Two English teachers are walking in the woods

I found a primer on writing poetry, on metre and rhyme and form, by Stephen Fry, of all people. In his foreword, Fry sympathises with anyone who has been traumatised by literature lessons in school:

"The way poetry was taught in school reminded W. H. Auden of a Punch cartoon composed, legend has it, by the poet A. E. Housman. Two English teachers are walking in the woods in springtime. The first, on hearing birdsong, is moved to quote William Wordsworth:

Teacher 1: Oh cuckoo, shall I call thee bird
                Or but a wandering voice?

Teacher 2: State the alternative preferred
                With reasons for your choice."

cp would probably approve - Fry quotes Auden again, this time on free verse:

"The poet who writes 'free' verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor."

Narrativium

I am avoiding work in all possible ways, including reading Wintersmith twice over in a weekend (the NLB came through) and half of Light in August - and fully intending to read the other half, which surprises me, having tried and failed to read Faulkner before (I think it was Sound and Fury - the one with all the different voices going round and round, unless that describes more than one novel). I am emboldened - I have also borrowed Absalom, Absalom (on the principle that once the first Faulkner is breached the second will be easier) and might actually try to read it.

Back from Viking land

A week and a half in Stockholm and Copenhagen, to study the Nordic social security system.

Stockholm. It gets dark here (and across the Strand) by 3 pm, which is invariably depressing, even with christmas lights sparkling over the street in the old city and from every christmas tree propped up against storefront or drainpipe. We have most of one day here, to walk around the charming and deeply-touristed medieval city (Gamla Stan), which offers candles, crystal ornaments, delicate wooden ships in a bottle, plastic horned helmets. We look in vain for a Swedish restaurant; evidently, when Swedes eat out, they eat Italian or Japanese. An ostensibly Italian restaurant has a Swedish special - fried potatoes with bacon and lingonberry sauce: breakfast tastes. We take a ferry across to the Viking Museum, where the Vasa ship is housed: built by Gustavus Adolphus in the midst of the Thirty Years' War to be the pride of his navy, sunk off the cost of Stockholm after a shamefully short period of sailing, dredged up in the 1960s. There was an inquiry after the sinking: the balance of evidence suggested that the King's ambitions were too much for the ship's design (two gun decks instead of one, too little ballast for so heavy a ship), but no blame was formally assigned.

Copenhagen. I guess the Swedes and Danes can tell the difference, but I can't really. More grime than Stockholm (or the part of Stockholm we saw), more neon, more rudeness, in consequence seemingly more interesting. We spend a good deal of time wandering, often inadvertently, up and down Strogen, the pedestrianised shopping street. A mandatory trip to the Little Mermaid, a surprisingly thoughtful statue posed on a rock, the waves breaking at her feet/flippers, juxtaposed against the powerhouses and chimneys on the other side of the shore. There is time to go to the Viking Museum at Roskilde, which houses five Viking ships salvaged in the 1950s/60s. The Museum staff have reconstructed the ships, using the same tools and materials the Vikings did, and will take the warship sailing (with a 120-man crew) to Dublin next year, after the winter. Imagine that heritage.

We go to Tivoli, which is a theme park right in the middle of the city and prettily, magically lit up at night (and not even the obvious Disney comparisons can spoil the mood). There are rides even in winter, perhaps because this is the warmest winter in 40, 50 years (above-zero temperatures). We ride the flying carousel, something Turkish; we get glogg (mulled wine), hot dogs; we take pictures of the light and sound show at the lake.

We go to Christiana, which is on the edge of the city and must be a relic of the 1960s - a small piece of land that claims to follow its own laws, primarily one that allows the sale and use of soft drugs (but not hard drubs). A wooden sign at the entrance says "Welcome to Christiana"; leaving, the same sign says "You are now entering the EU". The same trappings in every hippie or hippe-type place: cafes offering beer and hash, a "free Tibet" photographic exhibition, stalls selling Bob Marley posters, bongs, colourful striped made-in-Nepal scarves. A few grubby, sad-looking men in parkas in the backyard of a closed bar. A few dogs running with the bicycles. Mostly tourists here, though there are houses further back, away from the bars and cafes and shops (they say there are a hundred families living here). It feels like Camden Town, but on a much smaller scale. What one imagines the Village might have been like, but without the energy. You would recognise it if you were there.

The Nordic social security system. There is an aesthetically pleasing correlation between the policy and its price: high taxes to pay for comprehensive social security in case of unemployment, disability, illness, retirement...though this isn't something we didn't know before. The mystery, which no-one seems to be able to solve, is why the system works at all. Or perhaps we're asking the wrong questions? The Nordics seem to have made a necessity of virtue; perhaps that should not seem as odd as it is?

On poverty

In her latest collection Decreation, Anne Carson reproduces fragment 31 of Sappho:

He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing - oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead - or almost
I seem to me.

But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty...

After discussing the first four complete stanzas, Carson moves on to the last line, which seems to be the beginning of a fifth stanza:

"All is to be dared because even a person of poverty...," says the last verse. It is a new thought. The content of the thought is absolute daring. The condition of the thought is poverty. I don't want to give the impression that I know what this verse is saying or that I see where the poem is headed from here, I don't. Overall it leaves me wondering. Sappho stages an event of ecstasy but that's not what the poem is about either, ecstasy is just a means to an end. Unfortunately we don't reach the end, the poem breaks off. But we do see Sappho begin to turn towards it, towards this unreachable end. We see her senses empty themselves, we see her Being thrown outside its own centre where it stands observing her as if she were grass or dead. At which point a speculation occurs to me: granted this is a poem all about love, do we need to limit ourselves to a reading of it that is merely or conventionally erotic? After all, Sappho is believed by some historians to have been not just a poet of love and a worshipper of Aphrodite on Lesbos but also a priest of Aphrodite's cult and a teacher of her doctrines. Perhaps Sappho's poem wants to teach us something about the metaphysics or even the theology of love. Perhaps she is posing not the usual lovesong complaint, Why don't you love me? but a deeper spiritual question, What is it that love dares the self to do? Daring enters the poem in the last verse when Sappho uses the word tolmaton: "is to be dared." This word is a verbal adjective and expresses a mood of possibility or potential. Sappho says it is an absolute potential:

pan tolmaton: all is to be dared.

Moreover she consents to it - or seems to be on the point of consenting when the poem breaks off. Why does she consent? Her explanation no longer exists. So far as it goes, it leads us back to her ecstatic condition. For when an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer:

Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty."

Apples

I read a quarter of Michael Pollan's book, The Botany of Desire - it's about four domesticated species, the apple, the tulip, marijuana and the potato, and I have only read the bit on the apple - and while I don't much care for his style of writing, which is unnecessarily chatty, he does have an image of John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) wearing a sack for a shirt and a tin pot for a hat, snoozing in one of two canoes lashed together, floating downriver, a mound of seed in the other canoe. Chapman would not graft trees; he would only grow trees from seed; and so his apples were hard and sour, and good only for cider. That's why everyone in the frontier towns welcomed Chapman: not because an apple a day kept the doctor away (a PR slogan thought up by the apple growers later), but because he brought alcohol. Pollan quotes Emerson: "man would be more solitary, less friended, less supported, if the land yielded only the useful maize and potato, [and] withheld this ornamental and social fruit". He quotes a speaker to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1885: "The desire of the Puritan, distant from help and struggling for bare existence, to add the Pippin to his slender list of comforts, and the sour 'syder' to cheer his heart and liver, must be considered a fortunate circumstance". First found in the Kazakh forests. Each apple contains enough genetic material to be entirely unlike its parent, even more unlike than human beings are; but we have deliberately sweetened our apples (through grafting) and the legend of Johnny Appleseed. Pollan delights in the names of apples in the 19th century: the Bottle Greening, the Sheepnose, the Oxheart, the Yellow Bellflower, the Black Gilliflower, the Twenty-Ounce Pippin; the Westfield Seek-No-Further, the Hubbardston Nonesuch, the Rhode Island Greening, the Albemarle Pippin, the York Imperial, the Kentucky Red Streak, the Long Stem of Pennsylvania, the Ladies Favorite of Tennessee, the King of Tompkins County, the Peach of Kentucky, the American Nonpareille; the Baldwin, the Macintosh, the Jonathan, McAfee's Red, Norton's Melon, Moyer's Prize, Mezger's Calville, Kirke's Golden Reinette, Kelly's White, Walker's Beauty; Wismer's Dessert, Jacob's Sweet Winter, the Early Harvest and Cider Apple, the Clothes-Yard Apple, the Bread and Cheese, Cornell's Savewell and Putnam's Savewell, Paradise Winter, Payne's Late Keeper, and Hay's Winter Wine.

Apples remind me of an excerpt from a letter from John Szarkowski to Helmut Wohl, in a book of Szarkowski's letters and photographs, generously given by Dennis: "The apple book is a treasure, and demonstrates what I have long suspected - that the history of art is in fact a branch of pomology. ...There is of course one serious problem underlying the consideration of the apple in ancient times, which is that neither Greek nor Hebrew seems to have a specific word for 'apple', but generic words roughly translatable as 'an edible fruit approximately the size of a tennis ball'. This of course puts a very heavy load of responsibility on the visual record, which - frankly - is a poor place to put it. Those ancient sculptors who did the apples of the Hesperides, etc., felt that the difference between a peach and pomegranate was nothing to worry about, as along as one got the drapery right..." The facing page of the book has a photograph of a wooden wall with two windows (one with a reflection of leaves) and a tiny, brave, young Cox Pippin tree outside. C. 1983.

I haven't yet found a place to hang your gigantic black-and-white print of a hand holding three apples, though I asked for it as a gift.

The centre of the universe

I am going to bring you, Steve says, to the centre of the universe. The centre of universe is a little Hindu shine next to the railway tracks near Outram Park. The shrine has a tiled floor and roof, with no walls; the railway tracks end in grass and a wire fence and stacks of cargo; workers from the tracks cut across a corner of the shrine to climb up the stairs to the pavement ahead, removing their shoes as they cross the shrine. There is a tree at the entrance of the shrine, gnarled roots wrapped around in a white cloth; there are benches at the side, for old men and a cluster of women; there is a fire pit at the front of the shrine, beside the statue of Shiva and the golden feet on a pedestal, near a garbage container full of firewood. Devotional music fills the air. A friendly Indian woman tells us that today is the bathing of the god. This is the only shrine where the priest will have the bathing of the god for twenty-four hours, non-stop, all by himself. It is also the only shrine where the priest will let devotees bathe the god. We watch a devotee approach the little enclosure with the statue of Shiva and the feet. One of the priest's helpers keeps a bell ringing and the oil lamp lit for the appropriate parts of the ceremony when she has to wave smoke in the statue's face; the other helper hands her jars of water, henna, milk, honey, a white powder, a reddish-brown powder, which she pours nervously and solemnly over the statue and the feet. The helpers irreverentially remove blobs of paint or powder from the crooks of the statue. Then the bathing is over, and the Brahmin priest steps forward to dress the god in white cloth and flowers and give him a bindi. There are more oil lamps and smoke, and chanting; the devotee throws flowers at the statue, then walks around the shrine with a plate of fruit and flowers, leaving them at a different statue's feet (there are seven reincarnations of Shiva here, the friendly Indian woman says) and pressing her forehead to the ground. The sun is setting behind the shrine and the light cuts through the smoke from the fire pit, cuts through the devotional music and the ringing of the bell, the chanting of the priest in his green-and-gold sarong and string across his chest, the devotee pouring water, henna, milk, honey onto the statue. The friendly woman says that in times past there used to be five or six shrines along the tracks; the rest have gone off to be big temples elsewhere, and only this one is left.

Later, we head for the Roof Bar in Chinatown, which is as its name says (on a roof) but spoiled by loud radio music, and then the French Corner on Serangoon Road for fish and wine and dessert.

for Julian

My dear, we've been saying goodbye for a while now (all those cookouts!) and we've not really said goodbye, and perhaps that's a good way to have done it? After all, there's the road trip to plan, and the trip to China, or was it Tibet, or was it a beach somewhere, or someone's house, or any place with wine, or brownies, or potato in three different forms, or laughter, or books, or Stephen Fry, or whatever it is that our companionship does come from. Su-Lin said it first, but there doesn't seem anything else as apt - go well. When you come back we'll go looking for the Swedish restaurant at Clark Quay again.

Marking time

1. The day before National Day, we wandered to Home, wandered off to Lau Pa Sat for satay, back again for the S.A.D. show, which was remarkable chiefly for a video of one or other of the Little Red Dot posse wandering around Singapore with a huge white-faced paper mask over their head and your energetic dancing.

2. Last Thursday, we went to the Arts House to watch Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which seemed to begin with the intention of showing the, well, unbearable lightness of being, but drifted despite its best intentions into sentimentality (if not kitsch) by the end.

3. There was a BBQ and housewarming at I and D's new place at Joo Chiat (a few sausages, lots of drink), which is exactly where you imagine it to be. Dinner and drinks and Little Britain at YS's place the day after. J's BBQ the next week - a BBQ! With chipolatas and hamburgers and satay and kebabs and potato salad (not grilled, though there were roast potatoes) and stingray and prawns (courtesy of SL's parents). And then QI, which only the British (and Stephen Fry) could do.

4. I have been falling into books lately, which is less pernicious a form of escapism than some I can think of, but no less escapist for that. One of them was John Gregory Dunne's Nothing Lost, the first John Gregory Dunne I've read; it's exactly right on the ways in which people use one another, and the real tenderness among people. Steve found a second-hand copy of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and gave it to me; like all Ishiguros (or the few I've read, at least) it is very well done and faintly horrifying. Also We Need To Talk About Kevin, which is entirely horrifying but at the last shies away from concluding the discussion of evil.

5. The problem with code-switching is, of course, that after a while it isn't code-switching any more.

[to hold the title line thing in place]

At the end of the tax form, right after it tells you how much you have to pay and by what date, it says, "Thank you for your contribution towards nation building!".

So.

I'm up reading an article by the European Central Bank on labour productivity in the Nordic countries, and feeling like I'm back in school (to be precise - like I'm reading for Econs S - and a little glad to be able to recognise some of the technical terms still, and a little amazed that we learnt enough in Econs S to recognise these terms, and a little regretful that I never went on to be be able to do more than just recognise these terms) - and remembering that I did like this part of school, did like reading things beyond my knowledge or comprehension, did appreciate scholarly work, did like learning things. It's a strange thing to remember now - and a stranger thing to have forgotten.

Hobson's choice

I think the choice, such as it is, is between working a little harder and not catching up, or working a lot harder and possibly still not catching up, wherever "up" might be.

Best Behaviour

The more I hear about international protocol, the more it resembles nothing more than the rigidly and repressively circumscribed world of Edith Wharton's New York in House of Mirth or any account of the American aristocracy at the turn of the century (I think). I'm also reminded of Joan Didion's (not entirely convincing) essay on 1950s Hollywood as the "last stable society" in the West, with its definite and unquestioned patterns of behaviour. International protocol, as far as I can tell, is based on the distinction between things that are "nice" and things that are "not nice". Crossing your legs and pointing your toes at your counterpart at meetings is not nice. Leaving wine glasses around where devout Muslims might see them is not nice. Kissing or otherwise physically handling the wives of conservative Chinese statesmen is not nice. Not finding out where the toilets are beforehand is not nice. (It's harder to define what's nice.) I'm not often in a work situation where what's nice defines what's correct, but then again, it may be as good a measure as anything we've come up with.

One Art

I meant to do interesting and productive things, but have been looking for Elizabeth Bishop's letters online instead. Perhaps I'll buy her selected letters.

An excerpt of a letter to Robert Lowell:

March 30,1959

I have no news of any importance—but then, I don’t believe I ever have. We had a large dinner party for 20 on Lota’s birthday and it was quite successful, I think—dozens of Japanese lanterns and lots of plants and orchids our florist neighbor happened to give us at just the right moment. We set up five card tables in the “gallery”—all different colors, reflected in the rippled aluminum ceiling—very gay, if modest; and I produced an iced chestnut soufflé with fancy work in whipped cream, etc. It looked almost professional, by lantern light at least. . . .

During the ten weeks I read & read & read—the 3-volume life of Byron, Greville in 3 volumes, Lucan (didn’t you say you were reading that, too?), etc. etc.—and now am finishing the new edition of Keats’s letters—all to what purpose I’m not sure, but all fascinating. At the moment I find the Keats the best of the lot, though. Except for his unpleasant insistence on the palate, he strikes me as almost everything a poet should have been in his day. The class gulf between him and Byron is enormous. As Pascal says, if you can manage to be well-born it saves you thirty years.

inter alia

There are Hassan Massoudy postcards! I saw a copy of the "religion of love" one in the British Museum - it didn't have the bottom swirls and looked like billowing blue-black sails. The British Museum translation was slightly different (and superior): "I follow the religion of love: whatever way love's camels take, that is my religion and my faith."

Other postcards I have:
- Two bold, black strokes (rather like a swan) depicting the letter 'k'
- A fantastic collage entitled "Narkissos" and containing a little bit of all the world
- A row of cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, sporting identical crew-cuts and grey shirts, reading Howl, with their caps and notebooks laid out neatly in front of them
- Drawings of fossils.

This weekend I read, among other things, Caddy Ever After (using the first person singular doesn't work very well, but still a satisfying book) and Joan Didion's heartbreaking The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she talks about the sudden death of her husband and illness of her daughter - part personal memoir, part detached investigation into the aspects of grief (because we are taught, when confronted with the new or the harrowing, to read up, to go to the literature).

Recipe for Amelia Simmons's Independence Cake

Twenty pound flour, 15 pound sugar, 10 pound butter, 4 dozen eggs, one dozen eggs, 1 quart brandy, 1 ounce nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, mace, of each 3 ounces, two pound citron, currants and raisins 5 pound each, 1 quart yeast; when baked, frost with loaf sugar; dress with box and gold leaf.

From American Cookery, 1796; reproduced in Mark Kurlansky's Choice Cuts.

Shiny things

At the SF MOMA is a installation by Donald Judd, constructed of steel boxes painted white and stacked up at intervals to create a shelf. The museum's comment on the work: “Judd’s stacked boxes are often considered the epitome of minimalism, just as the artist is one of its foremost practitioners. Judd championed minimalist art for its clear, uncomplicated forms, unfettered by the emotive qualities of the abstract expressionist brushstroke. Over the years, however, other artists and critics have noted that Judd’s seemingly mute, rational and detached sculptures belie an alter ego obsessed with surface finish and reflectiveness.” This is clear evidence that conceptual art (or what I think of as conceptual art) has lost the point somewhere.

England and America

Notes in vaguely chronological order:

1. Graduation ceremonies. I don't remember much of my graduation ceremonies, and thought even less of them at the time (I skipped the massive Columbia one to go shopping), but my sister's graduation ceremonies moved me strangely. Not just because my little sister has graduated, which seems a very adult and grown-up thing to do though not when it happened to me, but because I took the words of congratulation and advice and benediction to heart. The Oxford ceremony spoke of intellectual honesty, of speaking truth at all cost. The Stanford one spoke of choosing one's ambitions (Vartan Gregorian gave the graduate commencement speech) and of public service; the President spoke of a former graduate (Alfred Manley?), who had told his first commencement class at Spellman College, after he became its president, never to let go of their self-respect, which he defined as "knowing the good, you did it; knowing the beautiful, you served it; knowing the truth, you spoke it". Not words I've not heard before, in other circumstances, other contexts; but that day, in the uncomfortable splendour of the Sheldonian, in the sun on the Stanford lawn, talk of speaking truth and the choice of one's ambitions and public service meant something to me; perhaps these things only take on concrete meaning after one has left school and all its concomitant values.

[I wonder whether Oxford, which has produced and continues to produce a good number of British civil servants and politicians, has stopped speaking of public service, or never did to start with, or because its paramount fear now is that its graduates will somehow find themselves unable to speak the truth, or simply because that's my paramount fear and what I seized upon. And if Americans talk about service because for them the good, the beautiful, the truth are still things which can be known and named and served.

I've been reading a good deal of Joan Didion lately - at her best she points out contradictory and illusionary fictions, narratives, stories that we tell ourselves; at her worst she is still interesting to read - and in a 1970 essay, "On the Morning After the Sixties", she talks about being at Berkeley in the 50s and how her generation never talked about changing the world; they didn't believe in grand theories or ideas or social programmes; they talked about finding peace within themselves; they talked about looking for a little town with a decent beach after graduation. The last generation to identify with adults and the moral ambiguity of adulthood:

"We were all very personal then, sometimes relentlessly, so, and, at that point where we either act or do not act, most of us are still. I suppose I am talking about just that: the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man's own blood. If man was bound to err, then any social organization was bound to be in error. It was a premise which still seems to me accurate enough, but one which robbed us early of a certain capacity for surprise.

...We were that generation called "silent," but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.

To have assumed that particular fate so early was the peculiarity of my generation. I think now that we were the last generation to identify with adults. That most of us have found adulthood just as morally ambiguous as we expected it to be falls perhaps into the category of prophecies self-fulfilled: I am simply not sure. I am telling you only how it was. The mood of Berkeley those years was one of mild but chronic "depression," against which I remember certain small things that seemed to me somehow explications, dazzling in their clarity, of the world I was about to enter: I remember a woman picking daffodils in the rain one day when I was walking in the hills. I remember a teacher who drank too much one night and revealed his fright and bitterness. I remember my real joy at discovering for the first time how language worked, at discovering, for example, that the central line of Heart of Darkness was a postscript. All such images were personal, and the personal was all that most of us expected to find. We would make a separate peace. We would do graduate work in Middle English, we would go abroad. We would make some money and live on a ranch. We would survive outside history, in a kind of idee fixe referred to always, during the years I spent at Berkeley, as "some little town with a decent beach."

...What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace. Only one person I knew at Berkeley later discovered an ideology, dealt himself into history, cut himself loose from both his own dread and his own time. A few of the people I knew at Berkeley killed themselves not long after. Another attempted suicide in Mexico and then, in a recovery which seemed in many ways a more advanced derangement, came home and joined the Bank of America's three-year executive-training program. Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time. If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending."

I don't think we're much good at identifying with adults and the moral ambiguities of adulthood, but I wonder if we're relentlessly personal, if we're unsurprised by politics, if we think to live outside history, if we're unable to believe in the barricade - and if that's something common to most Singaporeans, wherever we end up, a consequence of where we grew up.]


2. Lyme-Regis. First mentioned (the plaque on the wall said) in the Domesday book of 1087. Mentioned in Jane Austen's Persusasion (with other important historical things happening in between). It is exactly as one would imagine a sleepy seaside town to be, with all the necessary accoutrements: seagulls perched on the rocks overlooking the pebble beach, children squatting half-naked on the beach digging ineffectually at the pebbles with a toy spade, visitors determinedly sun-bathing in the mild white light. There are tea-houses and beach cafes and fossil shops and a rather sad arcade with a few brightly blinking slot machines and old people clutching a paper bucket of pennies. Part of the beachfront is closed for renovation; the authories are importing sand from France for certain stretches of the beach.

Lyme-Regis' present claim to fame is its fossils; its coast is some hundreds of millions years old (I believe from the Jurassic, and some 190 million years old), and for a few pounds a professional fossil-hunter will lead you out to the Black Vens when the tide is low, halfway to Charmouth, past the sun-bathers and the schoolchildren, to the edge of the rock pools and the seaweed exposed by the receding tide, and show you how to break open rocks with a hammer (he will provide hammers). You're not allowed to chip away at the cliffs, which in any case appear to be composed in part of black mud, but fossils found on the beach itself, little curls of ammonites lying on the beach or buried deep in chips of rock, are fair game, since they'll eventually be pounded by the waves and wind into pebbles. When the tide is low you can walk all the way to Charmouth.

We stayed at a B&B above a second-hand bookshop, the rooms decorated entirely in pink and white and floral trimmings. The B&B belongs to Bob, who is a retired professor of something scientific and once worked at Cape Canaveral, and Mariko, who is some 30 or 40 years younger. They met through the internet; she came to England to visit; she used to work at the Beach Cafe, which is run by Audrey, my sister's boyfriend's aunt; they were married within six months and now have two bonny sons. Audrey has in her employ another Japanese women, Yumi, who was a nun at a convent at Marble Arch for three months until she decided it wasn't her cup of tea, and is now going to study violin-making with someone up north and work summers at Audrey's. All this information is by way of Audrey, who gave us a wonderful roast dinner, and Hilary (my sister's boyfriend's mother and Audrey's sister). The other people at dinner were the boyfriend and the father, who is strong and silent and came in to dinner red-faced and wind-chapped from an 8-hour fishing trip and holding a bag of sea bass. If you came to visit us, Hilary said, we could give you fish for dinner.


3. Northern California. The first day I arrived in Stanford I contacted V, who brought me to his lovely house to see his lemon tree and almond tree and drink wine and tea (how very old! my sister said afterwards) and meet one of his roommates. The roommate's father had just bought some farmland in Missouri (?) to grow crops on, like corn and other crops I can't remember, to feed animals with. Wild animals, not his own; it's too much trouble to rear his own; he's just doing it for the fun of it. Every August, the roommate and his family and friends float down the Mississippi (?) in canoes and stop at someone's riverside house and have a lot of food and conversation and fun.

A couple of days in San Francisco - a day taking the cable car and attempting to bike over the Golden Gate Bridge (I gave up after falling off my bike somewhere after the bridge and decided to walk the bike downhill to Sausalito. At Sausalito we had hot chocolate and felt better and took the ferry back), and a day dragging the parents through the Haight, which on hindsight was not the best place to bring them, and City Lights, and looking at the sea-lions at Pier 39. The sea-lions appeared on the pier one day after the earthquake in the late 1980s (I think). The city organised it such that the pier was left for them (which I think a wonderful reaction to the sea-lions), and the sea-lions stayed - and grew. There were 10 sea-lions to begin with, and now there are about 300. Every summer they migrate somewhere (can't remember), but lately some have decided to stay in San Francisco. Which suggests something about the resilience and adaptability and sheer laziness of the sea-lions, which are very cute and mostly just lie on the pier basking in the sun and getting inquisitive looks from the seagulls.

I do like northern California, or what I've seen of it. My sister brought me up a small hill behind Stanford - there's a sign at the foot of the hill warning visitors of mountain lions and an installation art piece at the foot of the hill, featuring men made from spools of hay, um, making hay - from the top of which you can see all of Stanford, and the town, and the trees, and the bay, and the mountains beyond. My sister said she went jogging around the hill every week, because going there made her happy. We drove to the Napa Valley to visit the Mondavi winery (where they said that sales of merlot went up after doctors said that red wine was good for your heart and went down after Sideways) and V. Sattui, where my sister bought some sticky-sweet Gamay Rouge. We drove to Monterey Bay to take the 17-mile drive around Pebble Beach and then to Carmel-by-the-sea, which pretends to be a quaint English town. We didn't drive on to Big Sur, because my parents had had enough of driving and California by then; my father in particular doesn't like, is not comfortable with California: it was too expansive, too vast, too hot, too raw. Even the pinecones at Stanford were bigger than the pinecones in England! He grew up in confined spaces - the old RI, the old NUS campus; he was familiar and comfortable in cities like London and Paris, cities weighted down with history; in small, enclosed, compact spaces. His overriding image of America comes from the racial riots of the 60s. I thought of the flat, harsh light in L.A. when I visited it three years ago, and Joan Didion's early essays on Sacramento and quoting Bernard DeVoto on the West beginning where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches, and on the plane back I read Henry Miller's Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. I don't know if I would live there, but I can see, for the first time, why the empty spaces might attract one, how one might come to love the wide, straight roads and the mountains and the bay, the sense of possibility inherent in this spaces, the sense that here one may run away from oneself, find oneself, reinvent oneself.

Your bottom is a basket full of fruits and meat

The Peasant Declares His Love

High-yellow of my heart, with breasts like tangerines,
you taste better to me than eggplant stuffed with crab,
you are the tripe in my pepper-pot,
the dumpling in my peas, my tea of aromatic herbs.
You are the corned beef whose customhouse is my heart,
my mush with syrup that trickles down the throat.
You are a steaming dish, mushrooms cooked with rice,
crisp potato fries, and little fish fried brown....
My hankering for love follows you wherever you go.
Your bottom is a basket full of fruits and meat.

- Emile Roumer

From Mark Kurlansky's excellent compilation of food writing, Choice Cuts. Kurlansky has this to say about Emile Roumer: "Emile Roumer was born in Haiti in 1908. Educated in France, he wrote poetry in French from 1930 to 1935, and then stopped writing entirely."

Nourishment

On a Hay Dairies ad at a bus-stop: Goats' milk is more nutritious than cows' milk because what matters "is not what you swallow, but what you digest".

The thing about Singapore Idol

and the ones who can't sing:

(1) Why don't their friends stop them? and

(2) Especially the ones who go away sweetly and sadly - at least they're out there, and they're trying, and on national television. From where I stand, that must count for something.

Farm visits today!

First to Farmart, which is a kind of permanent farmers' market. Some of us bought quails' eggs; WN bought a pack (brace?) of quails. We weren't there at the right time, but on Sundays at about 1 pm the shop sells fried quail. Cab to Hay Dairies, a goat farm - the signboards at the farm said it used to be a pig farm, but converted to a goat farm with the help of the AVA (then PPD) when pig farms were phased out. Back in its pig farm days, it kept chickens and "a crocodile to dispose of chickens". Some very sweet baby goats, and some distinctly less sweet adult goats. The farm keeps different breeds of goats and has helpful signboards to elucidate on the distinctive characteristics of each breed: one tended to be high-strung, another tended to emit a distinctive complaining sound. There was one huge, hairy brute whose horn stumps glowed purple. Full of kids (of the human variety) offering the goats little plastic bags of hay. Then a trek to Bollywood Veggies (Ivy Singh-Lim's farm) and a wander into Green Circle, quite by accident. Green Circle is an organic vegetable farm, and would appeal to all the hippie yoghurt-loving tree-hugging East-Village-health-food people. We only stopped at Bollywood Veggies for lunch. Very yuppie - think of what a farm-themed restaurant would look like, and there you have it.

birthday greetings

Thank you, loves. Hot Russian sailors to you too, Fay. Mid twenties, late twenties; as JY said, at some point (quite soon), this will be a moot point and we will be indisputably in our late twenties.

My parents got me a fountain pen; my mother said that they figured that since I liked banging away on the old typewriter, I'd like a fountain pen. I am progressing backwards in technology.

flowers

To say that the orchids are opening up and my mom plucked away all the pollen - sacs? - from the lilies and I've converted my hookah into a vase for the ones which look like sunflowers but are not.

(To say, thank you.)

how Singapore prepares you for China

Daniel Bell on teaching political philosophy in Beijing. I didn't know he taught in NUS in the 1990s.

so

Steve is doing a visual arts/poem thing at the central library basement Thursday evening (7pm to 8.30 pm). There'll be words, and moving pictures, and music with rocks in it (probably). (This is the subtext time slot, but obviously something else and more fun.) Come by if you're in the neighbourhood.

I like this Edna St Vincent Millay

Since we were talking about sonnets. I'm sorry darling; I've got it straight now: Milton - epics; Shakespeare - sonnets (and never mind the plays?).


Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

In vaguely chronological but really no particular order

(1) Paul Theroux (at the NLB last Thursday) said that to be a writer, one must do two things: (i) leave home, and (ii) tell the truth.

You don't find it gets harder to tell truth to power in this line of work?

(2) Steve gave me a bar of green soap to carve.

(3) Wonderful dinner at J's place on Saturnight - we had roast lamb and poulet con leche and roast potatoes with onions and garlic and chipolatas and potato pancakes and corn muffins and spaghetti coated with butter and cheese and cream and a hint of lemon, and then molten chocolate babycakes (molten baby chocolate cakes? which is it which is tiny?) and pumpkin pie for dessert. All the major food groups: potato, meat and chocolate.

(4) My dad tells me that Low Thia Khiang spoke the purest teochew at the Hougang rally last night. Political rallies: does one vote as if for a local election (and may the best man win) or a national election (where - presumably - other considerations come in)?

(5) I appear to have been cross and out of joint for some two and a half years now.

(6) J lent me Richard Powers' Time of our Singing, which I really will read. Everyone seems to love Richard Powers (with the exception of jy, who doesn't read things that other people read on principle) and I have tried to read Galatea (can't spell it) but couldn't get past the first few chapters.

(7) I'm really not made for this job. Every time we're at the negotiating table I feel I'd rather be on the other side - rather be on the side of advocacy and passion than common sense and fiscal prudence. Better to sell a dream than to cut it down to size.

Nonetheless. The job that's in front of you, right?

(8) So was it Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil or Jane Eyre?

Consider all the relevant posts linked

I do still think we should have a book club. Not to improve literacy and not to read or refuse to read milton, but just to be able to read the same book at the same time (for once, excluding Pratchett, which is a constant) and talk about it. I'm thinking of the conversations between A. S. Byatt and Ignes Sodres on six books they liked (which I believed was called Interesting Conversations or something like) - that sort of thing. Everyone should get to pick something in turn, and yes I guess you can pick Paradise Lost and yes I guess you can refuse to read anyone who's still alive, who writes from a minority point of view and all the rest of the rules - but probably good to start with something we all wouldn't mind reading and which doesn't require three years of prior study and who can reasonably be read on the train and in bed and the odd moments of time we have entirely to ourselves.

Stuff

1. Did you know o.k. stands for oll korrect? (I still owe you ten minutes for that.)

2. Dinner on Friday with the usual crowd at Kalinka-Malinka, which has excellent shashlik and some unpronounceable cabbage roll thing (but avoid the dumplings), and later coffee and cake and Milton and Donne and the existence of free verse. Lunch on Saturday with WN and then dinner with S, SX and mf at a cosy little dim sum place in Tanjong Pagar where we ordered one of everything on the menu except the porridge. Then mf had to go off for a supper date so the rest of us ended up at Bakerzin talking about comfort books (children's books) and TV shows (anything written by Aaron Sorkin) and drinking milk. (I can't remember if I've said this here so I might as well say it again - watching Aaron Sorkin's TV shows is like reading Pratchett. It's not that he's the world's greatest writer exactly - it's that one buys into his moral vision. You watch the show/read the book and think yes that's how the world should be. And if you're me, you think it's how the world is, but that's a different story.)

I think this all the time but don't say it - it's so good to be with friends who will argue about poems and free verse (or the denial thereof) and the importance of children's books. And TV shows whose characters are involved and stimulated by their jobs and not willing to give anything less than their all and whatever else Dana said to Casey.

3. Sunday, sadly, was spent staring into space a lot and doing homework. I'm basically indifferent to a lot of what I'm supposed to be doing - in the sense that I've no emotional or ideological or philosophical (this one very rarely) preconceptions about these things - so it's mostly ok. I don't think one should work in (for?) the administration/regulation of something one really does love. I'm a little saddened every time we talk about schools, and especially universities, as a place to churn out workers. I guess that's the sensible way of thinking of it, but the part of me which values academic work can't help thinking about what Sayers had one of her characters say about Oxford - that Oxford has been called the home of lost causes; if the love of learning is a lost cause, then in Oxford at least it has found its abiding home.

4. Suyin - my dear, congratulations (very belatedly)! Hope you're feeling better.

5. My computer says it's eighteen minutes to Su-Lin's birthday. Happy birthday darling!

Google, or, A Remembered Conversation

My little brother took part in the Google worldwide programming competition (or something like). Anyone can take part. The top 500 in the world get through to the next round. The top 250 get a tee-shirt. The top 50 get to go to California for the final round.

Him: But I don't get to go.
Me: Why not?
Him: Because I'm not 21. So at best I get a tee-shirt.
Me: That's not a very balanced incentive structure.
Him: It's a cool tee-shirt. It's got "Google" on it.

Postcript: And so it does.

Well, was it untoward?

From one of the Sports Night transcripts:

Dan: Our anniversary. Today is our anniversary.
Casey: Jeez, Danny, that night in Minneapolis with the Jaegermeister, we didn't do anything untoward, did we?
Dan: You mean did we get married?
Casey: Yeah.
Dan: No.
Casey: (getting up and going backstage) Good.
Dan: (following) You recited the St. Crispin's Day speech from the lobby of the St. Paul Radisson.
Casey: (examining himself in the mirror) Well, was it untoward?
Dan: No, it was just embarrassing.

Do not depend on fairness of face, or why women always need new clothes

"[I]n Precepts for Women, written by the great woman historian, Pan Chao, the virtues and appearance of good women are described:

The virtues of women are not brilliant talent, nor distinction and elegance. The virtues of women are reserve, quiet, chastity, orderliness, governing herself to maintain a sense of shame, and conducting herself according to the rules of Confucian etiquette.

The appearance of a woman does not depend on fairness of face. The principles for a woman's appearance are to wash away dirt, wear clean and new clothing and ornaments, bathe often, and keep her body clean."

- From a brief survey of Chinese women and literature in Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung's Women Poets of China, which Yisheng pointed me to one day.

The other thing

is that I can't stop reading Sports Night transcripts.

When we grow up

I think we should have a bookshop, and I think it should be like Books Actually - except actually with books.

What I'd have (in addition to novels, I mean):
(1) A decent poetry section. Which means that twentieth-century poets cannot be limited to the collected poems of Yeats and Auden (separate collections, I mean).

(2) A decent non-fiction section. Why is it that Singaporean bookshops hardly ever carry non-academic non-fiction? Including personal essays, humour (I'm thinking of Thurber), travel, journalism with footnotes (I'm thinking of Eric Schlosser and Timothy Garton Ash), critical essays (I'm thinking of Northrop Frye's radio lectures? - The Education Imagination, and Anne Carson's wonderful book-length essays), political essays (but only if very good; can't think of an example), food, and so on. And some academic books (I'm thinking of Benedict Anderson).

(3) Children's books.

Catching up

I just started reading the blogs after a long absence and I am completely lost.

Random and less random thoughts:

There is no Swedish restaurant. It is a place of legend and myth and wishful thinking.

My dear, I had no idea his family were so horrible. How dare they? I can imagine being upset about a former lover's marriage, quite apart from what I thought about him. In this case, the man is clearly an idiot and a louse.

And if it's not too late to say my piece - I don't understand how you could have thought us smug and complacent and the other thing (there were three things, weren't there?). (From here I'll drop "we" and just speak of myself.) I do think of you and J as standard-bearers, and I am very proud of you, but I don't think that justifies my own laziness. I say "laziness" because it helps me to think that I could do anything I wanted to, if I just put my mind to it; but if I were honest I would admit that I don't think I could have got into grad school. What would I possibly study? Anything I enjoyed at undergraduate level (I realise now), I enjoyed on the level of emotion rather than intellect - I enjoyed reading Mill's "On Liberty" for the passion in it, rather than the argument (not that the argument was complicated - another reason in its favour). I'm afraid I can't think and I can't write; sometimes I'm afraid I couldn't think and couldn't write. How can it be that you don't think what you do is real work? I've always thought that scholarship was real, more real than the work I do. I remember being very lost and afraid and alone in Oxford; I also remember being in the Old Bodleian along one Saturday morning and reading (a translation of) the Phaedrus(?) and watching the sunlight slanting in and colouring the pale wooden desks a soft gold. At least teaching has some connection to language; I'm afraid I've lost all that.

What I mind about where I am is not the part about selling out but that I'm bad at it. I think it could be a worthy job and it could require a good deal of hard work and dedication; I'm unwilling to put in the hard work and dedication because that would only get me to average, and I'm unwilling to work at being average. I don't think much about it nowadays, and that worries me when I do think about it. I'm afraid not so much of losing desire but the desire for desire.

Common experiences and shared books are one thing (two things), but surely not all? Wouldn't we (all) be close anyway, whatever we did or did not choose to do?

So what have you been up to?

(1) The week before Chinese New Year was full of yakitori and sake. The bacon and vegetable yakitori at Nan-ban-teh (the one at Far East?) is highly recommended.

(2) I've started driving lessons again and am abysmally bad at them (as usual). Ten years from now I'll still be saying that I'm starting driving lessons again, and in the same cause of hopeless optimism.

(3) Happy Chinese New Year! This year I learnt to fold paper cranes.

(4) My grandfather came over to our house for reunion dinner (long story; that side of the family is mildly dysfunctional). He said we had to visit Hainan Island with him before he died so he could show us the jia xiang. The jia xiang is somewhere in the countryside. There are over 20 rooms - I think there are several houses - but only 3 people living there still: his brother's children. One is an odd-jobs man, one a retired teacher, and the other I think one of their wives. They plant vegetables and cultivate chickens (my mom: oh do you make chicken rice?) but only enough for themselves because they're lazy (my grandfather said) and because one can't earn much from selling produce. There is one toilet. He built it; he's been visiting every couple of years or so, and he built it on one of his last visits. It's outside the house and has a septic tank and pump and all. Before he built the toilet, they either dug a hole somewhere or just walked some distance from the house (I gather; he was a little evasive on this point). Now the sewage is pumped outside the jia xiang and left there. My grandfather said he wouldn't invite any of us there if there were no toilet, but now there is, and so we should go.

(5) Over the new year period, I watched (a) a whole bunch of Stephanie Sun music videos, (b) Fearless (full of China pride and improbable honour), (c) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (on DVD) (a little too clever in parts, but excellent overall), (d) The Pianist, (e) all of the five minutes of Batman Begins.

(6) The horoscope for monkeys born in 1980 (the big one on the pillar at Bugis, where all the Chinese temples are) says to stay away from alcohol and women this year.

Mustafa

is all new and shiny and organised now, which takes away the fun. But it does still have signs that point to (a) stationery, (b) artificial flower (yes, just the one), (c) furniture, and (d) gardening/car accessories.

Overheard - a man on his handphone somewhere behind the next shelf: "You want big or small?...How much? One inch?...One inch cannot lah..." To which all the women and gay men of the world agree.

this weekend

I read Thud!

The library came through after all.

I also (re-)read Homecoming and The Runner, after borrowing sl's (argh) Come a Stranger that day.

And I painted my room! With my father helping to shunt furniture about and paint and rearrange the room and rebuild shelves (the do-it-yourself kind that's all unpainted wooden planks and bolts), though I have much less shelving space now.

And I found books that belong to various people, mostly Minz. I will return them. Really.

I'm going to get flowers tomorrow to put in the house.

mm

Marianne Moore to Elizabeth Bishop (very early on in Bishop's writing life):

I can't help wishing you would sometime in some way risk some unprotected profundity of experience; or since no one admits profundity of experience, some characteristic private defiance of the significantly detestable. Continuously fascinated as I am by the creativeness and uniqueness of these assemblings of yours - which are really poems - I feel responsibility against anything that might threaten you; yet fear to admit such anxiety, lest I influence you away from an essential necessity or particular strength. The golden eggs can't be dealt with theoretically, by presumptuous mass salvation formulae. But I do feel that tentativeness and interiorizing are your danger as well as your strength.

why attempts to clean up my room inevitably fail

1. I have too much stuff. It's not a question of tidying my room; there's nowhere to tidy the stuff to. In? What I need is a grand purge.

2. I am easily defeated (see 1).

Although I did find $30. And my Columbia graduation certificate. (Wonder where the Oxford one is? Did I graduate?) Proving that tidiness brings its own reward.

Addendum (9.11 pm): I found two bricks in my room. Why?

Aalto

Becaus I found these notes in my notebook:

"For Aalto, wood, rather than metal, was the 'form-inspiring, deeply human material'." [I think from a sign in some museum.]

Aalto, early 1960s: "Churches don't need art, churches don't need ornament...at least not in the sense of 'art for churches'...Whatever their shape, they need purity of form and piety. That kind of purity of form is...the outcome of artistic work."

Before Sunrise

1. Beautiful movie. Perfectly shot.

2. Julie Delpy is luminous.

3. Also slightly annoying, the way twenty-something angst is. But only slightly, which speaks well of Richard Linklater. (Or perhaps I'm not very receptive to just-out-of-college angst at this point.)

4. Of course they slept together.

5. I think about you almost all the time.

Following the old tradition

I'm starting the year late and slightly hungover.

Happy new year everyone! Let it truly be a beginning.