On job titles

Today we met someone who had the job (inter alia) of Senior Intermittent Advisor to the US Treasury.

I'd like to officially be an Intermittent Employee or an Occasional Worker or even an Infrequent Thinker.

Charles V could vault onto his horse in a single bound

(I think) but the HK Jockey Club apparently holds a government-granted monopoly on pari-mutuel betting on horse raising [sic].

Saved!

Are teen movies getting better? Saw Mean Girls a while ago and then Saved a few days ago and both have more or less the same plot and cast of characters and both very well done (except that Saved was funnier. I particularly like how the Jesus fish on the Jewish girl's car had "gefilte" written in it. How many people have I offended already?). Funny and sharp and able to laugh at itself for taking with some seriousness the characters and the genre - and rather formulaic. In that characterisation rather like romantic comedies (thinking specifically now of Working Title productions).

The Legend

There is a Bruce Lee coffeeshop (called "Legend Eating House" or something like it) down Circular Road somewhere with posters and photographs of Bruce Lee on the wall and his face superimposed on the shop signs between bowls of noodles (it's a noodle shop) and on every waiter's shirt and a bust of Bruce Lee on the fridge top. We asked if any of the figurines were on sale and the manager/owner/uncle said no, none of them, but if we liked them we too could join the Hong Kong Bruce Lee Club and why not come again and see them another day?

Descartes

My sister's joke -

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

Yeah I know.

Not gentlemen

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

- Bertie Wooster from Aunts Aren't Gentlemen

On grass snakes

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

Did they not say it would be bliss?

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

*puts head in hands in despair*

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

If so, unwind me

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

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

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

In search of lost karma

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

(For the record)

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

Room with a view

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

Word of the Day

My brother found this on dictionary.com:

Grok: To understand profoundly through intuition or empathy.

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

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

Isn't that fantastic?

Grown-up-ness

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

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

Study of Time (2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Study of Time (1)

Study of Time

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

- Kenneth Koch

Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

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

For Minzhi, who will be reading Moby Dick

Reading Moby Dick at 30,000 Feet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Tony Hoagland

On glazed doughnuts

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