Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Beneath the gleaming facade of Singapore lies a palpable angst among its people. Through the perceptive analysis of interviews with 92 Singaporeans of different ethnicities, classes, educational levels, occupations, genders, and marital statuses, Singaporean sociologist TEO You Yenn puts her finger  on the sore spot in her new book Unease: Life in Singapore Families . Cannily she locates this gnawing sense of unease in the gap between national aspirations and familial realities. Singapore claims to be pro-family, and yet family life is hectic, anxious, and burdensome. What follows is a fine-grained examination of societal structure (institutions, policies, etc.) and culture (norms, values, habits, etc.), the former creating the latter, the latter reinforcing the former, including a chapter devoted to gender and another to class. The book would be of interest only to scholars and Singaporeans if it does not also have penetrating things to say about inequality. The problem of inequal...

"Ethnographies are mountains and endure," writes Dentan, but "theories are mayflies and don't." This work of ethnography is certain to endure like the mountain it is, and its theory about Semai peaceability is likely to be developed, strengthened, and affirmed by future ethnographers. To state its theory simplistically, Dentan argues that Semai peaceability originated as a functioning adaptation to Malay and British invasion, colonization, and child slavery. The Semai response to overwhelming violence, rape, and kidnapping is to flee, and when they cannot flee from the encroaching hegemonic state, to "surrender," in the author's specific sense of acting with the understanding that success is not within their control. The alternative is death and extinction. Semai elaborated this response into a religion of demon lovers (identification with one's oppressors), protective rituals, an egalitarian ethos, and a respectful way of raising kids, all des...

Finished reading Emmanuel Carrère's Lives Other Than My Own tonight. Impressed by his careful portraits of loss, a child to the tsunami at Sri Lanka, and a wife and mother to cancer. The writing is not just empathetic but keenly aware of the limits of empathy. He is hard on himself, particularly on his writerly egotism, especially in the earlier chapters. One wishes that either he complicates that simple self-criticism or amplifies it with detail and illustration, but perhaps the latter choice would have tipped the delicate balance of the book. As it is, the two sections are not equal and only tenuously linked by his presence in both situations, but the tenuousness of life is also what the book explores.  “The truth is we don’t know what goes on at the last minute; there must be lives that only seem to be failures, that find their meaning in extremis or whose value we have simply missed. There must also be lives that seem a success but are living hells, perhaps even at the end, ...

Revised the Preface and the Afterword to Snow at 5 PM . Finished reading East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity by Philippe Sands, recommended by Henry Abelove. Very well researched, it reads like a detective novel.  Watched Fire Song (2015), written and directed by Adam Garnet Jones, about a gay Anishinaabe teenager living in North Ontario and trying hard to get out of his small town. Andrew Martin, who plays the protagonist Shane, is a natural actor.

Smaller is Better: Japan's Mastery of the Miniature by O-Young Lee Japan is too often seen in opposition to the West, and so hides some of its peculiarities. This take on Japanese culture by a Korean writer, critic, and scholar capitalizes on his knowledge of the differences between Japanese and Korean cultures, so that what is truly distinctive about Japan-its penchant for making things smaller-comes thrillingly into focus. Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, translated by Edwin McClellan In his study Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction , J. Keith Vincent explains very well the different camps of interpretation of Soseki's novel: a patriarchal-imperialist view that focuses mainly on the third section of the novel, Sansei's testament; a subversive view that argues for the narrator's betrayal of his Sansei, to the extent that he may have married Sansei's wife after the teacher died; and a gay affirmative reading that highlights Sansei...

I'm planning to visit Japan in August and so when I found Haruki Murakami's work of journalism Underground at Kramerbooks in D.C., I bought it immediately, for who can resist a book subtitled "The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche"? The first, and bigger, part of the book consists of interviews with the victims of the gas attacks, and the family of those who died. These interviews are ordered according to the subway lines on which the Aum attack on March 20, 1995, a Monday, took place. Dissatisfied with the presentation by the Japanese media of a collective image of "the innocent Japanese sufferer," Murakami wanted to discover and document the actual people behind the label of victims, to recognize that each person had, as he puts it, "a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions and dilemmas." Most interesting, and moving, are the interviews of the subway staff who had to respond to the emergency. Their interviews are suffus...

V.S. Naipaul was climbing out of a cab when I approached the 92Y. He was a small man and leaned heavily on the arm of his bigger, younger wife. At the Y to promote his latest book The Masque of Africa, he read from the Gambon section, in which a French-educated biracial Gambonese lawyer speaks about the forest at the heart of African religions. Ultra-civilized himself, Naipaul read the account of magical rituals and secret rites in the voice of an interested but detached reporter, conveyed through prose at once transparent and artful. The interview segment was less successful, The interviewer asked convoluted questions but gave Naipaul too little time to respond. The questions were also too abstract. Last night tested Naipaul's faltering memory, but did not give the storyteller a chance to mesmerize.

A tribute to John Stahle,  Ganymede Unfinished, edited by Bryan Borland ,  is available today through   www.siblingrivalrypress.com . The sample pages look fabulous, very much the gospel according to John. I have a poetic sequence in it.  You can also buy copies a t John's memorial, which is scheduled for Saturday, September 18, from 2:30 - 4:30 at the LGBT Center, 208 West 13th Street in New York City.  All proceeds from the sale of   Ganymede Unfinished   on that day will go toward the cost of the memorial.

Gay men¹s lit/art print quarterly published quarterly in New York as a paperback book. Table of contents and readable sample pages . Purchase (print or download) here . --EDMUND WHITE on writing gay --OSCAR WILDE's delicious 1889 dialogue on art, ³The Decay of Lying² --GLENWAY WESCOTT's rare 1928 story of a little boy going to a ball in drag --BERGDORF BOYS by Scott Hess: first of four parts serializing a complete novel, both witty and dark, about gay party boys in New York --TEN gay poets in 36 pages--the finest survey of gay poetry in print today --EIGHT cutting-edge gay visual artists from around the world --SUSAN GLASPELL's 1917 story ³A Jury of Her Peers,² now a discovered text in feminist lit --INDIE EYE returns with tips on obscure movies to rent, including the first gay Bollywood flick! --The Paris of Our Dreams: the 19th-century transformation of Paris coincided with the birth of photography, and the rise of archival photographers w...

Asian American literary journal Kartika Review publishes its inaugural year print anthology. You can preview and buy the book here . I have a poem in it, "Childhood Punishments," which the journal nominated for the Pushcart. Fiction is edited by Christine Lee Zilka, Poetry by Sunny Woan, and Non-Fiction by Jason Wong. From the journal website : Kartika Review launched in September of 2007 as a national non-profit journal in support of the Asian American literary and arts community. We focus our efforts in two main directions: first, on challenging writers to bring forth innovative work that transforms preconceived limitations of "the multi-culti narrative" and second, on presenting creative writing that will cause readers to reconsider those preconceived limitations of "the multi-culti narrative."

I don't know where I read it, but I remember reading the event last night was supposed to start at 6. When I arrived at 6, I was told by a very cute looking guy at the table that 6 to 7 was reception for the writers, and the reading would begin at 7. That did not put me in a good mood, though some sneaky looks at guy-at-the-table soon lightened my mood.  The reading by the Lambda Award finalists was worth waiting for. One poet read, many novelists, and countless memoirists, making up a total of 12 readers that evening. Many were entertaining, but only a few reached into the place where only literature can reach.  I was captivated by a fictional narrative about a black boy joining an all-white class in an all-white town. The narrator, a girl classmate, was utterly convincing in her perplexed courage. What could have come across so easily as moralistic turns out, instead, to be truly novelistic in its depiction of characters and situation.  The other fascinating reader was another le...

From the chapter monstreux (monstrous): 2. The lover's discourse stifles the other, who finds no place for his own language beneath this massive utterance. It is not that I keep the other from speaking; but I know how to make the pronouns skid : "I speak and you hear me, hence we exist" (Ponge). Sometimes, in terror, I become aware of this reversal: I who supposed myself to be pure subject (subjected subject: fragile, delicate, pitiable) find myself turned into an obtuse thing blindly moving onward, crushing everything beneath his discourse; I who love am undesirable, consigned to the category of the bores: the ones who bear down too hard, who irritate, encroach, complicate, demand, intimidate (or more simply: those who speak). I have monumentally deceived myself.  (The other is disfigured by his persistent silence, as in those terrible dreams in which a loved person shows up with the lower part of his face quite erased, without any mouth at all; and I, the one who speak...

Our readings are embedded in our lives, even as we embed our lives in our readings. This book by Barthes came into my hands through a developing friendship with a lesbian colleague, SW. A gesture of empathy and help, does not the giving also savor of Eros? At any rate, there is dissemination, if not insemination, and I gratefully receive it.  The trope is particularly appropriate to a striking passage in the chapter on "Absence." Translated by Richard Howard, Barthes says: 2. Historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by the Woman: Woman is sedentary, Man hunts, journeys' Woman is faithful (she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises). It is Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so; she weaves and she sings; the Spinning Songs express both immobility (by the hum of the Wheel) and absence (far away, rhythms of travel, sea surges, cavalcades). It follows that in any man who utters the other's absence somethin...

TLS January 16 2009 from Joe Phelan's review of Robert Crawford's The Bard: Robert Burns, a biography : Through his membership of the Freemasons, his participation in the Tarbolton "Bachelors Club", and his friendship with like-minded people of his own class and background, he found ready support and assistance for his earliest poetic efforts, and encouragement for his desire to have his songs and poems published. It was not a wealthy patron, but his Irvine friend Richard Brown who first suggested that he send his verses to a magazine for publication. Such networks enabled Burns to develop and sustain a sense of the value of his literary output independent of that placed on it by wealthy supporters who drifted into and out of his life. Unlike John Clare, he was no reduced to debilitating social and intellectual isolation by the withdrawal of patronage. * Both [Robert] Fergusson and Allan Ramsay provided him with validating examples of a vernacular poetry which drew on...

In this 1995 book, Bersani begins with a stark statement: “No one wants to be called a homosexual.” He is not thinking, primarily, of closeted gay men or women, but the aversion to “homosexuality” on the part of self-identified homosexual activists and theorists. According to Bersani, queer theorists like Monique Wittig, Judith Butler, and Michael Warner have taken “queer” to delineate political rather than erotic tendencies. In their writing, they have erased the specificity of gay identity in favor of transcendence over the homo-hetero binary, or of social constructivism or of historicizing the category; these theorists fear, rightly, to essentialize gay identity, a move that would fall in with heterosexist practice. Though he is opposed, like the other theorists, to essentialist definitions, Bersani wants to reinstate the specificity of gay identity—same-sex desire—because one needs to oppose heterosexism on behalf of something, from the position of somewhere, however compromised so...

Before going to the Kundiman poetry reading at Fordham University last night, Pauline and I had dinner at Nook in Hell's Kitchen. Dinner was very pleasant, sauced by talk about the ekphrastic stories she is writing, and about the book of poems I am publishing next April. She gave me a copy of her essay published in an anthology of women's writing, Homelands: women's journeys across race, place, and time (edited by Patricia Justine Tumang and Jenesha De Rivera, and published by Seal Press). Pauline's essay charted her own journey towards accepting her ethnic identity as a Korean adoptee, and her gender identity as a transgendered woman. The essay--and the life--is remarkable for the geography it traverses. At the age of eight months, Pauline was flown from Seoul to Tokyo, then to Anchorage, and then to Chicago, where she was picked up by her foster parents, and brought back to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That flight set the pattern for a peripatetic life afterwards. Madison f...

from Joan Acocella's article "Romeo, Romeo" on Mark Morris's "Romeo and Juliet" based on a lost Prokofiev score: Morris's habit of standing inside a dance as he creates it is different from what many other choreographers do. . . . Morris is famous for the viscera quality of his dances--the fact that they are fleshy, muscular, that you can feel them on your body--and this is surely due in part to his habit of choreographing from inside, or starting there. * His most frequent correction was that he wanted the company to dance harder, with more attack. His other, constant complaint was about entropy--the fact that the dancers, two days after he taught them something, would start to slur it. Composers can comfort themselves that, if one performance is not to their liking, the next may be. The score survives. In dance, there is no score. The piece is what is performed. *** from Adam Gopnik's article "The Back of the World" on G. K. Chesterton: ...

from A. N. Wilson's review of Patrick French's The World Is What It Is: The authorized biography of V. S. Naipaul : "Doctored truth is not truth", Naipaul said; "I think the completeness of the record is what matters." * As Pat Naipaul saw in her often anguished diaries, the writing life puts an extraordinary strain on anyone who is attempting to share it. There are two sorts of marriage for writers: the ones such as Pat Naipaul's or Vera Nabokov's, where the wife enters, almost sentence by sentence into the writer's composing life; and the other sort, where only by keeping her distance can the writer's partner survive. ("Keep your hearts together and your tents separate", was the well-turned motto of Mrs R. S. Thomas, Elsi Eldridge.) *** from Adam I. P. Smith's review of Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold: Britain, America, and the making of the modern world : His core thesis is that the most important development in the pa...

Tonight was the reading by students in the spring writing program. I was the last student reader, out of twelve readers. Marie Ponsot, and classmate Kevin Sullivan were there, as well as Wise Woman and The Quarterback. I read five parts from "The Book of the Body," and felt the audience was with me throughout the reading. I was especially moved when Wise Woman looked as if she was about to weep or laugh. Christina Curtis, from Daphne Merkin's Non-Fiction Workshop, read a wonderful piece on her job attending to a salad bar in a West Coast restaurant; the essay served up a woman's method for surviving grief.

from Francis Robinson's review of Journal of Emperor Babur , translated by Annette Susannah Beveridge; adapted and abridged by Dilip Hiro: Babur was one of four warriors of Turkic-speaking stock who, in a period of less than a century, founded a major state in the heart of the Eurasian region reaching from the Balkans to Bengal. . . . When Babur died in 1530, he had laid the basis of the Mughal Empire which was to last until 1858, and which to the end of the seventeenth century was the greatest of these states in wealth and power. While remaining religiously inclusive for much of its existence, this Empire, nevertheless, continued to sustain the Muslim political frame, established by the Delhi Sultanate, which led to the sub-continent becoming home to one-third of the world's Muslims, a fact of major geopolitical significance. * Babur is also rightly famed for his autobiography, the Babur Nama . Throughout his life he kept a journal, which in his last years he worked into autob...