Not yet at the end of the year

Is it only 3 a.m. on Wed night/Thurs morning? This has been an interminable week. An interminable year, come to that. I can't remember any other time when I've been more relieved than anything to finally see the year come to an end. I don't make wishes for the new year but if I did mine would be - let the next year be different.

The mooring of starting out

Soonest Mended

Barely tolerated, living on the margin
In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued
On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso
Before it was time to start all over again.
There would be thunder in the bushes, a rustling of coils,
And Angelica, in the Ingres painting, was considering
The colorful but small monster near her toe, as though wondering whether forgetting
The whole thing might not, in the end, be the only solution.
And then there always came a time when
Happy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile
Came plowing down the course, just to make sure everything was O.K.,
Only by that time we were in another chapter and confused
About how to receive this latest piece of information.
Was it information? Weren't we rather acting this out
For someone else's benefit, thoughts in a mind
With room enough and to spare for our little problems (so they began to seem),
Our daily quandary about food and the rent and the bills to be paid?
To reduce all this to a small variant,
To step free at last, minuscule on the gigantic plateau --
This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.
Alas, the summer's energy wanes quickly,
A moment and it is gone. And no longer
May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.
Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.
Now there is no question even of that, but only
Of holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown off,
With an occasional dream, a vision: a robin flies across
The upper corner of the window, you brush your hair away
And cannot quite see, or a wound will flash
Against the sweet faces of the others, something like:
This is what you wanted to hear, so why
Did you think of listening to something else? We are all talkers
It is true, but underneath the talk lies
The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose
Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor.

These then were some hazards of the course,
Yet though we knew the course was hazards and nothing else
It was still a shock when, almost a quarter of a century later,
The clarity of the rules dawned on you for the first time.
They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game
Were merely spectators, though subject to its vicissitudes
And moving with it out of the tearful stadium, borne on shoulders, at last.
Night after night this message returns, repeated
In the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us,
Yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth,
The being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them,
Not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes
To be without, alone and desperate.
But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting
Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal. These were moments, years,
Solid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts,
But like the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression
Not too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day
When it had been outgrown. Better, you said, to stay cowering
Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning
Is a delusion, and I agreed, adding that
Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned,
That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint
None of us ever graduates from college,
For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up
Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.
And you see, both of us were right, though nothing
Has somehow come to nothing; the avatars
Of our conforming to the rules and living
Around the home have made -- well, in a sense, "good citizens" of us,
Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept
The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out,
For this is action, this not being sure, this careless
Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,
Making ready to forget, and always coming back
To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

- John Ashbery

Filtering Vodka

A colleague sent this: how to turn bottom-shelf vodka into something you can serve at a party in good conscience.

[three hours too late]

Happy birthday Addy! Hope you're well on your way to San Francisco by now.

Epitaph for a tourist

And all we did
     In that city was drink and think and loiter.

- from Louis Macneice, "Autumn Journal"

Bread and wine and roses

So my parents are coming back today and there's nary a scrap of food in the house -but there's bread and beer and flowers (it should be bread and wine and roses, should it not? There's no more wine, so I put flowers in the wine bottles.)

Merry Christmas everyone!

How to maul a turkey

So me and Steph carved the turkey for the office party with something not much more than a penknife - "carved" being an optimistic term for what we did to the turkey.

[more]

From one of the Anne Carsons (I think Men in the Off-hours), quoting Sappho:

To stop breathing is bad.
So the gods judge.
For they do not stop breathing.

A Pretext for Running after Tops

Found an old letter I never posted which put side by side a number of passages from Anne Carson -

From the Preface to Eros the Bittersweet:

Kafka's "The Top" is a story about a philosopher who spends his spare time around children so he can grab their tops in spin. To catch a top still spinning makes him happy for a moment in his belief "that the understanding of any detail, that of a spinning top for instance, was sufficient for the understanding of all things." Disgust follows delight almost at once and he throws down the top, walks away. Yet hope of understanding continues to fill him each time top-spinning preparations begin among the children: "as soon as the top began to spin and he was running breathlessly after it, the hope would turn to certainty but when he held the silly piece of wood in his hand he felt nauseated."

The story is about the delight we take in metaphor. A meaning spins, remaining upright on an axis of normalcy aligned with the conventions of connotation and denotation, and yet: to spin is not normal, and to dissemble normal uprightness by means of this fantastic motion is impertinent. What is the relation of impertinence to the hope of understanding? To delight?

The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Suppression of impertinence is not the lover's aim. Nor can I believe this philosopher really runs after understanding. Rather, he has become a philosopher (that is, one whose profession is to delight in understanding) in order to furnish himself with pretexts for running after tops.

From "Kinds of Water: An Essay on the Road to Compostela" in Plainwater

In the city of Burgos lies El Cid himself - beside Ximena he rests in an eternal conversation. Beneath the transept of Burgos Cathedral they have lain since 1921, and before that in a burial place in the city from the year 1835, and previously seven hundred years in the monastery of San Pedro outside the city walls. By now, she must know every word he is going to say. Yet she kisses his mouth and the eyes of his face, she kisses his hands, his truth, his marrow. What is the conversation of lovers? Compared with ordinary talk, it is as bread to stones. ...

There is no question I covet that conversation. There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is. And I see him free of it, as if he had simply crossed to the other side of a bridge, I see desire set free in him like some ray of mysterious light. Now tell me the truth, would you cross that bridge if you came to it? And where, if you made the grave choice to give up bread, would it take you? You see what I fear.

And back to Eros the Bittersweet:

From the testimony of lovers like Sokrates or Sappho we can construct what it would be like to live in a city of no desire. Both the philosopher and the poet find themselves describing Eros in an image of wings and metaphors of flying, for desire is a movement that carries yearning hearts from over here to over there, launching the wind or a story. In a city without desire such flights are unimaginable. Wings are kept clipped. The known and unknown align themselves one behind the other so that, provided you are positioned at the proper angle, they seem to be one and the same. ... To reach for something else than the facts will carry you beyond this city and perhaps, as for Sokrates, beyond this world. It is a high-risk proposition, as Sokrates saw quite clearly, to reach for the difference between known and unknown. He thought the risk worthwhile, because he was in love with the wooing itself. And who is not?

(I'm destroying the letter, and other similar letters; some things are beyond pardon.)

Arendt (reprise)

This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, "Volo ut sis (I want you to be)," without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.

- Hannah Arendt

Found this when attempting to clean up some of the clutter in my room. Well there you go; that's your answer why and why not. But because it's not an excuse, I'm still going to try and cut a path through the clutter.

[from Plainwater]

It would be an almost perfect love affair, wouldn't it? that between the pilgrim and the road. No mistake, it is a beautiful thing, the camino. It stretches away from you. It leads to real gold: Look at the way it shines. And it asks only one thing. Which happens to be the one thing you long to give. You step forward. You shiver in the light. Nothing is left in you but desire for that perfect economy of action, using up the whole heart, no residue, no mistake: camino. It would be as simple as water, wouldn't it? If there were any such thing as simple action for animals like us.

Pilgrims were people glad to take off their clothing, which was on fire.

- Anne Carson, "Kinds of Water: An Essay on the Road to Compostela"

Fate

I decide to start work at 2.15 in the morning - having left the office at 6 to catch Ocean's Twelve (why am I explaining this?) - and find that my office email network whatsit in inexplicably down. It's a sign of something - probably of severe time mismanagement on my part - but what can you do in the face of technical intransigence? And so to bed.

[more Ashbery]

Some Old Tires

This was mine, and I let it slip through my fingers.
Nevertheless, I do not want, in this airy and pleasant city,
To be held back by valors that were mine
Only for the space of a dream instant, before continuing

To be someone else's. Because there's too much to
Be done that doesn't fit, and the parts that get lost
Are the reasonable ones just because they got lost
And were forced to suffer transfiguration by finding their way home

To a forgotten spot way out in the fields. To have always
Had the wind for a friend is no recommendation. Yet some
Disagree, while still others claim that signs of fatigue
And mended places are, these offshore days, open

And a symbol of what must continue
After the ring is closed on us. The furniture,
Taken out and examined under the starlight, pleads
No contest. And the backs of those who sat there before.

- John Ashbery

[if you like]

Just Walking Around

What name do I have for you?
Certainly there is no name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much, and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting,
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among the islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light there, and mystery and food.
Come see it. Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

- John Ashbery

Service standards

So David Blunkett's secretary emailed the immigration Director-General saying, hey what happened to that case I sent you? What of it? It seems faintly hypocritical to expect politicians to be sea-green incorruptible. Don't we try to process cases faster if we know someone at the top is involved, or someone particularly noisy? Perhaps not an absolutely impartial system, but not an unbearably corrupt one either; the system can take some low-level corruption, and absolute impartiality is surely not a credible fiction. This is of course all the wrong sort of thing for a civil servant to say.

Everyone needs a talent

My ability to procrastinate astonishes even me, which takes some doing. Let it be known that standing on one leg is a sin. Also whistling.

And on TV, hypnotism and the "aggravated lethargy" induced by both. There are other ways, of course, of inducing aggravated lethargy, which the article does not mention.

Not that it matters, does it? One of us isn't communicating in the office, and it's probably me. Witness:

Colleague: ...there's an appeal from someone who wants to know why her mother didn't get X. Her mother passed away before we gave X out.

Me: Er, because she's dead?

Colleague: So I think we should talk to Y and coordinate our response on this and explain why the mother didn't qualify for X.

Me: That's not because she's not alive and no longer needs anything from the world of the living?

[query]

It is ok, isn't it, to eat days-old eggs?

Spamalot

Eric Idle says Derrida got it from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

(The Holy Grail is going to Broadway as a musical. And Tim Curry's in it! Isn't that the Rocky Horror guy? Did you need another reason to go to New York?)

Dave Eggers (who wrote the whole thing and doesn't sound manic at all - maybe I misjudged A Heartbreaking Work etc.) describes the Pythons' early programmes as combining "startling erudition, theatrical precision, and utter madness". Now there's a standard to live up to.

Scrambled Eggs that Stick to the Pan

Calvin Trillin interviews with the New Yorker.

Archilochos at the Edge

Breaks interrupt time and change its data. Archilochos' written texts break pieces of passing sound off from time and hold them as his own. Breaks make a person think. When I contemplate the physical spaces that articulate the letters 'I love you' in a written text, I may be led to think about other spaces, for example the space that lies between 'you' in the text and you in my life. Both of these kinds of space come into being by an act of symbolization. Both require the mind to reach out from what is present and actual to something else, something glimpsed in the imagination. In letters as in love, to imagine is to address oneself to what is not. To write words I put a symbol in place of an absent sound. To write the words 'I love you' requires a further, analogous replacement, one that is much more painful in its implication. Your absence from the syntax of my life is not a fact to be changed by written words. And it is the single fact that makes a difference to the lover, the fact that you and I are not one. Archilochos steps off the edge of the fact into extreme solitude.

Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

On tolerance, gratitude and the Public Service Commission

Today says that PSC has become more tolerant of failure.

I am told that PSC writes off one-third of its scholars after they come back and endure the first Commission interview, and another third after two years of work. Then they're left with the third they actually want.

The Mitre

So I just went to the most implausible bar in all Singapore. It's a derelict old backpackers' hotel called the Mitre. You go up Kiliney Road, until all the yuppie restaurants peter off and the road gets quieter, and then turn in up a long, dark driveway. At the end of the driveway - not at all visible from the road - is the crumbling facade of one of the old colonial houses, with the white paint peeling and discarded furniture piled in the corners of the porch and a sense of abandoned doors swinging out in the wind (though they didn't). And then you go in, and the bar is completely empty. It's just a long room with whitewashed walls and dark rafters and creaky old ceiling fans and large gaps in the ceiling and faded old slightly sinister posters on the walls and a mismatched set of broken armchairs lining the walls. and a bar at the far corner. There's a dark, grim staircase at one point with a large sign saying, "Non-residents not allowed upstairs". An old white-haired man limps out from the lighted gap at the far end at this point and says, Do you want a drink? It turns out that he has only Heineken and Tiger. We get our beers and drag chairs around and prop up the rickety coffee-table with a page from Lay Tong's magazine and then Don, Terry and Michelle proceed to discuss "Shutter" in great detail, while Lay Tong and I listen in queasy fascination. The place is perfect. It's everything you could possibly imagine it to be.

Cartoons from the New Yorker / notes / procrastination

Click on the link on this page.

And this is the Saul Steinberg Foundation, "to facilitate the study and appreciation of Saul Steinberg's contribution to 20th century art". I want to do that. Curate/design an exhibition of cartoons.

Artists go back into the closet (and return to representation).

On being smart

Jeffrey Williams says that literary criticism (and academia in general, probably) has shifted from emphasising historical analysis to intelligence to rigour and now (back) to "smartness". Now that there is little methodogical consistency to criticism, the important thing is not to write something well-researched or useful or relevant, but something smart. And interesting (as a bonus).

Here's John Erskine's essay (mentioned in the above one) on The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.

(So much for not blogging.)

quietly now

Yes I'm tired of it too. Let's start afresh. No more complaining about the world being too much to bear. I'm not taking this offline altogether because I need some place to write, but I'm declaring - again - a moratorium on bitching, which might translate into a moratorium on blogging. But write to me and I'll write back.

In repudiation of ovens

WN: ...but do you want to do some tormented Sylvia Plath head-in-the-oven thing?

No. No! I'd much rather be happy and fulfilled and whole. Sorry if I've given the impression that that needed saying.

Finding flowers by the interstate

The Agora Coalition from Rutgers University.

The Long Civic Generation

Robert Putnam says that there's a long "civic" generation - a generation of Americans substantially more engaged in community affairs and substantially trusting than those younger than they - which is roughly those the generation born between 1910 and 1940. The culminating point of the generation is the 1925-1930 cohort - "Since national surveying began, this cohort has been exceptionally civic: voting more, joining more, reading newspapers more, trusting more. As the distinguished sociologist Charles Tilly (born in 1928) said in commenting on an early version of this essay, 'We are the last suckers.' "

Elsewhere in the essay, Putnam examines a bunch of factors and then blames TV for the decline in civic engagement in America.

Laundry list

There's a report somewhere on the Internet (I think on the Feedback Unit site, but too lazy to check) on a public consultation exercise which revealed that what the youth of today want is a government which offers "internship programmes, job opportunities, empowerment, ownership and hope".

[ ]

It occurs to me that it cannot be healthy to be in a job which makes you a worse person than you were. Shouldn't one learn something positive - how to think more clearly, or write more lucidly, or interact better with other people, or explore different interests or occupations or points of view, or - ? And not just the SOPs of the civil service, which would be all very well and good if I wanted to stay in the civil service (not that I know how to work within it - there's a deep and unbridgeable chasm of communication between me and my boss - which is weird because we're both Oxford PPE, and similarity of education should produce some similarity of thought, shouldn't it?), but not useful for anything else. If anything, the job makes you bitchy and cynical and suspicious - which I supposed are traits which would be produced in any job in any large organisation, but that doesn't make it better.

Or one could just grow up, I suppose.

Things to buy

(1) A Californian town for $1.78m.

You don't think spending money on food would be a better idea?

Thaksin's government plans to send military planes to the Muslim south - to drop a hundred million paper origami cranes as a sign of peace and goodwill.

Comet

Holderlin: "Would I like to be a comet? I think so. For they have the speed of birds: they flower in fire, and are like children, in their purity. To wish for anything greater is not within man's reach."

- Robert Calasso's Literature and the Gods.

Ice Sculptures

"When I first picked up an ice chisel, it was very sharp and I pushed it and it made this 'crisp' sound, and the feel of it was so delicious, and I still have that pleasure," he said.

Tired

I think Dom (?) told me once (she read somewhere) that this was a bad year for monkeys and I remember being rather heartened by the news. Not sure if she meant this calendar year or the Chinese year but even if it's the Chinese year - at least the year will be over come February, and perhaps it wasn't all my fault after all? Alright. Enough already. Let me end this on something else which should definitely be written somewhere on the Net for posterity - you know how people sometimes dream of being chased by a shadowy something? Fay once dreamt of being chased by a giant shadowy penis. Yes and sweet dreams to you too.

Holiday Plans

If I went to the States to visit sometime in March, after the bloody budget (or rather, the Budget - talk about the reification of the state) is over, would you make available floor space?

Swingle Singers

Which I went to see with a couple of my colleagues (and I should've asked you I know, but we booked tickets at the last minute...) and were excellent, as always.

I love "Amazing Grace". In part I like it for itself (and especially the way the Swingles sing it), in part I like the idea of a redemptive grace.

Not Even For Helen Mirren

If ever you feel like watching a melodramatic, stylised interpretation of a rather common and sordid tale of love and lust and jealousy and blustering violence just that bit of cannibalism - try Peter Greenaway's "The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover". Otherwise avoid this. Great sets, if you like your restaurants nightmarish, but too much bluster and far too many scenes establishing the same point - a good deal of judicious editing is recommended.

Whose Line Is It Anyway?

This is an unfunny entry, but the British cast of Whose Line Is It Anyway? was at Bar None on Saturnight and very, very funny. I think they might still be performing; please go see.

Fraternal advice

[At my cousin's wedding dinner - ]
Me: I can't fit into any of my clothes. I need a dieting plan.
My brother: Starve.

[no comment]

XZ sends a journalist's blog on the war in Iraq.

Reader Response

I found a copy of Calvin Trillin's With All Disrespect in the library - a compilation of his columns from The Nation in the 1980s - and in one chapter ("Moral Suasion for Grownups"), he writes:

I figure what the State Department needs is a series of commercials with Patti LuPone, in her strapless "Evita" gown. They could run on one of those blue-movie cable channels, to reach the diplomatic crowd. "I like strong men," Patti would say. "Also strongmen." She is, of course, smiling her knowing smile. ... "I met a strongman I thought I was going to like," Patti says. "I liked his cars. I liked his Swiss bank account." Patti suddenly looks very serious. "Then I heard that he closes newspapers and runs torture chambers and makes people disappear," she says. She shakes her head sadly. "And to think," she says, "for a moment there, I thought he was a cool guy."

And just where it says "torture chambers", a previous reader has written, in neat blue capitals, AT TANGLIN POLICE STATION.

The Incredibles [spoiler warning]

Everyone has been saying it's good and it is. The superheroes are running around saving the day. Mr Incredible and Elasti-Girl fight over who should haul a thief off to justice and fall in love. Then the city turns against the superheroes: Mr Incredible fails to capture Bomb Voyage because he's dealing with Buddy, his fanatic fan (My name's not Buddy, it's Incredi-Boy!), a suicidal man sues Mr Incredible for foiling his suicide attempt and injuring him in the process, a whole trainful of people sue Mr Incredible for assorted injuries after he manages to stop the train from plunging off the broken track to its death (well - its passengers' deaths). The superheroes are returned to their hidden identities, relocated and told to stay normal. And now the story starts - Mr Incredible (now Bob Parr - of course his name is Bob) is married to Elasti-Girl (henceforth Helen Parr) and they have three kids (Violet, a teenager perpetually hidden behind her hair and who can make herself invisible and project a force field at will; Dash, the primary school kid who can run so fast no-one sees him; Jack Jack, the baby, who appears to be normal), a tiny car and a house in the burbs. Bob works in insurance. He's a hulking man - all that muscle as Mr Incredible has now turned to fat - and cramped into a tiny grey cubicle. There's a great scene when he stands up in a cubicle far too small to swing a cat in and peers out over the cubicle walls and the camera pans back to a sea of cubicle walls. He's unhappy with his job and spends his nights with an old superhero friend, Frozone (Lucius) in his car listening to his police-scanner and doing superhero work on the sly. Helen worries; she wants him to be promoted in his job; she warns her children to be normal because that's what the world wants them to be; she just wants them all to lead a happy normal family life.

There is the wonderful Edna Mode, voiced by the director himself (Brad Bird), the fashion designer who used to design superhero costumes (back in the days when she designed for the gods, not for supermodels, what's so super about these models) and who designs a whole new set of costumes for the Parr family.

The rest is fairly standard. Bob gets a message from a mysterious stranger, Mirage. He is sent on a secret mission to destroy a rogue robot on a deserted island. Mirage works for someone whose office is in the heart of a volcano. Of course the someone turns out to be Buddy, the fan that Mr Incredible spurned back in the real world. Buddy (now Syndrome) has invented all sorts of cool things to make up for his complete lack of superhuman powers. He wants to get back as Mr Incredible. I'm going to stop narrating here because you know the rest and I'm lazy. And it's as heartwarming as cartoons should be, and slyly funny as the better ones are - poking fun at all kinds of stereotypes, from the Italian fashion designer to the disgruntled office-worker to the star-crazed fan to the mad scientist in a volcano to the sulky teenager hiding behind her hair - and sensitive to the normalities (normalcies? that's gotta be wrong) of office life and marriage life and all those other lives that creep up on us. And the baby is really cute, too.

Return of the Modern

Apparently Taniguchi, architect of the new MOMA building now back in Manhattan, said to the museum trustees, "Raise a lot of money for me, I'll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I'll make the architecture disappear." And they raised almost a billion dollars for him, so he did. "The customary sensations that buildings give us - of secure enclosure, of masses of matter firmly supported - are diluted by a black gap, a mere quarter inch wide, that runs along the bottom and top of every interior wall, even at the base of weight-bearing pillars, so that everything, subtly, floats. The...aesthetic accomplishment [of the gaps] is to dematerialize the walls; the visitor moves through spaces demarcated as if by Japanese paper screens." (John Updike, "Invisible Cathedral", The New Yorker, Nov 15, 2004)

Paul Goldberger from the same issue: "In 1997, the museum snubbed the radicals and hired Taniguchi, who represents not the cutting edge of architecture but, rather, a carefully wrought, highly refined modernism - a cool and reserved aesthetic that has more in common wiht the Modern's original credo than with the expressive direction of recent architecture and museum design."

Makes one want to visit the Modern just for its design, and I did enjoy the tiny pared-down Modern they had in Queens while they were renovating the main building.

[Note to self: post longer entry, or at least read the rather technical article Von linked.]

[No puns]

10-year-old toast which has the face of the Virgin Mary.

Personal Ad

My dears, I downloaded Trillian and it automatically added my MSN and AIM contacts, which are far and few between, but not my ICQ contacts, which are slightly greater in number. If you see me online, please message me and I'll add you. Although, of course, if you never want me to talk to you online again, then this is your chance.

Today, we shine

as a beacon for Asia in organ donation and transplantation.

When you read that, did you see a beacon tower poking out of a mound of organs? No? Never mind.

Prophetic

I ran into one of the office attendants in the photocopying room today and he informed me, quite out of the blue, that unless I broke my bond within the first four years of the bond period I would never do so and before I knew it I would have worked thirteen years at the office just like him.

I have two comments:

(1) what, is it written on my face? and

(2) thirteen years?

Livejournal Watch on the Weblog

I don't know these people but I wish I did. Read the rest of the Weblog too.

I also wish I had the Wowee Zowee album and could write about Derrida (yes I know it's two different people writing entries about Pavement and Derrida. So?), but that's neither here nor there.

It's universal

The new poet laureate of the US writes like a CAPper.

Hobbes: Reprise

BBC Online poll: Have you lived in a country without a government? Send us your experiences.

As usual

I just did something exceedingly stupid and feel the need for absolution of some kind.

(Clearly, frittering away office time and resources counts in no way towards penance.)

Photos from Japan

Say hello to Von.

(For the record, I am not an ambulatory brain. Come to my office and they will tell you that I am a blot upon the landscape, and mostly a comatose blot at that.)

Self-Improvement

[A strangely apt but somewhat unfortunate time to find this poem.]

Self-Improvement

Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:

Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.

Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math.

Maybe he unscrewed
the bulb from his apartment ceiling
so that passersby would not believe
a giant firefly was pulsing
its electric abdomen in 13 B.

Maybe, as he stood
two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster
with his breath, he visualized the future
as a mansion standing on the shore
that he was rowing to
with his tongue's exhausted oar.

Of course, the girlfriend dumped him:
met someone, apres-ski, who,
using nothing but his nose
could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.

Sometimes we are asked
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.

Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.

The climaxes of suffering are complex,
costly, beautiful, but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.

So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.

- Tony Hoagland

[For XZ]

From Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

On Sex and Chocolates

Thomas sends this article: Libido linked to love of chocolate

WOMEN have compared chocolate to sex for decades. Now doctors have discovered a scientific link between the two.

According to Italian researchers, women who eat chocolate regularly had the highest levels of desire, arousal and satisfaction from sex. But for men, the findings of a British study were not so good....

...In the chocolate/sex study, urologists from Milan's San Raffaele hospital questioned 163 women about their consumption of chocolate and their sexual fulfilment.

"Women who have a daily intake of chocolate showed higher levels of desire than women who did not have this habit," the study found. "Chocolate can have a positive physiological impact on a woman's sexuality."

Dr Andrea Salonia, author of the study - funded by a university, not by the confectionery industry - said women who had a low libido could become more amorous after eating chocolate.

She believes chocolate could be particularly medicinal for women who shun sex because they are suffering from premenstrual tension.

"Chocolate is not like a food, it's like a drug," Dr Salonia said. "Women who suffer mood swings as a result of their menstrual cycle may also suffer a dip in their sexual function. I strongly believe eating chocolate may improve their sexual function."

The research also looked at smoking and coffee consumption, but found no links with sexual enjoyment.

From The Sunday Times of London

Holding Hands

My (sec 4) brother tells me that his friend broke up with his girlfriend. Oh I'm sorry, I say. My brother says, that's ok, they weren't very close. But they did hold hands.

Don't you want to be 16 again - or at least at an age where holding hands represented an escalation of romantic affection - and there was all the rest to come?

[because]

How do you make such implacable choices?

You said once (someone told you) that three things were needed: great doubt, great perseverance, great faith.

Whatever you say, I do need someone to tell me it isn't quite that stupid to find a dream and follow it.

John Peel

Have been so wrapped up in myself that I forgot I meant to say - I know John Peel died a while ago, but I didn't get round to saying it, and there should be a moment of mourning, however belated.

Of Scrabble, Brownies, Ice-cream and Other Necessities

Dinner(ish) with S and cp and J and jy at Westlake and then back to S's sans cp for scrabble and Folly Molly and Arrogant Worms (the cows song) and Swingle Sisters (all courtesy of J's ipod mini) and the most obscene poem ever written about a cunnin' vending machine (please someone write about it) and of course ice-cream and brownies and cookies, because are we ever at S's without chocolate in some form or other?

If there's one thing to be grateful to the Singapore education system for, it's for throwing me in with this bunch of people. Somehow, miraculously, we appear to all still be in touch and able to talk to each other and to hold a conversation - I don't have conversations with people in the office; we either gossip about our colleagues or discuss our work but we don't converse, exactly - and to not be told that it's silly or childish or spoilt to want to be happy, where happiness is a function not just of friends and family but of doing something one enjoys. And it's not a stupid question to ask, what do I want to do? (Though J's quotation from the Sandman echoes uncomfortably in my mind - that when we get what we want, we find that it is what we wanted.) Which is all to say, thank you S for having us over; I'm glad we did manage to get ourselves to your place after all (and not succumb to inertia, which was what I was going to do); next time I'll bring gin.

Wilco

is playing in Madison Square Garden on New Year's Eve. I offer this information for what it's worth.

Don't you wish I kept to silence?

Things To Do

Go to the gym.
Take up yoga, pilates, aerobics classes.
Learn to dive or wakeboard.
Learn a new language.
Study for the CFA something (Chartered...Financial...Accounting?).
Remember that at least one of the objectives of policy-making is the maximal convenience of the civil service.
Remember that at least one of the objectives of submission-writing is to get people to notice the brilliance of your arguments (all the more for being limited to 4 pages, 3-sentence paragraphs and monosyllabic words).
Not argue with the entire top hierarchy of the office.
Not make facetious and/or frivolous remarks to any of the top hierarchy.
Dress appropriately for the office (no t-shirts, no jeans, no suspicious footwear).
Express equal parts horror and curiosity when it is suggested that the office should mount an expedition to a gay club.
Read Pratchetts over and over again.
Read intelligent books and meditate over reviews not written.
Write letters in my head to people I once knew and now talk to only in the desperate reaches of my imagination (there is an Eliot poem that talks about memory reconsidered as passion?).
Stop taking the term "depression" in vain; there is depression with hospitals and drugs, and then there is what someone called reiterated whining.
Pull myself together and stop complaining.

I haven't any idea what I'd do otherwise. I don't think I could try to read political theory again, and this is in some way a loss for me (though a boon for political theory and the academic world in general). I know how strange that sounds and it's not a bad thing to be less starry-eyed and of course I wasn't any damn good at theory to start with, but it would be nice to think, wouldn't it, that some day it would be possible to go read Arendt in the New School? I came across a phrase of Henry James - some character describing himself as a "perfectly-equipped failure" - except that I'm not very well-equipped at all. Does a handful of quotations count as equipment? At least we'll die with harness on our back?

(Thank you for listening, for writing back, for calling, for keeping in touch, for offering a lifeline of words. Make a snow angel for all of us back in Singapore and think fondly of the sun.)

Litany

Does it seem to you that everyone is restless, unhappy, depressed, insane (showing signs of incipient insanity, in any case) or all of the above? More than usual, I mean. So what would it take and what's your escape plan?

Being Good and Doing Good

Keynes in 1938 recalling Bloomsbury: "Our prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Of these love came a long way first."

The essay is here.

A Problem of Conjugation

Minzhi just gave me the word "onsittan". It means "to oppress".

Good night now and don't let anything onsitteth you!

In lieu of an escape plan

[There is a way of telling this.]

Have been out of sorts and cranky lately, mainly because I loathe the office. Half the work is boring (because gambling regulation and tax are frankly rather boring subjects when you get down to the details) and half is interesting in parts (the parts that do not involve answering other people's questions); the office, on the other hand, takes all possible joy from work. I swear the office makes people even bitchier and more cynical than when they came in, and that takes some doing. This particular entry (and so many of the previous) is probably a case in hand.

It's all wrong, isn't it, to be all angsty and teenagey past the age of fifteen? Shouldn't we know what we want to do and find some way of getting there, rather than mope around sullenly? I put this question to Reidar (who will now never ask me how I am again) and in reply he gave me a TLS essay on the difference between being good and doing good, which compares Keynes and Shaw and which I will put up on this site when I figure out how to (it's too long for a blog entry).

Pink lights

[There is a way of telling this.]

Today we set out on an expedition to Mustapha and took a detour down Desker Road. There are pink lamps lit over some open doorways, and in the garish pink light sit girls with their legs crossed or old women guarding the doorway (and one resting by the door with her walking aid - but perhaps that household enjoys pink lighting). Food afterwards and then the muchness that is Mustapha. Doesn't Mustapha remind you of those gigantic discount stores in the States? With everything piled high and nothing that you would really want to buy (except the electronic stuff. And the food. Always the food).

Apart from that there isn't much happening that I can remember, but that's partly because it's 5 a.m. in the morning.

Movie count:
- Bride and Prejudice (pure Bollywood with rather unfortunate bits of dialogue in between the singing and dancing - the movie follows Jane Austen faithfully except for extraneous characters like Kitty and the Hursts, witty dialogue and biting social commentary);
- Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (as cheesy as the title promises);
- Motorcycle Diaries (Gael Garcia Bernal is gorgeous, and the movie is quite picturesque too);
- Hamam (thought it was too sentimental about Istanbul, but then again that was the point of the movie).

Book count (excepting the fluff and Pratchett and Wodehouse re-reads):
- John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies (my first Updike, and beautiful and understated);
- a couple of Gore Vidals (soap opera);
- Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (can't say anything about this in one bracket);
- Reading Lolita in Tehran (a woman professor teaching literature at the university in Tehran under the post-revolution fundamentalist regime in Iran. You should read this, even if you're the sort who shies away from books with Nabokov works and exotic cities in their titles);
- Going Postal (thank you Su-Lin for borrowing it from the library!)
- Minzhi's (copy of) The Bear Went over the Mountain (sorry, darling, for hanging onto it for so long. It's amazing).
- Jose Saramago, Blindness (first Saramago and am still reading).

On job titles

Today we met someone who had the job (inter alia) of Senior Intermittent Advisor to the US Treasury.

I'd like to officially be an Intermittent Employee or an Occasional Worker or even an Infrequent Thinker.

Charles V could vault onto his horse in a single bound

(I think) but the HK Jockey Club apparently holds a government-granted monopoly on pari-mutuel betting on horse raising [sic].

Saved!

Are teen movies getting better? Saw Mean Girls a while ago and then Saved a few days ago and both have more or less the same plot and cast of characters and both very well done (except that Saved was funnier. I particularly like how the Jesus fish on the Jewish girl's car had "gefilte" written in it. How many people have I offended already?). Funny and sharp and able to laugh at itself for taking with some seriousness the characters and the genre - and rather formulaic. In that characterisation rather like romantic comedies (thinking specifically now of Working Title productions).

The Legend

There is a Bruce Lee coffeeshop (called "Legend Eating House" or something like it) down Circular Road somewhere with posters and photographs of Bruce Lee on the wall and his face superimposed on the shop signs between bowls of noodles (it's a noodle shop) and on every waiter's shirt and a bust of Bruce Lee on the fridge top. We asked if any of the figurines were on sale and the manager/owner/uncle said no, none of them, but if we liked them we too could join the Hong Kong Bruce Lee Club and why not come again and see them another day?

Descartes

My sister's joke -

So Descartes walks into a bar and the barman asks him if he'll have a martini (a barman after your heart, Choon).
Descartes: I think not.
And then he vanishes.

Yeah I know.

Not gentlemen

I shuddered from hair-do to shoe-sole. I was even more thankful than before than she had given me the bum's rush. I know what making something of me meant. Ten minutes after the Bishop and colleague had done their stuff she would have been starting to mould me and jack up my soul, and I like my soul the way it is. It may not be the sort of soul that gets crowds cheering in the streets, but it suits me and I don't want people fooling about with it.

- Bertie Wooster from Aunts Aren't Gentlemen

On grass snakes

Minzhi sends me this from Diana Athill's autobiography, "Instead of a Letter" (which by the way is a great title):

"And to have a whole city which, by custom, the young could treat as their own, to be able to walk down its High Street as confidently as though it were your garden path, to be free to be arrogant and absurd­ to annoy other people by making loud, precious talk in restaurants, or to carry a grass snake with you when you went to parties­ that was the kind of thing that you would never be able to do unselfconsciously elsewhere, and which you needed to do."

Notes

(1) Several weekends ago we went heartlanding in Potong Pasir. Potong Pasir looks like it was stuck in a time warp twenty years ago. They still have the old provision shops and kiddy machines and playgrounds of metal contraptions (rather than plastic and foam) and unpainted HDB facades. Toa Payoh, across the expressway, is all shiny and new and has gardens and benches and residents' corners. The sign says "Welcome to Toa Payoh Vista".

(The only people who will go heartlanding are those who do not, for one reason or another and despite their protests to the contrary, see themselves as part of the heartland.)

(2) I took my driving test - and crashed into every possible thing there was to crash into. I mean kerbs and poles, not people and cars. The funny thing was, I crashed into everything with perfect equanimity, feeling sorry only for the tester - something disastrous always does happen when I do anything which requires any degree of physical coordination and grace - and rather glad that at least I didn't kill anyone. I should give up driving, except that everyone needs one thing in their lives to reach out for and test their faith against.

(3) Yesterday I saw "Imelda". I'm not sure what to make of the documentary, or Imelda Marcos. The director, Ramona Diaz, gave her plenty of rope to hang herself with, and she (Imelda Marcos) availed herself of it. And perhaps it's true that she believes in beauty as a political principle (she says in the film that beauty is love made real, which says more about her marriage to Ferdinand Marcos than her politics). Perhaps she really does believe that she and her husband did good for the country. Perhaps she really didn't know her husband was systematically robbing the country's treasury. It's possible. It's an unobstrusive documentary - Imelda Marcos carries the story - in the way that a Michael Moore documentary (I'm thinking of Fahrenheit 9/11) is as much about Michael Moore as whatever the documentary's about. But I'd like to have seen more of her relationship with her husband. She had some political positions of her own - Minister of National Settlements (I think; can't remember), Governor of Metropolitan Manila - but far more political influence than her positions warranted. Ferdinand Marcos sent his Catholic wife to Libya to persuade Gaddafi not to send arms to the Muslim separatists in the Philippine South. She couldn't have managed that just by being pretty. She campaigned for him - the first time a political wife did so (the others had been content with keeping house). She made herself out to be a poor girl from the countryside made good, but she came from one of the powerful political families. I'd like to have seen more of the political machinations of the time. More of the Marcos dictatorship. What did they do? Besides build convention centres and cultural centres and other buildings (an opposition member said she had an "edifice complex").

(4) Have been reading bits of the New Yorker these last few days - Thurber letters/short stories, a compilation of "Talk of the Town" pieces I found in the library, Dorothy Parker book reviews from the 1920s/30s, the most recent copy - not the most impressive or up-to-date specimens of the New Yorker - but all this is to say, do you think we could do something like this in Singapore? Not to reproduce the New Yorker, exactly, but to come up with something irreverent and humorous and open to experiment while at the same time with impeccable writing and solid research? Something that reads like a conversation with a good friend. Could be about anything at all - a magazine with an inordinate curiosity about the world - and what would hold the magazine together would be consistently good writing and a sense of humour. Not that everything needs to be funny - a magazine that took its writing seriously but where the writers didn't take themselves too seriously and could laugh at themselves. Oh and we could have decent book/movie/music reviews too. By writers that enjoy good and trashy music (books etc.) both but can tell the difference. What do you think? Would you want to write for something like this?

Did they not say it would be bliss?

Come let me betray to you and everyone else my total and utter ignorance of the Income Tax Act.

*puts head in hands in despair*

I can still remember bits of Hamlet - how long has it been, 7 years now? - but I'm damned if I can remember tax law. Do you ever get the feeling that we have had, in every sense of the word, a magnificent education in futility?

If so, unwind me

"A man once showed a so-called indestructible watch to Bob Benchley and Dorothy Parker at Tony's. They whammed it against a table top, then put it on the floor and stamped on it. The dismayed owner picked it up and put it to his ear. "It has stopped," he said incredulously. "Maybe you wound it too tight," said Benchley and Parker together.

"Maybe I wound myself too tight. If so, unwind me."

That's taken from Thurber and entirely out of context. I'm re-reading his selected letters, which Minz gave me (or I stole it, like all the other books I stole from her - darling, I still have your Borges, do you want it with you?) and am almost inspired enough to put pen to paper. Almost. But write me and I'll write back.

In search of lost karma

After mussels and fries and a grand bitching session at Oosters tonight it's time for some redemptive action to prevent rebirth as a cockroach. I'm declaring a moratorium on bitching, whining, and all other forms of complaining. Which will leave me with very little to write about - but have done already. I go.

(For the record)

Saturday evening/night came with Leslie Low of The Observatory at the Esplanade Recital Studio, which I rather enjoyed, whatever cp thinks about void deck poems (not that he mentioned void decks - give the man some credit) and after that Aural Defect doing something post-rock (that's a genre? Well I suppose we are living in a post-modern post-structural post-materialist world. And in a recentish Economist it said that Britain was a post-Christian society.) and in mixed media. Which was pretty good except that I can't concentrate for long on anything that doesn't have words. And then drinks at the Arts House and later satay under the flyover, and all after the Malaysian budget in the morning and the office D&D and subsequent drunken binge at Velvet (drunken for me, anyway, because I have no alcohol tolerance to speak of) the night before.

Room with a view

Minzhi's now in Harvard (I can't say Cambridge - makes me think you're in England) and in a room most felicitously positioned to see naked men going to the bathroom in the morning. Best of luck, darling - with school, I mean. And the naked men.

Word of the Day

My brother found this on dictionary.com:

Grok: To understand profoundly through intuition or empathy.

Comes from Robert A. Heinlein's novel "Stranger in a Strange Land", where it is a Martian word meaning literally "to drink" and metaphorically "to be one with".

Was dictionary.com's word of the day on 15 July 1999.

Isn't that fantastic?

Grown-up-ness

Su-Lin has put up the class blogs for the current 13A, 1A and 1B (good luck with the trial class, darling!) and as she points out, thank god our emails are not on the net for seniors to laugh at, though now that I think of it, aren't the Dorinda emails on Minz's webpage somewhere?

But the disturbing thing isn't what the kids are writing now or what we were writing then but the undeniable fact that I'm not writing anything much different nowadays; it's just much less excusable now. Bugger. (At least the swear words have changed a little; the English education did have some use after all.)

Study of Time (2)

It's not that time stops when you're travelling - if time is motion then isn't time precisely what's happening (can time happen?) when you're on the road? In any case -

Istanbul. First day was Istanbul and the old city walls and the Grand Bazaar, which has turned into an immense tourist trap and sells all manner of Turkish Delight, apple tea grains, carpets, water pipes, lamps of coloured glass. Every carpet-seller wants to talk to you, but oh only to talk, not to sell you a carpet, you are my guest not my customer, have more apple tea, let me tell you how wonderful my carpets are just by way of conversation, and aren't Asian girls sweet? A mosque at every corner and Ataturk's picture in every shop.

Cappadocia. Overnight bus to Cappadocia to see the fairy chimneys the next day like toys of the gods. A landscape like no other. A series of rock-cut churches at the Goreme open-air museum, richly frescoed in reds and blues and yellows. There are more churches, says the guide, but we don't need to see them; they're all the same. We refuse to go look at the weaving and say we want to drop off at the Red Valley instead with a couple of American girls who have been travelling in the Middle East. One in from Nebraska and the other from Wisconsin but says she's from Chicago to avoid the red-neck jokes. She has a year's grant to live in Dubai and do research on civil society in the Middle East with no commitment to any product at the end. They call each other "yani" because that's what Arabs say, the same way Californians say "um" or "like" all the time. Imagine calling someone "um"! They have just come from Iran and were never so glad in their lives to cross the border to Turkey (but don't take the train!) and strip. American tourists in Iran have to wear the full veil (burqa?). There are two kinds of women in Turkey - those who wear the veil and those who don't. The ones who don't wear hot pink tops and paint their faces an inch thick - they haven't cast off the veil for no twinset and pearls. But we're still trekking through the Red Valley and getting more and more lost by the minute. We cut across to a different path, stumble across the winery, reach an unfamiliar part of the road and hitch back to town on a passing tour bus. Evening spent learning about carpets - there is the kilim, the wool carpet; the samat (?), silk on wool; and the carpet, which is knotted and not woven; the carpets (kilims and all) tend to have traditional designs: women with their hands on their hips (asking something from the gods), blue eyes (to ward off the evil eye. Every woman and child wears something with the blue eye - a bracelet, a necklace, a pin.) - and wandering around the town. The next day is an underground city and a walk through the lush Ihlara Valley and a scramble around the Selime monastery, which is a series of abandoned rock caves. The early Christians lived in the mountains; you can see the caves (which are occasionally occupied by present-day hermits) still.

Pamukkale. Overnight bus to Selcuk, tour bus to Pamukkale, where lies the ruins of Hierapolis, the old Roman spa city. Pamukkale has a series of cascading calcium pools, turquoise on white over the edge of the cliff like the end of the world. We meet two Americans with the Peace Corps in Ukraine, a university lecturer in marketing from New York called Katherine and a business consultant from Memphis, Tennessee called John. They're in Kiev for two years and travelling in the slack period. Kiev, John says, is ripe for a revolution. The kids are tired of the system. They're tired of having their schools closed down and no food on the supermarket shelves. Of hauling water from the river and living in darkness because the electricity supply for the building (all buildings are centrally supplied) has been cut off yet again. A revolution takes either immense bravery or immense misery, I say. There are no leaders yet, according to John, but the misery is all but present. There are also on the trip the golden girls, two middle-aged Filipina New Yorkers. This is the key stone, the most important stone in the whole arch, says the guide. Wow! say the golden girls. The key stone holds up the arch! says the guide. It's a miracle! cry the golden girls.

Ephesus. The night in the tacky seaside town of Kusadasi with Miyuki (?), a Japanese girl who has abandoned her Turkish boyfriend to the sweltering heat of Istanbul to travel Turkey, and the next day in the magnificent ruins of Ephesus. What all the postcards show is the library of Celsus (also on the 20 million Turkish lira note). The library is also a tomb; Celsus decided that rather than building a grand sarcophagus for his dead father he'd built the library instead, and bury the father close by. When I die will you build me a library? This was one of the great libraries of the ancient world, but all the knowledge has been lost now. After Ephesus was the House of the Virgin Mary (John brought her to Ephesus after the death of Christ) and then the Temple of Artemis, which is now a swamp and a column and a whole bunch of storks (thought to bring fertility).

Istanbul. Zhen now has hair braids and I've a blue and purple hair wrap that will most certainly not be accepted in the office. We go into the tourist hamam (Cemberlitas Hamam, off Divan Yolu) stark naked except for a towel (to lie on) because we haven't enough clothes to get any wet in the hamam. I lie on my back on the central marble slab waiting for the masseuse to be done (the masseuses are huge Turkish women in black panties and breasts that reach down to their waists) and looking at the lights in the ceiling like stars. The most peaceful place in all Istanbul, which in its other incarnations is full of noise and smoke and over-friendly Turkish men. The other peaceful places are the mosques, of course, with their great ring of lights hanging low from the ceiling. In the old days they hung ostrich eggs among the lights to keep away spiders. Now they have electric lights but still hang decorative eggs. The mosques are dressed in pretty Iznik tiles (hence Blue Mosque) except for Aya Sofya, which was converted from the church of Sancta Sophia after the fall of Constantinople. It's the oldest trick in the book, appropriating the symbols of power of the conquered people, and they say Aya Sofya is still one of the seven wonders of the world, but I think the Ottomans sacked Justinian's great church. The mosaics are mostly gone from the marble walls and there are flower patterns on the ceiling painted over crosses. Remember that Islamic art doesn't allow representation of animals or people - is that the command against graven images? In any case the tiles are mesmerising in their blues and reds, blue because of the influence of Chinese pottery. The Ottomans loved Ming pottery. Topkapi palace the next day, with all the jewels of the Ottoman empire. I love Suleiman's taste - no ostentatious dagger hilts carved from a single emerald but a throne of polished wood and mother-of-pearl and swords that whisper of power and glamour. The legacy of Suleiman the Lawgiver. It's a cruise up the Bosphorus at night, to see how the glamorous of Istanbul live, in grand hotels that open onto the river for black-tie dinners with waiters and candles and the black waters of the Bosphorus. Someone's letting off fireworks when we get back to Sirkeci but they don't explode.

Athens. The entire city has pulled itself together for the Olympics, with free gigs around the city and street art on the road that winds around the Acropolis, which is beautiful and austere by night, and souvenir stores and cafes and restaurants that stay open the whole night. The streets are full of noise and light and drunken Aussies. In the day the sun bleaches all colour from the ruins and beats down without mercy; the days are best spent on the beach on one of the islands (we were at Marathonas beach in Aegina). The Olympic Stadium itself is a work of art, white against the blinding blue of the sky, the colours of Greece.

Study of Time (1)

Study of Time

One bird deserves another. One white and orange tabletop.
One twenty-five-year-old deserves another
Twenty-five-year-old. One harlequin deserves another harlequin. One rich cocktail of flames
deserves another
And one extravagant boast: I am the Obvious. My hunch is me.
One brain deserves a brain that has been hatched in the tropics
One broken heart a heart that has been differently broken.
It seems to me time to get something done. But if I get in the car
I am forty-five years old and you are nineteen. We are
Not going anywhere. The car won't start. And if I get out
I am sixty years old. I look around but don't see you there.
I expect it's a good presumption that you care coming back,
But hurry. If I go into the drugstore
I am thirty-three. The boy behind the counter
Is not a girl, but we discuss national politics anyway.
That fucking Nixon. Or That damned unholy war! If I read a magazine
At the stand, on the other side of the drugstore,
I am twenty-five, and you, dressed with some hoop-la, come in.
I am sixteen when I am lying on the floor, with you beside me
Reading a newspaper. One stone man
Deserves one stone women, and one glad day of being alone
And in good health. If at seventy
I get up and close the door,
I am fourteen and you are twenty. I'll put on
My blue shirt. My white tie, I'm twenty, twenty-one. Now we are eighty.
One five o'clock sunny day
Deserves another. We are both fifty-four. You pick up the bar that holds the door
And hit it as hard as you can at twenty. The floor deserves the floor
Of heaven that is a ceiling as we see it. One coldly affected group
Deserves another. We both very much enjoy engaging in sports.
You fall down, I pick you up. I am eight
You are sixty-six. Today is your birthday. You stand opening a cantaloupe. You say, Let's
Try another! You are sitting in the car,
You are twenty-three, I am forty-four and singing a Spanish song.
If she is nine years old, then I am fifty.
The birthdays come and go talking of Prospero. Good-bye, house!
Do you remember when we used to live in you
And be forty-eight years old? One age deserves another. One time deserves another time.

- Kenneth Koch

Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

Flying to Istanbul Friday night and will be back the Monday or Tuesday after next, I forget which. My organisational skills are without parallel. Now would be an excellent time to tell me all the things you ever wanted from Turkey which I could possibly get for you. (Bad timing all round I know. Don't disappear before I get back.)

For Minzhi, who will be reading Moby Dick

Reading Moby Dick at 30,000 Feet

At this height, Kansas
is just a concept,
a checkerboard design of wheat and corn

no larger than the foldout section
of my neighbor's travel magazine.
At this stage of the journey

I would estimate the distance
between myself and my own feelings
is roughly the same as the mileage

from Seattle to New York,
so I can lean back into the upholstered interval
between Muzak and lunch,

a little bored, a little old and strange.
I remember, as a dreamy
backyard kind of kid,

tilting up my head to watch
those planes engrave the sky
in lines so steady and so straight

they implied the enormous concentration
of good men,
but now my eyes flicker

from the in-flight movie
to the stewardess's pantyline,
then back into my book,

where men throw harpoons at something
much bigger and probably
better than themselves,

wanting to kill it,
wanting to see great clouds of blood erupt
to prove that they exist.

Imagine being born and growing up,
rushing through the world for sixty years
at unimaginable speeds.

Imagine a century like a room so large,
a corridor so long
you could travel for a lifetime

and never find the door,
until you had forgotten
that such a thing as doors exist.

Better to be on board the Pequod,
with a mad one-legged captain
living for revenge.

Better to feel the salt wind
spitting in your face,
to hold your sharpened weapon high,

to see the glisten
of the beast beneath the waves.
What a relief it would be

to hear someone in the crew
cry out like a gull,
Oh Captain, Captain!
Where are we going now?

- Tony Hoagland

On glazed doughnuts

Now I've had a really good weekend and I think it's partly because I didn't spend Saturday morning in Spring Singapore listening to speeches on productivity. Friday night was dinner with Mona, Dom and Fay in Dubliners (of course we're going to meet in an Irish pub in Singapore) and then I tagged along with Dom and Fay (ransacking Dom's wardrobe and patience in the process) to Dom's house for Sex in the City (will never look at glazed doughnuts the same way again, though of course I'll still eat them - Miranda, no man is worth a sacrifice of glazed doughnuts) and then to Phuture to jump around to hip hop and feel alive again. Being in the office is one definition of deadening. Saturday morning I spent sleeping - first Saturday this month, and the first Saturday I can remember - thank god I skipped Productivity Day, though it might have been funny, for a minute or two, to go there straight from Phuture - and then holed up in my room with apples and the White Stripes and the John McPhee reader. Can I exhort everyone to read John McPhee? Picked up the reader in New York last year on the strength of Von's recommendation (thank you! I'll go look for Michael Pollan and Calvin Trillin - though how does one find them in Singapore?) and didn't get around to reading it till now and my new lifetime ambition is to go to Princeton and sit at his feet. John McPhee's, that is. Incredible man. Incredible stories. I'd give so much to write like that. Then it was Saturday night - with a break for driving lessons; I've been taking them forever and still steer like I'm high - and time to accidentally crash Louise's choir party, which was a slightly surreal experience. I'm sorry, darling. Next time we'll bring hard liquor. Wala Wala next for a bit - most schizophrenic bar in Singapore - and I rather liked the band that was on and their fake-country-rock-on-crack version of Colin Raye's Love, Me until they started trying to get parts of the room to sing along with them. Some parts of my night-time entertainment I prefer non-interactive. Then Ida bit cp and we went home.

Who stands on your threshold?

Mm. So. If you were wondering. I've been pretending to work, for a change; I usually don't bother with the pretence. Hanging out with my sister, who's back for the hols and a force of nature unto herself. Mooching around. Checking email incessantly without writing back. Perhaps I should admit it - I do miss having someone lean in my doorway. Can't really perform for myself.
 

Baybeats

Saturday evening me and my sister went down to Baybeats and it was gratifyingly good. Do you remember Force Vomit? Not quite punk rock but funny and wry (and I admit it, I do like catchy tunes). And there was Humpback Oak, now the Observatory; missed part of their performance, which I regret, 'cause what I heard was excellent. And an energetic Hong Kong band called Whence He Came, which endears me to them. And oh there was a really lian band from Thailand, singing Cyndi Lauper - the singing wasn't too bad, in point of fact, but I hated them on first sight. And a bunch of somewhat boring bands from here and around the region. All in all a good night, though - perhaps I should find out what's happening in Singapore before my next bitching binge.
 
Sunday night I met an old friend for dinner and we were talking about Baybeats. He: Yeah at first it sounded quite good, but then I thought, rock music, well, it's time to grow up, isn't it? - Perhaps. But I'll keep my jeans and t-shirts and loud music for a while longer, thanks. Baybeats next year, anyone?
 

The Singer's House

In its entirety -
 
(Thanks, Thomas).
 
The Singer's House

When they said Carrickfergus I could hear
the frosty echo of saltminers’ picks.
I imagined it, chambered and glinting,
a township built of light.

What do we say any more                                            
to conjure the salt of our earth?
So much comes and is gone
that should be crystal and kept,

and amicable weathers
that bring up the grain of things,                                  
their tang of season and store,
are all the packing we’ll get.

So I say to myself Gweebarra
and its music hits off the place
like water hitting off granite.                                        
I see the glittering sound

framed in your window,
knives and forks set on oilcloth,
and the seals’ heads, suddenly outlined,
scanning everything.                                                  

People here used to believe
that drowned souls lived in the seals.
At spring tides they might change shape.
They loved music and swam in for a singer

who might stand at the end of summer                        
in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,
his shoulder to the jamb, his song
a rowboat far out in evening.

When I came here first you were always singing,
a hint of the clip of the pick                                        
in your winnowing climb and attack.
Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.
 
- Seamus Heaney

Please don't worry, I'm not a Republican

From Jung, a Columbia friend:
 
"...please don't worry--I'm not a Republican.  I considered it for a bit, but decided against it."
 
I don't remember what this is in response to - she wrote me a while back in reply to an email I sent her many months ago, and I don't think either of us remembers what the other wrote - but isn't it great, anyway?
 
She's also offering me sanctuary should I ever decide to run away from the Singapore government. A safe Democratic house, what more could I need? What am I doing here?
 
 

We still believe what we hear

Seamus Heaney wrote this for David Hammond, his singer/guitarist friend, after a night spent with friends happily singing and talking -

The Singer's House

People here used to believe
that drowned souls lived in seals.
At spring tides they might change shape.
They loved music and swam in for a singer

who might stand at the end of summer
in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,
his shoulder to the jamb, his song
a row-boat far out in evening.

When I came here first you were always singing,
a hint of the clip of the pick
in your winnowing climb and attack.
Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.


(- Do you have to take everything so seriously? - Well, yes.)

Painted shoes

(1) We're at a shoe shop in the Heeren, which sells rather cute hand-painted shoes. My sister likes the white ones with splashes of paint, which look like something Jackson Pollock would have done if he had used the whitewashed Panda(?) schoolgirl shoes we used to wear for a canvas. I like the ones in shades of red with an orange line running down. The Rothko ones? my sister says. - They're not bad.

(2) Later, mulling over the shoes -

Me: But what would I do with red shoes?
She: Wear them!
Me: But nothing would match them.
She: Well you know how I have these crimson silk Adidas sneakers I really like?
Me: Yeah?
She: And all my clothes are purple or green?
Me: Uh-huh.
She: I never wear the sneakers because they clash with my clothes.
Me: Right.
She: But I think you should get the red shoes! All your clothes are black or blue. You can wear them with jeans.

(3) Back at the shoe shop. She gets the Jackson Pollock shoes; I get, at her instigation, an entirely different pair. This time they look like something Roy Lichenstein (the guy who did the 40-foot cartoons? Is that the right name?) might have done on a bad day.

Me: You know what you are? You're a multiplier effect!
She: Yes!

list

Well this is your lasting legacy, that I sneak off from the Singapore delegation to queue in the rain for a Rilo Kiley/Modest Mouse show, neither of which I knew when with you but would not have found if not for you. And the Shins and the White Stripes and my obsession with Jeff Tweedy (though not the new album, which I cannot bring myself to like in its entirety), and Frank O'Hara and James Merrill and Wallace Stevens's The Man with the Blue Guitar, Woody Allen and Christopher Guest and the Coen brothers, and even Marianne Moore's poem on the Brooklyn Dodgers - if it all came to nothing but a handful of poems and songs, wouldn't it have been worth it anyway?

Rilo Kiley

Am listening to The Execution Of All Things with a pleasant feeling of serendipity. Always meant to check out the album but never got round to it and then I walked into the Shepherd's Bush Empire for the Modest Mouse/Bright Eyes show (Bright Eyes I can take or leave, but Modest Mouse! In London! And a damn good show too) and thought hey that's a good opening band and then found out it was Rilo Kiley! So I got the album after the show and it is pretty good.

I often ask for recommendations, but sometimes it's even better to find these things yourself, isn't it? In such moments all the pieces of the world come together.

London

I think I fell in love with London all over again this time. Not Oxford - I'm not sure I ever did fall out of love with it - went to visit my sister on Sunday and got there a little earlier and walked up New College Lane in the cool morning light assailed by memory - but I had forgotten how much I owe England.

...I knew that, if I fell out of this love or if it fell away from under me, the vistas which it had opened would still be there and the wind which had come up would not die down.

More later. London was my interregnum. Guess it's time to work now?

Falling

"This explains perhaps why I have never steered myself much. An American friend once said to me rebukingly: 'You never seem to make any positive choice; you just let things happen to you.' But the things that happen to one often seem better than the things one chooses. Even in writing poetry, which is something I did early choose to do, the few poems or passages which I find wear well have something of accident about them (the poems I did not intend to write) or, to put it more pretentiously, seem 'given'. So Magilligan Strand was like falling in love. For such occasions the word 'falling' is right; one does not step into love any more than one steps asleep - or awake. For awake, like asleep, is what one falls, and to keep falling awake seems to me the salt of life much more than existentialist defiance. We cannot of course live by Keats's Negative Sensibility alone, we must all, in E. M. Forster's phrase, use 'telegrams and anger'; all the same what I feel makes life worth living is not the clever scores but the surrenders - it may be to the life-quickening urge of an air-raid, to nonsense talked by one's friends, to a girl on top of the Empire State building, to the silence of a ruined Byzantine church, to woods, or weirs, or to heat dancing on a gravelled path, to music, drink or the smell of turf smoke, to the first view of the Atlantic or to the curve of a strand which seems to stretch to nowhere or everywhere and to ages before and after the combustion engine which defiled it."

- Louis MacNeice, "Landscapes of Childhood and Youth" (pages from an unwritten book).

Interregnum

"The chimes chimed and I left Cornell, had more than a month left to fill in. Marking time but not killing it. Once I had wanted to kill time but not any more. Because I was in love and because I knew that, if I fell out of this love or if it fell away from under me, the vistas which it had opened would still be there and the wind which had come up would not die down."

- from Louis MacNeice's The Strings are False.

Which I found in London! Somewhere on Charing Cross. I had forgotten I was looking for the book, which makes it all the better.

London and assorted observations

(1) I'm flying to London tomorrow for a few days. Study trip. Anybody wants anything? So far I've orders for chocolates, a Hat Full of Sky, other Pratchetts, Cosmopolitan, Mixmag, duty-free alcohol... SMS/email me ok?

(2) I would sleep with Jeff Tweedy's voice any day.

Late-night maggi mee

My brother woke up hungry at 1.30 a.m. (he had slept at 5 the previous evening) so we went down and had maggi mee.

Isn't that such a university thing? Something has come full cycle, but I'm not sure what.

Sexy Scrabble (reprise)

Don't you want a t-shirt that says IMPRIMBADTWIGGY?

I add that I contributed the verb to BADTWIGGY, even if she did afterwards metamorphosise into either a contradiction or a tease (the little slut).

My family and other animals (not quite, but I couldn't resist)

My mom's going to Taiwan with my grandmother to visit her (my mom's) brother and his family. Think it may be the first time she's travelling alone. Well not alone - she'll have my grandmother and my grandmother's maid and then my uncle's family (wife + 2 kids + innumerable dogs) and I think my aunt's mother too and possibly various other relatives - but without any of us. So I watched her pack for a bit tonight, in a strange role reversal, except that she knows exactly what she wants and where the bits go.

The point of all this was. She showed me a Taiwanese note with zhong hua min guo (you know what I mean, even if my pinyin is sadly askew) on it and said that her father named his first four sons for Taiwan: Zhen Zhong, Zhen Hua, Zhen Min, and Zhen Guo. Then came one more son, so he was named Zhen Xin. Was he Taiwanese? I ask in surprise. No, but he hated the Communists and was a strong supporter of the Kuomintang. He has a letter, a something, signed by someone then high up in the KMT thanking him for his help. And he never dared to return to China for fear of being arrested by the Communists.

I'm more or less happy with being rootless and Anglicised but once in a while one wishes - well, to be able to speak Chinese, for a start.

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 heart, 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

(Thank you.)

There's a garret in your future

On starving artists - my boss once said the same thing, that he didn't want to give arts groups too much money cause he thought artists produced their best work when poor. Bloody science students.

Glass houses and stones

On the one hand, my colleague finds a printout of Borges's essay, "The Library of Babel", on my desk, and says, this cannot be, there's no such thing as the library of Babel, and who is this Borges? Moment of genuine surprise - surely everyone knows of Borges, even non-faffy people? Well, I say, he's this South American short story writer and essayist...also a poet...very good. Er, and quite famous. My colleague is dubious.

And on the other hand, walking back with my brother today, we pass by someone smoking and my brother says, people who smoke are stupid. He divides smokers into smart and stupid. People who don't start smoking at all - smart. People who do start - stupid. People who start and then stop - smart (well first stupid and then smart). People who start and don't stop - stupid. Well (I say feebly) they get hooked and then they can't help it... He amends his categorisation of the world. People who start smoking and know they should but can't stop - weak. People who start smoking and don't know they should stop - stupid. That's a very harsh moral universe you live in, I say.

Was/Am I that bad? We're awfully judgemental people, aren't we?

Conversation (2)

I am telling you this because a conversation is a journey, and what gives it value is fear. You come to understand travel because you have had conversations, not vice versa. What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.

- Anne Carson, Plainwater

Conversation (1)

In the city of Burgos lies El Cid himself - beside Ximena he rests in an eternal conversation. Beneath the transept of Burgos Cathedral they have lain since 1921, and before that, in a burial place in the city from the year 1835, and previously, seven hundred years in the monastery of San Pedro outside the city walls. By now, she must know every word he is going to say. Yet she kisses his mouth and the eyes of his face, she kisses his hands, his truth, his marrow. What is the conversation of lovers? Compared with ordinary talk, it is as bread to stones. My heart gets dizzy. It is the most difficult photograph I have tried to take so far: up the scaffolding, hand over hand and out onto the pinnacles they blow, her hair like a red sail as they veer around storks' nests in the wind and clutch wide at the railings, leaning out over the tiny city, its clockwork shadows so crazily far below. One shriek goes flaring and flattening away down the valley. Gone. She kisses him on the shoulder in the Moorish custom. They look at one another. They look into the light. They jump.

There is no question I covet that conversation. There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is. And I see him free of it, as if he had simply crossed to the other side of a bridge, I see desire set free in him like some ray of mysterious light. Now tell me the truth, would you cross that bridge if you came to it? And where, if you made the grave choice to give up bread, would it take you? You see what I fear.

- Anne Carson, Plainwater

A Ghost is Born

Downloaded Quicktime and as a result am now able to listen to the new Wilco album. I dunno, does the first song (which is all I've heard so far) sound a little strange to you?

Words (3)

Finally finished Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet over the weekend and if you haven't read it yet you should. Part philosophy, part literary criticism, past classical history, part poetry at its clearest and most beautiful.

Words (2) - A Letter to William Carlos Williams

by Kenneth Rexroth

Dear Bill,

When I search the past for you,
Sometimes I think you are like
St. Francis, whose flesh went out
Like a happy cloud from him,
And merged with every lover -
Donkeys, flowers, lepers, suns -
But I think you are more like
Brother Juniper, who suffered
All indignities and glories
Laughing like a gentle fool.
You’re in the Fioretti
Somewhere, for you’re a fool, Bill,
Like the Fool in Yeats, the term
Of all wisdom and beauty.
It’s you, stands over against
Helen in all her wisdom,
Solomon in all his glory.

Remember years ago, when
I told you you were the first
Great Franciscan poet since
The Middle Ages? I disturbed
The even tenor of dinner.
Your wife thought I was crazy.
It’s true, though. And you’re “pure,” too,
A real classic, though not loud
About it - a whole lot like
The girls of the Anthology.
Not like strident Sappho, who
For all her grandeur, must have
Had endometriosis,
But like Anyte, who says
Just enough, softly, for all
The thousands of years to remember.

It’s a wonderful quiet
You have, a way of keeping
Still about the world, and its
Dirty rivers, and garbage cans,
Red wheelbarrows glazed with rain,
Cold plums stolen from the icebox,
And Queen Anne’s lace, and day’s eyes,
And leaf buds bursting over
Muddy roads, and splotched bellies
With babies in them, and Cortes
And Malinche on the bloody
Causeway, the death of the flower world.

Nowadays, when the press reels
With chatterboxes, you keep still,
Each year a sheaf of stillness,
Poems that have nothing to say,
Like the stillness of George Fox,
Sitting still under the cloud
Of all the world’s temptation,
By the fire, in the kitchen,
In the Vale of Beavor. And
The archetype, the silence
Of Christ, when he paused a long
Time and then said, “Thou sayest it.”

Now in a recent poem you say,
“I who am about to die.”
Maybe this is just a tag
From the classics, but it sends
A shudder over me. Where
Do you get that stuff, Williams?
Look at here. The day will come
When a young woman will walk
By the lucid Williams River,
Where it flows through an idyllic
News from Nowhere sort of landscape,
And she will say to her children,
“Isn’t it beautiful? It
Is named after a man who
Walked here once when it was called
The Passaic, and was filthy
With the poisonous excrements
Of sick men and factories.
He was a great man. He knew
It was beautiful then, although
Nobody else did, back there
In the Dark Ages. And the
Beautiful river he saw
Still flows in his veins, as it
Does in ours, and flows in our eyes,
And flows in time, and makes us
Part of it, and part of him.
That, children, is what is called
A sacramental relationship.
And that is what a poet
Is, children, one who creates
Sacramental relationships
That last always."

With love and admiration,
Kenneth Rexroth.

(This I take from Allen Ginsberg's reading list from heaven.)

Words (1 and a half)

Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand, which shouldn't come under words exactly, but still it does make you happy.

Words (1)

Sexy scrabble at Yisheng's place that night (only sexy or dirty or, if you're out of inspiration, plain vulgar, words allowed) and I'll never look at "jaw" in the same way again.

On reading

Me: I was just reading a couple of Iris Murdoch's essays (from a book I bought two years ago and never read till now) and now I want to go back to school and study philosophy and literature.

WN: Funny, I was just reading Eric Schlosser's "Reefer Madness" and now I want to be a drug lord. You must be reading the wrong books.

Sorry for the inconvenient

At the Cheers shop outside Tampines MRT is a sign that says (among other things):

Sorry for the inconvenient.

I rather like that. Perhaps I'll make a sign and put it up on my desk.

Why do I never learn

that the ability to stay up all night without falling over the next day belongs with other relics of my youth, like tight jeans (ah Miranda) and Smash Hits?

Still haven't written my notes

but I have caught up with everyone's blogs for the last three years or so.

(finally writing my notes of meeting)

Can I be really bitchy for a bit? Well of course I'm going to be anyway; this is fair warning.

One of the delegation members really annoyed me, so much so I found myself arguing the opposite of whatever he was saying. It wasn't that he was wrong, exactly; more that he had that insufferable smugness which attends (a) civil servants and (b) middle-aged men. You know? When they just know everything there is to know about a particular topic, and have no need of other viewpoints on the matter, even though their knowledge tends to consist of a string of banalities? When they're not willing to discuss issues, but they're more than happy to tell you how to think on any given topic? And he was a researcher by designation; shouldn't they have a little more intellectual curiosity?

Belatedly

For what it's worth, I'm half Teochew, and I can spell half the time.

O

Can I say. We saw Cirque de Soleil's O and it was magnificent.

Coming soon: Shibuya

We were walking through the empty space at MGM Grand at night, where the theme park used to be, and there were these huge boards announcing the shops to come. One said, "Coming soon: Shibuya."

There's an essay somewhere where Nietzsche says rather acerbically that Wagner's pathos topples taste. I think the sheer effrontery of Vegas topples taste. It's in the middle of a desert but there're fountains and lakes and canals and old-world European conservatories and soon there will be a Japanese garden the likes of which can only be found in Kyoto. First they have to build a mountain and then pipe in water for the streams and ponds and lakes and then bring in the trees and then they can sculpt the garden. In Singapore we just whinge about the weather being too hot and leave it at that; in Vegas they paint the ceiling has feathery white clouds and the blue fades quietly the dusk at the edges and the lighting is controlled to always simulate evening light (because they did studies which showed that that's when people shop the most, when they're all mellow and relaxed) and it's always 72 degrees F. As my colleague pointed out, Vegas works because Americans like to see things, but they don't like to leave their country. So they have the Eiffel Tower and Doge's Palace and the Colosseum and the Village and Shibuya brought to them, but all prettied up and air-conditioned. What complete lack of irony does it take to do such a thing, to say, well I'lll just create a scale model of the Eiffel Tower in the middle of my casino?

We met Steve Wynn, who is the American dream personnifed. He came to the Strip some 40 years ago, at 24, as a blackjack dealer. In 1989 he built the first of the mega hotel/casino/entertainment complexes, the Mirage, which was at the time about $400 million more expensive than any other casino built so far. He designed the damn thing and put a volcanic island at the front and fish at the reception and white tigers along the corridor (the sign above says: Phones. Restrooms. White Tigers. Shops.) and it's actually all quite nice. He built Treasure Island and then the Bellagio, which is still the pinnacle of achievement for these mega-whatsits, and then sold the lot to MGM because now that he has completely transformed the Strip, he wants to do something different there. He came to the Strip at 24 as a blackjack dealer! I'm 24, and I'm never going to build a $600m casino, not even in 20 years' time. No formal training, but he designs his own buildings. All the other meetings with the operators were very corporate affairs, we met the Board, they presented themselves as a body corporate, but Steve Wynn just flung himself into the room with his dogs. Oh and his Chief Operating Officer, whose job apparently was to open the door for his dogs.

In MGM Grand there was a sign that said, "Video arcade: virtual reality". As opposed, I suppose, to the actual reality of the rest of the casino/hotel/complex? It's impossible not to admire the scale of what was done in Vegas, and impossible to accept it entirely; we're schooled in British irony, after all. I almost said, impossible to accept it without any saving grace of irony. I'm not yet willing to put away a strong sense of the ridiculous, but perhaps this is an inhibiting quality? Perhaps what it takes is a complete abandonment of - not taste, exactly - but any self-consciousness whatsoever?