I mean I want to see

A: “It doesn’t just make me look fat, it makes me look like a cautionary tale by Roald Dahl.”

*

B: “Have you eaten? I’m tired of pouring hot water onto powdered things and calling that a meal.”

*

C: “I feel like a whale.”
D: “You feel like you were speared and devoured by a bunch of Japanese?”
E: “There she blows.”
F: “A whale (I’d imagine) would feel quite at ease with the world, unhurried in the way only surpassed by the giant sequoia or the cresote bush, or maybe non-volcanic mountains. A whale does not get hurt easily either. Hence whale song is a mainstay of homeopathy and Wiccan practices.”

*

(Reading Anne Carson)

A)
This is banal. It’s like Beckett. Say something!

B)
… What will you take? I ask Corrado who is leaving for Patagonia and when
he says 2 or 3
valises I say If I had to go away I would take with me everything I see.

She will again, if he just listens for her,
Approach with her old warmth and, by her arts,
Temper his voice with her voice so that he
Can speak the deeper language she imparts.

From here.

“Gobble”
J relentlessly miming gobbling despite nobody getting it.

“Headbutt”
- “Head-knock! Butt-knock!”

“Mick Jagger”
- S naming all his daughters.

“Brazil”
- (S’s great hint) “Gisele comes from?”

“Free”
- “What as a bird?”
- “Thin?”

“Panda”
- “This is a very famous animal.”

“Garfield”
- “Orange fat meow-meow.”

“Actor”
- “Brad Pitt is a?”
- “Hottie?”

“Buffy”
- M miming strength: “She is?”
- “She is She-Ra!”

“Cow”
- “It is an animal and white things come from it.”

“Darth Vader”
- (darth vader voice) “I am your father.”

“Robbery”
- “This happens a lot in Malaysia.”
- (getting it on the first try) “Robbery!”

“(don’t know)”
- “What’s big and runs in the snow and has tusks?”
- “Chipmunk!”

The many variations of “behind”, “bottom”, “rear” that we had, and the various relentless attempts we made to describe the words.

*

Corny headlines

“Kim Jong Ill or Kim Jong Well?”
(Caption for protests) “Farc off”

*

Listening to the Beethoven string quartets (Op. 18, Op. 132) and Ravel’s (so elegant) — also watched Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, which I thought was very well done. Writing too in small spurts while spending some energy preparing for the GREs. Life’s full, and it’s good.

From here

GOOD food (salad, crunchy calamari, crepes, seafood pasta, chocolate truffles), much laughter, and a friend whom I’ve not seen in several months said: “You look so happy. What’s happened? Are you getting married?”

Well I’ve dealt with the tangled mess I was carrying one thread at a time, and chucked out what I didn’t need. It takes some time to untangle memory and desire. I’m making headway. And the love, the love which helped shaped selves and narratives, it’s no longer tied up into something useless.

*

A (with relationship woes, talking to glass of wine): Ah, alcohol. I am loyal and constant in my love for you, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves.

FOR Anais. The rest of the photoshoot series，which was taken in Beijing during Chinese New Year. I’m not sure who or which magazine published these Jed Root photos — they’ve been sitting around on my hard disk for some time.

LANTERNS, mooncakes, pomelo and tea for for the mid-autumn festival. And here’s one of my favourite songs ever, 但愿人长久.

Hanoi, 2004

Hanoi, 2004

Outside Hanoi, 2004

Hanoi, 2004

SOME pictures I like, I love the openness of the people I was shooting, and the colours, too.

So once again, you meet people and perspectives change. I have found that if you are wrestling with huge things –- real things, then it is important not to let fake stuff or waste of time stuff or excess stuff enter your life during that time. Energy needs to be directed.

And life has to be about love, and life has to be about finding happiness where we can.

*

From J. Barnes:

A couple love each other, but they aren’t happy. What do we conclude? That one of them doesn’t really love the other; that they love one another a certain amount but not enough? I dispute that really; I dispute that enough. I’ve loved twice in my life (which seems quite a lot to me), once happily, once unhappily. It was the unhappy love that taught me most about love’s nature — though not at the time, not until yeras later. Dates and details — fill them in as you like. But I was in love, and loved, for a long time, many years. At first I was brazenly happy, bullish with solipsistic joy; yet most of the time I was puzzlingly, naggingly unhappy. Didn’t I love her enough? I knew I did — and put off half my future for her. Didn’t she love me enough? I knew she did — and gave up half her past for me. We lived side by side for many years, fretting at what was wrong with the equation we had invented. Mutual love did not add up to happiness. Stubbornly, we insisted that it did.

And later I decided what it was I believed about love. We think of it as an active force. My love makes her happy; her love makes me happy: how could this be wrong? It is wrong; it evokes a false conceptual model. It implies that love is a transforming wand , one that unlooses the ravelled knot, fills the top hat with handkerchiefs, sprays the air with doves. But the model isn’t from magic but particle physics. My love does not, cannot make her happy; my love can only release in her the capacity to be happy. And now things seem more understandable. How come I can’t make her happy, how come she can’t make me happy? Simple: the atomic reaction you expect isn’t taking place, the beam with which you are bombarding the particles is on the wrong wave length. But love isn’t an atomic bomb,…So where do we start? Love may or may not produce happiness; whether or not it does in the end, its primary effect is to energize.

…”We must love one another or die,” wrote W. H. Auden, bringing from E. M. Forster the declaration: “Because he once wrote ‘We must love one another or die’, he can command me to follow him.” Auden, however, was dissatisfied with this famous line from September 1, 1939. “That’s a damned lie!” he commented, “We must die anyway.” So when reprinting the poem he altered the line to the more logical “We must love one another and die.” Later he suppressed it altogether.

This shift from or to and is one of poetry’s most famous emendations. When I first came across it, I applauded the honest rigour with which Auden the critic revised Auden the poet. If a line sounds ringingly good it isn’t true — out with it — such an approach is bracingly free of writerly self-infatuation. Now I am not so sure. We must love one another and die has logic on its side; it’s also about as interesting on the subject of the human condition, and as striking, as We must listen to the radio and die or We must remember to defrost the fridge and die. Auden was rightly suspicious of his own rhetoric, but to say that the line We must love one another or die is untrue because we die anyway (or because those who do not love do not instantly expire) is to take a narrow or forgetful view. There are equally logical, and more persuasive, ways of reading the or line. The first, obvious one is this: We must love one another because if we don’t we are liable to end up killing one another. The second is: We must love one another because if we don’t, if love doesn’t fuel or lives, then we might as well be dead. This, surely, is no “damned lie”, to claim that those who get their deepest satisfaction from other things are living empty lives, are posturing crabs who swagger the sea-bed in borrowed shells.

This is difficult territory. We must be precise, and we mustn’t become sentimental…

*

读书好，好读书，读好书，书读好，做个读书人，以书为友，开卷有益，这些哲理不会被岁月的屐痕所泯灭，反而随着人们读书实践的深化和读书经验的积累，迸发出更为耀眼的火花。学业的繁重，思乡的痛苦，自不待言。然而，人生的麦田很大也很宽，着意耕耘，自有收获。