I mean I want to see

BURBLING over with good vibes. It was a very good break, Hoi An has a laid-back charm to it, with beautiful colours, charming riverside cafes serving good, cheap food and friendly people. The drive to Hue was also very pretty, with breathtaking views of the South China Sea.

S’pore people, it’s worth a three-to-five day visit; Silkair flies to Danang, which is about a 40 minute drive to Hoi An — you can get your hotel to arrange for transfers easily. It’s an old trading town, reminds me of Malacca, but with more interesting countryside — you can visit craft villages, cycle to the beach past paddy fields, watch fishing boats and water buffalos and so on. The old quarters are very tourist-oriented, what with the shops selling silk handbags and straw sandals. But charming all the same.

Things to do:

1. Take the train or hire a driver to Hue. Lovely scenery on the way there, with paddy fields next to the ocean, winding mountain roads (tell the driver to go up to Hai Van Pass instead of taking the tunnel), school girls cycling in their white ao dais with their long hair clipped back, lots of greenery.

2. Have dinner by the riverside and watch the sun set. The restaurants are lit with silk lanterns and some put kerosene lamps on each table, so it’s all very pretty. Recommended: Brother’s Cafe, Cargo Club’s white rose, grilled fish on banana leaf and stuffed squid, Nhu Y’s set meal. Food is good and cheap there.

3. Do some tailoring; I copied two dresses at Yaly, which did a good job. May go back if I want winter clothes/business suits made.

4. Go down to Hai Scout Cafe in town and book lessons at Red Bridge Cooking School. The boat trip up the river and the setting of the school/restaurant is worth the price, plus you get to learn how to make fresh rice-paper sheets and make yummy rolls. Hai Scout Cafe does a nice lime tea punch with grenadine and has a lovely garden courtyard with bamboo and butterflies where you can linger in the hot afternoons.

5. Visit the Cham ruins at My Son, another Unesco world heritage site in the area other than Hoi An itself and Hue’s citadel. See the Marble Mountains and China Beach on the way back to Hoi An.

6. Take a taxi or cycle to the beach, I like the restaurant at Hoi An Beach Resort which faces the river, where you can see water buffalos swimming and fishermen rowing their sampans as the sun sets.

Pictures to come.

*

Asking questions, doing searching, reading C. S. Lewis again: He’s very much the conservative but has a lucid style while discussing the big questions. How do things work out for justice and for the good? What do you do with this precious gift of life?

And if you believe in eternal life, there’s a paradigm shift of perspective, of what’s important and what’s not.

Silk lanterns, Hoi An, 2007

Cafe, Hoi An, 2007

Back from the very picturesque Hoi An and Hue. More later.

THERE’S this rush whenever you read a good book, it’s like touching a live wire. Structuralist at heart that I am, I love Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots. I know all this, tragedy, comedy, the Quest, the voyage and return.

The two strands of thought that shaped our teachers: The American New Criticism which took the lyric poem as the highest form of literature, and was therefore biased in favour of the modernist symbolist novel, against the traditional realist novel, the school of Leavis, which was more sympathetic to realism, but only if the writer was “on the side of life”, and belonged to a Great Tradition of secularised English Puritanism.

Graham Greene’s work, which fused together the romantic adventure story, the modern crime thriller and the French Catholic novel of sin, salvation and “mystical substitution” exemplified by Bernanos and Mauriac, did not satisfy the criteria of either of these schools of criticism. The key word or word cluster, some abstraction like “pity” in The Heart Of The Matter which recurs again and again and had an almost subliminal effect in organising and focusing the reader’s response to the always engrossing story and sharply evoked milieu.

I knew this all by heart and it’s coming back.

*

Song: Into The Fire

Come on, come on
Put your hands into the fire
Explain, explain
As I turn and meet the power
This time, this time
Turning white and sense dire
Pull up, pull up
From one extreme to another

Relationship is a high-wire act. To the left is the irretrievable past — your personal history, your previous relationships, your triumphs and your grief, the momentum which mechanically seeks to repeat itself, your helplessness. To the right is the uncontrollable future — your expectations and fears, a thousand desires yet unfulfilled, fading dreams.

*
Poem:

Patagonia
- by Kate Clanchy

I said perhaps Patagonia, and pictured
a peninsula, wide enough
for a couple of ladderback chairs
to wobble on at high tide. I thought

of us in breathless cold, facing
a horizon round as a coin, looped
in a cat’s cradle strung by gulls
from sea to sun. I planned to wait

till the waves had bored themselves
to sleep, till the last clinging barnacles,
growing worried in the hush, had
paddled off in tiny coracles, till

those restless birds, your actor’s hands,
had dropped slack into your lap,
until you’d turned, at last, to me.
When I spoke of Patagonia, I meant

skies all empty aching blue. I meant
years. I meant all of them with you.

REREADING Benedict Anderson, and listening and relistening to the Grey’s Anatomy How To Save A Life song.

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

Thinking of books and geography, the density of places and placenames that give the reader the most vivid sense of being drawn deep inside the novels, in much the same way that Dickens used the detailed urban geograpy of London to bring to life the world of Bill Sikes and Little Nell, in Dorothy Sayers’ Oxford of Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey.

I want to be able to say: This is my home, this is where I come from, I know your places from the books but what do you know of mine? Of the bus rides down Bukit Timah Road, the mornings waiting for buses at Somerset or Orchard, the morning runs around the posh area where school was, the rhythm of the trains, books punctuated with Simei, Tanah Merah, Bedok, Kembangan.

Je sais ce que je veux: de la couleur, de la douceur, des gens qui rigolent ou qui rêvent, quand je prononce le mot participation c’est pour en prendre mon comptant, pas plus et pas moins que les autres, du travail, oui il faut, non ce n’est pas toujours facile, pas toujours marrant, mais je refuse que quelqu’un d’autre en bave plus que moi, en tire meilleur ou pire profit. J’écris. Je lis. De la poésie. Du poétique. De la sagesse bon marché. C’est ce qui me reste de plus cher, et c’est souvent gratuit.

*

Minzhi linked to 林志炫’s 离人, which has lovely lyrics.

银色小船摇摇晃晃弯弯 悬在绒绒的天上
你的心事三三俩俩蓝蓝 停在我幽幽心上
你说情到深处人怎能不孤独 爱到浓时就牵肠挂肚 我的行李孤孤单单散散惹惆怅
离人放逐到边界 彷彿走入第五个季节
昼夜乱了和谐 潮氾任性涨退 字典里没有春天
离人挥霍着眼泪 回避还在眼前的离别 你不敢想明天 我不肯说再见
有人说 一次告别天上就会有颗星又熄灭

THERE are days when I just want to lie in bed and watch medical dramas as a displacement activity, when I kick over the pile of language books and don’t care. What does it matter, the books and ideas and essays and pining after graduate school and academia? I get tired of quietly grinding on with no contact. The day job’s comfortable, I can switch into the finance field, I can give it all up so very easily.

But here’s the thing. I’m incredibly lucky in that what I would like to do is what I’m good at. It’s not just a matter of being clever, of being able to see connections and draw what I’m reading together. I want to be there out in the field. It all still seems quite far away, and sometimes I doubt my ability to stick through it. Six years is a long time to be away. Others have started, have published, are writing their first book, are getting teaching awards.

So yes, listening to the language tapes again, reading dictionaries and histories of the region. The work makes me happy, even when it’s plodding grunt memorisation. I want to teach. I want to do research. I want to publish. I’m still so much in love with university life, with knowledge and education and all the wonderful associations with these words. I’m not giving up now, I can stay up as late as I need to, I can stick with it.

Then there’s the other part I don’t want to talk about, I’d rather push on and get on with life. People leave people and people leave places all the time, and people get on with life, some of them hobbling but moving on anyway. I don’t want to go backwards, so onwards etc.

1. Learn driving
2. GRE practice
3. Application essays
4. Look at funding options

*

“Your alter country is all that your first was not; commitment to it involves idealism, love, sentimentality and a certain selective vision,” as Julian Barnes wrote.

*

The Theme of the Three Caskets

‘Men and women are two locked caskets,
each of which contains the key to the other.’
- Isak Dinesen

One gold, one silver, one lead: who thinks
this test easy has already flunked.

Or, you have three daughters, two humming-
birds and the youngest, Cordelia, a grackle.

And here’s Cinderella, the ash-princess.
Three guesses, three wishes, three strikes and

you’re out. You’ve been practicing for this
for years, jumping rope, counting out,

learning to waltz, games and puzzles,
tests and chores. And work, in which strain

and ease fill and drain the body like air
having its way with the lungs. And now?

Your palms are mossy with sweat.
The more you think the less you understand.

It’s only your life you must choose, daily.

Freud, father of psychoanalysis,
the study of self-deception and survival,
saw the wish-fulfillment in this theme:

that we can choose death and make what we can’t
refuse a trophy to self-knowledge, grey,
malleable, dense with low tensile strength

and poisonous in every compound.
And that a vote for death elects love.
If death is the mother of love (Freud wrote

more, and more lovingly, on mothers
than on fathers), she is also the mother
of envy and gossip and spite, and she

loves her children equally. It isn’t mom
who folds us finally in her arms,
and it is we who are elected.

Is love the reward, or the test itself?

That kind of thought speeds our swift lives
along. The August air is stale in

the slack leaves, and a new moon thin
as a fingernail-paring tilts orange

and low in the rusty sky, and the city
is thick with trysts and spats,

and the banked blue fires of TV sets,
and the anger and depression that bead

on the body like an acid dew when it’s hot.
Tonight it seems that love is what’s

missing, the better half. But think
with your body: not to be dead is to be

sexual, vivid, tender and harsh, a riot
of mixed feelings, and able to choose.

Kyoto, 2006

WHAT I find engaging about Grey’s Anatomy are not so much the messy love affairs, but the sense of the surgical interns sticking together, of being within a circle of people who are going through a tough training course together, of playing together as a team, of being family to one another. It’s hard work, competitive too, but they’re in it together.

I suppose working through the bond creates such — er — bonds between like-minded people, but a more apt analogy would be grad school students. The best are competitive at heart, wanting to publish and get grants, but the sense of fellowship is strong as well, though research work can be solitary.

I’m learning how not to take the easy way out and really think hard about what I’m doing. It’s such a long long journey, I’ve barely started, and academic achievement comes in discrete units. Finishing 98 per cent of your thesis is no good, you can’t almost publish an article, or be one vote short of obtaining tenure. Perseverance and stamina and being self-driven are important for success. And an integral part of stamina means taking good care of myself — eat well, relax, sleep well, exercise — I’m a grown-up now and on my own, and there’s no need to rely on anyone else to make sure I’m fed on time and fed well and washed and healthy and drink enough water and put to bed on regular hours. I was miserable for the longest time and neglected to take care of myself and I’ll never trash myself again. If you don’t take good care of yourself you’ll not be in a position to give love or anything else to others.

Patience and creativity, the willingness to persevere in solitude for uncertain rewards well into the future. To be self-disciplined, good at time management, juggle several tasks and make the most out of autonomy, not easily intimidated by hurdles.

From the old archives.

TOO much of the escapist things: House episodes and transcripts, children’s books, recreational nibbling.

There’s a visceral pleasure to reading good books: a quickening of the pulse, a sudden impulse of delight, self-contained happiness with the hands cupped around a mug of dark tea and beside you a plate of mango cubes. Something wriggles, something’s alive, things come to light in interesting patterns. (I’ve always thought of good scholarship as being watchmen, planting lights on the firm ground.) You know this is food: Orlando, The Waves, To The Lighthouse, poetry disguised as theory, theory disguised as novels, words placed just right.

And it slowly stretches, the creature in its abstract cage asleep. The love for it does not have to announce itself in bright headlines. It’s just there, something that has never died. On the one side the commonplace commonsense, and on the other, the inordinate, extravagant underside that lies beneath the quotidian. Sometimes even beneath quiet exteriors you can sense it, vibrant and alive. It’s right, it’s right like old shoes, the fit is normal and quiet and unremarkable most of the time, and love is not just the fireworks but is about the simplest and the smoothest and the most well-worn of things. It’s like sunshine, the dessicated half-stilled parts of you just stretch towards it, you don’t need to reason or rationalise it. A sun, flowers, water, love. It’s like a great poet, which produces the brightest results with the simplest measures.

And sometimes it’s no longer about escapism. What do they know, anyway? Love is the strongest force, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when it happens — we can kill the love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies too. Or we can somehow open up another route for the love to travel.

Burbling on cos reading Virginia Woolf makes me really happy.

WAS watching House again, and thought of this quotation from Grey’s Anatomy:

I can’t think of a single reason why I should be a surgeon, but I can think of a thousand reasons why I should quit. They make it hard on purpose. There are lives in our hands. There comes a moment when it’s more than just a game, and you either take that step forward or turn around and walk away. I could quit, but here’s the thing. I love the playing field.

I want to be a Dr Koh! Obviously not the medical way as I squeam away at needles and would swoon away in a dead faint when I see spurting blood, but damn do I want my doctorate the research scholar way. It’s not for the prestige (oh who am I kidding, I’d love to hear myself being called Dr for the first time. Though it’s not prestigious until you’ve made actual real contributions to scholarship). It’s not just because I love rooting around in libraries, or because I’m good at writing papers; it’s because there’s real, actual work to be done, and also because I’d like to teach. Teaching, research, writing — lots of hard work, but work I’m made for.

There actually is a huge black hole where South-East Asian languages fall into in the comparative literature department; I know as I’ve been obsessively surfing the university complit sites and none offer many courses in literature of my part of the world at all. (To be fair, I don’t know much about literature in my part of the world too, other than the fact that people wave puppets around according to the stories of the Ramayana, and Vietnam has good contemporary poetry.)

There’s just slightly over two years before I’m free, and I’d be looking at enrolment in 2009 (unless I want to stick around for the bonus payout and leave at the start of 2010? More funds, but that means a “waste” of a year).

Letters of recommendation: previous professors, and I may need to get a couple of you scholars to write something for me.

So: Slowly, steadily, get the background, work for GREs, get the languages. And, importantly, find a university where the Comp Lit goes beyond the traditional East Asian/European languages.

Plan A:
Master’s in South-east Asian studies (Apply for grant, go to Cornell)
Comp Lit PhD

Plan B:
Master’s in South-east Asian studies (the NUS-ANU programme)
Comp Lit PhD

To do:
- Languages (at least four for a Comp Lit person: Classical Chinese for sourcework, Chinese, English, French, Vietnamese, Thai — er, German’s not really relevant to S-E Asian work but it’s useful as a grounding for Dutch?)
- GREs
- application essays
- start work on research interests (read more of heroes such as Sen, Said, Auerbach)