quiet notes

new land

2011-10-30T10:29:00.001+08:00

Until my early thirties, and apart from eight years in England, I had lived only in the eastern parts of this island. Then came a string of places - Upper Bukit Timah, Holland Village, Toa Payoh - all perfectly fine in their own ways. But I pined for the east and not recognising this, mistook my fickleness to new habitats for a chronic case of wanderlust.

I have moved back to the east now and I cannot even begin to say how this feels, how it feels to walk, drive, cycle through neighbourhoods that I have known since I was big enough to squat in a trishaw and accompany my grandmother and nanny to the Haig Road pasar.

Recent experience suggests though that I may have space in my heart for a new love.

Unexpectedly, over the last two weekends, I have come to know a new land - not new in the sense that I had not known it before, but new in that I am knowing it now in remarkable new ways. In this brief period of time, it has already become rather dear to me.

Tiong Bahru - meaning "the middle of the new"? Were you named thus when the walk-up apartment blocks that are now your most recognisable architecture were first built in the sixties? They were very much part of the new back then, embodiment of our youthful and newly postcolonial nation, these striking white buildings in the middle of a new city.

Walking on the pathways between blocks or in the corridors at dusk or on a Saturday late morning, looking up at balconies and peering through windows or glancing up the stairway to rest the eye on old fashioned metal door grilles - there is sometimes the smell of cooking from a kitchen, sometimes there is the sound of a pop song from a radio programme or the hum of voices from a television set. The names of roads not yet familiar and the weaving of alleys not yet inscribed into my mind - can you hear it in my voice? The pleasure, the delight, as I look, listen, and learn more about this new land - pure and intoxicating.

Perhaps because it is bestowed at this age -- when the spinning happiness and lightness of youthful infatuation have become as tired and revisitable as old tourist sites where nothing new can be added (except perhaps the softening of edges by the nostalgic misty eyes of a retrospective gaze) -- perhaps this is why my ardour for this new land gives me the feeling of having been returned to youth sans its heady, wild and reckless caprices and compulsions.

In his excellent book The Tao is Silent the witty and wise Raymond M. Smullyan writes: "freedom is doing what one likes; Zen is liking what one does." This leads me to see something which I shall commit myself to acknowledging by putting it here, in this public space, in words that shall outlast my flesh and bones and breath:

my approach towards novelty now (at two years shy of forty) compared to what it was from childhood up to age 35 seems to be guided by a Zen-like principle of liking what I do and not so much doing what I like.

This is a good place to be at. There is only so much time left; one really cannot afford to be squandering any more of it.

a grapefruit and a pomelo

2011-10-23T09:07:00.001+08:00

The pomelo says to the grapefruit:
"You are the prettiest shade of pink,
exceeding even the raspberry and the dragonfruit.
Sharp yet unjaded,
you speak your mind with forthright ease,
handling each word with care."

The grapefruit says to the pomelo:
"Your nature,
well-hidden behind walls of toughened skin,
can be uncovered in segments.
When teased from the shell,
an architecture of bits, each one fiercely singular,
comes into the light
as sweet, sweet juice."

to continue

2011-10-15T12:46:00.002+08:00

An sms exchange with my friend F a few evenings ago after I received news of my promotion -

Me: I've been promoted and my unit made autonomous.

F: Congrats! Now you will never finish your book.

Me: I don't think I can do anything but to continue.

F: Then better sleep early and wake up early to write!

[It was 11.05 at night.]

Me: Continue living I mean.

F has said before that he has low expectations of people. It would seem, though, that he has rather high expectations of me as a writer.

In an interview the pianist Mitsuko Uchida said: "There is no perfection. One works and if one is lucky, one discovers something every day. At a certain time one must have the courage to stop, and that's that."

Her statement is what I would say too, about how one might continue being a writer without renouncing all the other aspects that constitute one's sense of a full encompassing life.

Mitsuko Uchida also said: "If there is a heaven - I'm not a Christian - and if I arrive at the gate and they ask me what I am, all I will say is, 'Musician.'"

This immediately brought to mind something similar that J, a dear friend and former comrade-in-arms, used to pronounce firmly, her voice strong and steady, her beautiful big eyes serious, bright, wide: "I was born a composer. I live as a composer. When I am dead, I want to be remembered as a composer."

We were a jovial coterie, all of us practitioners and teachers in the arts - visual arts, music, theatre, literature - and J's earnest declaration (which she reiterated a number of times over three years) was something we admired but also poked fun at mercilessly to her face.

Yet today, when I ask myself what my profession at the gate of heaven is going to be, two words come to mind: "Reader. Writer."

And what I have come to understand is that for the second to emerge and to continue, to be buoyant, the first must always be like a furiously flowing river.

trunch

2011-10-10T21:10:00.000+08:00

Words are disappearing from the Oxford Concise Dictionary every year, I read in an article in the International Herald Tribune today. Words like growlery.

(Growlery: place to growl in, private room, den.)

Why should this word be removed? I should like to know. It is surely a mark of civilisation that every home should have a growlery in it. Where are we going to do all our growling now? Growling deserves a dedicated space.

Of course, to offer a balanced view, the IHT article also said that new words are being birthed each day, words like woot and sexting. I like too much what their sounds suggest to look their meanings up.

Actually, anyone can have a hand at making new words.

Yesterday I was having a cooked breakfast in a charming cafe perched on the side of a hillock at four o'clock in the afternoon. The waiter had asked as I entered the place if I was after brunch or dessert. Brunch, I said. Later on, after we had placed our orders, I coined the word "trunch" - it was tea time, I had not yet had lunch, and my friend was eager to have his first meal of the day.

If only there was time to trunch every other day! Am I not reasonable? It was a lovely lovely afternoon and afterwards the day just got better and better as the moon climbed higher and higher. With trunch to look forward to, the growlery would become a less needed space, and the word can be packed away in a box with tissue and mothballs together with breakfast, lunch, and supper.

Rashomoned

2011-10-08T10:24:00.000+08:00

A party at a friend's apartment near Scotts Road to usher in the new year - it was December 2009.

Last night this event was called back to mind in the course of a conversation with the host, a friend who has stood by me and given me all kinds of support in the tumult of these recent five years.

Both her helpers had noted that my then husband, to be known henceforth as Hyena in this blog, gobbled down his food. "Not one, but two of them said this to me," said my friend.

"That was how he ate," I said. "He ate like that at home too."

"I didn't expect a commentary on dinner table etiquette from the helpers,"said my friend, "from both of them at that."

The image of my friend's helpers, two middle-aged women with worn hands, one from Indonesia, the other from Thailand, comparing notes on guests and table manners made me think of James Joyce's very long short story The Dead. To be exact, I was thinking that it could be written up as a scene for a similar sort of story to Joyce's - a naturalistic depiction of a slice of Singaporean society at a party.

To be reminded of that evening, and to be told how Hyena and myself in relation to him were perceived and discussed by others not related to us can be described as a Rashomon moment. Different perspectives from different persons of the same event.

Then again, there is also the question of what could then be admitted versus that which is freely admitted to now. The different perspective that comes to light now was hitherto perhaps not so much unknown as unacknowledged.

To my friend, I said in a light tone, "Do you remember Leonard Bast from Howards End? He was invited to tea at the Schlegels after he returned Helen's umbrella - she left it behind at a Beethoven recital. The Schlegels are these liberal upper middle class women who live in a townhouse, and have no financial worries. Leonard Bast was working class, someone who read the same books as they did, but came from a different world. He had never met or known people like the Schlegels before he was invited to Margaret and Helen's home."

Thinking back now, looking back at the relationships, observations recorded as if one were a camera and the inferences that followed did not lead to the most logical of choices. Emotional intelligence, perceptiveness and a strong analytic mind may not good judgment make. A certain casualness, or is it absence of caution, has also proven to be detrimental.

All this can fuel self-hating, or it can be channeled elsewhere to less harmful, less futile ends.

two cakes meet

2011-10-01T11:55:00.001+08:00

Dear Black Forest Cake,

Thank you for treating me to lunch and telling me about your new pet fish.

I love hearing about pets. This year I have been the happy interlocutor of several tales about pets - a colleague's pet parrot (a sad story that deserves to be made into a short film); my brother YPL's friend's pet snake; a friend's ancient pet rabbits.

You say you spend a lot of time looking at the fish. You make sure they eat properly, you clean their tank, you buy new plants for them. Don't forget you promised me that you will let me watch you clean the tank one of these days.

"Do you scoop the fish out with a net and put them in a pail of fresh water?" I asked. You had done your research, you said. The tank is cleaned without the fish having to be moved. And you describe every stage of the process as if you were telling me the different philosophies of directing that exist.

We were meeting to celebrate the smooth delivery of our project, a children's picture book. It is the very first one you have authored, the second book in a series that still feels unreal to me even though the first one in the series celebrates its first birthday today.

I was also feeling grateful and celebratory because the two-week freeze of my fiction writing had finally begun to thaw two nights ago and yesterday morning the flow was back. So when you asked me how many projects I have going on, I could speak about all 3 of them without feeling the clutch of cold gnarled fingers around my heart.

I like what you said about the source of art. If the self is seen as the source, how small all art would be! I don't know about you, but it gives me great relief, to know that I am merely a transmitter, not the Generator.

Speaking of which, you might like "Generator 1st Floor" by Freelance Whales. It could be a good song to have on the next time you clean the tank.

Yours,
Orange Chiffon Cake

bedfellows and bedfellowesses

2011-09-29T19:01:00.005+08:00

Christina Rossetti was a regular from the 20's to the 30's

Emily Dickinson a dalliance in between

Thomas Hardy, Borges, Philip Larkin followed

before the women returned:

Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop,

and Hsia Yu

whose beer I drank and cab I shared (Taipei 2008)

then Marie Etienne, through Marilyn Hacker,

but the desire for a gin-and-tonic at 5 in the office

can only be assuaged by Wendy Cope

Oh yes, the bedside table knows

only too well

my constancy

my fickleness

notes on the solid

2007-11-18T06:45:00.000+08:00

Trees are solid.
When driven into: close to certain fatality.
Chairs are solid.
Settle into the seat; some segments of spine aligned with chair back.
The floor is solid.
Feet walk across it, plant and uproot with ease.
The apple in my hand is a solid.
It surrenders to the crush of my teeth, it enters.
And it disappears into the solid body of me.

the consolation a poem gives

2007-11-03T23:42:00.000+08:00

This one does the job exceptionally well: - one of Christina Rossetti's "Song" poems:

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet:
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

many shades of perfect

2007-10-28T22:47:00.000+08:00

A perfect day starts when Max and Sara are let off leash in the nearby park and they sprint for a couple of rounds under the tabebuia trees. The retriever's ears flop wildly as she runs. I love seeing their bright faces as they bound over the grass.

Happiness also comes in the shape of a perfect ban cheng kueh cooked and presented in the customary old fashion, now gone out of fashion: a circle folded into half, the centre is soft and the sides are crispy; the peanut filling is dry and crunchy.

Gladness comes from a teochew porridge lunch with family in the childhood neighbourhood. There should be chai bei (chopped up slow-cooked salted vegetables) and home-made fish cake. There wasn't but it was still perfect because there was cold crab.

Blessing: lunch is rounded off with a not-too-sweet, not-too-oily, delicately fragrant or nee, traditional yam and pumpkin dessert.

In a perfect day, there are unexpected finds at the art museum, paintings that make me say "thank you Lord".

In the late afternoon there is an unexpected hour and a half of writing. The story is not leaden-footed today, it bobs like a balloon! But no more, lest this breaks the spell. . .

What can be more perfect after toil and trance than a drive into town to meet an old friend L for dinner? After swimming, driving is the next best thing for clearing the head and especially driving when the sun has finished her glaring for the day. And the music in the car is karaoke-worthy.

Anna Akhmatova's "poor words"

2007-10-24T23:42:00.000+08:00

When a poem cuts just so, hairs stand on end, and hands balancing the book and neck balancing head forget about fatigue from mindless meetings, and ears bar the sounds of bus and TVmobile.

I had no idea that I would take to Anna Akhmatova, although her eyes did remind me of Christina Rossetti. Reading her sequence "Requiem" reminds me, how history bears out that poetry at its most powerful comes from persons most powerless. It was during his arduous years in exile that Dante wrote the "Commedia". The "dead poetry" that he begins with in the dark, harrowing journey through the "Inferno", culminates in "sacro poema", "sacred song". More on the "Purgatorio" (my favourite canticle) and the "Paradiso" in a future post (I am not wise enough to love the "Paradiso").

Anna Akhmatova wrote "Requiem" for herself and the other mothers and widows who queued outside prison walls, waiting to see their sons and husbands who were incarcerated by the Stalinist regime. She sings:

I have woven for them a great shroud
Out of the poor words I overheard them speak.

"Requiem" is a poem about national suffering in the voice of a suffering woman. Akhmatova said that the poem haunted her for fifteen years, "like bouts of an incurable illness".

I cannot begin to say how her lines move me, nor how it is that I who know nothing of regimes and bone-crushing brutality can feel the dead weight of the voice that says flatly, scornfully, in the opening lines of section 8, "To Death":

You will come in any case, so why not now?
Life is very hard: I'm waiting for you.
I have turned off the lights and thrown the door wide open
For you, so simple and so marvellous.

And I unashamedly marvel at the way a simple rhyme and a simple repetition evoke an unanswerable anguish in these closing lines of the untitled section 2:

Son in irons and husband clay.
Pray. Pray.

timely encounter

2007-10-17T08:48:00.000+08:00

Last night the school held the first of three evenings of meet-the-parents sessions. After the presentations, we had to stand in the corners assigned to our disciplines and field questions from parents and students.

A parent came up to me and asked about the teaching of the English language. He was a little concerned that language and literature will not be taught separately. His wife shared that their other daughter had had to study literature at school and she found it very dry.

As I explained to them the rationale behind the curriculum design of English, using the word pleasure more than once, I looked from time to time at their daughter, a slip of a girl in plastic frame glasses. She was constantly fidgeting, darting glances at the handphone in one hand, or turning away to glance at the other people in the room. Her parents listened patiently, their eyes not once moving away. The girl did not look at me until I asked her for her name and shook her hand.

I picture twenty-five other teenagers like this girl, all of them in a room with a poem, or a short story, or a novel on a desk before them. And the teacher in me, asleep since my last class on campus in April, springs to life.

I guess this is what they mean when they say it's a calling.

by an image charmed

2007-10-13T09:56:00.000+08:00

"Visiting at 280 Main Street, Amherst"
by Yeo Wei Wei

The leaves on these trees are shields from light
that spear our trespass upon her dress
As white as snow to veil a heart
blood-rich with tricks and cares too dark.
The single square pocket is smug and silent,
once where words wait their turn for tuning.
Emptied sweet wrappers nestle in the pocket
hugging their new company, short lyrics
hiding tall demands.
On these stairs she would have stood,
wrapping her fingers around a pencil
to secure a place like a dash,
palms astride a strange new song
as old as time, unpicked fruit from Eden.
This is the home of Miss Emily
famous in her day for the gingerbread she baked -
in rolled-up sleeves and floury face she had
a homely guise for sherry eyes, sharp ears, and steadfast knowing,
a soul like a bird, like the saint from Assisi -
she hid her savvy as she sipped her sherry
New England's self-sure solitary.

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

The poem was written after a visit to Emily Dickinson's homestead in November or December 2004. The photo was taken on that day itself. Dickinson wore only white after turning thirty, and there was a replica of one of her white dresses on display on a mannequin at the top of one of the stairways. It was also during the tour of the house that I learnt that Dickinson loved to bake. After she became a recluse, confining herself mainly to her bedroom (and this is, not coincidentally I think, the room with the best view of the road from town centre to the house), she continued to bake for the children in the vicinity. It was her custom to ring a bell to alert the children and when they were gathered under her window, she would lower a basket of baked goodies down to them. There's an excellent chapter about Emily Dickinson and the house in Diana Fuss's book The Sense of An Interior.

under covers

2007-10-11T22:11:00.000+08:00

Today I thought of a poem by Christina Rossetti, "Winter: My Secret". As the title suggests, the poem is about the speaker's secret. Throughout the poem, the speaker taunts the reader: What is her secret? Is there even a secret?

I have read this poem many times but it was only today that I wondered about the colon in the title. It seems to suggest that the speaker's secret is simply the season of winter. Winter appears in the poem as conditions that are anathema to disclosure, making "today" too cold for the speaker to tell her secret:

"Today's a nipping day, a biting day;/ In which one wants a shawl,/ A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:/ I cannot ope to very one who taps"

I like to think Christina Rossetti was having a prescient moment when she wrote this poem, foreseeing that some day in the future critics and scholars and students would pore tirelessly, tiresomely, over her poems, looking for traces of the life she lived. The poem rebuts such efforts, it refutes the transparency of writing - the way a text can bare all, can show the writer in all the nakedness of her emotion, her beliefs, everything that makes her a person. The poem seems to say: the writer can create, alongside the surfaces that reveal depths, other surfaces to conceal other depths. There can be space for secrecy, all need not be uncovered.

"Winter: My Secret" was published in a volume that came out in 1862. That year over in America Emily Dickinson wrote a poem that was kept hidden away together with a thousand and more and it has a similar thread. The poem is short enough to quote in full:

A Charm invests a face
Imperfectly beheld -
The Lady dare not lift her Veil
For fear it be dispelled -

But peers beyond her mesh -
And wishes - and denies -
Lest Interview - annul a want
That Image - satisfies -

This poem also makes me think of writing fiction, that there is a delicate balance that needs to be struck otherwise too much or too little is said. The face loses points of charm when it is entirely uncovered.

Is there something being said too about attention and interest that can be captured and sustained through appropriate veiling? The world of fiction is made up of made-up persons, things, situations, and all of it can be dissolved into nothing if there isn't any desire on the reader's part to behold and be engaged by the writer's imagination.

For the writer, there is the reminder of the care that needs to be taken in the work of veiling and unveiling.

归于陌生

2007-10-07T09:53:00.000+08:00

Chinese has finally re-surfaced as a language in my social life. It is the language that is used when I start and end each day in the workplace - something that was impossible in the previous work environment. Chinese is also the language we joke and banter in.

I can say truthfully that this return of my parents' first tongue, in a manner that is unassuming, glorious, and mischievious, has been one of the big surprises of my job change.

Will I go back to sounding as if I am in a no-man's land, writing in an English that is shadowed by Chinese? And the shadow is itself made up of broken music.

native songs, songs I would have sung to my children

2007-08-30T00:36:00.000+08:00

Many of Liang Wern Fook's songs contain water. Especially the ones I like. In my secondary school someone who has a lot to say about anything could be mocked as "having ink water" (literal translation from Mandarin). But I don't mean this about Liang Wern Fook's songs.

"Time flows by like a stream and nothing remains the same.
But friendship is a stream that flows forever."

These are sentiments from a very popular LWF song. Sounds a little cheesy in English, but in Chinese the idealism and hints of poetry shine through.

Another song goes:

"I am water and I come from the hills . . .
Dark clouds fill the sky, from North to South to East to West.
Nobody knows where I am.

Gently I descend back to the earth, filling fog and rain.
I am the droplets that land in your heart, in the core of you."

And in a more recent piece where LWF wrote the Chinese lyrics for a song that was composed in Japan:

"Eyes which have shed tears can see more clearly.
And it is a blessing to think of someone with tears in one's eyes."

Italian poets speak of inspiration coming to them as they walk by rivers and streams. In these xinyao (Singaporean Chinese ballads) there is nothing spelt out about the water of composition and the water of lyricism. Water is simply the element of emotions and ideals. The songs are not self-conscious; they were written to be sung, to be recorded, to be played, and to be heard. Perhaps this explains their appeal and the way they weave their way into memories, becoming part of one's life. I am grateful that I got to listen and to sing many of these songs during my teenage years. And they made me see Chinese in a new light.

Like me, many staunch fans will go through their old collection of tapes after hearing some of the songs in the Theatre Practice musical based on LWF's songs (sold out performances this time round, but they say there will be a production again in 2009).

and finally, let me go to a light-filled space

2007-08-18T14:24:00.000+08:00

The British sculptor Anthony Gormley's exhibition at the Hayward Gallery ends tomorrow. I went to the exhibition in June when I was in London. If I was still in London now, I'd go again.

There is so much to say about the exhibition, I don't know where to start. It's the reason why I thought I would blog about it, from the time I was at the exhibition, and then I thought about it on and off after I got back to Singapore, but I just didn't know how to write about it.

Maybe I could begin today by describing what happened to me when I encountered one of the installations at the exhibition, the one called "Blind Light". It consists of a glass box, the size of a HDB living room. The glass cube has a doorway, the size of an average bedroom door. This is the only exit and entrance into the box. The box is filled on the inside with fog and white light. It is like a cloud that has been captured in the glass box and illuminated with relentlessly bright white light.

I approached it in 3 ways. First, I walked into the box, just half a metre past the doorway, and then I quickly walked out. When you are inside, you can't see anything, not even your own hands (not unless you held them right up to your eyes). I kept thinking, what if I walk into someone?

Next, I stood near the doorway outside the box and observed what other people did when they saw the installation. It was a weekday morning and the visitors were mostly tourists or old age pensioners. There were people who went in in pairs. There was a late middle-aged woman who said to her friend, "I think I'd better not go in, I'm wearing slippers and it looks wet in there." She changed her mind twice but did not go in in the end. There was an elderly couple who walked in holding hands.

Then I walked all around the box, following the hand of a person that was feeling its way around the box. All that was visible of the person from the outside was his/her hand. It was pink and fleshy.

Thirdly, I decided to go back inside the box and walk along its perimeter. I wanted to feel my way around the box and have someone outside see my hand. On my way to one of the glass walls, a drop of water fell onto my face. I almost jumped out of my skin. Because it was not possible to see anything, I felt strangely liberated. I also felt my ears pricking up at all the sounds around me. And I tried all the time to see something other than the whiteness and the nebulousness.

The most unexpected thing about this third part of my experience of "Blind Light": I smiled and I teared a little, and I wondered, "Is this what it will be like? Not being able to see in a space flooded with light and hearing lots of voices of people whose faces and bodies can't be seen?" I felt joyous, jubilant, as if something I had long intuited had been empirically confirmed.

This morning, in the artist's interview, I heard something that brought that morning's experience back in a flash. The interview was conducted some years back and Anthony Gormley was talking about a general misperception of his aesthetic:

"it's interesting because people have talked about the total lack of ecstasy in the work, and in fact I think it comes from a very profound sense of the ecstatic. I hope that the spaces that I make are deeply paradoxical. In one sense they are entirely about the human condition as a condition, but on another they're also about freedom. I think they are about the fact that if the body is completely still the mind is able to extend itself in ways that can only happen if the body is completely still, and that's what leads me to sculpture, because sculpture of all the art forms is the most still and the most silent..."

Interviews with Anthony Gormley can be found at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/gormley_transcript.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/gormleya1.shtml

881 . . . AWAS! this papaya shake has spoilers, don't read before watching the film!

2007-08-12T16:45:00.000+08:00

I sat through Royston Tan's 881 waiting for one of the papaya sisters to die.

This death is an event that is breezily reported to the audience very soon after the opening of the film via a lighthearted, whimsical and short segment about the lives of the two young women before they met and became the Papaya Sisters.

That segment - the way it is filmed and I remember particularly the use of paper-cut-outs (not sure what the proper term is, but they're like paper dolls with clothes to mix and match, except 881 used cut-outs of Small Papaya's photographed parents - reminds me of the way the childhood of Amelie was narrated in that popular French film a few years back.

By telling the audience that one of the main characters will die at the age of 25 early on in the film, the narrative takes away the surprise of the later parts of the film where hints and scenes build up to full knowledge of the impending death.

Knowing that Small Papaya will eventually die from the outset means that there will be no climax from the moment that knowledge is uncovered as part of the plot development. Yet it would seem that knowing about her dying is critical to the climax of the film at the scenes where the Papaya Sisters have their ultimate battle of song and dance with the Durian Sisters.

Ya, I like the way the film plays tricks on the audience.

With gaudy costumes and choreography calling Mardi Gras to mind, the battle scene seems to invite the audience to drink in all the colours, to revel in the cheesiness of it all, to laugh at the extreme preparations that have been made by both sides.

And yet, underlying the glitter and the slapstick humour, there seems to be a serious face-off between life and death, between those with all the time in the world and those who have only a little time left, between the flashy spikiness of the funky technologically-powered future and the soft persuasion of the old-fashioned and the nostalgic's feathery caresses.

The other trick was in the characterisation of the ge-tai Xian Gu (Senior Fairy is my literal translation). At first she seems to be a stock character put in for laughs, like the prince of Ge-tai, played by the actual prince of ge-tai himself, Mr. Wang Lei.

But it turns out that there is more to her lofty seclusion (in a court complete with handmaidens) in a Chinese temple than the director's comic literal representation of her demi-goddess status in the world of ge-tai. She has magical powers and a pair of wings to demonstrate her immortality, and this is hilarious at first because it is a literal acting-out of the idea of someone who becomes a god (chen xian in Mandarin).

Xian Gu had retreated from a love triangle earlier on in her life, and so her cloistered existence takes on another layer of meaning in relation to her estranged relations with her twin sister, the seamstress who manages the Papaya Sisters. Her presence in the story proves to be for more than just laughs: she bears the burden of a secret love that is eventually uncovered.

Even immortals have unspeakable sorrows, so death, where is your sting? I guess this is why seeing Small Papaya on a sliver of moon as the film credits roll at the end becomes totally different from seeing the same image at the opening. That image is enlarged, in the small span of the film's length, from something that is glossy and pretty into something that is beautiful, arresting, powerful.

eye candies, mind boggles

2007-08-05T23:20:00.000+08:00

Saw a friend's picture of chupa chups lollies doing a dance and thought of a dance sequence in Tsai Ming Liang's Hole. The power of suggestion!

What quickly followed: marvel at the evidence of dogged labour: 3 cm strokes in groups of equal size covering large expanses of paper into magic ink bursts of fruity colour - and what impressed: the severity of the composition, the harsh assault on the question of value in art - lightly veiled. I do not paint, I do not draw - I am outside of these issues - making art out of language has a different set of quarrels.

One of the artists was weaving his web when I visited. Seeing the threads worked from hand to wall to ceiling made me envious - writing is material in an inside space, weaving with words is always threatened with the tottering over into incompletion, and then the nothingness of the incomplete is not a void but it is not discernible to anyone except for the ill-disciplined or hindered writer self.

Works alluded to are at - Go see! -:

"The EXTRAordinary Tales of Skylarking" by Hong Sek Chern, Ernest Chan, Noni Kaur, Khiew Huey Chian, Lim Kok Boon, December Pang, Ian Woo and Ye Shufang
Singapore
2 Aug - 2 Sep 07, Thu - Sun, JENDELA (Visual Arts Space)

when the present and the past are both not here

2007-08-03T04:14:00.000+08:00

A group of us went to watch Tan Pin Pin's Invisible City after work on Wednesday. Afterwards the Chemistry teacher said it made him want to go back to his school Chung Cheng High. It's one of the Chinese schools in the video, the one with the lake.

Actually I was surprised to see that the school is still at its original site in the Mountbatten area and that the lake is still there. I come from Dunman High, a school that used to hold an annual inter-school sports meet together with Chung Cheng High, Chung Cheng High (Branch), and Yu Hua Secondary School. This event was held at the National Stadium (recently closed and in the process of being erased). Apart from Chung Cheng High, the other three schools have lost their original buildings and locations.

Dunman High School was on Dunman Road. Next door there was another school, Dunman Secondary. Now Dunman High is at Tanjong Rhu and Dunman Secondary is in Tampines. The two schools are now separated by a sizable chunk of the east coast but their names can still thankfully be relied upon to cause some confusion. The confusion is the only thing that remains of our history as neighbours.

The first line in the Dunman High school song still holds truth, if a little stretched: "Dunman High School, here in Katong . . ." That song was probably written at a time when place names had umbilical cords to the places they named.

The Chinese pavilion near the science labs at the old site of Dunman High was re-created in the front yard of the new site. You can see it as you drive past. It's a smaller replica of the old pavilion and it looks like a toy. Every single time I've gone past the school and looked at the pavilion, it's been empty. It has an air of desperation about it. Like an unseasonal stage prop.

Some of the black and white photographs of old colonial houses in Invisible City also reminded me of toy houses. Maybe it's because the pictures were of houses and interiors without people in them. It's funny to think that these buildings used to be around, this spectral toyland. Of course it was all very concrete and real to the people who lived back then, like the photographer who took the pictures.

But as pictures in my newly-acquired memory of the city that was around before I was born they have a freshness, a newness, an alien-ness. Like the new pavilion. I cannot picture the old pavilion without hearing voices, laughing, singing, chattering - those Sec 1 afternoons come back in these sounds.

human retriever envies canine reliever

2007-07-22T20:19:00.000+08:00

Retrievers are supposed to be good swimmers. My golden retriever Sara runs away from the sea when we go to the beach. We tell ourselves she's afraid of the sound of the waves.

One time dog and owners were applauded by Japanese tourists standing up to their waists in the water. noisynotes had carried Sara into the sea until they were about 30 metres from land. Once he set her down into the water, she paddled straight for the shore and tore around the beach in a mad run to celebrate her escape.

Retrievers, as the name suggests, are supposed to be good at retrieving objects. If you look up the history of the breed, I think you'll find a narrative about their first fathers and mothers being adept at retrieving quarry.

Look at this face.

This is Sara - she who should have been named a golden reliever because she excels at relieving herself of her load. One of her owners, the one who is female like her and belongs to the retriever family, has the daily responsibility of going into the back yard to retrieve floor mats or chew bones or dog futons that have been dragged outside and duly relieved.

I like the spirit of relieving. But I can't embody it well enough. I relieved myself of a piano I owned for nearly 20 years last Thursday. That fed a delusion that lasted all of 3 days. On Friday I talked to ampulet Y about giving away books and CDs. On Saturday I daydreamed about holding a garage sale or peddling my books at a flea market. Today I opened two boxes of books to see what I could say good bye to.

Nothing.

Woof!

"sweet escape" was not among her songs

2007-07-16T21:58:00.000+08:00

Today on the MRT, on the way home from work, there were sights and sounds that could just about fit into the palm: miniature narratives for the making. Here's one:

A wisp of a girl, maybe 8 years old, in a plain cotton white dress with spaghetti straps, enters the carriage with a woman in a blouse with forgettable prints and black wide trousers. The woman wears a placid expression on her lined face; she looks as imperturble as her grey hair in its short perm.

The girl sings one American pop song after another as she stands next to the woman, sometimes swaying to the imaginary accompaniment. The songs are about love, longing, heartache. Her voice is thin, like the material of her dress. Gwen Stefani is not in her repertoire. She wears round glasses. Her eyes peer through them, unblinking. She points her fancy white leather shoes inwards and then outwards. They are her favourite part of the outfit.

The old woman looks ahead steadily. She does not hold on to the girl. When a seat became available, she walked hurriedly across to that side of the carriage and planted herself firmly down. The child remained standing in their former position. As I alighted, I caught one last glimpse. She is not holding on to anything and she does not seem to care that her singing is drawing the attention of tired commuters.

n y c's passion for grids

2007-07-16T04:40:00.000+08:00

Manifestation of the passion#1:

Manhatten island, New York city: grid city. "It's impossible to get lost in this city," said noisynotes, not known for his navigational skills. I disagree. I have a good visual memory of places, and I can usually find my way around after having gone through somewhere once. But I'm no good in a grid city. The right-angle edges of streets confuse me. What was to the right before becomes something on the left - right and left, up or down, it's all meaningless when you're constantly trying to work your way around squares and rectangles and lines.

It doesn't help that everything is supersized. The avenues are the width of 6 lanes each. It takes a long time to walk from one to the next, so if you've been walking in the wrong direction, ah yes, I know this well... After 1st Ave comes 2nd Ave. After 2nd Ave comes 3rd Ave. But after 3rd Ave... Why did they introduce names for some avenues and numbers for the rest? It all adds to the confusion.

The most interesting thing about New York for me, personally, is that I can't find my way back to my favourite bookshops and museums without looking up a directory and studying a map - as if I was going to them for the very first time. I have been to New York about 5 times since my first visit in 1997, and unlike all the other cities I've been to for about the same number of times or less, the locations of places seem to leave no mnemonic imprint.

So I stumbled around Union Square before I saw Barnes and Nobles and went in there to look up the address of The Strand. I remembered that it was somewhere off the square but where exactly simply escaped me. It's a bookshop I have been to every single time since my first visit to New York. (More on the shop below).

Being lost and finding one's way time and again can be frustrating. But it also lends something to the unexpected re-discovery of favourite places. Turn a corner and suddenly, there it is. The St. Marks Place bookshop. The MOMA. It's like bumping into old friends.

Manifestation of the passion#2:

A block before 14th St. and Broadway, I had two slices of chocolate chip banana bread and a mug of hot chocolate. I was sugaring up for the next stop on a free afternoon in New York: The Strand - a bookshop of used, remaindered and mint condition books all at reduced prices. It is highly recommended that one sugars up before going into a shop that prides itself on having 18 miles of books.

I suspect that new capital has been injected into The Strand. They have come up with a whole slew of their own merchandise (totes, tee-shirts, mugs). And the whole place just seemed cleaner, less dusty, less disorganized. You could still get books for less than a dollar, but these were mostly outside the shop, on tables and trolleys on the sidewalk.

I don't miss the dust and the book selection is still great. I even bought totes for friends and a tee-shirt. But the makeover does seem to have cleaned away some part of the shop's appearance that made browsing and shopping there an unforgettable and unique experience in the past. They didn't use to arrange the tables and shelves in the shop with any care for walking space. You had to wade through stacks of books. You could get lost between History and Fiction. All that's gone. Now it's grid city in The Strand.

last day on the ridge

2007-06-30T21:56:00.000+08:00

When I went to campus today for the last time as one of its employees, it was the 4th time this week I forgot to bring along my digital camera.

Before the first lot of books were packed and brought home last Sunday, I had meant to take some pictures of the booklined office I had occupied since 2004. noisynotes and I used two suitcases and went up and down twice, emptying books into the boot of his Honda Jazz.

Did I mention that I had bought only three books on my recent trip to London? It was the memory of the books that were patiently waiting for me to move them home from the office - I lost almost all interest in acquiring new ones.

T.A. (teaching assistant) M kindly helped out on Tuesday. Together we made about 5 rounds, carting books from office to car boot. When we had finished we stood and stared at the unlikely, lofty load in the boot and M said: "I can't wait for the day my collection of books gets this big." It's a point of view I used to share but no longer. Which makes M the perfect person to give a couple of books to, including an unread Ivanhoe and a collection of David Lodge's Structuralist and Post-structuralist readings on 19th and 20th C literature.

After the books the following had to be packed or binned: papers, files, stationery, pictures on the walls, cards, postcards, post-it notes, and other nonsense on the memo board. I won't go into it except that I managed to make myself throw away my undergraduate notes on Shakespeare and the Victorians. As for the notes accumulated during the PhD, I had wanted to bin the whole lot but somehow SOMEHOW! 60% of the bloody things escaped and made it into the car boot. No doubt they'll sit in some box or cupboard and continue to rot away which is what they've been doing the last 3 years.

"It's good you kept them. Maybe you'll write your big book on Dante some day," said a professor from another department at the car park. He did not say anything about the lime green armchair that blocked the rear view entirely. "Yes, some day. When I become an Italian. Or take on an Italian name," I quipped.

Today it was the turn of the course folders on the desktop of the iMac in the office. I put them all in a thumb drive, wrote two emails, called a friend, and then noisynotes came to collect me.

No photographs have been taken.

loveable city

2007-06-24T22:46:00.000+08:00

At Heathrow I spent 5 pounds on a journal called Monocle (a new baby of design guru Tyler Brule, the founder of Wallpaper). It lists the 20 most liveable cities in the magazine's first ever survey of such things. I had to buy it (even though it costs more than The New Yorker) because Singapore comes in at number 17. WOW! Looks like all the money we've been throwing at making ourselves hip and happenin' is finally working the magic that Singaporeans are best able to understand: Place on Global Chart.

I am a sucker for rankings, so of course I had to buy the mag. And I love the bit where it says that there were 22 murder cases in Singapore in 2006 open bracket all solved close bracket. Not even World's Most Liveable City - Munich - can match that.

What got me most worked up though is that London is not in the list. Okay, maybe it's because the Monocle head office is based in London and they would rather choose cities where they've not had to deal with the hassles of commuting, supermarket shopping, and the unpredictable English weather. I just spent 10 days in London and 4 days in Zurich (3rd Most Liveable City) and I must say, that though it was nice to have swift trains, clean air, lake and mountain views, and pretty Swiss houses to look at, I would probably suffocate from, oh I don't know, the absence of spirit, the vacuum where there should be vibe.

Where are the ghosts in Zurich? A city without ghosts cannot be liveable, it's not even been properly initiated into the rites of inhabitation. I readily admit that my own ignorance about Swiss culture and history plays a part in my indifference. For a great part of London's charm for me comes from it's having been the address of George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Christina Rossetti (who loved the poetry of the street Seven Sisters), Karl Marx (buried in Highgate Cemetery - so is Rossetti), Sigmund Freud (London was his refuge from Nazi Vienna in the last year of his life), Ezra Pound (lived in Kensington from 1904-1914, I think), J.S. Mill, and many more writers and artists.

noisynotes and I did a walk around Kensington that began on the High Street, wound through the oldest square and the second oldest square in the area, meandered through mews (stables turned into small houses), and finally ended at Holland Park. Can I say this without sounding like a total Anglophile? No, not really. I was in love with it all. And mainly because it's a big, crammed city of people and ghosts and it's not perpetually caught up with being globally liked and ranked highly on some world-class chart.

Here are some new finds I shall be returning to the next time I go to London:
- Lambs Conduit Street (cafes, Persephone bookshop, the Good Foods shop, Folk clothes and shoes, sadly no size 35)
- Gordon Place (the prettiest cul-de-sac on earth, possibly)
- Holland Park (the roses and the path of baby maples)
- Camper shoes in Covent Garden (not at all new, but what's new is that they now have size 35!)

London is also loveable because two of my dearest friends ER and MT live there.

a new old to keep company with

2007-06-03T11:43:00.000+08:00

Jack Gilbert is probably not a new name, especially if you are an avid reader of American poets.

My knowledge of American poetry is appallingly thin - it begins with Emily Dickinson, resuscitates for a bit with Lorine Niedecker and George Oppen, and peters out with Louise Gluck. Jorie Graham I should read more of, except I almost always see looming over a shoulder a dark cloud of readerly inadequacy. Marianne Moore I have yet to encounter though every time I see her Complete Poems in a bookshop I feel a pang of apology. Elizabeth Bishop, Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay are all in my pantheon but I've not had that sense of being struck by a bolt of lightning, I've not felt that I need to stop everything, put all calls on hold, postpone all distractions, halt and concentrate on listening until their pages run out of song. I could never really get Frank O'Hara even though one of my house-mates in graduate school tried her best to evangelize. I nibbled at John Ashbery and concluded that I was probably missing something since I could not see why his stuff's called poetry.

Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven was published in 2005. I bought it last week from PageOne. I became curious about him after reading an interview he did with the Paris Review. When asked "Were you a good teacher?" Jack Gilbert answered: "Excellent". When the interviewer said: "Many writers talk about how difficult it is to write. Is poetry hard work?" Jack Gilbert said: "They should try working in the steel mills in Pittsburgh. That's a very delicate kind of approach to the world - to be so frail that you can't stand having to write poetry. There are so many people who are really in trouble just making a living, who are really having a hard life. Besides, with poetry you're doing it for yourself. Other people are doing it because they have to feed the babies. But I do understand that it's hard to write, especially if you have a family."

His poems bowled me over. He has a voice like a stream in a forgotten place. It is pure even when saying rude words like "sonofabitch". It is gentle and forceful at the same time. I would quote you some lines like a diligent lit student but it seems a travesty to his poems to rip lines out. They are perfect pieces, I simply haven't the heart. I love the purity of his spirit, and I admire the way he has managed to show it through writing, foiling the dull and distortion of language.

I've also learnt from him that it's possible to make art from being obtuse. That it is oftentimes necessary to say no to worldliness if you don't want to settle for silence, which is a different thing altogether from quiet.

say "Udaipur", now sigh . . .

2007-05-30T17:06:00.000+08:00

Udaipur was our second stop in India. Visiting the City Palace, the Monsoon Palace, and other sights - or even just staring at the City Palace from the opposite bank of Lake Pichola where our hotel is situated, seeing the brilliantly white Lake Palace (a building that took up all the space on a tiny island, seeming to float on the water - see the photo on the right) - one is left feeling like you've stepped into a story land minus the kitsch of theme parks.

The buildings are mostly about 300 years old. Not much seems to have been done recently to prettify them, and this is the case even with the palaces that have been converted into hotels. Walking in their courtyards and rooms, you smell something unfamiliar, especially to the Singaporean nose. It is the smell of buildings and places left to age. And you wonder about the scenes that these walls have witnessed. I was entranced by Udaipur, a city of the impossible dream pursued to creation (man-made lakes in a desert), a city with a sense of the drama of light.

The city became the locus of fantasies made real when the political powers of the royal family were emptied by British colonial rule and the Maharana and his family turned their attention to ostentation and hobbies. You get a sense of this from so much of what makes the city magical. The photo on the right was taken after we had walked through the Crystal Gallery, the collection of the royal family's European crystal furniture including a sofa set, a dining set, and a four-poster bed; crystal chandeliers and lamps of different sizes; crystal tableware; even crystal fly swatters. There was also a whole row of green Murano glass chandeliers - as if to say, we're not just into the best British crystal makers, we know about Venetian glass too.

What I love most about Udaipur's City Palace is that it's actually made up of several palaces. Because each subsequent king added his own rooms to the complex, you could be standing in a chamber that was built and decorated in the 17th century and find that the neighbouring room was constructed 200 years later. There were so many surprises, including my personal favourite: walking through a narrow passageway, climbing a thin flight of stairs, seeming to have gone deep into the heart of the building, but only to find as you emerge from the stairwell, a courtyard not unlike the quads in an Oxbridge college! It is the sort of place that makes me want to sit down and re-read an Italo Calvino novel. Or to make up one of my own. . .

This is a dusk picture of the Aravalli hills that go all the way from Rajasthan to New Delhi. It was taken from a coign at the top of the Monsoon Palace. It's possibly the first time I've looked at a view and felt that the word "sublime" may have been coined for making language feel, sorely, its inadequacy.

Salaam Bombay!

2007-05-27T15:11:00.000+08:00

On 11 May I attended my last meetings at the university. Stepping out of the typically arctic air-conditioned room, I accepted the kindly and slightly embarrassed smiles of a small bunch of colleagues who stood around me. One of them offered me a sultana cracker. "They're delicious," he said. I looked at the packaging. "It's made in Malaysia," I said. "Tastes different from the ones I've had as a kid."

On 12 May noisynotes and I boarded a plane for Mumbai. I read somewhere that most Indians still call it by its old name Bombay. There is more than nostalgia in this, at least that's what I think now that I've seen it for myself. There's a gentleness, a sleepyheadedness in the m's of Mumbai that does not do justice to the city's roaring energies. Not as well as the booming b's in the old name. And this is how I would say it: Bom-m-m-Bay!

We didn't have much time in Bombay, just two half-days. It was the stopover en-route to Udaipur and Jaipur, the two cities in Rajasthan that were the destinations of this holiday. But Bombay surprised me. On the road from the airport to the hotel, I saw big colourful billboards with humorous advertisements in English. And the traffic was crazy but it was not as bad as I feared it would be. (I have been to Hanoi before where the traffic seemed crazier. But don't be disappointed: as you shall see in a later post about the car ride to the airport in Jaipur, for the first time I got to experience the life of a stuntswoman in a car chase scene, and "crazy" and "traffic" conjoin at a new formidable pinnacle!)

I wish that Bombay could be a more walkable city. The guidebook said that the best way to get around is by taxi. There's a good reason for this. We walked from the Prince of Wales museum to Fab India (a wonderful wonderful 4-storey shophouse with all kinds of cotton goods - shirts, kurtas, skirts, tablecloths, curtains, and my personal weakness: cushion covers). That was barely 8 minutes. And it was mildly stressful. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I could not stop thinking about the Singaporean director who lost his legs whilst filming a commercial in India. He was run over on the street.

After Fab India we decided to look for another shop called Bombay Paperie, which apparently sells very nice handmade paper and notebooks. This turned out to be the second voyage that Ulysses shouldn't have made. Walking up and down the same street at least 4 times whilst looking for the right lane to turn into, we became gradually aware that it was getting dark and we might not make it to the shop before closing time. In times like this I wish that noisynotes and I had the telepathic abilities of elves (at least the ones in The Lord of The Rings) but no, we must have been sending each other the wrong signals because we plodded on in single file and we turned into an alley that was lined by photocopying and hardware shops. Along the way I tried not to notice the beggars and the piles of rubbish that a worker seemed to be trundling more junk towards.

When we finally made it to Bombay Paperie it seemed closed. I was going to go up the stairs and check when I saw a huge grey rat, worming around the rubbish that had been shored by the curb. noisynotes also saw the rat. He had turned his back on the shop and was looking at the Bombay Stock Exchange building where armed security guards seemed to be supervising some operation. I took some pictures and we hailed a cab to go to dinner. Here's a picture of the building where the shop is located:

And here's one of the street, looking the other way:

The image of that rat haunted me for the rest of that day.

I saw so many beautiful old buildings in Bombay - but I could not take any pictures because I saw them from a moving car. And those three hours we spent walking on the first afternoon did discourage us from venturing out on foot. Which is a huge pity. In fact, I wished several times that I could just blend in, or become invisible, so as to be able to see the city, to take pictures of buildings and people up close. It reminds me of why I keep going back to Tokyo. And Taipei, too, joins that list.

Apart from the two streetscapes above, my photographs of Bombay are the views of the tourist who is half-entranced by this mad, maddening city, looking at it either behind a protective sheet of glass in a car or in an artificially-cooled room. My hope is that I will be able to return another time and see more of it without the glass. One thing for sure: pretty hand-printed cushion covers await my custom at Fab India.

(view of the esplanade at Nariman Point from hotel room)

olga 1, olga 2 and co.

2007-04-05T23:40:00.000+08:00

In case I get dementia or lose my memory one day, this is a list of the pets I have owned or co-owned from 1976 to present time:

1976 no name (chocolate dachshund)

1982 Goldie, Lucky, Sunny/Fluffy (?) (3 chicks, later chickens, later mother's chicken soup child-owner refused to eat)

1983 Romeo (baby rabbit, only one not eaten by mother rabbit, died in a cold monsoon night)

1984 no names (a few guppies and a pair of short-lived angel fish)

1984 no name (terrapin, killer of guppies - no more terrapins for me)

1985 Minky (fat hamster, escaped from right side neighbour's house, her husband killed by left side neighbour's German Shepherd dog, Hock Lai)

1987 Tootsie (skinny hamster named after movie, thought to be male, bought to mate with Minky, turned out to be female)

1987 Olga 1, Olga 2, and two other Russian names (goldfish given by friend on birthday)

1992 Snowy or Kit-Kat (stray dog later run over by car 2 months or so after I left Singapore)

1992 Bobby (stray dog found in a drain by my mother, bit me almost every time I came home during univ holidays, also bit my husband on his first visit to our house as my boyfriend)

2001 Milo (black Labrador Retriever mixed with something else, probably Rottweiler)

2003 Mr. Max (Japanese Spitz) and Sara Satchel Funnyface/ Sara Girl (Golden Retriever)

2005 Cherry (Golden Retriever, really my mother's baby)

today is Palm Sunday

2007-04-01T10:12:00.000+08:00

Christina Rossetti was born in London in 1830 and lived there until her death in 1894. At the tender age of fifteen, with her gifted ear she made poignant, haunting lyric poems that seem to flow from an ancient spring in an ancient wood. At the hearth of the house on Charlotte Street, where she lived with her close-knit family of three siblings, her half-Italian half-English mother, and her father, an exile from southern Italy, did she perform her poems after her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti showed off his latest drawings? Or did she sit in her father's chair, with the bible open at the Book of Revelations, listening to her sister Maria Francesca's pious musings? Or was she playing at rhymes with the other brother William Michael, who was the only one of the four to pursue profession over vocation, becoming a respectable civil servant at the Inland Revenue?

Christina Rossetti is remembered largely for her compact poems about goblins and sisters, love and aging. Perhaps it is not so widely known that in her final years she turned to the art of hymns, writing poem after poem, almost indistinguishably, about faith, hope, charity, and Love. There are also four books where she reveals her thoughts about scripture, published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge.

In one or two of these books she gives her view of Eve as a type of femininity, a mixture of womanly insecurity and motherly desire to nurture and improve her man. This is typical of her manner and her ability to see the basic elements of the person, man or woman, beneath layers of historicizing, mythologizing, evangelizing, prettifying, demonizing. In one of her essays on Dante, she suggests that his name might have been an abbreviation of Durante, which conjures the double senses of duration and endurance. Only a reader who can see past the glory of Dante's laurel-wreathed achievement and taste the bitterness of the bread of exile the poet had to endure after Florence cast him out, can imagine the burden and the premonition of his first name when it was not yet a tag of fame.

When the Messiah entered Jerusalem on the Sunday two thousand and seven years ago, he was a man preparing for death. His name would have been on the lips of scorn, mockery, hatred, indifference. The name is what remains after the man did his Father's bidding and bled. On more than a whim, I thought of Christina Rossetti after noticing two women holding palm leaves outside Ghim Moh wet market. She seems the best poet to read this morning, to remember this day of entering the city of death, the necessary course of things before returning to the city of Life. I think of this poem, one of the first of hers I read and instinctively loved:

"A Birthday"

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot:
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;

My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hand it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;

Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.

a version of the good life

2007-03-28T22:43:00.000+08:00

There was a photograph of a queue on the front page of the Chinese papers last Sunday. People were queuing for places at a talk by a professor from mainland China who is famous for her self-help manual based on Confucius's Analects. It's been on the bestseller charts of major bookshops in China for quite some time now.

Her name is Yu Dan and the book is called Yu Dan "Lun Yu" Xin De (Yu Dan's Thoughts On The Analects - please pardon the clumsy translation). She gave two talks last Saturday and they were both phenomenally popular (the talk at the auditorium in the newspaper's office building had to be telecast to two other rooms in the building because there were too many people and not enough seats for them).

Out of curiosity, I bought her book that evening and started reading it.

I can understand the appeal of the book. It unpacks the pithy teachings of Confucius for the reader in a clear and accessible style. There are interesting anecdotes and stories from other sources, and the variety plays a not insignificant role, I think, in the professor's success. She quotes from Tagore, the British press, and Japanese writers, to pad the kernels she's carefully unearthed from the Analects. And she succeeds in giving these ancient Chinese moral lessons a new life. Confucius is no longer a sage with wispy beard on a distant cloud.

I have always been curious about Confucius - 'always' dates from the time I studied at a secondary school which prided itself on its Confucianism. Incidentally, the discipline master was also the teacher in charge of Confucian studies. He was the most feared person in that school. I guess that's probably why I didn't choose Confucian studies as my subject for Religious Knowledge. I thought it was best to minimize contact time with the discipline master since his interests extended beyond disseminating Confucianism to disciplining skirts (over the knees please!), the heights of socks (long and nerdy please!), and hairstyles (no gel! fringe must be above the eyebrows!).

According to Professor Yu Dan, a true gentleman or lady should be measured in his or her attitude towards the world and its affairs. There should not be extremes, one should not be extremely for or against something; there should not be polarities, either-or's, between the thick and thin, the near and far, the remote and the related. Everything comes under the governance of dao yi, the ethical, righteous and lawful. Dao yi should be the standard and the principle behind all thoughts and actions.

The discipline master was probably too extreme, too passionate, for Confucius' liking. I say this with sincere empathy. I am myself a creature of passion and the idea of being measured about EVERYTHING depresses me. I guess I don't have what it takes to lead a good life according to Confucius.

what you know says what about you

2007-03-07T18:23:00.000+08:00

You know you're born to teach when scolding young miscreants gives you a cardiovascular rush.

You know you love your dog when you let him kiss you on the mouth even though you saw him chewing leaves and goodness-knows-what-else from the backyard in the same mouth ten minutes earlier.

You know how you see yourself is quite different from the rest of the world when insurance salesmen say with wide open eyes, "You mean even after That operation you have so Little coverage?" and on the days they feel like being sages: "Better go for the health screening and get more coverage before Something happens Tomorrow."

You know you have a good chance of making it big in a different industry when you watch American Idol and Simon Cowell seems to say exactly what you think about all the contestants. Honest!

You know your life would not be the same without electricity when you walk into Best Denki or Parissilk and you see at least five things that could make your home a better place.

You know you have friends from your own age group when you always end up talking about health and saving up for retirement.

You know you care about your health when you make sure you eat all your favourite foods (which are coincidentally high in cholesterol) in the days between the day you do your health screening and the day you get the results.

You know there are things you don't know when you have to find out the correct spelling of cholesterol (cholestral? cholesteral? cholesterel?) from the health report.

What do you know about you and more importantly, are you friend enough to tell me? :-)

master chen's ducks

2007-03-04T21:21:00.000+08:00

Fra Angelico's The Annunciation - a fresco in a monastery in Florence, heavenly city of the Renaissance, heralding the new magic of perceiving thick and solid objects represented on flat surfaces.

It's a well-known achievement. Since the Renaissance painters have been able to create the illusion of depth by adhering to the geometrical rules of perspective in their painting. The spectator can stand before such paintings and look in, beyond the painted surface, into another world, as fleshly populated and thickly architectural as ours.

On a recent visit to the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) I stood before a Chinese ink and colour painting of ducks by Chen Wen Hsi, a China-born artist who visited Singapore in 1949 and stayed on to paint, teach, and make it home until his death in 1991. The painting was one of the works at the artist's centennial exhibition at SAM until 8 April 2007.

There are four ducks, two swimming from the top and the other two from the right. Their necks are either craning toward the left or else they point their beaks in that direction. There are a few straggly grasses in the foreground across the width of the painting, suggesting a bank that overlaps into the space where the spectator stands. The ducks are paddling in water that is evoked across the paper without any visual clue to its depth except for the positioning of the ducks and the grasses. It is an emptiness in its absence of perspectival clues, in its flatness - as flat as the paper the artist's fingers pressed on; but also emptiness that fills out into meaning and content from the suggestion of webbed feet in the sparing dabs of colour beneath the rightmost duck's body.

Look, no horizon in sight! There extends a space like a hemisphere over the ducks, a space filled out from two arcs you might trace from joining the four edges of the picture diagonally. You might move in this space, hovering over the birds like a god or calling to them from the bank with feet planted on the ground. Or reach a hand inside, as I did, even with the poor substitute of the print in the catalogue.

Master Chen's ducks bob across the papery, watery surface. Do they look east or west? Probably both, following the master's lead.

family rules

2007-02-22T11:23:00.000+08:00

I did not wear red for Chinese New Year this year. At the in-laws' reunion dinner, nobody wore red. No pink in sight either. Lots of navy blue.

After the dinner noisynotes and I strolled over to the Marina Bay area. We waited for my parents who was supposed to be waiting for us in the room my brothers and I had booked for them. We would all have been in Bali if my father had been willing to fly. It took one of my brother's honed diplomat skills and at least twenty text messages before my father was persuaded to go for the two-night stay in the hotel. "It's for people who want to see fireworks," he said. "We'll have to eat at the hotel's restaurants. They're already sharpening their knives." (This sounds less sinister in Hokkien.)

With the MTV channel blasting away and some of us making snide comments about this and that pop singer, it felt just like home. My father was demonstrating the Atkins way of eating pineapple tarts. This was a good sign. One of my brothers pointed out that noisynotes looked tired. He had eyebags the size of his carry-on luggage. We decided to skip the fireworks that night.

The next day noisynotes and I visited the in-laws who, incidentally, checked themselves into another hotel in the Marina Bay area after we left. They had been doing this for over ten years, soon after father-in-law's premature death and relations soured with the extended family on his side.

We went home to prepare for a shabu-shabu lunch. We were hosting my parents and brothers for lunch. After lunch we went to the cinema at Marina Square and watched a Hong Kong movie about a police informant who had infiltrated a drug-trafficking group that was not called Wujiandao (Internal Affairs).

It was the first family outing to the cinema since 1980-something when we watched Police Academy 2. My mother wanted to be at the cinema 20 minutes before the screening time because she did not want to miss the trailers. We were the first ones in the cinema hall.

After the film my father said he was hungry so we went to the food court. Everyone ate something except for my father who had a coffee. This could have been a bad sign but it wasn't that day.

We knew that there would be a fireworks display in the Marina Bay at nine o'clock. 20 minutes before that, my parents started checking to see if everything was in place for the fireworks. They knew from the previous night's experience what to look out for. Were the police cars on the Benjamin Sheares bridge? Had the street lights in Marina South been switched off?

When the fireworks went off we were all in front of that window, looking out. They were beautiful, those fireworks.

grown-up composition

2007-02-14T20:26:00.000+08:00

In primary school I must have written at least five compositions under headings such as "An Eventful Day", "An Exciting Day", "An Unforgettable Day". Make that ten. The Chinese teacher had the same ideas as the English teacher.

I remember writing about a class excursion to the zoo, dressing up as one of Snow White's seven dwarfs, flying to Taiwan with my maternal grandmother to visit my relatives in Tainan, bringing three chicks home from school (it was a Science class in Primary 4 I think; we hatched them and drew the life-cycle chart in our jotter-books).

Those were a child's compositions. What happened today has shown me what an eventful, exciting, unforgettable day in grown-up terms can be. All except the last item are chronological:

1. My 98-year-old grandfather-in-law died of pneumonia at 6:47 a.m. He was the grandfather I never had.
2. When we got home from the hospital we found that Mr. Max, the Japanese Spitz, had chewed a portion of his back till it was sore and bloody.
3. When I got back from the vet's, there was a traffic police officer standing at our gate. He told me that he was here to impound noisynotes's car, because the road tax had expired.
4. I realized that noisynotes told me a white lie when he said that he had paid the road tax before he went on his three-week marketing tour around the world three weeks ago.
5. The car was towed away and noisynotes was given a red ticket that said the towing charge was $160.
6. noisynotes went to get the car back. He left the house at 11:30 a.m. He came back at 4 p.m. I decided not to tell him what I think about white lies; since I had taken compassionate leave, I thought I should be compassionate.
7. We went to the funeral parlor which my mother-in-law had chosen. It was in a light industry estate. Sorry, it was in what looked like a light industry estate. The same sort of buildings where you expect to find car mechanics.
8. I put in the final corrections to a short story and emailed it to a journal.
9. As expected, my stomach has keeled over to the stress and I have dutifully taken my diarrhea tablets.

And in true-blue aged form, I am begging to go to bed at 9 p.m., so that this day can end. It is time, R. I. P.

note to self (on a sleepless night after visiting at the hospital)

2007-02-11T02:26:00.000+08:00

When old and dying I must not forget the faith
of the Son who did not know how near or far
the last breath would be, the cold clasp of death.

When old and dying I must not forget the hope
of the Man who suffered like any man, woman, child
in the private stronghold of the self, his pain his own.

When old and dying I must not forget the charity
of the One who lets me live under his sun
and brings me home to be with him in eternity.

what is a l. p.?

2007-02-08T14:29:00.000+08:00

In the literature for beginners tutorial today a student asked, "What is a L. P.?" On the 23 young, trusting faces in the room, I noticed that more than a few were looking blank. I tried my best to describe the vinyl record, going on to talk about how you go about putting one on the player. I thought of someone I knew in the UK who owned at least a hundred records. Thinking back now, maybe I should have been more focussed in my attempt at filling in the blanks.

The reference to the cassette tape's forefather is in Arthur Yap's poem "in passing". It was one of the poems I had assigned for discussion. The poem mentions a mural at Changi Airport. Where is this mural? I asked. Nobody knew. That's probably because the mural has been removed and replaced with something more current, like the carpeting in the airport which, to me at least, always looks like it's just been replaced.

Incidentally, do you know that we are the only airport in the world that has carpeting all over (except for in the restrooms)? It's to reduce noise pollution from trolleys, apparently. We also have the best trolleys in the world. They're hardly ever squeaky. Which leads to the million dollar question: Why then do we need all that carpeting?

Actually, I have another million dollar question also inspired by the carpeting at Changi. Why does the carpet-purchasing-department invariable go for jarringly colourful patterns? What's wrong with sedate and dignified monocolour carpeting? Is the carpeting a visual and tactile exemplification of vibrancy in a multicultural society? Like I said, it's a million dollar question.

Back to "in passing". So much of the poem relies on the reader's sense of pride in Singapore's airport, one of the first signs that we'd truly "arrived" on the global stage when it opened in 1981. At that time it was the world's largest airport. Number One in the World! That was something I heard over and over again as a child and teenager. Also, don't forget, we were also Number One Port! Better than Amsterdam!

Two-thirds of the students in today's class were not yet born in 1981. So I had to tell them about the long circular water features that drizzled their circular shower in air-wells by the side of escalators inside what is now Terminal 1 of Changi International Airport. The sound of rain inside, is what I think impressed me at that time, although of course now I can't be sure if there was any sound at all or if the water could be heard above the piped-in muzak.

They had to listen to me do my grandmother act, "last time ah, there was . . . ". Only I was talking about stepless escalators, not the kacang puteh man or firecrackers. Correct me if I'm wrong, all you 1970's or 1960's babies out there, but wasn't Changi airport the first place in Singapore to have gently sloping escalators?

One of the students said that in Singapore a lot of things are in passing. I was tempted to talk about the National Library at Stamford Road, but we were running out of time.

Passing by, passing through, pass on before you pass out.

night walk #1

2007-02-04T00:02:00.000+08:00

The moon was full tonight. Did you see it? "Luminous, weightless, transparent", it was almost a twin to the one in the sky over lovers in the Leonard Cohen song, perfectly covered by Madeleine Peyroux in her album with the same title, Half The Perfect World.

I was with a friend, walking from the new Esplanade to the old. Earlier on we were at a screening of the film Summer Snow that was part of the Ann Hui retrospective at the Arts House's Hong Kong Spotlight. The director was present and there was a Q and A session after the screening. Ann Hui said that she didn't know how to make big films like The Banquet and The Curse of the Golden Flower. She didn't say this but I was thinking, she can't be using small pejoratively; the divide between big and small is the difference between a Chekhov short story and Tolstoy's War and Peace.

(Not having seen either of the two aforementioned Chinese films, I must say my analogy is based entirely on gut feeling. Also, I confess: I have yet to finish War and Peace. Anna Karenina was the best thing I read in 2004, more than ten years after I first approached it and fled, like a fool, before the hundred-page mark. I am still waiting for the brilliant translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky to work their magic on War and Peace. That's one reason for waiting.)

Of course Ann Hui said other thoughtful things. And those things lingered, not long until they slipped off the edges of the mind into the recesses of memory. I asked her why the soundtrack was composed by a Japanese and she responded with a vignette about a chance meeting with the then penniless Japanese composer in a fellow Hong Kong director's sitting room. It seemed to be a scene from one of her films.

Ann Hui's craft is in coaxing the small into filling the space of cinema just so; there is nothing forced, nothing affected. We did not talk about her, or the film we saw this evening, as we took the night for a short walk, from the truncated marina walkway up to the start of the Singapore River. There was a shared sense of comfort and contentment, of being at home. Tonight the small shall suffice; tonight the moon is full; tonight there are at least two on this island who can say, without a single pang, that there is good after all in the small.

having a break

2007-01-31T09:43:00.000+08:00

The island has been cool and without rain in the past three days. The air is light and agile, drier and thinner. The sunlight also seems less harsh. Can it be that spring has come, at last?

I was at Japanese class on Monday night and the sensei (teacher) taught us the words for summer holiday, winter holiday, spring holiday. When she asked the student on her left, what did you do in the summer holiday, everyone in the class laughed. We don't have summer holiday, someone said. It's always summer here, said another student. What about spring holiday? Nope, we don't have that either. What about winter holiday? We wish. More laughter.

It happens very often in the Japanese class, this communal owning-up to the island's have-not's. And it's done with a good measure of embarrassment, mirth, and contempt. In a much earlier class, with a different group of students, another sensei had said that she was new to the island and would like to know which places she ought to visit. The students looked around at each other and exchanged knowing smiles. This is the camaraderie of the island's people. Looking at the island and seeing it always in terms of the not-enough and the not-here.

When I sit, like the boy in the picture, in front of my book shelves, I am reminded of what a friend once said about not having to travel physically because by sitting in an armchair with a book his mind can go to all kinds of places. I think the island needs to sit in front of its bookshelves and find some way to travel. It has looked far too long at itself and found itself unlovely far too many times.

everness

2007-01-27T14:09:00.000+08:00

If you want to read about immortalism (an aspect of everness among others behind the last post), there is a book just out on the subject. You can read the review in The Financial Times Weekend supplement, though I think the title itself already sufficiently sells the book: How To Live Forever Or Die Trying: On The New Immortality.

neverness

2007-01-22T23:29:00.000+08:00

Neverness. The tongue pulls back into the pit before it rushes out twice, and twice it is tamed, stroked by the limit of teeth. This is how the word feels in my mouth - true to its meaning. A beautiful word, Borges said in an interview, "a word that's a poem in itself, full of hopelessness, sadness, and despair".

There doesn't seem to be room for neverness in this world, so bent on believing, doing, exceeding, saving and delivering, healing, detoxing, bettering, having it all. It is rubbed in our faces every day, can-do, can-have everness.

If everness has a home on earth, it's on this island. The controllers are for ever-changing it in their quest for the ever-lasting day in the sun. We are destined for everness, it seems, when the seasons that mark the passing of time never mark it here.

Suffer neverness instead? "There will never be . . . I shall never see . . . We will never do . . . She shall never learn . . . He will never make . . . It can never be . . ." It is a pall too heavy to wish on anything, anyone.

Writing, and finishing especially, are susceptible to the spirit of neverness. If you have ever set hope by words and yet never heard the whine, I envy you.

moss

2007-01-18T16:09:00.000+08:00

In a class a few days ago I read Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica". Here's the first section:

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
as old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

I was wearing a long-sleeved blouse that day. I propped my elbows on the panel and I rubbed them against the wood. That is how the stone becomes sleeve-worn, I said, from the people who sat by the windows, resting their arms along the ledges, looking out, looking down.

The smooth stone takes on a mossy facade. This suggests the time that has passed since the ledges were last warmed. I was suddenly reminded of the moss on the ground by the drains and the moss on the sides of the pond in my primary school. I liked to pat the moss, drawn by the dark green hue and the nappy feel of it, like the beginnings of hair on a baby's head.

Is it possible to find moss on this campus? I asked the students.

In November last year I visited a campus in Taipei and was elated by the sight of bicycles. Maybe it's to do with the universities I attended, both of them cycling towns. But to see bicycles parked everywhere, outside the main gate, the side gate, in the parking space in front of buildings, - it seemed proper. The unkempt look of bicycles with missing tyres, the forlorn expression of the ones that had been abandoned - these too were reassuring.

It wasn't just the bicycles, there were also parts of the campus that looked vintage and sleepy. I think if I was a student I would always remember these parts. I saw walls overgrown with climbers. If I had looked closer, I would have found some moss, of this I am quite sure.

If there was time enough for moss to grow, the story of the moss and the story of the stone of old buildings left to grow old

easy living

2006-12-25T16:29:00.000+08:00

It's been over 3 months since I wrote anything here. It was getting addictive, there seemed to be so many things to say, vignettes and ideas that seemed perfect for this kind of space. And it was gratifying to see them "out there". Perhaps it would be good to stop for a while, I thought in the middle of an unquiet October, just to see if I would worry about it, to see if the blog would be naggy and tiresome like the other unfinished pieces.

Yes, naggy and tiresome like the summer flies in Victoria, Australia, - you can't get rid of them no matter how indifferent you pretend to be as one of them aims for the cool crevice of a nostril, another passionate one has left its mark on your lips, you are haplessly flapping your hands at them, but they persist, they push themselves into your face.

The blog is much better company than pesky flies of course. That's another reason for this reunion.

the greenie patrol

2006-09-28T10:33:00.000+08:00

We took this photograph of Sara (left foreground), Mr Max (the white dog with closed eyes) and my mother's golden retriever, Cherry, about a year ago. They were waiting to be given their greenie bones. That's why they are in a group but each has an air of singlemindedness. Greenie bones - for the uninitiated, these are the canine world's equivalent of gummy bears: chewy, vegetable juice bones. It seems crazy, to think that dogs descended from carnivorous ancestors would even care to be near a bone that looks like and probably tastes like coagulated chlorophyll. Apparently not, judging from healthy sales of greenies in pet shops and the maniacal delight of our dogs whenever greenies are brandished. Milo, my mother's other dog, a labrador retriever mix, is unlike the other three; he roundly rejects apples, bananas and carrots.

But even he too is drooly deeply mad over greenie bones. Milo is the oldest and largest in the pack. He is also the alpha-dog. Which means he gets his greenie first.

Dogs are hierarchical creatures, Most of them are highly aware of their status in the pack. Alpha-dogs are confident and self-assured, they know they are at the top and they can usually be identified by their leader-like aura. Sara is the alpha in our home and Mr Max defers to her most of the time. He used to push Cherry around when she was a pup (At two she's the youngest.) He's stopped doing that ever since the big-boned gal began to tower over him.

We suspect that Cherry doesn't realize how big she's grown. In any case she seems happy being No. 4.

Willy Wonka's cousin and tropical oompa loompas

2006-09-19T10:37:00.000+08:00

On a recent evening noisy notes (my other half) and I were at an event at the National Museum organized by a European bank, part of the round of parties held for Singapore06. There were cocktails, canapes, live music, acrobats, and an exhibition of photographs by a Japanese artist from the bank's collection. The National Museum has not yet re-opened, and I must say it is quite an experience to take the escalator to its new basement level with a glass of wine in hand and to look up at the night sky through the glass ceiling.

There are two rooms in the basement currently displaying artworks from the Singapore Biennale. They were deserted, save for the two of us and the one or two men in suits who had wandered in from the party upstairs. There was a photograph of the Last Supper, wax figures at Madame Tussaud's taken by Sugimoto Hiroshi. There was a series of oil paintings of a man in varying seated poses and brandishing different disabilities called "The Artist Is A Lonely Heart" by Thai artist Chatchai Puipia.

Back upstairs we walked around looking for things to eat. That was when we met a woman in a chef's uniform who courteously showed us the chocolates and other sweets she had prepared.

"What is the name of your caterer?" we asked after eating a nest-like pastry with a hint of aniseed in its heart, and a half-coat of bitter dark chocolate, the name of which escapes me (Malfunctioning memory, the effect of drink and disturbing paintings on a mainly empty stomach).

"I can't tell you. I signed an agreement not to say," she said, "But I can tell you that I own a chocolate factory. And I have represented Singapore at chocolate competitions." Now I know what it means when in story books they say: "with a twinkle in her eye". Noisy notes suggested that she sign a less constraining contract at future functions. She handed him a tiramisu chocolate. "Here, try this."

The smile on Willy Wonka's Southeast Asian cousin's face widened when I said that the rose pastry she had urged me to try reminded me of the Middle East. One second later I got it: "It's like a Turkish Delight." I can easily eat a plate of those. They give me a magic-carpet high. I had two of the rose pastries. (They're called flanner or something like it though they are not at all like flans. "Flannel," insists noisy notes on the drive home, the effect of drink and too many meetings with suits on a mainly empty stomach.)

I am the size of a hobbit and I could see the top of her chef's headgear (another name to look up). She said it again, thinking we might not have heard it the first time, "I have a chocolate factory. We make chocolates for hotels . . . and some companies who say their chocolates come from other places." I wonder if she is a renegade Oompa Loompa. No - she is too pretty.

Noisy notes said, "You can't tell us the name of your company but surely you can tell us your name?"

Chef Jane Chan, you and the chocolates you made and your fabulous chocolate factory in Woodlands, they will always be part of our memories of our first visit to the new National Museum.

the significance of names

2006-09-10T11:47:00.000+08:00

Two days ago three assistant professors were waiting for bus number 160 at a bus-stop in Holland Village. Holland V, as it is affectionately partially acronymned by islanders, is a locale that belies its name by being situated nowhere close to the Netherlands and bears no resemblance to the pastoral nostalgic construct of a village in Europe. There are no thatched cottages and cattle here.

Still, the name does fit the job the place has been given in recent years: as a hangout for the workers in a hub of economically lucrative creativity, the kind of globalized synergistic cosmopolitan lifestyle hub that will prove an enticing playground for the mainly non-native IT and biotechnology labour elite who are imagined as playing a vital role in the current mission of making the island creative.

Two years ago it was widely reported when a political master exhorted Holland V for being hip and bohemian. (Digression: it is more accurate to say "the political master" but the charge of authoritarianism that peeks from the definite article is too much for a small blog to bear.) Bohemian only makes one of the assistant professors think of crystal blown in an industrial town of the former Czechoslovakia, another name buried in history, a name with no bearing on the present reality.

The assistant professors were talking about the Singapore Biennale and the campaign to educate non-Italian-speaking islanders in the correct pronunciation of the word ("say bian-nah-ley").

"Biennale means biennial, right?", said one of the assistant professors in his booming voice, towering over the other two like an Ent from Tolkien's epic. "So why not call it that? Biennial is easier to say too."

"Because there is an embedded reference to the Venice Biennale," proffered his colleague who prides herself on being-in-the-know about such things.

"Why Venice? Why Italian? I think it's got something to do with wanting to have our own Renaissance," quipped the third assistant professor, known for combining wit, mathematics, and devilry in his pedagogical philosophy.

There was a moment's silence as all three assistant professors took this in, each in his or her own way. Finally, the assistant professor who takes pride in knowing certain kinds of things says, "Renaissance? Ha! We need the Medici family for that to happen."

"Does it have to be Italian? Would a Chinese surname do?", posed the diabolical pedagogue.

"Biennale means biennial so I don't see why we can't just call it that," said the tall Ent-like assistant professor.

Bus number 160 arrived at the bus-stop. The assistant professors boarded it and were on their way to Orchard Road, a street on a part of the island that used to be covered by sprawling nutmeg and clove orchards.

tried and tested

2006-08-25T08:55:00.001+08:00

Term started two weeks ago. Eleven weeks to go and then it'll be over. You see where I am going with this.

There are good days. This Wednesday for instance. By some stroke of grace, one of the two modules I teach got its lowest enrolment since I started running it three years ago. It's the perfect size: 8 students. The small class means that I can teach it in the old-fashioned way, the way things used to be before university education was globalized (i.e. Americanized): I meet the students in my office where it's civilized and cosy, a change from the norm of gathering in faceless seminar rooms somewhere in the warren of the Arts faculty.

We spent an hour discussing two poems by Seamus Heaney, "Underground" and "An Artist". A number of interpretations for each poem were aired, most of them sensitive and shrewd, though the majority of the students looked awkward and abashed as they said what they thought. I talked about literary allusion, how they are like ghosts in a work they have been newly embedded in, how it's not possible to talk about literary allusion if one starts off by thinking the poet is showing off how much he or she knows.

There are not-so-good days. The lecture theatre is too cold, the students' faces show impatience, irritation. Some of them stare fixedly at their laptop screens. You wonder if they are surfing the web, or chatting with their friends in other lecture halls via MSN messenger. You feel like a mad person on a rock, shouting to the wind.

the long and short of it

2006-08-19T21:24:00.000+08:00

Short stories are symmetrical in ways that novels, long drawn-out affairs, can't be. That is why I am reminded of poetry when I read a patiently crafted short story. A good short story is like a good coffee after dinner, a complement to the day that is almost over, a reverie after things have run their course. Nothing needs to be added to it.

Often, there is a moment of surprise at the end, a point at which the reader realizes how much he or she still doesn't know and never will know. The story fades into the blank of the space after the last words, and the reader is as desolate as an orphan. What else is there to do? It seems wrong to start on the next story in the book when the story just finished is still filling up the corners of the room where the reader is seated or lying on the sofa. Everything outside the story seems frivolous and immaterial.

With stories that have such an effect on me, I have all the time in the world. If you are looking for an experience like the one I've described above, stories that are manifestly from another hand and yet seem imaginable within your everyday span, then the stories of two writers, the first a master and the second a stellar first-timer, Franz Kafka and Yiyun Li, should more than satisfy.

Germany's example

2006-08-13T11:55:00.000+08:00

The protagonist in the film Sophie Scholl made a deep impression with her heroic stance on freedom of speech and ideas, yet somehow the images my mind keeps returning to are of the faces of the Gestapo police inspector in charge of her case, the woman prison officer at the cell she was held a few hours before she was beheaded, the German general who hung his head briefly after her brother Hans Scholl's defiant testimony. Especially the Gestapo police inspector - the scenes of him grilling Sophie took up most of the film.

There were instants in which the distance between Sophie and her Nazi persecutors seemed to disappear - when the inspector seemed to respect her patriotism, when Hans's speech seemed to bear the face of truth to the general who had seen the truth at the battlefront with his own eyes, when the prison officer saw the young girl and her brother and friend and offered them a cigarette and a few minutes together in the cell.

Why can't these moments have been less sparse? Why are they impotent? Why is violence never the last resort when communication and exchange of ideas between opposite camps break down? Is it possible to silence the opposition forever through fear and coercion?

so much more than wags and woofs

2006-07-31T12:51:00.000+08:00

We have two dogs, Mr Max (Max for short) and Sara Satchel Funnyface (Sara for short). Max is a Japanese Spitz. He is often mistaken for a Samoyed. He is currently on a diet. Sara is a golden retriever. She is as pretty as Audrey Hepburn and she likes to greet people with something in her mouth. It could be a shoe or her rug. Both dogs turned three this year. Max is the more vocal one and he has, for the most part, successfully trained the husband and myself to understand him.

Here is a sampling of his canine codes:

1. High-pitched barks in the morning, with an interval of 10 seconds between each bark, can be translated as:
"Hey, bipeds!" . . . "I'm here waiting!" . . . "Where are you!" . . . "I need you!" . . . "Time for my walk!"

2. One or two high-pitched barks in the morning, followed by silence:
"I've puked!" OR "Diarrhea!" . . . "I don't feel so good!"

3. Low growls followed by frenzied low-pitch barking at the sight of other dog(s) being walked past our house:
"Caution! Enemy approaching" . . . "Enemy in sight! Enemy in sight! Enemy in sight! All systems go!"

4. Scattered mid-range barks at the door:
"I need to pee/poo!"

5. Insistent mid-range barking at the door when someone familiar is outside:
"Biped company! Yay!"

6. Insistent mid-range barking at the visitor or returnee after the door is opened and the person enters:
"Yay!" . . . "Yay!" . . . "Yay!"

7. High-pitched whining with nose pointing at a toy or some desired object that's out of reach:
"I want! Can't reach! I want! Can't reach!"

The code I dread most is no. 2.

Sara is much quieter: I don't think I've heard anything apart from no. 4 from her. And even then, it would be times when she's really desperate to go. Otherwise she would stand patiently at the door, waiting in silence for you to notice that she needs you to let her out into the garden.

Recently I found myself wishing that she wasn't so silent. "If only she could speak," I said to the husband. "She could have told us that she has not been feeling well for months."

I was on the phone to him after I found out at the clinic last week that poor Sara has a lesion along her spine. She must have been in pain for quite some time. I had brought her to the vet because we suspected her hip dysplasia had worsened. The dysplasia was diagnosed two years ago and we have been giving her joint supplements for the condition. As far back as three or four months ago, we noticed her eating grass in the garden. We put it down to her bad hip. Then about a month ago she began to halt suddenly in the middle of our longer walks at the Botanic Gardens and she would have to be coaxed to carry on. On our twice daily neighbourhood walks I noticed that she was trailing behind me while Max forged ahead. This was odd - they used to walk side by side. We decided to take her to the vet, thinking that it was probably her hip and mentally preparing ourselves for the possibility of surgery.

The vet stretched out her hind legs, one at a time. She did not make a single sound. The vet said to his assistant who was keying in the notes at the computer: "No sign of distress when hind legs are stretched to extremity." He looked at me and said: "There is something wrong with this dog but it's not her hips." He listened to her heart: it was fine. He listened to her lungs: they were fine. Then he pressed his fingers on her back, applying pressure as he moved them down her body. When he reached the lower back her flesh quivered. The X-ray showed the lesion.

"Rest the spine," the vet said. So there are to be no walks for six weeks. After six weeks, she must begin her rehabilitation: she needs to swim at least three times a week to build up her back muscles. She has to lose at least 2 kg. There are more supplements to take. I have bought a pet ramp for her to get in and out of the car without jumping. The staircase has been cordoned off so that she won't be able to go up and down the stairs.

When the vet ordered that there be no walks for six weeks, I looked at Sara in dismay. "Not that she'll mind too much," said the vet. He's right. The rest and the medication seem to be working. She seems a subtly changed dog, especially in the evening. We had her pigeonholed as a mopey melancholic type, but since her convalescence and treatment started, she seems to have become more bright-eyed and waggier.

We are also seeing a lot more of her silly happy expression, which we used to think was the result only of a long walk or a good run. She's been wearing this expression for no reason at all these few days. I suddenly remembered the other night that one of our friends who is particularly fond of Sara always used to say when she saw her, "Why does she look so sad?" To which I always used to answer, "She's not sad. She just looks like that. It's a retriever sad look." In fact, poor Sara was in distress and she was showing it on her face. But I did not know her as well as I thought I did and I mis-read her.

academia amnesia

2006-07-26T03:03:00.000+08:00

When poetry and poets were deemed dangerous by the Greeks, famously Plato declaimed, "We can admit no poetry into our city save only hymns to the gods and the praises of good men." Around the work of art there was awe, or to use Plato's term, "divine terror". (Ahh, how delicious, such ambivalence.)

In The Man Without Content , Giorgio Agamben explores the transformation of art from the ancients' sense of its overwhelming power to the contemporary experience of aesthetic taste and enjoyment. Art was once firmly in the sphere of interest; now it has become "merely interesting". From its deep and ineluctable oneness with the godly, the spiritual, and the immanent, the work of art has become a thing of subjectivity in its creation and a product for disinterested consumption in its reception. Agamben is not a high priest lamenting the destruction of art's place in the temple or its schism from deities. But he does provide a thought-provoking account of the artist's and the spectator's evolving relationships to each other and to the artwork across the ages in the Western cultures.

For instance: the question of aesthetic taste. The experience of art became a matter of demonstrating one's good taste as recent as the middle of the seventeenth century. Building on Agamben's analysis, it strikes me that the analogy of eating can be useful in illustrating the change in art from soul food ("food" that "feeds" the soul's beliefs and values even as it draws on these to sustain itself in the artist and the spectator) to the selectivity (and almost unavoidably, the elitism and egotism) of what is tasty and what is not.

From the man of taste, one could trace the birth of criticism. There is today many forms of criticism but I cannot think of any that does not begin with the assumption of a good faculty of judgment, that is to say, good taste. Movie reviews, restaurant reviews, book reviews, yes, even this one that I am not-so-covertly writing here. I have found so many good things in this book, but I shall single out one that is particularly resonant. In a quiet corner I found a protest that chimes with my personal disillusionment with contemporary practices of literary criticism and appreciation in academia. He writes:

"Whatever criterion the critical judgment employs to measure the reality of the work - its linguistic structure, its historical dimension, the authenticity of the Erlebnis [historical context] from which it has sprung, and so on - it will only have laid out, in place of a living body, an interminable skeleton of dead elements, and the work of art will have actually become for us, as Hegel says, the beautiful fruit picked from the tree that a friendly Fate has placed before us, without, however, giving back to us, together with it, either the branch that has borne it or the soil that has nourished it or the changing seasons that have helped it ripen. What has been negated is reassumed into the judgment as its only real content, and what has been affirmed is covered by this shadow. Our appreciation of art begins necessarily with the forgetting of art."

When critics forget their place in front of a work of art, when critics forget the role of criticism beside the role of art, when critics dissect the work of art as if it were as still and finite as a cadaver, then the critics turn the academy into a world of amnesia - hollow, shallow, and terrifying. But this is no divine terror. (Ahh, how despairing, such emptiness!)

water craft

2006-07-24T17:20:00.000+08:00

Over brunch last Saturday a friend said, "There's something relaxing about watering plants." He and his wife planned to go to a nursery later that day. In our garden there are trees and plants that came with the house when we moved in two years ago. Some of them we bought, the others came from the mother-in-law who is an enthusiast for blooms. I am not an ardent gardener, I water as part of a daily routine of caring for the dependents in the household. It goes like this: walk dogs, feed dogs, water plants, make coffee. I am usually too hungry or sleepy to be relaxed when watering the plants. But I do feel mildly excited when I spot new developments. Such as the time when a plant with purple flowers that had not flowered since the first two weeks of its arrival in our home as a birthday gift from the brother-in-law conceded a bud and proceeded to show off this singular violet mistress for two weeks. When it wilted, there was another, equally coy, but it begged off in a sudden spell of heat. There have been no flowers since. I look hopefully but the plant is decidedly playing hard-to-get. I have asked politely. Presently I suspect that it may be demanding to be called by name. A daunting task. I went back to watering with nonchalence.

There have been other petally surprises before this, some of them fit to be the subject of operas. There is a pot of white orchids bought from a charity bazaar during Chinese New Year three years ago. It is the same story as the plant with the purple flowers. Blooming gaily in the beginning, stoically barren afterwards. There was one time when it seemed to be making a comeback, thanks to the chemical seduction of the mother-in-law's Miracle Flower Food. There was a stalk of buds and they were in the early tentative stages of opening when a thunderstorm in the mid-afternoon threw forceful blows against the blinds behind the orchid rack, swinging them against the rack with such force that the pots went crashing on to the floor of the front porch. The stalk of white buds was bent, one of the buds had half-bloomed and it looked sorry and pitiful, lying by the side of charcoal that had until a few hours earlier been fit only to admire the pretty buds from underneath. There is a lesson here about the levelling effect of natural disaster, I thought, as I swept up the broken shards of pot and the dishevelled orchids. But that is not what struck me when I remembered today what my friend said about watering.

The tenants before us had four bougainvillea shrubs planted as a border between the porch and the front lawn. They were the most sad-looking bougainvillea plants ever spied this side of the island. I dug them out and planted Muriana shrubs in their place. The bougainvillea were transferred into pots and moved to a sunnier side of the garden. They did better than survive. They are easily the most thriving occupants in the garden. All I did was to water them every morning and in the evening pour the grounds from the morning's coffee into the soil. There was no art in their cultivation, only the consistency of a basic routine. There was a friend who came over for dinner once and remarked, "Ah, but they are easy plants to please!" And I would not be surprised if other green fingers agreed with him. But for the gardener inside, the serious anxious furtive hopeful gardener of images and ideas, tending to poem-saplings and story-seeds, watering words and pruning phrases, there can be nothing more comforting than the proof that going at something doggedly with the simplest of intentions and means can sometimes yield an unexpected bounty.