Post mortem
05/11/2009
You took from me your little death;
then buttoned your jeans, caught your breath.
Stale sandwiches, bad coffee at the terminal.
I drank the carafe of tears
you left on the cafe table.
I’m not worth a river. I’m only rental.
I dream a little death too.
Part of my heart belongs to you.
Your death is temporary, plebeian.
Mine is self-inflicted, permanent.
It left a brown scar.
If you want to see me again,
die a little for me, won’t you?
Until there’s an equation,
there’s persuasion. And we’ll talk,
lies like spinach, in our teeth,
about forgive and forget.
And we won’t. Take note:
I just want you to suffer as much as I did.
And then leave you anyway.
“How cruel,” you say.
“How just.”
New dialogue in Diagram
04/11/2009
Reid and I have a new dialogue published in issue #9.5 of Diagram, one of my favourite online publications. Read “Bioluminescence” here. We first tried to locate the conversation in a farming village but then thought it was too predictable.
If you pay attention to the webpage address, you will notice that the good folks at Diagram thought my surname is “Lai-ming”. This often happens. While I am never confused with my name, I understand why other people are. Oh well, “Lai-ming” is not a bad-sounding surname, I think.
Quote of the day
04/11/2009
“Maria.”
“Yes.”
“Maria.”
“Yes.”
“Maria.”
“Oh, yes. Please.”
“Art thou not cold?”
“Oh, no. Pull the robe over thy shoulders.”
“Maria.”
“I cannot speak.”
“Oh, Maria. Maria. Maria.”
Then afterwards, close, with the night cold outside, in the long warmth of the robe, her head touching his cheek, she lay quiet and happy against him and then said softly,
“And thou?”
– Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, p. 263
Your silhouette is blasphemous
02/11/2009
I have made a fatal bargain with the devil.
If I say to the moment: you are beautiful,
stay, stay a while, then I’m doomed.
Condemned to hell for eternal days.
I shall seek solitude.
I shall shake the dust of this man
off my nude feet with much alacrity.
I shall kill no tree for our secluded image.
I shall ignore his calling me his goddess.
I shall drink his unsubdued rage
but not be drowned.
I – shan’t — want — time — to — stop.
But woe is the minute I meet the blasphemer.
He proves in mind’s pupils all his reflections
are but miniatures, baser shadows.
I want to etch his live silhouette, imperial,
forever in my mind. Forever canonised.
But dusk arrives, children wail.
Dry leaves flung far outside the window.
Such a fine line between day and night.
I have not yet finished my masterpiece!
“Please, sunlight, stay a while,” I plead.
New poem in Breadcrumb Scabs
01/11/2009
Though love is lost, our lust– from “Love and Lust”
The poem was originally written for the collection Love & Lust (2008); but in the end the book only contains short stories. Reid and I have a dialogue-story “Their Voices, Varied and Many” published there instead. Read more about the collection here.
A new photograph, taken in Bruges and titled “A piece of sky”, is now published in Numinous: Spiritual Poetry (Issue #4).
Also, “A cup of fine tea: Divya Rajan’s “Factory Girls”", co-written with Jarno, is available here.
An Education
31/10/2009
Tonight, we went to watch the terrific An Education, starring Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard. The film was adapted by Nick Hornby from Lynn Barber’s memoir, originally published in Granta (maybe one day someone will adapt a piece from Cha into a major motion picture). The film is beautifully shot, and it is surefootedly directed by Lone Scherfig.
An Education, which is set in the early 1960s before sex was invented, as Philip Larkin has it, centres on the seduction of the sixteen-year-old Jenny (Mulligan) by the older and charming David (Sarsgaard). Jenny lives in a dull suburb where she is studying to go to Oxford University. Desperate to see the world beyond her narrow life, she readily submits to David’s advances. David introduces her to a sophisticated world of restaurants, art auctions and jazz clubs. The man turns out to be a fraud, a kind of conman, but he is likable, kind and worldly. He manages not only to seduce the girl, but also her parents, who allow her to go to Paris with him. Although Jenny’s future is put in jeopardy by David, she ultimately learns an important lesson.
The movie could have ended up being a dreary period piece but Hornby’s script is insightful and very funny. Alfred Molina who plays Jenny’s father gets a number of great lines and he makes the most of them. The scenes between David and Jenny’s parents are hilarious. The relationship between David and Jenny is also complicated enough to prevent the story from being a simple tale of predator and victim. David is immoral but also sympathetic. And Jenny, who although naive, knowingly allows herself to be taken in by the older man as it provides her the opportunity to broaden her horizons.
The performances are all strong (even Dominic Cooper, who plays David’s friend, redeems himself from his previous dreadful performance.) Mulligan is being hyped for a well-deserved Oscar nod. In the film, she has the kind of plain look that is harmless but is also capable of being transformed into something more glamorous. Sarsgaard captures the character, managing to be both charming and quietly menacing. We also enjoyed the few scenes in which Emma Thompson, playing the headmistress of Jenny’s school, appears. She seemed perfectly cast for the role.
The evocation of time and place in An Education is top drawer. The details of the time are recreated convincingly and the cinematography is very lovely. Finally, or should I say, firstly, the opening credit sequence is intelligent and entertaining. The artwork from the credits blended nicely into the actual film as the story began. All in all, terrific entertainment.
In expectation
31/10/2009
Only I know that crying baby on the moving train
cannot annoy me. My mind is elsewhere.
You’re merely a connection away,
clutching to your phone, reading my messages.
Hope my sweetness slept well last night,
after hopping from train to train.
Can one partially belong to someone?
I have no former template for this.
Why did I agree to meet?
You are not natural elements: wind, rain,
sun, snow, even rainbow,
to be silently endured from below.
They say memory has limits.
A poem so long that one forgets its beginning
at the end loses its identity; is no poem at all.
I think it best to make our encounters brief:
not too vast, too rich, too sore, too deep.
Who knows? These mouthful moments may
implant impenetrably deep. One day, if we have
emotional aphasia, all we can remember
are these remnants, overpowering:
a vow of silence, a blue drink,
poetry books you carry with you.
Words whispered into the ear:
“Can you imagine if we were together;
would we ever sleep?”
Mother Courage at the National Theatre
28/10/2009
Last night we went to watch Bertolt Brecht’s classic play Mother Courage & Her Children. The production which was directed by Deborah Warner featured a relatively new translation by American playwright Tony Kushner. The title role was played magnificently by Fiona Shaw.
Warner nicely presented Brecht’s ideas about breaking the fourth wall by making the scene changes right in front of the audience (we could see Shaw’s dresser help take off her clothes, for example) and having Gore Vidal read out the scene captions. Her production was full of energy and she brought a real rock and roll spirit to the play.
Shaw herself swaggered across the stage like a rock star. She completely captured my attention from the moment she was lifted on stage on top of her wagon until the moment she left the stage dragging the same wagon. What a true star. This is not surprising since she was the play, every eye on her. She handled a myriad of emotions truly, convincingly and touchingly. At times she was cunning, other times she was full of pathos. For example, when Mother Courage is forced to hide her emotions when presented with her dead son’s corpse, Shaw’s face moved beautifully between extreme sadness and the fixed strength of the character. For me, hers is without a doubt a superior performance to that of Helen Mirren’s Phèdre earlier in the season.
I also absolutely loved the live music provided by Duke Special and his band. Throughout the performance, they appeared in different places around the stage and wings. These changes were delightful for me, as was the music generally. The most powerful moment was the final scene, in which Shaw’s acting and the music combined to provide a dramatic finale. Instead of having a character give a big speech at the end of the play, Mother Courage dragged her wagon, alone, for her children were all dead, into a fiery light, which Special informed us in his concluding song to be hell.
The entire cast was excellent and I was not bored for one moment. (But I must admit during the night some recent poetry I read (by my most favourite contemporary poet) popped up in my mind several times.) I think Mother Courage was the most enjoyable night I have had at the theatre so far in London.
CHA in Time Out Hong Kong
28/10/2009
Cha co-editors were recently interviewed by Mary Agnew from Time Out Hong Kong and the feature article is now published in the magazine’s 40th issue. Read it here.
The second anniversary issue of Cha is due out in mid-November. According to an unofficial (and previously secret) Cha tradition, the issue will also serve as a birthday gift for the female co-editor (and every February issue is a Valentine’s gift for everyone). She is of course very grateful to all the people who participated, especially the webmaster, reviews editor, guest editor, consulting editing, and the co-editor. She is also boundlessly grateful to those who agreed to let their work appear in the November issue.
Whose heart this is
27/10/2009
“I carry your heart with me”, poem by e.e. cummings, reading by me. This recording (my very first — therefore — virginal recording) is for my special one, coarse and noble. You know who you are.
The text of the poem is available here.
Clichéd love
25/10/2009
“Do you know I love you, as much as I can
in such a short time?” But I say: you’re a blind man.
It is clichéd love: strangers meet and fall in love.
A big guy, shy about your beard, six feet tall.
You do boys’ things: video games, gym, football.
But you write a little, too, enjoy rediscovering words.
Now, you find me a possible muse for your pelican verse.
It is clichéd love: strangers meet and fall in love.
You write me into your poems: I am a shooting star,
a hooked fish, I’m callous, whimsical, scarred.
I am to dance, wordlessly, under the sea.
In one incarnation, I am a woman to be kissed.
One million things you see through me, and each you say
is true. I must be a monster. An imagery buffet.
It is clichéd love: strangers meet and fall in love.
Go on, write then. Write like a poet; eat me, use me.
Until one day you finish your sweet sauvage, then flee.
It is love: strangers meet and fall in love.
Shows of London
24/10/2009
I should mention the newly renovated Shows of London website. Yes, it looks a little similar to my own blog. It is because I am using the same WordPress template for both. I like the grey tone and the elegant layout.
Next Thursday, we are having a meeting titled “Duration and Forgetting”. I haven’t started reading the three chosen texts yet (they are available to download on the SOL website) but they all seem very interesting.
Debased creatures
24/10/2009
We are such debased creatures;
a divided hermaphrodite.
A quarter woman, a quarter man.
An alloy of fish and scorpion.
Let’s go back to the sea, swim in fabled shades,
to the deep rough bed where language fades.
It is impossible to be partially gutted
23/10/2009
i.
I vow never to speak to him again.
ii.
If you know what he said to me,
you’ll understand—
Words coming out of his fingers,
in the cold darkening night: ‘I feel nothing
inside’, ‘plaything’.
You see, he sharpened
his words, each a blade, ready to kill.
He intensified his skills.
Maybe he’s a fisherman, and I his flesh.
He said as much: ‘I hooked your chin,
and pulled you in’. ‘My most beautiful catch.’
Not only chin. Someone’s mocked heart was curbed;
it dangled, shivered ever so slightly on display.
Do fish cry? Their tears mistaken for stubborn mist.
iii.
These are no lover’s rites.
I vow never to open my mouth again.
Kindle
22/10/2009
My Kindle arrived this morning, via UPS Express. Thank you, my co-editor, for this very thoughtful birthday present. More about my new Kindle later.
I am also pleased that Amazon.co.uk deliveries continue during the Royal Mail Strike and some new books were delivered to me by Amazon’s own staff. Here, public services are uniformly and appallingly inefficient and expensive. Perhaps living in Hong Kong, Britain’s former colony, has really spoiled me.
A response in nine lines
22/10/2009
Stiffened heart, who would know
it can still stir.
Late at night I let this man speak his myths:
like is like and he doesn’t deny it.
You, stranger from another nation,
lips-loving, fingers on the mouse tip;
‘everyday I want to talk with you’, you say.
Of this I’m uncertain. But I’ll stay for the first fistful of
nights, pilgrimages, discoveries.
A cup of fine tea — new entries
19/10/2009
Six new entires have been uploaded to A Cup of Fine Tea’s website. Click on the poems’ titles below to read the posts.
- A cup of fine tea: Steven Schroeder’s “Guidebook Says”
- A cup of fine tea: Grace Chin’s “The Clothesline” (co-written with Jarno)
- A cup of fine tea: Gillian Sze’s “Sonnet II” (co-written with Jarno)
- A cup of fine tea: Gilbert Koh’s “Not Home” (co-written with Jeff)
- A cup of fine tea: Martin Alexander’s “Smashing up the Grand Piano”
- A cup of fine tea: Sridala Swami’s “moments before they take him away” (co-written with Jarno)
Visit A Cup of Fine Tea for more.
Once again
18/10/2009
I am having a Facebook break so I can focus on work and get the second anniversary issue of Cha ready for its launch in mid-November. In the meantime, this blog is still active.
Frieze art fair 2009
17/10/2009
Last year we didn’t go, thinking the tickets were a bit expensive. This year, knowing that everything is expensive in this part of the world, we bought tickets to the event (and spent more than four hours there). Next year, we won’t be going.
As is often the case with the large modern art exhibitions I have been to, this one was okay but not impressive. Most of the work seems repetitive and uninspiring. Many of the pieces I saw were little more than a half-baked idea or a copy of some other work; the vast majority of them were forgotten before I even left the room in which they were placed. To me, it seemed that the percentage of interesting work to uninteresting work was not nearly high enough. I would have been happy if one in ten of the things we saw by more than 1000 artists had made me even take a second look. Unfortunately, that was not the case.
Still, a few items caught my interest. One of my two favourite pieces is “Breathing in a House”, a video featuring China-born Hong Kong-based artist Pak Sheung Chuen (b. 1977). Here’s his description of “Breathing in a House”: “I rented an apartment in Busan (measuring 6.7M x 2.7M x 2.2M). Although I lived my daily life as usual there, I collected all my breath in transparent plastic bags until they filled up the entire apartment. The process took ten days to complete and I felt as if part of my life was absorbed by this apartment.” It was indeed amazing to see the apartment filled with plastic bags, every one of them containing his breath. (See more about the project here.)
One nice thing about the exhibit was that you were allowed to take photographs — in fact, they want you to do so. Many people, old and young, eagerly snapped pictures with their cell phones and then wrote down information about individual work. I did something similar and below you can find my own selection.
You can click on the artists’ names to learn more about them.
Art by Dawn Mellor
Art by Dawn Mellor
Art by Dawn Mellor
Art by Norbert Schwontkowski
“Girl with a chewing gum” (2009) by Aneta Grzeszykowska
“Slow Arc Inside a Cube IV” (2009) by Conrad Shawcross
“Electric fire with yellow fish” (1981) by Bill Woodrow
“Girl with a dog” (2009) by Sergei Shekhovtsov
“Girl with a dog” (2009) by Richard Wathen
“Kleiner Gorillar” (2008) by Jürgen Drescher
“Maria” (2009) by Anne-Marie Nordin
Statue of Norman Foster by Xavier Veilheimby
“Mirror, chair” (2009) by Jim Lambie
“Naked woman” (2009) by Stephan Balkenhol
“The old society” (2009) by Thomas Broome
“Reading room” (2009) by Lucy Williams – “bookspines in a bookshelf are slivers of paper” (quote from here)
“Sculpture – lamp IV” (1970) by Alina Szapocznikow
“Sky” (1982) by John Stezaker
“Untitled (socks holder)” by Ariel schlesinger
“Swellings” (2009) by Klara Kristalova
“Our Voodoo Master” (2009) by Djordje Ozbolt
“Beethoven’s Trumpet (With Ear) Opus #133′ (2007) by John Baldessari
Photography by Martin Eder
“Thomas Beattie” (2008) by Marc Quinn
“Yoko XXX” (2009) by Don Brown
Earlier, I said Pak Sheung Chuen’s “Breathing in a House” is one of my two favourite pieces in the fair. The second one is the painting below. It is a painting of a painting of seven horses in a room which appears to have been abandoned. Unfortunately, I did not write down the title of the piece or the artist’s name. Shame.
I have three more pictures from the Benelux trip published. They are ”Lone Lantern”, “Reflection” and “Farewell”; all available now at Counterexample Poetics. For a while, I thought editor Felino A. Soriano only accepts texts until I saw Steve’s pictures and then I sent the editor three pictures with which I was really pleased.
Of the three I like “Reflection” most and I am glad I took it while taking a walk in Breda. Look at that speck of blood. A bird could fly into that mirrored sky — all blue and white; into death. (Or is it just red paint?)
Poems published in Ultra Violet
16/10/2009
Our love toils about one period.
On the bloody and lusty grassland
You transform me into your self-pitied crippled rabbit.
–from “To Get Myself Some Water”
To the salted wind and the salted rain
she serves herself. By the morning
she knows he isn’t returning.
–from “The Fisherman’s Wife”
I’d like to thank editor of Ultra Violet, Anindita Sengupta, for inviting me to send her some poems and publishing two pieces: “To Get Myself Some Water” (first published in Hutt, adapted from a Chinese poem by my friend Ellen) and “The Fisherman’s Wife” (first published in Qarrtsiluni, reading by my former HKU student, Hanani). I am truly happy with these two poems and I am so glad to have them reprinted in Ultra Violet.
Stuff white people like
15/10/2009
Have you heard of Stuff White People Like? It was first a wordpress blog which then became a New York Times bestseller. There’s a feature article about it today in The Guardian. Yes, some of you may know that I am reading The Guardian the whole week in order to collect the full set of this. (Some observations about these fairy tales to follow soon.)
It is not difficult to guess what the blog/book Stuff White People Like is about. I heard about the blog about a year ago when someone (I forgot whom… Irene, was that you?) asked me if I agree with item #11 “Asian Girls“. My response was a positive one, if I remember correctly. The writer of the blog, Christian Lander, warns: ”Please note that this is one area where white women are exempt from”. An important but not necessarily fair remark.
Maybe someone from Hong Kong could start a blog “Stuff Hong Kong People Like”. To begin with: typhoon-induced days-off, celebrity gossip, British accent, fish balls, lemon tea, criticising wealthy people, pretending to be white (??) …. any other suggestions?
Recollection 21
15/10/2009
On my way to you,
I step lightly through the monsoon.
And for a moment, I think of tossing my umbrella
to the street,
for I am confident that if
I couldn’t quite walk between the drops,
I could at least skip from umbrella to umbrella
and arrive at you door,
dry.
by
Jeff
From 09-10-2005 (Sun)
The first Cinderella was Chinese
15/10/2009
On Thursday 17 September, my Facebook status was:
“When you are queen, you will never have to walk.” With these words the mother helps cut off the daughters’ toes and heels so their feet fit into the slippers.
Partly in response to my quote, my friend Kevin wrote this post and made an interesting and valid comparison between the evil stepsisters’ attempts to trim their feet and the ancient Chinese practice of foot-binding. Indeed, he was very wise to associate the fairy tale with the Middle Kingdom. According to mythographer, novelist and historian Marina Warner, ‘The earliest extant version of ‘Cinderella’ to feature a lost slipper was written down around AD 850-60 in China’ (1995 [1994]:202). Perhaps some people may be ‘gutted’ to discover that yes, the Chinese thought of it first, again? (‘Gutted’ is a word people use a lot here … on TV.)
Here’s the story retold by Warner in her hugely enjoyable book, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, first published in 1994:
The Chinese Cinderella, Yeh-hsien, is ‘intelligent, and good at making pottery on the wheel’. When her own mother dies, and is soon followed by her father, her father’s co-wife begins to maltreat her, and to prefer her own daughter. A magic golden fish appears in a pond and befriends Yeh-hsien. When the wicked stepmother discovers this source of comfort for her hated stepdaughter, she kills it, eats it and hides the bones ‘under the dull hill’. When Yeh-hsien, all unknowing, calls to the fish the next day as is her custom, an enchanter descends from the sky and tells her where to find the bones: ‘Take [them] and hide them in your room. Whatever you want, you have only to pray to them for it…’ Yeh-hsien does so, and finds that she no longer suffers from hunger or thirst or cold — the fishbones care for her. On the day of the local festival, her stepmother and stepsister order her to stay behind, but she waits till they have left, and then, in a cloak of kingfisher feathers and gold shoes, she joins them at the festival. Her sister recognizes her, and it is when Yeh-hsien realizes this and runs away that she loses one of her gold shoes. It is picked up and sold to a local warlord: ‘it was an inch too small even for the one among them that had the smallest foot. He ordered all the women in his kingdom to try it on. But there was not one that it fitted. It was as light as down and made no noise even when treading on stone.’
Yeh-hsien comes forward and, taking her fishbones with her, becomes ‘chief wife’ in the king’s household. Her stepmother and sister are stoned to death. (p. 202)
There’s more about this story and its re-interpretations in today’s China. Let me know if you’d like to hear it all.
Now you wonder where the idea of the ‘fishbones’ came from …
