Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the Year of the Metal Rat brings some good news. In response to the cancellation of Alfian Sa'at's "Dialogue and Dissent" class by Yale-NUS last year, Yale University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Senate passed a resolution recommending "the establishment of clear criteria and procedure" to handle such episodes involving free speech and academic independence. Singapore Unbound supports the recommendation wholeheartedly, but we are disappointed that the Senate "did not express explicit regret that, due in no small measure to this flawed institutional process, the victim Alfian Sa’at was publicly pilloried, including in [the Singaporean] parliament by the minister of education," as Linda Lim, Yale alumna and professor emerita at the University of Michigan, was quoted in the Times Higher Education . You may have heard ...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . I spent Martin Luther King Jr. Day reading Jonathan Gill's lively history of Harlem. After following the transformation of Muscoota, the Indian name for lower central Harlem, through tenuous Dutch settlement and successive waves of German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Latin migration to become the capital of black America, I arrived at the civil-rights era. King was signing his book at Blumstein when a woman walked in the department store's front door, cut to the front of the line of autograph seekers, and stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener. She was convinced that the Communist Party had been persecuting her for years through King. Writing in 2018, on the 50th anniversary of King's assassination, philosopher and social activist Cornel West observed that many who now sing the praises of King would be threatened by what he stood for. "His grand fight against poverty, militarism, mate...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  This is how Wikipedia introduces Mr. Chia Thye Poh: "Detained under the Internal Security Act of Singapore for allegedly conducting pro-communist activities against the government, he was imprisoned for 23 years without charge or trial and subsequently placed under conditions of house arrest for another nine years – in which he was first confined to the island of Sentosa and then subject to restrictions on his place of abode, employment, travel, and exercise of political rights." Appropriately for an encyclopedia, the language is objective and careful. Poetry can be care-full in another sense, by being an empathetic companion to the victims of political injustice, to walk with those who have been unfairly treated. Alfian Sa'at's poems about Mr. Chia Thye Poh, just published in the Evergreen Review, are some of the best political poems I know. In a drily laconic but deeply compassionate styl...

Column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . A friend and fellow poet, Miriam Stanley, attended Sunday's march against antisemitism in NYC. Afterwards, she posted on Facebook what she saw of some marchers' harassment of a man holding a sign calling Trump "racist in the White House." According to Miriam, "People were screaming at him. They cursed him. They physically invaded his space trying to scare him." When she tried to protect him, she was cursed at and physically harassed too. One woman said, "why don't you join the Moslems?" On the march, a man joined Miriam in protecting the anti-Trump protester, but other marchers continued their harassment. Miriam: "Some asked why he was holding the sign. He explained about Charlottesville and Trump saying there were good people on "both sides". The man explained how the shooter of the Pittsburg shul was a white supremacist. I also said the same things to the m...

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, ...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  When Pete Dolack invited me to read at the 26th Annual Alternative NYD Spoken-Word/ Performance Extravaganza, I jumped at the chance to see and hear some of my downtown poet friends again. What better way to start the year than with poetry? As expected, the gathering at St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Village was vastly and variously entertaining. A woman dedicated her three-minute reading to the animals killed by the Australian fires. A man punished his hand drum as he read in a monotone. Another read from behind a dwarf fir tree that she carried in above her head. Many poems read that afternoon could be charged with the lack of artfulness, but in their earnestness, their directness, their presence, they were more enjoyable than any verbal tricksiness of more accomplished readings. Against the frenzy of new year resolutions, which by definition looked to the future, the afternoon focused ...

Finished reading Anna Burns' Milkman today. I liked it very much. Henry Abelove gave me the book when he came to our holiday party. My Goodreads review: A revelation. How does one convey the emotional numbness that the unlikely heroine, Middle Sister, puts up to protect against the various invasive forms of violence in her Belfast community in the 1970s? By showing the constant struggle to maintain the shield, always in danger of slipping because of one's curiosity, anger, fear, and love, if not battered down by communal conflict. The language, repetitive, idiosyncratic, in one word, paranoid, immerses the reader in Middle Sister's consciousness. The immersion is complete with the voices of other members of the community, filtered through Middle Sister's consciousness in such a way that they are always at least potentially echoes of her own dilemma, figures of her own splitting. Today I also got to page 95 of Asad Haider's Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the...