Snow and Flames.

Digital Rotation:
Cynic: "Veil of Maya"

I've been spending my blog minutes (and minutes and minutes) on writing long-ish replies to interesting comments on recent posts here on my little brown blog. I'm hoping to actually put up links to my favorite and friends' sites soon (notice that they aren't necessarily the same thing). Just kidding.

The snow is falling yet again. This time, I don't feel quite as elated by the weather as I had in a more introspective mood, but it's still pretty. And it's a nice backdrop to all the work that is piling up on the personal and work fronts.

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I was in PA this past weekend, keeping on the down low more than on the brown side. I had the wonderful chance to dig through a small bookstore and actually finding a book that I've been hoping to get for a while on the remainder table. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace has been of interest to me ever since I read an interview with the author in the Asian American Writers' Workshop magazine, in which she recalls the forging of the book in the aftermath of her father's death, as the flames that engulfed her house also took with them the book that she was working on for many years. She contextualized her losses with the losses that war had been visiting upon the people of Iraq (the fire occurred during the first Gulf War) and other communities destroyed over the decades and centuries of warfare. So she goes through the process of reimagining the book, as well as engaging her feelings about war and peace through a series of writing workshops with veterans in the Bay Area, through which they all come to some sense of what peace truly means. I was fascinated by the concept of the book, the honesty through which she was willing to open up these very personal thoughts and processes, and even the novel that was destroyed and recreated, since I thoroughly enjoyed her previous novel, Tripmaster Monkey, whose main character, Wittman Ah Sing, was the lead in the new story as well.

In my enthusiasm to find the hardcover book for only $1.00 in this tiny bookstore, I actually ended up buying five copies, and convincing one of our friends to buy one as well. It seemed a waste to allow the books to sit forlorn and forgotten on those shelves. It seemed a waste to allow this confrontation with truth and with BIG ISSUES to languish in an eastern PA mall. I'll gift the books. I'll find somewhere to donate them. I'll do anything, but I had to take them from that space where they weren't doing anything for anyone. D was patient, though our bookshelves are brimming with the other books that I've had to rescue from peril in the past 2 years ("look! the complete Federalist Papers for only $1.00!").

Kingston holds a special place for me because her first book, The Woman Warrior, which is the one that most folks know, was our assigned reading when I began my freshman year of college. I got to meet her before our classes started, during freshman orientation. Little did I know that I would eventually find my own path towards both literature and the Asian American studies in which her book had already been cannonized.

Kingston's loss of her book in the flames of the Oakland fire make me appreciate the internet and web journals and weblogs that much more. At least this writing can be accessed from somewhere outside of my home, should it also be lost in flames.