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.