last day on the ridge

When I went to campus today for the last time as one of its employees, it was the 4th time this week I forgot to bring along my digital camera.

Before the first lot of books were packed and brought home last Sunday, I had meant to take some pictures of the booklined office I had occupied since 2004. noisynotes and I used two suitcases and went up and down twice, emptying books into the boot of his Honda Jazz.

Did I mention that I had bought only three books on my recent trip to London? It was the memory of the books that were patiently waiting for me to move them home from the office - I lost almost all interest in acquiring new ones.

T.A. (teaching assistant) M kindly helped out on Tuesday. Together we made about 5 rounds, carting books from office to car boot. When we had finished we stood and stared at the unlikely, lofty load in the boot and M said: "I can't wait for the day my collection of books gets this big." It's a point of view I used to share but no longer. Which makes M the perfect person to give a couple of books to, including an unread Ivanhoe and a collection of David Lodge's Structuralist and Post-structuralist readings on 19th and 20th C literature.

After the books the following had to be packed or binned: papers, files, stationery, pictures on the walls, cards, postcards, post-it notes, and other nonsense on the memo board. I won't go into it except that I managed to make myself throw away my undergraduate notes on Shakespeare and the Victorians. As for the notes accumulated during the PhD, I had wanted to bin the whole lot but somehow SOMEHOW! 60% of the bloody things escaped and made it into the car boot. No doubt they'll sit in some box or cupboard and continue to rot away which is what they've been doing the last 3 years.

"It's good you kept them. Maybe you'll write your big book on Dante some day," said a professor from another department at the car park. He did not say anything about the lime green armchair that blocked the rear view entirely. "Yes, some day. When I become an Italian. Or take on an Italian name," I quipped.

Today it was the turn of the course folders on the desktop of the iMac in the office. I put them all in a thumb drive, wrote two emails, called a friend, and then noisynotes came to collect me.

No photographs have been taken.

loveable city

At Heathrow I spent 5 pounds on a journal called Monocle (a new baby of design guru Tyler Brule, the founder of Wallpaper). It lists the 20 most liveable cities in the magazine's first ever survey of such things. I had to buy it (even though it costs more than The New Yorker) because Singapore comes in at number 17. WOW! Looks like all the money we've been throwing at making ourselves hip and happenin' is finally working the magic that Singaporeans are best able to understand: Place on Global Chart.

I am a sucker for rankings, so of course I had to buy the mag. And I love the bit where it says that there were 22 murder cases in Singapore in 2006 open bracket all solved close bracket. Not even World's Most Liveable City - Munich - can match that.

What got me most worked up though is that London is not in the list. Okay, maybe it's because the Monocle head office is based in London and they would rather choose cities where they've not had to deal with the hassles of commuting, supermarket shopping, and the unpredictable English weather. I just spent 10 days in London and 4 days in Zurich (3rd Most Liveable City) and I must say, that though it was nice to have swift trains, clean air, lake and mountain views, and pretty Swiss houses to look at, I would probably suffocate from, oh I don't know, the absence of spirit, the vacuum where there should be vibe.

Where are the ghosts in Zurich? A city without ghosts cannot be liveable, it's not even been properly initiated into the rites of inhabitation. I readily admit that my own ignorance about Swiss culture and history plays a part in my indifference. For a great part of London's charm for me comes from it's having been the address of George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Christina Rossetti (who loved the poetry of the street Seven Sisters), Karl Marx (buried in Highgate Cemetery - so is Rossetti), Sigmund Freud (London was his refuge from Nazi Vienna in the last year of his life), Ezra Pound (lived in Kensington from 1904-1914, I think), J.S. Mill, and many more writers and artists.

noisynotes and I did a walk around Kensington that began on the High Street, wound through the oldest square and the second oldest square in the area, meandered through mews (stables turned into small houses), and finally ended at Holland Park. Can I say this without sounding like a total Anglophile? No, not really. I was in love with it all. And mainly because it's a big, crammed city of people and ghosts and it's not perpetually caught up with being globally liked and ranked highly on some world-class chart.

Here are some new finds I shall be returning to the next time I go to London:
- Lambs Conduit Street (cafes, Persephone bookshop, the Good Foods shop, Folk clothes and shoes, sadly no size 35)
- Gordon Place (the prettiest cul-de-sac on earth, possibly)
- Holland Park (the roses and the path of baby maples)
- Camper shoes in Covent Garden (not at all new, but what's new is that they now have size 35!)

London is also loveable because two of my dearest friends ER and MT live there.

a new old to keep company with

Jack Gilbert is probably not a new name, especially if you are an avid reader of American poets.

My knowledge of American poetry is appallingly thin - it begins with Emily Dickinson, resuscitates for a bit with Lorine Niedecker and George Oppen, and peters out with Louise Gluck. Jorie Graham I should read more of, except I almost always see looming over a shoulder a dark cloud of readerly inadequacy. Marianne Moore I have yet to encounter though every time I see her Complete Poems in a bookshop I feel a pang of apology. Elizabeth Bishop, Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay are all in my pantheon but I've not had that sense of being struck by a bolt of lightning, I've not felt that I need to stop everything, put all calls on hold, postpone all distractions, halt and concentrate on listening until their pages run out of song. I could never really get Frank O'Hara even though one of my house-mates in graduate school tried her best to evangelize. I nibbled at John Ashbery and concluded that I was probably missing something since I could not see why his stuff's called poetry.

Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven was published in 2005. I bought it last week from PageOne. I became curious about him after reading an interview he did with the Paris Review. When asked "Were you a good teacher?" Jack Gilbert answered: "Excellent". When the interviewer said: "Many writers talk about how difficult it is to write. Is poetry hard work?" Jack Gilbert said: "They should try working in the steel mills in Pittsburgh. That's a very delicate kind of approach to the world - to be so frail that you can't stand having to write poetry. There are so many people who are really in trouble just making a living, who are really having a hard life. Besides, with poetry you're doing it for yourself. Other people are doing it because they have to feed the babies. But I do understand that it's hard to write, especially if you have a family."

His poems bowled me over. He has a voice like a stream in a forgotten place. It is pure even when saying rude words like "sonofabitch". It is gentle and forceful at the same time. I would quote you some lines like a diligent lit student but it seems a travesty to his poems to rip lines out. They are perfect pieces, I simply haven't the heart. I love the purity of his spirit, and I admire the way he has managed to show it through writing, foiling the dull and distortion of language.

I've also learnt from him that it's possible to make art from being obtuse. That it is oftentimes necessary to say no to worldliness if you don't want to settle for silence, which is a different thing altogether from quiet.