Save The Last Lindy Turn For Me

Thursday was a dance day – Save The Last Dance with Pei Ee in the afternoon, and lindy-hopping at night.

Save The Last Dance: some good dancing, pity about the rest of it. Especially cringeworthy bits included the black-guy-teaches-white-girl-how-to-get-wit-de-ghetto sequence that seems obligatory in these kinds of films, and, unfortunately for the scriptwriters, the big Emotional Breakthrough Moment when she finally managed to talk about her dead mother and why she quit ballet. We were greatly amused by the “MY DREAMS KILLED HER!!!” line. (If you haven’t seen the film, you can probably work out most of what happens just from this, with very little imagination needed)

All the same, I am a sucker for these self-discovery and realization of dreams and oh yeah, love, through _________ (fill in relevant dance style eg. disco, ballroom, mambo etc., and if you can name the corresponding film for each of those, then maybe you’re a sucker too) movies. I like climactic triumphal dance extravaganza scenes.

And then there was lindy-hopping, which has once again got me in its irresistably addictive grip. As much as I like clubbing, no clubbing experience I’ve ever had (with the exception of the drum’n’bass room at Fabric) manages to match the couple of hours I lindy-hop each week for pure joy provision.

I know why. It’s in that buoyant moment where push and pull and my fingers hooked on his all work together to give ooomph, that elusive but wonderful connection with a good partner. It’s in the music, never monotonous like club music can often be, full of wonderful sounds; trumpet like the sun singing, Ella’s voice like warm silken honey on your skin. It’s in the quaintly romantic idea of his proferred hand, her smile of acceptance, the communion of eyes during the dance, even though most of us are there to romance the dance rather than each other.

That’s why it ain’t got a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

The Sportswriter / Galapagos / Anil’s Ghost

More books, by the way:

Smoke And Mirrors and Angela’s Ashes, both of which I’ve been meaning to buy for the longest time.

A History Of Amnesia (Alfian Sa’at, one of my favourite Singaporean poets)

Ghostwritten (David Mitchell) and Galatea 2.2 (Richard Powers) from the Marine Parade library, which is full of books I can’t find in the UCL library and is an exceedingly pleasant place to lose yourself in for a few hours. Or a week.

Had to zip through Anil’s Ghost and Galapagos in order to finish them by their due dates, after taking far too long to get through The Sportswriter due to the fact that it seemed to induce chronic narcolepsy. It’s not that it’s a bad book – the writing had its moments, and some parts were marginally poignant, but it just moved far too slowly and I never found myself able to like or understand the protagonist very much, such as when he suggested to his ex-wife that they go into a room and make passionate love in the house of his friend who’d just committed suicide. She wasn’t keen, and I don’t blame her. Perhaps it’s a very male book.

Galapagos started off feeling like classic Vonnegut, and I was expecting great things, which might have been why I was a little disappointed by the end of it. There were all these fascinating little tidbits of how life was to be on the Galapagos island of Santa Rosalia for his motley crew of apocalypse survivors, and I kept reading in eager anticipation of finding out more, but was never given it. He wraps the book up hastily, and the reader is left to make imaginatory leaps between years on the island. What was daily life like? Who was the first human with flippers? How long did it all take?

I realize that longing for details like that aren’t always what reading Vonnegut is about – a Vonnegut book almost wouldn’t be a Vonnegut book without fistfuls of misleadingly simply expressed ideas, liberally sprinkled across paper and time, with you as reader expected to hunt, gather, and interpret. Given that I loved Slaughterhouse 5, The Sirens Of Titan and Cat’s Cradle, this disappointment in Galapagos is hard for me to justify, since it doesn’t seem a lesser book than these. I guess at the end of it all, I just wanted something it whetted my appetite for but didn’t give me. I still love Kurt, though. He’s given me enough gems, and is allowed to be less than marvellous every now and then.

I enjoyed Anil’s Ghost, mostly because I’ve always liked Michael Ondaatje’s writing style – the introductory passage alone wouldn’t let me go until I’d read it three times – but also because its content appealed to me. Forensics, archaeology, politics, and the tragedies it can bring about; loss, courage and sacrifice, lives of quiet desperation. It’s not anywhere as lyrical, scenic or romantic as The English Patient, but there’s a subtle, unambitious beauty in this book that I found equally (though differently) moving.

File Under Copout

From this week’s episode of the X-Files (Via Negativa/The One About The Guy With A Third Eye Who Creeped Doggett Out): Scenes From Story-Editing (aka Michelle Kvetches)

Chris Carter: Okay, droogs, this one’s gonna be all about Doggett, because he’s new, because we needed to chuck Mulder in a UFO so that whiny boy Duchovny could be in as few episodes as possible, and because I’m the Messiah.
Underlings: All hail Christ Carter.
Chris Carter: Oh, and because none of us are good enough writers to develop Doggett’s character while Scully’s in the way, we have to find a way to get Scully out of this one.
Underlings: Hmmmmmmmm.
Chris Carter: Hmmmmmmmm.
Misc. Underling: I know! Let’s get her abducted by aliens too!
Chris Carter: We did that already, remember?
Misc. Underling: Bugger.
Chris Carter: Hmmmmmmm.
Underlings: Hmmmmmmm.
Chris Carter: I have it! She’s pregnant, right? Let’s put her in hospital with acute abdominal pains! There’s nothing like a pregnant woman in jeopardy to yank viewers’ chains!
Underlings: Truly this is genius!
Chris Carter: Mommy’s Little Plot Device. I planned this all along. [earlier I wrote about the shorthand I use to note my displeasure when judging debates. This is the sort of claim that’d get an “OH, PUH-LEASE”]

Ugh. This is still my favourite show, but they really do deserve a whipping for that. Using the pregnancy for nothing other than to conveniently remove Scully from the action whenever the hell they feel like it is shamefully shoddy writing.

Must. Stop. Downloading. MP3s…

This is all the fault of WinMX and Epitonic, but I link them here so that you can meet, love and then hate them too.

Just downloaded: Ambivalence (Embellish), a charming little pop ditty, but don’t sing along to the “So get down on your knees and let me penetrate you deep from behind” line in the chorus in public places.

Now downloading: Fear Of Fireflies (Calla), from their Scavengers album, which I’m researching with purchase in mind.

Now playing: Strange Fruit (Billie Holiday). Classic.

253 (Geoff Ryman)

253 (via lukelog) is the Web edition of a novel I thumbed through in a bookstore a year or two ago, enjoyed, but then promptly forgot about, which is less an indictment of the work itself than of my Swiss-cheese memory.

Very brief description: it’s 253 people on a London Underground Bakerloo line train, each described in 253 words, each description hyperlinked to the others where relevant. The train will crash at Elephant And Castle.

It’d be interesting to take a print copy of the book on the Tube, read it conspicuously, then eyeball each passenger in the carriage in turn and scribble furiously in the margins. Then again, most people probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Far stranger things happen on the Tube, after all.

Mahler Newbie

Which Mahler symphony should a Mahler neophyte begin with? More specifically, which symphony should a neophyte with my music tastes begin with? The common recommendation seems to be to start with the fourth and avoid the sixth like the plague until you’re more settled in, but here the advice is to screw the naysayers and start with the sixth if you like 20th century music. The Beethoven table given matches favourite Beethoven symphonies to recommended Mahler starting points, and my favourite Beethoven, the fifth, is linked to the sixth as well.

Hmm. Advice?

Rick Astley Rut / Regeneration (Pat Barker)

(NoBloggerLove post 3: Friday 6 July)

Conversational snippet, which proves that Wednesday night’s clubbing ordeal was, at least, not all for naught:

Friend: Michelle, I just feel like I’m in a rut.
Me: _____, things could be worse. At least you weren’t dancing to Rick Astley on the platform at Mambo Night, for example.
Friend: You have a point. I feel better now.

* * *

(NoBloggerLove post 4: Saturday 7 July)

Regeneration is one of those books that makes me want to slap myself on the head after finishing it.

There’s a kind of seething frustration, a sort of “I can’t believe I spent all these years not having read Regeneration” sense of annoyed wonder at this book that I’ve deprived myself the pleasure of over a significant period of time, either through ignorance or apathy.

It happens occasionally enough to be just about right – any more frequently, and I’d worry about my ignorance; any less frequently, and I might start to miss that exciting feeling of making a find. It last happened some time in January, I think, when I heard Paul Simon’s Graceland for the first time, and again, there was this feeling, this vexation, that the rest of the world had spent years listening to Graceland, and I’d stupidly missed out.

If, like me, you like war poetry, especially Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and think the idea of being a fly on the wall in the hospital where they met and where Sassoon received “treatment” for his opposition to WWI is intriguing; if you enjoy subtle, intelligent writing somewhat in the vein of The Remains Of The Day, which is, in my opinion, a showcase of the art of saying just enough and no more, and if you haven’t read Regeneration (I don’t know about the other two books in the trilogy yet, but I’ll definitely get to them ASAP), then you might just be heading for a slap on the head.

Satisfying Saturation

Joy, I’m at that point where the amount of new music and new books I have to devour exceeds the amount of slack time I have in the day, such that every time I’m trying to choose what to listen to or read, there’s unexplored territory there for the taking. It’s a feeling of satisfying saturation.

After coffee on Sunday with Vikram, Walter, Ashraf and Gaurav, venturing into Borders started off as a diligent attempt to purchase Hart’s The Concept Of Law so that I could start (ha) on my jurisprudence summer assignment, but I came out instead with Painful (Yo La Tengo), Bossanova (Pixies), and No Other City, an anthology of Singaporean urban poems.

Today’s trip to the library yielded Life After God (Douglas Coupland), The Sportswriter (Richard Ford), Anil’s Ghost (Michael Ondaatje), Galapagos (Kurt Vonnegut), Underworld (Don DeLillo; I got through 80% of it before I had return it to the UCL library), and Regeneration (Pat Barker).

Street Photography Shyness

Strange: walking around Singapore with the digital camera, I see things I want to photograph, but feel shy about doing so, whereas I’d snap away without a second thought in London. I tried to pinpoint the source of this reticence, and kept hearing this little voice going “don’t look at me like that, I’m not a tourist, God forbid that I should be mistaken for a foreigner in my own country…”

I suppose this makes some sort of sense. In London I take it for granted that people see me as a foreigner, so walking around acting like a tourist changes nothing. The thing that puzzles me is that this Singapore shyness is extremely uncharacteristic – usually, if people are looking at me, the temptation is to mess further with their heads.

The sillliest thing of all, of course, is that this is what’s most likely to happen: Michelle plucks up courage, takes photo. Starts stewing in the juices of cultural discomfort, “aretheylookingatme? arepeoplelooking? what can I do to subtly show I’m not a foreigner but just someone walking around taking photos, DAMMIT, is that so strange?”. Average Singaporean walking by on the street gives her a casual glance, and forgets her the next nanosecond. His next thought is “Eh, where to makan tonight ah?” (Singlish translation: makan = eat, eh and ah = exclamations we add on beginnings and endings of sentences, just…because.)

This all means I should stop being silly and unMichellian.

The Invisible Library

The Invisible Library collects books which have only ever existed in other books, which is the wonderful sort of idea that floats around in my head from time to time, gets scribble-listed on scraps of paper and then promptly lost, which is why it’s a good thing someone else actually took the time and trouble to put it all together and get it online.

Books that sound intriguing:

  • Maniacs In The Fourth Dimension (my favourite fictitious author Kilgore Trout, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five)
  • Incessant Fartings of Imperial Scriveners
  • The Law’s Codpiece
  • What Bothers Priests About Holy Confession (all from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel)
  • Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Forced To Find Out (Douglas Adams’s The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe)
  • The Blancmange Tragedy (Edward Gorey)