> live mad, die sane
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: a double cow feature, westerns, indestructible muffins.
Hello friend,
> Reading: My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki, about a Japanese American woman making a documentary TV series titled My American Wife! sponsored by Big Beef. Naturally, I love it.
> Watching: First Cow with friends. I watch more often than not through the lens of race, so mostly I was noticing the foregrounding of White frontiersmen, the backgrounding of BIPOC. I know this lens is not always productive, especially when there were some important moments of subverting racist tropes (i.e. when the Chinese American protagonist asked the White protagonist "Where are you from?"). As a movie, it's quiet and atmospheric, and I'm into the baking. And although I don't think movies should be only about identity politics, it's difficult for the film not to reflect my discomfort on pioneer life—the ethos of a pioneer is to be the "first" in the west, but of course pioneers were not the first. The existence of the pioneer erases the existence of Indigenous people. Still, it's a lovely film, and maybe these are just the limits of the story and Kelly Reichardt was doing the best she could with her source material.
> Looking for a western that centers Asian American voices? My rec is C Pam Zhang's novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold.
> Newsletter rec is Anne Boyer's M I R A B I L A R Y. From this week's issue:
And yet this is it, this life — the only party we got invited to. Marx told us as much about not getting to make our history under conditions of our choosing. If I'd chosen, it would be whenever a person could sit in a grove doing dialectics as an acolyte of the religion of Don Quixote, a religion which has only two commandments:
- be a shepherd
- live mad, die sane
That time would probably be communism. And as this is not yet the case, I write about literature at all or to you today because I am saving my own soul by remembering that even in the grim times, what each of us has is each other. At least there is that You, which is every beloved, which constitutes itself across difference and species and the whole of life.
> I have high hopes for Sohla El-Waylly's new show with Andrew Rea (of Binging with Babish fame). Highly recommend the second episode, featuring a 7-course convenience store tasting menu.
> Making: Melissa Clark's muffins, a nearly indestructible recipe, given that I changed not only the flour but also the sugar and added a few extra ingredients, including leftover stir-fried carrots.
> "The Kitchen, Indexed" by Ira Goga:
A glass knife. A candle. Chamomile.
A handsaw. A hand towel.
A sharps container. Stones
that may or may not be hollow,
holding crystals. Ceramic tributes
to the moon. A no-kill mousetrap.
Carnations. Carnal studies. Blue thread,
to make stitches. Matches, to be struck.
I wanted to understand form,
the beginning of things. I deconstructed.
I stopped a clock, pulled its hands
from its hard face. I undressed
beneath the incandescent overhead.
I couldn’t name myself, but I renamed myself.
In a bowl, strawberries thawed
in their own wet red. I couldn’t think
too hard, which worried me. Because
there was no answer I wanted. To be a man
to be a tree / or something less / like a plank.
What I saw, I pinned down. I listed
what I knew to be true. Road salt
in an open dish. An hourglass full
of pink sand. A ruler. Assuming what I saw
was honest. The name? It means watchful
(later I found, in Latin, wrath. Oops).
It is my duty, dear reader, to never look away.
> Revisionist history brought to you by Roger Shimomura.
Cheers,
Tiffany