on this island

On This Island

Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.

Here at a small field's ending pause
Where the chalk wall falls to the foam and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide,
And the shingle scrambles after the suck-
-ing surf, and a gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.

Far off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge on urgent voluntary errands,
And this full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.

- Auden

oh dear

He called from the US to say hi, and my unregenerate heart - which had been so staid and sensible so far - leapt up within me.

I suppose better it happens than not.

odds and ends

I have all these bits and pieces I would like to do something with but can't think what - and can't justify keeping.

1. An ad for a shampoo available only at Watsons.:

Money Back Guarantee
FULL BODY
100%
[insert - what looks rather like arabic characters]
VEGETABLE SHAMPOO (tm)
NON-POISONOUS SHAMPOO
CONTENTS: Vegetables & Table Salt
COLOUR: Chocolate
GOOD FOR: HEALTH, BLOOD CIRCULATION, HAIR & SKIN
BURN OFF EXCESS FAT
DAILY USE: -EXTERNAL ONLY-
Most Sickness Gone

Inventor: Sen. Professor Dr. Sir Zeng Guoyan

[On the back of the ad]
Three pictures each of two men detailing the stages of hair regrowth and two picture of a woman in a blue dress who appears to have lost - weight? After Using: Less 8cm [from the shoulder], Less 9cm [from the bust]; Less 6cm [from the hip].

2. A photocopy of Thurber's letter to E. B. White on 20 January 1938, which begins, "I agree, as usual, with all your sound conclusions about things except the one about not being able to escape from beaten states by merely taking a boat and watching somebody balance a 20-gallon water jar on her head. That is, it seems to me, the only way to escape from such things..."

remembering the tsunami

I like this image: "butchers hung up their knives in a sign of respect for all life..."

Carol Ann Duffy talks to Jeanette Winterson

For the sake of old loves. Though I would like to get hold of Rapture.

Four notes from Melaka

My family drove to Melaka some weekends ago.

1. A little sign at the foot of a hill saying "this way to the Church of Our Lady of Enunciation".

2. Trishaws encrusted with plastic flowers and a Chinese dragon and rusty bells and strings of coloured lights and icons and a yellow waxpaper umbrella.

3. Instructions on how to clean a keris in one of the museums:

1. Materials needed:
- A banana stem about a metre long.
- A few limes.
- A coconut.
- A hollow segment of bamboo the length of the keris.
- An incense burner, some benzoin and some fragrant oil such as attar of roses.

2. Procedure
First step: Stab the keris a few times into the banana stem until it is wetted: the latex from the banana stem will clean the keris blade.
Second step: Cut two limes and rub them on the keris blade to clean off any remaining rust. A young pineapple or tamarind piece can be used in place of limes if need be.
Third step: Cut a coconut and pour the water into the bamboo tube. Immerse the keris in the coconut water for at least 24 hours.
Fourth step: Take the keris out of the bamboo tube and rinse the blade in clean clear water. Rub it again with a cut lime if any rust stains remain. After rinsing, the keris is left to dry and then wiped carefully with a clean cloth.
Fifth step: Treat the keris with the smoke from burning benzoin. Apply wax to the blade while it is hot to prevent it rusting again. It can also be perfumed by wiping it with fragrant oil.

4. From (a fragment of) the tombstone of Sultan Mansur Shah, who reigned from 1458 to 1477:

This has been translated as:

"This is the consecrated the holy grave the brilliant illuminated tomb of the just Sultan, the magnanimous ruler Sultan Mansur Shah. He removed from this mortal abode to hope on wednesday of Rejab in the year 882 after the Hijrah of the Prophet the chosen one."

This has been translated as:

"The world is but transitory: The world has no permanence,
The world is like a house made by a spider..."

Merry Christmas everyone!

Here's to peace and happiness this Christmas and the year to come. (One year at a time, right?)

Christmas eve eve

I was so very sleepy when I went to work - so sleepy that the security guard at my office building saw me walking in (as he was leaving) and said, hey you should be happier! - and it wasn't helped by the three-hour lunch (fish and chips and sausage and breaded mushrooms and fried chicken and beer and) that we had at molly malone's. Seven of us piled into a colleague's car and we drove back to the office and in the lift coming up from the carpark we were all a little silly and giggly and smelling terribly of cigarette smoke and talking loudly about what we'd do if PS were to come in - and he did! He walked into the lift at B1! (That's the top top boss at my place.) We were all stunned into silence - we flattened against the walls of the lifts - he stood awkwardly at the back - I couldn't for the life of me stop laughing, though I tried not to do it out loud - no-one said hello, or merry christmas!, or hasn't it been raining alot lately? - the lift reached the ground floor and everyone just stared as PS walked out as quickly as he could. And then we could move and talk and it was much too late. Good time to start thinking about alternative careers.

[It really ought to be the PS, but I think he has become his role; it's his name now.]

After work I went to my aunt's place - there was a Christmas party after all - and had food and some fizzy non-alcoholic lemonadey punch and sang carols - or rather, murmured under my breath as the rest sang christmas carols in chinese. It didn't help that by the time I figured out the words - there were song sheets; my aunt is both organised and experienced - I was at least two beats behind. My aunt is my mother's sister - my grandmother had five daughters who are mostly close to one another, though the seventh one wasn't there tonight - seventh in the family, which starts with the children from my grandfather's first marriage. This aunt used to organise Christmas parties every year; I vaguely remember her stopping for a few years, or perhaps I just hadn't been going, but I must be at the time of my life when I'm beginning to appreciate large noisy parties of relatives again. Of course the sisters talked about their kids and then about food. One of the (male) cousins praised my mother's cooking (she brings the meat). Another aunt said she could cook as well - but she prefers to cook healthy food. Only natural ingredients (I think - that's what tian ran is, right?) Someone: but then there's no taste! Aunt: Taste is not the most important thing!

When we got home we marinated the turkey with sesame oil and soya sauce and oyster sauce and cumin and coriander powder and black pepper and wu xiang fen and mustard and ginger powder and this chilli-onion-garlic-ginger paste.

Happy Christmas eve eve everyone!

Remarks on Narnia

1. The children were both ugly and annoying, which is unforgiveable.

2. I thought Aslan was done well - it could have been surpassingly tacky. The creatures were done pretty well.

3. The faun was very sweet, despite the massive nose.

4. Tilda Swinton was magnificence itself.

5. How do I report conversations in my new paranoia? Could I just leave the names out?

: Do you know who I think should have been Aslan?
: Judi Dench?

marriage by any other name

I'm rather touched by the Guardian's stories on gay civil partnerships in the UK.

groaning

I had oh so much to eat over the weekend. Roast chicken courtesy of BL at J's place on Saturday night and then a Penang food buffet lunch at the Orchid Country Club or whatever the NTUC club is called (my dad said, we must each eat at least ten plates of food to make it worth it - and we almost did) and a wonderful spread of chicken and sausage and corn cakes and pork pie and pasta with mushrooms and potato and cupcakes and cookies at S's.

[I'm trying out initials instead of names - googled our names and was horrified to get all the blogs, though no reason not to - I'm getting paranoid in my old age. Not industrious, though; haven't got round to deleting all the names in this blog yet.]

Tomorrow is Narnia!

to say

That I can write to you is a pleasure and a kindness; that you write back is a blessing.

mm

ACSian theatre did an interpretive dance performance of Aaron's poems from his collection. An expanded version of what they did at his book launch. These are rather quiet, contemplative, conversational poems; I'm not sure they lend themselves to all that emoting. But parts of it were well-done and it wasn't unenjoyable. Oh dear, the double negative. I did like the bit where someone (just one) was dancing with gestures much inspired by sign language (or perhaps it was sign language) for the poem about deaf people speaking to each other. Not so much the bit (in the same poem) where people chorus lines.

I diligently brought home my laptop - but cleverly not the battery or the power cable. Sometimes I astound myself.

Sunday at Su-Lin's is still on, right?

(Oh and - I broke up with him. I thought I'd say.)

So the blog's not too neglected

This afternoon was Andrea's wedding - Andrea's wedding! - and Andrea was beautiful and entirely herself. As if she had just absorbed happiness and hadn't let it change her beyond recognition. Everyone's getting married! Or engaged. Or, er, breaking up. It must be winter. Thursday afternoon was lunch with Su-Lin and Julian and Choon, at which I was very rude and ran off early. Friday before was dinner at the hawker centre and then a spell of watching the rain at Bakerzin with the work people and then Balcony with Choon, Ida, Jianyi, Addy and Jianyi's friends. Immensely bad service, and the large white couch things are not as comfortable as they look. Nice drinks, though, when they do eventually serve them. We ran into Terry and his friend there and they nicely let us sit on their couch thing. Then Coco Latte because Choon said we were still young, though we did creep out of the club an hour later, defeated by our youth. Oh and yesterday was dinner with Dom, Mona and Fay as a belated birthday thing for Dom (happy birthday!) and a good deal of chocolate and catching-up.

(Should I not name people? Does that make googling too easy? Should I have initials instead? Or dashes after an initial, as in "I had lunch with S---, J--- and C---"?)

In other news - I think the lure of lips, hands and eyes is wearing out. He's going to the States for over three weeks, and I move from neediness to relief at solitude to some genuine sadness and back again.

on the radio

Radio topic: do women use sex as a weapon?

Guy calling in*: Yes of course. Women use sex all the time to get what they want. I give you an example. I go to this pub with my friends, and every Friday night there are women who flirt with the bartender to get an extra bottle of cranberry juice.

Radio DJ (female): That's selling themselves a little short.

G c i: Some guys just can't say no to anything that walks on two legs and wears a skirt. But it's not our fault. We're programmed that way.

Radio DJ: There's no help for it?

G c i: But some men can resist. Older men can. Ithink it's because younger men are more inexperienced. You see a man in his 20s, he can't resist. But some men realise as they get older that they're more valuable...

Radio DJ: As are women!

G c i: ...And so they can say no sometimes.


*A summarised version; sadly, I can't reproduce his speech.

me too

Although all my life I have been much nearer poor than rich, I have inherited a symptom of richness: I have a strong propensity for idleness.

- Diana Athill, Stet

Shoes and ships and sealing wax

(1) I found Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris and The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down at the second-hand bookshop (San?) in Funan Centre. The Spirit etc. is an account of an epileptic Hmong girl's encounter with the Californian county medical system and is scrupulously fair to both sides. And a touching but unsentimental account of the Hmong people.

(2) I've been reading the three years of the annual Best American Essays that the library has, and it occurs to me that the personal essay has triumphed, in America at least (or perhaps just in the leading publications). And then I read, at last, Eliot Weinberger's Karmic Traces (also courtesy of the Central Lending Library, whose non-fiction selection seems to have improved over the old National Library), which is mostly impersonal and not the less splendid for that. There's a great essay on poetry of witness - when he talks about a selection of "witness" poems edited by Carolyn Forche, the criterion of inclusion in which seemed to be biographical data - all the poets had to have either witnessed whatever they were describing or have been born in the country. (Incidentally, I liked her collection of political poetry, whose title I've now forgotten - and in so many other instances am guilty of reading poets rather than poems. It's just easier to read poets.) Weinberger says that to look at the poet's personal background as a way of judging the poem defeats the imagination - there was a time when it was enough to think, to dream, to write; one didn't have to actually be present at the event. I remember an old conversation - must be some two years old now - when a friend (now doing a phd in English) said that what he looked for and prized most in a poem was the sincerity of the poet. That seemed odd, but I couldn't say why at the time, and I think this is the reason - that my friend seemed to prize the poet and his experience over the poem.

(3) The storytellers are in town! DBS Arts Centre, Saturday night to Tuesday night. Saturday night was full of kids, but Monday and Tuesday nights were not. They are excellent - there was one Indian woman (Jeera? Can't remember her name) who told a story about two thieves trying to burgle the cleverest minister in all India?, and when she was telling the story she became the two thieves, the minister and his shrew of a wife.

(4) I found Diana Athill's novel Don't Look At Me Like That in the library. It's a perfectly constructed novel. Neat, economical, and perfectly composed. I've also since read Stet, her memoir as an editor, and After A Funeral, her account of a friend and writer's collapse and suicide (in the mental health section of the Sengkang library). Stet rather makes me want to be an editor; I think I could be anal-minded enough. Perhaps. None of them touched me the way Instead Of A Letter did - Minz, I still have your copy of that - but they are all beautifully constructed.

(5) The great thing about the US is that while there is George Bush, there are also funny videos about him. Catch anyone doing that about a Singaporean politician.

(6) There was a man in the train plucking hairs from his chin with two coins.

(7) There was just an ad on the radio announcing some new Japanese TV show about doctors. "You think they are saints but not all of them are...Will medical purity be preserved? Tune in to the 'Great White Towel'!" I probably misheard that.

(8) S and cp arranged it, and we took Evans out for dinner at En bar and then sake at Nihon-shu. An unexpectedly lovely evening.

(9) Lunch with J and S at Windows last Tuesday afternoon.

(10) I just read Howl's Moving Castle which is as always cleverly plotted - much more cleverly than (what I remember of) the movie, which was too cute and aimless. And oh! I never thought John Donne would be used in that way.

(11) I have read and re-read Saffy's Angel and Indigo's Star - I think the characters in Indigo's Star are more settled in themselves and less manic, though I don't really like reading the school bully parts because they're too real - and I will have Permanent Rose very, very soon - as soon as the library gets its act together. I want a job in the acquisition department of the library.

(12) We're going to Harry Potter on Thursday!

thud

how does one get hold of a copy?

On reading essays and petticoats

Blogger.com tells me that the last entry was posted on 31 July. Can that be true? I wish there were some more exciting reason why I haven't written, but in truth I just didn't have much to write about.

I've been reading essays - specifically, the Best American Essays series, which I now intend to collect if ever I can find them. The latest one is the 2003 volume, edited by Anne Fadiman, who writes a superb and friendly introduction. Minz introduced me to Anne Fadiman and I've seen a couple of her essays in other volumes. I now want a subscription to "The American Scholar"; anything once edited by Anne Fadiman can't be that bad, can it?

(Does it seem to you that one takes much longer to get comfortable - not proficient, but comfortable - in one's voice than to lose it? Things destroyed in a day and so on.)

It's not what I read essays for, but I found an essay in a previous Best American Essays volume which gave the definitive definition of Jewish prayer: Know before Whom you stand. That struck me because - O vanity - of its applicability to a secular faith, in small letters: know before whom you stand. It reminds me of one of Minz's entries on a passage by Mulisch. A conductor is having a bad day with his discouraged musicians when all of a sudden their playing picks up, better than he's ever heard it, as if they were responding to some other presence in the room. He turns around to find that they were - the distinguised conductor (I've forgotten the name) was standing in the doorway. Who stands on your threshold? It seems important - not that one should be able to answer this, exactly - but that one should be able to know where to look for an answer. It seems (seems!) that I have spent some two years now discarding old, dimly-understood thoughts and beliefs and prejudices gathered over four years of occasional study for something that settles like a boredom over the mind. Not to mention hideously mixed metaphors.

What I read essays for is to find gems like this, from an essay by Virginia Woolf quoting one of Addison's essays:

I consider woman as a beautiful romantic animal, that may be adorned with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks. The lynx shall cast its skin at her feet to make her a tippet; the peacock, parrot, and swan, shall pay contributions to her muff; the sea shall be searched for shells, and the rocks for gems; and every part of nature furnish out its share towards the embellishment of a creature that is the most consummate work of it. All this I shall indulge them in; but as for the petticoat I have been speaking of, I neither can nor will allow it.

harry potter

I can talk about it now.

[ ]

Frank O'Hara to Larry Rivers:

You are worried that you don't write?
Don't be. It's the tribute of the air that
your paintings don't just let go
of you. And what poet ever sat down
in front of a Titian, pulled out
his versifying tablet and began
to drone? Don't complain, my dear.
You do what I can only name.

Well get started

From Seamus Heaney's commencement speech to the graduating class of 1996 from the University of North Carolina:

"Getting started, keeping going, getting started again -- in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others. So this rhythm is what I would like to talk about briefly this morning, because it is something I would want each one of you to experience in the years ahead, and experience not only in your professional life, whatever that may be, but in your emotional and spiritual lives as well -- because unless that underground level of the self is preserved as a verified and verifying element in your make-up, you are going to be in danger of settling into whatever profile the world prepares for you and accepting whatever profile the world provides for you. You'll be in danger of molding yourselves in accordance with laws of growth other than those of your own intuitive being."

(Thank you for sending this.)

Bring tap shoes and a song

Item found while making a half-assed attempt to clean my room:

(1) Fragment of newsprint stapled to a finger and a fraction of an ear: "characters, energy and personality a plus. Bring tap shoes and a song"

(2) Some ST article headline: "Fertility lost to the toys of the new age?"

(3) [Aside]: What am I to do with all that you have sent me?

(4) The contents of one pouch: a tiny lock and key, a larger lock and key, 50 pence and one blue bead

(5) A list written on office stationery: 1. Steve; 2. tax; 3. emails; 4. work.

In the mail

(1) A stone with a half-inch gash in it (made by a chainsaw, the note said);

(2) Last postcard from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY;

(3) A cloth card featuring an elephant.

Thank you.

You have a reservoir of optimism, he said

IRA statement

Eavan Boland

Pomegranate

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
                    It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.

- Eavan Boland

tchotchke

Just cause I felt like saying it.

Doorways

WN gives me a little statue of Ganesh from his backpacking trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. Ganesh! I say in delight. God of doorways! Yes, he says; and of escapes, too.

(A quick google tells me that Ganesh is the god of wisdom, intelligence, education, prudence. Also the god of luck and fortune, doorways, the household and writing. Also the remover of obstacles.)

Happy birthday Jianyi!

And happy fireworks to you too.

[ ]

"But if we were to allow ourselves to indulge in all the daydreams of inhabited stone there would be no end to it."

- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Again, again

To you, who never begged me vows or verse,
My gift shall be my absence

I know. I know. Still.

And worthy to be remembered...

On a wall in the Old North Church in Boston:

THIS TABLET
IN MEMORY OF
THOMAS JOHNSTON
OF BRATTLESTREET
BOSTON
------------ * ------------
BUILDER OF THE ORGAN
IN THIS CHURCH
And worthy to be remembered
as an engraver
and heraldic painter
+
He died May 8, 1767
at the age of 59 years

Camino de Santiago

Pictures of pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela.

I was joking at first when I said that what I wanted to do after my bond ended was the Spanish Pilgrimage, but it seems like a good way to transit from one stage of life to another (assuming that I do move on to another stage after the bond), and the routes seem to be full of true pilgrims and tourists, so they must still be walkable.

The Witches of Eastwick

There are witches in a little backwater suburban town in Rhode Island and they are women whose husbands have divorced them. Three witches, of course. Discovered their powers upon leaving their husbands/their husbands leaving them. Sleeping with random men in the town - mainly married men who are bored with their wives. Struggling to earn a living (only divorced women work). Looking for the next love affair, for whatever will make their lives that little less dreary. A dark stranger moves into the empty mansion, holds sabbats, holds sexual ceremonies (or rather, gives them a place to hold their own), energises them. You can see how this is going to develop. But it's Updike and so very clever, very funny - though it sounds like it's written from a woman's perspective but (I think) with details that a man would find sexy. The reader is made complicit in the casual, spiteful, malicious magic that is practised - and there's quite a good deal of it, and all of it distinctly feminine, or at least female; the dark stranger is the least convincing main character in the book. And of course full of unattractive suburban sex.

And then I realise how terribly self-centred and -absorbed I am

A 14-year-old Indian girl won the fight to have her two-year marriage to a teenage boy annulled and to go back to school.

[well, because]

You tell yourself they are the choices you make. And in some way they are the choices you make. "A creature part willing, part consenting, part chosen for."

Grace

I came home and found a couple of prints and a letter waiting for me. Both photographs of a desk - one with a laptop playing Wilco (How to fight loneliness) and a crucifix behind, and the other a laptop displaying the buff, hairy torso of a male bodybuilder with a photo of Virginia Woolf's profile propped up on top of the laptop. Evidently I can't describe photographs. But they were amazing, and all the more so for being unexpected. Thank you - and all the sanity that reason and circumstance allow to you too.

Franzen

Jonathan Franzen quotes from a letter written to him by Don DeLillo in his (Franzen's) Harper's essay (retitled "Why Bother?" in his collection, How to be alone):

The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we're not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it'll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us - we won't stop because the market dried up. The writer leads, he doesn't follow. The dynamic lives in the writer's mind, not in the size of the audience. And if the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the cracks and ruts of the culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously, as an endangered spectacle. A reduced context but a more intense one.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

...

Postscript: If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word 'identity' has reached an end.

I think I've located my discomfort with this collection of essays - reading them is a bit like having a college conversation all over again. Admittedly a more articulate, thoughtful and sophisticated conversation than I ever had in college, but with much the same ideals and anger. Which I've more or less lost by the wayside, for better or worse.

Today

we had lunch at Brewerkz, where Su-Lin conclusively decided she didn't like beef. Next time we share mains and appetisers (Su-Lin, do you like nachos?) and a jug of beer?

Egotism And Spiritual Pride

Sayers in a letter to her parents in 1921:

"I can't get the work I want, nor the money I want, nor consequently, the clothes I want, nor the holiday I want, nor the man I want!! And then people tell me of girls who are oppressed and embarrassed by the possession of an income of 300 pounds a year, and feel that they ought not to have it and ought to be doing slum work and being useful to society. I call that pure egotism and spiritual pride. How thankfully would you or I support life under a load of similar embarrassments."

Reasons To Read Dante

From David Coomes' biography of Dorothy Sayers, A Careless Rage for Life, courtesy of the Repository Used Book Collection:

In a remarkable letter to Charles Williams in 1944, having got it into her head that Dante had been a passionate lover, [Dorothy Sayers] wrote of 'the distinguishing marks of True Bedworthiness in the Male', finding these 'to consist in the presence of Three Grand Assumptions':

1. That the primary aim and object of Bed is that a good time should be had by all.

2. That (other things being equal) it is the business of the male to make it so.

3. That he knows his business.

The first Assumption rules out at once all Satyromaniacs, sadists, connoisseurs in rape, egotists, and superstitious believers in female reluctance, as well as Catholic (replenish-the-earth) utilitarians and stockbreeders.

The second Assumption rules out the hasty, the clumsy, the lazy, the inconsiderate, the peremptory, the untimely and (in most cases) the routinier...

The third Assumption rules out the tentative as well as the incompetent and inadequate.

On Follies

Sunday night had lemon-and-butter spaghetti (and raw egg yolk - at which point everyone slowed down in their eating) and chicken with yoghurt and corsican omelette (goat cheese) and raspberry chocolate pavlova with strawberry jam instead and yellow cream (jy: the cream's white in the picture. S: have you not read Laura? Cows give yellow milk in summer and white milk in winter. Ma had to colour the winter milk with a carrot so that her butter would be yellow). It also had the beginning of Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle and ice wine and talk. cp: Tell him about your foolishness. Fay: My foolishness? cp: Your folly. Yish: In a Renaissance garden?

Saturday night had sand and sea and the night wind.

Tea and Thou

Painted on the side of a van:

COFFEE AND ME     NON-DAIRY

One Reason I'll Never Be A Writer

I'm told that there were a couple of brothers (? perhaps it was a single solitary person) working on a novel or script who were penniless and so, for the time it took them to finish their novel (or script), collected free packets of tomato ketchup from fast food restaurants and diluted the ketchup to drink as tomato juice.

I don't think I would have the stomach for that.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

(1) It was not wondrously strange, and it should have been.

(2) Alan Rickman has the most mournful voice ever heard in a cinema.

Huh

Microsoft has reached a deal with Indonesia over the tens of thousands of pirated versions of Windows programmes used in government departments - Indonesia is to pay Microsoft $1 for every computer found using pirated software.

What? Or Why I'll Never Be An Ornithologist

From the BBC: "Migrating birds are unlikely to be seriously affected by offshore wind farms, according to a study. Scientists found that birds simply fly around the farm, or between the turbines; less than 1% are in danger of colliding with the giant structures."

Engineer-ness

[idle conversation on a colleague]

Me: ...he's not that much of an engineer.

[the Deputy Director]: He's entirely an engineer. You can see it a mile away. He exudes engineer-ness.

Me: Oh well, who doesn't here?

DD: You.

Some books

Read Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which is so very anthropological a science fiction book, and a rich and subtle and sensitive (I wish I didn't think in reviewers' adjectives) and entirely complete invention. But I couldn't quite manage to think of her androgynes as androgynes - they all seemed to be men with occasionally feminine characteristics - though whether that's a fault in her language, or the English language as such (where are the feminists?) or me, I'm not sure.

Also read Diana Wynn Jones' The Dark Lord of Derkholm and The Year of the Griffin. She takes an interesting premise to its logical and unexpected conclusion, and it always works. And is funny.

Re-read Anne Carson's The Autobiography of Red like a long drink.

Dipped into William Matthews' selected poems, which I found serendipitously in Harvard. I love finding books I've forgotten I'm looking for. Perhaps I'll find something and put it up here, though his poems aren't so good in isolation from each other.

And am starting on Calasso's The Ruin of Kasch. Perhaps one day we could make a pilgrimage to Calasso and sit at his feet?

He said, what would you like me to write?

Write about the sound a martini makes when it strike the ice. Write about the languor of tulips when you were a gardener at Manhattan Plaza. Write about wood as the "form-inspiring, deeply human material" and how you once loved a tree surgeon. Write about what blue smells like, how long it stayed, what moved it. Like Anne Carson said, beauty spins and the mind moves. Spin for me.

Star Wars

Camera shows different parts of the spaceship breaking off and exploding.

Camera pans into ship, to show Obiwan Kenobi, Artoo (I guess that should be R2, but that looks wrong) and Anakin Skywalker standing in the lobby of the ship. Panic all around them.

Anakin (gravely): I think the elevator's not working.

Camera pans out to more parts of the ship exploding and the world generally falling apart.

Mm

So I turned 25 a few days back.

Which sounds old, doesn't it? Old enough to know better, at any rate. Consider the rest of it said.

The problem

Or one of them, is that I don't think you are able or willing to hold me, if I were able or willing to attempt the experiment. I think of Virginia Woolf, if it was Virginia Woolf, talking about the heady wine of intelligent conversation and the close contact of a naked mind. I'm afraid of too many things, and not all of them unfounded. The physicality of your words. The evanescence of your presence. The real origin of my desire. Dorothy Sayers to John Cournos [somewhere on Minz's blog]: Ask any questions you like - I can't imagine the question I would not readily and frankly answer. But for Christ's sake, no generalities. Good God! Do you think I'm unsexed? What do we have to say to each other? I suppose there's a certain brute honesty to all this; we don't pretend to be anything more to each other, or to ask anything more of each other than the barest minimum without which this could not exist. But there's asking, and there's asking. We've come too far for me to give this up easily, or to open myself to it easily. (I can't speak for you.) Am I really immortal, does the sun care, when you leave will you give me back the words? Ask me for something I can bear to give.

Future employment/housing prospects

At lunch with WN on Saturday:

Me: [bitching about some office conversation where we talked about who was doing well was moving where was going out with whom] Every time we have a conversation like we had that day, I think I have to leave before it makes me even bitchier.
WN: You'd probably get the same experience in any MNC.
Me: But not in the cardboard box on the street corner that is going to be my home.

Oh did I tell you about the customs guy at Newark when I flew into the States?

Passport-stamping guy: [flipping through my passport and seeing my old US visa] What did you study here?
Me: Political science.
PSG: Wasn't that a mistake?
Me: Um.
PSG: I have a degree in political science too.

And the passport guy at JFK one of the times I flew in while I was still at Columbia told me he had a masters in international relations.

Kids these days

My brother is reading something scientific and incomprehensible and chatting on MSN at the same time.

Me: Are you doing homework or reading your own stuff?
Him: My own stuff. I don't do homework.
Me: I see. Sorry to have made that assumption.
Him: My teachers have all come to terms with it.
Me: Even your GP teacher?
Him: Oh, no-one does GP homework, so it's ok.

What are kids coming to these days?

Reading your mind

"Damage to the right frontal lobe, for example, sometimes led to a heightened interest in high cuisine, a condition dubbed gourmand syndrome. (One European political journalist, upon recovering from a stroke affecting this part of the brain, profited from the misfortune by becoming a food columnist.)" From Of Two Minds.

Strawberry Jam

Confession

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam
And the dark sweetness of a woman's body.
Also, well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress's neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognize greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I know what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud.
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

- Czeslaw Milosz

On re-reading Francis Spufford

I find Julian Barnes' description of an adolescent: "a creature part willing, part consenting, part chosen for."

What is needed

Anthropologist Joel Sherzer on the Kuna gathering house (the Kuna live on the San Blas islands around Panama): “A talking place, a chanting place, an angry place, a serious place, and a joking place.”

Strawberries/ice-cream

Diane Arbus on "the Mad Man from Massachusetts" (she photographed him for a magazine article on eccentrics): "He is said to have once stolen a box of strawberries, taken it to a police station and invited the police to go out and steal a box of ice-cream so they could all have some dessert."

Shall we attempt to be assaulted by cakes next week?

thank you note

Diane Arbus's note to Lisette Model (Model was her photography teacher and on this particular occasion had written Arbus a letter of recommendation for the Guggenheim Fellowship):

"Dear Lisette, my father told me to thank you but your eloquence is your own and your friendship is mine so I cannot. But I want to see you."

back

can we go out?

[pure whingeing]

Have probably left out something important - like my passport - but am too tired to think about it. Shall I work? (Hah.) Sleep for half an hour and miss my plane? Stare blankly into space?

Not even half-baked

Ah this is why grown-ups tend not to write submissions, however half-assed to start with (the submission I mean), at 3 a.m. after consecutive restless nights. When I grow up, I'm going to sleep properly and write in the day and do sensible grown-up things.

Laster minute

Three t-shirts, a pair of jeans, 3 books, a tupperware full of tea and soup-making fungus and 99 pieces of voice. And a towel, like the Hitchhiker Guide says. That's all I have to bring to the States, right? We're not going anywhere that won't allow sneakers and jeans?

At the last minute

Er. Do I need a visa?

Also

I have forgotten how cold 50-60 degrees F is. How cold is it?

Anticlimax

Found it! And my old civil service pass. And an envelope full of US dollars ($250) and another envelope full of Renminbi. And letters from Columbia telling me I owe them 10 cents (they've stopped sending them; possibly the postage cost more than my debt? How could I owe them 10 cents anyway?), various receipts, credit card bills and other items best left unmentioned. I astound myself sometimes.

Defining panic

Where's my passport?

It's not in the places it should be and not in the places I might have put it. Will they let me leave the country?

(Anyone wants anything should let me know by any means - preferably email if after Saturday morning. If I find my passport.)

(People I might be imposing on, if you're reading this and haven't yet, please give me phone numbers. There is probably a working phone in NYC and I'll possibly find it.)

Self-knowledge/parts of conversation

Me: ...and I'm going to go pretend to work.
Him: Why don't you decide either to work or not to work, and just focus on that?
Me: Me, focus on something?
Him: Instead of fooling yourself into thinking you're going to work.
Me: Nono - a little self-delusion is necessary.

Gonna go pretend to work now.

Putting out the call

I'm going to the States for the last two weeks of April to visit people in NY and Minz and Von in Cambridge, Mass. - anyone who wants to give stuff to Minzhi, Von, Billy, Zak, Yish or anyone else we might both know should tell me soon.

What it should have been

This site is long overdue for a revamp - in content if not in look - but before that, or since I'll never get around to it - things I should have said -

(1) That you're married! and that takes away all my words;

(2) That I'm sorry for being anti-social tonight - I'm truly glad for you, and appreciate the introduction, and do let's hang out soon;

(3) That I wish you would write to me, establish contact in some way, keep some line of communication open, so that in the far future we may yet start to be friends;

(4) That I saw La Jetee earlier today, followed immediately in the same tape by Buck Rogers and Bambi Meets Godzilla (whoever put that tape together either had a cruel sense of humour or no conception of the appropriate - which may come to the same thing in this case);

(5) That your name runs through every narrative I write, except I don't quite dare to say that, whether out of a belated reticence or courtesy (do you read this?) or wariness I don't know.

Endings. Frederica sat and waited for her lover, and wondered what the end of the affair would be. She had begun to think that there was always only an unreal moment's grace between the beginning of a love affair (the phrase was already old-fashioned, but she had a growing distaste for the word relationship) and this steady self-questioning about how and why and when it would end. The moment's grace was the moment of being 'in love', which brought with it a clear, driven purposefulness, an impersonal directed energy that was desired in its absence, and frightening in its presence. (Not least because at thirty-three a woman knew that the dreadful belief that it was possible to prolong this state forever was the most tormenting aspect of the illusion.) For days, or weeks, or months, as the case may be, Frederica thought, putting on a short white cotton nightdress, brushing her red hair, we do nothing without the accompanying image of the loved face, the imaginary limbs, and then, one day, we notice it's gone, there is no more, love is over. And what kills it? Often enough (she put out all the lights except the bedside lamp, she turned down the cover) a failure in oneself, or in the beloved, to conform to an ideal pattern put in the mind long before these particular two have met. ... [Love] is a dance. It has a formal pattern that friendships don't. It is a made-up story. Love. Something else, fiercer and harsher and hotter (Life?) needs us to believe in Love for purposes of its own, which are not ours. And we collude. She remembered playing the young Elizabeth I in the garden, the virgin queen whose power wsas the recognition that separateness and solitude were safety.

All a bit metaphysical, Frederica thought, waiting for the tap on the area window, from the basement steps down to the flat where she lived. All a defence against him not coming, which we always fear, even if really we are indifferent as to whether he comes or not.

But a month ago, six months ago, I wasn't thinking in language about what (if anything) is love. I was thinking about his mouth, and his arse, and his hands. People like me, who think too much, are so glad, so grateful, at least at first, to be overcome by thoughts of lips, hands and eyes.

...

She opened the door, and John and the night air came in, and he opened his arms. And immediately she knew that he was someone, not her idea of her own lover, and her idea of John Ottokar, but a complicated troubled breathing man, with ruffled hair and an erection. She closed the blind and with four quick hands they undressed him, and tumbled into the bed.

- A. S. Byatt, The Whispering Woman

[blank]

What is there to say? It's roundabout 4 pm in the afternoon and I've been awake for the last two hours or so - and all I want to do is curl up and go back to sleep. Not - naturally - as a result of any great exertion of the mind or body but because I appear to be entering into what Diana Athill called a dormouse hiberation. I need to get the hell out of myself, is what I need.

(Which is not to say that the surface drift of my life is exactly empty. There was chamber music on Monday, and that's more or less all I can say about it. For the nth time - Clive Bell said that the few who could truly appreciate artistic form could scale the peaks of sublime aesthetic pleasure - but everyone else, the ones who listened to a concert and thought about that pleasant summer holiday they had three years ago, could only remain at the warm foothills of humanity. I might be able to splash around in a puddle at the foot of those foothills. But there was wine and company and all the better for it. Wednesday Steph, Bee Leng and I went for a walk in the Esplanade Park, which was good in all ways. Thursday was a sober couple of glasses of wine and an early night at Bala and Friday Wendy, BL and I left Ricciotti at 10 clutching paper cups of red wine and sat by the river wondering if anyone would leave us a few coins. And then the weekend. It's a pleasant enough drift but, and but.)

Crisp

Right after we saw "The Naked Civil Servant" in the Esplanade library - the first (I freely confess) I heard of Quentin Crisp - I found his New York diaries at a secondhand bookshop in Tampines Mall, of all places. It is titled Resident Alien and was shelved under "serious/classic literature", which I think Crisp may have appreciated. Now that I've finished his New York account, can we get the video? If nothing else, it stars John Hurt.

Observations at ROM

I was there promptly at 10.45 am on a Saturday morning, a time at which (like so many others) all right-minded persons should be in bed, and ROM was crammed with people. Some couples nonchalantly in jeans but most in a rehearsal of bridal wear - muted white or pink dresses for the women and dark suits for the men - and all surrounded by a clutch of relatives and friends, most of whom looked hot and uncomfortable. We saw one white-clad woman stretchered into an ambulance.

After gathering everyone we were ushered into the waiting room, which in every way resembled an airport departure lounge - the same sense of imminent departure deadened by the long waiting time, the same suppressed excitement, the same awkwardness. There were groups of bridal parties standing in corners talking and taking photographs. A plasma TV showing what was probably an MCYS video on the joys of marriage. Signs around the room which said "Silence Please, Solemnization in Progress". There were three - meeting rooms? - in which one could be married, and they all had names: Love, Cherish and Joy. (I read "Cherish" as "Chastity" at first, assuming that it had to be a noun.) A loudspeaker announced the names of the next couple to be married: "Will Mr X and Miss Y please go to love."

Love itself was as bare as a senior civil servant's office. The presiding officer (registrar?) sat behind a large desk. The bridal couple sat/stood in front of her, and the witnesses sat at her left. A rostrum and a few mismatched settees were backed up against the other walls for the guests. The presiding officer read out her lines - matrimony in any religion, she said, was the union of ONE man and ONE woman (with clear emphasis on the number). The couple exchanged vows taken straight from the Christian service, except with all mention of God expunged and updated for the young and modern. "With this ring, I marry you." What happened to "I thee wed", which sounds better, even if only because of the burden of history of that phrase? If the Registry of Marriage, a Statutory Board of a secular government, had to appropriate the words of the Christian service, it could at least keep them in their old-fashioned beauty.

But there was a grace to the exchange of vows, which cannot be suppressed by unlovely surroundings or ungraceful words - especially mine. I think if anyone will they will be happy together, which seems to be no little achievement.

In passing

Saturday we got DVDs and ice-cream and curled up in front of the TV. Watched the Singapore Short Story Project, which was as bad as it sounds, and The World According To Garp, which was beautifully scripted, acted and directed. Life and death and growing up after the war and the pity of it all. Why haven't our artists mastered subtlety of form or thought or emotion? But I'll not throw stones. Sunday was lunch and shopping with Fay and then a picnic at the Botanic Gardens with bread and cheese and duck rilette and tapenade and hummus and wine and brownies and Scrabble and star-gazing. Su-Lin says it better. Aren't you proud of us for actually having a picnic? Either Monday or Tuesday had powerpoint slides (this will continue for the rest of the week) and half of "Some Came Running". Only Dean Martin can drink tea in white underwear and a grey hat and still look debonair. Tuesday lunch had fish and chips down Riverside Walk and more chocolate than good for anyone at Ricciotti. Let's go back there some day and get shamelessly drunk on wine and chocolate. On Wednesday XZ skived the Life Theatre Awards (or some suchlike) and we got oysters and attempted to get a drink at the Mitre. The doors were thrown open to the night and the lights on but there was no-one at the bar, so we ventured into the backroom and past the clutter of furniture and newspapers and magazines to the room at the far end. Dithered in front of the closed door - we could hear the radio and someone rustling around - and knocked only to have it opened by an European-looking man without a shirt. Er the bar? He: I don't work here. Exit left, sans drink. On Thursday we found Arab-ish cafes and the best ginger tea in town (in Little India, at any rate) and then I went home to look at powerpoint slides. Now it's Friday and there was beer and the second half of "Some Came Running". That's more TV/video than I've watched in a while - probably since the run of Woody Allen movies back in New York. That was two years ago but seems like a year ago - I've completely lost 2004. The days merge ineluctably into each other - and this is an effort to distinguish and preserve some part of them. Call it writing practice and don't ask what the practice is for.

Time Check (2)

It's the story that counts. No use telling me this isn't a story, or not the same story. I know you've fulfilled everything you promised, you love me, we sleep till noon and we spend the rest of the day eating, the food is superb, I don't deny that. But I worry about the future. In the story the boat disappears one day over the horizon, just disappears, and it doesn't say what happens then. On the island that is. It's the animals I'm afraid of, they weren't part of the bargain, in fact you didn't mention them, they may transform themselves back into men. Am I really immortal, does the sun care, when you leave will you give me back the words? Don't evade, don't pretend you won't leave after all; you leave in the story and the story is ruthless.

- Margaret Atwood, from the "Circe" poems

There are reasons why I'm sleeping alone tonight, not all of which I want to think through. At least it's clear space for a while, and I may be glad of it in time to come. I found an old entry which said I believed that one should give and hazard all - and it is a sign of age or common sense or some hardening of the emotional fibres - that I am afraid, for no discernible reason, for the first time I can remember in recent years, to do so, just like that. You give me what you can, with an easy, careless generosity, but my limits are so much more easily breached. Is it enough, will it be enough, do I want it to be enough, to just take the beauty of these days, as gently as we can, and lift them high above the debris of everyday life? Am I truly immortal, does the sun care, when you leave will you give me back the words? How much will you leave behind when your boat disappears over the horizon, what am I hoping to be left with?

Time check

Dinner with my family at Fatty Weng's tonight and it's been a while since I did anything with my family, as my parents are acutely aware of. My dad said they brought us to such places (like Fatty Weng's) so we can pass them on to the next generation. My mom said that the last time they went to Fatty Weng's was before I was born. And what a long time ago that was! I said. Oh yes, said my brother.

So suddenly it's March and how has your year been? I should be doing all kinds of useful things and organising my time and finances, but what I am going to do is go curl up in bed with a book. At least, at least - I looked through my blog entries for March 03 and March 04, and at least they're not exactly the same. Do you remember Sumiko Tan's column last Sunday (I think it was last Sunday), when she said that if a woman isn't married by 35, she should give up? There was a bit when she said that it was probably time to stop being a girl and grow up (my words, not hers) once one was past one's early 30s - it was simply not becoming to go on flirting with the world and giggling after cute guys once one was in one's late 30s. A few days later Steve showed me an IHT article which said that Japanese women were dressing like girls - in frilly blouses and long shapeless skirts and little cotton socks. According to some Japanese fashion critic, this is the virginal look. The article had an interview with a woman in her early thirties, who said that she enjoyed such clothes as they were "cute and comfortable" and would feel like she had stopped being a girl once she stopped being able to fit into such clothes.

(You should read the IHT article just for its preposterousness. Some Japanese fashion critic describes the popularity of the virginal look thus: "The Tokyo virgin is well-read, knowledgeable and sophisticated. She chooses to insulate herself in her own spiritual world. Virginity for her is less an issue of sexuality than a state of mind, and she strives to remain unsullied and pure no matter what her sexual experiences may be." Doesn't that remind you of the re-virginity movement in the American South? It's enough to make one want to run out and buy a miniskirt, fishnets and 6-inch stiletto heels.)

At 30 I'll probably feel exactly like the guys from "Sideways" and think that my life has marked one long forgettable boredom, but for now - preserve me from a future of pickled girlhood. Steve pointed out that if one didn't get married and have children and one's days are likely to be much the same, through one's 20s, 30s, 40s...Isn't that depressing? The only more depressing thing is being exactly the same person through one's 20s, 30s, 40s...if nothing else, at least let this year be different.

Viabs

An architect's wet-cement dream.

Why one should read the papers

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone . . . but they've always worked for me," he once wrote.

Also: "Hunter S. Thompson, who killed himself last week in his house in Woody Creek, near Aspen, Colorado, was a high-strung, thin-skinned, programmatically dissipated workaholic, inveterately suspicious of authority, perpetually worried that his best days were behind him, and unable to deal with the attention and success that he scrambled and sweated for many years to achieve. In other words, he was a magazine writer."

Addenda

[1] Typo of the week: a member of the public (i.e. one of the unwashed masses) wrote to the PM asking him to "tamper justice with kindness".

My other favourite is something I found in a government report, explaining that the Government must "exercise a judgemental call".

Incidentally, my department just bought everyone a grammar book (Plain Words by Ernest Gowers) before we degenerated from incoherence into a complete and entire illiteracy.

[2] You know the Robert Herrick poem that starts "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may"? It's called "To a Virgin, to make the most of time" or some suchlike. They do this thing in my office where everytime you start your computer, a powerpoint slide pops up with reminders, exhortations, warnings, grammar tips (forsooth), and cheery inspirational messages. A couple of days ago it was the Herrick poem.

Notes

In no particular order:

[1] Watch "Sideways" while it only shows a possible doom and not a current predicament. There's this fantastic moment where the two friends are sitting on the beach talking.

Miles (grade-school English teacher and unpublished - and apparently unpublishable - writer): Half my life is over and I have nothing to show for it. Nothing. I'm a thumbprint on the window of a skyscraper. I'm a smudge of excrement on a tissue surging out to sea with a million tons of raw sewage.
Jack (actor who did a successful day-time soap once and now does ads): See? Right there. Just what you just said. That is beautiful. 'A smudge of excrement... surging out to sea.'
Miles: Yeah.
Jack: I could never write that.
Miles: Neither could I, actually. I think it's Bukowski.

At which point someone sitting behind us in the audience says, Who's Bukowski?

[2] Addy, Jianyi, a couple of their friends and I tried to watch "La Jetee" at the Arts House. They screened the first 15 minutes or so to a muted undertone of "Total Eclipse of the Heart", stopped the film to try and turn off the house music, tore the film (on loan from the Alliance Francaise, thus worsening relations between the two countries), attempted to repair it with sticky tape, started the film from the beginning, gave up when the tape jammed in the projector, and apologised profusely.

[3] Wine Network at Dempsey Road with Julian, Addy and Jianyi, which was rather nice, even if at the back of beyond. What we need to do is go to the Mitre (you remember the creepy derelict hotel bar place?) to balance out the yuppies and the expats.

[4] Carried a bamboo (courtesy of Steve) back on the train and was stared at by a number of kids. Passed by a couple of joggers on the way back to my house, one of whom said to the other, "Quite expensive to get bamboo poles nowadays, must go chop it down yourself..."

[5] Shin Gee's getting married. Have I said this already? I'm told this is the first wave of marriages. Brace yourself.

[6] Lee sends this, and I can only offer it to all of you:

i read a great story about a factory worker who used to tape a poem in front of his machine where he worked. his job was repetitive and mindless and so he would just read the poem in front of him all day long and attempt to memorize it. eventually, his boss called him in and said, "look, you're a good kid and this is probably the first time you've been fired, but don't take it too hard. you're smart and you'll find a good job. but i couldn't have you here. everyone else here looks angry while they work and you just walk around with that goofy smile on your face. it creeps us out. good luck."

Interviews/essays this time

Reading about Rexroth, I want to learn Japanese. Oh yes and Chinese too.

Eliot Weinberger writes about Rexroth at his death. And on Rexroth, Chinese poetry and the American imagination. (Maybe I'll just read Weinberger instead.) Somewhere on the site are Rexroth's readings of his poems accompanied by a jazz band.

There's not enough time, what with faffing and reading Pratchett, not to mention the office. I tried the whole gainful employment thing and found myself, to no-one's surprise, amazingly incompetent at it; can I stop now?

More Rexroth

Found Rexroth poems on the net. This one's for you, if you read this, if you like.

When We With Sappho



“. . . about the cool water
the wind sounds through sprays
of apple, and from the quivering leaves
slumber pours down . . .”

We lie here in the bee filled, ruinous
Orchard of a decayed New England farm,
Summer in our hair, and the smell
Of summer in our twined bodies,
Summer in our mouths, and summer
In the luminous, fragmentary words
Of this dead Greek woman.
Stop reading. Lean back. Give me your mouth.
Your grace is as beautiful as sleep.
You move against me like a wave
That moves in sleep.
Your body spreads across my brain
Like a bird filled summer;
Not like a body, not like a separate thing,
But like a nimbus that hovers
Over every other thing in all the world.
Lean back. You are beautiful,
As beautiful as the folding
Of your hands in sleep.

We have grown old in the afternoon.
Here in our orchard we are as old
As she is now, wherever dissipate
In that distant sea her gleaming dust
Flashes in the wave crest
Or stains the murex shell.
All about us the old farm subsides
Into the honey bearing chaos of high summer.
In those far islands the temples
Have fallen away, and the marble
Is the color of wild honey.
There is nothing left of the gardens
That were once about them, of the fat
Turf marked with cloven hooves.
Only the sea grass struggles
Over the crumbled stone,
Over the splintered steps,
Only the blue and yellow
Of the sea, and the cliffs
Red in the distance across the bay.
Lean back.
Her memory has passed to our lips now.
Our kisses fall through summer’s chaos
In our own breasts and thighs.

Gold colossal domes of cumulus cloud
Lift over the undulant, sibilant forest.
The air presses against the earth.
Thunder breaks over the mountains.
Far off, over the Adirondacks,
Lightning quivers, almost invisible
In the bright sky, violet against
The grey, deep shadows of the bellied clouds.
The sweet virile hair of thunder storms
Brushes over the swelling horizon.
Take off your shoes and stockings.
I will kiss your sweet legs and feet
As they lie half buried in the tangle
Of rank scented midsummer flowers.
Take off your clothes. I will press
Your summer honeyed flesh into the hot
Soil, into the crushed, acrid herbage
Of midsummer. Let your body sink
Like honey through the hot
Granular fingers of summer.

Rest. Wait. We have enough for a while.
Kiss me with your mouth
Wet and ragged, your mouth that tastes
Of my own flesh. Read to me again
The twisting music of that language
That is of all others, itself a work of art.
Read again those isolate, poignant words
Saved by ancient grammarians
To illustrate the conjugations
And declensions of the more ancient dead.
Lean back in the curve of my body,
Press your bruised shoulders against
The damp hair of my body.
Kiss me again. Think, sweet linguist,
In this world the ablative is impossible.
No other one will help us here.
We must help ourselves to each other.
The wind walks slowly away from the storm;
Veers on the wooded crests; sounds
In the valleys. Here we are isolate,
One with the other; and beyond
This orchard lies isolation,
The isolation of all the world.
Never let anything intrude
On the isolation of this day,
These words, isolate on dead tongues,
This orchard, hidden from fact and history,
These shadows, blended in the summer light,
Together isolate beyond the world’s reciprocity.

Do not talk any more. Do not speak.
Do not break silence until
We are weary of each other.
Let our fingers run like steel
Carving the contours of our bodies’ gold.
Do not speak. My face sinks
In the clotted summer of your hair.
The sound of the bees stops.
Stillness falls like a cloud.
Be still. Let your body fall away
Into the awe filled silence
Of the fulfilled summer —
Back, back, infinitely away —
Our lips weak, faint with stillness.

See. The sun has fallen away.
Now there are amber
Long lights on the shattered
Boles of the ancient apple trees.
Our bodies move to each other
As bodies move in sleep;
At once filled and exhausted,
As the summer moves to autumn,
As we, with Sappho, move towards death.
My eyelids sink toward sleep in the hot
Autumn of your uncoiled hair.
Your body moves in my arms
On the verge of sleep;
And it is as though I held
In my arms the bird filled
Evening sky of summer.

- Kenneth Rexroth

The Advantages of Learning

I am a man with no ambitions
And few friends, wholly incapable
Of making a living, growing no
Younger, fugitive from some just doom.
Lonely, ill-clothed, what does it matter?
At midnight I make myself a jug
Of hot white wine and cardamon seeds.
In a torn grey robe and old beret,
I sit in the cold writing poems,
Drawing nudes on the crooked margins,
Copulating with sixteen year old
Nymphomaniacs of my imagination.

- Kenneth Rexroth

Signs of age

My god, it's "Ice Ice Baby" on the radio now!

And how old are we again?

Pretty pictures

Hubble telescope images.

New York, New York

"...the mark of a city worth living in is that there are never enough places to park".

Making books

Me: I've been reading and re-reading Diana Athill's Instead of a Letter and now I'm inspired. I want to work in publishing.
WN: Why?
Me: To be part of making a book!
WN: You can be a stapler.

[why this need for explanation?]

Am I really immortal, does the sun care, when you leave will you give me back the words? Don't evade, don't pretend you won't leave after all: you leave in the story and the story is ruthless.

- Margaret Atwood, from the Circe/Mud poems.

Howl's Moving Castle

I haven't read the book, but the movie's not worthy of Diana Wynne Jones (from what I have read), or Hayao Miyazaki (so I'm told). It's cute in parts but Miyazaki gives up on the plot halfway and brings the movie to a soppy ending in tears and laughter and sunshine and happily ever after.

Measuring worth

Focus on the Family is coordinating a "Worth Waiting For" project - getting kids (alright; young people) to pledge abstinence from pre-marital sex by wearing red-and-white bands. The red stands for true love and the white for purity.

Focus on the Family: "it's a message that young people love to have and love to embrace but it's just giving them the opportunity to embrace that hey, they can be empowered to save sex until after marriage and there are individuals worth waiting for."

[My modesty, the jewel in my dower? This campaign seems misconceived - isn't the important thing is to treat others with consideration and generosity and respect (and, yes, love, if you can manage it), rather than whether or not you go to bed with them? To simply say, stay away from sex! is too easy. Besides, as Diane Athill says - the tenderness between bodies may be restricted, but it is real, and if sex teaches you to think about a person other than yourself, then that's no bad thing.]

Breathing space (2)

I don't think one should repeat quotations. Nonetheless - from Anne Carson's 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.

Breathing space (1)

Minzhi came last weekend - no, weekend before last - and we had far too much food for dinner (coq au vin using Great Wall wine and potatoes and seafood) and Julian came to find everyone sprawled in the TV den eating Awfully Chocolate cake and watching Ab Fab. On Sunday we bewildered Julian's friends with smatterings of Chinese food and culture (rather more food than culture) and the Botanic Gardens. The Evolution Garden at the Botanic Gardens has signs like Monty Python chapter titles: "The Beginnings of Life", "The Rise of the Ferns", "The Flowering of the World". I want a company to come woo me with dinner and wine and river cruises too (perhaps not the last) - it would be a nice change from begging for a job. Minzhi's place briefly on Sunday night to say goodbye and beer and conversation on Monday night and then I made all kinds of resolutions to do work in the week which I didn't keep. Oh! Bak chor mee at Fengshan, because Kang Jet had the use of his car (Shin Gee/Rosa: So this place only opens for dinner? Me/Kang Jet: Er. Never been here so early before. The important thing to remember is that this place opens until 3 a.m..) and then Bark Cafe at Changi Chapel. I think we should return to Changi Chapel in the daylight, just because. The next weekend was the ACSian theatre production of Chekov's Three Sisters, which was unconvincing. It's possible that lines like "but all the poetry has gone out of my work!" cannot be said with a straight face today. Bar and Billiard Theatre after that where more people came and we managed thoroughly confused Judy's Hungarian friend and then the waiter said hi to Jo. (I tugged on XZ's sleeve as the whole bunch of us walked in and said, I don't think I'm dressed enough for this place. He: That's ok, not everyone's dressed up. Me: I don't think I'm old enough for this place.) Are we at the Chinese New Year week yet? Monday night and Tuesday afternoon spent looking at lomographs and old black-and-white photos of a Japanese sushi chef in Nakano, Wednesday eating too many pineapple tarts and fending off relatives, Thursday at the Beach Bar (bless Louise and her car) where Joanne gave me a piece of green chalk, and then Mortoni's and Balaclava on Friday night (why do we go to Bala?) and crawled through Saturday trying not to move too much.

Instead of a Letter

Minzhi lent me Diana Athill's Instead of a Letter before she left and so I read it, and then read it again, slowly, and then again as if it were the first time. More than anything else I have read in a long time this book resonates in me - I know this woman, and I have been in her place many times - more in the unhappy times than the happy times, simply because we were born into very different worlds.

Some passages.


I was hungry to be alive, so I was hungry to love - but was I hungry, in fact, for the companionship of those particular men, or of the third one, unmarried but not in love with me, whose reservations about me turned a lively attraction into infatuation so that I did not fall in love with him, but might have been jumping off a cliff? I have always shrunk from the idea of possessiveness, I have never tried to mould people into my own idea of them, and I have been satisfied with myself because of this; I have considered it a virtue. It may have been in part the virtue I took it to be, but I suspect now that it had other aspects as well: that if I did not grab at people, I grabbed at emotion, and that for many years the most intense emotion I could conceive of was one of pain.

*

Some people take refuge from emptiness in activity and excesses. They are the ones, I suppose, who cannot sleep for it. Mine was a dormouse escape, a hibernation. Instead of being unable to sleep I slept to excess, thinking lovingly of my bed during the day and getting into it with pleasure. Sleep for me has always been dreamless yet not negative, as though oblivion were a consciously welcomed good, so the only thing to dread about my nights was the slow, heavy emergence from them when an unthinking lack of enthusiasm for the days into which they pitched me made getting up an almost intolerable effort. Sleep at night, and a cautious huddling within limits during the day: walking to work along the same streets, eating the same meals, going back to the same room, then reading. In theory I longed to depart from this pattern and felt sorry for myself when I did not, but although I would have liked to have lived differently, the smallest alteration seemed to be beyond my energies. I had to be feeling unusually well before I could go so far as to take a bus to the National Gallery on a day off, instead of sleeping all the morning and reading all the afternoon.

Within these absurd limitations imposed on me by inertia, there were palliatives to be found: the company of the few friends then accessible - and that I do not say more about my friends is because their lives are their own affair, not because they are not precious to me - and the books I read, and the little life spun within the walls of the office, which was often amusing. The intimacy between people working together is an agreeable thing and very real, in spite of the disconcerting way in which it vanishes as soon as the same people meet each other in different circumstances. And always, at any time, I could look at things, whether at leaves unfolding on a plane tree, or at people's faces in a bus, or at a pigeon strutting after its mate on a roof, or at pictures.

*

The sensation of happiness itself is one for which I have only a physical vocabulary: warmth, expansion, floating, opening, relaxation. This was so from its beginning, and has become more with its confirmation in love. Unintellectual, unspiritual as I am, I have always identified closely with my body: for most of the time I am it and it is me. What happens to me physically is therefore of great importance to my general condition - a disposition threatening serious problems in illness or old age, but conducive to an especial happiness in love. To split the relationship of love into 'physical' and 'mental' is something which I cannot do. Making love is not a fugitive good, contained only in the time in which it is being done: it is, each time, an addition, an expansion of a whole happiness. I have never in the past known it to be quite wiped out by subsequent events, and I know that it will not be wiped out now. This final way of communication is one of the things which, like my feeling for Beckton and Oxford, I know to be stored in me: a good which I have experienced, which enters into and is entered by everything I see and hear and feel and smell, and of which I can only be deprived by the decay of consciousness. That when two people have lived together for several years their love-making loses its value is, in most cases, obvious, and I should expect it to do so with me: I should expect that only if the man I was living with and I were really as well suited as we had first believed would the habit of companionship and interdependence successfully supersede physical delight. But I do not see that this would discredit physical delight. If it exists, it will always have existed. Now, therefore, that it exists again for me, I am by that much richer to the end of my days.

So happiness, followed by love and increased by it, has for me the colour of physical pleasure although it embraces many other things and although it seems to be me to mean something larger than my own emotions and sensations. This is a period in which many people are concerned with the difficulty of communication. Poetry, novels, plays, paintings: they emphasize this theme so constantly that anyone who feels that human beings can communicate is beginning to look naive. But what is meeting a man from a different country, a different tradition, a different social and economic background, and finding that you and he can both speak about anything exactly as you feel, in perfect confidence of understanding even if not of agreement, if it is not communication? The discovery of trust and easiness which comes with such a meeting is another, and greater, enduring good.

Number games

Walked into my brother's room to return his calculator and found him sprawled on the bed on the phone. He [to me]: You're doing work? You use numbers at work?

Learning on the job

There's a survey in the UK which revealed two of the most popular places for jackpot winners to keep their tickets: "in their Bibles" and "in their underwear". (Courtesy of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport website.)

Found

I wish I had thought of this first.

Happy Chinese New Year! How have you been?

A sensible type

At lunch today we were talking of such weighty matters as marriages and relationships and gossip.

Colleague: ...yes of course opposites attract. Like my husband is much quieter and more sensible than I am.

Me: Doesn't it depend on who you're with? With sensible people you can be frivolous and silly, but some people you just have to be sensible because otherwise they'll fall down drunk in a gutter somewhere and kill themselves.

[Oh do shut up. That was not meant to be self-referential. To resume - ]

She: Yes! Deep down I'm really sensible, but I don't have to be cause my husband is more sensible. He calls me a kid, which I am. (She looks at me for a while.) I think you'll get the sensible type.

Times like that I wonder exactly what people think of me and suspect it's not flattering in the least.

Weekend notes

Thursday: Red wine and apples.

Friday: Open-faced sandwiches at the Copenhagen Tea Room. (XZ: These sandwiches defeat the whole point of sandwiches. WN: That's cause they're open-faced sandwiches. Me (brightly): And there we see the evolution of something utilitarian to...well someone had to say it, yes?) Night was videos at Terry's place - Next Stop Wonderland, which was fantastic till ACME LINOLEUM appeared; The Pianist, which is really not necessary to a healthy and fulfilling life; and This is Spinal Tap, which I disgracefully fell asleep in the middle of. I know; getting old. Oh and Bat Thumb! And Terry's the Matrix Remounted, which just goes to show why every kid should take karate/wushu/etc. classes.

Saturday: Woke up at 3 in the afternoon, pottered around, had dinner (ish) at Addy's place and then we sat around on the porch and realised exactly where our lives weren't going. Minzhi's back next week, the snow and JFK runways willing, so we can do it all over again, and with GP scripts and cranberry juice.

Sunday: Damn is it Sunday already? Well it was good while it lasted.

Jagged

At a talk on making a living in the arts on Friday, one of the panellists said, we shouldn't judge local works by Western standards. Some people watch too much Spielberg and then see something like "Fifteen", which is all jagged, and say it's not good! You laugh but some people say that!

Took all my self-control not to jump up and say "Fifteen" is a bad movie! It is! It's incoherent (jagged?) and self-indulgent and far too long.

(But all the panellists were impressive in their own right, and at least they're out there arranging music/singing/writing. I'll hold my peace.)

In the marine trade

Julian mentioned them at dinner last night and so I looked them up and here are pictures and one "commonly known as the clown or harlequin mantis shrimp in the marine trade".

What I learnt at work today

If in St Petersburg and pickpocketed by a bunch of gypsies, grab the gypsy kid (i.e. the youngest and weakest member) and hold him hostage and refuse to hand him over until they return your stuff. Which they will.

Definition of cool

An ad just overheard on the radio:

She: We don't just study normal subjects, we study cool things like rock music!

He: And we get personal laptops? Now that is cool!

Eh. What are kids coming to these days.

A Dylan Thomas Song Cycle

Looking for Dylan Thomas' "On No Work Of Words", I find that Peter Dickinson (is this the Changes trilogy author? I hope so. And did you know he - the Changes guy I mean - is married to the children's books writer Robin McKinley? Ok I'll stop now) has composed a Dylan Thomas Song Cycle. Does anybody have this and do you know how to get hold of it?

And since I did find the Dylan Thomas, here it is. (Well take it as a promise of some sort. Though I gotta say - three months isn't bad.)

On No Work Of Words

On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody
Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body
I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:

To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given
Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,
The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.

To lift to leave from the treasures of man is pleasing death
That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath
And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.

To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.
Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas
If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work.

Feeding people

Herbert Hoover organised two of the greatest relief efforts in the world.

[and yours is wilful ignorance]

He said, have you no sense of self-preservation?

It would appear not.

Free advertising for the Smithsonian

I bitch about the job all the time, but it does make me look up things like ways to give to the Smithsonian - some of which are pretty inventive (to a financial moron like me, at any rate). Invest with the Smithsonian! I don't know what the rates of return on investment are like for other kinds of investment, but at least this way you're helping a great museum?

Citizen of New York

Check out the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institute. I love it that the Chief Justice and the Vice President of the United States hold ex officio positions on the Board of Regents. And Patrick Leahy - it's somehow cool that the Senator from Vermont is on the Board (yes well). And I love the titles of the Honorable Barber B. Conable, Jr. - Citizen of New York, Former Member of Congress, Former President of the World Bank, and Consultant in International Finance - whatever else he was and is, he is first and foremost a Citizen of New York.

You can tell from the frivolous blogging (as opposed to all the serious and thoughtful pieces I produce of course) that I'm pretending to do work. Anyone who can take me though the tax structure of the US and particularly tax deduction for gifts to museums, foundations and other charitable institutions (or whatever qualifies in the US for tax-deductible gifts) will have me very much in their debt.

The Book Thing

An article from aldaily.com on the Book Thing - where people can give and take books freely (and free of charge). You think something like this would work in Singapore? I have any number of old books at home, some of which I guess we could possibly part with.

To be 16 again

Conversation with my brother, who is undergoing orientation at RJ (does one undergo orientation, in the same way one undergoes an ordeal? is one oriented...into? towards RJ?):

Me: ...So how are the girls?

Him: They're so dumb! We were playing volleyball with trash bags - you know, one guy and one girl partner to hold a trash bag and toss the volleyball to the next pair using the bag - and we were told not to move when we had the ball, and you know it means not to run but just to toss the ball, but then this girl said, but if we can't move our arms then how to throw the ball?

Me: Not all the girls right.

Him: They're all dumb or ugly.

Against interpretation

Susan Sontag tells Rolling Stone in 1979 that “rock’n’roll was the reason I got divorced”.

There are of course better obituaries around and much more one could say about Sontag, which will somehow include the bit where she says that she always thought a definition of a writer was one who was interested in everything. But perhaps - a very short personal tribute? I wanted to say - that I read "On Photography" one late night in Oxford and was amazed at what Sontag and the essay could do. And that was the start of an intermittent crush on her - a half-hearted love, since it only involved a handful of her essays and hardly any of the novels. And I like the - moral? - seriousness which with she approached books and writing - as well as the clear delight she took in reading and writing.

(It seems - if not wrong, exactly, then inappropriate - to talk about one woman's death when hundreds of thousands died in the tsunami disaster. But there's less than nothing I can say about the tsunami victims that wouldn't be at best trite. I'm damn well not going to say, with the Straits Times, that 2004 was a year of D&D - death and disaster. The hell is wrong with the ST columnists?)

What have you read this year?

The NYT presents the Hookie Awards in two parts for some of the most important essays of 2004 (excepting, of course, the NYT). Needless to say, they are all unfamiliar to me.

Instead of Keats, and just for the title

AGAIN, JOHN KEATS, OR THE POT OF BASIL

Just when I was getting completely through
dried out, balled up, anxious and empty
like a gulch in a John Huston movie
I went to see Strange Interlude and began
to go away for a weekend on the beach

into that theatre again and again
now I have a pot of basil a friend gave
me and am reading Keats again and realize
that everything is impossible in a different way
well so what, but there's a difference
between a window and a wall again

- Frank O'Hara

New Year wishes

From Adrienne Rich, "Sources":

But there was also the other Jew. The one you most feared, the one from the shtetl, from Brooklyn, from the wrong part of history, the wrong accent, the wrong class. The one I left you for.       The one both like and unlike you, who explained you to me for years, who could not explain himself.       The one who said, as if he had memorized the formula, There's nothing left now but the food and the humor.       The one who, like you, ended isolate, who had tried to move in the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens.       Who drove to Vermont in a rented car at dawn and shot himself.       For so many years I had thought you and he were in opposition. I needed your unlikeness then; now it's your likeness that stares me in the face.      There is something more than food, humor, a turn of phrase, a gesture of the hands:       there is something more.

Happy New Year, my dears, and may the year bring you the something more.