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?