I wait in the dark,
my eyes closed, my hands poised.
Sometimes it seems like nothing will come.
I open my eyes:
A white screen, a blank life.
A spark of anger flares up and fades.
I look at the clock:
two fifteen, two forty.
My mind begins to skitter and grasp.
I start to tap keys,
Foraging, accreting.
A vomit of letters piles up and reeks.
I barrel ahead
Ignore it, but I can’t
And yet I’m typing, forgiving myself.
Even though I know myself this writing is:
An accelerating unraveling: strands
drawn from desperation,
pulled apart to fill up space,
which is stuffed with straw and dross
from thin memories fattened up.
Strands unraveling from a height,
falling and tangling
to jumble together, but together.
If meaningless.
---
I gave you my page
last Wednesday, I did it.
Sometimes it seems like I wasn’t wrong.
I thought you would talk
about it, or something.
I thought you would be… clear if not kind.
I didn’t think you’d think
it was good, or thought through.
But you said nothing, nothing at all.
I cannot stand this,
I cannot, I will not.
I should have told you: nothing did come.
I’m doing that now:
forgive me, I’m sorry.
I hope you will say – don’t do it twice.
Even forgive me, by telling me writing is this:
A slow tying together – ropes
of patience,
of the need to fill an emptiness,
of straws made into twine,
made to sustain.
Ropes making a bridge that stretches ahead,
sturdy if flawed,
but not unraveling –
connecting.
---
Maybe. But that’s what kills me.
Do you remember?
I gave you my page.
Our eyes met, a beat passed.
“A great job today,” and then, “All right?”
“Yep,” I said. And I left you
in the dark.
But no more.
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Poetry: To Robert Jason Leahey
I had in mind your fallow hair,
in hands your curious face.
You entered thoughts and lurked in words,
a shadow near or far.
So then my plots I under lined
with clumsy traps that showed
the angled mirrors of a boy
who longed for tricks of light.
But when the weeks began to glue
and months began to build,
I thought you time and page had shelved
in memories turning cool.
So clumsy traps were set aside
and mirrors hid away,
and pen was put to paper now
in search of truths that’d fled.
But as I waited through the nights
my page and lives were blank.
My mind askittering would grasp
that nothing had been known.
I’d built my hopes with gossamer strands
and stuffed them full of dross.
I’d twined my castles and their floors
with memories fat and stray.
So now I looked with twice-opened eyes
and tried to build anew
a different home, a different way
to put me up above,
beyond the shadow of your touch,
beyond the clumsiness,
beyond the stains of memories,
beyond your startling reach.
Unwriting you from page and ink
I cleaned you from my thoughts;
since time and page had gathered dust
I tore you from new work.
But then the words were hollow and
the lines rang grey and false,
and he who pried apart the page
would nothing under find.
And calibrated angst and smarts
would only build to this:
a careful house and careful days
of waiting craziness.
So now I take the clumsy but
I take away the traps;
I take the mirrors and the dreams
but take away the light;
I put them all in front of you
in all this messiness;
I was given this to live and use,
this home, this time, this you.
I have in mind your fallow hair,
in hands your curious face.
You enter thoughts and bolster words,
a shadow next to mine.
And when this home should fall to ground
and when this time should pass,
your fallow hair and curious face
will stay and mark these truths:
I stopped and knew it would not do
to hide behind my words.
And if I have but all these words,
these here are due to you.
in hands your curious face.
You entered thoughts and lurked in words,
a shadow near or far.
So then my plots I under lined
with clumsy traps that showed
the angled mirrors of a boy
who longed for tricks of light.
But when the weeks began to glue
and months began to build,
I thought you time and page had shelved
in memories turning cool.
So clumsy traps were set aside
and mirrors hid away,
and pen was put to paper now
in search of truths that’d fled.
But as I waited through the nights
my page and lives were blank.
My mind askittering would grasp
that nothing had been known.
I’d built my hopes with gossamer strands
and stuffed them full of dross.
I’d twined my castles and their floors
with memories fat and stray.
So now I looked with twice-opened eyes
and tried to build anew
a different home, a different way
to put me up above,
beyond the shadow of your touch,
beyond the clumsiness,
beyond the stains of memories,
beyond your startling reach.
Unwriting you from page and ink
I cleaned you from my thoughts;
since time and page had gathered dust
I tore you from new work.
But then the words were hollow and
the lines rang grey and false,
and he who pried apart the page
would nothing under find.
And calibrated angst and smarts
would only build to this:
a careful house and careful days
of waiting craziness.
So now I take the clumsy but
I take away the traps;
I take the mirrors and the dreams
but take away the light;
I put them all in front of you
in all this messiness;
I was given this to live and use,
this home, this time, this you.
I have in mind your fallow hair,
in hands your curious face.
You enter thoughts and bolster words,
a shadow next to mine.
And when this home should fall to ground
and when this time should pass,
your fallow hair and curious face
will stay and mark these truths:
I stopped and knew it would not do
to hide behind my words.
And if I have but all these words,
these here are due to you.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Poetry: A Story For Young Employees
This is what they told me, this is what they said:
“Any names you want at all, except every name in red.”
So I looked through all they’d given me, lined and question marked,
And in the end I had my list, composed of thoughts and larks.
But when I brought my list with me, to a meeting with our top,
She looked at it then looked at me, and then the penny dropped:
“I notice that you’ve struck this off, and I’d like to just know why,
Because I’ve seen him work myself, and I do think he’s our guy.”
I should have mused and shrugged and left, I should have bit my lip,
I should have done just anything, but let this winner zip:
“It seems to me that when I pick, I think of work and worth,
But when you look at all these names, you see the last names first.”
So now I sit and file and sneeze, where once I dialed and signed.
Sometimes I type up résumés, but more to pass some time.
It’s hard to get an interview, when bosses recommend:
“This guy has so many honest bones, he’ll never break or bend.”
(Revision)
This is what they told me, this is what they said:
“Pick four to five you think are right, but not the names in red.”
So given what they’d given me, I thought and lined and ticked,
And in the end I had my three, the best I could have picked.
But when I brought my list to share, at a meeting with our top,
She looked at it then looked at me, and then the penny dropped:
“I know you’ve struck him off the list, but what about this guy?
I myself have seen his work, and think he’s worth a try.”
I should have mused or shrugged or caved, I should have bit my lip.
I should have done most anything, but let this zinger zip:
“It seems to me that when I picked, I saw their work and worth,
But when you looked at all these names, you saw the last names first.”
So now I sit and file and sneeze, where once I dialed and signed.
Sometimes I type up résumés, but those are wastes of time.
It’s hard to get an interview, when bosses recommend:
“This guy’s a bag of honest bones; he’ll never break or bend.”
“Any names you want at all, except every name in red.”
So I looked through all they’d given me, lined and question marked,
And in the end I had my list, composed of thoughts and larks.
But when I brought my list with me, to a meeting with our top,
She looked at it then looked at me, and then the penny dropped:
“I notice that you’ve struck this off, and I’d like to just know why,
Because I’ve seen him work myself, and I do think he’s our guy.”
I should have mused and shrugged and left, I should have bit my lip,
I should have done just anything, but let this winner zip:
“It seems to me that when I pick, I think of work and worth,
But when you look at all these names, you see the last names first.”
So now I sit and file and sneeze, where once I dialed and signed.
Sometimes I type up résumés, but more to pass some time.
It’s hard to get an interview, when bosses recommend:
“This guy has so many honest bones, he’ll never break or bend.”
(Revision)
This is what they told me, this is what they said:
“Pick four to five you think are right, but not the names in red.”
So given what they’d given me, I thought and lined and ticked,
And in the end I had my three, the best I could have picked.
But when I brought my list to share, at a meeting with our top,
She looked at it then looked at me, and then the penny dropped:
“I know you’ve struck him off the list, but what about this guy?
I myself have seen his work, and think he’s worth a try.”
I should have mused or shrugged or caved, I should have bit my lip.
I should have done most anything, but let this zinger zip:
“It seems to me that when I picked, I saw their work and worth,
But when you looked at all these names, you saw the last names first.”
So now I sit and file and sneeze, where once I dialed and signed.
Sometimes I type up résumés, but those are wastes of time.
It’s hard to get an interview, when bosses recommend:
“This guy’s a bag of honest bones; he’ll never break or bend.”
Poetry: Missing A Ride On A Train / Missing Rides On Trains
He entered; his flat heels clipped into a staccato; his head bobbed as he walked.
He had choices the length of the train, but he wasn’t looking.
You’d think he didn’t care.
I did –
These things can go in a blur.
He leaned; his sleeved arm pressed into the corner; his legs crossed at the sock.
He had headphones the size of my fists, but he wasn’t listening.
You could see it in his stare.
I did –
Behind my newspaper.
He moved; his shirt’s tail slid into my sideview; his hands laced on his crotch.
He kept tapping his balls of his feet, but he wasn’t annoying.
You might have found it hard to bear.
I did –
He was now my neighbor.
He shifted, his smooth jeans chafed into each other, his head turned as mine stopped.
He said sorry the way of something; was something starting?
You would have maybe dared.
I didn’t.
(Revision)
it started when
He entered as the doors were kissing, easing them apart.
His woolen skin was touched by beads his glove soon brushed away.
I saw his headphones size of fists, and soccer-married boots,
But still I tracked his every step, each dirt and ugly stain.
most of the time
He’d lean in when the train would shudder, press against the glass.
His meaty hands probed countless tunes in airy corner drums.
I heard his stages grass and sets, the sighs at perfect plays,
But still I parsed the many strains, each loud and crowding cry.
but then one day
He shifted as the crowds were leaving, body next to mine.
His jeans were crossed and hands were still like supplicating twins.
I felt his heavy heated parts, his presence close to me,
But still I paused at every turn – I paused at every turn.
until
He left.
And so did I.
He had choices the length of the train, but he wasn’t looking.
You’d think he didn’t care.
I did –
These things can go in a blur.
He leaned; his sleeved arm pressed into the corner; his legs crossed at the sock.
He had headphones the size of my fists, but he wasn’t listening.
You could see it in his stare.
I did –
Behind my newspaper.
He moved; his shirt’s tail slid into my sideview; his hands laced on his crotch.
He kept tapping his balls of his feet, but he wasn’t annoying.
You might have found it hard to bear.
I did –
He was now my neighbor.
He shifted, his smooth jeans chafed into each other, his head turned as mine stopped.
He said sorry the way of something; was something starting?
You would have maybe dared.
I didn’t.
(Revision)
it started when
He entered as the doors were kissing, easing them apart.
His woolen skin was touched by beads his glove soon brushed away.
I saw his headphones size of fists, and soccer-married boots,
But still I tracked his every step, each dirt and ugly stain.
most of the time
He’d lean in when the train would shudder, press against the glass.
His meaty hands probed countless tunes in airy corner drums.
I heard his stages grass and sets, the sighs at perfect plays,
But still I parsed the many strains, each loud and crowding cry.
but then one day
He shifted as the crowds were leaving, body next to mine.
His jeans were crossed and hands were still like supplicating twins.
I felt his heavy heated parts, his presence close to me,
But still I paused at every turn – I paused at every turn.
until
He left.
And so did I.
Poetry: Not Heard
This poem is meant to be read three ways: once through, then odd lines, and then even lines. The odd lines are meant to be in bold, but bolded white doesn't show up well (or at all; I can't tell the difference in any case).
And the last line is meant to be in bold.
---------------------
This is a country of four million
people, four million people with
smiles. This is a country
four million minds should very much find
worthwhile. In this a country
of four million smiling all dangers
four million will share. In this a country
of four million smiling in tandem
four million will fare
as one.
And the last line is meant to be in bold.
---------------------
This is a country of four million
people, four million people with
smiles. This is a country
four million minds should very much find
worthwhile. In this a country
of four million smiling all dangers
four million will share. In this a country
of four million smiling in tandem
four million will fare
as one.
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
The New Paper Column: Lift
The residence hall I live in is called Third Avenue North, and while it is famous for many things, it is probably most famous for its notoriously unreliable lift.
This is not an exaggeration.
Taking the lift in Third Avenue North is like being on one of those Fear Factor episodes, where blindfolded people have to pick and eat a random dish.
There are many different possible outcomes, but nine out of ten of those outcomes are bad to varying degrees.
The Third Avenue North Lift (Of Death), for example, has been known to scare lift-takers by grinding to a halt, and then jolting, before going back to normal.
It has also been known to ignore its circuit board’s instructions, and simply meander up and down endlessly until it decides to stop.
These, however, are not the worst of the possible scenarios.
The Worst Third Avenue North Lift Scenario is when it simply throws a hissy fit and decides to stop working altogether.
Many people would probably call this a lift breakdown, which is fairly harmless in the grand scheme of things.
Those people would be wrong.
This is because when the Third Avenue North Lift decides to break down, it does not just break down.
I do not quite understand the technical aspects of it, but for some reason when the lift breaks down the emergency button fails to work as well.
In addition, the Third Avenue North Lift must have a fearsome reputation at the local repair shop, because a Third Avenue North Lift Breakdown takes roughly two hours on average to fix.
In the meantime, there is nothing a person can do except swear (again) never to take the lift, and make friends with whoever else is in the lift.
This, of course, usually turns out to be either the guy with the yellow Mohawk, or the girl whose vocabulary consists solely of ‘awesome’ and ‘that’s so spicy’.
This is probably the reason people who are allotted rooms above the sixth floor at Third Avenue North develop such healthy leg muscles by the end of the academic year, but if the lift is notoriously unreliable, I am equally notoriously lazy.
Given those two things, I have talked to many people of many different persuasions over the year.
There have been many Kodak moments of newfound understanding.
I have found, for example, that it is entirely possible to use the word ‘sweeeeet’ six hundred times a day and still be a fairly intelligent person.
I have also found, for example, that is it entirely possible for an otherwise fairly intelligent person to think that dark eyes are disturbing and wrong.
If there is one thing I have truly learnt, it is that Third Avenue North’s residents are just as unreliable as its lift, and sometimes just as surprising.
Sweeping generalizations about Americans or Asians or the younger or older generations are just that: sweeping generalizations.
Notoriously unreliable, and inconveniently so, and you only learn something when they break down and leave you scrambling.
This is not an exaggeration.
Taking the lift in Third Avenue North is like being on one of those Fear Factor episodes, where blindfolded people have to pick and eat a random dish.
There are many different possible outcomes, but nine out of ten of those outcomes are bad to varying degrees.
The Third Avenue North Lift (Of Death), for example, has been known to scare lift-takers by grinding to a halt, and then jolting, before going back to normal.
It has also been known to ignore its circuit board’s instructions, and simply meander up and down endlessly until it decides to stop.
These, however, are not the worst of the possible scenarios.
The Worst Third Avenue North Lift Scenario is when it simply throws a hissy fit and decides to stop working altogether.
Many people would probably call this a lift breakdown, which is fairly harmless in the grand scheme of things.
Those people would be wrong.
This is because when the Third Avenue North Lift decides to break down, it does not just break down.
I do not quite understand the technical aspects of it, but for some reason when the lift breaks down the emergency button fails to work as well.
In addition, the Third Avenue North Lift must have a fearsome reputation at the local repair shop, because a Third Avenue North Lift Breakdown takes roughly two hours on average to fix.
In the meantime, there is nothing a person can do except swear (again) never to take the lift, and make friends with whoever else is in the lift.
This, of course, usually turns out to be either the guy with the yellow Mohawk, or the girl whose vocabulary consists solely of ‘awesome’ and ‘that’s so spicy’.
This is probably the reason people who are allotted rooms above the sixth floor at Third Avenue North develop such healthy leg muscles by the end of the academic year, but if the lift is notoriously unreliable, I am equally notoriously lazy.
Given those two things, I have talked to many people of many different persuasions over the year.
There have been many Kodak moments of newfound understanding.
I have found, for example, that it is entirely possible to use the word ‘sweeeeet’ six hundred times a day and still be a fairly intelligent person.
I have also found, for example, that is it entirely possible for an otherwise fairly intelligent person to think that dark eyes are disturbing and wrong.
If there is one thing I have truly learnt, it is that Third Avenue North’s residents are just as unreliable as its lift, and sometimes just as surprising.
Sweeping generalizations about Americans or Asians or the younger or older generations are just that: sweeping generalizations.
Notoriously unreliable, and inconveniently so, and you only learn something when they break down and leave you scrambling.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
The New Paper Column: De La Vega
Spring has finally come to New York.
Walking around the city these days, you can see it in the sea of T-shirts. You can feel it in the breezy winds no longer freezing your skin off.
You can hear it in the hobo who has started shouting “All You Need Is Love!” at every person that walks along Third Avenue.
Springtime in New York is indeed a wonderful time. It is capable of softening and soothing everything and everyone, even New Yorkers.
Just the other day, one of my floormates was extremely annoyed at his computer game. Instead of punching and (further) cracking the sheet of mirror on our common room wall, he merely screamed. That’s springtime in New York for you.
As for myself, I’m wandering the streets more often, now that I no longer risk hypothermia if I get lost.
I’ve discovered a few more alternative cafes, a shop that sells only chess pieces, and a bookstore that also sells discarded street signs.
But best of all, I’ve rediscovered De La Vega.
I saw a De La Vega on my first day in New York. My virgin De La Vega was a goldfish bowl that held two goldfishes, with the words “Glass Bowl Living” inscribed by the side.
It was done in chalk, and the weather was turning bad. It rained that night, and by the next day the drawing on the sidewalk was gone.
Over the next few months I came across De La Vega’s sporadically.
One morning in October I woke up and found my dorm’s courtyard completely scrawled over with De La Vega’s.
He had come in the a.m. hours, invited by the guards.
I kept a lookout for his work afterwards, but after January, when the snows had come and the weather worsened, he seemed to vanish entirely.
Gone were the deceptively innocent drawings that depicted complicated social issues, the hilarious caricatures that reimagined his mother as Chewbacca and other movie icons, and the murals of just everyday people.
I worried. For a while.
I wondered if he had been prosecuted by the police, or whether he had simply given up, frustrated with the people that kept smearing and distorting his artwork.
But then homework piled up, my allowance started thinning out, and between grades and money, De La Vega disappeared.
But two days ago I was taking a walk through Alphabet City, trying to ignore the voice in my head screaming “Final Exams! Final Exams!”, and there it was.
Underneath a tree with pink flowers, amidst the gloss of the city: a chalk drawing of a goldfish bowl, inscribed on the side with the words “Glass Bowl Living”.
In less than a month I will return to Singapore. I will miss many things about New York. Coldstone Ice Cream. Netflix. The Strand Bookstore.
But if there’s one thing that I desperately wish to see in Singapore, it is a De La Vega.
Singapore has weathered many seasons and many storms. Is it not time for springtime in Singapore yet?
Walking around the city these days, you can see it in the sea of T-shirts. You can feel it in the breezy winds no longer freezing your skin off.
You can hear it in the hobo who has started shouting “All You Need Is Love!” at every person that walks along Third Avenue.
Springtime in New York is indeed a wonderful time. It is capable of softening and soothing everything and everyone, even New Yorkers.
Just the other day, one of my floormates was extremely annoyed at his computer game. Instead of punching and (further) cracking the sheet of mirror on our common room wall, he merely screamed. That’s springtime in New York for you.
As for myself, I’m wandering the streets more often, now that I no longer risk hypothermia if I get lost.
I’ve discovered a few more alternative cafes, a shop that sells only chess pieces, and a bookstore that also sells discarded street signs.
But best of all, I’ve rediscovered De La Vega.
I saw a De La Vega on my first day in New York. My virgin De La Vega was a goldfish bowl that held two goldfishes, with the words “Glass Bowl Living” inscribed by the side.
It was done in chalk, and the weather was turning bad. It rained that night, and by the next day the drawing on the sidewalk was gone.
Over the next few months I came across De La Vega’s sporadically.
One morning in October I woke up and found my dorm’s courtyard completely scrawled over with De La Vega’s.
He had come in the a.m. hours, invited by the guards.
I kept a lookout for his work afterwards, but after January, when the snows had come and the weather worsened, he seemed to vanish entirely.
Gone were the deceptively innocent drawings that depicted complicated social issues, the hilarious caricatures that reimagined his mother as Chewbacca and other movie icons, and the murals of just everyday people.
I worried. For a while.
I wondered if he had been prosecuted by the police, or whether he had simply given up, frustrated with the people that kept smearing and distorting his artwork.
But then homework piled up, my allowance started thinning out, and between grades and money, De La Vega disappeared.
But two days ago I was taking a walk through Alphabet City, trying to ignore the voice in my head screaming “Final Exams! Final Exams!”, and there it was.
Underneath a tree with pink flowers, amidst the gloss of the city: a chalk drawing of a goldfish bowl, inscribed on the side with the words “Glass Bowl Living”.
In less than a month I will return to Singapore. I will miss many things about New York. Coldstone Ice Cream. Netflix. The Strand Bookstore.
But if there’s one thing that I desperately wish to see in Singapore, it is a De La Vega.
Singapore has weathered many seasons and many storms. Is it not time for springtime in Singapore yet?
Story: Apologia
I write this to you. I do not know you, and you do not know me, but this is for you from me nonetheless. Because I do not know you, you are anyone. You are everyone. You are the person who sits across the table from me in the classes I am taking, the classes I have taken, and the classes I will take, that person who does not understand my silence, whose laughter I do not understand, and who will therefore only remember me – if at all – as a curiosity. You are my friend, whose history I have crafted with my gaze and mind, and who likewise creates me. You are my best friend. You are my mother, my child, my third long-lost twice-removed cousin, shared of my genes and yet separated from my DNA. You are from Mars, from Pluto, from the thirteenth planet lost in the oblivion of collective amnesia, or only waiting to be discovered by those who would know you. You are the person who does not know I love you. I love you. But even if I told you you would not understand, because you would equate my love with sex, with roses, with torture, with childhood pets, with loss, with taking out the trash, with a flood of sounds passing through my lips, and I would equate my love with something quite different – an amorphous, shifting, unnameable emotion that lurches within me whenever I look at you. This is why I do not tell you, because I do not know myself. I do not know you either. This, then, is why I write to you: of and for the space that eternally lies between us. But this is not why I apologize to you.
I wonder, sometimes, whether you think about me, and, if you do, what thoughts brush across your mind. When I consider you, whether you are sitting there in your chair or whether you are passing by me on the pavement, I wonder what it is that you see when you look at me, what it is that I notice when I look at you, and I wonder whether either of those things are any more than illusions we graft onto each other with our imaginations. I wonder where you end and my version of you begins; I wonder what capacity for distortion and enhancement is in both of us. But the longer I look at you and listen to you, the more I think about you, and the more I realize that what you are is entirely what I think you are. If you are to walk up to me and interrupt my thoughts, even if you are to tell me precisely who you are, you will not be able to control my interpretation of you. Even if I agree with your assessment of yourself, it will still be my choice, and my agreement will still be different from your assessment in all the small ways that end up making all the difference in the world.
It appears to me, then, that you must likewise be responsible for creating a version of me. When you listen to my voice, when you size me up, when you bump against me or when your hand brushes mine, when you eat the sweet you take from my palm, and when you wrinkle your nose at my thrice-worn clothes or when you inquire after the brand of shampoo I use, you must create a similitude of me as well. ‘You’, then, are truly mine, and ‘I’ must be truly yours, whether we are shadowy presences making up each other’s numbers, or known elements in each other’s social diagrams.
But if we are each other’s creations, then everything else must likewise be refracted through the disparate lenses of each of our minds. “Not everything is about you,” people cry insultingly, but as I have shown to you, how can it be otherwise? You are the one who experiences everything, and so am I. Even if a person we both know dies or marries, you must feel your private grief or joy, as I do mine. From Plato, who in “The Trial And Death Of Socrates” writes that “the mind (is) the disposer and cause of all” (96), to Immanuel Kant, who in “The Critique Of Pure Reason” writes that “it is impossible for human beings to escape from their own psychology” (“The Critique Of Pure Reason” 79), to you and I, each of us who has lived, are living, and will live in this world, then, cannot help but adapt it to our own versions. And so you are there, while here am I, and we are separated by this space that exists between our minds. When everything from a supernova to the meaning of ugliness must resonate uniquely within you and I, how can there be such a thing as a meeting of minds? You can only create me, as I can only create you, and so we can only lose each other.
It is this that infuriates me, that makes me think we must ask each other, for both our sakes, “Who do you think I am” and “Who are you,” phrases that have echoed and will undoubtedly continue to echo in infinitely and uniquely vain strains. But when the explanation of one word that means different things to you and I must necessarily involve more divisive words, I suspect that we will be reduced to silent fools, pointing at objects that again widen our understandings of each other. But more than this, I feel that I should object to certain words that you might use, not because they would be wrong, but because by using them you will have made them a part of me. If, for example, you were to call me arrogant, and point out aspects of my behavior that led you to that conclusion, I might see your point, and I should afterwards always wonder whether those aspects are indeed deliberately, if subconsciously, arrogance on my part.
It is this multiplicity of selves, then, that further gives me pause. Already I question my own actions and motives. When I push my chair back from the table while all my colleagues are tucked in, do I do so because I am reticent, or do I do so because I wish to be noticed being reticent? I cannot answer this question, because, being conscious of either possibility, I must concede that both are equally true and equally false, and that selecting one would be an entirely arbitrary, and misleading, decision. It seems to me, then, that no one, not you and I or anyone else, could ever tell another, “This is who I am,” not only because other selves exist, but also because other selves might exist.
And yet what is “This is who I am” but what we tell each other every single instant of every single day that we are together? Brent Staples writes in “Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Power To Alter Public Space” of “(whistling) melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical composers” as his “equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country” (610). This is his equivalent of telling others, “This is who I am.” What is your equivalent, and what is mine? Style of clothes. Silence. Laughter at a brand of humor. Books. Movies. Likes. Dislike. Even when you ignore me, or even when I snub you, it is a choice, like every other choice, that enables us to proclaim ourselves and thereby negotiate each other. But these choices, like all other choices, are entirely arbitrary and hence entirely questionable. These are what we use, you and I, to say to each other, This is who I am, trust me, but I am afraid that we are different people when we are with different people, and so how can trust be possible? I cannot trust you, because I cannot trust myself. I am afraid that when I am with you I am unable even to recognize that “I instantaneously make another body for myself,” as Roland Barthes writes in “Camera Lucida” (14). I am afraid that you do the same, for how can you not? And so the unknowable people that we really are shrink further into ourselves, crowded and obscured by these infinitesimally different selves, and the space between us expands.
It is this that I wish to convey to you, this enduring sense that I am never quite myself, and that you are never quite yourself as well. It seems to me that only by this mutual admission can we move towards each other, and so what I really want to tell you in addition is not who I am, but that I am a mess of contradictions, qualifications, and justifications. I can only imagine that it is the same for you. It seems to me that only by embracing this complexity of selves can we begin to close the space between us, and so oftentimes chaos of sensibilities clash within me when I look at you. I wish to tell you not who I am, but all that I am, whether the pieces are incongruous, harmonious, or extraneous, and even if what I know of myself can only be the fragment of a whole. But as I consider the words that are at my disposal, I cannot help but feel that language itself has failed me. These words that we form with our lips and tongues and teeth, these letters that scribble themselves across a page into coherence and meaning – none of them are adequate for the emotions that I feel and wish to convey to you.
“Language is form and not substance,” Ferdinand de Saussure writes in “Literary Theory: An Anthology” (89), and it is precisely this artificiality of language that repels me. I cannot help but feel that language is a ramshackle construct we lock ourselves in, and that the more words we add to this sprawling artifice the more lost we become in it. I wish to tell you that I love you, but love is a word with flowering meanings of affection, attraction, infatuation, and more, and I do not feel all of those things for you. I wish to tell you that my love is of a teasing, whimsical, terrifying quality, and yet none of those three words are entirely appropriate either. I wish to tell you that I hate you, but from hatred are born a million derivatives as well. And so while you sit there, I am compelled to remain silent, even as letters clutter within me in my impossible attempt to translate feeling into word. I can only watch you, and hope that you have also once experienced this paucity of language.
And yet what is there left to you and I, if we should not have recourse to words? Stefan Georg writes in “The Word” that “where a word breaks off no thing may be” (“Das Wort” 1), and it is in this amorphousness of untranslatable emotion that we are equally lost. “It is language that creates and forms our reality,” Martin Heidegger writes in “On The Way To Language” (“The Linguistic Dit-Mension Of Subjectivity” 5); how can we think and grasp what has no name? We can only sense it vaguely, this part of you and I “which feels… lonely and abandoned, and… out of place and out of sync with the rest of the world,” as Andre Aciman writes in “Underground” (118). It is this part in each of us that we feel to be in unison when we cry together, laugh together, or shout at the cusp of the Grand Canyon together, and yet it is also this part in each of us that we can never confirm to be in unison, because we can never pin it down in words. And so it is this part in each of us that remains forever a mystery, to others and to ourselves.
It is an uneasy truce, then, that we have with language. We can never truly find each other in the primal vastnesses of the cries of grief, the laughter of joy, and the screams of rage and frustration. We can never truly find each other either in the misleading confinements of language, because, as Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher write in “Lacan And The Subject Of Language”, “language names things and murders them as full presences” (4). But we can move towards each other, however awkwardly, in the interstices between word and feeling. “All speech possess a beyond,” Jacques Lacan writes in “The Seminar, Book 1, Freud’s Papers On Technique” (242). Happy, sad, angry – all words hint at something bigger than themselves, and yet smaller than the sounds that are their purest form. It is in the space where all these somethings dwell, then, that we will come the closest, and so it is in this beyond that we shall sense each other closest by, even if we can never meet.
It is not understanding that I ask of you, then, but your attempt at understanding. This space shall always exist between us at any point in time because of the limitations of language, the multiplicity of selves, and the impossibility of ever matching our versions of the world. And so when you break down in tears at something I find utterly prosaic, I ask you to attempt to understand that my stumbling and insufficient words and actions are not deliberate, but the limit to which I can strain towards you in providing solace. All I can offer you in return, then, is the same attempt at understanding, in the moments when you are unable to reach me just as I need you most. So it is with tears, so it is with screams, so it is with laughter, so it is with everything. So it is with lovers, so it is with friends, so it is with family, so it is with even strangers, so it is with you and I.
This monumental attempt at understanding, however, is not all that I have to ask of you, because this space between us is not only always present, but also always changing. Ngugi wa Thiong’O writes in “Enactments Of Power: The Politics Of Performance Space” that we must ask of any space “what memories does the space carry and what longings it might generate” (485), and because the future, the present, and the past are connected in myriad constantly changing ways, you and I must constantly readjust our answers to these questions. So, then, must we constantly renegotiate the space between you and I.
How can you and I, for example, predict the future, which is by definition something that does not and might never exist? And yet predict the future we must, because if one instant does not affect the next to come, then you and I are simply atoms drifting carelessly. And so if the present is to cause the future, you and I must believe in promises that can only be phantoms. Perhaps you will talk to me because you think you will like me. Perhaps I will shift my attention elsewhere because I think you will be dull. Perhaps I will not be likeable, and perhaps you will not be dull, but there can be no certainty in any scenario, only possibilities. The future for you and I, then, can only exist as a world of shadows, wavering between non-existence and permanence, and yet we must acknowledge its power in affecting us now.
But if the future reaches back and guides our way, so too does the past stretch forward to give us signs. Perhaps you will not talk to me, because you have heard the whispers from the grapevine. Perhaps I will be interested in you, because I have seen your vivacity. But if the future is a world of shadows, so is the past. Perhaps those whispers about me were exaggerated, and perhaps your show of verve was an occurrence as rare as its intensity. Even ignoring the rampancy of conscious lies and the rise of the occasional blue moon, who can deny the human failings of misremembrance and simple forgetfulness? The past, then, is such a fragile thing, so easily shattered and remade, and yet what choice have you and I but to believe in the distorted reflections that we see in it, if we should not become like blind children groping in the dark?
Emile Zola writes in “Therese Raquin” that “what one doesn’t know, doesn’t exist” (41), and this gap in knowledge is and can only be the state of things between you and I. And yet even if the past and the future can never truly exist because we can never truly know them, they still possess us. Hannah Arendt writes in “Between Past And Future” that “we are living and struggling in a Protean universe where everything at any moment can be almost anything else” (95). This, then, is what you and I must endure; each step we take can only bring us to a new brink, because the future is changeable and so is the past, and even if we are not experiencing change we must expect it, and so let it change us as well, like the man who saves a coin in case of poverty. And it is because of this, because we are constantly changing, that your attempt at understanding is not all that I have to ask of you. I have to ask of you faith as well, faith in shadows, and this faith is all I can offer in return. I have to ask of you honesty as well, honesty when faith fails so new compromises may be found, and this honesty is all I can offer in return.
But these are not all that I have to ask of you. I have one more thing to ask of you, and it is for this last thing that I apologize.
You might ask me, as I have often asked myself, why we should struggle with this space that divides you and I. If this space borne between us of language, act, time, and subjectivity can only forever separate us, because words betray us, because proclamations of motivations can only be deliberate and thereby inherently suspicious, and because time and subjectivity conspire to make liars of us all, why should we struggle at all?
Why should you and I hold onto who we are as individuals, and not simply adopt a commonality of clothes, mannerisms, lingo, and all other trappings and suits, in order that one day the same gesture, the same word, and the same object can bypass this space and strike the same chords within us? Or why should we not simply let go of each other and all others, and thus give up the struggle that accompanies such spaces?
The only answer I could give to you, if you should ask me these questions, is that neither conformity nor isolation is living. If I should become you, or if you should become me, we should both disappear, the individual becoming the pair becoming the individual. If you and I should let go of each other and all others, you keeping entirely to yourself and I keeping entirely to myself, even when you and I are with each other or amongst others, then we should disappear as well, because without others we cannot define ourselves; there is no good without bad, not smart without stupid, and living alone creates an invisible life, until it passes into oblivion like the sound a falling tree makes when nobody hears it. Jonathan Lethem writes in “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn” of the “Doppler-effect fading of certain memories from the planet, as they’re recalled for the penultimate time, and then the last” (574). If you should lose yourself in me, or I in you, if you should keep entirely to yourself, or I to myself, then we can only become those memories, affecting no one and not changing ourselves, until we too ultimately fade away.
This, then, is why I apologize to you: not only because you must attempt to understand where no understanding is possible, not only because you must have faith in what can only be shadows, and not only because you must have the honesty to admit doubt when faith has failed, but also because, above, beyond and during all of these things you must do, you must continue to struggle, to be forever divided and yet forever linked to me, and so acknowledge me, even when all I can offer you are the same intangible things in return. This, then, is why I apologize to you: for this space that eternally lies between us and causes our strife, and yet defines us and allows us to live. This, then, is why I ask for your acknowledgement, even as I acknowledge you. This, then, is why I write this to you. This is my hello, the first step in many to come. And now it’s your turn.
WORKS CITED
____________________
Aciman, Andre. “Underground”. False Papers. Farrer, Strauss and Giroux Publishing. 2005. 118.
Arendt, Hannah. Between Past And Future. Penguin Books. 1993. 95.
Barthes, Roland. “Camera Lucida”. Writing The Essay. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, and Pat. C. Hoy II. New York: McGraw-Hill Custom Publishing. 2005. 14.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. “Course In General Linguistics”. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. In J. Rivkin and M. Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 1998. 89.
Georg, Stefan. Das Wort. Trans. Sebastiono Severi. 1994. 1.
Heidegger, Martin. On The Way To Language. 2004. 5.
< http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol8/dit-mension.html>
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique Of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp-Smith. 1929. 79.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar, Book 1, Freud’s Papers On Technique. 1953-4. Trans. John Forrester. London: Routledge Publishing. 1987. 242.
Lethem, Jonathan. “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn”. Writing The Essay. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, and Pat. C. Hoy II. New York: McGraw-Hill Custom Publishing. 2005. 574.
Plato. The Trial And Death Of Socrates. Ed. Shane Weller. Dover Thrift Editions. 1992. 96.
Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie and Bracher, Mark. Lacan And The Subject Of Language. 1991. 4.
Staples, Brent. “Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Ability To Alter Public Space”. Writing The Essay. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, and Pat. C. Hoy II. New York: McGraw-Hill Custom Publishing, 2005. 610.
Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. ““Enactments Of Power: The Politics Of Performance Space”. Writing The Essay. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, and Pat. C. Hoy II. New York: McGraw-Hill Custom Publishing, 2005. 485.
Zola, Emile. “Therese Raquin”. Seeds Of Modern Drama. Trans. Kathleen Boutall. Ed. Norris Houghton. Applause Theater And Cinema Books. 1963. 41.
I wonder, sometimes, whether you think about me, and, if you do, what thoughts brush across your mind. When I consider you, whether you are sitting there in your chair or whether you are passing by me on the pavement, I wonder what it is that you see when you look at me, what it is that I notice when I look at you, and I wonder whether either of those things are any more than illusions we graft onto each other with our imaginations. I wonder where you end and my version of you begins; I wonder what capacity for distortion and enhancement is in both of us. But the longer I look at you and listen to you, the more I think about you, and the more I realize that what you are is entirely what I think you are. If you are to walk up to me and interrupt my thoughts, even if you are to tell me precisely who you are, you will not be able to control my interpretation of you. Even if I agree with your assessment of yourself, it will still be my choice, and my agreement will still be different from your assessment in all the small ways that end up making all the difference in the world.
It appears to me, then, that you must likewise be responsible for creating a version of me. When you listen to my voice, when you size me up, when you bump against me or when your hand brushes mine, when you eat the sweet you take from my palm, and when you wrinkle your nose at my thrice-worn clothes or when you inquire after the brand of shampoo I use, you must create a similitude of me as well. ‘You’, then, are truly mine, and ‘I’ must be truly yours, whether we are shadowy presences making up each other’s numbers, or known elements in each other’s social diagrams.
But if we are each other’s creations, then everything else must likewise be refracted through the disparate lenses of each of our minds. “Not everything is about you,” people cry insultingly, but as I have shown to you, how can it be otherwise? You are the one who experiences everything, and so am I. Even if a person we both know dies or marries, you must feel your private grief or joy, as I do mine. From Plato, who in “The Trial And Death Of Socrates” writes that “the mind (is) the disposer and cause of all” (96), to Immanuel Kant, who in “The Critique Of Pure Reason” writes that “it is impossible for human beings to escape from their own psychology” (“The Critique Of Pure Reason” 79), to you and I, each of us who has lived, are living, and will live in this world, then, cannot help but adapt it to our own versions. And so you are there, while here am I, and we are separated by this space that exists between our minds. When everything from a supernova to the meaning of ugliness must resonate uniquely within you and I, how can there be such a thing as a meeting of minds? You can only create me, as I can only create you, and so we can only lose each other.
It is this that infuriates me, that makes me think we must ask each other, for both our sakes, “Who do you think I am” and “Who are you,” phrases that have echoed and will undoubtedly continue to echo in infinitely and uniquely vain strains. But when the explanation of one word that means different things to you and I must necessarily involve more divisive words, I suspect that we will be reduced to silent fools, pointing at objects that again widen our understandings of each other. But more than this, I feel that I should object to certain words that you might use, not because they would be wrong, but because by using them you will have made them a part of me. If, for example, you were to call me arrogant, and point out aspects of my behavior that led you to that conclusion, I might see your point, and I should afterwards always wonder whether those aspects are indeed deliberately, if subconsciously, arrogance on my part.
It is this multiplicity of selves, then, that further gives me pause. Already I question my own actions and motives. When I push my chair back from the table while all my colleagues are tucked in, do I do so because I am reticent, or do I do so because I wish to be noticed being reticent? I cannot answer this question, because, being conscious of either possibility, I must concede that both are equally true and equally false, and that selecting one would be an entirely arbitrary, and misleading, decision. It seems to me, then, that no one, not you and I or anyone else, could ever tell another, “This is who I am,” not only because other selves exist, but also because other selves might exist.
And yet what is “This is who I am” but what we tell each other every single instant of every single day that we are together? Brent Staples writes in “Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Power To Alter Public Space” of “(whistling) melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical composers” as his “equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country” (610). This is his equivalent of telling others, “This is who I am.” What is your equivalent, and what is mine? Style of clothes. Silence. Laughter at a brand of humor. Books. Movies. Likes. Dislike. Even when you ignore me, or even when I snub you, it is a choice, like every other choice, that enables us to proclaim ourselves and thereby negotiate each other. But these choices, like all other choices, are entirely arbitrary and hence entirely questionable. These are what we use, you and I, to say to each other, This is who I am, trust me, but I am afraid that we are different people when we are with different people, and so how can trust be possible? I cannot trust you, because I cannot trust myself. I am afraid that when I am with you I am unable even to recognize that “I instantaneously make another body for myself,” as Roland Barthes writes in “Camera Lucida” (14). I am afraid that you do the same, for how can you not? And so the unknowable people that we really are shrink further into ourselves, crowded and obscured by these infinitesimally different selves, and the space between us expands.
It is this that I wish to convey to you, this enduring sense that I am never quite myself, and that you are never quite yourself as well. It seems to me that only by this mutual admission can we move towards each other, and so what I really want to tell you in addition is not who I am, but that I am a mess of contradictions, qualifications, and justifications. I can only imagine that it is the same for you. It seems to me that only by embracing this complexity of selves can we begin to close the space between us, and so oftentimes chaos of sensibilities clash within me when I look at you. I wish to tell you not who I am, but all that I am, whether the pieces are incongruous, harmonious, or extraneous, and even if what I know of myself can only be the fragment of a whole. But as I consider the words that are at my disposal, I cannot help but feel that language itself has failed me. These words that we form with our lips and tongues and teeth, these letters that scribble themselves across a page into coherence and meaning – none of them are adequate for the emotions that I feel and wish to convey to you.
“Language is form and not substance,” Ferdinand de Saussure writes in “Literary Theory: An Anthology” (89), and it is precisely this artificiality of language that repels me. I cannot help but feel that language is a ramshackle construct we lock ourselves in, and that the more words we add to this sprawling artifice the more lost we become in it. I wish to tell you that I love you, but love is a word with flowering meanings of affection, attraction, infatuation, and more, and I do not feel all of those things for you. I wish to tell you that my love is of a teasing, whimsical, terrifying quality, and yet none of those three words are entirely appropriate either. I wish to tell you that I hate you, but from hatred are born a million derivatives as well. And so while you sit there, I am compelled to remain silent, even as letters clutter within me in my impossible attempt to translate feeling into word. I can only watch you, and hope that you have also once experienced this paucity of language.
And yet what is there left to you and I, if we should not have recourse to words? Stefan Georg writes in “The Word” that “where a word breaks off no thing may be” (“Das Wort” 1), and it is in this amorphousness of untranslatable emotion that we are equally lost. “It is language that creates and forms our reality,” Martin Heidegger writes in “On The Way To Language” (“The Linguistic Dit-Mension Of Subjectivity” 5); how can we think and grasp what has no name? We can only sense it vaguely, this part of you and I “which feels… lonely and abandoned, and… out of place and out of sync with the rest of the world,” as Andre Aciman writes in “Underground” (118). It is this part in each of us that we feel to be in unison when we cry together, laugh together, or shout at the cusp of the Grand Canyon together, and yet it is also this part in each of us that we can never confirm to be in unison, because we can never pin it down in words. And so it is this part in each of us that remains forever a mystery, to others and to ourselves.
It is an uneasy truce, then, that we have with language. We can never truly find each other in the primal vastnesses of the cries of grief, the laughter of joy, and the screams of rage and frustration. We can never truly find each other either in the misleading confinements of language, because, as Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher write in “Lacan And The Subject Of Language”, “language names things and murders them as full presences” (4). But we can move towards each other, however awkwardly, in the interstices between word and feeling. “All speech possess a beyond,” Jacques Lacan writes in “The Seminar, Book 1, Freud’s Papers On Technique” (242). Happy, sad, angry – all words hint at something bigger than themselves, and yet smaller than the sounds that are their purest form. It is in the space where all these somethings dwell, then, that we will come the closest, and so it is in this beyond that we shall sense each other closest by, even if we can never meet.
It is not understanding that I ask of you, then, but your attempt at understanding. This space shall always exist between us at any point in time because of the limitations of language, the multiplicity of selves, and the impossibility of ever matching our versions of the world. And so when you break down in tears at something I find utterly prosaic, I ask you to attempt to understand that my stumbling and insufficient words and actions are not deliberate, but the limit to which I can strain towards you in providing solace. All I can offer you in return, then, is the same attempt at understanding, in the moments when you are unable to reach me just as I need you most. So it is with tears, so it is with screams, so it is with laughter, so it is with everything. So it is with lovers, so it is with friends, so it is with family, so it is with even strangers, so it is with you and I.
This monumental attempt at understanding, however, is not all that I have to ask of you, because this space between us is not only always present, but also always changing. Ngugi wa Thiong’O writes in “Enactments Of Power: The Politics Of Performance Space” that we must ask of any space “what memories does the space carry and what longings it might generate” (485), and because the future, the present, and the past are connected in myriad constantly changing ways, you and I must constantly readjust our answers to these questions. So, then, must we constantly renegotiate the space between you and I.
How can you and I, for example, predict the future, which is by definition something that does not and might never exist? And yet predict the future we must, because if one instant does not affect the next to come, then you and I are simply atoms drifting carelessly. And so if the present is to cause the future, you and I must believe in promises that can only be phantoms. Perhaps you will talk to me because you think you will like me. Perhaps I will shift my attention elsewhere because I think you will be dull. Perhaps I will not be likeable, and perhaps you will not be dull, but there can be no certainty in any scenario, only possibilities. The future for you and I, then, can only exist as a world of shadows, wavering between non-existence and permanence, and yet we must acknowledge its power in affecting us now.
But if the future reaches back and guides our way, so too does the past stretch forward to give us signs. Perhaps you will not talk to me, because you have heard the whispers from the grapevine. Perhaps I will be interested in you, because I have seen your vivacity. But if the future is a world of shadows, so is the past. Perhaps those whispers about me were exaggerated, and perhaps your show of verve was an occurrence as rare as its intensity. Even ignoring the rampancy of conscious lies and the rise of the occasional blue moon, who can deny the human failings of misremembrance and simple forgetfulness? The past, then, is such a fragile thing, so easily shattered and remade, and yet what choice have you and I but to believe in the distorted reflections that we see in it, if we should not become like blind children groping in the dark?
Emile Zola writes in “Therese Raquin” that “what one doesn’t know, doesn’t exist” (41), and this gap in knowledge is and can only be the state of things between you and I. And yet even if the past and the future can never truly exist because we can never truly know them, they still possess us. Hannah Arendt writes in “Between Past And Future” that “we are living and struggling in a Protean universe where everything at any moment can be almost anything else” (95). This, then, is what you and I must endure; each step we take can only bring us to a new brink, because the future is changeable and so is the past, and even if we are not experiencing change we must expect it, and so let it change us as well, like the man who saves a coin in case of poverty. And it is because of this, because we are constantly changing, that your attempt at understanding is not all that I have to ask of you. I have to ask of you faith as well, faith in shadows, and this faith is all I can offer in return. I have to ask of you honesty as well, honesty when faith fails so new compromises may be found, and this honesty is all I can offer in return.
But these are not all that I have to ask of you. I have one more thing to ask of you, and it is for this last thing that I apologize.
You might ask me, as I have often asked myself, why we should struggle with this space that divides you and I. If this space borne between us of language, act, time, and subjectivity can only forever separate us, because words betray us, because proclamations of motivations can only be deliberate and thereby inherently suspicious, and because time and subjectivity conspire to make liars of us all, why should we struggle at all?
Why should you and I hold onto who we are as individuals, and not simply adopt a commonality of clothes, mannerisms, lingo, and all other trappings and suits, in order that one day the same gesture, the same word, and the same object can bypass this space and strike the same chords within us? Or why should we not simply let go of each other and all others, and thus give up the struggle that accompanies such spaces?
The only answer I could give to you, if you should ask me these questions, is that neither conformity nor isolation is living. If I should become you, or if you should become me, we should both disappear, the individual becoming the pair becoming the individual. If you and I should let go of each other and all others, you keeping entirely to yourself and I keeping entirely to myself, even when you and I are with each other or amongst others, then we should disappear as well, because without others we cannot define ourselves; there is no good without bad, not smart without stupid, and living alone creates an invisible life, until it passes into oblivion like the sound a falling tree makes when nobody hears it. Jonathan Lethem writes in “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn” of the “Doppler-effect fading of certain memories from the planet, as they’re recalled for the penultimate time, and then the last” (574). If you should lose yourself in me, or I in you, if you should keep entirely to yourself, or I to myself, then we can only become those memories, affecting no one and not changing ourselves, until we too ultimately fade away.
This, then, is why I apologize to you: not only because you must attempt to understand where no understanding is possible, not only because you must have faith in what can only be shadows, and not only because you must have the honesty to admit doubt when faith has failed, but also because, above, beyond and during all of these things you must do, you must continue to struggle, to be forever divided and yet forever linked to me, and so acknowledge me, even when all I can offer you are the same intangible things in return. This, then, is why I apologize to you: for this space that eternally lies between us and causes our strife, and yet defines us and allows us to live. This, then, is why I ask for your acknowledgement, even as I acknowledge you. This, then, is why I write this to you. This is my hello, the first step in many to come. And now it’s your turn.
WORKS CITED
____________________
Aciman, Andre. “Underground”. False Papers. Farrer, Strauss and Giroux Publishing. 2005. 118.
Arendt, Hannah. Between Past And Future. Penguin Books. 1993. 95.
Barthes, Roland. “Camera Lucida”. Writing The Essay. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, and Pat. C. Hoy II. New York: McGraw-Hill Custom Publishing. 2005. 14.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. “Course In General Linguistics”. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. In J. Rivkin and M. Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 1998. 89.
Georg, Stefan. Das Wort. Trans. Sebastiono Severi. 1994. 1.
Heidegger, Martin. On The Way To Language. 2004. 5.
< http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol8/dit-mension.html>
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique Of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp-Smith. 1929. 79.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar, Book 1, Freud’s Papers On Technique. 1953-4. Trans. John Forrester. London: Routledge Publishing. 1987. 242.
Lethem, Jonathan. “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn”. Writing The Essay. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, and Pat. C. Hoy II. New York: McGraw-Hill Custom Publishing. 2005. 574.
Plato. The Trial And Death Of Socrates. Ed. Shane Weller. Dover Thrift Editions. 1992. 96.
Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie and Bracher, Mark. Lacan And The Subject Of Language. 1991. 4.
Staples, Brent. “Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Ability To Alter Public Space”. Writing The Essay. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, and Pat. C. Hoy II. New York: McGraw-Hill Custom Publishing, 2005. 610.
Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. ““Enactments Of Power: The Politics Of Performance Space”. Writing The Essay. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, and Pat. C. Hoy II. New York: McGraw-Hill Custom Publishing, 2005. 485.
Zola, Emile. “Therese Raquin”. Seeds Of Modern Drama. Trans. Kathleen Boutall. Ed. Norris Houghton. Applause Theater And Cinema Books. 1963. 41.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
The New Paper Column: Feelin' Good
It’s eight at night, and I’m sleeping off a very heavy dinner eaten two hours earlier near Columbia University. I’m dreaming of – something, when someone knocks on the door.
Of course, whoever is at the door will not go away, so five minutes later, extremely groggy and irritated, I open the door to find one of my floormates standing outside.
“Do you have any eggs hidden anywhere that we can use?” he asks. “We need it for a party.”
I think it is probably significant that I do not even ask questions like ‘why’ anymore.
Half an hour later, I’m helping make stacks of French toast. Did you know that French toast apparently goes as well with soft drinks as with vodka?
Another hour later, I’m standing with my floormates outside one of the dorms in the North Tower of my residence hall, each of us holding a plate of French toast.
We are being told by an extremely apologetic student that the party has been unfortunately cancelled.
Apparently, a Residence Assistant had been informed that the party was going to involve alcohol, and so had been forced to step in.
On paper, you see, NYU policy forbids underage drinking.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen Resident Assistants themselves at some of these parties. Or residence hall security guards who ignore students blatantly traipsing in with alcohol bottles. Or the school paper reporting on beer pong parties.
An average NYU student consumes so much alcohol that a galang guni collecting bottles from NYU dorms could probably make it onto the Forbes list of richest people in the world.
But this, of course, hasn’t stopped NYU from occasionally breaking up parties.
When Residence Assistants have to do so, they usually say that it is because of the noise the party is generating and the disruption the party is causing other people.
They say this because stopping a party because of its alcoholic content is so laughable as to be ridiculous.
But everyone knows it’s about the alcohol, and so everyone laughs anyway.
So my floormates and I are standing here with our French toast, listening to the extremely apologetic student, and all of us are smiling at the silliness of the occasionally alcoholophobic administration.
The next day, of course, some people will say that the party self-destructed because too few people showed up. Maybe this is true.
When different people tell you different things, it can get pretty confusing.
But if you look at NYU’s precedent, and think about why different people are saying different things instead of working together, it can also get pretty depressing very quickly.
And meanwhile, plates of French toast go wasted, organizers and participants get annoyed, and the next time someone asks me to make French toast for a party I know I personally will be very very wary about wasting my eggs.
Is this what everybody really wants?
Of course, whoever is at the door will not go away, so five minutes later, extremely groggy and irritated, I open the door to find one of my floormates standing outside.
“Do you have any eggs hidden anywhere that we can use?” he asks. “We need it for a party.”
I think it is probably significant that I do not even ask questions like ‘why’ anymore.
Half an hour later, I’m helping make stacks of French toast. Did you know that French toast apparently goes as well with soft drinks as with vodka?
Another hour later, I’m standing with my floormates outside one of the dorms in the North Tower of my residence hall, each of us holding a plate of French toast.
We are being told by an extremely apologetic student that the party has been unfortunately cancelled.
Apparently, a Residence Assistant had been informed that the party was going to involve alcohol, and so had been forced to step in.
On paper, you see, NYU policy forbids underage drinking.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen Resident Assistants themselves at some of these parties. Or residence hall security guards who ignore students blatantly traipsing in with alcohol bottles. Or the school paper reporting on beer pong parties.
An average NYU student consumes so much alcohol that a galang guni collecting bottles from NYU dorms could probably make it onto the Forbes list of richest people in the world.
But this, of course, hasn’t stopped NYU from occasionally breaking up parties.
When Residence Assistants have to do so, they usually say that it is because of the noise the party is generating and the disruption the party is causing other people.
They say this because stopping a party because of its alcoholic content is so laughable as to be ridiculous.
But everyone knows it’s about the alcohol, and so everyone laughs anyway.
So my floormates and I are standing here with our French toast, listening to the extremely apologetic student, and all of us are smiling at the silliness of the occasionally alcoholophobic administration.
The next day, of course, some people will say that the party self-destructed because too few people showed up. Maybe this is true.
When different people tell you different things, it can get pretty confusing.
But if you look at NYU’s precedent, and think about why different people are saying different things instead of working together, it can also get pretty depressing very quickly.
And meanwhile, plates of French toast go wasted, organizers and participants get annoyed, and the next time someone asks me to make French toast for a party I know I personally will be very very wary about wasting my eggs.
Is this what everybody really wants?
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Play: Disembowelment
You like that steak? Not too rare? I usually get it rare and sometimes they get it too bloody. No? It’s okay? Okay then.
You want some wine to go with that, there’s some in the mini-bar. Wine makes steaks go down better, red wine, I think. My ex-wife and I took a wine course once, she was always into that self-improvement bullshit. Me, I was fine with beer.
No, no, I don’t want any. I – had a small drinking problem a few years ago, so it’s just water now. Steak and water.
I don’t usually do this, you know, but you looked so hungry out there in the cold, and – you don’t mind me shooting off, do you? No, that’s right, you eat, I talk, that sounds ‘bout right.
I could tell when I saw you, you know. That you’re a good listener. You got that ‘do your own time’ look. What? Yeah, it’s a prison thing, but don’t worry, I didn’t serve. I worked in the big house up in Texas once upon a time. Worked in the V.P. – vulnerable prisoners unit – the wife used to get a kick out of that, when she still found the blue suit sexy. (smiles) She wasn’t too good for handcuffs too, I’ll tell you that. But vulnerable prisoners, she thought that was a – whatcha-call-it – redundancy. “A redundancy in terms.” She could be a real bleeding heart sometimes. I could never tell her that the V.P.s are the bughouse crazy ones.
No, not doing that anymore. Hung up the blue suit and gave back the big stick about – what is it – yeah, ‘bout two years already. Now I’m in sales, travel round going to conferences in tux and tie, like, how crazy is that, right?
Fuck… two years. Can’t believe it’s been so long since – well, never mind ‘bout that.
(he broods for a moment)
It’s not that I hate this job, you know. I get to travel, go to fancy hotels, expense hookers. Tax-free fucking in big hotel beds.
But it’s boring shit, you know. The steaks and the hookers and the fucking products. I could roll off the fucking products for you by heart now, all 132 of them, fucking products and their S/N codes.
(he shakes his head in disgust, and then looks up)
You don’t mind me f-bombing, right? My wife hated it, said it was – uncouth. Unrefined. She was a real bitch sometimes, especially at the end. But we were happy once, you know. In the beginning. She liked that I worked in a prison, thought I was bettering society. I liked her too; she was a hotshot therapist, and she wasn’t just good at talking, you know what I’m saying?
(he smiles)
She could be such a cheerleader sometimes. But that was before she got all bughouse. Said I liked my job too much, wouldn’t you know. One second I’m saving the world a prisoner at a time, the next I’m some batshit crazy guy who gets off on suffering. She never got it, you know. She just never got it.
(he wait for a reaction, and is satisfied)
I’m glad you agree with me. You look like the sort of person who don’t mind blood and dirt, if you don’t mind me saying. (beat) You want another steak? I can getcha another one, might wanna get one for myself too. No?
But that’s all over for me now, you know. Now it’s this sales shit. Can’t get used to it – You know what they say; you never really get out of prison.
(he pauses)
Why did I quit then? (beat) I didn’t. I’d go back to the big house in a snap, but they won’t take me back.
Why?
No, it’s nothing like that. What do you think we are? It’s nothing like that. Me and five others, we were just – unlucky, you know. Two years ago something bad happened, we saw it, and they took us off, those who didn’t quit. ‘Shock And Extreme Trauma’, I still remember, is what the psych called it. Fucking trash-talk, basically.
You sure you wanna hear this? It’s pretty graphic.
Okay. So they called us to go to one of the cells, ‘assistance’ they called it, and they didn’t tell us anything more, so we knew it was gonna be bad, right. So I took this new kid, Evans, and two more officers, Hunt and Williams, and we went down with our sticks, you know.
And when we got there, the two officers already there were standing outside the cell. They wouldn’t go in cause it was blood everywhere, see. Floor, walls, bed literally dripping with blood. One of the cellies, Ricketts, strangled his bunkie and opened him up with a shank, see. Belly button to Adam’s apple. The sick bastard pulled out the liver and intestines, gave his bunkie a fucking lobotomy. So the stuff’s lying everywhere, there’s an eyeball on the locker, and another eyeball on the floor all stepped on and ground to bits, and the sick bastard’s standing at the back of the cell, holding his fucking bunkie’s heart, saying he’s gonna eat it and no-one can stop him. It was – it was…
(he shakes his head)
So Evans is puking everywhere, right, and nobody’s moving, and fucking Ricketts is there chewing on the goddamn heart, slurping it up, in goddamned fact, but we gotta follow protocol, right. So I went in, dragged Hunt in to cuff Ricketts, and I –
I gave Scofield – that was the bunkie’s name – I gave Scofield mouth-to-mouth. The fucker’s obviously dead, lying there with his insides on the outside, but you gotta follow the book, and the others – well.
So that was that.
You have the same look that my ex had. But that’s the worst part, I promise you.
So afterwards they made us all take psych sessions. Evans quit immediately, don’t blame the kid. It was a sick piece of shit. Godbear, Abrams, and Hunt didn’t last much longer either. So me and Williams, we stuck it out a bit longer, then Williams left too. Said he couldn’t eat meat without puking. Then it was just me, and then the psych wrote a report, said I was repressing ‘Shock And Extreme Trauma’, so they took me off too. Wrote each of us a big fat check afterwards. I got 500,000 big ones.
Then Rachel – my ex – left, said she couldn’t stand it, couldn’t even stand the thought of it, and she wasn’t even there.
(he pauses)
But like I said, I’d go back to the big house in a snap, I really would.
Why the fuck would I do that?
It’s just – how the fuck should I put this… It’s just – in the big house you have to keep sharp, you know? You have to deal with the rats, the rabbits, and the big bitches – that’s those doing life – they always have a shank somewhere for someone. Then you gotta deal with the new boots, pencil whip the convict bosses to keep ‘em in line, keep a finger on who’s riding with who, make sure the blickey doesn’t get out of hand, and all the while you gotta know when to keep your fucking nose out of gangs taking it to the square. You gotta – Grab The Danger, I don’t know, and when you can do all that, you feel –
(he pauses)
Yeah. Kinda like being a hobo. Kinda. (beat) And dying – people get shanked all the time. Sick shit goes down. Just – sick shit goes down, you know what I mean? And you gotta have people who are – not strong, but – people who won’t crack, you know? And you, and you can’t get – whatcha-call-it – desensitized too. Everyone gets desensitized, but desensitized gets you killed in a prison. Desensitized gets you killed in a war. That’s why I always told the wife that if you’re working in the V.P. you gotta – not love it – but you gotta – stay sharp. Take pride in your work, I guess some people say.
So I told her, Rach, baby, you keep talking, and you keep trying to stop all the bad stuff from happening, and when you get rid of all the rapists and murderers and the people who fuck 18 month-old babies and the people who chop up bodies and throw them into different cans round the state, you stop that, then I’ll stop too.
But until then, I told her, if I tell you I feel – I felt – alive – every day I spent in the V.P., don’t fucking stare at me like I’m crazy, I told her. Because you need people like me to keep your prisons, fight your wars – pull the heads off your chickens and slice the throats of your pigs. It’s people like us who keep doing while you keep talking, I told her. But she never got it. Even at the end. She kept crying, said she was Crying For My Humanity, wouldn’t you know it. She didn’t get it…
I Was More Human Than She Was. She was happy just – surviving. Talking. Fucking. She never saw – everything came to her in words, memories, nice products with labels. Repression. Guilt. Anger. Rage. Fear. But there are – you see a guy keestering a shank because he’s so scared out of his fucking mind, you hear fishes screaming after they’ve spent five days in the hole, or you step on an eyeball smashed to bits – after that you just – there are just – just some things that are – bigger, bigger than fucking words, you know what I’m saying? Even – hunger, or desperation – I get that, I’ve seen it, I don’t – I wouldn’t blame them…
(he looks down, and then looks up again, almost a challenge)
Well. They’re just such fucking huge things for such tiny words, but she never got that. Sometimes she was just a real mensch in her tailored Guccis. But I get it.
(he pauses)
And I did, you know. Feel alive. Like I was connected to something deep. I was the very best of the blue suits, rarely got red on me, but you know, guess I was lucky. But that’s all over now. Now it’s this – this pussy product-pushing. Getting fat and punchy. Sometimes I want – sometimes I think even a mugger could take me, you know?
(he looks away from the listener, but again nothing happens. He looks back)
I see. “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper”, huh.
(a beat)
I think I will have one of those steaks. I’m gonna order up another rare one. You sure you don’t want one too?
You want some wine to go with that, there’s some in the mini-bar. Wine makes steaks go down better, red wine, I think. My ex-wife and I took a wine course once, she was always into that self-improvement bullshit. Me, I was fine with beer.
No, no, I don’t want any. I – had a small drinking problem a few years ago, so it’s just water now. Steak and water.
I don’t usually do this, you know, but you looked so hungry out there in the cold, and – you don’t mind me shooting off, do you? No, that’s right, you eat, I talk, that sounds ‘bout right.
I could tell when I saw you, you know. That you’re a good listener. You got that ‘do your own time’ look. What? Yeah, it’s a prison thing, but don’t worry, I didn’t serve. I worked in the big house up in Texas once upon a time. Worked in the V.P. – vulnerable prisoners unit – the wife used to get a kick out of that, when she still found the blue suit sexy. (smiles) She wasn’t too good for handcuffs too, I’ll tell you that. But vulnerable prisoners, she thought that was a – whatcha-call-it – redundancy. “A redundancy in terms.” She could be a real bleeding heart sometimes. I could never tell her that the V.P.s are the bughouse crazy ones.
No, not doing that anymore. Hung up the blue suit and gave back the big stick about – what is it – yeah, ‘bout two years already. Now I’m in sales, travel round going to conferences in tux and tie, like, how crazy is that, right?
Fuck… two years. Can’t believe it’s been so long since – well, never mind ‘bout that.
(he broods for a moment)
It’s not that I hate this job, you know. I get to travel, go to fancy hotels, expense hookers. Tax-free fucking in big hotel beds.
But it’s boring shit, you know. The steaks and the hookers and the fucking products. I could roll off the fucking products for you by heart now, all 132 of them, fucking products and their S/N codes.
(he shakes his head in disgust, and then looks up)
You don’t mind me f-bombing, right? My wife hated it, said it was – uncouth. Unrefined. She was a real bitch sometimes, especially at the end. But we were happy once, you know. In the beginning. She liked that I worked in a prison, thought I was bettering society. I liked her too; she was a hotshot therapist, and she wasn’t just good at talking, you know what I’m saying?
(he smiles)
She could be such a cheerleader sometimes. But that was before she got all bughouse. Said I liked my job too much, wouldn’t you know. One second I’m saving the world a prisoner at a time, the next I’m some batshit crazy guy who gets off on suffering. She never got it, you know. She just never got it.
(he wait for a reaction, and is satisfied)
I’m glad you agree with me. You look like the sort of person who don’t mind blood and dirt, if you don’t mind me saying. (beat) You want another steak? I can getcha another one, might wanna get one for myself too. No?
But that’s all over for me now, you know. Now it’s this sales shit. Can’t get used to it – You know what they say; you never really get out of prison.
(he pauses)
Why did I quit then? (beat) I didn’t. I’d go back to the big house in a snap, but they won’t take me back.
Why?
No, it’s nothing like that. What do you think we are? It’s nothing like that. Me and five others, we were just – unlucky, you know. Two years ago something bad happened, we saw it, and they took us off, those who didn’t quit. ‘Shock And Extreme Trauma’, I still remember, is what the psych called it. Fucking trash-talk, basically.
You sure you wanna hear this? It’s pretty graphic.
Okay. So they called us to go to one of the cells, ‘assistance’ they called it, and they didn’t tell us anything more, so we knew it was gonna be bad, right. So I took this new kid, Evans, and two more officers, Hunt and Williams, and we went down with our sticks, you know.
And when we got there, the two officers already there were standing outside the cell. They wouldn’t go in cause it was blood everywhere, see. Floor, walls, bed literally dripping with blood. One of the cellies, Ricketts, strangled his bunkie and opened him up with a shank, see. Belly button to Adam’s apple. The sick bastard pulled out the liver and intestines, gave his bunkie a fucking lobotomy. So the stuff’s lying everywhere, there’s an eyeball on the locker, and another eyeball on the floor all stepped on and ground to bits, and the sick bastard’s standing at the back of the cell, holding his fucking bunkie’s heart, saying he’s gonna eat it and no-one can stop him. It was – it was…
(he shakes his head)
So Evans is puking everywhere, right, and nobody’s moving, and fucking Ricketts is there chewing on the goddamn heart, slurping it up, in goddamned fact, but we gotta follow protocol, right. So I went in, dragged Hunt in to cuff Ricketts, and I –
I gave Scofield – that was the bunkie’s name – I gave Scofield mouth-to-mouth. The fucker’s obviously dead, lying there with his insides on the outside, but you gotta follow the book, and the others – well.
So that was that.
You have the same look that my ex had. But that’s the worst part, I promise you.
So afterwards they made us all take psych sessions. Evans quit immediately, don’t blame the kid. It was a sick piece of shit. Godbear, Abrams, and Hunt didn’t last much longer either. So me and Williams, we stuck it out a bit longer, then Williams left too. Said he couldn’t eat meat without puking. Then it was just me, and then the psych wrote a report, said I was repressing ‘Shock And Extreme Trauma’, so they took me off too. Wrote each of us a big fat check afterwards. I got 500,000 big ones.
Then Rachel – my ex – left, said she couldn’t stand it, couldn’t even stand the thought of it, and she wasn’t even there.
(he pauses)
But like I said, I’d go back to the big house in a snap, I really would.
Why the fuck would I do that?
It’s just – how the fuck should I put this… It’s just – in the big house you have to keep sharp, you know? You have to deal with the rats, the rabbits, and the big bitches – that’s those doing life – they always have a shank somewhere for someone. Then you gotta deal with the new boots, pencil whip the convict bosses to keep ‘em in line, keep a finger on who’s riding with who, make sure the blickey doesn’t get out of hand, and all the while you gotta know when to keep your fucking nose out of gangs taking it to the square. You gotta – Grab The Danger, I don’t know, and when you can do all that, you feel –
(he pauses)
Yeah. Kinda like being a hobo. Kinda. (beat) And dying – people get shanked all the time. Sick shit goes down. Just – sick shit goes down, you know what I mean? And you gotta have people who are – not strong, but – people who won’t crack, you know? And you, and you can’t get – whatcha-call-it – desensitized too. Everyone gets desensitized, but desensitized gets you killed in a prison. Desensitized gets you killed in a war. That’s why I always told the wife that if you’re working in the V.P. you gotta – not love it – but you gotta – stay sharp. Take pride in your work, I guess some people say.
So I told her, Rach, baby, you keep talking, and you keep trying to stop all the bad stuff from happening, and when you get rid of all the rapists and murderers and the people who fuck 18 month-old babies and the people who chop up bodies and throw them into different cans round the state, you stop that, then I’ll stop too.
But until then, I told her, if I tell you I feel – I felt – alive – every day I spent in the V.P., don’t fucking stare at me like I’m crazy, I told her. Because you need people like me to keep your prisons, fight your wars – pull the heads off your chickens and slice the throats of your pigs. It’s people like us who keep doing while you keep talking, I told her. But she never got it. Even at the end. She kept crying, said she was Crying For My Humanity, wouldn’t you know it. She didn’t get it…
I Was More Human Than She Was. She was happy just – surviving. Talking. Fucking. She never saw – everything came to her in words, memories, nice products with labels. Repression. Guilt. Anger. Rage. Fear. But there are – you see a guy keestering a shank because he’s so scared out of his fucking mind, you hear fishes screaming after they’ve spent five days in the hole, or you step on an eyeball smashed to bits – after that you just – there are just – just some things that are – bigger, bigger than fucking words, you know what I’m saying? Even – hunger, or desperation – I get that, I’ve seen it, I don’t – I wouldn’t blame them…
(he looks down, and then looks up again, almost a challenge)
Well. They’re just such fucking huge things for such tiny words, but she never got that. Sometimes she was just a real mensch in her tailored Guccis. But I get it.
(he pauses)
And I did, you know. Feel alive. Like I was connected to something deep. I was the very best of the blue suits, rarely got red on me, but you know, guess I was lucky. But that’s all over now. Now it’s this – this pussy product-pushing. Getting fat and punchy. Sometimes I want – sometimes I think even a mugger could take me, you know?
(he looks away from the listener, but again nothing happens. He looks back)
I see. “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper”, huh.
(a beat)
I think I will have one of those steaks. I’m gonna order up another rare one. You sure you don’t want one too?
Monday, March 06, 2006
The New Paper Column: Map
When I first arrived in New York, a full week before move-in day at my dorm, my friend and I rented a cheap room in a hostel called The American Dream.
The room’s window faced a finger-distance solid wall, the public toilet was a hole in the wall with a hole in the floor, and walking down the stairs you had to be careful not to trip over any of the 9000 cats beloved (and individually named) by the hostel owner, but god help us if we weren’t the happiest people alive.
Blackened roadside bagels were authentic, hobos were refreshingly outspoken, and, best of all, the road system made sense.
Here, we thought, is a place that recognizes the reason for which numbers and the alphabet were created. Streets run numerically from 1st Street to 127th Street, and Avenues likewise from Avenue D to Avenue A, and then 1st Avenue to 12th.
Easy, we thought. And so we chucked our maps, determined not to be one of those tourists standing on road corners with maps flapping into their faces.
Of course, we proceeded to get thoroughly lost, and then even more lost, and then Jack Nicholson on Oscar night-lost, until finally, standing somewhere between Elridge and Hester (or, as we called them, Wherever and Whatever), we gave up and hailed a cab.
Since then, I have gotten lost a lot more times. Once, I set out at five in the afternoon for a five-thirty dinner party in Little Italy, and arrived at eight, smelling of roast-duck and chicken-rice from my three-year vacation in Chinatown.
You see, the thing about the Manhattan road system is that when you think you’ve got it all figured out, it sucker-punches you when you least expect it.
Roads that are supposed to be straight veer off at weird 32.5-degree angles and change their names. Orderly blocks are intersected in odd places by criss-crossing alleyways called Vandam and Gansevoort.
One moment you’re safely walking along 3rd and 5th, right on time, and the next you’re wondering why Mr. Bayard-Pell and Mr. Wooster are messing up your schedule.
It is, of course, in Chinatown that all hell breaks loose. My teacher once lived in Chinatown, and I wondered how he survived the move from Manhattanville to Salvador Dali-town. There are no cross-roads in Chinatown. There are only octagonal-roads and swirling intersections, where Henry, Madison, Monroe, Mott, Oliver, James, Chatham and Mosco meet, dance, and have tea-parties at poor unsuspecting people’s expenses. I wondered how my teacher managed to make it out of Chinatown before 2030.
But then I remembered that my teacher was already a voting Singaporean long before he moved to New York, much less Chinatown. And if a person can go to sleep as a East Coast-er, and wake up as a Marine Parade-r, when the actual Marine Parade is a 40-minute bus ride away, you’ve got to figure that that person is well equipped for the bizarre ways Manhattan carves itself up while being seemingly well-ordered.
So here’s to Singapore, from New York, and excuse me while I go buy myself a map.
The room’s window faced a finger-distance solid wall, the public toilet was a hole in the wall with a hole in the floor, and walking down the stairs you had to be careful not to trip over any of the 9000 cats beloved (and individually named) by the hostel owner, but god help us if we weren’t the happiest people alive.
Blackened roadside bagels were authentic, hobos were refreshingly outspoken, and, best of all, the road system made sense.
Here, we thought, is a place that recognizes the reason for which numbers and the alphabet were created. Streets run numerically from 1st Street to 127th Street, and Avenues likewise from Avenue D to Avenue A, and then 1st Avenue to 12th.
Easy, we thought. And so we chucked our maps, determined not to be one of those tourists standing on road corners with maps flapping into their faces.
Of course, we proceeded to get thoroughly lost, and then even more lost, and then Jack Nicholson on Oscar night-lost, until finally, standing somewhere between Elridge and Hester (or, as we called them, Wherever and Whatever), we gave up and hailed a cab.
Since then, I have gotten lost a lot more times. Once, I set out at five in the afternoon for a five-thirty dinner party in Little Italy, and arrived at eight, smelling of roast-duck and chicken-rice from my three-year vacation in Chinatown.
You see, the thing about the Manhattan road system is that when you think you’ve got it all figured out, it sucker-punches you when you least expect it.
Roads that are supposed to be straight veer off at weird 32.5-degree angles and change their names. Orderly blocks are intersected in odd places by criss-crossing alleyways called Vandam and Gansevoort.
One moment you’re safely walking along 3rd and 5th, right on time, and the next you’re wondering why Mr. Bayard-Pell and Mr. Wooster are messing up your schedule.
It is, of course, in Chinatown that all hell breaks loose. My teacher once lived in Chinatown, and I wondered how he survived the move from Manhattanville to Salvador Dali-town. There are no cross-roads in Chinatown. There are only octagonal-roads and swirling intersections, where Henry, Madison, Monroe, Mott, Oliver, James, Chatham and Mosco meet, dance, and have tea-parties at poor unsuspecting people’s expenses. I wondered how my teacher managed to make it out of Chinatown before 2030.
But then I remembered that my teacher was already a voting Singaporean long before he moved to New York, much less Chinatown. And if a person can go to sleep as a East Coast-er, and wake up as a Marine Parade-r, when the actual Marine Parade is a 40-minute bus ride away, you’ve got to figure that that person is well equipped for the bizarre ways Manhattan carves itself up while being seemingly well-ordered.
So here’s to Singapore, from New York, and excuse me while I go buy myself a map.
The New Paper Column: Night
On a late night several weeks ago one of my floormates was getting sick of being killed by zombies in Resident Evil 4. Another was hungry, a third “kind of remembered where this really famous 24-hour place was”, and that was how I ended up going out at three in the morning in search of the elusive Papaya Dog.
Papaya Dog, by the way, is an American chain that sells ‘hot dog with papaya juice’ combos. No, I don’t understand it either. But this is the country that greenlighted Son Of The Mask, the country that allowed Britney Spears to have a baby, and the country that continues to tolerate the Bush administration, so I suppose ‘hot dog and papaya juice’ companies make about as much sense as anything else.
In any case, it was three in the morning, and, because my floormate had insisted that he could remember where the place was without a “wussy” map, we were always “almost there”.
Drug dealers who would laugh in our faces if they knew how much money we had were offering us crack, police cars were having fun slowing down when they drove past us, and hobos were yelling things about our mothers this family paper probably couldn’t print, but we were “almost there, really. The next avenue, I think”.
The thing is, after forty-five minutes of ‘almost there’s, you start to tune out the sound, much like the way you automatically begin wondering how many fingers will fall off from the cold, and the way you start trying to remember the exact definition of ‘justifiable homicide’.
But at the same time, little details begin to catch your senses. The way drunks weave, stagger, and twirl one another around, for example, with oddly poetic grace (this is, of course, before they all fall down, like a weird NC-17 nursery rhyme).
The way people who are gangsters in the day enter Dunkin Donuts at night and ask politely for croissants.
The way the empty streets almost glow in the fluorescently amber hue of night lamps, as bits of paper and pages of newspapers flirt and dance above the tarmac ground.
The way friends, gathered in the a.m. hours under alfresco awnings, reminisce, gossip, and laugh in ways you just know would never happen at any other time, their voices seemingly coaxed out of their mouths by the night itself.
We did find Papaya Dog in the end (“Man! I totally told you it was here, didn’t I?”). And about half an hour after we found it, I was staring outside my 13th floor NYU dorm clear glass window. Some apartment lights that were switched on before we left were still on, and I felt really sorry for them.
My mother had warned me about Manhattan after dark (my brother, on the other hand, warned me that most drug dealers after dark were really undercover policemen), but she didn’t put much effort into it.
Maybe she knew it was futile, but I also think that maybe she also knew she’d brought me up in a way that would allow her to sleep at night while I’m here.
Because, really, my mother’s too smart not to know that people, especially teenagers, won’t just switch off after 11 p.m.
Papaya Dog, by the way, is an American chain that sells ‘hot dog with papaya juice’ combos. No, I don’t understand it either. But this is the country that greenlighted Son Of The Mask, the country that allowed Britney Spears to have a baby, and the country that continues to tolerate the Bush administration, so I suppose ‘hot dog and papaya juice’ companies make about as much sense as anything else.
In any case, it was three in the morning, and, because my floormate had insisted that he could remember where the place was without a “wussy” map, we were always “almost there”.
Drug dealers who would laugh in our faces if they knew how much money we had were offering us crack, police cars were having fun slowing down when they drove past us, and hobos were yelling things about our mothers this family paper probably couldn’t print, but we were “almost there, really. The next avenue, I think”.
The thing is, after forty-five minutes of ‘almost there’s, you start to tune out the sound, much like the way you automatically begin wondering how many fingers will fall off from the cold, and the way you start trying to remember the exact definition of ‘justifiable homicide’.
But at the same time, little details begin to catch your senses. The way drunks weave, stagger, and twirl one another around, for example, with oddly poetic grace (this is, of course, before they all fall down, like a weird NC-17 nursery rhyme).
The way people who are gangsters in the day enter Dunkin Donuts at night and ask politely for croissants.
The way the empty streets almost glow in the fluorescently amber hue of night lamps, as bits of paper and pages of newspapers flirt and dance above the tarmac ground.
The way friends, gathered in the a.m. hours under alfresco awnings, reminisce, gossip, and laugh in ways you just know would never happen at any other time, their voices seemingly coaxed out of their mouths by the night itself.
We did find Papaya Dog in the end (“Man! I totally told you it was here, didn’t I?”). And about half an hour after we found it, I was staring outside my 13th floor NYU dorm clear glass window. Some apartment lights that were switched on before we left were still on, and I felt really sorry for them.
My mother had warned me about Manhattan after dark (my brother, on the other hand, warned me that most drug dealers after dark were really undercover policemen), but she didn’t put much effort into it.
Maybe she knew it was futile, but I also think that maybe she also knew she’d brought me up in a way that would allow her to sleep at night while I’m here.
Because, really, my mother’s too smart not to know that people, especially teenagers, won’t just switch off after 11 p.m.
The New Paper Column: NS
I was trying to explain the concept of National Service to my roommate. “Twelve or more guys share a bunk, each has his own small space, and they all try not to kill each other,” I said, to begin with.
“So it’s like us,” my roommate replied. “Except with more space.”
Despite the disturbing news that my roommate had been trying not to kill me, I realized that he was right. Living in a New York University dorm is remarkably like being back in Singapore and serving National Service all over again. As weird as that might sound, the lessons of both are actually quite similar.
For example: Your fellow third sergeants won’t turn off the television because they’ve decided to watch pirated DVDs until four in the morning the night before an exercise. You try not to kill them. Your floor-mates decide that four in the morning before an exam is the best time to relieve stress by belting out rock songs on their guitars. You try not to kill them. See? That’s tolerance right there.
In fact, living here in New York has taught me some lessons that even National Service could not teach.
Take area cleaning, for instance. During National Service, servicemen are forced to clean their sleeping and company areas, in an effort to instill in them the virtues of housekeeping. I have two elder brothers, and I can safely tell you that I don’t think a week of fear-induced cleaning has ever encouraged anyone to clean some more when he gets home. Quite the opposite, in fact.
But after a semester at Columbia University, my elder brother immediately started volunteering to help my mother mop the floor twice a week. I used to wonder why. I don’t anymore. I’m guessing he probably found week-old pizza slices under the couch. Or he just got tired of stepping on wasabi peas constantly. Or maybe he stepped on a fork that was bizarrely on the bathroom floor. These are only guesses, you understand, but for some reason I’m pretty sure one of them is right.
And then of course there’s the fact that National Service is supposed to teach you discipline, through the inculcation of routines, timetables, and all that fun stuff. I don’t know. I don’t really find myself obsessing over whether my toothbrush is placed exactly correctly, or whether my shoes are placed in a certain order. I do know, however, that the one hour I spent trying not to stuff a drunk sorority girl’s head into a microwave probably taught me enough discipline to last a whole life’s worth of drunk people.
Why am I so sure? Well, if I didn’t do it when she said this: “Am I hot? No. Really? I’m hot? No. I’m not hot. My boyfriend tells me I’m hot. Did I say I was hot? I’m not hot. I’m hot. I’m hot, right? This is a nice microwave. Can I borrow your microwave? You have a very nice microwave. Am I hot? Hot? Not hot? Don’t lie to me. I’m hot. I’m so hot. My boyfriend tells me I’m hot. Wow. Like, awesome microwave. I’m not usually like this. I’m so totally usually not like this. I’m awesome when I’m not drunk. Really! I’m so hot.” And so forth… and forth… and forth.
I could go on some more, about many other things, but I think you get the idea.
Which is why, if I make it back to Singapore in one piece, without any homicides, or drug raps, or alcoholism problems on my record, I’d have become a pretty good person, right? And if I were also to bring fame to Singapore? Like say if I were to become… a world-class pianist?
“So it’s like us,” my roommate replied. “Except with more space.”
Despite the disturbing news that my roommate had been trying not to kill me, I realized that he was right. Living in a New York University dorm is remarkably like being back in Singapore and serving National Service all over again. As weird as that might sound, the lessons of both are actually quite similar.
For example: Your fellow third sergeants won’t turn off the television because they’ve decided to watch pirated DVDs until four in the morning the night before an exercise. You try not to kill them. Your floor-mates decide that four in the morning before an exam is the best time to relieve stress by belting out rock songs on their guitars. You try not to kill them. See? That’s tolerance right there.
In fact, living here in New York has taught me some lessons that even National Service could not teach.
Take area cleaning, for instance. During National Service, servicemen are forced to clean their sleeping and company areas, in an effort to instill in them the virtues of housekeeping. I have two elder brothers, and I can safely tell you that I don’t think a week of fear-induced cleaning has ever encouraged anyone to clean some more when he gets home. Quite the opposite, in fact.
But after a semester at Columbia University, my elder brother immediately started volunteering to help my mother mop the floor twice a week. I used to wonder why. I don’t anymore. I’m guessing he probably found week-old pizza slices under the couch. Or he just got tired of stepping on wasabi peas constantly. Or maybe he stepped on a fork that was bizarrely on the bathroom floor. These are only guesses, you understand, but for some reason I’m pretty sure one of them is right.
And then of course there’s the fact that National Service is supposed to teach you discipline, through the inculcation of routines, timetables, and all that fun stuff. I don’t know. I don’t really find myself obsessing over whether my toothbrush is placed exactly correctly, or whether my shoes are placed in a certain order. I do know, however, that the one hour I spent trying not to stuff a drunk sorority girl’s head into a microwave probably taught me enough discipline to last a whole life’s worth of drunk people.
Why am I so sure? Well, if I didn’t do it when she said this: “Am I hot? No. Really? I’m hot? No. I’m not hot. My boyfriend tells me I’m hot. Did I say I was hot? I’m not hot. I’m hot. I’m hot, right? This is a nice microwave. Can I borrow your microwave? You have a very nice microwave. Am I hot? Hot? Not hot? Don’t lie to me. I’m hot. I’m so hot. My boyfriend tells me I’m hot. Wow. Like, awesome microwave. I’m not usually like this. I’m so totally usually not like this. I’m awesome when I’m not drunk. Really! I’m so hot.” And so forth… and forth… and forth.
I could go on some more, about many other things, but I think you get the idea.
Which is why, if I make it back to Singapore in one piece, without any homicides, or drug raps, or alcoholism problems on my record, I’d have become a pretty good person, right? And if I were also to bring fame to Singapore? Like say if I were to become… a world-class pianist?
The New Paper Column: Shows
Winter hiatus. It takes place every year in America from late November to early February, and is the time during which TV networks regroup, reschedule, rewrite, and, while all that fun stuff is going on, repeat.
In other words, this is when there are 999 channels but nothing to watch.
Luckily, within any ten-block radius in New York City there are anywhere between 50 to 100 DVD shops. From monster-hits like Lost and Desperate Housewives, to critically-acclaimed (and therefore nobody-watched) gems like Veronica Mars and Firefly, to shows including Scrubs and Newsradio, if it once existed, you can bet that it’s probably languishing on a shelf somewhere in DVD form.
Which brings us to the DVD that I found two days ago. It’s called Sports Night, and ran between 1998-2000 (tagline: “It’s about sports. The same way Charlie’s Angels was about law enforcement.”).
Sports Night never really caught on, and was axed by ABC despite 10 Golden Globes and 21 nominations. But although it shared superficially nothing in common with Sex And The City, which also premiered in 1998, it was as brilliant as City, and for the same reasons.
Most of the people who watched City will tell you that they started for the sex, but stayed for the stories. It’s easy to be ground-breaking, but there’s got to be something there underneath the surface if you want people to stay. Friends was a pop culture phenomenon because beneath all the canned laughter and glitzy living was heart. Joey looks headed for cancellation because it’s a shiny but ultimately shallow product. The creators of Lost don’t stress how much money the pilot cost (US $10m), but keep repeating in interviews that it’s a story about people and how people relate to each other.
It’s about people and how they relate to each other. It’s a simple enough maxim, but one that isn’t followed very often. That is why, after having channel-surfed through enough shows to know, I can tell you definitively that America is just as capable of producing entertainment garbage as Singapore is (and has). But the flip side of that argument is that Singapore is as capable of producing quality shows as America is. And when it does, people do notice.
Royston Tan created the international festival-touring Fifteen. Eric Khoo’s Be With Me only failed to qualify for the Oscars on a technicality, and Tan Pin Pin’s Singapore Gaga actually did win an Oscar. Even Mediacorp, creator of the vomit-inducing Beautiful Connection (better known as Jiu Ceng Gao), the atrocious Living With Lydia, and the current rehash Love Concierge, once fanned a national fervor comparable to that of Lost and Housewives with its unmatched drama-thon Holland V.
All of these were quality shows because they were about people, real people, and about how these people related realistically to each other. The gangsters of Fifteen weren’t just Ah-Bengs. The cast of Singapore Gaga revealed the reality of Singapore behind Tourist Singapore. Mo Wanwan wasn’t just a fierce dragon-lady, Mo Yanyan wasn’t just a Villain, and Mo Jingjing wasn’t just innocent and cute.
Singapore is just as capable of telling good stories as America is. But it’s not an easy job, and you have to keep working at it, just as we journalists have to keep working to find the best ways to give you the best stories. And so it is one of my wishes for 2006 that Singapore excels not just economically, but artistically as well.
And yes, that means you too, Mediacorp. So can you please lay off the ‘conniving and evil sister’, ‘secretly rich and handsome guy’, and ‘innocent damsel-in-distress’ stereotypes already? The Mo family would be ashamed.
In other words, this is when there are 999 channels but nothing to watch.
Luckily, within any ten-block radius in New York City there are anywhere between 50 to 100 DVD shops. From monster-hits like Lost and Desperate Housewives, to critically-acclaimed (and therefore nobody-watched) gems like Veronica Mars and Firefly, to shows including Scrubs and Newsradio, if it once existed, you can bet that it’s probably languishing on a shelf somewhere in DVD form.
Which brings us to the DVD that I found two days ago. It’s called Sports Night, and ran between 1998-2000 (tagline: “It’s about sports. The same way Charlie’s Angels was about law enforcement.”).
Sports Night never really caught on, and was axed by ABC despite 10 Golden Globes and 21 nominations. But although it shared superficially nothing in common with Sex And The City, which also premiered in 1998, it was as brilliant as City, and for the same reasons.
Most of the people who watched City will tell you that they started for the sex, but stayed for the stories. It’s easy to be ground-breaking, but there’s got to be something there underneath the surface if you want people to stay. Friends was a pop culture phenomenon because beneath all the canned laughter and glitzy living was heart. Joey looks headed for cancellation because it’s a shiny but ultimately shallow product. The creators of Lost don’t stress how much money the pilot cost (US $10m), but keep repeating in interviews that it’s a story about people and how people relate to each other.
It’s about people and how they relate to each other. It’s a simple enough maxim, but one that isn’t followed very often. That is why, after having channel-surfed through enough shows to know, I can tell you definitively that America is just as capable of producing entertainment garbage as Singapore is (and has). But the flip side of that argument is that Singapore is as capable of producing quality shows as America is. And when it does, people do notice.
Royston Tan created the international festival-touring Fifteen. Eric Khoo’s Be With Me only failed to qualify for the Oscars on a technicality, and Tan Pin Pin’s Singapore Gaga actually did win an Oscar. Even Mediacorp, creator of the vomit-inducing Beautiful Connection (better known as Jiu Ceng Gao), the atrocious Living With Lydia, and the current rehash Love Concierge, once fanned a national fervor comparable to that of Lost and Housewives with its unmatched drama-thon Holland V.
All of these were quality shows because they were about people, real people, and about how these people related realistically to each other. The gangsters of Fifteen weren’t just Ah-Bengs. The cast of Singapore Gaga revealed the reality of Singapore behind Tourist Singapore. Mo Wanwan wasn’t just a fierce dragon-lady, Mo Yanyan wasn’t just a Villain, and Mo Jingjing wasn’t just innocent and cute.
Singapore is just as capable of telling good stories as America is. But it’s not an easy job, and you have to keep working at it, just as we journalists have to keep working to find the best ways to give you the best stories. And so it is one of my wishes for 2006 that Singapore excels not just economically, but artistically as well.
And yes, that means you too, Mediacorp. So can you please lay off the ‘conniving and evil sister’, ‘secretly rich and handsome guy’, and ‘innocent damsel-in-distress’ stereotypes already? The Mo family would be ashamed.
The New Paper Column: Sex
The view from my dorm’s common room window is amazing. You can see the Empire State Building in the distance, the Manhattan Bridge nearby, and, every Thursday night, the free sex show from a college student in the opposite tower.
Yes, you read the last statement correctly.
The first time she brought a guy over, she forgot to pull down the blinds. The second time, it wasn’t because she forgot. In the third week, a unanimous decision was made in my dorm that we should watch The O.C. somewhere else. Since then, various elevator conversations have convinced me that That Girl’s show is even more regular than network TV (and a lot less censored).
You would think that this exhibitionistic behavior was mostly confined to the West. In Singapore, for example, you would never walk in on university students having sex in a Starbucks toilet (which has happened to me twice in the last month).
But are Singapore and the US really that different? In last year’s Durex Global Sex Survey, Singapore was second last out of 41 countries when it came to frequency of sex. But according to various articles in The Straits Times and this paper, sex shops have penetrated downtown and heartland office spaces in the past year, making exciting profit figures selling erotic toys to naughty boardgames to kinky lingerie.
According to my friends, it’s also long been an open secret that, among other places, you can catch a R(A) movie if you walk by a certain downtown school that has glass-walled study rooms.
With Singapore’s first-ever Sex Expo soon to open, we seem to be gradually adopting the West’s openness about sex. But we’re also similar in another disturbing way.
Sex education is a divisive topic here in the US. Morning-after pills targeted at 17 or older females can prevent pregnancies if taken up to 72 hours post-sex. Last month, a vaccination was also invented that can prevent cervical cancer, a disease that stems largely from a sexually transmitted virus. But both are being blocked from reaching the masses because the government prefers pushing the message of abstinence, and so it can’t be seen to be condoning teenage sex in any way.
We are facing a similar situation in Singapore. Teenagers are becoming increasingly blasé about sex, but the increasingly out-dated message of abstinence is still being pushed. And the result has been published by The Straits Times in various reports, one as recent as two weeks ago: The age-group of 10-19 now make up 6 percent of all sexually-transmitted infection cases, a handful of seventeen year-olds have been diagnosed as HIV+, and the AIDs infection rate has been steadily on the rise. And yet we continue to prevent condoms from being handed out at nation-wide parties, and we continue to think that the abstinence message is working, despite various online studies showing that at least 60 percent of Singaporean teenagers have had multiple sex partners by the time they’re 18.
The results of this year’s Durex Global Sex Survey will be released on Tuesday, but we already know the really important sex numbers. The question is, will we continue to preach only abstinence, when we can all see (sometimes literally) that the college student next door is having sex 53 times a year, at the very, very least?
Yes, you read the last statement correctly.
The first time she brought a guy over, she forgot to pull down the blinds. The second time, it wasn’t because she forgot. In the third week, a unanimous decision was made in my dorm that we should watch The O.C. somewhere else. Since then, various elevator conversations have convinced me that That Girl’s show is even more regular than network TV (and a lot less censored).
You would think that this exhibitionistic behavior was mostly confined to the West. In Singapore, for example, you would never walk in on university students having sex in a Starbucks toilet (which has happened to me twice in the last month).
But are Singapore and the US really that different? In last year’s Durex Global Sex Survey, Singapore was second last out of 41 countries when it came to frequency of sex. But according to various articles in The Straits Times and this paper, sex shops have penetrated downtown and heartland office spaces in the past year, making exciting profit figures selling erotic toys to naughty boardgames to kinky lingerie.
According to my friends, it’s also long been an open secret that, among other places, you can catch a R(A) movie if you walk by a certain downtown school that has glass-walled study rooms.
With Singapore’s first-ever Sex Expo soon to open, we seem to be gradually adopting the West’s openness about sex. But we’re also similar in another disturbing way.
Sex education is a divisive topic here in the US. Morning-after pills targeted at 17 or older females can prevent pregnancies if taken up to 72 hours post-sex. Last month, a vaccination was also invented that can prevent cervical cancer, a disease that stems largely from a sexually transmitted virus. But both are being blocked from reaching the masses because the government prefers pushing the message of abstinence, and so it can’t be seen to be condoning teenage sex in any way.
We are facing a similar situation in Singapore. Teenagers are becoming increasingly blasé about sex, but the increasingly out-dated message of abstinence is still being pushed. And the result has been published by The Straits Times in various reports, one as recent as two weeks ago: The age-group of 10-19 now make up 6 percent of all sexually-transmitted infection cases, a handful of seventeen year-olds have been diagnosed as HIV+, and the AIDs infection rate has been steadily on the rise. And yet we continue to prevent condoms from being handed out at nation-wide parties, and we continue to think that the abstinence message is working, despite various online studies showing that at least 60 percent of Singaporean teenagers have had multiple sex partners by the time they’re 18.
The results of this year’s Durex Global Sex Survey will be released on Tuesday, but we already know the really important sex numbers. The question is, will we continue to preach only abstinence, when we can all see (sometimes literally) that the college student next door is having sex 53 times a year, at the very, very least?
The New Paper Column: Memoirs
“She’s sold her soul and betrayed her country. Hacking her to death would not be good enough.”
The above quote appeared late November in The New York Times, The Guardian, Reuters, Yahoo! News, and MSNBC, among other international media. Is it about a terrorist? Or a traitor caught selling national secrets? Or even just a defector badmouthing her birth country? No. It is about none of these things. It is about Zhang Ziyi, a China-born actress who took on a Japanese role in an American film.
Do not get me wrong. The casting of director Rob Marshall’s latest film adaptation Memoirs Of A Geisha is, at best, insensitive. The Japanese have their right to complain that, for a film about Japanese culture, none of the lead roles have gone to Japanese actresses. The Chinese also have their right to complain that, given Japan’s brutal occupation of China in World War II, Chinese actresses should not be playing sympathetic Japanese roles. Both countries naturally also have the right to complain that Memoirs is a deplorable American film that not only stereotypes Asian actors and actresses, but also Asian culture itself.
But while we should have the right to voice all of these complaints, let us not forget that Memoirs is not about a Chinese actress taking on a Japanese role in an American film. Memoirs is, in order of priority, an American film, starring Chinese actresses, about Japanese culture. It is a blockbuster aiming for ticket sales and Oscars, not a documentary aiming for cultural dialogue and Politics. If a Chinese actress had burned a China flag in Tokyo while pleading eternal allegiance to Japan, this column would be markedly different. But when Marshall himself has emphasized his careless-ness by saying repeatedly that “realism is not (his) chief concern” and that Memoirs “is really meant as a fable”, quarreling over whether Zhang Ziyi should be hacked into tiny little pieces for her participation is like quarreling over whether Jet Li should be castrated for playing an American’s collared Asian pet in the movie Unleashed.
Yes, Memoirs’ embarrassing situation might truly be the only one of its kind, if research gleaned from 47 websites has taught me anything. And yes, Memoirs’ casting director’s cultural cluelessness and general inability to differentiate one ‘yellow-face’ from another is insulting. And yes, Zhang Ziyi could have held out for another less controversial American debut. But this is Hollywood, baby. America’s dream factory is exactly what it is – the maker of two-hour dreams that are sometimes moving, sometimes boring, and sometimes shocking, but always, ultimately, only dreams that don’t really matter, because we know that they’re not accurate.
All that a Hollywood movie tries to be is entertaining. All that we want a Hollywood movie to try to be is entertaining. Blaming Hollywood for not being culturally attuned is like blaming a five-year old for not understanding Plato. In Hollywood, resemblance to reality is first and foremost only a bonus. If we really wanted realism, we’d skip Tinseltown and go straight to newspapers.
It is true that the West could do with a lot more education about the East. Memoirs is only the latest example. But it is also true that the East could stand to care a lot less about the West. And that depends on you and I to know what really matters, and what is just a silly inflammatory sentence spread into flames by flapping media.
The above quote appeared late November in The New York Times, The Guardian, Reuters, Yahoo! News, and MSNBC, among other international media. Is it about a terrorist? Or a traitor caught selling national secrets? Or even just a defector badmouthing her birth country? No. It is about none of these things. It is about Zhang Ziyi, a China-born actress who took on a Japanese role in an American film.
Do not get me wrong. The casting of director Rob Marshall’s latest film adaptation Memoirs Of A Geisha is, at best, insensitive. The Japanese have their right to complain that, for a film about Japanese culture, none of the lead roles have gone to Japanese actresses. The Chinese also have their right to complain that, given Japan’s brutal occupation of China in World War II, Chinese actresses should not be playing sympathetic Japanese roles. Both countries naturally also have the right to complain that Memoirs is a deplorable American film that not only stereotypes Asian actors and actresses, but also Asian culture itself.
But while we should have the right to voice all of these complaints, let us not forget that Memoirs is not about a Chinese actress taking on a Japanese role in an American film. Memoirs is, in order of priority, an American film, starring Chinese actresses, about Japanese culture. It is a blockbuster aiming for ticket sales and Oscars, not a documentary aiming for cultural dialogue and Politics. If a Chinese actress had burned a China flag in Tokyo while pleading eternal allegiance to Japan, this column would be markedly different. But when Marshall himself has emphasized his careless-ness by saying repeatedly that “realism is not (his) chief concern” and that Memoirs “is really meant as a fable”, quarreling over whether Zhang Ziyi should be hacked into tiny little pieces for her participation is like quarreling over whether Jet Li should be castrated for playing an American’s collared Asian pet in the movie Unleashed.
Yes, Memoirs’ embarrassing situation might truly be the only one of its kind, if research gleaned from 47 websites has taught me anything. And yes, Memoirs’ casting director’s cultural cluelessness and general inability to differentiate one ‘yellow-face’ from another is insulting. And yes, Zhang Ziyi could have held out for another less controversial American debut. But this is Hollywood, baby. America’s dream factory is exactly what it is – the maker of two-hour dreams that are sometimes moving, sometimes boring, and sometimes shocking, but always, ultimately, only dreams that don’t really matter, because we know that they’re not accurate.
All that a Hollywood movie tries to be is entertaining. All that we want a Hollywood movie to try to be is entertaining. Blaming Hollywood for not being culturally attuned is like blaming a five-year old for not understanding Plato. In Hollywood, resemblance to reality is first and foremost only a bonus. If we really wanted realism, we’d skip Tinseltown and go straight to newspapers.
It is true that the West could do with a lot more education about the East. Memoirs is only the latest example. But it is also true that the East could stand to care a lot less about the West. And that depends on you and I to know what really matters, and what is just a silly inflammatory sentence spread into flames by flapping media.
The New Paper Column: Food
I don’t know how any Singaporean could really be homesick in New York City. In the past few months, I’ve discovered not only Singaporean Fried Rice, but also Singapore Mai Fun (mee-fun, or vermicelli), Singaporean Noodles, and, my personal favourite, Singaporean Cookies.
(The search for Singaporean Steak, Singaporean Hot Dog, and Singaporean Salad is still ongoing. Stay tuned!)
There is, of course, nothing even vaguely Singaporean about these ‘Singaporean’ dishes.
But that problem hasn’t stopped enterprising five-dollar restaurants from exploiting our name, betting on the fact that most broke American college students still think of Singapore as some exotic locale. Sadly, for the most part, these restaurateurs have gotten it right.
Whether served in an American-run Japanese sushi-bar, or in a Taiwanese-run Chinese takeout place, I’ve seen (and complained about) countless fellow students literally swallowing the whole “Singaporean Experience” hook, line, and sinker.
Of course, the co-opting of foreign cuisines to local tastes is nothing new. Singaporean fish and chips differs from Australian fish and chips differs from British fish and chips according to local preferences.
So I really shouldn’t be surprised that in Manhattan Chinese food is not so much Chinese food as it is what Americans think Chinese food should be.
But where, then, does localization end and bastardization begin?
If Singaporean Chicken Rice is simply white rice fried with soy sauce, should it still be called Singaporean Chicken Rice, or should it be renamed American Singaporean Chicken Rice, or American Chicken Rice, or something else altogether?
This question, of course, is compounded by an additional problem: Does Singaporean Chicken Rice actually exist? If it does, why should we believe what we have is Chicken Rice in all its definitive Singaporean-ness? And if it doesn’t, how are we to agree on what would actually make our Chicken Rice Singaporean?
And even if we ever did settle on one definitive version of any Singaporean dish, we’d have to figure out one more thing: Do we insist on the purity of Singaporean flavour, and attempt to sue, torch, behead, kidnap, or otherwise eliminate all other rivals who claim to speak for us?
Or do we stand idly by and wait for non-Singaporeans to invent satirical Singaporean Burgers, Singaporean Falafels and Singaporean Pasta, which we will only know about too late when we see them in international supermarkets?
It would be so easy to think that Singapore’s culinary fate rests between these two extremes, but add in Singaporeans who struggle to explain to others why Singapore has no distinctive cuisine, Singaporeans who themselves laugh about Singapore’s melting pot of all foreign foods, and more, and the issue becomes a lot more complicated.
If somebody starts selling Singaporean Cheesecake one day, I don’t think I could arbitrate between the person selling it, and the person picketing outside, because there is no right or wrong here, only different priorities, and to ‘settle’ the question with platitudes about the freedom of selling cheesecake or “rights coming with responsibilities” (as one letter in a local paper read recently) is simplistic and naïve.
But I will say that if the day comes when even cheesecake is a hot-button issue, I hope that by that time we will have learned the value of dialogue, and not have to resort to either jerry cans of kerosene, or spiteful rhetoric in national papers.
(The search for Singaporean Steak, Singaporean Hot Dog, and Singaporean Salad is still ongoing. Stay tuned!)
There is, of course, nothing even vaguely Singaporean about these ‘Singaporean’ dishes.
But that problem hasn’t stopped enterprising five-dollar restaurants from exploiting our name, betting on the fact that most broke American college students still think of Singapore as some exotic locale. Sadly, for the most part, these restaurateurs have gotten it right.
Whether served in an American-run Japanese sushi-bar, or in a Taiwanese-run Chinese takeout place, I’ve seen (and complained about) countless fellow students literally swallowing the whole “Singaporean Experience” hook, line, and sinker.
Of course, the co-opting of foreign cuisines to local tastes is nothing new. Singaporean fish and chips differs from Australian fish and chips differs from British fish and chips according to local preferences.
So I really shouldn’t be surprised that in Manhattan Chinese food is not so much Chinese food as it is what Americans think Chinese food should be.
But where, then, does localization end and bastardization begin?
If Singaporean Chicken Rice is simply white rice fried with soy sauce, should it still be called Singaporean Chicken Rice, or should it be renamed American Singaporean Chicken Rice, or American Chicken Rice, or something else altogether?
This question, of course, is compounded by an additional problem: Does Singaporean Chicken Rice actually exist? If it does, why should we believe what we have is Chicken Rice in all its definitive Singaporean-ness? And if it doesn’t, how are we to agree on what would actually make our Chicken Rice Singaporean?
And even if we ever did settle on one definitive version of any Singaporean dish, we’d have to figure out one more thing: Do we insist on the purity of Singaporean flavour, and attempt to sue, torch, behead, kidnap, or otherwise eliminate all other rivals who claim to speak for us?
Or do we stand idly by and wait for non-Singaporeans to invent satirical Singaporean Burgers, Singaporean Falafels and Singaporean Pasta, which we will only know about too late when we see them in international supermarkets?
It would be so easy to think that Singapore’s culinary fate rests between these two extremes, but add in Singaporeans who struggle to explain to others why Singapore has no distinctive cuisine, Singaporeans who themselves laugh about Singapore’s melting pot of all foreign foods, and more, and the issue becomes a lot more complicated.
If somebody starts selling Singaporean Cheesecake one day, I don’t think I could arbitrate between the person selling it, and the person picketing outside, because there is no right or wrong here, only different priorities, and to ‘settle’ the question with platitudes about the freedom of selling cheesecake or “rights coming with responsibilities” (as one letter in a local paper read recently) is simplistic and naïve.
But I will say that if the day comes when even cheesecake is a hot-button issue, I hope that by that time we will have learned the value of dialogue, and not have to resort to either jerry cans of kerosene, or spiteful rhetoric in national papers.
The New Paper Column: Face
If we Singaporeans do only one thing better than the rest of the world, it’s saving face. So we’ve had a really horrible year of negative international publicity, with the A*Star debacle, our Press Freedom Index ranking, and now accusations of treating Australia with contempt regarding Australian death-sentenced drug trafficker Nguyen Tuong Van. If we know anything about saving face, it’s that it means never having to admit that we’re wrong, even if we are (and I’m not saying that we are, necessarily), and never having to say sorry even if we do admit that a mistake has been made. Since we have done neither despite considerable pressure, I can say that we are indeed very good at saving face.
But I’m no longer sure that we save face better than everyone else.
Unlike Singapore, a person in America is more likely to get run over by a cyclist than a driver. Unlike Singapore, there is only one 7-11 in the whole of Manhattan. But like Singapore, Americans are just as good, if not better, at saving face.
Hands up if you are now the owner or soon-to-be owner of an Xbox 360. Okay, for those of you now being stared at by everyone around you, I have more bad news. Of the power cords sent out with the 360s, a fraction easily overheats, making the entire system crash. Barely fifteen minutes after the launch of the 360 in America, buyers started reporting a range of error messages (much like Microsoft PCs’ infamous Blue Screen of Death, only black). Microsoft spokeswoman Molly O’Donnell responded that the distress calls represent “a very, very small fraction”, and offered to replace damaged systems. The official stand is that “with any launch of this magnitude, you are bound to see something happening”. All well and good – except that in March this year, Microsoft recalled 14 million Xbox power cords. Coincidence?
Of course, Microsoft’s mini-maybe-disaster is nothing compared to the cases of Apple and the American arm of Sony Electronics. Just days after the Ipod Nano’s launch in September, disgruntled consumers reported that the Nano’s screen scratches “insanely easily”. Despite initially denying, denying, and denying (head of Apple’s Ipod division Jon Rubenstein said that perhaps buyers should not “keep it in a pocket with your keys”), Apple was forced, five days and thousands of complaints later, to admit that “less than one-tenth of one percent” (sound familiar?) was shipped faulty. Even today, there has been no further admission, or apology, despite an ongoing lawsuit brought by consumers from the US, the UK, and Mexico.
As for Sony Electronics, well, where to begin? At least 52 Sony BMG titles have been identified so far as containing the vicious rootkit program, a copy-protection program that unfortunately invites hackers and viruses. But instead of issuing an apology in the first week of November, when the problem was identified, Sony issued two weeks later a software patch that created even worse problems for the computers. Only on 18 November did Sony issue an official apology – an apology that contained a lot of technical jargon, an exchange program, but not the simple word ‘sorry’, or even the phrase ‘we were wrong’.
Of course, it might seem petty to quibble about Microsoft, Apple, or Sony’s face-saving. After all, you might say, no one got physically hurt, or even killed. But think about the soldiers in Iraq who are dying because an American president won’t admit he is wrong. Think about Singapore’s reputation, which has been battered in international papers this year, with some blows not entirely undeserved. Sorry seems to be the hardest word, yes, but sometimes saving face means knowing when to say it.
But I’m no longer sure that we save face better than everyone else.
Unlike Singapore, a person in America is more likely to get run over by a cyclist than a driver. Unlike Singapore, there is only one 7-11 in the whole of Manhattan. But like Singapore, Americans are just as good, if not better, at saving face.
Hands up if you are now the owner or soon-to-be owner of an Xbox 360. Okay, for those of you now being stared at by everyone around you, I have more bad news. Of the power cords sent out with the 360s, a fraction easily overheats, making the entire system crash. Barely fifteen minutes after the launch of the 360 in America, buyers started reporting a range of error messages (much like Microsoft PCs’ infamous Blue Screen of Death, only black). Microsoft spokeswoman Molly O’Donnell responded that the distress calls represent “a very, very small fraction”, and offered to replace damaged systems. The official stand is that “with any launch of this magnitude, you are bound to see something happening”. All well and good – except that in March this year, Microsoft recalled 14 million Xbox power cords. Coincidence?
Of course, Microsoft’s mini-maybe-disaster is nothing compared to the cases of Apple and the American arm of Sony Electronics. Just days after the Ipod Nano’s launch in September, disgruntled consumers reported that the Nano’s screen scratches “insanely easily”. Despite initially denying, denying, and denying (head of Apple’s Ipod division Jon Rubenstein said that perhaps buyers should not “keep it in a pocket with your keys”), Apple was forced, five days and thousands of complaints later, to admit that “less than one-tenth of one percent” (sound familiar?) was shipped faulty. Even today, there has been no further admission, or apology, despite an ongoing lawsuit brought by consumers from the US, the UK, and Mexico.
As for Sony Electronics, well, where to begin? At least 52 Sony BMG titles have been identified so far as containing the vicious rootkit program, a copy-protection program that unfortunately invites hackers and viruses. But instead of issuing an apology in the first week of November, when the problem was identified, Sony issued two weeks later a software patch that created even worse problems for the computers. Only on 18 November did Sony issue an official apology – an apology that contained a lot of technical jargon, an exchange program, but not the simple word ‘sorry’, or even the phrase ‘we were wrong’.
Of course, it might seem petty to quibble about Microsoft, Apple, or Sony’s face-saving. After all, you might say, no one got physically hurt, or even killed. But think about the soldiers in Iraq who are dying because an American president won’t admit he is wrong. Think about Singapore’s reputation, which has been battered in international papers this year, with some blows not entirely undeserved. Sorry seems to be the hardest word, yes, but sometimes saving face means knowing when to say it.
The New Paper Column: Edu
I am secretly convinced that someone has arranged for a robotic spy to masquerade as my roommate at New York University.
We have both been in New York City for two months now, and my roommate, whom we shall call Caleb, has watched exactly one movie, zero plays, and zero Broadway or off-Broadway shows. In fact, not counting a day walking along Fifth Avenue, his exploration of Manhattan has not exceeded a five-block radius from the NYU campuses.
But it’s not what he hasn’t done that convinces me he is on someone’s payroll. It’s what he has done. For almost every single day now, he has managed to cram in ten-hour reading sessions at the library, in addition to writing papers in our room afterwards.
He even makes disagreeable noises when I’m slacking. Yes, he is even more Singaporean than I am. This is why I am convinced that he is a spy.
As for why I am convinced that he is a robot, just consider this. He has not touched the X-box, nor the Gamecube, nor the Playstation 2 in our suite’s common room once, and if I didn’t switch on the TV in our room occasionally, I am fairly sure that he wouldn’t even have watched a single second of TV. I’m sure you agree that there is simply no way he is even remotely human.
Of course, realizing that you are sleeping (in the same room) with a robotic spy who is likely taking note of your every action is enough to make anyone slightly paranoid. In fact, it is so paranoia-inducing that I’ve taken to recording down my own movements, grades, and time-management in multiple Excel spreadsheets.
Just in case he has managed somehow to install recording devices in my classrooms, I have also taken to shaking my head and making disapproving sounds whenever my professors and schoolmates say and do anything offensive.
When my classmate, who was asked to write and present a monologue, came to class dressed as a transvestite, and described things that even the Karma Sutra would blush at, I tsk-tsked and told him afterwards (just in case the camera was watching) how wrong his monologue was.
When my Terrorism And The Modern Man professor suggested that al-Qaeda’s actions and ideology were understandable, though not tolerable, I almost left the room (I didn’t, because grades are lowered for every two absences).
Even when I’m walking to my classes, I take care to keep a wide distance from those people protesting against either political party, against various laws, against the ban on marijuana as medicine, against student fee hikes, and just in case, even protests against Starbucks. I’ve seen Terminator: Rise Of The Machines, and if Kristanna Loken can be a shape-shifting T-X, then so can my ‘roommate’, right?
I have to admit, though, that all this looking over my shoulder is making me very tired, cranky, and careless. Just the other day I almost cracked and started paying attention when my Literature professor claimed that Hamlet is a badly constructed play, and in the next breath advised us to read Salman Rushdie’s books.
So I’m thinking that maybe I should transfer back to Singapore for a semester or two. I miss the food, I miss my family, and I miss my friends. And more than all of those things I miss the stress of simply having to study and not worry about anything else, especially about why my ‘roommate’ is now staring at me.
What do you guys think?
We have both been in New York City for two months now, and my roommate, whom we shall call Caleb, has watched exactly one movie, zero plays, and zero Broadway or off-Broadway shows. In fact, not counting a day walking along Fifth Avenue, his exploration of Manhattan has not exceeded a five-block radius from the NYU campuses.
But it’s not what he hasn’t done that convinces me he is on someone’s payroll. It’s what he has done. For almost every single day now, he has managed to cram in ten-hour reading sessions at the library, in addition to writing papers in our room afterwards.
He even makes disagreeable noises when I’m slacking. Yes, he is even more Singaporean than I am. This is why I am convinced that he is a spy.
As for why I am convinced that he is a robot, just consider this. He has not touched the X-box, nor the Gamecube, nor the Playstation 2 in our suite’s common room once, and if I didn’t switch on the TV in our room occasionally, I am fairly sure that he wouldn’t even have watched a single second of TV. I’m sure you agree that there is simply no way he is even remotely human.
Of course, realizing that you are sleeping (in the same room) with a robotic spy who is likely taking note of your every action is enough to make anyone slightly paranoid. In fact, it is so paranoia-inducing that I’ve taken to recording down my own movements, grades, and time-management in multiple Excel spreadsheets.
Just in case he has managed somehow to install recording devices in my classrooms, I have also taken to shaking my head and making disapproving sounds whenever my professors and schoolmates say and do anything offensive.
When my classmate, who was asked to write and present a monologue, came to class dressed as a transvestite, and described things that even the Karma Sutra would blush at, I tsk-tsked and told him afterwards (just in case the camera was watching) how wrong his monologue was.
When my Terrorism And The Modern Man professor suggested that al-Qaeda’s actions and ideology were understandable, though not tolerable, I almost left the room (I didn’t, because grades are lowered for every two absences).
Even when I’m walking to my classes, I take care to keep a wide distance from those people protesting against either political party, against various laws, against the ban on marijuana as medicine, against student fee hikes, and just in case, even protests against Starbucks. I’ve seen Terminator: Rise Of The Machines, and if Kristanna Loken can be a shape-shifting T-X, then so can my ‘roommate’, right?
I have to admit, though, that all this looking over my shoulder is making me very tired, cranky, and careless. Just the other day I almost cracked and started paying attention when my Literature professor claimed that Hamlet is a badly constructed play, and in the next breath advised us to read Salman Rushdie’s books.
So I’m thinking that maybe I should transfer back to Singapore for a semester or two. I miss the food, I miss my family, and I miss my friends. And more than all of those things I miss the stress of simply having to study and not worry about anything else, especially about why my ‘roommate’ is now staring at me.
What do you guys think?
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Play: 'Fuck' Is An Easy Word
Dennis is watching T.V. Joey enters and sits. A beat.
JOEY
What are we watching?
DENNIS
Buffy.
JOEY
The vampire show?
DENNIS
Yeah.
A beat.
JOEY
I don’t think I’ve actually seen an entire episode of this before.
DENNIS
It’s great. Joss Whedon is a fucking genius. (beat) I can loan you the DVDs again if you want.
JOEY
That’s okay. I didn’t like it in ‘99 and I’m not going to like it now.
A beat.
JOEY (CONT’D)
(grimacing) Oh man. Why did he do that? Why did he have to do that? That was a perfectly good eye.
DENNIS
It’s to increase the stakes. Dramatic tension, give Buffy a stronger incentive to defeat the First Evil. It’s really well-crafted if you really think about it. (beat) But yeah. Sticking someone’s eye out is pretty gross.
JOEY
I’m glad you think so.
DENNIS
But that’s not the worst part. There was an episode –
JOEY
No, no, that’s okay. (beat) God. You need to warn me when stuff like that’s going to happen. (shudders) I should probably stick to Family Guy.
A beat.
DENNIS
I thought you were doing homework.
JOEY
I was doing homework. (beat) Physics.
DENNIS
I’m so glad I dropped that. I sucked so fucking bad at it.
JOEY
Yeah. I remember. I think you traumatized McMahon for life.
DENNIS
That’s what the fucker wrote in my yearbook. (beat, smiling) What a dickhead. Fuck him. Still got here, didn’t I?
A beat.
JOEY
You still got an A for physics though.
DENNIS
That’s because I did all the questions in the fucking RedSpot book. Twice. (beat) It’s always the same questions year after fucking year after fucking year. I could have done it with my eyes closed.
A beat.
JOEY
Yeah. College physics is a lot more interesting, though. We’re learning some pretty cool stuff.
DENNIS
Like?
JOEY
Quantum physics – that’s stuff to do with time. Space-time continuum. Um. The Banach Tarski Paradox.
DENNIS
Are you just making shit up now?
JOEY
No. I’m not. It’s all in the textbook. I can show you if you don’t believe me.
DENNIS
Uh, no, that’s okay. I believe you.
A beat.
JOEY
So what’s going on in your classes now?
DENNIS
Nothing much. Just boring shit.
JOEY
“Boring shit”? Four months ago you were like, “Yes! I got into Tisch!”, and now it’s “boring shit”?
DENNIS
We’re just doing stupid shit now. Four-page scenes, five-minute colloquiums, bits and pieces. (beat) Plus I think my classmates are all fucking morons.
JOEY
Why?
DENNIS
They’re just so fucking stupid. No. Some of them. Okay. Maybe just one. (beat) We’re supposed to write our opinions on these white cards for colloquium, and someone wrote “Yeah man! Racism Is Kool” about something I did on racial discrimination. Cool with a ‘K’. (beat) Stupid fucker. Didn’t even write his name. (beat) Or her name.
JOEY
(tactfully) Yeah, that sucks.
DENNIS
I bet nobody does that in your physics colloquiums.
JOEY
We don’t have physics colloquiums.
DENNIS
Yeah, see? You guys are smarter already. Colloquiums are stupid. (beat) Fucking stupid.
JOEY
Physics isn’t much better. It’s just a bunch of stupid numbers and equations.
DENNIS
But you like it, right?
JOEY
Well, yeah.
DENNIS
And you’re good at it. No. You’re fucking good at it. McMahon drooled all over you. It was so fucking awkward. Like a man-crush. Except creepier.
JOEY
He wasn’t that smart, actually. (beat) And I’m sure if you keep working at your scripts you’ll get better.
DENNIS
It’s not like physics. There’s no magic book I can read. (beat) If I suck at it I suck at it. And I probably do.
A beat.
JOEY
Yeah. Maybe you do.
DENNIS
Thanks.
JOEY
Yeah. Maybe you really do.
DENNIS
What’s your fucking problem, huh? Why’re you being such a fucking dickhead?
JOEY
I’m tired of you making fun of physics. Physics is not stupid. And it’s not easy. And there is no “magic book”. God!
DENNIS
Okay! I’m sorry. Physics isn’t stupid. It’s very hard stuff for very smart people.
JOEY
Oh, fuck you!
A beat.
DENNIS
I don’t want to quarrel with you, okay? I’m just trying to watch my show.
JOEY
Yeah. Sure. (beat, then almost uncontrollably) You think watching these stupid shows is going to magically improve your writing skills? Please. You suck because you’re lazy and you think it should come easy to you.
DENNIS
Shut the fuck up.
JOEY
Because everything should come easy to you, right? Straight A’s in high school, scholarship…
DENNIS
Hey, I worked for that shit, okay?
JOEY
Please –
DENNIS
I’m a fucking workhorse, grinding away –
A beat.
JOEY
Yeah. Whatever.
DENNIS
(half-angrily) I’m sorry, okay?
JOEY
No, you’re not. You’re sitting here feeling sorry for yourself, but you’re thinking that you’re still better than me because you’re not taking physics anymore. Because you’re a Dramatic Writer now. Big whee.
A beat.
DENNIS
I just don’t like the subject. I’ve told you before. Nothing to do with you personally. I fucking laugh at physics Nobel Prize-winners. Every fucking year I Google the winner and I laugh. You know that. It’s not like it’s fucking new or anything.
A beat.
JOEY
Why are you saying ‘fuck’ every other sentence? It’s not – “awesome”.
A longer beat.
DENNIS
Fuck it. I don’t know. I said ‘fuck’ once, and then I said ‘fuck’ again, and now I can’t wake up without saying ‘fuck’. It just – kinda happened. (beat) You should try it. ‘Fuck’. It’s really easy.
A beat.
JOEY
No… I’m not a ‘fuck’ kind of guy. I just look stupid. Like if I try to say ‘babe’ or ‘dude’. (beat) Or ‘chick’. Some guys just look stupid saying ‘chick’. Or ‘fuck’.
DENNIS
Yeah. (beat) I can’t say ‘babe’ or ‘dude’ too. (beat) You wanna go get a movie from Hollywood Video later? I have a lot of self-pity to wallow through, but I could squeeze in a movie. Or two. If you’re feeling rebellious.
JOEY
Yeah. Okay. (beat, then awkwardly) I’m going to go finish some homework first though.
DENNIS
Yeah. Okay. (beat) I’ll be here.
JOEY
Okay.
JOEY
What are we watching?
DENNIS
Buffy.
JOEY
The vampire show?
DENNIS
Yeah.
A beat.
JOEY
I don’t think I’ve actually seen an entire episode of this before.
DENNIS
It’s great. Joss Whedon is a fucking genius. (beat) I can loan you the DVDs again if you want.
JOEY
That’s okay. I didn’t like it in ‘99 and I’m not going to like it now.
A beat.
JOEY (CONT’D)
(grimacing) Oh man. Why did he do that? Why did he have to do that? That was a perfectly good eye.
DENNIS
It’s to increase the stakes. Dramatic tension, give Buffy a stronger incentive to defeat the First Evil. It’s really well-crafted if you really think about it. (beat) But yeah. Sticking someone’s eye out is pretty gross.
JOEY
I’m glad you think so.
DENNIS
But that’s not the worst part. There was an episode –
JOEY
No, no, that’s okay. (beat) God. You need to warn me when stuff like that’s going to happen. (shudders) I should probably stick to Family Guy.
A beat.
DENNIS
I thought you were doing homework.
JOEY
I was doing homework. (beat) Physics.
DENNIS
I’m so glad I dropped that. I sucked so fucking bad at it.
JOEY
Yeah. I remember. I think you traumatized McMahon for life.
DENNIS
That’s what the fucker wrote in my yearbook. (beat, smiling) What a dickhead. Fuck him. Still got here, didn’t I?
A beat.
JOEY
You still got an A for physics though.
DENNIS
That’s because I did all the questions in the fucking RedSpot book. Twice. (beat) It’s always the same questions year after fucking year after fucking year. I could have done it with my eyes closed.
A beat.
JOEY
Yeah. College physics is a lot more interesting, though. We’re learning some pretty cool stuff.
DENNIS
Like?
JOEY
Quantum physics – that’s stuff to do with time. Space-time continuum. Um. The Banach Tarski Paradox.
DENNIS
Are you just making shit up now?
JOEY
No. I’m not. It’s all in the textbook. I can show you if you don’t believe me.
DENNIS
Uh, no, that’s okay. I believe you.
A beat.
JOEY
So what’s going on in your classes now?
DENNIS
Nothing much. Just boring shit.
JOEY
“Boring shit”? Four months ago you were like, “Yes! I got into Tisch!”, and now it’s “boring shit”?
DENNIS
We’re just doing stupid shit now. Four-page scenes, five-minute colloquiums, bits and pieces. (beat) Plus I think my classmates are all fucking morons.
JOEY
Why?
DENNIS
They’re just so fucking stupid. No. Some of them. Okay. Maybe just one. (beat) We’re supposed to write our opinions on these white cards for colloquium, and someone wrote “Yeah man! Racism Is Kool” about something I did on racial discrimination. Cool with a ‘K’. (beat) Stupid fucker. Didn’t even write his name. (beat) Or her name.
JOEY
(tactfully) Yeah, that sucks.
DENNIS
I bet nobody does that in your physics colloquiums.
JOEY
We don’t have physics colloquiums.
DENNIS
Yeah, see? You guys are smarter already. Colloquiums are stupid. (beat) Fucking stupid.
JOEY
Physics isn’t much better. It’s just a bunch of stupid numbers and equations.
DENNIS
But you like it, right?
JOEY
Well, yeah.
DENNIS
And you’re good at it. No. You’re fucking good at it. McMahon drooled all over you. It was so fucking awkward. Like a man-crush. Except creepier.
JOEY
He wasn’t that smart, actually. (beat) And I’m sure if you keep working at your scripts you’ll get better.
DENNIS
It’s not like physics. There’s no magic book I can read. (beat) If I suck at it I suck at it. And I probably do.
A beat.
JOEY
Yeah. Maybe you do.
DENNIS
Thanks.
JOEY
Yeah. Maybe you really do.
DENNIS
What’s your fucking problem, huh? Why’re you being such a fucking dickhead?
JOEY
I’m tired of you making fun of physics. Physics is not stupid. And it’s not easy. And there is no “magic book”. God!
DENNIS
Okay! I’m sorry. Physics isn’t stupid. It’s very hard stuff for very smart people.
JOEY
Oh, fuck you!
A beat.
DENNIS
I don’t want to quarrel with you, okay? I’m just trying to watch my show.
JOEY
Yeah. Sure. (beat, then almost uncontrollably) You think watching these stupid shows is going to magically improve your writing skills? Please. You suck because you’re lazy and you think it should come easy to you.
DENNIS
Shut the fuck up.
JOEY
Because everything should come easy to you, right? Straight A’s in high school, scholarship…
DENNIS
Hey, I worked for that shit, okay?
JOEY
Please –
DENNIS
I’m a fucking workhorse, grinding away –
A beat.
JOEY
Yeah. Whatever.
DENNIS
(half-angrily) I’m sorry, okay?
JOEY
No, you’re not. You’re sitting here feeling sorry for yourself, but you’re thinking that you’re still better than me because you’re not taking physics anymore. Because you’re a Dramatic Writer now. Big whee.
A beat.
DENNIS
I just don’t like the subject. I’ve told you before. Nothing to do with you personally. I fucking laugh at physics Nobel Prize-winners. Every fucking year I Google the winner and I laugh. You know that. It’s not like it’s fucking new or anything.
A beat.
JOEY
Why are you saying ‘fuck’ every other sentence? It’s not – “awesome”.
A longer beat.
DENNIS
Fuck it. I don’t know. I said ‘fuck’ once, and then I said ‘fuck’ again, and now I can’t wake up without saying ‘fuck’. It just – kinda happened. (beat) You should try it. ‘Fuck’. It’s really easy.
A beat.
JOEY
No… I’m not a ‘fuck’ kind of guy. I just look stupid. Like if I try to say ‘babe’ or ‘dude’. (beat) Or ‘chick’. Some guys just look stupid saying ‘chick’. Or ‘fuck’.
DENNIS
Yeah. (beat) I can’t say ‘babe’ or ‘dude’ too. (beat) You wanna go get a movie from Hollywood Video later? I have a lot of self-pity to wallow through, but I could squeeze in a movie. Or two. If you’re feeling rebellious.
JOEY
Yeah. Okay. (beat, then awkwardly) I’m going to go finish some homework first though.
DENNIS
Yeah. Okay. (beat) I’ll be here.
JOEY
Okay.
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