On the passing of another year

One year ago I made a list of things to do. The concrete things I mostly managed; the waffly ones were, well, waffly. "Grow in wisdom and temperance" - yeah, right. What a pompous twit I was.

Lots of things have happened (duh). I became a teacher briefly, and I hope my erstwhile students have recovered. ('Egregious' actually means "very bad", 4P; I should have corrected myself a long time ago damnit. I mixed it up with 'gregarious' as you should have figured out.) It was a short ten weeks but that time changed me. It was the scope of the responsibilities and the feeling of the sand always shifting beneath the feet that did it. It's a rare teacher indeed who's ever in total control of the situation; every lesson was a challenge, and I think it's good that I had the courage to occasionally laugh at my pretence of being in control. Some people tried so hard not to, but I think it's okay to lose face sometimes; it makes you the bigger man (or dweeb, actually).

Brandenburg. Ouch. Organizing your very own Bach concert on a whim is no joke. Who does that anyway? I learnt two things: how to apply for an Arts Fund grant, and how to kill yourself through overwork. I guess I should never have plunged in without getting a team together first. Still, on the positive side I had a chance to play with many great musician friends for the last time in a long while.

As an aside: my mom told me of a childhood connection to Brandy 2 (the concerto grosso one). Apparently when I was a kid (two years old) the opening to Brandy 2 was the theme music for the arts channel on TV, and every time it came on I'd stop whatever I was doing and listen till it was over. Guess it must have resonated on some subconscious level.

Then it was preparing for the trip and then actually getting to Yale. I can't believe I dragged myself and my mom all around New York, New Haven and a bit of Boston. And then OIS (fun times) and then the few days before classes started, and then living for the weekend every week, and midterm season, midterm season redux, Thanksgiving break, reading week, finals, flying back home. Went by just like that. I'm glad I met great people in OIS and my classes and had awesome suitemates; my term would have sucked without these little mercies. Looking back I should have partied more, and that's reflected in my grades.

So since I live by terms now, not years, new term's resolutions are in order. I resolve to

• Party at least once (I need help for this)
• Take classes I'm excited for
• Keep my grades up
• Stop sleeping in the 9am classes
• Stop trying my luck with the rice in Morse

Happy 2011!

on leaving singapore

As my departure for university nears I'm starting to get more apprehensive about it.

I think for slightly more than two years I've been buoyed along by this post-admissions-outcome glow. I was ridiculously happy - hey, who wouldn't be? - and somehow it's actually lasted this long. But now as I'm having to settle visa forms, flight and hotel bookings, and thinking about setting up a bank account... rooming with a total stranger probably from a culture quite dissimilar to mine... the laundry situation O.o... it's getting kinda daunting.

And let's not forget that my brains have rotted. I can understand about 30% of an average Chinese text. I've done nothing to my mind in NS except attempting to plough through Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy and learning enough Cyrillic to read the labels of vodka bottles. I can barely remember all the math and economics that I did and that's going to be awfully important later on.

I'm flying out of Singapore on National Day. When I booked the flight I downplayed the obvious significance - after all it's just a date. But the significance looms ever larger and it seems a very decisive up-yours to Singapore, and although the whole notion of patriotism is ridiculous to me I wonder whether I'm quite ready to leave the place I grew up in. It's all making me feel quite conflicted.

Come to think of it, once Yale said yes NUS never had a chance. When I did the US apps nearly 3 years ago I'd only applied to those schools that I thought were definitely better than NUS (the economists will recognise an application of ordinal utility here), so when an offer came along it seemed natural to take it. Looking back at it I think it was kinda self-centred. I know it'll be tough for my mom.

All things considered, there was a time when I really looked forward to independence and moving out of Singapore for ever and ever. Now I'm not quite so sure.

sporadic update #5

I thought about giving my writing some impetus the last time but that hasn't turned out well. It's been about four weeks since I last wrote. On the plus side, there are now a few things to report!

For instance, my badminton skills have improved significantly (from zero) ever since the geog guys started playing badminton fortnightly.

I've changed the default font on my blog to Franklin Gothic Medium because according to a survey on a site I just found (code style) it's the most common un-fugly sans serif font on Windows systems. Myriad Web isn't even represented in the survey, so this means no one apart from myself has been reading the blog the way it's supposed to look. Fail.

I finally went down to books actually a few weeks back, with adam. It's a lovely place - I want my house to look like that when I get one. Shelves everywhere O.o and lots of gems I never thought I'd find in Singapore. I got George Perec's Life: A User's Manual and a collection of Roger McGough's poetry (including Summer with Monika). That place made my day.

There've been three birthday parties that I've been to since my release from hermithood (organising the brandenburg project) - Adam's, Jing Xun's and Brenda's. I got slightly drunk at the first, thoroughly wasted at the second, and we got peck wasted at the third by playing 猜拳 (cai1 quan2, guess fist - or "the finger-guessing game", as Google Translate tells me). All good fun.

Sidetrack: Amazingly 猜拳 has its own page in the Chinese Wikipedia (and even more amazingly, I can still read about 80% of it). Apparently it can refer to scissors paper stone (rock paper scissors) or the one where you guess the number of fists open at the time (which was the one we played for drinks). Both are documented in Ming Dynasty books, the latter in the encyclopedic 五杂组. Bet you didn't know that.

I also bought a new laptop last Thursday at the PC Show (HP ProBook 4310s) on which I'm typing this blog entry now. PC Show was mad and godawfully crowded but it's always fascinating. Anyway the laptop's running Windows 7 now after I repartitioned the hard drive (a single 450GB drive is nuts) and got rid of Vista. Battery life is about 5 hours on normal typing and web-surfing, and just over the length of a normal movie for movie playback, so I'm satisfied. I've just discovered that the Chinese input on Windows 7 is a bitch though (the old XP one used to have a correction function that would give you phrases as you went along, which was a godsend; no such luck with this one). But heck, I'm not going to use Chinese in an academic context ever again.

Well that about sums it up. I had a re: mix rehearsal yesterday and will have a TPO one later today, but that's it. Anyone up for coffee is welcome to contact me through the usual methods and suggest a place and time.

noteworth-less

Wow it's been an incredibly long time since I updated, for the simple reason that life hasn't been that happening. I assume some people blog to give meaning to their life, others to document noteworthy stuff that's happened to them; I personally haven't felt the need for such direction, and my daily existence has become so humdrum as to be noteworth-less.

Let me give you an example - I play Civilization IV, and I've recently downloaded a new mod. This one is so arcane that it makes the vanilla game a walk in the park. As you might know, Civilization is turn-based. A 'quick' game is 700 turns; in the early game you have maybe 10 turns a minute, maybe more. By the time you reach turn 400+ (which in the 'real' timescale is the Victorian era), you're down to a turn a minute because of the 30+ computer opponents on a huge Earth map. By the time you reach about turn 600 (which is the furthest I've got on the noble difficulty setting), you're down to one turn every 3 minutes - which means the last 1/7 of the game (assuming you don't win it before that) takes 5 hours, most of which is spent staring at the screen waiting for the computer opponents' turns. I have taken to practicing completing the square while waiting, but I've reached turn 600 and in the slide towards futility I seem to have left the point of no return behind me long ago.

But I've decided to reverse the slide and turn causality on its head, in a sense. I've decided that maybe I should use blogging as an impetus to give direction to my life. I thought Facebook might replace blogging (notes, wall posts etc.) but Facebook's social activity is entirely derivative. If you don't already have an active social life then you're reduced to posting videos and links and comments on other people's videos and links. By contrast blogging is primary, original, creative in nature (at least more so than facebooking).

Let's see how long this motivation lasts; I give it two days.

weird dream came true

It's been a long time...

A few months back I dreamt I wrote a letter to the Danish embassy about how Danish butter cookies always came broken in the tin.

(It's a fetish of mine that whenever I open a tin of Danish butter cookies, I eat all the broken ones and pack all the whole ones into airtight glass jars.)

And they wrote back to me offering to give me a tin of unbroken butter cookies.

-----

Today I opened a tin of Danish butter cookies and not one was broken. =)

2 weeks at RI

I've finished two weeks of my one-term stint back at that school in Bishan – yeah that one of happy and not-so-happy teenage memories – and seen lots. Some encouraging, some not so.

First of all, it's been a steep learning curve standing up there and doing your darnedest to keep order while delivering the content you're supposed to go through. I think it's a gazillion times easier if you're doing math or the sciences or even history – at least you have readings, handouts, and a fairly comprehensive syllabus to work with. Of course there's a syllabus for English as well but my guys' abilities differ so wildly that it's a huge challenge holding the class together. Some of them have problems stringing a sentence together and keeping the grammatical number or tense agreement. Sadly, this is especially but not exclusively true of the foreign scholars. I wonder whether standards have slipped and if so, why.

And one of the saddest and scariest things about the modern age is that reading and writing (in a sustained, intellectual fashion) are skills that aren't valued any more. It's scary because I'm teaching things that hinge vitally on command of these skills. The people I'm teaching now grew up with the Internet. The younger ones were born in the year I got Internet access – that's 56kbps dialup, by the way. They've known iPods and MSN for as long as they can remember, and they've been on Facebook possibly as long as me. A whole generation of people has suddenly migrated away from books, magazines and newspapers, to grow up on blogs, podcasts and tweets – a shift of that speed and scale is alarming. I honestly believe that the piecemeal nature of information on the Internet has led directly to an impairment of our ability to store and process knowledge. Is it just me, or have kids these days (in fact, all of us) become dumber on average? Is there any way of knowing?

I'm also stunned by some of the attitudes to learning and to authority that I've seen. To be fair, they're only manifested in a tiny minority, and perhaps they aren't worse than in my time – perhaps I led a sheltered GEP-humanz life and I'd never even seen the kind of stuff that happened in the rest of RI (not to mention outside). But a few assignments I've been handed have shocked far more experienced teachers than myself – that is indicative of the level of seriousness and pride with which they treat their academic work. 

As some of you may know, RISE changed hands recently, and I've been absolutely shocked by the nonchalance – indeed the slapdash attitudes – shown by some of the younger players towards their new conductor. I'm seeing ridiculously poor standards of musical and rehearsal discipline, and sec 2s speaking out of turn, talking back to their seniors and teachers. Putting it bluntly, they are perfectly happy to waste the time and energy and goodwill of their betters. I am disgusted. Or do they know not what they do? If this is true of other CCAs as well, then I think it's time to bring tekan camps back.

That is not to say that I haven't seen good things. The good thing about being in RI is that there are always brilliant students with a flair for the language who really demonstrate superlative achievement and maturity. I've seen a few extremely promising orators and writers already. But even then, many of them aren't living up to their potential. The level of energy that I've felt is rather out of proportion to the level of achievement I've seen. True, they're only 15 going on 16, and they're incredibly distracted and unfocused as us guys often are; true, as teachers and seniors it's impossible for us to expect the guys to perform at their best all the time. Perhaps it's early days yet.

It's early days indeed – just ten days into my job I've weathered day after day of teachers' throat (a perennial job hazard), late nights (8pm and more, thanks to the enthusiasm of the RISE exco, which I'm loathe to suppress), and rowdy classes (sad to say I don't have a 'stage presence' like Mrs Smith!) I sometimes look at myself and wonder what right I have to suppose that I know better than my classes, to pretend that I have anything useful to share. But then I come across some guy or other who's dumb or rude or screwed up enough that I feel like smashing his noisehole – that happens about once a day – and then all's right with the world again. Though I haven't smashed anyone's noisehole (yet).

New Year resolutions

I resolve

• to live out the year.
• to not use powerpoint presentations unless absolutely necessary.
• to use only sans-serifs in print except for titles.
• to lower my expectations.
• to raise my standards (not a contradiction).
• to save more and drink less.
• to do more and mope less.
• to read cervantes' don quixote.
• to keep on writing and writing and writing.
• to meet deadlines.
• to stop depending on others so much.
• to never stop trying.
• to grow in wisdom and temperance.
• to never be cowed.
• to learn when to stop.

Happy 2010!

Christmas 2009

Life is boring as bollocks. I was hungry and nauseous throughout dinner; that's weird. Don't know if alcohol will make me feel good =D or throw up =( wtf.

* * *

(15 minutes later) Still feeling nauseous. This is strange.

Okay never mind. Some targets for the near future:

• Finish the pile of books next to me, and Don Quixote and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets which I don't have yet
• Play or listen to a performance of the Brandenburg Concertos (I need help with this)
• Be less crabby
• Revert to Singapore time zone (GMT +8)
• Waste less time on facebook and random surfing
• Catch up with old friends (try, at least)
• Don't screw up my job

Happy Sol Invictus!

hong kong.

Been busy prepping for the Mendelssohn concert and the Hong Kong trip along with lots of misc stuff so haven't been posting. I hope that will change because I sense my meagre readership dwindling still further, and also because I need to practise writing more.

Hong Kong was fun; there were lots to see and do and wonder at. The pace of life there is visibly faster - in the MTR stations people walk at twice the speed of Singaporeans, there's hardly any conversation, and people frown at you if you don't keep right on the escalator. The buildings are set into the hillside at crazy angles and heights, and the bus routes are insanely long windy single-lane routes up 30-degree slopes – terribly scenic but hell to drive, I'm sure. Huge respec' for HK bus drivers.

The language barrier was surprising. In reality most Hongkongers know very little English – either that or they're uncomfortable with speaking it. You could almost tell the people apart by what they spoke – Hongkongers spoke Cantonese, PRC Chinese spoke Mandarin, and if it was English chances are it would be a Singaporean tourist. We managed to get by with Mandarin but sometimes it was amusing, like when peck tried for 10 minutes to get warm water at the dim sum restaurant. And apparently 白开水 means something totally different there.

I observed that the people there aren't all that friendly or helpful – certainly a far cry from Bangkok! If the waitresses didn't understand you, sometimes they'd just leave after a few seconds, or treat you like dumbasses. At the hotel reception it seemed that the smiley badge they wore on their blouses was supposed to make up for the lack of facial expression. The attendants at Ocean Park hardly smiled either – they generally looked bored. And worst of all, the taxi driver we got on the trip out of the airport gave us some Chinese Yuan coins and a Thai 10-baht note in change, shortchanging us nearly HKD100. That was a positively distasteful experience.

I came back with nearly HKD1000 left because things were as expensive there, if not more, and the variety was atrocious – I didn't see a single running shoe that I really liked at all the factory outlets we visited, for instance. It was probably winter season but still, I expected better.

We went to Macau too and it was quite a lovely place – crappy 60s-70s slummy tenements next to gleaming hotels and beautifully-preserved colonial Portuguese architecture. And of course the egg tarts – we only ate two each though we swore to get through ten. They were quite awesome but the back-street one was better than the one from the touristy-looking bakery (I think it's called Koi Kee Bakery). We went to the Venetian too; it was a glittering, glitzy spectacle of sheer opulence, a monument to the power of money. The ceiling paintings and carpets were admittedly awesome, but the amount of it was so overwhelming that to my mind it was in very poor taste.

Oh and of course we stayed up late nights to talk cock but I'm not going into that. Suffice it to say that many secrets were learnt.

What else can I say? Hong Kong positively invites comparisons with Singapore; they're both majority-Chinese, extremely urban, modern Asian cities. It is huge though, compared to Singapore, and the people move much faster. The buildings are ridiculously tall, and mostly quite haphazard and dingy – the view from our hotel window was of a highly unedifying high-rise block whose whitewashed exterior had turned part cream, part rust-stained from age and neglect. The shopping was disappointing, possibly because we didn't go to the right places. Weather was pretty good (cool and mostly dry) but I was wheezing most nights from the pollution and low temperatures. I can certainly feel the extent of government microplanning in Singapore and for once I'm glad of it.

Now back to life!

Thoughts on ORD

I can't say I miss the place. I mean, that sounds terribly perverse, like Ost-nostalgie (nostalgia for East Germany) or Stockholm Syndrome (where hostages develop sympathy for their abductors) or something. 

To me, NS was all about a suspension of normality. "Normal" life processes (okay, for someone like me) like going to school, mucking about at home, relaxing on the comp/piano and reading were suspended, or disrupted. Instead we had extras and staying in and avoiding the wrath of senior commanders who could dig up any damn excuse to give you extras. 

They say that NS teaches you about life. I contend that this is only true because half the population of Singapore has gone through NS. The attitudes of NS permeate our society, and some people stick with them throughout their life. For instance, when you have 2 years to serve, you go through it with the "heck it" attitude cos you know that no matter what, ORD will come. But that isn't true of life, or a job - or at least, it isn't a healthy mindset, because when that happens then you're living only for death, or retirement, or a promotion, when what matters is actually the process and how it grows you.

I hated NS partly because of the discrepancy between the high-minded ideals it claimed to embody (defence of the motherland yada yada) and the sheer small-mindedness and hypocrisy of the people in it. Some people had a ridiculously inflated sense of self-importance - look at me, I outrank you, I'm gonna make you buy lunch/do my work for me just cos I can. 

We had a running gag about Karma in my unit. For some people, the bad karma they accumulate just doesn't come back to get them - maybe the dice of Fate are loaded. But in the Ranking Exercise of humanity they'll get a D grade. Justice is served. 

I hated my training days. Always tired, kinda hungry, never enough sleep (except at ETI, kind of, sometimes). And the bloody SOCs. And I can't shake the fact that most of my friends went to OCS and ended up getting $300 bucks more than me a month for the last year. Yes it reinforced the inferiority complex thing that I have. 

Though I guess all things considered, an admin posting's pretty okay. And I can't say that the explosives weren't fun!

But mostly I hated it because I ended up in a damn boring job. Damn DAMN boring, like so boring that I even started proofreading e-texts on Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders. 60+ pages in a day of proofreading - most in English but when I got bored I did a few pages of some French stuff and a few more pages on Heinrich Schliemann's Troy excavations, I think that was in German. That's the depths of boredom I plumbed in my NS days. Other people smoked, I did proofreading for Project Gutenberg. I also donated something like 10,000 grains of rice on freerice.com, playing French vocabulary.

I started drinking a bit but not clubbing so I think that's okay.

The people were mostly pretty good though - I mean fellow NSFs. Sure you meet some weirdos and lousy fkers but most were okay. Some were good to talk to and fun to hang out with and I hope to keep in touch with you guys.

Otherwise it's been a long 22 months and I'm just relieved that normality is resumed.

haven't been posting

Haven't been doing very much at all lately. been stoning at home, playing Civ IV to death and then reading a bit of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed (deep theology - notes on the Old Testament!) and other random books & articles without imbibing any of it at all. Also listening to Sergio Mendes' album Fool on the Hill, which has got me hooked!

Also been drinking rather more than I'm used to, but I guess it's ok (a bit of vodka or whiskey or irish cream, 3-4 nights a week, not gonna kill me). I need an authority to come over to my place and try my vodka, cos I suspect that some Schrodingerian trickery is going on and it's turning into paint thinner. ^^

I got silver for IPPT a couple of days back, which is quite awesome since I haven't really trained and I never got anywhere near there before all this NS shit.

A bad thing: I'm not feeling any motivation to get intellectually stimulated even though it's all around me. Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy is still on my table and I haven't touched it for a couple of weeks. I read Cherian George's collection of essays Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation, and I saw some really interesting points but I haven't felt tempted to go back and dig them up again.

I need to ask the right questions while reading, and take notes, and things, like back in school. A to-do list might help!

Hope this ennui will pass.

On MC

MCs are awesome. I had a fever and a bit of strep throat yesterday but the fever cleared up in 4 hours and the strep throat was gone by last night - and I have today to enjoy myself lol.

nugget of wisdom

from my mom:

Things look much better at IKEA than they do when they're at home.

in response to this limited-edition bookcase we saw yesterday - i have the one with the ordinary pine finishing =(

FML

that's my thought for today.

update

I haven't been updating regularly for the past few months now, as have most of the people I know. There's nothing edifying about life, as usual. I got called back to Army Open House for road marshalling Friday-Monday so I literally burnt the last weekend under the sun – I'm still recovering my normal skin tone, and my arms are starting to peel now that my forehead's done. Not pleasant.

First time I'd been to Joo Koon MRT – that place is really the edge of the known universe for me heh. I walked past some of the foreign workers' apartments and was overcome by the appalling smell of wet socks and sweat, like after field camp but way worse. I can't imagine how they live. There were clotheslines everywhere but otherwise it seemed to be neat – probably because these people live life so lightly, no real (physical) baggage to encumber them. I wonder how on earth they could live in there. The smell alone was surely a sign of the conditions inside.

These are real Singaporean slums, tucked away from public view by sheer geographical misfortune (just some factories, the end of the PIE and a couple of camps nearby). It strikes me now how little consideration we show to these people, who are after all here to earn a decent living just like the rest of us. Just because they're foreigners, they've been relegated to the edge of our national consciousness for too long, and it's time that they are acknowledged.

-----

On another note it was good to meet up with the geog guys over the weekend, too. It's been a very long time, and we talked for ages.

One thing that Wally asked and that I didn't address properly (I'm not sure whether any of the geog guys come here!) was whether you can appreciate music without playing an instrument. I don't believe so, at least not with regards to as regards classical music and maybe jazz. It's still surprisingly often that I realise things about music I hadn't seen before; it actually wasn't too long ago that I started paying attention to things like tempo and expression markings, and making sense of them, and once that happened I found pieces that I'd been playing wrongly all the while just because of some screwy recording I'd heard.

I'm sure, though, that it's different for other genres of music, like most modern pop which has a fairly standard set of instruments and lyrics, and even more so for Christian music where the whole point is its accessibility and inclusiveness – all you have to do is pick up a guitar and start doing your praise-the-lord stuff (that isn't a criticism). Different sorts of music simply have different purposes, functions, even audience intended, and I can't say I'm an expert.

-----

I've set myself a pretty ambitious reading programme, too; lots of the "classics". I'm not so sure how relevant they are though – some of Plato is awfully frustrating because of how careless they are about semantics. It'll be a long hard slog to ORD and beyond. I've long given up expecting any fulfilment from NS anyway.

Ah screw it I'm gonna sleep.

the banality of life is starting to piss me off.

There's nothing happening in my life. Nothing big anyway.

I did think I would start reading Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy on the computer (it's online somewhere; I've lost the link) but it is really tough going. I'm the sort of person who still needs to hold books in his hands.

I did start re-reading Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance today. It's part On-The-Road-esque travellogue, part philosophical rambling, part ego-tripping. I'm sure he has something very significant and meaningful to say about rhetoric and quality and the pursuit of excellence; I'm just not sure what.

What else? Thanks to the TPO meeting I found a new restaurant to take people to. It's called Curry Favor, 2 blocks down from Raffles City, and they do Japanese-style curry. The tenderloin beef that I had was pretty good - although it seemed more like beef stew to me.

There's a bottle of Baileys at home that's going (relatively) fast thanks to my valiant efforts.

It disturbs me that people know that hundreds and thousands of bright young Singaporeans have left this place and no one's asking why. Maybe they should set up a Panel or something.

Uniquely Singapore!

Where's the compassion in our "fine city"?

A short summary: this homeless guy who was sleeping in a tent at East Coast Park without a permit got picked up by some National Parks ranger and ended up being fined $800 - going to jail for 4 days because he couldn't pay. "In court on Tuesday, Noor was asked to produce his Identity Card or passport but he said that he had lost both items. It prompted District Judge Mr Shaiffudin Saruwan to retort in jest: 'I suggest you use a bicycle chain to tie yourself to a tree or you may lose yourself as well.'"

At this very moment District Judge Shaiffudin Saruwan has made me so very proud to be Singaporean. He should have sent him to jail even longer so that at least the guy could've enjoyed a few extra days of decent shelter.

On a more serious note, wtf? In that callous remark where was the respect and compassion due a human to another human? Was the judge lost in the contemplation of his wit?

In my view that remark was incredibly degrading, unnecessarily cruel and offensive. Surely this is not what we mean by the phrase 'to pass judgement'.

Sack this dude already.

-.-

Well I've fallen out of the habit of writing regular posts and these last couple of months have been pretty quiet. Just to reassure you guys that I'm still alive and posting, some thoughts:

I ran 21km in 2 hours 12 mins woohoo! Alright it's not fantastic but I think it's pretty good for a first try.

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People should be educated about the difference between (ethical) right and wrong and (factual) right and wrong. If you think about it, the confusion between the two is one of the main reasons why bigotry exists.

-----

I'm very disappointed at the maturity of political and social discourse in Singapore. I read the Online Citizen (TOC) and some local blogs semi-regularly, and the comments are highly unedifying. Usually on one side it's just inane and unsophisticated government bashing, while on the other we have those equally mindless cult-of-PAP fanatics. Why is no more effort being expended in being thoughtful and reasoned?

I think Kenneth Jeyaratnam's National Day message was a step in the right direction: we have got to recognise that yes the PAP has brought us economic development but no there's more to it than just GDP.

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Poets and authors and playwrights in Singapore have got to start asking the difficult questions: why else do they exist? Entertainment?

-----

What on earth was our foreign ministry thinking when they said they were "happy" that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was granted amnesty for half her sentence (1.5 years now) and that she will be under house arrest instead of being imprisoned? Oh the tender mercies of Myanmar's military government. Is she now expected to be grateful?And does the foreign service not have the balls to tell Myanmar their conduct is unacceptable? Or do our arms manufacturers really need their dirty money?

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I am absolutely enthralled by John Bayless's reinterpretations of Beatles songs in the style of Bach. Why is this genius not more widely heard?

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I think TPO, OMM and re:mix have got to come together and talk. They're cannibalising players off each other, and there's no way our amateur music scene can support so many groups in the state it's in right now. Music-making here could be so much better.

-----

From a comment I posted on someone else's blog some time ago:

Any particular set of values, of necessity, excludes others that don't agree with them. The point is that tolerance and secularism, by definition, exclude the least. Consider this statement: "the only thing I can't tolerate is intolerance".

To describe someone else as heathen is as good as saying: I am morally right, you are wrong, and therefore beneath me. It is an elitism of morality.

On National Day, 2009

August is the crudest month,
festooning lamp-posts with dead banners,
dulling memory and desire, stirring
tired people 
HEART TO HEART 
HAND IN HAND 
REACHING OUT 
heart in hand 
hand in mouth;
collective delusion.
April kept us warm - sweltering -
running for the blessed air-con,
defying nature 
with a little touch of Siberia.

*

Subtexts keep us alive,
help us remember who we are -
This is home, truly 
(kid you not)
Where I know I 
(am legally bound to) be;
Where my dreams wait for me 
(in my bunk after I'm back from outfield)
Where the river always flows 
(damn RCOs give you crotch-rot).

But there are many amnesiacs
in Singapore. Where there's money,
it pays to forget.

*

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
Got Girl Got Boy, Stop Fucking.
Tie Your Tubes, Then Carry On.
Don't Tie Your Tubes, We Need Your Babies.
Gays: Don't Fuck, We Only Want Your Money.

no self-contradiction at all.

*

I heard two housewives chatting -
Did you know, my last maid cheat my money
when she go to the market
so I send her back - Aiyah that's nothing; 
I caught my last maid talking
to another one from her homeland, 
so I dun let her go to market anymore,
Budden one day dunno why she fall down
while cleaning the windows! Aiyoh, bopian,
get another one lor. Lucky thing
corona say accident.

*

Does your heart bleed too?
Or are you one of those who,
after dining at Ministry of Food,
clubbing at Ministry of Sound,
wrinkle your noses at the Banglas
on the bus from the Ministry of Smell;
they who built your flats, your offices,
your lifts that stop on every floor
on the sweat of their broken backs
in the hope of buying a better life
one-tenth as good as your own?
Did you forget their humanity?
Did you stop to count the cost
of broken lives, O Singapore?

No, careless sentimentality costs money;
self-doubt is a loss-making business.
Didn't you learn that in your management course?

No, I studied arts, 
the best way to disappoint my parents.

*

I see flags hanging along corridors,
under windowsills, twisted into
vague memories of themselves by the wind.
Don't they look like bedsheets? -
red blood, five white dots and a smear of man-seed
from the few times the newlywed couple
tried to make love for the greater good,
the survival of the motherland,
the smear when he didn't know how to do it.

In sex-ed the motherland only taught him not to have sex;
presumably divine inspiration 
or porn would take care of the rest.

*

And under the grey fog of a Sumatran haze,
A crowd flowed by the Singapore River, so many;
I had not thought money had undone so many.
Unreal City, dry-eyed in the air-con
trooping out for lunch and a coffee
one desperate hour, one desperate scramble
past the quaint-hatted Japanese tourists
posing with the quaint-hatted bronze statues
of bronzed rickshaw-pullers, coolies,
now long dead; a grotesque spectacle 
proudly brought to you by the STB, 
in collaboration with the EDB.

*

You never give me your money,
You only give me your funny poems.

*

Who will sing of you, O Singapore?
Who will tell the stories of the land,
the million useless things -
the old Tembusu on the grounds 
of the shadowed yellow house at the junction -
when the few scattered survivors from old Singapore
are gone? Who will hear the echoes 
of the past in the names 
of places that all look the same?
Singapore you killed Calliope
and the clay of your soil 
and the bricks of your flats 
are red with her blood
and the blood of the people you forgot.

*

The URA's motto: Leave No Headstone Unturned.
I still remember the serene peace
of Bidadari, the scented breeze 
under the age-old trees;
it was the breath of a place 
that knew its time had come.

*

Singapore I waited in the corner
of the Japanese tourists' photographs, 
daring your river to swallow me whole
and make me forget. 

But no Lethean waters came to meet me,
only the still waters that one man's vision calmed,
and people dead to me flowing past me
on their way to oblivion and yesterday;
they know where they're going.
They wear the same quiet optimism -
a death-mask.

And when they die, they leave behind
nothing. No memories, no whiff of regret,
no sadly-missed sweet breath,
just a chequebook and a jar of ashes,
stuffed into a maze of urns stretching
up and away as far as the eye can see.
When they die, who will sing of their stories?

*

Sweet river run softly,
there is no one left to listen.

-----

This poem was 2 days in the gestation, 8th and 9th August 2009. I'm of course greatly indebted to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Allen Ginsberg's America, and indeed the entire canon of Greek and other classic literature. You may of course hear echoes of many other works in it. Thanks also to Zhaohan for looking at an early draft, and Cheng for a very encouraging review. Adam I wish you could've read it in the process, but oh well.

America, by Allen Ginsberg

A sound recording of Allen Ginsberg reading a draft of his poem "America" in 1956.