Autumn Sweater

analysing the ridiculousity that is Christina Perri's 'A Thousand Years'

2012-02-04T00:09:00.002+08:00

Heart beats fast

Colors and promises
How to be brave

That's cute, starting a song with these insipid fragments. What does the line "Colors and promises" mean? Perri's being deliberately elliptical but this will probably elude her Twilight-lovin' audience.

How can I love when I’m afraid to fall

At first glance, this is a striking line because of its sincere questioning, as if negotiating the rough, ruddy landscapes of love and longing. On a deeper level, the cultural connotation of "misunderstood, skinny bitch" is poignant because the opening line "Heart beats fast" speaks volumes of the speaker's rich inner life.

But watching you stand alone
All of my doubt suddenly goes away somehow

Why? Why does "watching you stand alone" mean that your doubt "suddenly" goes away "somehow"?? This is where the speaker has erred. If s/he's standing alone, maybe there's a very good reason for it. It feels like the object of the speaker's sexual desire is brooding and introspective — the modern day Byronic hero if you would so generously admit — but this being a song from Twilight requires a consideration of complex cultural codes, most of which are deceptively complex.

One step closer

To?? To what? To whom? Where and whence?? How and why??

I have died everyday waiting for you

Cute lyrics! It feels a lot like it's saying (obliquely, of course) "hey come listen to this sad song while you drink that frappe, you'll look very attractive"

Darling don’t be afraid I have loved you

If you think s/he's afraid, it's probably RAPE.

For a thousand years

I’ll love you for a thousand more

OH I get it now, it's a about handsome vampire singing to a girl that he loves. This love song makes sense to me!!

Time stands still

Perri employs the use of irony because time "stands still" but the speaker can still hold out for "a thousand years." I guess I am rendered asunder by the brilliance of her wit.

Beauty in all she is

Do I have to ask: what if she were ugly

I will be brave

Uh huh

I will not let anything take away

Except her VIRGINITY, you thousand year old rapist.

What’s standing in front of me

Is this question even necessary? You're gonna have beautiful vampire children.

Every breath

Every hour has come to this

Ooooh anaphora. This song has literary roots in deep stuff like Dickens and MLK.

One step closer

Wait for it, wait for it...

I have died everyday waiting for you

Darling don’t be afraid I have loved you

For a thousand years

I’ll love you for a thousand more

The chorus repeats itself for our listening pleasure.

diastole

2012-02-03T23:59:00.001+08:00

I've always thought of myself as an observer rather than one observed, and upon watching a video of myself performing CPR on a (deceptively-named) "lifelike dummy", watching the focus shift to my hands, my shoes, my face, I began to understand that we are constantly beheld by a panoply of gazes, each determining, subjectively, our personhood through an ideological and gendered lens.

What are the politics of seeing? That I determine the cultural quotient, emotional capacity, or even the slightest paucity of weird sociopathic shit from a visual run-down of a person seems to unmask and describe the judgmental subjectivity of every knowledge claim I make about him or her. "She's friendly but she's the sort of person who posts pictures of her semi-naked boyfriend on Facebook."; "These are my good friends but they like bands like Nickelback"; "She looks in-bred." etc. etc. And on an exponentially greater scale, "The laxity of our immigration policies is an issue"; "The immorality of this group of marginal people renders them the Sodom and Gomorrah of our times"; "The massive devastation of these cities by the flooding is yet another sign of the end times"; "We need to groom dynamic youths to expand our economy."

To disregard the fundamental subjectivity of our utterances and claims, and even to insist on our soi disant objective truth, is to me an abhorrent vulgarity that epitomizes the ugliness of humanity. This ugliness is located where there is a privileging of one truth over another, or cultivating a condescending attitude towards anything that threatens a paradigm. Granted, there are several things in our collective consciousness that are categorically wrong, like genocide or torture, but to spring attacks motivated by a defensive need to hold on to bases of power, to "stability", is pretty dubious. Unless we actively seek to be reasonably accommodating, acknowledge that epistemological humility is not intellectual apathy, and love the humanity of Other People, it's quite likely that nothing about the status quo is going to change.

I know I love to bask in my own ridiculousity, but there are things that we shouldn't feel uncool being passionate about. I guess it's a culmination of many events that have led to these recent, suckily structured and largely unoriginal thoughts. But writing is still quite the liberating experience that people describe, and that I remember, it to be.

2012-01-28T21:26:00.000+08:00

I feel terrible. To reach me, please call 9299999996BDJS&778, ext. 2386666-WOE-877 and you may enumerate all my shortcomings there. Please drop me a line! Or perhaps tomorrow will be a better day and I'll find additional reasons to exist more compliantly with the world.

rare narrative

2012-01-25T22:37:00.005+08:00

I have organized this year's CNY takings into a neat table (complete with a bar graph!!), so right now I feel like the Demigod of Information Management.

The Weekend in Review

Friday: There was a typhoon in the West. After winning a bowling prize (!) I went home, sat around and bummed, read a book (I forgot what else I did) (oh yeah I ran in the evening, and while doing cool-downs, this little girl asked her parents why I was bending over like that, that tiny bitch)

Saturday: Had "soft bone chicken" and "red miso ramen" for dinner before watching Wicked in the evening; was gifted a bag of artisanal espresso beans by my favorite people; yes it was a good day.

Sunday: After church, had lunch at Taiwanese place which left us hungrier; slept like a pig before being woken up for CNY dinner; forgot everything that happened from 7 pm to 9 am the next morning.

Monday: CNY at the mom's side (say YES to pork belly nirvana!), declared lunch "the only meal I'm having today", guilt run at night

Tuesday: Lowbrow breakfast watching ABA eat this mysterious sandwich from LJS, purchased The Mind's Eye by Oliver Sacks and this collection of Umberto Eco's essays on literature from Booksactually, felt good inside for supporting an independent bookstore and publisher, went to SMW's to graze on gourmet sausages, breadsticks with exotic dips, salad with this Japanese sesame dressing that heaven bestowed upon humankind, said Hi to a very pale MX who had flown in earlier from Bali, went home and laughed at Sister because she had school the next day.

Wednesday: Woke up for a run around the park, visited Page One, felt a little sad that it was closing but also glad because the wavy shelves had a way with making me feel quite queasy (especially with the waterfront view), bumped into L my fun crazy senior from the days of yore, L demanded I recommend some good books so I was like "Yes Fitzgerald's good", bought a book about early 20th century feminist anarchism and Jude the Obscure, endured a train ride with a mainlander talking at 200000 dB next to my year.

Back to work tomorrow, sigh. After which, it's preparation for an audition (!) and the SATs (!!). In all honesty, I do like that I have things to keep me near the level of Crazy Busy, just like the good old days.

self esteem

2012-01-23T23:16:00.001+08:00

Self Esteem: Jenny Slate
Directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp
Written by Dean Fleischer-Camp & Jenny Slate & Gabe Liedman

"Is this water? I haven't had my dinner yet, so — Oh! Is this, is this — Yes that's him. That's him. Look at him! I really like how he kind of crosses his legs while he types at the desk? But doesn't really cross his legs? I think it's also really poetic how the light's kind of diffused in the dark and hits his face like that. He used to have this acne problem when I first met him but he's got it under control."

"I wonder what sort of... cleanser? Moisturizer? Facial product? I wonder what sort of facial product he uses."

"I don't know, I remember him telling me about this exfoliator, I don't know. But he was always like, 'You should try this peach stone scrub' and I'm like, OK! But I never really got the chance to find it at the store."

"I think he's come back from a run. I'm not being presumptuous, I'm just observing that he's really perspiring a lot. Maybe he—"

"He sweats a lot but it's very... cleansing? He's a very clean person. He's not really attractive, but he's clean."

"I'm OK with clean guys."

"And I bet he's read, like, all the books recommended by Modern Library. I can tell this from his weird glasses but also because he's kind of like sitting — not "sitting" sitting, but, like, half-sitting — on a copy of A Barthes Reader, like he's read them all and is very tired of the world."

"I think he's very tired of existing but he still does it because people need him and he has a generous heart. How old is he? 19? 20?"

"I forgot, but it's not important because he's, like, simultaneously young and old so he doesn't care about age, he just needs to dress right."

"Does he smoke? I mean, he sounds very artistic, it's quite intimidating, so I thought naturally he would be smoking, like, because he's tired of life. Like, because he needs to alienate people because that's the normal, natural thing to do if you're an artist, especially —"

"You know, I'm not sure if he does? But I don't think he does. Doesn't he look like Allen Ginsberg, or Fred Armisen? It's crazy because he's this weird Asian version of them, I'm not so sure. I need him."

"I need him too."

"We need him."

etc.

blog memes like it's freakin' 2007 homies!!

2012-01-22T23:59:00.000+08:00

Open your Music, and hit Shuffle, and write the artist and the title of the song, next to each question.

Soundtrack of your life

Opening Credits: Midnight Train To Georgia - (The 30 Rock version)

Waking Up Scene: Little Bird - Goldfrapp

Car Driving Scene: The Best Days - The Softies

High School Flashback Scene: Sharon - Yeah Jazz

Nostalgic Scene: Enjoy The Silence - Depeche Mode (... ooh!!)

Bitter, Angry Scene: Edge Of The World - Sam Phillips

Break-up Scene: Les Femmes - Yelle

Agony scene: Undertow - Stars

Regret Scene: Magic - Girls

Nightclub/Bar Scene: Margarine Rock - Stereolab

Fight/Action Scene: 100 Years From Now - Karen Elson

Lawn Mowing Scene: Hey Tiger - Dear Nora

Sad, breakdown scene: Friday I'm In Love - The Cure

Death Scene: Wet Stuff - The Folk Implosion

Funeral Scene: Return To Patagonia - Lemon Jelly

Mellow/Pot-smoking Scene: Kaleidoscope - Ringo Deathstarr (again, ooh!!)

Dreaming About Someone Scene: My - Okay (this is a good one-man sband)

Sex Scene: The Birds They Circle - Karen Elson

Contemplation Scene: Blood Bank - Bon Iver

Chase Scene: Fancy - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Happy Love Scene: Hey moon! - Molly Nilsson

Happy Friend Scene: All In The Way - Slumber Party

Closing Credits: Slow and Strong - Dear Nora

blog memes like it's freakin' 2007 homies!!

2012-01-22T23:46:00.001+08:00

1) Put your iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. on shuffle mode.
2) For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3) YOU MUST WRITE THE SONG NAME DOWN, NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS.
4) Put any comments in brackets after the song name.
5) Tag 6 people.
-------------------------------------------------------
1. Are you male or female?
Marathon - Tennis

2. Describe yourself.
Since You Went Away - Dear Nora

3. What do people feel when they're around you?
Brunettes - COOLRUNNINGS

This is true on a superficial level. They feel they are in the presence of a brunette. An Asian brunette!!

4. Describe your current relationship.
You Make My Dreams - Hall & Oates

My relationship with my imaginary cat, Smiley Muffin, that is!

5. Where would you like to be now?
La valse d'Amélie - Yann Tiersen

This is also true

6. How do you feel about love?
Innerspace - The Apples In Stereo

7. What's your life like?
You Can't Force A Dance Part - Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele

This is also true. Lyrics: "No one in this party's having any fun tonight, and I'd do anything just to make it alright."

8. What would you ask for if you only had one wish?
More Real - The Necessaries

9. If someone says "Is this okay?", what would you say?
The Party - St Vincent

Now this is interesting, because this question reminds me of Annie Clark.

Lyrics: "Oh there aren't enough hands to point all the fingers"

10. How would you describe yourself?
Lump Sum - Bon Iver
"Lump" is accurate

11. What do you like in a guy/girl?
Down Down Down - Rob Lord

I was SO IN LOVE with this song back in '06. Good times!

12. How do you feel today?
The Big Fight - Stars

I feel a sense of harmony with the cosmos, or whatever, so this is odd.

13. What do your friends think of you?
Rose Hip November - Vashti Bunyan

Nice! I guess I am the token hippie in my circle of friends. Pass me my hemp twine that I may set up a clothesline for my freshly-dyed indigo fabrics, will ya?

14. What do you think of your parents?
Don't Lie - The Mantles

This is such a great song, you guys!! I hope my parents didn't lie to me about my birth, the reason for my very being, the truth of this plane of existence, the importance of arithmetic, etc.

15. What do you think about very often?
The Broken Paper-Heart Club - Princess Niko

16. What is 2+2?
Saddest Things - The Lil' Hospital

17. What do you think of the person you like?
You Can't Hurry Love - The Supremes

It's is a catchy song

18. What is your life story?
All The Young Dudes - Mott the Hoople
"All the young duuuuuudes, carry the ne-eeeewwwwwsss"

19. What do you want to be when you grow up?
It's All A Dream - The Arrogants

20. What do you think of when you see the person you like?
Still - Moscow Olympics

21. What will you dance to during your wedding?
Found Out - Caribou

22. What will they play at your funeral?
I'm The One - The Average White Band

23. What is your biggest fear?
Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing - Laura Nyro

24. What is your hobby/interest?
A Word Of A Friend - The Occasional Flickers

25. What do you think of your friends?
The Sky Turns To Black - Fireflies

notes about a weekend

2012-01-22T17:42:00.002+08:00

Wicked vs. Wide Sargasso Sea: Notes for myself

Both re-imagine and rewrite a canonical text to expose its inherent parochialism, but to slightly different ends. Wide Sargasso Sea is obviously equal parts postcolonial and feminist because the feminine-masculine and colonized-colonizer dichotomies work together to produce a work that challenges a particular literary tradition. This contestation is quite political in nature.

But Wicked responds to The Wizard Of Oz in a manner that is satiric but ultimately comedic. It approaches postcolonialism obliquely, via general ideas about minority voices and their oppression. It probably can be considered to contain a more mordant feminist agenda by way of its portrayal of sisterhood (and its complexities), consideration of femininity and conventions of beauty, and the political agency of women for emancipation embodied in Elphaba's struggle in Ozian society counterpointing the imperfections in Nessarose's political office (I can't believe I just typed that sentence). But these concerns are merely instrumental in crystallizing some fundamental problems in meta-ethics: that there isn't a perfect empirical basis to determine "the good", and that the determination of "the good" is made by the bases of power.

(OK. I just wanted to share what I thought after watching Wicked yesterday night. BTW do I still have friends?)

I suck at reading books

I suck at reading books because I have no attention span to speak of. At least I can still finish my sentences. But there are too many distra—oh look I have two pdf articles open

CNY "issues"

I have eaten four pineapple tarts today, but have not yet reached pineapple tart nirvana. This happens when the jam has adequate caramelization and the pastry is crumbly but not too crumbly. See also: red chile flakes go quite OK with pineapple jam.

What is the "right" way to excuse yourself from proper company when you need to zap some bak kwa in the microwave because you want to make crispy bak kwa cones to fill with ice cream? How do I politely refuse a guest's request to try one?

Friends they are jewels twice as beautiful and few

I was reading the handwritten things my bestest friends ever (like, I want to travel into the future and give your offspring hugs and expensive toys) wrote, and I felt pretty OK inside <-- understatement of the century!

Why yes that is an Iron and Wine song, thanks for asking.

dramatic

2012-01-15T23:18:00.003+08:00

SPOTLIGHT ON STAGE LEFT

Actor who looks like me is sitting on a bar stool, turned away from the light

I wish I had something remotely insightful to say here, but I have nothing. Sorry guys! I have nothing. Go read Retweetings or rip off some dubious philosophy quote. I guess it's the truth if it makes sense to you. I am a vacuum and nature abhors a vacuum.

The sound of trains passing

LIGHT DIMS

sorghum

2012-01-11T21:21:00.000+08:00

Just popped some pills. Hopefully I'll be fast asleep by the end of this post. (More hopefully, this thing should get itself published.)

Medical centre life now is quite happening, in a good way. There's this SYF-like competition among medical centres, and one of the components involves a simulation of a medical emergency, in which we evacuate an unconscious casualty back to the medical centre and attempt resuscitation. It's really fun because almost everyone's involved and there's a feeling of satisfaction (that is, of course, misplaced. But it's a feeling of satisfaction nonetheless.) I'm part of the ambulance team consisting of my senior and I, and despite feeling carsick every day at the back of the vehicle, with random medical equipment flying in all directions when we hit speed bumps, I think I am enjoying myself. It's overwhelmingly reminiscent of rehearsals, particularly that nostalgic combination of mental fatigue and physical strain.

It misses the point of assessing emergency preparedness because it's entirely contrived, with an artificial scenario that oversimplifies the panic, confusion and mental preparation of an actual situation, but hey it's fun so who cares?

quinoa

2012-01-10T22:48:00.002+08:00

My mailbox sucks because I get shit like "@acidrefluxtreatment is now following you on Twitter" and I haven't had, like, decent conversation in a long time wherein I feel comfortable enough to be equal parts self deprecating and self important, and my spectacle lenses are fogged up with raindrops and dirt but I can't be arsed to wipe them clean, and I am thinking of the sky and trying to remember it, how it looks when I am finally, for once, happy.

I haven't read a poem that makes me go Yes This Speaks The Truth in a very long time, and in that same expanse of time, I haven't encountered an idea which I think novel and awesome.

Actually I feel amazing right now because my parents love the garlic scape pesto I made and they're supportive of my quinoa-eating habit. After that they sliced me naval oranges and left pink grapefruit lemonade for my supper. Wow, affirmation really goes a long way!

In other news, I have just learnt of a piece of information that now compels me to re-evaluate my impressions of people (I mean this in a neutral, objective way) and myself, in relation to time and age and maturity and the future, etc. and this is not the platform to explicitly broadcast my thoughts in detail, but I'll be happier to discuss the general ideas behind such developments, and on a more fruitful level, what our limited perceptions say about our direct and indirect experiences of humanity.

I'm also reading To The Lighthouse currently, which puts me in an annoying modernist-introspective-complexity of fractured vision and experience-streams of consciousness-EVERYTHING mood. Example of a sentence: "As he gazed out to the sea — the flow and ebb of the waves, eating up the land a bit at a time, what a lark, what a plunge — the curtains shifted, woven in the warm summer air, without the gentleness, kindness even, of a breeze etc. etc. etc."

perennials

2012-01-07T20:55:00.003+08:00

I made it to the age of 20! Had I lived in Victorian London, I would probably be dead, or at least coughing myself to death, by now. Oh wait I AM coughing myself to death. Isn't that ironic? Isn't it ironic that I didn't locate the irony before labelling this an ironic situation? Isn't irony dead, or at least assimiliated so fully into daily life, that even our existence is an uncanny and conceptually strange condition that some might label... ironic?

Just kidding! I meant nothing of what I said earlier! However, I am sincere about the statement, "I made it to the age of 20!" because in the years preceding this even before conception, I had many close brushes with an abrupt and tragic end. For example, I had once choked on a pineapple sweet, and somone held me upside down by my ankles to shake it out. I always get flashbacks of this even as I, against my better judgement, ride on roller coasters, because G-forces are very reminiscent of this near-death experience. (Interesting, however, that G-forces thrill because they ARE near-death experiences in themselves.) Take another instance - while holidaying with my family, I swam to the deep end and promptly began to drown. My dad was a swimming champion in his youth, and this is why I am not in a vegetal state today, narrating my life's misfortunes through a feeding tube and an Eighties Macintosh voice.On a more fundamental level, my mom nearly resigned herself to a life of childlessness ("barren" is a really harsh word! But it's funny because of the agricultural connotation. Am I alienating you with my humour?) but then she had me. Also, of course, who can forget the time I was rudely hit by a car while running across the road in the dark of night? Being wheeled around the A&E was so much fun. Hospital gowns are comfy!

Birthdays are weird! It's like an anniversary of your birth, and there's cake, AND THERE ARE CANDLES ON THE CAKE (WHO THOUGHT OF THAT?), and people clap as they sing the birthday song while staring at you, and every time they sing that song my mind is infused with an awareness that it's copyrighted, and then I start to think about intellectual property and public history and the cultural consciousness of mankind, and before you know it, someone's helping me up from the ground. It's just really weird.

what

2012-01-01T23:59:00.002+08:00

As usual, the new year snuck up on me like a thief in the night.

I spent the last evening of 2011 talking to my childhood friends over dessert. Sat in the car and looked up at the sky through the sunroof. Had conversations about how we're growing up, our new and different responsibilities and challenges, the awkward situation of being simultaneously young and old, etc.. I kept quiet, mostly, because there wasn't much to add but resignation and introspection — that is not to say that these things are of little value. I am still young and still new to articulating these feelings of age accurately and precisely. At the same time, in equal measure, I was honestly perturbed by the time I'd lost in 2011. I would have done so many things differently.

What I want to say is: I am not ready for this, this mountain of decisions, decisions about decisions, meta meta meta decisions... It isn't decision-making per se that I loathe, but making these decisions in a tangled web of information and misinformation, the plurality of opinions, doubt about the future and my aptitude, blah blah blah. Everything I had taken for-granted — academic interests, relationships, career preferences, cost of living, even my own priorities in life — seemed to undergo a seismic shift so gradual that its miniscule changes went undetected for over a year, only to spring a surprise in the silent spaces of contemplation with nary a warning nor apology.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing. What is that thing Emerson said about experience? I'm too lazy to look it up now, Google Chrome search bar be damned. But I am certainly thankful for this year's experiences. I've felt stupid, brilliant, careless, patient, angry, depressed, hopeful, joyful, self-righteous, self-deprecating, humorless, loved, lonely, annoyed, confused, cruel, lost, and the complete list will span the rest of your screen, but I am thankful for all these experiences, all these emotions, and perhaps only in this can I say that I do not regret personhood and the lived experience of the mundane and the extraordinary. And I do like sharing this space in my life with you.

my reverse psychology new year's resolutions in the passive aggressive mode

2012-01-01T18:40:00.002+08:00

(adapted from a friend)

Get to know my friends and family better? As if I'll really start talking to that "weird part of my extended family." LOL @ self.
EXTEND MY ORD BECAUSE I LIKE THE PAIN.
Expunge all desire to learn driving because I want to make Singapore's roads a safer place for git children, those lil' turds.
Preserve my current personhood by freezing all skill levels.
Make less friends! Making friends this year really drained my energy. Friends are overrated! Most of them are spambots anyway!
Act douchier: wear Ed Hardy trucker caps non-ironically, hang out at Abercrombie, objectify women in the guise of postfeminist critique, etc.
Run away from marathons
Get totally fat. Actually, no, get totally obese. It's cool to be obese now. Not kidding!!! Really I'm not kidding. Why would I kid myself? FAT UP.

Have a blessed new year!

kwanzaa 2011

2011-12-26T20:41:00.006+08:00

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

2011-12-25T17:47:00.001+08:00

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

2011-12-21T23:01:00.005+08:00

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

2011-12-17T19:50:00.003+08:00

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

2011-12-15T00:14:00.000+08:00

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

2011-12-04T21:49:00.001+08:00

"thoughts" and "concerns"

2011-12-04T12:17:00.001+08:00

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

2011-12-01T22:14:00.001+08:00

"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

2011-11-30T15:21:00.001+08:00

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

2011-11-24T00:14:00.001+08:00

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

2011-11-21T01:28:00.001+08:00

blinis n shrooms

2011-11-14T21:58:00.001+08:00

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

2011-11-14T00:04:00.001+08:00

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

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

2011-11-10T20:32:00.001+08:00

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

2011-11-05T00:00:00.001+08:00

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

2011-11-01T19:42:00.004+08:00

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

2011-10-31T23:06:00.000+08:00

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

2011-10-23T23:16:00.003+08:00

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

2011-10-19T20:52:00.002+08:00

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

2011-10-16T01:01:00.000+08:00

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?"?

2011-10-15T21:42:00.002+08:00

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

2011-10-09T22:53:00.000+08:00

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

2011-10-03T22:27:00.001+08:00

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

2011-10-02T21:57:00.000+08:00

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

2011-10-02T21:40:00.001+08:00

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

2011-09-30T21:36:00.001+08:00

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

2011-09-28T22:42:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-26T10:23:00.003+08:00

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.

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

there is only beauty

2011-09-24T21:40:00.000+08:00

a quick painterly update

2011-09-18T19:34:00.004+08:00

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

2011-09-18T19:24:00.001+08:00

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

2011-09-18T00:17:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-16T18:49:00.001+08:00

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:

2011-09-16T00:10:00.001+08:00

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

2011-09-15T15:40:00.003+08:00

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

2011-09-12T22:34:00.001+08:00

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

2011-09-06T14:03:00.002+08:00

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

2011-09-03T01:15:00.001+08:00

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

2011-08-30T10:50:00.000+08:00

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

2011-08-24T22:52:00.000+08:00

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

2011-08-22T22:07:00.000+08:00

This will soon be my dinner:

Râpée morvandelle
Carottes glacées
Île flottante

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

new

2011-08-21T23:55:00.000+08:00

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

2011-08-21T02:01:00.000+08:00

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

2011-08-21T01:32:00.000+08:00

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

2011-08-21T01:28:00.000+08:00

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

2011-08-14T00:24:00.003+08:00

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

2011-08-13T12:06:00.000+08:00

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

NDP 2065

2011-08-09T20:56:00.000+08:00

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)

2011-08-09T11:13:00.002+08:00

Marina Abramovic Problems

2011-08-06T17:51:00.001+08:00

I feel very whiny today so I will whine continuously across several topics for a number of paragraphs. Deal with it.

WHAT IS UP WITH MOTIVATION? I mean, it gets annoying when people are so public about how amazing they're feeling that they want to share it with everyone they claim to know, as if enthusiasm can be contagious. It's not. It's inconsiderate. If you feel motivated about planting another shoebox garden outside your patio, or feel motivated about paperwork, or feel motivated about running into a jungle with a MATADOR, or feel motivated about surprising your girlfriend on your 6th Day Anniversary, please do us all a favour and keep your motivation to yourself. Good grief.
Complaining about pesky immigrants: everyone has done it before, not everyone has felt a sense of shame and hypocrisy after setting their complaint loose into the universe, and even fewer have lost sleep over their ethical lapse, whatever. But if you want to complain about migrants, at least locate the source of your complaint, right? "THE TRAINS ARE CROWDED, THOSE PESKY IMMIGRANTS" — is an example of not locating the source of your complaint. This type of complaint is often xenophobic and reflects the depravity of the complainer more than it reflects the state of affairs. It's nobody's fault that some people were born in poor villages and trying to raise a family of seven on their own... yup that's right, take in the guilt you upper-middle-class capitalist pig... suck it up now. By the way, the source of complaint in this instance is really the amazingly clever immigration policies at the governmental level — adding to the population for short-term economic gain without consideration for the relatively slower expansion of housing and infrastructure was a really genius move, you guys. Anyway I am totally aware of the non-homogeneity of the immigrant population here, and this is just a rant about the inadequacy of other people's rants, so, like, please be cognizant of this highly nuanced situation. You're also encouraged to rant about my rant so it becomes a meta-meta-rant! Omg, let's all sit in a circle and feel happy about being educated.
Pubescents given access to Twitter — isn't anyone going to say something about that? THEIR HORMONES ARE ALWAYS TALKING. Like, give their hormones an open-mic and they'll talk about how they adore girls that "Have sexy fingernails" or "Have manners" (let's not even GO INTO girls talking about boys who "Throw pebbles at your window"and "Spray the right amount of Axe" — seriously? Seriously?). I just want to say that other people have hormones too. "Damn gallstones! Blame my weird melatonin levels, I guess" (@endocrinesystemsthat), "Gloomy day. Woke up to menopause." (@gynaeproblemsthat) KIDS: PLEASE SILENCE YOUR HORMONES IF NOT YOUR PHONES. THANK YOU.
National Day. Why are people waving flags to a spectacle that celebrates militarism and consequently violence? Don't people think ever about that? Cut it off already! I just want like, a picnic and a fireworks show! Simplicity is so underrated in young nation states.

shoplifting

2011-08-01T00:05:00.000+08:00

Please gift me the following for Christmas:

Yoshimoto Nara towel

Rodarte torn-up knitted sweater (OK, OK, I know, 1.5 grand is a little too pricey for ripped outerwear. Hence, the following piece:)

Slightly more affordable Rodarte Radarte sweatshirt

Self-explanatory

Thanks, you guys!

ambiguity

2011-07-31T16:19:00.000+08:00

"There’s only a certain amount of control that you can have over a situation. I’m interested in working in that area in which the mind can no longer hold on to things. The point at which all ideas fall apart."

— Fred Sandback

objectivity

2011-07-31T15:16:00.000+08:00

Olivia Bee

narrativity

2011-07-30T23:46:00.000+08:00

Stephanie Davidson

what I want to do after december 2012, because it's never too early to plan

2011-07-30T22:52:00.000+08:00

Complete my wall of Penguin book covers (because my dad bought the postcard box set some time back and now it's sitting around looking very fashionable but also forlorn.)
Paint a wall saffron
Make a batch of macarons (sea salt and caramel). All my culinary hopes and dreams are banking on this.
Run some marathon without getting caught on camera and then having to untag photos on Facebook because a very small and select group of humans look good when running and I don't belong to this small and select group.
Book a flight to NYC; couchsurf + make friends with someone of non-Asiatic ethnicity who can make amazing fish tacos and have secret 30 Rock in-jokes with + "lose myself" + "find myself again"
Finish reading Infinite Jest — it is not a portable read.
Canoeing expedition
Kayaking expedition
Mountaineering expedition
Skiing expedition
Super-secret-spying expedition
Prison Break expedition
Grow a herb
Hang out with friends in the spirit of spontaneity and all that is cavalier + avoid annoying them
"Fight crime" (this is subject to interpretation)
Buy an iPhone and then disparage it for being too mainstream
Learn how to drive
Feel sad about not getting a car
Become bitter about not having a car but then reconciling bitterness with renewed sense of eco-friendliness + entitlement to self-righteousness at the EZ-link top up station
Frost cupcakes in unconventional ways: "Surprise! That wasn't chocolate!" cupcakes, "Orientalism" curried potato cupcakes to celebrate the life of Edward Said, organic gluten-free vegan "Nouveau Upper Middle Class" celeriac, marjoram and agave nectar cupcakes, poverty cupcakes (brushing of demerara symbolizing dust, grit of hard labour), "politicized masses" oatmeal raisin cupcakes, Post-Cupcakes, Post-Post-Cupcakes, "She felt something move in the attic" detective night cupcakes in celebration of Agatha Christie's birthday, "Cupcakes Against Interpretation" "cupcakes" in celebration of Susan Sontag's birthday, etc. etc. etc.
Throw a hissy fit on my 21st birthday.

Fun! Fun! Fun!

Your Catfish Friend

2011-07-30T19:52:00.001+08:00

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,"
I'd love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, "I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."

— Richard Brautigan

yknow

2011-07-29T20:39:00.002+08:00

I am very afraid because I have a colleague who talks like he's in a Dilbert cartoon and another who frowns like Charlyne Yi, and another who reminds me of Michael Cera, and I wake up in the mornings to dew-covered cobwebs frosting the huge field in the backyard of my new home and badly-made orange cake. I am afraid, because I might wake up and find myself back in BMT, waiting for my turn to throw the damn grenade. I DON'T WANNA WAKE UP. I WANT TO STAY IN MY AWESOME AIR-CONDITIONED ROOM (THAT I WILL CLEAN UP TILL THE PAPER CLIPS SHINE OR AT LEAST ARE RUST-FREE) AND RUN AROUND IMPORTANTLY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT WHEN SOMEONE SEMICONSCIOUS ARRIVES WITH MUCH FANFARE AND PERIODICALLY POP BY THE TREATMENT ROOM TO DRAW SOMEONE'S BLOOD, ALL THAT TILL DECEMBER 2012, AND IT'S OK IF THE WORLD ENDS BECAUSE I FEEL LIKE I HAVE GOTTEN WHAT I WANTED AND I AM CONTENT. I'm not shouting; I just couldn't find a good place in that paragraph to switch back to normal caps.

Anyway I'm going to haul my SAT practice book to my office and hopefully I will get like a million billion marks and immediate acceptance letters from Havard and Yale (oh, and maybe some smaller colleges like Vassar and Swarthmore, and their letters will be like "Please come to our school cuz we're small and select blah blah blah small liberal arts college blah blah blah tiny, tiny cohort blah blah blah amazing staff to student ratio cuz we're that small! come on! we're a little liberal arts college on a prairie blah blah our education is cute blah blah blah hipsters worship our alumni") and I'll be like, OH NO, EVERYONE WANTS ME BUT I HAVE NO $$$$$ :( :( :( :( :( and they'll be like, OH — SNORT — DON'T WORRY ABOUT THAT, WE'LL PAY YOU TO SIT IN OUR CLASSES, and then I'll snap out of my daydream by some whiny patient who has been waiting for 6 hours like it's all our fault.

Oh, life is so hard. I am going out to buy a popsicle but it's not going to change anything.

wikipedia articles I have recently read (reprise)

2011-07-24T20:15:00.000+08:00

wikipedia articles I have recently read

2011-07-24T18:02:00.002+08:00

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism... A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work

The Resistin Radicatz, a radical cheerleading group, do a cheer in front of AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington before joining the Million Worker March at the Lincoln Memorial.

A Escrava Isaura ("Isaura the Slave"), a 2004 Brazilian telenovela based on an 1875 abolitionist romance novel.

reading

2011-07-23T12:28:00.000+08:00

After reading Super Sad True Love Story and The Handmaid's Tale (finally), I am struck by the many similarities in the authors' convergent visions of the future: literacy is either obsolete or oppressed, public spaces have become so sexualized that radical movements have risen to spur a dramatic return to a chastity and purity, and religion (in particular Christianity) creates agency for the politicization of erstwhile primarily social concerns.

I think it's a scary combination, and I will instead read something frivolous like Julie & Julia because I don't intend to contemplate the future right now. I meant that in an ironically flippant way.

I'm falling ill. I am supposed to be watching HP7 later. I am supposed to be watching it with smuggled curry fries and a large milk tea, but now all I want is a crisp head of lettuce to munch on, like a fluffy bunny. Not that I am comparing myself to aforementioned fluffy bunny. I hate cinemas and their monopoly on crappy food. I want to grab handfuls of popcorn and throw it at the manager, saying Your food sucks egg (I mean, have you seen how much they charge for those tepid cheesy hotdogs? It's downright disrespectful.) I want to fling the popcorn passive-aggressively around the movie theatre. I want to make a German Expressionist film in stop-motion using popcorn. I want to graphically and violently destroy the popcorn in time to mournful bassoon music. The very action of contemplating cinema food makes me so angry. I am also angry because of my cold.

This post sucks.

Here is a picture to make it better.

chinese restaurant syndrome

2011-07-17T16:46:00.000+08:00

My mind: completely blown.

kapustin

2011-07-17T16:40:00.002+08:00

why structure doesn't quite speak to me

2011-07-16T23:50:00.002+08:00

When I say "I'm not a very structured person" I don't mean that I'm crazy, liberal, would prefer crazy rasta hobo hair and would like to do away with any sense of order whatsoever. It's just that I'm skeptical about compromising meaning to serve the boundaries set by structure. In this way, meaning is necessarily limited and artificially compartmentalized. Structure really is a manifestation of meaning. Structure necessarily follows meaning, and that is the logic of their complex dynamic.

Right now I'm speaking abstrusely in vague terms seemingly distant from reality. But I think the structure-meaning discourse is something that affects everyday life enough to be worth at least a passing inquiry.

Putting stuff in tables

Tables are a convenient way to categorize information, to access information and to compare across the catagories of information. It is an efficient method of organizing knowledge because it demarcates, defines and offers a means of comparison within the same space of inquiry. The only qualm I have with Putting Stuff In Tables is that boxing up information forces them into categories, and this negates the interrelatedness of the content you're working with. At best, they discourage inquiries into interconnectedness.

What do I mean? Imagine working with three factors to explain the rise of a certain nationalism in a certain region: 1) Economic frustration 2) Colonial policies 3) Regional influence. Normatively, the argument for the burgeoning of nationalism is spliced into three separate lines of reasoning. (Usually following the local-metropolitan/regional-international or a social-political-economic type of framework.) Yet there are several significant overlapping between the factors — economic frustration was the by-product of colonial administration, which was in constant dialogue with regional events, regional dissidence stemmed from economic upheaval etc. etc. So you see that there is an interesting interconnectedness across the factors, yet a table forces them to be expounded on as if they were totally discrete from each other.

My main quibble here is: if interrelation and convergences are observed in the external world, and if an appreciation of this complexity is to be valued in inquiry, then perhaps diagrammatic attempts to make sense of this world privileges convenience over truth, and is something we should be alert about.

Quantifying the abstract

I'll start with an example:

"On a scale of 1 to 10, what would you rate your enjoyment of this course?"

I think questions like these invite results that don't reveal how enjoyable the course was, but rather, tell us how people translate experience into a number and perceive the indices of this sliding scale.

Another common way the abstract is quantified is through the use and abuse of Key Performance Indicators in organizations. As a way to set benchmarks and gauge progress, KPIs are a useful tool that can benefit work productivity (or whatever managerial bullshit you can think of.) However, when the workings of the organization begin to serve KPIs as if they were concrete objectives to be met as if they were an end in themselves, the original thrust of the organization is undermined and overlooked. This is similar to the argument against examinations — that they fail to offer a holistic assessment of the student's progress. Examinations don't accurately reveal how much the student has learnt; they merely tell us how well a student can answer a predefined question in a predefined setting in a predefined length of time.

Justifying violence

Here I'm talking about larger structures: structures of power, structures that organize wealth and resources, structures that organize people. I am wary of structures, institutions, of power because they are traditionally self-serving and oppressive to varied extents depending on where you come from. I am questioning the foundations of statehood and its necessity in daily living, how it produces the social and ideas about the civil, how its subjects are born into its relentless conditioning not even knowing its pervasiveness in daily life. Pragmatically (and admittedly), a radical upheaval of statehood as the superstructure of global power is impossible due to real economic considerations, but having said that, we should be awakened to its flaws and among them, its systematic monopoly on "legitimate" violence.

That the state is fundamentally paranoid about its own existence is the Achilles' Heel impeding the possibility of peace. The converse is true: existential paranoia on the level of the state produces the desire for defense, and consequently, for the use of force to deter. (No matter how one tries to deny it, the use of potential force as an active mode of deterrence is still a violent gesture.) A dominant theme emerges in the apologetics for statehood: the structure provides, the structure stabilizes. But the structure also attacks, forgetting that contained within other structures are people, vulnerable and fallible, all serving some structure one way or another.

In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. (Sontag, Against Interpretation)

2011-07-15T19:48:00.001+08:00

I want to discuss how accurate it would be to describe Elephant Parade as twee, the ways in which this labeling is necessarily reductive, and how we are able to locate the elements that afford them the musical nuance and subtlety of emotion in spite of our ironizing of pleasure and skepticism towards genre.

the c word

2011-07-10T22:23:00.001+08:00

So many loaded words begin with a 'c'. Some you write in lower case : cannot, cunt, cretin, creep. The c is a toxic curve of ink that starts resolutely and defiantly with pen stab and ends in a curt, arrogant upward flick of the wrist. Some you write with a capital C. Printed, it looks like a hook, the precursor to an entrapment, an instrument of pain. Cancer, Chernobyl, Chemotherapy, Catharsis. They look very melodramatic on a page.

I was reading a magazine when I found out that my mum had cancer. I was like, OK, That's no more real than this tattooed model wearing Marc Jacobs and CDG. These things are on the same ontological plane to me. We also have insurance. Things will be OK, OK? I'm not sure how I slept that night but I still dragged myself to Bedok the next day feeling marginally shittier than usual.

A few days passed, the chemotherapy started, and the choir concert came and left. I returned home at eleven to the dim light of my flat when only the kitchen lights are on. I had the bouquet of flowers that Ms T returned to me ("bring them home to your mum" she said), and I left them on the counter. Minutes earlier, my teacher-in-charge called to say that the performance, in essence, frankly kinda sucked, and we had to do something about it. Or was it that I had to do something about it? Or was it also that I had to do something about myself?

I can't remember clearly in the darkness, anyway. I found out that my mum had shaved off her hair earlier that afternoon. Patients usually say they do that to regain a sense of Control because it's better than seeing hair strewn all over your bedroom floor every morning. Control also begins with a C, but I didn't feel the sense of assurance and authority that capitalization afforded. I sat on a chair and wanted, there and then, to shrink to the size of a bean and collapse under my own gravity like a faint clap.

The popular conception of cancer is that it is a narrative, and the narrative of cancer has a duality to it — it is a story both of triumph and defeat, propelled by a moral will. (Cancer is a "battle", people "succumb" to cancer eventually.) But really, cancer has no narrative, has no insistence on the duality of fates. More accurately, it is circular and absurdist. It has no plot, no dominant style. There is no meaning inherent in illness. (I devoured Sontag's opinions in Illness as Metaphor and tried to make them my own, vainly.)

My aunt discovered her cancer shortly after, and recently, two friends' mothers have also come down with cancer. Not one of them smokes. There is no moral undercurrent. She is a stall owner selling clothes, a doctor, a missionary.

Here is a different metaphor that stems from inverting the provisional logic of the original. (The C isn't a letter; it's really just a bracket, the start of a parenthetical enclosure. It has an end but it isn't a finality.) See that? It is closed off and sealed like an aside in a paragraph, and the text goes on, and the text has more meaning in its holism than in its fragments, and the text is more important than the fragment.

last saturday I:

2011-07-10T21:08:00.000+08:00

Woke up to WHEN LIFE KEEPS HANDING YOU ANCHOVIES/ YOU COVER THEM UP WITH SOME EXTRA CHEESE/ AND MAKE A PIZZA/ WITH WHAT YOU'VE GOT/ JUST MAKE A PIZZA/ WITH EVERYTHING ON TOP. This is my alarm clock in the morning and it calms me down.
Was startled by the suddenly-bespectacled S at Harbourfront, who later took pictures of everyone's breakfast at Starbucks. MX ordered a egg white wrap that looked like a teabag. I had an iced ristretto americano.
Walked around Safra eating a giant apple (courtesy of MX) and chocolate pebbles, waiting for the e-mart to open. We were so bored and desperate to kill time that we nearly got our nails done had MX not ventured into the parlour to discover the exorbitant prices they were charging for an imaginary sense of beauty and dubious, kitschy aesthetics. Also, we discussed the value of opening a cafe called Porn's.
Flew to Hougang Mall to buy ingredients for a yoghurt parfait with my DG. Canned fruit and low-fat yoghurt were all we could afford. We are heroically poor.
Flew to Provence (the bakery not the sun-kissed place in the south of France. Unfortunately.) to meet A and A and to disturb SY who was working at the counter. I had a sesame pizza because the sign said FRESH! JUST BAKED! And really, who can resist a slice of pizza with the cheese still sizzling in tomato juice and grease? Who even cares about the gluten? I don't. I stuffed the thing in my trap like it was a calzone on steroids and made a huge and undignified — though entirely justified — mess on the wicker tray.
Took a creepy video of MT grazing on curly fries outside the bare torsos flanking the soon-to-open Abercrombie & Fitch store at the corner of Orchard and Bideford (I love saying "at the corner of" it sounds like I'm describing my apartment in freakin Greenwich Village). Douchebags, take note!
Visited Mrs H at her swanky apartment behind the Heeren; tried to absorb the egg tarts via telekinesis but the sesame pizza seemed to have clogged up my entire digestive tract.
Was brought out for dinner at the wonderful and magical Spizza's and we all had a great time + excellent conversation. Italian food is beautiful. Peranakan food is piquant, charming. French cuisine is challenging, elegant. Australian food is cosmopolitan and refreshing. But Italian food is beautiful, is sublime, is moving, is heartbreaking. It leaves a memory beyond what food was served at the meal.
Called my mum to say I couldn't make it in time for the extended family dinner... a wave of guilt engulfs me.
Read I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence by Amy Sedaris and then sank into a sort of fuzzy, I-Love-My-Linen, There-Are-Too-Many-Pillows-On-My-Bed, I-Feel-Bad-For-Turning-Off-The-Lights-Before-My-Family-Got-Home type of slumber. It's a complex feeling.

Constellation anxiety

2011-07-06T12:57:00.001+08:00

A capricorn enjoys long walks
by the beach, rolling sushi and
the satisfaction of clean windows. Occasionally enjoys the complex
bouquet of a cabernet sauvignon.
Avoids pinstripes. Fills-in the gaps
that other people, a Taurus or
those pesky Geminis, make in their shoes and their souls.
Cries at that scene in Harold and Maude
when she throws the ring into
the sea "so I will always know
where it is." Isn't wonderful
around kids.

The stars don't quite get it
when they proclaim that
the lost love of your life
will return in the night, and at 3 am
when you realize that it isn't going to
happen, you open up
the supermarket guacamole and
an early episode of Friends,
cast in the sacred light of
their east village apartment.
Above: a plane etches a line
through the canvas of night.
How beautiful and savage that
the twinkled brows of the sky
imagine our existence, and we
their delicately lined providence.

-- WH Lee

Is bored in bunk

sundays (with grapes)

2011-07-03T20:44:00.002+08:00

Today I made a belated dinner thing for my mum! Cake: improvised pavlova with yoghurt and grapes.

Soaking porcini after lunch. "Hello!" say my grandma's slippered feet.

Parents returned home from lunch and were excited to let everyone try freshly made kueh from MacPherson.

The television played shows from the 90s where the female protagonist usually has crazy teased hair, purple eyeliner and considers eye-rolling a profoundly minimalist way of expressing contempt.

Then I splashed balsamic vinegar over the grapes and sent them to the furnace.

I cry a little when I smell onions browning in butter.

Adding cream and mushrooms. (I chickened out and bought "light cream" instead. I suck.)

I purchased a jar of white asparagus but they were so phallic-looking that I had to shred them lest my dinner party turns into Conservative Blushfeste 2011.

Shaved fennel is amazing.

Pasta course with roasted grapes.

Cardamom creme anglaise with a cloud of chai meringue floating breezily on its soft custard surface. In the background, the passionfruit are just turning overripe, their skins blistering with the promise of runny sunset colored yolks. Fantastic.

Pavlova is demolished.

pavlov's lesser-known cat

2011-07-03T01:16:00.000+08:00

Initially I had planned to do just the creme anglaise, but with four egg whites left over, it's hard to say no to experimentation. Not unexpectedly, I made meringues and flavoured them with chai (and sprinkled masala tea powder over half a batch for pretty brown flecks that my sight-impaired grandmother will probably mistake for mould.) I will float them on the cardamom-infused creme anglaise, perch the tangy pulp of passion fruit on top and hopefully impress myself enough to consider an alternative career path as Southeast Asia's answer to Alice Waters.

tomorrow's dinner

2011-07-02T19:46:00.001+08:00

cavatelli + porcini mushroom cream sauce + roasted grapes = pasta

fennel + olive oil + lemon + garlic + prosciutto = salad

creme anglaise (chilled) + cardamon + passionfruit + sprinkle of crystalized molasses = dessert

drinks = lapsang souchong / ice wine

a great stir in the milk-house

2011-07-02T12:22:00.000+08:00

The rumors are true. I am disgusting. I woke up at 5.50 am, then decided that I will not wake unless the sun wakes up with me too. (I believe the cosmos revolve around me like that.) Then I got out of bed at 8.30 and microwaved a burger from KFC and enjoyed the seasoned slab of factory farmed flesh on my plate. Then I was like, Should I still crash today's POP at Marina Bay? But there will always be another one. So I re-read some magazines and drank a rose vanilla infusion. Then I spent the rest of the morning reading food blogs and sticking receipts on my journal to old Burmese music, and now I am declaring that The rumors are true. And I am disgusting. And I hate the squiggly red line when I type rumours instead of rumors.

Knowledge

2011-07-02T11:03:00.002+08:00

Of the vastness of clouds
We knew nothing;
We slept in houses underground.

How the sun brings day by spreading light across the sky,
How night covers the earth in darkness
To reveal the stars, the planets

In their courses fixed
For eternity—

Here, what's left of the lost book On Knowledge ends.

Where was I born?
Where was I when my mother fell?
When Gail died?

Convinced
Of the gods' existence that
These wonders were their handiwork—

New Jersey.
Asleep.
Asleep.

— James Longenbach

Sonnet

2011-06-30T19:38:00.002+08:00

You jerk you didn't call me up
I haven't seen you in so long
You probably have a fucking tan
& besides that instead of making love tonight
You're drinking your parents to the airport
I'm through with you bourgeois boys
All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts
Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but

Nowadays you guys settle for a couch
By a soporific color cable t.v. set
Instead of any arc of love, no wonder
The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

Wake up! It's the middle of the night
You can either make love or die at the hands of
the Cobra Commander

_________________

To make love, turn to page 121.
To die, turn to page 172.

— Bernadette Mayer

why I'd rather be at home

2011-06-26T18:36:00.000+08:00

My sister and father are discussing Wuthering Heights —

Father: I did Wuthering Heights before.
Sister: Oh, really?
Father: But my teacher wasn't very good.
Father: Her husband was a neurosurgeon.
Father: I only remember a Catherine. Her daughter was also called Catherine, right?

Improvisation

2011-06-26T18:31:00.000+08:00

One thing about human nature is that nobody
wants to know the exact dimensions of their small talk.
I can’t imagine good advice.
If every human being has skin
how come I can see all of your veins?
Clicks and drips target my skull.
Important voices miss their target.
Some cities are ill suited for feet.
I’d never buy a door smaller than a tuba, you never know
what sort of friends you’ll make.
In the future there will be less to remember.
In the past I have only my body and shoes.
The gut and throat are two entirely different animals.
My hands don’t make good shoelaces, but I’m going to stay
in this lane, even if it’s slower.
The trick was done with saltwater and smoke
and an ingredient you can only find in an
out-of-business ethnic food store.
It all comes down to hand-eye coordination.
Once it took all my energy to get you out of the tub
we had converted from an indoor pool to a house.
I ended up on snorkeling spam lists inadvertently.
It is all inadvertent.
If you don’t believe me ask your mom.

— Rachel M. Simon

here

notes

2011-06-26T00:39:00.003+08:00

Motto for July: a macaron a day keeps the therapist at bay.

Why am I weary of TCM? Is this a willpower deficiency on my part? Has exposure to science led to a categorical condemnation of non-Western therapy? Is there an experience of imperialism implicit here?

I have decided to be anarchopacifist until I am convinced that the justifications for militarism as necessary for deterrence have legitimate grounding. I am a medic and I save lives. I skip the final line of the pledge. No complicity in state-sanctioned violence and suffering, thanks. Cheer.

The passing of the marriage equality act in NY today (saw it live on twitter, you guys) is amazing and I'm glad it happened. It doesn't cheapen marriage; it reaffirms the institution based on principle - of love and commitment - rather than shallow heteronormativity. To limit marriage by gender is to undermine its core. But tomorrow I expect that people in church are going to lambast it and I will be "corrected" if I seem to condone it. Y'all, according to the Bible, it's also a sin to mix your textiles. Just a thought. (Also I know that that's from the Law which we are spiritually exempt and delivered from, but it's just an example of how people craft a weird theology founded on dubious and power-laced interpretations.)

I suddenly feel like making black bean and salsa vegan-friendly burgers for my family but I am concerned that this will give everyone gas. Sad thought.

rejected lines from shameful older poems

2011-06-26T00:00:00.001+08:00

Above/ the moon is a golf ball

Otherness and alterity become words/ I wear like a choker

There is only a brick holding this gaping door open

I am swimming in pools of discontent holding this thought/ like an inflatable donut

I am a starfish

To have and to fold;/ this origami dog

Papery onion skins

But in the end/ Werther kills himself

Signed lies and/ stifled cries

2011-06-25T13:34:00.000+08:00

Mrs Carl Meyer and her Children

Names

2011-06-25T10:53:00.002+08:00

She was Eliza for a few weeks
When she was a baby —
Eliza Lily. Soon it changed to Lil.

Later she was Miss Steward in the baker's shop
and then 'my love', 'my darling', Mother.

Widowed at thirty, she went back to work
As Mrs Hand. Her daughter grew up,
Married and gave birth.

Now she was Nanna. 'Everybody
calls me Nanna,' she would say to visitors.
And so they did — friends, tradesmen, the doctor.

In the geriatric ward
They used the patients' Christian names.
'Lil,' we said, 'or Nanna,'
But it wasn't in her file
And for those last bewildered weeks
She was Eliza once again.

— Wendy Cope

Autumn Cancer (i.m. Liz Suttle)

2011-06-25T10:49:00.000+08:00

Each day, the autumn, eating a little further
into the bone.

A leaf falls on a stiller day, coloured a richer brown,
more glowing, more holding, like glazed bread or old apples;

and the lap of the lake gone smaller, a nibbling as of fishes
at feet in tidal pools. The herons stands longer.

Shoals of leaves float further on the water,
the low sun pulses, and light shafts pick more delicately

over woodland and the limbs of ash grown sensuous,
shapely, as a woman from a bath;

while on the alders, yellow, and here and there,
a round leaf hangs, spent coin in the stillness.

I have never known so exactly
this abacus of days. This withdrawal. This closing out.

— Kerry Hardie

weakness in the sky

2011-06-25T09:40:00.000+08:00

Woe

2011-06-25T09:36:00.000+08:00

No God's rain petals—

puddled, shallow
dreams and drifts

as airy as lambs' eyes

A breeze tosses
light sentencery

for God loves me

and hid me next to you

— Ethan Paquin

[Calmly grass becomes a wave]

2011-06-25T09:29:00.000+08:00

Calmly grass becomes a wave
See the body parts you name
unsoothes you where you slip
trying to to write or wake up

The songs overlap each other baby

an echo knell a creased pit
an animal
an animal

Hello call me

— Hoa Nguyen

Doppelganger

2011-06-25T08:21:00.001+08:00

Entering the lonely house with my wife
I saw him for the first time
Peering furtively from behind a bush --
Blackness that moved,
A shape amid the shadows,
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
Revealed in the ragged moon.
A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Put him to flight forever --
I dared not
(For reasons that I failed to understand),
Though I knew I should act at once.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.
He came, and I saw him crouching
Night after night.
Night after night
He came, and I saw him crouching,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone --
Though I knew I should act at once,
For reasons that I failed to understand
I dared not
Put him to flight forever.

A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Revealed in the ragged moon.
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
A shape amid the shadows,
Blackness that moved.

Peering furtively from behind a bush,
I saw him for the first time,
Entering the lonely house with my wife.

— James Lindon

a thing that made me laugh in the lecture room today

2011-06-20T21:28:00.000+08:00

From the Sedaratives section in The Believer, issue 78 (with guest columnist Paul Scheer) —

Dear Sedaratives,

Is it OK to break up with someone on Twitter? What if I don't have a Twitter account and ask a friend to do it for me? What's the protocol?

Stacie

Orlando, Fla.

Dear Stacie,

As my good friend Kathleen Turner once told me, "GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, YOU FREAKY STALKER!" But that's beside the point. Yes, it is OK to break up over Twitter. If you don't have a Twitter account, here are some other options for breaking up. Send a mass text to everyone but the dude (or gal) you're dating. Skywriting always works. It's public, and so much fun. But I think the absolute best way is a singing telegram. It's just not possible to be upset when a man in a gorilla costume tells you, "Stacie don't love you anymore" to the tune of "Eleanor Rigby."

Paul

My co-intern at the medical centre was like, Your magazine has so many words! I gave the same smile that expectant mothers gave when complemented about their glowing skin/jet black hair/engorged bosom/sense of importance/knitting skills/taste in floral textiles.

sundays

2011-06-19T18:28:00.000+08:00