Will Buckingham's Blog, page 15

Three Drinking Poems for National Poetry Day

National poetry day this year takes “memory” as its theme, so I thought that I should share these three rough translations from Chinese. All three of them are drinking poems — oblivion and forgetting being the other side of memory. The first poem is by Liu Zongyuan (柳宗元), and is about drinking wine at night in a Buddhist temple. The second is by Du Mu (杜牧), and is about drunken hermits. And the third is a lovely poem by Yu Xuanji (魚玄機), written in recollection of her lover.

I hope that you enjoy them.

 

“In the Western Pavilion of Fahua Temple

Drinking at Night”, by Liu Zongyuan.

In the Jeta grove,

  by the setting sun pavilion,

together we pour

  meditation-wine.

The fog is dark,

  the river laps the steps,

the moon is bright,

  flowers veil the window.

We’re not yet done

  with getting drunk—

gazing at each other,

  hair not yet white.

 

法華寺西亭夜飲

祇樹夕陽亭

共傾三昧酒

霧暗水連階

月明花覆牖

莫厭尊前醉

相看未白首

 

* * *

 

“Drunken Sleep”

by Du Mu (803-852)

Autumn dregs,

  fermenting in the rain;

a cold hut,

  among falling leaves;

the hermit

  has overslept—

he pours more wine,

  empties his cup.

 

醉眠

秋醪雨中熟

寒齋落葉中

幽人本多睡

更酌一樽空

 

* * *

 

“A Letter Sent to Guo Xiang”

by Yu Xuanji (844-869)

Morning and evening,

  my body’s drunken ache,

our mutual longings

  returning with the spring.

Through the rain,

  the messenger carries a letter,

and I stand by the window,

  broken-hearted.

In the mountains, I roll

  the pearl curtain and gaze.

Sadness returns

  like new fragrant grass.

Going and coming,

  from elegant feasts—

how much dust,

  fallen from the rafters?

 

寄國香

旦夕醉吟身

相思又此春

雨中寄書使

窗下斷腸人

山捲珠簾看

愁隨芳草新

別來清宴上

幾度落梁塵

 

Amateurs, Professionals and Bullshit Going Forwards

The new academic year has started at De Montfort University, and I’m teaching a course on Professional Writing Skills. It’s good to be back in the swing of teaching, and a pleasure to see my students from last year once again.

This is a course that I love teaching, because of the way that it directly mixes philosophical, technical and practical issues. But the longer I go on, the more I’m a little worried by the notion of a professional writer. In my lecture today, I said that I’d like to teach another course alongside this one called amateur writing skills. It got a muted laugh, but it was not really a joke.

The trouble with many widespread notions of professionalism (what I would call faux-professionalism), is that they can be so very narrow and restrictive. They conjure up drab images of suits, ties, boardrooms smelling of stale coffee, and that awful bureaucratic-speak that is properly categorised as bullshit (or bullshit going forward). In this context, ‘professional’ and ‘unprofessional’ (or ‘amateur’) are often terms that are used to maintain a very restrictive range of behaviours, and to limit what can and cannot be thought about and talked about. None of this seems to encapsulate a state of being towards which anybody, writer or otherwise, should aspire. 

So what I’m interested in are some deeper notions of amateurism and professionalism that, when taken together, get much closer to the core of what really matters in writing. Here, a couple of definitions will help. These are adapted from the wonderful online etymology dictionary. We can start with ‘amateur’.

amateur (n.) 1784, “one who has a taste for (something),” from French amateur “lover of,” from Latin amatorem “lover.” Meaning “dabbler” (as opposed to professional) is from 1786. As an adjective, by 1838…

Amateurism is often used as a term of abuse (particularly when the term is wielded by those who are fond of engaging in bullshit going forward). To be an amateur is to be inept, incompetent, unworldly, a dabbler—in short, unprofessional.

But I’d like to rescue the idea of the amateur as lover, and to maintain a positive spin on the word. Because there are few things that are more antithetical to bullshit going forward than enthusiasm, love, intoxication, joy and passion. If you want to write, you need to love what writing can do. You need to feed this enthusiasm, intoxication, joy and passion. You need to have a taste for writing. Writers need to be amateurs if they are going to write anything worth writing (the same, as I have argued elsewhere, goes for philosophers).

But what about professionalism? Let’s go back to the etymological dictionary, for the following…

professional (n.) c.1200, from Old French profession, “vows taken upon entering a religious order,” from Latin professionem “public declaration,” from past participle stem of profiteri “declare openly”. Meaning “any solemn declaration” is from mid-14c. Meaning “occupation one professes to be skilled in” is from early 15c.; meaning “body of persons engaged in some occupation” is from 1610…

What I love about this (yes, I love it, because I’m an incorrigible amateur) is that if you strip away bullshit going forwards, if you forget about suits and ties and stale-coffee boardrooms, you get to something much more existentially meaty: vows or commitments that are taken upon entering an order. In making such vows, you are not just saying “Oh, I’ll do x, y, or z” but you are making a much bigger commitment, a commitment that is public, one that marks the fact you are joining a community (albeit a loose-knit one), and one that may change the direction of your life. In other words, you are making a commitment with a degree of existential heft to it.

This deeper notion of ‘profession’ has two aspects: the making of an existential commitment, and the public declaration of this commitment, the willingness to say, “Yes, I have committed myself to this, and I’ll see it through.”

It is in this sense, I think, that it can be of use to writers to be not just amateurs, not just lovers, but also professionals. Love is a more personal affair. And love comes and goes. But as a writer, you may find that your writing really starts to bite, really starts to go deeper and further, when you decide that you are going to commit yourself to the act of writing, and when you make this commitment known to others, be they writers (i.e., members of the loose-knit order of writers), or non-writers.

The public aspect of commitment is important, I think. When I started out as a writer, I found it hard to say, “I am a writer”. I had only a couple of scrappy publications to my name, and no more. I wrote all the time, I loved writing (I was an amateur), and I had made a private commitment to writing… but I was reluctant to profess this commitment more broadly. I was, simply put, too shy. Looking back, I think that this reluctance was a mistake. It was a mistake because in the long run it made life harder for me. It created a split between the things that motivated me personally, that drove me existentially, and the things that I talked about in relationship with others. It stopped me from being able to relate to others, whether those who wrote and those who didn’t, as a writer. And this held me back.

So this is what I’ll be trying to explore about during the coming year. Of course we will talk about practical issues: publishers, submissions, formatting manuscripts, reading contracts, self-publishing and so on. But along the way I’ll also be trying to keep the course rooted in questions about what it means to write (or do anything else) as an amateur, as one who acts out of love, and what it means to write (or, again, do anything else) as a professional, as one who has made certain commitments, and who has made these commitments public.

Deep amateurism, then, and deep professionalism. Taken together these things are not opposed to each other, but instead support each other. And to engage in them is to perform a service not only to oneself, but also to others.

There is too much faux-professionalism in the world. There is too much bullshit going forwards. But deep professionalism, this ability to make commitments, and to be honest about the commitments that we have made, and deep amateurism, this ability to love, and the willingness to pursue what we love, seem to me to be powerful ways of pushing back against the tide, and of doing things, whether in writing or elsewhere, that are of lasting value.

Fashionable topics

I’ve just finished reading Julia Lovell’s translation of Lao She’s wonderful novel, Mr. Ma and Son, and I thought I’d share the following short quote.

In the book, the hapless ex-missionary, Reverend Ely, is trying to persuade Mr. Ma to write a book comparing Western and Chinese cultures. The good clergyman is not entirely disinterested in his urging, because he himself is working on a book called A History of Taoism, and needs some help with his poor Chinese. Anyway, here’s the quote, which is still pertinent today:

The Reverend Ely pulled out his pipe, and slowly filled it with tobacco. ‘I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking on your behalf for some time now, and I feel that while you’re abroad, you ought to take the opportunity of writing something. The best thing would be a comparison of Eastern and Western cultures. That’s a fashionable topic nowadays, and it doesn’t matter particularly whether what you write’s correct or not. As long a you say something with conviction, anything at all, you’ll be able to sell it…’

— Lao She, Mr Ma and Son, trans. Julia Lovell

Bath-time for Plato and Nietzsche

A philosopher’s work is never done. This evening, I realised that Plato and Nietzsche were looking a bit grubby, so I had to give them a bath…

Writing China, at the Nottingham Festival of Words

I’m delighted to be participating in the international launch event at the 2014 Nottingham Festival of Words, along with two fellow-novelists, the Nottingham-based Rhiannon Tsang (The Woman who Lost China, Open Books 2013), and the Beijing-based Karen Ma (Excess Baggage, China Books 2013). Between the three of us, we’ll be talking about ‘Writing China’.



Along the way, we’ll be talking about literature in English and Chinese, about how stories travel between China and the West, and about understandings and misunderstandings in both directions. Rhiannon and Karen will be giving short readings from their recently-published China-based novels. Meanwhile, I will be reading from A Book of Changes: Sixty-Four Chance Pieces, my novel based on the Chinese divination manual the I Ching, and due to be published in 2015 by Earnshaw Books.

We’re keeping readings brief, as most of the evening will be given over to discussion; and there should be ample time for audience questions. We’re hoping to explore questions such as: the expectations of Western readers when they come to Chinese literature; the ethical and moral issues raised by engaging with other people’s myths and histories; who, if anyone, “owns” particular narratives; and what rich possibilities may be opened up by crossing between literary traditions.

I’m hugely looking forward to spending an evening talking with two fascinating and stimulating writers. If you want to come along to the event, you can buy tickets (£4 full price, or £3 concessions) here. There’s a bit more about my fellow panellists below:

Karen Ma is a Chinese-American author and journalist based in Beijing. Born in China, Ma spent her formative years in Hong Kong and Japan, before earning an M.A. degree in Chinese language and literature from the University of Washington (Seattle, U.S.) During her 20 plus years living in Japan and China, Ma worked as a journalist and translator, taught Chinese at several universities and wrote a non-fiction book about cross-cultural romance entitled Modern Madam Butterfly: Fantasy and Reality of Japanese Cross-cultural Relationships, published in 1996 by Charles E. Tuttle. Ma’s most recent book is Excess Baggage, a semi-autobiographical novel based loosely on her family’s experience as Chinese immigrants living in Tokyo during the post bubble years of 1990s, published by San Francisco-based China Books in 2013. After a stint of five years living in New Delhi, India, where she started a Chinese-language program at the Indian capital’s foremost international school, navigating administrations and India-China tension to build a successful curriculum, Ma has now settled back in Beijing with her family and is busy researching her next book.  http://www.karenmaauthor.com/



Rhiannon Jenkins Tsang is a British writer whose work contains strong international themes and focuses on historical, cultural and emotional fault lines. Rhiannon was born in Yorkshire, read Chinese at Oxford University, and has nearly thirty years experience of the greater China world. Her debut novel THE WOMAN WHO LOST CHINA was published by Open Books www.open-bks.com in 2013. It was listed by Rana Mitter in The Daily Telegraph in his ten book literary tour of China and has been well reviewed and sold internationally.  Rhiannon’s poem, Oxford is a Portwon first prize at the Melbourne Festival in 2013.

 

Take Ten Books

Over on Facebook, a number of friends have tagged me in one of those chain-letter things, asking me to provide a list of ten books that have (“regardless of literary merit”) shaped or affected me deeply one way or another. I’m not a big fan of the “tag-and-pass-it-on” thing, so I thought that I’d put a list here on my blog instead. Here are my ten, in no particular order.

1. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Forget the Bible: if I was abandoned on a desert island, this is the one book that I would make sure that I had by my side. Calvino’s strange, brief, philosophical not-really-novel is, I contend, the best book in existence. Marco Polo and Kublai Khan meet in the palace gardens, and the Venetian explorer describes the cities of the Khan’s empire to the ruler, cities that the Khan himself will never visit. Saturated with philosophy, strange and haunting, I could read this book over and over again.

2. Political Systems of Highland Burma by Edmund Leach

Back when I was becoming an anthropologist of sorts, I read this extraodinary book about social change in the highlands of Burma. It was winter, and I was living in a small attic-room in Newcastle. I lay under piles of blankets, and read with feverish intensity. By the time I got to the end, the world seemed a different place. Incidentally, I re-read the book ten years later, and found it as dull as ditchwater, which makes it the only book on the list I do not have much desire to re-read any more.  But on first reading, it was the most exciting thing I had ever come across, and it sent my life skittering along new trajectories.

3. Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

Bought in a bookshop in South Shields. I worked through the big blue Macquarrie and Robinson translation annotating with a blunt pencil whilst living in a Buddhist community in Newcastle. I know that Hediegger is supposed to be abstruse and difficult (not to say dodgy), but Being and Time seemed to me — and still seems to me — to be about the most concrete experience that there is, the experience of being here, in my body, entangled in the things and the commitments that make up human life.

4. Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Comet in Moominland is a masterpiece. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s with the threat of global nuclear annihilation always in the background, Jansson gave me a way of thinking about what it might mean to live in the shadow of disaster. From Comet in Moominland I learned that, in extremis, there is still a great value to friendship, knowledge and a good cake.

5. The Journey to the West, aka Monkey, aka 西遊記 by Wu Cheng’en 吳承恩

I loved the Japanese TV series as a child, then in my Buddhist days, I came across Arthur Waley’s translation, Monkey. I took this book on retreat several times, and read about the antics of Sun Wu-kong when I should have been reading sutras and stuff like that. Anarchic, weird in the extreme, often bloodthirsty, frequently absurd, and somehow gloriously life-affirming. I read and reread this book, and it gets better and better. The full, unabridged translation is wonderful, and I’m working up to reading it in the Chinese original. Monkey is… irrepressible!

6. The Troubadour of Knowledge by Michel Serres

Wayward philosophising. A book about experience, about education, about translation, about storytelling, about science, and about the invention of things both new and strange. Exhilarating.

7. Other People’s Myths by Wendy Doniger

Wendy Doniger is a good thing for the world. I believe this very strongly. Other People’s Myths is strange, insightful, frequently funny, and just a little bit deranged. I picked up a copy in a sale back when I was an art student and was overwhelmed by the vibrancy of spirit that animated it. This book has had a huge influence on how I write scholarly stuff.

8. In Praise of Blandness by François Jullien

A more recent find, this one. It is a book about the aesthetics of that which is without any flavour. I read it a couple of years ago, and it continues to provide rich resources for thinking. I love this book because it undermines so many assumptions about what is of value, and it pretty much undercuts the obsession with drama and tragedy that is so prevalent in the philosophy and literature of the West.

9. Blindness by José Saramago

An absolutely terrific novel by any account; but above all else it is Saramago’s style—folksy, philosophical, full of irony and sparing with the punctuation—that really makes this such an astonishingly good book.

10. The Zhuangzi (莊子) by Somebody-or-Other (or a whole tribe of Sombodies-or-Others)

I dithered about including this book. I first encountered it, I think, in Wendy Doniger’s book (see above) — which includes the famous passage about the happiness of fish. There’s something maddening about the Zhuangzi. It is slippery as hell — frustrating, maddening, funny and insightful in equal parts. This book has been a kind of half-annoying, half-insightful travelling companion for a long time.

Afterthought

Of all the above books, if there was one that I would want to save—Farenheit 451-style—from the future pyres of some apocalyptic meltdown of civilization, it would be the Calvino. But the reason for this is not because it stands out as a single, exemplary work. Instead, the Calvino matters to me because it has become a sort of crossing-point where huge numbers of my interests and thoughts converge, and a map of all kinds of mental territories that are occupied by a multitude of other books and authors. I find it, as Lévi-Strauss might say, good to think with.

Of course, if you asked me tomorrow, I might come up with a whole other list. This one is pretty light on fiction, and there is no poetry in sight (which makes me feel a bit guilty when I think about those poor poets!). But I think the Calvino would be there whatever day you asked me. And, as for the rest, given that I have to settle on ten, for today I’ll let the list stand as it is…

 

A Lazy Sunday?

What better way of spending a lazy Sunday than by lying in bed with a good book all morning, and most of the afternoon as well, and then heading off to spend a couple of hours in the theatre? Except, on this occasion, the bed was a hospital bed and the theatre was an operating theatre.

I’m back out of the hospital and back home, after what was a fairly minor and routine operation last Sunday for a small hernia. The injury was sustained, I very much suspect, by over-zealously moving tables and chairs at a literature event back in March—I have vague recollections of people asking, “Do you want help with those tables?”, and me blithely grunting, “No, I’m doing fine!” So I have nobody to blame but myself. And whilst it has been something of an inconvenience, it is good to have the operation out of the way. The staff in the Leicester General Hospital were excellent, with a perfect mix of reassurance, competence and good cheer, and the operation went smoothly, without any complications.

I don’t really have much to say about the whole experience, other than that I feel very grateful for how well looked-after I was. The level of care was truly exceptional. And I was struck, as I often am when I have dealings with the health service, by the ordinary, everyday human warmth of everybody involved.

It is traditional to say, after a good experience with the NHS, how much one loves the NHS. And it is traditional, after a bad experience, to berate the NHS for its failings. But I’m a little suspicious of both of these tendencies. I’m suspicious, in part, because this conflates ideas of “standard of care” with the deeper questions about how healthcare should be paid for. As a result, the argument from “standard of care” is often used to justify the creeping privatisation that is being pushed by the present government. But in my view, the idea of a National Health Service should be rooted, first and foremost, not in questions of standard of care, but instead in questions of principle.

What are these questions of principle? There are three that come to mind: firstly that good healthcare should be available to all, regardless of ability to pay; secondly, that good health is not just an individual good, but also a public good (after all, it is in my interests not only that I am healthy, but that you are healthy as well, and it is in your interests that I am healthy…); and thirdly that, as a broad public good, health care is most sensibly paid for by a system of fair and rigorous taxation.

In my view (and the spirit of the times is against me, I know), the question is not whether privatised, public or public-private healthcare provides the best standard of care. Instead, the question is how, within a public healthcare system, it is possible to make sure that care is of the highest possible standard, for the benefit of all. Because only a properly public healthcare system can really reflect the fact that healthcare is itself a public good.

Anyway, I’m now back home and there have been no complications, so I’m spending a couple of resting, reading books, hobbling around, checking in on my email (I was impressed by uncannily appropriate spam message I received this morning urging me to “get a ripped abdomen for free…”), watching bad Taiwanese soap operas, and trying to persuade the cat — who is very impressed that I am spending so much time swathed in blankets on the sofa — not to leap too vigorously upon my wound.

Normal service will be resumed in due course. But my heartfelt thanks go to the excellent staff at Leicester General.

 

A note on conversation

One good thing about France is the bookshops. Proper bookshops, filled with proper books — books that are about stuff, shelves of philosophy and science and all kinds of other things (there are reasons that French bookshops are good and British bookshops not so good, but I won’t go into these at the moment). So I made use of last week’s holiday in France to indulge in a buying frenzy — paperback editions are also reasonably priced — and to get hold of a number of books about philosophy, Chinese studies and so on. It’s good to be giving my French a work-out, and I like the style of French sinology, which tends to be more speculative than Anglo-American traditions.

Anyway, amongst the books that I came away with was Jean François Billeter’s Notes sur Tchouang-tseu et la Philosophie or “Notes on Zhuangzi and Philosophy”, a reflection on a colloquium that took place in 2009 in Taiwan; and I thought that it was worth sharing the following small extract. The extract comes from a footnote, because everybody knows that the best bits in books are to be found in footnotes. The footnote that caught my eye is about conversation.

Comme j’avais fait une remarque sur cette importance de la conversation durant le colloque, un collègue allemand m’a demandé pourquoi j’écrivais. Il y a trois raisons, lui ai-je répondu: parce que l’écriture m’oblige à clarifier ma pensée, qu’elle permet de la conserver pour un usage futur et qu’elle fournit une base à la conversation.

Here’s a rough translation into English.

When I made a remark during the colloquium about the importance of conversation, a German colleague asked me why it was that I wrote. There are three reasons, I replied: because writing forces me to clarify my thinking; because it allows me to keep my thinking for future use; and because it forms a basis for conversation.

I like this idea a great deal. I have often said that one of the things that I want most out of life is to have interesting conversations. And this is one reason why I, too, write—it initiates interesting conversations. The writing is not an end-point, but instead a part of a broader process of conversation with others.

This is not to say that I think the essence of life lies in chattiness. I’m not interested in the exchange of information for its own sake. Instead, my concern with interesting conversations is more about developing a certain depth of relationship—with others and with the many things that make up the shared world. Conversation, you could say, is engagement, alongside others, with the world. Or this at least, seems to me to be the essence of conversation at its best. And whilst the exchange of information may be a part of this, it is not the whole of it. All kinds of other things might be going on as well in a good conversation (sharing perplexity, for example, which is not the same as sharing information). In other words, it might be possible to have some very rich conversations—like Marco Polo and the Kublai Khan in Calvino’s Invisible Cities—without speaking a single word…

 

Margaret, Manuscripts and the Moon

There’s a good story in the Guardian today about Margaret Atwood’s latest manuscript, which is going to be buried for one hundred years as a part of The Future Library Project, the creation of Scottish artist, Katie Paterson. It’s a terrific idea, so I went over to Paterson’s website to see what she had to say about it.

A forest has been planted in Norway, which will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in one hundred years time. Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unpublished, until 2114.

The texts will be held in a specially designed room in the New Public Deichmanske Library, Oslo. Tending the forest and ensuring its preservation for the 100-year duration of the artwork finds a conceptual counterpoint in the invitation extended to each writer: to conceive and produce a work in the hopes of finding a receptive reader in an unknown future.

This is intriguing stuff, and Paterson has produced a lot more work that is really worth looking at. For me, even more intriguing than the Future Library Project, is her “Earth-Moon-Earth”: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata translated into Morse code, sent as radio signals to reflect off the surface of the moon, returning in fragmented form to earth, and then re-scored with all the “gaps and absences” where the signal has been lost somewhere in the shadows and craters.

It’s a lovely idea, and really worth taking a look.

Proust, Hemingway and Writing Apps

I’ve just been reading The Wave in the Mind, a wonderful collection of essays by Ursula Le Guin. The essays are insightful and often very funny, and I was particularly pleased to see Le Guin write in celebration of long, luxuriant sentences.

Amongst those who dish out writing advice, there is often the claim that short sentences are to be preferred. There are even apps that can help you write shorter, punchier sentences, such as the Hemingway App, which offers to make your writing “bold and clear”.

However, when I read fiction, I often find that there is something a bit wearying about short and punchy sentences (I am one of the few who probably prefers pre-Lish Carver to the weird, boiled-down post-Lish Carver). For a long time, I’ve not been sure why it is that I get irritated by this taste for short sentences, but now I think that Le Guin puts her finger on it. It’s the exasperating manliness that seems to go with the territory. Here’s Le Guin on beards, manliness and sentence-length.

 

What it comes down to, I guess, is that I am just not manly. Like Ernest Hemingway was manly. The beard and the guns and the wives and the little short sentences. I do try. I have this sort of beardoid thing that keeps trying to grow, nine or ten hairs on my chin, sometimes even more; but what do I do with the hairs? I tweak them out. Would a man do that? Men don’t tweak. Men shave..

 

Instead of this machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat of short, manly sentences, Le Guin favours setting up a rhythm across a text as a whole, playing with sentence length as a way of playing with the attention of the reader. Novelist Emma Darwin also talks about rhythm in her excellent, thoughtful blog on the subject of sentence length. I recommend that you read it now.  Darwin writes about the “stress and slack” of longer sentences, the interlocking rhythms that you can set up when you let thoughts, images and ideas stretch out more luxuriantly. “Of course there’s a place for short sentences,” she writes, “but unless there’s a positive reason to stop dead every few words, I want every sentence to move the reader on to a very slightly different place from where we started.”

It may be that all of this is a matter of taste; and if you want to write short sentences, I don’t really mind. They are only sentences, after all. But just for balance, I’d like to see somebody inventing an app that channels the spirit of Marcel Proust. I don’t know quite how it would work, but perhaps it be something like this: you feed in a chunk of text, and if the app deems your sentences to be too short and “punchy”, it gives you some practical advice for remedying the situation, such as putting aside your hunting-rifle, or going to lie in a cork-lined room, foppishly eating madeleines, until you have cultivated sufficient langour to pick up the pen once more.