weeknotes 32.35 late again...
okay, i actually dont want to acknowledge that this is yet another weeknotes thats late. whats wrong with me. i cant even guarantee i'll be on time next week... whats up with mondays lately... what a garfield ass vibe i'm bringing to mondays. i also like lasagna tho
but here is the vibe: i drank a cup of coffee, took a 5 hr nap and now i'm writing this. and i'm very hungry so i'm using that as motivation to finish this post so i can go cook something and eat.
gas is $6.10 a gallon, nick broke no strings!! or hes hiding it from me... hmm.
i did go out last monday. rianne and i bev-hopped and went to the casino to buy menthols since you cant buy them in california now i guess. i also found and bought the fitzcarraldo edition of "what am i, a deer" by dolly parton, so yay, add that onto the growing pile of books i need to read. feels nice to get to catch up. also i hate teachers schedules and their "i get summer off" spiel. oh you mean the worst season?? bitch get off march-april and october-november. those are peak months. summer is for air conditioning and being indoors
i actually dont know why i'm late today, i did work yesterday and by the time i got home at 7:20 ish i thought i had enough time to write up this post and then i showered and then Forgot? and i actually dont really have anything worth noting to share this week. its hard when you work most days. although the reason i've been working so much, first reason, because sometimes there are special "mariah only" jobs, and the second is that someone guy was on FMLA, and now supposedly he is on bereavement. but everyone gossips so even though its believable i'm not sure its true until i hear it from someone credible.
i'm craving guan yin milk tea (grass jelly or tea jelly only for toppings. egg pudding is also an option but i rarely see it now) and like 3 scoops of brown rice from a specific mediterranean restaurant. and also a water chilled tomato.
so i forgot to talk about taiwan travelogue when i mentioned the international booker winner two weeks ago. despite this being on my to read list even before the international booker longlist was announced i'm not sure how to feel about it and because it won the prize i may be reading into it more harshly than if it didn't win or it wasn't even on my list. i don't know how to talk about this without spoilers, so continue at your own risk i guess. the rest of this post is about the book anyways and if that doesn't interest you just stop reading now, i love to yap.
international booker is a prize for books in translation, google it, i'm not explaining. i'm not surprised that it won out of all the books selected this year. the first layer of translation depends on the belief that this book is written by a japanese author. more specifically a japanese woman in the showa era. this was sooo hard for me to believe. like you're telling me that in the gap that tanizaki (a man) wrote some prefer nettles and sasameyuki and this what we get? i also believe that tanizaki is probably the greatest japanese writer of the 20th century so there is some bias.
my real problem is that aoyama is annoying in that "where my hug"-ass behavior from men in her expectations of chi-chan. not to mention calling her chi-chan pretty much off rip grossed me out. its not the -chan part that grosses me out its the difference of aoyama being able to deny being called as 'sensei' but chizuru (lets ignore that a taiwanese person has a japanese name for now) isnt allowed the same courtesy. theres a lot of cultural reason behind this but if aoyama wanted to be 'equals' there would be no honorific used when addressing her, also idk, maybe use her real given name instead of her colonial name, just an idea. but dont get me wrong, this is a Point of the book. its the pushiness that i find hard to believe, despite her being from kyushu. although i did kind of chuckle when she said something along the lines of "if i were a man i'd flip this table" or something alluding to kyushu danshi behavior despite her acting like a kyushu danshi the entire book. like girl at this point just flip the table. at a certain point in the book aoyama asks her how much some dagashi cost and its like "haha you're wrong because its free because i'm buying it for you" i'm really simplifying this. if a man did that i would just walk away. i find pretty unlikable but unlikable narrators don't make a book bad.
i also might be too woke for this "colonialism bad 101" rhetoric that is a pretty surface level interpretation of the book but in the start aoyama states that shes not going to write about japanese colonialism but will go to taiwan and write about how exotic the southern island is!! pineapples!! how fun. no acknowledgement that the reason she is able to do this experience is because of colonialism however being obtuse is pretty normal for aoyama. exoticism and fetishism about taiwanese life is just another aspect colonialism. so its quite impressive to be able to show orientalism with two east asian countries. and because i called taiwan a country i wont be allowed into china, rip. essentially aoyama is working as a propaganda machine to elevate taiwan as a benefit to The Empire for their pro-imperialist readers back home.
aoyama is somewhat 'yareyare-kei' in basically every aspect of life aside from food. and the food fixation is because she was tending to a temple or something for like two years and basically lived off rice and salted vegtables, and is now a gluton. so girl thats disordered eating, please seek help. and yareyare-kei in the way that murakami main characters are somewhat useless and driftless if that description helps. so this character type with colonialism and gay yearning kind of just pissed me off. like i could feel no intrinsic motivation from aoyama for why she was an author, so why was she even in taiwan writing anyways.
okay first the food part of this book was Too Much. it began to drag on. i get that food is a major aspect of the plot but at certain times and because of the amount of it i couldn't bring myself to continue to care. the food is actually probably the worst part of the book. and i couldn't see why it continued to be relevant? like why you're eating soup? describing a 12 course meal? wow that so interesting. its like this the entire book and does not let up at all until aoyama loses her appetite because chi-chan left but even then shes still like "i remember when we drank wintermelon juice, i miss chi-chan" i think because its so much text about food its actually about food and not something deeper lol. could i read deeper into things? sure, but how do i look past all the pathetic gay yearning.
i know theres a big pro-yearning team on the internet but yearning for unrequited love is pathetic behavior. if this is a hot take, my bad. but are you still gonna be like "yearning is romantic!!" when someone absolutely busted is the one doing it? i dont think so and thats all im saying!! reciprocity makes yearning okay. if theres yearning i want a painful slow burn with devastation or a very rewarding payoff but this book gives neither and i dont know if thats good or bad because it does somewhat market itself as a romance. and i guess there is some argument that chizuru feels some way towards aoyama, but i dont think these feelings are gay, hard to tell through power imbalances and layers of translation. however, maybe i cant read into it because of my Hetero lens. but one of my favorite books ever is notes of a crocodile by qiu miaojin which is another book about taiwanese lesbians. this isnt a pride month pandering bit either. (if you want another sad taiwanese lesbian solo dance by li kotomi is also an option)
the relationship between aoyama and chi-chan was actually my favorite aspect of this book. there are a few scenes that i dont want to spoil because i think their relationship is what the book does best. their conversations are so repetitive though. this book is like 70% eating, 10% train rides, 10% the same conversation but slightly different and the last 10% is plot.
so the book a novel that is written by a japanese author (aoyama) and re-discovered by the author yang shuang-zi however in that time the adopted daughter of aoyama found chizuru and her daughters in america and chizuru translates the book and wants her daughter to publish it in taiwan but failed to do so. so thats when yang shuang-zi "translated" it. then lin king translated it into english. does this make sense? to be honest i did have to google if aoyama was a real person within the first 40 pages or so because i was confused.
so without the gimmick of aoyama being the author does taiwan travelogue still hold up?? yah and imo it probably works better if you read it and realize that chizuru translated it before yang shuang-zi "translated" it. because why else would there be several layers of translation if it didn't mean something. yang shuang-zi couldve just wrote a book about a japanese author in 1930s colonial era taiwan but theres a point in the book being translated and all the cultural distillation that happens because of it. i have typed enough and i haven't even Said anything meaningful which is why i never really talk about books lol. its 9:30 pm and i'm not sure if i'm ever going to decide if i like the book. it has been one of the books that has made me really think though and i appreciate it. i actually have so much more to say but i'm stopping myself. a few days ago i made a list of a bunch of things i wanted to talk about and ive only gone through half of it lol. i get why it won international booker this year. being good and liking it are two different things. idk!! if anyone has read this book then lets talk about it.
anyways!! i need to cook and eat dinner and then go back to sleep. one day off was brutal... i promised links but its too late for that.