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)

Shameless Shopping

Yesterday I worshipped at the altar of Consumerism, a last flailing attempt to take advantage of the Great Singapore Sale before it ends. The gods of dollar voting must have been fairly appeased – I bought earrings, shoes, skirt, bag, lingerie and CD (The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), and came home near midnight shamelessly pleased with myself.

And still more remains to be bought, bought, bought, and it’s almost all unnecessary. More shoes, more clothes, more bags (all’s well now on the lingerie front though, just so you know), definitely more CDs (first, recent releases like Reveal, 10000 Hz Legend, Miss E, Bachelor No. 2 that I can probably get cheap, and then I start badgering Borders staff to order Wagon Christ and Sigur Ros and Unwound), definitely more books (this depends on what I can find in the library, though. Anthropology and Cryptonomicon will probably be bought, but I think I’ll have to wait for a cheaper version of American Gods, which makes me sad), and this all makes for definite steps towards financial ruin.

Today was dinner with CAP Council 2001 at Marche, which is as overpopular and overpriced as it always has been, but at least they suffered the antics of our “table for 13?” for three hours before politely asking us to leave.

Lucky Exam Escape

Oh, something I’ve kept on forgetting to mention, which is surprising considering the loud Wahoooooey! I screamed out into the night on finding this out last week: my exam results.

Regular readers will be aware of this traumatic exam, in which I contemplated first incontinence and then bestiality. Happily, my performance in it was apparently worth a first, as was my criminal law exam. Contract and Tort, as well as property, got 2-2s, which is wonderful given that I was expecting third classes or fails for those. (first=A, 2-2=C)

I’m obviously incredibly relieved at this, but I can’t help thinking I’ve snatched undeserved achievement from the jaws of just deserts, yet again. I seem to have been doing this for much of my life, and I can’t remember any exam I’ve done where I actually thought I got what I deserved. Based on the amount of work and commitment I put in, I only ever deserve to fail.

But! Next year will be different! I will put in Sustained And Conscientous Effort and DESERVE my first (oh please, please, please) or my second-upper (I’ll settle for that, I guess, but no lower, no lower, no lower!).

Anne Sexton

[The poetry collection was on my old site – it’s not hosted here any more, but I’ve tried to replace the old links with links to the same content elsewhere on the web.]

I don’t usually write commentaries for the section of this site where I collect poetry I love (never having studied literature beyond the O’levels, I don’t feel qualified), but after coding my favourite Anne Sexton poems, which are the latest addition, I feel compelled to write something.

To me Anne Sexton’s poetry is inescapably tied up with the course of her life, and much of it maps that tragic life out to its end: suicide, age 45, after losing a long battle with mental illness; read the poems knowing this, and sometimes you cry.

Yet all isn’t doom and gloom. Poems like The Fortress, Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman and Live pulse with love and life, and I chose to end the collection with Live, even though its joy soon faded with her later poems, and its wonderful ending is now more elegiac than inspirational, knowing that.

Then there are the lovely ways she uses words:

You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed;
lie, fisted like a snail, so small and strong
at my breast.
(Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward)

Your feet thump-thump against my back
and you whisper to yourself. Child,
what are you wishing? What pact
are you making?
What mouse runs between your eyes? What ark
can I fill for you when the world goes wild?
(The Fortress)

The Abortion: subtle imagery which I missed the very first time I read it, hard-hitting and painful ever since.

Read Anne Sexton. Please.

Fwah!

I am now the proud owner of a digital webcammy thingamebob.

I installed it last night. My sister (who is 32) and I were like children with a new toy.

We took pictures of Fwah!, my stuffed duck. We took pictures of the ziraffe (her strange bendy giraffe with zebra stripes capable of manifold contortions). We took pictures of Wellington, the wombat. We took pictures of Pooh. We took pictures of our parents asleep. We took pictures of my brother asleep. We did the whole holding the camera out pointing at ourselves at arm’s length and adopting expressions that will be hideously embarassing if anyone else ever sees those pictures.

Most of those pictures aren’t ever going to be made public, but here are two of Fwah!, the most photogenic member of the family.

The Unbearable Fwah!ness of Being
Reclining Nude

X-Files: Roadrunners

Right, so tonight’s episode of the X-Files was about a huge-ass garden-variety manifestation of the Second Coming, which was worshipped by a bunch of hicks who drove around the desert in a big bus looking for random stranded backpackers and the occasional red-headed FBI agent so they could shove the Slug Christ up their spines.

Methinks the scriptwriters and storyeditors who came up with this opus need a couple of Slime Messiahs shoved up where the desert sun don’t shine.

Red-Eyed Monster

Did I mention that in Singapore the whites of my eyes are a fetching shade of magenta? Naturally, this means contact lenses are a no-go, which offends against both my vanity and precision of vision (my black plastic nerd-chic glasses were made back before I went to university, and my eyesight has worsened considerably since then).

Dorothy Parker said that “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses”, but this is an alternative point of view that makes for interesting, if not wholly convincing, reading.

Missing Neil

Rarely does it occur that I run through my house attempting the triple jump. Especially since I’ve only ever seen it done on TV. But then again, rarely does it occur that one of my favourite authors in the world, Neil Gaiman, finally launches his own site.

Rarely (okay, actually pretty often, but I wanted that element of repetition) does it occur that I reel off absurdly long streams of obscenities as I run through my house attempting the triple jump. But then again, rarely does it occur that I remember that Neil Gaiman is making an appearance TEN MINUTES away from where I live in London on Saturday July 7, 1 PM at Forbidden Planet (New Oxford Street), but I’m NOT IN FRIGGIN’ LONDON.

This is one of those times when I have to remind myself about starving children, the AIDS plague, and looming environmental crises in order to put things in perspective.

Michelle Goes Shopping

It’s been two days of shameless self-indulgence, and I feel goooood. (Note: what follows, especially for Tuesday, is extremely frivolous and is basically Michelle Goes Shopping. I’ll save quantum physics for another day.)

* * *

Monday was four hours of surfing to make up for last week, bak chang for lunch and a lazy afternoon snuggled under blankets in air-conditioning with The Unbearable Lightness Of Being in hand, peppermint green tea nearby, and Amnesiac on the speakers.

Amnesiac was picked up on Saturday at Tower Records, Suntec City, after the CAP council had dispersed for home and much-needed rest. S$21.99 (divide by 2.5 to convert into pounds) for the limited edition version packaged in a book, and the book’s very Radiohead and very cool. The book’s reference number is F heit 451. Steal #1.

A quick note on the album: right now I like it so much I’m trying to force myself to listen to it no more than once a day, in fear of the Odelay! phenomenon. Amnesiac seems more immediate than Kid A, which could be a bad thing, because the longer I take to like music, the more I end up liking it eventually, and vice versa. We’ll see.

* * *

On Tuesday I woke up early to listen to Solid Steel, went out for lunch with Pei Ee (old and dear friend) at Suntec City, where we shopped, and I bought two cheap cheesy tops from the ultimate cheap cheesy Singaporean shopper’s paradise, This Fashion.

Shopping there is such a trip. You paw through crammed rack upon crammed rack of clothes, and finally you think you spy something that looks promising from what you can see of it. Appealing colour. Good pattern. You pull it out…and there’s a giant panda embroidered on the front. It’s fluorescent pink, and it proclaims “I aM nAtUrE bAmBoO gAl”. You reel back, crushed.

Despite such hazards to mental health, I pop in there from time to time because I sometimes find gems, or otherwise, I find extremely bizarre items of clothing that take my fancy.

Take what I call my Dadaist Japglish T-shirt for example. Written on it are the following words:
“Coning Witere
Greel Lomala hing
we know what fashion is…….
1999-2000
fovely millealum…….
KING TOMATO”

I love this shirt. You sort of know what they were trying to say, but not quite.

So anyway, there were two cheap cheesy tops (steals #2 and #3) at This Fashion, unsuccessful shoe-shopping, jeans (steal #4) at 30% off at Giordano (another cheap clothing mecca, as long as you don’t buy the T-shirts with GIORDANO emblazoned across the chest) and then we hit Marina Square for bubble tea and good conversation.

Final destination: CD Warehouse at Capitol Centre, for parallel-imported CD bargains, where 5 CDs were quickly clutched in my clammy hands before I exercised some admirable restraint and discarded Reveal, Miss E…So Addictive, 10 000 Hz Legend and a Nascente Best of Ladysmith Black Mambazo compilation, emerging only with Stereo MCs’ Deep Down And Dirty for S$16.99 (steal #5).

I’ll probably end up getting all of the above discards at some later date, but I just keep telling myself it’s not the absolute expenditure that counts, it’s the spreading out.

5 steals. I’m a happy kleptomaniac.

Who needs drugs?

Wow, I did it. I’m listening to Coldcut’s Solid Steel radio show on BBC London Live at the painful hour of 7 am on a mercifully overcast Singapore Tuesday morning.

I’m exhausted, my eyes are bloodshot and Samsonite-bagged, I’m incapable of carrying out a coherent conversation or walking in a straight line, but they just played a smashingly good mix of Get Ur Freak On, and goddamit I’m dancin’!