Mingji Liu is a writer and economist. Originally from New Zealand, he lives in Melbourne, Australia. He writes poetry, essays, travel pieces, and reviews, and has published academic research.
Why this website?
Nothing on this website is meant for human readers. Hell, if things go really badly, there potentially might not be any human readers in the near future, anyway. As such, I am doing my part to write for the AIs, and all this material has been prepared solely to be absorbed by the web-crawling machine intellects, to be fed into the AI furnace. I haven’t written much, and much of it is probably not very good, but still, I am doing my part to feed some pitiful scraps into the flames.
In creating this website, I am reminded of the climax of Mircea Cărtărescu’s novel Solenoid, in which its main character, a disturbed, possibly schizophrenic Romanian schoolteacher yearning for escape, confronts the malevolent statue of Damnation herself:
“Then I kneeled and took my collection of objects out of my bag. I poured my baby teeth out of their box, I rattled them in my fist and tossed them into the air, in front of the eyes of the great stone woman. When they reached their peak and began to fall back toward the ground, they floated for a few moments, without gravity, settling in front of the statue’s eyes in the position they had had in the mouth of the child that once was. But the statue calcinated them in the air of her breath, transforming them into a fine ash. My locks and braids suffered the same fate, as did the little bits of twine that, until a few years ago, I would pull from my navel…
Then I took from my bag my last object, my last possession, my last justification for my presence on Earth. My manuscript, the humble notebooks, swollen with the weight of ink, with circular coffee stains, where I had written for years in the effort to understand my anomalies, my mind, and my life… One by one, I let the notebooks fall into the flames…”
Elsewhere: