nyc hello

finally reached this sepulchral city, especially when after a 4hour drive from 5am in the dark dawn from washington dc, the first rush upon entering the city was the skyscrapers revealing even more skyscrapers. a raving madman called me a 'fucking nigger' (he must be colourblind). i love this city.

and i'm buying too many books. i bought 2 additional luggage for them.

and i've got six more days here. help.

hello from vermont

the flight wasn't as bad as my previous long-haul ones, thanks to a short and smooth transit (at frankfurt, whose airport reminds one of being in a communist cell - all black white grey). i could even, immediately upon touching down at JFK, rent a car and start on the road - which is nothing until one remembers that the US do their cars left-way (i.e. the wrong way). so whenever i wanted to signal my turnings i switched on the windscreen-wiper instead, and had the tendency to ever so inadvertently veer to the right. a few times i actually turned into the wrong side of the road. luckily oncoming drivers were either slowing down or stationary or generally forgiving. and i could even do parallel parking. a few times. wow.

anyway, drove up to new haven, checked into the hotel, and went round to yale university to have a look (why else would i want to go to new haven- its otherwise neither new nor haven-ly). but oh, yale, what more can i say?

and then this morning, a pop over to hartford, centre of connecticut, and visited one (yes, one) museum, but it did hold genuine artworks of the old masters. and then back on the road, a brief stopover at smith college (sylvia plath's alma mater), and now at brattleboro, vermont, a really small pass-by town that for some reasons became a mini-mecca of counterculture and aging hippies. i've no complaints coz that means bookshops and coffee, lotsa (as far as the size of the town goes bookshops and coffee, and real bookshops and real coffee. i was in this really quaint oldbookshop and immediately knew i had to buy a john knowles and jamaica kincaid. yes, divine revelations do occur in bookshops.

I'll be in this town for 2 nights and shall enjoy the crucible-esque ambience, and then on to waterbury to visit the ben&jerry's confectionery. lotsa other places to go, i'll update when i can.
___

i see that my verbiage has returned. the wonders of being away from school, away from singapore. the places that i've been to so far - airport, streets, laneways, shops, restaurants, cafes - are so filled with dignified silence, that even with a nasty jetlag i feel at rest.

p.s. my last day at school was, to my relief, uneventful. i was not reduced to a torrent of tears, and no one committed suicide. neither did the school building collapse into ruin. but the students were very sweet - they gave cards, photographs, wrote lil notes of thanks and well-wishes and scrolled them like a testamur (really microscopic ones). one class wrote theirs on a tee-shirt and slipped it over a pink (I.Absolutely.Do.Not.Know.What.That.Means) stuffed bear-or-some-such. i'm truly thankful and grateful of course, and I've read all their messages, little gestures that are more than anything money can get.

It's never farewell

Tomorrow is my last day teaching, and I rather write something about it now than after, what with the vivid and certain hindsight and the heavy sense of closure. One and a half years have seemed decades and decades, and there’re too much to say and too many thoughts. But I certainly leave with the fondest and dearest memories. I’d never put in such consuming energy into my endeavours before in my whole life; and yet I awoke every early morning eager to start the new day. The students have been an immense joy to teach, even if they could be utterly exasperating at times. They certainly have taught and inspired me more than I could ever them, and much as I’ll miss them and think of them often, I look forward to they all growing up and stepping out into this big, big world of life and its all, and scaling great beautiful heights. This part of my life has been nothing short of a precious miracle, and in years and years to come, I’ll always remember a boy who grew up wanting to be a teacher and whose wish eventually did come true.
___











但愿你的眼睛只看得到笑容
但愿你流下每一滴泪都让人感动
但愿你以後每一个梦不会一场空

天上人间如果真值得歌颂
也是因为有你才会变得闹哄哄
天大地大世界比你想像中朦胧
我不忍心再欺哄但愿你听得懂

但愿你会懂该何去何从

-王菲-

First Loves

i was thirteen and freshly-weaned from a staple of enid blyton, and grazing for books to read. this sense of loss and wandering only became clearer in retrospect. i remember chancing upon a row of christopher pike novels in the school library and immediately took to the books' characters who themselves were teenagers. but otherwise i was (and am) not a fan of mystery/horror/thriller trash.

one of the wonders of a library shelving real books (so too a bookshop, for that matter), apart from that the books could be loaned for free or a small fee, is that one never knows what one would find, even if one doesn't know what to look for in the first place. and indeed, not knowing what one seeks sometimes leads to surprises, discoveries, and for the better. booklovers, like don juan, would always find a beauty on the shelf.

it was during one of those aimless wanderings i came upon a novel, First Loves, by a local author, philip jeyaretnam. just like a teenager, i felt the protagonist Ah Leong's emotions, yet without being fully aware of it still. just like a child poring over an illustrated storybook, vaguely following the story and conjuring up imaginings only a child with near-non-existent conceptions of the physical world can. i was after all, just stepping into the beginning of the beginning of adulthood.

the things we read once upon a time sometimes come to rest at the end of our consciousness, not as forgotten relics or aimless dust, but as returning motifs of particular scenes, specific sensibilities, that subconsciously steer our base emotions, from which physical actions are wrought upon. the opening lines of First loves is one such, and in the many passing years after, there have been numerous times i walked home in rusted evenings and thought of Ah Leong:

Evening brought the breeze, channelled by the concrete blocks, blowing across Singapore. Evening set the birds chattering, as if desperate for one last word before narkness silenced them. Evening bought light, flooding the corridors of the concrete blocks and lining the roads. The daytime of tinted windows and air-conditioning was giving way to the night-time of flourescent tubes and halogen headlights. White then red flashed the cars speeding past on the road outside Ah Leong's window.

Across the country televisions were coming on and video cassette recorders plugged in. Husbands greeted wives and changed channels. Children greeted mothers and clamoured for dinner. Ah Leong stood at the window and looked out, trying to fix all Singapore in his gaze. ...
___

my reading, like the mind that guides and feeds on it, has matured and developed in seriousness (though the greatest spurt by far was in the last three years - as always i'm a late-bloomer, if ever), and literature has become my religion of sorts (if we refer to writers as creators not unlike gods, then it is not too hyperbolic a metaphor). and First Loves is a rare gem of local literature. the zeitgeist is captured lightly yet surely, and Ah Leong is a quintessential singaporean male teenager finishing school, enlisting into national service, drawing his first pay cheque, falling into his first love ... i've re-read it some three, four, times, at different stages of my life, and each time i take in an overlooked detail, i take with me a new sensibility, and re-connect with it; each time i marvel at my sendipitous find in that humble school library. and along with that musing returns memories of evenings of various colour, memories of myself as the naive young boy who was always in a drifting dreamworld of his own.

scripts

it's been an exhausting week, eversince that madrush of a tuesday, and the exam scripts came in, and i been marking and marking and marking, clearing up to 40 scripts a day. it's the tedium, it's the indecipherable scribbles, the frustrating grammatical errors, it's what i'm earning my living for, at least for now and another one week. and the scripts have all been marked, on top of filing a report on the students' performance. i'm drained, but satisfied at a hard work well done.

i do love my job.

you shouldn't have doubted my ability and willing ness to complete the work. i gave you my word and you should have taken it and trusted me, because i thought you knew me better. for the past one and a half years i have not put in so much, slogged so hard, stayed back and up so late, spent out of my own pockets, earned such a pittance, only to squander it on a last-minute cop-out. I'd said i would, and i would. i absolutely love what i'm doing and i cant love my job anymore than i do now though i would if i could.

i could be swamped with a million more scripts and they'd be nothing next to your galling doubting countenance.

S.

i could not even imagine my past; and when i think of it now, it seems to be showing me the life of some other persion. and that other person is what i repudiate; my whole 'self' is someplace else ... when i think back ... to all the delirium of my then self ... i seem to be observing the obsessions of a stranger, and i am stupefied to learn that that stranger was myself.

-- e. m. cioran
___

S left yesterday for a new job in the uk, and i'll miss him terribly. from being my politics tutor as an undergrad to being my phd supervisor, he was also always a friend. and to think it all started so serendipituously. it was my first day in the city, just off the plane, and poking my yet-enrolled nose around the uni and signing up for courses and tutorials. "fresh off the boat!" he said, when he spotted me scribbling my name onto one of the notices pinned on the wall. i had signed up for his tutorial.

that was four years ago when i was living a different and previous life; who'd have known how S, with his encyclopedic mind and formidable intellect, would deeply indebt me, would come to be someone who'd play an important and transformative role in my life.

the past year that he was marked an extraordinary deepening of our friendship. a particular incident had to happen that scuppered everyone's aspirations. at his most distraught and frustrated moment he had said, "something good must come out of this." and indeed there were happy endings. the past year had been an incredible one with S, with our once or twice weekly cook-ins, generous wine and coffee and music and conversations. to say i'll miss him and i'm sad that he's left is to put things mildly.

hopefully to better verse and voice

i like the fact that this blog exists. a handful of friends and a few fingers of students know about it, and i want to keep it that way. i'm a very private person, not very lively and certainly not loud and going by developments over the years, these traits look set to persist if not deepen.

most of all i like the fact that i'm writing for myself and no one else and i'll make sure this credo remains. i need an outlet to write, and i realise i type better than i pen and i need somewhere to store my writings that can be accessed and added wherever and where else perfecter than the Net?

the torrential downpour last week was an experience that only drove home this point. i had a brolly but no matter, i was soaked, my bag was soaked, my books (to kill a mockingbird; naipaul's essays) were soaked, my mont blanc pen got lost amidst the wet flurry (i cry), and my notebook that i pen thoughts in occasionally was reduced to something that can only be described as watercolour impressionism gone mad (the artist, incidentally, had used only one colour - montblanc blue).

the books should be fine, maybe after a few years the pages would be straightened out (if only gay people could be restored like that, hallelujah, but would they want to? restored to what?). my notebook's a new one, having recently filled out the older (and by far the most precious) one, so the damage was little. i can always re-write my thoughts and second drafts are usually better versions.

my greatest loss was the pen - not because it is expensive (it is), but because it has sentimental value and my name engraved. it is like possessing a first edition of a beloved novel by a favourite writer - beautiful, well-made, poetic, timeless. these are rare qualities in our ugly, gaudy, commercial age where today's fashion is tomorrow's trash. these are qualities that varnish objects priceless. i'll certainly buy another to replace the loss, but identical to its predecessor it may be, beloveds have only one life, one death, and another would never be the same. and especially writing instruments, that for me with a literary disposition and aspiration, they are rich in tradition, history, and symbolism. it is a pen and not a pen and not just a pen especially a well-made pen of vintage. i'll find an occasion to justify a new buy, and mark a new beginning. hopefully to better verse and voice.

on that hopeful note, here's One Art by elizabeth bishop:

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

an image

winterson once wrote that there're 3 endings to any story: revenge, tragedy, and forgiveness. her stories have always been bounded within boundaries, trapped in desires, and told stories within stories within stories. and it is precisely only from within such walls and fences and ceilings that her characters could break free and flee: in Sexing the Cheery, Fortunata escapes by cutting and retying her rope as she descends her castle of mutable ceilings and shifting floors; in The Passion, Villanelle transcends the realities, if not fixities, of her mortal worries by, like and unlike Christ, opening her webbed feet and walking on water.

but what about happiness?

it is said booklovers are romantics and they are so because they read books in search of lost happiness. and because true happiness is unfixed its devotees never cease their pilgrimage. winterson's readers are no different. yet when they come to the ending of each winterson the variable of happiness so integral to the function of fiction has become a non-issue, overlooked, forgotten, read into non-existence.

but has the element of happiness in fact disappeared?

in Written on the Body, Louise's appearance at her unnamed and ungendered lover's kitchen window is real but illusory, precisely because for illusions to exist they have to first be real. to be able to grasp the significance of that window scene is to sense the significance of Literature. that illusion is framed into a sort of permanence when the lover ends thus the story: i do not know if this is a happy ending but here we're let loose in open fields.

this is where the story starts.

it is too for those of us in search of happiness - this is what happiness is - in these open fields we glimpse the first ripples of a rainbow - that otherworldly arc in the sky, empty space and coloured points of light - an illusion, an image, imagic, magical.

obdurate fact of surrender

i've always thought it impossible to feel sad with the music of vivaldi. after all, his gloria - a tabernacle of sheer exuberance held me up during one of the darkest hours of my life, comforting, poulticing, healing the raw wretchedness of my skin, flesh, and bones. then i heard a most gnashingly poignant, cinematic, quietly devastating pane of violin music, an andante cushioned between the first and third movements of his b flat major concerto, and it felt like one had just emerged from the blind, deaf depths of oceans, cradling the nacreous oyster, cradling the mother of pearls.
___

at the centre of himself, a man cannot choose whom to love. he can choose how to live and can honour the truth of himself where he may. but he cannot choose whom to love ... the heart will always have the last word, and when the word is love we can recognise, we can respond, we can submit and we can try to ignore, but we can never choose. love is not a matter of choice but an obdurate fact of surrender.

-- andrew o'hagan, Be Near Me.

hello long time

the entire semester last i used the english textbook with them only once, during the first lesson and then i decided to abandon that and sourced materials from newspapers and novels. they got used to that; and once it slipped my tongue what i shouldnt have mouthed, that english textbooks are useless. but that of course shouldn't be taken too literally; and there's a whole qualification behind it which i omitted. now i'm no longer teaching them and in comes the new teacher and gets the textbook back in action they're all howling for blood. i'll miss them of course. on a brighter note, the former classes that i've returned to cheered and roared and this should probably be the closest i come to being a celeb. this is my final semester in teaching and i must and i will inspire them all.
___

p.s. i havent disappeared but something's wrong with this blog i havent been able to update it via my computer.