Excess & Access: That’s not how you do it over here in Ame-ri-ka. Got it?
((un)necessary) info: Don Mee Choi was born in South Korea and came to the U.S. via Hong Kong.
Reading The morning News is Exciting, I was reminded of Johaness’ “Teaching Translation” he wrote for AWP panel on translation: “These leaky bodies/trickle/trinkets are mysteriously context-less, merely “washing ashore’ (like a corpse?) without bringing the proper contexts to make sense of them. One of the problems with translation is that they come from other context; they generate excesses: too many meanings, too many versions, too many literary histories and contexts.”
Question I had here reading Johaness and Choi was then: What if the body brought ashore was alive?
Unnecessary info: The first “Westerner” Korean encountered on the territory of Korea was Hendrick Hamel, a Dutch tradesman whose ship was wrecked on its way to Japan, the original destination. He was brought ashore with his fellow tradesmen and caused great disturbance among Koreans who were struggling to keep the Westerners out of the territory, refusing any communication with the Western world.
Immigrants are insidious. You cannot stop them from trickling in.
Obviously, Don Mee Choi’s writing is not a translation piece but it shares characteristics of translation, Foreignertext, FOB -like existence that won’t shut up about his/her homecountry that nobody in the party cares about (and their obnoxious Engrish!).
In The Morning News is Exciting Choi unabashedly points to politics, foreign history , foreign folktalkes, foreign form of poetry, critical/theoretical texts and some Canonical text written in English. They are ostensibly stitched together, or maybe not even stitched, just put together like the parts of different bodies that don’t quite fit one another. The text does not assume pretense of coherency, smoothness or seamlessness; it flaunts the stitchedness with different fonts (italics) and “Notes on” pages that stretches the stitches and exposes what’s inside.
But it’s alive.
Knowingly, Choi’s “Notes on” page does not reveal everything(the context cannot really be seen through Work cited page) but pretends to be. The creature is mysteriously alive. (mystery and “exotic is the most suspicious of all qualities, not only insincere and fake but also potentially politically incorrect, possibly even imperialistic, as well as vulgar, seductive a ripoff.”(more from Johaness’ writing))
Foreigners can do things that would make the Native cringe unknowingly or knowingly (grin); Although this text is not a translation, this text acts like the foreigners who play their loud music in the backyard, making the neighbors cringe and embarrassed.
The Morning News is Exciting is unabashedly(delightfully) politically incorrect; Asian (American) lit/culture scholars would cringe at Choi weaving seemingly journalistic text about touchy issues like Korean women raped and murdered by GI with Western scholar’s writing like Deleuze & Guattari who DON’T KNOW ABOUT THIS PARTICULAR ISSUE. Politics has to be focusing on particular, using particular voice.
Some critics will cringe at her use of Emily Dickinson; what does canonized English writer(disregard that she would not have agreed to this popularity or exposure to the public even) has to do with doubling of foreign identity in “Twin flower”? Isn’t that forced-inscribing for both sides, West and East?
Maybe incorrect info: From what I remember, Final Harvest by Thomas H. Johnson, which Choi chose to use for “Twin flower” section, was criticized for its heavy-editing on Emily Dickinson’s unorthodox use of punctuation.
The Morning News is Exciting is unabashedly loud; Language poet, like Susan Howe, insisted upon subverting the distinction between original/source/authentic text and the text that cites from the “source text” by not citing the texts that were used, and as Language poets took established positions, such convention became, well, the convention. “Notes on” pages in The Morning News is exciting refuses to follow such
etiquettes and announces where this is coming from, but not really.
Obnoxiously political statement [*Not cited]: Asians are often perceived to be model minority. They are thought to be quiet, gentle, (a)sexual.
This obnoxious loudness characterizes this book; Opening with “Manegg” section that sounds like accented/incorrect English, it not only flaunts its obnoxious alienness, but with “Notes on” page it shows off its incorrectness even more—I mean, what else can be more incorrect, semantically, than homophonic translation? It’s a slap-on-the-face for the translators who seeks the technique of “precise translation”. At the same time, it’s a mimicry of what native speakers want to tell those foreigners or Hong Kong people who speaks in Hong-Kong-ized English, “Say no lame!” trans: please speak English in correct manner.
And The morning news is exciting seems to play with excessive/unearned rhyming: wee & we, elite &petite, common confusion of lie & lay. Isn’t rhyming supposed to form a delicate mental link of both meaning and sound?
Inappropriate reference: Reading A Mown Lawn by Lydia Davis, my students called Lydia Davis to be pretentious for feeling entitled to talk about unearned political topics like Vietnam War.
A Mown Lawn by Lydia Davis
She hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of wom, the beginning of the name of what she was—a woman. A mown lawn had a sad sound to it, like a long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan. Lawn had some of the letters of man, though the reverse of man would be Nam, a bad war. A raw war. Lawn also contained the letters of law. In fact, lawn was a contraction of lawman. Certainly a lawman could and did mow a lawn. Law and order could be seen as starting from lawn order, valued by so many Americans. More lawn could be made using a lawn mower. A lawn mower did make more lawn. More lawn was a contraction of more lawmen. Did more lawn in America make more lawmen in America? Did more lawn make more Nam? More mown lawn made more long moan, from her. Or a lawn mourn. So often, she said, Americans wanted more mown lawn. All of America might be one long mown lawn. A lawn not mown grows long, she said: better a long lawn. Better a long lawn and a mole. Let the lawman have the mown lawn, she said. Or the moron, the lawn moron.
Unnecessary attachment:
Poetry space hasn’t been kind to women, especially Korean women. 허난설헌 (Huh nan sul hun) was a poet in late 1500 who was abused and abandoned by her husband for being a poet and being regarded as brilliant poet; the poetry was the space of men, and the uninvited was to be punished. Poetry betrayed her.
That's why poetry has to be loud and obnoxious!!!!!
Poetry have to crash party where people exchange pleasantries.
For public announcements are for boys and men, instructions are for girls. Poetry has to speak louder, be obnoxious, using the Master’s language, the Poetryspace in a “wrong” way. Girls should. Make them frown. The error/mimicry makes the Master’s voice blush. The traditional Korean poetryspace, its format is now used to avenge her.
What an error. She’s an errorist(28).
Unnecessary attachment: Korean aphorisms.zip
1. Women and dried fish get softer as they are beaten
2. Women are like Christmas cake; nobody wants it after 25th
3. Once married, you have to live three years deaf, three years blind, three years mute
to obey your husband and while doing so, have to bear a son(s) for the family
(Incorrect translation, probably)
From notes on Disability Studies lecture: “In theatre, a Character with Disability has to lay out his/her backstory that explains where the disability is coming from. Explained, laid out, narrated. The disability has to be utilized for defining the character, and for developing the plot. Gratuitous disability is not allowed on the stage.”
Oh but it is.
Gratuitousness & Loudness is encouraged:
COPRPSELESS BODIES WASHING ASHORE discuss the relevancy of the morning news & whether or not it is exciting. the corpses live on a soundstage it is not a real living room they are probably not even drinking real coffee some of them are drinking vodka probably. living as they do on the set the corpses have no other context they having nothing to talk about except for the morning news & whether or not it is exciting. probably everyone thinks that the morning news is exciting as it relates to them. WHAT DOES ALIVE MEAN it means organic maybe it means making decisions. the corpses do not make decisions they just talk about the morning news it has been decided for them. they are not the news or the makers of the news they talk about the news how is that exciting it isn’t, unless the morning news is exciting. UNNECESSARY INFO this is reality television we are paying for unnecessary that is what we want. we want to see your plastic leg & know how it got there who hurt you who’s victim who’s foreign & exotic to sound cultured at a cocktail party. pick your disability; you may choose up to three before becoming unmarketable. POLITICALLY CORRECT is marketable because it is WHOLESOME which means AMERICAN which means BETTER if you are a member of the MARKET from which PROFIT is derived it is a product we make women of it or out of sometimes or we make corpses which is POLITICALLY INCORRECT but if you’re a rebel even that can be marketable. language poetry is not marketable. the morning news is about that which is marketable. politically incorrect just work it you’re a rebel you don’t need to define the source texts but you do – what does that make it a bruise. INCORRECT. sound is not a bruise it’s a bone marrow transplant it’s supposed to hurt worse than that & you have to be awake. THE MORNING NEWS LIKES BODIES so show it I mean the transplant or a note it’s a window. show the surgery scenes it’s a bloody word they have to be so hacked up they are. they are. like “marry” is positively dripping it’s a weapon. I mean it was a weapon now it’s dead. INCORRECT. women are allowed in the factories during war. the war machine is broken it needs cogs no one wants to make cogs anymore the war machine is falling apart it needs poems they don’t have to have a gender even if they do you have to break them in. YOU HAVE TO BREAK A WOMAN IN she is born to be a rebel too marketable. you want plastic surgery she gets it she’s a mess. now, she’s obsessed. now, you listen to her, don’t you, when she bats her macerated I-lashes, don’t you, when she retracts into reaction it’s a touch not afraid to burn your face off make another. a face doesn’t have to mean a face it’s just a hovering in front of a screen. onscreen the morning news is exciting off-screen they aren’t wearing any makeup it looks ugly. women aren’t supposed to be seen except in the surgery scenes. in the surgery scenes what is extracted it is a baby I mean it is role-fulfillment put it on the news it’s an emblem. what is extracted rebellion put her on the news she is docile but not. do not put her on the news she is volatile. she is not a disaster she is a woman do not put her on the morning news the corpses will not know what to do she has a context she clings to it she isn’t willing to give it up. THIS ISN’T A FLOATING DOOR IT’S A BOOK you have to swim.
ReplyDelete(sponsored by _________________)
Choi says, “I won’t lay an eggy egg.” Why does Choi use “egg” twice? Oh, but even that question is inaccurate. She doesn’t use “egg” twice. She says “eggy,” then “egg.” If she would have said “egg egg” then the sounds would be the same. They’d crash into each other, or wipe each other it. I don’t think it’d be as phonetically pleasing. There’d be no divergence or contrast. “egg egg” would follow the pattern of the stanza with “inlaw inlaw” “align align.” These are true doubles. They are repetitions of the same word – you spell them the same, and they come of your mouth and reach your ear the same. The intrigue of variety is lacking. “eggy,” though, is not egg. “Egg” ends in the hard, certain “guh.” There is no trailing off, or wandering about. It’s “guh,” and it’s over. The finite and circumscribed sound of “egg” is like the American GIs who raped the women. The crime and the sound of the word are concerned with matter, physicality, and finiteness. There is something a rapist wants, and there is something an egg wants. You can crack an egg and throw it at somebody. You can transfix someone with the sound of “egg,” in the same way you penetrate someone via rape.
ReplyDeleteBut with “eggy,” it’s not so. How do you throw an “eggy” at someone? It must be difficult. “eggy” lacks the stoicism of “egg.” Egg is not wound tight, it does not cease with a “guh,” it never really stops. You can't hold it in your hand, it'll fall out. You say “eggy,” and the “e” sound just sort of goes on forever and ever. Even when you’ve moved on to another word, the “e” sound is still present. It’s not hard or weighty; it’s a soft, light lilting vowel. It’s like the colonized subjects. No amount of Coca-Cola or television or strip malls will turn Asia into America. Asia has to be Asia, and America has to be America. Linguistics mandates it! Otherwise, what’s the point of have two separate words, why not just label everything America? There are exclusive traits that make the Asian countries what they are, and the same goes for America. But what makes “eggy” “eggy” can never be settled. “eggy” can’t compose a constitution. The “e” permits it to float on interminably. In the battle of “eggy” versues “egg,” “eggy” wins, because “eggy” can fight forever, while “egg” has to stop. Maybe that’s why Choi put them together: to prove the superiority of the mobile flutter over the sturdy, well-defined sound.
I’ll posit that the “e” in “eggy,” and the other “e” sounds, like “e” in “tizzy” and the “e” in “colony” are like the girl’s Ziploc plastic bags. Being covered in Ziploc baggies might not lead to lots of joyful interaction with society, but the world doesn’t seem like a very valuable place. There’s lots of laws. There’s the 1972 Law that reinforces the 1961 Law. Laws are so powerful that they have power over nature. Choi says winter is “nothing” the Law is “something.” Well, who makes these laws? The judges don’t. Judith Butler tells me that judges only cite them, and because they cite them over and over again (i.e. performance), we think of judges as being these experts in rules. But do judges know where these laws come from? Do police? Do they come from the grass and trees? No! They come from America, and capitalism, and individualism. By isolating herself in a Ziploc bag, the girl has a shield. The tentacles of capitalism – the crippled hand of John McCain, the big, brown fingers of Barack Obama can touch the bag. But they can’t touch her. The plastic serves as a protecting device, a second skin that renders her actual skin immune to the colonizers and their bacteria. She’s like the “e.” She’s always out of reach: she eludes their grasp. In this way, she’s like Dickinson. Dickinson said, screw America, I’m gonna start my own society, and her “Soul” would do the selecting, not Newsweek. The “Soul” and the “e”- sound are both opaque, incoherent things that defy containment or material observation. So that’s why Choi screams, “Decolonize madness!” “Sane” is not “sane,” it just means you have lots of things that humans can see: a car, home, family, and some stock. “Mad” is not “mad,” but it does signify that the empirical aspects of American middle-class capitalism won’t encumber you.
ReplyDeletealso, jiyoon says poetry space hasn't been kind to women. well, i think the opposite. The world of poetry has permitted Dickinson to create her own society, Plath to prove how superior she is to every single person on Earth - "I'm too pure for you or anyone." Millay employed poetry to prove that girls could be just as caddy and rude about love-relationships as boys like Byron. More recently, Reines summoned poetry to tell the world what a blockhead asshole her ex-boyfriend was.
ReplyDeleteAlthough in a necessarily different context from Jiyoon (all these contexts heaped on contexts), I was also deeply fascinated by the space that The Morning News is Exciting! occupies as a book so resistant to and so dependent upon translation, the English language, the colonial infiltration, empire. As Jiyoon and the Notes pages illustrate, sources for this collection come from things which the book itself sets up (and also deconstructs, of course) as polar opposites: pinnacles of “western” thought and literature, and Korean folk stories, news, and theory. The book was originally written in English—and yet, as Jiyoon notes, it reads as if it has been translated, contains translations, and is intricately bound up with the act of translation, autotranslation, being “already translated” (95).
ReplyDeleteEarly on, she quotes Deleuze and Guattari: “there is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language” (18). This statement is persistently echoed throughout the book, where English is set apart as the colonial infiltrator, the “gentleman” dominator, the source of strength (“she asked OED for power” [52]), and an overpowering empire (enemy?). “Speak English! Only Nation!” (93) “The Diary of a Translator” admonishes—admonishing the figures within the collection, the writer/translator herself, and the reader, who, imbibing the “translation-language” of the previous sections has become in his or her own way a co-translator of the text, consumer and editor of the text, implanting and surrounding what exists on the page with his or her own context, definition of “exotic” or “dominant” or “beautiful”—here meaning “grammatical” or perhaps “correct.” Yet “Speak English! Only Nation!” resists its own command by existing in a fragmentary manner, included in a collection full of lines which sound as if they were taken out of context or translated incorrectly, MSG itself becoming a character and the moon remaining a moon—the poem can exclaim English! but it cannot (WILL not) become “proper” English. The very declaration itself acts like a localized translation, the way the line “Speak Spanish!” or “Speak Hindi!” would be dubbed over in an American “foreign film” release.
The entire book works feels like it works in this manner, at least to me. Although it was written in English, it seems to act more like a resistance to the dominating act of translation than any form of surrender to the “Master’s language”—rather, by writing in an English suffused with what Jiyoon notes as “gratuitousness and loudness,” the “intrigue of variety” [in eggy egg] (from Seth), the “obnoxious alienness” and all this politicality, The Morning News is Exciting! becomes “already translated”—that is, a work which should not be translated (dominated) again. This may well be what she calls “resistant bilingualism” (18): her ability to write in English undermining the traditional power structure which calls for her, as a “Korean poet” to write her “mysterious” and “exotic” Korean poems in Korean and then be translated—that is, overwritten—by some American who claims he or she is doing Choi a “service,” bringing her work into the English-speaking public. Like Jiyoon’s “Fuck you spellcheck machine,” there seems to be a wild degree of rebellion against the colonially, linguistically imposed power structure. “Undo English!” Choi is loudly shouting, “a strategy of immediacy, a local liberation” (110).
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, even as The Morning News is Exciting! seems to be operating as resistant bilingualism, undermining the standard process of domination in language/literature, Choi seems to exist in a paradoxical place: she has translated several books into English from Korean, and appropriates the legends/poem-songs of her Korean background, forcing them into bizarre, twisted English-speaking shapes to fit into The Morning News is Exciting! She is, in an odd way, perpetuating the same cycle of “power takeover” which her poems laboriously cry out against. There is some sense of this unstable and uncomfortable existence, particularly marked by the shifting and unhappiness (maybe “discontent”?) of the female, “speaker” figures here, especially in “Diary of a Translator”… perhaps most intriguing is the line “Then translation for me is a form of exile and empire” (18)—which seems fairly straightforward at first: empire for the colonizing dominance of the English language over other languages and cultures, and exile for her role as a translator, exiled from one culture into the dominant English society, perpetuating its ends rather than ends she has, perhaps, genuine interest in. This notion is supported everywhere in the text but the intense number of “twins” and “twin zones” and “twin-flowers”—the one who moved away to a different culture (colony) and the one who is left behind (neocolony), the twoness of existing as one who opposes domination and one who dominates others. (Unnecessary [inappropriate] attachment: German has a noun for this; English doesn’t.)
But then we are given the statement “suicide is a system of exile” (92), which immediately equates (in my mind at least) to the deaths of the women which plague the early sections of the book—of course suicide and murder are not the same thing, but here is some degree of equivalency between the women brutally killed by the infiltration of the American GIs, the sexual domination, and the act of surrender to the English language implied in translation—death, in both cases, by infection, outbreak, the multiplying of something horrible on the tongue. For Choi, translation seems equal parts inevitable and horrible, morning news both exciting and self-destructive, truly “exile and empire,” suicide and unavoidable domination by outside forces.
ReplyDeleteAnd now I have a massive headache from staying up eating this book for hours and hours last night, so I’m going to finish off with two questions/noticeable things which I hope someone else will comment on.
1) A large majority of the theorists/writers/pinnacles of thought which are brought up in the book and cited on the Notes pages are works in translation. Does this push the book (and language domination) into an even more paradoxical corner where quotes are not only taken out of context to be placed in The Morning News is Exciting! but taken out of context wholly by their removal from their own original languages? Is English truly the dominating force behind these quotes if the theories themselves are Freudian or Marxist?
2) “What is the accumulated speech of the mothers?” (110). Choi writes that “Females are silent” (41), and D&G claim there is no such thing as a “mother tongue”—what role does femininity play in language particularly? In culture? Does the female figure exist solely for domination? Why do we have the term “mother tongue” if language (and by extension, linguistic domination) is a masculine affair, a power takeover by the reigning majority?
I think that the bodies in Morning News are both dead and alive and the living dead. All the people in the text are fractured to a certain extent and the language is often fractured too – most obviously in the first section Manegg (also w/ Engrish and sentences/sources stitched like Frankenstein’s monster’s body as Jiyoon mentions). Different types of fracture – mainly of identity become more apparent as the book progresses esp with Instructions From the Inner Room, The Tower, and Diary of a Botanist (off the top of my head though I know that there is a great deal more in the text)… my immediate reaction upon reading it – even a second time – was to think about how imperialism works to breakdown outsider culture and/or how imperialist culture infiltrates outsider culture and works to breakdown the individual – if that make sense? I think i’ve really over simplified here – but that is the gist of my thought/feeling.
ReplyDeleteI do agree that the text has this sort of FOB language and sits in this sort of FOB-y state and feels situated outside communities that are more “welcoming” to this kind of (trickle) immigration and outside of the enclaves… the loneliness/outsiderness that she experiences in The Tower makes me think of all these things. A pull towards and away from home – the blue suitcase she keeps touching – and the plastic bags – both as synthetic and “Warning: To avoid danger of suffocation, keep this plastic bag away from babies and children. Do not use this bag in cribs, beds, carriages or playpens. The plastic bag could block nose and mouth and prevent breathing. This bag is not a toy." Which places the immigrant into the space of child rather makes them into children – choking their voice with a double silencing.
Even though there is this kind of silencing going on – I do agree w/ Jiyoon – the text does shout and resist and subverts and undermine – the intersplicing of texts, the shout of Manegg, reappropriating/redefining Emily Dickinson, and “girls should” takes the silence – withheld air and forces it outward as a shout... and now i'm thinking that maybe there is no actual silencing going on but it's only perception of the silent/submission asian woman - when in fact she's shouting...
The Morning News is Exciting, what to say, besides her stuff with Emily made me question my own work with Emily. Didn’t know Emily played the field, but that is digression that once I got past let me be drawn to Jiyoon & Kim’s comments about translation and gender roles and ideas around loudness.
ReplyDeleteIn her journal style chapters, especially in Diary of Return, found myself drawn to the way Don Mee Choi uses repetition as a type of hinge or negation or what Amanda mentions as a refusal of translation. It reminded me of home, that is to say this is my home. (p. 15) In the next few pages, that is to say becomes that is not to say (pp. 16-17) That is to say and that is not to say are typically used as phrases to clarify meaning and be more specifically elaborative. But the way Choi throws these phrases around they smash against one another in this bam, and the ensuing reality is blurred or the tradition/dominant voice is called into question. The very idea of “saying” is pushed beyond itself. 10 Aug 2002, say appears as “returning”, when I return when I return I say things are near of nearness when I say such things. (p. 19) I returns to say something of things like, near of nearness, small of smallness, twin of a twoness, exile of a exileness, empire/empireness, (p. 19) The nearness of near or the exileness of exile are completely intangible, like the ness becomes the essence of the word, the heart of its being but in the same breath a void without speakable or translatable meaning, kind of a non-utterance.
The other repetition as negation or non-utterance is Choi’s use of I in the Diary of a Botanist and Diary of a Translator. The Botanist poems use I frequently, and the I appears as action. An example of this can be found on page 59 in 1, I squat…I walk…I lift…I kiss…I sweat…I wash…I mark…I follow. In 3 I will tell you (p.61), and the I is telling what the parrot said to the I. And in 4, the final poem in this sequence, the I is not. Is the I not because she is a parrot, or a translator, or a voice of another world, another way, another system? (p. 89) A system without translation is called I-no system. (p.89) At first I read the dash as an “am”. I am no system, but that would be too easy that way. The tension of the dash, the I and the system is really quite disturbing.
The last thing I will mention is Emily. I almost hate myself for making this link. It seems too diminishing to Choi and to The Morning News is Exciting. Emily can signify the cultural appropriation or cultural destruction/colonization, but also what exists beyond a system possibly. As I wrote about the I, there was the thought to twinning and sister language that Choi uses to foreshadow and introduce Emily. Then the line I hate, hate, hate the most of Emily’s came into my head and won’t leave; I'm Nobody! Who are you?// Are you – Nobody – too? Is Choi using I as a system, and a system is nobody? So the western over importance of I becomes nobody, a meaningless void that has appropriated her home, her self. Emily and Choi can both be the witness or testimony to what happens when people and poets alike are trapped within an oppressive system.
Some Correlatives:
ReplyDeleteIf I am exciting am I not on the morning news? If I am a child who was living on September 11 even if I was in smalltown Nebraska and my pa done didn’t let us have no TV so we done didn’t hear for near a year I reckon. But being an American I was there so I can write this poem:
It was a quiet September morning the first plane
Hit the first tower they’re mmm mm great! The second plane
Rationale reality is aimed at. Katie Couric stood up &
His pleasure provokes it implies so much.
And my poem was built on the stolen lands of Indians (native Americans for those not resisting political correctness) but because that land where that poem was written belongs to me then perhaps you ought to back the fuck off and not steal my land and my jobs and take them from my people and give them to your people. These are my poems and only those who got here second can use them. Get here second you can consent to meaning congealing gone copacetic & coughed up again like an egg runny with cold virus.
+++
There is the aspect that source texts always emanate from elsewhere, whether translated from another language or not. That any next is made up of a range of influences….say a poem influenced by an Ernst collage, a Radiohead song, and the couch I’m sitting on. Translation does not occur in a 1:1 ratio. I could write and describe these influences individually on a stanzaic basis then in the fourth stanza bring them all together but that would be rather boring….rather the reverse translation of the text would only be able to be performed by the writer as language is a dirty little thief hiding in a hole behind the bushes that it carved out for itself. This is related to….
OFTEN
Words (when considered in context) do not transmit the meanings they ought to. They can be tricky, diseased little fuckers, coughing and sputtering all over the place, giving us their malaise though they have a veneer of elation.
Thanks, Jiyoon, for the great lead (and thanks to everybody else, too!). Like Kim, I’m interested in all the different kinds of fracturing (and layering) happening in The Morning News is Exciting. “Home is in layers,” the (imagined) twin tells the speaker; “Ideology exists in layers,” the speaker tells her (imagined) twin in “A Journey from the Neocolony to Colony, a section which reads like the record of a correspondence—or which serves as a medium for it. The twin and speaker correspond through the not-quite matching projection on 82: “Are you sad. I am not mad,” “Are you lovely? I am lively,” etc.—is this a symbiotic relationship? If we consider Aase Berg’s point in “Language and Madness” that the mother (or father)-child relationship involves a “a positive psychosis,” love developing in distance, the relationship being the “root of language, madness, and complexity,” what do we make of the cyst necessitating physical distance between the mother and baby on 102? (The “deformity” is severed, wrapped in the news and dropped in the river).
ReplyDeleteCarina tells us, “you have to swim” in/through/over this book, and I agree; I’m interested in the way distance and loss are figured in the text. A “system without translation,” the I-no system in “Diary of a Translator” (“childless and empty like madness”) “used a plastic shovel to scoop up” the “lips of home” which have “amassed internally” (90-91). The book, with its strange sutures (and gaps), exists perhaps as a zone wherein plates shift beneath and over each other—(on 60: “The pages of my diary, a runaway train”) and over which a fog settles, travels (allowing for both mobility ( and stagnancy, potentially obscuring the aerial view of the camera covering the news) (though “I began at the cold water” at the bottom of her mother’s uterus—and “milk is deep”, the universe “isn’t as deep as you think” (109). “Loneliness is a dense thing,” says the speaker in “Weavers in Exile,” the universe is “one vast puddle of moss” (101, 102). (“Home is nothing and so are you. Clouds fade over time. You must endure the distance. The fog is your home,” says the speaker to her twin when organizing these plates—as she does later with loss: “my loss neatly folded, wiped, and laminated to repel dust” (83, 68)).
Loss is perhaps tied to this “system of longing” for home; it is not solely absence (home is the twin of suicide?) (92). In “The Tower,” Choi writes, “Loss is gloss as she navigates the sea of empire,” and later, “Loss is gloss as she navigates the entire hegemony” (54, 55). In Seth’s discussion of the protection provided by the Ziploc bags, we might think of this gloss as a kind of corporeal (capitalistic?) film. Of course, the “gloss” makes possible the act of translation—usually a kind of overwriting the text, a making clear (this relates, perhaps, to Jiyoon’s point about the lack of citation, etc.)—these lines call to mind questions of access and excess, I think. (While “gloss” serves a function in the logic of the text, the rhyme makes the line feel glossy to me—like adorning lips—those of home?).
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ReplyDelete(p 19): The repeat of “when I return” at the beginning an automated slip, an incantatory lapse into a groove of something ancient, the “return” signifying (like the omnipresent, dusty blue suitcase) a permanent imminence, a forever suspension between departure & arrival and anticipating/nostalgizing an impossible return...and so this “twin”ness is a multiple residency, but in that double-rendering, the speaker is proscribed to a nowhere-space, a contextual existence that is over-written, a proliferation of meanings and laws. She leaves copies of herself behind in a former context (the Fatherland) When she goes back to the Fatherland, the new empire-contextualized self cannot revert to or overwrite the former reading of the former context, and so there is a kind of spectral encounter of a former copy of the self wandering around in that now-foreignized context, in which an iteration of the self is also rendered foreign.
ReplyDeletea slightly jostled image, an elapsed shifting
dislocated place/image, unstable, like translation
“all signs are signs of signs” like her language/semiotic processing has been infected re/pre-programmed by Elsewhere
into binaries...primary/secondary, although she is still subordinate in either realm, however the Empire realm kindly provides her with the morning tonic of “news” for the domestic inundation, in which she, as resident of the Dominant, in her “exile that excels beyond excess(26)” is situated to passively absorb the entertainment of non-Empire-world catastrophe/crisis (“Cameraman, run to my twin zone.”).
Which is why alone in the high tower is a refuge. With enough contexts within and texts to create incessant additional contextual and semiotic layers, and the reassurance-idea of the dusty blue suitcase nearby. “She knew joy, she knew Freud...Tower is power. She preferred power” (52).