tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-199547462024-03-12T00:53:58.832-04:00Song of a Reformed Headhuntera poet's journal: notes, drafts, and reactionsJee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.comBlogger2932125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-37673873781459537202024-03-11T06:02:00.004-04:002024-03-11T06:02:17.569-04:00George Chauncey's GAY NEW YORK<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> The full title of the book is <a class="bookTitle" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108295.Gay_New_York" itemprop="url" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 1.3; text-decoration-line: none;"><i>Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940</i></a>.<br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Subtle analysis combined with plenty of interesting detail makes this a terrific read. The style is not at all academic, and yet the rigor is so. The research into visual and textual documents held by a wide range of sources, such as purity movements, the police, local newspapers, doctors' reports, is impressive, and the documents themselves are read with sensitivity and insight. My biggest takeaways are (1) when the fairy, the emblem of the period, gives way to the gay, the view of queer men changed from being a gender status to a sexual identity, and (2) the notion of heterosexuality arose together with the notion of homosexuality, when the white middle-class men felt threatened by women's social progress and the fairies' increasing visibility. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-36369634441762724942024-03-11T04:24:00.002-04:002024-03-11T04:24:26.381-04:00Straits Times Reviews SAMPLE AND LOOP<p> <span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">Thanks, Shawn Hoo, for <a href="https://www.straitstimes.com/life/arts/book-review-jee-leong-koh-s-sample-and-loop-is-poetic-panorama-of-singaporeans-in-america" target="_blank">this lovely review</a> of SAMPLE AND LOOP in Singapore's broadsheet, the Straits Times. "His signature sensitivity for rhythm and metre propels the book forward and it swells to a climax in The Dying Nurse. Always the reinventor, Sample and Loop sees Koh create a form that feels unique and accommodates the world of diasporic feeling in its roaming, roving expansiveness."</span></p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">The book is available online in Singapore at <a href="https://www.wordimagesg.com/product-page/sample-and-loop" target="_blank">wordimagesg/product-page/sample-and-loop</a>. It's also available in the US on </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"><a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/sample-and-loop-a-simple-history-of-singaporeans-in-america-jee-leong-koh/20714476?ean=9781958652060">Bookshop.org</a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sample-Loop-History-Singaporeans-America/dp/1958652067/ref=sr_1_7" target="_blank">Amazon</a>.</span><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibwnx-7v_K8sbrrjqOosrB_KOegdZt_ql4i7Q_vmjuLwVPPlhYZiKNdf_xr3IFYPz9MFxwicLJGpCmyaJg6zdQbNrjTduqTJGZeO3nxmU8AYUKy07NJ1AYSbE6YZoyEC3dZrxeMtWLR0Zm39kWDuqWTSJ2RnQZ1Ibzn9XHTV0k8Irn0RPnWxbI/s1573/ST%20Review%20of%20S&L.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1573" data-original-width="1290" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibwnx-7v_K8sbrrjqOosrB_KOegdZt_ql4i7Q_vmjuLwVPPlhYZiKNdf_xr3IFYPz9MFxwicLJGpCmyaJg6zdQbNrjTduqTJGZeO3nxmU8AYUKy07NJ1AYSbE6YZoyEC3dZrxeMtWLR0Zm39kWDuqWTSJ2RnQZ1Ibzn9XHTV0k8Irn0RPnWxbI/w328-h400/ST%20Review%20of%20S&L.jpg" width="328" /></a></div><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "system-ui", ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></div>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-79993288608492101702024-03-05T05:42:00.001-05:002024-03-05T05:42:20.166-05:00In That Strange Place<p> Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up <a href="https://singaporeunbound.org/join" target="_blank">here</a>.</p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Every year I teach sonnets to my Grade IX students, and so every year I teach </span><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/claude-mckay" style="background-color: white; color: #007c89; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">Claude McKay</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">. A Jamaican, an Afro-Caribbean, a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance, a Communist, a bisexual, he wrote not just poems of passion and protest, but also delightful novels about Black life in Jamaica (</span><em style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Banana Bottom</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">) and America (</span><em style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Home to Harlem</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">). One of my favorite poems of his is "The Harlem Dancer," where he finds himself in a highly pensive mood.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Blown by black players upon a picnic day.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The light gauze hanging loose about her form;</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curls</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze;</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">But looking at her falsely-smiling face,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">I knew her self was not in that strange place.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Every year I ask my students what they understand by the last line of the poem ("Her heart was not in the dancing because she was doing it only for white patronage."), and every year I ask them how the speaker "knew" it. Someone or another eventually hits on it: the speaker too is a Black immigrant artist, and he knew it from his own experience.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Then I ask, does it matter that the speaker is male and the dancer is female? For the man to claim to know the innermost part of a woman? Does not the man "devour" her in his claim of knowledge, just as the wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys and girls do? Here, the distinction between speaker and poet becomes important because how can we be sure that the poet has not taken that possibility—that the speaker is also a devourer—into account? Another way of putting this is that the poem always knows more than the poet.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Jee Leong Koh</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">February 29, 2024</span></p>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-85976393934889573582024-02-18T16:57:00.001-05:002024-02-18T16:57:11.716-05:00Didier Eribon's RETURNING TO REIMS<p> Recommended by Henry Abelove, it's an excellent read. In this mix of memoir and critical analysis, French sociologist Didier Eribon asks why he had not written before about his working-class origins when he had written extensively on the also-stigmatized identity of being gay. The flight from Reims, where he grew up, to Paris is, on the one hand, a fulfillment of gay desire and, on the other, an abandonment of his class. Insightful analysis of how the social worlds and identities we are born into—including the worlds of work, education, sports, and "culture"—predetermine so much of our life. They show us what is possible; they also don't show us what is possible. It is a violence inflicted on both gay and working-class people, giving rise to an abiding feeling of shame that we can try to rework politically into pride and action, but we can never free ourselves from. Perhaps I am too influenced by the generic conventions of a memoir, but I would have liked to learn more about the day-to-day details of working, studying, and cruising in Reims. </p><p>Some of my favorite passages:</p><p>"That is why any sociology or any philosophy that begins by placing at the center of its project the "point of view of the actors" and the "meaning they give to their actions" runs the risk of simply reproducing a shorthand version of the mystified relation tha social agents maintain with their own practices and desires, and consequently does nothing more than serve to perpetuate the world as it currently stands—an ideology of justification (for the established order)."</p><p>"A worker's body, as it ages, reveals to anyone who looks at it the truth about the existence of classes."</p><p>"When people write about the working class world, which they rarely do, it is most often because they have left it behind. They thereby contribute to perpetuating the social illegitimacy of the people they are speaking of in the very moment of speaking about them. This happens even if they write with the goal of exposing and critiquing the very status of social illegitimacy to which these people are relegated over and over again, because in writing they take a necessary critical distance, and with it the position of a judge or an evaluator."</p><p>"An interest in artistic and literary objects always ends up contributing, whether or not it happens consciously, to a way of defining yourself as having more self-worth; it helps produce a differentiation from those who lack access to those same objects, or a "distinction," in the sense of a gap between yourself and others..."</p><p>"Merleau-Ponty, too, while emphasizing that "the vote consults people at rest, outside their job, outside their life," that is, according to an abstract and individualizing logic, insists on the fact that "when we vote, it is a form of violence": "Each rejects the suffrage of the others." Far from seeking to collaborate in defining all together what the "general will" of the people might be, far from contributing to the establishment of a consensus or to the emergence of a majority to whose wishes a minority would agree to acquiesce, the working class, or some part of it (and in this it is like any other class: think of the reaction of the bourgeoisie each time the left is elected to power), is there ready to contest the claim that some elected majority represents the "general" point of view...."</p><p>"I might put it this way, taking my inspiration from the metaphoric floral prose of Genet: there comes a moment when, being spat upon, you turn the spit into roses; you turn the verbal attacks into a garland of flowers, into rays of light. There is, in short, a moment when shame turns into pride. This pride is political through and through because it defies the deepest workings of normality and of normativity."</p>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-30402601893359866712024-02-07T04:22:00.002-05:002024-02-07T04:22:21.180-05:00Pomes in Blackbox Manifold<p> I have 3 poems in <a href="https://blackboxmanifold.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/issues/issue-31/jeeleongkohbm31" target="_blank">Blackbox Manifold</a>, published from the University of Sheffield, UK. Grateful thanks to editors Adam Piette and Alex Houen.<br /><br />"A bird in hand is worth two in the bush,<br />they said and fled the violent neighborhood<br />to burbs, who knew zilch of the miracle<br />of the bush burning and not burning up...."</p>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-13401022546107499372024-01-19T05:48:00.001-05:002024-01-19T05:48:06.269-05:00Magical Islands<i>Weekly Column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up <a href="https://singaporeunbound.org/join" target="_blank">here</a>.</i><div><br /></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Yesterday I was asked by a student writer of the school's newspaper to recommend a recent read for an article about students' reading habits and preferences. This was what I wrote back to her:</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">"I just finished reading Rachel Heng's novel </span><a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-great-reclamation-rachel-heng/19082984?ean=9780593420119" style="background-color: white; color: #007c89; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank"><em>The Great Reclamation</em></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">, and I loved it. It is a bildungsroman, but it is also an epic. The story follows Ah Boon from boyhood in a fishing village to adulthood in the government. In the process, it also traces the trajectory of Singapore from the last days of British rule to the heady times of the country's post-independence development. What is lost in the rush to modernize? What does modernization do to one's sense of self? These are questions that the novel explores with keen sympathy and insight. And with magical islands to boot."</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">What I could have added to modernization but did not, was the question about what is lost in the rush to statehood. Don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of colonialism, but neither am I a fan of the nation-state, with its strict territorial boundaries and its rigid definition of citizenship. What is lost when a group of people organize themselves into a nation-state, whether that be Israeli, Palestinian, Catalan, Scottish, or Chinese? Too much, I fear.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">A vital aspect of the imaginative power of </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The Great Reclamation</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> lies in its magical realist vision of these beautiful islands, east of Singapore, around which fishermen could haul in a great catch and still never drain the sea of its life. The islands don't belong to anybody and they belong to everybody. The fishing village, prospering because of these magical islands, proposes an alternative political arrangement free of the state, and an alternative relationship to nature and its bounty. Although the title of the novel refers apparently to the land reclamation project carried out with ruthless efficiency by the independent, modern state, in the novel's vision of the village and the appearing-disappearing islands, the title also points to a political reclamation of an old civic ideal.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Jee Leong Koh</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202020; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">January 18, 2024</span></div>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-71003141280665325962024-01-12T05:01:00.002-05:002024-01-12T05:01:28.893-05:00Resolutions and Irresolutions<p>Column written for the weekly Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up <a href="https://singaporeunbound.org/join" target="_blank">here</a>. </p><p>As poetry editor of the Evergreen Review, I'm organizing the NYC-based journal's new year poetry celebration "Resolutions and Irresolutions," featuring Amber Atiya, Brad Vogel, and Katherine Swett, on Tuesday, Jan 16, 7 pm, at a Tribeca home (RSVP me at jkoh@singaporeunbound.org).</p><p>Why that event name? I was thinking of the obligatory new year resolutions, certainly, but I was also thinking of the equally obligatory irresolutions of poets and poetry. The fiercer the pressure on poetry to be didactic and activist, the harder I find myself resisting it in favor of indecision, ambiguity, questions, and irony.</p><p>There is a gap, I have discovered, between being a citizen and a poet. They are related, but they are not the same. The citizen wants justice above all, the poet wants beauty. And an ideal society worthy of its name must find the space to accommodate the poet, its unreliable ally, its steadfast critic. If not, it is but a totalitarian regime.</p><p>While I was talking with a poet-friend recently, we laughed over the fact that I had titled my recent books in the format of dualities: Connor and Seal, Sample and Loop. I did not plan consciously to do so, but it happened. In fact, as I thought about it, the dualities were there all along: Steep Tea, Bite Harder, Payday Loans. Even when the two words are the same, as in Inspector Inspector, there is a difference, a gap, between them. The difference interests me.</p><p>Jee Leong Koh<br />January 11, 2024</p>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-48949973499972508012023-12-12T20:03:00.003-05:002023-12-12T20:03:55.049-05:00New Singapore Unbound Video<p>We have <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OdvxKfr9YQ" target="_blank">a new video</a> for Singapore Unbound! Thanks to Eunice Lau. The video captures our history and past accomplishments and looks forward to our future directions and plans. Take a look!</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OdvxKfr9YQ" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="337" data-original-width="500" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBn1zqU8_tTyvaawkb7TmhzHtVxxkaAOe3h65CzY3nwJZLay0FhkwEMuPT8rIhlgtGa6Wcmhz5DWrA22OIR-bga7ubkux_TwJ37Fqw4_lRnI6oJ6fJ4QbPeSjDK9uD6OxpTbUjCR06d5OsYF3uRtkbB3gObsFfQRCvm9377pZghoOp7OgsOXmh/s320/Screen%20Shot%202023-12-12%20at%208.02.40%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-65859021522144195352023-11-13T04:08:00.001-05:002023-11-13T04:08:44.106-05:00Sample and Loop: A Simple History of Singaporeans in America<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio2jRbOV2I-qT_mHkhh58TfjuF34oel1KT8-2ZdMoVC3j_PH71IMk09ncsg9lCwMR27_cqiSHLTHHDkg7RpY5-40QpuhK_bHysG1tP2cq-8tsk0jS6-elg_si_gkFSHz2qjM9TYAJX_sficHHmxt-HObIzOyv-PeNhn_cB1a53Z5HSI825WvMu/s1362/Sample%20and%20Loop%20cover.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1362" data-original-width="878" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio2jRbOV2I-qT_mHkhh58TfjuF34oel1KT8-2ZdMoVC3j_PH71IMk09ncsg9lCwMR27_cqiSHLTHHDkg7RpY5-40QpuhK_bHysG1tP2cq-8tsk0jS6-elg_si_gkFSHz2qjM9TYAJX_sficHHmxt-HObIzOyv-PeNhn_cB1a53Z5HSI825WvMu/s320/Sample%20and%20Loop%20cover.jpg" /><span style="text-align: left;"> </span></a></div>
My name is on the book cover, but the book is in fact written by many hands. My grateful thanks to the many Singaporeans in America who shared their stories with me and gave me permission to write them up in verse. Here it is, a book about us: SAMPLE AND LOOP: A SIMPLE HISTORY OF SINGAPOREANS IN AMERICA.
<br /><br />"Based on personal interviews, these poems together tell a part of the story of the migration of Singaporeans to the United States of America. Sample and Loop traces the nonlinear, multidimensional, and surprising trajectory of lived experience in musical verse. Here are the Ceramicist, the Pediatrician, the Scenic Designer, the Chef, the Porn Star, and a host of other migrant-pilgrims sharing the tales of their lives even as they continue to make those lives in a country not of their birth. By narrating their discoveries, troubles, hopes, and sorrows, they refract a powerful beam of light on both countries and compose a wayward music for the road."
<br /><br />All sale proceeds go to Singapore Unbound, the NYC-based literary organization that envisions and works for a creative and fulfilling life for everyone. You can find the book on <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/sample-and-loop-a-simple-history-of-singaporeans-in-america-jee-leong-koh/20714476?ean=9781958652060">Bookshop.org</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sample-Loop-History-Singaporeans-America/dp/1958652067/ref=sr_1_7" target="_blank">Amazon</a>.<div><br /></div>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-6978613883518759322023-10-15T07:11:00.001-04:002023-10-15T07:11:08.704-04:00Theme and Variations<p> With Henry, I saw New York City Ballet danced Balanchine's "Serenade," "Orpheus," and "Theme and Variations" last Tuesday. Balanchine's gift was for composition, color, and rhythm, and not for narrative, as the overly literal "Orpheus." Sara Mearns was outstanding in "Serenade." In "Theme and Variations," Megan Fairchild was lovely, and so was her partner Anthony Huxley, although he was not tall or strong enough to swing her effortlessly with one arm. </p>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-26592496540868546032023-09-15T05:22:00.002-04:002023-09-15T05:22:19.720-04:00Elegiac, Witty, and Bold<p> "Departing significantly from his earlier collection Steep Tea, Jee Leong Koh’s latest work, Inspector Inspector, is an elegiac, yet witty and bold exploration of history, exile and Asian queer identities. Through various forms and narrative, the reader is invited into a variety of spaces: the personal or the intimate, queer spaces of the lover; the everyday for the diasporic community drawing from interviews with Singaporeans living in America; and the elegiac poems in memory of the speaker’s late father." </p><p>Thanks, Jennifer Wong, for <a href="https://poetryschool.com/reviews/review-roundup-inspector-inspector-by-jee-leong-koh-carcanet-faust-by-sandeep-parmar-shearsman-books-o-by-zeina-hashem-beck-penguin-books/" target="_blank">this lovely review</a> of INSPECTOR INSPECTOR. </p>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-42865687751365889932023-09-13T18:35:00.001-04:002023-09-13T18:35:02.362-04:00Opinion: We Call on the President-Elect to Lead Race ConversationsHard on the heels of the election of former Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam to the Presidency of Singapore came <a href="https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/subhas-nair-jail-racial-religion-ill-will-court-3746751" target="_blank">the outrageous sentencing of rapper Subhas Nair </a>to six weeks’ imprisonment for attempting to “promote ill will” between different races in Singapore. His crimes? Making four social-media posts that called attention to the different responses of the authorities and the media to wrongdoing by perpetrators of different races. Subhas is not alone in feeling angry and frustrated about systemic racism in Singapore. More than half (56.2%) of respondents in a<a href="https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/racism-discrimination-singapore-survey-ips-2601276" target="_blank"> 2021 survey on race relations </a>felt that racism was an important problem—this was an increase of almost 10 percentage points from the 46.3% response in the 2016 survey.
<br /><br />During his run for the Presidency, Tharman spoke about <a href="https://www.asiaone.com/singapore/i-just-got-used-tharman-shares-race-related-issues-and-racist-experiences-growing" target="_blank">the racism he experienced</a> while growing up as a brown child. When he returned home from sports on public buses, there were fellow commuters who would not sit beside him. It was also not uncommon that buses did not stop to pick him up when he was the lone person flagging the bus down. Although Tharman assured his interlocutor that things have improved since then, we are not so sure. As recently as 2019, the then Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat, then also tipped to be the next Prime Minister, claimed that <a href="https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/older-generation-singaporeans-not-ready-non-chinese-pm-heng-swee-keat" target="_blank">the older generation of Singaporeans was not ready for a non-Chinese Prime Minister</a>, despite the fact that Tharman’s polls in the general elections—averaging at 70% from a demography of constituents of varied ages and ethnicities—were consistently higher than those of any of his People’s Action Party (PAP) colleagues, with the exception of the Prime Minister. President-elect Tharman smashed that party shibboleth by winning the role with a record vote of 70.4%.
<br /><br />When artist Preeti Nair, the sister of Subhas Nair, asked Tharman during a meeting how Singaporeans should respond to disrespect, he shared about his own experience with racism before saying that he accepted it back then as the social norm. He then added, in Preeti’s paraphrase, that “change falls on people who create art” and through art as a medium “we can kind of talk about different things and kind of shift perspectives wherever we can and encourage that change.” The irony does not escape Preeti and us that Tharman’s recommendation is what she and her brother are doing but for which they are being punished. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=HECgDdSOpchILNKO&v=jmuuNSfH_xk&feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">In her video</a>, she went on to share how disappointed she was with his answer because "for the longest time, many marginalized groups that are [sic] mentioned in my question alone have already chose [sic] the route of acceptance and they have been accepting the way they have been mistreated for a very long time and I think we should pass the acceptance stage of it.”
<br /><br />We cannot agree with Preeti more. Singapore is way past accepting racism as the norm. And resisting racism can come in many ways—art being a sure way to showcase the discomfort of accepting and living with racist attitudes. So, now that campaigning is over and the presidency has been won resoundingly, we call on the President-elect to initiate and lead country-wide, community-deep dialogues on race and racism with the help of civic groups, trained experts on multiculturalism, and sensitized academics and laypersons. President-elect Tharman can display his independence from his former party by making this a focus of his presidency. Although there is rightly skepticism from some quarters about how far a builder of Singapore’s current system would go towards changing it, we are cautiously encouraged by Tharman’s understanding of the link between race and class.<a href="https://www.asiaone.com/singapore/i-just-got-used-tharman-shares-race-related-issues-and-racist-experiences-growing" target="_blank"> In his musings to his interlocutor,</a> he said, “Never think that growing up as a minority is the same as growing up as a majority in Singapore. It isn’t, it isn’t. It’s different,” adding, “and particularly for those who are in the lower rungs of society, it is especially different if you’re a Malay or Indian.”
<br /><br /> Therefore, we call on the President-elect: <div>- to lead conversations about racial prejudice and discrimination in the daily life and the workplace </div><div>- to lead conversations about patronizing and parsimonious attitudes towards welfare recipients, in particular, brown recipients </div><div>- to lead conversations about the socioeconomic causes of criminalized activities such as drug dealing and consumption, in which brown Singaporeans are disproportionately represented </div><div>- to lead conversations on the unconscionable treatment of migrant workers and domestic helpers, in keeping with the “Respect for All” campaign slogan of the President-elect.
<br /><br />We want President-elect Tharman to truly be a “President for a new era” as he has pledged. We want him to be a sphere of influence and change—encouraging the authorities to reinterpret the racial and religious harmony laws with forbearance, widening the space for expression so that the younger generation of artists like Subhas and Preeti can express their views by using parody, humor, and irony, without the oppressive fear of reprisals.
<br /><br />We understand that the Elected Presidency is a flawed institution—it divides the nation without giving the winner much power constitutionally—but the Presidency still carries an enormous moral force, and we call on the President-elect, who will become President on September 14 with a strong people’s mandate, to assert that power to unite Singapore by discussing head-on issues of race and racism, as part of the long-term healing for the country.
<br /><br />Editorial Board, Singapore Unbound
<br />September 12, 2023
<br /><br /><a href="https://singaporeunbound.org/" target="_blank">Singapore Unbound</a> is a NYC-based literary organization dedicated to the advancement of freedom of expression and equal rights for all through cultural exchange and activism.
The role of Singapore Unbound’s Editorial Board is to provide readers with a thoughtful and independent perspective on issues that resonate with our organization’s values. The Board also seeks to engage readers in a critical dialogue about important social questions by providing them with the information to make decisions and take actions for the common good.
<br /><br /> The Editorial Board develops its positions on a variety of issues, but the views expressed are independent of the rest of the organization. Editorials are unsigned to reflect the fact that they represent the collective views of the Board instead of any individual member.</div>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-20559767565013221632023-09-10T13:42:00.001-04:002023-09-10T13:42:07.976-04:00The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, by Jacqueline Rose<p> <span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The most valuable essays here are "To Die One's Own Death" and "In Extremis" on Simone Weil. The first argues persuasively, to my mind, that Freud's concept of the death drive arose from the death of his most loved daughter Sophie Halberstadt-Freud due to the 'Spanish' flu. That theoretical innovation led to, in Rose's words, "a considerable downgrade in the status of the drives of self-preservation and mastery that were key to his earlier topography of the mind, as they are all now seen to be working in the service of the organism's need to follow the path to its own death," or as Freud puts it in </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">, "The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion." Rose applies this insight to our experience of callous and careless death during the COVID pandemic and derives an ethical guide: we should work for a fairer world where people are enabled not only to live free and fulfilling lives, but also to choose how they wish to die.</span></p><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The Simone Weil essay introduced me to a writer whom I had thought of only as a philosopher and a mystic, but not as a trade unionist and would-be French Resistance fighter. What Rose says about Weil's habitual use of analogy as a means of argumentation is very interesting: "Visceral and unworldly, Weil's analogies push at the limits of language, giving voice to something painful or that eludes understanding.... Analogy is a spiritual principle, since it is only by means of 'analogy and transference' that our attachment to particular human beings can be raised to the level of universal love."</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The rest of the essays in the book say what needs to be said about the gendered violence, governmental ineptitude, and global inequities exposed and increased by COVID, but the same points were made by many other writers. The one gem, a powerful guide-post, comes in the essay "Life after Death," about living post-pandemic: "One place to begin would be to make room for the complex legacies of the human mind, without the need to push reckoning aside. Past wrongs would not be subject to denial, as if our personal or national identities depend on a pseudo-innocence which absolves us of all crimes. </span><b style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Let the insights of the analytic couch percolate into our public and political lives, and no less crucially, the other way round (we need to acknowledge the weight of historical affliction on our dreams) </b><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">[emphasis mine]."</span><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></div>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-44714898571924166412023-09-09T13:38:00.001-04:002023-09-09T13:38:07.998-04:00Freud and the Non-European<p> A brilliant reading of Freud's <i>Moses and Monotheism</i> by the late Edward Said. It originates as a talk given at the Freud Museum in London. After Said's talk, Jacqueline Rose responded, and her response was fittingly included in the Verso book.</p><p>Said concludes:</p><p>"Freud's uneasy relationship with the orthodoxy of his own community is very much a part of the complex of ideas so well described by Deutscher, who forgets to mention what I think is an essential component of it: its irremediably diasporic, unhoused character. This is a subject which George Steiner has celebrated with great elan for many years. But I would want to quality Deutscher by saying that this needn't be seen only as a Jewish characteristic; in our age of vast population transfers, of refugees, exiles, expatriates and immigrants, it can also be identified in the diasporic, wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness of someone who is both inside and outside of his or her community. This is now a relatively widespread phenomenon, even though an understanding of what that condition means is far from common. Freud's meditations and insistence on the non-European from a Jewish point of view provide, I think, an admirable sketch of what it entails, by way of refusing to resolve identity into some of the nationalist or religious herds in which so many people want so desperately to run. More bold is Freud's profound exemplification of the insight that even for the most definable, the most identifiable, the most stubborn, communal identity—for him, this was the Jewish identity—there are inherent limits that prevent if from being fully incorporated into one, and only one, Identity.</p><p>"Freud's symbol of those limits was that the founder of Jewish identity was himself a non-European Egyptian. In other words, identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed, because Moses was Egyptian, and therefore always outside the identity inside which so many have stood, and suffered—and later, perhaps, even triumphed. The strength of this thought is, I believe, that it can be articulated in and speak to other besieged identities as well—not through dispensing palliatives such as tolerance and compassion but, rather, by attending to it as a troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular wound—the essence of the cosmopolitan, from which there can be no recovery, no state of resolved or Stoic calm, and no utopian reconciliation even within itself. This is a necessary psychological experience, Freud says, but the problem is that he doesn't give any indication of how long it must be tolerated or whether, properly speaking, it has a real history—history being always that which comes after and, all too often, either overrides or represses the flaw. The questions Freud therefore leaves us with are: can so utterly indecisive and so deeply undetermined a history ever <i>be</i> written? In what language, and with what sort of vocabulary? </p><p>Can it aspire to the condition of a politics of diaspora life? Can it ever become the not-so-precarious foundation in the land of Jews and Palestinians of a bi-national state in which Israel and Palestine are parts, rather than antagonists of each other's history and underlying reality? I myself believe so—as much because Freud's unresolved sense of identity is so fruitful an example, as because the condition he takes such pains to elucidate is actually more general in the non-European world than he suspected."</p><p>Properly for a Freudian, Jacqueline Rose was far less optimistic about the prospects of such a notion, as she made clear in her response to Said's lecture. </p><p>"What I am suggesting is that we move, in a sense, further along the path of Said's reading: that we should see Freud less as purely the diagnostician of—more squarely <i>inside</i>—the dilemma of identity which he describes. More simply, I am suggesting that the fixity of identity—for Freud, for any of us—is something from which it is very hard to escape—harder than Said, for wholly admirable motives, wants it to be. And on this subject, <i>Moses and Monotheism</i> also has a great deal to say. For if it offers an account, so brilliantly drawn out here this evening, of identities that know their own provisionality, it also does the opposite. In addition to bearing all the marks of late style so vividly characterized by Said—and, indeed, perhaps for that very reason—Moses and Monotheism is also one of Freud's most violent texts.... It offers the thesis, already adumbrated in <i>Totem and Taboo</i>, that an act of murder is constitutive of the social tie. In fact monotheism, together with the "advance in intellectuality" that is said to accompany it, takes hold only because of the bloody deed which presided over its birth. As has often been pointed out, you can reject the flawed historical argument of both these texts while accepting the underlying thesis that there is no sociality without violence, that people are most powerfully and effectively united by what they agree to hate. What binds the people to each other and to their God is that they killed him.</p><p>"It would be odd, then, if Freud himself was free of all the conflictual strains of identity to which, in this last work, he gives such potent and strange shape. What a people have in common, Freud suggests, is a trauma: a "knowledge"—to return to the quote from Said's <i>Beginnings</i>—so devastating as to be unbearable in one's down sight, and only slightly more bearable as a subject of psychoanalytic investigation. This is, if you like, the other half of the story. For trauma, far from generating freedom, openness to others as well as to the divided and unresolved fragments of self, leads to a very different kind of fragmentation—one which is, in Freud's own words, "devastating", and causes identities to batten down, to go exactly the other way: towards dogma, the dangers of coercive and coercing forms of faith? Are we at risk of idealizing the flaws and fissures of identity?...</p><p>"... I am less sanguine about the ability of new forms of nationalist to bypass the insanity of the group, especially given the traumatized history of both sides of the conflict in the Middle East. As Judge Richard Gladstone put it at the Ernest Jones Memorial Lecture in October, on the subject of the Albanians of Kosovo, we have an unrealistic expectation of how traumatized peoples will behave.</p><p>"And I believe that Freud was less sanguine too—not only because, as Edward Said puts it, history represses the flaw, but because the most historically attested response to trauma is to repeat it. It is for similar reasons that I believe Freud to have been more torn between belonging and not belonging as a Jew, between his own remarkable vision of the Jew as created by a non-European and his belief in the Jew as the bravest—even the last—embodiment of the best of the spirit of Europe; between the Jew as eternal foreigner and the Jew as someone who wanted to enter the world of nations, who wanted, deluded or not, to go home. This evening, Edward Said has paid the most extraordinary tribute to Freud by taking out of his last work a vision of identity as able to move beyond the dangers of identity in our times. If I dissent a little, it is not just because I am not sure that Freud was quite there, but also because I wonder—as we look at the world around us today—whether any of us ever will be."</p>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-87879862368912527022023-08-30T05:50:00.004-04:002023-08-30T05:51:32.956-04:00Opinion: Who Owns the Presidential Election?<p> </p><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="mcnTextBlock" style="border-collapse: collapse; min-width: 100%; text-size-adjust: 100%; width: 100%;"><tbody class="mcnTextBlockOuter"><tr><td class="mcnTextBlockInner" style="padding-top: 9px; text-size-adjust: 100%;" valign="top"><table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="mcnTextContentContainer" style="border-collapse: collapse; max-width: 100%; min-width: 100%; text-size-adjust: 100%; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="mcnTextContent" style="color: #202020; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px; padding: 0px 18px 9px; text-size-adjust: 100%; word-break: break-word;" valign="top"><div dir="auto"><p data-pm-slice="1 1 []" style="line-height: 21px; margin: 10px 0px; padding: 0px; text-size-adjust: 100%;">One of the effects of <a href="https://time.com/6300630/singapore-scandals-criticism-thin-skinned/" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">the July 2023 scandals</a> that hit the Singapore government is the state’s loss of control over the narrative around the upcoming Presidential Election. The Elected Presidency, an invention of the governing party, has come <a href="https://www.academia.sg/academic-views/elected-president/" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">under strong fire</a> for being a flawed institution that was created out of political maneuvering and expediency. Instead of uniting the country’s people behind a ceremonial but vital figurehead, it has been struck by the lightning of political dissent and division. On state-controlled media, the ruling party’s candidate Tharman Shanmugaratnam attempts to burnish his independent (and dare we say it, populist) credentials by describing himself as <a href="https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/presidential-election-2023-tharman-shanmugaratnam-president-interview-3712791" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">a former student activist</a>, an irony not lost on activists persecuted by the state. This blatant attempt to appeal to the younger and more politically conscious generation only throws up questions about Tharman’s complicity with past and present state persecution.<br /> <br />Control of the electoral discourse has almost imperceptibly passed into the hands of the citizens themselves. No longer dictated from above, the discourse is now taken up and developed by multiple commentators over multiple sites. Yet it is not fragmented and isolated but shows the remarkable coherence of argumentation: assertions are elaborated, supported, and often criticized in a true, democratic fashion. They challenge the rules of the race that limit the field to individuals who would be no threat to the ruling party PAP but do not guarantee only quality candidates become eligible. As a result, we have a Presidential candidate, Tan Kin Lian, whose <a href="https://singaporeuncensored.com/tan-kin-lian-fires-back-whats-wrong-with-looking-at-pretty-girls-they-prefer-attention/" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">sexist</a>, <a href="https://sg.news.yahoo.com/tan-kin-lian-alleged-racist-033053745.html" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">racist</a>, <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@cowpehcowboo/video/7270728433716432129" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">homophobic</a>, and <a href="https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/tan-kin-lian-president-spouse-singaporean-election-3723921?ref=wethecitizens.net" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">nativist</a> views will pose a threat to the social fabric of Singapore if he is elected. They took screenshots of his now-deleted posts and went viral with them, informing and engaging the younger demographic of voters who prefer to consume their daily dose of current affairs on social media platforms instead of traditional MSM channels. They derided the number of times the Constitution has been amended in order to raise the corporate threshold for eligible candidates to such stringent standards that even a businessman with deep pockets and experience like George Goh is disqualified—further reinforcing the perception that these changes make an institution that is inherently undemocratic <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CwFczfvSpBa/?igshid=MWZjMTM2ODFkZg==" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">even more so</a>. They openly mull over <a href="https://www.wethecitizens.net/presidential-election-nope/" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">spoiling the vote</a> as a “protest against the protest candidate” who isn’t a viable option, and more importantly, against a flawed system that keeps reinforcing this Orwellian conundrum for voters in the first place.<br /> <br />They are <a href="https://www.jom.media/" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">independent media outlets</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jwham/" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">netizens</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CwPopH4haX5/" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">comedians</a>, <a href="https://www.academia.sg/academic-views/lecture-kevin-tan-presidency/" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">academics</a>, workers, and students, who desire an authentic choice and the right to exercise their vote as citizens of the Republic of Singapore. They are holding discussions not only in private conversations but, more importantly, on public platforms in full view of Singaporeans—on <a href="https://gutzy.asia/" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">websites</a>, <a href="https://politicalsophistry.wordpress.com/" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">blogs</a>, <a href="https://www.wethecitizens.net/" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">newsletters</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/planb.sg/" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">podcasts</a>, and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/wakeupsingapore/" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">social media</a>. They are contributing to an increasingly vibrant independent media landscape, emboldened to speak despite state strictures and clampdown. They are developing a maturing democracy, without waiting for the permission to proceed. Whichever way you choose to vote (or not), and whatever the results, there is already a clear winner: they, or rather, we, the people. <br /><br />Editorial Board, Singapore Unbound<br /><br /><a href="https://singaporeunbound.org/" style="color: #007c89; text-size-adjust: 100%;" target="_blank">Singapore Unbound</a> is a NYC-based literary organization dedicated to the advancement of freedom of expression and equal rights for all through cultural exchange and activism.<br /><br />The role of Singapore Unbound’s Editorial Board is to provide readers with a thoughtful and independent perspective on issues that resonate with our organization’s values. The Board also seeks to engage readers in a critical dialogue about important social questions by providing them with the information to make decisions and take actions for the common good.<br /><br />The Editorial Board develops its positions on a variety of issues, but the views expressed are independent of the rest of the organization. Editorials are unsigned to reflect the fact that they represent the collective views of the Board instead of any individual member.</p></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="mcnTextBlock" style="border-collapse: collapse; min-width: 100%; text-size-adjust: 100%; width: 100%;"><tbody class="mcnTextBlockOuter"><tr><td class="mcnTextBlockInner" style="padding-top: 9px; text-size-adjust: 100%;" valign="top"><table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="mcnTextContentContainer" style="border-collapse: collapse; max-width: 100%; min-width: 100%; text-size-adjust: 100%; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="mcnTextContent" style="color: #656565; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px; padding: 0px 18px 9px; text-align: center; text-size-adjust: 100%; word-break: break-word;" valign="top"></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="mcnTextBlock" style="border-collapse: collapse; min-width: 100%; text-size-adjust: 100%; width: 100%;"><tbody class="mcnTextBlockOuter"></tbody></table>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-28884590697290741562023-08-24T09:10:00.003-04:002023-08-24T09:10:30.070-04:00Foster Child of New York<i>Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up <a href="https://singaporeunbound.org/join" target="_blank">here</a>. </i><div><br /></div><div>My father died five years ago. Yesterday was his death anniversary. Five years seems wrong. It feels both too long and too short. In this state of unmooring, one becomes time's orphan, just as moving from Singapore to New York made me an orphan of place. I have lived in New York as a foster child for 20 years. 20 years seems wrong too, for the same reason. Yesterday I tried to recall the exact day I landed in JFK airport and took the bus to Grand Central Station, in order to board the train to Sarah Lawrence College, where I was to learn how to write, but I could not remember. What I remembered was sitting across from an older Jewish man on the train. He told me he was a jeweler who opened his own shop. Tonight, 20 years after I came to this city to see if I would be any good as a poet, I am having dinner with a younger Singaporean poet and her mom. She is here to pursue further training in the craft of writing, as I did. She will meet a host of interesting people in NYC, the sedulous, the sadducees, the seducers. I hope she will meet my jeweler. </div><div><br /></div>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-5103023576202352742023-08-17T04:22:00.002-04:002023-08-17T04:22:15.176-04:00This Sorrow That Lifts Me UpPortuguese poet Florbela Espanca (1894-1930), in her life and work, reminds me quite a bit of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The disadvantaged background giving rise to huge literary ambitions. The New Woman of early 20th century. Loving the sonnet form for its combination of control and ecstasy. The sustained aesthetics of late Romanticism and early Modernism. Her frequent use of exclamations is off-putting to my ear, but the deployment of ellipses gives her sonnets a rare quality of inarticulateness before the ineffable. <div><br /></div>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-12024293845319962482023-08-15T05:14:00.005-04:002023-08-15T05:14:41.964-04:00Useful Work versus Useless ToilAll four essays originated as lectures. Morris gives a clear and eloquent explanation of his Socialism in the essays "Useful Work versus Useless Toil" and "How I Became a Socialist." The former lays interesting stress on the wastefulness of Capitalism, a useful counterpoint to how capitalist production is often seen as as the most efficient use of resources. The essay also links the hopes of labor to the hope for a Socialist future in a rhetorically useful move. <div><br /></div><div>"What is the nature of the hope which, when it is present in work, makes it worth doing? </div><div><br /></div><div>"It is threefold, I think—hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and hope of these also in some abundance and of good quality; rest enough and good enough to be worth having; product worth having by one who is neither a fool nor an ascetic; pleasure enough for all of us to be conscious of it while we are at work; not a mere habit, the loss of which we shall feel as a fidgety man feels the loss of the bit of string he fidgets with."</div><div><br /></div><div>The famous essay "Gothic Architecture" I find thought-provoking, especially in its castigation of the Renaissance as a kind of slavish imitation of the Greeks and Romans and in its praise of Gothic architecture, based on the invention of the arch, as natural and reasonable to a free and equal society. I don't know enough about art history to judge his argument well, but in its outline, as given in this essay, I don't find it entirely persuasive. </div><div><br /></div><div>The essay "Lesser Arts," originally titled "The Decorative Arts," is the least interesting one to me, but even here, Morris's insistence on the ethical meaning of aesthetic forms is bracing, as is his advocacy of a back-to-the-crafts approach to revitalizing both the Greater and the Lesser Arts. </div><div><br /></div>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-54464872645525876622023-08-04T11:38:00.003-04:002023-08-04T11:38:15.058-04:00Georges Bataille's Critical Essays 1 1944-1948<p> From "A Morality Based on Misfortune: <i>The Plague</i>" (1947):</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Camus's example shows how one may start out from a revolt-based morality and slide back quickly into a depressed one.</p><p>This is because a morality founded upon passion, upon an irreducible part of ourselves, is often accompanied by bad conscience: how are we to avoid feeling guilty, certain as we are that we are concealing the face of Caligula within ourselves? No one is in any doubt, the power associated with the unleashing of passion is a fearsome danger for <i>possible life</i>. What is ordinarily missed is that the even is not then the product of passion, but of power. Even in Caligula one could not say that the evil was profound, since his capricious acts rapidly destroy his power—and he knows it. Evil is what is done by the SS in the concentration camps; it is what acquires power by killing and, by killing, increases the power of the regime it serves. One cannot even say exactly that evil lies in power (otherwise there would be evil in tigers); evil lies in the fact that passion has grown servile, has placed itself in the service of a legal power that can only exert itself coldly. Pure passion is naturally in revolt and never wants legal power; generally, it does not even have power as its end but ruin, excessive expenditure rapidly destroying power.</p><p>*</p></blockquote><p></p><p>From "From Existentialism to the Primacy of the Economy" (1947):</p><p></p><blockquote>The word profit <i>jars</i>, admittedly, if used in connection with the <i>present instant</i>, but that incompatibility reveals precisely what governs the narrowness of economics: the narrowness of the language of knowledge, which is not able, as a general rule, to reckon with the present. In discursive language, the present is the poor relation (or whipping boy): what has meaning only for the present has, in reality, no meaning; what has value only for the present is not useful. An immense State has ascribed to itself the purpose of emancipating human beings once and for all, but that seductive end has led it, in a privileged way, into the clutches of logic: since the present instant has meaning only in a way that runs counter to logic, en entire people is subject to an <i>actual</i> heightened servitude, which, as a consequence, does not count, in the name of a nonexistent emancipation, which, as a consequence is the very <i>meaning</i> of servitude. And indeed, when it comes to the strenuous effort currently stirring the world, who could set the perfect impotence of the instant against it? I shall confine myself to showing that unproductive expenditure, drawing its meaning from the current instant, is seldom, as we imagine, wastage; as a general rule, <i>it has the positive value of art</i>. Living creatures are so constructed that, as they expend themselves, their excess of energy radiates out: the effect of this is the brilliance that attracts us, above and beyond the needs that are satisfied. Art is precisely this positive squandering of energy; it is an economic fact and the economy gives it a—theoretically measurable—value as soon as it accepts the sense of the present.</blockquote><p></p><p>*</p><p>From "The Sexual revolution and the Kinsey Report" (1948):</p><p></p><blockquote><p>This deserves precise formulation:</p><p><i>'Animality' or sexual exuberance is the element within us which prevents our being reduced to things.</i></p><p><i>'Humanity,' on the other hand in its specificity in working time, tends to make us into things, at the expense of our sexual exuberance.</i></p></blockquote><p><i></i></p><p><br /></p>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-65435163202416435802023-06-17T10:35:00.005-04:002023-06-17T10:36:10.855-04:00Reading at Kinokuniya in Singapore<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdzmJs-xQYzrp3LbGXAY3ZyjFUMH-_fSCgW3Ug3C_kw_4vDe7EQZiGBTB5bxhEIWYBI_pUG_kqfS3ULK30IxYKHe2BWBYu4onx9h4MpPFAxFKlBxThqa2caPXmR04Lc6Vpw36cILOE0EDUbL9f91qcuxj_K98ni7ZP1ZT9Q-ZF1s-SM39Pkg/s2000/MEET%20THE%20AUTHOR%20OF%20INSPECTOR%20INSPECTOR%20(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2000" data-original-width="1414" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdzmJs-xQYzrp3LbGXAY3ZyjFUMH-_fSCgW3Ug3C_kw_4vDe7EQZiGBTB5bxhEIWYBI_pUG_kqfS3ULK30IxYKHe2BWBYu4onx9h4MpPFAxFKlBxThqa2caPXmR04Lc6Vpw36cILOE0EDUbL9f91qcuxj_K98ni7ZP1ZT9Q-ZF1s-SM39Pkg/w283-h400/MEET%20THE%20AUTHOR%20OF%20INSPECTOR%20INSPECTOR%20(1).jpg" width="283" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p>I will be reading from Inspector2 on Friday, July 7, 7.30-8.30 pm, at Kinokuniya Main Store in Singapore. Jamie Foo will moderate the Q&A. Join us!</p><p><br /></p>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-69672987551803141352023-06-09T06:13:00.003-04:002023-06-09T06:13:49.363-04:00Singapore's 1st-ever Independent Media Fair<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/singapore-independent-media-fair-tickets-652604436437" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="6912" data-original-width="13824" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCcwVfiiez5cp3xTrpD3G6qRLbX6IhW50lpoUzxEcFxYRb1ngP99QonsMxW69jApI-GRxD3l0Lpqi2y7pqRiBi-rKjwJmAAEB3OvgF-hzmWaqBWHxgLL2mGKyNgdJqnyUytF5s6KDpq7hJdbjy3RwBVb8h9n_wWdbiXHKWQe4ViSdDoci63Q/w640-h320/2.png" width="640" /></a></div>
Singapore Unbound and Mekong Review are jointly organizing the first-ever independent media fair in Singapore. With interesting exhibition booths and exciting speaker events, the fair is free and open to the public. Donations welcomed.<a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/singapore-independent-media-fair-tickets-652604436437" target="_blank"> Join the conversation!</a><div> </div><div>Fair Exhibition (2.00-6.30 pm, 6th floor) </div><div><br /></div><div>Ethos Books </div><div>Function 8 </div><div>Gaudy Boy Press </div><div>Jom </div><div>Kontinentalist </div><div>Lepak Conversations </div><div>Meantime Magazine </div><div>Mekong Review </div><div>New Naratif </div><div>Singapore Climate Rally </div><div>Wake Up Singapore </div><div>and more! </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Open Forum: Why Do We Need an Independent Media? (2.30-4.00 pm, Ruby Room, 5th floor) </div><div><br /></div><div> What kinds of activities does the term “media” cover? What is meant by the term “independent”? If the media are to be independent, who exercises oversight? What are the sources of their authority and validity? What about objectivity or evenhandedness? </div><div><br /></div><div>Panelists: Ariffin Sha (Wake Up Singapore), Loh Pei Ying (Head and Co-Founder, Kontinentalist), and Ng Kah Gay (Publisher, Ethos Books) </div><div><br /></div><div>Moderator: Sudhir Vadaketh (Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Jom) </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Author Reading and Discussion: The Uses of Storytelling (4.30-6.00 pm, Ruby Room, 5th floor) </div><div><br /></div><div>How is storytelling related to journalism and other media products? Is there any difference between art and propaganda? What kind of stories make the most impact on readers and listeners? </div><div><br /></div><div>Panelists: Alfian Sa’at (Playwright, Poet, and Writer), Kelly Leow (Co-Writer and Co-Producer, Saga, the AWARE Podcast), and Victor Fernando R. Ocampo (Speculative Fiction Author) </div><div><br /></div><div>Moderator: Koh Jee Leong (Founder, Singapore Unbound, and Publisher, Gaudy Boy) </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Fair Organizers: Mekong Review and Singapore Unbound </div><div>Venue Partner: The Projector </div><div><a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/singapore-independent-media-fair-tickets-652604436437" target="_blank">Register Now!</a></div>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-5102771370602130972023-06-01T09:36:00.006-04:002023-06-01T09:37:44.114-04:00Steep Tea in Exact Editions' Pride Month Reading ListPleased to share with you that my book of poems <i>Steep Tea</i> (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by the <i>Financial Times</i> in the UK and a Finalist by the Lambda Literary Awards in the US, is included in <a href="https://blog.exacteditions.com/reading-list-lgbtq-pride-month/" target="_blank">Exact Editions' Reading List for LGBTQ+ Pride Month</a> this year. Exact Editions is a digital publishing company based in London. Follow the link and you can read a sample of my book online and, if you like it well enough, purchase an e-copy. <div><br /><div><br /> <div><br /></div></div></div>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-30959754931697669242023-05-15T18:01:00.005-04:002023-05-15T18:01:58.720-04:00Monica Youn's FROM FROMI <a href="https://poetryschool.com/theblog/review-from-from-by-monica-youn/" target="_blank">reviewed</a> Monica Youn's new book FROM FROM for The Poetry School in the UK.
<br /><br />"From From, Monica Youn’s fourth book of poems, is a striking departure from her first three books. Instead of addressing race obliquely and occasionally, From From confronts it full-on, from beginning to end. Interviewed in Bomb magazine, Youn explained, ‘I always felt I had permission to talk about race, but I wanted to figure out a way to write about race that would ring true to me.’ The child of Korean immigrants, Youn trains her incisive intelligence and considerable lyrical gift on her experience growing up in Texas and living in New York as a racial minority. The result is a volume of poems that is deeply heartfelt yet bracingly suspicious, exploratory and accomplished...."
<br /><br />If you're in NYC and would like to hear Monica Youn read, please consider coming to this fun Happy Hour jointly organized by the NY Public Library and Singapore Unbound on Friday, May 26, 5.30-7.30 pm, on a midtown rooftop. Monica Youn will be reading with Vijay Seshadri and Hamid Roslan. The event is free, but registration is <a href=" https://www.nypl.org/.../prog.../2023/05/26/singaporeunbound" target="_blank">required</a>.<div><br /></div>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-15343608248043329552023-04-16T11:56:00.003-04:002023-04-16T11:56:31.703-04:00Maylis de Kerangal's EASTBOUNDNothing extra, nothing wasted, that's how good this novella is. Met the novelist and her son at the launch of the Archipelago Books translation (by Jessica Moore) in a beautiful brownstone home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19954746.post-52412866276348847932023-04-09T12:17:00.003-04:002023-04-09T12:17:13.185-04:00Erich Fromm's BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION<p> "The alienated patient, in search for and in need of an idol, finds the analyst and usually endows him with the qualities of his father and mother as the two powerful persons he knew as a child. Thus the <i>content</i> of transference is usually related to infantile patterns while its <i>intensity</i> is the result of the patient's alienation. Needless to add that the transference phenomenon is not restricted to the analytic situation. It is to be found in all forms of idolization of authority figures, in political, religious, and social life." (53)</p><p>"Just as our sense develop and become human senses in the process of their productive relatedness to nature, our relatedness to man, says Marx, becomes human relatedness in the act of loving. "Let us assume <i>man</i> to be <i>man</i>, and his relation to the world to be a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, etc. If you wish to enjoy art you must be an artistically inclined person; if you wish to influence other people you must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging effect upon others. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a <i>specific expression</i>, corresponding to the object of your will, of your <i>real individual life</i>. If you love without evoking love in return, i.e., if you are not able, by the <i>manifestation</i> of yourself as a loving person, to make yourself a <i>beloved person</i>, then your love is impotent and a misfortune." (69; Marx, in Economic and Philosophical manuscripts, p. 168)</p><p>"I want to emphasize again that the theory that ideas are determined by the forms of economic and social life does not imply that they have no validity of their own or that they are mere "reflexes" of economic needs. The ideal of freedom, for instance, is deeply rooted in the nature of man, and it is precisely for this reason that it was an ideal for the Hebrews in Egypt, the slaves in Rome, the German peasants in the sixteenth century, the German workers who fought the dictators of East Germany. On the other hand, the idea of authority and order is also deeply implanted in human existence. It is precisely because any given social order can appeal to ideas which transcend the necessities of this order that they can become so potent and so appealing to the human heart. Yet why a certain idea gains ascendancy and popularity is to be understood in historical terms, that is, in terms of the social character produced in a given culture." (86)</p><p>"Awareness of the unconscious is an experience which is characterized by its spontaneity and suddenness. One's eyes are suddenly opened; oneself and the world appear in a different light, as seen from a different viewpoint. There is usually a great deal of anxiety aroused while the experience takes place, while afterward a new feeling of strength is present. The process of discovering the unconscious can be described as a series of ever-widening experiences, which are deeply felt and which transcend theoretical, intellectual knowledge." (94)</p><p>"Both for Spinoza and for Marx the aim of life is liberation from bondage, and the way to this aim is the overcoming of illusions and the full use of our active powers." (109)</p><p>"As to the <i>contents of the unconscious</i>, no generalization is possible. But one statement can be made: it always represents the whole man, with all his potentialities for darkness and light; it always contains the basis for the different answers which man is capable of giving to the question which existence poses. In the extreme case of the most regressive cultures, bent on returning to animal existence, this very wish is predominant and conscious, while all strivings to emerge from this level are repressed. In a culture which has moved from the regressive to the spiritual-progressive goal, the forces representing the dark are unconscious. But man, in any culture, has all the potentialities within himself; he is the archaic man, the beast of prey, the cannibal, the idolator, and he is the being with a capacity for reason, for love, for justice. The content of the unconscious, then, is neither the good nor the evil, the rational nor the irrational: it is both; it is all that is human. <i>The unconscious is the whole man—minus that part of him which corresponds to his society</i>. Consciousness represents social man, the accidental limitations set by the historical situation into which an individual is thrown. Unconsciousness represents universal man, the whole man, rooted in the cosmos; it represents the plant in him, the animal in him, the spirit in him; it represents his past, down to the dawn of human existence, and it represents his future up to the day when man will have become fully human, and when nature will be humanized as man will be "naturalized." (128-129)</p><p>"Furthermore, any new discovery is an adventure, and the adventures require not only a certain degree of inner security, but also a validity and joy which can be found only in those for whom living is more than releasing tensions and avoiding pain. In order to reduce the general level of stupidity, we need not more "intellect" but a different kind of character; men who are independent, adventurous, and who are in love with life." (155)</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Jee Leonghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01979179110231643931noreply@blogger.com0