District and Circle

Great article on the blame game

2011-08-19T15:27:00.002+08:00

From Psychology Today

"In 1967, Watzlavik, Beavin, and Jackson published The Pragmatics of Human Communication, which identified several axioms (i.e., commonly accepted principles) of interpersonal communication and how it works. One axiom, "The Punctuation of the Sequence of Events" (p. 54), provides insight into why the blame game is so common in interpersonal communication.

In reality, relational communication events are continuous; they are ongoing, with no clear-cut beginning or ending. In other words, in the context of close relationships, communication events are continuous transactions, as they are tied to the past, present, and future of the relationship. As participants (or observers), however, there is a tendency to divide communication transactions into sequences of stimuli and response, or cause and effect - to impose our own punctuation on the communication transaction."

From the Granta 'Money' issue

2011-08-10T15:01:00.003+08:00

"In fact the trouble I was having with ethics was that I'd never thought about them before -- in any sense. I had opinions on almost every subject, could argue any position and believed in almost nothing. I grew up, not necessarily with the belief, but with the feeling powerfully impressed on me, that life was a question of surviving, of making it through, not getting caught." - Richard Rayner (Rich, Rich, Rich)

The 'Marginal Cost' Mistake

2011-05-04T13:54:00.002+08:00

Prof Clayton Christensen in HBR

"Weʼre taught in finance and economics that in evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs, and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues that each alternative entails. We learn in our course that
this doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities theyʼll need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, that approach
would be fine. But if the futureʼs different—and it almost always is—then itʼs the wrong thing to do.
This theory addresses the third question I discuss with my students—how to live a life of integrity (stay out of jail).
Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives when we choose between right and wrong. Av oice in our head says, “Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldnʼt do this. But in this particular extenuating
circumstance, just this once, itʼs OK.” The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low.
It suckers you in, and you donʼt ever look at where that path ultimately is headed and at the full costs that the choice entails.
Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.”

Catalogue of rejected thoughts

2011-04-25T13:40:00.000+08:00

"It seems to me that the writers we love most are those who manage to capture something we ourselves have thought and rejected, for being forbidden, dangerous, elusive, something that if we made room for it would undo something else we want to keep, so we force it away—literature as a catalogue of rejected thoughts. For the way they can hold onto what the rest of us would put away as dangerous, they become heroes, the ones who emerge with the one thing we hoped to keep secret, but know we need. When I say to you James Salter is one of my heroes, that is what I mean."

--From an essay by Alexander Chee

From "In Treatment"- my favourite show at the moment

2011-03-29T23:11:00.007+08:00

Just watched episode 16 of Season 3 where Adele beguiles Paul with her analysis of his situation. The scriptwriting in this series is so complex and nuanced that it takes my breath away.

Adele: "The first day I met you, you insisted that you and Gina had it all figured out, that your need to save people started with your mother's illness.."

Paul: "..and does that seem far fetched to you?"

Adele: "It doesn't. But I think caring for your mother was also a way of saving yourself. It was miserable, yes.. but it was also safe and familiar and it kept you from having to find any real connections elsewhere, from risking yourself in the outside world..
And it also had the convenience of allowing you to blame it all on your father.
And it's really not so different to what you do to this day, is it? You cloister yourself in your apartment or your burrow-like office, you convince yourself you're sick, you'll accept a growing paralysis rather than taking a risk and finding where or towards whom your real passion lies.
And is it any wonder you haven't found what drives you yet?
You're 57 years old. And at some point you're going to have to move past the stories you've assigned to your life. These steadfast explanations you've settled on years ago. You have to look at yourself again. For real answers, you have to take that risk."

This is so true for all of us at any age...maybe particularly our mid-thirties and forties. We need to move beyond the stories we have assigned to ourselves and our lives and take at least a few risks all over again.

Found online in a comment thread....

2011-03-23T09:32:00.002+08:00

"To be whole, let yourself break.
To be straight, let yourself bend.
To be full, let yourself be empty.
To be new, let yourself wear out.
To have everything, give everything up."

Godawful Poem#2

2010-08-24T21:42:00.004+08:00

Thanks to Peter and his 'Godawful Poetry Fortnight' , I'm here again with my sickly second offering.

I wandered lonely as a status update
I surfed, I liked, I borrowed.
In Twitter, I found a rowdy crowd,
In blogs I drowned my sorrow.

Before I knew what hit my soul,
I surfed, I read, I borrowed.
RSS feeds told me all I need,
Now I can’t tell today from tomorrow.

So oft upon my couch I lie,
I surf, I chat, drink Bordeaux.
I melt into my glowing screen,
The real world turns to shadows.

Our digital selves are quite complete,
We post, we like, we follow.
We haven’t met and yet we’re friends,
You should know by now I'm shallow.

Terribly bad, truly awful poem

2010-08-23T21:19:00.005+08:00

It's Godawful Poetry Fortnight and this below is my contribution!

This poem wrote itself on the bus to work,

And then on the train back home.

It wrote itself while I was working hard

at something else.

This poem skipped breakfast and lunch,

It drank three cups of coffee with sugar,

Followed by a slice of terribly sweet cake.

And it wouldn’t stop at that.

This poem had a drink.

Or two. In fact, it might’ve mixed it all up.

Wine after beer, have no fear.

This poem has no respect

for sonnets, ballads and neat little rhymes.

Police arrested this poem for insulting a couple of haikus.

This poem is lost because it prefers losing.

This poem wants to learn old languages

and ignore emerging markets.

This poem has made no investments.

It doesn’t want your money,

Or your praise. This poem is so stupid.

It thinks it will survive in the real world.

Inventing places

2010-02-27T19:36:00.003+08:00

I read The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh and wanted to preserve this bit: " I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination; that her practical, bustling London was no less invented than mine, neither more not less true, only very far apart. It was not her fault that she could not understand, for as Tridib often said of her, the inventions she lived in moved with her, so that although she had lived in many places, she had never travelled at all"

On writing - Elizabeth Lowry in Granta 103

2010-01-17T15:00:00.004+08:00

From an excerpt in my favourite literary magazine:

"There’s a sense in which writing is simply scar tissue, the attempt to create a meaningful self out of a compromised one, and in my case this damage was caused by the constant move from country to country, which made for radical instability. J.M. Coetzee once characterized South African literature in the era of apartheid as ‘a less than fully human literature, unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power’."

Super Duper Blockbuster Thriller

2009-11-02T20:45:00.013+08:00

"Super Duper Blockbuster Crime Thriller" -- these screaming superlatives usually advertise Tamil crime fiction stacked in tea stalls in Chennai. They may have well led to the formation of Blaft - an independent publishing firm in Chennai, started up by a mathematician and a fashion designer who thought it would be good to translate the books and find out what the hell they were about.

I met them both at ScRipt, a mini-feature of the Singapore Writers Festival -- providing a platform where emerging writers from South Asia could promote their work in Singapore.

I went for a few sessions and they were great but the Blaft session stood out with its bizarre posters and tales straight out of some Coen Brothers' film.

The Blafties translate pulp fiction in Indian languages to English as well as publish original fiction in English. They veer towards experimental fiction and what Rakesh Khanna (one of Blaft's founders) calls 'Irrealism.'

"Maybe its like surrealism, I don't know," he said. Kaveri Lalchand, who also makes clothes and acts in theatre and does all sorts of other things, talked about convincing Surender Mohan Pathak, a prolific Hindi crime fiction author, to let Blaft translate his work into English.

Rakesh and Kaveri tracked Pathak down to his house in Old Delhi and the man whose books have sold over 150,000 copies (each-see comment below!) in Hindi was understandably amused by their proposed print run of 5,000 copies. Still, they persisted and so their catalogue of books and translations keeps growing in direct proportion to their tenacity.

It's wonderful to see current, surreal or irreal work out of India exploiting the immense diversity of Indian languages. It was also just fun to hang out with people who are so passionate about what they do and do it alongside other full-time jobs.

We were never warned about heartbreak

2009-10-25T13:35:00.004+08:00

This is a line from Julian Barnes' brilliant new short story -- Complicity-- published in the October 19th issue of the New Yorker. My favourite bit is below but the whole story is here.

"I used the word “complicity” a bit ago. I like the word. To me, it indicates an unspoken understanding between two people, a kind of pre-sense, if you like. The first hint that you may be suited, before the nervous trudgery of finding out whether you “share the same interests,” or have the same metabolism, or are sexually compatible, or both want children, or however it is that we argue consciously about our unconscious decisions. Later, looking back, we will fetishize and celebrate the first date, the first kiss, the first holiday together, but what really counts is what happened before this public story: that moment, more of pulse than of thought, which goes, Yes, perhaps her, and Yes, perhaps him."

The politics of Singlish

2009-10-25T13:26:00.008+08:00

Given that this week is dedicated to the Singapore Writers Festival, I read some poetry by Arthur Yap-- one of Singapore's foremost poets. I first encountered his work at the National Library when I moved to Singapore five years ago. I was looking for local poetry and literature, and his collection of poems -- The Space of City Trees-- struck a chord.

I'm happy to post one of his poem here. It deals with the dilemmas inherent in the forging of postcolonial identities. There is also a great essay that analyses this poem and others like it in QRLS -- the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore.

The Correctness of Flavour -- By Arthur Yap

waiting for the lime sherbert to arrive,
mother turned around to her vacuous child:
boy, you heard what i said earlier?
nowadays, they emphasise english.

boy rolled his squinty eyes to the ceiling.
waitress returned, flustered, and started
on her own emphases:
lime sherbert today don't have.
mango got. strawberry also don't have.

mother, upset and acutely strident:
today DOESN'T have.
today DOES NOT have

Singapore Writers Festival

2009-10-24T17:06:00.010+08:00

The Singapore Writers Festival started yesterday and is on till November 1. Workshops and conversations are happening all week at The Arts House -- one of my favourite buildings in Singapore. This is a multidisciplinary literary festival, featuring some 120 writers from 22 countries and over 170 programmes.

Today I saw O Thiam Chin, a young Singaporean author, talk about his book of short stories, 'Never Been Better' -- published by MPH.

"I don't always go for the big dramatic moments. I'm much more interested in the small and subtle moments of realisation that people have," he said.

When asked why he had not thought of looking for international publishers for his book, Thiam Chin said that he had chosen to be a small fish swimming in a small pond. "I'm not sure I was up to international standards. I wanted to look for local publishers first as my stories also had a local flavour," he said. He spoke of his dreams of getting published in The New Yorker some day.

It was a nice little session -- and I was glad to have attended it. I plan to walk around and attend free sessions over the next few days. And of course, I'll record impressions and conversations that stay with me and post them here.

Here's a picture I like -- of Thiam Chin autographing his book.

Our band gets a review

2009-10-11T23:07:00.000+08:00

It's always fun to perform. It's even better to get a review !

Where synthetic biology may lead us...

2009-09-30T23:15:00.001+08:00

Michael Specter is probably one of my favourite science writers. He has written a fascinating piece on synthetic biology in this week's issue of the New Yorker. It's fairly futuristic and it seems like this will be a field to watch. I quote from the article below -- a taste of things to come!

"No scientific achievement has promised so much, and none has come with greater risks or clearer possibilities for deliberate abuse. The benefits of new technologies—from genetically engineered food to the wonders of pharmaceuticals—often have been oversold. If the tools of synthetic biology succeed, though, they could turn specialized molecules into tiny, self-contained factories, creating cheap drugs, clean fuels, and new organisms to siphon carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."

It is not knowledge we lack

2009-09-05T19:52:00.002+08:00

I've been in the grip of Sven Lindqvist's book on European barbarism. It's called 'Exterminate All The Brutes' and is a terrible, wrenching account of imperialism and racism through the centuries. He ends the book with this paragraph that I think is broadly applicable to life.

"You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions."

Eugene sent me a memory in the mail

2009-08-10T21:43:00.001+08:00

Traces of Gorm

By Eugene Tong

Goodbye Gorm.

Thank you for your service these past eight years. Time and again, you held your load and offer uplift to baby pictures, bric-a-back, stuffed toys, a sword, cookbooks and photo albums and DVDs; offered shelter to Buddha and my shoes and stood firm against the wall through earthquakes and other rumblings.

I brought you, feverish rantings and all, to my Koreatown apartment from Reportergirl's Exposition Park bedroom when said reporter moved back home. You were sorely needed then to bring order to the piles of papers and videotapes leaning against the wall on the floor in my one-bedroom abode.

You were there for about six to eight months, until a new job led us to North Hollywood, a large one-bedroom with a formal dining room in a 1950s vintage 2nd floor walk-up.

*

*BLAH BLEA
BLEAUGH

It was there that I decided to once and for all correct your structural deficiency and complete you. For you see, reportergirl neglected to install metal crossbars on your back -- a pair of aluminum rods -- so you won't tip over.

You stood tall and firm (with metal reinforcement) on the corner with the Buddha altar on your top shelf watching over the living room, next the an Ikea floor lamp rescued from another friend departing L.A.

I lasted all of six months there. Though apparently aesthetically pleasing with the right crowd and located in an up-and-coming artsy neighborhood in the shadow of Universial Studios, the apartment had one fatal flaw -- it gets HOT AS HELL.

I'm talking 90 degrees plus (32 C) INSIDE, when the temperature outside is in the low-80s (27 C). I would spend at least two hours each night after getting home trying to cool the place with an aging window air conditioner and two large box fans.

Screw vintage. I want a place built in the last 20 years with central air con and heating, and well-insulated so it's cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

I found it in Pasadena -- a three bedroom townhouse with a little patch of backyard between the 210 Freeway and an alley.

I lived there for seven years, and quite happily for at least six of those. But alas, with a career change and relocating back to the San Francisco Bay Area, I must put said home on the market (and in this market!).

And I can't take you with me.

I hope the Salvation Army of Pasadena can find you a good home, or return you to the earth from whence you came.

Eugene goes to see Miyazaki

2009-08-01T23:17:00.002+08:00

By Eugene Tong

Hayao Miyazaki Live

Anime and manga legend Hayao Miyazaki in conversation. July 25, 2009.
Location: Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley.

The legendary animator takes the stage -- to a standing ovation, of course.

To the left: Roland Kelts (Tokyo University lecturer and author ofJapanamerica) asking the questions. To his right, the translator, Beth something...

Topics discussed:

-- Apocalypse as a theme in his films (he once thought the end of the world would happen in his lifetime, but at his age (68), that's not likely now...laughs).

-- With our interactions increasingly virtual, is that a bad thing? (It's all relative...)

-- Where does he go to find inspiration? (Walks near his house...)

-- He's told his wife as far back as Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind (1984) that it would be his last film, due to the amount of work involved. Twenty-five years and eight more films later, he doesn't say that much, at least at home.

-- Making an animated film becomes so involving that when it's complete, he doesn't want to watch them again.

-- Which is his favorite among his films? Well, each film is like his child, and if you have eight children, you can't say you love one more than the others!

-- How do you think audiences will view his films 50 years from now? (He makes films grandmothers want to show their grand kids, rather than films mothers would take their kids.)

-- Why the tendency for strong girls as protagonists in your films? (Well, of the current crop of 20 or so animators he's hired and is training for his Studio Ghibli, only one is a man. Maybe I have to start making films with strong boy characters.)

-- There are rarely any truly evil bad guys in his films...(He doesn't want to have to draw that; and reality is never as simple as all good or all bad.)

-- On expressive eyes: In My Neighbor Totoro, he wanted his artists to draw Totoro's eyes so that you can't tell whether it's intelligent or not. As for the insect Ohmu from Nausicaa, you really have no clue with so many eyes.

-- His advice to young animators and artists: Draw everything around you for inspiration.

-- Some animators he considers contemporaries: Pixar's John Lasseter and Nick Park of Aardman Animation.

-- On true love in his films: It has to be earned after the overcoming obstacles (and he speculates things will be tough for Sosuke and Ponyo after the movie's (Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea)over...).

-- On overcoming writer's block: When he gets stuck he would concentrate so hard that his nose bleed...

-- On the Japanese government viewing Anime and Manga as "soft-power": Well, the government won't be around much longer (laughs)! But his films are mostly intended for Japanese audiences. The fact that they've found an audience outside of Japan is just a bonus.

(ED: Japanese PM Taro Aso called for new Diet elections due to low approval ratings.)

-- What lies ahead? He doesn't think about the future...

As with any chat that relies on a translator, there's an unpleasant lag between his answer in Japanese and the English translation for us non-speakers.

The questions from Kelts were thoughtful, despite early on focusing too much on Miyazaki's latest film Ponyo, which I haven't seen. Some tough questions drew a few good humor groans from the filmmaker.

Still, Kelts sometimes made the mistake of asking questions with long prefaces, which may have elicited some off-topic answers from Miyazaki. Always keep it short and tight, then shut up and let the subject talk.

Miyazaki often answer questions indirectly -- maybe it's a cultural thing, or he's trying to be diplomatic. And I'm sure some of his answers got lost in translation too. In the end, he revealed himself a thoughtful, tough-but-fair minded visionary artist who can have a sense of humor about his work.

After the event, a group of autograph hounds (myself included) gathered by the stage entrance waiting for the man the emerge. He did about a half hour later and posed for a few photos, but declined to sign anything.

Why read poetry?

2009-07-26T10:42:00.000+08:00

"Poetry connects us with our deep roots, our evolution as an animal that evolved rhythmic language as a means of transmitting vital information across the generations. We need the comfort and stimulation that this vital part of us gets from the ancient art."--Robert Pinsky

We Real Cool

2009-07-26T10:22:00.003+08:00

I love this ballad by Gwendolyn Brooks. It has a sad, sweet recklessness that grips me ever so often. I'm usually a sensible and measured sort right up until I'm not. There are days when I want to drive off the cliff that is the balance between emotion and intellect, just to see the crash.

I found this poem in a book called 'The Making of a Poem' -- a Norton anthology of poetic forms. It's a wonderful book for any aspiring poet because it explains the importance of form and illustrates with examples. For those of you who care, a ballad is apparently a short narrative usually arranged in four-line stanzas with a distinctive and memorable meter.

We Real Cool

(THE POOL PLAYERS.  SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.)

We real cool.

 We Left school.

We Lurk late.

We Strike straight.

We Sing sin.

We Thin gin.

We Jazz June.

We Die soon.

The morning hours

2009-07-21T08:00:00.005+08:00

Eugene said he couldn't afford the luxury of introspection yesterday. He had many things to do so he'll be here later in the week.

As for me, I woke up pretty early today and enjoyed the dark quietness till the cats decided to start pawing around and mewing like babies. I'm re-reading Slaughterhouse 5 and its a little scary that I remember nothing. I might as well be reading it for the first time. I love how it begins: "All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names."

Please press the button for the desired floor

2009-07-17T21:01:00.006+08:00

This little circle of light on number one makes me very happy on Fridays. Reportergirl has left the building.

I worked hard this week and pretty well I thought. Found a new tasks bar on gmail which is so handy for keeping track of things I have to do...Oh the joy when I struck off the last task on the list! I'm looking forward to a peaceful weekend

Good hare day

2009-07-13T22:54:00.007+08:00

By Eugene Tong

In the hills above my home a family of wild hare reside.

This family, consisting of several large, well-fed grown-up hares and three little ones of various ages, spend their springs and summers lounging on the lawn in the shade, munching on grass and shrubs.

In fact, hares big and small typically emerge about two hours before sunset -- I guess it's a bit too hot to be foraging when the sun's out at full force. It's the same time when I have my dinner. Of note are the little hares, who are never alone. Their elders are always nearby, keeping a look out for potential dangers while the little ones munch and munch. Much like mama hare here.

Here's a little one -- and they're real tiny compared to the well-fed grown-ups -- hiding here as a scary human with a camera approached. One of them even has a white tail -- which sets it apart from its black-tail siblings. The photo is a bit blurry. It was shot with my 300mm zoom lens without a tripod, and my hands weren't especially steady.

Here's bird. I don't know what kind. But it likes to hang out by the rose bushes.

Sunset Saturday.

A nice sunset, set to hip-hop music coming from my Indian neighbor's backyard.

Hares can sure get pretty fat on a vegetarian diet.

Hares like to keep clean too.

--Photos by Canon Rebel XS.

Be careful of words, even the miraculous ones...

2009-07-11T11:48:00.008+08:00

I've been logging long, bleak hours at the 'puter. This morning, I'm like a bat out of hell starving and devouring words that hold feelings or dissect them or stick them up to the light to see if they change colour.

All week I have worked at words that hunker down into flat opaqueness.

So I did what I usually do and turned to Jeanette Winterson's collection of poems and was rewarded with Anne Sexton's brilliant poem on words. Sexton was a troubled woman by all accounts. She killed herself in her late 40s after having won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

This is a photograph of the luminous Ms Sexton whose words encapsulate everything -- from the trickery of words themselves to the seductions of suicide.

(Readers: Please don't worry. Reportergirl is not suicidal. She is possessed of an inherent silliness that cancels out any potential for self-harm or annihilation)

Words

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous ones we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be good as fingers.
They can be trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.

Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.

Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren't good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.

But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

Sonnet

2009-07-06T18:19:00.009+08:00

By Eugene Tong

I was driving home from a taqueria run when my thoughts turned to photos -- the photo album from 'Up'; that I should take more photos of myself with my first home before the sale closes; treasured photos from happier times I wished I had a copy of -- when my random-tracking car stereo tuned to the Cure's "Pictures of You."

A good friend once mentioned the best photos are in our minds. True -- it's always a pleasure when a pleasant image from the past long buried is dragged to the surface by string of thoughts, one after another in a train of thought that makes sense only to you. But it seems the older I get, the more difficult it is to remember. Memories I once vowed never to forget fade, or are at the very least buried by fresher, maybe equally eventful experiences.

That's why we have photos, without which we may lose sight of who we were in better times; indeed we could be once more.

(And believe me, all my yammering here does relate back to "UP" -- probably Pixar's best offering since, well, their last movie "Ratatouille." But let's stay spoiler-free for now...)

Instead, I offer this lyric from The Verve's Sonnet, perhaps my fav track from Urban Hymns:

My friend and me,

Looking through her red box of memories,

Faded I'm sure,

But love seems to stick in her veins you know...

More here

My Slow Morning

2009-07-06T05:31:00.009+08:00

This morning was different,

the air sweet with fatigue, the water

defied laws of physics and stayed cool

under synthetic blue heat.

The molecules stole a few

quiet moments unto themselves.

The leaves still glowed

with last night's rain,

and what they made of it.

I crawled out of that hole

between dreams and awakening.

and broke into myself like a thief,

but left with nothing.

©Reportergirl 7.07.09

The Unbearable Lightness of Waiting

2009-06-29T16:36:00.010+08:00

By Eugene Tong

I've been doing a lot of waiting lately.

Waiting for my test scores. Waiting for my body to heal after a few years of neglect at the expense of career. Waiting for someone to buy the home I left behind since moving back to the Bay Area from Southern California. Waiting for school admission, then waiting some more to get off the waitlist when said admission panel had to wait to decide whether to offer me a spot in the incoming class.

Waiting is inaction. It requires patience; discipline to and faith in the favorable outcome you've been waiting for, whatever it may be, will due soon. Recall Penelope from the Odyssey, who waited decades for her husband Odysseus to return from the Trojan War, all the while warding off advances from 108 "odious suitors" (according to the wiki).

But it's much more difficult to pull off in practice, especially living in a society that often emphasizes action over thoughtful, careful contemplation; brawn over brains and the triumph of win-at-all-cost. Yet even I have the pang of restlessness; of disatisfaction with what is, but too unnerved to act if action would ruin the chances of achieving what I seek.

And so I'm waiting, much as I've always had, for good or naught. Acting by not acting, hoping for the best, expecting the worst, haunted by the infinite possiblilities of what may have been and taking solace in the familiar.

It reminds me of Carl, the old protagonist of Pixar's "Up" and the film's heartbreaking first act. But that's a story for next week (after I see the rest of the movie -- the cinema had a blackout during my screening...).

Why Bottle Shock (2008) is a pretty bad movie

2009-06-23T19:49:00.003+08:00

Bottle Shock tells the story of two upstart California wines that trumped their more established French counterparts at a supposedly historic blind tasting in Paris in 1976.

The California set are represented by Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman), a San Franciso lawyer turned vinter and his hippy son Bo and their employee Gustavo (his father was a field hand and Gustavo has soil and grapes inscribed deep in his DNA and brain circuitry. I hope they donate his mutant brain to science). They are joined by Sam – an intern who everybody assumed would be a man but she proves to be a bonafide blondie starlet type, wearing what she thinks a 70s person would wear. She also features in the films’s most clichéd scenes.

There are two other key characters: A British wine dealer, Steven Spurrier, who wants to find a way in to the snobby world of French wine expertise and his friend, Maurice, an expat from Milwaukee. Spurrier is the founder of Academie du Vin – an outfit that purports to educate the palate of philistines. He perhaps delivers one of only two convincing lines in the whole film—I’ll get to that later.

Maurice convinces Spurrier that he must try the wines from California and let the Frenchies test them as a way of garnering some publicity for his academie. So Spurrier sets off to California and we next see him with a flat tire on the way to Napa Valley. Quite predictably, Jim Barrett happens to be driving by and they have a brief discussion about wine where Spurrier succeeds in annoying Barrett.

At least their animosity leads to this very convincing exchange later on in the film:

“Jim Barrett: Why don't I like you?

Steven Spurrier: Because you think I'm an arsehole. And I'm not, really. I'm just British and, well... you're not.”

But other than this clever piece of dialogue and many long shots of sun-kissed Napa valley grapes on vine, this film feels like a roughly drawn caricature of a really good story. It has an inherent flakiness from the get-go that flattens even the deep philosophies that it seeks to propagate about wine.

Remember that scene in Sideways where a softly glowing Virginia Marsden tells Paul Giamatti why she loves wine? Well, Bottle Shock tries something similar in the scene where Barrett discovers that Gustavo is secretly making his own wine and fires him. It’s supposed to be moving but it just made me roll my eyes.

“Gustavo Brambila: You people, you think you can just buy your way into this. You cannot do it that way.

Jim Barrett: Alright...

Gustavo Brambila: You have to have it in your blood, you have to grow up with the soil underneath your nails, the smell of the grapes in the air that you breathe. The cultivation of the vine was an art form. The refinement of the vine is a religion that requires pain and desire and sacrifice.”

The refinement of the vine is a religion? No amount of labored handwringing by even poor Freddy Rodriguez, who is actually a very talented actor, could rescue this bit of screenwriting.

I’ve decided to stop my review here and tell you that reading AO Scott’s review of the film in the New York Times was more fun than watching the film itself. I particularly liked his conclusion which borrows from wine-snob terminology. I wish I had thought of reviewing this film in similar terms but I didn’t, so I might as well quote Monsieur Scott.

“The filmmakers struggle to shoehorn a fascinating story about wine into some kind of screen genre or another. But Bottle Shock is unable to figure out what kind of movie it wants to be, and flops around between madcap comedy and rousing drama. To borrow a wine-snob term of art, it lacks structure. Or, to push the idiom a little further, it’s a little too sweet, with some pleasantly nutty notes and a baloney finish.”

Dispatches from the Couch

2009-06-22T22:56:00.005+08:00

By Eugene Tong

A feng shui master recently divined what's troubling HSBC, which has seen its stock price tumble by at least 1/3 on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange from a year ago. And it's not overexposure to sub-prime mortgage-backed securities!

Apparently the REAL culprit is the West Kowloon -- a residential and office high-rise office development constructed on reclaimed land jutting out into Victoria Harbor. That project, along with the demolition of the old Hong Kong Star Ferry Terminal two years ago has jacked-up the wealth feng shui around the bank's headquarters. And the bad luck is supposed to last at least two years.

As for Singapore, if you think the economy is bad now, it could've been worse if it weren't for the Merlion! That beacon to millions of tourists looking for the best staged scenic photo in town took one for the home team when it was struck by lightning all those months ago. But it's still standing proud and spewing water into the mouth of the river, despite the slight singe. A good omen in these tough times.

Way to go, Ministry of Tourism!

Wednesdays with We Gang

2009-06-19T19:49:00.019+08:00

My good friend Roger Chiaw and I were out one February evening in Little India drinking beer in the dive next to the Prince of Wales, where you get cloudy naans studded with more minced garlic than is civilised.

Ben Harrison of Etcetera joined us and over glasses of strong, cold beer I told them about the Hindustani music I had learned as a child. I was sad I didn’t sing or play an instrument any more when so many of my formative years were immersed in music—in learning, studying or practicing it.

My parents were music-mad and we grew up listening to Bhimsen Joshi and Kishori Amonkar on one of those grand wooden radiograms that looked like a long, ornate sideboard. It was a ritual we all assembled for watching my father as he pushed open the wooden doors to reveal velvet-lined insides.

And then when I was about 10 or 11, I heard pop music for the first time. Abba and Boney M. I remember thinking it was like hearing ice-cream.

Anyway, back to the present. Ben suggested I get in touch with his friend Adrian, who was looking for singers –possibly for back-up vocals. After a couple of text messages and so forth, I finally went to meet Adrian and his gang on a Wednesday evening at their weekly rehearsal space — Bob’s Studio near Lavender MRT.

This studio is in someone’s apartment. It’s a room that is painted blood red and decorated with old mannequins that function as lights and a couple of framed posters of Portishead, Jamiroquai, The Velvet Underground..that sort of thing. There are people going about their lives as you walk in. A cat is also usually circling about looking for a leg to rub its head on.

We Gang and I. It was instant connection at first song. And I haven’t missed a Wednesday since. How can I explain the joy of rolling up at Bob’s studio on Wednesdays, tired from work but bright-eyed about being in a band?

Adrian, Bradley, Grace, Gerry and Goo are warm, funny and about the most down-to-earth people I’ve ever met, apart from the fact that they are so hugely talented. I know, I know. I’m gushing but meeting them and being part of their band is the most wonderful thing that’s happened to me lately. They don’t take themselves too seriously, which makes for interesting rehearsals. “Not like that, lah” Adrian will say or simply collapse in laughter when it is like that or we keep getting something wrong.

We meet for a meal earlier if we can, and some of us talk about work, some offer conspiracy theories while Grace usually says something obscene. I ask for a bottle of water and the coffee shop man always tells me with a serious expression that it costs 3,700 singapore dollars. I laugh every time.

If I pull a long face, as is my wont, there are questions, “You kena stress? Your boss kena scold you?” (kena is Singlish for 'something has happened.' I like it. If I got an injection, for instance, I’d say, wah lau, I kena jab”)

The picture you see here is the one Grace took of me during the last week’s rehearsals. I’m barefoot in the studio and I’m happy.

(Sincere thanks to Roger and Ben for making this happen)

For obscenity, against pornography

2009-06-18T15:14:00.003+08:00

This is a great rambling interview with Henry Miller -- part of The Paris Review series of interviews with writers.

“I believe in saying the truth, coming out with it cold, shocking if necessary, not disguising it. In other words, obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.”

Reportercat finds real friend in Afrorat

2009-06-17T18:37:00.007+08:00

So who are your real friends and how came they to be your friends?
The Wall Street Journal has a wonderful article on the role of friendship and intimacy in keeping us healthy.
Despite all my wandering gypsy years, I feel very lucky to have friendships that have transcended time/space constraints. I’m still in touch with a girl I was best friends with when I was about seven or eight years old. She and I have led very different lives but the mad silly rush of a friendship built on cycling around Bangalore, trading Amar Chitra Katha comics, Tintin and Asterix, has never really faded.
So now, even though we only talk every few months, there is never any dressing up of our lives. We are entirely transparent to each other in a way that you can only be to someone who has known you since you were a child.
Two of my closest friends (these friendships were sealed in a Bombay hostel and later in California) have moved, married and become mothers and we go years without seeing each other but phone calls and emails fill the gaps. These changes have done little to detract from the things we share.
And I’m blessed with my men friends too. One is a former colleague and we started off as ‘first-day-first-show friends,’ meaning we were both eager to see the latest Bollywood release. Over the last decade, this friendship has turned into a rambling old conversation that endures through my journeys west and far-east, despite significant differences in ideologies and beliefs.
And along the way, I have made some new and very dear friends. But some of these friendships have also been hurtful and downright painful. They’ve forced me to acknowledge that a true friend is hard to come by. I now have a few rules when it comes to identifying a truly close friend (as opposed to facebook folk and acquaintances)
As rules go, they’re simple and fairly obvious. But I might as well state them for the record: A true friend will pick up the phone if I call, will listen, will return call if he/she misses it, will initiate call/email/or some form of contact periodically. I can talk, cry and be vulnerable without fear of one-upmanship or competition with this person. I can actually depend on this person for an honest exchange of thoughts and ideas.
I’m so grateful that there are many such people in my life. I want to celebrate them with two poems I like very much. One is by Shakespeare and the other is a wonderful couplet by Mirza Ghalib.

Sonnet 30
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

Ghalib is a little darker, but that is his strength. He says:

yih kahaan kii dostii hai kih bane hain dost naasih
koii chaarah-saaz hotaa koii Gam-guzaar hotaa

This roughly translates as: “What kind of friendship is this where friends turn advisors?
I only wish for someone to walk with me, to help, perhaps, to sympathise”

(Photo details: Many thanks to Reportercat and his beloved friend Afrorat for posing so nicely)

"It's Still Sunday Where I Am," Eugene says

2009-06-15T12:59:00.006+08:00

Dispatches From The Couch

By Eugene Tong

Sorry for the delay -- I blame the time difference between S'pore and Cali. It's still Sunday, and I just watched the Lakers win another NBA title, this time against the Orlando Magic. The Lakers won on the road, which means those looking to overturn and torch police cars on Figueroa tonight will be disappointed.
I've been on break since leaving my newsroom job last August. In fact, I've hardly strung together a sentence for at least 21 months. As I write this, I'm waiting for my new TV obsession -- Kendra! Hef's girlfriend from The Girls Next Door is now on her own and planning her wedding! The 24-year-old is quite a character and has little inhibition before the cameras, which makes the show deliciously trashy. Her straight-man fiance Hank Baskett provides the yang to her yin.
Yes, I've filled most my unemployment down time with TV, especially junk TV, and I don't feel an ounce a guilt about it. Another recent favorite -- Deadliest Warrior -- a pseudo documentary that has been described as a bar argument taken a little too far. Like who would win in a fight between a Ninja and a Spartan warrior? How about the IRA vs. Taliban? The answers may surprise you!

And in between bad TV that's soooo entertaining -- there's the Internet! A recent tip from my cousin Andrew: AsianPoses! Mystified by why we flash the V sign with our fingers while posing for photos in before exotic landmarks? Now you shall have your answer!
So here's the first post. Not exactly poetry, yet. But in a few weeks, who knows?

Area woman wonders where her weekend went

2009-06-14T11:58:00.016+08:00

Oh look, it's Monday again. Eugene's guest post will be here soon. It is meant to inaugurate the opening up of this space to guest bloggers. New week, new voices. Oh and about last week-- well, it rushed past me in customary, tubular speed. I'm not going to attempt to describe it in detail. But here are salient features of time just elapsed:

Highlight of the week: Met former boss lady from the daily newspaper that I worked at. She left over a year ago for the US. This meant a most wonderful reunion with her and other friends from the days when I was a real reportergirl. Anyway, over drinks and dinner, the couple at the table behind us were notable for the frequency at which they leaned across the table to lock eyes and mouths in passionate kisses. The cynical journalists among us prompted bets -"It's the first month of togetherness." And one of us was so audacious as to go up to them and proceed to flatter them about how very sweet they were and then get the required information. They took it in good spirit (bless them) and yes, the cynical journalists won. It was the first month. In fact, the man, who at one point was licking chocolate off the lady's fingers, added another dimension to the proceedings when he told my friend. "Her husband doesn't know she's here."

World Science Festival: Monday is here but I wish I was at the World Science Festival in New York. I would have liked to hear Edward O. Wilson to talk about sociobiology and hear about the evolutionary explanations of morality. There is much controversy about this whole issue and I would like to understand it all better.

My fledgling music career: About three months ago, or maybe four, I started singing with a local band who are absolutely wonderful. Name and myspace details will be forthcoming soon. Last Wednesday, we pretty much sealed up a song I've written-that we've been playing around with for a while. We're going to record some of these new songs this week and I'm very excited about that!

The Life of Your Mind: This is a link to a very good essay in n+1 which actually inspired last Monday's column. I failed to credit it so this is a way of making reparations. Some of the blogging conventions are irritating though, no? A link-heavy blog post is quite idiotic in some ways. I feel as if I'm saying, "Oh I think its a really good idea for you to start reading a whole different article right in the middle of what I'm saying."

I'm hyperlinked and hypertexted and hypertired so I had best shut up for now.

There is so much good poetry in the world...

2009-06-11T22:05:00.004+08:00

...and there is so much I've yet to read and still I attempt to write. Really, I have to shake my head at my own optimism.

I've posted the work of Kim Addonizio here before. I've shared this one with a few friends, but thought I'd just post it here too.

I like how raw it is...I particularly adore these lines: "You know/where she's headed, you know she'll wake up/with an ache she can't locate and no money/and a terrible thirst"

You Don't Know What Love Is

You don't know what love is

but you know how to raise it in me

like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to

wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.

How to start clean. This love even sits up

and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.

Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want

to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive

to some cinderblock shithole in the desert

where she can drink and get sick and then

dance in nothing but her underwear. You know

where she's headed, you know she'll wake up

with an ache she can't locate and no money

and a terrible thirst. So to hell

with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt

and your tongue down my throat

like an oxygen tube. Cover me

in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

The Politics of Prizes

2009-06-09T21:14:00.003+08:00

Robert Lee Hotz has written an excellent column in The Wall Street Journal about the new wave of science prizes that drive innovation while also achieving a kind of stealth advertising.

Mr Hotz says that prizes may soon rival traditional research grants that spurred innovation. This is interesting but what really got my attention was a passing reference to James F. English, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who has written a book called 'The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and Circulation of Cultural Value.' I was able to find parts of the book on Google books so you can look for it there. I had a quick look (will have to buy the book) and took down these notes which I'll share here.

"The rise of prizes over the last century, especially their feverish proliferation over recent decades is widely seen as one of the more glaring symptoms of a consumer society run rampant, a society that can conceive of artistic achievement only in terms of stardom and success and that is fast replacing a rich and varied cultural world with a shallow and homogeneous McCulture based on the model of network TV."

Welcome to my new weekly column

2009-06-08T18:09:00.010+08:00

Dear reader,

This is a new weekly column to light up my own Monday.
It's called ‘Monday Is Here But I’m Elsewhere.’ Please note that I welcome guest writers and contributors. If you are a regular reader, you may support my suspect edifice by volunteering to write one of these columns.
You may also propose alternative titles for this Monday column such as the 'Monday's Putrid Monologue' or 'Monday is Not Really Manic, It's Like Any Other Day, So Please Just Shut Up About It'. Feel free.
This project is free of grand purpose. It’s fun for me and I hope I don’t bore you to tears.
If you'd like to contribute, please get in touch.
Cheers,
Reportergirl

Monday Is Here But I’m Elsewhere

I’m back in 1996, when I sent and received my first e-mail. I remember being nervous in the cybercafé where this monumental event occurred and somewhat awestruck by the sheer speed of communication. Just a week into the world of email, the little red postbox in Sadashivanagar began to look quaint and old-world to me.

And now a decade later, I routinely say yes to facebook friends with not much thought, I put up breezy status updates (sincere but not too self-revelatory). I instant-share inane thoughts on twitter and I record longer observations here on this blog.

But what has really changed is my increasing susceptibility to communication. By sheer dint of its availability, I now have the ability to reach out and be reached by an ever-widening circle of people. Here’s a list of all the ways in which you can reach me, read me, follow me and affect me.

1) My Blog
2) My Twitter Account
3) Facebook
4) Gmail
5) Work mail
6) Mobile Phone (And because I have an iphone, I can access all the above on my phone and listen to music at the same time)

Surely, this level of message sending and getting is altering my neuronal circuitry in permanent ways. I already feel the effects of having so many pulls on my attention. I’m less able to focus completely on a given task. I’m highly susceptible to distraction. I used be fairly disciplined but now, I feel like one of those rats in a Skinner experiment, constantly pushing the lever for an instant fix of some salty, deep-fried thing (new content, new music, new news).

Another problem with all this connectedness is that one seems to teeter on the edge of more and more self-revelation. It feels to me like I’m always on the brink of saying/writing something in public (or to people I don’t know all that well) that is better off kept private. (Even if it’s some inane thing like having dirt under my fingernails, I’m now broadcasting it to more than a 100 people including work colleagues and clients)

There are even new words for this sort of thing. ‘Oversharing’ and ‘semiotic promiscuity’ are just two of the terms I’ve recently encountered and immediately liked, for they confirm vague experiences I didn’t necessarily have a name for.

I love all the advantages of this brave new internet world and the easy access to a ready audience of friends and acquaintances. But there is also now, in me, a slow but sure rebellion. As the e-brevity of communication sharpens, I find myself equally drawn to long form e-mails that quite faithfully mimic traditional letter-writing. I adore the ornateness of salutations and sign-offs, of emotions recollected, rather than instantly transmitted over chat. There is a formality of expression in e-letters that seems almost as quaint now as that little red postbox.

In fact, in what is a sure reaction to the extreme functional and casual nature of most online exchange, I find myself writing long e-mails. It’s not that I’m rosy eyed about the past—or believe that things were vastly better then. I’m quite aware that nostalgia is a sentimental trickster. Maybe I’m just a little scared of these trendy new changes, a tad suspicious of all this connectedness. And maybe, I’m looking for some rules and conventions and a return to mental discipline where there seems to be none.

What do you think? How have all these technologies affected you? I’d love to hear about it.

Mad man on wire

2009-06-07T22:26:00.011+08:00

I've come sadly to the end of Sunday but I'm still thinking about the documentary I watched on Friday. Man on Wire is a film about Philippe Petit, the tightrope walker/artist/clean out of his mind Frenchman and his equally deranged friends who helped him plan and execute illegal acts of amazing and completely surreal acrobatics.

I mean, just look at this photograph. The man sneaked up there with his friends on several occasions and studied how to tie a cable between the twin towers and walked across it eight times. At various times during this insane walk, he lay down on the rope. I have never seen anything like it. The fact that any person could conjure up such a dream, let alone achieve it, is completely mind boggling.

In telling Petit's story, the film manages to be wonderful and funny, sad yet inspiring and leaves you shaking your head in disbelief long after you've seen it. Awestruck, insane, unbelievable--these are the words that come to mind.

Oh the devil take me, I'm not doing the film much justice with my words, but really, just go watch it.

I wrote this two years ago...

2009-05-30T11:35:00.003+08:00

Extinct

The last angry scream

was heard in circa three zero one six,

said the Committee For Conservation

Of Emotional Diversity.

Plundered by Prozac,

anger management

and breathing skills,

it died at the turn of the century.

In its place, it spawned

a new religion of deep inhalers,

whose bodies were temples,

who ate low-fat meals.

Its demise was recorded

in the Extinct Emotion Registry,

created by a concerned few

in circa two zero seventy

to preserve all that was

lost or deleted,

when megachips decoded

genomic anomalies,

faulty circuitry,

marginal incongruities,

and scrambled

the infinite capacity

that humans had for error.

©Reportergirl 9.01.07

Loose Change

2009-05-11T13:24:00.008+08:00

For Anoopa, in response to Paper Money

Being alone can take you

to the doorstep

of any of the many

unsuitable men on this planet.

So while being alone

builds character,

it also breaks it. Yes,

this is the sound I make

as I eat my own words.

Being alone builds character.

I must have said that in the afternoon,

while still optimistic,

before the evening broke me

with its soft blows.

I nursed my drink and a city I once knew,

felt my way around it like we all did,

faltering, wanting something,

or someone.

©Reportergirl 10.05.09

Andrew Motion talks about his poetry

2009-05-08T10:27:00.003+08:00

I liked this poem by Andew Motion....and what he says about his poetry. "My poems are the product of a relationship between a side of my mind which is conscious, alert, educated and manipulative, and a side which is as murky as a primaeval swamp. I can't predict when this relationship will flower. If I try to goad it into existence I merely engage with one side of my mind or the other, and the poem suffers.
I want my writing to be as clear as water. No ornate language; very few obvious tricks. I want readers to be able to see all the way down through its surfaces into the swamp. I want them to feel they're in a world they thought they knew, but which turns out to be stranger, more charged, more disturbed than they realised. In truth, creating this world is a more theatrical operation than the writing admits, and it's this discretion about strong feeling, and strong feeling itself, which keeps drawing me back to the writers I most admire: Wordsworth, Edward Thomas, Philip Larkin."

Couplings, decouplings plus one

2009-05-02T22:50:00.006+08:00

I chanced upon the work of Maria Legault -a performance artist who is based in Toronto-- on Facebook of all places. All I did was click on a link for a photo album titled 'Memories of my Ex'--which I thought was an unusual title. The album was so compelling in its beauty. Maria poses with her lover-- a home-crafted life-size doll with a somewhat wistful expression.

So Maria and lover, whose name is Plus One are at the beach, they're getting married, they're kissing, they're on honeymoon --they enact all the public rituals of courtship.

In her artistic statement, Maria says: "The futility of this romantic debauchery aims to explore the structures, boundaries and conventions of love relationships. Plus One embodies the surrogate lover, the transitional object that is an ideal ground for romantic projection. I use his uncanniness to paradoxically deconstruct love taboos while still indulging in their beauty and romanticism."

The results are astonishing. I found the photographs so lyrical and moving. This one here, photographed by Beni Kori, took my breath away...To see the entire project, go here:http://www.mariaplusone.com/

I thought about why this made such an impression on me and I realised there are several reasons. One is of course, coincidence. I stumbled across this just when I was thinking about the commercialisation of couplehood and certain frozen gestures of courtship and how they translate in social media. Come to think of it, the public image of couplehood and what constitutes it are pretty standard even though there are as many different types of being a couple as there are people.

Another reason this appealed to me was because I had also just read a column about the somewhat unrealistic expectations we have of our lovers. (I have two favourite agony aunt columnists--one is Mariella Frostrup who writes for The Guardian and the other is Cary Tennis for Salon). The clever Ms Frostrup tells a bored wife: "We expect a lot of our romantic unions these days - continuing romance, fulfilment, great sex, solid support, procreation, equal duties, selfless devotion, high-octane excitement, stability, longevity, unpredictability. You don't have to study that list for long to see how unachievable it is in its entirety."

So coming as it did, immediately after these thoughts and readings, Maria Legault's work seemed all the more relevant and wonderfully refreshing.

Book Impressions

2009-04-17T21:32:00.003+08:00

The formality of the book review is a great thing but I must confess that I'm obsessed with copying down passages that resonate with me. I feel pretty anxious if I don't preserve a fragment or paragraph somewhere because it is a way of cataloguing the book in my brain. I hope to contruct an uneven and long trail of found words--fictional accounts that reflect some of my realities and the equal and opposing truths that make our world both bleak and wonderful. I recently read two very good books--The Gathering by Anne Enright and The Sorrows of An American by Siri Hustvedt.

The Gathering is a book of immense power. Both were gifts from my permanent housemate -- the first he found while he was away in Delhi and the second, here in Singapore. He has my eternal gratitude for introducing me to Enright's wonderful writing. Here is a paragraph I felt compelled to copy. I haven't put it in a notebook yet like I usually do, but recording it on this blog seems to assuage the anxiety of losing track of it.

"There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick."

Siri Hustvedt's 'What I Loved' is a stunning book so I had great expectations for her newest book, 'The Sorrows of An American'. She explores psychotherapy and neurological machinations as well as the compulsion to document, exhibit and reveal. My only quarrels with this book were a couple of almost made-for-Hollywood type climactic scenarios. That said, it is a great read and this bit stayed with me. It is so, so brilliant:

"I've often thought none of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalises the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions."

It's a mad, mad world

2009-04-15T11:18:00.007+08:00

Is it a sign of a feeble mind to latch on to a song by Tears for Fears in the un-ending sameness that is the inside of a mall? I walk around the giant mall I work next to and I'm always reminded of these words; "All around me are familiar faces/Worn out places, worn out faces/Bright and early for their daily races/Going nowhere, going nowhere."

I look at the store windows and there are so many ugly clothes that money can buy and think that it is just as well I don't really have all that much money, right now at least. Think of it; Grey leopard print tights, leopard print bra with underwiring hard enough to cut the soft skin that usually covers a woman’s ribs. Even if she has unfortunate taste in clothes, it is too harsh a punishment.

It is all rather absurd--the shiny floors of shops, the too-bright lights and the made-up salesgirls with the fake, glued-on, too-impossibly-thick caterpillar eyelashes and the for-sale signs and the everything-must-go loudness of the piped-in muzak that surrounds my head as it registers 'Made in China,’ 'Made in China' and ' Made in China ' labels all around the Disneyland wondering, wondering, wondering how many hours somebody worked to deliver this batch of clothes or those shoes and these bags and how much they got paid and what percentage mark-up and why am I wandering about here with my aching feet on ill-thought high heels when I won’t buy anything and what if I do buy that foxy grey top with the metal sequins that nobody over 25 should rightly attempt to wear, what would that choice make me? An easily-influenced, insecure woman who is responding excellently to all the advertisements that urge her to cling desperately to the vestiges of girlhood, that's what.

Turns out that maybe, just today, I know better than to be that woman. That's the great thing about growing older. Some of us really do get wiser, even if wisdom only strikes momentarily, like clear lightning, disappearing swiftly again into clouds of unreason.

Reportercat catches something

2009-03-08T21:07:00.003+08:00

Weekend entertainment. I'm guessing these need no further elaboration

Rumour has it...

2009-02-09T23:13:00.007+08:00

Dear all who read this blog and know that my mission is to commit acts of poetry (sometimes maudlin), lo and behold my latest creation. Starship, you can take me back now as I have accomplished my mission.

Flowers

I don’t know where I went

in that blue night,

I walked an uneasy road

and found some scattered seeds,

I gathered up and took to bed.

They grew wild

in my sleep,

spread rumours of flowers

in the morning breeze.

Best Descriptions of Bad Acting

2009-02-09T22:49:00.003+08:00

I spoke to the walking wounded in my home town on Sunday and he used a rather original metaphor to describe the overwrought quality particular to the writing of many Indian hacks. "Like child actors in Hindi films, always over-acting." This made me laugh a great deal because its one of those images that makes sense immediately.

There is much joy to be taken in particularly bad acting--I feel great awe that I'm being allowed a special glimpse into the construction of a persona, the struggle to assemble it and the spectacular ways in which it can fail. I like being able to identify the inauthenticities in the expressions of a truly bad actor because then it increases your appreciation for the actor who is accomplished and nuanced.

I want to take the chance here to include a brilliant description of particularly bad acting by Nancy Franklin, who recently reviewed a television series called 'The Beast' for The New Yorker. She says of the actor Travis Fimmel: "His expressions are those of a person whose face itches but whose hands are tied, and all he can do is twitch until the feeling goes away."

The Holding Space of Words Set To Meter

2009-02-09T22:24:00.010+08:00

Kim Addonizio's poetic voice moves me. This is a woman who writes like she has been singed by hell's fires and then immediately dipped in cool waters--she writes with the kind of balance only a woman who is well aware of Newton's Third Law of Propulsion. You know the one? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So Ms Addonizio writes with the fervour of someone who has known the equal and opposite sides of luck, like somebody whose pain breaks inside her every so often like beads from some torn string and reassembles mysteriously once again. This poem is one of my favourites:

The Numbers

How many nights have I lain here like this, feverish with plans,

with fears, with the last sentence someone spoke, still trying to finish

a conversation already over? How many nights were wasted

in not sleeping, how many in sleep—I don’t know

how many hungers there are, how much radiance or salt, how

many times

the world breaks apart, disintegrates to nothing and starts up again

in the course of an ordinary hour. I don’t know how God can bear

seeing everything at once: the falling bodies, the monuments and

burnings,

the lovers pacing the floors of how many locked hearts. I want

to close

my eyes and find a quiet field in fog, a few sheep moving toward

a fence.

I want to count them, I want them to end. I don’t want to wonder

how many people are sitting in restaurants about to close down,

which of them will wander the sidewalks all night

while the pies revolve in the refrigerated dark. How many days

are left of my life, how much does it matter if I manage to say

one true thing about it—how often have I tried, how often

failed and fallen into depression? The field is wet, each grassblade

gleaming with its own particularity, even here, so that I can’t help

asking again, the white sky filling with footprints, bricks,

with mutterings over rosaries, with hands that pass over flames

before covering the eyes. I’m tired, I want to rest now.

I want to kiss the body of my lover, the one mouth, the simple

name

without a shadow. Let me go. How many prayers

are there tonight, how many of us must stay awake and listen?

Cultivating Solitude

2009-02-09T21:57:00.005+08:00

You need a lot of discipline to cultivate solitude. To plant the seeds of it, you need not to watch TV, you need not to blog or send out too many texts or check your facebook account or update it.

You need to find some time where you are alone and you are not reaching out to anybody or anything. You can be an observer and not really report it to anybody. I kind of did it on Friday night and most of Saturday and the results were interesting. I find it made me calmer, it balanced my approach to things and has now rendered me annoyingly self congratulatory.

I was inspired by an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education by William Deresiewicz, who says that the contemporary self is most scared of anonymity. His theory is very sound--he says our need to be connected is also the need to be visible. So when we post our photographs on facebook or when I write on this blog, it validates me. In his words:

"This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility"

I recommend reading the article in its entirety but what was particularly valuable to me was this concluding paragraph:

"A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive — though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity. How many friends do I have on Facebook? How many people are reading my blog? How many Google hits does my name generate? Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection. Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone."

Everything worth saying has already been said

2008-12-23T19:21:00.003+08:00

And everything worth writing has also been written. Why am I persisting with this blog then? I don't know. Today, I just wanted to say that 'Things We Lost in The Fire' is a great film mostly because Benicio Del Toro is the risen lord of subtlety in it. He is so nuanced and accurate that you can't stop watching him. He plays Jerry, a former lawyer with a heroin habit. You wait for him to dissemble and you wait for him to recover and you watch him watch his best friend's wife, Audrey, played by Halle Berry. There, that's my review. Anything more and I'll give away the film.

Another film I liked recently was 'Love Me If You Dare'(Jeux d'enfants) -- with its crazed young protagonists, Julien and Sophie, who grow up into equally crazed lovelorn adults with an obsession for a childhood game. The best scene has the heroine (on a bet) wearing her underwear on top of her clothes for an exam. Weird as anything, but so good because their love, honest as it is, is sociopathic, as love sometimes is.

I know, my reviews are sketchy today. So am I, dear reader, so am I.

Small unidentified happenings

2008-12-22T23:25:00.004+08:00

I love the little UFO moments in life where someone or something so utterly random crosses your path so as to be life affirming. Such a very thing happened to me today, dear reader. I was in Little India looking for a large sponge or a broom handle attached to one of those squeegee things. I stopped at one stellar shop which had populated the footpath with a constellation of aluminium utensils and plastic buckets of varying sizes and colours. I walked into the tube-lit store and found the ownerman who had one good eye and another eye which looked like a large white, carved marble. He stood up and said "yes, hello?."

I said, "Hello, do you have one of those large sponges? Or those mops with a sponge, you know, to soak up standing water?"

He thought about it for a second and then he said, "No. I don't have that. But I have rope."

A good word for self doubt

2008-12-22T23:06:00.004+08:00

There's so much literature out there telling everybody to feel good that we have no idea how to feel bad. For once, I read something that acknowledged this problem. Richard Friedman, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, writes in the NYTimes today, "The challenge of maintaining one’s self-esteem without recognition or reward is daunting. Chances are that if you are impervious to self-doubt and go on feeling good about yourself in the face of failure, you have either won the temperamental sweepstakes or you have a real problem tolerating bad news."

Messy Lives

2008-12-22T22:54:00.004+08:00

You know, it has been quiet around here for months now. I've toured the districts and come full circle. Back on the island and happy to be here. Well, happy isn't entirely accurate. But are words really accurate barometers of feelings? Behold the slippery slope of semantics as I struggle to name the feeling and fail.

Anyway, the real reason I'm writing is to link to a profile of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is one of my favourite actors. I think of him as Capote and then as Freddie Miles in The Talented Mr Ripley and a whole host of other roles, and think how completely he inhabits his characters.

Here's a paragraph from it that I particularly liked:

"What’s so essential about this movie is our desire to be certain about something and say, This is what I believe is right, wrong, black, white. That’s it. To feel confident that you can wake up and live your day and be proud instead of living in what’s really true, which is the whole mess that the world is. The world is hard, and John is saying that being a human on this earth is a complicated, messy thing.” Hoffman paused again. “And I, personally, am uncomfortable with that messiness, just as I acknowledge its absolute necessity."

The magic of the southern skies

2008-09-14T18:12:00.009+08:00

One of the great things about being in the southern hemisphere and somewhere semi-rural is the fact that the night sky is so different to what I'm used to. The light pollution is negligible on the hillside where we live and on a clear night, the sky is a cascade of stars.

I still find myself looking for Polaris out of habit, but realise that New Zealand is too far down for that. Here, you can see the Southern Cross shining bright and clear.

Anyway, the real story is that on Friday night, we went down to the Ward Observatory in Wanganui, which houses New Zealand's largest unmodified refractor telescope. The Wanganui Astronomical Society opens the observatory up for public viewings every Friday after sunset. I went up into the darkened dome and said hello to the people there and we exchanged names and pleasantries even though we couldn't see each other's faces. They were knowledgeable old men who had been looking at the southern skies for years.

The first thing I saw through the telescope was the craggy and dimpled surface of the moon. This was followed by a view of Jupiter and his handsome stripes. I also saw Jupiter's moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. But what made the evening special was the eerie red light in the darkness of the observatory and meeting the members of the astronomical society. They spoke so passionately about the hundreds of volcanoes on Io and dispensed many other bits of celestial gossip...it was the most fun I've had while also learning a lot about deep space and the intricacies of telescopes.

Movie night and teary eyes

2008-09-11T08:16:00.013+08:00

La Vie Revee des Anges or The Dreamlife of Angels is the name of the extraordinary French film that had me weeping copiously into my oversize grey fleece last night. We borrowed it from the Wanganui Library, where I have spent some happy afternoons. And I digress. The story is simple enough but the treatment is complex. Two penniless girls, Marie and Isa, befriend each other at a sweatshop. Director Eric Zoncka, who co-authored the script, manages to portray all the intricacies of friendship; mutual need, exploitation and camaraderie. Elodie Bouchez plays Isa, the tomboyish optimist who approaches even her destitution with a certain madcap exuberance. Natacha Regneir plays Marie, a pessimist who is too afraid to need people. Still, she lets Isa into her life and the flat that she is housesitting for a mother and daughter who are in hospital after an accident. Together, Marie and Isa find that their hard lives, devoid of prospects, are made somewhat better by company. Friction is never far from their interactions though. Isa starts reading the diaries that belong to Sandrine, the room's original occupant, who now lies in a coma. She is moved enough to visit the comatose girl while Marie worries about when they might have to move out. Despite their obvious personality differences, the girls continue to comfort each other. Isa drags Marie to places she may have never gone, given her introversion. They manage to charm a couple of bouncers, Fredo and Charly, to gain entry into a club. I particularly liked the character of the Charly, the overweight bouncer who doesn't think he's fat. He's a gentle and wise giant who would have taken care of Marie if she'd let him. But Marie gets involved with his boss, a rich brat who sees her as an interesting diversion. This is where it gets ugly. Marie finds she can't let go of the brat, much as she dislikes him. What's evident is that through all their situations, the girls are by turn exploiters and by turn, the exploited. And yet, there is a sad hopefulness to them which I found all too human and honest and it stayed with me. Wasn't surprised to learn that they both shared the Best Actress Award at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.

The best thing about walking...

2008-09-09T18:32:00.007+08:00

Walking around this town makes me happy. There is the quiet road by the river and the slip roads in the park by Virginia Lake. There are the old trees and dogs that come bounding up to you. A golden retriever appeared today wagging its tail at me and walked alongside for a while. Ducks came up to the entrance of our house the other day, it was amazing. Today, I was out walking for most of the evening. I watched the orange evening light turn into blue and inky black. The stars started to appear quite quickly in that pointillist way they do sometimes. I had the cold evening breeze on my face and I walked homewards. I thought of a paragraph from the book I'm reading. "Our lives spent in rooms, our imaginations and outlooks framed by windows--by concepts, logic, language--most of us continue to think of nature as a place to visit, wearing sunscreen and suitable protective clothing. Visitors in the museum of the great outdoors." (The book I'm reading is called The Picador Nature Reader and is edited by Daniel Halpern and Dan Frank)

The consolations of poetry

2008-08-13T07:01:00.006+08:00

Things hardly ever go as planned, especially big things and that's why there is poetry. Sometimes, there is much solace in words, not action. All it takes is a couch, a page with a few lines, a rhyme, a metaphor and suddenly the view changes. I discovered Urdu poetry on my trip back home this time, thanks to the man who has no name. I'm barely fluent in Hindi but I'm quite taken with Urdu's old world charms and wish I had learned Urdu in school. The men who write these poems seem to be posessed with an intelligence measured by self-deprecation and an appreciation for the absurdities of life. For instance, look at this couplet, which is among my favourite lines by Mirza Ghalib:

"Ranj se xuugar huaa insaan, toh mit jaataa hai ranj

mushkilen mujh par padi itnii, kih aasaaN ho gaiin"

This roughly translates as 'When a person becomes accustomed to grief, then grief is erased/ The difficulties that fell upon me were so many, that it became easy.'

It's a wry and useful way of looking at a series of misfortunes and it invariably makes me laugh at my troubles, varied as they may be.

Lost and Found

2008-07-17T12:13:00.005+08:00

After two months of being lost in transition, I finally find myself in Wanganui, New Zealand. The Singapore shipment arrived shortly after I did, so now I am unpacking the boxes while the man I am married to is off at work. It's cold here but not at all gloomy. People are accessible in a way that is real, immediate and reassuring. And the thing that grabs straight away, is an unfailing sense of humour that crops up in the most unexpected of places. I went to Good Year Tyres today to replace a punctured tyre on our rental car. A handwritten sign said, "Please be patient. I only work here because I'm too old for the paper run, too young for the pension and too tired to have an affair." On a previous visit, the River City Cabs taxi driver who was driving me up the main street asked if I was newly wed. I said I wasn't and his reply? "Well, I like to say that Wanganui is a town for newly-weds or nearly-deads. So if you're in the middle, good luck to you miss." Yes, I'm here and I'm much in the middle so good luck to me indeed!

Waving Goodbye to the Singapore house

2008-05-31T09:52:00.005+08:00

I haven't been around puppies. No blog, no internet, not much e-mail or television. Just travel, family, friends and a whole load of good books. I should have been in Singapore today completing the formalities of handing over our empty house back to its owners. But I'm still in Bangalore, having decided to spend more time with my parents and friends. Three wonderful women have helped make this remote handover happen and I haven't the words to thank them. It's no easy matter. The house needed cleaning, the cats needed feeding and have now been shifted to the house of a friend who will forever be my sky fairy of much goodness. This is about the most slacker-like thing I have done in my life and I really should do it more. It is also probably the first time in six years that I have spent more than a week or ten days at home with my parents. I've only managed four or five days at best but at least the visits have been made at frequent intervals. It was my father, really. His big, thoughtful eyes were transparent with dismay and he said, "Do you have to go this week?" and I held his soft pudgy hand in mine and said, "No, I don't really have to go. I'll stay on a little longer."

It's good to be on the road back home again

2008-05-11T23:07:00.002+08:00

I love coming back to Bangalore. Too pleased at the moment and drunk on amma's cooking to say more than that.

Anxiety-relieving Bhangra (TM)

2008-05-06T18:46:00.005+08:00

The packers are coming tomorrow. The forms are somewhat filled. New Zealand biosecurity is very strict and so there's all kinds of boxes to tick and sign. I'm sorting my clothes now, having mostly finished with all the papers. What am I forgetting? According to my files and my wind-up chronicle, all systems are go. Why am I talking like a fool in a hyped-up Hollywood movie? See, this is what happens. At weak and vulnerable moments in our lives, we fall back on stock plots and phrases for comfort. In other news, I was immensely entertained by this Billie Jean Bhangra video that is making the rounds of the interweb (said like the great world leader George W Bush.) In case you're interested, here's one of my favourite recent Bushisms from Slate:
"Let me start off by saying that in 2000 I said, 'Vote for me. I'm an agent of change.' In 2004, I said, 'I'm not interested in change—I want to continue as president.' Every candidate has got to say 'change.' That's what the American people expect." —Washington, D.C., March 5, 2008
Go George! Why should anybody be anxious when y'all are in charge eh?

Kneel and worship at the church of Charlie

2008-05-05T10:43:00.003+08:00

Whether you read my theories or not, please read Charlie Brooker, the funniest and greatest genius columnist of our time, writing in The Guardian (which is also the greatest newspaper in the world) about existential angst. I love this paragraph: "The gap between your stupid face and cold hard reality is increasing all the time. We plod down the street holding remote conversations with voices in little plastic boxes. We slump in front of hi-def panels watching processed, graded, synchronised imagery. We wander through made-up online worlds, pausing occasionally to chew the fat with some blue-skinned tit in a jester's hat. We watch time and space collapse on a daily basis. Our world is now running an enhanced, expanded version of reality's vanilla operating system. As a result, it's all too easy to feel like a viewer of - rather than a participant in - your own life."

Theory of Life Central/You are here/ Welcome

2008-05-05T09:11:00.011+08:00

Good morning puppies. Anybody who doesn't like being called that, I'm not sorry. I like saying it. Okay? Its my blog and I'll bark if I want to. But I'm richly brimming with theory, concept and witloads of understanding this glorious Monday morning (while earthly mortals work, I have morphed from reportergirl to skyfairy) By the way, anybody have any suggestions for what kind of costume would most suit a reportergirl ? Ah, but I digress from my richly theories. My theory this morning is that I've so far been looking at my life as a maze, while in actuality, it is a labyrinth. A labyrinth is not a maze. This is a very important distinction and lets not forget it. My expertise with Google (it has made experts of us all, none more so than I) reveals that a labyrinth is a circuitous path with one entrance point, that leads through a series of switch-backs to its centre. A maze, however, has dead ends and blind alleyways. Its intention is confusion and mystery. The labyrinth, when followed, leads eventually and without making choices to the centre. The French existentialists laboured over choice and came to the conclusion that there was no absolute right or wrong choice--you just had to make a choice and take full responsibility for it. (I'm talking macro life choice here, not your average bad choice of food, drink, etc) In simpler terms, bloom where you are planted or find a better soil and climate mix. But remember that repotting takes some planning and soil prepping. Don't be doing it willy nilly or you'll be wilting. So back then to the labyrinth, which may be thought of as a map of your innermost being. There is no right or wrong way to walk the labyrinth. It's comforting to know that the feelings that won't be tamed, the switch-backs and the meanderings they cause, will all eventually lead to the centre. As one of my favourite Indian playwrights Girish Karnad, says "You can't master knowledge through austerities. It must come with experience."

Good notes and bad photographs

2008-05-03T17:15:00.003+08:00

I can be quite inept with a camera but the results don't do much to discourage me. Some of my friends derive great enjoyment from these photoshop fix-resistant images. I'm flaunting a flawed photograph of my favourite vegetable market in Bangalore. I'll hopefully be there next weekend to see my parents and friends before I fly off to the new end of the earth.

Nudging yourself towards better decisions

2008-05-03T09:02:00.010+08:00

I've started walking a lot more than I used to. It started off as a planned, incremental increase in exercise and now it's a way of life, even in 75 per cent humidity. I make an exception only on the days when I have let vanity get the better of me and have worn girly shoes that almost always hurt. My favourite columnist writes today that little and often is a better way to change than instituting dramatic militaristic regimens, which are bound to fail.
"The point missed by the "transform your life now" culture of pop psychology is that the changes most of us would like to make in our lives aren't enormous. We don't have eating disorders: we'd just like to eat healthier meals. We don't lurch through our working lives, always about to get fired: we'd just like to finish a project on time for once. We're not debilitatingly depressed or anxious: we'd just like to be a bit happier. All we need is a nudge, whereas many gurus would rather deliver a kicking." If there's anything you're looking to change about your life, I suggest reading this column as a starting point. Baby steps. That's where it all starts. So I'm going to gently shut down my laptop and walk down to this reservoir near our house where I love to go but don't go often enough.

Field Guide Poetry

2008-05-03T08:46:00.004+08:00

Some months ago I attempted a poetry exercise set by David Morley in the excellent Books section of Guardian Online. An ecologist and poet, Morley, suggested we try and locate poetry in the scientific, somewhat opaque language of natural history field guides. I have a small book called A Guide to Growing the Native Plants of Singapore and these lines seemed mighty poetic to me. This is clunky and incomplete but I love the second paragraph and the fact that one can find poetry in the most unexpected places.

Native species, they evolved over millions of years

to cope with climate, soils, seasons and interactions,
with others in the ecosystem.

Accidentally-introduced species
come by various means,
on tires, earth-moving equipment
and in the ballast of ships.
They may just persist close to their sites of escape,
establish so well, they outcompete the native species,
though, the most exotic species are those
deliberately introduced by humans.

A quarter of native plant species are already extinct,
yet, most tropical cities grow the overexploited
Madagascan flame-of-the-forest,
the American rain tree.

This modern world of muchness

2008-05-02T09:07:00.007+08:00

I slept like a child again and have woken up to a beautiful, breezy blue-sky day. Sold our beloved coffee machine yesterday and was sorry to see it go. I'm not attached to much but that DeLonghi machine was more than a machine you know? A memory of Italy and the warm ritual of many cafes for all the coffee lovers who ever visited our home. Yet, every single time I pack up a home (seven times in the last 10 years) I think to myself that I really must simplify my life, own less, buy less, accumulate less. And its so hard at least where I live not to go out and buy something. Trinkets and beads I haven't worn, a neck pillow that I have used once, because it breaks my neck far worse than sleeping on my own shoulder like a drunken lout, 100 multi-purpose cleaning wipes for cleaning the laptop screen (75 unused), sachets of sample hyacinth moisturiser or some such(yuck) papers, papers, papers, particle board furniture, nifty tools that have not been used at all, the list is endless. I'll manage to sell some things, recycle some and the rest will all end up in a landfill somewhere, while I take more long-haul flights and buy new things made in some factory in India or China.
What's the alternative? I'm not even going to talk about carbon footprint--rendered almost meaningless from overuse, misuse and dodgy calculations. Please read Specter's Big Foot in The New Yorker. Michael Pollan has also written a great article called, Why Bother? He takes the question of individual responsibility and works out some answers. It's really worth reading.

"Let’s say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I’m struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?
A sense of personal virtue, you might suggest, somewhat sheepishly. But what good is that when virtue itself is quickly becoming a term of derision?"

"And even if in the face of this derision I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint? According to one analysis, if walking to work increases your appetite and you consume more meat or milk as a result, walking might actually emit more carbon than driving. A handful of studies have recently suggested that in certain cases under certain conditions, produce from places as far away as New Zealand might account for less carbon than comparable domestic products. True, at least one of these studies was co-written by a representative of agribusiness interests in (surprise!) New Zealand, but even so, they make you wonder. If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I’ve got to consider not only “food miles” but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I’ll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out."

The joy of joblessness/ To say what one thinks, instead of what one should say

2008-05-01T09:17:00.006+08:00

My last day at work was a breeze. At the coffee shop upstairs, it was also my favourite barista's last day. She's quitting to spend more time with her children. She gave her special customers free coffees and I was pleased to be among them. I'll miss her and the mean-faced fruit lady and the crazed Indian stall owners who put so much salt and MSG in their food that you can lose a litre of body fluid simply by eating lunch there. And then, there's the lovely woman across the road, who because I can't speak Mandarin, communicates with me in sign language. We've developed our own charades for noodles/tofu/vegetables, no meat, no fish. Two months ago, when I got to her stall, she smiled, nay beamed and handed over a laminated menu with an all-new VEGETARIAN section. How cool is that? And now I've gone and left, bah, ungrateful wretch that I am.
I've had such a good run here -- loved my work and met some incredible people whose stories will always stay with me because of the madcap humour and quiet grace with which they handled not-so-great-news from doctors. And yet I feel like my work here is done. Last night I slept a whole nine hours for the first time in months. I slept like the dead.
I have learned some very wonderful things in these last three-and-a-half years. Yesterday, as I was cleaning up my desk, I found a small piece of paper given to me by a woman I interviewed a year ago. It sums up some of the most important things that I have learned to do (lie), actually, I'm still trying very hard to learn these lessons.
"To see and hear what is there, instead of what one should see and hear. To say what one thinks, instead of what one should say. To feel what one feels, instead of what one should feel. To ask for what one wants, instead of waiting for permission. To take risks on one's behalf, instead of choosing to be safe." — Virginia Satir

I love it when they make fun of my profession

2008-04-29T16:58:00.001+08:00

Why? Because we all take ourselves too damn seriously, that's why.

Delicious Lines

2008-04-29T12:22:00.003+08:00

This just in. Three delicious lines from the poetry section of, what else, the New Yorker. What can I say ? I'm a creature of habit. Franz Wright calls this The World of the Senses. Here are the lines that grabbed me and set my neurons on a happy spin. Click link for the whole poem, don't be lazy. You need to work for poetry. Such lucky things we are, really, to have all these luxuries unfold at the click of a mouse.

"What a day: I had some trouble
following the plotline; however,
the special effects were incredible"

The Scale of Human Trafficking

2008-04-28T22:56:00.005+08:00

William Finnegan investigates the trafficking of women from Moldova to Dubai and the rest of the world in this New Yorker article. He profiles Stella Rotaru, a young woman who works with the International Office of Migration to rescue women who are stuck in brothels, who are looking for a way out or a way back home.
When I started off as a crime reporter in Bangalore, I had to do one story on the trafficking of adolescent girls within India, and even that was one story too much. I don't think I had the maturity or the distance needed to write that effectively. I still remember the faces of the three girls rescued from some 60-year-old man's hotel room. One of them was 14 and schizophrenic. I don't know what happened to her after that, except that she was sent to some sort of a home.
I recommend sticking with this 13-page-long story, because unlike me, Finnegan finds out what happens to women after they've been trafficked and rescued. If you don't or can't stick with the story, here's a paragraph that tells you a little bit about Stella Rotaru, the woman behind some of the rescues, and why she never switches her cell phone off:
"Brothel raids in other countries yield many of Rotaru’s beneficiaries, as her clients are known. After a raid, she’ll get calls from the detainees, or from cops, consulates, families, or friends—even, sometimes, from prostitution customers. “Rescue calls” tend to be more urgent. Women phone clandestinely, from captivity, and Rotaru may have only moments to get the information she needs. The women don’t always have the information themselves; in extreme cases, they may not be sure what country they’re in. Look out the window, Rotaru will say. Any sign you can see. Exact spellings. Look for an address on matchbooks, or McDonald’s bags. What languages do the johns speak? If she can capture a number on caller I.D., it can be useful, although simply calling back without an all-clear is generally too dangerous."

Do I dare?

2008-04-27T23:11:00.004+08:00

Do I dare publish a random act of my own poetry? Yes, I do. Here then, is my maudlin offering for Monday.

Destination

Getting there is easy.
All you have to do, they said,
Is take the train out to the bay,
transfer onto a yellowline bus
and then,
walk ten minutes.
You’ll see.
Beyond the red flowers,
the blue house on a green hill.
It’s easy.
Except, the train wasn’t on time
And the bus did not wait for me
So I walked all the way
And when I got there
an hour later than they said,
it was too dark
to see the colours.

Rescuing Madam Butterfly

2008-04-24T14:19:00.008+08:00

I helped rescue a day-old butterfly today. A chap at work brought this beauty called the Common Rose into the office because he was doing a story on Rosalind Tay. She's an occupational therapist turned senior operations executive, who started a butterfly garden at Alexandra Hospital.
Her rationale was simple: Watching the butterflies, with their colourful and magical symmetries is an oddly soothing and affirming experience for those in recovery.
Anyway, the Common Rose rode into work in a box, to be photographed. Knowing nothing about the species, I resorted to google. It gets its name probably because it is abundantly found in South India and Sri Lanka, especially after the monsoons. Botanists call it an "excellent generalist" meaning it has adapted to a range of habitats from up to 8,000 feet in the Western Ghats and South Indian Hills and up to 5000 feet in the Himalayas. And somehow, our youngling of a Common Rose managed to fly out of her box in Singapore and made her way up onto one of the light fixtures in this gigantic office. Luckily, that particular light wasn't on.
The only reason I even knew was because I sit next to butterfly boy and some girls were shrieking, being girls and all. If we had just left her there, Madam Butterfly would have died. Maybe its a mister butterfly, but I just like the sound of madam. And I didn't want her to die in some cold air-conditioned office among journalists. If I were to die, I'd want to be in the flower garden hanging with my friends, talking. And then, mid-discussion, I would die happy, just after I'd made my point.
So, I found one of the cleaner ladies who suggested calling the cleaning department. The good folks at the cleaning department sent a man with a long stick and he also went and found a net. Then I went and found wildlife woman from our office. I knew she could help. We all watched as he very carefully coaxed Madam Butterfly into the net and brought her down from her high perch. We helped her back into her box and she seemed to sit still in there. She's on her way back to the Alexandra Hospital garden now, where they have the kind of flowers she likes to sit on and where some 101 other species of tropical butterflies gather.
Even if her life span is only a few days, I'm so happy that it will be spent among flowers and friends and not in an office. My day is so much better for having encountered the spectacular symmetry of her black, pink, red and grey hues. It also made me think of our general attitude to small insects and animals ...do we value their lives at all?
JM Coetzee is perhaps one of the few authors who discusses our cruelty and indifference to the animal world. In an interview after he received the Nobel prize, Coetzee said of animals: "There is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart. (You'll notice its exactly what I've done in my post)
There is also a temptation to seek in animals what is easiest for human beings to sympathise or empathise with, and consequently to favour those animal species which for one reason or another seem to us to be “almost human” in their mental and emotional processes. So dogs (for example) are treated as “almost human” whereas reptiles are treated as entirely alien." Coetzee says that the lives of animals remain unimportant existences of which people take notice only when their lives cross ours. And while he agrees that we may never know the inner lives of animals, the one thing we can do, he says, is respect their right to life.

The Curse of Officialese

2008-04-23T15:00:00.005+08:00

Further to our tele-conversation, I am pleased to append herewith our 2nd Revised Quotation for your kind perusal.
Yes, that's right. Read it again puppies. That's the sort of communication I'm dealing with every day and will keep dealing with until all our wordly posessions have been enveloped by cardboard and bubble wrap and set sail for Nuova Zealandia. Joy is my name, moving is my game.

The genius of Jack Kerouac

2008-04-22T16:36:00.002+08:00

After an intense spell of work, I treated myself to an old Paris Review interview of Jack Kerouac. It's so delicious, it's like reading a chocolate gelato. I love this paragraph:
"Well, look, did you ever hear a guy telling a long, wild tale to a bunch of men in a bar and all are listening and smiling, did you ever hear that guy stop to revise himself, go back to a previous sentence to improve it, to defray its rythmic thought impact. If he pauses to blow his nose, isn't he planning his next sentence? And when he lets that next sentence loose, isn't it once and for all the way he wanted to say it? Doesn't he depart from the thought of that sentence and, as Shakespeare says, "forever holds his tongue," on the subject since he's passed over it like a part of a river that flows over a rock once and for all and never returns and can never flow any other way in time? Incidentally, as for my bug against periods, that was the prose in October In The Railroad Earth, very experimental, intended to clack along all the way like a steam engine pulling a one-hundred-car freight with a talky caboose at the end, that was my way at the time and it still can be done if the thinking during the swift writing is confessional and pure and all excited with the life of it. And be sure of this, I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and hiding of feelings."

Overcompensation is a wonderful thing

2008-04-18T17:41:00.005+08:00

See, immediately after promoting wrist-slashing links, I came across this mister on the left. What a cool, tubular and frickin smart dude is he?
What? What? It's Friday and I'm happy. Happy like him, happy like a girl in a flowing silk skirt and bitey shoes that hurt her feet but look good and I'm happy like somebody who has newly-hatched boundaries. And cruising like somebody who has drunk just the right amount of Daiginjo Sake--you know the rice wine that is so mellow and smooth that it won't give up even one secret easily. So yeah, that's the kind of smile it produces and that's what I'm wearing along with Mister Snoopy on the left. And yes, that's a disco tune in my head. But I'm not telling you its name, because I'm so happy that I'm silly like that.

Pure and Unfamiliar Silence

2008-04-18T17:06:00.007+08:00

Jane Hirshfield is an American poet whose work I stumbled across quite by accident on this website. She has titled this strangely hypnotic arrangement of words, 'This Was Once A Love Poem.' I will now look out for her work because it moves me (like this photograph my husband took) and plays strings in my head that sound like Gustavo Santaolalla's Iguazu.
To maximise this opiate feeling, I'd recommend reading the poem first and then listening to the music.
Warning: If you're not into enjoying a little bit of wistful sadness, then this is a mighty good wrist-slashing combo. And you won't want fries with it or a large Coke. Har, I'm so funny, especially when I try, eh?
This Was Once A Love Poem
This was once a love poem, before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short, before it found itself sitting, perplexed and a little embarrassed, on the fender of a parked car, while many people passed by without turning their heads. It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement. It remembers choosing these shoes, this scarf or tie. Once, it drank beer for breakfast, drifted its feet in a river side by side with the feet of another. Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy, dropping its head so the hair would fall forward, so the eyes would not be seen. It spoke with passion of history, of art. It was lovely then, this poem. Under its chin, no fold of skin softened. Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat. What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall. An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks. The longing has not diminished. Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat, the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus. Yes, it decides: Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots. When it finds itself disquieted by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life, it will touch them—one, then another— with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.

Profiling George Clooney

2008-04-17T09:02:00.006+08:00

A New Yorker profile never fails to fill me with awe at the amount of work put in by the reporter, the variety of sources he or she interviews, the number of times and situations in which they meet the subject of the profile --it's just incredible. Ian Parker's profile of George Clooney is fascinating in the details that he has managed to elicit from friends--not gossipy bits but just observations that build a complete picture of what makes him vital, or as the headline explains, the effort behind his effortless charm. I particularly liked this part where Richard Kind, a long-time friend of Clooney's talks about him, because it underlines that peculiar need or compulsion that some great peformers have, well, that need to perform all the time:

"Kind told me, “I’m very protective of him. When I’m staying with him, I will never bring anyone to the house while he’s there. The reason? This is almost pathological: he has to entertain that new person. Even if he doesn’t want to, he will draw that person in with stories, and will entertain him. He could have been working all day, he could have a headache, it doesn’t matter, when he’s at that dinner, he’s got to talk to that person, and make that person . . . I don’t know whether it’s make that person like him, but he wants to make him feel at home.”

The Faulty Plumbing of Your Flaky Mind

2008-04-15T10:00:00.010+08:00

My new TV-free life gives me a lot more time to read. Last night, I read a New Scientist review of Gary Marcus' new book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, which was so damn mindbending, it made me want to buy the book. He shows how the mind is held together by gum and duct tape -- meaning it is of a clumsy design. Apparently, brain modules that evolved for one purpose often take on roles that they weren't really designed for. "So our mental functions, while adequate individually, can harm us when working together-such as when our reasoning skills and healthy sex drive conspire to talk us into disastrous affairs. I guess Shaggy was on to something when he sang that it wasn't me, song. "It wasn't me, it was my mind." Marcus'observations are somewhat scary because they make so much sense. Just read his Idea Lab article on our awfully unreliable memories and further complicate your view of yourself and all the dumb choices you've ever made.

The Morning After

2008-04-13T09:19:00.001+08:00

And so the date is done and I've counted another year, brought in the day with drink and an overflowing cup of friendship. (the last four drinks were probably unnessecary and show that I may be older but I'm not getting any wiser). The naked exhibitionism that is this blog is also testament to the immaturity and suspectness of my edifice, dear reader. So trust my words no more than you would the breeze.
The first person to call was my mother, who I love for her peculiar honesty and intuition, whose articulation of the fear that can accompany the birth of a child, has left me with a precious awareness of the subtext in motherhood. As a youngling playing with large-eyed dolls, I had always assumed that women were filled with immense joy after the birth of a child. That it was one of those blessed, unambiguous states of being....
I'm thinking today of women and men who don't quite feel so fantastic, who are hit with waves of doubt, who were/are good mothers and fathers, despite the apprehension and loss of self that accompanies birth.
I thought this sort of feeling was not possible to translate into language. But of course, a poet would find a way to do it. Sylvia Plath's 'Morning Song' is perhaps the most brilliant articulation of the awe and fear surrounding birth I have ever read. It's not important to know, but she wrote it shortly after she became a mother.
The startling genius of this poem is hard to break down, but read it once, pause and then read it again. Wonder at her command of language and metaphor, rythm and structure and then look around and see if your world still looks the same.

MORNING SONG

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles,
and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival.
New statue. In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

The Tale of Two No-Good Tribesmen

2008-04-10T08:20:00.000+08:00

I woke to fresh lizard kill this morning. A tail-less corpse, upturned on the floor. The two layabouts pictured here no doubt assume that this is a great offering to be appreciated by their leader. There is much solemn skirting about said kill while I clean it up. Still, I am glad they accord me such respect. As we all know, hierarchy and power dynamics, especially in a tribe of three, are very important. So I have given them their reward: scratch under chin and soft white bellies. They've forgotten they have claws which is good. I also forget that I have claws. My personality hypothesis today is that my claws are way too retractable and that I need to sharpen them a little bit. Maybe I need to relearn some hissing too, while I'm at it, I mean if I even knew how to hiss in the first place. What am I on about? I am poor this morning and radioactive. Half-life = 32 years. But that's going up to magic number 33 soon. Oh how lovely are the peaceful notes of middle-age where angst is dulled and one thinks of soft rugs and plush carpets. I think I had better shut up now.

Moving To The Country

2008-04-09T08:54:00.000+08:00

I'm moving countries in seven weeks. All it means is that I have a bunch of tasks and a couple of lists to follow meticulously. I have to complete said tasks by certain dates and cross out with a tick. That's all. Cool.
That's what I tell myself. Actually, even if I tick off things, I'm obsessing about tangential stuff, the accumulation of life, papers and memories bound up with this house, this island.
So I'm a little emotional it seems, which is fine. Why I expect to function like a robot is anybody's guess, but I think we all expect ourselves to be robotic to a certain extent. We assume it makes life easy. It doesn't. Nor does losing it. Balance, my dear Watson, is key. And for me, balance immediately arrives when I see images like these. Can only be described as tres, beaucoup good!

The Science of Wonderment

2008-04-08T21:19:00.001+08:00

My penchant for quoting studies (usually to the long-suffering soul who listens to all my boring theories) is born out of a need to formulate my own rational understanding of behaviour. I like knowing, for instance, that women under stress tend to secrete more oxytocin--the hormone that promotes feelings of empathy and bonding while men tend to secrete testosterone, the hormone that is most associated with feelings of aggression. I think it explains a lot of things. It makes a lot more sense than those annoying 'women come from outer space' type relationship books that oversimplify the differences between men and women. It also explains why friendships between women are nurturing in very special ways. My women friends, you all know who you are, thank you for the warmth of your sparkly-eyed empathy. But I've actually been equally, if not more lucky, with my men friends, who have so often taught me the anatomy of grace in difficult situations.
But I digress. Through the ages, science has often been seen as an agent of disenchantment. The reasoning behind this line of thought is that science curbs the imagination and leaves the mysteries of the world in tatters.
A new book called Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science, by John Barrow, a Cambridge cosmologist, challenges this view by showing how the history of art and that of drawing is tied to the history of science. The Guardian (How empty would my life be without Guardian online? Even the thought scares me) has a wonderful review of Barlow's book and an accompanying slide show which shows the original scientific image that inspired Van Gogh's Starry Nights, among other things. But what might happen as the technology of visual reproduction grows more and more sophisticated? Will the sheer power of immersive realities bump off the imagination? This is the scenario that Barlow envisages, and it's definitely something I'm going to be wondering about for a while:

"We can imagine what the next stage will be, with holographic creations and alternative realities. So, for example, instead of reading Shakespeare, we're increasingly going to find ourselves transported into a Shakespearean environment. Instead of imagining, which will be thought of as hard work, we will be dropped into an experience. We see this saturation of interactive experience already with the web, and I see the future very much as one where subjects are increasingly presented in a way that removes the need to exercise one's imagination."

Best ever one-line review of The Prestige

2008-04-05T07:03:00.000+08:00

I watched that Prestige movie -the one where Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman play crazed and obsessive-competitive magicians.
My friend, the New Asian who lives in LA, wanted to know what I thought about the film. New Asian and I go back a long way, bound by our mutual desire to deconstruct all manner of cinema, even really important films like Bounce and Bring It On.
I told New Asian that it was a good film. "That part where they squash birds was hard to watch. Their competition and obsession was believable and tension-creating so I quite liked it. It made me question what entertainment really means, how we sometimes enjoy watching things go bad, that we are secretly thrilled when we watch something macabre even as we shake our heads in horror and recount the trauma of it later to our friends. There's something vaguely self-congratulatory, a misplaced pride even, at having been a firsthand witness of something awful. And that's awful but true"
New Asian's response: "These are two really obsessive and bitter dudes who need to chill, though chilling would reduce their greatness."

This Post Will Change Your Life

2008-04-05T06:37:00.000+08:00

There's a guy at work who buys a sugary biscuit before he starts writing his column. He's very focussed about his writing and incredibly disciplined. He's not always wandering off to get a coffee or a tea, mid-sentence, like some other people we know. (me)
I just read about a study which shows he's on to something good. Apparently, when blood glucose is depleted, we're less able to exert self-control. The researchers say that the brain has a limited reserve amount of glucose, which allows us to handle the initial task demanding self control. Once that glucose supply is depleted, self control becomes much more difficult, across an array of different tasks.
Oliver Burkeman at The Guardian refers to this study in his latest column, the title of which I love and have shamelessly lifted. He talks about the effort needed to resist the power of our surroundings. For instance, "food that gets eaten because it's there; evenings spent watching TV because there's a TV in the room. Or bigger things: a job you fell into because it came along, or a relationship."
The point is that resisting these things uses up real energy. Burkeman argues that this is why willpower can be only a temporary or partial solution in changing a behaviour.
"It's exhaustible, and if you rely on it too much in one area - eating healthily, say - you will find that you don't have enough left over for the rest of life."
But there is a moral here for me...if I really want to concentrate on something or resist something or hopefully, someone, I need to eat a bar of good dark chocolate first.

Girl Power

2008-02-11T16:04:00.000+08:00

This new girl power thing is perhaps the worst version of feminism I've ever seen. You know the one? The I-m-a-girl-with-all-my-precious-girlie-ways, and I watch sex and the city, and I-go-learn-pole-dancing-because-Im-such-a-badass, version.
There's a baby-teen version too and its evident in the marketing of the 'Little Princess Culture' that will encourage girls to grow into self-obsessed brats. The kind who go on TV to talk about what strong and beautiful women they are.
I'm a woman and I'm crying on TV because I've lost so much weight and had a makeover. Makeover, makeover, makeover. I have a right to look sexy and pretty and h o t.
I'm a princess. And I better not look a day older than 45.
Let me be seen deriving no satisfaction from any pursuit that does not involve me flogging my tired sexuality, legs, face or hair. I'm sick to death of it, I'm sick of my friends talking about it, I'm sick of being marketed products that promise to fix it all so I can be the woman I was always meant to be, I'm going to stamp on the credit card meant EXCLUSIVELY for today's woman and jump up and down like a mad feminist, Yeah.

Anyway, mid-rant I came across this interesting bit of information from the New York Times that makes me wonder about the roles we take on:

According to a study of how children ages 5 to 13 spend their time, by Isabelle Cherney and Kamala London, psychologists at Creighton University and the University of Toledo, respectively, and published in the journal Sex Roles, girls tend to become less stereotypical in their play as they age — choosing more neutral toys, sports and computer games — while boys remain emphatically masculine in theirs. There was one exception to that trend: television-watching. The viewing habits of girls become strikingly more feminine in their tween years.

Whether girlie or girlist, girls, because they’re allowed more latitude in their identities, can still be girls: Boys, on the other hand, must be boys — unless no one is watching. In another study of younger children, Cherney and London found that if ushered alone into a room and told they could play with anything, nearly half the boys chose “feminine” toys as often as “masculine” ones, provided they believed nobody, especially their fathers, would find out. That made me question whether any more expansive vision of girlhood can survive without a similar overhaul of boyhood, which, apparently, is not in the offing.

Evidence of Things Unseen

2008-01-06T22:02:00.000+08:00

I discovered the novelist Richard Ford in a university library in Los Angeles some seven years ago. The emotional lives of his somewhat lost characters with their moral quandaries and vulnerabilities drew me in. I learned much later that he enjoyed a long friendship with Raymond Carver , that they commented on each other's work, drew inspiration from each other...though Ford says he learned more from Carver than the other way around.
There's an excellent interview with Ford in the latest Granta (No. 99) where he talks about his work, literature and life. An excerpt:

Tim Adams: Has faith or church-going ever had any appeal to you?
Ford: Not church going. But faith, well... There's the famous line in Hebrews 11: 'Faith is the evidence of things unseen.' I've always been attracted to that line. But for specifically irreligious reasons. I deem that line to be a line about the imagination. I could almost say that, 'the imagination is the evidence of things unseen.' But again specifically I'd say that my 'faith' lies in the imagination and in the imagination's power to bring into existence essential experience that heretofore wasn't known to exist.

Adams: That reminds me of Franck Bascombe's line: 'The unseen exists and has properties.' Do you have an ongoing sense of that 'unseen,' or only at certain charged moments?
Ford: I don't think much about the unseen. For lack of great erudition, or a great education, I suppose I've stored a fair amount of trust in my instinct. But as soon as I see that written down I start to think that instinct may just be another word for luck and for trusting to luck -- which I've done. A favourite line I repair to is by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who said: 'We have a built-in, very potent, hair-triggered tendency to find agency in things that are not agents.' I'm not sure if Dennett approves of that tendency or not. But certainly that's one of the things literature does-- it ascribes agency where before no agency was noticed: it says this causes that, this is a consequence of that, etc. It may be that writing fiction, imagining agencies, is my most trusted way into the unseen.

What does art do?

2008-01-03T11:06:00.000+08:00

Talking about art in Saigon got me thinking about art in general. How artists are treated is a pretty good barometer of where a society is headed. And from what I ve been reading over the last couple of years, India isn't doing so well in that respect. First, they drove MF Husain out of India, then some right wing idiot rolled up at at Baroda's prestigious fine arts university and attacked a student artist. If you thought they would arrest the right winger, well what do you know, they arrested the student instead..this was in 2007.
Even now, when I visited, I found the pluralistic Hinduism I knew had slowly but surely given way to various shades of Hindutva--a very curious and spurious mixture of fascist methodology and puritanism.
There were things that made me hopeful, a few reviews of new art and artists; women trained in traditional dance presenting contemporary modern pieces where once there was only orthodoxy--these things were encouraging.
Historian and critic John Berger has a wonderful explanation that tells you why art is important. (I found all his books in a second-hand book shop in Bangalore and was therefore reminded of him)
"I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour."

Seen in Saigon

2008-01-03T10:44:00.001+08:00

In Saigon, I encountered mass produced art on a scale I have seldom seen before. On all our travels, we (my travelling companion and I), usually buy something by a local artist. It's not what we set out to do, but something usually catches his eye or mine and then we buy it and wrap it with much care and cart it back home so it can find its rightful place on some wall in our house. The only thing we bought this time was a print of an old propaganda poster from the war. My eyes are drawn to tourist art for its mawkish sentimentality and also because it tells you what the mood of a place is, what its gearing up for.
In Vietnam, the mood is commerce. What sells, multiplies. So, yes there were many portraits of women in cone-shaped straw hats. That's fine. What wasn't fine were portraits of Vietnamese women --all the same except for different background colours--I guess you were meant to choose whatever would go with your colour of wall of furniture. Even stranger were the copies of Western artists which seemed almost to outnumber the hats and women--hundreds of copies of Klimt's The Kiss, Botero's rotund women and anything else that has ever graced a museum. Maybe we were looking in the wrong places or even the wrong city, because Hanoi is said to be a city teeming with original, contemporary Vietnamese art with its unique European influences. Apart from a cathedral and a post office, Saigon's city centre is rapidly giving way to the standard issue glass-chrome-steel high rise.
The main shopping area, Dong Khoi, is a snarl of silk and lacquer, the new malls flash the names Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Cavalli at you. Inside, uniformed and delicately-featured salesgirls look flustered as a man in a British accent, slows down his speech and asks for trousers in a "b i g g e r" size. So, here it is the new Vietnam and its open for business, just like anywhere else.

The Other Person of The Year

2008-01-02T14:27:00.000+08:00

I'm not sure Time magazine holds the kind of sway it did even a decade ago, but the choice of Putin as person of the year has clearly brought the magazine some much needed publicity. Garry Kasparov's oped in the Wall Street Journal shows how this choice is an endorsement of dictatorship. The magazine has made some weak justifications. Apparently, the Person of the Year is just somebody who made the news a lot, it doesn't mean that the person is good or a great leader or any such thing.

"The most revealing moment in Ms. Rice’s comments came when the topic of Mr. Medvedev as the next president was first broached. The official transcript reads:

“SECRETARY RICE: Well, I guess, they’re still going to have an election in March. ” (laughter)
Perhaps my sense of humor was dulled during the five days I spent in a Moscow jail last month for protesting against these sham elections. Or maybe it was reading about the constant persecution of my fellow activists across the country that did it. Madam Secretary went on to speak approvingly of Mr. Medvedev, making the undemocratic nature of his selection sound like a minor annoyance. The last remaining element of democracy in Russia, the transition of power, will be destroyed. Will Mr. Putin and his successor still be welcomed with open arms in the club of leading democracies?
In the early days of our opposition activities last year, when members of Other Russia were harassed and arrested, the “bright siders” in the West said it could be worse. Later, when our marchers were badly beaten in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Mr. Putin’s fans in the West said at least the police weren’t killing us in the streets.
Last week, 22-year-old opposition activist Yury Chervochkin died in hospital after several weeks in a coma. He had been beaten nearly to death an hour after making an anxious cellphone call to our offices saying he was being followed by members of the organized-crime task force known as UBOP, which has become the vanguard of the Kremlin’s war on political opposition. A witness saw him clubbed repeatedly by men with baseball bats.
Yury’s sin was not chanting Nazi slogans or praising the deeds of Josef Stalin, activities that regularly go unremarked in Russia these days. No, he had been caught throwing leaflets that read “The elections are a farce!” That was enough to make him a marked man. Now, for agitating for real democracy in Russia, he is dead.

This is a good opportunity to remember Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist who was murdered on Oct. 7, 2006, Putin’s birthday. The police investigation into this infamous assassination has stalled and talk of it has died down. The Kremlin is counting on the same thing happening with “minor” cases like that of Yury Chervochkin."

The Race Row

2007-12-15T13:15:00.000+08:00

I've been trying to make my mind up about the Martin Amis race row in the UK and what it means for the larger debate on Islamism.
Amis made some pretty incoherent declarations in an interview, where after the failed plot to blow up transatlantic planes in August 2006, he said felt 'a definite urge' to argue that British Muslims in general 'must suffer' for the actions of suicide bombers 'until they got their house in order'. By suffering, he meant 'strip searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan', 'not letting them [Muslims] travel', and 'further down the road', deportation.
Amis has pointed out in rebuttal after rebuttal that this is not a problem about race. "It's about ideology," he said. To his detractors, he issued a letter in The Guardian where he imagined their miserable chore of "dourly assembling their diatribes, hopscotching and cherrypicking from a press interview here, a TV interview there, an essay, a short story, some gout of alphabet soup in the Daily Mail, distorting this, suppressing that, and fudging the other. They are not interested in arguments and ideas, but in staking out "positions", in sending "signals", and in flirtatiously seeking the approval of the likeminded," he said.
I don't think that Amis' pronouncements are racist. In fact, I agree with the eloquent Pankaj Mishra who says that it is barely relevant whether Amis or any other individual is racist.
"We should be more concerned about this fact: that ideas regarded as intellectually null and morally abhorrent in any other context are not only accepted and condoned but also celebrated as bold truth-telling," Mishra wrote.
He explained that the instant pundits on Islam make it seem as if the presence in our midst of people who want to kill or wound us is an unprecedented event in human history. "The fervour of the ideologue manqué makes no room for the sober fact that almost every nation-state harbours a disaffected and volatile minority, whose size varies constantly in inverse relation to the alertness, tact and wisdom of the majority population."
Mishra starts by pointing out: "Never perhaps in history has so much nonsense been so confidently peddled about a population as large and diverse as this planet's billion-plus Muslims."
"Closely examined, Muslim societies briskly dissolve our complacent, parochial notions about religion, democracy, secularism and capitalism. They expose, too, the notion of a monolithic Islam pressing down uniformly on all believers everywhere as a crude caricature."
But caricatures as we know are simple. And in a baffling world, we seek the reassuring presence and utterance of simplicity.
I think that Amis's views are surprisingly simplistic, for a man of his writing talent. I'm all for debate but that's not what he's engaging in...his comments are problematic. He has since distanced himself from the remarks, calling them a 'thought experiment.' We've seen such thought experiments in action in communal riots in India. The moment you blame an entire community for the actions of a few, you make the leap from a rational view of the world to the abyss of the paranoical one.
The other thing that's missing from this debate is the role of the West in the radicalisation of Islam. Professor Terry Eagleton, the man who has been baiting Amis argues his point quite clearly :"It is an obvious point, but one still worth making, that it was our own barbarism and colonialism in the Middle East that has helped to create these situations in the first place. Amis and Hitchens have become perversely silent on the crimes of Western civilisation. Western civilisation has produced enormous advances, but not to see the darker side of that, not to see the barbarism of the West, and not to see that at a time when we are killing thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, seems extraordinarily naive."

Sea of Me

2007-12-01T12:37:00.000+08:00

John Lahr has just won the Reportergirl Award for Wordsmithery. Thank you ladies and gentlemen, for your kind applause. Lahr's profile of British comedian and actor Steve Coogan in the November 5th issue of the New Yorker is very enjoyable.
Lahr says that Coogan specialises in creating characters not jokes. One such hugely popular Coogan invention was Alan Partridge -- a character, who Lahr quite brilliantly describes as "..a hapless talk-show host demoted to radio DJ, Patridge was mean-spirited, self-aggrandising, status-seeking, forever tempest-tossed in the Sea of Me."
There are many people I've interviewed who would do justice to this description.

Drug Rep with an MD

2007-11-27T07:26:00.000+08:00

Dr Daniel Carlat's article in The New York Times is a stunning first person account of the kind of friendship and influence that pharmaceutical industry money can buy. Dr Carlat, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and the publisher of The Carlat Psychiatry Report, is astonishingly candid about how he became an industry-sponsored speaker and why he gave it up in favour of running a blog and a report (that takes no drug industry money) that is meant to help doctors critically assess drug research and marketing claims.
His moment of truth arrives when a fellow psychiatrist asks him some tough questions about the side effects of Effexor-- the drug that Dr Carlat is being paid to talk up. This is perhaps the most powerful passage in the story. Dr Carlat is quoting from an industry-sponsored study which reports that patients are liable to develop hypertension only if they are taking Effexor at doses higher than 300 mg per day, when the skeptical psychiatrist says many of his patients developed hypertension on much lower doses. Dr Carlat describes his own nervousness, how he speeded up the talk and presented more data in support of Effexor. But this is also when his conscience kicks in:

"Driving home, I went back over the talk in my mind. I knew I had not lied — I had reported the data exactly as they were reported in the paper. But still, I had spun the results of the study in the most positive way possible, and I had not talked about the limitations of the data. I had not, for example, mentioned that if you focused specifically on patients taking between 200 and 300 milligrams per day, a commonly prescribed dosage range, you found a 3.7 percent incidence of hypertension. While this was not a statistically significant higher rate than the placebo, it still hinted that such moderate doses could, indeed, cause hypertension. Nor had I mentioned the fact that since the data were derived from placebo-controlled clinical trials, the patients were probably not representative of the patients seen in most real practices. Patients who are very old or who have significant medical problems are excluded from such studies. But real-world patients may well be at higher risk to develop hypertension on Effexor.
I realized that in my canned talks, I was blithely minimizing the hypertension risks, conveniently overlooking the fact that hypertension is a dangerous condition and not one to be trifled with. Why, I began to wonder, would anyone prescribe an antidepressant that could cause hypertension when there were many other alternatives? And why wasn’t I asking this obvious question out loud during my talks?"

The Real Thing

2007-11-26T08:24:00.001+08:00

Two Days in Paris reminded me of Tom Stoppard's play, The Real Thing. The protagonist, Henry, a playwright, is married to an actress. He falls in love with another actress and as he leaves his marriage, he wonders if this new love is the real thing.
There's a passage in the play where he talks about the fact that insecurity in love stems from the suspicion that somebody else has the same kind of access to or knowledge of the loved one as we do.

"It's to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek, knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It's what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh, but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy...we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. Our lovers share us with the passing trade. But in pairs, we insist that we give ourselves each other. What selves? What's left? What else is there that hasn't been dealt out like a deck of cards? A sort of knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, you can be generous about what's shared -- she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on tables, she's everybody's and it don't mean a thing, let them eat cake; knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it's held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it's gone, everything is pain."

Crazy like a fox

2007-11-25T18:06:00.000+08:00

She's so bright, this Julie Delpy character. I've just watched Two Days in Paris, a film she wrote, directed and composed music for...and I think its somewhat autobiographical. It's the funniest movie on love I've seen in a long time, horribly funny in the way that only truth can be. It makes me think she had far more do with the script of Before Sunrise, than was let on, that Richard Linklater is probably forever indebted to her. What I liked best about this film is its intelligent banter and and how it frequently laughs at the more ridiculous and torturous aspects of love -- the ways in which we want to posess each other, how reluctant we are to really know the people we love. It is also an intensely political film in some ways - ploughing as it does into every racial stereotype, contrasting European artistic freedom with American piety and laughing darkly at male sexual jealousy. Delpy plays Marion, a Parisienne now living in New York with her American boyfriend (Adam Goldberg). They're visiting Paris for two days and the stream of Marion's exboyfriends and her flirtatious nature sets jealousy going like a fat gold watch. Marion doesn't quite see the problem, you end up sympathising with the slightly hypochondriacal, sad clown character that Goldberg so brilliantly becomes.
I also like how her character always holds up the mundane problems of love against the larger problems in the world. That appeals to me a lot. The ability to appreciate scale when it comes to problems, romantic or otherwise, is vastly underestimated, come to think of it. There's a gem of a scene which she talks about in an interview -where Marion is agonising about men one minute and the next minute, she's worried because she has read that women use four times more toilet paper than men.. "And now I think of everything we destroy," she says, all the while crying...
Pretty crazy, but rang true to me.