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“Maxine Hong Kingston: Buddha In Berkeley”

Leonard’s essay starts as a review of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey…gotta love that title….and, I admit, have never heard of the author. He writes that in the novel, “America in the sixties is looked at through the lens of a half-dozen Chinese novels, most of them sixteenth century.” What?! It get’s better. The protagonist, Wittman Ah Sing (Witman? Sing? …Song of Myself?...different Whitman), is  “Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield, Augie March, maybe even Stephen Daedalus.” I’m just impressed I know who all four of those are…although can’t say that I’ve read more than the first few pages of Ullysses. According to Leonard, “Wittman is a ‘tripmaster,’ a friendly guide to the stoned in their travels…But he’s also…an incarnation of the Monkey King in Wu Ch’eng-en’s sixteenth century Journey to the West.

This sounds too freaky not to read.

Cool drawing of the Monkey King:

New word: Götterdämmerung = “twilight of the gods”…the last Opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle.

New learning: Great quote from the book, “To think up reasons why something would not work guarantees that it will not work. Never do feasibility studies. Get on with creation.”