I finally understand the true meaning of suffering after reading Thích Nhất Hạnh’s How to Smile. All these years, I thought I was stressing out thin, worrying too much, and depressing, but I was suffering. Using bitter melon (khổ qua) as a metaphor, Thích Nhất Hạnh explained:

There’s a vegetable in Vietnam called bitter melon. The Chinese word for bitter also means suffering. If you’re not used to eating bitter melon, you may suffer.…

Suffering is bitter, and our natural tendency is to run away from it. Our store consciousness, our unconscious mind, can set up a program of behaviors to help us run away from suffering and approach only what’s pleasant. This prevents us from knowing the goodness of suffering, the healing it can bring.

As I read this passage, his message makes perfect sense. Suffering is inevitable. No matter how good your life is or how much money you have, you will experience suffering. You have to face it. Thích Nhất Hạnh reminded us:

When you don’t know how to handle the suffering inside you or how to help handle the suffering around you, you may try not to be there anymore, thinking that will make you feel better. To commit suicide is an act of despair. It’s not wise

What I have been experiencing all these years is suffering. The longer you live, the more suffering you will have to go through. I am only 47, and yet I suffered the lost of both of my parents. I care deeply about my family, career, and democracy, but they are out of my control. When I feel completely hopeless, I suffer. If I can’t get rid of suffering, I have to embrace it. This is what Thích Nhất Hạnh was getting at:

[O]ur conscious mind knows that suffering has things to teach us, and that we shouldn’t be afraid of it. We are ready to suffer a little bit in order to learn, grow, and heal. We have to use our intelligence. We use our concentration to get insight, to transform the suffering and become an enlightened one, a free person.

Rather than succumb to suffering, I thrive on it. I don’t want suffering to hold me back. I was suffering when I first learned snowboarding. I kept falling hard and I could have given up, but I didn’t want to run away from my suffering. I kept at it until I could turn my suffering into pleasants. After reading this book, I will face suffering with a smile.

Tập thơ Đời mãi ở phương đông của nhà thơ Du Tử Lê phát hành năm 1974 lúc ông 32 tuổi. Ông viết trong tình trạng ưu uất và vốn đã nên những bài thơ tình của ông nói lên sự đau đớn: “tình như một đường gươm / ngực đây, gươm hãy ngập”.

Hạnh phúc lúc đó đối với ông cũng rất sầu muộn. Trong “Khi ở biển với T.C”, ông viết:

hạnh phúc ở trên cao
ta đào sâu dưới đáy
hãy vỗ lên đời tan
Những ngày mưa lệ nhạt

Và ông kết thúc rằng:

hạnh phúc không có chân
cách gì ta đuổi được
tình yêu không có cánh
làm sao ta bay theo
tất cả ở tim người
cõi hư vô thần thánh

Lớn lên vào thời điểm chinh chiến, ông thèm thuồng da thịt như thèm thuồng hòa bình:

ta trở về nha trang
thấy trời ôm biển lạ
bỗng anh thèm ôm em
thấy nụ hôn rất ngọt
thấy ngực thơm mùi trầm
ôi hòa bình hòa bình

Và “Giữ đời cho nhau” là bài thơ quen thuộc vì được nhạc sĩ Từ Công Phụng phổ thành ca khúc:

ơn em thơ dại từ trời
theo ta xuống biển vớt đời ta trôi
ơn em, dáng mỏng mưa vời
theo ta lên núi về đồi yêu thương
ơn em, ngực ngải môi trầm
cho ta cỏ mặn trăm lần lá ngoan
ơn em, hơi thoảng chỗ nằm
dấu quanh quẩn dấu nỗi buồn một nơi
ơn em, hồn sớm ngậm ngùi
kiếp sau xin giữ lại đời cho nhau

Tôi đọc tập thơ này sau những buổi trượt tuyết để thư giãn. Những lúc đó thân thể mỏi mệt và đầu óc cũng không tỉnh táo. Tuy nhiên tôi cảm thấy thích những lời thơ sâu sắc của ông. Nếu có cơ hội tôi sẽ tìm đọc thêm thơ của ông.

With 20 years of experience and having designed hundreds of books, Debbie Berne covers every detail that goes into designing a completely book from start to finish. The primary focus is print. She dedicates one chapter on e-books, but nothing on web books.

On “Using Fonts Together,” Berne writes:

It’s certainly possible—and in type scholarship often considered admirable—to set an entire book in a single typeface. More commonly, I want two or three fonts for all the different situations inside a book. Usually, I will choose a serifed text type for the body text and a sans serif as a contrast for chapter titles and headings. Sometimes the diversity of text will make the addition of a third font appropriate- for sidebars or other distinctive passages, as display type in part or chapter openers, or for small areas of emphasis or little areas of flair. This is (usually) enough. Font choice isn’t the only way to differentiate kinds of text, and designers push type to show its many faces by using it bold or in all caps or larger or, when possible, in color. Keeping a font palette limited makes a big project feel unified and intentional.

This passage made me curious how many typefaces I used in Vietnamese Typography. It turns out 100 typefaces are being used for the book site. Oops! I broke the rule.

Nevertheless, this is a comprehensive, informative guide on designing a book that everyone who’s involved in publishing a book should read.

After reading two books on democracy back to back, I needed something lighter. Rob Sheffield’s book on how Taylor Swift reinvented pop music seems like a good reading detour. I must confess: I am not a Swiftie. I tried to listen to her albums, but I can’t get past three songs. I read Sheffield’s music reviews for Rolling Stone every once in a while; therefore, I wanted to know what he has to say about Taylor Swift. Not knowing her work makes it hard for me to follow the book. I enjoyed it though. It’s a quick read. I might take a deep dive into her catalog like I had with Miles Davis, JAY-Z, and Bob Dylan. Will see!

Democracy is dying in the United States. It is up to us, the people, to save our democracy. In this brief book, the authors provide 10 steps to defend our democracy:

1. Be prepared and learn how our government supposed to work
2. Get informed and learn how to spot real news vs. fake news
3. Vote early and often from up upballots to downballots
4. Donate in the candidates and causes you believe in while navigate America’s deeply fucked campaign system
5. Volunteer, knock on doors, and do what you can
6. Organize, boycott, and protest
7. Take a break and take care of yourself
8. Make politics your job and your duty to save our democracy
9. Run for office
10. Get to the finish line

It’s a quick read that will help you to get involve. I don’t care about politics, but I care deeply about our democracy. I am doing a small part on this blog to defend our democracy.

In Democracy Awakening, Professor Heather Cox Richardson teaches an essential civic course that Americans need to learn about democracy. From historical to policial to cultural to social to moral, Professor Richardson provides each perspective with clarity. The US democracy has survived over 200 years, but not without challenges. More than ever, democracy is on the brink of collapsing today with Trump and his lies. Professor Richardson writes:

If he could get Americans to reject the truth and accept his lies about what had happened, they would be psychologically committed to him.…

He had successfully sold his own narrative over the truth, and his supporters would continue to believe him rather than those calling him out.

Professor Richardson provides details on Trump lies:

Far from retreating, Trump had moved to the stage that scholars of authoritarianism call a “Big Lie,” a key propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany. This is a lie so huge that no one can believe it is false. If leaders repeat it enough times, refusing to admit that it is a lie, people come to think it is the truth because surely no one would make up anything so outrageous.…

Big lies are springboards for authoritarians. They enable a leader to convince followers that they were unfairly cheated of power by those the leader demonizes. In the U.S., the power of Trump’s Big Lie to rally supporters meant that the Republican Party gradually purged those members who continued to stand against him, and leaders consistently refused to acknowledge that Biden had won the election. “Election denier” became a political identity, and going into Biden’s presidency, most Republicans simply affirmed that he was the current president.

Professor Richardson gives a brief explanation on how ur political system should work:

The Constitution established a representative democracy, a republic, in which voters would elect lawmakers who would represent the people. That legislative branch would be a balance to a single leader at the head of the executive branch; each would prevent the rise of a tyrant from the other side. Congress would write all “necessary and proper” laws, levy taxes, borrow money, pay the nation’s debts, establish a postal service, establish courts, declare war, support an army and navy, and organize and call forth “the militia to execute the Laws of the Union” and “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”

The president would execute the laws, but if Congress overstepped, the president could veto proposed legislation. In turn, Congress could override a presidential veto. Congress could declare war, but the president was the commander in chief of the army and had the power to make treaties with foreign powers. It was quite an elegant system of paths and trip wires, really.…

Finally, the Framers authorized a third branch of government, the judicial branch, with a Supreme Court to settle disputes between inhabitants of the different states. They also guaranteed that every defendant had the right to a jury trial but said little else about the judiciary.

This book is a must-read for American citizens who ignored democracy or were clueless about democracy. Learn the truth and recognize the difference between democracy and autocracy. Without democracy, the United States is no longer the land of the free. Without freedom, nothing else matters.

“In the Middle of My Life,” Jennifer Change writes:

I once loved a man
who’d force the weight of his body
into a felt-tip pen, scoring torn

I am not really sure what she means. It takes me half way through the collection to read something I understand. “What Is Truth” is a heartbreaking poem, in which she reveals:

The woman in the bed next to mine
was also a wife, also a suicide, and refused
to take off her headscarf.
Both of us had been emptied,
stomachs pumped, hazy,
self-hazed in the bleak hours
before dawn. She had more to say
than I did, more right to her grief,
though our charts read the same,
neither of us content,
neither white. Without my glasses,
the room a yellow blur,
her coal-dark eyes startling
as a reflection caught
in passing. Alone with her,
far from my life, we were
a calm pair, propped up
on white sheets stiffened by daily
bleaching, every touch sterilized,
unfeeling. Like me, she had taken pills:
Vicodin, Percocet, poisoned anapests
choking our throats. She had not chosen
her own life and so endeavored
to leave it the indifferent husband, the children, pitiless, pulling at her sleeves,
her hands, pant legs, and hems,

She writes a lot about her father as well. I have to revisit the poems to understand their relationship.

Of course I loved this quote from Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

And of course, I misunderstood the quote as well until I read Jay Parini’s explanation in Robert Frost: Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart. The more I read Parini’s commentaries, the more I need to learn about poetry. I don’t have a clue about the beat and the meter. Most of Frost’s poems are over my head. Though I could “Fire And Ice”:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Parini’s provides more fascinating insights of the poem. The poems, the commentaries, and the typesetting—Adobe Jenson, design by Robert Slimbach–are enjoyable to read.

Mottley’s poems are poignant and provocative. In her opening poem, “a case for / against repetitions,” she writes:

play dead / play docile / play along
stare a beast in its mouth and dare it to bite this is the only way to know if
the country is still hungry

Mottley writes about blackness and about her great grandmother:

My great grandmother was the original Rosa Parks.
Except it was Virginia and she was so much meaner
than Rosa ever dared to be
My great granny was what you would call
A motherfucker. A bitch. A python
when it came to protecting her young

She calls out “all the best celebrities are perverted” and she spares no Miles Davis:

miles davis plays a mean trumpet and i must admit
i still listen to flamenco sketches when the going gets tough as his knuckles
scabbed over from his woman’s cheekbone
but a man that mean must got something
he needs to puff into that brass
so my daddy puts it on the stereo and
we all name our babies after him
hoping they might be born metallic

I don’t understand everything she writes, but I enjoy her works. The poems are set in Chaparral, designed by Carol Twombly, and they are a pleasure to read.

I didn’t understand everything I read, but some lines stood out to me. For instance,in “Troubadours,” Phillips writes:

Life itself being a ramble of mystery, pattern, accident, and surprise, we took heart in knowing whatever road we were on must be the right one-or anyway, we believed it was, and belief still counts. We pressed forward. We weren’t afraid. Nor unafraid.

And in “Like So,” he writes:

From attention to adoration
is a smallish distance–

and yet no arrow, no boat
with sail

can cross it

like the mind’s insistence.

I should read the whole book again, slower. Will see!