In detective stories there’s no birds sing. Joy is forbidden, temptation the sign of the devil, illicit, enthralling, a siren not a song. Joy is the accomplice of crime.  Solving a crime, no matter how chaotic or even random the path, is an epistemological triumph, where the detective follows the rules without following the rules.

The world of Thomas Pynchon’s newest novel, Inherent Vice, is as irreparably flawed as any hard-boiled dystopian mystery. But it is also a world where good karma is every bit as important as fingerprints, good sex (even extreme sex) is not punished, where you not only face the music, you can’t escape it—it won’t turn off.  It’s as if the novel includes a built-in AM radio that’s always on.

Inherent Vice has generally been reviewed as “Pynchon lite.”  But I think it is a wise book, under-rated because it is not portentous, indeed the opposite, in which the case for joy is made, joy as a way toward meaning and central to life rather than a spin-off.  The hero is no longer a passive schlemiel but a “private dick” in every way, who uses his head and feeds it, but unlike the other characters in the book who struggle or blithely fail, he is able to balance joy and responsibility; bridge hedonists, criminals, and police of all stripes, pick your combinations; and bring parents around to children.

He accepts no fees from clients, yet money magically arrives whenever he needs it.  And like found money, puns abound, as if language itself was able to celebrate its accidents without sacrificing itself to disorder.

The plot is convoluted as any Pynchon novel but it moves differently—in bursts driven by the puns and random twists of language, reminding me of Flann O’Brien’s The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman, as if the songs and words rattling around in our heads were characters driving the story and solving the crime was a matter of being in tune with the many voices within.

Click here to read Henry Reese’s bio

Click here to read Sampsonia Way Magazine

As a Chinese citizen, I cannot publish in China. But I can freely “promote Chinese culture” in the U.S., engage in cultural exchanges, and speak from the lectern at American universities

I am deeply impressed by the openness of American culture, and its acceptance of—and identification with—different cultures. It was so in the past, it is even more so at present. I think of a slim book of poetry titled Gitanjali, which, to the surprise and delight of many Asians, was discovered and embraced by the Western world in the 1910s in a spirit of universalism. It was written by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). As a young man, I was influenced by Tagore as well as the American poet Walt Whitman and the Chinese poet Ai Qing. In the underground “literary salons” that my friend Ya Mo and I founded in Guiyang in the 1960s-1970s, all of us were enlightened and inspired by these and other writers of wisdom.

As a Chinese, I am dedicated to cultivating a culture of freedom in contemporary China, a culture that values exchanges with the U.S. and also values the best of Chinese civilization of five thousand years, including the ancient philosophies; the poetry of the Tang, lyrics of the Song, arias of the Yuan, and vernacular fiction of the Qing Dynasty; the figural art of calligraphy; landscape painting; traditional gardens and architecture; uniquely Chinese apparels; and the life- and spirit-nourishing tea culture. The plurality of world cultures should respect, borrow from, complement, enrich, and identify with one another in peaceful coexistence. For me, promoting Chinese culture and Sino-American exchanges is a spiritual as well as a historical and cultural mission.

I have a Chinese heart of poetry and freedom. I am also a citizen of the world. From my interactions with college students in the U.S., I have discovered that young people today are interested not only in their own ethnic and regional cultures, but also in other ethnic cultures that are exotic but universal at the same time. They are not interested in superficial trends or childish repetitions and imitations between cultures.

For me, poetry in the social dimension is a vehicle of moral responsibility and human conscience. As the zenith of Chinese spiritual culture, however, it has nothing to do with social well-being or the worldly pursuit of fame and fortune. It is the externalization of spiritual life at its purest! It is the true heart and soul! It is the original humanity!

It is being one with heaven and earth, being one with the boundless universe!

This is how I define my aesthetic ideal with Chinese humanist characteristics. It also represents my dream of living a “poetic life,” to be distinguished from the lives of ordinary people and politicians. Its meaning and value lies in revealing an independent, self-sufficient “individual life” in the midst of a muddy world.

Click here to read Huang Xiang’s bio.

One Saturday morning while I am walking around my new Pittsburgh neighborhood, I buy a human-sized mirror for a dollar at a yard sale. My sons buy toys and a dinosaur—only 50 cents for each!

Walking in the streets where colorful flowers are blooming, wandering in the park where there’s a playground, going to the yard sale where I can buy quality goods at low prices, I always think it be very great if my relatives and friends were with me now. Whenever I arrive at a pleasant and joyful place, I see my friends from Burma in my mind’s eye and I am overwhelmed by yearning. My happiness becomes incomplete.

Before I go to bed, I check my e-mail and end up spending the whole night at the computer. Nighttime in the United States is daytime in Burma, isn’t it? While chatting with a friend from Sanchaung (a middle class township in Rangoon division), she informs me that her mother-in-law has passed away.

“What happened?” I ask, and then my heart aches as she tells me the story.

After a rainstorm in Rangoon, the waters flooded for hours. Nobody maintains the drainage system, so the water can find no way out. The roads become ponds. Beneath the ponds are sidewalks that were built in British colonial period over 100 years ago. Some are broken, some are cracked, some have holes.

My friend’s mother-in-law was coming back from the market early that morning. The rain was neither light nor heavy. She stepped on the broken sidewalk and just disappeared. Three days later, her body was found blocking the mouth of a canal where it flowed into the Rangoon River. I can’t stop thinking about how many have died in such tragedies.

Another friend e-mails “Hello.” He is working at an NGO and frequently takes trips to countryside. He is younger than me, so he starts his e-mail with the traditional address to an older woman: “Ahma,” he writes, “I can’t stand it anymore.”

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

He doesn’t beat around the bush: “People are starving in the villages.”

“Really?”
I have to wait for his reply; he is typing for a good while. At last his reply shows up, long and painful. “The weather is chaotic; the prices of seeds, fertilizer, and cultivation are all expensive. At the same time that farmers are facing these difficulties, the regime seizes their land so that they become landless farmers. If someone complains about the situation, he is arrested. So people suffer painfully in silence. People don’t have enough food and they are being suppressed. They are angry; they are living in hell.”

Just reading his words, so full of evil pain, I wonder if he is writing in tears. I am suffering, too, since I don’t know how to console him.

On Saturday I get a chance to talk with my mother through gTalk. I ask about her neighbor.

“She doesn’t live here anymore,” my mother replies. “She is going back to her village.”

I am surprised and worried. Her neighbor often suffers heart problems and has to be rushed to the clinic or a hospital. There are no clinics, no hospitals and no medical doctors in the village. If she has a heart problem, what will she do?

I share my worries, but my mother says, “Even if she stays in Rangoon, she doesn’t have money for medical expenses. If she gets ill and is hospitalized, the hospital can provide only the bed, she has to buy everything else. Since she can’t afford to go to a clinic or hospital, living in a village is less expensive. She says she’ll just sit and wait for the day of death.”

I have no words to say. I can only feel sad. What can I do?

Then I think about my friend informing me about death of her mother-in-law, and how many have died because of lack of money for medical treatment.

And I think about how many have been waiting for the day they have to die.

Click here to read Khet Mar’s bio.