I probably won’t be updating things here in the near future. But I will be posting about life and writing in my clandestine thoughtletter “A Stroll in the Megamall.”
Blog
Greetings to Those of 2018
I made this website in 2013, shortly after graduating from college.
Has it been five years?
I made this website while living in Shanghai for the first time.
And now I am back in China, in Beijing, this time.
Continue reading
New Ventures, New Essays
As a general update on myself and my art . . . Continue reading
10 Reasons For and Against Activism
I believe that intolerance, wealth distribution, elitism, mass incarceration, government surveillance, environmental destruction, extortionate medical costs, and an increasingly irrelevant education system afflict my country and must be addressed. But does my belief in this morally compel me to be an activist? Continue reading
Some Notes of Note(s)
Let’s talk about notebooks, because I like them. When I’m putting down new creative writing, I use a good pen and a discerningly selected notebook. Usually, I’m sitting in a cafe with a black medium coffee. In most cafes I sit by the window, but in my favorite cafes, the kind with thoughts floating around, I’ll sit in a dark corner.
Lessons from the Appalachian Trail
From March 8th to August 11th, I hiked the length of the Appalachian Trail. Along the way, a friend asked me to name three things I had learned. Bothered by my inability to come up with something at the time, I sat down and made this list.
Sometimes
I get a little mixed up sometimes.
Sometimes I catch this bug that makes me think posting things online will accomplish something. That I will connect with someone, somewhere, somehow and be richer for it.
Continue reading
Quote the Twentieth
“It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction is a part of truth.” – Mark Twain
Quote the Nineteenth
“My greatest dream is to be studied by literary academics. I have left clues for them like Dan Brown left clues for Robert Langdon.” – Jonathan Safran Foer
Quote the Eighteenth
“To hate a good thing begets hatred. To hate an evil thing begets love.” – Cormac McCarthy
Quote the Seventeenth
“I have some ideas—the very saying of them makes them true—that will inevitably make me a famous artist.” – Andy Warhol
Quote the Sixteenth
“Much of my art is missing an essential ingredient of wisdom, that of sadness. This is intentional. I have left space for it as a courtesy, so that when you stop laughing, in a dark nook, or lying in bed, you have somewhere to put it.” – Calvin Harris
Quote the Fifteenth
“To become great is to believe in the stories about all those who became great before you.” – Haruki Murakami
Quote the Fourteenth
“The single greatest achievement in life is irreducibility.” – David Lynch
Quote the Thirteenth
“Reading about great artists who lived depressed, isolated, tortured lives I feel a pang of fear because I know some part of me has absorbed this possibility for myself, and may push me towards it without my knowledge or ability to protest.” – David Foster Wallace
Quote the Twelfth
“There are so many otherwise unreachable truths about myself that I am able to express through my art, but that isn’t enough.” – Charlie Kaufman
Quote the Eleventh
“If we admit that human life can be ruled, then all possibility of life is renewed.” – Leo Tolstoy
Quote the Tenth
“One must savor every moment like a saccharine wound.” – Federico Garcia Lorca
Quote the Ninth
“Anything that is only one thing is no thing.”
– Thomas Mann
Quote the Eighth
“Everything James Joyce writes is a joke; sometimes it’s funny; sometimes it’s true.”
– James Joyce
Quote the Seventh
“The boy says, ‘I am narcissistic; I am pretentious; I am a fool.’ The man turns and says, ‘You are narcissistic; you are pretentious; you are a fool.’”
– Walt Whitman
Faces Wanted
I want your face!
You may have noticed the big scary image of myself in the middle of my website, well, I want that to go. This website is an ongoing art piece in itself, and the first stage of that is replacing my face with yours.
Quote the Sixth
“There are so many people I have decided not to be.”
– Charlie Kaufman
Quote The Fifth
“The Doctor Who episode about Van Gogh made me cry.”
– James Franco
Quote The Fourth
“In an encounter with dense meaning you must first sniff, then pucker, swish and spit; comment on your appreciation of bitter things and ask is that almond?”
– Douglas Adams
Quote The Third
“All change is good, even that which is evil.”
– Joe Biden
Quote The Second
“A true artist is both an imposter and a god, but never an imposter god.”
– Herman Melville
Quote The First
“To be pretentious is to believe god lives in the gap between logic and aesthetics.”
– Terrence Malick
Welcome
There’s a place in my pink heart, a small room between the ventricles, a septal defect, they say, furnished with white plaster walls and two cherry red ottomans, on the left of which I sit, cross-legged, with a cup of steaming macchiato, patting beside me invitingly.
