Favourites
Bloke Shaving, Kolkata, India, Rolleiflex 2004
Traveller, Kolkata, India, Rolleiflex, 2004
Images from Jakarta Selatan, September 2016
WARNING: These images show the slaughter of animals in detail. Not for the squeamish or the sensitive.
Scene from Sing Lit Station Prose Bootcamp, Singapore, December 2016
Hao Guang's ear, Hsien Min listening to Kenny Leck with Clarissa Goenawan and Hoe Fang's hand in the background
Naka Meguro, Tokyo, Japan, 2012
The joys of existence this evening but not necessarily all at once:
Wedding, Lombok 2011
On distinguishing between 'the character', 'the man' and 'the author':
"It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes."
Death of the Author, Roland Barthes, Trans Richard Howard
Waiting for a taxi, Claymore Hill, Singapore 2006
Thinking about WG Sebald's Manchester in the Max Ferber section of The Emigrants.
This is the closest I get in literature to the time and place of my birth in Manchester at the end of the 60s. On arrival Sebald travels through Didsbury on his way to his lodgings. Did he pass the place of my birth? He writes of dour, grey days in a decaying city long since past its best, his only solace a teas-made with its reassuring lime green fluorescent clock face.
Max Ferber is based on Frank Auerbach, who was put on a plane to England at the start of the war by his parents who were deported a few years later and died in the camps.
Buddhist Lodge, Kim Yam Rd, Singapore 2004
"He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter let when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness."
W G Sebald, The Emigrants
Here are some of W G Sebald's writing tips from a student at the University of East Anglia where he taught up until the time of his death in 2001. These provide a wonderful insight into his work.
Also here is the Michael Silverblatt KRCW Bookworm W G Sebald interview dated 6 Dec 2001. He died just over a week later on 14 December 2001of a heart aneurysm near Norwich.
Off Sampeng Lane, Bangkok, 2000
One year on and memorials to The Man are everywhere. Time to:
Vigil, Singapore General Hospital
Tribute, Tanjong Pagar Community Centre
More images at:
If you'd like to read a story of mine, The Finger is featured in Singapore Poetry.
Further background to the story can be found here.
This is a photo story of our niece, Kamila, getting a haircut in October 2015.
