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Ming Pian

The book is printed on business cards, enough card-pages to fill a business card album. Is it about the anxieties of 面子? Yes. No. Maybe. Yes.

Salon 383: Sound & Sense— Composer/sound artist Yin Yi; Gu Ling on Chinese poetry and translation; poetry by Hai An

freshly painted across the street from our building

Monika and I are pleased to announce that the second event in our Salon 383 series will be held this Sunday, February 12 from 3 – 5pm.

Salon 383 seeks to create a space for artists, writers, designers, musicians and critics to present their work in a warm, informal atmosphere followed by discussion among the artists and audience members.

On Sunday, we’ll explore the surprising beauty of everyday sounds with composer and sound artist Yin Yi, learn from writer and art critic Gu Ling how to read classical Chinese poetry and calligraphy in the midst of the hypermodern cosmopolitan urban world of contemporary Shanghai, and hear the poetry of poet and translator Hai An in both Chinese and English. Scroll down for more information on the presenters and their projects below.

Coffee, tea, mineral water and snacks will be provided. RMB 20 admission. Please RSVP.

Sunday, February 12 from 3 – 5pm 

Colorbox Creative Arts Center
83 Xiangyang Lu, #20, first floor 
上海市襄阳路383弄20号

Acoustic Sound Art | Yin Yi

If one were to ask you how many sounds you heard on your way home yesterday, what would your answer be? Think not of the sounds you “should have” heard, but the ones you really heard. Shanghai-based sound artist Yin Yi will talk about his love affair with acoustics and sound and present a micro-acoustic concert that explores the charisma of sound itself.

Reading Chinese Poetry | Gu Ling

A few foreign friends of mine hang Chinese poetry written in calligraphy in their homes without knowing the meaning of the poetry or how to read it. This presentation provides a how-to gateway into Chinese poetry using images, sound and film.

Bilingual Poetry Reading | Hai An

The poet Hai An will read a selection of poems selected from throughout his writing career, and David Perry will read versions of the poems in English translation.

*

Yin Yi is a Shanghai-based composer, sound artist and location recording producer. He is also the founder  of the BM Space Art Space (Douban page). As an independent composer, his range of work includes live music performance, modern dance, drama, physical theatre and film. As a sound artist, Yin Yi focuses on sounds from the city and daily life and has been researching a sound art project title “City Sound Travel.” He also teaches digital audio technology and sound design. 

Gu Ling is a Shanghai-based writer, translator, and media and art researcher and critic interested in the variety of Chinese classical art practices and how they relate to modern life. She works for trueart.com and is a contributing writing for the arts site randian 燃点 (“Flashpoint”).

Poet and translator Hai An was born in Taizhou, Zhejiang and now lives in Shanghai. He has published a number of volumes of poetry, translated the work of many foreign poets into Chinese, edited a major anthology of Western poetry in Chinese translation, and appeared a several international poetry festivals and conferences both in China and abroad. He teaches literature at Fudan University.

A Tongue-Twister for Tibetans

 Twitter poem No. 1*

Yongkang Lu between Xianyang Lu and Jiashan Lu before Expo gentrification

Where Futurama translator
Queen Meet the Dead
gave gay writers
a Trojan Horse. WHO
WILL JESSE VENTURA
ENDORSE? China’s
African Union HQ?
Al Jazeera English?
Occupy Oakland?

New Study gross as it is
of RNC appears with
Tiananmen tank man.

Facebook sends jobs
mock public, rolls w
leaders affected by 
sadomasochistic tarts, 
anti-locust Hong Kongers,
Higgs democracy, burning
the black flag, police violence.

Newt Gingrich’s biggest
donor: gambling Asians
in Macau, Singapore and 
hacked up bits of Paterson
saying “pro-abortion” spam

like an older sister
tongue-twister for Tibetans

who hate the police
watching Angela Merkel
destroyed by bulldozers

*built (fast) from my feed

 

Notes on Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”

Teaching a lot of Orwell this spring in a writing class focused on questions of economic equality and justice. I mean inequality and injustice. Haven’t read him in a long time. Plan to re-engage here with Orwell as I reread his work.

1.

Orwell is too rational. I mean that in the best way, but he’s an idealist realist, and his ideals lead (led as he changed) him to prescribe and proscribe (and so rationally). To scribe ( “Why I Write”). Politically. And he’s on the right side most agree, picking an Orwell from the pile. You can be a neocon ex-Trotskyite like Hitchens and agree (in fact, claim Orwell for your very own, you imagine yourself “the O of our times” and are ever the contrarian, and imagine Iraq your own private Catalonia). You can be a Chomskyite retro-anarcho-syndicalist and agree, again and in another — radically different own private Catalonia. You can be a bland centrist and Orwell is so rational and preaches against extremes — this is what you remember from Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, you think — and you blithely use “Orwellian” in conversation in precisely the lazy and sloppy fashion proscribed in “Politics and the English Language” to mean any number of things in any number of lazy sloppy moments. You can be a libertarian a la Ron Paul and love Orwell for his nightmare visions of malevolent total state power. You can be a right-wing pundit on Fox and use “Orwellian” in just the same fashion as the bland moderate. You can be on Democracy Now! talking to Amy Goodman and Orwell is there for you. But in the end, the thing is, this is just what “Politics and the English Language” wants to fight (my brain almost typed “militates against,” but then thought better). He would hate the word “overdetermined.” He would appreciate the irony of his name and its adjective form being so.

 

Thinking about Liu Xiaobo too. Liu Xia’s “ugly doll” photographs, as well.

Google Liu Xiaobo Orwellian

BOMB IRAN

A poem from a set written not long after we moved to Shanghai and settled down in the French Concession near the old publisher’s row on Shaoxing Lu (once known as the Rue Victor-Emmanuel III). It was published at some point in Sal Mimeo. I tend not to think about old poems much, but the recent surge in American-Iranian saber rattling in the US media have sent me back a few times to this one. Lots of 2006 references here, with “BOMB IRAN” being the closer.

WORLD BANK CARD ALBUM

for Kevin Davies

We wish we could drop it
The defining massacre of the moment
Ours, the day a diastole
flooding with blood and vowels
O say wait what not to come
Let’s face “our moment”
In fidelity to the imagined-as-forgotten:
We knew she’d be there, up to her neck in the frozen river
The important thing now
Is more orders, ones requiring less
Loss of top-shelf self in the supply chain
Than this which requires guilt and admission
You have to take the train
To Lhasa before the rest of you
Here hit the dice: I misread 1 a.m. as I AM
Again, radio on
Rhetorician in Maine woods!
A long haul from bad nights’ sleep
Upon sleep, and then, again and there
On the other end of the beam a stranger
One of countless broken means
The floating world of cartoon bears
Like ictus means a meter or a seizure
The body’s prosody buried in thin
Dirt above the creek below the cave
In the Reading Room it’s Illy
Flipping through the World Bank Card Album
Shangainese retirees waltz amidst the fumes
I mistranslate shaoxing both ways as “little happiness”
LA Times editorial opines: BOMB IRAN (11/9/06)

 

The Chinese DVD pirate pundit speaks

The Great Sages

Laozi
Zhuangzi 
Kongzi
Mengzi
Ponzi

Notice Tone

Is off the chest box isgarden
dirt going construction ballsite

cold side of Mercury where
all our ornery hormones

rip generator airlight or where
pure pneumatic hammers

durian strapped to a moped
form scramble runaround &

Jump horny vac
jump

Translation: Two poems by Hai An

The Shanghai poet Hai An recently asked me to work with him on translations of two of his poems in advance of the 25th anniversary meeting of the Shanghai Translators Association. So I did.

 

A HIGH-SPEED TRAIN

With her last glance she sees
The scene collapsing out the window. A dragonfly gone

A little girl in a train car amidst fellow townspeople
The instant of blooming done, undone

A flash of summer lightning in the south hits the line
Strikes the high-speed train strikes the heart of state machinery

So much pain out in the fields, so many souls departing, such
Sudden news shocks this world

For a century, the train passed far from her house
And further yet into her dreams. Dragonflies skimmed low

Rails disappearing far into the distance cut the horizon, drew her far
Trains from the west vanishing into the sky

A siren wails. Day cuts into night again and again
Wakes us up, wakes up as in the past

And tonight unknowing she
Falls into night without end or beginning

(2011)

 

动 车

她最后的一瞥,看见
窗外的景致坍塌。蜻蜓不见了

一位小女孩,随同一车的父老乡亲
顷刻间完成一生的绽放

一道南国的闪电,击中了一列
飞奔的动车,一列国家机器的中枢

哀鸿遍野的惨痛,纷飞的灵魂
一夜间,震惊了全球

整整一百年,火车开到了家门口
开进她的梦想。蜻蜓低飞

那长长的铁轨,一再撑开她的远方
火车打从西方驶来,消失在更远的天际

汽笛声声。黑夜只是暂歇的白昼
还会醒来,一如既往地醒来

而今晚,她的灵魂无从知晓
为何要湮灭在这片黑漆漆的夜色里?

(2011)

 

TSUNAMI

The sea rose broke down the door
And came straight at you

Dragged you into its water, surrender
Struggle shall cease without delay
Drift, drift with the flotsam
Though dead, you cannot sink into the sea
People, shut up for once about your dignity and rights

The dahlias on Sumatra
Notorious Dahlias
In full bloom in the sea
But boundless is the ocean
Where we find love, rise from suffering

As in mere moments the sea rose
to reclaim its lost territory

(2004)


海 啸

大海站起身,破门
走到你的面前

拉下水,卸去一切武装
战火即刻消停
随波逐流,漂成一堆垃圾
死了不让你沉入海底
人类,奢谈你的尊严与权利

苏门答腊岛的大丽花
臭名远扬的大丽花
在大海怒放
而更为辽阔的是心灵之海
爱,正从苦难中起身

大海站起身,一夜间
收复所有的失地

(2004)