fanatic fandom

life and fiction

2011-08-01T22:36:00.009+08:00

Several years ago, I stopped reading novels for leisure. And, if fiction is an education of the heart, this might have meant that my heart ceased to be educated. But it wasn't that at all. I stopped reading fiction because there was too much going on in my life - more than enough to educate any heart many, many times over - and I felt I didn't need any more education. Instead, what I needed was, is, rest. And that is one thing that novels, for all their power, cannot give.

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too tired to eat

2011-06-03T09:09:00.003+08:00

You know you need a break when you realise you're too tired to eat. I've been wishing in the last few weeks for some sort of wonderpill a la Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that would contain an entire meal - all necessary nutrients included - in a tablet. And all you have to do is pop the pill and it would expand in your stomach, taking up just the right amount of room to make you feel full and stop it from shrinking (yes - not eating enough makes your stomach shrink).

So looking forward to the holiday. Really hope that all goes well.
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systems

2011-05-15T21:16:00.007+08:00

Some thoughts, following a late-night chat with a friend at the prata place near my home. Nothing like a good prata with a nice teh-o-ice-limau or teh-si-alia-kosong, to whet one's appetite for good conversation and/or pseudo-philosophizing.

We were talking about charismatic leaders and the systems they build. Actually, we were talking about just one particular charismatic leader whom my friend has had the privilege of working with, but you know the type - the LKYs and Steve Jobs of the world. They build up organisations, put systems in place, sometimes even plan for succession by doing the best they can to train future leaders, ingrain their values and work processes in their co-leaders and subordinates. And then they leave. And sooner or later, the system starts to fail.

All too often, I think, we think of systems as being independent of human influence. We think of them as mere frameworks for action, like factory production lines which in themselves are neutral, have no personality, conform to no ideology or organising vision. Yet of course that is far from the truth. Anyone who has ever had to take over the running of a system from a predecessor whose personality differed very greatly from their own, knows this intuitively.

Systems are designed by people. The design process is far from the neutral. It reflects the personality - the strengths and weaknesses - of the designer. Any system, in fact, is made with the comfort and ease of the designer in mind. When someone else has to take over the system from its original designers, there is bound to be some point of mismatch somewhere. Whether major or minor, this mismatch will make itself felt. It is then up to the new users of the system to either change themselves (difficult), or to change the system (also difficult - but probably wiser).

Singapore Inc. is currently in the early stages of what may turn out to be a major systemic overhaul. It's about time, and I'm glad it's happening now, rather than later.
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whan that aprille with his shoures soote

2011-04-11T00:34:00.008+08:00

It's already April, and it's been a 4-month hiatus since i've posted anything here, and this afternoon the April showers came pouring down on the official opening ceremony of the park/playground just outside my back door, and the member of parliament with his entourage and all the guests and performers were forced to take shelter under the tentage with the wind blowing the rain in their faces.

Rain like the shower that came this afternoon is often unwanted - but this year, i've been praying for the kind of rain Chaucer was talking about in his opening to The Canterbury Tales - the sweet showers in today's post title. The other obvious candidate for a first post in April was, of course, TS Eliot - "April is the cruellest month" - but that has not been true so far this year, and perhaps it's time to give poor Eliot a break, as i'm fairly certain he's done his duty on this blog before. Instead, this April seems to be an answer to prayer - and i am tempted to say, "Well, about time!"; but that would be tempting fate, and anyway, i've never approached life with much of a sense of entitlement. So i will simply accept the unexpected blessings with a quiet gratitude made all the stronger because i know how quickly such blessings can be snatched away.

Life is intractable, and tenuous, and a whole lot of other words that feel good on the tongue, and that i have somewhere in the back of my mind but can't call up right now. i don't think i'll ever wrap my mind around it. That's OK. i've learnt to live with not knowing. i've learnt to live with being human. ... ...

once more, with feeling

2010-12-06T00:28:00.003+08:00

'... the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"'

(from On The Road, by Jack Kerouac)
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the evidence of things not seen

2010-10-31T12:38:00.002+08:00

Here's the ending of one of my favourite Catholic guilt novels - Brideshead Revisited (the other is Graham Greene's The End of the Affair). Call it whimsy, but both novels have always been placed side by side on my bookshelf - they both tell essentially the same story, but one ends in doubt and despair, the other in faith and hope. No prizes for guessing which I like better.

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There was one part of the house I had not yet visited, and I went there now. The chapel showed no ill-effects of its long neglect; the art-noveau paint was as fresh and bright as ever; the art-noveau lamp burned once more before the altar. I said a prayer, an ancient, newly-learned form of words, and left, turning towards the camp; and as I walked back, and the cook-house bugle sounded ahead of me, I thought:

'The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year, the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

'And yet,' I thought, stepping out more briskly towards the camp, where the bugles after a pause had taken up the second call and were sounding 'Pick-em-up, pick-em-up, hot potatoes', 'and yet that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.

'Something quite remote from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame - a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.'

I quickened my pace and reached the hut which served us for our ante-room.

'You're looking unusually cheerful today,' said the second-in-command.

(from Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh)
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a diminished thing

2010-10-10T12:01:00.001+08:00

It's the 10th of October, 2010. A perfect ten. One of life's little ironies, perhaps, that i should be thinking about this poem, on this day of all days.

The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

(Robert Frost)
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Saint-Saens, Symphony No. 3 in C minor, 'Organ'

2010-09-08T23:22:00.005+08:00

The latest obsession - the 2nd movement of Saint-Saens's Symphony No. 3. i remember hearing this live in concert back in the London days, in a small church in central London (can't remember what it's called, unfortunately), and literally feeling the pews rumble with the deep echoing of the pipe organ.

And now, listening to it again, wishing to feel the music deep within my bones the way i did that first time i heard it live. Hungering for experience, thirsting for epiphany.
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the most beautiful life

2010-06-05T00:24:00.003+08:00

'The carrying out of a vocation differed from the actions dictated by reason or inclination. ... The most beautiful life possible has always seemed to me to be one where everything is determined, either by the pressure of circumstances or by impulses such as I have just mentioned, and where there is never any room for choice.'

(Simone Weil)

What an absolutely horrifying idea.
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a room of one's own

2010-06-02T22:09:00.006+08:00

My dream work-room would be air-conditioned, with windows that look out into sky and trees, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a first-rate sound system, a large furry rug / carpet for my toes to curl up in, and lots of photos, pictures, and little knick-knacks to give it character.
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Here are some women writers' rooms that i like.
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AS Byatt's - this is exactly how i'd have imagined her room would look:

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Margaret Forster's - love the windows and the wood:

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Wendy Cope's is not bad - but it looks too much like it belongs to a uni undergrad, and i can't help but feel i've been there, done that, bought the tshirt. i'll always remember the uni days fondly, but that's in the past, and i'm not going back. :)

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if

2010-06-01T00:27:00.002+08:00

Okok, so i know this is imperialist, patriarchal, and any number of other horrible things, but heck, i've always loved it, and i'm not gonna stop lovin' it just cos lit theory sez it ain't cool.

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If

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

(Rudyard Kipling)
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shining from shook foil

2010-05-18T20:05:00.005+08:00

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

(G.M. Hopkins)
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mending wall

2010-05-02T21:13:00.007+08:00

Some people are by nature wall-builders, others, bridge-builders. Both are necessary - the former, to define and preserve, assert and keep inviolate, to give space for the self to be; the latter, to explore and keep open, reach out and respond, to make ways for the self to grow.

i am a bridge-builder at heart. Even as a child, i was always the one caught in the middle, or, to look at it more positively, i was always the one negotiating, peacemaking, trying to find a compromise, trying to keep a foot (and only having two feet was often a problem!) in more than one world at a time. Even now, i often find myself speaking up, not just for my own convictions, but for the views of those with whom i disagree, and sometimes, i speak for others even more than i speak for myself (something which my wall-building friends sometimes misunderstand).

It's not always comfortable, this bridge-building business, and sometimes i wish i were a wall-builder instead. How easy it must be, i am tempted to think, to retire behind the protective barrier of settled opinion, to not have one's heart divided by this sense of sympathy that compels one to think of the other even at the expense of one's self-interest. And then there are those occasions in life when wall-building is an absolute necessity - when one has to lay down the law and execute it, or when a principle or value one holds dear is threatened, or when one simply has to take a stand in order to preserve the sense of a self against some external force that threatens to encroach upon who one is. It's not easy. Just as i'm sure it's not easy for wall-builders to make themselves build bridges.

Acting against one's nature for the sake of a higher good can be very hard indeed. And even harder, the task of discerning exactly what to build, and when.
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mixing memory and desire (2)

2010-04-24T20:45:00.004+08:00

On the coach this evening, travelling back from a church event in some ulu campsite in the north of Singapore, looking out into the darkness of near-empty streets, taking in the soft glow of the streetlamps, i felt almost like a tourist in a foreign land, cocooned in the cosy confines of a chartered tour bus with my fellow travellers, all of us disparate individuals yet somehow brought together and united by a common purpose.

It occurred to me how long it's been since i've been on an overseas tour. i was reminded of those long overnight trips in Morocco, travelling from city to city on the public buses with the wide open plains on one side of the road, and the distant mountains on the other. The call of muezzin in the sunset as we passed some remote village along the way. The feeling that inside the bus, all was safety and predictability, while outside was the cold and dark, and dangers unknown and yet somehow vaguely apprehended.

i want to travel again. It's been so long since i've gone anywhere different, that doesn't speak English, where i can feel not quite at home, and comfortable being not quite at home because there's no reason why things should be otherwise. It's been too long since i've felt like a real foreigner in a culture i don't recognise at all, that requires me to get out of myself and make radical adjustments to the way i eat and talk and live, if only for a week or two.

Wanderlust. Perhaps at the end of the year, i'll finally find time and space to go somewhere. It doesn't have to be far from here. As long as English is not the first language, and as long as it's not a developed country. i really should start planning now.
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crossroads

2010-04-17T10:00:00.004+08:00

"I think I'm having a midlife crisis."
"Crisis, or crossroads - whatever you call it..."

Trust JL to be able to turn life round and see things from a different (and alliterative!) perspective. Crossroads - places where one learns how to choose, where one learns the difficult lesson of responsibility. Yes, God actually does give us choices in the finite span of our here and now, and it is in making these choices that we finally start growing up.
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seeing with new eyes

2010-04-10T12:18:00.002+08:00

My 4-plus year-old camera has just gone to the Great Scrapheap In The Sky, so it's time now to get a new one. According to the guy at the camera shop, it's a wonder it's lasted so long - most electronic products nowadays are made to last just 2 years. (Akan datang: rant on consumerism, and the commercial tactics manufacturers use to fuel it.)

New camera - and hopefully, a new sense of vision, a new way of seeing. Mine eyes have not been o' the best recently, to steal Lear's immortal words, and the demise of my old camera is a good reminder to take some time out to look at things afresh.

i might start by buying some flowers.
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conservation

2010-04-09T02:05:00.002+08:00

Wanting to give, yet faced with the perennial human problem of finite resources - how best to burn burn burn without burning out? The question is the same, whether the subject is fossil fuels, or simply one's personal use of time and energy. If someone has the answer, do let me know. i'd dearly like to find out.
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in praise of fish noodle soup

2010-04-08T16:26:00.004+08:00

Simple pleasures. A hot steaming bowl of noodles, swimming in rich milky soup, with generous helpings of skinless fresh fish, and a teaspoon of flaming-hot chilli padi to top it all off.

i can't emphasise enough how grateful i am to the fish noodle stall aunty for introducing me to her dubious-sounding fish-soup concoction earlier this year. It's now often the highlight of my work week - and i save it for those days when i'm feeling the most worn down and worn out. Never fails to make me feel better.

In times of leanness, drought and famine, we learn to value the little things so much more.
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smouldering like brown paper

2010-04-04T21:34:00.003+08:00

'(His) intellect sparkles like diamonds, while mine smoulders like brown paper.'

(Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure)
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it's only natural

2010-03-27T07:54:00.003+08:00

It's morning, and i'm awakened by the chattering of mynahs outside my window. A raucous tribe of mynahs, it seems, pounding on the metal roof tiles in a flurry of vehement pattering. i look out of the window, and there they are - a whole tribe of two, jet feathers tensed, locked in battle over a scrap of breakfast.

Nature has been on my mind a fair bit recently - all thanks to Tom and Tess - Nature with the capital N as well as that quieter nature with its dimunitive 'n' - the nature we speak of when we say, 'human nature', or perhaps, 'that's just her nature'. i wonder what that mynah incident is telling me, and what will result from all this rumination.
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insane in the membrane

2010-03-22T22:06:00.002+08:00

Now where is that from? It sounds singularly familiar - and strangely enough, when i hear it in my head, it's always sung to the tune of the bassline of Queen's 'Under Pressure'.

How weirdly random, i know.
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i am persuaded

2010-03-07T02:51:00.002+08:00

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For Thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

(Romans 8:35-39)
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starting over again

2010-01-31T20:52:00.002+08:00

Remember this song by Natalie Cole, from sometime in the 1990s? Almost two decades away - oh how the years years years run away like horses over the hill...

The mini-mart that's half a minute's walk from my backdoor, and that's been serving our neighbourhood for the last 23 years, finally closed down for good yesterday. Not for lack of business - they've always had a regular clientele among the people living in the area - but because the owners found that age and various health problems were making it hard for them to run the business. Yesterday evening, I found the whole 'supermart' team - Aunty Agnes, her brothers and sister - sitting on the pavement just outside the empty shop-building. Just sitting there, chatting, not doing much. The shutters were down. I asked them what they were doing there, and they said, having a farewell party.

Aunty Agnes used to play basketball with the neighbourhood kids back when the park that's a 5 seconds' walk from my back door used to be a basketball court. I've grown up used to the fact that all I had to do if I ever had a food craving, or if I needed to buy some random sundries, was to head out to the supermart at 'The Back'. No need for long complicated shopping lists - all we had to do if we forgot something was to pop back to the shop and get it - a little embarrassing, of course, to be caught out being so forgetful, but of course that's not the kind of thing that's worth worrying too much over.

I'm not sure how all this relates to the Natalie Cole song that's been running in my head for the last few days. Maybe it's the idea that Aunty Agnes and her family are all packed up and will be starting over again sometime soon, after 23 years of building and maintaining a lovely little family business that has given so much to our neighbourhood. Maybe it's the fact that all of us will have to start over again, developing new grocery-shopping habits now that our beloved supermart is gone.

Maybe it's more than the supermart. Maybe it's where life is right now, on the verge of change that I feel is round the corner, but without knowing exactly what, when, or how. The heart preparing to build anew, perhaps - gathering whatever energy it can gather, whatever lessons it has learnt from the past.

Whatever it is, this is a lovely song, and Natalie Cole has a lovely voice, and so, for old times' sake, here it is, and a blogpost bearing its name.
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chinese boxes

2009-12-28T22:03:00.002+08:00

Warning to Children

Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness,
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and pare the rind off:
In the kernel you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel -
Children, leave the string alone!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still unopened on his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
He lives - he then unties the string.

(Robert Graves)
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incarnation

2009-12-25T22:24:00.000+08:00

"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth."

- John 1:14

i love this poem by, surprise surprise, Marie Howe, which captures a bit of what it must have meant for God to be dwelling among us, the Word made flesh. Not only to be constrained by time and space, not only to have to put up with all the indignities and inconveniences of bodily life, but also, to be living with us - clamouring, grasping, contentious, self-seeking people that we are.

'The people Jesus loved' - surely Howe included herself among the number? And surely, this poem is more symbol than story, though of course, it is story as well?

The Star Market

The people Jesus loved were shopping at The Star Market yesterday.
An old lead-coloured man standing next to me at the checkout
breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.

Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and
hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them:
shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, as if The Star Market

had declared a day off for the able-bodied, and I had wandered in
with the rest of them: sour milk, bad meat:
looking for cereal and spring water.

Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, looking for my lost car
in the parking lot later, stumbling among the people who would have
been lowered into rooms by ropes, who would have crept

out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands
and knees begging for mercy.

If I touch only the hem of his garment, one woman thought, I will be healed.
Could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?

(from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, by Marie Howe)
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fearful symmetry

2009-12-19T16:00:00.007+08:00

"It has made me grasp as never before that God has an inner strategic (as distinct from tactical) purpose for His creation, thereby enabling me to see through the Theater of the Absurd, which is what life seems to be, and into the Theater of Fearful Symmetry, which is what it is. Thus reality sorts itself out, like film coming into sync, and everything that exists, from the tiniest atom to the illimitable universe in which our tiny earth revolves, everything that happens, from the most trivial event to the most seemingly momentous, makes one pattern, tells one story, is comprehended in one prayer: Thy will be done."

(Malcolm Muggeridge, 'Afterword' to A Third Testament)

Being much too inclined to finding pattern where others might see none, I find the thought of the universe as a Theatre of Fearful Symmetry designed to fulfil the will of God perhaps a little too comfortable, too convenient, for me not to distrust. But an unquestioned rejection of what is most congenial to us is possibly just as foolish as its unquestioned acceptance - so just because I personally find the idea of a Grand Narrative that encompasses the whole of history very attractive indeed, is no good reason to reject the idea without prior examination.
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sorry, but, do i know you?

2009-11-28T15:29:00.003+08:00

An article from the Guardian on living with prosopagnosia, or face blindness:

i get a mild version of this every day in the workplace - something i imagine my 'clients' (as we call them nowadays) find mildly traumatising. It's doubly difficult at work because so many of my clients have very similar hairstyles. The clothing doesn't help, either.

Fortunately, most of my friends and peers have neither the time nor the inclination to get too creative with their hairstyles and look more or less the same from year to year - so i generally manage to recognise the people who are most important in my life. That said, i must confess to having failed to recognise a very close friend of 12 years - someone i lived with for almost 2 years - after a change of hairstyle and some weight loss. She was appalled, to say the least.

i generally get by, but have made some very embarrasing errors in the past. Methinks this is probably also the reason i don't like watching gangster movies - too many criminals, too many faces (think: Ocean's Eleven) - which makes it very difficult to follow the plot.

i wonder if i actually have a very mild form of this disorder. It'd be interesting to find out.
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back to the Old World

2009-11-21T10:58:00.005+08:00

It's Mozart weekend - and quite suddenly i'm finding myself remembering Austria, especially the hotels and youth hostels we stayed in back then. I remember being very impressed with everything - from the facilities to the wonderful breakfasts with 10 different types of cereal and what was truly a smorsgabord of different hams and other cold cuts. I remember the crisp, cool white sheets of the bunk beds, the warm glow of the pine furniture, the friendly efficiency of the service staff.

And, from the same holiday, I remember the hotel at Lake Como in Italy, the name of which I cannot for the life of me recall - but what I do remember is our room with the sloping pinewood roof and the window overlooking the lake (we even caught sight of some fireworks from some celebratory event on the opposite shore), and the unbelievably comfortable beds - so soft you could sink right into them - and of course those wild strawberries, tiny and perfect, that we found along the trail when hiking in the hills surrounding the lake. Oh nostalgia!

I miss Europe - its genteel Old World charm, the way things there are just a tad slower than here in frenetic Singapore. And I so want to go back to visit - when oh when will I find time and space to make the trip?
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our town

2009-10-28T18:16:00.005+08:00

It's that time of the year again - time to tie up loose ends, look backwards and forwards, clean the room, clear the bookshelves.

So i've finally decided to give away this book - Growing Rich by Fay Weldon. i've kept it for far too long, and only because of the opening paragraph, which, when i read the book 10 years ago, made me think of Singapore...

"The world is full of little towns that people want to leave, and scarcely know why. The hills crowd in too closely, they say, or the plains which stretch around are too featureless, or the freeway runs through, or doesn't run through: you can hardly put your finger on the sources of their discontent, or indeed your own. There's a doctor, a school, good neighbours, kindness and even friends - it's just you know you have to get out of there or die: let the name of the place be Dullsville, Tennessee, or Borup, Denmark, or Newcastle, New South Wales, or El Ain in the United Arab Emirites, or Fenedge, East Anglia, a kind of sorrow creeps along the streets and drags you down; you can hardly lift your feet to shake it off. The shops in the High Street are forever closed for lunch, or would be better if they were: the houses in the centre may be old, veritable antiquities, but still lack resonance: a tuning fork that declines to twang, dead in the face of all expectation. And if nothing happens you know you'll soon be dead as well, or your soul will be. Some marriages are like this, too, but that's another story."

i was a pretty miserable person 10 years ago.
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the stewardship of pain

2009-10-17T21:49:00.002+08:00

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Obviously not something I've written, as can be seen from the first sentence. But (or should that be therefore) lovely lovely lovely.

For all who have a heart.

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One of the troubles with being a man who spends most of his life writing books is that I don't have many adventures. Other people go off into their workplace. They come back and have stories to tell about the people they have seen and the things they have done. The adventures I have are mainly the ones that I have inside my head, except every once in a while. I am going to tell you about one small adventure I had last summer that meant a lot to me and has left its mark. My wife and I went to Texas for the first time. I spoke at a number of different places, one of which is a marvelous retreat center called Laity Lodge in Kerrville, Texas. If you have never been there, give it a try. It is a magic place, located in the Frio River Valley. To get to it, you have to drive in the river for about a mile and a half, actually in the water with it sloshing around your hub caps. It is magic also in terms of the magic that is generated by the people there. A lot of them have been coming back for a long time. I found that within a very short time of our arrival -- we were there for about a week -- I felt extraordinarily safe in the way you would normally think of feeling safe only in the bosom of your own family; safe to be whoever I was, to say whatever came into my mind, not worried about making a good show or anything like that.

I was wondering what I would talk to them about. They said, "Wing it." I thought, "I don't mind doing that because I feel so comfortable here." I said, "How would you like me to wing it? Wing it about what?"

They said, "How about telling your own story?" I volunteered to do that and did. In place of telling them about my childhood, I read them a small section from a recent book of mine, actually written for children, though published as a regular adult book, called The Wizard's Tide. I described an episode of my childhood which I said could stand for the shadow side of it and what made it tough.

I'll quickly tell you about that episode. It took place in the 1930's during the Depression when there wasn't much money; an awful lot of drinking was going on in the world and in my family; an unsettled and unsettling time even for a child of ten, which I was.

The episode I described concerned a time when my father had come back from somewhere. He had obviously had too much to drink. My mother did not want him to take the car. She got the keys from him somehow and gave them to me and said, "Don't let you father have these." I had already gone to bed. I took the car keys and I had them in my fist under the pillow. My father came and somehow knew I had the keys and said, "Give them to me. I have got to have them. I have got to go some place."

I didn't know what to say, what to be or how to react. I was frightened, sad and all the rest of it. I lay there and listened to him, pleading really, "Give me the keys."

I pulled the covers over my head to escape the situation and then finally, went to sleep with his voice in my ears. A sad story which stood for a lot of other sadness of those early years.

When I finished reading it, Howard Butt, who is head of the Butt Foundation which finances Laity Lodge, came up to me and said something for which I was utterly unprepared. He said, "You have had a fair amount of pain in your life, like everybody else. You have been a good steward of it."

That phrase caught me absolutely off guard -- to be a steward of your pain. I didn't hear it as a compliment particularly. It is not as if I had set out to be a steward of my pain, but rather something that happened.

I thought a lot about what the stewardship of pain means; the ways in which we deal with pain. Beside being a steward of it, there are alternatives. The most tempting is to forget it, to hide it, to cover it over, to pretend it never happened, because it is too hard to deal with. It is too unsettling to remember.

I think the world is always asking us to do it that way. Our families are always, in a way, part of the family system and so apt to say, "Don't talk about things that cause pain. You can't trust the world with those secrets. Those are family secrets. Keep them hidden. Keep them hidden from each other. Keep them hidden from yourself. Don't allow yourself to feel them."

My mother lived to be almost 92 and survived very well in this world by, in a way, burying her bad times. Up to almost the end, she remained a very valuable, interesting person, but she paid a price for that because a certain part of her stopped growing in the direction of compassion and wisdom, etc.

Another thing you can do with your pain, of course, is to use it to win sympathy. I guess a sob story is a story you tell hoping that people will sob with you. Sort of an end in itself, a way almost of giving yourself a kind of stature in the eyes of the world as a suffering one.

Another way, I suppose, of dealing with your pain is using it as an excuse for failure, if you think of yourself as a failure -- "If only I had gotten the breaks; if only those bad things hadn't happened, who knows where I might have been today."

Another great temptation about pain, I think, is to allow yourself to be embittered and trapped by it. The classic example of that is the tragic character of Miss Haversham in Charles Dickens's wonderful novel, Great Expectations. She was deserted by her bridegroom on her wedding day. He never showed up. She spent the rest of her days sitting in the room where the great reception was to have been, her wedding cake moldering, her dress long since turned to rags, imprisoned in a sadness that she simply never could escape. All of these are options of dealing with pain.

Stewardship of pain. What does that mean? I have thought a lot about it. I think it means, before anything else, to keep in touch with your pain, to keep in touch with the sad times, with the hard times of your past for many reasons. I think it is often those times when we were most alive, when we were somehow closest to being most vitally human beings.

Keep in touch with it because it is at those moments of pain where you are most open to the pain of other people -- most open to your own deep places. Keep in touch with those sad times because it is then that you are most aware of your own powerlessness, crushed in a way by what is happening to you, but also most aware of God's power to pull you through it, to be with you in it. Keeping in touch with your pain, I think, means also to be true to who in your depths you have it in you to be -- depths of pain and also in a way depths of joy, because they both come from the same place.

When I think of stewardship of pain, I think also of that strange, dark, harsh parable Jesus tells of the talents, which doesn't turn out at all the way you would expect. You remember, the master gives the three servants talents. He gives one five talents, another, two, and another, one talent. Off they go. He comes back on the day of reckoning and asks the five-talent man what he has done with his money and he says, "Master, you delivered to me five talents; here I have made five talents more." The Master says, "Well done, good and faithful servant...enter into the joy of your master." The two-talent man has made another two.

The one-talent man, you remember, says, "I was afraid and I went and hid my talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours." The Master says, "Wicked and slothful servant! Take the talent from him, and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth."

To begin with the negative part of it first, it seems to me that the one-talent man represents what I said before, somebody who buried the richest treasure he had, not just pain, but the most alive part of himself, buried it in the ground. He was never able to become who he might have been. I think the outer darkness the Master casts him into is not to be thought of so much as a punishment, as it is to be thought of as the inevitable consequence of what it means to bury your life. If you bury your life, you don't leave your life. You don't meet other people who are alive. You are alone; you are in the dark.

"From him who hath not, it will taken." Those hard words. That if the life is buried, if the pain is somehow covered over and forgotten, instead of growing, you shrink. You become less; you become diminished.

The positive side of it, of course, is the other ones, the ones who came back with more than they started out with. As the parable says, they traded with their talents. They traded with their lives -- a wonderful phrase. We were made to be life traders, because I have what you need, which is me, and you have what you need, which is you. That is the joy into which the Master invites his servants.

Pain can become a treasure if we treasure it to the point where it can become compassion and healing, not just for ourselves, but also for other people. If you want to see that sort of thing in operation, the treasuring of pain, the using of pain to the healing of yourself and others, someday attend an open meeting of AA or any of the related groups. That is exactly what those people are doing, sharing their hurts, their experiences and their joys.

And remember the cross. It seems to me that the cross of Christ in a way speaks somewhat like this same word, saying that out of that greatest pain endured in love and faithfulness, comes the greatest beauty and our greatest hope.

(Frederick Buechner)
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iThirst (part 2)

2009-10-15T22:34:00.003+08:00

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Thirst

Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have. I walk
out to the pond and all the way God has
given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the hour
and the bell; grant me, in your mercy,
a little more time. Love for the earth
and love for you are having such a long
conversation in my heart. Who knows what
will finally happen or where I will be sent,
yet already I have given a great many things
away, expecting to be told to pack nothing,
except the prayers which, with this thirst,
I am slowy learning.

(Mary Oliver)
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look through my window

2009-10-13T23:02:00.004+08:00

I've started a new blog. A green one, this time.

Please. Feel free to look at the windows. :)
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the red sea desperadoes

2009-10-09T01:42:00.002+08:00

from Umberto Eco, Misreadings, 'Memos from a publications editor':

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"Regretfully, we are returning your manuscript: Anonymous, The Bible

I must say that the first few hundred pages of this manuscript really hooked me. Action-packed, they have everything today's reader wants in a good story. Sex (lots of it, including adultery, sodomy, incest), also murder, war, massacres, and so on. The Sodom and Gomorrah chapter, with the tranvestites putting the make on the angels, is worthy of Rabelais; the Noah stories are pure Jules Verne; the escape from Egypt cries out to be turned into a major motion picture . . . In other words, a real blockbuster, very well structured, with plenty of twists, full of invention, with just the right amount of piety, and never lapsing into tragedy.

But as I kept on reading, I realized that this is actually an anthology, involving several writers, with many--too many--stretches of poetry, and passages that are downright mawkish and boring, and jeremiads that make no sense.

The end result is a monster omnibus. It seems to have something for everybody, but ends up appealing to nobody. And acquiring the rights from all these different authors will mean big headaches, unless the editor takes care of that himself. The editor's name, by the way, doesn't appear anywhere on the manuscript, not even in the table of contents. Is there some reason for keeping his identity a secret?

I'd suggest trying to get the rights only to the first five chapters. We're on sure ground there. Also come up with a better title. How about The Red Sea Desperadoes?"
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love, and be silent

2009-10-07T18:44:00.002+08:00

I like the quiet brimfulness of the writing here. It's gorgeous.

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I wish that he could see the things I've sown. Diluted in me is John Wiggins, as today's rain will be in summer's harvest. I wish that I could see him once again, hear his footfalls on the gravel driveway, heavy on one foot. These dried leavings aren't complete in their remembrance, like the trimmings swept from green growth on a grocer's floor, they crumble on my fingertips and fly piecemeal to the wind. I do not do my father justice, that was his charge. I've borne his name, in and out of marriage, a name that is my own, sometimes I wish his strain would leave me, sometimes I'd like to choke it to full bloom. I'd like to turn to him today and say, 'I love you: too late: I'm sorry: you did the best you could: you were my father: I learned from you: you were an honest man.'

I cultivate a tiny garden; 'plot' reminds me of a cemetery. I plant only what my family guarantees to eat. The rest I give to those who want. Had you known him, I'd like to think you would have bought your groceries from John Wiggins. He always had a pleasant word. He could tell you how to plan a meal for twenty people, give you produce wholesale, trim your cut of meat before he weighed it - profit wasn't Daddy's motive, life was. Life defeated him. He taught me how to pack a grocery bag, I worked there weekends, canned goods on the bottom, perishables on top. Someone puts tomatoes on the bottom of my bag these days, I repack it. I was taught respect of certain order. One sees one's father's face, as one grows older, in the most peculiar places. I see Daddy in each bud. I see his stance on corners. I, myself, wear grocer's aprons, when I cook. My mother always said there was no cleaning that damned blood from those white aprons. My father left a stain: I miss him. I write longhand, and in ink.

(from 'Grocer's Daughter', by Marianne Wiggins)
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too many coincidences

2009-10-05T23:19:00.003+08:00

And not good ones, either. Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes. Whatever next. Oh wait, I don't really want to know.

At times like this, doing textual analyses of poems, novels and plays by dead white men, or living non-white women for that matter, just seems terribly, selfishly irrelevant. Surely there must be other ways spend our time and energies, to not waste our lives.

Here's hoping that friends and loved ones in the Philippines, Taiwan, and elsewhere, are, and will remain, safe and well.
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not counting the cost

2009-10-05T23:05:00.004+08:00

Here's a counterpoint to an early blog entry in the blue blog.

Obviously, I still have lots to learn.

Teach us, good Lord,
to serve you as you deserve,
to give and not to count the cost,
to fight and not to heed the wounds,
to toil and not to seek for rest,
to labour and not to ask for any reward,
save that of knowing that we do your will.

Amen.
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auld lang syne

2009-09-24T23:13:00.003+08:00

Nothing like meeting up with old friends to make one feel the passing of time. Things start feeling especially weird when you end up looking at the dear old face across the table from you, listening to him / her talk of things both of you used to love, and realising, quite suddenly, how you don't care for these things anymore. The sense of detachment can be quite disorientating.
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river

2009-08-08T13:16:00.002+08:00

Love that river metaphor.

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'One of the Observer pieces that I wrote there in 1975 was an exploration not of a real country but of a fictitious one - the England created in the great sequence of novels that Anthony Powell had just completed, A Dance to the Music of Time - and what particularly struck me about it was Powell's ability to suggest how great changes prepare themselves unseen beneath the apparently tranquil surface of one's life and then deflect it into some new course entirely, in the way that a placid river suddenly goes tumbling through the rapids, before emerging to resume its tranquil course, but running now in some perhaps quite different direction from before.'
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(from the 'Introduction' to Constructions, by Michael Frayn)
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all is gift

2009-08-07T00:07:00.004+08:00

I hadn't known before that Borges was partially blind. I would like to inherit his spirit - this man who saw blindness as a gift, who enumerated in a defiant essay (forged in the fires of what pain, who can tell?) all the gifts that it had given him.
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A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.
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If a blind man thinks this way, he is saved. Blindness is a gift. I have exhausted you with the gifts it has given me. It gave me Anglo-Saxon, it gave me some Scandinavian, it gave me a knowledge of a Medieval literature I had ignored, it gave me the writing of various books, good or bad, but which justified the moment in which they were written. Moreover, blindness has made me feel surrounded by the kindness of others. People always feel goodwill toward the blind.
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(from 'Blindness' by Jorge Luis Borges)
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a piece of chalk

2009-08-06T21:27:00.003+08:00

In the tradition of learning from the best, may I present:
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"A Piece of Chalk"
by G.K. Chesterton
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I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer holidays, when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up a walking-stick, and put six very bright-coloured chalks in my pocket. I then went into the kitchen (which, along with the rest of the house, belonged to a very square and sensible old woman in a Sussex village), and asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any brown paper. She had a great deal; in fact, she had too much; and she mistook the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper. She seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper he must be wanting to tie up parcels; which was the last thing I wanted to do; indeed, it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my mental capacity. Hence she dwelt very much on the varying qualities of toughness and endurance in the material. I explained to her that I only wanted to draw pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in the least; and that from my point of view, therefore, it was a question not of tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing comparatively irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that I wanted to draw she offered to overwhelm me with note-paper, apparently supposing that I did my notes and correspondence on old brown paper wrappers from motives of economy.
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I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I not only liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness in paper, just as I liked the quality of brownness in October woods, or in beer, or in the peat-streams of the North. Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness. All this I said (in an off-hand way) to the old woman; and I put the brown paper in my pocket along with the chalks, and possibly other things. I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
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With my stick and my knife, my chalks and my brown paper, I went out on to the great downs. I crawled across those colossal contours that express the best quality of England, because they are at the same time soft and strong. The smoothness of them has the same meaning as the smoothness of great cart-horses, or the smoothness of the beech-tree; it declares in the teeth of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty are merciful. As my eye swept the landscape, the landscape was as kindly as any of its cottages,but for power it was like an earthquake. The villages in the immense valley were safe, one could see, for centuries; yet the lifting of the whole land was like the lifting of one enormous wave to wash them all away.
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I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place to sit down and draw. Do not, for heaven's sake, imagine I was going to sketch from Nature. I was going to draw devils and seraphim, and blind old gods of that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colours on brown paper. They are much better worth drawing than Nature; also they are much easier to draw. When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew the soul of the cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the beasts. But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.
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They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave out much less about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had stared all day. They blazoned the shields of their paladins with the purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets. The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the Virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.
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But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on the brown paper, it began to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that a most exquisite and essential chalk, behind. I searched all my pockets, but I could not find any white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential. I cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is that, that white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When (so to speak) your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity for example, is exactly the same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. In a sense our age has realised this fact, and expressed it in our sullen costume. For if it were really true that white was a blank and colourless thing, negative and non-commital, then white would be used instead of black and grey for the funeral dress of this pessimistic period. We should see city gentlemen in frock coats of spotless silver satin, with top hats as white as arun lilies. Which is not the case.
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Meanwhile I could not find my chalk.
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I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town nearer than Chichester at which it was even remotely probable that there would be such a thing as an artist's colourman. And yet, without white, my absurd little pictures would be as pointless as the world would be if there were no good people in it. I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for expedients. Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter, again and again, so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imagine a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hourglass. Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some salt water with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on an immense warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made entirely out of white chalk. White chalk was piled mere miles until it met the sky. I stooped and broke a piece off the rock I sat on: it did not mark so well as the shop chalks do; but it gave the effect. And I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realising that this Southern England is not only a grand peninsula, and a tradition and a civilisation; it is something even more admirable. It is a piece of chalk.
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a delicious author

2009-08-05T22:32:00.003+08:00

Partly to make up for that uncharacteristic bout of whining about DH Lawrence, here's some more happifying fandom - John Piper's thoughts on CS Lewis.

I especially love the bit about Lewis as 'romantic rationalist'. Yes - in the image of his Creator, Lewis is a delicious author, rational and passionate. Any wannabe writer would do well to aspire towards the same.

And how lovely of Piper to affirm the 'professors and writers who devoted tremendous creative energies to render credible the existence of trees and water and souls and love and God'. We need more of those around.

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The Man Who Taught Me To See

Indeed, I thank God for professors and writers who devoted tremendous creative energies to render credible the existence of trees and water and souls and love and God. C. S. Lewis, who died the same day as John F. Kennedy in 1963 and who taught English at Oxford, walked up over the horizon of my little brown path in 1964 with such blazing brightness that it is hard to overstate the impact he had on my life.

Someone introduced me to Lewis my freshman year with the book, Mere Christianity. For the next five or six years I was almost never without a Lewis book near at hand. I think that without his influence I would not have lived my life with as much joy or usefulness as I have. There are reasons for this.

He has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he showed me that newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valuable for being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and opened for me the wisdom of the ages. To this day I get most of my soul-food from centuries ago. I thank God for Lewis’s compelling demonstration of the obvious.

He demonstrated for me and convinced me that rigorous, precise, penetrating logic is not opposed to deep, soul-stirring feeling and vivid, lively—even playful—imagination. He was a "romantic rationalist." He combined things that almost everybody today assumes are mutually exclusive: rationalism and poetry, cool logic and warm feeling, disciplined prose and free imagination. In shattering these old stereotypes, he freed me to think hard and to write poetry, to argue for the resurrection and compose hymns to Christ, to smash an argument and hug a friend, to demand a definition and use a metaphor.

Lewis gave me an intense sense of the "realness" of things. The preciousness of this is hard to communicate. To wake up in the morning and be aware of the firmness of the mattress, the warmth of the sun’s rays, the sound of the clock ticking, the sheer being of things ("quiddity" as he calls it). He helped me become alive to life. He helped me see what is there in the world—things that, if we didn’t have, we would pay a million dollars to have, but having them, ignore. He made me more alive to beauty. He put my soul on notice that there are daily wonders that will waken worship if I open my eyes. He shook my dozing soul and threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God and heaven and hell broke into my world with glory and horror.

He exposed the sophisticated intellectual opposition to objective being and objective value for the naked folly that it was. The philosophical king of my generation had no clothes on, and the writer of children’s books from Oxford had the courage to say so.

You can’t go on "seeing through" things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to "see through" first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To "see through" all things is the same as not to see.

Oh, how much more could be said about the world as C. S. Lewis saw it and the way he spoke. He has his flaws, some of them serious. But I will never cease to thank God for this remarkable man who came onto my path at the perfect moment.

(from Don't Waste Your Life, John Piper)
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on frivolity

2009-07-30T20:16:00.003+08:00

Further sign of ageing - a surprising, and ugly, impatience with frivolity. O Time, what hast thou wrought.
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antidote

2009-07-29T18:43:00.004+08:00

Cinematic trope from martial arts movies: the concerned best friend / faithful lover / devoted son or daughter / loyal disciple rushes back from the seventh mountain behind the seventh river on the seventh moon of the seventh month with the antidote to the deadly poison that is slowly sapping the lifeforce out of his/her buddy / lover / parent / teacher.

No faithful friend / lover / child / disciple in sight, but thank goodness for good poetry. Here's my antidote to Lawrence:

The Snow Storm

I walked down towards the river, and the deer had left tracks
deep as half my arm, that ended in a perfect hoof
and the shump shump sound my boots made walking made the silence loud.

And when I turned back towards the great house
I walked beside the deer tracks again.
And when I came near the feeder: little tracks of the birds on the surface of the snow I'd broken through.

Put your finger here, and see my hands, then bring your hand and put it in my side.

I put my hand down into the deer track
...............and touched the bottom of an invisible hoof.
Then my finger in the little mark of the jay.

(Marie Howe, from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time)
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woman in love... NOT

2009-07-29T14:54:00.009+08:00

"Women In Love is five hundred pages of passionate vehemence, wave after wave of turgid, exasperated writing impelled towards some distant and invisible end; the persistent underground beating of some dark and inaccessible sea in an underworld whose inhabitants are known by this alone, that they writhe continually, like the damned, in a frenzy of sexual awareness of one another. Their creator believes that he can distinguish the writhing of one from the writhing of another... to him they are utterly and profoundly different; to us they are all the same."

- John Middleton Murray

To be fair, I don't agree with this entirely - the characters are very distinct, and there's more to the novel than sex (though not much). And I must say that Lawrence is one of the most skilled, observant chroniclers of sexual politics I have ever encountered - his grasp of the complexities of the interactions between men and women (and between men and men, women and women) is probably second to none.

But oh, what kind of person must Lawrence have been, to have written a novel in which everything tends, turgidly and pulsatingly (and yes, that's the paradox), towards death and dissolution, and in which there is no love, only the will to power and the will to possess - no compassion, no tenderness, only animal desire either loosed or repressed.....

Lawrence is poison, and I need an antidote - NOW. Suggestions, anyone?
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this is newness (2)

2009-07-26T22:38:00.007+08:00

I'm trying to remember if I've ever felt this way before. I don't think so. This is newness - this dazed sense of the future opening up before me with choices that are really mine to choose, and this yearning for 'more and more and then more of it', as Marie Howe put it so memorably in 'What The Living Do'. It's like standing before a vast piece of empty land with a shovel in hand, wanting to rush out and turn the whole into a ripe billowing field of every possible crop ever known to mankind - and knowing that I have only a shovel, and that no one plants a field with more than one main crop at any one time. Sure, there's crop rotation, but which shall I start with first? And how to choose?

That explains the relative silence on this blog over the last few months - too many things happening, life moving in too many unexpected directions more quickly than I am used to. Real life happening, so that suddenly the cyberlife seems that much less interesting and compelling. I really don't think I'll be doing too much random fandom websurfing in the near future - real life beckoning, and oh so much of it - there's just no time to waste on the internet anymore.

Not that I'm complaining - it's good to feel alive, it's good to want things, and it's good to be able to see possible futures, possible desirable futures, even within whatever constraints life has put in place for me right now. It's new to me - and I'm relishing the feeling, but at the same time, I can't stand here gaping with my shovel forever.

So, I'll need to get a move on. I need to decide. Oh God help me make the right choices, and at the right time.
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what the Lord requires

2009-06-08T02:25:00.003+08:00

Wherewith shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old?

Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

(Micah 6:6-8)
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dear Emily...

2009-05-19T21:11:00.003+08:00

Is it too much to ask, to want to teach Emily Dickinson next year? I missed the chance to study her poetry in JC because our teacher decided to read GB Shaw instead (??!!!??). Is dear Emily going to lose out to some contemporary unknown in this latest round of the Most-Examinable-Writer contest?

Edit: 26 July 09

Ok, not some contemporary unknown, then, but good ol' depressive Tommy with his milkmaids and cows. That's alright, I suppose - could have been worse. Emily will just have to wait till some other time.
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the inevitable AWARE blogpost

2009-05-01T03:20:00.007+08:00

Well, it had to happen sometime, so it might as well be now, at 3.30am on the morning of Labour Day. This AWARE thang. Sigh.

1) Can I just say that I'm writing this as a Bible-believing Christian who also believes that Singapore, being a secular society, needs to be run in a way that treats all legitimate religious groups in the same way. "Regardless of race, language or religion" - our schoolchildren recite this during assembly every morning - but it seems such pledges are easily forgotten in the heat of debate over emotional issues.

2) I wish that the new Exco would come up with a single, coherent statement detailing their version of tthe chronology of events to date (including the preliminaries to the March 28 AGM), as well as their vision for AWARE in future. It does not help their case that people have to piece together their story from a hodgepodge of media reports, all of which may or may not be biased (who knows?), and none of which has the full story.

The Old Guard has made their case clearly and plainly at this website:
http://we-are-aware.sg/statements

If the new Exco could do the same, they would be doing much to clarify the muddied waters of this media-hyped debate - and goodness knows we could all do with some clarity in this.

3) I also want to say that this debacle is not about whether or not people approve of homosexual behaviour. It is about civil society, and what the ground rules for engagement ought to be in a secular society like Singapore. If what has been reported is true, it would appear that the new Exco, despite acting within the bounds of what is allowed by AWARE's constitution, were not acting in a way that was ethically fair and above board. In other words, they seem to have used the letter of the law to go against the spirit of the law. This is not the way to effect change in civil society here in Singapore. If people have a grievance with the way things are done in a particular civil society group, they should simply give their feedback to the existing leaders. And if these leaders do not take their suggestions on board, and if what the organisation is doing is not against the law, the grievance-holders are free to start another rival organisation. The free market of civil society can then be allowed to work in deciding which organisation has the better, more workable action plan.

There. I've had my say.

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mayang sari CNY getaway

2009-01-27T12:37:00.001+08:00

I’m sitting in a sort of beach shelter / beach bar. It’s a wooden construction, with wooden pillars and beams apparently tied / fixed together with hemp, the ceiling made of what looks like rows of bamboo, but varnished a deep mahogany. The sea-wind here – not a sea-breeze, not that tame – blows continually from the sea and gives the coconut trees a permanently frazzled look – their leaves straining away from the shore.

I’m the only person here who’s alone. Everyone else seems to be here with their families – whole tribes of adults and youngsters with everything from beach towels to pushchairs, and even crutches (one unfortunate boy, about ten years old I’d guess, wearing a black ankle guard on his right foot, now quietly resting on his left ankle). I watch these families and wonder about them – where they’re from, what they’re like, who loves who and who doesn’t quite like who, what brings them together and what threatens to pull them apart, what draws them here.

Earlier I saw a little boy knock over one of the heavy stone urns guarding the wooden path to this beach bar. He tried to walk away from it but was called to account by a big man I assume was his father and a pony-tailed, pink-clad woman who must have been his mother. They tried to reprimand him but it seemed clear they weren’t really angry – and I’m sure the boy knew it. He opened his mouth wide and wailed. Later, the resort staff came along to look at the damage – the urn fell apart into two jagged pieces in their hands – and their laughter undid whatever little effect the parents’ half-hearted attempts at discipline had on him. Lesson learned – it doesn’t matter if you destroy something that is not yours, because nobody really cares anyway.

Later I saw the family of the boy with crutches seated round a table, all six of them diligently writing postcards, heads bent and brows furrowed with such earnestness over their task that I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of envy for the recipients of so much concentrated epistolatory effort. I wish people would write me postcards like that. I think the family’s German – I just heard the father-figure swearing (“Scheizer…!”) when his son’s crutches slipped on the glossy painted cement floor and the boy landed on the floor.

The waiters and cooks (they double up – multi-taskers, all) are preparing lunch with what looks like gusto – that same attentiveness given to the food as the German family gave to their postcards earlier on. Attentiveness. That’s it. The quality which confers on things their worth. That is why I’d like to be a recipient of that family’s earnest postcards.

If writing is a calling, then what does it call one to do? What am I called to do, really, if and when I am called to write? For every 10 pages of drivel that no one, least of all myself, would ever want to read, there may be one gem of wisdom like that realisation about attentiveness. All that time for so little. Is that what the writing life means? Can I take it, this little reward for so much labour?

the road less-travelled

2009-01-26T16:09:00.002+08:00

I’ve made a mistake, a wrong choice. It’s the first time I’ve had to make such a choice, and I’ve gone and spoilt it, marred things, opened the door to the necessity of further choices about what to do with that that wrong choice and its consequences.

I speak, of course, of the nail polish I chose for the pedicure I just had this morning. It’s a bright peachy candy pink, the sort of pink one might find gracing a Barbie’s Dream House, the sort of pink that I’d usually never venture within a mile of, so deep is the terror that its over-the-top pink-ness strikes in my heart. Yet today I chose to use this colour in my first-ever pedicure. What came over me, you ask? To be honest, I really have no clue. I thought it might perhaps be a bit less attention-seeking than one of the deeper reds, less visible to the eye. I thought it might blend in a bit better. But no. My newly peach nails draw more attention to themselves than they would have, had they been clad in the deepest scarlet. And the reason they do, is because they don’t go. They don’t go with the rest of my clothes, they don’t match the way I carry myself, the way I speak, the way I think. In other words, my toes have now morphed into something quite other than me, something alien to my nature. Something I don’t quite recognise.

Now that’s a heck of a burden to be putting on ten mostly harmless toes. And of course I’m not upset – I just enjoy the experience of kicking up a rhetorical fuss over something of so little consequence. But to some extent, I do regret the choice, because I really did want a makeover for my feet, and I’m now wondering whether, in addition to removing the pink varnish when I get home, I should actually buy a bottle of that deep red stuff I was talking about earlier, and make real women of my toes. (Right now they’re little Lolitas – tweenage digits peeking out coyly from my sensible sandals). But that would cost more money, and right now I’m loath to be spending money on anything that I don’t absolutely need… but then again, perhaps I do need my nails not to make me look at a sixteen-year-old on a sugar-high.

Ah. Decisions, decisions. I wonder which way the penny will fall. Watch this space for the next update!
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reminder

2009-01-26T00:06:00.001+08:00

“I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”

“So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.”

(from The Fellowship of the Ring)
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iThirst...

2009-01-11T23:18:00.003+08:00

... for so many things. For the Word and the word, for good live music, for good fellowship with good friends. For order and sanity, and time to breathe, for love and faith and hope.
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the road goes ever on

2008-12-27T22:42:00.003+08:00

A Rabbi and a Sheikh musician are travelling together along a country road, along with the Rabbi's cat and the Sheikh's donkey. This is part of their conversation:

Sheikh: He's a strange ass. Believe it or not, he can read my scores and sings in three languages.

Rabbi: That's amazing!

Sheikh: It's more of a worry. He sings out of tune. You can give speech to an ass, but he's still an ass.

Rabbi: You don't think we should educate everyone?

Sheikh: Yes, we should even educate asses. But without illusions. Every time I like a song, I feel moved to pass it on. So I gather round the greatest possible number of musicians and teach it to them.

Rabbi: And that doesn't give them talent, does it?

Sheikh: No. The worst part is that when I hear the text in their mouth, it's ruined. And the lyrics I liked become ordinary.

Rabbi: You know what, we should just live in a cave and mind our own business. I bring my books, you bring your songs.

Sheikh: One day Allah would reproach us for it. We'd be like Jonah, who treated a tree as more important than people.

Rabbi: So what? Aren't we allowed to say that we've done a lot for other people and that they've worn us out and we're old and we want to be left alone?

Sheikh: No.

(from The Rabbi's Cat, Joann Sfar)
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Christmas musings

2008-12-25T23:08:00.006+08:00

It's Christmas - a year has passed since the ardent Buechner posts of Christmas 2007, and what a year it's been. A pause, now, to think about that first Christmas - the unwed pregnancy with its attendant humiliations (who would believe a young teenage girl jabbering away about angelic visitations?), the difficult journey made to satisfy the demands of a foreign colonizer, the lack of suitable accommodation (and probably the poverty that kept the better establishments out of reach), the straw sticky with messy afterbirth, the strange visitors - the poorest of the poor tending their sheep on the Judean hillsides, the exotic Eastern sages, the heavenly messengers, the mass infanticide that drove them into Egypt as refugees. Silent, peaceful night? I really don't know about that. It seems to me that Jesus was born in the most trying of circumstances - not exactly what most of us would call 'peaceful'. In fact, I'm not sure how much of Jesus's life was 'peaceful' by the usual standards.

And yet:

'For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.' - Isaiah 9:6

Because:

'Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.' - John 14.27

Something to for me to think about, as I prepare for yet another day fighting entropy and inertia at work, while downstairs the usual drama plays itself out in its usual late night way, and the lone sands stretch into the distant horizons of the arid other life.
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a door gently closing

2008-12-23T22:15:00.004+08:00

So I got my final results for my M.A. today. Didn't do too badly, all things considered - I was expecting straight Bs or Cs this term, which didn't happen, alleluia thank You God amen. Didn't do as well for the Coetzee paper as I would have wanted to, or as I knew I could have done if I had more time - perhaps some time next year I'll pick it up again and do something with it, maybe even try to get it published in some journal, the way TR suggested right at the start.

Meanwhile, I hear a door gently closing - a door which I closed myself, but not without regret or hesitation. I miss talking Lit with people in the know, I miss the in-jokes, the feeling of being at least slightly knowledgeable about something, the feeling of having mastery over something I have to do, the 'N' conversations one can only have with fellow 'N's that have been so sorely lacking in my life of late. And of course I miss Lit - my first love - but I'm so busy now I don't even have time to miss my first love properly, because I have neither the time nor energy to even think about the things I enjoy.

Anyway, so it's done, the M.A., and my flirtation with my first love. At least I did come away from the course having gained something - research and writing skills, a deeper understanding of Coetzee's work, a few new poets and writers discovered, a more-than-passing acquaintance with some of my lecturers, a renewed conviction that much of current literary theory is really just so much b*****t, and an invitation from TR to drop by her office to say 'Hi' (this means so much to me cos I think she's one of the most brilliant people I know, and it's nice to be appreciated by people one appreciates).

Not too bad, I guess, everything considered. It's been a good year and a half, and I'm grateful. And I guess that's the most important thing.
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bookshelving

2008-12-21T01:58:00.007+08:00

It's been so long since I've updated - the days, days, days run away like horses over the hill. It's almost the end of the year, Christmas is just round the corner, and I haven't done anything this year about gifts and cards because I've been so caught up with trying to catch up with work.
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Anyways, to make up for the long silence, here are some pretty / cool / pretty cool bookshelf ideas that I might just like to follow up if / when I get my own place. Hmm. It's something about December that puts me in the nesting mood, I think. I remember dreamin' of kitchens at around this time last year.

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The Parenthetical Bookshelf - this has the elegance of a mathematical equation.
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The Staircase Bookshelf - my second thought, after "Oh cool!", was: "How would you mop the stairs without damaging all those books?"
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The Tree of Knowledge Bookshelf - again, pretty, and pretty impractical....

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The Rainbow Bookshelf - I'd love to retire at the end of a long day to a room like this one, and just... chill.

why I am not doing a PhD

2008-11-17T23:30:00.004+08:00

Because I honestly don't think I can spend the rest of my life doing stuff like this and still take myself seriously.

---------------------------------------

from Parker, Emma. '"Apple Pie" Ideology and the Politics of Appetite in the Novels of Toni Morrison.' Contemporary Literature. 39.4 (1998), 614-643.

'Audre Lorde has remarked that for African American women, "oppression is as American as apple pie" (114). The fiction of Toni Morrison provides an exploration of the effects of dominant (white, male) American cultural values or "apple pie" ideology on the African American community, particularly its women, and does so in terms of what can be called the politics of appetite. This essay examines Morrison's representation of the way in which issues of gender and race shape appetite. It looks at the themes of hunger and cannibalism but focuses specifi- cally on sugar. In Morrison's novels fruit pies and other sweet foods have a special significance...'
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queen anne's lace

2008-10-26T22:03:00.004+08:00

It's been a month since I last updated, and oh so much has happened. No time now to write long posts, so a picture will have to suffice.
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Aren't they pretty?

(With thanks to JL, for the William Carlos Williams poem that led me to find this on Google Images.)
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restoring the years

2008-09-26T18:10:00.004+08:00

"And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you. And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the LORD your God, that hath dealt wondrously with you: and my people shall never be ashamed."

(Joel 2:25 - 26)
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against fanaticism

2008-09-11T02:57:00.004+08:00

"Rational, secular intellectuals are not notably quick to take offense. Like Karl Popper, they tend to believe that: I must teach myself to distrust that dangerous intuitive feeling or conviction that it is I who am right. I must distrust this feeling however strong it may be. Indeed, the stronger it is, the greater is the danger that I may deceive myself; and, with it, the danger that I may become an intolerant fanatic."

(J.M. Coetzee)
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on censorship

2008-09-09T18:47:00.003+08:00

Still on Coetzee, after a short hiatus in which I tried to attend to the other promises I have to keep. Ah, those Frostian woods - how they call to me, call to me...

Funny how the world of literary academia seems so alluring and attractive, indeed, comfortable, every time I experience it as an insider, yet every time I step outside to look at it objectively, it seems so removed from any kind of reality that has any relevance or usefulness to anything or anybody in any sense that matters. I wonder what the result of this tug-of-war will be. The funny thing is that I don't even know what labels to give the opposing sides, or even which side I want to ally myself with.

----------------------------------------------------

The recommendation, in full, of the South African board of censors on Coetzee's novel, Waiting for the Barbarians:

(from McDonald, Peter D. 'The Writer, the Critic, and the Censor: J.M. Coetzee and the Question of Literature'.)

"This is a somewhat Kafkaesque type of narrative, with the narrator an elderly somewhat Quixotic Magistrate, for long posted at a little frontier outpost, who has sought a modus vivendi if not operandi with the nomadic tribes (the barbarians). But the officiously overbearing Imperial police & military find in him an impediment to their plan to extend Imperial sway to subduing the barbarians. So there is tension between the ambitious authoritarians and the indulgent magistrate. He loses position & authority, & suffers severe battering. Doom, brutality and suffering suffuse this sombre book unrelieved by any lighter touches. The few across the line sex incidents are almost entirely inexplicit & in no case lust-provoking. The locale is as obscure as Erewhon, and any symbolism more so - apart from the arrogant tyranny of the State [sic] senior ideologists - their blinkered ideological outlook and ruthlessness. [Added as an afterthought: Further symbolism could with diligence be extracted. All is of world-wide significance, not particularised.] Thought the book has considerable literary merit, it quite lacks popular appeal. The likely readership will be limited largely to the intelligentsia, the discriminating minority. There are less than a dozen 'offensive' words and all are commonplace & functionally in context. We ['I' crossed out] submit that there is no convincing reason for declaring the book undesirable."

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For the State:
So that's the way to keep the arts neutered even if not neutral - cosy up to artists and intellectuals in their comfortable little ivory towers, if need be, help to furnish those ivory towers with the latest designer furniture and contemporary artwork (and don't forget the fine food and wine), and flatter their sense of themselves as being above oh-so-proletariat concerns like 'popular appeal'.

And for artists:
Keep art sacrosanct, above all, make sure that aesthetics takes priority over everything else, and well, yes, you'll have your artistic purity, you'll even be given space by the powers-that-be to speak whatever truth you want to speak - but at the risk of irrelevance.

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speculation

2008-08-31T11:57:00.007+08:00

So, my theory about Coetzee's writing after looking at his two earliest novels, Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country, which are about as rich and lushly lyrical (or, the way I see it, wanky, self-indulgent) as those of any number of other gifted prose stylists: later Coetzee's stripped-bare language is his response to loss and suffering. He's lost so much - a wife (first to divorce, then cancer), a son (to possible suicide), and a native country (even though that particular loss was chosen). In the midst of such losses, what can one do, but retreat into silence? Or, if one must speak, surely all but the barest of words must seem superfluous? Remember Lear ("Never, never, never, never, never"), and the way his rotund eloquence finally turns to what would be child-like simplicity if the words were not so heart-rendingly painful.

Reading earlier Coetzee, I've realised that the reason I've stopped reading novels for so long is that I can no longer take the way most fiction, simply by way of its prose style, imposes such rich other-worlds on its readers. Too much, too much. It's sensory overload. And emotional, psychological overload as well - in any good novel, the characters' burdens become one's own and one starts to share a little of their lives. Perhaps sometimes one has enough burdens of one's own - there is no need to take on more.

Early Coetzee reads like a completely different writer from the Coetzee I've come to know. I'm glad I started with his later work.
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obsession

2008-08-23T20:34:00.006+08:00

The Coetzee fandom continues unabated. Actually, it's running rabid. Now that I'm done with his latest books, I'm going backwards to the less-known, not-quite-so-prizewinning earlier works, and oh, how I love them all, every single one. This is the first time in my life I've been this way about any writer. Most of the time, I find something to dislike or to be disappointed by fairly quickly. Not with Coetzee. I think this is becoming an obsession. And I don't mean that in the flippant way I usually use that word, either.

Here's something taken from the back cover of Boyhood, which I think captures the essence of Coetzee's writing for me.

'As funny, cruel and terrifying as life itself. It is also intense and elegant, clearly the product of (a) complex, subtle imagination... Austerely beautiful... (with an) aloof, edgy grace and seething passion...' (Irish Times)

Ok, I dunno about 'seething' - sounds too drama-mama for Coetzee, but the rest of that, yeah, just about gets it. Here's an example of that passionate intensity combined with the sparest of prose (or, what P called 'baby English' - said the great P, "It's not easy to write in baby English."):

-------------------------------------------

'There is another first memory, one that he trusts more fully but would never repeat, certainly not to Greenberg and Goldstein, who would trumpet it around the school and turn him into a laughing-stock.

He is sitting beside his mother in a bus. It must be cold, for he is wearing red woollen leggings and a woollen cap with a bobble. The engine of the bus labours; they are ascending the wild and desolate Swartberg Pass.

In his hand is a sweet-wrapper. He holds the wrapper out of the window, which is open a crack. It flaps and trembles in the wind.

"Shall I let it go?" he asks his mother.

She nods. He lets it go.

The scrap of paper flies up into the sky. Below there is nothing but the grim abyss of the pass, ringed with cold mountainpeaks. Craning backwards, he catches a last glimpse of the paper, still bravely flying.

"What will happen to it?" he asks his mother; but she does not comprehend.

That is the other first memory, the secret one. He thinks all the time of the scrap of paper, alone in all that vastness, that he abandoned when he should not have abandoned it. One day he must go back to the Swatberg Pass and find it and rescue it. That is his duty: he may not die until he has done it.'

(from Boyhood)

---------------------------------------------------

I think the other thing that so attracts me to his writing is that it's really survivor's writing. Maybe that's the link with the holocaust writing that I'm so drawn to as well. As Frost put it in 'The Oven Bird',

The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
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on Dostoevsky

2008-08-19T15:19:00.007+08:00

'I read again last night the fifth chapter of the second part of The Brothers Karamazov, the chapter in which Ivan hands back his ticket of admission to the universe God has created, and found myself sobbing uncontrollaby.

These are pages I have read innumerable times before, yet instead of becoming inured to their force I find myself more and more vulnerable before them. Why? It is not as if I am in sympathy with Ivan's rather vengeful views. Contrary to him, I believe that the greatest of all contributions to political ethics was made by Jesus when he urged the injured and offended among us to turn the other cheek, thereby breaking the cycle of revenge and reprisal. So why does Ivan make me cry in spite of myself?

The answer has nothing to do with ethics or politics, everything to do with rhetoric. In his tirade against forgiveness Ivan shamelessly uses sentiment (martyred children) and caricature (cruel landowners) to advance his ends. Far more powerful than the substance of his argument, which is not strong, are the accents of anguish, the personal anguish of a soul unable to bear the horrors of this world. It is the voice of Ivan, as realised by Dostoevsky, not his reasoning, that sweeps me along.

Are those tones of anguish real? Does Ivan "really" feel as he claims to feel, and does the reader in consequence "really" share Ivan's feelings? The answer to the latter question is troubling. The answer is Yes. What one recognises, even as one hears Ivan's words, even as one asks whether one wants to rise up and follow him and give back one's ticket too, even as one asks whether it is not mere rhetoric ("mere" rhetoric) that one is reading, even as one asks, shocked, how a Christian, Dostoevsky, a follower of Christ, could allow Ivan such powerful words - even in the midst of all this there is space enough to think too, Glory be! At last I see it before me, the battle pitched on the highest ground! If to anyone (Alyosha, for instance) it shall be given to vanquish Ivan, by word or by example, then indeed the word of Christ will be forever vindicated! And therefore one thinks, Slava, Fyodor Michailovich! May your name resound for ever in the halls of fame!

And one is thankful to Russia too, Mother Russia, for setting before us with such indisputable certainty the standards toward which any serious novelist must toil, even if without the faintest chance of getting there: the standard of the master Tolstoy on the one hand and of the master Dostoevsky on the other. By their example one becomes a better artist; and by better I do not mean more skilful but ethically better. They annihilate one's impurer pretensions; they clear one's eyesight; they fortify one's arm.'

(from the closing chapter of J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year)

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Edit: 9 Sept 2008

It's so characteristic of Coetzee that even this is not allowed to be the final word in the novel. I've just checked out The Brothers Karamazov from the library, and lo and behold, the chapter reference given by 'Coetzee' in the text is... well, not exactly wrong, but certainly rather unusual and confusing. One would expect a writer and an academic like Coetzee to follow the usual referencing conventions more closely. So it looks like even this apparently rousing call to an ethical aesthetics cannot be taken at face value.

And therefore one thinks, Slava, John Maxwell Coetzee, for once again refusing to allow us to take easy refuge in easy answers! May your name resound forever in the halls of fame!
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smitten

2008-08-18T00:52:00.004+08:00

Smitten is when you can forgive anything. So I've been reading Coetzee's latest, Diary of a Bad Year, and despite all my initial misgivings, all my objections against self-indulgent, self-advertising writing, I'm starting to really enjoy it.

I wonder how many such fans he has. What a strange thing loyalty is.

Edit: 19 Aug 08

Evidence that I'm really and truly losing it: I'm almost done with the book, and I don't want it to end!!! I just want to keep on and on reading this stuff - Coetzee's little essaylets on politics and power and just about anything under the sun, including magpies, love and Bach.

Coetzee should keep a blog. I'd be his biggest fan.
...
...

lately

2008-08-15T00:17:00.004+08:00

"...most late Beethoven pieces take surprising courses. His earlier works tend to have a tone (which sometimes he names for us, as in the "Pathetique" and "Eroica") that propels a dramatic unfolding: We hear what happens to the pathos and the heroism. In his late works Beethoven turned away from such clear dramatic curves to more elusive and evocative trains of ideas whose effect he and his time called poetic. And in keeping with the turn from drama to poetry, he left the heroics behind."

(from Slate)

Hmm. Interesting distinction between the 'dramatic' and the 'poetic'. I'm not sure if I agree.

Whatever. I'm only just starting to discover late Beethoven. Methinks it's time to go listen to those last string quartets again.
...
...

where i can be free

2008-08-09T21:20:00.006+08:00

With even more thanks to XW for all this mind-food. Lunch is on me next time, ok?

An interview with Gao Xingjian.

'According to Gao, a writer's only responsibility is "to the language he writes in". Determined to rid himself of others' ideologies, to live, as he says, "without isms", he advocates a "cold literature", detached from both political agendas and consumerist pressures, whose purpose is to bear witness...

Without Isms is neither nihilism nor eclecticism; nor is it egotism or solipsism. It opposes totalitarian dictatorship but also opposes the inflation of the self to God or Superman. It hates seeing other people trampled on like dog shit. Without Isms detests politics and does not take part in politics, but is not opposed to other people who do. If people want to get involved in politics, let them go right ahead. What Without Isms opposes is the foisting of a particular brand of politics on to the individual by means of abstract collective names such as 'the people', 'the race' or 'the nation'.'

-----------------------------------------

Besides the fact that any mention of Gao Xingjian immediately reminds me of V (and P and XW), and of the cheese-and-crackers-and-Paul-Auster-in-the-canteen days now so long gone (halcyon days - oh nostalgia!), this just strikes at the heart of what literature is for me. Gao's in good Nobel Prizewinning company here - birds of a feather etc - Coetzee takes much the same view, which has gotten him into all sorts of trouble with South African anti-apartheid activists who wanted him to commit himself to their cause.

(Ok, let me admit now that I haven't read any Gao Xingjian, but this interview is making me think that I should go look up his work.)

I was asked the other day why I don't like women's writing. (By that, I don't mean writing that happens to be by women - there are lots of female writers that I like; I mean, writing that advertises / labels itself as 'women's writing', writing that serves the feminist cause.) And as usual in the case of the things that I feel really deeply about, I found myself struggling to articulate what I think. I have vaguely embarrassing memories of repeating the word 'Hysterical' several times, and not getting much further than that. But I think what bothers me about women's writing - and by extension, most if not all writing that serves a cause - is that the aesthetics tends to get lost in the politics. Of course, there are exceptions, perhaps even many exceptions, I really don't know; but commitment to a political ideology does seem to get in the way, very often, of a clear-eyed objectivity regarding the quality of the work as art.

Perhaps there is a side of me that desperately needs to believe that literature can be a space where Politics and Ideology do not have to matter. And I know how naive this sounds - every writer writes for a cause, even if the cause is anti-political, like in Gao and Coetzee - but maybe it's because I need to think that literature is a place where one can still be free. A place 'away from all camps', as Coetzee puts it in Life & Times of Michael K, where the only measure of worth is that of aesthetic quality.

Ah well. Even this belief in an autonomous literature is an ideology in itself, I guess. So there's no getting away from it and we all might as well go, oh I dunno, sing National Day songs or something, for all that this is gonna get us.

Happy National Day.
...
...

interbloggeral incest (2)

2008-08-08T14:50:00.003+08:00

From XW's blog. Thanks much, for poetry and other things.

------------------------------------------------

The Beautiful Lie

He was about four I think... it was so long ago.
In a garden; he'd done some damage
behind a bright screen of sweet-peas -
snapped a stalk, a stake, I don't recall,
but the grandmother came and saw, and asked him:
"Did you do that?"

Now, if she'd said why did you do that,
he'd never have denied it. She showed him
he had a choice. I could see, in his face,
the new sense, the possible. That word and deed
need not match, that you could say the world
different, to suit you.

When he said "No", I swear it was as moving
as the first time a baby's fist clenches
on a finger, as momentous as the first
taste of fruit. I could feel his eyes looking
through a new window, at a world whose form
and colour weren't fixed

but fluid, that poured like a snake, trembled
around the edges like northern lights, shape-shifted
at the spell of a voice. I could sense him filling
like a glass, hear the unreal sea in his ears.
This is how to make songs, create men, paint pictures,
tell a story.

I think I made up the screen of sweet peas.
Maybe they were beans; maybe there was no screen,
it just felt as if there should be, somehow.
And he was my - no, I don't need to tell that.
I know I made up the screen. And I recall very well
what he had done.

(Sheenagh Pugh)
...
...

acquainted with the night

2008-08-05T22:32:00.003+08:00

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

(Robert Frost)

------------------------------------------------

This book by poet Christoher Dewdney just arrived in the mail today, and I'm much looking forward to reading it.

From the back cover:

'Weaving together science and storytelling, art and anthropology, award-winning poet Christopher Dewdney takes readers on a fascinating journey through the nocturnal realm. In twelve chapters corresponding to the twelve hours of night, he illuminates night's central themes, including sunsets, nocturnal animals, bedtime stories, festivals of the night, fireworks, astronomy, nightclubs, sleep and dreams, the graveyard shift, the art of darkness, and endless nights. With infectious curiosity, a lyrical intimate tone, and an eye for nighttime beauties both natural and man-made, Dewdney paints a captivating portrait of our hours in darkness.'

Ok, some of the things on that list sounded kinda weird - 'the art of darkness'? 'endless nights'??? Sounds like a Sandman comic. Actually (*checks Amazon*), it is a Sandman comic. Nevertheless, I'm sure the book is better-written than the blurb. And anyways, any book that begins with "I love night." cannot but resonate with me.

I'm so looking forward to this - I'll stop this blog entry now and start reading pronto!
...
...

dream dream dream

2008-08-04T18:00:00.005+08:00

At the end of this year, what I'd like more than anything in the world is to take a holiday to some place like Tasmania, with beautiful scenery and not too many people, and drive around exploring the place with my uni friends (sans kids and hubbies). I want to feel free. (Cue I Want To Break Free by Queen - I've always associated that song with images of people in cool convertibles, driving along the coast with hair flying in the wind - I think there may have been a car advert at some point that was made along those lines.)

Tasmania in December 2008? Hmm. Time to start planning...
...
...

the art of losing

2008-07-29T01:35:00.005+08:00

I'm starting to find a disturbing thread running through the books and music I love (or have loved). King Lear, Disgrace, Age of Iron, What I Loved, Celan's poetry, Fugitive Pieces, W;t, Barabbas, the book of Job, Hopkins' 'Pitched past pitch of grief', Beethoven's final piano sonatas, the Schubert sonata as played by Richter that I'm currently obsessed with. What all of these have in common is a desolation (or in some cases, a transcendent bareness) that comes from the experience of searing, harrowing loss. In so many of these works, the protagonist is stripped of everything that s/he ever valued, everything that shored up his/her sense of self. (Ok, maybe it's hard to see / hear that happening in the music, but the music I love so often has an austerity to it that could be attributed to a desire to communicate that feeling of being stripped bare in musical language.)

So what's with this obsession with loss? I really don't know - perhaps it's because that kind of loss has something so elemental about it. One feels a kind of purgation reading about it. Though I'd be the first to say, good to encounter in art, and let's hope that's as far as it ever gets.
...
...

Schubert: Piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat, D960

2008-07-27T22:46:00.007+08:00

So the CD finally arrived yesterday - a live recording of Sviatoslav Richter playing Schubert's last piano sonata in a parish church somewhere in England. You can hear the audience members coughing - some of them very badly, the poor things - and occasionally you can catch the sound of cars, and, according to the CD notes, even airplanes, in the background. But somehow, even though such disturbances normally annoy me, in this case, they just make the whole performance come alive in a way that would have not been possible if all the ambient noise had been edited out.

I love Richter's playing. I'm not sure if that's the consensus among the music people - certainly I've heard people say things like "He was quite eccentric", or, even worse, "He's very popular", (implying that he's not that good, really). I guess what I like about the way he makes music is, firstly, his technical prowess (every note so clearly articulated, even in glissando passages, believe it or not!), and secondly, the individuality of his musical vision, its sheer verve and confidence.

If only he'd made more recordings. But ah well. I'm just glad to have discovered him, even if I came a bit late to the party.

Ooh, and an interesting analysis (again, I can't vouch for its musical credentials, but I like the writing) of the Schubert sonata. I really should go find a few other recordings to listen to.

Edit: 28 July 08

The other thing I like so much about Richter's interpretation of this sonata is the way he's so comfortable with silence. This is related to the confidence and verve I mentioned earlier, I guess - he is utterly unafraid, whether of speed-demon running notes or huge handspan-expanding chords, or just silence.

Ok, I suppose it all boils down to the fearlessness. That's it, really. I mean, sure, most musicians are confident of their craft, but very few sound fearless the way Richter does.

Apparently, he's got another, better, recording of this sonata, made somewhere in the 1970s in Prague. I want to hear that one too, so that I'll have something to compare this recording with.
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...

called by name

2008-07-27T21:52:00.002+08:00

It's late afternoon at the lake. The turtles are moving closer to shore. The surface of the water is undisturbed, an expanse of smooth, grey slate. Most of the children in my neighbourhood are called home for supper by their mothers. They open the back doors, wipe their hands on their aprons, and yell, "Willie!" or "Joe!" or "Ray!" Either that or they use a bell, bolted to the doorframe and loud enough to start the dogs barking in backyards all along the street. But I was always called home by my father, and he didn't do it in the customary way. He walked down the alley all the way to the lake. If I was close, I could hear his shoes on the gravel before he came into sight. If I was far, I would see him across the surface of the water, emerging out of shadows and into the grey light. He would stand with his hands in the pockets of the windbreaker while he looked for me. This is how he got me to come home. He always came to the place where I was before he called my name.

(Dennis Covington)
...
...

the soul selects her own society

2008-07-21T17:34:00.003+08:00

Here's new US Poet Laureate's Kay Ryan's record of her traumatic encounter with the AWP Conference. It's an interesting, lively essay - though its attraction for me was not so much its observations and insights, but the sense that I was hearing someone else articulate ideas that I've long held but had never dared to think were quite legitimate.
...
...

525 600 minutes

2008-07-21T01:54:00.003+08:00

I loved this song back in Uni, and I still love it now, because cheesy though it may seem, it is so true.

Sometimes I need things like this to remind me of how I want to live my life.

-------------------------------

Seasons of Love

ALL
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes,
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Moments so dear.
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?

In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights
In cups of coffee
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.

In five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes
How do you measure
A year in the life?

How about love? How about love? How about love?
Measure in love
Seasons of love. Seasons of love.

HOMELESS WOMAN
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes!
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Journeys to plan.
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes
How do you measure the life
Of a woman or a man?

COLLINS
In truths that she learned,
Or in times that he cried.
In bridges he burned,
Or the way that she died.

ALL
It's time now to sing out,
Tho' the story never ends
Let's celebrate, remember
A year in the life of friends

Remember the love! Remember the love!
Seasons of love!

HOMELESS WOMAN (while ALL sing)
Oh you got to got to
Remember the love!
You know that love is a gift from up above
Share love, give love, spread love

Measure, measure your life in love.

(by Jonathan Larson. From the musical, Rent.)
...
...

history / herstory

2008-07-16T18:01:00.004+08:00

History repeats itself so that we can apply the lessons learned in the past.

I'm sure Freud would have loads to say about repetition. Deja vu - to find yourself back in the place you were at, all of nine years ago, but this time, knowing where things could go, knowing what paths were chosen the last time and where those paths led, knowing now what the alternatives are... There's a certain cosmic irony a la Sam Beckett to all this that I'm not finding very funny right now, even though I know that laughing my way through this might be one of the better ways to deal.
...
...

choices, choices...

2008-07-07T23:37:00.001+08:00

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

- Robert Frost
...
...

more of it than we think

2008-07-05T12:04:00.005+08:00

I've been thinking about literature, and my relation to it. Until not too long ago, literature was my religion: I looked to it for Answers, for some way of living life, of understanding and finding one's way around the world. I think that, in a vague kinda way, I thought (or hoped) that words had the power to change the world - one idea at a time, one person at a time.

All of these beliefs still hold true for me, I think, but to a much lesser extent than in the past. Now, the main role that literature plays for me is as a counterbalance or even a corrective to religious fundamentalism, to the kind of closed-up, totalising perspective on the world that threatens anyone who embraces any kind of religious faith. It's also my refuge - 'the refuge of art', as Nabokov puts it in the gorgeous, swoon-inducing closing paragraph of Lolita. It's the space where anything can be thought and said, where being merely human is treated with an honesty, a forthrightness, and sometimes a kindness and sympathy, that the more dogmatic strains of religion often do not make room for. In other words, it's my antidote to myopia and goody-two-shoe-ness.

I think I'll also have to ask my friends to alert me if they see any signs of myopia and goody-two-shoe-ness emerging in my attitudes and behaviour. I'd hate to forget the world's more-of-it-than-we-think-ness, its incorrigible plurality.
...
...

after the movie

2008-07-02T11:17:00.003+08:00

...
After the Movie

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.
He says that he believes a person can love someone
and still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that's not love. That's attachment.
Michael says, No, that's love. You can love someone, then come
to a day

when you're forced to think "it's him or me"
think "me" and kill him.

I say, Then it's not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist
even in the murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what
is it?

We're walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded
night—and I hear my voice repeating
what I used to say to my husband: Love is action,
I used to say to him.

Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to
look at someone you want to eat and not eat them.

Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.

Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are
doomed to live in purgatory.

Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight.
I can't drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I've just
bought—

again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck
the stuff from
the hole the flip top made.

What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.
But what I think he's saying is "You are too strict. You
are a nun."

Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think
these things of me even if he's not thinking them?

Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer
and colder.
Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,

we both know the winter has only begun.

(Marie Howe)

----------------------------------------------------

It was somewhere in 2000 or 2001, I think, or perhaps even as early as 1999, that I discovered Marie Howe in the Atlantic Unbound. At that time, I was searching for some kind of - I suppose the word would be 'salvation', though I didn't know it then - salvation, then; and the closest I came to finding it was in literature, in poetry and fiction. And Marie Howe's 'What The Living Do' showed me a way to live life that was real, beautiful and true.

She's got a new book out, finally, 10 years after her last - The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, which, I suspect, is where today's poem is taken from. It's been in my Amazon shopping cart for ages - I just haven't gotten round to actually ordering it yet, because I'm still wondering if I should wait for the paperback version to be out. I'm not too keen on hardcovers - they take up too much space.

Maybe I should just order it, huh. It seems kinda silly to be doing the delayed gratification thing just for the sake of some few millimetres of shelf space.
...
...

singapore = africa?

2008-07-01T12:56:00.002+08:00

from Elizabeth Costello, by J.M. Coetzee:

'In Africa, a book must offer you a return for the money you spend on it. What do I stand to learn by reading this story, the African will ask? How will it advance me? ...

We do of course make books in Africa. But the books we make are for children, teaching-books in the simplest sense. If you want to make money publishing books in Africa, you must put out books that will be prescribed for schools, that will be bought in quantity by the education system to be read and studied in the classroom. It does not pay to publish writers with serious ambitions, writers who write about adults and matters that concern adults. Such writers must look elsewhere for their salvation. ...

Of course you will find publishers in Africa, one here, one there, who will support local writers even if they will never make money. But in the broad picture, storytelling provides a livelihood neither for publishers nor for writers.'

--------------------------------------------

Of course, we know that Singapore isn't Africa. But the analysis of the writing and publishing industry in Africa (which isn't Coetzee's, strictly speaking - this comes from the mouth of one of his characters, a literary/political activist novelist) does show up some similarities between the continent and the city-state. The best-selling books here, after all, are self-help books, business manuals and assessment books. Anyone looking to work in the book-publishing industry here either has to content themselves with working in these 'genres', or be willing to work in tiny loss-making outfits that are cross-subsidised by their owners' other, more profitable businesses.

At least, that is what I've observed. I'd be glad if anyone could prove me wrong.
...
...

help salman rushdie!

2008-06-25T22:47:00.003+08:00

Just came upon this while looking for stuff on Coetzee:

A petition, dated 12 April 1990, signed by an entire delegation of internationally renowned writers, asking for governmental aid for Salman Rushdie, who had, a year ago in 1989, been the subject of death-threats after the publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses. The names include Margaret Atwood, Derek Walcott, Umberto Eco, Hanif Kureishi, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Harold Pinter, Susan Sontag, Kurt Vonnegut, David Lodge, Andrei Voznesensky, and JM Coetzee of course... The list goes on - some familiar names, some completely unknown to me. Some of them dead by now. An international coalition (there's no other word for it) of people whose lifework it is (was) to shape thought, to extend the frontiers of our collective ideas of who we are and what it means to be human. I like the sense of camaraderie this evokes - the sense of some larger solidarity of purpose that unites all these disparate people from all over the world. And of that ultimate destiny that we all share.

It reminds me of this, from John Donne:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

How old was I when this happened? It's been 18 years. And now, look how all this is being memorialised on the internet, and me adding to it in this absolutely insignificant way.

More than two weeks spent mostly in silence and recovering from a bad flu that won't go away, is not good for the mental health. Thank goodness for the internet - it's been my main link to the rest of the world during this time. But virtuality can only take one so far. I think I need to embark on another round of excessive socialising again, soon.
...
...

clarity

2008-06-23T15:20:00.004+08:00

from Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace.

....."... She says I am not a good guide."
....."But you were a teacher."
....."Of the most incidental kind. Teaching was never a vocation for me. Certainly I never aspired to teach people how to live. I was what used to be called a scholar. I wrote books about dead people. That was where my heart was. I taught only to make a living."
...
...

musing

2008-06-14T14:30:00.003+08:00

Over at PFFA, there's a bunch of crazy people currently engaged in a read-a-poet project: the idea is that we read the work of just one contemporary poet over the entire month of June, and write daily commentaries on what we're reading. It's a fascinating exercise - not so much because of what one can learn about the poets from other people's commentaries, but because of the way individual commentators develop their relationships with their poets over time.

Criticism is a frighteningly revealing activity. You feel so exposed, because you can't help but reveal your prejudices, your values, in the act of writing about someone else's work. And then there is the fear of being found out, of having your own inadequacies laid bare to someone else's critical eye.

And then of course there is always the sneaking suspicion that the poet you're writing about is lurking around the forum, reading what you're saying, and thinking, What an idiot.

Two more weeks of this. I wonder where we all will be at the end of this.
...
...

a pragmatist at heart

2008-05-28T02:36:00.003+08:00

Ok, i'm getting a bit obsessive about Louise Glück's poetry. It's so merciless.

With thanks to C for the intro.

------------------------------------

Circe's Power

I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
look like pigs.

I'm sick of your world
that lets the outside disguise the inside.

Your men weren't bad men;
undisciplined life
did that to them. As pigs,

under the care of
me and my ladies, they
sweetened right up.

Then I reversed the spell,
showing you my goodness
as well as my power. I saw

we could be happy here,
as men and women are
when their needs are simple. In the same breath,

I foresaw your departure,
your men with my help braving
the crying and pounding sea. You think

a few tears upset me? My friend,
every sorceress is
a pragmatist at heart; nobody

sees essence who can't
face limitation. If I wanted only to hold you

I could hold you prisoner.

- Louise Glück

...
...

falling from love

2008-05-26T14:44:00.002+08:00

...
Parable of the Dove

A dove lived in a village.
When it opened its mouth
sweetness came out, sound
like a silver light around
the cherry bough. But
the dove wasn't satisfied.

It saw the villagers
gathered to listen under
the blossoming tree.
It didn't think: I
am higher than they are.
It wanted to walk among them,
to experience the violence of human feeling,
in part for its song's sake.

So it became human.
It found passion, it found violence,
first conflated, then
as separate emotions
and these were not
contained by music. Thus
its song changed,
the sweet notes of its longing to be human
soured and flattened. Then

the world drew back; the mutant
fell from love
as from the cherry branch,
it fell stained with the bloody
fruit of the tree.

So it is true after all, not merely
a rule of art:
change your form and you change your nature.
And time does this to us.

- Louise Glück
...
...

i like...

2008-05-25T21:13:00.005+08:00

from Wilbur, Richard. 'An Introductory Note.' Collected Poems: 1943 - 2004.

'I once asked Wallace Stevens whether he liked such-and-such a poem of his, and he heartily replied, "I like all my poems." Every poet has moments of feeling that way, moved by gratitude for all the times when he got something decently said, or hoped to have done so, and could in conscience add another poem to his manuscript. That, I think, is the mood in which a collected poems - as opposed to a stern winnowed selected - should be assembled.'

Well, since the man himself has already declared his affections, who am i to scorn any published poem of his, however slight it may appear?

-------------------------------------------

from Ceremony and Other Poems (1950)

Parable

I read how Quixote in his random ride
Came to a crossing once, and lest he lose
The purity of chance, would not decide

Whither to fare, but wished his horse to choose.
For glory lay wherever he might turn.
His head was light with pride, his horse's shoes

Were heavy, and he headed for the barn.

Epistemology

..................I

Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

..................II

We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, "You are not true."

[Geeky editorial note: 'Epistemology' reminds me of this time when i asked a student of mine, easily the brightest student in her cohort, why she was not doing the new 'A' Level subject for the creme de la creme of Singaporean JC students known as 'Knowledge & Inquiry', aka Philosophy 101. Her answer? "Because I didn't want to have to keep asking myself whether the chair I'm sitting on is real."]

from Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems (1961)

Two Voices in a Meadow

......A Milkweed

Anonymous as cherubs,
Over the crib of God,
White seeds are floating
Out of my burst pod.
What power had I
Before I learned to yield?
Shatter me, great wind:
I shall possess the field.

.....A Stone

As casual as cow-dung
Under the crib of God,
I lie where chance would have me,
Up to the ears in sod.
Why should I move? To move
Befits a light desire.
The sill of Heaven would founder
Did such as I aspire.

from 'Poems For Children and Others': Opposites

..................12

What is the opposite of two?
A lonely me, a lonely you.

..................17

There's more than one way to be right
About the opposite of white,
And those who merely answer black
Are very, very single-track.
They make one want to scream, "I beg
Your pardon, but within an egg
(A fact known to the simplest folk)
The opposite of white is yolk!"

...................18

The opposite of doughnut? Wait
A minute while I meditate.

This isn't easy. Ah, I've found it!
A cookie with a hole around it.

....................22

The opposite of a cloud would be
A white reflection in the sea,

Or a huge blueness in the air,
Caused by a cloud's not being there.

...................39

The opposite of opposite?
That's much too difficult. I quit.

from More Opposites

....................9

What is the opposite of road?
I'd say the answer is abode.
"What's an abode?" you ask. I'd say
It's ground that doesn't lead away -
Some patch of earth where you abide
Because it makes you satisfied.

Abodes don't take you anywhere,
Because you are already there.

....................14

The opposite of robber? Come,
You know the answer. Don't be dumb!
While robbers take things for a living,
Philanthropists are fond of giving.
"And yet," you say, "that's not quite true;
Philanthropists are takers, too,
And often have been very greedy
Before they thought to help the needy.

Well, let's be obvious, then: the op-
Posite of robber is cop.
...
...

za bor poetry (2)

2008-05-23T01:10:00.002+08:00

I never thought to find myself saying this, but I think I need to read some women poets. Let's hope that the trip to Borders later today proves helpful.
...
...

afterword

2008-05-20T00:38:00.002+08:00

"I thought it was a good concert, but when I heard the results... [makes face, sticks out tongue] I find things disturbing. I'm talking about life in general, not music."

- Sviatoslav Richter

Ok, this fandom has to stop. How many times can one keep watching a video featuring mostly video clips of piano recitals for crying out loud?

I need a job.
...
...

you just gotta love him...

2008-05-18T21:59:00.007+08:00

On playing at Stalin's funeral:

"All sorts of nonsense were written about me. Absurd things! Supposedly, I played deliberately to protest against Stalin... I played at Stalin's funeral. Indeed, I did play there. I chose to play a long fugue by Bach. The audience hissed. What audience could hiss at Stalin's funeral??? That's completely ludicrous! The police tore me away from the piano!"

- Sviatoslav Richter

Poor man - prevented from playing for the Fatherland, just because his philistine audience couldn't appreciate Bach and had no concert etiquette... :)

...
...

to baldly go where no man has gone before

2008-05-18T01:51:00.011+08:00

...
...

The fact that I'm reading and enjoying Foucault's Discipline and Punish is starting to feel vaguely disturbing. This may just be the start of a slippery slope leading to a lifetime in academia...

I wonder if a Foucauldian-Christian (??!!) reading of the crucifixion would even be possible...

...

-------------------------------------------

...

from Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. 47 - 49.

...

"The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor casses, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested.

...

An offence, according to the law of the classical age, quite apart from the damage it may produce, apart even from the rule that it breaks, offends the rectitude of those who abide by the law: 'If one commits something that the law forbids, even if there is neither harm nor injury to the individual, it is an offence that demands reparation, because the right of the superior man is violated and because it offends the dignity of his character' (Risi, 9). Besides its immediate victim, the crime attacks the sovereign: it attacks him personally, since the law represents the will of the sovereign; it attacks him physically, since the force of the law is the force of the prince. 'For a law to be in force in this kingdom, it must necessarily have emanated directly from the sovereign, or at least have been confirmed by the seal of his authority' (Muyart de Vouglans, xxxiv). The intervention of the sovereign is not, therefore, an arbitration between two adversaries; it is much more, even, than an action to enforce respect for the rights of the individual; it is a direct reply to the person who has offended him. There can be no doubt that 'the exercise of the sovereign power in the punishment of crime is one of the essential parts of the administration of justice' (Jousse, vii). Punishment, therefore, cannot be identified with or even measured by the redress of the injury; in punishment, there must always be a portion that belongs to the prince, and, even when it is combined with the redress laid down, it constitutes the most important element in the penal liquidation of the crime. Now, this portion belonging to the prince is not in itself simple: on the one hand, it requires redress for the injury that has been done to his kingdom (as an element of disorder and as an example given to others, this considerable injury is out of all proportion to that which has been committed upon a private individual); but it also requires that the king take revenge for an affront to his very person.

...

The right to punish, therefore, is an aspect of the sovereign's right to make war on his enemies: to punish belongs to 'that absolute power of life and death which Roman law calls merum imperium, a right by virtue of which the prince sees that his law is respected by ordering the punishment of crime' (Muyart de Vouglans, xxxiv). But punishment is also a way of exacting retribution that is both personal and public, since the physico-political force of the sovereign is in a sense present in the law: 'One sees by the very definition of the law that it tends not only to prohibit, but also to avenge contempt for its authority by the punishment of those who violate its prohibitions' (Muyart de Vouglans, xxxiv). In the execution of the most ordinary penalty, in the most punctilious respect of legal forms, reign the active forces of revenge.

...

The public execution, then, has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular. The public execution, however hasty and everyday, belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored (coronation, entry of the king into a conquered city, the submission of rebellious subjects); over and above the crime that has placed the sovereign in contempt, it deploys before all eyes an invincible force. Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength. Although redress of the private injury occasioned by the offence must be proportionate, although the sentence must be equitable, the punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measure, but of imbalance and excess; in this liturgy of punishment, there must be an emphatic affirmation of power and of its intrinsic superiority. And this superiority is not simply that of right, but that of the physical strength of the sovereign beating down upon the body of his adversary and mastering it: by breaking the law, the offender has touched the very person of the prince; and it is the prince - or at least those to whom he has delegated his force - who seizes upon the body of the condemned man and displays it marked, beaten, broken. The ceremony of punishment, then, is an exercise of 'terror'."

...
...

Schubert: Piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat major, D.960

2008-05-17T22:25:00.006+08:00

My first encounter with this piece (specifically, the second movement) was in the desolate opening scenes of Richter: The Enigma, Bruno Monsaingeon's documentary on pianist Sviatoslav Richter. Once again, the dynamic i identified in the earlier post about Ribena Man has kicked in - how can any other recording ever match up to Richter's dark, passionate clarity?

Schubert is one of the (many) composers whose music I haven't really paid much attention to in the past. For some reason, I had the mistaken notion that everything he'd written was as cheerfully bubbly as the 'Trout' Quintet - where I got that notion from, I have no idea, since I'd listened to so little of his work in the first place. Now, thanks to Naxos and the NUS library website, I'm happily exploring Schubert's repertoire and making up for lost time and past ignorance. Now to find me a full recording of Richter playing that last sonata...

Speaking of Richter - I was looking at his recordings on the online record stores a couple of months back, and was flabbergasted to find that the out-of-print Richter / Beethoven CD I gave away so casually almost 2 years ago (wanting to free up precious space on my CD shelf) is selling for at least US$25 (and, on Amazon.co.uk - a staggering 51 pounds!!!) on the internet marketplace. I had no idea it was worth that much. I'm now wondering if I would have kept it, if I had known. I think not - the fact remains that I didn't like the music in the album (Beethoven's 1st Piano Concerto, and his Piano Sonata in A flat major, 'Funeral March', that I had to play for my Diploma exam - oohh... not-good memories...). But I might have had more awareness of the value of the gift, and might thus have taken more pleasure in the giving. As it was, I thought the person I gave it to was doing me a big favour by allowing me to make space for other, better (haha!) recordings on my CD shelf. Ah the ignorance of youth!
...
...

octet

2008-05-11T20:40:00.007+08:00

Mendelssohn has always struck me as one of those unfortunate (or fortunate, depending on how you look at it) artists who never reached the heights of greatness simply because they were too happy. (Yes, I subscribe, shamelessly, to the 'great art comes out of great suffering' school of thought. So sue me.) So while I may enjoy his music, it's not often that it touches me at any deeper level. But I do like, very much, his Octet for Strings, Op 20. (With thanks to L for introducing this to me, even though she doesn't read this blog. I think.) It's such an exuberant, youthful, happy piece of music - the violins and violas rushing headlong into the sunlight, hats flying in the wind, and the cellos following behind, carrying the picnic baskets with the patient resignation of gruff, barely-concealed affection. The piece is a joy to watch in performance as well - I saw it played by some of the faculty members from the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory a few months back, and was struck by the energy and synergy of their collaborative effort, and by how much they enjoyed the music. Everyone needs to attend a performance like that once in a while, just to remind ourselves of what it means to take pleasure in the things we love.
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...

the persistence of song

2008-04-30T21:43:00.003+08:00

There is a kind of song that sings in the air in the coolness of the evening, and i heard this airborne singing yesterday, and it was very good.

--------------------------------------------------

The Persistence of Song

Although it is not yet evening,
The secretaries have changed their frocks
As if it were time for dancing,
And locked up in the scholars' books
There is a kind of rejoicing,
There is a kind of singing
That even the dark stone canyon makes
As though all fountains were going
At once, and the colour flowed from bricks
In one wild, lit upsurging.

What is the weather doing?
And who arrived on a scallop shell
With the smell of the sea this morning?
- Creating a small upheaval
High above the scaffolding
By saying, "All will be well.
There is a kind of rejoicing."

Is there a kind of rejoicing
In saying "All will be well"?
High above the scaffolding,
Creating a small upheaval,
The smell of the sea this morning
Arrived on a scallop shell.
What was the weather doing

In one wild, lit upsurging?
At once, the colour flowed from bricks
As though all fountains were going,
And even the dark stone canyon makes
Here a kind of singing,
And there a kind of rejoicing,
And locked up in the scholars' books
There is a time for dancing
When the secretaries have changed their frocks,
And though it is not yet evening,

There is the persistence of song.

(Howard Moss)
...
...

author: anon

2008-04-29T14:49:00.006+08:00

A review of a book written by one of my favourite lecturers from back in the uni days. John Mullan, aka Ribena Man, always, invariably, came for classes and lectures with a packet of Ribena which he would set down on the table or the lectern with an emphatic 'thump', as if it constituted a kind of postmodern sceptre of authority. If he'd been teaching in Singapore, he would have been inundated by cartons, nay, whole cargo-containers, of Ribena on Teachers' Day. i enjoyed his classes - they were clear, erudite, and witty. i only wish i'd appreciated lecturers like him more - the problem with being exposed to the best right at the start is that you take it for granted, thinking that it is the norm. Which would be fine, if not for the niggling little problem of having to cope with less than the best most of the rest of the time. That's been a problem for me in many areas of life, i think.

-------------------------------------------------------

from: The Times Literary Supplement, 20 Feb 2008

Mullan, John. Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature. London: Faber, 2008.

Anonymous is perhaps the greatest – and certainly the most prolific – of English authors. Among his or her masterworks are The Dunciad, In Memoriam, Clarissa and Pride and Prejudice; and the range of genres is astonishing, from the Marprelate tracts through “Fanny Hill” to A Letter Concerning Toleration. Anonymous’s relatives, the Pseudonyms, are commonest in the Victorian period: they include not only George Eliot, Lewis Carroll and Currer Bell but interesting lesser figures such as Ouida and Fiona Macleod. In Anonymity, his “secret history of English Literature” (in fact, a secret history of post-medieval English literature), John Mullan conflates anonymity and pseudonymity, grouping his examples according to the motives for authorial concealment: modesty or mockery, cross-gendering or fear for one’s life.

A great deal of material is condensed in this book, and the juxtapositions are frequently suggestive. Primary Colors, the roman-à-clef based on the first Clinton campaign that caused such excitement in 1996, is brought together with Gulliver’s Travels, An Essay on Man and the Waverley Novels under the rubric “Mischief”. What the American furore throws into relief is how po-faced people tend to be today about any trifling with the talisman of the author. Of course there were special circumstances in the case of Primary Colors: Joe Klein denied his authorship on air. But then Sir Walter Scott denied his to the Prince Regent; and while he may have spoken with a twinkle in his eye, the point is that he was allowed to get away with it. One secret history implicit in Mullan’s book is that of something harder to imagine than the absence of antibiotics or electricity: people actually respecting each other’s privacy.

Charlotte Brontë’s friend Ellen Nussey watched the proofs of Jane Eyre being corrected in her own house without ever being so intrusive as to ask what was going on. Not only that, but she “passed them to the house letter bag without glancing at the address; perceiving that confidence was not volunteered, it was not sought”. A few years later, when Brontë was enjoying literary society in London, she kept up the pretence that she had no connection to the brilliant Currer Bell – and so did others: “Most people know me I think”, Brontë wrote in a letter; “but they are far too well-bred to show that they know me”.

Mullan renders these, and many other such vignettes, with clarity and good humour: a consistent virtue of the book is its fullness of anecdote. We tremble with Fanny Burney as she takes her first steps towards publication through the intermediary of “her nineteen-year-old brother Charles, who first approached the bookseller Thomas Lowndes ‘in the dark of the evening’, disguised in hat and old greatcoat, and going by the name of ‘Mr King’”. We thrill to the “taunting pseudonymity” of the Marprelate tracts and the author-hunt it provoked: the printing press being moved from house to house, the betrayals, the interrogations under torture. And we smile with Swift’s friends as they pretend not to know who had written Gulliver’s Travels. Mullan thinks that this emphasis on biography is, paradoxically, required by his subject: “the main lesson is a simple one: that anonymity is most successful when it provokes the search for an author”. Yet, since provoking the search for an author is itself Mullan’s major criterion of success, this statement is merely circular. It leaves one wondering whether the strangeness, the self-alienation of at least some anonymous and pseudonymous writing is not being rather lost sight of.

Of course, no text is wholly in its writer’s control, but anonymity and pseudonymity markedly increase the disjunction. Many authors in Mullan’s book display sharp reluctance to have their living, social selves connected to writings which they may have been involved in producing, but which are not entirely their own.

The chapter on reviewing mentions Charles Wentworth Dilke, Editor of the Athenaeum in the 1830s and 40s, who “never signed anything he wrote and scrupulously guarded against the names of his reviewers ever escaping the office”; the reason being that to write for the Athenaeum was to write, not simply as oneself, but with the journal’s values and its impersonal voice. Mullan does not say if he thinks there was any virtue in this practice; the main concern of his chapter is to unmask the personal connections that anonymity also served to conceal. We are meant to tut, on being told that in George Eliot’s review of G. H. Lewes’s Life and Works of Goethe in the Leader in 1855, “there is no hint that the reviewer is acquainted with the author”; and when Mullan writes that “the dispassionate self-image of the TLS belied networks of allegiance and intimacy”, the word “belied” implies scandal. The assumption is that to expose the people doing the writing is to explain what is really going on.

Of course, some backs were secretly patted, some favours furtively cashed in. But networks of allegiance only explain things in so far as people act in line with the allegiances they profess. Mullan registers, in passing, the interesting point that George Eliot’s review of Lewes’s work was not in fact very warm: “one can sense Eliot’s reticence about praising the book”. The ideal of impartiality here trumps the personal relationship, but Mullan does not ask how widely this might have happened elsewhere, nor how anonymity might have affected – even perhaps benefited – the large proportion of reviewing that was not disreputable. T. S. Eliot claimed (perhaps unsurprisingly) that it taught him “to moderate my dislikes and crotchets, to write in a temperate and impartial way”. Our current norm of named reviewing (it was adopted by the TLS in 1974) is no doubt better; but it is hardly a perfect system. It has not abolished personal bias: if anything, it seems to have nourished it by bringing it into the open and making it seem acceptable. F. W. Bateson’s argument for the abandonment of anonymity, that “the worth of an opinion varies with the degree of respect we have for the holder”, is not the whole truth of the matter: a piece of writing ought to be able to carry its own conviction. For all its obvious cons, anonymous reviewing did have some pros: not least in its insistent reminder that reviews should do more than express a personal opinion.

Mullan makes a good point in support of his conflation of anonymity and pseudonymity: Robinson Crusoe was published without an author’s name, i.e., anonymously; “but its title page declared it to be ‘Written by himself’, so we might say that it appeared under the pseudonym ‘Robinson Crusoe’”; it is equally true of Defoe’s Roxana and Moll Flanders, and of Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa, that their “supposed authors . . . were their protagonists”. But there are also reasons for keeping the terms apart.

Pseudonyms, and variants like “by the Author of X”, build an authorial persona, albeit one separate from the person doing the writing: they allow successive works to be read in relation to one another. It mattered to Pride and Prejudice that it was announced as being “by the Author of Sense and Sensibility”, and to Mansfield Park that it was “By the Author of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice”. It says something still true to our sense of Jane Austen’s trajectory as an author that, after what Mullan judges to be the disappointed reception of Mansfield Park, Emma was advertised as being by the author of merely “‘Pride and Prejudice,’ &c. &c”. True anonymity, by contrast, sends a book orphaned into the world, and with no siblings to protect it. This is what Charlotte Brontë wished to do to Villette, despite the success she had had with Jane Eyre and Shirley under the pseudonym Currer Bell. Mullan plausibly sees the same motive in play here as in her initial adoption of a pseudonym: the need to draw on events from her life, and people she knew, without fearing they would be recognized and gossiped about.

Yet anonymous rather than pseudonymous publication would have done something more: it would have estranged Villette from the rest of Brontë’s oeuvre, signalling that the text had – as it does – a different character and aims. Jane Eyre, being the girl and then woman she is, was always going to write her story, call it Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, and make sure she got the best editor in town: Currer Bell. But Lucy Snowe’s relationship to writing and publication is deeply troubled: at once longing to reveal herself and ashamed of doing so, she is aware that words misrepresent as well as represent. For her, writing is as much self-laceration as self-expression. It is in line with her modesty that her story should be titled, not with her name (which in any case sounds like a pseudonym) but the name of a place; conversely, it is in line with her pride that it should go out into the world as simply her achievement. In the event, Brontë’s publishers insisted the book be issued under the well-known pseudonym: it may have helped sales, but it made the novel a marginally lesser work of art.

Villette is, importantly, about grief, and it is likely that Brontë’s wish for anonymity was influenced by the anonymous publication of In Memoriam three years before. Tennyson’s work shares Villette’s sense of the alienness of writing: “The sad mechanic exercise, / Like dull narcotics”, as well as its openness to sources of expression that lie beyond the writer’s control: “From out waste places comes a cry”. To have put an authorial name on In Memoriam would be like a driver signing a car crash: it would blithely assert the confidence in personal agency which the work itself terrifyingly smashes apart.

Mullan’s account of In Memoriam is – like the rest of his book – both well informed about the circumstances and, as literary criticism, non-interventionist. His explanation of the work’s anonymous publication is that “it is as if the making public of what was once private requires the author’s withdrawal” – but this explains very little (isn’t all publishing “the making public of what was once private”?). The phrase “as if” appeals to Mullan almost as much as to Cher Horowitz, in the movie Clueless: it allows him to bring an idea into range without having to engage it in argument. A stark instance occurs when he is mulling over the difference between the casual anonymity of many texts in the medieval period and the pointed anonymity that came in thereafter: “the very word ‘anonymous’, used to describe a literary text, dates only from the sixteenth century, as if it took print to make the absence of an author’s name an important fact”. As if! – it doesn’t seem to matter whether we are persuaded by the notion or not; but in a different kind of book it might have been foundational to the whole enterprise.

Throughout Anonymity, Professor Mullan practises the technique of administering anaesthesia to his discussion just when it seems to be getting really interesting: we are left with the glib and the self-evident. Of Thomas Gray: “as if turning your poetry into published work were mortifying”. Of the Alice books: they took “their life from a special relationship with children. They hardly belonged to the realm of commercial authorship”. Of Sir Walter Scott: “his anonymity was a way of turning his personal experience into impersonal fiction”. Towards its end, Mullan’s book asks what is certainly a major question, albeit a familiar one: “To what extent do we need that author’s name in order to read?”. No answer is proposed, and no reference made to the many that have been given in the past. It may be that Mullan eschews the pursuit of these ideas – together with complex sentences and long words – because he likes to think he is writing for the “general reader”. But general readers can be particular. I suspect that many readers, of many kinds, will wish Anonymity had appeared in unabridged form.

About the reviewer:

Matthew Reynolds holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is the author of The Realms of Verse, 1830–1870: English poetry in a time of nation building, 2001, and is the co-editor of Dante in English, 2005.
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do we not bleed?

2008-04-18T00:39:00.007+08:00

i was reminded of one of my favourite Shakespearean plays today. Hmm. Amazing how much of my ethical system, as far as i have one, has been, and continues to be, constructed by the books i read. Replace 'Jew' with any category of unjustly marginalised people, and voila! That is what i think of almost any kind of prejudice and discrimination.

It's been a long time. Almost ten years. i really ought to read it again and see if it's still the same play. i know for sure that i am not the same reader.

--------------------------------------------------

........ He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge?

(Bill S. The Merchant of Venice, Act I Sc iii)
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achtung baby

2008-04-13T00:58:00.003+08:00

Listening to U2's Achtung Baby has made me realise how good they used to be, how ahead of their time.

It's such a pity they've since sold out. They should have just stopped making new albums after Pop. Do i really mean that? Yes, i do. That is how much i value artistic development and innovation. After the negative critical reception of Pop (unfairly negative, i think - Pop may not have been the stadium rock that U2 had grown famous with, but it was good music on its own terms), they stopped pushing the boundaries and started making floataround, characterless easy-listening stuff instead. Which is a pity, because i really do think that they used to be a truly great band.
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world enough and time

2008-04-11T23:48:00.005+08:00

Time flies when you're having fun. Or so it's said. i can't believe it's already almost the middle of April - almost a third of the year gone already. Time's winged chariot, hurrying near.

Or, as Larkin put it in that devastatingly simple poem, 'Days':

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

One of these days, i will read Heidegger's 'Being and Time', and possibly understand it.

i want more time.

"Nothing much to say, i guess,
Just the same as all the rest,
You've been tryin' to throw your arms around the world..."

(U2, Tryin' To Throw Your Arms Around the World)
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men behaving badly

2008-04-10T20:56:00.003+08:00

On Heidegger's involvement in Hitler's Third Reich, and other related matters. Ooooohhhh... All the more reason not to go into academia...

--------------------------

from Steiner, George. Heidegger. London: Fontana Press, 1992. xxv - xxvi. (Italics mine.)

"What strikes me as perfectly evident is the extent of Heidegger's rhetorical and administrative participation in the Nazification of the German university-world in 1933-34. Like so many other intellectuals, Heidegger was manifestedly caught up in the brutal, festive inebriation which swept across Germany after some fifteen years of national humiliation and despair. Naked power can mesmerize the academic-mandarin temper (Sigmund Freud was, for a spell, entranced by Mussolini, and those thinkers and writers who worshipped at Stalin's shrine were legion). Unquestionably, Martin Heidegger saw himself as a chosen praeceptor Germaniae, as a leader-in-thought who would mould a national resurrection. The Platonic image, not only in reference to Plato's doctrines of philosophic governance but also with regard to Plato's role as advisor to Sicilian despotism, lay to hand. The chapter of the unwisdom of philosophers in regard to matters political is a long one. Voltaire's Jew-hatred was rabid. The racism of Frege was of the blackest hue. Sartre not only sought to evade or find apologia for the world of the Gulag; he deliberately falsified what he knew of the insensate savagery of the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China. It is an ill-kept secret that cloistered intellectuals and men who spend their lives immured in words, in texts, can experience with especial intensity the seductions of violent political proposals, most particularly where such violence does not touch their own person. There can be in the sensibility and outlook of the charismatic teacher, of the philosophical absolutist, more than a touch of surrogate sadism..."

i find the link Steiner makes between 'the sensibility and outlook of the charismatic teacher' and 'surrogate sadism' highly intriguing. And, i must admit, it is a link that i'm inclined to agree exists. One of these days i'll have to write a long post about the teaching profession and the exercise / abuse of power.
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sigh...

2008-04-10T01:14:00.003+08:00

"Whoever truly knows what is knows what he wills in the midst of what is."

(Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art.")

What is it with these German philosophers?? Can't they say anything without getting themselves mired in layers upon layers of words turning in on themselves?
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happiness is...

2008-04-09T16:04:00.004+08:00

... having all the world before you, and the first movement of Brahms' Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in G major, Op 78*, running through your head in all its delicious lilting joy.

[*Music bimbo note: performed by Henryk Szeryng and Arthur Rubinstein. I didn't like this version at first due to the sloooooooooow tempo, but somehow it grew on me, possibly because you can actually hear the piano part, unlike in the other recordings I have where the piano part is obscured by the superstar violin. I guess the superstar pianist in this recording made sure he was not drowned out by his slightly-less-superstar musical partner. Anyway, Brahms was a pianist - his piano parts rock and deserve to be heard! The other recording I like is by Leonid Kogan - nice appropriate tempo and lovely violin tone that doesn't feel over-the-top the way Heifetz's does.]

Edit: 25 Apr 08

i just heard this yesterday, played on the cello by some German dude Alban Gerhardt. It sounded... different. Weird. Just by sheer virtue of the lower, mellower cello tone, the piece became, not deliciously joyful, but warmly joyful. It lost the sunshine and took on the steady crackle of the fireplace instead. Which i suspect is not what JB intended.
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