Odette Wong

Odette Wong grew up in the placid, ethnic suburbs of Los Angeles. The radical boredom one reads about drives some young Angelinos to nihilism but a handful towards cold blooded satire. The local UC provided some intellectual relief leading her to believe that grad school would take things up to a higher level. Ordinary levels of elitist disgust became icy rage when forced to read the products of a declining humanities, especially in her dealings with the Asian American side of things where familiarity heightened contempt. She craved the negativity of Adorno and  the rigor of Hugh Kenner while admiring the dialectical splendor of Jameson. After getting a terminal MA she hightailed it out of Orange County and cut off most all contacts with family and friends. Now in Carlsbad, she pens dispatches for the SS African Mercury, dissecting literary conferences with a dry wit that unmasks the pseudo-radical posturing, her prose tempered by a quiet optimism that the West’s decline might seed something fiercer from the non-West.

Her tastes in poetry lean to Poundian epic but in criticism, to the humanistic universalism of Williams and Leavis. She infuses her private garden with the dissonance of obscure avant-garde compositions and is currently looking into the ideologies of sound. 

Jab, jab, jab at the homogenizing tide, half-hoping for mr. dialectic to come flip the script.

ARTICLES

Weather Report | Fall-Winter 2023
Weather Report | 2 | Winter-Spring 2025