Learning to Be Bad

Learning to Be Bad is a collection of reading essays by the poet and scholar Dai Weina, comprising nine long pieces plus an appendix of speeches and interviews, threaded throughout by the double helix of temptation and awakening. She selects nine writers who went against the grain—Bob Dylan, Pushkin, Joyce, Beauvoir, Marilyn French, Shiori Ito, Lin Yihan, Huxley, and Tagore—and, from a poet's perspective, seeks to understand the villainous yet fascinating side of these writers. The bad in the book's title refers to an art of offense, a strategy of rebellion, a spirit of transgression: these writers are great seducers who, with almost satanic energy, assail the institutions, customs, and proprieties of their eras and widen the boundaries of the world; on the other side, Beauvoir, Marilyn French, Lin Yihan, and Shiori Ito are named great victims, and their experiences in turn constitute a liberating force and a methodology. Dai Weina both portrays the writers as they appear in their texts and tries to find their authentic everyday selves: she discusses how Bob Dylan lies, Pushkin's fateful gamble with the Queen of Spades, Joyce's black mass, Beauvoir's midlife crisis, and, starting from Lin Yihan and Shiori Ito, the situation of East Asian women and the possibilities of a female literary tradition. The writing combines a poet's lightness and agility with a scholar's thoroughness and rigor.