my etcetera

An attempt to organise scattered and personal thoughts.

Blog break 29/01/2010

Filed under: Being a student is not easy, Books — t @ 00:45

I will not be blogging for a while so I can finish reading some books and writing a new paper. (Déjà vu?) We are also in the process of putting together the tenth issue of Cha, which will be made available towards the end of February.

I would also like to say on record that I am not happy with several social websites which display my unprotected tweets. Is this even legal? I publish my tweets on Twitter, but I did not give anyone permission to republish them elsewhere. I understand many people are perfectly happy that their tweets appear in many places. But I don’t. I was never asked by these other websites whether it’s okay that they use my tweets. Think about it. It’s like stealing my blog posts, published here, and republishing them on other websites, without telling me first. I don’t know if I would say yes if they asked me for permission, but at least being asked would make me less uneasy/angry. These are my words, my writing — I don’t want them appearing on other websites, especially those that I don’t approve of.

Apparently I haven’t read the ‘terms and conditions’ carefully enough.

 

A plea 28/01/2010

Filed under: Not everything can be categorised! — t @ 12:47

“I do not know what to do. You refuse to let me explain the situation and I do not know other methods to reach you — you have severed all the available ones. I desperately need one more verbal intercourse to discuss what has transpired, for you are so mistaken about me and about us. We have overcome many misunderstandings in the past — will you be so hard-hearted this time, and not grant us another chance? Do you honestly believe that I am a mistress of delusions? Can you swear to God that you and I were not sincere? When you deliberately did what you did to discomfort me, although I was upset and you were aware that I was upset, did I not forgive you and trust you again? When you in the past on multiple occasions rudely ordered me to leave, did I not forget my dignity and powder it with patience and past memories? I did not leave. I stood firm. Now, how harsh you judged me. You judged me for doing what you yourself also did. Yes, what we did involved two people. It is but the nature of that kind of dealing we succumbed ourselves to. Did you not secretly deceive? Did you not feel passion for someone or something inappropriate? How dare you judge me now! And your accusation — can I not say the same and claim that I may not be your first? But I won’t claim that, for I believe in you. This time, you jumped to conclusions too soon, triggered by three letters, non-vowel, capitalised. You must not do this to us.”

This post was inspired by the personal ads discussed on the website “Advertising for Love”. You can view my post either as a diary entry or a personal advertisement. What happened between the writer and the addressee, ‘You’?

 

Now, a bit of history 28/01/2010

Filed under: Art, London life — t @ 09:09

Do you know what the object on the left is?

It is called “Ain Sakhri lovers figurine” and is one of the 100 items discussed in “A History of the World in 100 Objects“, a project co-run by the British Museum and the BBC. By the way, their podcasts are wonderful.

Found in the Middle East and made by the Natufians in about 9,000BC, this is the earliest known artistic representation of two people having sexual intercourse.

The programme website describes the figurine: “The knees of one of the figures bend up over the legs of the other. The pebble has been ingeniously carved so that, whichever way you look at it, the shape of the figurine is phallic but the genders of the couple are not revealed.”

I particularly liked “the genders of the couple are not revealed”. Jill Cook, Curator of the Museum, comments: “Whether we see the Ain Sakhri lovers as a piece of erotica, a tender expression of homosexual or heterosexual love, a symbol of fertility, masculinity or a metaphor for creation, depends on our own background and beliefs.”

To learn more about the Ain Sakhri lovers and the difference between ‘art’ and ‘artefact’, see here.

 

Sylvander and Clarinda 25/01/2010

Filed under: Books, Life — t @ 22:31

From The Romantic Poets: Robert Burns, p. 24 (Guardian, Monday 25 January 2010):

In December 1787 Robert Burns met Mrs Agnes McLehose at a tea party in Edinburgh. The two were mutually attracted and shortly after their first meeting they began a passionate, but platonic, affair leading to an exchange of letters. Adopting the traditional Arcadian pseudonyms Sylvander and Clarinda, they wrote to each other in a torrid and highly artificial style, vaguely hinting at something more. Their correspondence is a curious combination of literary decorum and a dangerous crossing of the boundary of social convention.

On 27 December 1791, to mark the end of the affair, Burns sent this song (Ae Fond Kiss) within a letter to McLehose who was on the point of her departure for Jamaica and a planned reconciliation with her husband.

 

Quote(s) of the day 25/01/2010

Filed under: Books, Life, Throw Away of the Day — t @ 10:49

Who doesn’t like Montaigne (1533-1592), the very man who invented the essay genre? His writings are fun, wise, philosophical, sometimes provocative. He says these things:

  • “If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.”
  • “In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page-boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk — they are all part of the curriculum.”
  • “Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.”
  • “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.”
  • “Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.”
  • “One may be humble out of pride.”
  • “The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of your death.”
  • “The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.”
  • “The world is all a carcass and vanity, the shadow of a shadow, a play and in one word, just nothing.”
  • “When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.”

…. and many more.

One of the passages that I return to again and again is his contemplation of his friendship with Estienne de la Boetie, from “Of Friendship” in The Essays of Montaigne (Vol. 6, Chapter XXVII):

“[W]hat we commonly call friends and friendships, are nothing but acquaintance and familiarities, either occasionally contracted, or upon some design, by means of which there happens some little intercourse betwixt our souls.  But in the friendship I speak of, they mix and work themselves into one piece, with so universal a mixture, that there is no more sign of the seam by which they were first conjoined.  If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I. There is, beyond all that I am able to say, I know not what inexplicable and fated power that brought on this union.  We sought one another long before we met, and by the characters we heard of one another, which wrought upon our affections more than, in reason, mere reports should do; I think ’twas by some secret appointment of heaven.” — Emphasis mine. The full text of Volume 6 can be found here.

Is it possible to find such a friend? Is it possible? (Why I ask ‘Is it possible’ twice is beyond my reasoning. But I’ll let the repetition stand.) Have you found yours yet?

 

Van Gogh and his oranges 24/01/2010

Filed under: Art, Why am I writing this on a Sunday? — t @ 15:26

When we were having dinner with our friend Jonathan (also the prose guest editor of the second anniversary issue of Cha) in a Sichuan restaurant in Soho, London (by the way, I took the men to the ‘wrong’ restaurant)1, we discussed many things, including writing, publishing, our favourite world cities and art. I learnt then that he likes van Gogh and recently he also mentions this in his blog post. Today, when reading an article by Laura Cumming about a new exhibition “The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters“, we were reminded of him. We will probably go to the exhibit and here’s just a foretaste of what’s being shown. Cumming’s writing is beautiful and below, she is describing “Still Life with Basket and Six Oranges”, painted by van Gogh in March 1888:

“There is a table top of oranges in this show so incandescent one takes a dazed step backwards. the white cloth scintillates, racing up towards the brilliant blue aura of a basket formed of twining, dancing willow. The oranges within form a troupe of glowing spheres. The very walls seem to be watching the show, admiring the celluloid crackle of sunshine on peel, the singular beauty of each fruit, the sensational all-together-now performance. Why should oranges not be some kind of miracle.” — Laura Cumming (Observer, 24/01/2010)

1 We planned to go to Barshu, which Jeff and I went in November last year (it must be for my birthday?) and were very very impressed by the food. But I ended up taking the men to another restaurant across the street. In my defense, it was dark (it was half past five?), both restaurants serve Sichuan cuisine and the pricing is similar. Plus, their names are also very similar, in English anyway. Okay I should have read their Chinese ….

 

The Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising 24/01/2010

Filed under: Art, Hey it's Saturday, London life — t @ 10:04

SEE MORE PICTURES HERE.

In my previous post, I said that I would be collecting the Guardian’s new series of booklets devoted to the Romantic poets. But when it comes to collecting, I have nothing on Robert Opie. Opie is an avid collector of consumer products and packaging which are on display at The Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising in Notting Hill. The museum features products from the Victorian era through to today. Displayed in jam-packed glass cases almost as if they are shrines to materialism, Opie’s collection features a wide variety of products including early postcards, cigarettes, cosmetic pieces, household cleaning items, confectioneries, wartime posters, boardgames, early household appliances and more.

For me, the case devoted to the Great Exhibition of 1851 was one of the highlights. The Great Exhibition showcased the ‘art and industry of all nations’. Over six million people came to see the thousands of exhibits. In a Victorian magazine, it was claimed that “In no other country of the world could such an exhibition of the industrial arts have taken place.” Interestingly, I heard something similar from Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, who is responsible for putting together the new BBC radio programme, “A History of the World“, which will discuss human development through 100 objects from the museum itself. MacGregor claimed that only the British Museum could put on a programme of this scale. Undoubtedly true, but this is also a reminder that Britain is still dining out on the legacy of its empire.

The Brand museum was also full of other curiosities. For example, the early typewriter shown below from the Nineteenth Century. You may not be able to see it, but the keys are not in the QWERTY format, common today.

I was also struck by the old candies and chocolates. Some of them still in their original wrappers. For example, the collection has some liquorice all sorts and chocolate bars from the 1930s, which are still intact. The effect was somewhat eerie, as the products were never consumed as intended but are still being consumed in another way.

There was also a lot devoted to the two world wars including propaganda posters, patriotic advertising by corporations and a wide variety of other consumer products related to the conflicts. Two of our favourites were a satirical reworking of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderful called Adolf in Blunderland (by James Dyrenforth and Max Kester in 1940). The other was a stuffed Winston Churchill who looks more like Chairman Mao or a gangster rapper (he is giving the V for Victory sign sideways as if he is coming from the hood) than a Prime Minister.

Adolf in Blunderland

Winston Churchill and his famous “V”

I found the materials from the Nineteenth and the early Twentieth Centuries much more interesting than that from after the Second World War. This is perhaps because the older items are much more alien, while still being strangely familiar. When we arrived at the more modern sections, we felt a sort of collapse in interest, probably because we were then surrounded by things which were easily recognizable. It is as if the mystery was gone and we were back to the supermarket.

I also wished that the museum had been a little more curated. There wasn’t much information and the importance of objects was sometimes lost when included with dozens of others in the same case. However, much of the charm of the museum comes from ‘the old curiosity shop‘ feel that it provides. We were constantly reminded of the owner’s passion for collecting, and one could still see his areas of interest clearly. When we were leaving the museum, we saw the man himself, walking into his kingdom.

 

Dim sum 23/01/2010

Filed under: Hey it's Saturday, London life, Missing home, Mother tongue — t @ 19:55

In Hong Kong, my partner and I went to a cha lau regularly. Eating dim sum, sipping tea and reading Ming Pao and South China Morning Post was a very enjoyable way to spend a Saturday or Sunday morning. (Jeff doesn’t read Ming Pao, for a very obvious reason.) On those occasions when I went to have dim sum with my family, the constant supply of food was matched by constant chattering and laughter. While I poured tea for my parents, my sisters would in turn fill my cup. I love them.

However, having moved to London, we have stopped this regular ritual, and thus every cha lau experience is precious. Last year, on Saturday 18 January 2009, we went to the China Town to have dim sum. It was Chinese New Year. The food was not great, to be honest. But dim sum that is not great is still dim sum, you know. That’s why I was still very elated by the whole experience.

Today, to celebrate a certain event that I have related on Facebook, the partner brought me to a really good Chinese restaurant in Paddington — Pearl Liang. The food was incredible. I rarely have dim sum now, so do allow me to indulge in some photo-sharing.

The restaurant is quite elegant and it was full at around one o’clock.

That’s my Guardian. I was going to read Julian Barnes’s new short story “Sleeping with John Updike”, which is for the first anniversary of Updike’s death. Unfortunately, we were paying too much attention to the food and therefore the story left the restaurant unread.

On a side note, Guardian and Observer are giving out a new series of booklets about the Romantic poets. (I collected the “Great Fairytale” series last year.) John Keats, the subject of Jane Campion’s Bright Star, starts off the series, with a forward by Andrew Motion. Tomorrow in Observer is Lord Byron. Other Romantic poets in line are Robert Burns (on 25 January, to coincide with and celebrate Burns Night), William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake. No surprises at all.

Dish #1: “Mince pork croquette” 家鄉咸水角£2.7. Jeff loves this dish and he orders it almost every time we go to a cha lau.

Dish #2: “Fried Ho Fun with Beef” 干炒牛河 £6.8. This is not really dim sum but we love flat noodles. Notice the spicy sauce? It didn’t last long and we had to ask for more. See below.

Dish #3: “Pork rib in black bean sauce” 豉汁蒸排骨 £2.8. There wasn’t much black bean sauce there but the dish was absolutely gorgeous. The pork was tender and perfectly seasoned.
Dish #4 “Honey roasted pork bun” 蜜汁叉燒包 £2.7. Jeff is a huge fan and he orders this every time. Yes, every time. And look, we had another helping of spicy sauce. Really, it still wasn’t enough.

Dish #5: “Spice prawn ravioli in soup” 辣汁鮮蝦水餃 £3.2. The soup was absolutely fantastic, probably the highlight of the meal. It was subtly spicy and had some Chinese herbal flavour, which gave the dish an uniquely delicious and strong taste.

That’s my cup of tea.

After dim sum, we went to Portobello Market to hunt for an antique hair pin. My hair is now long enough for different styles. Woohoo! We then went to the Brand Museum, also in Notting Hill. The museum will be discussed in another post.

 

Hong Kong, my home and my people, what is happening to you? 23/01/2010

Filed under: Missing home, Mother tongue — t @ 10:37

 

Quote of the day 20/01/2010

Filed under: Books, Throw Away of the Day — t @ 15:50

Isobel Armstrong praises photography; and a certain person’s justification of her obsession with (her own) images.

“The very fact that [the photograph] emerges from a fleeting moment in time means that that time is irrevocably lost. Even to exchange the photographed rose with the real rose a few hours later is to expose the delicate ravage of time in a disposition of pollen or fallen petal or the transformation of light. Photographs are celebrations of the uniqueness of every moment of being, every configuration of shadow and substance, and an elegy upon them. The permanent structures guaranteed by the physics of light, and the impermanent moment when the light never again falls in exactly the same way, are its dialectic. Photographs are as heavily mediated as paintings, depending on light, camera angle, the grain of paper, the mood of the artist. Photographs of the same object by different people are always different, utterances about the play of light, universes exposed in a single lens, epiphanies of transcience.”

–Isobel Armstong’s The Radical Aesthetic, p. 8

 

“Small and incestuous” 20/01/2010

Filed under: Missing home, Poetry — t @ 00:21

In her blog post “Critique, Cruelty“, Anindita Sengupta comments on the situation of Indian English poetry:

“[T]he world of Indian English poetry is so small and incestuous. Nobody wants to disagree with each other on what constitutes good poetry, or even poetry for that matter. The small and incestuous problem exists everywhere to some extent.”

This made me wonder about the world of Hong Kong English poetry. The poetry scene in HK is also small. It is surely smaller than that in India and the sheer difference in numbers between the poetry submissions we receive from Indian writers and Hong Kong writers is one telling indication. Indeed, one can list the names of published Hong Kong poets (both locally-born and expatriates) without much difficulty, if one follows this sort of thing. I won’t say that the Hong Kong poetry scene is ‘incestuous’, but I will say that a kind of metaphorical familial relationship exists, which is good for forging a sense of community but may also inhabit open and constructive criticism. From my experience, not many HK poets are willing to engage in critical discussion of other poets’ work, even if they are capable of doing so. The circle is simply too small to allow for open dialogue: it is easier and safer to say nice things, while swallowing your judgments. (This situation contrasts greatly with that in Singapore, where some writers seem only too eager to dismantle the work of others — whether deserved or not.) Criticism is not encouraged in HK, I feel. One’s relative young age and lack of publishing experience may add to one’s desire to remain perfectly congenial. But is this healthy?

Or, perhaps living away from home for a year I am becoming too distant from the current situation there? I have heard that there are certain people who are not squeamish about voicing their opinion.

 

Trope rotation 19/01/2010

Filed under: Stories — t @ 17:02

An adorable person once commented that I love repeating myself. Although he’s the only person who has made this remark, as a self-proclaimed poet it’s still a slightly demoralising thing to hear. It’s worse than being told, ‘Hey girl, you’ve had bad hair for ten days in a row. You should do something about it. Shave your head, disappear or perpetually hide in a car’.

But then I remembered the poet and critic Craig Raine’s comment on Oscar Wilde, who was often found indulgently repeating and borrowing from himself. Raine, finger wagging, christens this practice ‘trope rotation’.1 Now, the adorable you out there, next time when you are provoked to voice your intellectual opinion again (and I shall of course humbly listen), do use ‘trope rotation’ as a code. I’ll understand what you mean, and your possibly justified criticism (you are always right) would sound infinitely more pleasing to my ears.2

1Craig Raine, ‘Trope Rotation’, Arête, 2 (Spring-Summer 2000), p. 135.

2 Macfarlane (see the previous post) summaries Josephine Guy’s comment on Wilde’s style: ‘In The British Avant-Garde, Josephine Guy persuasively argues that Wilde’s auto-plagiarisms can be understood as a canonaclastic form of self-quotation[.]‘ (Macfarlane, p. 169).

 

Quote of the day 19/01/2010

Filed under: Books, Throw Away of the Day — t @ 15:14

Where does ‘cliché’ come from?

“In the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Britain, as Linda Dowling observes, elegies for an exhausted English became commonplace–as did grievances at the impossibility of originality. ‘Our language is too worn,’ lamented the poet and playwright John Davidson in 1886, ‘too much abused, / Jaded and overspurred, wind-broken, lame–the hackneyed roadster every bagman mounts.’ So ‘jaded’ was language felt to be in the fin de siècle, indeed, that a new word was coined to describe a ‘worn-out’ word. ‘Cliché’, as W. J. McCormack points out, derives from the specialized vocabulary of the printing trade. It comes from the early nineteenth-century French term for a stereotype block, presumably due to the noise the blocks made whilst printing (clicher is a variant of the verb cliquer, to click). It existed in this literal meaning until the 1890s: the OED offers Andrew Lang, writing in Longwood’s Magazine in 1892, as providing the first usage of cliché as a metaphor meaning ‘A stereotyped expression, a commonplace phrase’. The coinage stuck, and the word cliché itself became a cliché, reproduced many times over to designate something reproduced many times over.”

–Robert Macfarlane’s Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (pp. 159-160)

 

She misses 19/01/2010

Filed under: Missing home — t @ 13:17

She misses Hong Kong. The parents, the sisters, the fish balls. Even the typhoons and summer showers. Street lamps dusted in the smog, late night suppers, the noise in Mongkok. Clothes cheap and inexpensive in Causeway Bay. Curry fish balls. The “V” sign women make when taking pictures. Hong Kong English. Sweaty men and their big bellies. Taxi rides. Old ladies’ hair buns. Steamed fish. Father’s cooking. Pork chop rice. Fish balls. Busy Central, at dusk, people walk to the MTR station. Old trees in Sheung Wan. Fish balls with oyster sauce. Fish balls with some ketchup. High heels. People don’t wear clothes randomly. My long hair. And friends, friends, friends. We laugh in Cantonese, gossip about who is married, who is fat, who is getting a baby. Soon, we are all old and ridiculous. And lovely.

 

vanité conjointe 19/01/2010

Filed under: Documenting vanity, London life — t @ 12:33

Courtesy of JZ

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Boiled frog 18/01/2010

Filed under: Not everything can be categorised! — t @ 17:10

The frog dies, doesn’t wriggle,
doesn’t make a noise.
It’s almost pleasant to look at now
in its flaccid, peaceful, boiled state.
The best way to kill you, I see,
is not to force pills down your throat.
Or undress you in the cold,
leaving you to freeze;
limbs frozen, penis small.
It’s not even to strategically place
your body on a busy rail track
to be minced by a roaring train.
You said you were a frog,
before my virginal lips
turned you into a prince.
But you lied. You still were.

This poem was inspired by the fairytale, The Frog Prince and the “boiling frog” urban legend. Read “What the Grimm Brothers didn’t tell you” here.

 

The World’s Wife 16/01/2010

Filed under: Books, Hey it's Saturday, London life, Plays, Poetry — t @ 22:27

My partner bought me Carol Ann Duffy’s famous poetry collection, The World’s Wife, last year. Bless him. He knows I love poetry and often buys me poetry books.

The collection features works ostensibly narrated by the wives of well-known historical and fictional men, famous men reimagined as women, or women who were well-known in their own right. Some of the subjects include Mrs Midas, Mrs Aesop, Mrs Darwin, Mrs Faust, Anne Hathaway, Queen Kong, Pygmalion’s Bride, Mrs Icarus, Frau Freud, Salome, Eurydice, Penelope, Mrs Beast and Demeter. I found the poems largely amusing but thought one can’t read them all in one sitting or the poems become repetitive and lose their effect (I talked about this here.) All the same, when JZ once again surprised me with tickets to Linda Marlowe’s dramatic interpretation of selected poems from the book, I was thrilled.

The reading was at Trafalgar Studios, located predictably enough just off Trafalgar Square. In the theatre, there are two studios and our performance was in the smaller one, a cosy fringe-style venue.

Marlowe turned out to be a potent and versatile performer, able to switch easily from young maiden (e.g. “Little Red Cap”) to cynical wive (e.g. “Mrs Faust”, “Mrs Beast” and “Mrs Darwin”) to emotionally vulnerable  hunchback (“Mrs Quasimodo”) to love-struck ape (“Queen Kong”). For me, her turn as “Mrs Quasimodo”, a hunchback who thought she had found her love in Quasimodo only to discover that he was more attracted to normal-looking women was particularly heart-breaking:

Because it’s better, isn’t it, to be well formed.
better to be slim, be slight,
our slender neck quoted between two thumbs;
and beautiful, with creamy skin,
and tumbling auburn hair,
those devasting eyes;
and have each lovely foot
held in a bigger hand
and kissed;
then be watched till morning as you sleep,
so perfect, vulnerable and young
you hurt his blood.
(from “Mrs Quasimodo”, Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife, p. 37)

But the night was not all so serious and many of the selected poems highlighted Duffy’s unique brand of humour. The poem that got the most laughs was “Mrs Faust”, which ends with the lines: “I keep Faust’s secret still — / the clever, cunning, callous bastard / didn’t have a soul to sell” (p. 27).

Of course, much of the power and humour of the night came from the poet’s sharp writing and strong language. Hearing the poems read out loud, I was particularly struck by their rhythm, a reminder that sometimes literature needs to be read out loud to be fully appreciated. I could only imagine what it would have been like to hear Dickens the master perform his work.

On the train back home, I was re-reading the poems, and I could almost hear Marlowe reading them; it was as if she were lending me her voice, and thus giving me an understanding of rhythm that I am not sure I had before. This reminded me that a male poet living in Hong Kong, who I shall not identify except to say that his ego is so big it needs its own chair, told me that my poetry was completely lacking in rhythm. After tonight, I am still not sure if my poetry will scant perfectly, but at least I will be able to read other people’s work with a keener ear.

 

Fictional fragments 15/01/2010

Filed under: Not everything can be categorised! — t @ 22:47

1. Someone was sitting in front of me. I found myself staring at the back of his neck. None of my former boyfriends had hair exactly like his and it made me want to kiss this stranger’s soft, ginger strands. He turned and looked at me, as if he knew he was being watched. At first his face was blank, or perhaps slightly inquisitive, then he realised he’s looking at someone attractive, and he smiled. I could say something about his lips. I could say something about his stubble. But I was paying all my attention to his eyes. He had hazel eyes, large irises. He winked. How dare he! (Our history began at that moment. But sorry, you’re not privileged to know what happened that night.)

2. The advantage of having a window ceiling is that you can see the sky turns into dirty blue, then grey, then black. The disadvantage is that it reflects light, and when it doesn’t, you feel lonely again, in utter darkness.

3. Another stranger who sits next to me just grabs a bottle of red wine from god knows where, amidst a speaker’s talk. He’s bearded, thin; he wears old sneakers. He is rather handsome. He passes the bottle to his friends sitting on the same row. How dare he! He doesn’t even ask if I want to refill my glass! But I assume too early. He saves the last glass for me. He pours the wine gently. Gently, I say. And then he winks! Why does everyone wink at me?

I see he looks at my name tag, writes down my name. He knows I am looking.

(Pictured: The Anatomy Theatre & Museum, King’s College London)

 

Femme avec Fleurs 15/01/2010

Filed under: Documenting vanity, London life — t @ 22:05

Courtesy of JZ

     

    Quote of the day 13/01/2010

    Filed under: Books, Throw Away of the Day — t @ 19:31

    Raymond Williams discusses ‘jargon’:

    “Jargon [...] has been in English from mC14, from fw jargon, oF — warbling of birds, chatter. [...] The specialized vocabularies of various sciences and branches of knowledge do not ordinarily attract description as jargon if they remain sufficiently specialized. The problem is usually the entry of such terms into more general talk and writing. This is very common in the obvious cases of law and administration, where the problem of relations between precise and general terms is often intractable. In branches of knowledge which bear on matters which already have a common general vocabulary the problem is even more acute, since the material reasons for specialized precision are less clear or are absent. It is interesting that it is mainly in relation to psychology and sociology, and studies derived from them, but also in relation to an opposing intellectual position such as Marxism, that some of the most regular dismissive uses of jargon are now found. It is true that specialized internal vocabularies can be developed, in any of these and other areas, to a fault. But it is also true that the use of a new term or the new definition of a concept is often the necessary form of a challenge to other ways of thinking or of indication of new and alternative ways. Every known general position, in matters of art and belief, has its defining terms, and the difference between these and the terms identified as jargon is often no more than one of relative date and familiarity. To run together the senses of jargon as specialized, unfamiliar, belonging to a hostile position, and unintelligible chatter is then at times indeed a jargon: a confident local habit which merely assumes its own intelligibility and generality.”

    –Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, pp. 176-178.

    (Pictured: two bottles of nail polish my sisters sent me before Christmas. Incidentally (or predictably?) polish originated in China. The enterprise of beautifying oneself has a long history in the Middle Kingdom. ’Nail polish’ is not a jargon expression.)