Unreal city

I getting tired of titling these blog posts. My little tatters of allusion are getting more and more arbitrary. This one contains just the frailest gossamer of sense. In the future, I might just starting quoting from “The Waste Land” in line order, just to have something pretty running up and down my sidebar. I’m exactly that kind of shameless douche.

Tomorrow I’ve got a placement test. Still sleeping and waking at convent hour, up with the Prime, so at least I won’t have to worry about making the 9:45 call time. I keep hearing ICLP tends to under-place, so I’ll probably emerge from the classroom with a rueful smile and a welt across my pride. I tell myself it’ll be nice, maybe, to learn the lowly foundational things really thoroughly. My instinct is always to snip off corners in my haste to cut through to the cool stuff— the interesting readings, the seminal texts I’ll feel legit for having crammed into my messy repertoire. I know it’ll be good for me to learn patience. But I’d have more fun tumbling inelegantly through thorny sentences that are too hard for me, I’m sure.

I spent the day with the metro map at my fingertips again, chose a station near a dense concentration of those rainbow dots that stand for tourist traps. My favorite find of the day— the flagship branch of this sometime bookstore that expanded into purveying every kind of bourgeois culture— world maps, soft jazz, lattes, and ready-to-wear. There’s a heaven on earth. Its name is Eslite.

The selection of English-language books sent me into paroxysms of consumerist lust, but even a trigger-happy shopper like me knows it’d be stupid to cart home a stack of Roman alphabet from Taipei. I spent a lot of time China-squatting in front of the western philosophy section— basically four shelves’ worth of Kant. It’s a subject I’m really only interested in during episodes of Philistine guilt, or when it’s presented in an emphatically non-western language, I guess. I also stared at the strange, beautiful, devastatingly priced knickknacks scattered throughout the building, the usual acquisitive pressure building in my fingertips. I wanted to buy them all— as gifts, so I could rinse off with generosity the shame of a useless purchase. That’s the funny thing about Eslite— it makes you start wondering who among your acquaintances could use an owl plushy or a jigsaw puzzle of a medieval unicorn tapestry.

I did make an impulse buy, the Chinese-language edition of the tiger mom book— an incentive, I guess, to get less illiterate with respect to traditional characters. If they’d had it in simplified, I would have gotten one for my parents.

After three hours of exquisitely curated temptation, I took the Bannan line to Ximen, a shopper’s paradise navigable by foot. My destination was Carrefour, a behemoth department store I had fond memories of from Harbin. Somehow I’d gotten it into my head that this was the most promising place to find a pillow— sleeping on Arendt and Nietzsche is romantic and all, but a nice wadding of cotton would be lots more comfortable than the second-semester DS curriculum. I got to drag my haul up and down Ximen and through the metro system— an absurd-looking tourist clutching a pillow.

Before and after I wandered, engaging in arbitrary acts of religious tourism as prompted by my metro map. The temples, while beautiful, always make me feel slightly uncomfortable— just the sort of minor psychic irritation that makes you seek out its source again and again. Or maybe that’s just me. In the States it was different, touring with the Religious Studies department, a Sanskrit-reading, lucidly nodding crew of undergrads and divines. Almost none of us were practitioners, and the lamas knew Professor Quintman, who once worked as a shrine keeper in the very rooms we circled while talking about Avalokitesvara, snapping discrete photos of the altars.

In Taipei I stand next to believers, staring up at richly carved ceilings while they do semantically opaque things with bows and incense. It reminds me that I don’t know much about religious practice at all.

And in a way I think I’m more interested in the churches— the gray blocky Catholic one near the Gongguan station, the Grace Baptist, elegant in a pyramidal pomo way, even the grimy little one next door.