Category: Writing

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The Year of Stories

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

Tranquility

Some years ago, I took up traditional Korean dance for a while. At the start, it was just me and my teacher and these three old ladies, all of us practicing basic movements. At the end of the hour, when my shoulders ached and I was drenched in sweat, the old ladies would be laughing and smiling with the teacher. I couldn’t figure out how they did it.

And then, after maybe six months of doing these same dumb movements again and again — arms up, arms down, arms up, arms down — one day I felt my shoulders drop. I stopped trying and just danced. What had been so exhausting, so effortful, became natural and easy.

Two years into being a husband and a father, something similar seems to have happened. I’ve felt something slip into place. I’m not striving anymore, or trying to make it all be a certain way. I’m just doing it.

Spontaneous overflow

With that settling into my new roles came an unexpected burst of creativity.

Half my lifetime ago — I was 23 then, just out of college, and today I’m turning 47 — I spent four months in India and Nepal. I’ve wanted to write about it ever since, but somehow the writing never came.

Until now. What began as a little blog post about how technology has changed travel — digital maps and social media replacing guidebooks and backpacker cafes, that sort of thing — suddenly turned into the stories themselves.

I’d held onto these stories for years, feeling like I had no right to tell them — like they wouldn’t be interesting unless I had some excuse for them, some unifying theme or grand idea. But then I thought about all those New Yorker articles about that summer the writer worked in a grocery store or chopped wood or whatever, and I realized that stories are just stories. They’re interesting if you’re interested.

At first I worried that this sudden outpouring of writing about long-ago travel was a kind of nostalgia trip, a pining for a way of life foreclosed by fatherhood and a global pandemic. But that wasn’t it. It was something like the opposite, in fact. I’m not pining anymore for the road. I’m home. Maybe at last I can write about that long-ago trip because it’s finally over.

Recollecting

So now I’m literally re-collecting — transcribing my old notebooks (thanks Mom for taking pictures of all those pages while studiously not reading them!), getting in contact with long-forgotten travel partners (thanks Zuck!), reading histories of India and Nepal and the Hippie Trail and the Goa party scene. What will emerge from all this? I don’t know. But for now, as Toni Morrison put it, I’m writing the book I want to read.

The start of a reading list.

It’s great to have a new project. My family think it’s cool that I’m writing. My daughter likes to hear the little stories about falling off a camel or getting lost in the Himalayas as they come back to me. Maybe in some way this is all for her. Being a dad means telling your kid the stories that shape her world and give her a sense of wonder to go out into it.

So this year is the year of stories, of emotion recollected in tranquility. It’s the start of a new journey, but a journey that can only be undertaken from the comfort of home.

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…Aaaaand, we’re back!

Sorry for the little hiatus there. I was transitioning from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, and it took a little time.

I want to give a shout-out to WPBeginner, who did the entire transfer for me for free. Seriously. They’ll get a small commission from my hosting with Bluehost, and they handled the whole transition, except for the part where I had to transfer my domain from my own hosting service. I had to fix one or two little things, but they handled the process beautifully, and you can’t argue with the price!

Anyway, joshphilipross.com is back and better than ever.

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Train wrecks and cancer

There are things you can only learn from being in a train wreck. Like how to survive a train wreck, what to do when you’re in a train car and it’s on its side and on fire and everyone around you is screaming or dead. Like what it feels like to be in a train wreck. And being in a train wreck is so intense and loud and such a big fucking deal that you start to think that there’s maybe nothing grander or sweeter or profounder than the things you learn from being in a train wreck.

The bullshit part is the thinking that all of life is like your train wreck. It’s not. Hardly any of life is like your train wreck, and your actual train wreck is boring. I once sat through an AA meeting up in Harlem where the speaker kept saying things like, “Remember zip guns?” or “Remember razor fights?” and the black men in their forties and fifties would nod, and I was thinking, Zip guns? Razor fights? I haven’t ever seen that shit in my life.

We are taught, however, to think of certain types of train wrecks as glamorous, even universal. I knew enough that in the seventh grade, when I went to San Francisco to do pot for the first time with Zorick and Tony the Russian car thief, and when they took me to somebody’s house where everyone was slumped on the floor, dazed and wasted and listening to thrash metal in their Megadeth T-shirts, that I was seeing the coolest fucking thing on the goddamn planet. I knew when I watch Sid and Nancy that I was supposed to want to be a suicidal junkie. There are a million rock songs about that particular train wreck — so many that you might start to think you haven’t really lived unless you’ve hung around Casey Jones and gone off the rails.

You know what else is a train wreck? Cancer. And it’s boring as shit. No one wants to read your cancer memoir. I’ve known too many women who’ve had cancer and written godawful poetry about it and cried when they read the poetry and been pissed as hell that I didn’t cry too. But it’s your train wreck, not mine, and no one’s written good songs about it — not even Bob Marley, who died of cancer while writing songs about marijuana and gunfights.

So yes, Michael Lally and Dave Hickey and Greil Marcus and Anthony Kiedis and a dozen other ex-junkies, I get a kick out of the way you jam. I was raised on it. Half the time I’m not even sure what you’re on about — maybe the drugs fuzzed a circuit up there, and now you talk faster than you think, or maybe that’s the particular skill that kept you alive when everyone else was crushed under luggage and broken glass. But don’t try to sell me on the golden glory of the old-timey railway and its switching errors. There are other ways of being alive, other ways of knowing. When you’re not so caught up on the trouble ahead and the trouble behind, you can light out and look all around.

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Ways of telling tales

I like the way Owen Lattimore writes. He’s got style and verve, and he doesn’t shy away from bold statements, whether it’s comparing the Urga Living Buddha’s shopping spree in Shanghai to that of a drunken sailor or simply declaring this or that political action a disaster. It’s probably only my Asian studies friends who will ever end up reading Lattimore, but as I make my way through Nomads and Commissars: Mongolia Revisited, from 1962, it makes me realize how useful it is to have a plainspoken, amiable guide to obscure times and places.

Lattimore was a mid-20th century China Hand, to use a now-dated term. He advised Chiang Kai-shek during World War II, and he spoke fluent Mongolian when no one else did, and he wrote it as he saw it. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that he never earned an advanced degree, though he served in major academic posts. He never went through the seasoning — deadening? — process of learning to write only sentences that you can defend to a committee.

And if there was one thing Lattimore failed at, it was defending himself to a committee. His later years were damaged by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who claimed that Lattimore was “the top Russian espionage agent in the United States.” The charges mostly amounted to invented hearsay, and stemmed perhaps from what looks, in retrospect, like Lattimore’s eminently sane approach to Communism and Communists, which was to consider them carefully and write about this or that particular action or person on the merits.

So set aside the Communist nonsense. What strikes me is that I write a lot about foreign places, I plan to write a lot more about foreign places, and Lattimore is an example I like of how to do it.

There’s room to criticize. Lattimore’s breezy confidence smacks of a casual imperialism that was common among British writers of an earlier era and American policy experts at mid-century. Nomads and Commissars is written at almost the last possible moment before any serious thinker on Asia had to take into account Orientalism and postmodernism more generally. The best products of the new ideas — Laurel Kendall is a personal favorite — have found new ways to tell good stories without the narratorial remove of earlier writers.

But just as the earlier writing was (usually unintentionally) dishonest about the motives and power dynamics that underlay it, post-modern scholarship is often dishonest in the other direction, as writers strive to pretend that they don’t have personal opinions. Kendall, for example, always dodges the question of whether the shamanism she studies is “real,” and of course any good postmodernist can tear apart the whole concept of the real until the person who asked the question feels like an idiot for believing in reality.Another fine postmodern storyteller, Heonik Kwon, dodges questions by fictionalizing his accounts, putting them entirely into the voices of his informants. And yet I am sure that Kendall and Kwon have some gut-level beliefs about ghosts and spirits, one way or the other, and it seems somehow a little sneaky never to come out and say what those beliefs are.

Somewhere there’s a balance. As I continue to write on topics that interest me in cultures not my own, I’ll have to work on that balance. As I do, I should remember Lattimore and the pleasure of a bold assertion well stated.

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[a space to fill]

So here it is, a new space for me to fill with words. We’ll see what comes of it, if anything.

For now, I intend to use it as something of a journal, never mind that no one in her right mind would want to read my journal, or at least not the bits of it I’d be willing to put on the web. But for those days when no grand essay is forthcoming, this is a place where I can let out the little thoughts, the small ideas, the notions that don’t quite lead anywhere.

For example, right now I’m stuck with a couple of writing projects, so instead of writing them, I’ll come here and write about them. First of all, I’ve been trying to formulate an essay about what it’s been like to return to the US after so long abroad. I feel like there’s something important in there, some kernel of experience that has value, and that it has a lot to do with September 11th. I feel like I missed America’s sense of organic movement from there to here, but that having watched it from the outside, I have a better notion of what the world thinks of us. I also want to get into the strange dislocation that I’ve experienced — to describe how weird it is to find myself homesick for Korea, or to feel at home in New York’s Koreatown. And there’s something else as well, the experience of being an immigrant and an exile, that I think is important and that I want to describe. But I’m not sure how to frame this all yet. Maybe as three separate essays, or three interrelated chapters? We’ll see.

The other project is my collected Korea essays, which need an introductory chapter to turn them into a book. I’ve been trying to work out how to explain how I ended up in Korea — possibly as part of my essay entitled “Kindergarten” — but that whole episode of my life was messy and complicated (the deciding, not the going), and I’m not sure how much of that I want to include in a book about what happened later.

In other news, MoveOn.org is holding its Democratic Primary today. Check in for very good information about all the Democratic candidates, including a lengthy question-and-answer sesion with each (except Lieberman, who is barely a Democrat anyway) and links to their websites. Where do I stand? So far I like Edwards, but it’s a long way to go yet.