To: Hunter

[11 November 2022]

The Smetana trio concert was mediocre: this is a judgment in part made on account of the concert hall. I moved to a row in the side boxes after the intermission and it was much better to have the sound mix that way; my initial seat had been in the fourth row and my eyes were level with the violinist’s feet: I kept on looking at his red shoelaces. The Rachmaninoff trio élégiaque was quite nice and so was the Martinů piano trio, but I was distracted during the first by all the imperfections I could perceive in the performers. Smetana seems to me to be a predictable and brusque composer, but the experience of the sound at that point was much better. There was an encore by Dvořák and I was astounded by how distinctive Dvořák is—I could hardly hear what they had said but realized or imputed the sounds spoken by the violinist to Dvořák after the first several seconds of the piece, and it’s not one I’m familiar with. The crowd was relatively geriatric and I found the air smelled bad. I wore my black cashmere skirt and purple merino baselayer and hemp gardening clogs with no socks and sheepskin insoles. When I got home I finished Part Four of The Golden Bowl and felt it was much more dramatic than the music. There’s a kind of disgusting asexual heaving that happens in some classical music, esp. that which we vaguely term “romantic,” that easily becomes tiring for me after a while. Then my mind starts to drift, but if the music isn’t clasping me to it, then I have a hard time valuing the loose association between those thoughts and the landscape of sound that subtends it. I haven’t been to a classical music concert since… April 14 2018—I performed some piece by Ravel with a baritone, piano, and flute. If we discount performances that I’ve participated in, then I saw the John Adams opera, Girls of the Golden West, in San Francisco, in 2017. What a name (I had forgotten it)! There you could see super beautiful elderly people dressed up. The most dramatic sexual experiences of music I’ve had are uncountable but I was thinking of Dmitri Hvorostovsky in analysis. I might add to that some of the TMC performances of Britten canticles. But I didn’t recognize the experience of intensity as sexual, and I’m not sure now if it’s valid to connect the musical thrill with the other.

I had the most horrible orgasm two hours before the concert. It was horrible because I knew I had gone far, but not even close. So much unexhausted, so much to remain, to continue to disturb, it was a huge peak but not final. I truly wanted to be more dead. Here one apprehends the simple loop between sex and death. I was still after, but not still enough, and certainly conscious, awake, not fading out. In this midway state between having reached something very high and not having attained it, I thought about the fact that it had been the most intense orgasm I had experienced since September, since the day I had gone to John to tell him about my new sexual dalliances from the summer, and the movements of my epistolary entanglements. That was September 11, and I had cried in the morning, and I didn’t know then that it was D.H. Lawrence’s birthday. The next day I started to spot some red discharge, which I read as menstruation, but maybe that was ovulation, implantation bleeding. When an orgasm lasts so long I suppose I might be capable of criminal acts. This is where the mind wanders, this is true evil, and it’s a state I’ve apprehended not just in that moment, but in the recent weeks. It can’t be discharged, it lives in the body. At some point during the Rachmaninoff I imagined bruising his arm and then rolling up into a ball and hiding under a bed. Now I think about the scissors near my ear and all these ways things can skirt around things and how this doesn’t represent devious cuteness but something far more blunt: the inability of a thing to achieve its aim. I decided to listen to Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau afterwards. Not immediately afterwards, but after a few days, in fact. I got updates on the trip and it lightened me up a bit, but also tightened my core. Recently I’ve been apparently unable to go more than two days without running.

I want to spend some time with the blackness of the first chapter of The Rainbow.

The “black eyes staring round and hostile, her fair hair sticking out in a wild fleece.” This is the daughter.

“Her black eyes stared antagonistic from her exquisite face, her arms clung tightly to her mother, afraid.”

“He sat up, unable to bear a contradiction in her. She moved about inscrutably.” This is the mother.

She has “wide, grey eyes that almost smiled with a low light.”

She has an “ugly-beautiful mouth,” “still unmoved and sad.”

A “wonderful remoteness” about her coincides with the “heart knock[ing] in his chest.”

“He stood there and waited, suspended.”

Later he stands in his own black clothes.

“She came close up to him, to his intent, black-clothed body, and laid her hand on his arm.”

“He remained unmoved. Her eyes, with a blackness of memory struggling with passion, primitive and electric away at the back of them, rejected him and absorbed him at once. But he remained himself. He breathed with difficulty, and sweat came out at the roots of his hair, on his forehead.”

When she woke up that morning she was like a cold column of stone rotating on a spit; a body ready to be polished or worn into a granulous pebbled surface. How did the manufacturers of $34 claw clips manage the shine, or the faux-stone finish of the black or terracotta ones? Such a question had arisen as she examined the mess of fabrics on the floor of her room—set up in the oriental style, with a bed on the floor, albeit made of a single sheepskin. But there were more sheepskins—a transsubstantiation of the hundreds of chintz and calico scarves of a 19th-century member of the East India Company into something that evoked the squalor of Beckett in Dublin, or more properly Hardy’s Tess at Stonehenge, or Cathy of Wuthering Heights. This was the Cusk aesthetic, the aesthetic of renovation and dank basements, while the merino sheep of Australia clamored in her dreams. One hoped that the literati style of Ithaca, NY would find its secret nest in the words of a new language.

It was a cold evening and I took a cold walk, and it rained at around 35 degrees. I wore a black cashmere skirt with brick-red tights, a warm brown merino shirt, a duller brown recycled wool chore coat which is getting a little threadbare, and a light blue rain jacket. I brought my camera along but put it away once it started to rain. I went to the Ithaca falls, and by the time I approached the white roar, my fingers had almost completely lost sensation and the low battery indicator on my camera started to blink red. I didn’t bring gloves. The walk back was less rainy, and I saw many pumpkins. Later I took a nap, at the dangerously late hour of 6:30 PM, and when I woke up, I got up and wrapped my lower half with an alpaca blanket. I used a claw clip to fasten it around my waist and when I was taking it off a thread got pulled by the exposed metal of the spring. This little accident made me think about the longevity of the thing, and about whether or not people make and sell alpaca skirts online. So I was looking around at different alpaca fiber vendors and found myself on this website called Peruvian Connection. This stuff needs to persist; the taboo of it is delicious to me: “ethnographic” prints, 19th-century orientalism, explicit references to paisley, chintz, calico,— “Grand-scale Kashmiri paisleys swirl in opulent jewel tones of cobalt, violet, antique gold and persimmon.” Here are four more product descriptions, they’re fun to collect: (1) “Patterned after a Ming Dynasty-era textile, the jacquard knit pencil skirt showcases a rock garden and flying cranes in navy, cream and walnut on jade green pima; contrast floral trim accents the waist and hem."; (2) “A perfect balance of ease and elegance, this contemporary two-piece ensemble is jacquard knit and patterned after an Indian shibori-dyed textile in amber, pecan and navy pima. Pants have an elasticized waist, straight legs and a cropped hem."; (3) “Delicate flowering branches from an antique Japanese screen pattern the mottled teal ground of this elegant shirt. Tailored of lightweight cotton (70%) and silk (30%) voile, with a hidden button placket and shirttail hem."; (4) “Scrolling botanicals from a Victorian wallpaper pattern the chambray blue ground of the pima jacquard knit pencil skirt.” I want to collect more. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sorry, I’m laughing really hard, and am too distracted to write anything critical now. They have a shirt called the “Byron shirt” and it has 3.5 stars, two ratings. It’s " a romantic blouse in sheer black viscose (96%) […] flecked with raw-edged metallic threads (4%) to subtly catch the light.” The reviews are by a 65+-year-old female who is retired, somewhere between 5'9'' and 5'11'', she says it’s gorgeous, the other is 55 to 64, 5'3''-5'4'', is employed in the architecture/engineering/science fields, says it is “very cheap, scratchy fabric.” I wonder how the designers of the site came to decide that they’d ask reviewers about their fields of employment. It seems like the customers who submit reviews consistently run above the age of 40… Anyway now that I’ve done enough marvelling, here’s what the site has to say about itself:

Peruvian Connection was launched in 1976 by mother and daughter team Biddy and Annie Hurlbut, after inspiration took hold halfway across the globe. While researching anthropology in Peru, Annie, a 19-year-old Yale student, fell in love with extraordinary hand woven mantas and ponchos she discovered in the markets of Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Incas.

This is certainly the kind of person I imagine living in the foothills of Palo Alto. None of the models on the website are asian—they’re either white or brown, and if brown, not asiatic—I am sort of flummoxed by the notion of me showing up to somebody’s party in suburban California and wearing a very orientalist dress—maybe something in “mottled teal” with a “shibori-dyed textile” and some vague reference to persimmons or an even more exotic fruit—anyone make Akebia prints??? It would be most vicious and comical. Anyway it made me think about something I had heard about during the Psychoanalysis conference in late September. I had to fish up my notes in order to locate the source: it was Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ornamentalism. This obnoxious indian man had presented something about ornamentalism and he was wearing the most beautiful scarf and hexagonal glasses. I didn’t find him obnoxious until later, but I was grateful during his talk that he really played the part. Later he told us that he had lost his luggage, so what he was wearing was sort of the emergency attire, all he had on his back.

For some reason I’m quite content to be sexualized as an asian female. I’m not content to not be sexualized as an asian female. If I have to be asian, I can’t stand it not having a sexual significance. Everything needs to have a bearing on sex. But I probably mean something limited and specific by this contentness with being sexualized as an asian female. To be an asian female is to be defined by features of the face, which have been coded as “asian.” It has the clean structure of a structuralist diagram, it’s completely within the sign-world, the associations are “arbitrary.” None of the features, like a low nose bridge, an epicanthic fold, are associated with a culture—they simply function like signs in a language. We can further the symbolic milieu of the sign as poets might: the low or “subtle” nose bridge may be a hypertrophic femininity, or a lack of masculinity—it produces a particular kind of shine on the round end of the nose, see Freud on the fetishistic signification of glanz (gleam) in glanz auf der Nase (glance at the nose). The deep epicanthic fold a signifier of the genital crease, and some vague ideal of cunt and soul put together makes me glad—I like how Z reified the word for me so many years ago—besides these two particular features of my face I seem aggressively uninterested in being perceived as asian. It makes me so wet when men on Reddit write about being into asian women as a category, but the minute they begin to refer to a specific asian woman, I glance over whatever it is that might encode a stereotype—submissiveness, a tight cunt, massage parlors, maids, virgins, and sexual tourism are complete dead zone for me. This is a subtle matter, a bit like the question of what makes the use of a “symbol” in a poem trite; cf. Baudelaire for excellent examples of racialized eroticism and great metaphysical hits on the symbol, i.e. “Correspondances.”

I’m deeply homophobic in the cultural sense; I need to “nationalize” asians when I encounter them. Xinyu’s my friend from Beijing, and therefore different from me. This student is an LA Korean and that one is a Ridgewood Chinese. But I have to admit that when I’m with someone asian I feel anxious about the idea of being seen with them and of the presumption that we have some kind of racial intimacy. And I can’t remember the last time I was attracted to an asian man, like on the street. It’s not difficult to have a crush on or fall in love with an asian man but the lack of liquidity with asian strangers on dating apps is more trouble. The issue is not a racism so intense that I can’t find asian men attractive. It’s the notion that I wouldn’t want to be seen as coupled with an asian man, again because of my discomfort with the presumption of sameness. And I sort of think of or imagine that asian men would expect this of me, would expect me to enjoy eating meat, for instance. I can’t get behind meat.

Here’s my preferred definition of the “yellow woman,” from Ornamentalism. I dug through several, and want to preserve some snippets of phrases from the others, but find a lot of the language a bit overwrought:

Simultaneously consecrated and desecrated as an inherently aesthetic object, the yellow woman calls for a theorization of persons and things that considers a human ontology inextricable from synthetic extensions, art, and commodity. Instead of being pure capture or representing fugitive flight from the nominative biological or anatomical raced body, the yellow woman emerges as a “body ornament” whose perihumanity demands that we approach ontology, fleshliness, and aliveness differently. By perihumanity, I mean to identify the peculiar in-and-out position, the peripherality and the proximity of the Asiatic woman to the ideals of the human and the feminine.

The yellow woman exists in opposition to the black woman, in that she “stands to the side” of discourses which center the injury of the flesh. The yellow woman is apparently invulnerable to injuries of the flesh on account of her synthetic perihumanity, but her unfleshliness invites mutilation. She “survives through abstract and synthetic rather than organic means, and whose personhood is animated through, rather than eviscerated by, aesthetic congealment.” Aesthetic congealment—I think that’s a good strong phrase. And I guess she is a “fetish,” but not so much a replacement for the phallus of the mother, but a fetish which leaves the question of the mother’s castration in suspension. Studying this “yellow woman” is useful for me because I’ve long been interested in “the distressing affinity that can exist between agency and complicity, antiessentialism and authenticity, and affirmation and reification.” I actually don’t understand why these oppositions are framed as such—the last one is the least clear. Why would affirmation stand against reification? Affirmation of what, reification of what? “I am not a thing” might be the affirmation; reification would be thing.

Twenty-two Lewd Chinese Women

From Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ornamentalism [modified]:

August 24, 1874: an American steamer named the SS Japan, carrying almost six hundred Chinese passengers traveling from Hong Kong to America. They were all allowed to disembark except for twenty-two young women ranging in ages from seventeen to twenty-three. “They were lewd,” he said.

A Mr. Ira M. Condit concurred that a penchant for festive and bright colors (especially the color yellow) indicates dissolute character. Prostitutes, he testified, wear a “gayer style of dress, a dress with yellow in it, & brighter colors. There is no definite dress which distinguishes them as such from the others more than that general feature of dress . . . [and again, later] they wear a great deal of bright yellow. . . .

Dr. Gibson: They are accustomed to wear flowered gaudy kind of clothing—clothing that is not worn by respectable wives. There is no indelicacy in seeing or examining them; those women will show it if the’[sic] exposed there [sic] arms; & you will find . . . under their outside clothing in 9 out of 10 cases some of this variegated silk or imitation of silk, some fancy clothes that has [sic] a bright color. . . .”

This then led Mr. Ryan the prosecutor to call several of the women forward, in order to raise and peek into their sleeves. More eyeballing ensued, with the men inspecting the hems of the women’s gowns and examining their hair; there was even a heated debate about just how wide a sleeve could be before tipping into licentiousness.

“Courtesans are in the habit of wearing a kind of flowered garment generally—not always, but generally. You will find silk; you will find silk yellow & figured, & things of that kind, which are not worn so much by the wives; the wives wear plain colors, except on gala days, when there is a great deal of dressing up for company.”

“They have many modes of doing the hair in different places.”

Xanthophobia

My racial homophobia is most intense when I consider matters of dress. It’s not the fact that I look asian that matters. But the minute I imagine myself walking around looking like wallpaper, or porcelain, or washi paper, or any kind of ornamental surface or screen, I feel obliterated in a very specific way which is hard to describe because I can’t even imagine it—me in a qipao or laden with jade and gold—impossible! This is why I need to be careful with maximalist prints; the most “orientalist” piece in my wardrobe is probably the Reformation turtleneck with the naked white ladies on it—it’s funny because it looks like a pattern you might find on fine china, but the motif is vaguely Botticellian. But I never wear it anyway, partly because it’s clingy, but also because I don’t want to be seen looking like a sexy wall. It’s the fact of looking like ornament which makes the experience fraught, not the specific cultural signifiers of the garment’s print. This sense of phobia even goes so far as to include the kinds of minimalist fashions one might associate with Muji or Uniqlo. I had the experience of going on the Sou-sou website multiple times since college and thinking about how I was invested in a certain balloonish culotte thing that I associated with bourgeois modern japanese women, but I eventually disavowed and conveniently forgot this. I can’t wear black drapey things anymore without feeling weird about my ostensible “perihumanity.” For someone who claims to love objects and sexual objectification so much it’s a bit weird.

I don’t even like to expose the fact that I own a few furoshiki. I admit to having a somewhat superfluous collection of Japanese textiles—I have several tea towels and dish cloths from Nawrap and a Kontex (Imbari) lattice towel. I can deal with my Drogheria Crivellini tabi shoes because they’re Italian and made in a mary jane style, but were they adorned with some japanese print I’d have a harder time wearing them out. So let’s say that I buy some kind of weird “chintz calico” patterned thing from Annie Hurlbut’s website and go around looking like wallpaper. I can’t.

I’ve been thinking a bit about certain “frontiers” of femininity that I don’t dare approach—not interested in doing anything to my nails, too frightened of the heaviness of jewelry. Fingernails: this sense that you’re being hobbled. I can wear heels because that involves being not-hobbled while seeming hobbled. Fingers can’t do the same performance of apparent embarrassment. How could I type with this clonic speed? Alec had nails painted in five different pastel colors. The paint was chipped around the edges, and sort of accentuated the nails' broadness and size. He put his nails inside me, kind of—this could not happen if his nails were long and sharp. Later he told me about giving a random man a blowjob, and feeling like he was good at it. I don’t want to play with my nails. “Susie Asado” is the greatest poem with a nail in it, catch me with “Susie Asado” scratched in tiny letters on the surface of my nails. I garden without gloves sometimes, and it’s to stain them with soil, and to injure the skin. When I separated the perilla seed pods from the plants I stained my fingertips with whatever dark resinous compound comes off of the plant tissue. And I think all forms of jewelry produce some kind of constraint that I find difficult to bear—it always reminds me of the Petrarch poem with the deer and the collar. It signifies one’s ownedness; I’m not worthy of it and may never be. I like Laurent’s wedding ring, a scarab beetle in silver. But the elegance, the stasis of bearing stones and metal, I don’t know if it’s something I can “bear.” When I was a small girl, I liked the beaded bracelets I encountered in Taiwan, but I can’t imagine wanting to wear that stuff anymore. Tattoos are not essentially feminine, but could easily be—the only tattoo I can envision getting is a knuckle tattoo with my name on it—D I D I, like Lars von Trier’s F U C K.

When I wrote letters more I’d marvel at the beauty of walking around with fingers stained in fountain pen ink.

My phobia of painted nails has something to do with this material from Ornamentalism: “Mahogany’s red sheen, glossy black lacquer, translucent white porcelain, and the brilliant colors of indigo, cochineal dyes, and silver ore all carried and produced racial meanings. […] Imported goods and materials of Asia and the Americas held novel, structural properties like durability or elasticity that Europeans not only strove to imitate and harness for their own manufacturing but also increasingly came to associate and project onto the racialized bodies from whom the objects came. Porcelain, what was known as true kaolin Chinese porcelain, is particularly interesting in this regard because of its alchemical and seemingly impossible properties: known not only for its glossy beauty, its refinement, its receptivity to color and design manipulation but also for its surprising durability, its miraculous capacity to sustain the extreme high heat that lends it its translucency. The invention of porcelain as a precious and rare new material—an advanced production process that baffled Western manufacturers for decades and served as something of a precursor to the twentieth-century fascination with materia nova—promised in the eighteenth century the magic of material transformation. Porcelain thus connoted both hardness and plasticity, old-world beauty and new-world technology, fragile daintiness and insensate coolness: a mixture of antithetical symbolic meanings that are then ascribed to, indeed, become the very “stuff ” of Asiatic femininity.”

Maybe the beauty of the pictures of my menses is linked to their apparent “hardness and plasticity,” to their “fragile daintiness and insensate coolness.” I’m not sure if I’m referring to the menses themselves, dried on a glazed white ceramic plate, or the plate, or the way the dried tissue looked once cracked and lacquer-like. Or if it has something to do with the flattening of the photographic apparatus. But the important thing about those photos is that it’s real tissue. You just can’t abstract the fleshliness of it from the smoothness of the image. It refuses the desexualization of the body, or at least that’s what I experienced as I viewed them afterwards.

There’s a strong undercurrent in what I do of looking tough, pliant, unbreakable, cruel, I admit this with reluctation. But I also just aggressively want someone to care about me approximately twice a month—at the very beginning of menstruation, and in the middle of the luteal phase. I’ve often hated the notion that language would make me seem “aesthetically congealed” or something, which is probably why I write so much, so it looks more like bleeding. But if blood hardens into something smooth, who cares? Can I escape from my inhumanity?

One of my favorite things Z wrote involved owning the love of the nominal. I used to want to criticize him for this aspect of his past writing and even did so once, but when he named the phenomenon I felt an immense brief pleasure. It’s ornamental and oriental—that word “epiepiphyte” so much like “epicanthic.” And of course all the stuff we could say about orchids. I know that everything I’ve ever “repudiated” about him had something to do with a desire not to face the oriental. You can see it in how I called myself a cyborg once. Ah well, but will I face it enough? I can’t open up the “green hornet” email; I can’t read “reproach” or “eschaton.”

GLÜCK: The axiom is that the mark of poetic intelligence or vocation is passion for language, which is thought to mean delirious response to language’s smallest communicative unit: to the word. The poet is supposed to be the person who can’t get enough of words like “incarnadine.” This was not my experience. From the time, at four or five or six, I first started reading poems, first thought of the poets I read as my companions, my predecessors—from the beginning I preferred the simplest vocabulary. What fascinated me were the possibilities of context. What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word’s setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word’s full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise; such language, in being generic, is likely to contain the greatest and most dramatic variety of meaning within individual words. I liked scale, but I liked it invisible. I loved those poems that seemed so small on the page but that swelled in the mind; I didn’t like the windy, dwindling kind. Not surprisingly, the sort of sentence I was drawn to, which reflected these tastes and native habit of mind, was paradox, which has the added advantage of nicely rescuing the dogmatic nature from a too moralizing rhetoric.

GLOOMWAIF: People who know the names of things appear powerful to me. We are good at referring to objects but unless we are indentured to a trade we rarely learn the kind of nominative lushness that makes other people uncomfortable to witness. In truth though what I am in love with is the way that writers kleptomaniacally repurpose these terms, in much the same way that some serial killers are known to flay and wear their victim’s skin. It is wrong and shallow and largely purposeless, and thus possesses all of the textural aspects of a loveable thing. Like a wrinkly cellophane bag and the possible dopamine of asphyxiation. This sort of purposefully unuseful or aesthetically fatigued mode is some sort of shadow or sign for the sort of involuted fastidiousness that gives someone’s soul the enamoring illusion of total substance. Fractal dimension. Smoke and mirrors. It is why I care about things like the reanimation of the encyclopaedic novel. It is why I have been attracted, in the past, to regionally competitive science bowl participants, scrabble champions, and amateur horticulturists. I am some sort of epiepiphyte.