Descartes

My sister's joke -

So Descartes walks into a bar and the barman asks him if he'll have a martini (a barman after your heart, Choon).
Descartes: I think not.
And then he vanishes.

Yeah I know.

Not gentlemen

I shuddered from hair-do to shoe-sole. I was even more thankful than before than she had given me the bum's rush. I know what making something of me meant. Ten minutes after the Bishop and colleague had done their stuff she would have been starting to mould me and jack up my soul, and I like my soul the way it is. It may not be the sort of soul that gets crowds cheering in the streets, but it suits me and I don't want people fooling about with it.

- Bertie Wooster from Aunts Aren't Gentlemen

On grass snakes

Minzhi sends me this from Diana Athill's autobiography, "Instead of a Letter" (which by the way is a great title):

"And to have a whole city which, by custom, the young could treat as their own, to be able to walk down its High Street as confidently as though it were your garden path, to be free to be arrogant and absurd­ to annoy other people by making loud, precious talk in restaurants, or to carry a grass snake with you when you went to parties­ that was the kind of thing that you would never be able to do unselfconsciously elsewhere, and which you needed to do."

Notes

(1) Several weekends ago we went heartlanding in Potong Pasir. Potong Pasir looks like it was stuck in a time warp twenty years ago. They still have the old provision shops and kiddy machines and playgrounds of metal contraptions (rather than plastic and foam) and unpainted HDB facades. Toa Payoh, across the expressway, is all shiny and new and has gardens and benches and residents' corners. The sign says "Welcome to Toa Payoh Vista".

(The only people who will go heartlanding are those who do not, for one reason or another and despite their protests to the contrary, see themselves as part of the heartland.)

(2) I took my driving test - and crashed into every possible thing there was to crash into. I mean kerbs and poles, not people and cars. The funny thing was, I crashed into everything with perfect equanimity, feeling sorry only for the tester - something disastrous always does happen when I do anything which requires any degree of physical coordination and grace - and rather glad that at least I didn't kill anyone. I should give up driving, except that everyone needs one thing in their lives to reach out for and test their faith against.

(3) Yesterday I saw "Imelda". I'm not sure what to make of the documentary, or Imelda Marcos. The director, Ramona Diaz, gave her plenty of rope to hang herself with, and she (Imelda Marcos) availed herself of it. And perhaps it's true that she believes in beauty as a political principle (she says in the film that beauty is love made real, which says more about her marriage to Ferdinand Marcos than her politics). Perhaps she really does believe that she and her husband did good for the country. Perhaps she really didn't know her husband was systematically robbing the country's treasury. It's possible. It's an unobstrusive documentary - Imelda Marcos carries the story - in the way that a Michael Moore documentary (I'm thinking of Fahrenheit 9/11) is as much about Michael Moore as whatever the documentary's about. But I'd like to have seen more of her relationship with her husband. She had some political positions of her own - Minister of National Settlements (I think; can't remember), Governor of Metropolitan Manila - but far more political influence than her positions warranted. Ferdinand Marcos sent his Catholic wife to Libya to persuade Gaddafi not to send arms to the Muslim separatists in the Philippine South. She couldn't have managed that just by being pretty. She campaigned for him - the first time a political wife did so (the others had been content with keeping house). She made herself out to be a poor girl from the countryside made good, but she came from one of the powerful political families. I'd like to have seen more of the political machinations of the time. More of the Marcos dictatorship. What did they do? Besides build convention centres and cultural centres and other buildings (an opposition member said she had an "edifice complex").

(4) Have been reading bits of the New Yorker these last few days - Thurber letters/short stories, a compilation of "Talk of the Town" pieces I found in the library, Dorothy Parker book reviews from the 1920s/30s, the most recent copy - not the most impressive or up-to-date specimens of the New Yorker - but all this is to say, do you think we could do something like this in Singapore? Not to reproduce the New Yorker, exactly, but to come up with something irreverent and humorous and open to experiment while at the same time with impeccable writing and solid research? Something that reads like a conversation with a good friend. Could be about anything at all - a magazine with an inordinate curiosity about the world - and what would hold the magazine together would be consistently good writing and a sense of humour. Not that everything needs to be funny - a magazine that took its writing seriously but where the writers didn't take themselves too seriously and could laugh at themselves. Oh and we could have decent book/movie/music reviews too. By writers that enjoy good and trashy music (books etc.) both but can tell the difference. What do you think? Would you want to write for something like this?

Did they not say it would be bliss?

Come let me betray to you and everyone else my total and utter ignorance of the Income Tax Act.

*puts head in hands in despair*

I can still remember bits of Hamlet - how long has it been, 7 years now? - but I'm damned if I can remember tax law. Do you ever get the feeling that we have had, in every sense of the word, a magnificent education in futility?

If so, unwind me

"A man once showed a so-called indestructible watch to Bob Benchley and Dorothy Parker at Tony's. They whammed it against a table top, then put it on the floor and stamped on it. The dismayed owner picked it up and put it to his ear. "It has stopped," he said incredulously. "Maybe you wound it too tight," said Benchley and Parker together.

"Maybe I wound myself too tight. If so, unwind me."

That's taken from Thurber and entirely out of context. I'm re-reading his selected letters, which Minz gave me (or I stole it, like all the other books I stole from her - darling, I still have your Borges, do you want it with you?) and am almost inspired enough to put pen to paper. Almost. But write me and I'll write back.

In search of lost karma

After mussels and fries and a grand bitching session at Oosters tonight it's time for some redemptive action to prevent rebirth as a cockroach. I'm declaring a moratorium on bitching, whining, and all other forms of complaining. Which will leave me with very little to write about - but have done already. I go.

(For the record)

Saturday evening/night came with Leslie Low of The Observatory at the Esplanade Recital Studio, which I rather enjoyed, whatever cp thinks about void deck poems (not that he mentioned void decks - give the man some credit) and after that Aural Defect doing something post-rock (that's a genre? Well I suppose we are living in a post-modern post-structural post-materialist world. And in a recentish Economist it said that Britain was a post-Christian society.) and in mixed media. Which was pretty good except that I can't concentrate for long on anything that doesn't have words. And then drinks at the Arts House and later satay under the flyover, and all after the Malaysian budget in the morning and the office D&D and subsequent drunken binge at Velvet (drunken for me, anyway, because I have no alcohol tolerance to speak of) the night before.

Room with a view

Minzhi's now in Harvard (I can't say Cambridge - makes me think you're in England) and in a room most felicitously positioned to see naked men going to the bathroom in the morning. Best of luck, darling - with school, I mean. And the naked men.

Word of the Day

My brother found this on dictionary.com:

Grok: To understand profoundly through intuition or empathy.

Comes from Robert A. Heinlein's novel "Stranger in a Strange Land", where it is a Martian word meaning literally "to drink" and metaphorically "to be one with".

Was dictionary.com's word of the day on 15 July 1999.

Isn't that fantastic?

Grown-up-ness

Su-Lin has put up the class blogs for the current 13A, 1A and 1B (good luck with the trial class, darling!) and as she points out, thank god our emails are not on the net for seniors to laugh at, though now that I think of it, aren't the Dorinda emails on Minz's webpage somewhere?

But the disturbing thing isn't what the kids are writing now or what we were writing then but the undeniable fact that I'm not writing anything much different nowadays; it's just much less excusable now. Bugger. (At least the swear words have changed a little; the English education did have some use after all.)

Study of Time (2)

It's not that time stops when you're travelling - if time is motion then isn't time precisely what's happening (can time happen?) when you're on the road? In any case -

Istanbul. First day was Istanbul and the old city walls and the Grand Bazaar, which has turned into an immense tourist trap and sells all manner of Turkish Delight, apple tea grains, carpets, water pipes, lamps of coloured glass. Every carpet-seller wants to talk to you, but oh only to talk, not to sell you a carpet, you are my guest not my customer, have more apple tea, let me tell you how wonderful my carpets are just by way of conversation, and aren't Asian girls sweet? A mosque at every corner and Ataturk's picture in every shop.

Cappadocia. Overnight bus to Cappadocia to see the fairy chimneys the next day like toys of the gods. A landscape like no other. A series of rock-cut churches at the Goreme open-air museum, richly frescoed in reds and blues and yellows. There are more churches, says the guide, but we don't need to see them; they're all the same. We refuse to go look at the weaving and say we want to drop off at the Red Valley instead with a couple of American girls who have been travelling in the Middle East. One in from Nebraska and the other from Wisconsin but says she's from Chicago to avoid the red-neck jokes. She has a year's grant to live in Dubai and do research on civil society in the Middle East with no commitment to any product at the end. They call each other "yani" because that's what Arabs say, the same way Californians say "um" or "like" all the time. Imagine calling someone "um"! They have just come from Iran and were never so glad in their lives to cross the border to Turkey (but don't take the train!) and strip. American tourists in Iran have to wear the full veil (burqa?). There are two kinds of women in Turkey - those who wear the veil and those who don't. The ones who don't wear hot pink tops and paint their faces an inch thick - they haven't cast off the veil for no twinset and pearls. But we're still trekking through the Red Valley and getting more and more lost by the minute. We cut across to a different path, stumble across the winery, reach an unfamiliar part of the road and hitch back to town on a passing tour bus. Evening spent learning about carpets - there is the kilim, the wool carpet; the samat (?), silk on wool; and the carpet, which is knotted and not woven; the carpets (kilims and all) tend to have traditional designs: women with their hands on their hips (asking something from the gods), blue eyes (to ward off the evil eye. Every woman and child wears something with the blue eye - a bracelet, a necklace, a pin.) - and wandering around the town. The next day is an underground city and a walk through the lush Ihlara Valley and a scramble around the Selime monastery, which is a series of abandoned rock caves. The early Christians lived in the mountains; you can see the caves (which are occasionally occupied by present-day hermits) still.

Pamukkale. Overnight bus to Selcuk, tour bus to Pamukkale, where lies the ruins of Hierapolis, the old Roman spa city. Pamukkale has a series of cascading calcium pools, turquoise on white over the edge of the cliff like the end of the world. We meet two Americans with the Peace Corps in Ukraine, a university lecturer in marketing from New York called Katherine and a business consultant from Memphis, Tennessee called John. They're in Kiev for two years and travelling in the slack period. Kiev, John says, is ripe for a revolution. The kids are tired of the system. They're tired of having their schools closed down and no food on the supermarket shelves. Of hauling water from the river and living in darkness because the electricity supply for the building (all buildings are centrally supplied) has been cut off yet again. A revolution takes either immense bravery or immense misery, I say. There are no leaders yet, according to John, but the misery is all but present. There are also on the trip the golden girls, two middle-aged Filipina New Yorkers. This is the key stone, the most important stone in the whole arch, says the guide. Wow! say the golden girls. The key stone holds up the arch! says the guide. It's a miracle! cry the golden girls.

Ephesus. The night in the tacky seaside town of Kusadasi with Miyuki (?), a Japanese girl who has abandoned her Turkish boyfriend to the sweltering heat of Istanbul to travel Turkey, and the next day in the magnificent ruins of Ephesus. What all the postcards show is the library of Celsus (also on the 20 million Turkish lira note). The library is also a tomb; Celsus decided that rather than building a grand sarcophagus for his dead father he'd built the library instead, and bury the father close by. When I die will you build me a library? This was one of the great libraries of the ancient world, but all the knowledge has been lost now. After Ephesus was the House of the Virgin Mary (John brought her to Ephesus after the death of Christ) and then the Temple of Artemis, which is now a swamp and a column and a whole bunch of storks (thought to bring fertility).

Istanbul. Zhen now has hair braids and I've a blue and purple hair wrap that will most certainly not be accepted in the office. We go into the tourist hamam (Cemberlitas Hamam, off Divan Yolu) stark naked except for a towel (to lie on) because we haven't enough clothes to get any wet in the hamam. I lie on my back on the central marble slab waiting for the masseuse to be done (the masseuses are huge Turkish women in black panties and breasts that reach down to their waists) and looking at the lights in the ceiling like stars. The most peaceful place in all Istanbul, which in its other incarnations is full of noise and smoke and over-friendly Turkish men. The other peaceful places are the mosques, of course, with their great ring of lights hanging low from the ceiling. In the old days they hung ostrich eggs among the lights to keep away spiders. Now they have electric lights but still hang decorative eggs. The mosques are dressed in pretty Iznik tiles (hence Blue Mosque) except for Aya Sofya, which was converted from the church of Sancta Sophia after the fall of Constantinople. It's the oldest trick in the book, appropriating the symbols of power of the conquered people, and they say Aya Sofya is still one of the seven wonders of the world, but I think the Ottomans sacked Justinian's great church. The mosaics are mostly gone from the marble walls and there are flower patterns on the ceiling painted over crosses. Remember that Islamic art doesn't allow representation of animals or people - is that the command against graven images? In any case the tiles are mesmerising in their blues and reds, blue because of the influence of Chinese pottery. The Ottomans loved Ming pottery. Topkapi palace the next day, with all the jewels of the Ottoman empire. I love Suleiman's taste - no ostentatious dagger hilts carved from a single emerald but a throne of polished wood and mother-of-pearl and swords that whisper of power and glamour. The legacy of Suleiman the Lawgiver. It's a cruise up the Bosphorus at night, to see how the glamorous of Istanbul live, in grand hotels that open onto the river for black-tie dinners with waiters and candles and the black waters of the Bosphorus. Someone's letting off fireworks when we get back to Sirkeci but they don't explode.

Athens. The entire city has pulled itself together for the Olympics, with free gigs around the city and street art on the road that winds around the Acropolis, which is beautiful and austere by night, and souvenir stores and cafes and restaurants that stay open the whole night. The streets are full of noise and light and drunken Aussies. In the day the sun bleaches all colour from the ruins and beats down without mercy; the days are best spent on the beach on one of the islands (we were at Marathonas beach in Aegina). The Olympic Stadium itself is a work of art, white against the blinding blue of the sky, the colours of Greece.

Study of Time (1)

Study of Time

One bird deserves another. One white and orange tabletop.
One twenty-five-year-old deserves another
Twenty-five-year-old. One harlequin deserves another harlequin. One rich cocktail of flames
deserves another
And one extravagant boast: I am the Obvious. My hunch is me.
One brain deserves a brain that has been hatched in the tropics
One broken heart a heart that has been differently broken.
It seems to me time to get something done. But if I get in the car
I am forty-five years old and you are nineteen. We are
Not going anywhere. The car won't start. And if I get out
I am sixty years old. I look around but don't see you there.
I expect it's a good presumption that you care coming back,
But hurry. If I go into the drugstore
I am thirty-three. The boy behind the counter
Is not a girl, but we discuss national politics anyway.
That fucking Nixon. Or That damned unholy war! If I read a magazine
At the stand, on the other side of the drugstore,
I am twenty-five, and you, dressed with some hoop-la, come in.
I am sixteen when I am lying on the floor, with you beside me
Reading a newspaper. One stone man
Deserves one stone women, and one glad day of being alone
And in good health. If at seventy
I get up and close the door,
I am fourteen and you are twenty. I'll put on
My blue shirt. My white tie, I'm twenty, twenty-one. Now we are eighty.
One five o'clock sunny day
Deserves another. We are both fifty-four. You pick up the bar that holds the door
And hit it as hard as you can at twenty. The floor deserves the floor
Of heaven that is a ceiling as we see it. One coldly affected group
Deserves another. We both very much enjoy engaging in sports.
You fall down, I pick you up. I am eight
You are sixty-six. Today is your birthday. You stand opening a cantaloupe. You say, Let's
Try another! You are sitting in the car,
You are twenty-three, I am forty-four and singing a Spanish song.
If she is nine years old, then I am fifty.
The birthdays come and go talking of Prospero. Good-bye, house!
Do you remember when we used to live in you
And be forty-eight years old? One age deserves another. One time deserves another time.

- Kenneth Koch

Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

Flying to Istanbul Friday night and will be back the Monday or Tuesday after next, I forget which. My organisational skills are without parallel. Now would be an excellent time to tell me all the things you ever wanted from Turkey which I could possibly get for you. (Bad timing all round I know. Don't disappear before I get back.)

For Minzhi, who will be reading Moby Dick

Reading Moby Dick at 30,000 Feet

At this height, Kansas
is just a concept,
a checkerboard design of wheat and corn

no larger than the foldout section
of my neighbor's travel magazine.
At this stage of the journey

I would estimate the distance
between myself and my own feelings
is roughly the same as the mileage

from Seattle to New York,
so I can lean back into the upholstered interval
between Muzak and lunch,

a little bored, a little old and strange.
I remember, as a dreamy
backyard kind of kid,

tilting up my head to watch
those planes engrave the sky
in lines so steady and so straight

they implied the enormous concentration
of good men,
but now my eyes flicker

from the in-flight movie
to the stewardess's pantyline,
then back into my book,

where men throw harpoons at something
much bigger and probably
better than themselves,

wanting to kill it,
wanting to see great clouds of blood erupt
to prove that they exist.

Imagine being born and growing up,
rushing through the world for sixty years
at unimaginable speeds.

Imagine a century like a room so large,
a corridor so long
you could travel for a lifetime

and never find the door,
until you had forgotten
that such a thing as doors exist.

Better to be on board the Pequod,
with a mad one-legged captain
living for revenge.

Better to feel the salt wind
spitting in your face,
to hold your sharpened weapon high,

to see the glisten
of the beast beneath the waves.
What a relief it would be

to hear someone in the crew
cry out like a gull,
Oh Captain, Captain!
Where are we going now?

- Tony Hoagland

On glazed doughnuts

Now I've had a really good weekend and I think it's partly because I didn't spend Saturday morning in Spring Singapore listening to speeches on productivity. Friday night was dinner with Mona, Dom and Fay in Dubliners (of course we're going to meet in an Irish pub in Singapore) and then I tagged along with Dom and Fay (ransacking Dom's wardrobe and patience in the process) to Dom's house for Sex in the City (will never look at glazed doughnuts the same way again, though of course I'll still eat them - Miranda, no man is worth a sacrifice of glazed doughnuts) and then to Phuture to jump around to hip hop and feel alive again. Being in the office is one definition of deadening. Saturday morning I spent sleeping - first Saturday this month, and the first Saturday I can remember - thank god I skipped Productivity Day, though it might have been funny, for a minute or two, to go there straight from Phuture - and then holed up in my room with apples and the White Stripes and the John McPhee reader. Can I exhort everyone to read John McPhee? Picked up the reader in New York last year on the strength of Von's recommendation (thank you! I'll go look for Michael Pollan and Calvin Trillin - though how does one find them in Singapore?) and didn't get around to reading it till now and my new lifetime ambition is to go to Princeton and sit at his feet. John McPhee's, that is. Incredible man. Incredible stories. I'd give so much to write like that. Then it was Saturday night - with a break for driving lessons; I've been taking them forever and still steer like I'm high - and time to accidentally crash Louise's choir party, which was a slightly surreal experience. I'm sorry, darling. Next time we'll bring hard liquor. Wala Wala next for a bit - most schizophrenic bar in Singapore - and I rather liked the band that was on and their fake-country-rock-on-crack version of Colin Raye's Love, Me until they started trying to get parts of the room to sing along with them. Some parts of my night-time entertainment I prefer non-interactive. Then Ida bit cp and we went home.

Who stands on your threshold?

Mm. So. If you were wondering. I've been pretending to work, for a change; I usually don't bother with the pretence. Hanging out with my sister, who's back for the hols and a force of nature unto herself. Mooching around. Checking email incessantly without writing back. Perhaps I should admit it - I do miss having someone lean in my doorway. Can't really perform for myself.
 

Baybeats

Saturday evening me and my sister went down to Baybeats and it was gratifyingly good. Do you remember Force Vomit? Not quite punk rock but funny and wry (and I admit it, I do like catchy tunes). And there was Humpback Oak, now the Observatory; missed part of their performance, which I regret, 'cause what I heard was excellent. And an energetic Hong Kong band called Whence He Came, which endears me to them. And oh there was a really lian band from Thailand, singing Cyndi Lauper - the singing wasn't too bad, in point of fact, but I hated them on first sight. And a bunch of somewhat boring bands from here and around the region. All in all a good night, though - perhaps I should find out what's happening in Singapore before my next bitching binge.
 
Sunday night I met an old friend for dinner and we were talking about Baybeats. He: Yeah at first it sounded quite good, but then I thought, rock music, well, it's time to grow up, isn't it? - Perhaps. But I'll keep my jeans and t-shirts and loud music for a while longer, thanks. Baybeats next year, anyone?
 

The Singer's House

In its entirety -
 
(Thanks, Thomas).
 
The Singer's House

When they said Carrickfergus I could hear
the frosty echo of saltminers’ picks.
I imagined it, chambered and glinting,
a township built of light.

What do we say any more                                            
to conjure the salt of our earth?
So much comes and is gone
that should be crystal and kept,

and amicable weathers
that bring up the grain of things,                                  
their tang of season and store,
are all the packing we’ll get.

So I say to myself Gweebarra
and its music hits off the place
like water hitting off granite.                                        
I see the glittering sound

framed in your window,
knives and forks set on oilcloth,
and the seals’ heads, suddenly outlined,
scanning everything.                                                  

People here used to believe
that drowned souls lived in the seals.
At spring tides they might change shape.
They loved music and swam in for a singer

who might stand at the end of summer                        
in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,
his shoulder to the jamb, his song
a rowboat far out in evening.

When I came here first you were always singing,
a hint of the clip of the pick                                        
in your winnowing climb and attack.
Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.
 
- Seamus Heaney

Please don't worry, I'm not a Republican

From Jung, a Columbia friend:
 
"...please don't worry--I'm not a Republican.  I considered it for a bit, but decided against it."
 
I don't remember what this is in response to - she wrote me a while back in reply to an email I sent her many months ago, and I don't think either of us remembers what the other wrote - but isn't it great, anyway?
 
She's also offering me sanctuary should I ever decide to run away from the Singapore government. A safe Democratic house, what more could I need? What am I doing here?
 
 

We still believe what we hear

Seamus Heaney wrote this for David Hammond, his singer/guitarist friend, after a night spent with friends happily singing and talking -

The Singer's House

People here used to believe
that drowned souls lived in seals.
At spring tides they might change shape.
They loved music and swam in for a singer

who might stand at the end of summer
in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,
his shoulder to the jamb, his song
a row-boat far out in evening.

When I came here first you were always singing,
a hint of the clip of the pick
in your winnowing climb and attack.
Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.


(- Do you have to take everything so seriously? - Well, yes.)

Painted shoes

(1) We're at a shoe shop in the Heeren, which sells rather cute hand-painted shoes. My sister likes the white ones with splashes of paint, which look like something Jackson Pollock would have done if he had used the whitewashed Panda(?) schoolgirl shoes we used to wear for a canvas. I like the ones in shades of red with an orange line running down. The Rothko ones? my sister says. - They're not bad.

(2) Later, mulling over the shoes -

Me: But what would I do with red shoes?
She: Wear them!
Me: But nothing would match them.
She: Well you know how I have these crimson silk Adidas sneakers I really like?
Me: Yeah?
She: And all my clothes are purple or green?
Me: Uh-huh.
She: I never wear the sneakers because they clash with my clothes.
Me: Right.
She: But I think you should get the red shoes! All your clothes are black or blue. You can wear them with jeans.

(3) Back at the shoe shop. She gets the Jackson Pollock shoes; I get, at her instigation, an entirely different pair. This time they look like something Roy Lichenstein (the guy who did the 40-foot cartoons? Is that the right name?) might have done on a bad day.

Me: You know what you are? You're a multiplier effect!
She: Yes!

list

Well this is your lasting legacy, that I sneak off from the Singapore delegation to queue in the rain for a Rilo Kiley/Modest Mouse show, neither of which I knew when with you but would not have found if not for you. And the Shins and the White Stripes and my obsession with Jeff Tweedy (though not the new album, which I cannot bring myself to like in its entirety), and Frank O'Hara and James Merrill and Wallace Stevens's The Man with the Blue Guitar, Woody Allen and Christopher Guest and the Coen brothers, and even Marianne Moore's poem on the Brooklyn Dodgers - if it all came to nothing but a handful of poems and songs, wouldn't it have been worth it anyway?

Rilo Kiley

Am listening to The Execution Of All Things with a pleasant feeling of serendipity. Always meant to check out the album but never got round to it and then I walked into the Shepherd's Bush Empire for the Modest Mouse/Bright Eyes show (Bright Eyes I can take or leave, but Modest Mouse! In London! And a damn good show too) and thought hey that's a good opening band and then found out it was Rilo Kiley! So I got the album after the show and it is pretty good.

I often ask for recommendations, but sometimes it's even better to find these things yourself, isn't it? In such moments all the pieces of the world come together.

London

I think I fell in love with London all over again this time. Not Oxford - I'm not sure I ever did fall out of love with it - went to visit my sister on Sunday and got there a little earlier and walked up New College Lane in the cool morning light assailed by memory - but I had forgotten how much I owe England.

...I knew that, if I fell out of this love or if it fell away from under me, the vistas which it had opened would still be there and the wind which had come up would not die down.

More later. London was my interregnum. Guess it's time to work now?

Falling

"This explains perhaps why I have never steered myself much. An American friend once said to me rebukingly: 'You never seem to make any positive choice; you just let things happen to you.' But the things that happen to one often seem better than the things one chooses. Even in writing poetry, which is something I did early choose to do, the few poems or passages which I find wear well have something of accident about them (the poems I did not intend to write) or, to put it more pretentiously, seem 'given'. So Magilligan Strand was like falling in love. For such occasions the word 'falling' is right; one does not step into love any more than one steps asleep - or awake. For awake, like asleep, is what one falls, and to keep falling awake seems to me the salt of life much more than existentialist defiance. We cannot of course live by Keats's Negative Sensibility alone, we must all, in E. M. Forster's phrase, use 'telegrams and anger'; all the same what I feel makes life worth living is not the clever scores but the surrenders - it may be to the life-quickening urge of an air-raid, to nonsense talked by one's friends, to a girl on top of the Empire State building, to the silence of a ruined Byzantine church, to woods, or weirs, or to heat dancing on a gravelled path, to music, drink or the smell of turf smoke, to the first view of the Atlantic or to the curve of a strand which seems to stretch to nowhere or everywhere and to ages before and after the combustion engine which defiled it."

- Louis MacNeice, "Landscapes of Childhood and Youth" (pages from an unwritten book).

Interregnum

"The chimes chimed and I left Cornell, had more than a month left to fill in. Marking time but not killing it. Once I had wanted to kill time but not any more. Because I was in love and because I knew that, if I fell out of this love or if it fell away from under me, the vistas which it had opened would still be there and the wind which had come up would not die down."

- from Louis MacNeice's The Strings are False.

Which I found in London! Somewhere on Charing Cross. I had forgotten I was looking for the book, which makes it all the better.

London and assorted observations

(1) I'm flying to London tomorrow for a few days. Study trip. Anybody wants anything? So far I've orders for chocolates, a Hat Full of Sky, other Pratchetts, Cosmopolitan, Mixmag, duty-free alcohol... SMS/email me ok?

(2) I would sleep with Jeff Tweedy's voice any day.

Late-night maggi mee

My brother woke up hungry at 1.30 a.m. (he had slept at 5 the previous evening) so we went down and had maggi mee.

Isn't that such a university thing? Something has come full cycle, but I'm not sure what.

Sexy Scrabble (reprise)

Don't you want a t-shirt that says IMPRIMBADTWIGGY?

I add that I contributed the verb to BADTWIGGY, even if she did afterwards metamorphosise into either a contradiction or a tease (the little slut).

My family and other animals (not quite, but I couldn't resist)

My mom's going to Taiwan with my grandmother to visit her (my mom's) brother and his family. Think it may be the first time she's travelling alone. Well not alone - she'll have my grandmother and my grandmother's maid and then my uncle's family (wife + 2 kids + innumerable dogs) and I think my aunt's mother too and possibly various other relatives - but without any of us. So I watched her pack for a bit tonight, in a strange role reversal, except that she knows exactly what she wants and where the bits go.

The point of all this was. She showed me a Taiwanese note with zhong hua min guo (you know what I mean, even if my pinyin is sadly askew) on it and said that her father named his first four sons for Taiwan: Zhen Zhong, Zhen Hua, Zhen Min, and Zhen Guo. Then came one more son, so he was named Zhen Xin. Was he Taiwanese? I ask in surprise. No, but he hated the Communists and was a strong supporter of the Kuomintang. He has a letter, a something, signed by someone then high up in the KMT thanking him for his help. And he never dared to return to China for fear of being arrested by the Communists.

I'm more or less happy with being rootless and Anglicised but once in a while one wishes - well, to be able to speak Chinese, for a start.

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our heart, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

- Carol Ann Duffy

(Thank you.)

There's a garret in your future

On starving artists - my boss once said the same thing, that he didn't want to give arts groups too much money cause he thought artists produced their best work when poor. Bloody science students.

Glass houses and stones

On the one hand, my colleague finds a printout of Borges's essay, "The Library of Babel", on my desk, and says, this cannot be, there's no such thing as the library of Babel, and who is this Borges? Moment of genuine surprise - surely everyone knows of Borges, even non-faffy people? Well, I say, he's this South American short story writer and essayist...also a poet...very good. Er, and quite famous. My colleague is dubious.

And on the other hand, walking back with my brother today, we pass by someone smoking and my brother says, people who smoke are stupid. He divides smokers into smart and stupid. People who don't start smoking at all - smart. People who do start - stupid. People who start and then stop - smart (well first stupid and then smart). People who start and don't stop - stupid. Well (I say feebly) they get hooked and then they can't help it... He amends his categorisation of the world. People who start smoking and know they should but can't stop - weak. People who start smoking and don't know they should stop - stupid. That's a very harsh moral universe you live in, I say.

Was/Am I that bad? We're awfully judgemental people, aren't we?

Conversation (2)

I am telling you this because a conversation is a journey, and what gives it value is fear. You come to understand travel because you have had conversations, not vice versa. What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.

- Anne Carson, Plainwater

Conversation (1)

In the city of Burgos lies El Cid himself - beside Ximena he rests in an eternal conversation. Beneath the transept of Burgos Cathedral they have lain since 1921, and before that, in a burial place in the city from the year 1835, and previously, seven hundred years in the monastery of San Pedro outside the city walls. By now, she must know every word he is going to say. Yet she kisses his mouth and the eyes of his face, she kisses his hands, his truth, his marrow. What is the conversation of lovers? Compared with ordinary talk, it is as bread to stones. My heart gets dizzy. It is the most difficult photograph I have tried to take so far: up the scaffolding, hand over hand and out onto the pinnacles they blow, her hair like a red sail as they veer around storks' nests in the wind and clutch wide at the railings, leaning out over the tiny city, its clockwork shadows so crazily far below. One shriek goes flaring and flattening away down the valley. Gone. She kisses him on the shoulder in the Moorish custom. They look at one another. They look into the light. They jump.

There is no question I covet that conversation. There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is. And I see him free of it, as if he had simply crossed to the other side of a bridge, I see desire set free in him like some ray of mysterious light. Now tell me the truth, would you cross that bridge if you came to it? And where, if you made the grave choice to give up bread, would it take you? You see what I fear.

- Anne Carson, Plainwater

A Ghost is Born

Downloaded Quicktime and as a result am now able to listen to the new Wilco album. I dunno, does the first song (which is all I've heard so far) sound a little strange to you?

Words (3)

Finally finished Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet over the weekend and if you haven't read it yet you should. Part philosophy, part literary criticism, past classical history, part poetry at its clearest and most beautiful.

Words (2) - A Letter to William Carlos Williams

by Kenneth Rexroth

Dear Bill,

When I search the past for you,
Sometimes I think you are like
St. Francis, whose flesh went out
Like a happy cloud from him,
And merged with every lover -
Donkeys, flowers, lepers, suns -
But I think you are more like
Brother Juniper, who suffered
All indignities and glories
Laughing like a gentle fool.
You’re in the Fioretti
Somewhere, for you’re a fool, Bill,
Like the Fool in Yeats, the term
Of all wisdom and beauty.
It’s you, stands over against
Helen in all her wisdom,
Solomon in all his glory.

Remember years ago, when
I told you you were the first
Great Franciscan poet since
The Middle Ages? I disturbed
The even tenor of dinner.
Your wife thought I was crazy.
It’s true, though. And you’re “pure,” too,
A real classic, though not loud
About it - a whole lot like
The girls of the Anthology.
Not like strident Sappho, who
For all her grandeur, must have
Had endometriosis,
But like Anyte, who says
Just enough, softly, for all
The thousands of years to remember.

It’s a wonderful quiet
You have, a way of keeping
Still about the world, and its
Dirty rivers, and garbage cans,
Red wheelbarrows glazed with rain,
Cold plums stolen from the icebox,
And Queen Anne’s lace, and day’s eyes,
And leaf buds bursting over
Muddy roads, and splotched bellies
With babies in them, and Cortes
And Malinche on the bloody
Causeway, the death of the flower world.

Nowadays, when the press reels
With chatterboxes, you keep still,
Each year a sheaf of stillness,
Poems that have nothing to say,
Like the stillness of George Fox,
Sitting still under the cloud
Of all the world’s temptation,
By the fire, in the kitchen,
In the Vale of Beavor. And
The archetype, the silence
Of Christ, when he paused a long
Time and then said, “Thou sayest it.”

Now in a recent poem you say,
“I who am about to die.”
Maybe this is just a tag
From the classics, but it sends
A shudder over me. Where
Do you get that stuff, Williams?
Look at here. The day will come
When a young woman will walk
By the lucid Williams River,
Where it flows through an idyllic
News from Nowhere sort of landscape,
And she will say to her children,
“Isn’t it beautiful? It
Is named after a man who
Walked here once when it was called
The Passaic, and was filthy
With the poisonous excrements
Of sick men and factories.
He was a great man. He knew
It was beautiful then, although
Nobody else did, back there
In the Dark Ages. And the
Beautiful river he saw
Still flows in his veins, as it
Does in ours, and flows in our eyes,
And flows in time, and makes us
Part of it, and part of him.
That, children, is what is called
A sacramental relationship.
And that is what a poet
Is, children, one who creates
Sacramental relationships
That last always."

With love and admiration,
Kenneth Rexroth.

(This I take from Allen Ginsberg's reading list from heaven.)

Words (1 and a half)

Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand, which shouldn't come under words exactly, but still it does make you happy.

Words (1)

Sexy scrabble at Yisheng's place that night (only sexy or dirty or, if you're out of inspiration, plain vulgar, words allowed) and I'll never look at "jaw" in the same way again.

On reading

Me: I was just reading a couple of Iris Murdoch's essays (from a book I bought two years ago and never read till now) and now I want to go back to school and study philosophy and literature.

WN: Funny, I was just reading Eric Schlosser's "Reefer Madness" and now I want to be a drug lord. You must be reading the wrong books.

Sorry for the inconvenient

At the Cheers shop outside Tampines MRT is a sign that says (among other things):

Sorry for the inconvenient.

I rather like that. Perhaps I'll make a sign and put it up on my desk.

Why do I never learn

that the ability to stay up all night without falling over the next day belongs with other relics of my youth, like tight jeans (ah Miranda) and Smash Hits?

Still haven't written my notes

but I have caught up with everyone's blogs for the last three years or so.

(finally writing my notes of meeting)

Can I be really bitchy for a bit? Well of course I'm going to be anyway; this is fair warning.

One of the delegation members really annoyed me, so much so I found myself arguing the opposite of whatever he was saying. It wasn't that he was wrong, exactly; more that he had that insufferable smugness which attends (a) civil servants and (b) middle-aged men. You know? When they just know everything there is to know about a particular topic, and have no need of other viewpoints on the matter, even though their knowledge tends to consist of a string of banalities? When they're not willing to discuss issues, but they're more than happy to tell you how to think on any given topic? And he was a researcher by designation; shouldn't they have a little more intellectual curiosity?

Belatedly

For what it's worth, I'm half Teochew, and I can spell half the time.

O

Can I say. We saw Cirque de Soleil's O and it was magnificent.

Coming soon: Shibuya

We were walking through the empty space at MGM Grand at night, where the theme park used to be, and there were these huge boards announcing the shops to come. One said, "Coming soon: Shibuya."

There's an essay somewhere where Nietzsche says rather acerbically that Wagner's pathos topples taste. I think the sheer effrontery of Vegas topples taste. It's in the middle of a desert but there're fountains and lakes and canals and old-world European conservatories and soon there will be a Japanese garden the likes of which can only be found in Kyoto. First they have to build a mountain and then pipe in water for the streams and ponds and lakes and then bring in the trees and then they can sculpt the garden. In Singapore we just whinge about the weather being too hot and leave it at that; in Vegas they paint the ceiling has feathery white clouds and the blue fades quietly the dusk at the edges and the lighting is controlled to always simulate evening light (because they did studies which showed that that's when people shop the most, when they're all mellow and relaxed) and it's always 72 degrees F. As my colleague pointed out, Vegas works because Americans like to see things, but they don't like to leave their country. So they have the Eiffel Tower and Doge's Palace and the Colosseum and the Village and Shibuya brought to them, but all prettied up and air-conditioned. What complete lack of irony does it take to do such a thing, to say, well I'lll just create a scale model of the Eiffel Tower in the middle of my casino?

We met Steve Wynn, who is the American dream personnifed. He came to the Strip some 40 years ago, at 24, as a blackjack dealer. In 1989 he built the first of the mega hotel/casino/entertainment complexes, the Mirage, which was at the time about $400 million more expensive than any other casino built so far. He designed the damn thing and put a volcanic island at the front and fish at the reception and white tigers along the corridor (the sign above says: Phones. Restrooms. White Tigers. Shops.) and it's actually all quite nice. He built Treasure Island and then the Bellagio, which is still the pinnacle of achievement for these mega-whatsits, and then sold the lot to MGM because now that he has completely transformed the Strip, he wants to do something different there. He came to the Strip at 24 as a blackjack dealer! I'm 24, and I'm never going to build a $600m casino, not even in 20 years' time. No formal training, but he designs his own buildings. All the other meetings with the operators were very corporate affairs, we met the Board, they presented themselves as a body corporate, but Steve Wynn just flung himself into the room with his dogs. Oh and his Chief Operating Officer, whose job apparently was to open the door for his dogs.

In MGM Grand there was a sign that said, "Video arcade: virtual reality". As opposed, I suppose, to the actual reality of the rest of the casino/hotel/complex? It's impossible not to admire the scale of what was done in Vegas, and impossible to accept it entirely; we're schooled in British irony, after all. I almost said, impossible to accept it without any saving grace of irony. I'm not yet willing to put away a strong sense of the ridiculous, but perhaps this is an inhibiting quality? Perhaps what it takes is a complete abandonment of - not taste, exactly - but any self-consciousness whatsoever?

Move away from the icing

Spent the night hanging out in Su-Lin's room watching Sex in the City and eating cookies and playing bridge (though not all three at once because men are incapable of multi-tasking) and it was one of the best nights I've had in a while. It's been a while since we spent time just lazing and playing bridge, hasn't it?

home

and laden with duty-free alcohol. I've wine and Hoegaarden and Bombay Sapphire (just for you, Choon). Shall we make martinis?

We are made of such stuff

16 May: Water slides! A 68 degree water slide called the Leap of Faith at the Mayan Temple in the Lost City of Atlantis - this is Disney meets Underwater World, now in salmon pink.

(And there were meetings and stuff, more of that later. The water slides were the important bit. And the sea water pools with star fish and sting rays and baby sharks!)

17 May: woke up at 6 and went down to beach. Gorgeous blue-green waters and white sand, just like the postcards. No living creature in sight but a couple of gulls and a dog at what looked like a cairn of stones. Walked along the shoreline listening to the waves.

17 May, later: There was a bride posing in the lobby of the Venetian. The Venetian looks...well, Venetian. There's a copy of St Mark's Square (and oh, darlings, a MASSIVE Sephora. SMS me if you want anything) and a canal and gondola rides and of course a massive casino with cars atop some of the jackpot machines (so they can just jump up and give you the car if you win, I guess?) and trompe l'oeil on the walls and frescoes on the ceiling - not exactly the Sistine Chapel, but overwhelming nonetheless. Went for a walk on the strip - could see the strip from the airplane, and the beam of light from the pyramid that is the Luxor - the Duke's Palace (is that what it is? the one on the real St Mark's Square) next to a volcanic island (apparently complete with erupting volcano) and ahead there was Caesar's Palace with the Colosseum and Roman Forum and the Pantheon, all brought together for your convenience. And there are the smaller seedier slot machine parlours and all-you-can-eat buffets and Latino men standing on the street handing out soft porn (the Police guy with us collected them solemnly. Appendix A of my report, he said).

Truly fantastic, in the old sense of the word. It transcends kitsch. And terribly addictive - music on the streets the whole time through and everyone in party clothes (though the people are mostly pretty tacky - old retirees with permed hair (men and women) sitting rather grimly at the slot machines and lots of cute young couples holding beer bottles and more fat Americans in strangely Hawaiian gear) and all the lights from the casino and of course the single beam from the Luxor. This is the American candy-floss version of the world.

All the same, I think I'd rather create my own fantasy.

What time is it now?

15 May, 4 pm: flight from Singapore to LAX (16 hours)
Transit at LAX (5ish hours)
Flight from LAX to Miami (4 - 5 hours)
Transit at Miami (3 - 4 hours)
Wait in Miami because have missed flight (1/2 hour)
Flight from Miami to Nassau, the Bahamas (1ish hour)
Wait in Nassau for luggage (2 hours)
Drive from Nassau to Atlantis Resort, Paradise Island (1/2 hour)
Reach Atlantis at on 16 May, 12 pm, local time.

Leave Atlantis on 17 May, 3 pm.
Drive from Atlantis to Nassau (1/2 hour)
Flight from Nassau to Miami, fortunately taking right flight (1ish hour)
Transit in Miami (2 - 3 hours)
Flight from Miami to Las Vegas (5ish hours)
Time spent talking to random Argentinian man on flight (1/6 hour (You live in Las Vegas? - No, Singapore. - Oh you are here on vacation? - Er sort of. - You come from Miami? - No, the Bahamas. - I am in Miami two days, on vacation. It is very nice. - I wasn't actually there but, er, yes?)
Drive from Las Vegas airport to the Venetian (1/2 hour)
Time spent gawking in Venetian lobby (1/2 hour)
Reach the Venetian on 17 May, 11 pm, local time.

Time left to sleep until breakfast/meeting tomorrow (about 2 hours).

Possessions

I have: a ticket, laptop, credit card, passport, and a suit in my, uh, suitcase. That's it, right? Do I need anything else? Anybody want anything from Vegas?

boo

Alright my loves; I am finally going; whatever I've forgotten will just have to stay forgotten. I'll have my laptop along (of course), so write to me and I'll, um, tell you about all the meetings I had to take notes for. See you in a week.

Still not packed

But oh I got the sweetest email from Tomoko saying, yes Tokyo may legalise gambling soon, so you might come to Tokyo more often?

Heh.

[Though there is a limit to the number of gambling study trips I can possibly take. Yes really.]

HELP

I just locked myself out of my room! And it's 1.30 a.m. and I HAVEN'T packed for tomorrow's flight (well of course I haven't packed) and I don't even know what to pack. God I'm so intelligent aren't I? Can't find the keys to the room - should I wake my parents up - or just wait till the morning?

Another belated reply

From Julian:

Remember this bit in History of the World?

“’We must love one another or die,’ wrote W.H. Auden, bringing from E.M. Forster the declaration: ‘Because he once wrote “We must love one another or die,” he can command me to follow him’. Auden, however, was dissatisfied with this famous line from ‘September 1, 1939’. That’s a damned lie!” he commented. ‘We must die anyway.’ So when reprinting the poem he altered the line to the more logical ‘We must love one another and die.’ Later he suppressed it altogether.

I'm sure Julian Barnes is right, but I always thought it was the other way round, that Auden originally wrote, "We must love one another and die", and then changed it to "We must love one another or die" because that's more conventional. There's a strange comfort in "We must love one another and die" - well yes of course everyone dies (there's a scene in one of the Pratchetts, isn't there, where someone asks the History Monks if they've ever seen a dying man and there's a short pause and then they say, umm yes isn't everyone?) - but the necessity of death is matched by the necessity of love - at least we do have to love one another as well. And because Auden once wrote "We must love one another and die" he can command me.

[I don't know if I should link the original blog entry - guess I'll leave it as is? if you know Julian, and you probably do, then you know the link.]

Geland

Congratulations on your graduation! (Belatedly.)

Er do you read this? Someone tell him. :)

I'd have said it on your blog, but it wasn't the right entry for exclamation marks and smiley faces.

by the light of all my burning bridges

The trip dates are: 15 - 22 May (we leave 20 May, reach Singapore 22 May. Bloody time zones). The official dates and my dates as well, since I will tamely return home with the rest of the delegation and not attempt to remain illegitimately in the States.

Feels like I haven't been out for ages. Can we go out when I come back?

(This is, I'm pretty sure, absolutely the wrong thing to do, but for the right reasons. Shouldn't I be feeling good about it, then?)

Salad days

Oh! It's "Eternal Love" on the radio - by PJ and Duncan!

I'm gonna go look for my old Smash Hits. And the CD (ah well). And their autograph!

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

- Elizabeth Bishop


Oh for godssake. Exactly what am I doing this for? Two hours offered grudgingly from a weekend? Bugger this for a game of soldiers. (The irritable self asserts itself (sorry), which in some lights may pass for intelligence.)

Like Carrot always says

personal isn't the same as important.

Gambling

It's been a while since I went back to Jeanette Winterson, but isn't there a line (think it's in The Passion) that says what you risk reveals what you value?

Was just going to say that I'm absolutely the wrong person to do this because I don't gamble, but that's not true is it; I will hazard all for some things, just not horses or cards or little shiny pictures on a machine.

So what do you gamble on?

When this is all over

I won't be able to run a casino but I will be able to run Gamblers Anonymous. I'm building up my resume, I am. (MTI gets the glam bits; we get to do research on the no. of people who've killed themselves cos they couldn't find enough money to gamble with. Ah, public service.)

National Gambling Impact Study Commission Report: In Louisiana, one man confessed to robbing and murdering six elderly individuals to feed his problem with gambling on electronic gaming devices [think jackpot machines].

Credit card crime, employee theft, that's all fairly easy to understand, but murder - it seems that something else, something crucial, must have broken down in the man to drive him to actual murder, doesn't it? Besides a gambling addiction, I mean. Or possibly we're all closer to murder than we realise.

Stolen

from Minz (april 13) -

in the new mulisch novel there is a guest conductor who tells of having an off day with the orchestra he is rehearsing, the playing lacklustre and uninspired, but all of a sudden a magical change comes over the orchestra and his musicians begin to play like never before he could hardly believe his ears for the marvellous sound. after a while he senses they are responding to something or some presence other than himself. he turns around, and sees that herbert von karajan had come into the auditorium and was standing in the doorway listening.

the question that mulisch extends to us is: who stands on your threshold?

my trouble, i suppose, is that no one leans in my doorway any longer, but i haven't learnt to perform for myself, and that is not at all a comfortable thing to have to admit.

My trouble is that I still look for for your presence in my doorway.

Talking to WN on the phone yesterday:

Me: Um. So I'm going to be in LA for a few days, maybe. Should I try to - ?
WN: No.
Me: How did you know what I was going to ask?
WN: Do you know how many dimensions you have?
Me: 2? Half?
WN: Fewer.

Bugger.

Observations

1. People are lumpy and misshapen. When you cut out their photos in Photoshop? And you try to capture each strand of hair and follow the line of their sleeve? It takes a good deal of judicious airbrushing before they look like how I fondly imagine real people to look, i.e. non-lumpy and quite shapen.

2. I know the steering wheel tends towards the straight and narrow, if left to itself, but roads don't; they curve just for me.

3. Can we start a campaign against jaywalkers? And a traffic light awareness campaign?

Mother's Day

My brother is on the floor drawing the parts of a heart on a shiny blue heart he cut out himself, because my mom's a biology teacher and my brother...is a boy.

Still. Isn't he sweet?

13 - Mission statement

Let us honour if we can
The vertical man,
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.

- Auden

Incidentally, the James Fenton lecture on Auden from which most of this is taken can be found here.

12 - Resolution

I have to do some work tonight. This morning. Somehow.

11

A Pact

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root -
Let there be commerce between us.

- Ezra Pound

10

I think of some philosopher asking Wittgenstein how he managed to live according to his own philosophy and Wittgenstein saying, the bloody hard way.

But even that's adolescent.

It's not that hard, not for us, is it?

My dad tells me I can't start from the attitude that everything has a solution. Which is an odd thing for anyone to say to me, except that I'm a completely different person with my dad. I'm all jumpy and bitey and impatient. I don't know why. Well - all kinds of reasons - sometimes I don't want to be complicit with my dad because he's awfully nice to me but not really, not ever, to my mom, he jumps on her all the time - and I do understand his jokes, I just don't want to say, don't want to have to say, well I'm on your side - but then my mom laughs at him too, and then looks at me. I don't want to be on anyone's side! And I'm all of 6 years old again.

My dad started talking about his friend, a lawyer struggling to maintain his one-man firm, tried to build a career and so married late and now he's old but his kids are quite young and he still hasn't paid off his mortgage - talking about failure, how hard it was to start again - and oh I didn't want to hear, so started chatting very blithely about oh how his friend hadn't failed, he could still do all kinds of stuff. I hate myself when I'm with my dad. I don't want to talk about failure and the possibility of failure. I don't want to feel - compassion? because pity wouldn't be quite right, but compassion sounds too grand, far grander than anything I might feel - for my dad. I don't want, isn't that terrible?

9 - Jellyfish

Watched Bright Future on...some weekend. Think it was last weekend.

I'm getting increasingly impatient with movies about disaffected, disconnected youth. I can see the temptation of course - which is also, of course, why I'm impatient with these shows - wandering around as though catatonic is not the hard bit. Getting lost, whether or not in translation, isn't the hard bit. It's practically a compulsory stage of adolescence. But one should stop being a teenager at some point, should one not?

Not that I'm there yet.

There's a bit in one of James Fenton's lectures, where he's talking about Dylan Thomas's attitude towards the war. Thomas says he's tempted to participate sometimes, "but the temptation's not too strong, and the sanity of the imagination is."

Drifting around isn't particularly imaginative, is it?

8

I also have

The Shins, Oh, Inverted World
Modest Mouse, The Moon & Antarctica
The New Pornographers, Electric Version
no money left.

7

[These are in no discernible order whatsoever, of course.]

Von writes, out of the blue, to ask if I've heard Mermaid Avenue.

Yes!

It's nice to have one's taste vindicated, isn't it?

And Wilco's new album's coming out in June sometime (obviously not big enough a fan to know the exact date)!

6

What if everyone on the trip, all of whom are more senior than me, think I'm a complete air-head?

5

I've spent the early part of this week cutting up people's photos in Photoshop and pasting them onto a roller-coaster. To make a present for my director, who's just left.

Plenty of variety in this job.

(I realise it's ungracious to complain right after the Vegas trip entry. Sorry.)

4

Um. There's a study trip to Las Vegas. That's why I'm trying to finish my papers. From the 15th to the 22nd, though the dates may shift.

3 - Cretinism

More from Barbarian Invasions -

The (old, sick, dying) professor and his friends are all sitting around talking about their youth and sex and then they make a list of all the isms they went through - marxism, structuralism, deconstructionism...(there were more, but I can't remember them).

One: Was there any ism we didn't try out?
Another: Cretinism!

And later there's a dinner party (omelette with truffle oil, was it?) where they talk about intelligence. How there were periods in history - Socrates' Athens, the Renaissance, the beginning of the American Revolution - when people were intelligent. What has happened to all that intelligence?

Ahh.

2 - Illiterates

[The numbered bits are suppressed blogs. Do you write blogs in your head all the time? And then somehow not commit them to screen? Am I just weird? Oh shut up.]

In Barbarian Invasions, which was the high point of the film fest for me -

The professor's ex-students come to visit him [they've been bribed by his son to do so, but we don't know this - or I don't know this - at this point]. They hang around awkwardly, say they miss him, and then leave.

One of the friends, also an ageing academic type: For illiterates, they're really quite sweet.

Happy birthday [insert name here*]!

I'm sorry I'm not there. Really do have to finish a paper. My own damn fault of course.

[* deleted for modesty]

1

James Fenton on Auden:

"Ursula Niebuhr, the theologican wife of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who was critical of pacifism, gives an account of Auden's commencement address at Smith College in 1940... Auden called his address a sermon, but he put the text at the end. It is from Rilke's Words to a Young Poet:

The only courage that is demanded of us: [is] to have courage for the most extraordinary, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter....Only he or she who is ready for everything...will live the relation to another as something alive....We must always hold to what is difficult, then that which still seems to us the most hostile will become what we most trust and find most faithful...Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

And Ursula Niebuhr goes on to recall how Auden

wrote sympathetically about Rilke's negative reaction to the First World War. 'Not to understand: yes, that was my entire occupation in those years'; and commented on these words of Rilke, 'To be conscious but to refuse to understand, is a positive act that calls for courage of the highest order.' But he admitted that, 'It may be difficult for the outsider...to distinguish it from selfish or cowardly indifference.' For him, Rilke was the writer to whom to turn, 'for strength to resist the treacherous temptations that approach us disguised as righteous duties.'

I think of Blake's question:

Thou has a lap full of seed
And this is a fine country.
Why dost thou not cast thy seed
And live in it merrily.

To which the answer must be: if only it were as easy as that. If only what the question supposes were true. Auden had the greatest gifts of any of our poets in the twentieth century, the greatest lap full of seed. And it was given to him to know that, and to doubt it, to know and to doubt it. The sense of being primus inter pares, the sense of always being the youngest person in the room, the spirit that could say to posterity, 'You did not live in our time - be sorry' - all this was given him. And then, to be conscious but to refuse to understand, to live not in a fine but in a lean country, to hold to what was most difficult, to face that which was most hostile - this too was given him. To make mistakes, to know humiliation - this too was given him. To find himself wronged or in the wrong, to find his courage taken for cowardice, to find himself human in short - all this was given him. 'Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us,' and perhaps that forward impulse of renunciation implied a gesture towards the terrible. This was where his Gift had brought him, to this lean country and to these caves of accusation.' "

- James Fenton, "Auden in the End", from The Strength of Poetry.

today

I filed and made sandwiches (which people ate, yes) and went to the gym (aren't you proud of me?) and made a paper aeroplane for a 4-year-old boy.

How to be a writer

James Fenton's lectures on poetry tells us that a very young Stephen Spender asked an equally young Auden if he (Spender) shoud not write prose instead. Auden: You must write nothing but poetry, we do not want to lose you for poetry. Spender: But do you really think I'm any good? Auden: Of course. Spender: But why? Auden: Because you are so infinitely capable of being humiliated. Art is born of humiliation.

Well if Auden's right, I should be a bloody excellent poet, shouldn't I?

cut my nails

I have fingertips!

dumdeedum

indie rock

"Anne Sexton liked to arrive about ten minutes late for her own performance: let the crowd work up a little anticipation. She would saunter to the podium, light a cigarette, kick off her shoes, and in a throaty voice say, 'I'm gonna read a poem that tells you what kind of poet I am, what kind of woman I am, so if you don't like it you can leave.' Then she would launch into her signature poem:

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved your nude arms at villagers going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind."

(Germaine Greer's description)

And she did the reading to the accompaniment of a rock band.

Hong Lou Meng

Oh my dears. We went to watch "Dream of a Red Chamber" - and it was the most bimbotic production of hong lou meng the likes of which will never be seen again. One hopes. Much weeping and wailing and flailing from chair to chair and - oh - much singing. Witness:

Lin mei mei finds out that Bao yu is to marry Pao jie jie.

Background chorus: She was thunderstruck!

[Loud portentous music starts. She lurches backwards into the pillar, clutching her heart. Servant flutters up.]

Servant: [singing] What is wrong?

She: [singing] Ah! [Lurches forward into different pillar and sobs into it.]

Servant: [singing] Don't cry!

She: [singing] My heart is broken!

[Lurches on to Bao yu's rooms. Background music dies and she runs in complete silence - obviously to show dramatic tension. Finds Bao yu - played by Lin Ching Hsia; the entire cast was female except for the father, who appears in the first and last scene - propped up in bed with determinedly blank expression.]

She: [thankfully not singing] Who are you going to marry?

Bao yu: Lin mei mei.

She: And where is your heart now?

Bao yu: I have given my heart to Lin mei mei.

She: Ah!

[Cut to shot of - white cockatrice? - flapping around agitatedly. Cut back to Lin mei mei and Bao yu. Much weeping/flailing/giggling. She lurches out. Portentous music starts up.]

I exaggerate, but only a little. It was amazing. Oh and when she died? Never saw a more pointlessly drawn-out death scene, or one so devoid of pathos. At one point she collapses, her maid collapses on top of her, and we hold our breaths - then the scene cuts to her in a (different) chair looking pale and wan, and someone in the row behind us says, "Aiyah not dead yet." Exactly.

reputation

Walking out to take the lift down to go talk to the IT people (i.e. work-related stuff, really), I run into a colleague in the lift lobby. "Coffee break?" he asks immediately.

Well! My reputation precedes me.

But did he go to parties at day's end?

Thank you Dom! How do you do it?

You Want a Social Life, with Friends

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What's true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn't time enough, my friends--
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends--
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day's end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.

- Kenneth Koch

note to self

From the ARTSingapore show: Shinoda Todo and Yoshi Imamura.

yesterday meaning thursday of course

Addy said, Let's have a party! At my house! Now! And we got fruit and cheese from Carrefour and went to her place and watched American Idol, which I've never seen before - the Jasmine girl that I hear everyone talk about is incredibly annoying and so is her flower - and was pleasantly not drunk the whole time, which makes a nice change, doesn't it? c said, we're all hanging out with the wrong people - you should be hanging out with straight men, and I should be hanging out with gay men. Me: But it wouldn't be as fun. c: Not true. Me: But it wouldn't be as comfortable. c: Again not true.

my life distilled

Conversation with my little brother, who's 8 years younger:

Me: What time are you waking up tomorrow?

Him: Early. About 6? 7?

Me: Can wake me up? I need to do work.

Him: I'm sure.

Me: No, really. I really need to do work.

Him: But you'll just say mmm and go back to sleep and wake up at 10 and stone for a bit and have lunch and...I dunno, spend time somehow, and then when I come back at night you'll say you haven't done any work yet.

Me: (Indignant silence.)

There's a Kenneth Koch poem somewhere

that says that of three things, working (writing), making love and going out with friends, a man has time for one of them well, maybe two, but not all three.

Now that's a lie.

I can't even do one of them.

(Can't remember the title of the poem, but it's in the collection (Straits? - whatever it is, it's on my wishlist) with "My Olivetti Speaks". Is that spelt right? Oh - I was recently told - thank you Lee - that the last person to use 'spelt', apart from me and my people, was alive 250 years ago. Is that right? Do you all use 'spelled' now? This is distressing.)

Posterity

I like to think that when I leave the office the poor sod after me will flip through my papers and find Pratchett library call numbers and Modest Mouse track listings scribbled in the margins.

(Alright. The Shins, and in pink pen behind an accounts statement. This is an odd kind of retribution for spending a long time painstakingly typing numbers into an Excel spreadsheet only to have them - just when I thought I had got the hang of them - disappear on me. Isn't that just like a number?)

I dreamt of my (big) boss last night

and he was telling me that something wasn't allowed, can't remember what. No - he didn't tell me - he sent a note - right at the end of my dream, which up to that point was in no way related to the office.

I'm sending my therapy bill to the office.

Taken out of context I must seem so strange

(Ani DiFranco, "Firedoor". What's the proper format for song titles?)

This is addictive, isn't it?

Stoppit yen go do some work.

Oh - conversation with my long-suffering boss today:

Me: But what's the point of working out the numbers? If our logic holds, then the tax will work out to be the same in the end.

He: [The big boss] just wants to see if our logic holds...

Me: But my logic's better than my numbers, so if the numbers will probably be wrong even if the logic holds.

He wasn't convinced. I go count beans.

Just so

"Thank you. You're very kind. I won't be stupid again. I'm giving you a lot of trouble."

"Not a bit. I only wish I could help you."

"You can. If only you would. I'm sure you're clever. You look clever. I'm not clever. I do wish I was. I think I should have been happier if I'd been clever. It must be nice to do things. I've so often thought that if I could have painted pictures or ridden a motor-cycle or something, I should have got more out of my life."

Harriet agreed, gravely, that it was perhaps a good thing to have an occupation of some sort.

- Dorothy Sayers, Have His Carcase

Another reason to love Wilco

Fess up to downloading music off the web and make a donation.

There is nothing outside the blog

Oh! There's a very very funny blog entry spoofing Derrida. Please go to The Weblog.

Coming out of the tall grass

BACK!

Was going to stay away until I had something to say that wasn't a complaint, but realised that the day would never come and I do rather miss blogging. So, um, hi.

Can I recommend to you Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots, and Leaves? She wants to set up a militant wing of the society for the protection of the apostrophe (apparently that society does exist and in a most respectable and genteel way) to go around correcting misplaced apostrophes on greengrocers' signs and movie posters and I feel her pain. Besides, she's funny. And she has convinced me of the virtues of punctuation, even in blogs and emails. I am a reformed creature.

And (though she would deplore my tendency to run to italics) there's a wonderful example of a misplaced apostrophe in her book: BOBS' MOTORS. If I ever have a son I shall call him Bobs. Or not.

I should say this on the book blog we all share, but um I've forgotten how to post anything there. (If you're reading this, will you teach me?) So. In the last few months - god has it been that long? - I've stumbled upon George Eliot and never looked back. So far I've read Mill on the Floss, which I now regret refusing to read back when my sister was doing it for A Level Lit (sorry); Daniel Deronda, which I tried to like and couldn't; and Middlemarch, which gives me the same sort of muddled bewilderment that Marx does - I know I'm in the presence of a master, but it's too much to absorb. I can't like Dorothea much, though. I like her in her muddled and anguished moments, and I do sympathise, however reluctant I am to admit it, with the Dorothea at the beginning of the book, but it's too hard to like someone who's beatific half the time. I was looking for Middlemarch because A. S. Byatt said she read George Eliot as an undergrad and couldn't understand the appeal, and then read Middlemarch when she was struggling with teaching and writing and bringing up her kids and wondering what the hell it was all about. Well I've far more choice that Dorothea did, so much so the comparison's ridiculous, and it's probably unsound critical practice to take books quite so personally but - I can see myself doing that, getting into some modern-day equivalent of a marriage to Casaubon (or getting into a marriage with a modern-day Casaubon), and then being terribly unhappy because I can't get out of it. (Beat.) Want to help me break my bond? But what would I do then?

Damn but I wasn't going to talk about my job, or my utter failure at it. There are some days when I'm awfully depressed about work and some when I'm all psyched up about my job and I've come to the realisation that these days bear absolutely no correlation to the work itself. Do you think it's all hormonal, and maybe I should just go have more chocolate, or something? I shall go find some.