On glazed doughnuts

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

Who stands on your threshold?

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

Baybeats

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

The Singer's House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We still believe what we hear

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

The Singer's House

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

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

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


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

Painted shoes

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

(2) Later, mulling over the shoes -

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

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

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

list

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

Rilo Kiley

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

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

London

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

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

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

Falling

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

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

Interregnum

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

- from Louis MacNeice's The Strings are False.

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

London and assorted observations

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

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

Late-night maggi mee

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

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

Sexy Scrabble (reprise)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prayer

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

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

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

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

- Carol Ann Duffy

(Thank you.)

There's a garret in your future

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

Glass houses and stones

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

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

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

Conversation (2)

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

- Anne Carson, Plainwater