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15.10.03
My dears.
As of today, I am a fully paid-up and productive member of society.
Well, paid, at least.
Eventually.
Oh but. Let me tell you the whole story.
I'm supposed to be working on my vices. That's what they call it, vice. Gambling, smoking, drinking.
More specifically, to help develop a policy framework for the gambling industry. Such as it is.
Me.
I don't gamble. I don't smoke. I do drink, but I can get drunk on a glass of red wine, so I'm not sure that counts.
Almost laughed out loud when I was told.
And. The funnier part is. I was transferred to the Social and Security Programmes Directorate from the Economic Programmes Directorate because I said I'd much rather work with social policy than economic policy.
I hope somewhere some god is laughing, cos this would be too good to waste on an accident.
14.10.03
Working seems to be an entirely different kind of game from school and I don't know the rules and I don't even want to play it. It's like worrying about the first day of school all over again, except worse: what if it's too hard too mathsy too damn boring (entirely probable) what if I talk funny and can't find anyone to have lunch with since the whole place is filled with economists and accountants and engineers? At least in school you can find interesting classes and people who like the same things.
Bugger this for a game of soldiers, as Nobby would say.
13.10.03
The problem with clearing out my room is that it didn't use to be my room, or not only my room. There's too much junk. My junk from since I was three and my sister's and things that were stored in the room because there was no other space in the house like unwanted gifts and cassette tapes and a box of rusted tools and a Vietnamese straw hat and random things that just appear. Like test-tubes. What am I going to do with them? Throwing them away is out of the question; I am congenitally incapable of throwing junk away. Why am I in a room where test-tubes are a problem?
Addendum: I have put a flower in one, a sparkly pink pen with a fluffy, er, fluffball at one end in another, and a paintbrush in the third. What would you use a test-tube for?
13.10.03
On alcohol and other poisons:
My little brother comes into my room saying he has a headache and then sees the tiny bottle of Bacardi I brought back from Puerto Rico. What's that? he says. Oh that's Bacardi. Is it nice do you like it? Yes quite (At this point I'm distracted by my computer). So it's alcoholic? Yes it's rum. Will it alleviate headaches? Er. Probably not. Don't try it. Why not, if it's alcohol? If you've never had alcohol before it might give you a worse headache. Ah, he says, and puts the bottle back.
13.10.03
Nocturne
There's nothing worse
than feeling bad and not
being able to tell you.
Not because you'd kill me
or it would kill you, or
we don't love each other.
It's space. The sky is grey
and clear, with pink and
blue shadows under each cloud.
A tiny airliner drops its
specks over the U N Building.
My eyes, like millions of
glassy squares, merely reflect.
Everything sees through me,
in the daytime I'm too hot
and at night I freeze; I'm
built the wrong way for the
river and a mild gale would
break every fibre in me.
Why don't I go east and west
instead of north and south?
It's the architect's fault.
And in a few years I'll be
useless, not even an office
building. Because you have
no telephone, and live so
far away; the Pepsi-Cola sign,
the seagulls and the noise.
- Frank O'Hara
There comes a point, there always comes a point, when you can say you miss him, quietly, with accuracy, with love, and not resent him for it.
13.10.03
Borrowing something Minz quoted in an entirely different context:
I'll never again feel as tall as the sky and as old as the hills and as strong as the sea. I have been given something for a while, and the price of it is that I have to give it back.
After years of escaping economics I'm being returned to it with a vengeance. Wednesday I start at the Ministry of Finance.
So today I made a list of all the things I needed to do and buy before I start work and then sat down to write letters.
12.10.03
One feels - one feels, how completely pretentious - that if I mock people for not reading books, not voluntarily anyway and not for themselves, I should be reading something maybe more intelligent and difficult and rewarding than The Truth? Though reading Pratchett is rewarding, but perhaps not in the right way.
Anyhow. Check out poach's book blog, in which we all write.
3.10.03
Jin wan qu bei jing. See you in a week.
29.9.03
On twerpitude:
'That was always the dream, wasn't it? "I wish I knew then what I know now"? But when you got older, you found out that you now wasn't you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp.'
From Pratchett, Nightwatch.
28.9.03
We have Nightwatch! And my little brother has started reading it - Are there any more Guards books, he says. I'm delighted. Though this will only confirm my mom's opinion that Pratchett is childish and not suitable reading for adults (so I can read it but she can't).
26.9.03
We are going to Beijing. We have paid for our tickets we have accommodation (thanks to Minzhi's Mom's friend) we have maps and guidebooks and it is done we are going. I'm gladder and gladder for this trip.
25.9.03
Somehow I always do manage but
You found them for me, what
I love, lakes and paintings.
- John Ashbery, 'Insane Decisions'
Well not lakes and paintings, exactly.
25.9.03
Completely failing to find my passport photos - why is it you always have millions of photos when you don't need them and none when you do? - but I did find my beer bottle opener in, um, the shape of a shark's head. It looks better than it sounds.
25.9.03
Iris Murdoch: "The love which brings the right answer is an exercise of justice and realism and really looking. The difficulty is to keep the attention fixed on the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair."
Let me get out my checklist.
25.9.03
My grandfather just called to inform me that it's been a long time since I came back. Hai mei zuo gong! Ni zhi dao hen jiu le ma? Ni you mei you da dian hua qu wen, wei she me zhe me jiu hai mei zuo gong? Zhen de hen jiu le! Na ni zai jia li zuo she me? Mei dian zai jia, bu shi hen men? Wei she me hai mei zuo gong, zhe me jiu le!
23.9.03
Wouldn't it be nice, Choonping said the other day, after watching Amadeus at Addy's house, to believe so strongly in your own talent and be right?
22.9.03
Shall I go to China, you think? I'd like to but I vaguely feel that I should linger here and try to be useful.
22.9.03
Have just been interrogated by a Prudential salesman lurking around Tampines MRT.
(1) University
He: So are you a student or are you working?
I: Uh, I'm looking for a job.
: You just graduated?
: Yah. May, June...
: (Puzzled) Did you study here...
: Er, England.
: Oh, England! Which university?
: Er. Oxford.
: Oxford? The famous Oxford, that one?
: Er. Yes?
(2) Scholarships
: You're a scholar right?
: Er. Yes?
: I thought so...So why you say you're looking for a job?
: I haven't started working yet.
: But I thought...you're PSC is it?
: Er. Yes?
: I thought they allocated jobs to the scholars...
: (here we go again)
: But Oxford, must be top scholar, right?
: No, not really, not at all.
: Sorry lah, I got a lot of friends also scholar...they say there're two kinds of scholars? The admin service kind and...
: I'm the other kind.
(3) JCs
: Eh I ask you, are you from RJC?
: Er. Yes?
: Heh I thought so, can tell from the way you talk.
: Really ah?
: Yah, can tell one...I got a lot of friends from RJ, you know...I'm from Hwa Chong...
(4) Career paths
: Not say cannot get jobs now. It depends...if you're very active, then maybe you might find it quite hard to work under a boss...you know...but if you're willing to run around, just go up to people on the street and talk...like I'm talking to you...then it's okay. You dare or not, go up to people and talk?
: (non-committal)
: But I think your job path quite set for the next few years...unless you break bond, but I think won't right...in the civil service I think you can go quite far, if you don't screw up, like they say in the army...you know what I mean?
(5) A job offer
(He recollects his forms - But we cannot stay here and talk the whole night - and agrees that I'm not really in need of anything Prudential can offer right now.)
: So I'll just write down your name...and put 'PSC Scholar - not yet working' OK?
: Unemployed.
: No lah cannot say like that one...definitely got job what. At first I was thinking, I should ask you to join my company!
22.9.03
My printer has gone mad.
22.9.03
Just talked to PSC and they said erm sorry we can't find a job match for you. Not even the civil service? Dear God. Am I that unemployable? Don't answer.
21.9.03
Watched Pirates of the Caribbean with my brother and have reached two conclusions: (1) 14-year-old boys have boundless appetites, and (2) Johnny Depp makes a charming pirate. I know Su-Lin's views on Orlando Bloom's delectability but I'm for Capn Jack Sparrow...
Yesterday after dinner we sat around and looked at each other and said, now what? Someone mentioned Kurosawa and Addy said we must do a Kurosawa marathon someday and Choonping said, let's do it now! Let's be spontaneous! Let's be young again! And so we got Throne of Blood (Addy's Dad picked it up from her video store near their place) and trooped over to Addy's house (Addy asked her Dad to come get us) and her mom said, what would you like to drink would you like some wine? And Choonping said, are we old enough? We appear to have graduated to non-supermarket-bottom-shelf wine and real wineglasses instead of plastic tumblers. Ah, adulthood. And then Throne of Blood, which lasted for less than two hours only because we fast-forwarded the bits where the tape was dodgy - didn't really spoil the movie, since we don't understand Japanese and they move so slowly fast-forwarding only makes them move at normal speed, or what our MTV generation would consider to be normal speed, and anyway we know what's going to happen - and I have to say, that was the scariest Lady Macbeth ever. It's the eyebrows. Alright that's not doing any justice to the movie, which had excellent cinematography - wonderfully-placed shots in their spartan bedroom and throne-room - and the bleakness of the mountainside and Cobweb Castle and the mist rising from nowhere - and of course Lady Macbeth. Or whatever she was in Japanese. Addy says that men and women speak differently in Japanese - different words, different grammar - but very effeminate gay men might use the feminine way of speaking, and very butch lesbian women might use the masculine way of speaking. So in a gay play you can always pick out who the gay characters are and who the straight ones are.
20.9.03
This morning there was waiting for me in my inbox an email on an old Washington Post Style Invitational contest, asking readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. The winners:
1. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
2. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
3. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
4. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
5. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an in definite period.
6. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
7. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
8. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
9. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.
10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
11. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
13. Glibido: All talk and no action.
14. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
15. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
17. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating.
18. Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.
19.9.03
Heh Fay sent me an email that quoted someone saying, 'Men are like fine wine. They all start out like grapes and it's our job to stomp on them and keep them in the dark until they mature into something we'd like to have dinner with.'
19.9.03
Have just made a long list of all things I should have done already and having made the list I feel quite justified in ignoring it entirely and returning to Wyrd Sisters.
19.9.03
Overheard at Pasir Ris Library yesterday: two kids (Sec 3 or 4 I guess) talking about books, and one enthusiastically recommending to the other a book about someone hacking into the Singapore Stock Exchange and so saving the country. Then he says, maybe we should read Shakespeare, his English very powerful. The friend: yah now we're reading what...that jesus...julius...caesar? Sec One Sec Two do romance damn sian. But now do Julius Caesar very interesting eh. He goes on to say that the history plays were more interesting but wah lau history damn hard one.
I should've asked him what romance plays he did. Who says no-one's interested in Shakespeare these days?
19.9.03
In Daren Shiau's Heartland there is a RJ Humanities scholar who watches foreign films and argues about animal rights and looks down on Chinese/dialect-speaking HDB-dwellers and their smelly coffeeshop toilets and is trying to choose between Oxford PPE and Harvard/Yale/Princeton on a PSC scholarship (that's the definition of a Humanities scholar, isn't it?) and drives her Daddy's car around (Humanities scholars are all rich, aren't they?) and is, somehow, therefore, attractive in a mature sophisticated way. According to the protagonist, who does live in a HDB flat - in Ghim Moh no less - and isn't a Humanities scholar and can't drive (he hasn't learnt yet, isn't that terrible? They're in J2 for godssake) and has no money to go to a glam university overseas and so is very stressed-out with his Humanities scholar girlfriend. But that's okay because she breaks up with him - we're too different she says - and in time he acquires another girlfriend, his next-door neighbour, who makes the career move from a salesgirl to a real estate agent and doesn't like going to museums and sings Chinese karaoke and plays pool and is therefore a much nicer and more comfortable person to be with. I do protest. Shouldn't writers break down stereotypes rather than rely on them?
19.9.03
On positive thinking:
Magrat concentrated.
Well, that seemed to work.
Nothing in the sight of mortal man had in fact changed. What Magrat had achieved was a mere adjustment of the mental processes, from a bewildered and slightly frightened woman gliding inexorably towards the inhospitable ground to a clear-headed, optimistic and positive thinking woman who had really got it together, was taking full responsibility for her own life and in general knew where she was coming from although, unfortunately, where she was heading had not changed in any way. But she felt a lot better about it.
Bless Pratchett.
Oh I read Wee Free Men today. At Borders. Yes I know.
17.9.03
Borges: I remember that I have forgotten quite a good example of the dream-and-life equation. But I think I can recall it now: it is by the American poet Cummings. There are four lines. I must apologize for the first. Evidently it was written by a young man, writing for young men, and I can no longer claim the privilege - I am far too old for that kind of game. But the stanza should be quoted in full. The first line is: "god's terrible face, brighter than a spoon." I am rather sorry about the spoon, because of course one feels that he thought at first of a sword, or of a candle, or of the sun, or of a shield, or of something traditionally shining; and then he said, "No - after all, I'm modern, so I'll work in a spoon." And so he got his spoon. But we may forgive him that for what comes afterwards: "god's terrible face, brighter than a spoon, / collects the image of one fatal word." This second line is better, I think. And as my friend Murchison said to me, in a spoon we often have many images collected. I had never thought of that, because I had been taken aback by the spoon and did not want to think much about it.
(From Borges' lectures, This Craft of Verse. I'm trying to finish my library books...) Isn't that wonderful? And it really is a terrible line. I think I should name this blog 'And so he got his spoon'. And vaguely in response to what Minz and Su-Lin have been saying about O Level Lit - I don't suppose a student would be able to write that about e. e. cummings and do well?
17.9.03
1.30 a.m. I finally finally finished The Sound and the Fury - only because it's overdue - and reluctantly admit that it is a masterful novel - but oh I do hate reading Southern talk, it makes you feel like your mouth's full of cotton-wool. Erm.
17.9.03
Whoever made Turn Left Turn Right took a lovely, haunting story and turned into the very ordinary love story of two people you couldn't bring yourself to care about. Okay Edmund Chen and the waitress were a lot funnier than I expected them to be and Takeshi Kanehiro (or whatever his name is) is really rather cute when he's moping but the girl was just annoying. All she did was drift palely about. Though by the end of it you are convinced that the two deserve each other, if only because they're both annoying in the same way.
16.9.03
At the back of one of his comics is a short bio of Neil Gaiman saying now that he's one he doesn't think being a grown-up is all that it was cracked up to be but he does like staying up late. Yes exactly.
16.9.03
I keep on bitching about having to work for the civil service but truth is I've no idea what I'd do otherwise. Go to grad school? School's something I'm familiar with, at least. But I don't know what I'd do. I'm not really a political scientist, by temperament or talent. I'd like to do something on stories, I think. Anne Carson, because she cuts through me. Something on words. Even if I could possibly be less vague, I'm not qualified (hah) to do anything of the sort. So. Maybe bloodymindedness isn't a reason to do something, if it's the only reason. But then what? I'd say I was adrift, except I don't seem to have done anything all this while but drift. I think I should have started worrying about all this sooner. Like four years ago.
13.9.03
Oh! Yesterday a letter arrived from Chihiro saying, laughter, right? From the Thurber quotation of course. And just in time.
(The quotation: "Keep warm," he said. "Ride close together. Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After." From The Thirteen Clocks.)
13.9.03
The thing is. It's all very well to pretend to be a politics student in university and it was fun and all but I don't think I can keep up the pretence. But I'm not even vaguely trained for anything else. How?
13.9.03
Peter Wimsey: I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done, but it has not gone on strike altogether.
From Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night.
12.9.03
There is Only One of Everything
Not a tree but the tree
we saw, it will never exist, split by the wind
and bending down
like that again. What will push out of the earth
later, making it summer, will not be
grass, leaves, repetition, there will
have to be other words. When my
eyes close language vanishes. The cat
with the divided face, half black half orange
nests in my scruffy fur coat, I drink tea,
fingers curved around the cup, impossible
to duplicate these flavours. The table
and freak plates glow softly, consuming themselves,
I look out at you and you occur
in this winter kitchen, random as trees or sentences,
entering me, fading like them, in time you will
disappear
but the way you dance by yourself
on the tile floor to a worn song, flat and mournful,
so delighted, spoon waved in one hand, wisps of
roughened hair
sticking up from your head, it's your surprised
body, pleasure I like. I can even say it,
though only once and it won't
last: I want this. I want
this.
- Margaret Atwood
I read these poems and then I remember I can't give them to you anymore. Sometimes I forget and daydream of you still. Sometimes I wish I did hate you, it might make things simpler. I can't give you what you want but I can give you silence, which comes pretty close. And yes that hurts.
12.9.03
Frost was wrong; it may begin in delight but it doesn't end in wisdom.
12.9.03
I'm looking for the extravagant promise. Or what would probably turn out to be the extravagant lie. What Winterson called the emotional extravagance needed to stay in one place. I'm looking for a reason to give up reason. A surrender yes, but it has to be a lucid surrender, you have to give me some pretext for self-deception. Make me believe it's real. I said to Minz once that we couldn't be religious because we couldn't give up reason entirely and she said yes but we fall in love. Give me a reason to walk into the river with my pockets weighted with stones.
Or not, as the case may be.
12.9.03
Asparagus
This afternoon a man leans over
the hard rolls and the curled
butter, and tells me everything: two
women love him, he loves them, what
should he do?
The sun
sifts down through the imperceptibly
brownish urban air. I'm going to
suffer for this: turn red, get
blisters or else cancer. I eat
asparagus with my fingers, he
plunges into description.
He's at his wit's end, sewed
up in his own frenzy. He has
breadcrumbs in his beard.
I wonder
if I should let my hair go grey
so my advice will be better.
I could wrinkle up my eyelids,
look wise. I could get a pet lizard.
You're not crazy, I tell him.
Others have done this. Me too.
Messy love is better than none,
I guess. I'm no authority
on sane living.
Which is all true
and no help at all, because
this form of love is like the pain
of childbirth: so intense
it's hard to remember afterwards,
or what kind of screams and grimaces
it pushed you into.
The shrimp arrive on their skewers,
the courtyard trees unroll
their yellowy caterpillars,
pollen powders our shoulders.
He wants them both, he relates
tortures, the coffee
arrives, and altogether I am amazed
at his stupidities.
I sit looking at him
with a sort of wonder,
or is it envy?
Listen, I say to him,
you're very lucky.
- Margaret Atwood.
Thing is. Even knowing what I know now - even knowing how it would turn out - I would do everything the same, only earlier. Be stupider.
12.9.03
Oh but we should have seen the sunset from Santa Monica pier, we should have made time to see it together. At the time I thought there was no need for a grand gesture at the end, but perhaps, if there was to be an end, we might as well have had a grand one? And let one ending hide another ending.
12.9.03
Since there are all kinds of ways to read the story I'll choose to believe that it was real. Why not, after all? A personal mythology. As Carrot would say, I'm mistaking personal for important. Damn but I was stupid. Or we both were. Take your pick.
12.9.03
Wired on coffee and too jumpy to read and too lazy to go out what shall I do?
Yesterday we went to Minzhi's place to shang3 yue4 and cai3 deng1 mi2 except you need to be good at Chinese and have the kind of mind that likes solving crossword puzzles and I fail miserably on both counts. But there were mooncakes and pomelo and pear and maki and tea and lanterns and Choonping reminding us that Hamlet burst into Ophelia's room with his garters down-gyved around his ankles.
Today my relatives came over to play mahjong and I was left to entertain my 17-year-old cousin, who was shocked that I didn't know any Sun Yanzi songs (all I knew was that she had been in the NDP) or who Jay Chou was (apparently he plays the cello and makes girls melt and flow away like water) and had never watched an episode of Holland Village (well I did today and I have to say, Huang Wenyong is a most unconvincing stroke victim. He's convinced that his ex-wife doesn't love him anymore because his lian3 is wai1 after the stroke, but he had a really hard time keeping it wai1). My cousin looked through my CD collection and said it was all before his time and downloaded S.H.E. songs onto my computer instead (ni3 shi4 dian4 / ni3 shi4 deng1 / you are my superstar). Also I didn't know there were fishtanks exploding into flame all across Singapore. So what do you know, he said.
Oh! I have a squirrel lantern. So I can hang it in my room and tell myself to be like the squirrel. This will make sense to probably only one person I know. Go listen to the White Stripes' Elephant album won't you?
11.9.03
Why does it have to be so extreme, he says.
OK now I hate you.
10.9.03
Wine and cheese (and crackers and potato salad and baby carrots and celery and chips and ice-cream and smoked salmon and bread and sausages) at Cindy's place tonight. God I'm stuffed.
10.9.03
Defining the Problem
I can't forgive you. Even if I could,
You wouldn't pardon me for seeing through you.
And yet I cannot cure myself of love
For what I thought you were before I knew you.
- Wendy Cope
10.9.03
That's why you stopped writing and I didn't see.
10.9.03
This one I never saw coming. Not just that we wouldn't be lovers, but that you wouldn't love me any more. Did I need you so badly I couldn't see it? Couldn't see you?
I don't much care about communication, he says. Well I suppose there are worse ways of saying, fuck off.
10.9.03
What are you looking for?
Someone who will match me passion for passion.
What are you looking for?
A way to sustain passion.
What are you looking for?
A reason to stop running. A reason to stay.
And?
This is not something I can ask of you.
And?
This is not something you will allow me to ask of you.
And?
I have been wilfully blind. But even the darkness is dazzling, sometimes.
And?
How can you have stopped loving me so quickly?
9.9.03
This is all wrong. The wrong sort of journal entirely. I should have said: Addy and I went down to AWARE today and while we weren't terribly inspired - what is it AWARE does, exactly? I'm still not sure - we're going to write reviews of feminist books and films for their journal (AWARENESS. I know I know). And then we pottered around Sembawang Music Store (Shop?) where I bought Eels (Beautiful Freak. And incidentally an excellent album.) and Addy got the something - not exactly the soundtrack, or the soundtrack of the background music - for Turn Left Turn Right. Xiang zuo zuan, xiang you zuan. (Did I get that right?) I've read it! In Chinese! Minz lent me the book saying, it's in Chinese but there are lots of pictures, and when I got home that day my sister said, is that a Chinese book? and I said, yes but it's a picture book, and then we read most of it together and were very proud of ourselves. We have to go see the movie, okay?
9.9.03
How long have I been bugging you to get a passport? No it was too expensive too troublesome you didn't have anywhere to go soon anyway. It turns out that all you needed was a good reason to go through the expense and trouble. I wanted to be reason enough.
(You're not coming; you're not ever going to come - or not in the forseeable future, let's be fair; you never seriously planned on coming. I should have seen it but I wanted so much to believe in my version of the story. A clean break, isn't that what I always advocated for other people?)
9.9.03
I need something to do. Something more than re-reading all the Pratchetts that ever were and are. A project. Something for the long term, or the longish term. Somewhere to put down roots. Being foreign in a foreign country - well that's the definition of a foreigner isn't it? But being foreign in your own country, that's a different matter.
9.9.03
Ordinarily I really like doing nothing. Especially in the holidays, when there aren't any undone essays to feel guilty about. But this time it's different. I'm not a student anymore. I can't get used to that idea, and even less to the idea that I'm not going away when the holidays are over. The holidays are over, I suppose. The holidays are over and I'm staying in Singapore - for six years and probably forever - and you are never going to come here. Well at least missing you distracts me from worrying about jobs and worrying about jobs distracts me from missing you. The perfect balance.
7.9.03
Sorry, Magrat, not Margrat.
6.9.03
Not: stay the same person. Because no-one does that, or should do that. But: stay recognizable. Stay someone I can talk to. (Yes it's all about me, really.) Keep in touch, where touch can dissolve distance.
5.9.03
Borges: I think the first reading of a poem is a true one, and after that we delude ourselves into the belief that the sensation, the impression, is repeated. But, as I say, it may be mere loyalty, a mere trick of the memory, a mere confusion between our passion and the passion we once felt. Thus, it might be said that poetry is a new experience every time. Every time I read a poem, the experience happens to occur. And that is poetry.
From Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse.
After the first death - each death feels like the first, all over again, each time?
5.9.03
I've been listening to the CDs you made and I've only one thing to say. Herman's Hermits?
4.9.03
Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost: The responsibility of the living to the dead is not simple. It is we who let them go, for we do not accompany them. It is we who hold them here - deny them their nothingness - by naming their names. Out of these two wrongs comes the writing of epitaphs.
Perhaps - instead of, when you leave will you give me back the words, it's time to let go of you in words? But no epitaphs.
4.9.03
You know. If we were all Pratchett people I would be Margrat Garlick. Now there's a comforting thought. (For the benefit of the non-Pratchett-reading people - though you should of course start now - she's a wet hen. That's the official definition. She likes flowers and sparkly things and believes in being nice to people, which she is in a vague and bedraggled way. And she reads too much. Am I reading too much Pratchett, you think?)
Oh! - the NUS email said, Our library is strictly for member's use. That's rather a lot of books for one person. I think if you're going to be snooty you should at least be grammatically correct.
4.9.03
At Minz's today (it's 1 a.m. right now but the day doesn't change until I go to bed) I learn that Nemo means 'nobody' in latin. So finding Nemo means finding nobody. Which is, of course, perfect. Nemo's father sets out to find Nemo and what does he find? Himself, of course. A question of identity: who is it you are looking for when you are looking for yourself? Someone? No-one? And (Minz points out) Nemo and his father are clown-fish and of course that brings into play questions about appearances and surfaces - laughing on the outside crying on the inside sorta thing - which ties in neatly with the larger question of identity, of the search for identity.
Yes I'm going now. Yes, now.
4.9.03
Sometimes you can see depression arriving and before it hits you you can go get a good funny book and hide somewhere until it passes. Sometimes you can see melodrama arriving too, but that one is harder to avoid. Anger is easier, and even easier if unjustified. But then easy is too easy, isn't it?
4.9.03
Huh. I wrote to NUS saying hello I'm a student can I use your library (small liberty with the truth there) and they wrote back saying no the library is for members why don't you try the National Library that's a public library. And they gave me the nlb.gov.sg link. Bastards. They used to be a lot nicer about letting people use the NUS library.
3.9.03
On Shelter
You can write on a wall with a fish heart, it's because of the phosphorus. They eat it. There are shacks like that down along the river. I am writing this to be as wrong as possible to you. Replace the door when you leave, it says. Now you tell me how wrong that is, how long it glows. Tell me.
From Anne Carson, Plainwater.
3.9.03
From Anne Carson's Economy of the Unlost, which I've been reading with infinitesimal slowness - can't concentrate on anything more challenging than Pratchett.
Paul Celan: Reachable, near and unlost amid the losses, this one thing remained: language. This thing, language, remained unlost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to go through its own loss of answers, had to go through terrifying muteness, had to go through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing talk. It went through and gave no words for that which happened; yet it went through this happening. Went through and was able to come back to light "enriched" by it all.
In this language I have tried, during those years and the years after, to write poems....
3.9.03
So today I was buying lunch from the coffeeshop and the guy preparing it said, jin tian mei you xue xiao meh? ni jin nian ji nian ji le? He didn't start with xiao meimei but I know he was thinking it. I almost said, liu nian ji, but chickened out and said, erm wo yi jing bi ye le, xian zai zai zao gong zuo. He: zao dao le ma? Me: hai mei you. He: xian zai hen nan zao ma? Me: er, bi jiao nan. (Well it is harder to find a job nowadays I guess? I wouldn't really know but that's too hard to explain in Chinese. In my Chinese.) He: zhi yao you qian mai wu can jiu gou le. Was hoping he'd give me lunch free but he wasn't really that sympathetic...
What with getting carded at Zouk, this is insane. How old do I look? Alright don't answer that.
3.9.03
Am I allowed to miss you? I don't know how to play this game.
2.9.03
My brother just wandered into my room to return my library copy of Fifth Elephant and said, 'Not bad. You got any more?' I figure it's my duty to pass Pratchett on to the young ones...
1.9.03
The longer thing: "It's the story that counts. No use telling me this isn't a story or not the same story. I know you've fulfilled everything you promised, you love me, we sleep till noon and we spend the rest of the day eating, the food is superb, I don't deny that. But I worry about the future. In the story the boat disappears one day over the horizon, just disappears, and it doesn't say what happens then. On the island that is. It's the animals I'm afraid of, they weren't part of the bargain, in fact you didn't mention them, they may transform themselves back into men. Am I really immortal, does the sun care, when you leave will you give me back the words? Don't evade, don't pretend you won't leave after all: you leave in the story and the story is ruthless."
From Margaret Atwood. I just found my copy of Eating Fire.