saying 'I am Singaporean' relates neither a racial nor national identity, it denotes a certain class. Singapore is a class concept like its airlines. The language is artificial like the smiles of the stewardesses.

Random Thoughts

The final insult, the late humiliation one could receive from the son, the uncle from his nephew who despise him for his financial situation when he has finally spoken about the loan. It does not matter if the son or the nephew is polite, whether if the son or nephew is willing to help. But to give him the opportunity to feel sympathy if not to say condescending things would be enough. But the fact is that he has not spoken. The nephew or the son remembers photos they have taken together. Photos of him when he was a young man and he is a baby, when he is a young boy and he is in his late twenties. The wedding, his wedding, the banquet hall (should I give the name?) of another four couples all marrying on the same day. No, they aren't friends, or related, it was an auspicious date, an auspicious day they said. Perhaps they all went to the same fortune teller. But it was a wedding nonetheless. To hear about his financial problem, or anyone of them (from that side of the family). I would say poverty, but financial issues plague them since, perhaps when their father started working in the bank, as a young man, and died leaving a cup of undrank hot Milo on the table, unmedically, he was told it was the phlegm in the lung, choked on a phlegm, he was told in the morning, he was told again, when his mother recounts, repeats the incident at different intervals of his life a la Robbe-Grillet, with different details. It is not just the difference in each repetition, but also the difference in the state of mind of the listener, accorded by age, mood et. al. that the story the kitchen, the night he slept as an adolescent and the man who is supposed to drink the cup of milo went to the hospital instead. He was not told which hospital, but he is sure that the it was the same hospital his wife passed away about twenty years later. I wanted to write the hospital that took her life. But doctors should not worry that this would be another accusation of them overcharging or another act of negligence, how I sympathise how mundane they live although some drama series portray otherwise, doctors can believe I am like many other jealous of you, of your salary, but doctors this is not even about you.  This medical idiot who told me, when she was relapsing, that she was reacting to my presence. Motherfucker, with Hong Kong accent English told me as calmly, as if to tell me I interrupted his break, he had to take a long walk from his desk to the ward to respond to my call. So the son of this man who left a cup of Milo unfinished, one of the many sons, had two kids and a flat with so many statues of Buddha. I have lesser interest in the religion than the class position, the cultural position, or more generally the cultural position it signifies. He was the man that did the drawing of the Goddess of Mercy that I erased a few lines and added mine so that it will look as if I am the one who did the drawing, to add to the realism, and as a matter of fact, I still feel no shame, about this for I am sure it was an act of indolence, of being lazy to draw than the lack of ability to, he was one of my drawing teacher, I did not how to contextualised it as appropriateion, I laughed at him when he was turning bald, or rather losing hair, thinning hair, now this is happening to me. I remember his sister telling me the two times he was robbed, he was the best looking and trendiest amongst her brothers. I remember he was the one who told me babies cry at birth because, according to the Buddhist teaching, they know they are born to suffer. But it is not as if he is dead now, it is just a belated reflection and memory of a person after hearing about what happened few days ago.

Saw a man, not Singaporean, paid for curry puffs at old chang kee this afternoon with coins from a fat wallet filled with other things than dollar notes (the cashier was a little impatient as it took him a while to dig out he coins with one finger). He added chili sauce to curry puffs. Another overreacting script about foreigners and curry and our identity? Thought about 19th century, of years that seem to have nothing to do with us, 1848 1870... Of Asia. Old chang kee is now 1.40 per puff. Read ignorant comments about race and how precious vehicles with flashlights are. Heard channel news asia news reader with educated accent addressing an injured or dead worker from Bangladesh as gentleman. I didn't know we are so polite. Read someone stupid but fortunate to say time-to-leave -the -country, as for the rest, think of the time to wake up for work tomorrow. 

Since last week, the daily encounter with digging and construction sites, neon colours reflective stripes, and helmuts, looking into the hole they dug on the road, breeding mosquitoes, I told a taxi-driver it is money they are digging for those who signed contracts for develpoment. I did not say corrupt. Since last week, I thought of a picture, a painting of them gathering around the hole looking down pensively at the hole, all of them are thinkers not workers anymore. Facing away from the viewers since they are mostly faceless.

Idle hands, for a fist, a middle finger from a hand that refuses work and forget the money home. 

I thought about friends near the area. I thought of friends now with expensive holiday overseas. I though about people who went overseas for low paying jobs, not an expat in HongKong or Shanghai. I recall now the myth of them being really rich when they reach their hometown after a few years. Long queue at the remittance, so old shopping mall permits them gathering outside, a woman intimate with two man, not because they are sharing an umbrella but the wait, three-person in bed, slippers and shirts not how a designer  friend defines cut, I wish to think like a self-gratifying Nietzchean with a general disdain towards humanity.

Another group behind the truck

Ugly Slave Child and 青玉案·元夕 - Xin Qiji 辛弃疾

"衆裏尋他千百度，驀然回首，那人卻在燈火闌珊處。" -《青玉案·元夕》
"Having almost exhausted my energy searching for that person (vague), I suddenly turned my head, and there they were, standing at the far end of the street where the candlelight is the dimmest."
"少年不識愁滋味，愛上層樓。 愛上層樓，為賦新詞強說愁。 而今識盡愁滋味，欲說還休。 欲說還休，卻道天涼好個秋。" -《醜奴儿》
In searching the feeling of sadness in my youth,
I liked to climb pagodas.
Climbed up the pagodas,
For the sake of writing new verse, I talked much about melancholy.
Yet now that I've known in full melancholy's taste,
I hesitate to mention it.
Hesitate to mention it,
Rather I blabber, the weather's cold, a fine autumn.

Hotel Almagro - Ricardo Piglia (Formas Breves, pp. 9 -12)

When I came to live in Buenos Aires I rented a room in Hotel Almagro, situated between Rivadavia and Castro Barros. I was about to finish my first book and Jorge Álvarez offered me a contract to publish and work at the publishing house. I was to prepare an anthology of North American prose from Poe to Purdy. With this salary and what I had earned in the university, I was able to settle and live in Buenos Aires. During this period, it was at the department of Introduction-History in the Faculty of Humanity, and I had to travel every fortnight to La Plata. I rented a room at the pension close to the bus station and stay three days of the week in La Plata teaching classes. I had a life divided, living two lives in two cities as if I was two different person, with different circles of friends in each place.

What was the same, however, was the life in the hotel room. The empty corridors, the lobbies, the anonymous atmosphere of those places where one is always passing. Living in a hotel is the best way to avoid the illusion of 'having' a personal life, and of not having anything personal to tell, except the traces left by others. The lodging in La Plata was an endless house converted into a kind of hotel managed by a 'long-term' student who sublets the rooms. The landlady was hospitalised and every month the chap  dropped some money into the mailbox of the hospital at Las Mercedes. 

The room I rented was comfortable, with a balcony facing the street and a high ceiling. The room at Hotel Almagro had a high ceiling too, and the window opens to the view of the back of the Boxing Federation. The two rooms have similar closets, the kind with two doors and shelves lined with newspapers. One afternoon, in La Plata, I discovered, at a corner of the closet, letters by a woman. I always find traces left by the previous occupants of a hotel room. The letters were hidden in a gap as if someone was concealing a pack of drugs. The nervous handwriting was illegible. I almost understood nothing - as always when I read the letters of a stranger, the allusions, and to really understand clearly to decipher the words but not the meanings or the passing emotions. The woman is called Angelita, she wasn't willing to come to live in Tranque-Lauquen. She had ran away from home and sounded desperate, giving me the feeling of someone rejected. On the last page, with another letter attached, someone had written a telephone number. When I tried to call it was the guard of a hospital in City Bell who answered. Nobody there knew Angelita. 

Naturally I forgot the matter, but after some time, in Buenos Aires, lying on the bed of the hotel room, I happened to get up and inspect the closet. On one side, between a gap, there were two letters of the woman from La Plata. 

I have no explanation. The only possible explanation is to think that I was placed in a parallel world, and there were other two, also placed in a parallel world, passed from one side to another like me, and by these strange coincidences that chance produces, the letters had coincided with me. It is not rare for one to meet a stranger twice in two cities, but it seems rarer to find in two different places letters of  the two person that were communicating, and which one does not know. 

The pension in La Plata still exist, and the 'long-term' student is still there. Now he is a calm old man who sublets the rooms to students and business travellers passing La Plata on their way to the south of the Buenos Aires province. Hotel Amalgro is still the same, and when passing by Avenida Rivadavia, towards the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at Calle Puan, I always walk past the door and remember those days. Opposite is the confectionary Las Violetas. Of course there is a quiet bar, and with good lighting as if one is living in a hotel room. 

Translated by Justin Loke

I am also writing in exile. Exile from my country that does not exist

I am also writing in exile. Exile from my country that does not exist

my English grammar is perfect, but my worldview is a mess

my English grammar is perfect, but my worldview is a mess

The Cafe (transcribed)

The cafe displays fake posters of a real revolution and some old books from the xxxxxx Foreign Language Press as if, like most cafes, only for display and not meant to be read. But when this cafe, which seems to be another cafe for hipsters' and designers' ahistorical nostalgia, is closed, the books are removed from the shelves and read. From the outside, we noticed that the lighting is much brighter when the cafe is closed fro the day. But this cafe is not a bar or club. ***** We discussed how poster designs degenerated in that country during the 80s. ***** '...but this is not an issue about the intrinsic quality of the English language itself. Just as much as I dislike the fake accents I heard on this humid island, I abhor the tone of the colloquial English here which is only a parody of slangs. Especially its vocative expressions, especially when I hear it from kids, and thought about the future of this island they called a cuntry. This republic of silence has been mocked by her intelligent and educated citizens for not voicing out. But for me, an inhabitant not as intelligent or educated like them, the problem with this republic of silence is not because it is silent, but that it is not quiet enough. We should not express ourselves too much if we do not have a language of our own.***** During the meeting, the teachers were joking about the students who mispronounced the word 'memoir', the condescending discussion of how unforgivable it was. but it is quite normal, most of the time, I have heard insincere laments about the quality of the students, and the students about the teachers. What is the point of proper pronunciation, diction and grammar for English. English is a bastard language, and 'memoir' is a borrowed term. And we are no less another kind of ideological bastards suffering from colonial hangover. To speak 'proper' English, to write when my English grammar is perfect, but my ideology is a mess (it is a mess if you think ideology only refers to communism or nazism or islam fundamentalism). I hear the echoes of the word 'imperial' in the guise of global - and the misused 'international'. This imperial language, 'my English grammar is perfect, but my worldview is a mess'. The real joke is the that English is the first language here, the myth that it is universal... and the problem of foreigners from the third world who don't use this lanaguage. When your grandfather is sodomised, and grandmother was gang raped your language becomes a dialect. The antithetical gesture of retaining the syntax, and some Asian dimunitive interjections is the greatest parody. No James Joyce will emerge, those who started learning Thai aren't Samuel Beckett who wrote in French. There is no Dante to poeticise a vulgar tongue, or turning it into a national language. The native writers are fortunate. They can return to admire Malaysia or adopt Indonesia. The others would usually despise their origins. They hate the new immigrants or foreign labourers because they are like the ghosts of their forefathers who have returned to do more or less the same kind of labour, occupying the same social positions. We have tried so hard to change our accent and language through education, and adopting another religion with fake Michael Jackson as pastor, we encountered these 'cousins' we do not want to acknowledge, who returned to smear our social status and expose our origins. According to a writer of another once colonised continent, literary tradition is the muse, and literature is a tone of voice, but this island has neither. The local writers and national librarians will disagree. But when we vacilliate between fake accents and parodic colloquialisms, I repeat, we have neither. But I do not write to peddle them this idea. What's the point of writing properly when you are not reading properly or confined to anglo-american literature. It is not even a matter of method but the content your ideology draws you towards. A PhD research with the conclusion that it is fine since language is basically meant for communication disappoints the hope I had for the conversation. It is not the problem of grammar deteriorating in the recent years - but why is it a problem. A problem for who? Who does it serve? For your master to understand you? Or to write about your anglicised asian tongue and Singlish when you are living in New York because you are so witty? ***** We never disagree that this country is a parody.***** I am also writing in exile. Exile from my country that does not exist.***** I was consoled when you told me about Malayan English. But Malaya does not exist anymore. My grandfather is not a Malayan, I was born too late to be considered one, and have no wish to become one. I do not need these petty alternatives. I am Han, who was once an imperialist too, and will return as an imperialist again.'

Pigs

We were the sons of an obsolete calendar sold to the south sea as pigs. The silhouette of a tree a gun shot /The bird drops like a leaf the leaves flew away like birds /The horizon of my grandchildren is narrower than the gap between the door and the wooden frame/ It was the sun of the an obsolete calendar the moon dissolves into the yellowed river.

bourgeoisie

To learn the faded meaning of the term ‘bourgeoisie’ is far more important than understanding any research methodologies.

Wetness

The group who occupied the table just left - judging from how wet the table is when we got here. While waiting for the waitress to wipe the table, I told him that in so many bars and clubs of this humid island, there are so many idiots who spent money for the attention of the girls or to flock to where the girls are on certain nights. Hoping to get them wet below, but in the end all these pathetic guys are only capable of wetting the table top, wetting the pack of cigarettes I left on the table, moisting only the beer coaster.

Literary talent and money - Ricardo Piglia, El Ultimo Lector p. 167

Economy is the basic metaphor of the device: it defines, first and foremost, a relation between literature and money. Joyce, for example, believed that his talent could be explained by his tendency to waste: spending what he did not have, giving huge tips, borrowing and getting into debts, and seeing how this prodigality with money as related to his literary talent.

The reverse could be Kafka: money is like a foreign and dangerous object. In a letter to Milena, during January 1922, he told a story that could illuminate what is being said. In procrastination, the scene concentrates on the narrative world of Kafka: 'Once, when I was little, I had acquired a ten cent coin and very much wanted to give it to a beggar that used to sit between the two squares. Well now, it seems to me a huge amount of money, a sum that probably no beggar has ever received, and therefore I am ashamed to have done something so extravagant in front of the beggar. But nevertheless I had to give the money: change the coin, give one cent to the old woman, and then go round the block of the municipality and the arcade, returning to appear as a new benefactor from the left, returning to give another cent to the beggar, then run around and repeat the same action ten times. (Or maybe less, because I believe that at certain moment the beggar has lost her patience and disappear.)' As always with Kafka, everything is displaced: the generosity is a requirement, unavoidable, one must try to hide it, even though it is futile.

Waste, alm, loans, credits, all these terms could be highly productive metaphors of modes of reading. Rather than an interpretation, it is a system of appropriation that defined such uses - the property is displaced. E. M. Forster, in Aspect of Novel, imagined all the novelists from different eras writing at same time on a table in a library with the entire literature at his disposal. An idea that, surely, is the opposite of linearity and hierarchy; any past element could be used as new. The image of Forster is the representation of a concrete space where instruments, experiments, and preparations coexist. It is Joyce working in his room with rough papers and books, in bed with a magnifying glass and the entire literature in front of him. The literary tradition is a field of associations as visible as the streets of Dublin. Or rather, a physical space as visible as the paths of the city. See how Joyce realised all the literary styles in English lanaguge in the chapter on the clinic in Ulysses: regardless of the era, totally out of context, or rather, within the context of his current usage.







.

Mario Santiago 'Advice to Selected Art Students and Poets'

Don't lose yourself to the word Art or art school or scene, don't get suck too deep into black holes between the thighs, whichever head you use, nor the vice of having no vices, don't get caught in wage labour or making money, money should only be cheated stolen or robbed never earned. That is the most important lesson never learned.- Mario Santiago 'Advice to Selected Art Students and Poets'

Greater than Lukacs

During last evening's reading, Clement was rummaging through his bag for a pen to underline a sentence. In the end, he found two pens instead of one from the right pocket of his baggy bermudas. He looked towards me, then laughed goofily at himself. It reminded me of the pen Georg Lukacs took out from his pocket when the KGB officer arresting him asked if he was carrying any weapon. The intransigent pen of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 he surrendered. For a moment, I thought he is more magnificent, greater than Lukacs, but of course, I did not tell him.

Lu Xun

John Stuart Mill declared that tyranny makes men cynical. He did not know that a Republic makes them silent' (Selected Works (1980), 2, p. 356)

Useless Actions - Ricardo Piglia

Repeating useless actions is a sign of old age. When one reaches ninety, one is already a little mad. Everything is a copy of something that was lived before. Hence, younger people hate the old: we live in what for them will be the future. Old age has the structure of a prophecy. Telling about the future something nobody could recognise clearly

(Prison Perpetua)

Greek Coin - Ricardo Piglia

Greek Coin

The tiny town is like a Greek coin that has sunk into the bottom of the river shining under the last light of the afternoon. It represents nothing, except that it is lost. There is a date, but out of time, and with the condition of art, as worn, not aged, it has been made a beautiful object that governs exchange and wealth.

For the last few days, I remembered the pages that Claude Levi-Strauss wrote in The Savage Mind about the work of art as miniature. Reality works towards an actual scale, while art works towards a miniature (in French). Art is a synthetic form of the universe, a microcosm that reproduces the specificity of the world. The Greek coin is an entire model of an economy, of an entire civilization, but at times, only a lost object that shines in the late afternoon under the transparent water.



(The Last Reader [El Ultimo Lector], Ricardo Piglia, p.13)

I lowered the lamp to raise a shadow

I lowered the lamp to raise a shadow

If you really think you are a poet, send her not poems but money. Read about somewhere – pretend to forget where – that celebrates epistolary relationships. Not in the past, seventeen, nineteenth, eighteen, but the future utopia, twenty, twenty. People who use scientific jargons to depict childish ideas are no different from the decadent writings in French of frivolous thoughts in sombre and literary tone. 

If you think you are a writer, write not words but numbers and decimals on your notebook, incomes and liabilities, surplus and deficits, plus minus. Write from the back, from recto to verso, like how a Chinese book should be read. Stop singing, stop irritating those walking or working next to you, stop telling people that there is always a book reference for every day-today issue, for every thought in their head.

If you think you are a painter, paint not on canvas. Paint on walls not pictures but an even colour. Paint on furniture, unstable tables your friend made. Use enamel, emulsion, and lacquer not oil or acrylic. Paint drips on your boots like a worker, not an artist.  Draw on a sketchbook so that it is easy to keep but almost impossible to exhibit.

Art Education

Art Education

It was the age I learned to hug.*

The police walked like a gangster

the gangster talked about business

the businessman was a teacher

and the teacher is a lecher.

Everything was actually, or trying to be like, something else than itself.

Every inch of the land is developed.

But the uneven brain development is reflected on the pasty faces with vacuous expressions.

And the peasant stock degenerates further with the belief that they are middle-class property owners and started to buy paintings for their empty walls.

It was the age I learned to fuck.

In the morning, my friend drew me a diagram on the studio cubicle wall to show me the position of the clitoris.

The position was wrong.

I discovered this in bed, at night - not during live drawing lessons.

The police officer talks to me like a hooligan

the gangster walks into a political rally

the politician is a businessman

but the teacher remains a lecher:

Neo-liberal forever.

Now I priced my drawings according to the price of cheeseburger in McDonald’s.

Now I am being paid by schools the rate of a bar hostess for answering cuntish questions like

-          Why is Van Gogh’s Sunflowers significant?

-          Why must we apply rule of thirds for composition?

-          Why is reading modernist manifesto important to my art practice?

Tertiary institutions are like day care centres for bored old children to be entertained with events and non-curricular activities.

The teachers are like salesmen with some discount books and equipment to sell to the students.

In the evening, I went to a music lounge with a friend and returned all the money I was paid to a hostess whose country had betrayed the Third World Congress.

Endangered Predators - Cassius Song

'Stop eating Shark's fin' - or 'finished with fin'
- contra, incidental, on individuals harmed by sharks.
- thought about all the endangered predators, i.e., bears, tigers... in this age. the emergence of our sympathy for these fierce predators..
- predators used to consumed, we want to save ourselves from them, from the encounter.
- the power of  late capitalism, the apex of consumerism is that the absolute consumers (predators) are being consumed as well, preying on predators, the predators are preys themselves,
- an image of a shark, the open jaws of tiger, whatever, open to swallow itself.