a few minutes to mayday

Macaulay -- with deliberate exaggeration -- prophesied that working-class suffrage (this would be in the mid/late 1800s I guess) would bring about the end of 'literature, science, commerce' and that 'a few half-naked fishermen would divide with the owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest European cities.'

3 a.m. don't ask.

on the radio: British trade unions want the governments to force firms to make sure that employees take breaks and go on holidays. :)

what, 6.30 already?

listening to audio clips on the bbc website of bbc reports during the 1989 velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia --

a handpainted poster in Prague said: the heart of Europe beats again.

5 something in the evening, waaaay behind any schedule

Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were offered the Nobel prize for ending the Vietnam War. I'm not sure when this is; 1973? Le Duc Tho said no, South Vietnam didn't have peace yet. 60 Harvard and MIT professors wrote a letter protesting that the prize was more than anyone with a sense of justice could take. Kissinger's son, David, at Cambridge, was told by his friends that some people said his father didn't deserve the prize. David Kissinger: So what? My mother says the same thing. Kissinger didn't take his prize in person, and donated the money to the New York Community Trust to set up scholarships for the kids of servicemen who had died in Vietnam. When Saigon fell in 1975, he wrote to the Nobel authorities offering to return the prize and money, and they said no, keep it.

oh! -- look --

And, to put it delicately, Kissinger was even less lucky in most of his political colleagues in Washington than in some of those abroad. Truman had been a moral tower of strength for Acheson, brave and politically astute even when at odds with Congress. As to the general quality of Mr Nixon’s moral leadership, silence is the only possible charity, though one can say he had the courage to make decisions in foreign policy which better men and better Presidents had failed to make. And as to Mr Ford, it is difficult to see that he had much to contribute to foreign policy save his amiable and direct personality. (Bell 1977)

argh when you descend into kissinger trivia

about a quarter past midnight -- that's not very late is it?

i'd say it was too late to do laundry but i procrastinate in vain. the laundry room beckons.

midnightish

i remember it! erm a quotation that's been kinda running around my head and i could never quite pin it down (am i mixing metaphors?)

'tis true 'tis day, what though it be?
wilt thou therefore rise from me?

i dunno who said it; but it was in erm an elizabeth peters book and john tregarth said it to vicky.

gino's whitebait is to die for. :)

bloop

Peter Wimsey to Harriet Vane: I would like to write you the kind of words that burn the paper they're on, except that those words have a way of being unforgiveable as well as unforgettable.

Sometimes I'd like to just go to earth. Vade in pacem.

excerpt

So we're at Edamame, on a summer evening, and I've a glass of choya and a bowl of edamame and a platter of sushi in front of me, and outside laughter hangs in the air like sunlight, long and mellow.

He says, picking at unfamiliar sushi -- I want to set up a commune.
I lick sticky rice off my fingers. I have visions of hippie communes sprouting up in the middle of the Yorkshire dales (he's a Yorkshire man). -- What kind of commune?
-- With people in it.
I laugh; I can't help it.-- That's a start, sure.
He grins. Says his father's house was peaceful and unstressful and he'd like a place like that to live in. He saw something like that in Wales (name of a place I didn't catch) and there were these people just living peacefully and happily together.
The Singaporean in me -- But how did they live? Oh but I suppose they all had their own jobs.
-- No, they were just born rich.
-- Ah.
We contemplate the endless possibilities open to one just born rich. I tell him about the artist's house in Harajuku -- the one Fay and I found quite by accident: three-storeyed, brilliantly graffitized on the outside, with studios on the ground floor, residential rooms on the second and a shop on the third. He is politely attentive -- or attentively polite perhaps; I can't tell a courteous restraint from polite indifference.

No I don't know where this is going either.

a bit later

when this grows up it'll be a proper webpage with, yknow, words and pictures and dancing stickmen. really. i have a summer...well some part of the summer anyway. a hundred a thousand a million -- yknow, many -- undone things. like laundry. and battels. and -- hey -- revision. so i'm just going to sleep now.

2 a.m.

i posted something i did either i did it wrongly or blogger ate it and i seem to have screwed up the edit function and can't get at the code otherwise so it's just going to be weird. it's been that kind of day. well no it hasn't; or it shouldn't have cos i had sushi at edamame which was nice and then ice-cream much much later at G&Ds because one can only go for ice-cream after the libraries close and then we sat on the benches outside high street, yknow where that platform thing with three benches is, just after the turl street turning, until the police car circled the area stopped and said (the man inside, not the car) are you okay? and then we moved to standing in front of the platform thing because didn't want even the policeman to think we were sad finalists with no lives. but everything is finals-coloured nowadays. i should be really really scared but i'm too tired. and i didn't get cambridge after all. *shrug*

1.30ish in the morning.

so we leave G&Ds at almost 12 midnight cos one can only do something so frivolous as ice-cream after all the libraries are closed and meander down High Street and stop at the benches at the little raised platform bit just after the turning to Turl Street and stop there for so long the police car circling the area (meaning High Street and Turl Street I guess; odd) stops and the policeman says Hey are you alright? -- Yes of course -- It's just that I've never seen people stay out so long. After that we move and stand in front of the platform thing so that we're not sad people with no lives who sit on benches that are probably soaked with stale alcohol and tramp puke and god knows what in the middle of the night; we're just sad finalists who stand around High Street in the middle of the night talking about Scandinavia. Might be going after graduation, if one lives till after graduation. I should be scared about the exams but I'm too tired to care; at this stage, there's nothing much I can do to make myself more intelligent. *shrug*

far, far too late in the early morning (is that weird?) to be reading about Chinese foreign policy during the Cold War.

in the library earlier today (yesterday argh temporal confusion thing) -- read an article by Warren Cohen on the 'lost chance' of the US to get China on its side in 1949 -- Cohen wrote that in the 1960s he had wrote an article saying there was a lost chance, and later Nancy Tucker wrote a book with better arguments for the same thing. He said that some called it a Cohen-Tucker thesis. And in a footnote he says that the idea of a Cohen-Tucker thesis was helped by Cohen's marriage to Tucker some years later...and that to the disappointment/surprise of friends and critics and suchlike, they do not have any children or pets named after Dean Acheson. :)

the Kermode quotation is stolen out of Su-Lin's brilliant essay on fairy-tales and women's writing (erm hope you don't mind :). Right. Before this night is much older I *must* progress beyond Mao's 'lean to one side' speech.

1.30something a.m. room,

with Velvet Underground playing -- the album sleeve says that this is a band that fused rock with avant-garde music (their first album as Velvet Underground was produced by Andy Warhol! who teamed them up with Nico! I want that CD) -- best summed up by the idea that not many people bought their albums -- but those who did set up their own bands. It's a really cool album. *really* cool. But must get hold of their lyrics somewhere so can understand what they're saying.

omigodmigodmigod. I'm in the library and after 10 minutes I get bored out of my mind and look around and there's the Faber Book of Pop (eds. Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage) on the table and I leaf through it and the introduction says Lou Reed did an interview with Vaclav Havel and it's in the book and it's *amazing*. Havel is amazing. He said that there was a band -- oh no I can't remember the name, the Universal Band of Plastic People or some other configuration of those words, now called Midnight Unots (eh?) -- and they played some Velvet Underground songs -- Havel brought the first Velvet Underground LP to Prague from New York! he was there in Columbia University for the riots, gave talks with Milos Forman, went shopping in East Village and bought psychedelic posters, how cool is that? -- and the band was of course arrested and Havel and some people organized a campaign to help them and Havel persuaded all these intellectual professor types to help too and that was while people could still all go to a courtroom without fear and they didn't get the band off entirely but the band members got lighter sentences than they would otherwise have had -- and that created a community of solidarity that they thought it would be a shame not to continue -- and that was how Charter 77 started. That's amazing. And later Lou Reed plays for Havel and his friends -- Reed says he doesn't want to do a huge concert cos he's here as a journalist and he's a very private person and Havel says nono, just friends, but that means almost 200 of them, all dissidents -- and some of them know the Velvet Underground songs by heart so Reed plays with them -- he (Reed) says he meant his music to be more than just music, to be about the freedom of expression as well, and that there in Czechoslovakia (the interview was in 1988) his music had found a home -- and after, Havel gives Reed a little black book of his lyrics translated into Czech and says that there are only 200 of those books; they were printed secretly (in the Communist times) and anyone having them then would have been arrested.

so I wander into the kitchen to get yoghurt and my housemates tell me the Green Party people just came a-calling because voting day is in a week's time. I say I know cos the poll cards are in the lodge and that I'm going to vote here before I vote in Singapore. They say vote sensibly! don't have any wacky ideas and stick us without someone weird just cos you're not going to be here next year! Emma says well in local elections it's the people more than the parties that count. Then she says she voted Lib Dem in the general election even though she's against everything they're for because she thought the guy (Evan Harris? what I don't know about British politics would fill my finals scripts) was the best one running. Dave says yes but he won't vote for them again the next time because they're against tuition fees and if he paid them he wants them (fees, not the Lib Dems) to stay. They start talking about British politicians and having not anything to contribute and being naturally unsociable, I retreat to my computer. I can't compare British elections with Singaporean ones because I know nothing about the latter (or the former, but ignorance there is less culpable I think?). Not that it would have mattered anyway because the overseas voting thing wasn't up in time for the last election. I heard the election results over BBC, where an astonished DJ said the PAP just won all but 2 seats in Singapore's general election. The news updates are three minutes each time and they normally do at least a minute of local news as well, so they don't tell you every country's general election results, just the noteworthy ones. It's kinda weird. At the end of the IR in the Cold War tutorial on China, my tutor said, quite seriously, what do you think about the Communist Party in China? Singapore's a one-party state too, isn't it? It's kinda shaming, somehow.

on the radio: gunfire heard/seen in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Sotheby's chairman Alfred Taubman (I think?) fined five million pounds for price-fixing. Too much money in all the wrong places.

clandestinely on the new college library computers while first- and second-years around me work.

I have a poll card! For the first time in three years here. For, er, Holywell ward. Isn't Holywell just one street? Anyhow. I can vote! Exercising my democratic rights. In a country not mine and which I'm going to leave soon, but.

room. morning. sleepy.

newsflash Jean Marie Le Pen is in the second round of the Presidential elections! Always knew there was something strange about the French.

new college library, still and forever.

*cautiously* I am a person -- I am a body; a brain; a person as distinguishable from the body; a person as existing independently from the body; a person as co-existing with the body; a soul -- I am consciousness; memory; self-awareness; material substance; immaterial substance; a series of overlapping successive selves (held together by chains of psychological connectedness); irreducibly I.

There is a point to philosophy, I'm sure; I just haven't figured it out yet.

new college library basement.

there's a lovely bit of grass beside the library -- like a tiny tiny quad -- just go down two worn stone steps -- bordered on the two sides with flowers and with the foot of new college tower on the far corner and two pine-like trees standing guard in front of the tower, green against the grey stone. and then it peters out into a long narrow strip of construction-filled something, and then it's the turf tavern behind.

anyhow. i'm back in the library after a cookie expedition.

new college library (don't say anything).

it's a *beautiful* day outside and people are sitting around on the lawns talking and laughing and reading and playing croquet. and i'm reading about locke's theory of substance. that is to say, i've been reading about it for the past four hours or so now, and i'm no closer to knowing what locke thought about substance. philosophers have a tendency to say, very gravely, that philosophy must take our ordinary everyday experience into account (must be from the 'inside of lived experience') -- so if we think, ordinarily, that when we touch (say) the table we are touching a table that exists outside and independent of our minds, then philosophy must be able to account for this belief, strange as it may be. i think something has gone very wrong with philosophy. when i touch you -- do i not touch *you*? you as person; substantial; material; unified in time and space; real beneath my hands --

gah.

my room.

so shawne and i were walking back from the cinema after y tu mama tambien last night lamenting our lives and wondering why we weren't at a beach in mexico eating fried fish and swimming in the gorgeous gorgeous water that was a clear turquoise and not the murky grey you find in singapore -- and we were talking about setting up a little bookshop-cafe-movie-screening-place that (my improvisation now) would have lots of plants and sofas and cushions and of course space on the walls for aspiring artists/photographers to display stuff, and place in the cafe for poets and musicians to perform -- i don't know what kind of cafe -- we could do something like the phoenix one which if i remember rightly could be a bar as well -- or is that conflating too many things into one place? and of course somewhere that one can screen lots of indie movies. or maybe a different somewhere. anyhow. i thought -- if i get this down on words, in whatever form -- then maybe it'll happen. :)

1.30ish a.m., my room.

just watched 'y tu mama tambien' (and your mother too) -- fantastic film about mexico, road-trips, friendship, sex, trust, love, betrayal and beaches! i know how cliched that sounds -- two boys in the summer before starting university, their girlfriends have gone to travel in europe; one (tencho) is from a rich political family, the other (julio) is from a lower/middle class family i think, his mom's a secretary; at a glitzy party thrown by tencho's dad and graced by the president they meet tencho's cousin's wife, luisa, who's from spain; luisa says she's thinking of going to the beach and they start telling her about 'heaven's mouth', a beach they make up; luisa finds out her husband, jano, tencho's cousin, has been cheating on her and calls the boys and says ok i'll come and then they're off! julio and tencho are charolastras. space cowboys. friendships and trips. luisa sleeps with tencho. julio sees them. goes to the swimming pool anyway to wait for tencho. they race underwater as they often do; this time julio wins. he says, you shouldn't have let me win. and then he says, i slept with ana (tencho's girlfriend). charolastras are not supposed to sleep with each other's girls. long night of recrimination. the voiceovers get somewhat too intrusive at times, too narrative, but are mostly very well done, and carry along the wider narrative within which this story is set. the next day luisa fucks julio in the car and tencho stops because he doesn't want to be the chauffeur. it comes out later that tencho's slept with ceci (julio's girlfriend) before. luisa storms off. tencho apologizes on his knees (as he had made julio do so the night before). they catch up with ceci. they take a lucky turning (saba was high -- he's always high -- when he told them about a beach and they didn't know how to get anywhere) and they do come to a beach. a beautiful one. and they meet a fisherman and his family who gives boat tours and stuff around the coast. chuy. (voiceover: chuy won't be able to give boat tours before cos something, i forget what, some government thing; he relocates and tries to find work but several companies prevent him; ends up as a janitor in a hotel and never fishes again.) and the beach is called 'heaven's mouth'. dinner and dancing; more stories come out -- 'truth' -- while they're drinking and we find out that they each have fucked the other's girlfriends several times and julio has slept with tencho's mother. then they go back and have group sex. this is bad story-telling but it's just for my record; it was a nervous and sexy scene. in the morning julio and tencho leave; luisa stays behind. the friendship's broken; luisa dies a month later of cancer as she and only she knew -- so she said she would have left jano anyway; she had always known about his affairs. an amazing story. and very well done. and full of life! and tenderness and --

and of course trust and betrayal. 'yet she / will be / false, ere i come, to two or three'.

6.50 pm, my room.

starting again.