I mean I want to see

FOER’S Everything Is Illuminated: it’s excellent writing, reminds me of Rushdie. Go read it.

J also pointed me to Joan Didion’s The Year Of Magical Thinking, which I like, but I find her fiction blandish. For writing in the same vein give me Graham Greene, for the vicissitudes of personality in the face of human extremities: war, death, loss and love.

Got out the Heaney for some subway time reading — oh the richness and exactness of his writing. Yum.

*

Philip Pullman —

>> You observed some years ago that, while children’s writers are addressing the deep questions of life, the novelists who write for adults only want to ‘cut artistic capers’. Is that still the case?

A: Oh, I think so. I said it to be provocative, mind you.

I think it has to do with this story business again. You see, when you write for an audience that largely consists of children, you have got to put the story at the centre of what you’re doing, and when you do that, you cannot be self-conscious and postmodern and tricksy and self-referential and all that sort of stuff that the literary types like. But that is actually a great advantage to you as an artist, because stories can say things more wisely and more profoundly and more directly than any commentary on stories can.

Flowers, from a friend

*

A survey of colleagues people find most annoying:

Shirkers
Colleagues who always seem to find excuses to avoid work stress out over a fifth of UK workers.

Screamers
Tantrums and arguments in open spaces, whether in an open plan office, the corridor or the staff restaurant, set 11 per cent of people’s teeth on edge.

Gossipers
There’s nothing worse than being talked about behind one’s back or feeling excluded from private conversations. At nine per cent, gossipers are the third most stressful type of co-worker.

Whiners
Their glass is always half empty, they never see the positives in any situation and have a negative influence in the office. Colleagues’ complaining about work upset eight per cent of their colleagues.

Megaphones
When they’re trying to concentrate, nothing is more guaranteed to stress out seven per cent of UK workers than fellow colleagues talking loudly on the phone or banging their keyboards as they type.

Hijackers
Meetings are the bane of every employee’s life so people who hijack meetings by raising irrelevant topics wind-up seven per cent of their colleagues.

Wanderers
Long coffee, tea, toilet and smoking breaks annoy six per cent of colleagues, leaving them feeling short-changed.

Slurpers
Noisy drinkers, eaters and gum chewers irritate five per cent of work colleagues. Included in this category are people who can’t stop clicking their pens!

Swearers
Workers swearing loudly upset five per cent of their colleagues.

Sneezers
About the last person workers like to see is someone with a streaming nose or spluttering cough. Sick colleagues coming into work annoy four per cent of their healthy co-workers.

EVERYTIME I eat jiaozi I’d think of Mo Yan.

He tells the story of how he became a writer. When he was young, he had laboured side by side with college students when they were sent down to the fields to work during the Cultural Revolution. During breaks in the fields, the youngsters would talk about food, trading descriptions of food they had eaten or heard about. A student said he knew someone who wrote a book that brought him much money in royalties. Each day, he would eat jiaozi, rich pork dumplings with chives, at all three meals, the juice oozing with each bite. So Mo Yan decided to become a writer to eat meaty jiaozi three times a day.

“Owing to my lower-class background, the stories I wrote were filled with the commonest of views, and anyone looking for traces of elegance or graceful beauty in them would likely come away disappointed. There’s nothing I can do about that. A writer writes what he knows, in ways that are natural to him. I grew up hungry and lonely, a witness to human suffering and injustice; my mind is filled with sympathy for humanity in general and outrage over a society that bristles with inequality. That’s what my stories are all about, that’s all they could be about,” he wrote.

When he started out, his motivation stemmed from the desire to eat good food. But he gradually realised that a life of eating jiaozi three times a day can still be accompanied by pain and suffering, and that spiritual suffering is no less painful than physical hunger. So the act of giving voice to this suffering became the sacred duty of a writer.

*

Winterson: “Some days are like this – nothing really gets done and what does get done is pointless. Then, out comes a poem or a cat, or a flower, or a sunburst, or even a good piece of cheese, and the tilted world rights.

I admit it, I am struggling with my life at the moment – not my work life or my inner life, but the how to manage the incessant ignorant demands of senseless life. The bureaucratic nosy-parker form-filling time-wasting email-crazy, texting nightmare, junk sham of life that technology has locked us into. I seem to have spent all day today talking to Call Centres, arranging paperwork for VAT returns, filing receipts, checking out travel data, and it’s the mental equivalent of stuffing your face with Big Macs.

The more real work I do the less tolerance I have for the unreal world called real life.”

“[I believe that] in our time, the inner life, the imaginative life, the life of the mind, needed strengthening and protection, because we live so much on the outside, pretending that all our needs can be met by a bit more shopping and better technology….

I am always fighting for literature – the real deal – because I want a complete world. Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a complete world – so is Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady. They are very different books, very different kinds of books, and it is redundant to talk about one as naturalistic and the other as free-wheeling fantasy. The best writers always make their own worlds, which sometimes resemble the one we think we live in, and sometimes show us a place not like this one at all. Henry James isn’t a great writer because he faithfully copies the world we live in and hands it back to us – he is as partial as a photographer framing a shot. His is a stylised, selected cut that distorts in order to give meaning. The sleight of hand is that we call it what we know. If it really was what we knew we would not need to know it. We go on needing to know it because it is not what we know. It is familiar, but we don’t know it.

And that sense of recognition? The feeling that this is our book, our character, our situation? The best work is a cup that holds the liquid that you are. The miracle is that someone else, very different to you, will also feel it is their book, their character, their situation. This is achieved not because we are reading a slice of life – no slice of life can do more than fit in a few of us, but because a particular set of circumstances suddenly becomes universally relevant. This happens when a book can go deeper than the top layer of life and into the subterranean place where emotion and imagination chemically react into self-revelation. We learn about ourselves through someone not ourselves – it is like falling in love – the stranger brings the gift.”

Events take place in the late 5th century and during the 6th century after the Anglo-Saxons had begun their migration and settlement in England.

Utilises
- caesura
- alliteration
- mix of the West Saxon and Anglian dialects of Old English

I Grendel
- King Hrothgar, who built Heorot. Wife: Wealhþeow. Grendel attacks hall and kills and devours the warriors. All flee.
- Beowulf, young warrior, leaves homeland to help Hrothgar.
- Gr. devours one of B’s men. B leaps up and grabs Gr’s arm and battles.
- B’s men try to help but Gr. impervious to swords. B tears Gr’s arm from his body, Gr runs home to die.

II Gr’s mother
- kills Hrothgar’s most trusted warrior.
- Hrothgar, B and their men track Gr’s M to lair under a lake.
- B gets Hrunting, a sword, as a present from warrior called Unferth.
- GrM unable to harm B because of his armour. She drags him to a cavern at the bottom of the lake. She prevails at first. B. finds that Hrunting cannot harm his foe. B grabs sword from GrM’s armoury and beheads her. He finds Gr’s corpse in the lair and severs the head, returning to Heorot.

III Dragon
- B. returns home and becomes king of his own people.
- Man steals golden cup from dragon’s lair. Dragon leaves cave in rage and burns up everything in sight.
- B. and warriors fight dragons, but only one warrior — Wiglaf — stays to help B. They kill dragon, but B. dies from wounds. Dragon’s treasure taken from lair and buried with B’s ashes.

*

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

- written in verse stanzas that end with the “bob and the wheel.”
The “bob” is a very short line, and the wheel is a trimeter quatrain.
The five lines together rhyme ABABA.

Example:
ill-sped
Hounds hasten by the score
To maul him, hide and head;
Men drag him in to shore
And dogs pronounce him dead.

Plot:
The Challenge

- King Arthur’s court at Camelot on New Year’s day.
- A stranger, the gigantic Green Knight, mounted on horseback and armed with an axe, enters the hall and lays down a challenge. One of Arthur’s knights may take the axe and strike a single blow against the Green Knight, on the condition that the Green Knight, if he survives, will return the blow one year and one day later.
- Sir Gawain, the youngest of Arthur’s knights, reluctantly accepts the challenge and chops off the giant’s head. The Green Knight, still alive, picks up his own head, reminds Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel in a year and a day, and rides off.

Sir Gawain’s journey

- Almost a year later, on All Hallows Day, Sir Gawain sets off in his finest armour, on his horse Gringolet, to find the Green Chapel and complete his bargain with the Green Knight.
- His shield is marked with the pentangle, which the poem attributes to Solomon, and which is to remind him of his knightly obligations.
- Journey takes him from the isle of Anglesey to a castle somewhere in the West Midlands, where he arrives on Christmas Eve. He meets the lord of the castle and his beautiful wife, who are pleased to have such a renowned guest.
- After the feasting of Christmas Day, the lord inquires why Gawain has journeyed so far from home during the holiday season. Gawain tells of his New Year’s Day appointment at the Green Chapel and that he must continue his search the next day.
- The lord laughs and insists Gawain must prolong his visit, for his search has ended: the Green Chapel is not two miles away.

The lord’s bargain

- That night, the lord announces that while he spends the next day hunting, the travel-weary Gawain shall stay at the castle, sleep as late as he wants (even through Mass), and eat whenever he chooses to arise; the lady will keep him company.
- The lord proposes a bargain: he will give Gawain whatever he catches, on condition that Gawain gives to the lord, without explanation, whatever he might gain during the day. Gawain accepts.
- The next morning, after the lord has gone, the lady of the castle visits Gawain’s room and tries to seduce him, claiming that she knows of the reputation of Arthur’s knights as great lovers. Gawain, however, keeps to his promise to remain chaste until his mission to the Green Chapel is complete, and yields nothing but a single kiss.
- When the lord returns with the deer he has killed, he hands it straight to Sir Gawain, as agreed, and Gawain responds by returning the lady’s kiss to the lord. According to the lord’s bargain, Gawain refuses to explain where he won the kiss.
- On the second morning, Gawain again receives a visit from the lady, and again politely refuses her advances. That evening, when the lord returns, there is a similar exchange of a hunted boar for two kisses.
- On the third morning, when the lady visits his chamber, Gawain maintains his chastity but accepts a green silk girdle, which is supposed to keep him from harm, as a parting gift. But, the lady insists, he must not tell her husband. That evening, the lord returns with a fox, which he exchanges with Gawain for three kisses. However, Gawain keeps the girdle from the lord so that he can use it in his forthcoming encounter with the Green Knight.

The meeting with the Green Knight

- The next day, Gawain leaves for the Green Chapel, with the lady’s silk girdle hidden under his armour, and accompanied by a guide from the lord’s castle.
- Leaving the guide, who is afraid to approach the Green Chapel, Gawain finds Green Knight busy whetting the blade of an axe in readiness for the fight.
- As arranged, the Green Knight moves to behead Gawain, but after three axe-swings Gawain remains only slightly injured, the third blow barely cutting his neck. The Green Knight then reveals himself to be an alter ego of the lord of the castle, Bertilak de Hautdesert, and explains that the three axe blows were for the three occasions when Gawain was visited by the lady.
- The third blow, which drew blood, was a punishment for Gawain’s acceptance of the silk girdle. There is much speculation as to whether the girdle would have really kept Gawain from dying had the Green Knight desired to kill him.
- The lady, it seems, has lied to Gawain insofar as the girdle has not kept him completely from harm. On the other hand, it has kept him from death. The author leaves the exact powers of the girdle undefined and open to interpretation, but makes it clear that the Green Knight would not have willingly spared Gawain’s life had he failed to resist the lady’s sexual advances. Assuming it has no life-saving powers, it is meant to be ironic that the girdle, the one thing that Gawain thinks will save him, is actually the thing that harms him; furthermore, assuming the girdle has no real powers, it would have been the thing that led to his death had he taken it as a love token, which is what the lady originally offerered it to him as.

- Green Knight explains that Gawain’s trial was arranged by Morgan le Fay, mistress of the wizard Merlin and now a guest at Hautdesert castle.
- The two men part on cordial terms, Gawain returning to Camelot.
- There, Sir Gawain recounts his adventure to Arthur and explains his shame at having partially succumbed to the lady’s attempts, if only in his mind. Arthur refuses to blame Gawain and decrees that all his knights should henceforth wear a green sash in recognition of Gawain’s courage and honour.

- continental accentual-syllabic metre, a style which had developed since around the twelfth century as an alternative to the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre. Known for metrical innovation, inventing the rhyme royal, and one of the first English poets to use the five-stress line, a decasyllabic cousin to the iambic pentameter

- The Knight, The Miller, The Nun’s Priest, The Merchant, The Wife of Bath
- Troilus and Criseyde

Knight’s:
Arcite and Palamon, imprisoned by Theseus, duke of Athens. Falling in love with the sister of Hippolyta, Emily (Emelye). They variously get out of prison and end up in a tournament over Emily arranged by Theseus. Arcite wins, but dies before he can claim Emily as his prize and so Palamon marries her.

Miller’s
Nicholas and Alisoun, with Absolon. Landlord and Second Flood.

Nun’s Priest
Beast fable, Chanticleer, Pretelote and the Fox. Follows the monk’s accounts of despots and fallen heroes. Echoes Franklin’s domestic lives.

Merchant:
Januarie, May, Damyan. Pluto and Proserpyne

Wife of Bath:
old woman and knight.

Troilus and Criseyde:
- 8239 lines of rhyme-royal (seven-line stanzas rhyming ababbcc) in five books, the first major work of English literature and sometimes called the first English novel on account of its concern with the characters’ psychology.
- set inside Troy during the Trojan War. Pandare: friend of Troilus. Diomede.

TAKING a couple of friends around the Tanjong Pagar area; Blue Ginger for a lightish meal (such cute pie tee!), Qun Zhong at Neil Road for dumplings, and tea just a few doors down.

Also: Cedele’s carrot walnut cake, handfuls of almonds, green apple and sunflower seed salad, gnocchi, raspberries and hazelnut gelato. Yum.

*

Graham Swift’s Tomorrow. Gotta love the digested reads from The Guardian.

Buds

WAS just thinking how lucky I’ve been in terms of people — family and friends.

Those of you who’ve showed me much generosity, generosity which can be playful, humorous and imaginative, which can be sombre and serious and life-changing.

Those with whom I can share my fears without fear of being shot down. And my achievements without feeling the lash of jealousy or envy as a response, but happiness instead.

*

Some updates to the books, poetry and recipes list. Have neglected much of my website.

Reading Dawkin’s The God Delusion. Bertrand Russell’s observation — that the fundamental cause of problems in the world is that the intelligent are full of doubt while the stupid are cocksure — is inapplicable here. It is strong, it is punchy, it is clever, though sometimes ranty. (Ooh, I do miss my philosophy classes and papers, I see a whole plethora of arguments you can make in response to the book.)

*

Of course emotion plays a huge role in religion, but for me the question is is Christianity true? And there are questions I continue to grapple with — how do you read the Bible? Do Christians actually believe in Adam and Eve and so on? (And the book of Revelation, which reads as if the writer was high.) If you’re not expected to swallow the whole of the Bible, do you end up with a pick-and-mix sort of faith?

From Dawkins:

“Assuming that [he] was a mainstream Christian, he probably believed some combination of the following:

- In the time of the ancestors, a man was born to a virgin mother with no biological father being involved.
- The same fatherless man called out to a friend called Lazarus, who had been dead long enought to stink, and Lazarus promptly came back to life.
- The fatherless man himself came alive after being dead and buried three days.
- Forty days later, the fatherless man went up to the top of a hill and then disappeared bodily into the sky.
- If you murmur thoughts privately in your head, the fatherless man, and his ‘father’ (who is also himself) will hear your thoughts and may act upon them. He is simultaneously able to hear the thoughts of everybody else in the world.
- If you do something bad, or something good, the same fatherless man sees all, even if nobody else does. You may be rewarded or punished accordingly, including after your death.
- The fatherless man’s virgin mother never died but ‘ascended’ bodily into heaven.
- Bread and wine, if blssed by a priest, ‘become’ the body and blood of the fatherless man.”

And the character of Yahweh, who smites and zaps and kills and make people jump through hoops (sacrificing their sons?! and poor Job) etc. Dawkins again:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomanical, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Also, truth must be more than just intellectual assent. Ah well, onwards.

MINZHI is the source of all that’s good. Reading Segalen now thanks to her recommendations.

*

“If you write in an unclear way about big ideas, you produce something that seems tantalizingly attractive to inexperienced but intellectually ambitious students. Till one knows better, it’s hard to distinguish something that’s hard to understand because the writer was unclear in his own mind from something like a mathematical proof that’s hard to understand because the ideas it represents are hard to understand.”

*

After a chat with Minzhi, I’m wondering: How do we begin to set up a bookshop with books we want that we can’t get, with personalised book-buying recommendations — ie move people towards reading Saramago, Nooteboom, Byatt, depending on their tastes and inclinations. Can do it for children too, for parents who don’t know what sort of books to buy their children.

And we can do it with other languages! Chinese book recommendations, for instance, how to start with Chinese poetry.

I think it may be able to work out.

QUICK, quick, quick, a film on Du Pre. Go see it before the copyright police catch up.

There are just a few in every generation. Musicians with the unmistakable qualities that make the rare but familiar figure of the internationally-acclaimed artist. It’s one of the most totally absorbing of all professions that demands not only a God-given talent but also character and will to develop it and an essential single-mindedness from the earliest age. The demands are high and are met by just a few.

Du Pre is an inspiration. She’s just so beautiful.

*

My weakness: pretty dresses. There’s this chain of stores named Blum that carries clothes with exactly the same design and material as Armani, Shanghai Tang, DKNY, Tocca etc but without the labels and from past seasons; I’m not sure how exactly they get their stock but I suspect it’s profiteering from China manufacturing. But in any case, the prices are around US$100 to US$170 for a dress, and US$200 for a pantsuit, made from good material such as silk or linen or wool. I think it’s a pretty good price for the quality, and I buy a couple of things every now and then.

A few of them:

- Black silk cheongsam with detailing at the edges and a swathe of colour beneath the collar, and a deep turquoise lining.
- Baby blue raw silk dress with a square collar and wide cream straps, with stitch detailing.
- Black slim-cut pantsuit, with discreet aubergine pinstripes and a white and purple lining, exactly the same as Armani but at less than half the price.
- Short drifty dress with a V-shaped neckline, blurred purple and green spots on white silk (I know: purple and green?! but somehow it doesn’t clash and I don’t look like a grape — or at least I hope not).
- Fitted egg-shell blue dress with deep brown stitching and detailing along the collar, sleeves, waist, darts and hemline.

Dogfish
by Mary Oliver

Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman’s boot,
with a white belly.

If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.

And you know
what a smile means,
don’t you?

*

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

*

It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.

*

Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don’t we?

Slowly

*

the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.

*

You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it’s the same old story - - -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

*

And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.

*

And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it.

I’M IN love with Eliot Weinberger. Can’t find Karmic Traces in the bookstores here, but I know many of you would like this set of essays. (We really have to set up a bookstore where we bring in books from New Directions and Canongate and similar.)

“Time then, or how we inhabit it, has taken on the condition of poetry. A poem belongs to an historical moment, fixed by time and place, most evident in the language the poem speaks, but also in its range of concerns and the form — its clothes of fashion — in which the poem is wrapped. But it simultaneously exists outside of the historical continuum. Ancient poems, the great ones, are as immediate, or more immediate, than those written yesterday. Some indefinable living matter in the poem — perhaps its karmic traces — allows it to remain vital as it persists through the ages, even as the language in which it was written dies out, even as it travels by translation from language to language.”

*

“Sappho comes down to us only in the bits of papyrus used to wrap mummies, but some of the lineaments of her desire have survived. She wants — paraphrasing the Davenport translation — a woman slender as a young tree, with thin hands, and wrists like the wild rose. Eyes that are bold, or with a smiling brightness, beautiful feet, and something that has been lost in the lacunae, skin presumably, whiter than milk, whiter by far than an egg.”

*

According to the poet Timothy Steele, formalist poetry, more than any other pursuit, can “nourish”

a love of nature, an enthusiasm for justice, a readiness of good humour, a spontaneous susceptibility to beauty and joy, an interest in our past, a hope for our future, and, above all, a desire that others should have the opportunity and encouragement to share these qualities

*

I wish we had a proper literary column, much like Anne Fadiman’s.

I’m thinking of literary friendships, of literary courtship, of relationships that develop through the swapping of books. The books that you lend out are telling of who you are — your interests, your sensibilities — you discover the other person through his books, and when you couple that with a discovery of a new world of books that give you joy the mixture can be pretty potent.

It’s an intimate process. You can tell where the pages are well-thumbed, where they fall open, which passages are noted, how he holds the book in his hand. You can tell whether he’s a carnal lover, as Fadiman puts it, or not. (In Ex Libris, she writes that just as there is more than one way to love a person, there is more than one way to love a book. Those who revere first editions and pretty covers, who worry about sun damage to spines and despise pencil notes in margins, are courtly lovers. Those who split open books as if they were ripe fruit, who dog-ear pages and use paperbacks as table mats, are carnal lovers.)

You get a pretty good idea of what strong, important, influential presences there have been in her life. You can guess at some of her fantasies, at where she feels most at home.

And we are each the inhabitant of a mental home, some bounded and shaped place, with its maps and signposts. This gives us identity. Sharing books clues us in onto the other person’s territory. You tiptoe onto their ground, imagine yourself at home in their homes, and discover the open roof above.

*

To read: Guy Davenport

*

Oh! Check this out, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue presented in a very interesting manner. There’s a whole page of them!

RACH piano and cello sonata. What a lovely piece, full of sweep, passion, gorgeous melodic lines and rich harmonies. Ravel’s Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello. Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor: complexity, diversity, and unity, good stuff.

*

To read: Halldor Laxness

THE problem with not loving well is that you may kill your heart.

“It doesn’t do to dwell in fantasy, which is not the same as imagination. Imagination is the power to reshape reality, to find hope where there appears to be only despair. Imagination creates signs that speak of the future and bring it closer. Fantasy is in some ways its opposite. It is a form of despair that flees from reality rather than seeking to reshape it. W. B. Yeats wrote, ‘We had fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare”.”

*

Time to start reading again. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close. Ingenious and heartbreaking.