Borges' Library: June 2022

Schadenfreude, A Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For
by Rebecca Schuman (Goodreads Review)

This memoir is beautifully voiced. Original, fun and really hilarious at times too. For me, Schuman is a cross between Dave Barry and Mrs Maisel. It kept me smiling and laughing the entire read.

The book spans a long time--from senior year in high school until she is 38, about to have a baby. Memoirs with long time spans are tough to pull off. I am now starting work on a language memoir of my own (Japanese) and hoping to study with Schuman at Stanford Continuing Studies. While I was reading, I kept wondering, "is this really okay to make fun of Germans like this?" My husband says it is allowed... She is so hilarious --especially when she went back to Berlin again in grad school to try to become fluent yet again. And I loved how her passion for Kafka propelled the entire life story-- laughing when every single German person took time to remind her that, yeah, Kafka is not German!

The funny parts were funny, but I have to say I preferred the serious parts. She was excellent on Heidegger and Wittgenstein and I would have wanted a lot more of that. I suspect there was more but maybe that was edited out. What a shame that would have been as those parts really captured my interest. I also appreciated her long struggle with trying to get tenure. Her struggle was long but the descriptions did not drag on and in fact, it was only the very last part of the book.

I was happy it had a happy ending too.
Now, I am off to see what else she is writing.
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Crying in H Mart
by Michelle Zauner

Goodread Review

One of the most talented writers I have met at UCLA Extension recently raved about this book, so I had to read it immediately. It's been on my radar since it came out... though I had not heard of Zauner's band till after reading the book. A very moving account of the author's relationship with her mother, it spanned from her childhood and teenage years till after her mother's death and the years after. During the illness, at one point, I started to think if I ever doubted that having kids was meaningful, all I had to do was read this book as I was deeply moved by the author's care and devotion to her mother. She is an extraordinarily kind and loving human being. The best daughter. She even managed to make her wedding be about her mother over her own self... I loved her story and admired her character so much.

The book was a bit slow-reading for me, not because I wasn't interested, but rather because it never brought much outside reference to the story. Many people will appreciate that since you are always right there in story, it creates a very cinematic experience... And this book is incredibly evocative and emotionally compelling like the best cinema. That said, for me, I would have loved more history and context about certain aspects of Korean culture she was writing about-- especially about family relations, the language and more about food. I am imagining a cookbook at least someday!! I will never forget the book. Like the reviewer in the Chicago Review of Books, I also expected to cry (which I did) but did not expect to find myself deep in self-reflection: "In this book, Zauner brings us all in so close that we’re left with no other option but to examine our own lives just as closely."

The Magical Language of Others
by E.J. Koh

Review

As I was reading, in some ways it felt the exact opposite to Crying in H Mart--in story, but also in writing styles.

The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays
by Esmé Weijun Wang

Review

This book is a tour de force. It is a book of essays that works on the reader like the best memoir you have ever read. I stayed up late two nights in a row because I could not put it down. As a person who is not fundamentally interested in psychiatry and issues of pharmacology, I resisted buying the book because life is short and there are so many books sitting on my nightstand. But after reading a short article about the author, I felt impressed and wanted to read more and then could not stop reading. This book has the best of everything non-fiction: gorgeous and precise sentences, thought provoking ideas, a lot of research that leads to insights and a world-opening artistic vision. Need I say more? I love the chapter on Chimayo best.

Fragrant Rice: My Continuing Love Affair with Bali [Includes 115 Recipes]
by Janet De Neefe

Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir
by Farah Bashir

In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri

Goodreads Review

It is an interesting premise: Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist gives up her language of strength and power to embark on a journey of writing in another language... one in which she is not proficient at yet. I once knew a Polish writer whose English was so fluent that I never once caught a hint that it was not his native tongue. A modern-day Joseph Conrad? A genius who one day informed me that he had decided to give up English.... why, I asked? Well, according to him, he was bored thinking about the things that people thought of in English. In French, he declared, the intellectual possibilities were wide open. the language he thought and dreamt in grew out of is reading--and if he preferred reading French books then I figured it only made sense he would want to think in that language as well. I feel the same about Japanese. I prefer myself when I was thinking and reading in that language. And so Lahiri's choice makes sense... in a nutshell, she fell in love. With a language, with its literature and its people.

Fragrant Rice: My Continuing Love Affair with Bali [Includes 115 Recipes]
by Janet De Neefe

All Strangers Are Kin, by Zora O'Neill

Goodreads Review

To make people laugh in a foreign language. What a wonderful life goal! Languages all have their personalities--and so in many ways when you switch languages you become another person.

Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
by Raquel Cepeda

Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging
by Anne Liu Kellor (no review)

Taste: My Life through Food
by Stanley Tucci

Educated
by Tara Westover

My beautiful bowl. It was sold as an artifact found at the bottom of the sea. From the Wanli Shipwreck (+/- 1625), which was a European vessel loaded with Chinese kraak porcelain--mainly from Jingdezhen. I really wanted a bowl from the wreck but this was the only one I could afford. It is incredible how well it withstood hundreds of years underwater.

I was, however, puzzled by the interior. Not very beautiful, right? The catalogue said it is Sanskrit for 福 (fortune). I spoke to the salvager and he said that an expert at Jingdezhen told him that was what it was and that many ceramics at the time had sloppy Sanskrit--perhaps for the Japanese market, I wondered, since Shingon Buddhism in Japan values expressions in Sanskrit language--written in Siddam.

The Siddham script is a descendent of the Brahmi script and an ancestor of the Devanagari script. The name Siddham comes from Sanskrit and means "accomplished or perfected" The Siddham script is mainly used by Shingon Buddhists in Japan to write out mantra and sutras in Sanskrit. It was introduced to Japan by Kukai in 806 AD after he had studied Sanskrit and Mantrayana Buddhism in China. In Japan the Siddham script is known as 梵字 (bonji).

Poking around with the help of scholars Victor Mair and Jan Walls, we (and by "we" I mean they) figured out that it was almost certainly not Siddam 福 (fortune) but "Buddha" 佛。

It is possible, anyway, if a Portuguese or Dutch ship (the Wanli wreck was Portuguese) was sailing back to Europe from Macao, loaded down with ceramics for the European market, they might carry some things for the Japanese market since the ships stopped in Malacca, where there was a thriving spice and ceramics market... this is the basic background of my novel manuscript from way back that I want to finish.... off-load ceramics for Japan and buy spices. The ship went down before reaching the harbor... but not far off-shore.

I have seen unreadable Arabic script on Chinese ceramics --but this really was pretty bad...

Victor Mair cautions:

Dear Leanne,

A number of bowls found in the Belitung shipwreck had pseudo-Arabic
writing, and I've also seen pseudo-Siddham writing on various objects.

best,

VHM

Professor Mair contacted Suzanne Valenstein, long term curator of ceramics at the Met in New York (now retired), who had this to say:

Regarding Leanne Ogasawara’s inquiry, below, I have consulted the following:

First and foremost, a book by John Ayers, now-retired Keeper of the Far Eastern Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum (and my personal Chinese-pot-guru for over sixty years): The Baur Collection, Geneva. Chinese Ceramics, Volume Two: Ming Porcelains and Other Wares. Geneva, Switzerland, 1969. (And now, obviously, out of print.)

No. 588, Plate A 185. “Blue-and-white dish of lotus form. Mark and reign of Wan Li (1573-1619). Diameter 19.0 cm.

Moulded in the form of an open lotus flower with two ranks of sixteen scalloped petals, the lower rank with projecting points on the outside; the rim foliate; small, low foot. In the center inside is a medallion with a Sanscrit character with ju-I heads, and round the outside the upper rank of petals contains eight further characters alternating with floral sprays, forming an inscription. The six-character mark is written underglaze blue.” He further mentions similar bowls in several museum collections.

John’s book was revised and republished in Geneva in 1999, Chinese Ceramics in the Baur Collection, Volume 1. The dish is illustrated in Plate 78 [previously as Plate A185]. The physical description is the same as before, but there is a change in the description of the characters: “Inside is a medallion painted with the Sanscrit character for ’Buddha’ (Chinese fo) bordered with ru-i heads, and round the outside the upper rank of petals contains eight further characters alternating with floral sprays.”

Another of my favorite authorities is Wang Qingzheng, of the Shanghai Museum. His 368-page book, A Dictionary of Chinese Ceramics (in English), Singapore, 2002, is absolutely indispensable in the study of Chinese pots.

Under the topic of Motifs, on page 256, Mr. Wang lists: “Sanskrit (fan wen). An ancient written language of India, this script is used as a decorative element on temple vessels in the Ming dynasty. Sanskrit inscriptions, mainly rendered in underglaze blue, are quotations from Buddhist scriptures or incantations.” He illustrates a blue-and-white dish that is not foliated like the one that John Ayers illustrated. This dish has a large, presumably Sanskrit, central character, surrounded by three rows of other presumably Sanskrit characters.

Jan Walls reminded me that at the Ming court the influence of Tibetan Buddhism was strong but that many mistakes in the various scripts could be found on porcelain.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time. --Francis Bacon

Other material

Borges' Library

A blog that will interest almost no one...

Reading Memoir 2019-2022

Wanli Shipwrecked Bowl-- a Mystery

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