Theme Magazine (print) Interview with Yumi Roth, Filipino American Sculptor October 2008 Profile of Jinoh Park, Korean American Filmmaker July 2008 “Love in the Time of Television,” article about the Confucian traits in Korean soap operas August 2006 “Beijing’s Underground Rock Scene,” article about Beijing rock music pioneers including Xiao Rong and Kaiser Kuo June 2006 Interview with Zhang Da, Shanghainese fashion designer featured in the first Chinese Vogue (as translator) October 2005
Asianavenue (digital) Article about Korean American Filmmakers (including Greg Pak, Mike Kang) 2002 Article about Asian American Adoptees 2003 Article about Asian American Dog Breeds (Thai Ridgeback, Jindo, and Tibetan terrier) 2003
China Daily (print, English edition) Beijing Profile of Ray Blue, American Jazz musician teaching at the Midi School of Music (China’s first rock/jazz music school) 2002
Mme. Figaro China (print, Chinese edition) Beijing Co-wrote and co-researched article on Latin Dance in Beijing (included interviews with a pioneering teacher based at the Brazilian Embassy) with a then-editor Lucy Chen, who translated into Chinese 2002
Beijing Journal (print, English, under editor Michael O’Neill) Beijing Article on Latin Dance in Beijing (reworked and rewrote previous in English) 2002 Article on the New Silk Road, China’s top modelling agency (interviewed CEO and models about the emerging Chinese industry) 2002
Le Magazine (print, English, under editor Jerry Chan, magazine owned by mogul Hong Huang) Beijing Article about the “Emperor’s Mall” behind the Summer Palace 2002 Article about local hiking equipment shops (for a newly emerging pastime in Beijing) and ideal places for hiking outside Beijing 2002 Article about History of Chinese Acupuncture 2001 Film Review of “Suzhou River,” indie film starring Zhou Xun directed by Lou Ye 2001 Film Review of “Dancer in the Dark,” starring Bjork and directed by Lars Von Trier 2001
I hope to do something with this piece. Sharing it just for the moment.
The Flowers in His Pocket: “Time Machine” and Histories of Flowers
Wendy Cheng October 22, 2017 For M.A. Seminar with Sarah Cole at Columbia University
Flowers play a most mysterious role in H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine.” They are described in more general terms than just about anything else in the book, and yet their appearances structure the time travel exploration in unmistakable “plot points” from beginning to end. Rhododendrons and “mauve and purple blossoms dropping in a shower under the beating of hailstones” (Wells 25) are the first thing the Time Traveler sees when he arrives in the future world. Garlands of flowers are brought in greeting by the Eloi and more significantly by Weena after he saves her from drowning in a stream, marking the beginning of the central relationship. The Time Traveler later discovers “two withered flowers” like “white mallows” (Wells 59) in his pocket, gifts picked for him by Weena during their arduous journey toward the Palace of Green Porcelain. By the end of the book, these flowers emerge as the only evidence he possesses, and can share, of the future world. In Wells’ epilogue, he claims that they represent “gratitude” and a “mutual tenderness,” and one gets the sense that he attributes these values to the overall meaning of the book. Yet what kind of “gratitude” is being described, and what kind of “meaning” does the novel really impart in its entirety? While the flowers remind us of the altruistic exchange between Weena and the Time Traveler – her sacrificing her life to retrieve his time machine in return for his having saved her own life – their romance and relationship play only a slight, peripheral role to the solitary experience of the Time Traveler and his accumulation of intellectual knowledge. I argue that in examining a few histories of flowers – mainly, that of the evolution of flowers in context of the overall evolution of plants, and that of Victorian botanical innovations like the “Wardian Case” – we can clearly understand the ”gratitude” these flowers represent in Wells as being not a humanist (nor romantic) one, but a post-humanist, post- religious and post-national one. One must consider the view afforded by the end of the book as highlighting mutual dependence and interactions as forms of “altruism,” or “romance” that have occurred for over more than a hundred million years between angiosperms, or flowering plants, as well as their lichen ancestors – and all other living things on the planet. In giving flowers center stage, Wells challenges us to give angiosperms their due.
Flowering plants played a major role in what defined Charles Darwin as an evolutionary theorist specifically because they were an obstacle to his advancements. Darwin was famously confounded by the suddenness with which angiosperms burst onto the scene during the history of evolution, about one hundred and fifty million years ago. “Darwin long pondered the origin and rapid diversification of flowering plants, describing them as an ‘abominable mystery.’ In comparison with gymnosperms, which possess rather rudimentary male and female cones (like the pine cone), flowering plants present several innovations: the flower contains the male organs (stamens) and the female organs (pistil), surrounded by petals and sepals, while the ovules, instead of being naked, are protected within the pistil. How was nature able to invent the flower, a structure so different from that of cones?” (“Where Do Flowers Come From?”).
Angiosperms, or flowering plants – with flowers being the plants’ sexual organs- were an advancement on gymnosperms, or plants with cones. The innovation of flowers enabled angiosperms to become the most successful of all plants in their self-proliferation and diversification, as they used the mobility of other living things – insects and animals – to spread their genes all over the earth and allow for genetic mutation. Today there are about 300,000 species of flowering plants – a mere 300,000 to my mind, as that means grouping Americans alone into clusters of roughly 1000 people each would allow us to represent every kind of flower that exists. And angiosperms now make up eighty percent of all living plants on earth. As the major source of food for all living things – they are our plums, our squash, our peas and potatoes – flowering plants could easily be said to have had a reciprocal life of “mutual tenderness” with humans, animals and insects.
While some people think of Darwin as being confounded by the “how” of gymnosperms leading to angiosperms – an issue that some scientists have recently theorized as having been solved by the discovery of a “common ancestor” called the Welwitschia, a plant with cones that include male organs and a kind of vestigial, non-functioning female organ (“Where Do Flowers Come From?”) – Darwin’s “Abominable Mystery” is actually far more central to his prominence as an evolutionary theorist than that – and for the same reasons that they could be seen as central to Wells’ book. Darwin defined himself against the prevailing evolution theories of the later 19th century by suggesting a gradual sense of evolution; he believed that “nature does not take a leap.” The previous theorists had subscribed to “saltational” speciation, “also known as abrupt speciation” or “the discontinuity in a lineage that occurs through genetic mutations, chromosomal aberrations or other evolutionary mechanisms that cause reproductively isolated individuals to establish a new species population” (Friedman). In other words, flowers were the one thing that became an obstacle to Darwin’s advancement in evolution – as well as to our generally accepted contemporary belief in the gradual effect of genetic mutation. This infers that one can see the sudden emergence of flowers as representing something post-religiously and provisionally “divine,” or outside of the realm of trends proven by science.
Wells often refers to flowers as simply “flowers” – rhododendrons are the only specific kind of flower he ever names in the book, and this clearly contrasts with the specificity with which he describes, for example, the German influence on Greek writing as affecting a person’s success in absorbing the classics via time travel. This simplification of flowers as a subject recalls the way that divinity is usually represented without nomenclature. And there is something about the way flowers represent what is “good evolution” in the future world, as well as the “goodwill and gratitude” that occur between two races – the human and Eloi – that gives flowers a provisionally “divine” function in the book. Indeed, flowers could be seen as a non-Godlike God, and this is clarified by both their similarity and contrast to lichens, which are the only living things that the Time Traveler witnesses in the farthest future he has visited by the end of the book. When looking at the history of lichens, we can see how that future world devoid of animals, human-like creatures, flowers or trees simultaneously represents a farthest past. Lichens could be the oldest living organisms, and as carbon sinks, they played a large role in balancing carbon dioxide and oxygen in a way that allowed earth to be habitable for humans and other living things (Hedges, Kennedy). Wells’ farthest future does not portray the doom of a world where human-like creatures can never exist again, so much as it represents our defeat by an organism that never needed us, especially not as much as flowers did. One could see lichens as representing a kind of unknowable and disinterested God, the kind of God that people feared precisely when Humanism became prevalent. Flowers, instead, can represent a post-humanist, post-religious collaborator, one that allows us to invest our energies in a symbiotic rather than Baconian subjugating style.
In briefly looking at a Victorian botanical innovation, we can more easily understand flowers as expressing a post-national “gratitude” or “mutual tenderness.” Richard Mabey, in his “Cabaret of Plants,” describes the development of the Wardian Case, the prototype of what would later develop into the first “botanical theatres, the nineteenth century’s glass arks” (Mabey 253). A doctor initially concerned about the effect of industry on his patients’ health, Ward later became personally frustrated with being unable to grow his ferns in the toxic atmosphere of East End, London. He began to grow them in sealed glass jars on his window ledge, following Joseph Priestley’s first discoveries that “plants enclosed in airtight glass cases are self-sustaining” (254). After Ward succeeded in using sealed glass jars to raise thirty different species in three years, he began to develop glass cases that would soon be used to ship plants between far distances; the first went from London to the Antipodes. His Wardian cases would be mass produced and by the 1840’s, were used to transport 20,000 tea plants from Shanghai to the Himalayas for the East Indian Company (Mabey 256). This meant that by Wells’ time, “suburban hothouses” full of “exotic vegetation” would be accessible to any householder. And the grandest of all at Chatsworth, the Duke of Devonshire’s seat in Derbyshire was probably an elite version of what Wells’ father had access to as a gardener, though it gives us some perspective on the possibilities: “There were massive, exotic foliage plants and ferns brought from the jungles and mountains of distant continents, orange trees brought from Malta, altingias and araucarias, date palms from the Tankerville collection, the feathery cocoa palm and the giant palms…hibiscus, bougainvillea… cassias, cinnamon trees… the bird of paradise flower…” (257).
One can easily imagine how the availability of “exotic” plants as seen specifically through varying forms of “glass cases,” and for the first time in one’s history, could inspire a person to seek a deeper and more organic connection to other peoples. The Eloi as a race immediately bring to mind Tibetans with their monks’ robes and large communal temples. It is no accident that rhododendrons come from Southeast Asia and are more abundant in Tibet than anywhere else in the world. And by indulging in an imagined world full of garlands of flowers, Wells expresses a wish to go beyond the glass case and experience a tradition aligned with that of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Indians and indigenous cultures all over the world.
If taken primarily from the perspective of an environmental gratitude, one finds Wells advocating an attitude for humanity that is neither sentimental nor without heart. Flowers, ironically, symbolize what is romantic and ideal, and yet our relationship with them has been one where we have merely benefitted each other in ways that are both necessary and pleasant. It is perhaps similar to the ways in which a gardener might interact with a garden he prefers, or the caretaker of a house with a house that she admires. It is similar, too, to how a gardener might offer to marry a girl specifically after her mother has died, as in the case of Wells’ parents. It might be the kindest sort of interaction that we can ever really ask for, the sort that we enjoy but that also saves our lives. Perhaps Wells is saying that for us to have that relationship with the environment, we must first understand that that is exactly what it’s like.
Belyeu, Samantha. “Why are Flowering Plants Important to the Earth and Humans?” Sciencing. April 24, 2017 https://sciencing.com/flowering-plants-important-earth-humans-6628704.html
“Where Do Flowers Come From? Shedding Light on Darwin’s ‘Abominable Mystery’.” Phys.org, Feb 17, 2017 https://phys.org/news/2017-02-darwin-abominable-mystery.html
Friedman, W.E. “The Meaning of Darwin’s ‘Abominable Mystery’.” Pubmed.gov, 2008 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21628174
Hedges, Blair and Kennedy, Barbara K. “First Land Plants and Fungi Changed Earth’s Climate, Paving the Way for Explosive Evolution of Land Animals, New Gene Study Suggests.” Penn State Science. http://science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2001-news/Hedges8-2001.htm
Mabey, Richard. “The Cabaret of Plants.” W.W. Norton, 2016, New York, NY. “Origin of Flowers Have Been Discovered.” IFL Science. http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-
animals/origin-flowers-has-been-discovered/
“Rhododendron,” The Flower Expert. https://www.theflowerexpert.com/content/mostpopularflowers/morepopularflowers/rhododendron
For NYC-based Theme Magazine in 2006, I interviewed two prominent Chinese rock musicians who I had met while living in Beijing in 2000. One was XiaoRong, a popular punk rocker who, to my high-maintenance sensibilities, had the charisma of Bruce Lee. The other was Kaiser Kuo, an American-born pioneer of Chinese rock who had been a founding member of Tang Chao and was rumored to have brought the first guitar pedal to China.
Theme Magazine, Founded by Jiae Kim and John Lee. Edited by Rain Noe.
Here’s a link to a youtube of a performance of XiaoRong’s when he first emerged. It’s good to be reminded that these things were happening in China at the turn of the millennia:
Theme Magazine, NYC. Founders: John Lee and Jiae Kim. Editor: Rain Noe***disclaimer: as a feminist who has been sensitive to reactions of female readers, I need to point out that my Korean-American editor, who is brilliant but male, chose to add the word “slew” to the first sentence. I remember this clearly because I do not typically use that word. I’m sure I have the drafts to back this up. It is also notable that I was asked to write this article by my Korean-American editors-in-chief: very happy to do so, but I have detected some sensitivity in the responses of my readers. For example, I might not have chosen to highlight the quote that is enlarged; that was the editors-in-chief’s emphasis, as it’s a graphic design choice. Obviously there are a number of varying human characteristics described throughout the article according to the carefully-designed content of the tv shows, which I chose from among perhaps eight or so box-sets offered me by my editors-in-chief. I do believe my descriptions of the shows are very precise.
Le Zhou Kan, begun in 2000, was the original predecessor to “Time Out Beijing” and was owned by Hong Huang, the celebrated Beijing media mogul and pioneer of Lifestyle magazines in China (her mother was Mao’s translator, and Hong herself was formerly married to Chinese film giant Chen Kaige). Le was one of a small handful of magazines that combined the resources of western expatriates and locals to delineate and also encourage the growth of leisure, “lifestyle” and entertainment of a mode that many locals might have found to be completely western.
My very first published articles were thus these two reviews, for “Suzhou River” by celebrated Chinese indie director Lou Ye, and “Dancer in the Dark” by Lars von Trier, both of which came out that year.
***Note added 1-19-20: These first two documents are drafts I wrote before my editor did the final edits. There were some substantial differences.
I kept only one copy of the dozens of issues I worked on that year, images of which are presented below. Our then-editor Jerry Chan can be found at: http://facebook.com/jerry.chan2 and https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-chan-987b1924/
Here’s the masthead for the issue I have (whose cover, with the tennis players, is on home page) – my birth name, Wendy Cheng, is under Editorial:
For nostalgia’s sake: My very first journalism task was to work as a listings editor for Le, and I got to translate addresses of entertainment venues, which were fairly developed in Beijing:
My first trials at interviews were with Zheng Xiaolong, famous in China for “Beijinger in NY,” and Jin Chen, a newbie director. Info from the latter was used for a movie summary, printed here in the upper left hand corner, for “Chrysanthemum Tea”:
Another fond memory I have was of researching “movie bars,” which were a phenomenon that existed in Beijing, but not in New York City or in any other city as I’d personally witnessed. More details in the copy of my jottings on these bars below:
I just completed an interview with Boris Frumin about his work on Grigori Kozintsev’s 1970 adaptation of “King Lear” for Cineaste Magazine, currently online for the summer issue. Please keep reading to find the link!
Grigori Kozintsev’s 1970 “King Lear” is arguably the most moving Shakespeare adaptation on film. Peter Brooks and Kozintsev wrote letters to each other from England and the Soviet Union as they simultaneously planned two versions of the Shakespeare classic. Brooks wrote that his visual form – consisting of lots of medium closeups and closeups – was inspired by Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Joan of Arc.” But his film’s volubility led Kozintsev to protest that the power of “Joan of Arc” came from its silence. Kozintsev himself chose to bring out the emotion of “Lear” by transcending historicism and prioritizing the power of its events over dialogue.
It was fantastic working with Boris Frumin, a mentor to many important American filmmakers as well as to myself, and with the pioneering Gary Crowdus and his staff at Cineaste Magazine, for this article. My research on Kozintsev’s film – and the phenomenon of “glocalization” – was initially guided by the wonderful Julie Peters in her “Global Shakespeare” class at Columbia’s graduate English Literature program. Please read the interview to learn about an important part of film history and its impact on the developments of the film industry in America today: https://www.cineaste.com/summer2020/from-minimalism-to-neorealism-boris-frumin-interview
And keep reading this blog to see a few photos that are not featured in the article, of Frumin on set and a book he was given by Kozintsev as a gift!
Valentina Shendrikova as Cordelia, Juri Jarvet as King Lear.Juri Jarvet and Oleg Dal.
Boris Frumin, first Assistant Director, on set with actor Leonhard Merzin, who played Edgar:
Frumin talking to Grigori Kozintsev:
A book of poems by prominent Soviet poet Arseny Tarkovsky, father of Andrei Tarkovsky, given by Kozintsev to Frumin. The inscription reads, “Great poems of the father of the great director to remember days of baptism by fire on ‘King Lear'”:
The following is a research proposal I wrote in recent years. Whether or not I end up writing a book on this topic, I believe that the points addressed here are important for filmmakers to consider. The argument is basically for closer and more disciplined reading as a way to increase the articulation of the film medium:
Memory Arts were initiated by Simonides in ancient Greek culture and continued by practitioners like Giulio Camillo during the Renaissance. They were extended by rhetoricians like Thomas Wilson in the Early Modern period and reflected by Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre. Memory Arts can provide contemporary film culture with a useful genealogy for the beginnings of film technology.
Frances Yates’ “The Art of Memory” not only demystifies the hierarchy of words over images by describing the history of their interplay through Memory Arts, she also mentions examples of mnemotechnic which would imbue any filmmaker or film enthusiast with nostalgia for the early workings of film. One example is the mental placement of character- and prop-resembling objects over loci, or locations, to aid memory. More striking are varied uses of mental lighting and framing. Perhaps most unique are Early Modern developments like mental re-sizing of objects, a maneuver which allowed people to visualize objects in juxtapositions and perspectives that would be impossible in real life, just as in film montage.
Human Image on a Memory Locus. From Romberch, Congestorim artificiose memorie, ed. of 1533 (Yates 118)
As film camera technology has a history of under two hundred years, and literature a history of more than two thousand, one wonders if the film medium will ever bloom with the diversity and rigor of form that has developed in literature over millennia. Many people seem to accept the opposite.
Henri Bergson’s “Matter and Memory” (1896), largely seen as the philosophical precursor to film theory, draws back to an idea that Camillo echoed in Plato about the inherent relationship between memory and the spirit. It fundamentally entwines ethics, responsibility, and the power of visual images while elaborating at length about the physical workings of memory in the brain. But Bergson’s later film followers, in a traumatized post-Freudian, post-World War era, may have clung most to “immediacy” of action and physicality – and intuition versus rationalism – as being crucial to knowledge. It is this celebration of immediacy that has made film attractive to artists and to audiences – a delving into the moment. But moving forward, could we not just as easily promote an alternate line of descendants to Bergson’s theories which makes film more accountable to literature and past archives, potentially increasing the capacity of “articulation” in film?
John Millington Synge in the Aran Islands
For example, aspects of diction, prosody, and an author’s specific codification of language should contribute just as much – or far more – to films as characters do (or plot structure, or environmental details). In a recent paper, I compared diction and form in John Millington Synge’s account of the Aran Islands to that in Somerville and Ross. Synge’s use of language, nourished by physicality and unusual experience, is marked by simplicity and transparency: when a man jumps from rock to rock in cowskin sandals, that is all that needs to be said. However, striking phrases like “long-legged pigs” or “wreathes of seaweed in their hair” contribute just as much to a visual template different from Somerville and Ross’s version. The female authors not only tend more toward cultural and intellectual allusion throughout their journey in the Islands, but reveal a momentum-driven surreality that stems from physical paralysis: “the creaking of their boots was as… the delirium of a corncrake.” Should not the most interesting forms of language more frequently represent the lives of authors and the characters and situations they create through visuals in film?
A corncrake, perhaps delirious.
We can look, too, at authors whose words were developed in a time impacted by newly-emerging visual mediums. When Joyce depicts a young woman standing under lamplight, why has no filmmaker simply followed that blueprint and accurately captured the depth of feeling of that moment? When scholars read Emily Dickinson’s codification of “noon” as consciousness, or “birds” in their varying modes of flight, should not these visual ideas more accurately express who Emily Dickinson was than any “immediate” or “physicalized” representation of her earthly life?
The millennia of “articulation” which we developed through literature and its word-based corollaries were assisted, time and time again, by visual methods. Visual technologies emerged after millennia-long interaction with words in memory practice. Thus, one could anticipate that the film medium is destined to grow beyond its initial – while ever-relevant – celebration of ‘immediacy,’ and to increase its capacities of articulation through a fuller use of literary archives to inform visual choice.
Sue-Lynn Zan December 21, 2018, edited May 22, 2020
Edith Somerville and Violet Martin (a.k.a. Martin Ross) were second cousins who belonged to an elite Anglo-Irish family of the late 19th century. They published their first commercially-successful novel, “The Real Charlotte,” when James Joyce was twelve years old.
Edith Somerville
Violet Martin
I wrote an article for Ploughshares Blog that explores connections between the texts of James Joyce’s famous short story “Araby” and Somerville and Ross’s novel “The Real Charlotte.” I observed these synchronicities after having taught the short story at the School of Visual Arts, recognizing what appeared to be echoes of wordings and a few significant plot events. As “The Real Charlotte” emerged a popular novel the same year of the “Araby” bazaar which inspired Joyce’s short story, I began to consider the ways in which the authors’ milieus intersected. Please see my article at this link: http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/transmigrations-in-joyce-and-somerville-ross/
I continue to find these women empowering and a source of inspiration, as they were not only acrobatically witty writers and skilled visual artists, but also ardent environmentalists. Like Zelda Fitzgerald, Somerville and Ross were young women whose background of privilege sometimes lent to flaws in their creative work; unlike Zelda Fitzgerald, they found a niche for themselves that afforded them financial independence and a high level of recognition.
Great thanks to Colm Toibin for introducing the book to me at Columbia and mentoring my research, and to Ellen Duffer at Ploughshares for being a supportive and generous editor.
