rogers is one of the most legendary female sound engineers in an industry long dominated by men. These days, she’s also a professor at the Berklee School of Music, where she researches how our brains process sound.

Lastly, author Eugene Lim brings us speculative fiction on the interstellar connections between celebrity CEO Elon Musk and the Organist podcast itself.

Hypnosis segment produced by Ross Simonini.
Interview with Susan Rogers produced by Jenny Ament.

Producers:
Ross Simonini
Andrew Leland

http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/the-organist/sleeping-knowledge

J’s on an intense Zola kick and this book was the one that started it. she said i had to read it. i went dragging my feet. a 500-page naturalist book from the 19th century seemed like it, um, was not going to be my bag. i imagined, semi-rightly, endless pages of description and plot not to mention a moribund philosophy and a long-ago decided politics. i slogged through the first half, which was better than i expected but still slow going.

and then something clicked. it wasn’t exactly needing to find out what happened next, it was a different kind of suspense…. it’s a spectacular biography of the mind of the mob, and with little piercing sketches of psychology. godlike in its handling of the landscape and the multiple minds of its society. like pedro costa in its use of natural light. and an honest, admirable, and relevant politics. (the title referenced finally on the last page, which seems countered by every page before it.)

it is said that sixty thousand marched at zola’s funeral. sixty. thousand.

and o god the horses of germinal. the horses of germinal are more awesome and terrible in their nightmares than the horses of nietzsche or tarr or tarkovsky.

two paragraphs, one from mid-way through and one from near the end, to give you a hint at its arc, as if you needed it. coal miners. won’t be but should be read by everyone who voted for trump and everyone who didn’t. we’re dying “miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” i didn’t want to read it but i’m shattered, glad, and changed now that i did.

It was a scarlet vision of the revolution that would inevitably carry them all away, on some blood-soaked fin de siècle evening. That was it, one night the people would rise up, cast caution aside, and run riot like this far and wide all over the countryside; and there would be rivers of bourgeois blood, their heads would be waved on pikes, their strong-boxes hacked open, and their gold poured all over the ground. The women would scream, and the men would look gaunt as wolves, their fangs drooling and gnashing. Yes, these same rags and the same thunder of clogs, the same terrifying pack of animals with dirty skins and foul breath, would sweep away the old world, as their barbarian hordes overflowed and surged through the land. There would be blazing fires, not a stone of the towns would be left standing, and they would become savages again, living out in the woods, once the poor had enjoyed their great orgy and garnered their harvest, sucked the women dry and sacked the cellars of the rich. There would be nothing left, not a sou of inherited wealth, not a line of legal entitlement, until the day when, perhaps, a new order might at last spring up from the earth. And that was the future out there, tearing down the road like some natural disaster, and buffeting their faces with its great hurricane wind.*

& from the last chapter:

‘You’re right, you’re better off leaving, if you can . . . And I’m glad I’ve seen you, because at least you’ll know I’ve got no axe to grind with you. There was a time I wanted to kill you, after all that butchery. But then you think it over, don’t you? You realize that in the end it’s not really anyone’s fault . . . No, it’s really not your fault, it’s everyone’s fault.’

Have you heard the story of how a racist country tried to keep out non-whites through hasty legislation, got rebuffed by the courts, but then passed a similar immigration ban that was successfully upheld? 

i came across this the other day, right around the time when news came out of SCROTUS’s 2nd try at an immigration ban. The Komagata Maru incident, 1914, Canada.

After Canada and the United States stopped South Asian immigration, Punjabi and other South Asian activists concentrated on trying to reopen the door to Canada. They believed they had a more powerful argument in dealing with Canada than with the United States because, like India, Canada was a part of the British Empire. From the beginning, they were very persistent in supporting would-be-immigrants from India (including women and children), in fighting individual immigration cases in court, in lobbying officials in Ottawa, London and Delhi, and in publishing propaganda aimed both at white Canadian and South Asian audiences.

A moment of great encouragement came in November 1913 when a Canadian judge overruled an immigration department order for the deportation of 38 Punjabi Sikhs. These immigrants had come to Canada via Japan on a regularly scheduled Japanese passenger liner, the Panama Maru. Immigration officials had ordered them deported because they had not come by continuous journey from India and because they were not carrying the requisite amount of money. The judge found fault with the continuous journey regulation and also the regulation specifying a $200 requirement. He looked closely at the wording of these regulations and ruled them inconsistent with the wording of the Immigration Act and therefore invalid. He then allowed the passengers to land. It was this victory for the passengers in the Panama Maru case that encouraged the sailing of the Komagata Maru in the following April 1914.

Unfortunately, by April the legal situation had changed. The Canadian government had quickly rewritten its regulations to meet the objections it encountered in court. Although briefly invalidated, the continuous journey and $200 requirement regulations were back in force by January 1914, three months before the Komagata Maru left Hong Kong for Vancouver. The leadership of the Komagata Maru passengers might have been deterred from sailing after the reissue of these regulations. Instead, they convinced themselves that a Canadian court would rule in their favour.

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/komagata-maru/

__________________

Section from Erika Lee’s The Making Of Asian America.

Other links:

• http://komagatamarujourney.ca/incident
• http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/komagata-maru-backgrounder-apology-1.3584372

Last night, I finished Diane Fujino’s biography of Richard Aoki and wanted to write a quick note/review on it…

Because of its method, which is largely a presentation of Richard Aoki’s autobiographical oral history, the book is an odd mix of autobiography and biography. We read Aoki in first person talking about his parents breaking up in the internment camps, his time in the army, his involvement with the Socialist Workers Party, the Black Panthers, the Asian American Political Alliance, the Third World Liberation Front strike, and so on. Fujino then adds her own commentary at the end of each chapter (and throughout also has useful, extensive footnotes).

A few quibbles with this necessary and important work… While her method gives us a direct and a useful sense of Aoki’s style, the reliance on interview-transcription allows Aoki to guide and frame his story often to the detriment of context, and Fujino’s followup commentary often seemed more redundant than clarifying. As well, since the interviews were no doubt extensively edited for clarity (for a minor example Fujino says in one footnote that she added words to give a statement context; p 369, note 17) it would be informative to know more about this editing process.

Reading this in 2015, three years after the informant revelations, to say the obvious and easy: many episodes beg for reconsideration and revision. The book if nothing else is a continuous lesson in historiography.

Obviously much to chew over, but two things stay with me in particular. Whatever status he had, his almost play-by-play account of the TWLF strike at Berkeley was deeply moving. Even though I don’t really care to read tactical or military history–and Aoki’s accounting of the strike (the costliest in UC history) seems unique in that it focused mostly on such things–and even though I’m reading as someone partly already suspicious of his motives, Aoki’s palpable involvement and risk, as well as the investment and risk of so many others, to create a program of academics where they could self determine their own education, is astounding and very moving.

The other episode, and one that seems virtually unrelated to any stain due to his informant activity, is Aoki’s reaction to the riots after the Rodney King verdict. At this point he’s a college administrator and a colleague says to him, “Richard, how’s it feel? You know how to start riots. Now you’re getting paid to stop one.” It’s not a little disturbing to read him confronting that conflict, thinking about the trap he’s in as an employee of the state. Aoki’s assessment of the radical left’s losses as nearly total since 1968 is also familiar and familiarly disheartening.

_____________
PS Today, following up in the library, I read one of the more radical revisionist readings of Aoki’s informant activities. According to Black Studies professor and Aoki friend, Douglas Henry Daniels, being paid by the FBI (for assumed useless knowledge) was, “one of the earlier attempts to recoup remuneration for the internments…” Ha! I’ll take that for a dollar!

_________________

Other Aoki resources I found useful:

Momo Chang’s good summary of the revelations of Aoki’s informant activities and its aftermath.

The A-Files: Richard Aoki & the FBI, written by Aoki friends Belvin Louie & Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, discusses what it was like as close friends to hear and process the informant news.

Mostly behind a paywall, A Richard Aoki Forum: What Does It Take to Destroy a Legend? appeared in Amerasian journal and has responses by several Aoki supporters, including his close friend, long-time activist Harvey Dong.

Why Couldn’t Richard Aoki Have Been an Informant? by Tamara Nopper

And the excellent multi-part, in-depth coverage of Aoki in Hyphen Magazine by Momo Chang and others: Who Was Richard Aoki?

The Aoki documentary

AWP is pronounced mwahaha i’d said and meant but nonetheless had a good time there and met and talked with good folk . but the demographics of the event brought me to think and talk about and keep thinking about the mongrel coalition against gringpo … some said they saw the mongrels by what they’re particularly reacting against and so as all about KG and conceptual poetry, which frankly i could give two shits about. for me i love the mongrels cuz they give voice to an anger and to unsaid, long-suppressed complaints not through academic footnote but with shotgun poetry. (i love the mongrels too cuz they could give a shit whether i don’t or do.) so my ardor is not precisely becuz their enemy is my enemy since their enemy number one is floating methane on some not-mine moon. it’s for me less to do with anti-CP than finally making more visible the way power moves (and thus how oppression done) : making more visible how that happens in my own then shamed mind and in those important rooms. so i love the mongrels. it may all turn robespierre next month but the initial strikes are mayhem and genius.