Using the sortes biblicae method (my favorite) to explore The Rupture Tense. Xie can be terse, she can be political, she can be mysterious and teasing. She can seem briefly euphuistic though maybe this is her way of ridiculing common knowledge.
Some of my favorites are quite sparse, such as “Broken Proverbs,” which consists of 16 one-liners in a Confucian mode, in which at first it’s hard to find a through-line, though there’s an accumulation of cross-reference and diction that starts to add up–“by indirection finding direction out,” as poor old Polonius put it. (I always thought Polonius got a bum rap.) One begins to notice a pattern of reference: words such as wrong, grief, danger, chaos, curdling, laceration, incoherence. It adds up to an indictment.
In any case, many individual lines stand on their own:
- Shove a slogan down the throat enough times and it’ll become an acquired taste.
- The safest form to assume is a mirror.
I will savor this book.
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