what is a l. p.?

In the literature for beginners tutorial today a student asked, "What is a L. P.?" On the 23 young, trusting faces in the room, I noticed that more than a few were looking blank. I tried my best to describe the vinyl record, going on to talk about how you go about putting one on the player. I thought of someone I knew in the UK who owned at least a hundred records. Thinking back now, maybe I should have been more focussed in my attempt at filling in the blanks.

The reference to the cassette tape's forefather is in Arthur Yap's poem "in passing". It was one of the poems I had assigned for discussion. The poem mentions a mural at Changi Airport. Where is this mural? I asked. Nobody knew. That's probably because the mural has been removed and replaced with something more current, like the carpeting in the airport which, to me at least, always looks like it's just been replaced.

Incidentally, do you know that we are the only airport in the world that has carpeting all over (except for in the restrooms)? It's to reduce noise pollution from trolleys, apparently. We also have the best trolleys in the world. They're hardly ever squeaky. Which leads to the million dollar question: Why then do we need all that carpeting?

Actually, I have another million dollar question also inspired by the carpeting at Changi. Why does the carpet-purchasing-department invariable go for jarringly colourful patterns? What's wrong with sedate and dignified monocolour carpeting? Is the carpeting a visual and tactile exemplification of vibrancy in a multicultural society? Like I said, it's a million dollar question.

Back to "in passing". So much of the poem relies on the reader's sense of pride in Singapore's airport, one of the first signs that we'd truly "arrived" on the global stage when it opened in 1981. At that time it was the world's largest airport. Number One in the World! That was something I heard over and over again as a child and teenager. Also, don't forget, we were also Number One Port! Better than Amsterdam!

Two-thirds of the students in today's class were not yet born in 1981. So I had to tell them about the long circular water features that drizzled their circular shower in air-wells by the side of escalators inside what is now Terminal 1 of Changi International Airport. The sound of rain inside, is what I think impressed me at that time, although of course now I can't be sure if there was any sound at all or if the water could be heard above the piped-in muzak.

They had to listen to me do my grandmother act, "last time ah, there was . . . ". Only I was talking about stepless escalators, not the kacang puteh man or firecrackers. Correct me if I'm wrong, all you 1970's or 1960's babies out there, but wasn't Changi airport the first place in Singapore to have gently sloping escalators?

One of the students said that in Singapore a lot of things are in passing. I was tempted to talk about the National Library at Stamford Road, but we were running out of time.

Passing by, passing through, pass on before you pass out.

night walk #1

The moon was full tonight. Did you see it? "Luminous, weightless, transparent", it was almost a twin to the one in the sky over lovers in the Leonard Cohen song, perfectly covered by Madeleine Peyroux in her album with the same title, Half The Perfect World.

I was with a friend, walking from the new Esplanade to the old. Earlier on we were at a screening of the film Summer Snow that was part of the Ann Hui retrospective at the Arts House's Hong Kong Spotlight. The director was present and there was a Q and A session after the screening. Ann Hui said that she didn't know how to make big films like The Banquet and The Curse of the Golden Flower. She didn't say this but I was thinking, she can't be using small pejoratively; the divide between big and small is the difference between a Chekhov short story and Tolstoy's War and Peace.

(Not having seen either of the two aforementioned Chinese films, I must say my analogy is based entirely on gut feeling. Also, I confess: I have yet to finish War and Peace. Anna Karenina was the best thing I read in 2004, more than ten years after I first approached it and fled, like a fool, before the hundred-page mark. I am still waiting for the brilliant translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky to work their magic on War and Peace. That's one reason for waiting.)

Of course Ann Hui said other thoughtful things. And those things lingered, not long until they slipped off the edges of the mind into the recesses of memory. I asked her why the soundtrack was composed by a Japanese and she responded with a vignette about a chance meeting with the then penniless Japanese composer in a fellow Hong Kong director's sitting room. It seemed to be a scene from one of her films.

Ann Hui's craft is in coaxing the small into filling the space of cinema just so; there is nothing forced, nothing affected. We did not talk about her, or the film we saw this evening, as we took the night for a short walk, from the truncated marina walkway up to the start of the Singapore River. There was a shared sense of comfort and contentment, of being at home. Tonight the small shall suffice; tonight the moon is full; tonight there are at least two on this island who can say, without a single pang, that there is good after all in the small.

having a break

The island has been cool and without rain in the past three days. The air is light and agile, drier and thinner. The sunlight also seems less harsh. Can it be that spring has come, at last?

I was at Japanese class on Monday night and the sensei (teacher) taught us the words for summer holiday, winter holiday, spring holiday. When she asked the student on her left, what did you do in the summer holiday, everyone in the class laughed. We don't have summer holiday, someone said. It's always summer here, said another student. What about spring holiday? Nope, we don't have that either. What about winter holiday? We wish. More laughter.

It happens very often in the Japanese class, this communal owning-up to the island's have-not's. And it's done with a good measure of embarrassment, mirth, and contempt. In a much earlier class, with a different group of students, another sensei had said that she was new to the island and would like to know which places she ought to visit. The students looked around at each other and exchanged knowing smiles. This is the camaraderie of the island's people. Looking at the island and seeing it always in terms of the not-enough and the not-here.

When I sit, like the boy in the picture, in front of my book shelves, I am reminded of what a friend once said about not having to travel physically because by sitting in an armchair with a book his mind can go to all kinds of places. I think the island needs to sit in front of its bookshelves and find some way to travel. It has looked far too long at itself and found itself unlovely far too many times.

neverness

Neverness. The tongue pulls back into the pit before it rushes out twice, and twice it is tamed, stroked by the limit of teeth. This is how the word feels in my mouth - true to its meaning. A beautiful word, Borges said in an interview, "a word that's a poem in itself, full of hopelessness, sadness, and despair".

There doesn't seem to be room for neverness in this world, so bent on believing, doing, exceeding, saving and delivering, healing, detoxing, bettering, having it all. It is rubbed in our faces every day, can-do, can-have everness.

If everness has a home on earth, it's on this island. The controllers are for ever-changing it in their quest for the ever-lasting day in the sun. We are destined for everness, it seems, when the seasons that mark the passing of time never mark it here.

Suffer neverness instead? "There will never be . . . I shall never see . . . We will never do . . . She shall never learn . . . He will never make . . . It can never be . . ." It is a pall too heavy to wish on anything, anyone.

Writing, and finishing especially, are susceptible to the spirit of neverness. If you have ever set hope by words and yet never heard the whine, I envy you.

moss

In a class a few days ago I read Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica". Here's the first section:

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
as old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.


I was wearing a long-sleeved blouse that day. I propped my elbows on the panel and I rubbed them against the wood. That is how the stone becomes sleeve-worn, I said, from the people who sat by the windows, resting their arms along the ledges, looking out, looking down.

The smooth stone takes on a mossy facade. This suggests the time that has passed since the ledges were last warmed. I was suddenly reminded of the moss on the ground by the drains and the moss on the sides of the pond in my primary school. I liked to pat the moss, drawn by the dark green hue and the nappy feel of it, like the beginnings of hair on a baby's head.

Is it possible to find moss on this campus? I asked the students.

In November last year I visited a campus in Taipei and was elated by the sight of bicycles. Maybe it's to do with the universities I attended, both of them cycling towns. But to see bicycles parked everywhere, outside the main gate, the side gate, in the parking space in front of buildings, - it seemed proper. The unkempt look of bicycles with missing tyres, the forlorn expression of the ones that had been abandoned - these too were reassuring.

It wasn't just the bicycles, there were also parts of the campus that looked vintage and sleepy. I think if I was a student I would always remember these parts. I saw walls overgrown with climbers. If I had looked closer, I would have found some moss, of this I am quite sure.

If there was time enough for moss to grow, the story of the moss and the story of the stone of old buildings left to grow old

Willy Wonka's cousin and tropical oompa loompas

On a recent evening noisy notes (my other half) and I were at an event at the National Museum organized by a European bank, part of the round of parties held for Singapore06. There were cocktails, canapes, live music, acrobats, and an exhibition of photographs by a Japanese artist from the bank's collection. The National Museum has not yet re-opened, and I must say it is quite an experience to take the escalator to its new basement level with a glass of wine in hand and to look up at the night sky through the glass ceiling.

There are two rooms in the basement currently displaying artworks from the Singapore Biennale. They were deserted, save for the two of us and the one or two men in suits who had wandered in from the party upstairs. There was a photograph of the Last Supper, wax figures at Madame Tussaud's taken by Sugimoto Hiroshi. There was a series of oil paintings of a man in varying seated poses and brandishing different disabilities called "The Artist Is A Lonely Heart" by Thai artist Chatchai Puipia.

Back upstairs we walked around looking for things to eat. That was when we met a woman in a chef's uniform who courteously showed us the chocolates and other sweets she had prepared.

"What is the name of your caterer?" we asked after eating a nest-like pastry with a hint of aniseed in its heart, and a half-coat of bitter dark chocolate, the name of which escapes me (Malfunctioning memory, the effect of drink and disturbing paintings on a mainly empty stomach).

"I can't tell you. I signed an agreement not to say," she said, "But I can tell you that I own a chocolate factory. And I have represented Singapore at chocolate competitions." Now I know what it means when in story books they say: "with a twinkle in her eye". Noisy notes suggested that she sign a less constraining contract at future functions. She handed him a tiramisu chocolate. "Here, try this."

The smile on Willy Wonka's Southeast Asian cousin's face widened when I said that the rose pastry she had urged me to try reminded me of the Middle East. One second later I got it: "It's like a Turkish Delight." I can easily eat a plate of those. They give me a magic-carpet high. I had two of the rose pastries. (They're called flanner or something like it though they are not at all like flans. "Flannel," insists noisy notes on the drive home, the effect of drink and too many meetings with suits on a mainly empty stomach.)

I am the size of a hobbit and I could see the top of her chef's headgear (another name to look up). She said it again, thinking we might not have heard it the first time, "I have a chocolate factory. We make chocolates for hotels . . . and some companies who say their chocolates come from other places." I wonder if she is a renegade Oompa Loompa. No - she is too pretty.

Noisy notes said, "You can't tell us the name of your company but surely you can tell us your name?"

Chef Jane Chan, you and the chocolates you made and your fabulous chocolate factory in Woodlands, they will always be part of our memories of our first visit to the new National Museum.

the significance of names

Two days ago three assistant professors were waiting for bus number 160 at a bus-stop in Holland Village. Holland V, as it is affectionately partially acronymned by islanders, is a locale that belies its name by being situated nowhere close to the Netherlands and bears no resemblance to the pastoral nostalgic construct of a village in Europe. There are no thatched cottages and cattle here.

Still, the name does fit the job the place has been given in recent years: as a hangout for the workers in a hub of economically lucrative creativity, the kind of globalized synergistic cosmopolitan lifestyle hub that will prove an enticing playground for the mainly non-native IT and biotechnology labour elite who are imagined as playing a vital role in the current mission of making the island creative.

Two years ago it was widely reported when a political master exhorted Holland V for being hip and bohemian. (Digression: it is more accurate to say "the political master" but the charge of authoritarianism that peeks from the definite article is too much for a small blog to bear.) Bohemian only makes one of the assistant professors think of crystal blown in an industrial town of the former Czechoslovakia, another name buried in history, a name with no bearing on the present reality.

The assistant professors were talking about the Singapore Biennale and the campaign to educate non-Italian-speaking islanders in the correct pronunciation of the word ("say bian-nah-ley").

"Biennale means biennial, right?", said one of the assistant professors in his booming voice, towering over the other two like an Ent from Tolkien's epic. "So why not call it that? Biennial is easier to say too."

"Because there is an embedded reference to the Venice Biennale," proffered his colleague who prides herself on being-in-the-know about such things.

"Why Venice? Why Italian? I think it's got something to do with wanting to have our own Renaissance," quipped the third assistant professor, known for combining wit, mathematics, and devilry in his pedagogical philosophy.

There was a moment's silence as all three assistant professors took this in, each in his or her own way. Finally, the assistant professor who takes pride in knowing certain kinds of things says, "Renaissance? Ha! We need the Medici family for that to happen."

"Does it have to be Italian? Would a Chinese surname do?", posed the diabolical pedagogue.

"Biennale means biennial so I don't see why we can't just call it that," said the tall Ent-like assistant professor.

Bus number 160 arrived at the bus-stop. The assistant professors boarded it and were on their way to Orchard Road, a street on a part of the island that used to be covered by sprawling nutmeg and clove orchards.