"For Now, I'm Well."
Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here.
Pining for our Second Saturdays gatherings? Fear not! We've collated some recs from our authors, hosts, and regulars for your enjoyment. And if you have not yet attended this special NYC monthly event, here's a taste of the community in store for you. If you have suggestions of your own, please send them!
On the recommendation of both his brother and The New Yorker, poet Josh Lefkowitz has started doing one "Yoga With Adriene" video each morning before he resumes the process of sitting on various chairs and couch cushions for the following 12 hours until bedtime. Or you can put yourself in the very good hands of Candice Miller, who not only hosts Second Saturdays but also runs the yoga and meditation studio YogaCare. Check out their schedule tab for all class times. If you're tired of sitting down during the day, you can take a walk with crime writer SJ Rozan through the cherry trees in these video updates from the New York Botanical Garden.
Look to the end of the pandemic by reading the poem "In Time" by Amlanjyoti Goswami, who featured with Jeremy Tiang last December. From Shou Jie ENG, a beautiful list in the vein of the great literary and aesthetic listmakers—"Two Hundred Fifty Things An Architect Should Know" by Michael Sorkin, an architect and urbanist who died from complications due to the coronavirus a week and a half ago. He was one of the great speculative thinkers and designers of his generation. With his newly formed three-person book club, Caleb Goh read Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston and he recommends to everyone this gay rom-com novel about the fictitious first son of the United States of America who falls in love with the Prince of Wales.
Want to watch something instead? Laura Cook says the Margaret Atwood documentary on Hulu is amazing. For a better understanding of Singapore's upcoming elections, I've been watching "The Show with PJ Thum," the new YouTube series by the Oxford-trained historian who explains an unfree and unfair system with comic flair. When I take a break from remote teaching, I've been listening to Sarah Chang. She gave a charismatically unbuttoned performance of Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1, with the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
Finally, Martha Cooley, novelist and great friend of Singapore Unbound, translates a powerful short piece called "Parole" ("Words") by the Italian writer Domenico Starnone, which he published in the newspaper l'Internazionale. It's a somewhat bitter but also bracing perspective on the writer's dilemma in these times:
Words by Domenico Starnone, trans. Martha Cooley
If one has a little imagination, the numbers slice your tongue. Too much agony, too many dead. One feels ashamed of having spent one’s life lacing words together, ashamed of still doing so now, adrift in reclusion, without a when, a where, or even a who. Merely tossing down these thirteenhundredandninety characters, spaces included (the spaces so reduced that at this point they might as well be counted too), seems insensitive. And yet we talk and write even more than before, on the radio and TV, in newspapers, via WhatsApp, Twitter, messages in bottles. While the lives of so many are ending, we who don’t govern a thing, who know nothing about medicine, nursing, math and statistics, how a vaccine gets made, all useful things, continue formulating—so as to feel alive and active—forward-looking, poetic-sounding little thoughts. We calibrate words, inject ourselves cleanly with nostalgia for how lovely life was before Covid-19, indignation at how full of folly everything was, anxiety that the Hungarian virus will infect Europe by exploiting the new coronavirus. Yet the forced beauty of each syllable cancels good intentions and makes the phrases frigid. I too write solemn-and-wise words to people who ask how I’m doing. Good thing I almost always feel ashamed, delete, reply: “For now, I’m well. Take care, stay inside your home. However long it takes is what it takes.”
Jee Leong Koh
April 9, 2020
Pining for our Second Saturdays gatherings? Fear not! We've collated some recs from our authors, hosts, and regulars for your enjoyment. And if you have not yet attended this special NYC monthly event, here's a taste of the community in store for you. If you have suggestions of your own, please send them!
On the recommendation of both his brother and The New Yorker, poet Josh Lefkowitz has started doing one "Yoga With Adriene" video each morning before he resumes the process of sitting on various chairs and couch cushions for the following 12 hours until bedtime. Or you can put yourself in the very good hands of Candice Miller, who not only hosts Second Saturdays but also runs the yoga and meditation studio YogaCare. Check out their schedule tab for all class times. If you're tired of sitting down during the day, you can take a walk with crime writer SJ Rozan through the cherry trees in these video updates from the New York Botanical Garden.
Look to the end of the pandemic by reading the poem "In Time" by Amlanjyoti Goswami, who featured with Jeremy Tiang last December. From Shou Jie ENG, a beautiful list in the vein of the great literary and aesthetic listmakers—"Two Hundred Fifty Things An Architect Should Know" by Michael Sorkin, an architect and urbanist who died from complications due to the coronavirus a week and a half ago. He was one of the great speculative thinkers and designers of his generation. With his newly formed three-person book club, Caleb Goh read Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston and he recommends to everyone this gay rom-com novel about the fictitious first son of the United States of America who falls in love with the Prince of Wales.
Want to watch something instead? Laura Cook says the Margaret Atwood documentary on Hulu is amazing. For a better understanding of Singapore's upcoming elections, I've been watching "The Show with PJ Thum," the new YouTube series by the Oxford-trained historian who explains an unfree and unfair system with comic flair. When I take a break from remote teaching, I've been listening to Sarah Chang. She gave a charismatically unbuttoned performance of Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1, with the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
Finally, Martha Cooley, novelist and great friend of Singapore Unbound, translates a powerful short piece called "Parole" ("Words") by the Italian writer Domenico Starnone, which he published in the newspaper l'Internazionale. It's a somewhat bitter but also bracing perspective on the writer's dilemma in these times:
Words by Domenico Starnone, trans. Martha Cooley
If one has a little imagination, the numbers slice your tongue. Too much agony, too many dead. One feels ashamed of having spent one’s life lacing words together, ashamed of still doing so now, adrift in reclusion, without a when, a where, or even a who. Merely tossing down these thirteenhundredandninety characters, spaces included (the spaces so reduced that at this point they might as well be counted too), seems insensitive. And yet we talk and write even more than before, on the radio and TV, in newspapers, via WhatsApp, Twitter, messages in bottles. While the lives of so many are ending, we who don’t govern a thing, who know nothing about medicine, nursing, math and statistics, how a vaccine gets made, all useful things, continue formulating—so as to feel alive and active—forward-looking, poetic-sounding little thoughts. We calibrate words, inject ourselves cleanly with nostalgia for how lovely life was before Covid-19, indignation at how full of folly everything was, anxiety that the Hungarian virus will infect Europe by exploiting the new coronavirus. Yet the forced beauty of each syllable cancels good intentions and makes the phrases frigid. I too write solemn-and-wise words to people who ask how I’m doing. Good thing I almost always feel ashamed, delete, reply: “For now, I’m well. Take care, stay inside your home. However long it takes is what it takes.”
Jee Leong Koh
April 9, 2020
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