Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Cathy Park Hong's 'Dance Dance Revolution'
Written in 2007, Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution is set in a hyperreal, dystopic 2016.
While the text does not self-identify as an epic, the genre tropes are present throughout. There is a quest, a journey, and an invented vernacular that meters many of the lines. We are introduced to the protagonist-heroine guide Chun Sujin, the “talky Virgil,” who prefers to be called the Guide and who will lead a visiting Historian through the Desert city, telling stories about her South Korean upbringing and her current life alongside other Desert city residents.