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To fill my required non-fiction quota, i'm halfway through "Life Along The Silk Road", a pretty excellent ethnography and cultural history of the golden age of Central Asia's now-evaporating historical pride. The different eras are enumerated through the perspectives of less-illustrious people, merchants, Tibetan soldiers, Buddhist/Nestorian monks, civil servants and etc.

I picked up a copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto the week after finals to try to get a leg up on the reading material of a "New Media Technologies" class i'm taking this coming semester. The class has gained quite the cult reputation within the school of journalism here as a maverick warband, but i'm beginning to have my doubts. As a classic skeptic, i'm very suspicious of such one-sided tech evangelism in a journalism building. Anyways, the book seems pretty unbearable and i'm probably going to be the pariah of the class.

In fiction, I have my hands on "Story of the Stone" by Cao Xueqin, an 18th century Chinese gossip novel, "The Worm Ouroboros" by E.R. Eddison, a Tolkien-era fantasy by an outcast from the Inklings, "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" by Gene Wolfe and of course, i'm always plugging away at Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en.

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I really can't stand to read more than a page of regular paragraphed prose on a digital screen. After that, my eyes start to ache and my attention to wander. I also like the tactile satisfaction of having a hard copy paperback tome one can pop open anywhere.

Don't take my word for it though, I only recently realized that writing prose out longhand before typing it up on a computer is considered totally luddite (I still do it though).

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The above reminded me of that massive lumbering academic introduction in the poetry textbook of Dead Poets Society that Robin Williams summarily had the students tear out. You'll forgive me if I don't have very much respect for formalism. Prose can be poetic and poetry can be prosaic. Not every culture developed its manners of genre and styles in writing the same way The West has.

Poetry of virtually any stripe or silly school, like music, can be consumed and even admired without rigorous education on How to Appreciate. The question of whether or not one appreciates said stanzas is a lifestyle thing more than anything; the thing that determines what speaks true and what's sophomoric jibba-jabber.

Like Dao, like jazz, you need be at a certain point in your life to understand where the artist's craft is coming from. Once you're at that point, you understand it, digest it with crystal clarity the moment you read the words. Like the Dao, all attempt to define it in formal terms fail, but it rings true in your mind and body with the visceral immediacy of satori.

Like jazz, knowledge of all the complex chord structures, arrangements and time signatures may enhance the depth at which you appreciate the composition, but one can appreciate the song regardless of such stuff.

Just read one of Li Bai's poems, probably better known for its cameo in Alpha Centauri:
"Together we stand
the mountain and I

Until only the mountain is left"

I'd flood this with stuff from Bai Juyi, Charles Wright, Ryokan and Al Young, but I don't have their books with me right now so you lucked out. Instead, like Zhuangzi said: "The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you've gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?"

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I wrote a review of "Air" by Geoff Ryman

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I'm far from the greatest fan of Russian lit, but Chekov is probably tied with Flannery O'Connor and Borges as master of the short form story.

An interesting topic of speculation with no right or wrong answers: Which fiction author do you think defines best the latter half of the 20th Century? Which nonfiction author?

The second World War irreversibly altered the course of everyone's collective unconscious (the industrialization of war and murder, the violent breach birth of globalism, things involving fat bombs, the beginning of the downward spiral for the colonial era) . I think you only need to read fiction from the 30s, 40s and 50s to see document and eyewitness.

In terms of fiction, i'd say it's a tie between George Orwell and J.G. Ballard. Incidentally, it's probably significant that both their most famous works are sci-fi-- both of them were integral in its legitimizing into something other than penny-dreadfuls.

Orwell's nonfiction novels read, like his prose itself, the sound of modernism exploding at the seams. Ballard's work was obviously a running document of mutations in the post-WW2 psyche, but more important for me: Empire of the Sun (in the top three of my top five), without spoiling any of it, reads like a microcosm of the world's post-modern coming-out party during WW2 and the sudden flipping of the binary light switch from Colonialism to Post-colonialism.

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Print isn't going to die in our lifetime. Newspaper dailies will, but monthly magazines and paperback publishing have at least a generation or two left. Hardbound might fade away, mostly due to the current popular tabloid-dimension format, which I don't mind. Cumbersome, archaic, overpriced collector-whore vanity purchases, I say.

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On Murakami, my first and favorite read from him was Wind-Up Bird, with declining interest in each of the next of his novels I picked up. His books are almost a sort of pastoralism for the city-- the mundane actions and interactions between characters tend to suggest a realist's touch, but when those lengthy tension-building stretches of the mundane loose into the violent, as they invariably do (or in the worst cases, don't; see: Dance, Dance, Dance), the violence is cartoon-y, embellished, diminished or otherwise made "magical" and robbed of the moral/ethical impact that serves as the grounding "real" portion of Surreal. I'd say that's what separates him, makes his stuff "poppier," than that of other East Asian postmodern authors, such as Can Xue, who also practice automatic writing. Can Xue can write a children's dodgeball game to feel like an atrocity exhibition.

Of course, there are exceptions to everything-- Wind-Up Bird has that one scene of ultraviolence that most people remember.

Wind-Up Bird reads like a remake of Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book (the plots are almost identical), which I prefer over the former since late 80s Istanbul is a much more interesting backdrop than mid-90s Tokyo. It also helps that Pamuk is firmly in the camp of adjective-abusing, not-a-little-meandering hardcore descriptive postmodernists with an eye for luxuriant prose that I love. There may be even less forward motion in Black Book than Wind-Up, but I never find myself particularly caring because Pamuk packs every overblown noir paragraph with minutae about the city, its nooks and its residents that are just terribly great to me. Wind-Up Bird lacked that insider's eye and self-indulgent love of the city in comparison.

Speaking of meandering self-indulgent neo-postmodernists, Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain is a fantastic pulpy adventure novel. The whole thing is like a dream-blend of Journey to the West with George R.R. Martin-style realist fantasy in the period just before the British Raj. The worst portions are the slice-of-life chapters about an Indian college student on an 80s U.S. college campus, but those are standard fair for young Asian-American authors and are thankfully few and far in between.