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.

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."