Day 51: C. P. Cavafy, Eileen Chang, Michael Chabon

The letter today is C.

C. P. Cavafy - Waiting for the Barbarians

Read here

I chose this poem because I recently read a really good novel with the same title by JM Coetzee.

Cavafy and Coetzee know a good title when they hear it. They also know its the kind of phrase that gets better with repetition.

Waiting for the Barbarians, waiting for the Barbarians. waiting for the Barbarians.

Just the phrase fills me with dread- both towards the barbarians and the government that labelled them as such.

This poem is a series of dialogues by a confused speaker at a time of societal panic, who asks questions that to everyone else is common sense.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

At the end, the barbarians don't show up. They possibly dont even exist. The narrator is disappointed. "They were, those people, a kind of solution"

The line is brilliant. You can hear Cavafy slamming the table and getting up and taking an envigorating walk around the block in excitement.

I am glad this poem is just as good as the Coetzee novel it inspired.

Eileen Chang - Red Rose White Rose

I find short stories that are over thirty pages very intimidating because you dont get the punchy satisfaction of a single-sitting story, but you don't get the longterm satisfaction of a novel. Really, novellas (if we can call any story between 50 and 110 pages) dont quite fit into any reading lifestyle which is why I never get round to reading them.

But this novella is a very quick and immersive read and could easily be told in twice as many pages. It is the brevity that makes it a really good story, even if it is your classic wistful love story (like Chekhov's Lady and the Dog).

The main dude in this, Zhenbao, is a cad right to the end. A guy who has learned to treat relationships as transactional and disposable, and is surprised by the couple relationships he cared for, ones he disposed of too early.

This story is set in 1920s Shanghai, and the Chinese society in the story feels very similar to any Western society. It is interesting to read a Chinese story about individuals who are free to travel and pursue their desires. Almost every other Chinese narrative I have read is about various degrees of suffering and suffocation due to malevolent traditions, governments, and wartime enemies. This says less about 'originality' or whatever and more about the last 150 years of Chinese history, where History was punishingly inescapable - so to read a modern-feeling love story in historic-china where the protagonist's only enemy is himself is quite interesting.

Zhenbao hinself is bland, but I really like the rich descriptions of the women in the story, who Chang gives a lot of personality.

There was a canary at a place, and whenever it sang she thought it was calling to her. 'Yes bird?' she'd answer right off, standing on tip-toe with her hands behind her back, and her face tilted up towards the bird cage. Her tan face was long, not round like a child's, but at such moments she seemed remarkably childlike. She'd gaze white eyed at the bird in the cage, the whites of her eyes tinged blue, as if she was staring into the deep blue skies.
Rose may have been the most ordinary of girls, but her very youth made her remarkably hard to read. Like that canary - calling out but not really saying anything to anyone.

The last paragraph of story is bewildering and incredible. It is like ending a story with "and then they died". A real "im sick of writing this story" type ending, but for this one it feels completely intentional and smart.

I can't wait to read what other people have said about this story. It is really good.

Michael Chabon - Wes Anderson

I like Wes Anderson well enough. I love a couple of the movies, but by the time I realised his tropes and tricks, I got sick of him. I also think that the aesthetic appeal of these movies got stale with the end of twee/indie/hipster culture in the mid 2010s. Still, these movies hold up much better than other examples of millennial whimsy.

I found a large-print edition or an anthology of Micahel Chabon's introductions to things. I love when a book has an introdcution by another author. I hate it when they spoil the book, so I read them at the end, or midway through if I'm not enjoying the book- maybe the introducer can encourage me.

Chabon's introductions are great. I really love how he starts the intro:

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research "childhood."
There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been bro-ken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher's heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this egg first arises "adolescence." The feeling haunts people all their lives.

To use a very millennial word (that I have noticed coming back into fashion):

Awesome!