The centre of the universe

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

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

for Julian

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

Marking time

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

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

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

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

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

[to hold the title line thing in place]

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

So.

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

Hobson's choice

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

Best Behaviour

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

One Art

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

An excerpt of a letter to Robert Lowell:

March 30,1959

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

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

inter alia

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

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

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

Recipe for Amelia Simmons's Independence Cake

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

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

Shiny things

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

England and America

Notes in vaguely chronological order:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

Your bottom is a basket full of fruits and meat

The Peasant Declares His Love

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

- Emile Roumer

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

Nourishment

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

The thing about Singapore Idol

and the ones who can't sing:

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

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

Farm visits today!

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

birthday greetings

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

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

flowers

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

(To say, thank you.)

how Singapore prepares you for China

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

so

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

I like this Edna St Vincent Millay

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


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

In vaguely chronological but really no particular order

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider all the relevant posts linked

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

Stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google, or, A Remembered Conversation

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

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

Postcript: And so it does.

Well, was it untoward?

From one of the Sports Night transcripts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other thing

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

When we grow up

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

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

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

(3) Children's books.

Catching up

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

Random and less random thoughts:

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

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

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

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

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

So what have you been up to?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mustafa

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

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

this weekend

I read Thud!

The library came through after all.

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

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

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

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

mm

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

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

why attempts to clean up my room inevitably fail

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

2. I am easily defeated (see 1).

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

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

Aalto

Becaus I found these notes in my notebook:

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

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

Before Sunrise

1. Beautiful movie. Perfectly shot.

2. Julie Delpy is luminous.

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

4. Of course they slept together.

5. I think about you almost all the time.

Following the old tradition

I'm starting the year late and slightly hungover.

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

on this island

On This Island

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

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

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

- Auden

oh dear

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

I suppose better it happens than not.

odds and ends

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

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

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

Inventor: Sen. Professor Dr. Sir Zeng Guoyan

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

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

remembering the tsunami

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

Carol Ann Duffy talks to Jeanette Winterson

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

Four notes from Melaka

My family drove to Melaka some weekends ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This has been translated as:

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

This has been translated as:

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

Merry Christmas everyone!

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

Christmas eve eve

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

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

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

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

Happy Christmas eve eve everyone!

Remarks on Narnia

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

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

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

4. Tilda Swinton was magnificence itself.

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

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

marriage by any other name

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

groaning

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

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

Tomorrow is Narnia!

to say

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

mm

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

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

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

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

So the blog's not too neglected

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

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

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

on the radio

Radio topic: do women use sex as a weapon?

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

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

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

Radio DJ: There's no help for it?

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

Radio DJ: As are women!

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


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

me too

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

- Diana Athill, Stet

Shoes and ships and sealing wax

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

thud

how does one get hold of a copy?

On reading essays and petticoats

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

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

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

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

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

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

harry potter

I can talk about it now.

[ ]

Frank O'Hara to Larry Rivers:

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

Well get started

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

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

(Thank you for sending this.)

Bring tap shoes and a song

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the mail

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

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

(3) A cloth card featuring an elephant.

Thank you.

You have a reservoir of optimism, he said

IRA statement

Eavan Boland

Pomegranate

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

- Eavan Boland

tchotchke

Just cause I felt like saying it.

Doorways

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

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

Happy birthday Jianyi!

And happy fireworks to you too.

[ ]

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

- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Again, again

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

I know. I know. Still.

And worthy to be remembered...

On a wall in the Old North Church in Boston:

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

Camino de Santiago

Pictures of pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela.

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

The Witches of Eastwick

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

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

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

[well, because]

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

Grace

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

Franzen

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

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

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

...

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

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

Today

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

Egotism And Spiritual Pride

Sayers in a letter to her parents in 1921:

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

Reasons To Read Dante

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

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

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

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

3. That he knows his business.

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

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

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

On Follies

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

Saturday night had sand and sea and the night wind.

Tea and Thou

Painted on the side of a van:

COFFEE AND ME     NON-DAIRY

One Reason I'll Never Be A Writer

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

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

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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

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

Huh

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

What? Or Why I'll Never Be An Ornithologist

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

Engineer-ness

[idle conversation on a colleague]

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

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

Me: Oh well, who doesn't here?

DD: You.

Some books

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

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

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

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

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

He said, what would you like me to write?

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

Star Wars

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

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

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

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

Mm

So I turned 25 a few days back.

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

The problem

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

Future employment/housing prospects

At lunch with WN on Saturday:

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

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

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

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

Kids these days

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

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

What are kids coming to these days?

Reading your mind

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

Strawberry Jam

Confession

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

- Czeslaw Milosz

On re-reading Francis Spufford

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

What is needed

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

Strawberries/ice-cream

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

Shall we attempt to be assaulted by cakes next week?

thank you note

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

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

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can we go out?