Past 3 in the morning. I am incredibly glad to be in New York and I can feel all the threads of this year unravelling out of control. In a bad way I mean. Is that strange?

But a quick recap. And less inanity post-bath, with any luck.

(One) Public interview by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim yesterday evening. Most of the musical discussion was over my head but I remember a phrase of Barenboim's: the unrepeatability of music. The unrepeatability of the musical moment, I guess.

(Two) The White Sheikh, dir. Fellini. I forget the Italian title. Didn't know what to expect when I got there -- and had a very pleasant surprise. Amazingly funny comedy. Beautifully, confidently shot. The guy giving the preface said that it could have been inspiration for the Purple Rose of Cairo and yeah I can see how that worked.

(Three) Muddling through Susan Sontag's In America. Muddling through is not quite the right word perhaps; it is a compelling book but I'm getting too sleepy to pay attention.

(Four) Diana Krall, I Miss You So.

Tuesday morning 1.35 a.m. We're into October already! And I have decided that since I will never get up early in the morning unless, possibly, my life absolutely and immediately depended on it, I'll just pretend to work at night instead.

Wolf Trap (or perhaps Wolf Den), dir. Jiri Weiss, 1957: a strange love triangle: couple adopt an orphaned teenager. The man is the Mayor and the District Vet and not very old and kinda good-looking I guess in a scholarly kind of way in the right light. Or at least he's supposed to be. His wife is Mrs Bennet multiplied a hundredfold. The girl is wide-eyed and blonde and pretty. Intense -- melodramatic -- emotional exploration because of course she and the man fall in love but they are both, for different reasons, grateful to the wife.

And lots of Chinese soft porn. I think The Golden Lotus -- the two chapters I read of it anyway -- is soft porn. It may be lots of other things besides but I think it was written to be soft porn. And it's damn funny, but that might be because Chinese doesn't translate well into English, let alone grandiloquent classical Chinese narratives.

Unfortunately now Monday morning, 12.54 a.m. What would you do if you woke up at 1 p.m. and only got to the library at 4 and had a million things to read on social constructivist international relations theory and had absolutely no more clean clothes left? Do everything in the library except work, including reading the Columbia Spectator for the first time, and then go for dinner at the Afghan Kebab House (102nd St and Broadway and incidentally very good -- even if anything with 'kebab' in it makes me think fondly of Ahmed's) and then come home resolving to work and go straight online to read West Wing recaps.

10.48 p.m.

1. I Not Stupid, dir. Jack Neo. Fantastic. I really enjoyed that. Especially the campness of it all. And nicely -- gently? -- satirical.

2. Dinner at Kenneth's. It occurred to me on the way back that all these years overseas I've always been friends with someone who can cook well. Really, eat-till-I'm-stuffed well.

3. 3.45 a.m. Back from raspberry beer that actually tasted of raspberries at the Belgian Bar somewhere on 8th St/St Mark's? Take the 1 line to the 8th St/NYU stop (Christopher St?) and walk further into the Village.

4. 5.52 a.m.You think, that perhaps if I not sleep for the next 24 hours, I will get half my work and all my laundry done?

very early saturday morning 1.18 a.m. After reading most of Elizabeth Peters' Naked Once More at a go. Desperately in need of work. Shopped-out. Lovely comic-book (graphic novel) shopping with Yisheng in the morning -- St Mark's comics; the shop person promised that they'd have Sandman tmrw but I don't really want to go back to Brooklyn for them, 10% off or not; and I got something Yisheng recommended, Kabuki which I haven't touched because don't want to lose soul to it until have done some token reading. And then lunch at Sophie's Cuban Cuisine on 96 Chambers Street with Yisheng and Addy and Mona and then dropped by lovely lovely little designer boutique somewhere on Reade Street and then wended slowly to Chinatown, dropping by shops and suchlike. And wonderful (am running out of adjectives) stationery shop called -- oh I forgot what. Somewhere nearish Broadway/Canal Street I think but could be sadly wrong. New York is such a shopping place. I am so broke.

Heard someone -- a girl -- give a pretty good evil MWAhahahaha laugh, followed by a HEHeheheh cackle on the way back from the subway station. And then heard her friend tell her, in all seriousness, that the mwahaha laugh was more of an evil man's laugh, directed at someone, whereas the witch's cackle, the heheheh, was more of a witch rubbing her hands and cackling while she gazed into her crystal ball. The pathology of evil laughs.


wishlist item two: a fit and functional body, so can wear pretty clothes.
wishlist item three: lots and lots of money to buy pretty clothes.
wishlist item four: creative talent to make pretty clothes if cannot afford to buy them (cf. wishlist item three).
wishlist item five: many many graphic novels and place to browse them in. Is that very socially dysfunctional?

1.46 a.m. I need to learn how to write reviews. Film reviews specifically but all art-ish reviews in general, really. But till then, for the record:

- Loves of a Blonde, dir. Milos Forman. Beautifully shot. Still camerawork like close-up shots. About a factory girl from the country. The movie starts with her telling her friend about some guy who's given her a ring, some guy who picked her up in the woods one day. A forest-ranger. Married. It's peacetime. Some army division comes to the town -- the manager of this enormous factory asked them to, to please his girls -- and three heavy-set army men pick up the girl, Ancula, and her friends. Or try to; the girls decide in the end not to leave with them. To the woods. Apparently the options are (a) tea-shops, (b) the woods/parks, (c) the girls' dorm. A really crammed squashed dorm. She gets distracted by the piano-player who persuades her to come up to his room by saying that he wouldn't touch her and then sleeps with her. A piano-player from Prague. Milo. She goes to Prague to look for him. I'm telling a very bald and boring story but it was shot in loving detail. The path of a wedding ring rolling across the floor. The look on someone's face, the way they drop their eyes, the way they pick up their cap. I think of photographs and camera stills because there was a still quality to the shots -- but also a kind of restlessness? The camera picking out details. People fidgeting. Oh god I'm so bad at this.

- L'oro di Napoli. dir. Vittorio de Seca. Who is of course very very good. And a compelling actor. Four stories set in Naples. Gets darker and darker; the first two are funny, the third full of a kind of black pathos but still funny, and the last quite dark and slightly bizarre. And kinda tragic. Sophia Loren is beautiful, Toto is a genius. OK no more but it has to be seen. Italian neo-realist cinema. Incidentally also the director of The Bicycle Thief and Umberto Dee (I misspell, but that's the phonetic spelling of the title).

argh.

wishlist item one: functional and functioning brain.

9 something p.m. My computer clock is faster than the Blogger clock. Which is all kinda surreal cos it means that I'm writing these things after they've been published. Anyhow. Someone living on the floor below is practising on his -- sax? I'm bad at music and musical instruments and stuff. Which is fortunate because he's not terribly good but the music is mellow and kinda fills the night, or at least the hollow shaft-like thing that my window looks out on. My neighbour's alarm clock is going off at 15-minute intervals. Not so euphonious a night sound.



almost 11 pm now. I'm back from borrowing out all the (four) Elizabeth Peters books in the Butler stacks. The stacks are scary when they go dark. Not quite as scary as the rolling ones in Oxford, but nonetheless. And then briefly read bits of one book on the Low steps -- there's something about wide steps that invites sitting and reading, isn't there? -- and then tore self away to return here before my eyes fell out of their sockets. But I love being on campus at night. There are always groups of people playing frisbee or football, and others sitting around on steps/benches/fountain rims just chatting softly. The night makes people mellow. I'd rather talk to someone at night; people tend to be more relaxed, more willing to open up. There's a guy outside wandering around the curb -- not a homeless guy I mean; I think this one is waiting for something/someone? -- and singing softly 'She's got a ticket to ri-i-ide'. Either he's waiting for someone or he belongs to the 'Access-a-Ride' van parked nearby, which makes the song incredibly corny. Night sounds.

almost 1 p.m. I'm late for class (again).

The Ten Desiderata for Love (circa. late imperial China)

One: Spend money lavishly.
Two: Take infinite pains.
Three: Use sweet words and honeyed phrases.
Four: Be tender and solicitous.
Five: Court her with longing looks.
Six: Display your battle prowress.
Seven: Be discreet as one deaf and dumb.
Eight: Select a friend to aid your enterprise.
Nine: Don fresh clothes.
Ten: Be affable and good-humoured.

taken from McLaren transl., The Chinese Femme Fatale 1994

11.55 a.m. i.e. a time when I really shouldn't be in my room eating cornflakes with orange juice (separately) and listening to illegally-downloaded music.

room inventory:
- cups with tea dregs caramelizing in them: 1
- posters etc. decorating walls in tasteful manner: 0
- t-shirts, jeans etc. piled on back of chair/bed: 8?
- cornflake crumbs on floor: ask the cockroaches
- knives badly in need of washing: 1
- papers, stolen library slips, tea bags etc. randomly strewn across room: innumerable
- of which, copies of the onion: 2
- classes i have completed the reading for: 0

wheee

3.15 a.m. New York. (I have yet to grow tired of writing New York.) Set this up again to record what little I have seen of New York -- and because I have a lot of work to do and have no intention of doing it. So here it is. And here I am.

110th and Amsterdam.

Shang yue. The sky faintly orange with lamplight
and tonight the moon bright enough to compete,
big like a streetlamp. A car horns when we stop
in the middle of the road to look. First official day
of autumn, and we’re explaining – inventing –
the origins of the mid-autumn festival to Tomoko.
– Is it like the Korean moon festival – a kind of
Korean thanksgiving? – No. Maybe. We’ve forgotten
all our traditions except the food. (Laughter.) Later,
out of the kitchen window, with crumbly greasy
days-old Chinatown mooncakes and green tea
with a panda on the box from West Side supermarket,
we’ll look for and not find the moon.

New York, 23 Sept 2002

meow?

about 11.30 pm, listening to Shawne's Singin in the Rain, at long last sorting out my untouched Economists.

Richard Schulte, ethnobotanist. Explored the Amazonian rainforest.
Julia Margaret Cameron, photographer in the 1800s.

about 11.30 pm, listening to Rent

have a Starbucks napkin from Borders on Saturday (when the waiter took my chair away from under me when I stood up) that says: Vir virtutis sum. English translation: I am a manly man. Shawne tells me 'vir' means 'man' in Italian (Latin?) -- and therefore 'virtue', that which a man does. Isn't that cool? In a bad, sexist way of course.

Shawne and I looked up 'ethnic' in the dictionary today: it comes (through ecclesiastical Latin) from ethnos, meaning 'nation', and ethnikos, meaning 'heathen'. I think we should put forward a new formulation of the civic/ethnic nationalism distinction: civic for godly nations, and ethnic for pagan, heathen ones.

just before 9 pm

and i'm home! eating! having cooked dinner! instead of in the bod. amazing. and amazingly, yknow, sad.

almost 9 pm

if you stand at the windows of the ppe reading room -- there's a liquid gold sunset over trinity lawns, behind and through the trees, shading up into a deepening pink/purple -- and rows of students bent over their books reflected in the window, over the lawns -- the white flowers look like snow, beneath the sun -- kinda puts things in perspective. :)

and, and -- someone came up to the window to look at the sunset too, someone i didn't know, and we agreed that the sunset was very beautiful.

11 something at night

and i just had mushroom soup and the world is good. :)

afternoon, radcliffe science library (cos open on sundays. don't say it.)

i just wrote, quite seriously, on my finals notes: is the tree ontologically independent of God?

i think it's time to quit.

about 1.30 a.m.

why do countries matter, anyway? the things we care about tend to be precisely those things not chosen -- family, country -- i'd say love, too --

hell does this all matter. we go home, we do our jobs, and forces larger than us will determine the direction of our country -- of the country we call ours -- it doesn't take much does it. our parents were the first generation born in singapore, and they call it home, cos they've known no other. some of our grandparents do, some think of china/wherever as home. people adapt quickly, don't they? one's tempted to make facile psychological/pathological assumptions, that people need homes/some place to call a home, that they form attachments quickly, and all the rest of it. and then we say that this is how it has always been; that we have always called this home; that there is some bond deeper than -- oh hell. didn't heidegger say that what was specifically human wasn't our ability to reason but our ability to turn instinct into art? all animals have to eat but we have gourmet cuisine. all animals live somewhere; we love our homes.

somewhere somehow i give a damn about all this. or i did.

i wrote to you that this has been a year of letting go. things, people, dreams, ambitions, memories, loves, ideals, principles -- cos i betrayed them or realized i didn't care enough for them or both. strange how one only realizes how much one actually cares after betrayal. like winterson says: why is the measure of love loss? or, less poetically, wtf is wrong with people? -- or perhaps one shouldn't generalize one's sins. wtf is wrong with me. -- do you remember the sandman toast? to old gods, absent friends, lost loves, and the season of mists. and may each of us always give the devil his due. -- either you didn't like the last bit as much, or, more accurately i think, thought it would upset people if i proposed it as a toast. but why not, after all? if one sells one's soul (we don't really believe in souls anymore, do we, in this cynical age?), i suppose one should know the price. geez talk about a cheap metaphor.

almost 9 pm

yesterday i saw bend it like beckham with shawne and it was excellent and today i took a detour along the river on the way back from lwc to look at houseboats (the artemis is for sale; 29 500 quid; narrow, 47ft; purple and green but i guess that can be repainted; call 01865 749363. or maybe 794363. can't remember). times like those i remember why i love oxford. and as for the other times -- peace is too easily shattered, isn't it? by the least violence. i am accused of being an ignorant and tyrannical liberal -- i stand guilty of the first, not sure about the second, and i guess i am probably liberal? i believe in love and truth and justice and freedom; but i'm not sure i believe in people -- myself first of all. *shrug* peter wimsey: the first thing a principle does is to kill someone. i think that's right; if you believe strongly enough, then everything goes down before it, including your welfare, and that of those around you. and if you don't care that much, then i guess that's human enough. tout ca comprendre...or rather, plus ca change...

If I can let you go as trees let go
Their leaves, so casually, one by one;
If I can come to know what they do know,
That fall is the release, the consummation;
Then fear of time and the uncertain fruit
Would not distemper the great lucid skies
This strangest autumn, mellow and acute.
If I can take the dark with open eyes
And call it seasonal, not harsh or strange
(For love itself may need a time of sleep),
And, treelike, stand unmoved before the change,
Lose what I can to keep what I can keep,
The strong root still alive under the snow,
Love will endure -- if I can let you go.

May Sarton, Autumn Sonnets II

almost 2 a.m.

shawne and adrian and i went for dinner after the bod at the new lebanese/kebab place where haagen daz used to be (where 'selection of six starters' apparently means that the waiter selects six at seeming randomness for you') and then shawne and i went to new college garden and sat on a bench and looked at the stars -- and it was a clear night and i think we saw the big dipper and loads of other stars except can't tell which is which -- and we just hung out for a bit and it was really good and helped me get a perspective on things. so i get a 2:2. fuck it lah. i've been doing work -- it's not enough and it's not very good but i have been working and i have been trying and if i get a 2:2 there wasn't much else i could have done, short of stay in the library every day since 2nd year...i'm fairly good at this. not very good, and it kinda depends which paper, but reasonably good. the exams are not a measure of my worth. i'm going to write it down here so i remember. and i've learnt a lot from oxford and i'm so glad i came here just because and whatever else, i'm going to keep that. and of course i'll probably be really crushed when the results come out and i get a 2:2 but like shawne says maybe it's just god/the universe :) trying to tell you something. this sounds like a bad self-help book or a bad beatles rip-off but -- let it go already. exams don't count for very much in the grand scheme of things -- the grand scheme of happiness and love and life, that is. as opposed to psc-world. :) -- earlier, standing outside blackwell's art shop, we saw two guys in black tie and a bottle of wine skip down the pavement singing 'we're going to see the wizard' -- and then later there were stars on a clear night over new college garden, and a friend to talk too -- that's oxford, just like that.

past a bedtime i can't afford

ok. tired. i give up. vade in pacem. i'm going to earth for a bit.

harriet: it would hurt like hell.
peter: what would that matter, as long as it made a good book?

hell it's not like you read the damn thing anyway.

(and then i remembered that i had a card and it has the sweetest dolphins on the cover and i'm happy now. :) doesn't take much does it?)