about words: the sympathizer

A few months ago I was prompted to pick up Viet Thanh Nguyen's debut novel The Sympathizer after listening to a fascinating interview with Nguyen on Fresh Air. I finished reading the book a while back, and I've been remiss in not sharing a few excepts sooner.

First: context. Let's begin with the opening sentences:

I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.

If you're from the United States and this doesn't remind you of the opening lines of another novel, then Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man still isn't required reading, which would be an unforgivable failure of the education system.

At any rate, that book begins:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids——and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

The Sympathizer is steeped in an Ellisonian influence, which not not surprising: Nguyen is an Invisible Man superfan, having apparently gone so far as to name his son after its author.

Ten songs (top perhaps?)

Lately I've been working on editing a pile of short stories and prepping them to be thrown at (and probably rejected by) literary magazines, and assembling something that I hope will become novel #3. The upshot of this is that I don't have much available RAM to update this thing with anything very substantial or thoughtful.

So, let's have some filler: something not very substantial and not requiring too much thought on my part. Everyone likes top ten lists. Everyone likes music. Okay, let's call this my ten favorite songs. Or ten songs that are among my favorites. Or just ten songs. Let's cap it off by throwing in some spontaneously selected images that may (or may not) evoke the texture or flavor of these songs, and then let's call it a day. I've got stuff to do.

TOP TEN SONGS GO

infosift: cohesion & conflict

On my way to cash my paycheck last week I happened to catch a Here & Now segment in which journalist Ryan Lenz is interviewed about high-profile white supremacist Matthew Heinbach, whom Lenz calls "the youthful face of hate in America." One remark in particular piqued my attention:

It's interesting to note about Heinbach's whole worldview: he disguises or conceals or covers up his racism through what he calls Christian love. He says I don't hate anybody, I just love white people. It's a very interesting moral twist.

Most surprising about this is Lenz's incredulity. This sort of thing isn't "interesting," at least not in any sense synonymous with "unusual" or "unexpected." The obverse of embrace is rejection, after all. One entity cannot be held in preference without depreciation to everything that is not that entity. Booing the Yankees is corollary to cheering the Red Sox. The insider calls it "community spirit;" the outsider calls it "insularity."

And so on.

RIP: Toad

Update from where we left off: I woke up this morning to an email from Jason.

The light also had its disadvantages; specifically, it negated Mr. Satan's camouflage to more developed eyes. On returning home tonight, I noticed sticky, red smears on the porch combined with strange, lumpy shapes.  On closer inspection, I determined it to be blood.  Following this trail of blood and viscera, I found the bulk of Mr. Satan's dessicated corpse surrounded by raccoon tracks.  Nothing was eaten; the raccoon killed the toad purely for sport.  On a positive note, I'll have a new hat soon, and I'll bury Mr. Satan where the red fern grows.

I'm sure Mr. Satan spent its final hours doing what it loved: devouring living things. And hey, at least the raccoon had a good time.

Mr. Satan: gone but not forgotten.

Critters: Featuring Frog & Toad

I sojourned briefly in Jersey on the way from Philadelphia to rural Massachusetts. The reason for the trip: I hadn't seen Jason since January and hadn't visited Earthdance since 2014, and when he finds himself with two consecutive days off at the border of spring and summertime, the wise wage slave takes advantage.

I was only in town for a few hours, but made a point of checking up on the situation out in the woods. Three weeks made all the difference: the ebony jewelwings are out and about, and I know precisely where to find them. With the water level of the pond decreasing over the last few years, my favorite odonata have taken their domain from its edge (pictured hereabouts) to the brook the overflowing pond used to spill into.

I wish I possessed the time and imagination to convey the quiet joy and wonder of the damselflies' grotto. Verdure and water-flattened stones; the only immediately perceptible movements above the creek's surface are committed by antediluvian insects that look for the world like living automata, equal parts tensile muscle and silent gearwork, chitin and lapis lazuli, engineered by an anonymous forgotten Daedalus for Babylon's royal conservatory or the temple gardens at Rhodes.

You see? I cannot explain it without resorting to silly metaphors. But there really is something splendid and otherworldly in the scene—a statement which might express less about the event itself than imply the estrangement of its author from the world that shaped him and the insects both. (Postscript thought: it is the pale cast of anthropocentrism—events that have no clear analogue within an anthropized setting are called "otherworldly," as though the city and the wild green exist independently on separate planets. It is a dangerous way of thinking.)

*          *          *

On the dry bed of the defunct anastomotic channel between the pond and the brook, I met a frog.

ふるいけやかわずとびこむ

Straight White Men

I'm pretty sure this is a first: I've reviewed video games, cartoons, bad direct-to-video superhero films, and books, but never a play. Today we'll be looking at Young Jean Lee's Straight White Men, staged in Philadelphia by the InterAct Theatre Company, which I had the pleasure and (ahem) privilege of seeing last week. This is also one of those rare occasions where I'll be issuing a spoiler warning: if you're fortunate to live in or near a city that is or will be hosting a production of Straight White Men, you'd be much better served buying a ticket and seeing it without any expectations or preconceptions.

stray thoughts: ducklings & dragons

Was in Jersey yesterday on an errand and took another opportunity to visit the woods. It's only been a week, and I might be mistaken, but it appears to have filled out considerably in just the last seven days. Maybe I can attribute the difference to weather conditions: during my last visit it was partially overcast, and yesterday the sun shone brilliantly and unobstructed.

I know I once wrote a bloody novel about how crappy it can be to live in the suburbs of North Jersey, but damn if they're not beautiful during the spring and summer. So unbelievably luxuriantly green.

I'm indebted the the forests I habited as an adolescent for pretty much anything I can claim to know about wild flora and fauna. The only reason I ever read up on birds, plants, or bugs is because I find them outside and want to better understand what sort of life my own is intersecting with. I don't understand much of anything about "nature" at all. There's just some woods here and there in North Jersey I'm acquainted with.

At the onset of my visit yesterday I met several odonata and got my hopes up that another week was all the ebony jewelwings needed to mature and populate their grotto by the pond. No such luck—but it was one of those uncommon (but not unusual) days when the pond was hosting a wood duck. They always startle me: even before the surface of the pond comes into view over the tangle of wild roses at its circumference, the wood duck (a very shy, skittish, and exceedingly vocal bird) hears you coming and tears shrieking into the arboreal shadows almost too fast for your eyes to find before it disappears.

Most of the time I've only seen solitary males at this pond. Yesterday it was a female, a mama bird. True to her species' form, she screamed and bolted into the woods before I even knew she was there, leaving seven ducklings behind. I moved in for a closer look, puzzled as to why she'd apparently abandon them to me (a predator, as far as she knew), and wondering if maybe they weren't actually her brood. I came around to where the ducklings were gathered in hiding under the leaves of a fallen (but still living) tree drooping out over the surface of the water. The female was still nearby: she made herself conspicuous, crying plaintively, staying low to the ground, flapping and hopping towards the forest's interior, but not going far.

It was the first time I'd seen volucrine decoy tactics in action up close! Mama bird was trying to lure me towards herself, away from her brood. After I'd backed off and waited in the brush for a while, she returned to the pond with a swoosh and a splash, and her ducklings hurried to her, peeping excitedly.

Via Sergey Tishin.