Vanity, Tom Cruise, Telling, Vanity

All right, I admit it: I am somewhat taken with checking my sales rank on Amazon. The numbers fluctuate so much between the fifth realm of heaven and the fringes of hell that I can't stop looking at them... A more interesting revelation from all this is that pop-ups are storming the pulp market (that's a fave word this week: PULP)--I did not know that "Annie, a Girl Who Loved Gordon", a book by Stephen King, is also available in pop-up format. Now I do, and apparently this book has been sold as a companion piece to my moon-crazed monkeys.

JY invited me to an auditorium screening of "Collateral" Sunday night. It was a well-made thriller (how many are there of those today) despite Tom Cruise's unmoving rock-like performance. I still hold, grey hair-dye notwithstanding, that the most talented part of him as an actor are his perfect teeth. I don't fault JY for liking him, however; he embodies a lot of things about Hollywood, what some see as a magic factory and what Bob Kaufman sagely christened "the cultural cancer of the universe".

I have to do a lot of translations tonight, so no time for purple hazing. Wanted to mention the lesson of the weekend all the same. M has advised me repeatedly to not tell my stories before I write them down. Sound words if only my ears weren't wooden doors. Sunday morning, Mom and Far call and we chat. Go over some consistent family dynamics. It's fun in its familiarity. We tell each other lame jokes. Actually, Far tells cute if innocuous jokes and I listen with genuine if dutiful pleasure. I get excited and make Mom listen to my new idea for a story concerning curiosity and a box. She calls Far to come hear it, too. Pressure mounts; I'm on speakerphone. I can hear myself repeat what I just said, unedited, and the youngness of my voice devoid of bodily trembling trebles. The story is not related chronologically. I give them a less tight rendition than the ones I've shopped to others, more contemporary fiction readers and writers. There is a notable silence when I reach the end.

"Hello?"
"Yes, we're here." Far's assurance rings from across the Atlantic.
"Well, that was the end."
"Uh huh."He's thinking.
"What did you think?" I wasn't fishing for compliments, but for identification.
"I don't know. I'll have to think about it." He sounds hesitant. About telling me what he really thinks? About deciding what he really thinks?
"What does Mom think? Mom?"
"Yes! Mom is here!" She calls from the kitchen a ways off. "That was it?" O, crushing!
" Yeah... It's not meant to be a novel."
"Why do you base all your stories in China?" She's... disappointed?
"I don't. This collection happens to be set during mid-80s China because I am interested in people's shifting social attitudes toward opening up economically and the avalanche of changes ahead of them. I wrote a story recently set in New York. What does it matter?"
"It doesn't sound like much happens in your story." Her frankness has won prizes.
"It's more like a psychological portrait of the man with the box and how the people in the community project what they think is in it." I feel the speaker's platform sinking beneath me.

"What's the moral of the story?" Far finally launches his Culminating Question.
"I don't like overt moralising in fiction. Anyway, this one doesn't have a conventional one. [I can hear his attention droop and drift over to some place else. Maybe the window overlooking the river or CNN with the sound turned down.] It's partly about the randomness of life: it is only after his neighbours start taking such interest in the box that they come to visit. And to accommodate their calls, he begins to make snacks and eventually that sets him up as an entrepreneur when the gates of commerce open in a few years... So something unexpected has galvanised him."
"I see. I don't know, sweetheart. Show it to me when you're done with it." He was trying to be kind, but sincere. Funny, that's what I try to be as well.
"Hmm... Mom will have to read the story when you finish. It sounds like a movie the way you described it." I appreciate that she's making an effort to be encouraging.

I later thought of this William Carlos Williams poem in my recovery of enthusiasm for the project. Reading it again, I paused slightly at the lonely genius part. That was not what made me remember it, but rather the joy in the narrator's knowing his dance is grotesque: he is dancing because of the life force that makes him dance for himself. This was a good occasion to remember making things, doing things, being, isn't always about audience or vanity, but action:

"Dance Russe"

If when my wife is sleeping

and the baby and Kathleen

are sleeping

and the sun is a flame-white disc

in silken mists

above shining trees,—

if I in my north room

dance naked, grotesquely

before my mirror

waving my shirt round my head

and singing softly to myself:

"I am lonely, lonely,

I was born to be lonely,

I am best so!"

If I admire my arms, my face,

my shoulders, flanks, buttocks

against the yellow drawn shades—



Who shall say I am not

the happy genius of my household?

---William Carlos Williams

Time to go back to Han Feizi and other dead pontificants. Zhuangzi still rocks.

Will be hopefully learning the first verse of the pavane, "Belle qui tiens ma vie", before going to sleep. Bu Bear has been found under some blankets on my reading chair and reinstated on the bed. He was a marvelous companion to wake up next to on this grey misty morning--such a pleasant little rump beneath the covers!