Baltimore – Yellow Crane in the Rain

The Joy of Self-Recogniton

During college, there were a couple of occasions when I learned that parties I’d attended had turned into orgies after I’d gone home. Maybe they weren’t real orgies – they were more like spontaneous adjournments to the shower – but I think I would have enjoyed them. Over decades of regretful recollection, I blamed my early bedtime: Ten thirty or eleven was when I was ready to head back to the dorm to go night-night – just at the time a party starts to get interesting. Curse my body clock!

More recent ruminations, however, have convinced me that blaming my body clock is overly generous. It’s not that the parties turned into orgies after I left: The parties turned into orgies because I left. That’s how orgies work, with the real swingers lurking in the shadows, waiting for the shmendricks like me to clear out. My departure is a signal for the real party to get started.

When I lived in New York, I was typically isolated. If by some miracle I ever found myself having lunch with someone, man or woman, I would be overcome with gratitude and begin enthusing along the lines of “Wow, I’m really glad I met up with you. I don’t get out very often,” to which my lunchmate would invariably respond with a “Whoa,” sometimes accentuated by a raised pointer finger. “This lunch is a one-off,” he’d inform me. “I don’t usually have time to get together like this. Besides, we’re not friends or anything.” Mulling over such experiences, I concluded that I was coming on too strong for New York. You could get away with the presumption of companionship in a low-stakes environment like Baltimore, but not in the Big Apple, where space and time are at a premium. My roommate once told me, “I don’t have time to be your friend,” to drive home the point.

It has finally occurred to me, now in advanced middle age, that the problem was neither space nor time but hierarchy, which, as I failed to recognize when I resided in Gotham, is the governing principle of life there. Hierarchy, alas, holds few advantages for me, so of course I never had a chance. The message had always been clear enough: “I don’t usually have time to get together like this” meant “I don’t usually have time to get together like this with someone like you”; “I don’t have time to be your friend” meant “I don’t have time to be your friend.” Now I get it.

While doing research in Beijing, I once visited a dance club near the University. The music was playing, and the beat was heavy, but the floor remained open, for all of the copious young people in attendance stood lingering at the periphery, watching and waiting. My assessment of the situation was perchance a bit racist: “Chinese people are too shy to have a good time. Good thing Captain America is here to break the ice. Leave it to me.” I strode to the center of the space and commenced gyrating and frugging in my inimitable manner, expecting to trigger a like motion from the natives. But the song ended with no dance support. Another number went by, and then another. I was twisting all alone, with none of Beijing’s youth inspired to join me. After fifteen or twenty minutes of flying solo, I gave up in disgust. “You people are hopeless. What more can I do for you?” I sat down on a bar stool, at which the entire body of clubgoers promptly swarmed onto the floor and began dancing individually, in couples, and in merry clusters. It was one of the most humiliating occurrences of my life, and I slunk out of the club and trudged home in disgrace, too defeated to retrieve my bicycle.

Apparently, I’m a schmuck in Beijing too.

How I Wrote Meet Me at the RASCAL

First, I created the basic text by translating into English parts of the Chinese anecdotal source “Yushan yao luan zhi” (“Treachery at Yushan”), by Feng Shu (1593-1645). Here are two sentences from this basic text:

True to what her cousin had told her, Chief Eunuch Wei Zhongxian was then at the height of his influence. On Tiger Hill, in Suzhou, the Puhui Shrine was being built in his honor.

Next, I transplanted the basic text to contemporary and near-future America, resulting in the Baltimore text, named for the city I chose to be the main characters’ American hometown (although not all the action takes place there). Here is the Baltimore version of the two sentences shown above:

True to what her cousin had told her, the current Director of the FBI, a eunuch called King Kong, was then at the height of his influence. In Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, King Kong Coliseum was being built in his honor.

Then, I subjected the Baltimore Text to a process called larding, meaning that I inserted one new sentence between every two sentences already there. Larding is one of the many literary exercises favored by the Oulipo coterie of experimental writers. (See Harry Mathews’ Oulipo Compendium for a full description of larding.) I larded the Baltimore text a total of three times. After the first round, our two sample sentences were now three, and they looked like this (the inserted sentence is italicized):

True to what her cousin had told her, the current Director of the FBI, a eunuch called King Kong, was then at the height of his influence. Eunuchs like King Kong had capitalized on the great demand for their employment in both the private and public sectors, where they reduced the risk of costly sexual harassment lawsuits. In Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, King Kong Coliseum was being built in his honor.

After the second round of larding, the resulting five-sentence passage (with the inserted sentences italicized) read as follows:

True to what her cousin had told her, the current Director of the FBI, a eunuch called King Kong, was then at the height of his influence. He had, in fact, just been named person of the year by Time Magazine. Eunuchs like King Kong had capitalized on the great demand for their employment in both the private and public sectors, where they reduced the risk of costly sexual harassment lawsuits. The trendsetter in this regard had been media scion Pharaoh Weinstein, whose self-castration on live MeToo TV had inspired young Kong (then known by his rapist name of Mahatma Montessori) to choose the gelded path to power. In Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, King Kong Coliseum was being built in his honor.

With the third round of larding (again highlighted in italics), RASCAL assumed its final density, as shown in our sample:

True to what her cousin had told her, the current Director of the FBI, a eunuch called King Kong, was then at the height of his influence. The name King Kong would later figure prominently in accounts of America’s decline, but during his own time he commanded respect and no one deemed his rise improper. He had, in fact, just been named person of the year by Time Magazine. His autobiography, More Balls Than Most, sat immobile atop the New York Times bestseller list, where it dominated both the political and inspirational genres. Eunuchs like King Kong had capitalized on the great demand for their employment in both the private and public sectors, where they reduced the risk of costly sexual harassment lawsuits. (The final liquidation of the Catholic Church in a class-action settlement served as the wake-up call.) The trendsetter in this regard had been media scion Pharaoh Weinstein, whose self-castration on live MeToo TV had inspired young Kong (then known by his rapist name of Mahatma Montessori) to choose the gelded path to power. Kong’s career, in a few short presidential administrations, led him to his current commanding position in the Bureau.

In Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, King Kong Coliseum was being built in his honor.

By the numbers (according to textfixer.com): The Baltimore text contained 371 sentences, which grew into 729, then 1407, and finally 2777, with each round of larding. Between every two sentences of the Baltimore text, there are seven in the completed RASCAL.

Stylistically, the hardest thing about larding is that each new sentence will separate two sentences that belong together, so that the effect on the text is damaging. A writer seeking merely to mitigate the damage would labor to make each new sentence a general nullity, so that nothing of substance is interposed between the ideally consecutive sentences of the original. On the other hand, if the writer, accepting the challenge of the experiment, wishes to transform the damage into an improvement, then he must craft each new sentence to contain either amusing embellishment or wholly new material that follows naturally from the previous sentence while leading seamlessly to the following one. The new sentence, therefore, loops off in a (hopefully) interesting direction before returning to the original thread of the text. The Oulipo exercise of larding is like being forced to use an extension cord to plug in a lamp that is already right next to the electrical socket. One can try to hide the extension cord (or in this case seven extension cords), or one can make it artistically pleasing enough, perhaps by tinkering it into a string of Christmas lights, to count as an important part of the overall décor.

Book Review: Six Frigates, by Ian W. Toll

Although I read mostly novels these days, it’s good every once in a while to check in with an amazing history book, of which Six Frigates is a superb example. The story of the founding and early institutional history of the United States is easily as enthralling as any novel. Toll’s book is very nautically detailed, but it also includes thorough treatments of the Founders, the political parties, the leading issues facing the young republic such as Barbary piracy and French and British impressment of sailors (which seems to approach kidnapping and slavery in its straightforwardness), as well as quaint customs like dueling.

Among Six Frigates’ panorama of the early nineteenth century appears this account of British anti-Americanism, which I read as evidence of the social reaction that came to dominate thought by century’s end:

Hatred of America seems a prevailing sentiment in this country. Whether it be that they have no crown and nobility, and are on this account not quite a genteel power; or that their manners are less polished than our own; or that we grudge their independence…the fact is undeniable that the bulk of our people would fain be at war with them. (p. 276)

Readers of some of my other reviews will know that the tracing of such sentiments to the murderous genteel ideologies of the twentieth century is a pet project of mine.

Here is another private take from Toll’s book: As a Baltimorean, I read the whole work in dreadful anticipation of a cruel truth that finally emerges in a postscript:

1853: Constellation is broken up at the Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk. Some of her timbers may have been incorporated into a new sloop of war, also christened the Constellation. (The latter remains afloat in Baltimore harbor.) (p. 475)

In sum, there is a lot for me in this book (not all of it pleasant), and there is certain to be a lot for you too; but above all it is a gripping, epic story. It will capture (or should I say impress) your imagination, whatever your circumstances.

What I’m Working On

My current book project is a little hard to explain, but I’ll try:

I translated a seventeenth-century Chinese text, a detailed account of a tedious political imbroglio, into English.
I extracted an intriguing subplot concerning a despicable family, resulting in a snappy 6000-word text.
I transplanted the setting to contemporary Baltimore. My impulse was threefold:
- Chinese settings seem to discourage would-be readers, and Baltimore may prove more accessible;
- Chinese names are especially off-putting to would-be readers, so rendering Zhang Qi as Tinus Juckman, Gu Xiangtai as Morgan Schwartzenberg, and Chen Luqian as Ruckleshaus Schumacher will hopefully yield more memorable characters;
- Transplanting Chinese institutions such as eunuchs and public floggings to Baltimore produces a keen jarring effect.
For fuller length and depth (and for the challenge) I am now employing an Oulipo method called larding, which means inserting one new sentence between every two sentences of a given text. The baseline translated/edited/transplanted 6000-word text has, as of this posting, been subjected to almost two full rounds of larding and currently stands at 22,000 words. I plan to lard it a total of three times.

I call it Meet Me at the RASCAL. Here is a choice sentence: “Tinka Klein and an oud player named Ashurbanipal, both naked and dreadlocked to the pubes, leapt back and forth between the modules of Goldie’s Italian leather sofa, trying to avoid collateral damage.”