...

activities of daily living, by lisa hsiao chen

i feel like so much of my life i've spent just thinking about projects, and about dying, and so reading Activities of Daily Living by Lisa Hsiao Chen—another book i found at the library—felt deeply familiar, and replenishing, and comforting to my soul. both a narrative about looking after an ailing stepfather and a gathering of different ways that time, death, and projects have been imagined, theorized, and experienced by different artists, writers, thinkers. (i feel like i have so many things to read and track down.) most featured in the book—and the subject of the protagonist's Project—is the performance artist Tehching Hsieh (谢德庆), to whom this book was my formal introduction.

hearing about hsieh's pieces, one balks at the idea of committing whole years of their life to such undertakings, not only because they are so punishing and long, but because they are so thoroughly, unashamedly unproductive. to which another says, the pointlessness is the point; freedom is exercising the freedom to waste one's time; what does it mean to be productive?; aren't all projects a lovingly deliberate waste of time?

the project that would become Activities was originally conceived as a collection of diary entries to be kept over the course of years. (note: it was partly inspired by boris groy's short piece "the loneliness of the project," which i also recommend reading.) though it didn't turn out exactly as conceived (the book is classified as autofiction), this book still feels, in many moments, like a diary. and not just in the way that its material feels so intimately real, but evenin the way the days unravel, slowly, inevitably, not in deference to a singular plot or thematic unity. structurally, the book reminded me of a more ponderous Weather by Jenny Offill—its constant movement between narrative and rumination, its love of quotations, factoids and anecdotes (the relation or significance of which is often left unexplicated, as an exercise for the reader), equal parts poignant and wry.

When she first grasped the full extent of the Father's camera collection and gear—including more than a dozen cameras and hundreds of lenses, lens hoods, tripods, light meters, timers, filters, and other items he'd acquired mostly through eBay auctions and local flea markets, some of them not even removed from their boxes—Alice was aggrieved by how much time and money he'd wasted on things he'd barely even used. Such were the dreams of the project, the arid talk about opening a bar or gallery-café space; the late-night tinkering on a doomed automobile; the movie treatments, the list of possible band names—all those larval, mewling things like newborn kittens, their eyes still gummed shut and their ears not even properly sprouted, vulnerable to being drowned in a sack or left in a shoebox beneath a freeway underpass—and how, despite and because of all this, nothing quite gleams like a future project, forever the unspoiled crush object seen from across the room.

Most people are probably only capable of one or two big ideas in their lifetimes. Alice, for one, was starting to think that her only subject was time, and however she might construct provocations around this subject, her only real idea about time was that it passes and that this is sad.

i'm thankful for this book; i cherished the experience of reading it and feeling subtly changed by it. sincerely recommend.

thanks for reading. ♥ take care.