Song of a Reformed Headhunter

  One of the effects of  the July 2023 scandals  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  under strong fire  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 former student activist , 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.   Control of the electoral discourse ha

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  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 wri

Portuguese 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.

All 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.  "What is the nature of the hope which, when it is present in work, makes it worth doing?  "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

 From "A Morality Based on Misfortune: The Plague " (1947): Camus's example shows how one may start out from a revolt-based morality and slide back quickly into a depressed one. 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 possible life . 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 t