The joys of existence this evening but not necessarily all at once:
- cheese & mushroom roti prata
- Reading Chekhov's Gooseberries
- Mucking about with Sophia
- Litening to A Moon Shaped Pool
- Chocolate
Favourites
The joys of existence this evening but not necessarily all at once:
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
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.
"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.
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.
The Ragged Wood
O hurry where by water among the trees
The delicate-stepping stag and his lady sigh,
When they have but looked upon their images -
Would none had ever loved but you and I!
Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed
Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky,
When the sun looked out of his golden hood? -
O that none ever loved but you and I!
O hurty to the ragged wood, for there
I will drive all those lovers out and cry -
O my share of the world, O yellow hair!
No one has ever loved but you and I.
William Butler Yeats
In Singapore, Australia and Jakarta, worlds fall apart, everyone is looking for an escape, and nothing will be the same again. Exploring possibility and desire, yearning and identity, We Rose Up Slowly is the debut collection of short stories by Jon Gresham. Buy We Rose Up Slowly on line here.
Enough of that blatant self promotion. Here is a poem:
I
I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
There in their heat the winter floods
Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,
And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.
These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,
Sour the boiling honey;
The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;
There in the sun the frigid threads
Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
The signal moon is zero in their voids.
I see the summer children in their mothers
Split up the brawned womb’s weathers,
Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;
There in the deep with quartered shades
Of sun and moon they paint their dams
As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.
I see that from these boys shall men of nothing
Stature by seedy shifting,
Or lame the air with leaping from its heats;
There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse
Of love and light bursts in their throats.
O see the pulse of summer in the ice.
II
But seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;
There, in his night, the black-tongued bells
The sleepy man of winter pulls,
Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.
We are the dark derniers let us summon
Death from a summer woman,
A muscling life from lovers in their cramp
From the fair dead who flush the sea
The bright-eyed worm on Davy’s lamp
And from the planted womb the man of straw.
We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,
Green of the seaweeds’ iron,
Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,
Pick the world’s ball of wave and froth
To choke the deserts with her tides,
And comb the county gardens for a wreath.
In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,
Heigh ho the blood and berry,
And nail the merry squires to the trees;
Here love’s damp muscle dries and dies
Here break a kiss in no love’s quarry,
O see the poles of promise in the boys.
III
I see you boys of summer in your ruin.
Man in his maggot’s barren.
And boys are full and foreign to the pouch.
I am the man your father was.
We are the sons of flint and pitch.
O see the poles are kissing as they cross.
Dylan Thomas, 1914 - 1953
Today, I am off to BooksActually to learn how the bookshop works. I will have my best 'retail assistant' face on.
The above image was a Kuala Lumpur International Photo Award Finalist in 2009.
Charmaine Yeo, Ruth Schooling, Sarah Tang, me in the glasses, Kenny Zeng and Alison Schooling & cat at Sarah and Schooling, Jalan Pisang, Singapore, June 2015.
Last week at Sarah and Schooling’s office on Jalan Pisang I spent a couple of hours going through the final proofs of my book, We Rose Up Slowly.
I discovered one minor error: a pair of missing quotation marks at the end of an indented paragraph, and that was it. No more revisions, edits or changes.
The book was sent to the printers the next day with another 9 titles - including new poetry from Cyril Wong, reprints of From the Belly of the Cat & Balik Kampung - which Math Paper Press will also publish in early July.
Sarah and Schooling, as always, have done a wonderful job on these books.
I am very happy with their cover design of We Rose Up Slowly. After many false starts with external content providers, the talented Kenny Zeng of Sarah and Schooling came up with the goods and showed Math Paper Press and I several of his ideas for the final cover. We were all unanimous in choosing the final cover above.
Kenny Z’s cover is ethereal, enigmatic and quirky. There is a reason for the cow floating above the clouds on the back cover. His design illuminates the sensibility of the text and invites readers into a world of possibility, romance and beauty.
Thanks and good luck to Kenny Z - who is off to New York to study in a couple of months.