The Flowers of Keiwha
Page 26
become kimokawa; trying to be kimokawa, I end up somewhere else entirely.”
"And entire novels have been written that way.”
"Sometimes to the detriment of both intent and outcome.”
"But sometimes to unexpected success.”
Roaring so. This work is being created in one single draft with minimal editing or revision. In fact, with the exception of some typo correction, this work has been more or less created in one-go, over the course of a few weeks of course, but still without any note-writing, pre-planning, or the subtraction or addition of text after the fact. Kerouac did this with On the Road (although an earlier proto-draft has been found); some of the Dadaists and other early Moderns tried similar projects though with little success. The writer is self-conscious this is not a major work, but it is fun to write and the little unexpected surprises which are minor joys to the reader are minor joys to the author. Literature, self-conscious and an entity, is now raising its immense head and ripping into the text because BARBIEDOLL is a literature major and TUSK is a literature major and one of the teachers this year is ALSO a literature major. ALSO is tall and thin and beautiful, but she is Korean and TUSK does not want her. ALSO majored in literature at Ewha, she is thirty and unmarried and so ‘left on the shelf,’ but her presence is some sort of implicit comment on TUSK’s essay on the non-existence of Korean literature. Koreans cannot write literature so this book is a gift to them. The primary image of Korean art is the hammer-wielding madman of Oldboy, to be imitated and distributed worldwide by the Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-hui Cho.
Week 5
Week 4 was a lie, of course; like any good , all it had was elements of fiction confabulated with a thinly-disguised reality; where truth-finally did show up it had to be in the form of the actual existence of the Japanese boys—there were five, but TUSK tried to avoid them; TUSK tried to pretend them out of play, yet they harassed him anyway, they found it hilarious (not contemptible or frightening) that he would utterly ignore their presence as he scanned (quite openly) at 180 Japanese girls.
180 Japanese girls. What a sight. A number beyond comprehension, including such a complete perfect range of every type of Japanese face, from wide-faced to narrow; from high-cheekboned to fish-lipped; girls of every type and dimension possible, a fifth dyed-hair if not more; a fifth fully blonde, maybe half dyed-hair; 40% fat, another 20% definitely unattractive, but still leaving behind seventy possibles, forty truly nice-looking, twenty outright stunners. Yet out of these TUSK will in time speak to perhaps ten, each one will be recorded down to microscopic levels of gesture and that is this year’s crux—this is Week 4, the full and fortunate and complete week, when the things that happened happened and 2.5 weeks (so short! the truncation Keiwha’s greatest slack) compressing a lifetime of action. All that was possible was allegory.
It was stated in Week 4 that Yale was about the senior societies and the overlap of your department with others. This was a lie. In truth of course the years worked quite differently. SEATTLE arrives her junior year (TUSK’s first) as a transfer student; therefore she is cut out of all the action of your first-year friends (and this is key; later on you are to be still in touch with a good fifth of the people in your first year college floor if you are very social) and this is partly why she is a lone-wolf. Then TUSK takes a year off so he misses SEATTLE’s final year; when he returns, he is plunged immediately back into the social stir, completely with black crack-addict girlfriend, and later in the sophomore year he declares English Lit as his major.
Of eight hundred such Lit majors, there is no discernible “community” per se, except perhaps at the higher academic regions where certain students fall under the tutelage of particular professors. By doing so, they get access to special grants (a six week tour to study Cretan architecture not unknown), fellowships, and prizes. So in this sense there is a definitely English lit community, but of course by the time you reach this place you’ve already made your first year and second year friends; clearly life at the school is cross-disciplinary and more by personality choice rather than some insular group of Lits who then square off into separate affiliations and cross-departmental cliques. The question then is not one of concentricities (TUSK model) or overlaps (SEATTLE slew), but of that one particular unbounded strand of motion one is walking through a crowd that includes both concentricities, overlaps, as well as affiliations, societies, sports, and localities. Who is making a fuss about literature. Well Rainier, Ballhurst, Alki, and Northgate.
So nine names now. (Jihadist, Sasquatch, Samurai, Turnkey and Poker, Week 4) This is simultaneously word-game and trip down memory lane. Jihadist comes to mind as prominent, as he threw a Bjork-party once that entailed listening to nine consecutive hours of Bjork while everyone got drunk (TUSK felt he was going mad). The conceit was that you had to be there for the full nine hours if you wanted in and though “theme parties” just bring to mind cheap hipsters from Oshkosh, nevertheless this was clearly one of the weirdest parties to go through; afterwards you completely understood Bjork. Sasquatch once came to TUSK as he sat on the greensward in front of the main library, and she just seemed so droll, although she was a true literaturist as well. Samurai, as mentioned, was distinctly Japanese yet had also read Murakami and thought him okay (majoring in ichthyology, like the emperor). Turnkey, the future diplomat, would one day be depressed, had two related friends, TK2, TK3, TK2 of whom would sleep with Jihadist. A Murakami fan. Poker, loner, interacted mostly online.
Moving into the Lit department proper, the affiliations/crossover with Japan diminishes. Rainier is tall and senior to Ballhurst, who writes poetry and belongs to the school of absurdists. He isn’t part of the drama clique per se but would be a natural addition. Alki represents an interesting fusion of Seattle-literature-Japan as she has something going on with all three, yet may be remembered predominately for being working-class and skeptical. And then Northgate is an elite Long Island girl who does a little part-time modeling but keeps to herself; her father an R&B singer; the precise “aesthetic war” between R&B and hiphop becoming known to TUSK only through her as representations of a struggle in which some things are understood in common but others are wildly divergent.
There is, therefore, no “English Lit Faculty” story. To write one would be a lie because the individuals are far more engaged with their main social circle and then their secondary before they are engaged with the department per se. For TUSK it is Chicken Leg and then the people who coalesce around an art-rock band whose lead is TUSK’s close friend. Yet drama must be told; the filament-waving crowd demands close answers, microscopic examinations. So we find those who go after one year fellowships and try to get into the Master’s program. Those who seek out the full PhD and get it; the even fewer who get tenure-track positions, and those after the career in Marketing. There were several competitions at play here and some made a sport of having a finger in all pools (although this is clearly impossible in some cases). Blind guy started a pornographic film series, yet all think at the back of their head had he just been normal, he would have found close friends, there was no need to degenerate like this. Conversely, others formed a political group around being pro-sex. Drama as such unfolds in the highly ironic development that pushing for pro-sex, trying to increase the profile of sex in public discourse and change society to become more sexual, the individual members started to become less and less interested in the act. One girl even entered a convent.
One guy wore ‘Guys and Dolls’ clothes all the time—yet was seen repairing an ATM machine, is he staff? Another sang opera constantly as he walked around, this was the magic of the place, the center of the world a truly global-class university. Several novels exist here: the story behind the suicide cluster (perhaps only the one involving the Hispanic girl invites true sympathy, it’s a deeper matter than just being a Latina in a white man’s world; the other possible was the Indian boy whose parents on the first day of school came up to the student security guard at the dorm and asked how they could choose
his classes—a year later, the realization what they were). There’s the Catholic community (and another convent-goer, though she picked a blueblood one and stayed), the entrepreneurs who started something that they managed to sell for a cool million (divided four ways); the actual run-in to the aforementioned pornographic film being filmed in progress (in a girl’s bathroom no less); and then only minor scenes here and there, those things that appeared in the papers but were all messed up and confused in rendition; some of the dramatists got stuff into East Village theatres, one girl got plastic surgery to find a rich husband but is still looking; one girl slept with at least three hundred guys.
In truth, then, it was about the process getting to the end—the senior seminars that were ten or twelve students; and then the things that went on at Chicken Leg. There would be space here for five or six simultaneous dramas, but the time has come for a little close-in inspection. Rainier/Ballhurst, as mentioned, are two close male friends, one tall, the other small but slim, who had a piece of the action at the English Lit faculty (they