while spring cleaning a couple of days ago, i relocated a notebook full of quotations i had jotted down over the years. there are many i still like --

All men should try to learn before they die
What they are running from, and to, and why ~~ James Thurber

No matter how well you perform there's always someone of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy. ~~ Sir Laurence Olivier

The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that every saint has a past, every sinner a future. ~~ Oscar Wilde

We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and as ute as stones, our very passivity would be an act. ~~Jean Paul Sartre

Whether it is the best of times or the worst of times it is the only time we have ~~Art Buchwald

the break was nice. now deep breath, and here we go again.

The Brother is correct. Will Ferrell as Franz Liebkind is just wrong wrong wrong.

sms

exchange with su-lin

su-lin: don't you start work soon? would you like to get lunch sometime this week, before you do?
me: i start on friday. hasn't term started for you?
su-lin: yes, but we scoot at twelve
me: i don't know what they pay you for. so wed or thurs?
su-lin: it's common test week, you bitch. tmrw? there's a staff meeting...will 2ish be too late?
me: me a bitch? i shall save that message to show cp. 2ish is fine

3 years in york with cp and look what happens.

Currently reading:
The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton

carded

in borders yesterday, paying for the sideways dvd, the cashier asked me for identification because i was purchasing an m18 movie. in retrospect, i guess i'm flattered (oh to be 18 again), but in the moment it was like - what am i buying, porn? a little common sense does go a long way.

i had forgotten how nice salads can be, but making two gorgeous ones in the last couple of weeks has rectified that. yesterday's was an attempt at replicating the alpine bagels cobb salad that i used to like so much: romaine lettuce, corn niblets, kalamata olives, sliced tomatoes, tinned mandarin oranges, stilton cheese, pepperidge farm onion and garlic croutons, balsamic vinaigrette. next time: something with apples.

Currently reading:
Foreign Studies - Shusako Endo

the comeback

One of the nasty things about summer is that there are no new episodes of anything, which is why I am pleased that HBO has put out this new sitcom. It is not bad, and proves that Lisa Kudrow has talent, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion notwithstanding.

… and thanks for all the fish

Trengganu, Malaysia

1.1 We were in Redang, Trengganu, population 50, goats 512.

1.2 There are certain restrictions when young families come to choosing a place to go on vacation. Screaming young kids means (a) nowhere too far away (b) nothing historical, cultural or faux-historical and (c) no ecotourism, adventure tourism, or anything else involving Mortal Peril. The island of Redang epitomises what you have left.

1.3 When I was little, we did a lot of trips like this: Langkawi, Phuket, Batam. I think I even looked forward to them. Obviously then, observing the other families on our flight, the first thought that comes to mind is: was I so obnoxious when I was 8?

1.4 The second is: probably.

1.5 Jianyi’s idea with the leashes isn’t so bad.


2.1 It’s a 1.5 hour flight from Seletar Air Base. They’ve opened up most of Seletar Camp for civilian use. Singapore Technologies is still in there, and the bungalows that the British officers used back in the day, but as far as I could see a lot of the SAF facilities are gone. I used Seletar Camp once in my NS days, for a river crossing exercise, and the most memorable thing about that was how my socks turned mustard yellow afterwards.


3.1 The first thing you notice are the goats. They come in four flavours: brown with horns, black with horns, brown without horns and black without horns, and they all shit extravagantly.

3.2 And chickens.

3.3 The kids are extraordinarily friendly, and wave at us every time we pass. They seem to spend an unnatural amount of time wading around in the drains with their homemade fishing hooks. There is a school very nearby, and I’m almost positive they are playing truant.

3.4 My aunt thinks that it’s remarkable that they do not succumb to ringworm and other vector-borne diseases. They probably do.

3.5 This is my aunt.




She would have my head if she knew I had posted her picture on the Internet.


4.1 The seawater is calm, turquoise, and so clear that it’s almost unnatural. Along the private stretch in front of our resort, it appears that there is no marine life whatsoever. If you look really, really hard, you can locate the occasional dead bivalve. I despair, but just a little.

4.2 Fortunately, there are rocks. And where there are rocks, there are cirrepedia; and where there are cirrepedia, there are other macrofauna.

4.3 We spend a pleasant afternoon communing with the fish, as well as a knobbly sea cucumber that scares the bejesus out of a little girl with a Strawberry Shortcake wading ring.


5.1 The food tries to be average, and occasionally succeeds.

5.2 Drinks at 17 Rm a pop sweeten the deal a bit.


6.1 I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale has nothing to do with the Rossetti poem, and I’m beginning to think that Khushwant Singh did not even mean the title as a quotation. The book was dull, and suffers from being a dolled-up political statement, which I’m sure people know how much I hate. Don’t be tempted.


7.1 Kayaking reminds me of OBS, where Kenneth Gay thought it would be a good idea to cook a whole, unchopped onion into a cauldron of asparagus soup and canned chicken curry and call it dinner.

7.2 It’s a singularly inefficient way to travel, although I suppose you could look at it from another angle and say that it’s a great workout. .


8.1 There isn’t much to do at nights. The television is on the fritz, and the other recreational facilities they have are lame. I wish I had better books. (Currently reading: The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear – Walter Moers)


9.1. We visit Pulau Tamun, MPA. It’s no more than a rock in the ocean, but it has a mosque, a few chalet bungalows, a cemetery and a research lab.

9.2. They study sea turtles in this lab, and it continues to amaze me that Chelonia navigate the world, avoid the soup pot, and have still not gone extinct.

9.3 According to a sign on the beach, SAFETY IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. ACCIDENTS are also AT YOUR OWN RISK.

9.4 There is life in abundance. The fish eat from your hands. In particular, one snout-nosed species is more than happy to swim right up to you and poke curiously at your fingers.

9.5 Even after much coaxing, the only person willing to venture far from the shore is The Other Brother. Everyone else: you missed out.


10.1 It wasn’t perfect, but I kind of needed the break.

and since she mentioned it

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me:
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain;
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

           Christina Rossetti

going to malaysia

back on friday

i aten't dead, and all that

in babylon

-- was, in the end, a meaty book: large bites of story that hung together in a tenuous but (ultimately) very satisfying way. Chalk this up as the second novel about clockmakers that I've found praiseworthy.

I probably sped through it a little bit too fast (mostly because I was enjoying it); because of that I feel that I missed some of the superstructure that Moring built into the novel, and that might have taken something away from the reading. (In general, I find it harder to pay attention when reading now than in my JC days. Not sure why; perhaps it's amyloid plaque in the brain already). The translation (I read the Flamingo edition) was, as far as I could tell, quite well done -- it hardly resembled a translated work, in fact. Something to do with the fact that it was written in Dutch? Certain languages seem to survive translation to English better than others.

Loved: Uncle Herman, the picking-through-the-haunted-house bits, the fairy tales, all the descriptions of food, and the last chapter. Especially the fairy tales (I'm a sucker for stories within stories.)

(Minz: it's a book that really merits a fuller review; suffice it to say that I
think you'll like it.)

sermon

-- today was nothing new, yet completely useful -- all about not letting fear rule your life, but letting love guide your decisions. True that. Being judged and assessed and observed -- from primary school till now -- has filled me to the brim with paranoia, with the unshakeable feeling that if I let my guard down for a second someone is going to get me. Heh. Not caring what other people think of you: the lifelong struggle.

Currently reading:
I Shall Not Hear The Nightingale - Khushwant Singh (purely because the title caught my eye; we shall see.)

worst book ever written

Voila

cruise + holmes = gross

Currently reading:
Too Loud a Solitude - Bohumil Hrabal

gift

my mom brought me back a bottle of small wine with a cobra in it (biting its own tail all auryn). and, i think, figs. it's supposed to grant one immunity to various ailments and whatnots, but I'm not sure i have the stomach for it, so i'm just going to let it sit on my desk for a while next to the ceramic bulldog.

with people from all over the world back for summer the house is a veritable madhouse, which is good in some ways but quite exhausting in others. i enjoy silence and solitude too much for my own good. why am i not a grad student? ok, don't answer that.

dukegabe is back from NC and mourning the end of his freedom to travel. he must have visited about a third of the free nations of the world in his 4 years in college, and he's off (again) to a last thing in australia next week before he starts work at sph. i forgot to ask him to get me margaret rivers chocolate bars.

pink martini

thanks to dead like me and a conspicuous hmv display, i now own this CD: 11 tracks in 6 different languages, and some exquisitely weird versions of familiar tunes.

(oh! they're all from harvard!)

like never before

-- was actually rather good for something i selected solely on the basis of having an attractive cover. it was wistful, even beautiful at times, a book featuring a jewish family that, surprisingly, wasn't all about what it is to be jewish. i would quote, but i have returned it.

tastes

maybe i just don't know women very well, but i was most surprised that su-lin pulled this off the shelf for me to read. it's a classic, well, boys book, raw, testosterone-charged, even mildly homoerotic. it ends more like an episode of the sopranos than a chapter of the hardy boys, and though i can't say i disliked it...su-lin? whatever happened to sugar and spice and all things nice?

if you recall, i told minz a few months ago that i thought pat mckillip's riddlemaster trilogy was a work that would be appreciated more by guys than girls. that idea was very quickly shot down, so if i get loud protests about my take on cormier, perhaps the conclusion is that i'm a bigot. isn't it true, though, that many children's books are gender-targeted? not just because writers feel they need to fulfil some unspoken social contract to maintain the gender identities of the next generation, but out of commercial necessity as well -- parents like clear-cut choices for their kids, I think: GI Joes and Barbies and all that.

or are Humans people genderless when it comes to taste in literature because we grew up reading everything? i kind of like that notion: transcending the social construct to appreciate something as it is. conveniently 21st century as well: no barriers, no lenses, just the snowy whiteness of objectivity.


i do like being recommended books -- there's a very different pleasure in picking a good book off the shelf and reading one because someone you know passes it off to you. the exercise then is not just 'why did i like it', but 'why did the other person like it', and if (s)he is someone you care about, that can be insight worth having.

Currently reading:
In Babylon - Marcel Moring

to someone

strangely enough, the noun is "chiropractic"

From Voyage to the End of the Room, Tibor Fischer

When long-left-alone jungle tribes are dragged into the spokes of civilisation, they get mangled. It's not simple matters that result in their destruction. It's not that they're not as well armed as the interlopers, that they can't manage to adapt, or that they have nothing to sell. They're flattened by the awareness that their beliefs have failed: it's not destructive to learn that there is a better way of hunting a peccary, that synthetic fabrics have their uses, or that you need to master another language to trade. All of us can be extremely adaptable when it's to our advantage to do so. One belief trampled is a nuisance, but to see all your answers as litter on the streets of your conquerors... Getting the numbers wrong for a lottery draw, or getting wet because you didn't take an umbrella because you surmised it wouldn't rain is radically different from discovering that your family all hate you and that the bank in which you had your life savings never existed.

Is the loss of the feeling that everything will be all right simply an indication that you've finally grown up or that you're not right in the head? I don't dream any more. Or I do, but not with any conviction. It's like watching a foot ball match when you don't support either team and you don't know any of the players and you don't have any interest in the sport: it passes the time, but you don't care.

anyhow, if anyone else would like the mystery of the milo godzilla to be shattered in front of their unwilling eyes, here's the link

i logged on to complain about my numinousness being taken from me (again), and lo, if it had not been done already. she even robs me of the satisfaction of referencing it. humph.

today i made latkes

-- with more than a measure of guilt, because i had promised su-lin that she would be present when during the process so she could have one fresh from the pan. called her and burned two of them, so there's immanent justice for you.

(she has been promised one wrapped in a paper towel the next time we meet)

latkes because of all quiet..., and friedrich as well, in which they toss hot potato pancakes from hand to hand. wanted to add streaky bacon, but forgot to buy any, which is just as well because that would be sort of non-traditional. also forgotten: cranberry sauce; plain old strawberry jam on the side, however, worked just fine.

hitchhiker's guide

To be frank, I didn't much care for it.

1. Arthur Dent was too...sane. In the book, you got the sense that AD's head was always about five seconds away from imploding. I know CP is going to hate me for saying this, but I think I would have preferred someone like Bill Murray in the role, 'cos Martin Freeman just didn't carry it for me.

2. I really wanted the zany bits to be over the top, and they weren't. The one movie where they can legitimately smear cheese over everything, and they miss their chance.

3. It was too glossy. I guess I was expecting something like the Monty Python movies where there's this underlying sense of fakeness. Is it legitimate to complain that the production value of a movie is too high? Marvin was perfectly tacky, though. Oh, and so was the whale. More of the show should have felt that way.

4. I'm not sure what the Guide looked like in my mind, but it certainly did not look like That. (Concession: 10/10 for Stephen Fry's narration)

Oh well.

dinosaur redux

on evans road, opposite the school of physical education, there is a new eatery called the prata cafe. on the menu at this place: milo godzilla (aka milo dinosaur: the next generation). i have not had the pleasure of ordering this yet, but in my mind's eye it's a two-foot monstrosity, has a quarter of a tin of milo powder in it, and is topped with two shots of brandy set aflame.

Currently reading:
Voyage To the End of the Room - Tibor Fischer