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.