Janet picks up her fortune cookie,
Then puts it down, turns to her friend:
“Don’t bank too much on youth. Your rookie
Season is drawing to an end.
John, things we would – when young – not think of,
Start to make sense when, on the brink of
Thirtydom, we pause to scan
What salves and salads cannot ban,
The earliest furrows on our faces,
The loneliness within our souls,
Our febrile clawing for mean goals,
Our programmed cockfights and rat races,
Our dreary dignity, false pride,
And hearts stored in formaldehyde.

– Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate

No worries – no anxiety. Just reading a very good book and felt those were awesome lines.

Context here:

I embrace this opportunity of remarking that [Mr. Jaggers] washed his clients off, as if he were a surgeon or a dentist. He had a closet in his room, fitted up for the purpose, which smelt of the scented soap like a perfumer’s shop. It had an usually large jack-towel on a roller inside the door, and he would wash his hands, wipe them and dry them all over this towel, whenever he came in from a police court or dismissed a client from his room. When I and my friends repaired to him at six o’clock the next day, he seemed to have been engaged on a case of a darker complexion than usual, for, we found him with his head butted into this closet, not only washing his hands, but laving his face and gargling his throat. And even when he had done all that, and had gone all round the jack-towel, he took out his penknife and scraped the case out of his nails before he put his coat on.

– Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Even more information here, in case you didn’t understand the symbolism.

Just a heads up: I’ll be speaking at the upcoming WriteCamp Singapore 2011 on “Singapore Literature: Where we should be going”.

In the talk – which I’m giving in my own personal capacity – I’ll discuss:

• Why Singapore Literature needs to be taught in Singapore schools,
• Why this hasn’t been happening, and
• What Singaporean writers should do to reverse this trend.

–

When is WriteCamp and what’s it about? From the SWF website:

Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2011
Time: 2pm – 6pm
Venue: Seminar Rooms 1 and 2, National Museum of Singapore
Price of Admission: FREE!

WriteCamp is SWF’s take on the “unconference” – a dynamic, user-generated series of workshops and talks where presenters share their knowledge to small, passionate audiences.

Each session is typically 30 minutes, with two or three sessions running concurrently so that audiences have the luxury of choice while speakers have to keep their talks snappy and insightful.

Topics can cover the craft of writing, tips on publishing, or other writing-related subjects.

Apart from fun networking and the buzz of spontaneous creativity, Writecamp promises to shed new light on writers and writing too!

Have an idea for a talk? Send it to writecamp.swf@gmail.com with your topic and contact details and we’ll get in touch with you if it’s selected.

Please join me, either as a listener or as a speaker, if you can. You can sign up for the event here or browse the SWF website for more details.

See you there!

Elyot: (seriously) You mustn’t be serious, my dear one; it’s just what they want.

Amanda: Who’s they?

Elyot: All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant. Laugh at everything, all their sacred shibboleths. Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light.

Amanda: If I laugh at everything, I must laugh at us too.

Elyot: Certainly you must. We’re figures of fun all right.

– Noel Coward, Private Lives.

Also relevant:

…we have to…be able to laugh at ourselves – because if we can’t laugh at ourselves when you (sic) are standing on a pedestal (sic), somebody is going to knock you (sic) down.

– Lee Hsien Loong, Prime Minister’s National Day Rally Speech 2006.

Was just reminded of the poem below when I received an e-mail blast from The Arts House regarding a reading of Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry.

–

Christopher Robin
By Czeslaw Milosz

I must think suddenly of matters too difficult for a bear of little brain. I have never asked myself what lies beyond the place where we live, I and Rabbit, Piglet and Eeyore, with our friend Christopher Robin. That is, we continued to live here, and nothing changed, and I just ate my little something. Only Christopher Robin left for a moment.

Owl says that immediately beyond our garden Time begins, and that it is an awfully deep well. If you fall in it, you go down and down, very quickly, and no one knows what happens to you next. I was a bit worried about Christopher Robin falling in, but he came back and then I asked him about the well. “Old bear,” he answered. “I was in it and I was falling and I was changing as I fell. My legs became long, I was a big person, I grew old, hunched, and I walked with a cane, and then I died. It was probably just a dream, it was quite unreal. The only real thing was you, old bear, and our shared fun. Now I won’t go anywhere, even if I’m called in for an afternoon snack.”

There was a story which my father and mother used to tell people about me when I was a child. They had said to me one day, “Today we are going to take you to school.” At the end of the day they asked me, “Did you like school?” I said, “I loved it.” The next morning they got me up early. When I asked why they were doing that they said, “You have to go to school.” And I said, crying, “But I went to school yesterday.”

– V. S. Naipaul, Half a Life, p. 22 (my emphasis).

My review of Tan Tarn How’s Six Plays – the text which I was busy devouring in June while recuperating from my short stint in the Weapon X Project – is now up on the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS).

Six of the Best
Compilation revives veteran playwright’s greatest hits

This collection brings together six of Tan Tarn How’s best works thus far, written and produced over a period of 11 years (1992 – 2003). Prior to this, The Lady of Soul and Her Ultimate ‘S’ Machine (“Soul“) was published individually in 1993, and Undercover and Home were published in play collections that featured various local playwrights. The publication of these plays in one volume are, hence, important in providing readers and scholars of Singapore literature with a holistic overview of Tan’s concerns as well as showcasing the diversity of topics he writes on, while demonstrating Tan’s dexterity as a playwright when tackling a range of subjects.

Thematically, most of Tan’s concerns, as with the majority of P65 Singaporean writers, are with the socio-political environment and machinations of the Singapore state – an ostensibly natural reflection of and response towards the environment that P65 Singaporean writers have been bred in.

(continued…)

Six Plays by Tan Tarn How.

Today, I am drinking Complan for the very first time in my life.

Complan is gross. Okay, I’m biased. I’ve never been a very big fan of these… products.

In any case, I just thought I’d mark this occasion with a poem because of how Complan has been immortalised (to me, at least) in Arthur Yap’s “2 mothers in a hdb playground”:

2 mothers in a hdb playground

ah beng is so smart,
already he can watch tv & know the whole story.
your kim cheong is also quite smart,
what boy is he in the exam?

this playground is not too bad, but i’m always
so worried, car here, car there.
at exam time, it’s worse.
because you know why?
kim cheong eats so little.

give him some complan. my ah beng was like that,
now he’s different. if you give him anything
he’s sure to finish it all up.

sure, sure. cheong’s father buys him
vitamins but he keeps it inside his mouth
& later gives it to the cat.
i scold like mad but what for?
if i don’t see it, how can i scold?

on Saturday, tv showed a new type,
special for children. why don’t you call
his father buy some? maybe they are better.

money’s no problem. it’s not that
we want to save. if we buy it
& he doesn’t eat it, throwing money
into the jamban is the same.
ah beng’s father spends so much,
takes out the mosaic floor & wants
to make terazzo or what.

we also got new furniture, bought from diethelm.
the sofa is so soft. i dare not sit. they all
sit like don’t want to get up. so expensive.
nearly two thousand dollars, sure must be good.

that you can’t say. my toa-soh
bought an expensive sewing machine,
after 6 months, it is already spoilt.
she took it back but … beng,
come here, come, don’t play the fool.
your tuition teacher is coming.
wah! kim cheong, now you’re quite big.

come, cheong, quick go home & bathe.
ah pah wants to take you chya-hong in new motor-car.

– Arthur Yap

I can’t remember if the original had any stanzas but I thought I’d delineate the text into stanzas so you can see the conversation between the mothers (a la Peter Tan’s webpage).

In case you are not very intelligent and don’t know why this poem is meaningful, please allow me to highlight a few significant aspects of the poem to you:

• Captures the use of English in Singapore, especially how Chinese Singaporeans speak English (wrongly or otherwise) in modern Singapore’s early years (look at the title: it’s “a hdb” instead of “an hdb”. So you’ve got to be adamantine when you read out the title i.e. “a haitch-dee-bee” instead of “an aitch-dee-bee”).
• Demonstrates changing class aspirations in Singapore, from a Chinese perspective, at least.
• Depicts the urbanisation of the Singapore landscape vis-a-vis economic progress.

DO YOU NOW UNDERSTAND WHY YOU NEED COMPLAN???

Well, I still maintain that Complan is gross but beggars whose mouths have been wired shut cannot be choosers.

BTW, whoever is coming over to my place to visit me – you’re gonna be served Complan.

I’ve just finished reading Map of the Invisible World by Tash Aw.

I got it at a book swap on Sunday and it’s accompanied me since my operation on Tuesday.

There was a motif in the text which I thought was quite cool: the recurrent use of “La Coccinelle (The Ladybird)” by Victor Hugo to discuss the theme of love.

The poem, in French, as far as I know, as follows:

La Coccinelle

Elle me dit: “Quelque chose
“Me tourmente.” Et j’aperçus
Son cou de neige, et, dessus,
Un petit insecte rose.

J’aurais dû, – mais, sage ou fou,
A seize ans, on est farouche, -
Voir le baiser sur sa bouche
Plus que l’insecte à son cou.

On eût dit un coquillage;
Dos rose et taché de noir.
Les fauvettes pour nous voir
Se penchaient dans le feuillage.

Sa bouche fraîche était là;
Je me courbai sur la belle,
Et je pris la coccinelle;
Mais le baiser s’envola.

“Fils, apprends comme on me nomme,”
Dit l’insecte du ciel bleu,
“Les bêtes sont au bon Dieu;
“Mais la bêtise est à l’homme.”

– Victor Hugo

An English translation, culled together from other translations plus my own limited knowledge of French:

The Ladybird

She told me: “Something is
Bothering me.” And I saw
Her snow-white neck, and, on it,
A small rose-coloured insect.

I should have, – but, wise or foolish,
One is awkward at sixteen, -
Seen the kiss on her lips
More than the bug on her neck.

One would have called it a seashell;
Red-backed and spotted black.
To see us, the warblers
Leaned forward in the foilage.

There was her cool mouth;
I bent over the lovely girl,
And I caught the ladybird;
But away flew the kiss.

“Son, learn my name,”
Said the bug from the sky blue,
“The beasts belong to our good Lord;
“But beastly stupidity belongs to man.”

– Victor Hugo

Here’s a comic of the poem too, if you’re so inclined.