monoceros blogsI wish I could fly a plane. Not the huge commercial planes, just a small one that would take me over fields and rivers. On clear days, when I'm out driving, I'll notice several planes pulling across the sky, dragging air and plumes of smoke. They're marvellous to watch, and I imagine that their view of the land below is splendid. One of my guilty pleasures is watching the movie Fly Away Home. I was always envious of Anna Paquin's character who got to fly with her geese, escorting them to warmer pastures for winter. And to fly over Canada. Exquisite.
Hayao Miyazaki, I read somewhere, has a fascination with flight too. Many of his movies feature at least one flight scene or deals with creatures that fly. Let's see - in Laputa, we have a floating castle; in Totoro, we have a leaping Catbus (okay, maybe that doesn't quite count); Spirited Away has Haku, who morphs into a flying dragon and takes Chihiro on a nice ride; Porco Rosso is about pilots, and has a flying pig for its hero; and now, Howl's Moving Castle is about a flying castle. He always adds lovely flight sequences in his films. I also read that Miyazaki was very taken with a story by Roald Dahl. The short story is titled "They Shall Not Grow Old," taken from Dahl's collection, Over To You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying. Dahl himself was a fighter pilot during World War II, and the stories in the collection are about pilots who died - their duty, their trials, the beauty and horror they witnessed.
For all its wonder, flying is not without its danger. Often, the most wonderous things are the most terrifying - the ocean, dinosaurs, icebergs. I once read a wonderful essay titled "The Stunt Pilot" by Annie Dillard. Dave Rahm was one of the pilots often seen at flight shows, pulling amazing stunts, creating art with their machines. Dillard describes it as such - "The black plane dropped spinning, and flattened out spinning the other way; it began to carve the air into forms that built wildly and musically on each other and never ended." Rahm died performing a dangerous maneuver for King Hussein in Jordan. He was training the aerobatics team, the Royal Jordanian Falcons. At the same time, he was visiting professor of geology at the University of Jordan. His wife was watching him perform that day.
Another essay, "The Right Stuff," by Tom Wolfe, describes the extraordinary experiences of military test pilots who later became the astronauts of the American space program. What does it take to be a fighter pilot? In Wolfe's words - "But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life. The idea seemed to be that any fool could do that, if that was all that required, just as any fool could throw away his life in the process. No, the idea here (in all the all-enclosing fraternity) seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment - and then go to up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite - and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a peole, a nation, to humanity, to God. ... A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even - ultimately, God willing, one day - that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men's eye, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself."
After reading Wolfe's essay in my creative non-fiction class last fall, I began to understand why pilots are always labelled as swaggering, ego-filled men who consider themselves above civilians and even other men in the military. Perhaps the judgement has a grain of truth, but the manner of flight, the power to command a plane, requires a certain frame of mind, a certain psyche, that few possess. That right stuff indeed.
Maybe I should watch The Aviator this weekend. It's Oscar weekend, after all. But today's poem on The Writer's Almanac (the main reason for this long post) made me view flight from a different angle. The perception of flight still retains its beauty but the terror of a moment strung together with death is what surfaces here.
Beauty or Flight
The man who jumped from the highway bridge one afternoon
who drove his car along in rush hour traffic
then carefully pulled it over, fussed with something briefly on the dash,
so casually that another driver passing
thought he was looking for a map, or a cassette tape,
that had slid during the last turn before the bridge-that's all?
and then stepped out of the car, standing, stretching,
and closing the door routinely, a man in need of a break
on a long drive, a man untroubled by his next appointment,
a man who felt himself growing tired and thought
he needed some air, looked up the highway once
and then down at the almost frozen rows of traffic
under the haze that lingered above the bridge
and then broke simply and suddenly into a run, a dead run,
one motorist called it, crossing in front of his car
and not even stopping at the railing between the bridge
and the empty space beside the bridge, entering that space
and opening his mouth in what one driver called a scream,
though she heard no sound above the drone of traffic, and
other drivers saw as a gasp for breath, not unlike a child takes
when diving into a backyard pool, and he executed then
a nearly perfect, if a little rushed, swan dive out across the space
next to the bridge and into the water ninety-five feet below.
One fisherman in a boat a little upstream
saw the man who jumped from the highway bridge,
the moment he left the bridge and entered his dive, and the fisherman
swore he saw not a man but a large bird, a falcon or an eagle,
shot mid-flight by an angry driver, a large bird
who was trying to regain some sense of beauty, some sense of flight,
in its final dying seconds.
~ by Denver Butson, from Triptych
...do not agree. I seem to have great difficulty getting things done ahead of time. I stayed at the music school till three this morning, typing out my teaching philosophy. Collapsed in bed at four, got up at 8:30 in the morning (much thanks to my faithful morning caller, LK, who was out shopping on a Friday night) and began writing and revising. I finished two cover letters and then raced to school. My job applications were submitted fifteen minutes before the deadline.
Now I'm too exhausted to do much else. I did manage to clear the mess on my living room floor and also put some gas in the White Rabbit.
I'm now listening to Nat King Cole. I remember listening to an album called The Love Songs of Nat King Cole on my first discman (my brother gave it to me after my "O" Levels) in Istanbul. It was December 1995 and I had made my first trip to Europe. Winter, choral singing, my warm Limited coat. I was 17 and happy and wrinkle-free.
I lost the cd a few years later and felt a little guilty since it belonged to my father. I recently purchased it again - $9.99 on Amazon. Oh, the memories.
Spring break is here. It's really here! A year ago, I was furiously editing several ELT books for my old boss. I couldn't believe I wasted half of my spring break editing non-stop. I could hear my neighbors watching DVDs while I made so many proofreading marks that I dreamed of them at night. This year, spring break is mine. Well, I'll be grading and writing and reading and preparing for the next six and a half weeks of the semester. But still, it's wonderful just to say "Spring break is here!" LK has warned me not to get caught on any programs that vaguely resemble "Girls Gone Wild." Heh. The wildest thing I might do is watch Constantine and scare myself silly.
The online edition of The Straits Times won't be free for much longer. They're planning to charge online users $15 a month, $72 for six months, or $120 for a year.
They believe they have a "good and valuable" product that people will want to pay for. Well, I'm certainly not one of such people. Yes, I read The Straits Times because I feel closer to home when I read about what's going on in Singapore. But paying fees for news online is where I draw the line. Other online editions of newspapers like The Guardian and The New York Times are free. Certain articles in the archives of the NYTimes require fees, but they only cease to be free after a certain amount of time. Everything else is FOC as long as you're a regular reader.
I was disappointed when they first reduced the number of Life! articles online. They also reduced the seven-day archive to a three-day one. What was the purpose? To induce readers to buy the print edition? Then I got a little more peeved when STI required registration last year (probably part of the plan to charge readers once they found out how many folks read STI; do they actually believe number of readers = number of people who will pay to read?), so I adopted the widely available user name and password: stisucks. Now, I'll just stop reading it altogether. Not that anyone from the SPH company would care about the loss of one reader though; after all, a large number of people would supposedly pay to read this "good and valuable product."
Oh, and a final word on STI. In the email informing me about the new fees, a rather remarkable sentence reads:
"You will want to know whether you will get anything more, now that you have to pay. The answer is yes."
They want readers to pay and this is the quality of writing they deliver?
My toolkit for tongue-healing. I'm almost back to eating normal foods. It's been an interesting three days.
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Tiggie and I once had with an idea (just for fun) about setting up a tea-shop/bookstore. Lately, I've been daydreaming about the stuff I'd sell in that shop.
- Literary fiction (novels and short story collections)
- Travel writing (memoirs, essays)
- Essay collections (not the boring stuff, but provocative writing by Jonathan Franzen, Joan Didion, Umberto Eco, and Cynthia Ozick)
- Good poetry from various parts of the world
- Children's books, the well-illustrated kind with unusual stories
- A selection of graphic novels and quirky comics
- Reference books on writing and grammar
- A few art books
- Literary journals
- Some stationery: Moleskines, Namiki pens, Italian pencils, seals, wax sticks, marbled paper, desk organizers
- Shelves with sachets and tins of tea
- Canvas totebags for books
- Magazines on writing and reading
I'm sure I've got other ideas tucked away but I'll leave it as this for now. Perhaps if DSD has a stake in the shop, she'd add a section on cookbooks, in which case I'd insist on MFK Fisher's The Art of Eating as a featured title.
So it's Wednesday today, and I'm building my imaginary shop around the corner. The catalogue of items would probably be too specialized and the shop would never make any money because I eschew inane self-help books, cheesy self-improvement titles, and the mass market titles with overdoses of purple prose. I'm not too big a fan of chick lit. either, which doesn't bode well for my little store. These are actually the books that sell. But since I would never hawk something I wouldn't want to read, I'd have to be content with customers who share similar literary tastes, and that would be about eight people. Heh, and that's fine by me.
Studio Ghibli's Howl's Moving Castle is going to open in Singapore on February 24th, shifted up from March 10th.
If only I were going home for spring break!
The book cover is out! Elizabeth Kostova's debut novel, The Historian, is going to be a wonderful read. I've read parts of the work and it's excellent writing in the spirit of literary fiction, intellectual adventure, and historical and travel writing with gothic elements.
On shelves June 14th, 2005.
National Geographic Traveler featured Ireland in an issue years ago, and I've been wishing to visit ever since. Last night, I made the tough decision not to apply for this little fellowship that would allow me to spend a month in Moveen, Ireland. It's actually a competition among the MFA students that I'm not sure I could even win. I decided against it since I need to either go home to Singapore to get my new house ready or stay in Michigan and do research. It feels foolish, but I didn't have time to complete the statement and I thought I'd wait till LK gets enough time off and then we can explore Ireland together.
For now, I'll just dream of those operatic seacliffs.
Hawk Cliff
Emerald Isle
~Pictures taken from http://www.walkingadventures.com
My menu is limited to beef/chicken broth with acini di pepe (little granules of pasta, quite delicious really), yoghurt, ice-cream, sliced cling peaches, spinach, milk, and water. Tons of water. At least this is a better deal that the constant abdomen agony I experienced about a year ago.
Still, the tragedy of it all is that I have to gargle with a special liquid that numbs my mouth before I can eat anything. Every few hours, I gargle with the other solution which I mustn't swallow unless I'd like a quick trip to the ER unit.
Before I taught today (I warned my students that I might have to cancel class), I gargled with the mouth-numbing stuff, loaded up on lozenges, and then told the class that lessons were going to take place until the medicine wore off. I did cancel office hours though.
It's rather frustrating not being able to talk and eat at free will. I'm learning the value of having a healthy and functioning tongue. Once I get well, I'm treating myself to solid foods, which means meat, meat and more meat! Okay, some fish too. And French fries!
Whenever LK and I are apart, I always forget about Valentine's Day when the day swings round. I was so busy today worrying about that damn tongue and my thesis turn-in date (today) that I forgot about the occasion until I went to Google.
Of course, LK had messaged his Valentine last night wishing her a happy day, and she promptly forgot the next morning - it's all because of the time difference that I get these things screwed up.
Go seek her out all courteously
And say I come,
Wind of spices whose song is ever
Epithalamium.
O, hurry over the dark lands
And run upon the sea
For seas and lands shall not divide us,
My love and me.
Now, wind, of your good courtesy
I pray you go
And come into her little garden
And sing at her window;
Singing: The bridal wind is blowing
For Love is at his noon;
And soon will your true love be with you,
Soon, O soon.
~by James Joyce
from "Chamber Music"
Sick again. Always got something going. My tongue is inflamed, and I can barely eat, drink, or talk without experiencing excruciating pain. The doctor couldn't tell if it's an allergic reaction or a viral infection, so I've got two types of liquids to gargle with - one is a mixture of water and hydrogen peroxide! - and some medicine to injest. How am I going to teach? How am I going to eat? I wish I had a drip.
I feel like a drip.
My enthusiasm for the movie arrives seven years late. I watched it at State Theater when I was an undergraduate here in Michigan. I watched the Oscars the year it won Best Picture and Gwyneth Paltrow won for her role as Viola, much to my chagrin, as I was rooting for Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth.
I may have mentioned before that I don't care much at all for Ms. Paltrow, though her acting in The Royal Tenenbaums didn't grate as much as I'd expected. And I'm thoroughly willing to endure her screen presence in Shakespeare in Love if only because the screenplay is just terrific and so is the score. And the costumes aren't bad either. And I have fond memories of reading the Bard's plays.
Watching it again on TV tonight was better than that time at the theater. I'm not sure why. Perhaps I'm older now and more tolerant of Gwyneth Paltrow. I do remember liking the final scene that has Shakespeare imagining his muse, Viola, walking out from the sea towards a thicket of trees. A very resonant closing scene. It was perhaps the one moment in the movie that I looked forward to watching again.
Arthur Miller, the great playwright, has passed on. And I passed on the chance to met him last year when he visited Ann Arbor in April. The reason? LK was visiting then and I went to the airport to fetch him. I don't have any regrets, though, since I usually stiffen up in the presence of greatness, and am unable to say anything of use.
Arthur Miller, the famous father-in-law of Daniel Day-Lewis and one-time husband of Marilyn Monroe, was an alumnus at Michigan, and he won a slew of Hopwood Awards. Legend is that he came here specifically to win those awards, or rather, the money.
Death of a Salesman and The Crucible are two of his most popular plays. I'm partial towards The Crucible because for a time, I was interested in the Salem witch trials. The play was made into a good film too, with leads played by Winona Ryder and Miller's future son-in-law, Daniel Day-Lewis. Funny how two individual with famous fathers married - Daniel Day-Lewis' father, Cecil Day-Lewis, was an acclaimed poet.
Rest in peace, Mr. Miller.
It's been a long week - plenty of deadlines, events, and important visitors. LK arrived in time to watch me write, help me put together my Hopwood manuscripts, buy me breakfast when I craved for hashbrowns, and celebrate with me when I was done with my paper storm. We even had time for a mini roadtrip.
Two readings this week - one by Rattawut Lapcharoensap, one of Michigan's success stories, and another by a favorite author, Don Lee. Although Don Lee is more well-known as the editor of Ploughshares, one of America's top literary journals, his works, Yellow and Country of Origin, cut quite a path in Asian-American literature. I owe noob for introducing his writing to me, since I knew Don Lee only as the editor of Ploughshares. Well, his short story collection came out in 2001, and I was in Singapore then, and the bookstores there can't be trusted to promote the same titles that are featured in the US.
The line-up of literary events meant that I got to see other familiar faces, like my friend Elizabeth who will soon be the next success story of the program. A little conversation with her at the beginning of the semester helped me cement the project for my novel and I owe her quite a bit in terms of the support she's offered me over the course of our friendship.
So I got to introduce an author this week (those mini mikes they clip on you - eh), have dinner with him and other faculty, although I'm horrible at small talk and say some of the silliest and most random things. I also failed to talk about my own work in a meaningful way; or rather, I just failed to talk about my work (I need thicker skin). I also have a wonderful ability of making myself the odd one out - I chose not to have any alcohol and I also ordered the least interesting entree at a swanky restaurant. I'm brilliant that way.
A CNY steamboat dinner with friends on Wednesday too. Good times, good food. It was really wonderful to have LK attend; he and Jake had their little car talk, and LK and noob had their little computer talk.
He leaves tomorrow. Bugger. I've been so busy that we haven't even time to watch a movie. Oh well. At least, he enjoyed the readings and we both agreed that Don's was top-notch. He's very cool, collected, and he'd chosen his excerpt well. One of the best visiting writers. The next visitor I look forward to is Ian Jack, editor of Cambridge University's Granta. And I can look forward to LK's next visit, which will be either in the summer or fall.
Now, I've got some applications to tackle, and my 120-page thesis workshop maunscript to complete.
"How the hell am I supposed to fly with wings the size of peanuts?" ~ Ice Bat
"How the hell am I supposed to finish all this work with less than a day left?" ~ Monoceros
So a childhood friend of mine got married this past weekend. And then my former colleage, affectionately known as Ah Yeo, or Karen, is getting married in November. Up next is my favorite cellist (I suppose the only cellist I know), Noella, who is getting married in September. Yesterday, my mom wrote to say my cousin, Leona, is getting married this June.
It's raining weddings! I wonder if I'll get to go to any.
A little less from me now that February looms large. Husband visiting (yay!), writing awards, thesis workshop, introducing a visiting author, fellowship applications, job applications, teaching, writing travel essays, writing novella. This semester is squeezing everything out of me. I've already had to turn down a visit from Tiggie and I missed applying for an award by a few days. Very frustrating, as I've become rather scatter-brained this term. I missed an important appointment and had to apologize profusely to the person, I failed to mark down certain dates on my calendar, and I forgot to change my contact lenses after a month.
I did remember to attend a session on applying for a specific job, only to leave more depressed as it's going to be very competitive, so much so that the weakling in me who fears competition just wants to give up. But I'll apply anyway. I'm so desperate for a job that I'll force myself to complete all the nitty-gritty for the application the way Elmer Fudd is driven to "kill the Wabbit" at any cost.
Had a nice conversation last week with a friend, T., an undergrad, who majors in saxophone, English/writing, and Italian. He also once studied piano under my friend P. We covered Piazzolla, the Argentinian tango, Moleskines (he's a fan too), Isak Dinesen, Italian films, Paris, the writing awards and other random topics. The lucky fellow is waiting to hear from the Fulbright people about a scholarship to Italy, and if he doesn't get it, he'll be off to France (Grenoble or Paris) to teach English.
I'm terribly envious. Spending a year after graduation in Europe is a wonderful opportunity. It's been a while since I was last there. I miss Istanbul, every square inch of Italy, Vienna... .