Notes Towards Day 12 (Thurs, Feb. 23): Licking (The Book) of Salt

Exquisite.

A relief for me. This is the kind of story I want to read more of, in which there
are people like me, generally speaking (I'll settle for anything that isn't very
heteronormative), but who have lives outside their genders, identities beyond
their sexual partners and practices....Someone's got to do it, normalize
(for lack of a better word?) queerness so it's not all Brokeback Mountain and
Boys Don't Cry and The Well of Loneliness. Stories about queer people, not
about queerness.

... And so perhaps The Book of Salt represents an accomplishment which
feminism is right now struggling with: this book achieves a kind of inclusiveness,
in which any and every person is relevant because any and every person is
gendered in addition to and, and, and ... And the gendering informs the rest,
the rest informs the gendering.

"She thought she was hearing GertrudeStein's laughter....
I thought I was hearing my father's voice. She had left
hers behind. I had unfortunately overpacked." (160)

"there is no forgiveness in ancestor worship,
only retribution and eternal debt." (196-197)

"To them, my body offers an exacting, predetermined
life story. It cripples their imagination as it does mine....
I am an Indochinese laborer, generalized and indiscriminate,
easily spotted and readily identifiable all the same. It is this
curious mixture of careless disregard and notoriety that
makes me long to take my body into a busy Saigon
marketplace and lose it in the crush. There, I tell myself,
I was just a man...." (152)

"She has a democratic stare....She looks and looks until she sees....
Her weakness...lies in the sheer force of her suppositions...They
make her vulnerable in unexpected ways." (157)

"Sorrow preys on the unprotected openings, the eyes, ears, mouth,
and heart. Do not speak, see, hear or feel. Pain is allayed, and
sadness will subside. Ignorance...is best for someone like me." (107)

"I lie to myself like no one else can." (80)

VI. How do we read this novel, in light of Stein's aesthetic?
"Pointless overdecoration, GertrudeStein explains, thinking of the
commas and periods she has plucked from the pages of her writings.
Such interference, she insists, are nothing more than toads flattened
on a country road, careless and unsightly. The modern world is without
limits, she tells Miss Toklas, so the modern story must accomodate
the possibilities--a road where she can get lost if she so choses
or go slow and touch each blade of grass." (28)

"My comprehension...is based mostly on my ability to look for the
signals and intepret the signs. Words...are convenient, a handy
shortcut to meaning. But too often, words limit and deny." (117)

"'Slip your own meanings into their words'...Language is a house with
a host of doors, and I am too often uninvited and without the keys." (155)

"A 'memory' for me was another way of saying a 'story.'
A 'story' was another way of saying a 'gift.'" (258)

VII. What kinds of words does Truong/Binh use?
How did they "operate" on you??

Jan Clausen, "The Cook's Tale."
Women's Review of Books 20, 10-11 (July 2003):
like a documentary film technique, the camera imparts its
own sense of motion to still photographs--
a swooped, focusing, animating effect...

"bloodless": heavy reliance on images and repetition
(overwritten? inviting of interpretation?)

lacks fleshed-out people:
Binh flexible and mercurial,
but static, suspended between eventful
memory and present, w/ few choices
sexual & linguistic homelessness
feminized stereotypes of Asian men

"flat": appropriate both to their iconic status and
cook's need to know them as behavioral probabilities....?

VIII. But: let's look harder and longer at the
uneasy power relations in the novel (per Clausen):