Something I forgot to say yesterday and have popped into the computer room complete with backpack to write: I’m going backpacking in Greece and Turkey from today till the 23rd, so updates will be strenuously attempted but perhaps not always possible. Email will be checked every few days if I can, so travel tips , good wishes and assorted randomness (“Increasing Sexual-Potency-Frequency” spammers, this does not mean you) are always welcome.
Apart from the fact that the writing at dooce.com is hilarious, other kicks I got from reading her site include the fact that at one point directly under her link to me she linked to “Sexual Healing” and “Pay-per-view consumption of porn in Provo”.
I’m too late to take part formally in her cruel exercise (If you were fleeing nuclear holocaust/a second term with G.W. Bush and could only take one mix tape with 12 songs on it and one book, which 12 songs and which book would they be?), but couldn’t resist giving it a try, belatedly.
But before I do: the problem I have with lists of this sort is never deciding how seriously I should take the criteria – if I were truly fleeing nuclear holocaust, I might just balk at taking Soundgarden’s Blow Up The Outside World along even if I absolutely loved it. This is a subset of a more general species of consideration – should the music reflect my probable need for spirit-boosting and optimism when in the process of fleeing nuclear holocaust or more George? Because a great deal of the music I love isn’t particularly happy-clappy, and who knows what effects it could have on my fragile sanity in such circumstances. Also, assuming these 12 songs are all I’m going to have to listen to, surely I’ll need variety rather than just my 12 favourite songs, so even though it sorely pains me to have only one Sonic Youth song in there, it’ll have to be that way for balance.
And after that long preliminary ramble, my 12 songs, list prone to frequent and irrational change, are:
‘Cross The Breeze (Sonic Youth)
AT&T (Pavement)
Manta Ray (Pixies)
Marine Machines (Amon Tobin)
Black Steel (Tricky)
Get Ur Freak On (Missy Elliot)
A Question Of Lust (Depeche Mode)
Sometimes When We Touch (Dan Hill)
Wednesday Morning 3 AM (Simon and Garfunkel)
They Can’t Take That Away From Me (sung by Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong)
Brahms’ 2nd symphony (just the 1st movement if I’m not allowed the whole thing)
One Day More (Les Miserables)
And my one book probably has to be Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, although I choose this sulkily because of all the others I have to leave behind.
I never quite realized just how much of a grammar geek I am till I discovered The Vocabula Review, and almost every article and feature seemed to strike a chord with me, and I don’t mean a namby-pamby rock-a-bye-baby softly strummed mandolin chord, I mean a full-on aural assault cock-rock volume 11 power chord.
From The Like Virus (David Grambs):
“The kids and more and more adults seem locked in a kind of cawing hyperpresent tense. Many have strangely unresonant, throat-blocked, or glottal voices and use “up-talk,” the tendency to end all sentences in a rising, questioning inflection.”
YES!! YES!! Oh, he feels my pain!! I am beset by violent and irrational urges whenever I hear many varieties of the American accent, this one in particular.
Other features that elicited similarly orgasmic (if you ignore the “Oh, he feels my pain” bit. I’m not kinky that way.) screams of agreement from me were Grumbling About Grammar, On Dimwitticisms and Clues To Concise Writing.
(Having said all this, it would be hypocritical not to admit that I commit a fair number of grammatical crimes myself. I have problems with semi-colons. I overuse “basically” and “ostensibly”. I often wilfully adopt non-standard methods of writing and sentence construction, and much of the content of this blog will testify to this.)
The Mercy Seat is dizzyingly claustrophobic; no matter where you run, you keep running up against “And the mercy seat is waiting”, and a menacing wall of sound closes in, frenetic psycho strings, crashing piano, approaching terror in the drums, close your eyes and you see flashes of cold steel, the jagged violence of electricity, shadowed corridors that eventually close in and engulf you.
So there’s the bunch of us poetry types, awkwardly situated in the Borders history section such that poor unassuming history types wandering around in search of The Fall Of Byzantine or whatever had unexpected encounters with Luke’s asshole musings or Yi-Sheng banging a book wildly against his head while shrieking:
Mary had a little lamb!
Do you like green eggs and ham!
I love you and you love me!
Frame thy fearful symmetry!
Let us go then, you and I!
Like a diamond in the sky!
EIEIEIO!
Happy birthday and hello!
(from A Loud Poem to be Read to a Very Obliging Audience, by Ng Yi-Sheng. One of my favourite poems by one of my favourite poets.)
I enjoy poetry readings. Even the ones that reek of pretension amuse rather than annoy me, and most of the readings I’ve been to in Singapore have generally been populated by people who go there for love of the craft rather than some self-pleasing agenda.
I remember John Agard and Grace Nichols in the Substation courtyard, infusing candle-lit night air with their fascinating rhythm. I recently described our backfired attempt at comedy during an open-mike session in the same place. There were all those readings at the National Library as well – Luke reading Climbing Mount Biang (I can’t remember how it went exactly, but it was something like “After climbing Biang/You realize that the only thing worse than going up Biang/Is going down Biang/Wah biang!”. The last two words are a Hokkien “exclamation”.), some Aussie guy singing a strummy thing he called Dolphin Song and the sound guy behind him cracking up because it was so laughably bad, and always at least one poem that managed to touch me.
From somnolence.org, my newest daily read:
‘I do think that the AMG is a useful resource, despite the whole “Like This? Try That!” tool being a waste of time. For example: Like the Red House Painters? Want something “Colder, Firmer”? Try… Henry Rollins!’
Jokes aside, I agree. At Pitchfork, Mark Richard-San writes about pre-Internet record hunting, and how searching through record bins remains more appealing to him than downloading songs. I can see where he’s coming from, but my personal reaction to it is that for me, the Internet was a godsend. Growing up in Singapore, none of my friends shared my tastes in music. We have no alternative radio stations. We had only one local magazine that reviewed albums other than the latest Mariah Carey, and I remain a regular purchaser of BigO even though I now get most of what I need from the Net, simply because it fed my hunger for something different when I had nothing else, and I remain grateful.
Anyway, once I got Internet access, everything changed, and the AMG was one of the sites I used to spend hours trawling. I’ve written about this before and I don’t need to go into it again, but I guess my basic point is that for me, finding out about Neutral Milk Hotel and Amon Tobin and even the Smashing Pumpkins (before Mellon Collie) was the result of me spending hours on the Internet, because I simply had nowhere else to go to find what I wanted. And the AMG was, and remains, a big part of that, so thanks, AMG. I owe you.
Music moments that won’t leave my head this week:
And I am learning him, learning
the journey of him, the journey of the
cobbled spine and the contours of muscle,
of tongue and lips and teeth, of the old scars and
the steel-toed heart. His warmth winds around me
and his voice binds me with a whispered word.
I trace his veins to their fire source and
dissolve into them, and find the shape of him
in the heart of a flame.
He is the poem I travel.
— One Winged Angels, Koh Tsin Yen
I might see Yen later today if she goes to the poetry reading I’ll be at this afternoon – it’s to promote onewinged, an anthology of young Singaporean writing named after her poem. I’ll ask her if I can put the whole poem up here.
I came home on Monday from dinner with Jiawen and was engaged in all-out nose-honking (I have been attacked by the snifflebug) while watching the Les Miserables 10th anniversary concert on TV. My mother came out for a midnight glass of water, and said “Goodness, dear, you’ve seen this, what, over ten times, and you still cry?”
I don’t still cry. It was just the sniffles. But Les Mis remains one of the great heart-wrenching loves of my life, and just right now there’s nothing I want to do more than reread the book (this resolve may have become somewhat weakened by the time I’m wading through the 20 pages about sewers, but we’ll see), rewatch the musical when I get back to London, and relisten to the soundtrack (all 3 CDs, and I know almost all of it by heart).
I know Les Mis isn’t exactly a high-brow pleasure – professing my love for Stephen Sondheim might be more musically astute. I don’t care. I’m not ashamed of the fact that for me it pushes all the right buttons and tugs all the right heartstrings. It’s the same way Beethoven’s 5th has its hand round my heart even if his 6th is the one my brain loves.
I love every note sung by Javert (my favourite character), and every subsequent return to the musical motif in which he first enters (“Now bring me Prisoner 24601”, during Look Down).
I love the blossoming of the harmony in At The End Of The Day at “Like the waves crash on the sand/Like a storm that’ll break any second”.
I love it when both Valjean and Javert hiss “Javert!” simultaneously during their first confrontation (Valjean: I am warning you Javert!/Javert: You know nothing of Javert!)
I love Mdm Thernadier. “Master of the ‘ouse/Isn’t worth me spit/Comforter, philosopher and lifelong shit!”
I love everything Enjolras sings. “One more day before the storm!” abruptly ends the saccharine love triangle passage in One Day More for the passionate idealism and brotherhood of the students, and from there the song unfurls in all its glory, and I’m goose-pimpled from beginning to end.
“They will come when we call.” “Damn their warnings, damn their lies/They will see the people rise.” They didn’t come, and the people didn’t rise, and the slow painful turn of the barricades after the final disastrous battle is always agonizing.
The anguish of Marius’s “Oh my friends, my friends, don’t ask me/What your sacrifice was for” (Empty Chairs at Empty Tables) gets me every time.
I love the entire passage in the epilogue where the spirits of Fantine and Eponine appear and sing with Valjean. “And remember the truth that once was spoken/To love another person is to see the face of God.”
And those closing strains die away, and the finale begins, a faint chorus of distant voices singing in unison, the orchestra silent. “Do you hear the people sing lost in the valley of the night? It is the music of a people who are climbing to the light.” In the next verse the orchestra gives a tentative bass, and then everything starts to gain in momentum and strength till the final jubilant “Tomorrow comes!”, and there’s a lump in my throat, and I’m shaking, and I clap, and clap, and clap.
Right, so there’s my Japanese dismemberment movie out of the way for this lifetime. It’s a blessing we weren’t able to get tickets for this on Saturday night after stuffing ourselves at the Breeks buffet dinner, but watched it on Sunday afternoon instead with lunch well out of the way.
“Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver.”
– A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
One of my all-time favourite passages about music, and certainly one of the most distinctive. The other day some words from it came to mind when I was listening to Sigur Ros, so I thought I’d put the whole passage up here for everyone else to love too.
Elsewhere in reading, I finished Monday’s library books and headed back for more yesterday: Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami), The Ghost Road (Pat Barker, the last book in the Regeneration trilogy), Art And Lies (Jeanette Winterson), The Child Garden (Geoff Ryman).
From Monday, The Eye In The Door was a worthy sequel to Regeneration, which says a lot given that I loved Regeneration. It moves away from Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen to focus on Billy Prior, who had initially intrigued me less than the former two because he was completely fictional, as opposed to being a war poet I entered the story already loving. The book’s success, for me, lies in two accomplishments: firstly, making me interested in Prior as an individual beyond morbid fascination with his war experiences, and secondly, the idea of divisions within the self in almost everything the book explores, from homosexuality to class conflicts to Prior’s psychological problems to Dr Rivers’ difficulties in treating Sassoon. Engaging stuff, and Pat Barker’s accessible writing style helps a great deal.
Loved The Passion. Loved the language, loved the imagery, loved the quirky humour, loved it, loved it, loved it. Not exactly a hard-hitting book of ideas, and not particularly insightful even with regard to its major theme (passion, unsurprisingly), but all the way through I felt caressed by words, and often, that’s all I need or want.