Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Nic Sebastian reads my poem "Childhood Punishments" at Whale Sound . She reads it much more quietly, reflectively, than I do. I like her interpretation very much. You can lose a Saturday listening to the growing archive of poems. * GASPP: A Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose is reviewed by the gay Asian website Fridae . I hope the major papers in Singapore will have the guts to review it too. The book is carried by independent bookstores, but no news yet about the big chains.

John Kander and Fred Ebb teamed up for the last time to write "The Scottsboro Boys." (Ebb died in 2004.) The musical provocatively revives the racist theatrical tradition of the minstrel show to "tell the truth" about nine young black men convicted wrongly of raping two white women in rural Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. In doing so, the musical "deconstructs" the assumptions of white superiority that underlay the minstrel show. It also demonstrates how art forms associated with African Americans are rooted in the experience of slavery. In an interview, 83-year-old Kander said that he had actually directed minstrel shows at a boys' camp in the 1930s. They were a part of the national culture then, performed without much thought about their offensiveness. The 1930s are not really that long ago. They are within living memory. As Haywood Patterson, one of the nine men, Joshua Henry was a powerful and charismatic presence on stage. John Cullum played the...

Visited Dia at Beacon last Saturday with GH. Was entranced by Sol LeWitt's Drawing Series, an on-site work that made the rooms into a chapel, and Robert "Spiral Jetty" Smithson's glass and mirror sculptures. I would have liked to go to the edge of Michael Heizer's negative sculpture, North, East, South, West, but it was cordoned off by a glass barricade. The former biscuit factory was a beautiful place to view the art. I had never had as strong a response to Conceptual and Minimalist art as I did that afternoon. It needs the space it cannot get in museums. Even Andy Warhol looked good here, represented by the serialist work, Shadows . Lunch was in a diner in Beacon, with T and D, and S who was visiting them from London. On Sunday, GH and I walked round Williamsburg, looking at recent and new condominiums. GH is working on converting a commercial building for residential use, and so took lots of photos of windows, doors and walls. He was excited to stumble on a ...

Poets Wear Prada Press is printing my chapbook Payday Loans through Amazon's CreateSpace, a print-on-demand publishing service. So I can now be found on Amazon, and you can buy my book here . My copy, which arrived this afternoon, looks very good. It is perfect-bound, not saddle-stitched as before, and the glossy cover is sturdier. And the sequence of 30 sonnets, organized by the month of April, still costs the same: US$10.

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 rough draft. On Reading Not A Muse , an Anthology of Women’s Poetry I am not a woman, have never made love to a woman and will probably never make love to a woman since I prefer a man’s sweet nerve. Reading this anthology, subtitled the inner lives of women , I wonder what a thing a woman is. I think she is my sister crying at the other end of the line, in a different continent, who not so secretly worshipped and resented me but now asks in wild abandonment, “Why can’t you keep it in?”

KM forwarded me this video of Singapore in 1957. Produced by the Malayan Film Unit, it advertised to British travelers the charms of a visit to Singapore, "the world in miniature." KM asked me if this was the Singapore which I grew up in. I remember from the 70s Van Kleef Aquarium, the sights and sounds of the amusement park, the smells of roadside hawker stalls, but I don't see the crowded shophouse in Tanjong Pagar that hold my first memories of home, or the new housing estate of Telok Blangah Crescent, to which I moved at the age of five, and where my parents still live. Of all the exoticized figures in the film, I identity most immediately with the woman in the Malay dance hall, waiting for a white man and his dance ticket.