Lu Xun, one of the most intelligent and most original of the May 4th intellectuals in China, joined the Chinese branch of the League of Left-Wing Writers in 1930 (the League was part of or affiliated with or at least sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party; not sure) but hated it and left because he said the Soviet idea of a perfect poem went like this:

Oh, steam whistle!
Oh, Lenin!

From Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, (1990; 1999 edition; damned if I remember the page number.) Spence says that Lu Xun refused to join the CCP and until his death in 1936 told the young Chinese writers to maintain a sense of Chinese culture, of social problems/conditions, and of the ridiculous.

Hannah Arendt in a casual footnote: 'The common prejudice that love is as common as ‘romance’ may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.’ (The Human Condition, p. 242)

I miss talking to you, you know? *rueful* After all that. That's what they say in stories, isn't it, that it's the little things that matter, in the end. Things like: we baked pie for thanksgiving! (Thanksgiving, what a wonderful name for a holiday. Someone told me that in Chinese it's gan en jie. There were about 10 of us at the dinner table and maybe 2 Americans and at the beginning of the meal the host (a Yugoslav herself) said, shall we say something? give thanks? and we all looked at each other.) Or: they've wrapped the trees in fairylights and if I stand up now I can see them outside the window, all golden and enchanted. Or: when asked what he thought about Freud, Max Beerbohm replied, 'A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, were they not?' Or: I have egg and sweetcorn pudding leftovers. I think you'd like it; you like sweetcorn don't you? I have half a tray of it in my room still. Or: I miss talking to you, you know?

G. K. Chesterton said of Max Beerbohm that 'he does not indulge in the base idolatry of believing in himself.'

from Epstein, 'The Beerbohm Cult', The Weekly Standard, 11/11/2002. Which of course I found in that incomparable website, Arts and Letters Daily.

good fuck.

The White House didn't want a new independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks, so they did the next best thing: insisted on a bipartisan commission; only bipartisan groups could be allowed to use subpoenas and at least 6 of the 10 members would have to approve the subpoena; and Bush just named Kissinger as the chairman. '[Ari] Fleischer said that the changes would ensure the inquiry's usefulness.'

'Bush names Kissinger to head Sept 11 commission,' NYT, 27 Nov 2002

and reading beyond the front page of the New York Times for the first time in a while now:

In Jenin on Friday, a military operation to arrest a Palestinian militant erupted into a fierce gun battle in which Israeli soldiers shot dead an 11-year-old Palestinian boy and a senior United Nations worker.

The death of the aid worker, a Briton, has caused considerable friction between Israel and the United Nations...

'West Bank Explosion Kills 2 'Most Wanted' '



Israel is asking the Bush administration for $4 billion in military aid and $8-10 billion in loan guarantees (helps Israel borrow at lower interest rates; the NYT tells us that there is no cost to the US if Israel repays its loans, and Israel has never defaulted on a loan). It is not known how much the administration will provide/ask from Congress yet.

A 26-month conflict with the Palestinians has strained Israel's defense budget, while the violence has sharply reduced foreign investment and tourism.

Israel is the largest recipient of United States loans and grants, amounting to $2.9 billion this fiscal year.

The State Department said last week it would ask Congress for $2.16 billion in military aid for Israel for fiscal year 2004, which begins next September. That is an increase of $120 million from a request for $2.04 billion for this year.

'Israel asks the U.S. for an increase of $4 billion in military aid'

one day all the leaves fell and it was winter. they've wrapped fairylights around the trees along college walk, and sometimes at night they turn them on and walking down the path is like walking through a million electric fireflies, and sometimes the lights stay off but the little glass bulbs reflect the lamplight from the path and it's as though the trees were frosted with silvery sparkles.

i don't get it.

After five hours of debate in the House of Commons, a motion by Mr. Blair's government in favor of United Nations Resolution 1441 [on Iraq] was approved without a vote when the legislators called out their approval with a shout of "Aye."

Shortly before, an amendment requiring parliamentary approval for any use of British troops — and urging a new Security Council mandate for military action to enforce Resolution 1441 — was defeated by a vote of 452 to 85.

The supporters of the amendment, proposed by the opposition Liberal Democrats, included 32 members of Mr. Blair's Labor Party.

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told the Commons that it would be "utterly irresponsible" to offer legislators a vote to pre-approve military action if it would put lives of British forces at risk.

'U.N. Monitor Says Iraqis Are Denying Having Arms Cache', NYT 26 Nov 2002

am discovering that i *can't* wing a 30-page essay on constructivist international relations theory in three hours. or five. or a night. or, probably, any length of time.

ok you know what? i give up. i give up trying not to be socially dysfunctional and i give up trying not to sound too unsingaporean. it's not even about speaking singlish, it's about speaking singaporean. i give up trying to make small talk about rice-cookers. i give up trying not to be the kind of person with whom almost-strangers feel compelled to talk about the jewish lobby in america instead of people with ang mo kio faces. (don't ask.) i give up trying not to be the kind of person for whom the same almost-strangers feel compelled to suddenly switch to speaking in grammatically-correct english. was that even grammatically correct? i shall be vaguely asianized with the americans and vaguely westernized with the singaporeans and generally strange. sit in a corner and drink gin and gibber poems to myself. i'm working on the gin.

(unfair? -- of course. it was fun. really nice people. really cool people. really good food. didn't really talk about rice-cookers. that much. and only in the context of chicken rice. talked to this girl, she was great. left before the drinking started but that's cos i had -- have -- an essay to write and i hadn't -- still haven't -- figured out the title. but walked home with these two girls, one of whom stayed in my hall. -- ah but she wasn't singaporean she was chinese-american and said 'dude' a lot and the other was singaporean but had an american accent so strong you could bomb afghanistan with it. -- bad taste? whatever.)

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hears, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer --
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

- Carol Ann Duffy

i've forgotten my tempest.

You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse.

continental political thought class on monday -- that is to say, a class on french and german leftist thought in the 1950s/60s -- and the tutor explaining that a lot of people on left in south america looked to gramsci for inspiration partly because he's a classic and everyone who's read any marxist/leftist theory knows him and partly cos he provides a non-marxist alternative for the left -- and the tutor said that this wasn't just a speculation; when he said people turned to gramsci, he's seeing names and faces in his mind, in argentina (where he's from), in uruguay, in chile. -- i can't imagine what it'd be like to have been part of the left movements in latin america -- to be now sitting in a classroom in new york teaching gramsci seeing the faces of those who believed in it --

on wednesday i went for the meeting in support of the divestment campaign at columbia and there were several professors who spoke up -- it's a faculty initiative -- and said i'm jew i hold dual citizenship in the state of israel and i protest the occupation. there's a group of jewish women -- women in black -- who hold a vigil every week for those who have died in the second intifada, palestinian and jew alike. someone talked of how her father was very very sick in ramallah and it was impossible to get medicines and morphine patches; they had to ask israeli friends to help them get supplies in tel aviv. i should do more reading and put up a coherent argument in protest of the occupation; this isn't an argument but --

on Karl Rove speaking at a political forum on the American presidency at the University of Utah (and saying, among other things, that America was tilting towards the Republicans):

In the question-and-answer session, a woman politely asked Mr. Rove if the administration was concerned over the possibility that 200,000 innocent Iraqis might die in an American-led invasion.

Mr. Rove responded, "I'm more concerned about the 3,000 who died on 9/11."

NYT, 'Rove Declares Nation is Tilting to Republicans'

Old poems like old friends. Something I just remembered and looked up.

excerpt from Robert Frost, 'Two Tramps in Mud Time'

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

I'm back in New York. It's still novel, saying that. I'm back in New York. This is home and I haven't quite learnt to call it home yet, the way Oxford was home, and is still -- but that's for later. Too many memories that I can't think about don't quite dare to remember and have to write down before they slip away. Martin Amis said that in every writer's heart was a sliver of ice that allowed him (her) to transform anything and everything into material for writing. Plundering your own memories -- and inevitably other people's memories and other people's experiences -- for writing fodder. Or to put it another way: reworking memory/experience, transforming it into something else, something lifted over and above the literalness of ordinary life. Metaphor. That's from Jeanette Winterson. -- You know, when I get my act together, all this will go into a book some day. -- (He looks over at me.) Will I get named? -- No. That's not how it works.

And so at random --

London. I'd forgotten how much I liked London. Or rather, I'd forgotten I liked London at all. This other London. The walk from Angel Islington down to Covent Garden in the evening. The grand arches of the market -- the last few stallholders packing up their throws and pots and bangles -- the guy with the guitar singing Simon and Garfunkel's 'Coming to America', and I laugh and look for a quid, how can I not give him something? -- the acerbic busker changing Ronan Keating's song, singing 'I'm broke but I'm happy' -- it falls flat when I try to describe it. Black coats swinging past. A child calling. Blonde hair and perfume. Someone fumbling for a coin. The old graceful buildings. There is a grace in London that New York never achieves.

What's happening to my writing? Or was it always this stilted and I never noticed?

It's the same for Oxford. Columbia is pretty but it doesn't have the quiet arrogance, the self-assured beauty, above all the grace that Oxford does. That Oxford has without trying at all, a grace acquired through great age and great deeds. Oxford. Walking past the Rad Cam on Guy Fawkes Day listening to the sound of fireworks exploding everywhere, remembering a night in the library last year, in the Upper Camera listening to fireworks not reading the book in front of me wishing I were elsewhere and then looking up to see one perfect starburst of fireworks through the windows, like a gift, all the more perfect for being unexpected; jumping up and running to the windows to look for more fireworks while everyone returned to their books -- or a different Guy Fawkes, in Somerville this time, running out from the room to the lawns to watch the fireworks and returning windblown windnumbed laughing to the meeting (I remember writing a letter to you that evening, covertly, baby I miss you more than words can say. One more letter you will never get.) Walking through Oxford walking through wading through memories. The tree in Holywell Quad in New College, the one in front of the porter's lodge, has lost half its leaves and the other half has turned yellow. In first year that tree was right outside my window and I measured the seasons watching its leaves; first the top half turned yellow and the bottom stayed green and when the bottom leaves had turned yellow and were clinging on precariously to the branches the top branches were bare and soon the entire tree would be bare and that was when I knew winter was here. The two trees at the other end of the lawn, flanking the steps, were burnished red; in the spring they will be white, laden with blossom, and when the wind blows the flowers will lift into the air dancing like a bridal shower. And then I was out of New College; there are just so many memories one can bear at a time. First thing I did -- apart from go to Brasenose -- was go to the Parks. Alone. To see the autumn leaves and to try not to remember watching the sunrise playing frisbee walking by the river feeding the ducks; I had forgotten how many times I had sought solace in the Parks. First thing I did when I got back to New York, after dumping my stuff in my room, was take the walk to Central Park to see the autumn leaves. Three blocks down Central Parkway and it was my first time in the Park alone. First time in autumn. Leaves of pale yellows and browns as if painted with sunlight and the occasional burnished red-bronze flaming in the midst and trees clinging on to red-dapped green and kicking through dried leaves looking for leaves to send to you pressing them in the book of poems I had brought along because of course I had to have a book -- I'm not telling this well. There was a tree with a branch extended like a hand in welcome, dark wood snaking its pattern in that midst of yellow-green, and if you stood right under it and looked up into the filigree of leaves it seemed that you were in a cage with layer upon layer of leaves delicate as a spiderweb stretching out around you. There was wire fence around the lake and stars like leaves caught on the wire mesh. I picked up a spray of red leaves and tucked them into my jeans pocket when I went to the supermarket later and for that time wore a bouquet of autumn leaves.

I would write more about England but I can't find the words can't begin to face the memories. Walking through Columbia at night I want to write about Low Plaza and the way the lamplight spills onto the steps and creates inviting pools of shadow that one can sit in and look up at the stars, and in a way in writing about Low Plaza I'm writing about the Clarendon. About sitting on the steps with chocolate from the Tuck Shop with trashy magazines from Borders to watch the sunlight fade away on Broad Street with kebabs late at night talking about Rousseau and Saint-Simon with Boots sandwiches looking at the PPE Reading Room looking at our nemesis. I'd write about the silence of the Lehman Library basement where time dissolves and think about the PPE Reading Room and about that sunset one evening, close to the finals, postcard-spectacular, and in the windows the reflected rows of students superimposed upon the purples and reds and golds -- or perhaps that time at New College in the garden after the library looking up at the stars talking saying hey whatever else Oxford was it was this; it was friendship and grace and a starlit garden; or that time with ice-cream from the Tuck Shop in the garden on a bench talking about --

I can't start to list. I miss you, you know?

I meant this to be about the trip to England. A trip back in time in so many ways. Or -- a trip to lay certain things to rest. Oxford. London. Some things are over and done with. I could cry then but now back in New York I only feel blank. It's all still too raw. I came to England with little more than a handful of poems and I'm leaving -- I have left -- with very little more than that.

i've been cooking more these few days, partly cos that's what i resort to when i have nothing better to do/that i want to do and have run out of excuses for procrastination. and sometimes i make the mistake of eating in my room which means that the smell of fried garlic and soya sauce lingers not just in your hair but in the clothes piled on the chair and in the carpet and in the air -- and it reminds me, a little, of 12 york place. i'm just sayin'. i miss you guys. :)

dirty words/phrases:

1. The spectre of something is haunting somewhere. Only cool when Marx did it.
2. Textured.
3. A sociological ontology of the international system.
4. Norms have behavioural effects. (How exactly do norms affect behaviour?)
4a. Norms are constitutive of identity.
4b. Identity.


Not that this is related in any way. From the New Straits Times online, 9/19/2002. Dr Mahathir on the 2002/3 budget allocations.

"Allocation for women must be increased as their role in our country is very significant now. Even in the Finance Ministry, the majority of them are women, so we want to give a bigger allocation for them in our aim to develop a happy and progressive family institution," he said.

notebook: zbyslaw marek maciejewski (except pretend that the crossed polish l is there). krakow painter.

my new york legacy is going be caffeine addiction. caffeine and MSG.

from an icq conversation on friday 10/11/02.

Cyan: go try to write a poem with the word "happy" in it.
Cyan: that's your assignment for this week
coffeecupless: :)
Cyan: serious
Cyan: and i mean a poem. not a nursery rhyme or a love song

the only things i can think of are happy horses and happy daggers. ok you're right; happy poems come hard; but poems come hard these days. i'm not giving up, just not handing it in on time. :)

late. cold. rain. new york has just turned into london. there's a great line in the newest lucifer, 'how can hell be no more than a clumsy copy of london?'

A 19th-century Malay writer once observed that the founding of Singapore had made 'dragons out of worms and worms out of dragons'.

A different Malay writer in 1927 said that 'the knowledge that is give to people under foreign influence has no purpose other than to impoverish the intellect and teach them to lick the soles of their masters' boots.'

Apparently (according to Steinberg et al. In Search of SEA 1987 anyway) they were both talking about the system of 'public instruction' imposed/established by the European colonialists in SEA.


interlude: some drunk idiots pressed the emergency button in the lift while on the first floor and said oh hey look the lift is stuck and so climbed the stairs instead with their pizzas instead of releasing the emergency button whose alarm can be heard all through the damn building

In 1906, one of the most important of the early Malay journals listed no fewer than 26 different virtues of newspapers, among them that they were 'the light of the mind, the talisman of the thoughts, the mirror of events, the servant of the wise, the prompter of the forgetful, a guide to those who stray, a prop to the weak, the guardian of the community, and the forum for all discussion.'

A 'self-satire' by Nguyen Khuyn, a Vietnamese provincial governor-general and writer, on the discrepancy between the form and realities of power and talent in the mandarin class. Round about 1885.

When I open my mouth, I speak strongly and with a bookish authority. Yet my soft, flaccid lips can also drink me into drunken stupours. When I think of myself I am disgusted with myself, yet even with all this...my name has appeared upon the gold examination list.'

lunchtime/schooltime. do you think that perhaps the Supreme Court is the institutionalization of Carl Schmitt's 'instituting moment'? Hang on to that thought.

past midnight again and just had an epiphany. two epiphanies. one was that my life has been a complete waste of skin and breath -- i have never, for example, jumped off some random turkish guy's fishing boat -- and two was that i will never do so. am resigned to being boringly conventional and staid and bourgeois etc. sorry.

To you, who never begged me for vows or verses,
My gift shall be my absence.

- Dorothy Parker

late sunday night. it's not the next day until i've gone to bed.

'The history of feminist thought is a history of the refusal of the hierarchical construction of the relationship between male and female in its specific contexts and an attempt to reverse of displace its operations.' (Joan Scott 1998)

It is? OK.

French anthropologist Maurice Godelier, from same Scott article: ‘It is not sexuality which haunts society, but society which haunts the body’s sexuality. Sex-related differences between bodiesare continually summoned as testimony to social relations and phenomena that have nothing to do with sexuality. Not only as testimony to, but also testimony for – in other words, as legitimation.’



to check out:
- Mary Hill's biography of Charlotte Gilman Perkins
- at some point I suppose one will have to tackle Derrida and Lacan and the psychoanalytical people. Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray? Kristeva on Arendt.
- Kaja Silverman. A feminist film theorist who draws on Freud and Lacan.
- Gayatri Spivak *sighhh*
- Judith Butler

am going to STOP before the list gets too long.

oh but before i forget. and unrelated to feminist things. octavio paz's essays. i'm not sure about the poems. have only read a handful and -- spanish seems to lend itself to bombast, doesn't it? at least in the english translations; i'm told that neruda in spanish is very different from neruda in translation. sometimes there's a beautiful extravagance to the words and sometimes it's just extravagant. i think i prefer -- right now, anyway -- a leaner and more robust poetry.

just 1 a.m. which is good considering had dinner at shangri-la -- the right tibetan restaurant this time! -- and then a drink at simone, this really cool bar on st mark's and 1st ave, with red brocade walls and zebra-print sofas (but compared to yaffa cafe it is the epitome of subtlety and understatement) with jianyi and yeen teck (everyone else at dinner having bored of our company) and then spending more money at east village books and st mark's comics. the newest lucifer and dorothy parker (i know, terribly mainstream) and then home and it's just just 1! exciting? happening? but fun. i make no apologies for extreme geekiness.

Afternoon. Room.

"Just like any other war, this is not a clean war," he said. "This is a dirty war. You cannot judge it in humanitarian terms."

- Israeli army commander in charge of the brigade in Nablus. From the NYT, 10/3//02, 'An Israeli's sorrowful rule over a sullen Nablus'.

Evening. Compelled by sloth to remain in room.

Ferdinand Marcos in his 1965 inaugural address: 'The Filipino, it seems, has lost his soul, his dignity, and his courage. Our people have come ot the point of despair. We have ceased to value order.'

And this is apparently because, as Marcos continued, the 'government is gripping the iron hand of venality, its treasury is barren, its resources are wasted, its civil service is slothful and indifferent, its armed forced demoralized and its councils sterile.'

Past 3 in the morning. I am incredibly glad to be in New York and I can feel all the threads of this year unravelling out of control. In a bad way I mean. Is that strange?

But a quick recap. And less inanity post-bath, with any luck.

(One) Public interview by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim yesterday evening. Most of the musical discussion was over my head but I remember a phrase of Barenboim's: the unrepeatability of music. The unrepeatability of the musical moment, I guess.

(Two) The White Sheikh, dir. Fellini. I forget the Italian title. Didn't know what to expect when I got there -- and had a very pleasant surprise. Amazingly funny comedy. Beautifully, confidently shot. The guy giving the preface said that it could have been inspiration for the Purple Rose of Cairo and yeah I can see how that worked.

(Three) Muddling through Susan Sontag's In America. Muddling through is not quite the right word perhaps; it is a compelling book but I'm getting too sleepy to pay attention.

(Four) Diana Krall, I Miss You So.

Tuesday morning 1.35 a.m. We're into October already! And I have decided that since I will never get up early in the morning unless, possibly, my life absolutely and immediately depended on it, I'll just pretend to work at night instead.

Wolf Trap (or perhaps Wolf Den), dir. Jiri Weiss, 1957: a strange love triangle: couple adopt an orphaned teenager. The man is the Mayor and the District Vet and not very old and kinda good-looking I guess in a scholarly kind of way in the right light. Or at least he's supposed to be. His wife is Mrs Bennet multiplied a hundredfold. The girl is wide-eyed and blonde and pretty. Intense -- melodramatic -- emotional exploration because of course she and the man fall in love but they are both, for different reasons, grateful to the wife.

And lots of Chinese soft porn. I think The Golden Lotus -- the two chapters I read of it anyway -- is soft porn. It may be lots of other things besides but I think it was written to be soft porn. And it's damn funny, but that might be because Chinese doesn't translate well into English, let alone grandiloquent classical Chinese narratives.

Unfortunately now Monday morning, 12.54 a.m. What would you do if you woke up at 1 p.m. and only got to the library at 4 and had a million things to read on social constructivist international relations theory and had absolutely no more clean clothes left? Do everything in the library except work, including reading the Columbia Spectator for the first time, and then go for dinner at the Afghan Kebab House (102nd St and Broadway and incidentally very good -- even if anything with 'kebab' in it makes me think fondly of Ahmed's) and then come home resolving to work and go straight online to read West Wing recaps.

10.48 p.m.

1. I Not Stupid, dir. Jack Neo. Fantastic. I really enjoyed that. Especially the campness of it all. And nicely -- gently? -- satirical.

2. Dinner at Kenneth's. It occurred to me on the way back that all these years overseas I've always been friends with someone who can cook well. Really, eat-till-I'm-stuffed well.

3. 3.45 a.m. Back from raspberry beer that actually tasted of raspberries at the Belgian Bar somewhere on 8th St/St Mark's? Take the 1 line to the 8th St/NYU stop (Christopher St?) and walk further into the Village.

4. 5.52 a.m.You think, that perhaps if I not sleep for the next 24 hours, I will get half my work and all my laundry done?

very early saturday morning 1.18 a.m. After reading most of Elizabeth Peters' Naked Once More at a go. Desperately in need of work. Shopped-out. Lovely comic-book (graphic novel) shopping with Yisheng in the morning -- St Mark's comics; the shop person promised that they'd have Sandman tmrw but I don't really want to go back to Brooklyn for them, 10% off or not; and I got something Yisheng recommended, Kabuki which I haven't touched because don't want to lose soul to it until have done some token reading. And then lunch at Sophie's Cuban Cuisine on 96 Chambers Street with Yisheng and Addy and Mona and then dropped by lovely lovely little designer boutique somewhere on Reade Street and then wended slowly to Chinatown, dropping by shops and suchlike. And wonderful (am running out of adjectives) stationery shop called -- oh I forgot what. Somewhere nearish Broadway/Canal Street I think but could be sadly wrong. New York is such a shopping place. I am so broke.

Heard someone -- a girl -- give a pretty good evil MWAhahahaha laugh, followed by a HEHeheheh cackle on the way back from the subway station. And then heard her friend tell her, in all seriousness, that the mwahaha laugh was more of an evil man's laugh, directed at someone, whereas the witch's cackle, the heheheh, was more of a witch rubbing her hands and cackling while she gazed into her crystal ball. The pathology of evil laughs.


wishlist item two: a fit and functional body, so can wear pretty clothes.
wishlist item three: lots and lots of money to buy pretty clothes.
wishlist item four: creative talent to make pretty clothes if cannot afford to buy them (cf. wishlist item three).
wishlist item five: many many graphic novels and place to browse them in. Is that very socially dysfunctional?

1.46 a.m. I need to learn how to write reviews. Film reviews specifically but all art-ish reviews in general, really. But till then, for the record:

- Loves of a Blonde, dir. Milos Forman. Beautifully shot. Still camerawork like close-up shots. About a factory girl from the country. The movie starts with her telling her friend about some guy who's given her a ring, some guy who picked her up in the woods one day. A forest-ranger. Married. It's peacetime. Some army division comes to the town -- the manager of this enormous factory asked them to, to please his girls -- and three heavy-set army men pick up the girl, Ancula, and her friends. Or try to; the girls decide in the end not to leave with them. To the woods. Apparently the options are (a) tea-shops, (b) the woods/parks, (c) the girls' dorm. A really crammed squashed dorm. She gets distracted by the piano-player who persuades her to come up to his room by saying that he wouldn't touch her and then sleeps with her. A piano-player from Prague. Milo. She goes to Prague to look for him. I'm telling a very bald and boring story but it was shot in loving detail. The path of a wedding ring rolling across the floor. The look on someone's face, the way they drop their eyes, the way they pick up their cap. I think of photographs and camera stills because there was a still quality to the shots -- but also a kind of restlessness? The camera picking out details. People fidgeting. Oh god I'm so bad at this.

- L'oro di Napoli. dir. Vittorio de Seca. Who is of course very very good. And a compelling actor. Four stories set in Naples. Gets darker and darker; the first two are funny, the third full of a kind of black pathos but still funny, and the last quite dark and slightly bizarre. And kinda tragic. Sophia Loren is beautiful, Toto is a genius. OK no more but it has to be seen. Italian neo-realist cinema. Incidentally also the director of The Bicycle Thief and Umberto Dee (I misspell, but that's the phonetic spelling of the title).

argh.

wishlist item one: functional and functioning brain.

9 something p.m. My computer clock is faster than the Blogger clock. Which is all kinda surreal cos it means that I'm writing these things after they've been published. Anyhow. Someone living on the floor below is practising on his -- sax? I'm bad at music and musical instruments and stuff. Which is fortunate because he's not terribly good but the music is mellow and kinda fills the night, or at least the hollow shaft-like thing that my window looks out on. My neighbour's alarm clock is going off at 15-minute intervals. Not so euphonious a night sound.



almost 11 pm now. I'm back from borrowing out all the (four) Elizabeth Peters books in the Butler stacks. The stacks are scary when they go dark. Not quite as scary as the rolling ones in Oxford, but nonetheless. And then briefly read bits of one book on the Low steps -- there's something about wide steps that invites sitting and reading, isn't there? -- and then tore self away to return here before my eyes fell out of their sockets. But I love being on campus at night. There are always groups of people playing frisbee or football, and others sitting around on steps/benches/fountain rims just chatting softly. The night makes people mellow. I'd rather talk to someone at night; people tend to be more relaxed, more willing to open up. There's a guy outside wandering around the curb -- not a homeless guy I mean; I think this one is waiting for something/someone? -- and singing softly 'She's got a ticket to ri-i-ide'. Either he's waiting for someone or he belongs to the 'Access-a-Ride' van parked nearby, which makes the song incredibly corny. Night sounds.

almost 1 p.m. I'm late for class (again).

The Ten Desiderata for Love (circa. late imperial China)

One: Spend money lavishly.
Two: Take infinite pains.
Three: Use sweet words and honeyed phrases.
Four: Be tender and solicitous.
Five: Court her with longing looks.
Six: Display your battle prowress.
Seven: Be discreet as one deaf and dumb.
Eight: Select a friend to aid your enterprise.
Nine: Don fresh clothes.
Ten: Be affable and good-humoured.

taken from McLaren transl., The Chinese Femme Fatale 1994

11.55 a.m. i.e. a time when I really shouldn't be in my room eating cornflakes with orange juice (separately) and listening to illegally-downloaded music.

room inventory:
- cups with tea dregs caramelizing in them: 1
- posters etc. decorating walls in tasteful manner: 0
- t-shirts, jeans etc. piled on back of chair/bed: 8?
- cornflake crumbs on floor: ask the cockroaches
- knives badly in need of washing: 1
- papers, stolen library slips, tea bags etc. randomly strewn across room: innumerable
- of which, copies of the onion: 2
- classes i have completed the reading for: 0

wheee

3.15 a.m. New York. (I have yet to grow tired of writing New York.) Set this up again to record what little I have seen of New York -- and because I have a lot of work to do and have no intention of doing it. So here it is. And here I am.

110th and Amsterdam.

Shang yue. The sky faintly orange with lamplight
and tonight the moon bright enough to compete,
big like a streetlamp. A car horns when we stop
in the middle of the road to look. First official day
of autumn, and we’re explaining – inventing –
the origins of the mid-autumn festival to Tomoko.
– Is it like the Korean moon festival – a kind of
Korean thanksgiving? – No. Maybe. We’ve forgotten
all our traditions except the food. (Laughter.) Later,
out of the kitchen window, with crumbly greasy
days-old Chinatown mooncakes and green tea
with a panda on the box from West Side supermarket,
we’ll look for and not find the moon.

New York, 23 Sept 2002

meow?

about 11.30 pm, listening to Shawne's Singin in the Rain, at long last sorting out my untouched Economists.

Richard Schulte, ethnobotanist. Explored the Amazonian rainforest.
Julia Margaret Cameron, photographer in the 1800s.

about 11.30 pm, listening to Rent

have a Starbucks napkin from Borders on Saturday (when the waiter took my chair away from under me when I stood up) that says: Vir virtutis sum. English translation: I am a manly man. Shawne tells me 'vir' means 'man' in Italian (Latin?) -- and therefore 'virtue', that which a man does. Isn't that cool? In a bad, sexist way of course.

Shawne and I looked up 'ethnic' in the dictionary today: it comes (through ecclesiastical Latin) from ethnos, meaning 'nation', and ethnikos, meaning 'heathen'. I think we should put forward a new formulation of the civic/ethnic nationalism distinction: civic for godly nations, and ethnic for pagan, heathen ones.

just before 9 pm

and i'm home! eating! having cooked dinner! instead of in the bod. amazing. and amazingly, yknow, sad.

almost 9 pm

if you stand at the windows of the ppe reading room -- there's a liquid gold sunset over trinity lawns, behind and through the trees, shading up into a deepening pink/purple -- and rows of students bent over their books reflected in the window, over the lawns -- the white flowers look like snow, beneath the sun -- kinda puts things in perspective. :)

and, and -- someone came up to the window to look at the sunset too, someone i didn't know, and we agreed that the sunset was very beautiful.

11 something at night

and i just had mushroom soup and the world is good. :)

afternoon, radcliffe science library (cos open on sundays. don't say it.)

i just wrote, quite seriously, on my finals notes: is the tree ontologically independent of God?

i think it's time to quit.

about 1.30 a.m.

why do countries matter, anyway? the things we care about tend to be precisely those things not chosen -- family, country -- i'd say love, too --

hell does this all matter. we go home, we do our jobs, and forces larger than us will determine the direction of our country -- of the country we call ours -- it doesn't take much does it. our parents were the first generation born in singapore, and they call it home, cos they've known no other. some of our grandparents do, some think of china/wherever as home. people adapt quickly, don't they? one's tempted to make facile psychological/pathological assumptions, that people need homes/some place to call a home, that they form attachments quickly, and all the rest of it. and then we say that this is how it has always been; that we have always called this home; that there is some bond deeper than -- oh hell. didn't heidegger say that what was specifically human wasn't our ability to reason but our ability to turn instinct into art? all animals have to eat but we have gourmet cuisine. all animals live somewhere; we love our homes.

somewhere somehow i give a damn about all this. or i did.

i wrote to you that this has been a year of letting go. things, people, dreams, ambitions, memories, loves, ideals, principles -- cos i betrayed them or realized i didn't care enough for them or both. strange how one only realizes how much one actually cares after betrayal. like winterson says: why is the measure of love loss? or, less poetically, wtf is wrong with people? -- or perhaps one shouldn't generalize one's sins. wtf is wrong with me. -- do you remember the sandman toast? to old gods, absent friends, lost loves, and the season of mists. and may each of us always give the devil his due. -- either you didn't like the last bit as much, or, more accurately i think, thought it would upset people if i proposed it as a toast. but why not, after all? if one sells one's soul (we don't really believe in souls anymore, do we, in this cynical age?), i suppose one should know the price. geez talk about a cheap metaphor.

almost 9 pm

yesterday i saw bend it like beckham with shawne and it was excellent and today i took a detour along the river on the way back from lwc to look at houseboats (the artemis is for sale; 29 500 quid; narrow, 47ft; purple and green but i guess that can be repainted; call 01865 749363. or maybe 794363. can't remember). times like those i remember why i love oxford. and as for the other times -- peace is too easily shattered, isn't it? by the least violence. i am accused of being an ignorant and tyrannical liberal -- i stand guilty of the first, not sure about the second, and i guess i am probably liberal? i believe in love and truth and justice and freedom; but i'm not sure i believe in people -- myself first of all. *shrug* peter wimsey: the first thing a principle does is to kill someone. i think that's right; if you believe strongly enough, then everything goes down before it, including your welfare, and that of those around you. and if you don't care that much, then i guess that's human enough. tout ca comprendre...or rather, plus ca change...

If I can let you go as trees let go
Their leaves, so casually, one by one;
If I can come to know what they do know,
That fall is the release, the consummation;
Then fear of time and the uncertain fruit
Would not distemper the great lucid skies
This strangest autumn, mellow and acute.
If I can take the dark with open eyes
And call it seasonal, not harsh or strange
(For love itself may need a time of sleep),
And, treelike, stand unmoved before the change,
Lose what I can to keep what I can keep,
The strong root still alive under the snow,
Love will endure -- if I can let you go.

May Sarton, Autumn Sonnets II

almost 2 a.m.

shawne and adrian and i went for dinner after the bod at the new lebanese/kebab place where haagen daz used to be (where 'selection of six starters' apparently means that the waiter selects six at seeming randomness for you') and then shawne and i went to new college garden and sat on a bench and looked at the stars -- and it was a clear night and i think we saw the big dipper and loads of other stars except can't tell which is which -- and we just hung out for a bit and it was really good and helped me get a perspective on things. so i get a 2:2. fuck it lah. i've been doing work -- it's not enough and it's not very good but i have been working and i have been trying and if i get a 2:2 there wasn't much else i could have done, short of stay in the library every day since 2nd year...i'm fairly good at this. not very good, and it kinda depends which paper, but reasonably good. the exams are not a measure of my worth. i'm going to write it down here so i remember. and i've learnt a lot from oxford and i'm so glad i came here just because and whatever else, i'm going to keep that. and of course i'll probably be really crushed when the results come out and i get a 2:2 but like shawne says maybe it's just god/the universe :) trying to tell you something. this sounds like a bad self-help book or a bad beatles rip-off but -- let it go already. exams don't count for very much in the grand scheme of things -- the grand scheme of happiness and love and life, that is. as opposed to psc-world. :) -- earlier, standing outside blackwell's art shop, we saw two guys in black tie and a bottle of wine skip down the pavement singing 'we're going to see the wizard' -- and then later there were stars on a clear night over new college garden, and a friend to talk too -- that's oxford, just like that.

past a bedtime i can't afford

ok. tired. i give up. vade in pacem. i'm going to earth for a bit.

harriet: it would hurt like hell.
peter: what would that matter, as long as it made a good book?

hell it's not like you read the damn thing anyway.

(and then i remembered that i had a card and it has the sweetest dolphins on the cover and i'm happy now. :) doesn't take much does it?)

a few minutes to mayday

Macaulay -- with deliberate exaggeration -- prophesied that working-class suffrage (this would be in the mid/late 1800s I guess) would bring about the end of 'literature, science, commerce' and that 'a few half-naked fishermen would divide with the owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest European cities.'

3 a.m. don't ask.

on the radio: British trade unions want the governments to force firms to make sure that employees take breaks and go on holidays. :)

what, 6.30 already?

listening to audio clips on the bbc website of bbc reports during the 1989 velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia --

a handpainted poster in Prague said: the heart of Europe beats again.

5 something in the evening, waaaay behind any schedule

Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were offered the Nobel prize for ending the Vietnam War. I'm not sure when this is; 1973? Le Duc Tho said no, South Vietnam didn't have peace yet. 60 Harvard and MIT professors wrote a letter protesting that the prize was more than anyone with a sense of justice could take. Kissinger's son, David, at Cambridge, was told by his friends that some people said his father didn't deserve the prize. David Kissinger: So what? My mother says the same thing. Kissinger didn't take his prize in person, and donated the money to the New York Community Trust to set up scholarships for the kids of servicemen who had died in Vietnam. When Saigon fell in 1975, he wrote to the Nobel authorities offering to return the prize and money, and they said no, keep it.

oh! -- look --

And, to put it delicately, Kissinger was even less lucky in most of his political colleagues in Washington than in some of those abroad. Truman had been a moral tower of strength for Acheson, brave and politically astute even when at odds with Congress. As to the general quality of Mr Nixon’s moral leadership, silence is the only possible charity, though one can say he had the courage to make decisions in foreign policy which better men and better Presidents had failed to make. And as to Mr Ford, it is difficult to see that he had much to contribute to foreign policy save his amiable and direct personality. (Bell 1977)

argh when you descend into kissinger trivia

about a quarter past midnight -- that's not very late is it?

i'd say it was too late to do laundry but i procrastinate in vain. the laundry room beckons.

midnightish

i remember it! erm a quotation that's been kinda running around my head and i could never quite pin it down (am i mixing metaphors?)

'tis true 'tis day, what though it be?
wilt thou therefore rise from me?

i dunno who said it; but it was in erm an elizabeth peters book and john tregarth said it to vicky.

gino's whitebait is to die for. :)

bloop

Peter Wimsey to Harriet Vane: I would like to write you the kind of words that burn the paper they're on, except that those words have a way of being unforgiveable as well as unforgettable.

Sometimes I'd like to just go to earth. Vade in pacem.

excerpt

So we're at Edamame, on a summer evening, and I've a glass of choya and a bowl of edamame and a platter of sushi in front of me, and outside laughter hangs in the air like sunlight, long and mellow.

He says, picking at unfamiliar sushi -- I want to set up a commune.
I lick sticky rice off my fingers. I have visions of hippie communes sprouting up in the middle of the Yorkshire dales (he's a Yorkshire man). -- What kind of commune?
-- With people in it.
I laugh; I can't help it.-- That's a start, sure.
He grins. Says his father's house was peaceful and unstressful and he'd like a place like that to live in. He saw something like that in Wales (name of a place I didn't catch) and there were these people just living peacefully and happily together.
The Singaporean in me -- But how did they live? Oh but I suppose they all had their own jobs.
-- No, they were just born rich.
-- Ah.
We contemplate the endless possibilities open to one just born rich. I tell him about the artist's house in Harajuku -- the one Fay and I found quite by accident: three-storeyed, brilliantly graffitized on the outside, with studios on the ground floor, residential rooms on the second and a shop on the third. He is politely attentive -- or attentively polite perhaps; I can't tell a courteous restraint from polite indifference.

No I don't know where this is going either.

a bit later

when this grows up it'll be a proper webpage with, yknow, words and pictures and dancing stickmen. really. i have a summer...well some part of the summer anyway. a hundred a thousand a million -- yknow, many -- undone things. like laundry. and battels. and -- hey -- revision. so i'm just going to sleep now.

2 a.m.

i posted something i did either i did it wrongly or blogger ate it and i seem to have screwed up the edit function and can't get at the code otherwise so it's just going to be weird. it's been that kind of day. well no it hasn't; or it shouldn't have cos i had sushi at edamame which was nice and then ice-cream much much later at G&Ds because one can only go for ice-cream after the libraries close and then we sat on the benches outside high street, yknow where that platform thing with three benches is, just after the turl street turning, until the police car circled the area stopped and said (the man inside, not the car) are you okay? and then we moved to standing in front of the platform thing because didn't want even the policeman to think we were sad finalists with no lives. but everything is finals-coloured nowadays. i should be really really scared but i'm too tired. and i didn't get cambridge after all. *shrug*

1.30ish in the morning.

so we leave G&Ds at almost 12 midnight cos one can only do something so frivolous as ice-cream after all the libraries are closed and meander down High Street and stop at the benches at the little raised platform bit just after the turning to Turl Street and stop there for so long the police car circling the area (meaning High Street and Turl Street I guess; odd) stops and the policeman says Hey are you alright? -- Yes of course -- It's just that I've never seen people stay out so long. After that we move and stand in front of the platform thing so that we're not sad people with no lives who sit on benches that are probably soaked with stale alcohol and tramp puke and god knows what in the middle of the night; we're just sad finalists who stand around High Street in the middle of the night talking about Scandinavia. Might be going after graduation, if one lives till after graduation. I should be scared about the exams but I'm too tired to care; at this stage, there's nothing much I can do to make myself more intelligent. *shrug*

far, far too late in the early morning (is that weird?) to be reading about Chinese foreign policy during the Cold War.

in the library earlier today (yesterday argh temporal confusion thing) -- read an article by Warren Cohen on the 'lost chance' of the US to get China on its side in 1949 -- Cohen wrote that in the 1960s he had wrote an article saying there was a lost chance, and later Nancy Tucker wrote a book with better arguments for the same thing. He said that some called it a Cohen-Tucker thesis. And in a footnote he says that the idea of a Cohen-Tucker thesis was helped by Cohen's marriage to Tucker some years later...and that to the disappointment/surprise of friends and critics and suchlike, they do not have any children or pets named after Dean Acheson. :)

the Kermode quotation is stolen out of Su-Lin's brilliant essay on fairy-tales and women's writing (erm hope you don't mind :). Right. Before this night is much older I *must* progress beyond Mao's 'lean to one side' speech.

1.30something a.m. room,

with Velvet Underground playing -- the album sleeve says that this is a band that fused rock with avant-garde music (their first album as Velvet Underground was produced by Andy Warhol! who teamed them up with Nico! I want that CD) -- best summed up by the idea that not many people bought their albums -- but those who did set up their own bands. It's a really cool album. *really* cool. But must get hold of their lyrics somewhere so can understand what they're saying.

omigodmigodmigod. I'm in the library and after 10 minutes I get bored out of my mind and look around and there's the Faber Book of Pop (eds. Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage) on the table and I leaf through it and the introduction says Lou Reed did an interview with Vaclav Havel and it's in the book and it's *amazing*. Havel is amazing. He said that there was a band -- oh no I can't remember the name, the Universal Band of Plastic People or some other configuration of those words, now called Midnight Unots (eh?) -- and they played some Velvet Underground songs -- Havel brought the first Velvet Underground LP to Prague from New York! he was there in Columbia University for the riots, gave talks with Milos Forman, went shopping in East Village and bought psychedelic posters, how cool is that? -- and the band was of course arrested and Havel and some people organized a campaign to help them and Havel persuaded all these intellectual professor types to help too and that was while people could still all go to a courtroom without fear and they didn't get the band off entirely but the band members got lighter sentences than they would otherwise have had -- and that created a community of solidarity that they thought it would be a shame not to continue -- and that was how Charter 77 started. That's amazing. And later Lou Reed plays for Havel and his friends -- Reed says he doesn't want to do a huge concert cos he's here as a journalist and he's a very private person and Havel says nono, just friends, but that means almost 200 of them, all dissidents -- and some of them know the Velvet Underground songs by heart so Reed plays with them -- he (Reed) says he meant his music to be more than just music, to be about the freedom of expression as well, and that there in Czechoslovakia (the interview was in 1988) his music had found a home -- and after, Havel gives Reed a little black book of his lyrics translated into Czech and says that there are only 200 of those books; they were printed secretly (in the Communist times) and anyone having them then would have been arrested.

so I wander into the kitchen to get yoghurt and my housemates tell me the Green Party people just came a-calling because voting day is in a week's time. I say I know cos the poll cards are in the lodge and that I'm going to vote here before I vote in Singapore. They say vote sensibly! don't have any wacky ideas and stick us without someone weird just cos you're not going to be here next year! Emma says well in local elections it's the people more than the parties that count. Then she says she voted Lib Dem in the general election even though she's against everything they're for because she thought the guy (Evan Harris? what I don't know about British politics would fill my finals scripts) was the best one running. Dave says yes but he won't vote for them again the next time because they're against tuition fees and if he paid them he wants them (fees, not the Lib Dems) to stay. They start talking about British politicians and having not anything to contribute and being naturally unsociable, I retreat to my computer. I can't compare British elections with Singaporean ones because I know nothing about the latter (or the former, but ignorance there is less culpable I think?). Not that it would have mattered anyway because the overseas voting thing wasn't up in time for the last election. I heard the election results over BBC, where an astonished DJ said the PAP just won all but 2 seats in Singapore's general election. The news updates are three minutes each time and they normally do at least a minute of local news as well, so they don't tell you every country's general election results, just the noteworthy ones. It's kinda weird. At the end of the IR in the Cold War tutorial on China, my tutor said, quite seriously, what do you think about the Communist Party in China? Singapore's a one-party state too, isn't it? It's kinda shaming, somehow.

on the radio: gunfire heard/seen in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Sotheby's chairman Alfred Taubman (I think?) fined five million pounds for price-fixing. Too much money in all the wrong places.

clandestinely on the new college library computers while first- and second-years around me work.

I have a poll card! For the first time in three years here. For, er, Holywell ward. Isn't Holywell just one street? Anyhow. I can vote! Exercising my democratic rights. In a country not mine and which I'm going to leave soon, but.

room. morning. sleepy.

newsflash Jean Marie Le Pen is in the second round of the Presidential elections! Always knew there was something strange about the French.

new college library, still and forever.

*cautiously* I am a person -- I am a body; a brain; a person as distinguishable from the body; a person as existing independently from the body; a person as co-existing with the body; a soul -- I am consciousness; memory; self-awareness; material substance; immaterial substance; a series of overlapping successive selves (held together by chains of psychological connectedness); irreducibly I.

There is a point to philosophy, I'm sure; I just haven't figured it out yet.

new college library basement.

there's a lovely bit of grass beside the library -- like a tiny tiny quad -- just go down two worn stone steps -- bordered on the two sides with flowers and with the foot of new college tower on the far corner and two pine-like trees standing guard in front of the tower, green against the grey stone. and then it peters out into a long narrow strip of construction-filled something, and then it's the turf tavern behind.

anyhow. i'm back in the library after a cookie expedition.

new college library (don't say anything).

it's a *beautiful* day outside and people are sitting around on the lawns talking and laughing and reading and playing croquet. and i'm reading about locke's theory of substance. that is to say, i've been reading about it for the past four hours or so now, and i'm no closer to knowing what locke thought about substance. philosophers have a tendency to say, very gravely, that philosophy must take our ordinary everyday experience into account (must be from the 'inside of lived experience') -- so if we think, ordinarily, that when we touch (say) the table we are touching a table that exists outside and independent of our minds, then philosophy must be able to account for this belief, strange as it may be. i think something has gone very wrong with philosophy. when i touch you -- do i not touch *you*? you as person; substantial; material; unified in time and space; real beneath my hands --

gah.

my room.

so shawne and i were walking back from the cinema after y tu mama tambien last night lamenting our lives and wondering why we weren't at a beach in mexico eating fried fish and swimming in the gorgeous gorgeous water that was a clear turquoise and not the murky grey you find in singapore -- and we were talking about setting up a little bookshop-cafe-movie-screening-place that (my improvisation now) would have lots of plants and sofas and cushions and of course space on the walls for aspiring artists/photographers to display stuff, and place in the cafe for poets and musicians to perform -- i don't know what kind of cafe -- we could do something like the phoenix one which if i remember rightly could be a bar as well -- or is that conflating too many things into one place? and of course somewhere that one can screen lots of indie movies. or maybe a different somewhere. anyhow. i thought -- if i get this down on words, in whatever form -- then maybe it'll happen. :)

1.30ish a.m., my room.

just watched 'y tu mama tambien' (and your mother too) -- fantastic film about mexico, road-trips, friendship, sex, trust, love, betrayal and beaches! i know how cliched that sounds -- two boys in the summer before starting university, their girlfriends have gone to travel in europe; one (tencho) is from a rich political family, the other (julio) is from a lower/middle class family i think, his mom's a secretary; at a glitzy party thrown by tencho's dad and graced by the president they meet tencho's cousin's wife, luisa, who's from spain; luisa says she's thinking of going to the beach and they start telling her about 'heaven's mouth', a beach they make up; luisa finds out her husband, jano, tencho's cousin, has been cheating on her and calls the boys and says ok i'll come and then they're off! julio and tencho are charolastras. space cowboys. friendships and trips. luisa sleeps with tencho. julio sees them. goes to the swimming pool anyway to wait for tencho. they race underwater as they often do; this time julio wins. he says, you shouldn't have let me win. and then he says, i slept with ana (tencho's girlfriend). charolastras are not supposed to sleep with each other's girls. long night of recrimination. the voiceovers get somewhat too intrusive at times, too narrative, but are mostly very well done, and carry along the wider narrative within which this story is set. the next day luisa fucks julio in the car and tencho stops because he doesn't want to be the chauffeur. it comes out later that tencho's slept with ceci (julio's girlfriend) before. luisa storms off. tencho apologizes on his knees (as he had made julio do so the night before). they catch up with ceci. they take a lucky turning (saba was high -- he's always high -- when he told them about a beach and they didn't know how to get anywhere) and they do come to a beach. a beautiful one. and they meet a fisherman and his family who gives boat tours and stuff around the coast. chuy. (voiceover: chuy won't be able to give boat tours before cos something, i forget what, some government thing; he relocates and tries to find work but several companies prevent him; ends up as a janitor in a hotel and never fishes again.) and the beach is called 'heaven's mouth'. dinner and dancing; more stories come out -- 'truth' -- while they're drinking and we find out that they each have fucked the other's girlfriends several times and julio has slept with tencho's mother. then they go back and have group sex. this is bad story-telling but it's just for my record; it was a nervous and sexy scene. in the morning julio and tencho leave; luisa stays behind. the friendship's broken; luisa dies a month later of cancer as she and only she knew -- so she said she would have left jano anyway; she had always known about his affairs. an amazing story. and very well done. and full of life! and tenderness and --

and of course trust and betrayal. 'yet she / will be / false, ere i come, to two or three'.

6.50 pm, my room.

starting again.