I mean I want to see

A: If you cut off children’s fingertips, they will grow back.
B: How do you know this? Have you tried experimenting?
A: It was in a study! But once they reach puberty, the finger-tip will be lost for good.
C: We’re talking about the fingertip? Not the finger*nail*?
A: Yes!
B: So D, your baby’s like a starfish. Can regenerate!
E: Why isn’t someone asking what sort of “study” this is?!

D: I just found out a year ago that sperm do not have eyes.
A: Yes, it’s just a single cell. And the dot, that’s not an eye. It’s the nucleus.
E: No, it’s all diversified. Some sperm have noses, so they smell the egg. Others have ears, so they hear the egg.

A: I don’t like her, of course.
B: Of course. The truth’s sinking beneath the horizon, you realise.
A: There is no lying! I’m not in self-denial! There is no attraction.
B: Uh-huh…The truth has sunk far below the horizon, and this time it’s fallen into a black hole. Let’s stop this conversation before it heads for another galaxy.

“When someone has compassion on us we find ourselves really seen, heard, attended to…If someone’s attention is genuinely compassionate it does not stop at attentiveness: he or she is willing to speak, act and even suffer with us and for us. It is in such passivity, as we receive their compassion, that the most powerful dynamics of our own feeling and activity are shaped. Amazed gratitude for such compassion can last a lifetime.”

- David Ford,
The Shape Of Living

*

Saw a rainbow today after walking out from Sunshine Plaza. Beautiful! The last time I saw a rainbow was about two years back, out of my flat window over the sea. I love moments of magic like these.

Was talking with YL, and he told a story of how someone said: “I trust that she was acting in my best interests.” To have that sort of faith in someone in a relationship is what he wants, he said.

Also talking to my Christian friends again and reading books by Timothy Radcliffe and Howatch and trying to get my hands on David Ford. For some reason I keep circling and circling round the question of faith and can’t settle. The big quesions of life, death, purpose, good and evil. In any case I think the best way to reach out to someone is by example, not preaching.

More Amartya Sen. I think one of my friends was in Trinity when he was Master, got to ask if he’s ever talked to him one on one.

*

Also rereading Susan Howatch, I love her characters and dialogue and wit and way of seeing reality. Following the markets, too, these are interesting times.

*

I like people, even prosaic ones, even when we’re sitting around eating cake and discussing mundane bourgeois matters, but I *love* conversations that spark with ideas, with electricity, with passion and information. I love people who are brilliant, who are bullet-sure confident about the things they know (and can *teach me stuff*), and interested in the things they don�t that I do. I love the expansion of mental horizons, I love the exhilarating views.

*

Pursuit
- Sylvia Plath

There is a panther stalks me down:
One day I’ll have my death of him;
His greed has set the woods aflame,
He prowls more lordly than the sun.
Most soft, most suavely glides that step,
Advancing always at my back;
From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:
The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.
Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,
Haggard through the hot white noon.
Along red network of his veins
What fires run, what craving wakes?

Insatiate, he ransacks the land
Condemned by our ancestral fault,
Crying: blood, let blood be spilt;
Meat must glut his mouth’s raw wound.
Keen the rending teeth and sweet
The singeing fury of his fur;
His kisses parch, each paw’s a briar,
Doom consummates that appetite.
In the wake of this fierce cat,
Kindled like torches for his joy,
Charred and ravened women lie,
Become his starving body’s bait.

Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade;
Midnight cloaks the sultry grove;
The black marauder, hauled by love
On fluent haunches, keeps my speed.
Behind snarled thickets of my eyes
Lurks the lithe one; in dreams’ ambush
Bright those claws that mar the flesh
And hungry, hungry, those taut thights.
His ardor snares me, lights the trees,
And I run flaring in my skin;
What lull, what cool can lap me in
When burns and brands that yellow gaze?

I hurl my heart to halt his pace,
To quench his thirst I squander blook;
He eats, and still his need seeks food,
Compels a total sacrifice.
His voice waylays me, spells a trance,
The gutted forest falls to ash;
Appalled by secret want, I rush
From such assault of radiance.
Entering the tower of my fears,
I shut my doors on that dark guilt,
I bolt the door, each door I bolt.
Blood quickens, gonging in my ears:

The panther’s tread is on the stairs,
Coming up and up the stairs.

To what will you compare
day
is it like night
to what will you compare
an apple
is it like a kingdom
to what will you compare
flesh
at night
the silence
between lips
to what will you compare an eye
a hand in darkness
is the right like the left
teeth tongue mouth
a kiss
to what will you compare
a hip
hair
fingers
breath
silence
poetry
in daylight
at night

- Tadeusz Rozewicz

Go, little book,
out of this house and into the world,

carriage made of paper rolling toward town
bearing a single passenger
beyond the reach of this jittery pen,
far from the desk and the nosy gooseneck lamp.

It is time to decamp,
put on a jacket and venture outside,
time to be regarded by other eyes,
bound to be held in foreign hands.

So off you go, infants of the brain,
with a wave and some bits of fatherly advice:

stay out as late as you like,
don’t bother to call or write,
and talk to as many strangers as you can.

- Billy Collins

*

“Go, litel bok . . .
And red whereso thow be, or elles songe,
That thow be understood, God I biseche!”

- Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde

*

Go, little book - the ancient phrase
And still the daintiest - go your ways,
My Otto, over sea and land,
Till you shall come to Nelly’s hand.

How shall I your Nelly know?
By her blue eyes and her black brow,
By her fierce and slender look,
And by her goodness, little book!

What shall I say when I come there?
You shall speak her soft and fair:
See - you shall say - the love they send
To greet their unforgotten friend!

Giant Adulpho you shall sing
The next, and then the cradled king:
And the four corners of the roof
Then kindly bless; and to your perch aloof,
Where Balzac all in yellow dressed
And the dear Webster of the west
Encircle the prepotent throne
Of Shakespeare and of Calderon,
Shall climb an upstart.

There with these
You shall give ear to breaking seas
And windmills turning in the breeze,
A distant undetermined din
Without; and you shall hear within
The blazing and the bickering logs,
The crowing child, the yawning dogs,
And ever agile, high and low,
Our Nelly going to and fro.

There shall you all silent sit,
Till, when perchance the lamp is lit
And the day’s labour done, she takes
Poor Otto down, and, warming for our sakes,
Perchance beholds, alive and near,
Our distant faces reappear.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

*

If I May

I would like to thank (besides my family, you, my teachers, friends and readers) hydrogen
for fueling the stars without which poetry
would not exist. The sun has been the star
most crucial to my work, but distant stars
have been there for me, too, and planets, meteors,
the moon. About the moon, I’m grateful
that our boys left flags up there, and brought back
rocks and dust. I’d like to thank the dust.
The oceans may or may not have put
molecules together that first time
to form a living cell, but I would like
to thank the oceans for that dreamy look
they give us when the cameras turn toward Earth

. . . God I want to thank
especially, if He exists, which I believe
He does. He may not. Probably not.
But I would like to thank Him. Thanks.

- Brooks Haxton

When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.

A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

No, it’s more like the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me that love is a ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird that is better late than never.

- Billy Collins

LOVE the sound of the marimba! Je suis ravie! The percussion renditions of Bach were jolly good fun, with a nice jazzy piece rounding it off. But it’s the last of the downtown lunchtime concerts, sigh.

Conversation over sandwiches at tuckshop after that was delightful as well:

A (on craigslist personals): So there was this Indian guy who was looking for a second wife in Singapore.
B: Is he Muslim?
A: No he’s Hindu.
C: Many gods, many wives.

C (on dating using a webcam): Make him dress up for you for date night and buy you flowers and hold them up to the webcam. You can watch movies together! And take your laptop to the park where you hold picnics, eating alone but together.
B: Have you done this before? You seem very familiar with this.
C: But wait, there’s a time difference….
B: Yeah he can’t be having a picnic by himself at 3am.

A: Reading from a Snapple cap: “A bee has five eyes”.
D: Is that true?
B: Wikipedia. Finally, something to do at work.

C (talking of Winter’s Tale): The tickets were snapped up.
B (in shocked tones): People here watch Shakespeare?

D: I’ve a friend whose child refused to speak. So she just didn’t give him any food or did anything for him until he spoke.
B: “Can I have an apple….Please?”
D: Yea the “please” is very important.

B: I know one baby that can say “banana”. That’s three syllables! And apple.
C: Aim higher. Teach S (B’s one-year-old) to say…”epistemology”. That’s six syllables.

C: So what’s the most expensive thing you’ve bought overseas?
B tells story of her carpet experience in Morocco, of being fed tea and having a parade of carpets rolled out before their eyes. They succumbed and bought: “The carpets were very very heavy, and we were backpacking! So we rolled the carpets up and mailed them home, but they never arrived. Then we fell into recrimination mode: “Why did you make me buy the carpet? etc etc”

*

Some good talks over some good meals lately, I love those people who are confident about the stuff they know, and interested in the things they don’t.

Spoke to this person, for instance, who conducts classes in prisons for inmates and officers, and talked of the prison system, learners, opportunities, loyalty, respect.

*

Reading Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief. De facto objections, to the truth of Christian belief, and de jure objections, that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable, or rationally unjustified, or irrational, or in some other way rationally unacceptable. Oh my God, I *miss* philosophy, I miss it achingly. And I miss talks with D, the theology student, over bowls of grapes and cherries.

Also halfway through Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance Of Loss. Which I really really like, for its warmth and humour and insight and easy, lyrical style.

In between work I’m reading Plath’s incantatory Ariel, which I last read ten years ago.

Oh, life is good.

*

Billy Collins: Ballistics

- Every so often I talk to someone, and it changes them. Sometimes I just listen and it changes them. Now that is magical.
- The way that, year after year, we become more ourselves.
- The way truth slowly surfaces and turns into pain, pain turns into wisdom, wisdom turns into joy; especially the last part.

*

How can I explain what feels so right about them? Well, for starters none of them seem to have that inbuilt competitive streak that you can’t seem to excise from Singaporeans, especially those from our circles. I think they don’t care, or care rather little, who’s doing better. They’re driven, but are such genuine people; nobody’s really trying to be anyone else than themselves, and they’re comfortable with that.

MET P at the old stomping grounds of Coronation Plaza, where she made me laugh until I cried with descriptions of her students’ essays (drowning and mother’s love at Changi Village, the backpedalling “Korean” essay), and we went for my first ever foot reflexology session! Which rocks! It was very enjoyable and relaxing, not painful, and I’ll be back for more. Am always a fan of soothing human touch.

Then after browsing in the chichi shops down Bukit Timah, it was this free movie at the Arts House, which was interesting, with beautiful Spanish actresses, but rather badly plotted.

A: I thought he met with a bear after he toboganned off that cliff. It was like something out of my students’ essays. First he escaped death, then a paw appeared.
B: I escaped from the jaws of death only to meet the jaws of a bear.

B (Passing by a poster of “Thunder Down Under” hunks): Oh, interesting.
A: You mean interesting or hot?
B: Hot, actually.
A: Yes, I thought they didn’t look very interesting.
B: Yeah, Quasimodo looks interesting.

*

Have to be more conscientious with languages, calligraphy, reading, writing. Was at my favourite second hand bookstore and talked with some Vietnamese students who were there to get cheap Economics textbooks — I recognise that drive they have, that hunger. At the end of the day it’s all about being a good steward of your gifts, making the most of your opportunities, being grateful you’ve had the chances and the ability and the energy to make constructive choices that benefit not just yourself but others around you.

Also bought Blink in the bookstore, which has been a fascinating read so far, how marriage analysts can predict divorce and judge the health of a relationship by looking out for certain signals in an hour-long tape, the gut feeling.

After all these years I’m still very excited about books, about learning, about people, about reaching out. I think I’ve a gift for getting passionate about things and conveying that passion and lighting sparks of interest. I’m sure I want to end up writing and teaching for a career, so academia seems to be the way to go, though I’m wary of in-talk and garbling about isms for the sake of garbling. But teaching in schools is also interesting: civil service work: I think you’ve got to get the kids young. I also *love* my teacher/academic friends very very much, they tend to be my favourite kind of people. And some of my professors are exactly who I want to be twenty years down the road — open, curious, alight, with good work-life balance and healthy families and relationships.

Work on, work on.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with the people skills I’ve picked up since starting work — need to do more about my gut feel and instincts and reading people. It’s like fishes that have to keep moving forward to breathe properly — I have to keep learning new skills to stay happy. :P

*

Who has my

1. Invisible Cities (I MISSS this book!!! Pllleaase return it to me, the book has been with me everywhere, including to Venice.)
2. Dogville
3. Amelie
4. Anne Fadiman
5. Rushdie’s East, West

?

A: I’d a colleague who was a snake. (Looks at reporter) He was a reporter before he joined us. (Looks at Punjabi) He’s a Punjabi.
B (Punjabi): Racist!
C (Reporter): Occupationist!
D: C…what’s wrong with snakes? I was once sent a wikipedia entry that said my ancestors used to worship them. I understand they also sacrifice themselves to make good handbags and shoes.
C: D, I’m Chinese. We eat snakes, we don’t worship them.

*

B: Guys, any of you interested in going to the Coldpay concert? …I don’t seem to know many coldplay fans though.
C: B, I think Coldplay is racist.

“I swam across,
I jumped across for you,
Oh what a thing to do.
Cos you were all yellow…

I drew a line for you,
Oh what a thing to do,
And it was all yellow,
Your skin.”

A: Eh B, you want biscuits?
B: Sure!
A tosses a packet over: This is like feeding a seal!
B claps his hands together and barks.

C: Who’s this xxx fellow? I’ve to call him to get more information.
A: Is he good-looking?
B: He’s tall.
A: You’re not answering the question.
B: That’s about it.
A: Okay, C, don’t bother calling him. Just message.

Photo: ??

Photo: From here

USED to make Valentines for friends in school, and these matchbox ones really are the cutest things. Yes, I’ve a Martha Stewart/Stepford Wife streak in me :)

Talked of the sweetest gifts we’ve received, including recordings and scrapbooks and trips and Polaroids.

*

Bought cheapish tickets for The Winter’s Tale, we’ll be in circle 3 — Ethan Hawke will be like an ant. I’ll need to borrow opera glasses.

OH MY. I’ve not had such huge laughter for ages! Was out for lunch with an old friend of mine who taught me “power seduction moves” that had me rolling about helpless with laughter. Swimming, calligraphy, reading, library, writing letters — so goes another day.

Had some people over at my place last Saturday, which was fun as well, with drinks and laughter and crazy talk and making people sit on the floor. Too. Much. Food.

*

A: You chose a run over an orgy. We’ve obviously not corrupted you enough with our wicked bohemian ways.
B: I went to a mission school where orgies were frowned upon…
A: …But you come from the people of the Kama Sutra.

*

I do not like what I’ve read of Philip Roth so far. Read the Krepesh books after watching Elegy, but the books are full of overly clever, self-absorbed, emotionally vacant protagonists. Blech.

A: She’s from the class of ‘03, she’s from the class of ‘04, she’s from the class of ‘06 etc etc
B: And you? You’re from the class of?
C: It doesn’t begin with an “0″, that’s for sure.
D: Yeah, it’s more like the class of “Oh my God I’m old.”

Hilarious stories abound from Chinese New Year gatherings, including how I was mistaken for the mother of a 24-year-old. This is retribution. I’m NEVER teasing people about their ages again.

*

Reading Schlink’s The Reader. Very good stuff. Also catching up on Fables comics. Yay for Snow and Bigby!

ULYSSES, the book that went off like a bomb in the literary world, was published by Shakespeare and Co on Feb 2, 1922. (James Joyce was born on Feb 2, 1882.)

Nora Tully describes it thus:

The response to Ulysses was immediate and extreme. Writer and literary critic Malcolm Cowley described it using the metaphor of a stone dropped into water: there was a moment of silence, the stone was dropped, “then all the frogs who inhabited the pool began to talk at once”.

James Joyce lived in a world of giants — Virginia Woolf, Proust, Pound, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot…the modernists. The comments of other writers about Ulysses are absolutely marvellous, because they all recognised what has come. They all realised what had happened. The 20th century had arrived. They had all been working towards it, trying to wrestle the 19th century out of existence, bringing new forms to light. And it’s not that any of these people failed. But Ulysses was the real death-knell. T.S. Eliot said that Ulysses “killed the 19th century”. He also asked: “How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?…I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.”

The responses of the writers ran the gamut from disgust to despair and elation.

Yeats:

(I) “A mad book!”
(II) “I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence … It is an entirely new thing — neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time.”

George Bernard Shaw:

“If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing — not whitewashing — it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water.”

Edmund Wilson:

“The more we read Ulysses, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce’s genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perception of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives. To have traced all these interdependences, to have given each of these elements its value, yet never to have lost sight of the moral through preoccuptation with the physical, nor to have forgotten the general in the particular; to have exhibited ordinary humanity without either satirizing it or sentimentalizing it - this would already have been sufficiently remarkable; but to have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equalled in the literature of our time.”

Hart Crane:

“I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age.”

Samuel Beckett’s wonderful quote about Finnegans Wake is also applicable to Ulysses:

“You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.”

WATCHING the Nadal-Federer in the office today, and talking of great tennis rivalries.

A: I’ve never seen anything as intense and closely-matched as the Federer-Nadal rivalry before.
B: No, there was McEnroe-Borg. It was excellent as they’ve different styles. One was ice-cold, the other brash and volatile.
A: I don’t remember. What year was this?
B: Before you were born.
C: Can I switch to the football channel now?

EXHAUSTED but satisfied after a whole day of hilarious conversation over lunch and tea and visiting and hanging out and running errands. Oh, the wonderful new couple! I laughed till my stomach ached over tales of responding to questions about personal life (the lesbian skit, the aunt who thought A was pregnant and how A played along, the imaginary boyfriend who ran away), power play in relationships, the “it won’t hurt if you don’t resist” guy, “What is your size” man, the love of camels. Oh I love love love bright funny people who are full of life and eat batteries for breakfast.

Then lo-hei at Spottiswoode Park, a most lovely estate, in my friend’s cosy breezy apartment where I terrorised people into promising me angpows, with maotai and wine from a Chinese vinter (!!) being poured most liberally. Was almost comatose from food overload and lack of sleep and the drinks by the time I headed to Little India and lay back into the cushions.

I really like these new people I’ve been meeting.