Remove a man from WILLIAM LOWE? Sounds like a tree (6)

2025-12-01

Sometimes, when I am walking around the city, I smell something so similar to a scent I have smelled before, that I have to stop walking, because my vision is taken over by memory, and I am there and no longer here, if only for a moment. (It happens with sound, too, but not nearly as often.) Some places I have been transported back to: the wooded area around my grandparent’s island home at dusk, with hydrangeas; underneath the pine tree in Sasha’s backyard, having lost something; a hutong in Beijing, where it was raining, and there were two of us, but I only had the one umbrella---predictably, I didn’t share, not because I am rude but because I thought they’d rather get rained on; the museum of children, with that sick smell of white bread that I was not allowed to see nor eat; and some where I have forgotten too much to name them, and endless others. I never really know what to do about it.

2025-12-01

I am very cautious about people who pack their sentences with -isms and -ologies and names of dead men. I call it “术语堆砌法.”

2025-12-01

(Re-)exposure to something cruel and/or violent does not just force you to face something already within yourself, but it can seem that way, and some people like to pretend it is this way. If you are not careful, it is more like a growing tumor, or a knife, dragged across an old scar, widening it.

2025-12-01

A silly problem with an impossible premise: I do not like the idea of having a style, somehow, I want to be like tap water; style seems to be a perversion. I can’t shake it. I used to get nightmares about tattoos. It’s the same thing.

2025-11-30

Do you remember the Onion video about the man who studied anteaters?

2025-11-30

I promised myself I would write more about my own experiences, not just my thoughts, but it is possible that my thoughts are just my experiences: I am almost always "out of the moment." Anyway, I went to the Met today. The weapons exhibit did not have any guns past the mid 19th century... Probably it would be too uncomfortable to have an automatic machine gun at the end of a long hall of ornate and antique swords, daggers, rifles, etc., but they should really try it.

It may have been my state of mind, but I did not find the newest exhibits very pleasant. I spend too much brain power thinking about the optimal route. I want to read everything, but then I am reminded why I do not like my phone, or too much web-browsing: my brain is shattered with so much information, too discrete, like swiping through posts. Has even the museum become phone-ified? Or is it the audience (me) who is the problem, and the museum was really always like this? (It is probably a bit of both. The museum was always a discontinuous presentation of items and information. But we all have internet brain now.)

2025-11-30

我从小就是一个表达欲很强烈的人，可惜我的表达能力一直跟不上。再说呢，我总是在中文和英文之间盘旋、不断失衡，像跷跷板的两端一样。

A thought: “the wind is really big today”（今天风很大）

2025-11-30

I am an elephant. (We are all elephants, and we are all blind men. A blind man could spend a month with an elephant and still not know where his elephant liver is, or if he has a liver, or if it is soft.)

2025-11-29

Reading Gaskell in between Brontë and Dickens is like putting the bread between two real courses (lobster risotto and baked Alaska).

2025-11-29

A novel is like a building, but construction is not so easy, and seeing is not so simple. Best way to understand, then, is to write yourself -- to become a novelist and to experience the "dangers and difficulties of words" (Woolf). Both great perception and great imagination is needed to read; and maybe this is why I do not trust readers who cannot themselves write, because they can only see that the building is made out of bricks, but not the ovens in which they were fired, the source of the clay (perhaps even concrete), the carvings across the lintel, or that I have stolen some bricks from another building, that some are not even bricks...

Reading can become passive (to READ as you would WATCH), but it shouldn't be. Writing demands the mind to be active.

I see different bricks, different entrances and exists, depending on whether my mind is set to scholarship (the production of a paper) or tailored to fiction (the production of a story). And then there is another, which I have not experienced too often, not since K-12, where the novel overtakes me, and I forget that the bricks do not exist, and when I remember my past I must sort through bricks and determine whether they belong to a book-building or a real-building. (But is there really even a strict, or meaningful, difference? And another thing: my dreams are often so mundane that I spend minutes trying to decipher whether they happened or not, and sometimes it is a real experience which I mistake for a dream, until I confirm with another that it had in fact happened. It is without a doubt very jumbled now.) What about painting? Is there a painting mode of reading? (Is this when I pay more attention to white space and the contours of the words and letters rather than their content?)

But worse than all that is complacency.

2025-11-29

Ingestion; I read a book, or media of some sort. Digestion; I think it through while doing nothing. Regurgitation (or something more pleasant); creative output.

I think, through coursework, I have ruined the balance between these three, and I am in a constant state of indigestion. In high school, or even the first two years of college, I did not take my coursework seriously so I could pursue what I wanted. I was not so overwhelmed with new standards and new information and new ideas that it became difficult to work through problems I wanted to work through. Now it takes a long time to finish things, and before I finish I have decided that I need to begin again, because I have ingested too much and I realize the insufficiency of the original. This is good, but too much "food" will kill a man, kill his brain.

2025-11-29

I am glad I know people who will allow me to question the election cycle. It is okay not to have answers.

2025-11-28

But nothing touches at the atomic level! (So I am told)

2025-11-28

Sometimes I get so frustrated with creation: when I think about how the universe will eventually end in heat death (probably; this may be our best hypothesis, but it's all in my head ... never once have I seen something which suggested "heat death" to me, you know? People used to look into the sky and experience the firmament or 分野 or what have you, and now I experience "luminous spheroid[s] of plasma held together by self-gravity," but really we still all just see a bunch of white dots on near-black) or how I will inevitably add to the pile of errors and words and so, so many words and that my "work" will not necessarily be any more universal or less in error than what has come before. But is "universal" really what I want? To make the "universe?" (No.)

I could write more on that, but I won't; I want to talk about things (not) lasting. There is a scene in 三体, on Pluto, when the solar system is about to get super smushed, and they discuss what lasts the longest: not electronics, not paper, but stone carvings... (I want to make video games, but I always keep coming back to words, just words.)

2025-11-28

Started a website so that I can shout into the void and maybe write in more complete sentences; instead of, you know, writing just enough so that I can recover the original thought. (Maybe it will still be that.) I really took "言者所以在意，得意而忘言" and ran with it.

2025-11-27

Thanksgiving dinner: “从来没有人这么想过！” x 15. What to make of this? Why say this?