kwanzaa 2011

I'm not proud of the ranting I do online. It's sometimes done in a fit of jealousy, or a crushing wave of insecurity. In moments when I forget the beauty of the present and the future. But this is me: I'm not some cultivated online persona with nothing but funny, deranged things to say. I believe in discretion and sensitivity, but I'm skeptical about self-censorship. There's always truth in something that is uttered; it's just a matter of whether the truth resides in the statement itself, or the subtext, or both. 

Also, isn't it kinda weird that I'm talking to an imagined audience online? Hey imagined audience, does anyone here read this in my voice? I don't even know how my voice sounds like to other people! Crazy huh! 

angry shoes

Re: college and my future — am feeling jittery about meeting all the deadlines by next year. And my scholarship basket is empty as frak. (Hey there, WASP who marked my KI scripts: fuck you. Also to a certain statutory board: I hope you get audited, and I hope you flunk it. To the kids playing with whistles outside: here's a fun fact! If you place the whistle deeper down your throat, you'll be able to whistle WITHOUT needing any special equipment! Here try it —)

BTW merry christmas everyone and watch your cholesterol levels. Peace and love.

Grinchy.

in the eyes of

I have a theory that the past is at first a horrifying memory which makes a progression towards beauty, thought and saudade. The initial horror stems from a sense of abjection: the person in the memory is simultaneously me and also not me. What energizes the progression towards thought and beauty really are the dual motions of time and experience. We feel saudade because we are utterly cognizant, utterly powerless, about the expanding intangible distances between self and memory, and it is only this way that Man is truly vulnerable.

yeasty goodness

Since spambots are the only people* who read this blog, I feel like I can write things** in here with relatively inconsequential implications.

The problem with me is that I value verbosity as a sign of consciousness to the point of adopting this as a personal virtue to be upheld and cherished. This is perhaps why my family has stopped reading my blog — I am boring and incapable of being the subject of scandal. In real life, I have learnt that most of my Asian peers have a hearing range shaped by the intricate and delicate frequencies of music they listen to, such as the sparkly glitter music of Girls Generation, Avril Lavigne's artful and well-deliberated screeching, and the sexy, shrill whining of the Simple Plan boys. As a result of such cultivated listening tastes, they cannot hear me clearly, for puberty had gifted me with a low and obscure voice reviewed by some as the "gentle baritone of a dying cat's last breath", "a rhinoceros' silent fart" and "the sound raindrops make as they roll down sandpaper." If you have already heard about the very real social problem of Not Knowing What's The Maximum Number Of Times You Can Ask "What?" When Trying To Understand A Person, maybe it's time you heard the other side of the story — the one that ends with "and thus, the mute reached for the nearest chair and pummeled his friend bloody."

People with low voices are so often rejected by society. Society makes fun of their low voices, because apparently it's the funniest thing in their (tiny lil') world! Some employers have a minimum Hz allowance. Go below that and it's the blue-collared world for you, young'un, but of course it doesn't make you less of a person because every single worker has his own small and perfect role in society! When was the last time you heard a man's manly voice on the train's PA system? For me, this was approximately 18 months ago on the NY subway, but because I miss those times so much, it feels like 18 centuries ago. THAT'S RIGHT, IT HAS BEEN 18 CENTURIES SINCE I HEARD A MAN'S MANLY VOICE OVER THE TRAIN'S PA SYSTEM.  

This is why I have turned to written and visual forms of language and communication, packed in densely strung paragraphs, to express my personality and ultimately my being because that's how real conversation looks like. What is communicated in a a certain gesture, be it giveaway eyebrow twitching and a nervous wring of an arm-sleeve, takes the form of sentence structures so subtle in their intent that they pretend to hide what they really intend to reveal, and pretend to reveal what they really intend to hide. Take more time to process my sentences, why don't you. Sentence are awesome and I can do whatever I want with them, PSLE English be damned. 

* I like to adopt a very loose definition of "people"

** the vulnerable nakedness of my most primal insecurities

bread and earth

Here I am, at my workplace at 11.30 at night, feeling strange and displaced. My head is made of lead and my arms are suspended from my body by fibres of light and spun cheetos. My energy right now is that much provisional. 

Anyway I'm back from Vietnam and I am wondering if it sounds a tad condescending to say that I am moderately enamored by this charming land. My head's still spinning from shuttling frenetically between the chaotic urban sprawl that is Hanoi and the countryside with the new Panasonic factories lifting away its fogged slumber. On the road, hills and mountains greet me from the horizon, then dart back behind the wall of buildings. I am not a stranger to having motorcycles and scooters swerve about inches away from you, like dragonflies negotiating the still damp air, but the experience of these streets is constantly overwhelming. I'm not sure whether it overwhelms me in a good or bad way, but the flow of traffic strikes me as a daily celebration of human instinct and flexibility. I feel more, if you will, human on these streets because I'm constantly making eye contact with the motorists, graciously giving and taking the spaces on the roads, using instinct to negotiate my way to the other end. Walking across the street is an indispensable urban language here. It's a refreshing change from glancing at the disembodied faces behind the darkened windshields, parked neatly behind the lines, impatient for your crossing (whereby you are never fast enough) and the traffic light's changing (no matter how inevitable it is.)

"The traffic lights here are merely a suggestion," says S, our Singaporean guide who is now based in Hanoi, as she walks breezily across a busy traffic circus. Another thing about the streets - you can't be taken seriously if you get cold feet mid-stride. Everyone is sure to identify you as a first-timer, a greenhorn to the dissonance of such casual deregulation in a communist state. Taken further, to feel apprehension in the middle of the road is to doubt the delicate ecosystem of confidence between its users. It takes a great deal of trust to know that the Vespa won't plow right through you despite being 8 metres in front and traveling at least 50 km/h.

The urban-rural divide is a false dichotomy here. Sidewalks seem to spew greenery from either side of the roads, with vines getting tangled in some rusty second-floor balustrades, creeping up the power cables, plaiting them clumsily together as if friendship bracelets frayed by time. In the countryside, industry emerges from the fertile ground in grey blocks of economic promise. Oxen walk along the highways, from the market, oblivious to the thunder-like rumble of container trucks. 

Of course, I am looking at the different landscapes through voyeuristic, touristy lenses. It's hard not to romanticize experiences of traveling in a land so foreign to your own, because we are so distanced from the reality of uncertainty and discomfort within these memories, but it's a long night and some nights are not worth sleeping.

vignettes

"thoughts" and "concerns"

I'm flying to Hanoi tomorrow. This is exciting and emancipating. It feels like life is normal again and I'm no longer the reluctant subject of the state apparatus etc. etc.

Anyway I'm currently reading this Nicholas Tarling book on Nationalism in SEA and it's bringing me back to the stuffy theatrette and the badly designed foldable tables. There are fond memories and there are less-fond memories, and in this bizarre mental flurry of time and reminiscing, I realise with much horror that my SATs are in two months' time and I haven't done a full paper yet. Therefore I suck at being Asian.  I will obviously fail the writing section because the examiners are going to resurrect David Foster Wallace and he will dissect every sentence I write and mock its terrible non-native speaker grammar, and then I'll feel wronged, insecure and disillusioned once more. This will be the emotional fuel for my memoir, a slim volume of recollections that will be published posthumously, in the year 2300, in a Chinese archeology monograph about folk writing among the urban underclass. 

Additionally, this insecurity is compounded by the recent questioning of the utility of my weird academic interests. Cultural anthropology? Comparative literature? Historiography? I'm surrounded by healthcare professionals dedicated to the lives of other human beings, so knowledge concerning the plurality of definitions in the study of nationalism, or describing the unity of form, content and tone in a sonnet, seems to be much of a trivial and selfish preoccupation. The narcissism of language games, the destructive acts of framing and re-framing real human problems into abstract and abstruse theory, the active complicity between language, knowledge and sources of oppression... I realize that everything I love is also everything that I condemn. 

I don't know how I'm going to reconcile these dissonant polarities. How do people in ivory towers connect with "those on the ground"? I think the very phrase "those on the ground" necessarily frames and re-enforces a vertical relationship that will continue to stay vertical unless a deeply horizontal relationship is established and sustained. Can one really take an interest in the "expressions of humanity" without firstly taking an interest in what's primal and fundamental in sustaining these "expressions"? Does anyone feel this way too?

sentences all around me

"With the rise of ethnography — as described by Stocking, and also as demonstrated in linguistics, racial theory, historical classification — there is a codification of difference, and various evolutionary schemes going from primitive to subject race, and finally to superior or civilized peoples."

"Sweetheart, you still have scads of time for things like that. Your whole life is ahead of you."

"Thou thimble,/ Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail!"

"For this recipe we're adding grated apple to exxy strawberries, making the jam stretch further."

"At the start of the play, Richard has just had his brother Clarence arrested and placed in the Tower of London."

"He frowned and looked sideways at the phone, as if the phone itself had betrayed him."

"To what extent should the State involve itself in the world of business?"

needles

Hey guys, this is why I look tired all the time:

Quasi-autobiographical account of an evening; some elements are fictive but the general spirit is left intact

1710: Everyone but the duty crew leaves the medical centre.

1730: Dinner arrives in microwavable white boxes. People enter the pantry, open the boxes and their mood level is all JOHN DOE HAS ENCOUNTERED A BAD MEAL, MINUS TEN MOOD POINTS. This is because they open the boxes and discover that dinner is staring back at them through the charred, gelatinous flesh of their bulbous eyes and eye-stems. I make instant ramen from meidi-ya (butter salt broth and dehydrated potatoes!! Dehydrated potatoes!!) and hide in a corner to use the internet and weep into the deeply aromatic broth with the dehydrated potatoes. I gaze at the dehydrated potatoes swelling up to their full potential. This is somewhat moving.

1800: In preparation for my upcoming vacation, I am browsing Frommer's for "best pho in Hanoi", but I realize I am using the wrong language to do this. Meanwhile I notice the butter salt broth congealing.

1900: Chats with colleague about traveling to Vietnam. "Samuel I suggest you go to China," he says repeatedly in-between my indignant protests. "I was in Beijing and I had a total culture shock," he continues, valiantly confronting his memories of the harrowing plumbing in 1990s China, "they don't close the doors when they poop. The plateaus were amazing." I inform him the plateaus might have, on a subconscious level, inspired his new haircut. Little of my humour is appreciated by others.

2000: Someone else enters the room looking for people to play bridge with. None of us know how to play bridge.

2030: Filled with self-loathing, I throw away what's left of dinner.

2130: After almost completing my Google map of places to visit in Hanoi, a patient arrives. Ignoring the general rule that reporting sick at night should be for urgent cases, he arrives with a runny nose, smelling vaguely of damp rags and suet.

2200: A unit screws up administration for some medical certification and announce their arrival while the doctor tries to call McDelivery. Everyone is irked.

2230: Someone else arrives. "Doctor I can't take it anymore," he weeps. I leave the room to complete the last pin on my beautiful map representing the temporary and symptomatic relief of (romanticized) Florence Nightingale duties. When I soar through the clouds on the wonderful Boeing representing my hopes and dreams, I am going to point back at everyone on the ground with a sort of misplaced sense of schadenfreude.

0000: Someone from outfield is sent here for insect bites. I give him diclofenac and promethazine shots ("one on the arm, another on the bum!"). A lot of screaming and swearing ensues. "Let it all out," I say as calmly as I can, "just let it all out." This session of treatment ends with the both of us shaking hands.

0130: "Should we sleep?" we collectively wonder. Something in the air tells me otherwise, but I fall asleep anyway.

0300: The phone rings. Or was it a dream? It rings again. I answer the call. "We're sending one guy over for physical exhaustion" says the voice. Once again, I am filled with self-loathing. I eat an apple pie.

0328: I am using a rectal probe to measure his temperature.

0332: I am removing his mud-caked boots to do an ECG on him. Mud falls onto my pristine floor in clumps. This makes me very unhappy.

0343: A few of us are transferring him to the sickbay.

0400: I collapse on the bed, but is there anyone around to make sure my airway is clear and that I am breathing? Noooooo...

0530: One of the damn phones wakes me up.

0730: I flee to another room to get some sleep. PEOPLE KEEP ENTERING AND LEAVING THE ROOM. I chant in my head, Don't go to sleep with a frown in your pocket, take it to the yard and tie it to a rocket, shoot it to the moon you'll feel better soon, don't go to bed with a frown (repeat). 

1000: I wake up cussing.

23

Because I'm not comfortable with posting this on Facebook and making this so amenable to Likes:

Dear Mrs Yeap,

If only you could remember the 13 year old who grovelled to you about being forced into the choir... Look at me now. I love singing, I love choir, I love the music that you taught me about from the very beginning. It's so hard to shed any tears - I can't shed a tear at all - because I don't regret any second of doing what I did in school and am even planning to do now and in the future. I'm so incredibly blessed you refused to let me go, kept me in with your strong-headedness, saying how much fun I'd have in Perth, playing candlelight soccer, performing on stage, so many things we've done in four terribly short years.

I will also now say that you were an inspiration to us all, and even saying that you motivated us all the way would be grossly shortchanging you of your amazing dedication, one that I used to be skeptical about but am now utterly, and humbly, convinced of. You were as knitted to the choir as much as the music we sang ,and for that I thank you. You've taught me the mysterious beauty of chords (I will always remember Happy Chords, Sad Chords and Diminished Chords because I do this in jest, and now with a somewhat burdening saudade) and the gorgeous aesthetics of sounds and harmonies and resonances. I love that these things are going to stick with me for life, and in these wonderful moments you do live on.

Once I laughed when you told us you believed that everyone has a guardian angel in heaven watching over us. I still don't quite believe that, but in a metaphorical way that just completely makes sense now, because you will always be with XM Chorale, in every song we sing, moving quietly through the bars and the notes, there in every breath, every final bow.

hello

blinis n shrooms

This rain has been so kind, complementing my inner landscapes with the pathetic fallacy of constant and frigid drizzling and a Hallmark Channel sunset, the combination of which behooves me crawl into bed and emerge periodically for the profound joy of hot oatmeal porridge and lentil stew + blowing my nose into a kleenex, because I guess you can't have it all. 

Tomorrow's power breakfast is:

guacamole 

Swedish cardamom toast (courtesy of my favorite Scandinavian store, PrisXtra, just kidding, Ikea.)

miso soup

I have no thoughts or opinions about anything at the moment, but I am now planning for my happy fantasy getaway to New York in time for Spring 2013! I hope my dreams and wishes will ALL COME TRUE (this includes a certain poetic justice dealt out to a certain problem patient but I will not deign to discuss this further here.)

beautiful debris of time

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

From BODY, SPACE, IMAGE: notes towards improvisation and performance:

YAWNING

LET THE SOFT PALATE OPEN UPWARDS

INTO THE DOME OF THE HEAD

LET THE YAWNS OPEN THE INTERIOR SPACES OF THE BODY

THE BREATH IS THE MEANS BY WHICH THE INSIDE OF THE BODY KNOWS THE OUTSIDE

LET THE AIR SUPPORT YOU LIKE WATER

LET THE BREATH TRAVEL DOWN

OPENING THE GATEWAYS

OF SHOULDERS

ELBOWS

WRISTS

KNEES

ANKLES

LET THE BREATH FILL YOU TO YOUR FULL SIZE

ON THE OUT BREATH

LET GO

OF TIREDNESS

PAIN

WAITING

LET THE BREATH GIVE THE BODY

T I M E

YAWNING    LENGTHENING   STRETCHING   FOLDING   ROLLING

EACH BREATH A DIFFERENT STORY

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

Samuel Palmer, Self-portrait (?1828)

I love this painting because his distracted gaze appears vaguely defiant, resigned, lonely even. The sadness is quiet but simultaneously confrontational. It's fascinating and super-poignant. It's also interesting that it evokes similar feelings one might get from a Francis Bacon or a Jenny Saville portrait, as if Palmer's sensibilities were reborn in new forms of style and technique. I love art that is sad.

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

My grandparents' celebrated their 60th anniversary today. When I'm 80, will I be surrounded with people I love, and who love me? How will my world look like through lenses tinted slightly rosier by cataracts and presbyopia, wisdom and experience, knowledge and heartache? I hate speaking in future tense.

hangnails

This is my life thus far: I am googling "ingrown toenail home remedy", an hour ago I felt like hiding under my new duvet and crying because for a few minutes I became acutely aware of the temporality everything (my eyes kept searching, desperately, for something immutable but all I saw was the tragedy of decay), I am filled with this incredible sense of remorse after doing some facebook stalking because there are some pictures that just cannot be unseen (everyone is embarrassed by these) and this is all my doing and I only have myself to blame, and I had a double McSpicy for dinner. 

I think I can't identify exhaustion even if it hits me repeatedly in the face with a nebulizer.

Is this post just another way of saying the same thing? "I am tired, and how so:"

random stuff I have read and thought interesting

Concepts of Modern Art: from Fauvism to Postmodernism:

This is a book about modern art. It contains phrases such as ritual accepted as referring to a transcendent realm and In spite of an initial concern with the architectonics of stained glass, Bart van der Leck was opposed to the premature union of architecture and painting. These are things that I read and enjoy. Therefore, I will always be lonely.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides:

Firstly, I will admit that I enjoyed the first hundred pages or so before falling into a deeply troubling indifference towards the characters and the entire novel. Madeleine is a privileged white girl studying English in Brown. I'm like, Sure, this is an OK premise, why not? Then she discovers semiotics. Then, she discovers boys while, at the same time, discovering semiotics. Apparently when a character is interested in semiotics he/she will also spout lines from A Lover's Discourse, which is a fine text both romanticized and de-romanticized when read and imagined, but to me it's annoying as a plot device. (Side note: dreading the day when tumblr and/or hipsters discover this book and being Goethe-depressed like they totally epitomized unrequited love) Oh, her boyfriend throws this book at her too. Also he descends into madness, but because he's brilliant, he strives valiantly to understand his mania and even adjusts his medication experimentally. This is because he is brilliant. (The novel does not stop alluding to his brilliance because SPOILER ALERT this is his tragic downfall.) Here is a representative line: Leonard lay his head back, sighing. "They don't even understand the mechanism of manic depression yet. Our knowledge about the brain is vanishingly tiny."

You're probably wondering why this annoys me. The characters respond to and are affected by each other in ways that are not unexpected. The characters are constructed in ways that foreground a singular aspect about them which is frustratingly clichéd. There are two men competing for the love of a woman. One of them flies to India because he's, like, spiritual, and stuff?

The other reason Calcutta felt real was that he was here for a purpose. Until now he'd been merely sightseeing. The best he could say about his travels so far was that they described the route of a pilgrimage that had led him to his present location.

This is just one of the many lines that successfully demonstrate how annoying, if not enraging, contemporary orientalism can be: Asia is still a landscape framed by the language used by the West. It is a place of spirituality and pilgrimage (see: Eat, Pray, Love), and also a landscape lousy with chaos and squalor; the antithesis of the West in its urbane, disinterested hedonism and materialism, a land of rational order that provides a calm, placating sort of education which is now making the kids restless and radical. I want to believe that Eugenides is being deliberately ironic about the statements his characters say, perhaps as a means of ridiculing eighties "spirituality", but the condescension here is too subtle to be farce. Take, for instance, this scene in Calcutta:

The vendor explained what was in each, pointing, "Salt lassi. Sweet lassi. Bhang lassi." 

"We're here for the Bhang lassi," Mike said.  

This provoked merriment from the two men loafing against the wall, the vendor's friends, presumably.

Of course they choose the lassi laced with weed. You can only get three flavours of lassi in India apparently: salty, sweet and weed. I wouldn't be surprised, since this is the India of a more exotic flavour, of a mystic brand of religion and spirituality. But usual tropes about college and post-college kids aside, the presentation of the non-White is embarrassingly one-dimensional. The now-postcolonial Other (or should I say, "once-colonized Other" since this is a thing constantly alluded to) is the product of the tropical, stifling climate: they are lazy, they "loaf" around leading simpleton lifestyles, etc. etc. Either that, or they are weakened invalids whose basic needs are met by the "charity" of these Brown grads,

Wrapped in his sheet he looked as ancient and brown-skinned as an Egyptian mummy... [the old man] sagged between them like an animal carcass.

These are the few glimpses of Asian life that Eugenide's characters experience — their lives are shaped by the apparent horror of what they keenly observe in the lives of other people. Generally the text is at once trite, condescending and anachronistic in its undertone of a latent manifest destiny, steeped in the concerns associated with the powerful and the privileged. This is surprising, considering that the recurrent ideas Mr Eugenides' previous work are informed by experiences from the margins: the skewed narrative perspectives in The Virgin Suicides and unconventional sexual experiences and identities in Middlesex. 

Still, there are parts of the novel that are arresting and moving, if in an understated and muted way. The text is readable but not dumbed-down. There are passing references to many other texts. I am somewhat disappointed with my experience of reading The Marriage Plot. 

The Stories of Ray Bradbury

This tome is interesting to me because I have always associated science fiction with pulp novellas, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine and terrible cover art. These short stories are deeply psychological. I would read a story, take a nap and then feel a terrible sense of dread that I can't really locate.

The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion

This is useful to the person who wants to memorize esoteric pieces of information to throw around at a sit-down dinner party, over the potpourri and the vases of orchids. This one way to end a conversation you never wanted to be in. Here are some shorter entries:

Goy: a term used in the Bible for any nation including Israel

Sandalfon: an angel who figures prominently in the ancient divine-chariot mysticism

Kalischer, Tsevi Hirsch (1795-1874): rabbinic forefunner of modern Zionism who flourished in the western Polish province of Posen annexed by Prussia. 

Etc. etc.

the power of ethical reasoning

the most callous, stupid things were done

just because regulations required them

and no one thought to change the regulations

there are many human beings locked away

in special wards throughout the country

some of them abandoned by their parents

and sometimes unloved by anyone else

just as a hamster can be conditioned to press a lever for food

a human being can be conditioned by professional rewards

to ignore intellectual contradictions and the suffering of others

professional prestige, a vague sense of progress, cash money

all-stars, and the opportunity to travel

were the maintaining factors

in our society the mildly obese are respected

for their stability, fortitude, and excuses

they make a tiny difference by voting

but a big difference by spending $10,000 on things

and the voting and spending are for opposite things

the out-of-control behavior of meat-eating human beings

is actually admirable, because it's comforting to mothers

articulating intellectual convictions, isolating irrational behaviors

in emails and poems, and shoving the pultizer prize in your mom’s face

saying, 'i won the pultizer prize bitch'

to humble her into being a better person

are a few of the tasks that now control my life

alone at night i turned away from the computer

hit my face on the bed, made a noise

and turned back toward the computer

with a neutral facial expression, thinking

i knew how it felt not to be in control of one's life

the next day i said, 'if you really wanted to change

you would have changed by now'

— Tao Lin

diptych

INSPIRATION: ZERO

Went with my mom to view the Musée d'Orsay paintings at the National Museum today, met friends-of-family-friends, of which the salt-and-pepper haired patriarch (not quite the word but it does describe his role) said Hello to me over at the urinals after the show (adults are oblivious to social awkwardness) and later proceeded to quiz me about NS life. At the same time, I was like, 'oh god I am being questioned by a member of the public intelligentsia and he brought along a friend who's a UOB painting of the year recipient ONE NEEDS TO LOOK LIKE ERUDITE MEMBER OF HIS ILK OH NO THEY SEEM TO BE WALKING OVER TO ONE AND ONE WILL NOW GAZE INTENTLY AT THIS MONET'

Therein lies my problem: I cannot take high culture very seriously because it feels like I am betraying my background (even though I take pleasure in betraying my very roots because they're obviously socially conditioned and therefore artificial), attendant to which is a self-ironizing attitude I wield as I approach the social world. Sincerity isn't dead, it's just suffused with a sort of playful jesting and constant parody. 

In any case, I did enjoy the show because I saw a painting that Renoir did of a cat!! (and a naked child) But seriously, the range and quality of paintings are worth the time. The exhibition was cogent and coherent. There was, as it were, a logical flow that described the progress of French painting sensually and cerebrally. It broached the usual questions of art reflecting life, but raised more pertinent, moving, perspectives on areas like War and the Abject or even Solitude. Impressionist paintings are also very pretty. 

Anyway here's the painting that had the cat (ok fine, Pierre August Renoir The Boy With The Cat):

"MONTHLIES"

When I have 'good laughs' I remember them for life. For example, when I was 13 went out to this now-defunct noodle place, Nooch, at citylink mall. My friend said something silly and the whole table quaked with bubbly pubescent giggling, surely much to the ire of the chi-chi noodle slurping yuppie crowd. With some horror, I now realize this had happened six years ago. In our later years this crazy friend and I would recall that moment with some fondness and, I believe, saudade. Around the same period, my dad bought The Complete Companion to Dibley and I actually thought I was going to die mid-laughter because I couldn't breathe. Yes I was that sort of kid.

Similarly, I've had some good laughs recently. This is because in 2010 I discovered the genius that is 30 Rock. Also because I go out with friends (I have friends!!) and we gang up against The Past and we laugh at it. OK, so the past also conceals some pain, some frustrating times, even some problems that still remain unresolved, but it's most convenient and forgiving that time buries things very nicely for us, and troubles only come back to haunt us sporadically in our moments of solitude!! Anyway I titled this section Monthlies as an in-joke which was really a "you had to be there" moment between some friends and I. I've not laughed that hard in the month of October before! (Mainly I sneered haughtily)

what does not translate

Recently I was taking a look at the medical records of someone with Asperger's. There was a fractured, moving — if not painful — narrativity to it. It was a story of perpetual regression, marginalisation and heartbreaking innocence. I read splintered fragments from psychiatric clinical notes, fully aware of that obliquely poetic angle they took, wanting to use these understatedly emotion-rich materials in my writing. 

As if personal tragedy had to be appropriated, broadcasted and then enjoyed! Sometimes artists are monsters, claiming experience where experience is secondhand, occupying personae they don't even understand. 

I'm not sure if empathy is dead. Is empathy (like charity) a supererogatory thing? If so, is the very act of empathy an act of misrepresentation, a misconstruing of subjective experiences, albeit one stemming from good intentions? Whut?

and because I am not enjoying the tone of this post, 

image

It's raining. And right when I was about to complain about the rheumy cold weather, I read my newsfeed on Facebook and see comments like "It's minus one thousand degrees here" — which is a nice, if not timely, observation of the subjectivity and singularity of people's experiences. 

It has occurred to me that I am no longer in school. Yes, I am a pretty slow adapter. I'm not sure how any normal person (read: JC-educated, mind-numbingly middle class, post-adolescent) can approach NS in a way that doesn't profoundly change their paradigms about life and the world. It's not really work, and it's not really school. It's a fuzzy limbo, a jarring mix of "education" and "service", and it does not come close to the "service learning" we undertake (with disinterest) back in school. We encounter superiors who are occasionally wonderful but mostly incompetent in some major, complex way; the hours are elastic: periods of mindless energy give way to a flaccid, slouching-in-the-chair-with-despair idleness; instructions are confusing, pointless, and could have come from a camel with a typewriter for all we know. Yet there is a degree of sheltering involved, in that we aren't drawing a salary, we are coerced into this and therefore are not at fault for being bratty while we still can. 

Conversely, nothing much has changed between school and this... whatever this is. Mornings are still spent on the train with my train-pals, Fat Guy Who Hogs The Width Of The Train Door, Japanese Youtube Cooking Host-Lookalike, and Person Who Probably Walked To The Station Still Asleep. I spend the day looking busy and stressed (oh, why? Because I think it's very chic.) (No.) and sometimes people bitch about other people to me, revealing more about their own insecurities and prejudices than the supposed flaws of others. Sometimes I bring tea along and read a book (while listening to them bitch.) 

And what is the future but that proverbial shroud of obscure mist covering the obscure horizon (subverted my own Wallace Stevens reference, y'all), with all the tangibility of words with no referents, or words with so many referents they become essentially meaningless. 

status quo

Is it so hard not to build a culture around religion (and 'faith')?
Some people can't afford books that have sunsets and white couples splashed all over the covers. Some people can't afford Bibles that are printed on acid-free paper with Moroccan leather covers. Some people don't have all the energy to be participative on demand. Some people are incompatible with the conservatism of privileged, educated, middle-class Chinese people with their 'existential' 'problems'...

Is this imperialism inherited?

Is it wrong to examine things critically? Is it wrong to be skeptical now? Isn't the practice of examining things critically for the sake of  refuting doubt to augment belief somewhat dubious?

When will we finally acknowledge inherent hypocrisies?

What is 'belief'? Do we really have autonomy over our 'beliefs'?

Why does 'tradition' maintain such an esteemed role?

Why is this source of power now human?

what is "What's Your Name?"?

I watched this movie recently and tried my best to make sense of it all:

An oblique glimpse at white privilege and the conditions that create and perpetuate it

Capitalist ideology disguised as a tale of one woman who leaves marketing to become an artist.

Another story that attempts to answer the question "Can a man and a woman 'just be friends'?"

Parody of Woman's Magazine culture

Post-feminist re-appropriation of the harlot figure

Post-feminist ironic re-appropriation of the harlot figure

Parochial, counter-progressive presentation of women as flighty, impulsive and unintelligent

Sensitive portrayal of the complex male-female dynamic

Sensitive portrayal of the complex me-and-my-vagina dynamic

Comedic portrayal of one bimbo's stupidity

A comment on the saying, "When a man sleeps around, it's OK. When a women sleeps around, she's a slut."

A comment on the saying, "When a man sleeps around, it's OK. When a women sleeps around it's also OK and she will never get STDs."

A comment on the saying, "When a man sleeps around, it's OK. When a women sleeps around, she gets to write a book about it and earn royalties from the movie adaptation."

A journey scuttling back and forth between urban and pastoral, chaos and order, displacement and home, man and woman, mother and daughter, attachment and entitlement, art and life, work and play, green eggs and ham, Tiffany & Co., night and day, bleh and bleh, M & Ms, P's & Q's, etc.

A confused understanding of love and its various hypocrisies

The value of social media considered vis a vis traditional print media

A film with a ridiculous premise that starts off fine then decides to change its tone, because changing its tone is like changing shoes, or hairstyles, or boyfriends, or dogs, you know? 

A film with too many characters and too many names

A chick flick that's also a home interiors programme

cerebrum

Guardian interview with Jenny Saville:

"Other people I've talked to had the same bedroom all their childhood." And she says with unconcealed yearning, "To me that's magical. That your journey as a child would be within the same four walls. I never had that level of stability." Like her paintings, hers was a world in limbo, with no continuous narrative except the narrative she imposed herself.

the great pond and its waste of the lilies

Well, Caden Cotard
is a man already dead.

He, um, lives in a half world
between stasis and antistasis
  
and time is concentrated,
  
chronology confused.
  
Yet up until recently he's--
  
He's strived valiantly
  
to make sense of his situation.
  
But now he, ah--
He's turned to stone.

You need to watch Synecdoche, New York.

cruddy vibes

Actual things said by people on a K-Pop interest group's discussion page:

Lol I Stare Hard On That and the blue circle more clearer


"Such thick spect. SO CUTE!~~"


i willfor ne oppa


every one becoz 2pm lover for ever


he REALLY should keep up with the whole rocker thing ^_^ ♥ man he is AMAZING~~~!


owh,,,owesome n handsome


♥ ♥ plz be my chingu!!!!


i like ur hair


This supports my theory that every person has sentience, but for some people that's all they have.

I hate myself.

we need more realistic singaporean dramas

An HDB flat, number of rooms unknown. An underused piano is now a makeshift shelf; the piano stool has disappeared under stacks of files. Save for a family portrait with hairstyles circa 2002 and a wooden panel with the words "God Bless This Home" engraved in a font with ostentatious swirls, there are no other features hanging on the wall. The sofa is upholstered in leather, and the leather has turned a terrible shade of grey-blue. New pillows in bright green, obviously from IKEA, have redeemed the otherwise dull interior from lower middle class gloom. A folded-up card table is clearly visible from behind the sofa.

The front door opens and UNISE (pronounced "Eunice" with the stress on the second syllable) enters looking bored. She is in a uniform that clearly identifies her as a student from an upper-middle-tier secondary school. She says nothing.

The camera pans to the right, revealing another sofa in the same revolting colour. ULANDA, a young graduate fresh from SMU, is sitting on the sofa buffing her nails.

ULANDA: Oh hi.

UNISE: Hey.

ULANDA continues buffing her nails, occasionally checking her iPhone (it is in a pink case). UNISE walks OFFSCREEN to the kitchen, where she opens the refrigerator audibly.

UNISE: (OFFSCREEN) No more nutella.

ULANDA: Oh no.

CLOSING CREDITS

blurbs

Ugh, anyone can come up with a syllabus. Seriously. Here's mine. 

This is the syllabus for a major in nowness and the past (career options: librarian, groupie, glamour vlogger, stand-up comedian, performance artist, ecological activist)

The Now And The Past major is one that challenges as much as it encourages the student to critically experience the immediacy of the present through a lens shaped by the grinding stone of the past. The program prepares the student for the practical aspects of daily thought that is maintained by an analytical inquiry into the theoretical frameworks of the past and present. Understanding and appreciating the sensation and jouissance of thought is crucial; it is through the splicing of experience into meaningful categories of study and the process of holistic consideration and consolidation that the program reaches its crux in its inquiry into the human experience. 

Course sampler

NATP BC1001 Introduction to Stuff That Is Pretty Much "Now"

Examination on the meaning of the term "Now" opens up a host of questions relating to experience, even the experience of experience, and the course progresses, experience of experience of experience. This stages an attempt to introduce Nowness into the intellectual consciousness as not just a general theory of the world but as a a field of knowledge and a state of mind. Questions raised include: What is Now? What, then, is the Past? What is the What of the Now and the Past and how do we locate it and how can we enumerate all its various details if at all? What Now? Now, What? How Now is Now? Should Now be on Twitter? If Now was on Twitter how would its tweets be constructed? 

NATP BC 1002 Articulating The Now in relation to The Past 

In technicalizing the articulation of experience, this course attempts to reconsider versions of The Now and The Past and ways and means in which they are articulated. It is inherent in the very act of articulation that it is simultaneously destroyed. While gaining an awareness of limitations, students will explore and exploit new and novel expressions of the present in relation to past to build a distinctive, expressive foundation of thought. The course will also prompt inquiries into the relationship between Now and Past, and ways and means of describing this relationship in a coherent, constantly analytical manner.

NATP AH 3111 Diane Arbus and Now

In this course we explore the life and work of Arbus, detailing her conquests into the landscape of Otherness, the celebration and solace found within her expression of immediacies. The beauty, drudgery, connivance and blasphemy of a "past" interacts almost sculpturally with her work on the mortal subject, raising relevant and resonant questions about the nature of Now and the relationships between Now and Past.

Coursework: interpretive dance

NATP IS 2219 OK So What About The Future? — An epistemological glance of what is Now

In this necessarily personal and intimate class, students will inquire deep within and question the empirical methods used to ascertain experience. The persistence of the Future perturbs with its unpredictability and illogical empirical existence. Through the cognitive and spiritual dissonance of anxiety and excitement, students will embark on private projects to answer questions that cannot be articulated in the mortal languages. 

Coursework: metaphysical thesis

NATP PQRST 1010101 I Guess We Should Talk About Feminism Since We're Here

A radical social, economic and cultural shift in the intellectual landscape with roots beginning in the Biblical narrative of Ruth, the course seeks to understand the impact of Feminism on intellectual thought and our perception of what is Now. The course will study diverse fields such as marine biology, business and management, game theory and art history to gain insights and perspectives that reveal greater, deeper truth about our singular existence. The introductory class will take us from Austen's grave to Lady Gaga's secret fashion lair, from Marie Curie's schoolroom to the aesthetics of Ke$ha's manager's antiheteronormative powder room.

Coursework: potato sculptures (an exercise in Otherness and the fertile vision)

NATP KFCKCRW 1221 Food of the Now (this is NOT lunch, you guys!!!) 

An exciting, interactive daily journey into our confrontations with the immediacy of food. The routine-like structure of the class arrests us with a familiarity that resonates with an unsettling, cognitive dissonance, featuring the olfactory and gustatory effects of visual, edible sculptures and forms. The striking immediacy that hits the perceiving subject, upon interaction with these forms, is examined and then responded to. Attendantly, the recalling of the past through this intimate immediacy is observed and reflected upon.

Class meets daily at 1200 in the John Galt Dining Hall.

NATP BC 666 Perceiving Time

As an exercise in duration, the class requires patience and concentration. Be enriched as Prof. Mary LaBelle DeLaName raises issues of temperance and temporality, tackling a range of hands-on time perception in the Tibetian, Mesopotamian, Middle-American and Alaskan cultures, even taking excursions farther afield into the experience of time in the Saturnic moons of Sianarq and Tarqeq.

Health warning: students may experience the Rip Van Winkle phenomenon in certain scenarios.

life of the mind

I have new spectacles!!!

This is an online repository of the profound and the banal.

I ate from a tub of mascarpone cheese and discovered it had gone bad. It's that indescribable disappointment when mascarpone becomes mascarpon-yay and then mascarpo, ugh, nay.

I am fattening up for winter (in Hanoi)

Should I subscribe to the Paris Review?? I think I would really like a Paris Review Café au Lait cup.

It would go really well with these new spectacles.

25

Mrs H passed away last Saturday night. Here is a list of some of the many things, both practical and profound, that she had taught me.

1. How to pronounce tonkotsu when ordering ramen
2. That the world is filled with possibilities if only I move my lazy ass and look for them
3. I can find good Italian food at Spizza
4. That if I don't move my lazy ass to look for possibilities there is still someone caring enough to send  emailers listing these possibilities
5. How, and why, I shouldn't screw up a debate speech
6. Humility, and why this is a thing worth cultivating
7. That cancer isn't a death sentence
8. That it's not impossible to do what you like as a career
9. Philly cheesesteaks are good. (This has got to be the the 3rd most understated truth of all time.)
10. Strength, in its wonderful polysemy

there is only beauty

a quick painterly update

In a fit of rage I painted over the entire collage with thick, white acrylic. Truly I am an artist.

dinner in the apocalyptic urban pastoral

Gravlax n' greens! (broccolini and arugula, of course) ft. mascarpone artery killerz

Close-up

Tagliatelle

White asparagus, lavender and a rum-butter sauce. I have said it before and I'll say it again: they look like dildos. This vs. this. 

lonely ampersand is lonely

I know this blog isn't the first thing I turn to when I'm feeling angsty (Joke!) but I feel oddly Blurgh this evening and I don't really know why. It's an absence of that jouissance shit that people get when they feel like they are really hitting that self-realization tier in the hierarchy of needs. In the stolen words of something I saw on twitter, I'm not Van Gogh depressed, just Morrissey depressed. 

I'm kinda sick of hyperreality. Please bring back the Regency Period and good ol' Western Imperialism... I'd rather be colonized by the British than Post-Industrial Proto-Material PRC. I'd rather be colonized explicitly and in name, than coerced into tacit arrangements that hide some secret, dark core. I'm tired of hearing about what's going on in the lives of everyone else I know by the minute, and I miss expecting phone calls on my house phone, teleconferencing, living with less information and more wisdom in general. 

Oh the things I would give to be able to un-know.

give me a back massage and I will love you forever

Hey you guys! I've started on a new art project!

It's a diptych and this afternoon I have just started work on the first panel. I have cut up a 2001-era map of Singapore into strips that I then pasted on stretched canvas. It's a meditation on the topographies and taxonomies of memory, how I relate to my sense of place, and how the work of memory necessarily pieces and un-pieces fragments in a mysterious pattern I am not entirely cognizant of. This is probably going to change as I add on more layers of these fragments.

The formal qualities of this piece returns to the idea of making approximations — each strip and fragment is measured and cut with less attention to precision than to the sensation of fibre tearing and giving. I suppose this gives the act of creation a sense of the aleatoric and arbitrary, even the sensual. But it is in no way an invitation into an allegorical realm. The piece is not an allegory of our increasingly fragmented sense of nation, but rather, a subjective insight into a personal sense of dislocation and of, sense of, sense of, sense of, sense of, sense of, sense of

Obviously you can tell that I haven't planned this well enough. But the idea is, I am going to do a collage of old maps and it's inspired by dislocation/distance/departures/development/disaster.

It is decided:

I shall go gallery-hopping and sketching tomorrow. Perhaps I will also read a book in a quiet café in a self-conscious and parodic fashion, and I am hoping that it will rain. Oh no I have lost the ability to be genuinely sincere about pleasure. :(

By the way, this is how I look now.

edgar is a good name for a hamster

For the first time in a very, very long time, I will be home for a full weekend — and more! It is therefore regrettable that I have no idea what to do with all this time. To celebrate, I have spiked a milkshake from McDonald's with a splash of rum. Currently I am staring at the ceiling. Yay!!

On 12/9/01

When I was 9, my grandfather woke the house up with his death-knell voice. It's an ominous, booming newscaster's voice — he used to be a weatherman during the Japanese Occupation, you see. "America is getting bombed" he said, wait, no, he proclaimed. On hindsight, what is now interesting to me is how I failed to respond with the horror that, say, Jennifer Aniston must have had as she clutched her tiny little heart and brushed her Rachel-era hair off her moist disbelieving cheeks while waking up to the news on CNN. I filed this piece of information in the part of my brain where phrases like "Gaza is getting bombed", "East Timor is getting bombed" and "Afghanistan is getting bombed" resided amongst other sinister half-truths. I guess growing up around one of the gray-haired horsemen of the end times had rendered me utterly indifferent to the suffering of others. Or perhaps I had perceived the suffering of others the way I perceived the suffering of Cinderella when her coach turned back into a pumpkin and she had to walk all the way home in uncomfortable peasant footwear. Whatevs, I was only 9. My only impression of that day was how black the front page was and how it inconveniently stained my fingers before I left for school.

The visual magnificence and scale of the horror will probably remain unmatched for a long time, but then again I may be speaking with the hubris of a stable present. Will anything come close to even echo the extent of tragedy, and so clearly and shatteringly demarcate an era in history with a single event? Many disasters remain a national or regional tragedy. I'm thinking of SARS or the Bali Bombings or The Tsunami. They don't really result in a pivotal change in anything other than an increased usage of words like "resilience", "vigilant" and "secure". This tragedy, on the other hand, proclaimed the end of the Happy Nineties, cast a shadow over the entire idea of being Muslim (or Jew, or Christian, or adopting any sort of religious identity for that matter), opened up a Pandora's Box of other issues that would be boring to talk about right now, and became a sort of irreducible proposition that provided the reasons for the shape of the geopolitical and economic world today. (Also, people just can't stop talking about it! But this is a consequence of its far-reaching effects, that a person in Asia, in Singapore, should feel affected by it. And not just affected by it, but self-reflexively questioning his own secondhand experience of the event.)

A decade has passed and I am looking back at this with a sense of the Kantian Sublime — that no matter how overwhelming a thing can be, there is a pleasure to be located within the idea that there is something that also overwhelms that overwhelming thing. What is overwhelming is again overwhelmed. (Very, very loosely. Sorry Mister Kant!) Yes, viewing pictures of the towers crumbling, and people jumping off the buildings is overwhelming and rightly so, but watching the two beams of light every night at Ground Zero overwhelms that original tragedy because it unmasks the horror and reveals it to be a triumph of the human spirit at its prenatal stage. 

Somehow I don't feel comfortable with leaving it at that. I think the idea is that continued discussion and thought on this is the point of the triumph. To be content with calling it a "triumph, The End" is to miss the point of the sublime triumph over the tragedy. What did 9/11 (or in my circumstance 12/9) teach us? Is it debasing to call this a teachable moment, or is it contributive to the sense of triumph? And why "sense" of triumph? 

It Was Raining in Delft

A cornerstone. Marble pilings. Curbstones and brick.
I saw rooftops. The sun after a rain shower.
Liz, there are children in clumsy jackets. Cobblestones
         and the sun now in a curbside pool.
I will call in an hour where you are sleeping. I’ve been walking
         for 7 hrs on yr name day.
Dead, I am calling you now.
There are colonnades. Yellow wrappers in the square.
Just what you’d suspect: a market with flowers and matrons,
         handbags.
Beauty walks this world. It ages everything.
I am far and I am an animal and I am just another I-am poem,
         a we-see poem, a they-love poem.
The green. All the different windows.
There is so much stone here. And grass. So beautiful each
         translucent electric blade.
And the noise. Cheers folding into traffic. These things.
         Things that have been already said many times:
leaf, zipper, sparrow, lintel, scarf, window shade.


— Peter Gizzi

furrow

Blogger has a new interface! This is going to revolutionize the way I write! It's all about context! Context context context!

I am incredibly tired. I am so tired I feel like I will never experience vigour and life ever again. I am giving too much of myself away. But what is "too much"? And why would anyone care, anyway? I am just the machine that checks your temperature every half hour in the depths of the night like Florence effing Nightingale. (Whoops! I'm being too fresh!) 

Somewhat relatedly: "What exactly do you write about?" ask some when I tell them that writing is an activity that I enjoy. These are the same people who grow up to be accountants/corporate lawyers/physics tutors/the kind of literature teachers who wear Tina Fey glasses and speak like physics tutors while wearing a cropped cardigan thinking that it's "edgy". Deep inside — on a very visceral level — I want to snap and say that I love writing ingredients lists on the back of canned produce, and would love to spend my entire life typing "sodium bicarbonate, water, asparagus" into a word processor, because I'm beginning to think it's a ridiculous question. It is ridiculous because when someone says "Hello, I am Jimmy McSurnameSurname and I enjoy playing soccer" no one asks him what sort of terrain he plays on, or "What kind of soccer do you like to play?" 

My rant hasn't ended. When I say "I write poems and occasionally prose" (because I'm losing interest in communicating with said person) it is usually followed by something inane like "Have you written poems about a girl before?" The only answer to that is "Yes, your Mom". 

Writing isn't about categorizing the things you write in tidy boxes which you then whisk away for storage; it's a consequence of language and experience, it's an affirmation of our human-ness. Because it is composed of consequence and expectation, it is simulacra and not experience itself. But it is such amazing, delicious simulacra. 

swallow vinyl punk

every sentence sounds thoughtful with "the human experience" inserted into it

Beautiful 100% cotton professionally printed fabric designed by us and shaped by the human experience....Fantastic French Nest...perfect for your sun room or porch!

In these vivid memoirs, Lee takes a profoundly personal look back at the events that led to Singapore's independence and shaped its struggle for success, and the human experience.

Surprise: we are beyond psyched and honored to present an extremely rare + intimate Dallas performance from the man responsible for our favorite album of the last decade and one of the best records of 2011 and the human experience: Noah Lennox of Animal Collective, better known to most as PANDA BEAR.

Two decades have passed since the demonic lords, Diablo, Mephisto, andBaal, set out across the world of Sanctuary on a vicious rampage, twisting humanity to their unholy will. Yet for those who battled the Prime Evils, the memory fades slowly in the human experience.

This simple tomato soup from Chef Michael Bulkowski of Findlay, Ohio’s Revolver restaurant is flavored with cinnamon and the human experience, and is a favorite of his vegetarian daughter.

Just in time for Resort 2012, Céline has released the Nano! The Luggage Mini (not as “mini” as it sounds) became my bag of the summer and the human experience.

Howdy friend! How'd you like to be neighbors in the human experience? Come join me in FarmVille, where you can grow delicious fruits and vegetables on your very own farm!

DD does do some work throughout the school holidays. Not so much as to pre-prep or as revision but more to keep her occupied in the human experience. 

When the Federal Reserve chairman speaks on Friday, markets will search the human experience for clues about a new stimulus.

Your horoscope: A slow pace of life might be jazzed up only by socializing with people you would rather not be associating with. Pay special attention to where you're putting your money. Some large expenditures could be coming your way, and you might be less likely than usual to get a loan. Practice frugality. The human experience.

cuz i may be bad, but i'm perfectly good at it.

sex in the air, i don't care, i love the smell of it.

sticks and stones may break my bones but

chains and whips excite me and make me think about the human experience

julia child smiles on me

This will soon be my dinner:

Râpée morvandelle
Carottes glacées
Île flottante


They are all italicized because they're so fancy in French.

new

I am 19. I can give injections and I'm trained to handle weapons, but my parents won't let me keep a cat for a day in the house. I said house. 

Oh, and you know what really bugs me? Living things. What's up with respiration and like, consciousness? It's ANNOYING. CUT IT OUT ALREADY. 

Well hello I am very young and angsty this evening.

I will promise to make you an amazing tomato salad and then deliberately forget. Because my heart is a black pencil scrawl — that much provisionary, that much half-assedly formed. 

I love my grandparents. So much. 

Puritans are hysterical.

a long rain

This is the 12th time I am retyping the opening line to this post but nothing really seems to be kickstarting my chain of thoughts tonight. I am alarmed that the routine of work and sleep and bad, bad food is dulling my capacity to critically approach and contemplate my daily experiences. 

After watching my friends get ready for their lives studying abroad, I can't help but feel that a chapter in my life is closing and entering this mythic realm of Memory, where images reside in rosy-hued repositories, catalogued by a mysterious index unknown to my conscious mind still waiting for me to brush off their archival dust when a vaguely familiar sound prompts their urgent retrieval. 

I am tired and in the blur of this long night I am sensing a strange clarity.

Whinlands

All year round the whin
Can show a blossom or two
But it's in full bloom now.
As if the small yolk stain

From all the birds' eggs in
All the nests of the spring
Were spiked and hung
Everywhere on bushes to ripen.

Hills oxidize gold.
Above the smoulder of green shoot
And dross of dead thorns underfoot
The blossoms scald.

Put a match under
Whins, they go up of a sudden.
They make no flame in the sun
But a fierce heat tremor

Yet incineration like that
Only takes the thorn.
The tough sticks don't burn,
Remain like bone, charred horn.

Gilt, jaggy, springy, frilled
This stunted, dry richness
Persists on hills, near stone ditches,
Over flintbed and battlefield.

— Seamus Heaney

Somnambulist

Nestrobber's hands
and a face in its net of gossamer;

he came back weeping
to unstarch the pillow

and freckle her sheets
with tiny yolk.

— Seamus Heaney

A Sloping Pitch

Was it butane or propane, Gaz
or Trangia? I can never rembember
that kind of detail. I do recall
the air heat-wavering like water
above the stove, the ring
of neat blue petals splaying so
compliantly beneath the kettle
and how it had been an uphill struggle
to sleep: someone tearing long strips
from the dark with their snoring,
cars returning late, and the sloping pitch,
the yaw of the ground rolling us together
as if all night rounding a corner at speed.

— Patrick Brandon

quiche, claret

Just kidding, I didn't have claret... I just made tea... In a novelty The Office mug. 

NDP 2065

NILAN KAPUR-ZHANG XIAOEN'S doe-eyed face appears on the immense iLCD screen at the historic Marina Bay CiviDistric Floating Platform. Only 10, he's taken the country by storm with his hit single, 'Love You Baby Long Long Baby (Wo Ai Ni)'. 

NILAN: Hello Singapore! (smiles; waits for cheering to cease) Thank you! Thank you! I am Nilan KaZhang and I am so exciting to be here right now! Happy birthday Singapore!!! (more cheering; adjusts flashing red vest) I just want to give a shout out to Dame LadyGaga!! She's in the audience today!! (camera cuts to slender figure cloaked in a white-red cardboard dress structured like a coffin in the audience, with only her thin, slightly wrinkled lips exposed. They reveal a slight crescent of a smile.) Boy, does she have memories of national day parades since my grandmother was a JC kid! Ready? 1, 2—

Fireworks shoot up into the sky in perfect synchrony with this year's theme song, WO AI NI TO THE MAX MY HOME MY LOVE. NILAN prances around the stage with his electric piccolo and 2000 back up dancers, most of whom are wearing special-edition aluminium EcoPants. 

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

NILAN: It is such an honour to be emceeing today! I may be the youngest host ever!! (raises hands in the air to loud cheering) This is indeed the year of the Youth. Just last year, our 9 year old talent, Javreenda Lu, became the youngest-ever gold-medallist in the Mumbai Olympics! And last month, 12 year old Xantha Hussein received the Nobel Prize for Medicine for her work in oncological biogenetics! Guess it's something in our water, eh? (nervous laughter from the audience as they collectively recall the uranium contamination disaster just a decade earlier)

This being the 100th Anniversary of our Pre-Revisionist Independence makes it a very, very special celebration for all of us, even as states approach their natural expiry dates. Watching old movies in our ideological cannon, like 'Sandcastle', 'Chicken Rice War' and 'The Gamblers', makes me so aware of our rich culture and our rich heritage! And, of course, how we constantly make it evolve to benefit the economy! Now, here's a special screening of an oldie-but-goodie documentary: 'Local Flavours'. (respectful applause)

The iLCD screen lights up to the familiar electronic-angklung theme music of 'Local Flavours'—a docu-musical-drama made in 2030 about the durian famine, and how everyone overcame the odds despite clashes with the Western world. On the screen: an iconic scene featuring DANIEL SUM as 'YI-DA' and RACHEL HIRAGAMOTOSANTO as 'JANE' is playing to more loud cheering from the audience. 

YI-DA: (looking at the twinkly lights of Jurong Island, singing sweetly, softly) 

Jane-yeeee, Jane-yeeeee, how I missed your fragrant pineapple breath

unlike your friends who reek of crystal meth! 

JANE: (emerges from behind a curtain, sympathetically)

Oh, Yi-Da.

(sings)

The songs of the East are still numb to me

Oh how I would again loathe to see

The peculiar husk of the spiky, gruesome monstrosity! Ah, ah.

YI-DA:

I know we are too different

but this beautiful fruit won't be frequent!

I love you but I have chosen,

have chosen,

(CHORUS-LINE: He has chosen! He has chosen! He has chosen!)

YI-DA: Darkness! 

The lights go off and the audience cheers.

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

Fireworks are lighting up the night sky, to the backdrop of the Marina Bay CiviDistric and the new 2.2 km-tall CITIBANK-RePublicTransportCommunications-AdventureLand Tower standing proudly behind Marina Bay Sands. Images of every citizen are beamed by laser into space. The Cabinet is doing a traditional R&B closing number to rapturous applause.

NILAN: We have come to the end of this year's amazing show! What a night! Be sure to stay for the massive party happening along Orchard Road later! Friends above 90 will be let in free, so be sure to bring your Universal-Citizen-Pass! There'll be recreations of your favourite malls! Celebrities! Food! I'll be there, you sh— (transmission is cut)