It is — what it is

He sighed. Sighing is the worst form of breathing and I try not to do it myself but I admit it's hard. Sighing is something we struggle to unlearn. (from "The Air as Air")

The stories in An Oral History of Atlantis are funny and weird. I laughed and nodded along. I was so looking forward to a new book from Ed Park; the only disappointment is that it's not a novel. 

The star of the collection, in my view, is "Well-Moistened With Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts." (And I would love for this story to be a full novel.) An archeological dig, funded by a mysterious foundation, consisting of 18 women all named Tina, on a nameless and drifting island, with a mission to collect samples and translate "oracle bone script" — they wanted never to leave.

We contemplated sending him some saucy photos, the Syllabic sybarites draped languorously over pottery shards and lexicons, feeding one another thumb-sized grapes, but that plan could backfire: it wouldn't do to waste a resource as precious as film. So we pecked out letters on the rusty old Remington, asking the Foundation to consider the value of establishing permanent scholars on the island. A final draft was produced. Then we realized there was no mail service. I volunteered to type out five more copies. These were sealed and tied to the legs of birds we'd befriended. We showed them a picture of our benefactor and hoped for the best, releasing them into the giant Rothko painting that was the sky at twilight, salmon over slate.

As for the language of symbols they were intent on deciphering, "everything could mean anything, as well as its opposite. You had to pick which side of the contradiction to embrace, or else record the whole unholy snarl itself." One day a Tina falls ill and leaves, and a replacement is sent, the Anti-Tina. "All poetry is accuracy," she said.

In "Eat Pray Click," a writer of "pure Sensibilism, with a shot of Mood Writing," devises a Kindle hack (or virus) whereby a book is revised on every reading.

Basically, he longed for a text that wasn't set in stone, something more akin to a living organism — a story with free will. He didn't like that books started on the first page and ended on the last.

"Where's the freedom in that?" he'd say, in letter after letter.

"The Gift" describes a charismatic prof's Fundamentals of Aphorism lectures at a community college and recounts the occasion on which the now heavily overused tautology "It is — what it is" was uttered for the first time in recorded history.

Not a weak story among them.

The Stories 
A Note to My Translator  (at 0:56 of audiobook preview) 
The Wife on Ambien (in The New Yorker)
Machine City 
Seven Women 
Two Laptops (more or less)
Thought and Memory
Eat Pray Click (or Easter Promenade)
Slide to Unlock 

Review

What is history?

What is history? So it is asked, repeatedly and pointedly, in Same Bed Different Dreams (no comma), by Ed Park, a readably maximalist metafictional alternate "history" of Korea positing that the Provisional Government established during Japan's occupation of Korea operates to this day, its ultimate aim being a unified Korea. Fact, perception, memory, imagination. Drawing connections and filling in the blanks.

Pop quiz (in the guise of mandatory corporate security training):

After Japan's defeat in World War II, Korea was divided into North and South across the 38th parallel

A. by someone in the U.S. State Department who had to find a map in National Geographic because he wasn't exactly sure where Korea was.

B. and the animosity between the Soviet-backed North and U.S.-backed South led to the Korean War — the "Forgotten War."

C. where no border existed before.

D. or was it?!

I read most of this book two-handedly, in one fist my ereader, in the other my phone, ready to check names and events against popularly recorded history (and I really messed up my algorithms in the process). The problem with reading alternate history is knowing enough actual history to be able to discern the deviations, and to be honest, what little knowledge I have about Korea is limited to K-pop and M*A*S*H

"It's said that the Korean Provisional Government is more a state of mind than an actual governing body." Park reveals foundational members, secret members, anticipatory members, and undercover operatives of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG), among them Isabella Bird, Leon Czolgosz (assassin of President McKinley), poet Yi Sang, Harold Sakata (who portrayed Bond villain Oddjob), Douglas MacArthur, Marilyn Monroe, Jesus Christ, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ronald Reagan, Younghill Kang, Thomas Wolfe, Maxwell Perkins, Richard E. Kim, and Philip Roth.

The history of the KPG is presented in the form of a manuscript titled Same Bed, Different Dreams (with a translator's note about deleting the comma), read by writer Soon Sheen, whose day job, much like mine, mostly consists of navigating (sometimes literally) a techmegacorp, and trying to figure out what the hell their job actually consists of.

Park's Same Bed also asks (literally), "What is a book?" Concerning Syngman Rhee's The Spirit of Independence, one of the secret bibles of the KPG,

Few readers can remember where all the chapters are, which means the book is often encountered out of order. More important than the book's contents is the fact of its existence: that it has been composed in extremis, cut up, and concealed.

This novel is a celebration of fiction, intertextuality, and, in a roundabout way, good editing. "The problem with being a good copy editor is that the world will always be in error."

One main narrative thread concerns the sci-fi series 2333 (so named either to honour the fictional author's wife's birthdate, or to call out the legendary founding of Korea in 2333 bc; personally, I can't help but think of 2666; and apparently in Chinese it's the equivalent of lmao), pulp fiction space adventures written by a PKD-admiring Korean War vet, and serving as inspiration for a couple of game developers, with the resulting software folded into the algorithms of the aforementioned techmegacorp.

This novel bounces from the tragic (suspicious?) death of Kim Jong Il's little brother at the age of about 4 to the circumstances of the destruction in 1983 of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by Soviet Air Forces.

Despite its concern with Korea, it's dense with Americana. It follows Betsy Palmer (who eventually starred in Friday the 13th, which has an imagined backstory rooted in the Korean War and its aimless violence can be seen as an allegory of American intervention; also one of Kim Jong Il's favourite movies). It trails Ronald Reagan (who ratted out communists and eventually became president). It documents their encounters on gameshow I've Got a Secret. It plays JFA on a loop (that's punk band Jodie Foster's Army, whose name was inspired by John Hinkley Jr, who attempted to assassinate Reagan).

(Palmer also dated James Dean, regarding whom we have this wonderful sentence: "Half of him is falling apart at the seams while the other half insists there are no seams.")

Also hockey lore. One short chapter division is named after my hometown, being where Tim Horton crashed and died (and I've been craving a cruller since reading those pages). Because of course Same Bed covers the history of the Buffalo Sabres, whose very existence is tied to the KPG, evidenced through their 1974 11th-round draft pick — "nonexistent" Taro Tsujimoto of the Tokyo Katanas (why are they called the "sabres" anyway?), and culminating in Park's dramatization of the fog game, featuring a bat swooping down from the arena rafters. Apparently, you can't make this stuff up.

I am inspired to see Friday the 13th, a film I didn't think I'd ever watch, even though Same Bed has given away the entire plot and ending. 

Yura insists that the film is as deep and beautiful and disquieting as anything he's seen. That it's a dream masquerading as the ultimate horror film. A poem of grief. 

It was early pages when I gave up on grasping the intricacies of occupational and international politics, and simply gave myself over to this wild ride, a distorted fun-house version of history laden with conspiracy. Park performs pure magic.

To do
Procure a copy of Dictee.
Watch Friday the 13th.