In the end, academic writing is an art. The art of creating structures of ideas, and placing ideas in relation to each other. Sometimes, the structure works, and everything falls into place. Other times, the structure fails, ideas overflow, and all become extremely messy and unsatisfying.
Thinking back to the play I saw a few days ago, I imagine the computer screen in front of me as a stage. How can one build a structure of words on a page that can be most expressive and illuminating? How does one deal with one's own limits (materials, knowledge, time), and still create something interesting and worthwhile?
Writing is a genuine struggle between seeking information and searching for art. This struggle is a collective one--the writer thinks with a collective of other writers past and present. It is a struggle against banality, fixed formulas, lies...
I can hardly imagine what I am doing everyday in my windowless office is indeed this kind of "noble" struggle. Most of the time I feel banal, disconnected, tired.
But on second thought, it must be a struggle of such a nature. Otherwise, it would not have been so damn difficult!
Monday, March 28, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Skinwalking
On Friday evening, I went to see a play called "Skinwalking," written, directed, and stage-designed by Cecelia Raker, a Harvard College senior who is pursuing a cool special concentration in "the conception and direction of socially impactful theater and opera." Despite her young age, Cecelia has been involved in theater and opera direction for many years, has a special interest in Yiddish theater and interned at London's Shakespeare company.
The play tells the story of the return of Mari, a young woman working at her father's law office in the city, to her hometown to inherit her grandmother's house. There she stays with her uncle, who is the only person left in the house that used to be home to her traditional Jewish family. She sees again her elementary school classmate David, who was and is in love with her and would do anything to protect her. And she meets strangers too -- a homeless couple at the Dunkin Doughnuts who turn out to be the biblical figure of Mary and Joseph; and a 12-year-old girl Miriam, who turns out to be Moses' sister, and has lived through three millennia wandering in the desert listening and retelling countless stories. Mari is also haunted by two ghosts--the ghost of her own mother, who committed suicide after being abandoned by her lover, Mari's father; and a skinwalker, a creature without mouth who can nevertheless take people's skin and suck people's soul. It is a story about one's relation to religion and tradition in today's secular world where connections to the past and to traditional mythologies are severed or repressed. The play treats this serious topic with humor and lightheartedness, gently poking fun both at the jadedness and banality of everyday life.
This complex story unfolds in the play very intelligently, as the audience is given bits and pieces of references and symbolism that require patient piecing-together. Meanwhile, each character is fully developed--they are vibrant and consistent, simultaneously strange and familiar, and their language is the most delicious kind of colloquial English--understated, funny, working-class. Every line of the dialogue is written so seamlessly and with great care.
The stage design, done by the director and writer herself, is very effective. The stage is broken into six parts. Three parts on the stage (Uncle's home, the desert, and Dunkin Doughnuts), two balconies (a bed where Mari was born and now sleeps, and a bridge where Mari's mother committed suicide), and some actors also sit in the audience. There is no change of scenes. Just a single set covers every need in the play. With multiple actions happening in its different compartments, the stage is so interesting to look at, yet not too overwhelming, leaving enough space for the viewers to ponder.
Adding to the play's expressiveness are many outstanding moments of choreographed dancing and fighting, meticulous sound design, and amazing performance from a cast composed of mostly freshman and sophomores. It's, simply, a work made with great care. And because of this, it has a dazzling expressive power.
It is such a treat to encounter a piece of art conceived and executed so well in all aspects. The fact that it is a low-budget, collective work by such a young group of dramatists adds to its power to inspire. I have much to learn from these 19-year-olds.
The play tells the story of the return of Mari, a young woman working at her father's law office in the city, to her hometown to inherit her grandmother's house. There she stays with her uncle, who is the only person left in the house that used to be home to her traditional Jewish family. She sees again her elementary school classmate David, who was and is in love with her and would do anything to protect her. And she meets strangers too -- a homeless couple at the Dunkin Doughnuts who turn out to be the biblical figure of Mary and Joseph; and a 12-year-old girl Miriam, who turns out to be Moses' sister, and has lived through three millennia wandering in the desert listening and retelling countless stories. Mari is also haunted by two ghosts--the ghost of her own mother, who committed suicide after being abandoned by her lover, Mari's father; and a skinwalker, a creature without mouth who can nevertheless take people's skin and suck people's soul. It is a story about one's relation to religion and tradition in today's secular world where connections to the past and to traditional mythologies are severed or repressed. The play treats this serious topic with humor and lightheartedness, gently poking fun both at the jadedness and banality of everyday life.
This complex story unfolds in the play very intelligently, as the audience is given bits and pieces of references and symbolism that require patient piecing-together. Meanwhile, each character is fully developed--they are vibrant and consistent, simultaneously strange and familiar, and their language is the most delicious kind of colloquial English--understated, funny, working-class. Every line of the dialogue is written so seamlessly and with great care.
The stage design, done by the director and writer herself, is very effective. The stage is broken into six parts. Three parts on the stage (Uncle's home, the desert, and Dunkin Doughnuts), two balconies (a bed where Mari was born and now sleeps, and a bridge where Mari's mother committed suicide), and some actors also sit in the audience. There is no change of scenes. Just a single set covers every need in the play. With multiple actions happening in its different compartments, the stage is so interesting to look at, yet not too overwhelming, leaving enough space for the viewers to ponder.
Adding to the play's expressiveness are many outstanding moments of choreographed dancing and fighting, meticulous sound design, and amazing performance from a cast composed of mostly freshman and sophomores. It's, simply, a work made with great care. And because of this, it has a dazzling expressive power.
It is such a treat to encounter a piece of art conceived and executed so well in all aspects. The fact that it is a low-budget, collective work by such a young group of dramatists adds to its power to inspire. I have much to learn from these 19-year-olds.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Writing
You have been writing everyday. You think about what to write when you go to sleep and the minute you wake up. You eat breakfast and lunch. You drink coffee and eat a plate of strawberries. You hug each other. You write.
We feel the same way as our pages when we write. When our writing is crappy and incoherent, we feel thin, incomplete, mis-spelt, like a basket of waste paper. When our writing flows, runs and jumps, we feel breathless, tipsy, light, as if sitting on a hot-air balloon.
And why do I write? What's the purpose of it all?
It's a job, a challenge, a freedom, a duty, a record, an escape, an affliction, a pretense, an identity, a mask, a choice, a habit, a drag, a dance.
We feel the same way as our pages when we write. When our writing is crappy and incoherent, we feel thin, incomplete, mis-spelt, like a basket of waste paper. When our writing flows, runs and jumps, we feel breathless, tipsy, light, as if sitting on a hot-air balloon.
And why do I write? What's the purpose of it all?
It's a job, a challenge, a freedom, a duty, a record, an escape, an affliction, a pretense, an identity, a mask, a choice, a habit, a drag, a dance.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Film, Risk, Contingency
This evening at the Film Studies Workshop, Mette Hjort from the Lingnan University of Hong Kong, will be speaking on "Film and Risk," based on a book of the same title she is editing. Just a cursory read of her introduction chapter drew me in considerably. Film-making involves many risks: economic, political, environmental and personal. The book project she and others are working on aims to understand how this risk is perceived and experienced by individuals involved in filmmaking and viewing, and how it is managed (or ill-managed) in the film industries and in the wider society. Their methodology is a combination of ethnography (of the film industry), oral history, textual analysis, and sociological study.
The choice of "risk" as the organizing concept is an interesting one. On the one hand, "risk" dialogues with the much older concept of "contingency" in film studies, yet treats "chance-happenings" with more human agency and responsibility than how "contingency" is traditionally treated. On the other hand, "risk" is a term used often in the context of politics and economics, therefore it allows us to speak about film experiences in relation to other social experiences. Further more, while risk involves personal rationality, calculation, and responsibility, it also involves the power structures that distribute the risk. (In Hollywood cinema, for example, stunt actors have to perform risky activities in place of real actors; In China, certain film projects damage environment, and the risk is shouldered by the residents who live there). Therefore, thinking about risk and cinema raises questions not only with regard to "ethical accounting" in filmmaking, but regarding all our cultural activities and how they interact with real-life politics and society.
For me, this is a particular attractive line of thinking about cinema. I think of cinema, theater and literature as laboratories for us to experiment with ideas about ourselves and about the world. The film studies I have read seems to deal much with trauma, suffering, memory, history, but not enough with other operative ideas such as risk. There is so much more to be done in this field--what a happy reminder from Mette Hjort's visit!
The choice of "risk" as the organizing concept is an interesting one. On the one hand, "risk" dialogues with the much older concept of "contingency" in film studies, yet treats "chance-happenings" with more human agency and responsibility than how "contingency" is traditionally treated. On the other hand, "risk" is a term used often in the context of politics and economics, therefore it allows us to speak about film experiences in relation to other social experiences. Further more, while risk involves personal rationality, calculation, and responsibility, it also involves the power structures that distribute the risk. (In Hollywood cinema, for example, stunt actors have to perform risky activities in place of real actors; In China, certain film projects damage environment, and the risk is shouldered by the residents who live there). Therefore, thinking about risk and cinema raises questions not only with regard to "ethical accounting" in filmmaking, but regarding all our cultural activities and how they interact with real-life politics and society.
For me, this is a particular attractive line of thinking about cinema. I think of cinema, theater and literature as laboratories for us to experiment with ideas about ourselves and about the world. The film studies I have read seems to deal much with trauma, suffering, memory, history, but not enough with other operative ideas such as risk. There is so much more to be done in this field--what a happy reminder from Mette Hjort's visit!
Saturday, March 19, 2011
biographies vs photographs
My headache in the past week has been an irresistable impulse to write biographically. Somehow I was obsessed with establishing the people behind the story of social change I was telling, to the point that I began to include totally irrelevant details that began to dilute my arguments altogether.
Today as I moved paragraphs around, deleted irrelevant details and attempted at a coherent thesis, I started to see where my own impulse for biography came from, and why it might be detrimental to good academic writing.
My impulse for biography came from a love for strange tales of the individual life. I am fascinated by the turns and twists of fates, by personal losses and gains, by deep experiences and feelings. When I have such materials in my hands, I relish them and cannot stop wondering and writing about them.
This fascination is a good beginning -- it makes the events I am describing palpably real for me. Yet this fascination brings me too close to my materials and makes me perceive things out of proportion. In fact, the most important parameters in my story are things impersonal and structural, things that are lifeless but control life. Therefore, in order to truly understand and be responsible to those whose stories I will retell, I have to pay much more attention to those structures around them, to move from melodramatic writing to analytical writing.
A second fallacy in biographical writing is a kind of historical determinism on a personal level. By recounting a person's life history, I implicitly make the argument that since he or she went through these experiences, therefore, he and she thought about things in this way, and therefore made such and such decision. However, this kind of determinism is often teleological and wrong. In fact, people are very contextual. They say and do things differently according to different contexts. It's impossible to recover who they really are. Furthermore, people are not static--they are perpetually revising themselves in an never-ending process of becoming. Focusing too much on biography, especially a personal instead of an inter-personal one, will result in a narrow understanding of who that person is.
Historical moments are much better conceived as photographs. In a photograph, one sees a slice in time, where all kinds of forces are present. Writing a short history might be analogous to selecting a series of photographs and writing about the linkages between various salient elements in these photographs. Maybe this metaphor is one way to help me keep my eyes on more things than those that feel dear and near.
Today as I moved paragraphs around, deleted irrelevant details and attempted at a coherent thesis, I started to see where my own impulse for biography came from, and why it might be detrimental to good academic writing.
My impulse for biography came from a love for strange tales of the individual life. I am fascinated by the turns and twists of fates, by personal losses and gains, by deep experiences and feelings. When I have such materials in my hands, I relish them and cannot stop wondering and writing about them.
This fascination is a good beginning -- it makes the events I am describing palpably real for me. Yet this fascination brings me too close to my materials and makes me perceive things out of proportion. In fact, the most important parameters in my story are things impersonal and structural, things that are lifeless but control life. Therefore, in order to truly understand and be responsible to those whose stories I will retell, I have to pay much more attention to those structures around them, to move from melodramatic writing to analytical writing.
A second fallacy in biographical writing is a kind of historical determinism on a personal level. By recounting a person's life history, I implicitly make the argument that since he or she went through these experiences, therefore, he and she thought about things in this way, and therefore made such and such decision. However, this kind of determinism is often teleological and wrong. In fact, people are very contextual. They say and do things differently according to different contexts. It's impossible to recover who they really are. Furthermore, people are not static--they are perpetually revising themselves in an never-ending process of becoming. Focusing too much on biography, especially a personal instead of an inter-personal one, will result in a narrow understanding of who that person is.
Historical moments are much better conceived as photographs. In a photograph, one sees a slice in time, where all kinds of forces are present. Writing a short history might be analogous to selecting a series of photographs and writing about the linkages between various salient elements in these photographs. Maybe this metaphor is one way to help me keep my eyes on more things than those that feel dear and near.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
the stake of indie film exhibition
In the past week, I have been struggling with an article I have to write for a conference in mid-April. The conference is on Chinese cinema, and I was assigned the topic of "independent cinema circuits."
Compared to American indie films, Chinese indie cinema is doubly disadvantaged. In the U.S., indie cinema must establish itself as an alternative to the capital-intensive Hollywood. In China, besides having to compete with blockbuster productions, indie cinema has to deal with the fact that it cannot be shown in any official cinematic space, whether in cinemas, or on television. With little capital and no official cinematic space, it is a miracle that this cinema has survived and grown. My paper is to recount this story of survival and growth. What have been the strategies of survival? Who have been the crucial supporters? How has this particular history of survival affect the forms and concerns of this cinema? How has this cinema opened new spaces, and how has it adapted to suit the old ones? How does this survival story serve as a legacy for filmmakers and audiences?
Thinking about my own daily experiences, I must confess that on this campus, the place that brings me the most happiness has been the Harvard Film Archive. If HFA, Coolidge Corner Theater, Brattle Street Theater, and Kendall Square Cinema were to close down within the next years, this place would become for me infinitely impoverished. Of course, I could shun film altogether and read, but the loss would not be simply the loss of good cinema. The loss would be this: facing dominance, the society failed to produce alternative, failed to issue its counter-act. If in cinema, alternatives were gone; then very quickly, the same thing would happen in other fields as well. Each field is a battleground that the society can't afford to lose.
The Chinese indie cinema has been a success story so far. Yet the success may not continue if lessons were not learned from its history. From new indie films made in China, I can see how hard it is to master the cinematic art and to find one's own voice. It takes years to build that intuitive sensibility that can lead to best directorial decisions on the spot. If making a film is already so difficult, then making viable a cinema is just equally if not more difficult. One needs to learn to adapt, insist, follow and invent--and do all of these at the right time, with the right people. Learning about how to make this cinematic alternative viable in China is one way of learning how to make many good things viable in that country, in this world.
Film studies may not be the most practical field that contributes to livelihood. Yet it is one of the fields that try to make sure there are nice things in the world. If HFA, Brattle Street Theater, Coolidge Corner and Kendall Square are so indispensable for me, then I shall renew my faith in this discipline, and go back to my writing!
Compared to American indie films, Chinese indie cinema is doubly disadvantaged. In the U.S., indie cinema must establish itself as an alternative to the capital-intensive Hollywood. In China, besides having to compete with blockbuster productions, indie cinema has to deal with the fact that it cannot be shown in any official cinematic space, whether in cinemas, or on television. With little capital and no official cinematic space, it is a miracle that this cinema has survived and grown. My paper is to recount this story of survival and growth. What have been the strategies of survival? Who have been the crucial supporters? How has this particular history of survival affect the forms and concerns of this cinema? How has this cinema opened new spaces, and how has it adapted to suit the old ones? How does this survival story serve as a legacy for filmmakers and audiences?
Thinking about my own daily experiences, I must confess that on this campus, the place that brings me the most happiness has been the Harvard Film Archive. If HFA, Coolidge Corner Theater, Brattle Street Theater, and Kendall Square Cinema were to close down within the next years, this place would become for me infinitely impoverished. Of course, I could shun film altogether and read, but the loss would not be simply the loss of good cinema. The loss would be this: facing dominance, the society failed to produce alternative, failed to issue its counter-act. If in cinema, alternatives were gone; then very quickly, the same thing would happen in other fields as well. Each field is a battleground that the society can't afford to lose.
The Chinese indie cinema has been a success story so far. Yet the success may not continue if lessons were not learned from its history. From new indie films made in China, I can see how hard it is to master the cinematic art and to find one's own voice. It takes years to build that intuitive sensibility that can lead to best directorial decisions on the spot. If making a film is already so difficult, then making viable a cinema is just equally if not more difficult. One needs to learn to adapt, insist, follow and invent--and do all of these at the right time, with the right people. Learning about how to make this cinematic alternative viable in China is one way of learning how to make many good things viable in that country, in this world.
Film studies may not be the most practical field that contributes to livelihood. Yet it is one of the fields that try to make sure there are nice things in the world. If HFA, Brattle Street Theater, Coolidge Corner and Kendall Square are so indispensable for me, then I shall renew my faith in this discipline, and go back to my writing!
blogging again
Sofie, a good friend from California, wrote me and asked why I hadn't been writing on my Chinese blog site (http://yinikanotebook.blogbus.com/). When I was blogging a year ago, Sofie was one of the loyal readers.
Getting her email made me realize that I haven't visited her blogs for quite some time. So I went to her page, and found she had written many new entries. A cultural hybrid like me, an enterprising scientist who is timid and risk-loving at the same time, and a mother to a boy who's just learning to speak, Sofie shares her daily observations, fantastical thinking, and ethical reasoning with these short pieces. Reading these entries I feel close to her again, as if she were living just next door. I no longer need to write in my email to her, "I hope you are well." I know she is well.
So here I am, updating this site for the first time after a long hiatus, a hiatus caused not by a lack of writing but by too much of it. Academic writing has taken over and replaced personal writing. And I for some time lost that conviction that bloggers share -- that how we live our everyday life is important, that we must fight against automatism and reclaim spaces for contemplation, choices, and sharing.
Getting her email made me realize that I haven't visited her blogs for quite some time. So I went to her page, and found she had written many new entries. A cultural hybrid like me, an enterprising scientist who is timid and risk-loving at the same time, and a mother to a boy who's just learning to speak, Sofie shares her daily observations, fantastical thinking, and ethical reasoning with these short pieces. Reading these entries I feel close to her again, as if she were living just next door. I no longer need to write in my email to her, "I hope you are well." I know she is well.
So here I am, updating this site for the first time after a long hiatus, a hiatus caused not by a lack of writing but by too much of it. Academic writing has taken over and replaced personal writing. And I for some time lost that conviction that bloggers share -- that how we live our everyday life is important, that we must fight against automatism and reclaim spaces for contemplation, choices, and sharing.
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