we are cards

I haven't written here in a while because there hasn't been much to write about, or that there has been so much to write about that everything amounts to a thin veil of strictly diaphanous consistency, the albumin surrounding the yolk of an egg. The cumulative effect of experience has been thus so poorly conceived of by myself. I am also a lazier person, preferring to torrent a movie I already own on DVD than sift through piles of ephemera to get to the disc. I have also taken to boredly imbibing temperance beverages and pretending to be really interested in Downton Abbey if only to please myself, as if I can now only curate myself after having made fun of people who curate external objects in their lives. Days have become strange and artificial, dome-like, with the phrase "nothing suggesting architecture" floating now and then again in my mind, a tomb of dreams and syntax.

While time and space have become dimensions of reality that I can no longer accept as objective and true, I have been enjoying the thought of being able to gripe about college applications and the deluge of essays that I will treat as manifestations of my own tepid personality, words written on a page in a mysterious order known fully only to myself, and then again, concealing everything from myself. I will hide behind these apparitions of meaning in the hope that they become masks, and turn them into the physicality and particularity of my face. Humanity is begrudgingly knit together by our experience with materiality.

I am afraid of confronting the idea of internality, because there is nothing else in the body besides viscera and effluvia. I don't know how we contain multitudes or the sky. I don't know why we say "we don't know" so knowingly and charmingly. I am reading text without knowing why or how. You are reading this thinking you know why, but really you don't, and this matters to me. It is weird that we have holes in our faces and think them necessary and even beautiful. 

I want to believe that words belong to me, but it's us who belong to language, who come into being because of speech, who are made subjects because of the ability to translate an innateness of being into words that are hopefully coherent. Pronouns are that much insidious and invisible in ordering social reality. I can say "I aspire to become a person who lives with cats" while thinking nothing of grammar, accepting syntax as truth much like mathematics and numbers, social conventions notwithstanding. I have been buried in these thoughts and I want to be buried with them.

bad

"If I can't leave this God-forsaken town and go to college, no-one will!"

Emergency

Arm-in-arm, I forgot
               what the city looks like from a helicopter,

what the city looks like in the middle of winter during the middle of the night,
               do you remember

in the middle of the street and what I am saying,
               what shape is this, and you hold it up, prism—

what does the city look like
when the middle of the sky opens,
what is beyond that, tell me, what are we looking for, don’t die right now
               this view is worth every single

               and it is snowing and I forgot what the Earth’s axis says: Yes (at all times),
               Yes, whatever the circumstance, Yes, I forgot to tell you, Yes.

— Katie Jean Shinkle

weeklong meals of harissa and cocktails

Not sure if depressed or just very thirsty

Noticed I haven't drunk water in ~8 hours

No one has written me an acrostic poem before, i think.

No one has written a poem about me, i think.

Inspired by the phrase "dead to self"

Life is grotesque.

Significant accomplishments in 2012: I have written a bunch of stuff

I have started calling 'university' 'college': dangerous expectations.

"The town was buoyant with suicides."

I was generally unimpressed with everything I experienced yesterday.

I am generally unimpressed with my current surroundings/situation/circumstances.

"If you have good thoughts they will always shine out of your face and you will always look lovely"

It's like Roald Dahl gave me the finger

Thanks for listening

Sleeping feels superfluous and inessential.

Blegh.

images

terror haiku

I am not ready

I am not in college yet

It is far away

my life is omnishambles (new poem)

my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles

my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles

my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles
my life is omnishambles

thoughtz

Don't know if depressed or just my body's way of screaming CAFFEEEEEIIIINE.

Just turned off a charity event's facebook notifications.

I ate a melona bar. It is 1 AM.

Cramps.

I don't have a uterus.

I have a phantom uterus.

Judith Butler.

I can't relate to anything/anyone without developing overdependence.

I read some Henry Miller on the train today.

I am learning hiragana because I like to practise writing without thinking, it is a deeply meditative act.

I also observed/stared at other people reading on the train today and I tried to feed the phrase "kindred spirit" into their heads but I think they didn't receive the memo.

Feel more emotionally involved in comedy than serious drama.

I haven't christened my new umbrella yet. Will probably name it Judith Butler.

I want to drink gazpacho for a week and pretend it's a fad diet, I'm just doing it ironically.

Feel like this is an echo chamber and it's just me talking to myself and some search engines silently caching my pages. It's a nice feeling, kinda like being in a jacuzzi.

If anyone reads reads this, say "Judith Butler," and I will gaze at you with a knowing expression.

opinions!! part ii

Sex tape scholar's conduct 'reprehensible & unbecoming': Heng Swee Keat — CNA, 12 Nov 2012

The nation has been scandalised by grotesquely depraved sex acts depicting moral impoverishment of the highest order! A sex blog has threatened to rip apart the very fabric that binds society at large, showing complete disregard for the sensibilities of the dignified gentlemen and gentlewomen of these good streets! May we ne'er comprehend the full consequences of having the minds of young innocents splayed out, exposed, to the sordid crimes of reproachful ignominy! O—O—O! May God have mercy on us all! — Town Crier, 12 Nov 2012

Isn't it such a postmodern predilection to say that the moral outrage generated by the discovery of explicit sexual content in the personal blog of a scholar of law was inordinate and uncalled for, the product of a conservative society at odds with shifting value systems? Or even the idea of value systems? Taking into consideration the extensive news coverage and the devotion which the general public, or the impression given by the media of the general public, has given to admonishing the behaviour of the two individuals, it's hard not to see that disgust has been overplayed, sensationalising the story into the dramatic playing-out of a few questions of recent pertinence: how should scholarships be awarded, and to whom — in particular, should citizenship be a prerequisite? How has the nature of scholarships changed over the years and over national borders, from financial aid to a symbol of prestige and eminence? 

opinions!! part i

I have 0 opinions left in my head-space, I've used all of them up.

I need to form some opinions today! Urgently!

I am going to the websites of quasi-reputable local news sources to form some opinions now.

There is a very small-town quality to the articles I am reading. I think it is charming.

Unfortunately, I cannot control my involuntary eye-rolling. I have tried, believe me.

#1 - Headline: Social pressure can help deal with littering habits 

Social pressure may help change littering habits, and only to the extent that the individuals responsible for the bulk of litter in public spaces can have their behaviour altered by top-down grassroots campaigns (this is an oxymoron valid in Singaporean social structures) for a sustained period of time. There are several assumptions the article, the most fundamental of which I will merely list for the sake of brevity: firstly, that there is a qualitative increase in litter—pointed out by our most perceptive PM; secondly, that the behaviour of litterbugs are amenable to "social pressure;" and thirdly, that the individuals who constitute the group of "litterbugs"are homogenous enough that their receptivity to social pressure be assumed. 

I question the efficacy of forming a "Clean and Green Taskforce" consisting of volunteers representing different grassroots organisations, if it is more likely that the taskforce end up duplicating the efforts of existing environmental awareness movements (e.g. 'Singapore, Litter-Free' Campaign.) However, because this is a movement focused within smaller communities or pockets of living spaces, greater attention may be paid to the specifics of each situation. 

This raises a larger question that I have always found to be dubious: what can the public even do to reduce littering, if this theoretical public is also partly constituted by these 'litterbugs'? Additionally, anti-littering laws were implemented during the period of soft authoritarianism when social behaviour was still amenable to legislative measures. Given the supposedly "blasé" attitude about environmental cleanliness that Singaporean have adopted over the subsequent decades, is a reevaluation of current anti-littering laws a reasonable course of action? And on a side note, the use of public humiliation—or Corrective Work Order—presupposes that the act of cleaning public areas is a source of humiliation; the sign of punishment (the bright yellow/orange vests) does not sufficiently signify the shame of the punishment. It is likely that with the stigma associated with cleaning up other people's trash, Singapore will find it hard to break into a culture of having a shared responsibility in maintaining environmental cleanliness and hygiene. 

In Memory of Alois Alzheimer

I

Before this page fades from memory,
spare a thought for Alois Alzheimer,
called to mind each time

someone becomes forgetful,
disintegration vindicating
his good name.

II

His is the last image assigned
to the ex-President who has slipped
from public view; soiled sheets
give credence to his thesis;

his territory is marked out
by the track of urine
dribbled along the corridor
of the day-care centre.

III

Lie close to me in the dry sheets
while I can still tell who you are.

Let me declare how much I love you
before our bed is sorely tested.

Love me with drooling toxins, with carbon monoxide,
with rope, with arrows through my heart.

—Dennis O’Driscoll

terms of endearment

A Milky Taste

Little boy I could eat you. Swallow you
whole, pick your nails from the gaps
in my teeth. I’d spit on you, let my hair
float, a woolen mop. Feel tears ooze
out of my skin. The water of my chest,
a set of rulers, will snap across your
knuckles, make them swell up blue.
I laugh at the hand of cards lying
on the wooden table. You lost, with
the cows, our green wedding rings, to
your brother in a barn. Your mouth,
a jagged key, cuts my cheek, I could
scream at the moon nailed in black.
Little boy, drink your milk and kiss me,
the coyotes howl tonight, I can hear
the chickens fuss from my window.

— Natalie Scenters-Zapico

other monitions

you can listen to this while riding at the back of a truck down a mountain after sunset, like I did, and turn the sound into light and the light into sound; the truck is sprinting past autumn like a floppy eared dog hunting wild hares in the dewy forest, and I am—you are—suddenly contiguous with the world

THOUGHTS THOUGHT

HAPPY CAPS LOCK DAY

IT'S EASIER FOR ME TO TYPE IN CAPS LOCK BECAUSE OF THE IRONIC DISTANCE I GUESS. 

ANYWAY,

THOUGHTS THOUGHT WHILE READING COLLEGE CONFIDENTIAL FORUMS ANIMATED BY MY OWN ANXIETY/SELF-AGGRANDIZEMENT/SHIT I READ AND WILL QUOTE VERBATIM

1. HE HAS PERFECT SCORES FOR EVERY STANDARDIZED TEST HE TOOK, UNSURPRISED THAT HE REPORTS ETHNICITY AS 'ASIAN'

2. I AM VISUALIZING AN 18-YEAR-OLD HUGGING HER CAT: 'TABITHA,' SHE SAYS, 'I AM SO GLAD I GOT ACCEPTED TO _____! IT MUST BE BECAUSE I LOVE ANIMALS.'

3. SEEMS LIKE THE GENERAL MESSAGE I GET RE: PERSONAL ESSAYS IS TO BE 'BOLD' AND 'EMOTIONAL'

4. I AM LOOKING AT REJECTION STATS AND BEING TERRIFIED & ANTICIPATING DEPRESSION IN GENERAL.

5. JUST SAW SOMEONE CLAIM THAT HIS STATUS AS 'POOR GAY CATHOLIC ARAB' MIGHT HAVE BEEN A DRAW FOR THE COLLEGE, WHAT?

6. 'I'M POOR BUT NOT LIKE HOMELESS POOR'

7. I THINK THE BEST ADVICE HAS BEEN THIS: TO BE 'SINCERE, PROFESSIONAL AND AUTHENTIC' THIS IS MY NEW MANTRA.

8. I AM APPLYING TO A SCHOOL THAT SOUNDS LIKE A SNEEZE WHEN YOU ABBREVIATE ITS NAME

9. I AM TIRED OF TAIWAN. THIS IS MY PERSONAL TOURISM CAMPAIGN. 

10. A JOYOUS CAPS LOCK DAY TO ONE AND ALL. AMEN.

P.S. JUDITH BUTLER'S MOLE IS THE BARTHESIAN PUNCTUM. HOPE THIS LINE WON'T CATCH UP WITH ME WHEN I APPLY TO GRAD SCHOOL.

i like my body when it is with your

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh … And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

— ee cummings

adulthood IV

thoughts thought while scrolling through my newsfeed II

This friend eats out A LOT.

Antoine Dodson's grandma passed away 16 years ago.

I like the idea of cleaning up mudflats and mangroves but I can't think of any pair of shoes that I hate enough to deliberately disfigure with organic gunk.

Weird how the S3 just entered our techno-cultural consciousness much like a dream. Also a person included "Panda" in his name, so that's another friend I won't be able to take seriously.

I wonder if this person knows that his posts are viewable by 2.2 billion people with internet connection.

Contemporary Art.

Cake!

a website called SlideShare exists

Oh? Uploading your vacation photos has exhausted you? Try making clay bricks with half the number of fingers you've got. Do it now.

I feel so weird about "community improvement" projects overseas. What have we really learnt from condescension? Acts of humility shouldn't become one big corporate project. That's a nice straw hut though. Super ethnic.

the iPhone 5's longer screen has really unleashed a tsunami of complex Freudian imagery

new poem s/n 1255

while listening to the velvet underground
when I really should be sleeping
and am re-evaluating the gin and tonics
that were poured hours ago,
time like a rusty iron chain
hangs in the air,
as if the memory of a dead
dog. Tomorrow morning, I will wake
protesting, feeling for metaphorical sunlight.
The years don't mean a thing to me.
Hide my bones at the bottom of the ocean,
pretend this is origami, tell no one I said hi.

event horizons

Ideas for zines

1. A zine that resists the idea of curation. Brief discussion ("ironic discourse") about Found Objects, Found Objects in Singapore, short rant about curation availing itself to the masses/the masses availing themselves to curatorial powers, mechanical poems, articles plagiarised from my town council's newsletter.

2. A zine about industrial areas. Candid interviews with factory workers, The Immigré, short pull-out about "immigration chic", self-effacing article about gentrification fantasies, discussion about becoming post-industrial, art project that appropriates photographs of "industry professionals" and reinstalls the images in various environments to surreal and humorous effect.

3. A zine about Bishan that parodies zines about Tiong Bahru. Opens with "Brief history of Bishan" ripped off Wikipedia and drawn/annotated over with poetic sounding words, mythology, other histories, article that re-imagines Bishan as hipster enclave, article about the best drinks to be found around Bishan (none), article entitled "Dogs I have Known In Bishan", poem about the MRT station and the experience of change. 

Ideas for coffee

A latte made with fermented milk from nomadic tribes in the Sahara

A single-origin coffee siphoned over a period of 10 years then strained through limestone in the manner of stalagmite formation

Artificial coffee flavour pressurised and roasted into pellets that are then processed as if coffee beans

Coffee beans that are fried not roasted

Kopi Luak that is not vegetarian/PETA-supporter friendly

Ideas for libraries

"Late nights @ the library" 

Speak Terrible English Movement

Noisy libraries for urban-types who have gotten used to environmental noise in shopping malls

Library that is also a bar

Library that is also a gym

Sarcastic cybrarians Tell It Like It Is

Ayn Rand book-burning day

in media res rant

"If you think this sort of award is the only way to validate your intelligence—privileging intelligence as a quality above all else—then," he continued, looking out through the window but never quite looking at anything, "you need to shut the fuck up. Because you didn't deserve it. You didn't fucking deserve it. I know life is unfair—so sad—but everything will work out in the end. The universe turns in on itself to amend injustices both large and tiny. You will not amount to anything."

The room was ravaged by the silence that followed. The white noise of traffic was neutral and devastating. 

"I speak the truth," he said.

"You don't."

"There is nothing more repugnant than your sense of entitlement. I want you to know that."

How was I supposed to respond to this? A flipped table, a damaged paper lantern, a chipped nail. I can only think in images, and the world is conceived as a series of sense percepts that form an artificial holism, an impression of "experience" accessible to no one else. In this way, I am all alone in the world.

We are all alone, lonely, in the world.

"You are retarded," he said. "You limit yourself by questioning the ontology of everything. It's bad enough that you can't even commit to a belief in the existence of the Real, but you sentimentalise it and make it your own personal, romanticised problem. Your selfishness is grotesque because it is embedded in your grasp of first principles, colouring everything you think and do and say."

I can control everything in this discursive space. 

He did backflips across the room and returned to the starting point. He shapeshifted into a carp, gasping for air on the floor. He turned back into a person. 

"Discussions about truth should have been done in the last epoch."

"No one knows who is talking and who is replying anymore."

fête

thoughts thought while scrolling through my newsfeed

3eanuts is so underrated.

I forgot about this page, and I forgot why I 'liked' it.

70% of permissible items on my newsfeed are really just ads for ready-to-wear collections.

I don't care that 3 of my friends "liked" samsung mobile

Hypothesis: the quality of a political facebook page is determined by the quality of followers. (or the type of people who "share" posts?)

Am probably the only person currently reading the articles on this art blog + I feel very alone

if only every politician was as savvy and thoughtful as Nicole Seah .

Maybe the only savvy and thoughtful politician I am following on Facebook is Nicole Seah, and there are many more, posting thoughtful and inspired things that only the savvy are capable of posting.

I need to make hashbrowns in my waffle iron.

Can't believe I might be attending college with this dude, whose web presence is 60% photos of him wearing a tacky shirt in what appears to be the same club.

What has become of this person (mean this in a good way)

Someone is watching dance videos on youtube, but more than that, wants people to know that his watching of dance videos is inconsistent with his way of life/character and is trying to provoke amused responses.

I wish my country's developmental status was high enough so I may preoccupy myself with designer metal trays for my self-published chapbook party.

I think family photos are very sweet, especially if someone >70 years old is in the middle of the picture.

This is a picture of a Chinese lady (?celebrity) wearing tinted aviators, cuddling a poodle.

Farmville still exists!!

I know an inordinate number of people studying pharmacy, but what does this really say about me as a person?

Stumbling on amazing recipes on newsfeed is the only gift facebook has given me

horrible premonitory vision of peers sharing pictures of their children/spawn + me clicking "like" on them out of obligation/sympathy

seymour

Vitagen saleswoman comes to my door.

Vitagen saleswoman: Do you want Vitagen?

Grandpa: What?

Vitagen saleswoman: Vitagen, uncle?

Grandpa: What? Yakult?

Grandma: No, Sustagen!

Grandpa: OH, Sustagen!

Vitagen saleswoman: okay, Sustagen. 

Phone rings

Me: Grandpa, call for you

Grandpa: (on phone) Who? Girlfriend? Fiji? Oh!

Goes on to talk about heart problems

Shard

After the ravages that took the bees by storm
and cleansed the clotted ceiling space

so they’d be no danger to the kids who slept
in that bedroom all summer, I discovered

in the charred ruins of their intricate city
a hand-size fragment of honeycomb, still

clear gold and full of good honey glinting
in its papery stiff hexagonals, which I took

the tip of my tongue to and tasted the pure
spirit of sweetness alive there, like words

from a letter you’d thought you destroyed — just
a scrap of phrases, but enough to call back

exactly what happened, and the good of it.

— Eamon Grennan

adulthood III

A Cocteau Twins playlist
A slideshow of found gifs
A plate of homemade sauerkraut
Picking at one's nails, crying
The sky turning purple at 7 PM

how to say

iam enim hiemps transiit imber abiit et recessit

For winter is now past, the rain is over and gone.

DUE NORTH was an amazing experience: I realize this statement conceals more than it reveals. I am still haunted by the Tagore poem, the line in Both Sides Now ("Tears and fears and feeling proud/To say 'I love you' right out loud"), the dissonant, luminescent tintinnabuli in Magnificat, brilliant and different polychoralities, etc. etc. The programme was rigorous and challenging, lustrous because diverse.

And now the hours seem to melt into each other because I am quite drugged and ill and dreaming of the invalid lifestyle, being attended to by concerned nurses and fed shotglasses of gin, while in fevered states writing, quite brilliantly and madly, heartbreaking things that are particular and also universal — not. I'm just drugged and ill, and my mind is mostly a fog that is starting to lift.

I am in very, very terrible shape.

thoughtz

Feel that I will never be a wine person but am cursed to lead a life struggling to emulate that of a wine person though in a parodic way. 

Not sure if drunk or just sleepy or at the dangerous intersection of inebriation and lethargy. 

Feel as though I will never be a successful driver because of my inability to overtake others: I mean this spatially and figuratively.

Said to a friend "I do not know what I want to do" then stopped myself halfway because this has been said a thousand times, in wakefulness and in sleep. Talked about Taiwan/sandflies instead.

Feel glad to have read this line: "thick encrustations of interpretation" and this will be my life motto if the world doesn't end in 2012.

Quite certain that a playlist to accompany showers of fire and brimstone would come in SUPER handy because we will all die anyway, and I want to die listening to okay-to-good music.

Opened the refrigerator and found 3/4 eaten bottle of pesto covered in mould. Placed it back feeling a specific emotion (sadness and ~5% anger). Made a mental note to stop buying butter.

Meditating on questions like: is it better for a person to be explicit about his internal life or only say elliptical things very occasionally?

If you make life out to be a metaphor for something else, you should probably eat a sock or something, I don't know.

Kind of feel that if you afford to hold a garage sale here, you're not really doing it for the money.

I think we can successfully delineate young adulthood into phases grounded by relevance of/ironic appreciation of Thought Catalog articles. 

I can't even get through a magazine without being distracted by something. I am referring to a magazine with pictures.

The Sims can't even hold my attention for 20 minutes. Ended up googling "rosebud symbolism" last time I tried, which was ?13 months ago.

Feel that, besides the unequal distribution of the world's wealth, the most pressing issue that has been inadequately addressed is the unequal distribution of DSLRs. Sick of looking at the same images. Feel that the planet's collective image repertoire is impoverished.

André Leon Tally: "It's a famine of beauty — a famine of beauty, honey!" Aspire to remember this forever.

Had a talk with supervisor about the existence of primitives who can't grasp the concept of death. I was like, this isn't interesting to me because it probably isn't accurate/doesn't seem to arrive from a very credible source.

A chapter in a book that raises thematic questions about the trajectory of facts while undermining its own claims to the existence of a universally felt "truthiness."

I can hear someone in the neighbourhood vomit/cry.

The Gardener

Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.

— Rabindranath Tagore

adulthood II

The party will be structured like a bar mitzvah, and will be held in a crumbling secondhand bookshop. We will be talking through shelves. Chairs are not allowed but you may sit on the floor. 

The first hour will be spent in silence. You may write notes, but it is strongly recommended that you use eye contact as the primary means of communication. Tapas will be served. 

In the second hour, a slideshow of war photography will be projected against a bookshelf. A lottery will be held to decide who will read a passage from a random page from Gravity and Grace, a text written by Simone Weil. Music composed by Arvo Pärt will be played on old Creative speakers. There will be trays of sausages passed around. Spicy bloody mary cocktails will be served, in chilled mugs.

The final hour will be spent making zabaglione and dancing. 

dies irae

I was looking at google analytics for this blog. Why are my pageviews predominantly Russian?? (Silence, my computer nerd friends: this is a question I do not want the answer to.) In any case, it is 0039 and I am looking up "Farfalle" on Wikipedia because I miss Turin and I am filled with the anxiety of tomorrow's pasta not matching its sauce, and cooking a terrible lunch, and all my friends leaving me, writing terrible reviews on Facebook, etc. etc. 

Europa Cantat was great. Nothing in Singapore will ever come close to that level of national and regional support and community involvement that I witnessed in Turin. I am caught up between divergent strains of living — the laid-back, heritage town lifestyle that is so continental, so Torinese; and the convenience and comfort of the metropolis, nevermind that constant sense of alientation. Someone posited that the Italians, having reached the highest level of development, have the resources and ability to enjoy this quality of life. I do not agree fully with this economic argument because it is the complex matrix of culture, history, geography and economics that produces the conditions for "lifestyles", but whatever. It is what it is.

On another note, if Mitch Albom were to adapt my life to a direct-to-television telenovela on the Hallmark Channel, it would go something like: This is the story of S, who broke his voice at age 10 and has been trying to piece it back together ever since. The more I use my voice in debate speeches and choral pieces and spoken word things, the more I feel alienated from the familiarity of it. It does feel like I'm losing a part of myself. I feel less resonant and less convinced of that clarity I was so sure of 5 years ago, when, in bits and pieces, people began to partake in the undoing of this certainty and the confidence it entitled me to. It's less of an "adjusting one's sound to complement other voices and the music" thing than it is a complaint (and a futile manifesto) against the critique of the natural speaking voice, in its wonderful intonations — for, and in, what they are — that reflect interior states of being, of personhood. 

function

It has dawned on me that maintaining a personal blog in the age of twitter and facebook and tumblr and pinterest (and so on) is BIZARRE. The Internet is becoming a hypersocial space, and the personal blog is a novelty, a vestige of pubescence, a relic from a more genteel era of friendster and online quizzes. It does not feel relevant amidst the omnipresent bombardment of information in aggressive streams and "live feeds" on screens both portable and mired in stasis. One cannot really claim to be able to keep up with the news anymore.

Originally a digital progression from the analogue diary or journal form, the writerly force behind personal blogs was a desire to recount and archive experience — both the experience of daily life, as well as the life of the mind. Much like the diary form, blog entries tended towards an interiority that was naive about the social space it broadcasted itself in. Inadvertently, the private sphere became conflated with the public; sometimes this was a good thing, and sometimes this led to undesired consequences. In any case, blogging was a thing used to express an individuality in a massive digital world — to differentiate yourself as a perceiving, thinking, feeling subject located in a new and vastly expanding reality of kinda anonymous voices. 

Arguably, this spirit of personal journaling and diary-keeping now manifests itself in spaces like twitter and facebook and instagram. As a record of daily life, we upload photographs, leave behind messages both mundane and life-altering, announce births, deaths and marriages, etc. Our profiles don't merely assert our individuality, but also reveal our personality. The spirit of the age is: we'd rather forsake our humanity for a sense of having a personality, than feel bland and drone-like. What, then, is the point of the personal blog? How does it still persist with all the funky, well-designed alternatives hanging around? How has the form changed, if at all?

I refer to the seminal feminist text by Virginia Woolf that uses spatial metaphors to describe the experience of women in literary history and practice — spaces of constraint are also spaces of liberation. Like the room encapsulating feminine experience, virtual spaces such as the personal blog continue to exist as the praxis between experience and writing on the Internet. They don't suffer from a (relative) poverty of information, but instead offer a depth of perspective that negotiates between the two worlds of direct experience and recounted memory tinted mildly by the limitations of a lingual medium. The personal blog tells us that there is a different way of knowing a person.

pet peeves (updated July 2012)

curation vs. "curation"
HTHT
people who complain that anything mint-flavoured reminds them of toothpaste
freshman orientation camps
Glee
chihuahuas
Instagram
truffle fries
Facebook
Club photography
coffee aficionados who righteously declare "coffee made using a super automatic machine isn't espresso"
K-Pop
reselling shitty vintage furniture with a 300% markup
ST's Urban pull-out
Ordering a burger with all the vegetables removed

adulthood

garlic scape pesto
arugula pesto
miso mayonaise
aubergine and mint bruschetta
strawberry-filled cardamom cupcakes
brownies with kahlua, sea salt and olive oil
coriander and lime chicken wings
grilled peanut butter and jelly pad thai sandwiches
pulled pork
creamed onion gratin
maple syrup-roasted tomatoes
fennel and radish salad
cherry and ginger muesli on earl grey ice cream
kouign amann

do not revive

turn "ugh" into "hug"!! no.

When is it OK to dress like we're all going to Lilith Fair '98 again?

Is it OK to post sad photographs on Facebook? 

I said some nasty things about Keats during tuition and I only regret 30% of what was said.

I want to have a HTHT with everything that moves.

I hate the world. 

Just kidding I only hate about 3/5ths of the world the rest is fine.

I need to come up with witty things to say on my deathbed. 

Forgot the times when "stupid" was a bad word, but I remember how stucco walls gave me finger blisters.

Saw a kitten about 3 hours ago but it ran off.

It was a balmy evening.

nunc dimittis

I am not a wine person. Nothing interests me.

In other news, I connect with Bridesmaids on a spiritual level. Is this a bad thing.

Will someone be so kind as to slap me with a fish because I really need to get my shit together. 

Also: It's Gustav Klimpt's birthday!

Stowaway

1.

Aging, I am a stowaway in the hold of my being.
Even memory is a finger to my lips.
Once I entered down the center aisle
at the Comédie Française, the Artemis of Ephesus
on my arm, all eyes on her rows of breasts and me.
“Who is this master of her ninety nipples?”
the public whispered.
Now the ocean is my audience,
I see in secret my last secret.


2.

Mid-December, my old felt hat that I could have imagined
myself leaving behind in a restaurant for eternity
blew out into the Atlantic. The damn thing so familiar
I saw myself wearing it even into the deep,
an aging Narcissus, in white foam and northern sunlight,
on my way to becoming a conch. It is like seeing music
this growing from flesh and bone into seashell:
undulating salts become a purple mantle,
and the almost translucent
bivalve of memory and forgetting closes.

— Stanley Moss

transcription

Thesis: I think that I often fail to understand the gravity of the various things I land myself in, and perhaps this is a good thing. 

An elaboration in the guise of an example: I'm singing again. Sorry? What? I don't like singing on my own. And neither do I identify myself as a person who hums randomly while washing the dishes, before bursting into song while hanging up the dishtowels to dry. Maybe it's the idea of singing that I love — that it comes from a primal place, a sacred place. Maybe it's the idea of "having a voice" that I am especially attracted to. It is a means of assertion, but also of deep inflexion and interiority; it is a site of power, but also a site for the transgression of power. It creates modalities of thought alongside tonalities that are musical and moving. There is a physicality tied heavily to the "conceptual" voice: how the muscles push air from the lungs through the vocal folds, how air is displaced to create waves, how this is received by an audience and transcribed into sound — the voice, a simple and complicated path of energy that is we give and receive, over and over again. To reference Barthes: like the photograph, the voice is a transparent medium that we glaze over to look into our own specific realities.

Clarifications to put me back on topic: it's not practical concerns that bug me, but purely theoretical ones. I'm singing in a choir (duh) and, inasmuch as committing requires some sacrifice, it's how this preoccupation fits in with larger questions about the roles that voice and text play in my experience of life. I enter into these projects without consciously perceiving their significance, and find myself discovering themes that recur mysteriously and wonderfully. 

Parenthetical asides that work paratactically:

A: Life is a consequence of love. 

Q: Is love a consequence of life?

What happens when the answers come before the questions?

I want to bake a mandarin-scented olive oil cake!

tai tai to-do list

1. Watch Bridesmaids

2. Figure out how to use this newfangled mio tv thing

3. Make an orange-scented olive oil cake (and solve a personnel dilemma concerning lavender: to add or not to add?)

4. Catch up on HBO's Girls

5. Find out if "ombré" is a colour or a pattern or a lifestyle

6. Complete Season 2 of The Office

7. Catch up with a zillion Western educated people who have returned for the summer months or whatever summer "is"

8. Wash this beautiful glass bodum mug I made a latte in

9. Rearrange bookshelves

10. Figure out what's the deal with my notoriously tardy Paris Review subscription (?!)

fiendish lines

This week has been about:

The destruction of functional harmonies

My favorite living writer favoriting my lame tweet, about a deep desire for a discussion on masocriticism in a Piedmontese accent via a long distance phone call

The happy realization that I am going to Turin in a month

Auditions on Saturday (a state of affairs as well as an idea for a Lorrie Moore-esque short story?) 

Feeling sad while reading Morrison's Beloved 

(It also feels weird to refer to Toni Morrison as "Morrison")

Parataxis as a way of feeling

The jarring misappropriation of Susan Sontag (I will forgive you one day, though, Ms Popova, while starving and crawling through the streets for an internship)

Much like the arrival of a newborn, the ceremonious delivery of my new espresso machine (applause!)

A video of the Burning Ship fractal

The horror and the ineluctable Spiral Into Despair after discovering my favorite Whoopi Goldberg routine, in which a surfer girl is totally funny and then totally sad and then totally consoling us and totally making me bawl all over my aging macbook pro, deleted.

Thinking of doing a zine of New Literature with the title done in the style of WordArt 2000, but afraid that it will look like perhaps I'm trying too hard to explore (and transgress) the shifting horizons of aesthetics and taste.

sensitive driving

I guess this week has been filled with You-Saw-It-Comings, most of which have been unpleasant and had stemmed from the destructive machinations of a capitalist paradigm hypersaturated with commodities, or perhaps I'm merely concretizing theory and saying "There is a name for all our problems and it is This." 

I wish I had more time to wander libraries drowsily, reading cookbooks and flipping through philosophy and art theory in the thickly-illustrated "Introducing..." series. 

Having a thought: I don't know why I feel offended when people say that I have a "unique" voice/style/sensibility. And then upon further reflection, I feel like a capricious child, which, I guess, kinda sucks. 

Basically I spent the afternoon looking at air ticket prices and sighing my way to premature hypertension.

Leave the Spine Behind

The moon was never made of shoelaces
but your spleen could very well
sneak out of your body at night
to follow its passion for origami, opera,
or rare meat. You probably wouldn’t even notice
until someone at a bar punched you in the gut
and their knuckles found your vertebrae’s grooves
and the message was sent from brain to tailbone
that to not have a hometown is a disadvantageous
situation to find yourself in when the family
roses are pulled from the ground.
They’ll probably prescribe memorization
or thermonuclear meditation when the truth of the matter
is that any way you position your bed in relation to the compass
destiny remains a crock of shit. The other crock is in the will
and it has never been a secret that the desire to end estrangement
wins three times out of seven. Statistics can prove the likelihood
of my knee finding your knee-pit in the middle of the night.
My scars are out of town at a storytelling convention
trying to coax a fervor from a haughty diphthong.

— Rachel M. Simon

Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.


— Jack Gilbert

After your death

First, I emptied the closets of your clothes,
threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised
from your touch, left empty the jars

you bought for preserves. The next morning,
birds rustled the fruit trees, and later
when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem,

I found it half eaten, the other side
already rotting, or—like another I plucked
and split open—being taken from the inside:

a swarm of insects hollowing it. I’m too late,
again, another space emptied by loss.
Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.

— Natasha Tretheway

week of 7 eggs

In the spirit of this blog circa 2006, I have returned from church camp feeling pretty relaxed (maybe even blissed out, but I am a puritan who doesn't like to associate with recreational drugs because it's pagan, because I am a puritan, and because ankles are sinful, and because chocolate is the devil's communion wafer, etc. etc.) and perhaps more at ease with living, in ways that I will not self absorbedly expose here. Perhaps I'll just say this: it's hard to love others if a model for perfect love doesn't exist, and I am thankful that there is an ontological basis for that, even if it's so fleeting and abstract in my mind.

Also, I'm not exactly looking forward to the weekend that is coming up. 

Also, the sun has been quite the self centred diva lately!! Hey solar system — I really don't appreciate that.

I miss good ol' 103rd st w and eating a broccoli pizza and living in fear of being mugged, like, 40% of the time. And rushing from lower manhattan to midtown for dinner and a thing at the lincoln centre. And walking up morningside heights. Cripes. I think people get really tired of listening to me go on and on about nyc.

triad

I am walking in the backyard with a neutral expression because I have been reading Megan Boyle and thinking about various scenes in various Wes Anderson films and thinking about a "new visual idiom" that I do not know much about. I come across a sack of quinoa. I open the top. I squat down and put my face into the quinoa. I lift up my face, and look at the sun. My face is covered in quinoa, like rainbow sprinkles on a cake pop. I lie down on the soft earth. A field of quinoa appears here 100 years later. A road that crosses the field is named after the quinoa plants. The place is famed for its beautiful sunsets. You make plans to take your children here, but this thought will always slip your mind.

---

There is a food truck in Brooklyn that makes ice cream in various flavours. Its bestseller is an ice cream with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwich chunks, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches, the ice cream sandwiches filled with salted caramel cookie ice cream sandwiches. It is a fractal with 0 calories.

---

Hey mister! You into child prodigies??? I got you some prodigies at the back of store. This came in two days ago: seven kids with MFAs, and they're busy composing a song in microtone. Dig those tonalities! I've got a kid with a doctorate in comparative theology but he's a downer and he has a beard. There was a fifteen year old neurosurgeon but I sold him to that nice lady you met on your way in. I don't know about you but I would invest in the medical sciences right now, because you'll never know what's gonna eat you up, with all our drinkin' and eatin' and microwavin' — God. Yeah, these? These are 7 month old babies currently pursuing their MBAs while working their way up to a Guggenheim fellowship, because diversity is good. Can you spell polymath? They can. They can also spell zephyr, protohaemophiliac and Amy Sherman-Palladino. They've been getting quite good reviews from my customers but if I were you I'd wait for the next batch to arrive because they come with PhDs in analytical and experimental computing, and Google internships after the 3rd month. 

umami III

I came across interesting phrases today:

1. "volunteer go-go dancers"
2. "an erotics of epistemology"
3. "an island without rain"

umami II

I bought some bulgar this afternoon.

I also bought a pack of amaranth.

I tried adding a some miso to kewpie mayo. Then I mixed them together in a 50/50 portion. It was good. 

I plucked mint leaves from the plant outside my house, then I added them to my tabouleh. 

Blink if you understand this.

my week as avant garde eu de parfum

Top notes are industrial: 10-year-old handrails, Persephone's festering shampoo suds, burnt arthropods on fluorescent bulbs, made-in-China cable ties, spearmint dental floss and expired credit cards being thrown into a shredding machine. The cacophony of distressing smells gives way to a muted freshness, as if an oil refinery had been washed away by a cleansing tsunami leaving in its wake the smell of decay and mortality, but also of earth and fertility. Less assertive than its opening, the middle notes are pleasant and pastoral. I smell a field of unripe bananas, the vegetal scent of an Asian greengrocer, a single passionfruit behind trampled by an Iberian piglet, and cilantro. Its crisp edges are rounded by the mineral qualities of the base notes — isotonic drinks splashed over tarmac, miso in a wooden bowl, Arvo Pärt's tintinnabulati, old wristwatches, sandalwood and soy bean. 

Available online

20 ml: SGD 100

50 ml: SGD 200

100 ml: SGD 300

linkfeste

URLS URLS URLS!!!

How to see Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie

"Classic 6:" New York City Apartment Building Living, 1880s-1910s

Walled city of Kowloon

Walled city of Ahmedabad

Walled city of Lahore

writ large

I'm returning library books at a slower rate than I borrow. In order to make these loans meaningful I will record the titles that I borrow, and my reasons for taking them out.

---

Title:

Poem of the Deep Song

Author:

Federico Garcia Lorca

Extract:

The labyrinths

that time creates

vanish.

(Only the desert

remains.)

Why I borrowed this:

I like Lorca's poetry and I thought that reading a book of poetry titled Poem of the Deep Song would be a gratifying experience. I tried to read the poems in the original Spanish, and felt that they sounded more romantic and passionate; in English they sounded plaintive and woodsy, like a person with a beard and 1930s salvaged denim should be reading them aloud.

Questions:

Is the deep song an outmoded form of poetry? How do images of the Andalusian setting refract that urgent, searching interiority into a work about soul and nature?

---

Title:

Candide

Author:

Voltaire

Extract:

Discussing the distressing circumstances in which Candide, Cunégonde, and the old woman reached Cadiz, and how they set sail for the New World

'Who could have robbed me of my moidores and diamondes?' cried Cunégonde, bursting into tears. 'What are we to live on? Whatever shall we do? Where shall I find more Inquisitors and Jews to replace them?'

Why I borrowed this:

I wanted to read Voltaire, that's all.

Questions:

How is the satire in Candide different from satire in The Noose? What's up with satire commenting on the nature of art all the time? Will I ever finish reading a French novel?

---

Title:

The Professor

Author:

Charlotte Brontë

Extract:

Now, reader, during the last two pages I have been giving you honey fresh from flowers, but you must not live entirely on food so luscious; taste a little gall — just a drop, by way of change.

Why I borrowed this:

I walked a flight of stairs up to the fiction section, and decided that I needed to borrow something there to make my effort worthwhile. I have never read anything by the Brontë sisters before. I haven't read much Victorian lit. Books are kind of cheesy. (see extract above) I did not finish this book.

Questions:

How did Charlotte Brontë look like while writing in the voice of the bossypants omniscient narrator who dispenses advice freely and irresponsibly? Was she frowning?

---

Title:

Shorts 1

Author:

Haresh Sharma

Extract:

Sanjay: I finished my story. It's good. It is. It's brilliant. Even Suzanne said she liked it. Well-researched, good style, good variety of quotes. Perfect. I spoke to Choo yesterday. My whole life has been wrong. I don't know when it started being wrong. I don't know when it started being wrong, or how... When I edit, it's someone else's words. I just make it... nice. But I can't write, I can't create those words, because any way it comes out, it's manipulation. Every person I interview, every word I write... it's all a scam. A conspiracy which we're part of.

Why I borrowed this:

The Singapore Collection was near the fiction section. Also, I saw this at a certain local bookstore in Tiong Bahru a while ago but didn't bother buying it because I would probably ruin the cover in my disorganized dump bag. This copy was lovingly wrapped in plastic by the gentle book custodians at NLB.

Questions:

How do local plays create emotional peaks and frosty endings? What is a "local play" anyway?

---

Title:

Simone Weil — An Anthology

Author:

Simone Weil, edited by Siân Miles

Extract:

The Greeks knew about art and sport, but not about work. The master is the slave of the slave in the sense that the slave makes the master.

Why I borrowed this:

Simone Weil is a person who inspires me because her critique of force shapes my view of the world, and now I'm bitterly anarcho-pacifist, or, at least, philosophically anarcho-pacifist.

Questions:

Is there a place for rhetoric when writing about oppression? How is force analysed?

opinions

Opinions are like onions, because they are words with two Os in them. Speaking of the letter O, what's up with the O. Henry Award? Why is it now called the PEN/O. Henry prize? (I googled it and it's been happening since 2009, so I guess I am such a phony. Phony is a word with only one O.)

Anyway, here are some opinions that I will be dispensing throughout the course of the week.

The twitter account @viatumblr

For weeks I've tried to make sense of this, being very charitable and accommodating in my evaluation of this internet phenomenon, but kindness is elusive and sometimes it's unkind to be kind. @viatumblr is a repository of generally bad advice written by jaded teenagers obsessed with Sylvia Plath and Catcher In The Rye and believe The Perks Of Being A Wallflower is a singular elegy to their tormented and fragile sense of self.

A selection of gems:

A beautiful girl is a beautiful girl, but a beautiful girl with a brain is an absolutely lethal combination.

Maybe I'm over you. Maybe I've moved on. Maybe I like someone else. Maybe, I'm just a really good liar. #viatumblr

You're a whore and an incredibly horrible person. Go screw another life, you slut!

A girl's laughter is much more cheerful than a boy's. But a boy's cry is much more meaningful than a girl's. #viatumblr

I wouldn't deny that these things are inspirational to someone out there, but I wouldn't deny many other things, such as: the people who earnestly believe these things to be wisdom are also the people who say "this title looks punchier when you use wordart", making passive aggressive statements online is not a constructive way to deal with relationships, etc. etc.

What bugs me the most about @viatumblr is that most of it is written in the second person, which (falsely) imagines a second party. This is retarded, because there is no real discourse happening (or even being created) and the intended audience is usually framed as the much-hated victimizer, the object of naked pubescent wrath, whom the speaker doesn't really bother addressing in real life anyway.

Emma Yong passed away and I feel shitty

Mainly because she wasn't supposed to die, or that role models don't just die of cancer abruptly at the age of 36. Perhaps I'm not most upset about Emma Yong passing away because I'll miss her person, but I'm more upset (and rather ashamed about the reason why I feel this way) that people are getting cancer and dying, as if it's some absurd cliché that will grow to define my experience as a person.

I was sitting in the train somewhere between Khatib and Yishun when my friend told me, and my first thought was Oh my God I am so fucking sad and this then became I don't understand and there was also a tan, wrinkled man in his 70s? with snowy eyebrows folding beautiful deranged pleats of long lalang grass, sticking them into corners of the cabin, giving them to people, putting them back in an old shopping bag from a suburban mall. I want to be sad and young forever.

Whoopi Goldberg makes me really, you know, emotional, I don't know

... But, like, I dunno, like, if you're ever on the beach or something and you want to go for a walk or somewhere, just talk, like I'm always at the sea wall, like all you have to do is to kinda look me up, ok? ok?

And this: http://muumuuhouse.com/bsg.poetry2.html

riverrun

Just wanna give a shout out to my young hoodlums down yonder at the village green:

Oh, yeah, this bag? I bought this at the MoMA before you were old enough to watch The Hunger Games without adult supervision, so you can SUCK THAT, HOES.

how

I like to imagine the scene of my dying as the death of Rue in The Hunger Games. Of course the precocious die young. Don't peak when you're in high school.

I've been thinking about 

1) How modalities work within a text.

2) How retarded it is that I spent the entire weekend being sick.

3) This choral piece that deconstructs and reconstructs Purcell's Hear My Prayer O Lord and how singing   is such a cerebral experience.

4) That snake in China with the clawed hand.

5) How I browsed the Management section at the library ironically, and then thought to myself THESE BOOKS ARE FOR SQUARES but then realized that a majority of library users check out these books, and then I felt that life isn't really worth living because I am obviously a space cadet without grounded, feasible ambitions and an overly inflated sense of self.

6) The idea that cat paw pads look like beans.

7) I can't type properly because I took some salbutamol and my hands are shaking!

8) Chocolate is GREAT

9) Greatness is subjective

10) Subjective experiences are very Vogue

11) I buy too many magazines because I fantasize about placing them casually on the coffee table 

12) Organizations that produce coffee table books about themselves are very presumptuous

13) I spelt presumptuous wrongly at first. Thank God for spellcheck.

14) Grammar check does not exist because the computer companies want to appease language Nazis.

15) Because language Nazis don't run the world; they sit and gripe at the sidelines, and this is precisely my bleak future.

resembling

OK, so it's Saturday morning and I'm sick, and watching the pilot episode of HBO's Girls, and it's very rainy outside. I like the dialogue and the situations the characters get trapped in because it's very urban (they live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn) and quasi-literary (Hannah interned at Melville House and this is evidenced by the stacks of Tao Lin books displayed around the office) and also very cosmopolitan (Jessa flew from Greece to France — oh actually she did a week in Bali — and then to New York) and has very Judd Apatow humour, like if McSweeney's shorter fiction came to life, this would be it. 

The problem that most people have with the series is that it's a show about white people and their post-college, pre-employment problems. It doesn't depict the racial diversity in the location that it's set in, or the experiences of women across race, sexuality and socioeconomic class, despite the inherent claim in its title to a broad spectrum of experience. But it isn't so much the lack of representation that is the real issue — after all, sometimes some people just have friends of similar colour, duh. It's the misrepresentation of non-white individuals, or reliance on new urban stereotypes, that I have a bone to pick. For example, the other intern at the publishing house is Chinese/Korean and she is mocked for being good at Photoshop and her apparent insensitivity (she doesn't realize Hannah is leaving because she had just lost her internship). These two obvious traits about her, the only traits we can know about her, are played up for laughs. 

"Where are you going? Will you get me a lunar bar? And a smartwater and vitaminwater?"

And in another particularly striking moment, a nameless black man tells Hannah to smile more.

We are given the impression that he is one of those crazy folks you meet on the street. Still, he speaks one of the more meaningful lines in the episode, because, you know, Wisdom From The Gutter.

Thus, in Girls, the only Black man in New York is mentally unsound, and the only Asian girl is an insensitive nerd. That said, these are rather unfair points of critique based on the viewing of just the pilot episode, but if it's any indication of what is to come, then the series — no matter how brilliant its portrayal of an urban, coming-of-age experience in arguably the most expensive city in the world — started off on a racially dubious note.