today

I filed and made sandwiches (which people ate, yes) and went to the gym (aren't you proud of me?) and made a paper aeroplane for a 4-year-old boy.

How to be a writer

James Fenton's lectures on poetry tells us that a very young Stephen Spender asked an equally young Auden if he (Spender) shoud not write prose instead. Auden: You must write nothing but poetry, we do not want to lose you for poetry. Spender: But do you really think I'm any good? Auden: Of course. Spender: But why? Auden: Because you are so infinitely capable of being humiliated. Art is born of humiliation.

Well if Auden's right, I should be a bloody excellent poet, shouldn't I?

cut my nails

I have fingertips!

dumdeedum

indie rock

"Anne Sexton liked to arrive about ten minutes late for her own performance: let the crowd work up a little anticipation. She would saunter to the podium, light a cigarette, kick off her shoes, and in a throaty voice say, 'I'm gonna read a poem that tells you what kind of poet I am, what kind of woman I am, so if you don't like it you can leave.' Then she would launch into her signature poem:

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved your nude arms at villagers going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind."

(Germaine Greer's description)

And she did the reading to the accompaniment of a rock band.

Hong Lou Meng

Oh my dears. We went to watch "Dream of a Red Chamber" - and it was the most bimbotic production of hong lou meng the likes of which will never be seen again. One hopes. Much weeping and wailing and flailing from chair to chair and - oh - much singing. Witness:

Lin mei mei finds out that Bao yu is to marry Pao jie jie.

Background chorus: She was thunderstruck!

[Loud portentous music starts. She lurches backwards into the pillar, clutching her heart. Servant flutters up.]

Servant: [singing] What is wrong?

She: [singing] Ah! [Lurches forward into different pillar and sobs into it.]

Servant: [singing] Don't cry!

She: [singing] My heart is broken!

[Lurches on to Bao yu's rooms. Background music dies and she runs in complete silence - obviously to show dramatic tension. Finds Bao yu - played by Lin Ching Hsia; the entire cast was female except for the father, who appears in the first and last scene - propped up in bed with determinedly blank expression.]

She: [thankfully not singing] Who are you going to marry?

Bao yu: Lin mei mei.

She: And where is your heart now?

Bao yu: I have given my heart to Lin mei mei.

She: Ah!

[Cut to shot of - white cockatrice? - flapping around agitatedly. Cut back to Lin mei mei and Bao yu. Much weeping/flailing/giggling. She lurches out. Portentous music starts up.]

I exaggerate, but only a little. It was amazing. Oh and when she died? Never saw a more pointlessly drawn-out death scene, or one so devoid of pathos. At one point she collapses, her maid collapses on top of her, and we hold our breaths - then the scene cuts to her in a (different) chair looking pale and wan, and someone in the row behind us says, "Aiyah not dead yet." Exactly.

reputation

Walking out to take the lift down to go talk to the IT people (i.e. work-related stuff, really), I run into a colleague in the lift lobby. "Coffee break?" he asks immediately.

Well! My reputation precedes me.

But did he go to parties at day's end?

Thank you Dom! How do you do it?

You Want a Social Life, with Friends

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What's true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn't time enough, my friends--
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends--
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day's end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.

- Kenneth Koch

note to self

From the ARTSingapore show: Shinoda Todo and Yoshi Imamura.

yesterday meaning thursday of course

Addy said, Let's have a party! At my house! Now! And we got fruit and cheese from Carrefour and went to her place and watched American Idol, which I've never seen before - the Jasmine girl that I hear everyone talk about is incredibly annoying and so is her flower - and was pleasantly not drunk the whole time, which makes a nice change, doesn't it? c said, we're all hanging out with the wrong people - you should be hanging out with straight men, and I should be hanging out with gay men. Me: But it wouldn't be as fun. c: Not true. Me: But it wouldn't be as comfortable. c: Again not true.

my life distilled

Conversation with my little brother, who's 8 years younger:

Me: What time are you waking up tomorrow?

Him: Early. About 6? 7?

Me: Can wake me up? I need to do work.

Him: I'm sure.

Me: No, really. I really need to do work.

Him: But you'll just say mmm and go back to sleep and wake up at 10 and stone for a bit and have lunch and...I dunno, spend time somehow, and then when I come back at night you'll say you haven't done any work yet.

Me: (Indignant silence.)

There's a Kenneth Koch poem somewhere

that says that of three things, working (writing), making love and going out with friends, a man has time for one of them well, maybe two, but not all three.

Now that's a lie.

I can't even do one of them.

(Can't remember the title of the poem, but it's in the collection (Straits? - whatever it is, it's on my wishlist) with "My Olivetti Speaks". Is that spelt right? Oh - I was recently told - thank you Lee - that the last person to use 'spelt', apart from me and my people, was alive 250 years ago. Is that right? Do you all use 'spelled' now? This is distressing.)

Posterity

I like to think that when I leave the office the poor sod after me will flip through my papers and find Pratchett library call numbers and Modest Mouse track listings scribbled in the margins.

(Alright. The Shins, and in pink pen behind an accounts statement. This is an odd kind of retribution for spending a long time painstakingly typing numbers into an Excel spreadsheet only to have them - just when I thought I had got the hang of them - disappear on me. Isn't that just like a number?)

I dreamt of my (big) boss last night

and he was telling me that something wasn't allowed, can't remember what. No - he didn't tell me - he sent a note - right at the end of my dream, which up to that point was in no way related to the office.

I'm sending my therapy bill to the office.

Taken out of context I must seem so strange

(Ani DiFranco, "Firedoor". What's the proper format for song titles?)

This is addictive, isn't it?

Stoppit yen go do some work.

Oh - conversation with my long-suffering boss today:

Me: But what's the point of working out the numbers? If our logic holds, then the tax will work out to be the same in the end.

He: [The big boss] just wants to see if our logic holds...

Me: But my logic's better than my numbers, so if the numbers will probably be wrong even if the logic holds.

He wasn't convinced. I go count beans.

Just so

"Thank you. You're very kind. I won't be stupid again. I'm giving you a lot of trouble."

"Not a bit. I only wish I could help you."

"You can. If only you would. I'm sure you're clever. You look clever. I'm not clever. I do wish I was. I think I should have been happier if I'd been clever. It must be nice to do things. I've so often thought that if I could have painted pictures or ridden a motor-cycle or something, I should have got more out of my life."

Harriet agreed, gravely, that it was perhaps a good thing to have an occupation of some sort.

- Dorothy Sayers, Have His Carcase

Another reason to love Wilco

Fess up to downloading music off the web and make a donation.

There is nothing outside the blog

Oh! There's a very very funny blog entry spoofing Derrida. Please go to The Weblog.

Coming out of the tall grass

BACK!

Was going to stay away until I had something to say that wasn't a complaint, but realised that the day would never come and I do rather miss blogging. So, um, hi.

Can I recommend to you Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots, and Leaves? She wants to set up a militant wing of the society for the protection of the apostrophe (apparently that society does exist and in a most respectable and genteel way) to go around correcting misplaced apostrophes on greengrocers' signs and movie posters and I feel her pain. Besides, she's funny. And she has convinced me of the virtues of punctuation, even in blogs and emails. I am a reformed creature.

And (though she would deplore my tendency to run to italics) there's a wonderful example of a misplaced apostrophe in her book: BOBS' MOTORS. If I ever have a son I shall call him Bobs. Or not.

I should say this on the book blog we all share, but um I've forgotten how to post anything there. (If you're reading this, will you teach me?) So. In the last few months - god has it been that long? - I've stumbled upon George Eliot and never looked back. So far I've read Mill on the Floss, which I now regret refusing to read back when my sister was doing it for A Level Lit (sorry); Daniel Deronda, which I tried to like and couldn't; and Middlemarch, which gives me the same sort of muddled bewilderment that Marx does - I know I'm in the presence of a master, but it's too much to absorb. I can't like Dorothea much, though. I like her in her muddled and anguished moments, and I do sympathise, however reluctant I am to admit it, with the Dorothea at the beginning of the book, but it's too hard to like someone who's beatific half the time. I was looking for Middlemarch because A. S. Byatt said she read George Eliot as an undergrad and couldn't understand the appeal, and then read Middlemarch when she was struggling with teaching and writing and bringing up her kids and wondering what the hell it was all about. Well I've far more choice that Dorothea did, so much so the comparison's ridiculous, and it's probably unsound critical practice to take books quite so personally but - I can see myself doing that, getting into some modern-day equivalent of a marriage to Casaubon (or getting into a marriage with a modern-day Casaubon), and then being terribly unhappy because I can't get out of it. (Beat.) Want to help me break my bond? But what would I do then?

Damn but I wasn't going to talk about my job, or my utter failure at it. There are some days when I'm awfully depressed about work and some when I'm all psyched up about my job and I've come to the realisation that these days bear absolutely no correlation to the work itself. Do you think it's all hormonal, and maybe I should just go have more chocolate, or something? I shall go find some.