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Succubus to the Incubus

What a line. Only someone like a cultural anthropologist could say a line like this about Ruth Madoff, wife of the infamous notorious Bernie.

“She’s perceived as the succubus to Bernie’s incubus,” said Prof. Richard A. Shweder, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago. “She was inside a circle of people whose wealth has been sucked out of the system.”

Full article here.

Definition of succubus from wikipedia: In folklore, a succubus (plural succubi) is a demon^[1] in dreams to have sexual intercourse, according to the medieval European legend. Its male counterpart is the incubus. They draw energy from the men to sustain themselves, often until the point of exhaustion or death of the victim.

since May

Some days, I feel like a complete bump on a log. The hours fly by and I have nothing to show for it. I even forget that I'm supposed to be looking for a job because there aren't many jobs to look at. But then if I look back a little closely, I see that so much has happened and there is much to celebrate. Here is a recap since May of my adventures in the kitchen, in the world of Irvine, and elsewhere.

I made an amazing sandwich from leftovers.


I sold my cute too big bike to a volcom surfer dude.


We celebrated my mom's 50th birthday at Taps Restaurant in Brea. That's my brother's cute girlfriend on the right.


I took over my mom's kitchen to do my first paid wedding floral gig. She ended up taking it over with her new bff from korea. I was peeved but relieved.


It was too much work for too little pay. By the end, I wished I had charged 3x the amount I quoted. I think I'm going to nix any ideas of a side business. This kind of nonstop labor is only worth it for my best friends.

I went to the Irvine farmer's market with Jacob. He got very excited about the 3 for $1 pomellos at the CalPoly stand.


I got excited about the succulents.

I made almond biscotti using this recipe.

And I went to a bachelorette party in Hawaii. I met a new friend Reshma, a bridesmaid from London. I reconnected with Tiff and Kate. I watched Sung-Ae eat.

And I watched beautiful Sung Yeon and Joe get married.

And I watched the single groomsmen forage and hunt.

It was a blast. Complete with cupcakes and paddleboarding.


And lastly, today, I created a new address logo using Adobe Illustrator CS4 which some of you will be seeing in your mail.

Here's to the rest of June. May it be filled with new friends, new experiences, and fun times at the beach.

p.s.- i have no idea why my pics are coming out small.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

I have a friend who blogs about her practice of living inspired. I admire her constant search for inspiration and how she continues to find inspiration in unexpected places, filling her life with wonder and new possibilities.

Last week, an email exchange with her reminded me of her valued search for inspiration and I began to think about what inspires me. If you're not used to thinking in those terms, it's a little hard to get there. It takes some warming up and I drew a blank.

Spivak inspired me last week although it's still a swirling mass of challenging and intriguing ideas around my head. Did baking an amazing zucchini orange marmalade bread from the Tartine cookbook count as inspiration? Maybe.

But today, I finally finished What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Vintage International) by Haruki Murakami and when I had read the last page and closed the book with satisfaction, I said emphatically, "Aha! This book inspires me!"

It's interesting, you know. From reading the book, I didn't feel like I should pick up running or even write a book. Murakami wrote this book as a memoir of sorts, a quest to find out for himself what his personal standard has been as a runner and writer. He chronicles how he first started writing, first started running, and how those two shaped each other and his life's perspective.

Towards the end of the book, Murakami writes about becoming a better swimmer for triathlon competitions. He finds a coach who strips his form down and teaches him one thing at a time. At first, it is "awful and awkward" and he can't understand how learning to swim (for ex.) flat as a board without rotation is going to help him. Next, his coach introduces rotating his left shoulder only and makes him swim up and down the pool doing only that. And so on ad tedium until one day, everything clicks. Every part of his body is moving as it should. His old habits have been broken, his old form is no more, a new form has emerged, a synchronization of all the new parts. Revelation!

Murakami's experience reminded me of learning to play the piano. I started piano lessons when I was four years old and ended in college. For a time in my youth, my parents were convinced that I was going to become a concert pianist and I would practice for 2-3 hours and could only leave the bench to go to the bathroom. Since then, my fingers have become stiff and I am nowhere near the kind of fluid alacrity I had on the keys. But I remember the drills and the experience of revelation. I remember the scales, the arpeggios, my worn out Czerny book. I remember how good it felt when I conquered a scale and my fingers flew over something that had troubled me a few weeks before. I remember how my teacher and I would break down a piece and how I would practice each trill, each measure over and over again until it was flawless and everything came together. I had no false illusions about becoming a world class pianist overnight. I knew it would take hours of practice, dedication, and years of devotion.

Similarly, I feel the same way about printing and book arts. I have no illusions of becoming a letterpress printer over night. Slowly but surely through my classes, I have gained a vocabulary and dexterity with my movements that have helped me become more and more proficient at designing, setting type, and printing correctly.

Why is it then that I never applied this to the art of writing? Maybe it's because it's so foreign (unprofitable, impractical?) and language around it so pretentious and lofty. How many times have I read or heard, "writing cannot be taught"? The idea is that talent for writing is innate and either you have it or you don't. Everyday, I sit in front of my laptop or notebook (or worse, think about sitting in front of my laptop or notebook) and wonder about how to do what I want so much to do i.e. write the damn novel. The writer's life feels shrouded in mystery and fantasy, an inacessible dream. Or in other word(s), bullshit.

Murakami's memoir shows me that writing, like any other craft and skill, is about the process of doing things over and over again, mastering each small thing, taking each step towards the finish line, getting a coach, doing whatever it is to keep on the journey of living the way your heart takes you and learning to do it with the pain of Reality. And when you finish something, you get up and do it again or find something new to challenge yourself, to keep learning about yourself, to keep being healthy. The learning and growing never ends.

After reading the book, I didn't feel like I should pick up running or even write a book. I felt and thought these things:
1. I need to do writing drills like I used to do piano drills.
2. I need training: a good coach, exercises, a space and structure for practice.
3. When I sit down to write, I cannot sit down to write a book. I sit down to write a word, a sentence, and to grow and learn.

Inspiring.

Thanks mom and dad for all those years of piano lessons. And thanks Liz for the inspiration to live inspired.

Spivak, the Subaltern, feminism

One of the perks of having no job to report to each day is that I get to attend seminars on UCI's campus. UCI gets an impressive array of world class scholars to visit, especially when it comes to deconstruction and critical theory (like Derrida).

J. invited me to attend a two day seminar by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a scholar whom I had never heard of (which only speaks of my ignorance in such things). I declined the first day's lectures. J. came back raving, muttering for hours about feminism and Hannah Arendt and reproductive heteronormativity and the notion of honorary male in post-menopausal women. I was intrigued enough to attend the second day.

To be honest, for the first half of the 3 hour session, I had no idea what her work was supposed to be doing. It was obvious that she was a powerhouse of a scholar. She was cross-referencing philosophy, literature, and anthropology and translating from original texts in multiple languages (french, bengali, german) while she taught about her feminist theories. It was so esoteric with only slight glimmers of understanding and practical application that I began to realize there were people such as her who lived on a completely higher level of thinking and the only way the masses got it was to have it trickled down bit by bit by people who kept breaking it down into dumber more understandable morsels.

By the 2nd half however, things started coming together. It's much too convoluted in my head to even try to explain "what" it was that was coming together for me but I left inspired and challenged by her passion for feminism, her intellectual rigor, her discipline and activist energy. I realized that what she was trying to do with all of her work, her deconstructive readings of literature and philosophy, her reflections on contemporary society, was to show how there was no legitimate understanding or place for the role of "woman" and the closest thing we had to a place and/or recognition was the status of honorary male given to post-menopausal, aging women who were post-reproductive (thus unable to be identified as woman by the ability to reproduce) and intelligent enough to command respect in the sphere of men. Or something like that.

Afterwards, we shook hands. J. and her had a little tete-a-tete over tea sandwiches. After all that, it was nice to see her as a normal human being who talked about her past lover and needed to run off to the gym because she hadn't worked out in 10 days.

A stimulating afternoon even if I only understood like 2% of what I heard. A couple things became clearer. Whatever my life work is, it will have to do with women. And it is becoming clearer that I must continue to be in places that nurture ideas and consider them a necessary part of being.