Looking With Your Feet

I'm convinced that the best way to really see a city is to walk through it. And it is even better if you're lost. I learned this a few years ago in Glasgow. On the way to a local museum I took a wrong turn and before I knew it I was at the entrance to an enormous park full of men and women in tartans. They were there for the World Highland Games. I spent the next couple of hours wandering through the grounds, between swirling bagpipers, twirling dancers, and enormous men practicing to throw large pine logs. Six years later I can remember the sights and the sounds as if I'd been there this morning.

Ever since then I've made a point of discovering cities on foot. It helps me see more, and it also helps me understand more. On one of my trips to Bangkok I decided to walk to where I was staying, instead of taking a taxi. On the way I spotted a gorgeous pagoda. It was a particularly fine monument, and I turned aside to take a closer look. When I got there, I realized that while it was grand enough to have been another imposing reminder of Thailand's golden age of empire, it was no ancient relic. On the contrary, it was a brand new temple that the current King had just finished building. Suddenly I had a new-found appreciation for the importance of Buddhism to everyday life in Thailand.

Occasionally you do get to see a holdover from an ancient time. For example, if you feel thirsty while walking down Stonegate in York, you can nip into the Punch Bowl for beer. And if one of your ancestors had been walking that same street three hundred years ago, he might have done the same. After all, the Punch Bowl has been dated back to 1675. On the other hand, going walkabout can also introduce you to more recent history. Like the time I stumbled across The Red Piano cafe in Siem Riep, where Angelina Jolie and her crew hung out while shooting for the first Tomb Raider movie.

The point of this reflection is that very soon I will move out of Singapore. I'm surprised and embarrassed to admit that I've lived in this city for seven years and made scant effort to see the city where I live. Very soon after moving here I fell into a comfortably familiar routine, the sort where you go from point A to point B without really seeing anything in between.

So now I've resolved to change that. For the next 2 or 3 months I'm going to act like a tourist. I'll see the sights and take the pictures and most importantly I'll walk the streets of the city I've taken for granted for so long.

Stay tuned, because I'm sure I will see something utterly unexpected.

Going Down In History

I'm trapped.

It all started in December 2006. That was the last time I went to India for a holiday. On the rare occasions that I holiday in India, I like to fill up my time and my suitcase by shopping for books. That is the one thing that is still much cheaper there.

I'm also a bit obsessive about "collecting the full set" of anything. I'm a sucker for boxed sets, the full trilogy in one package, that sort of stuff.

So if you put these two impulses together, and then place me in front of a book called The New Penguin History of The World, I turn into putty. Very silly putty.

A historian named J. M. Roberts set out to write the enire history of the human race, from the time before there even was a human race, all the way up to the present day. Before he passed away in 2003 he took the story as far as America's war on terror, and Nature's newly uncovered war on mankind via global warming. Such staggering ambition deserves to be rewarded. I snapped up the book without a second thought.

The cover blurbs described the book as "A stupendous achievement.." and "A work of outstanding breadth...". But they left out the fact that it is stupendously boring. Here's a sentence picked out completely at random: "Political democracy developed faster than social, on the other hand, even if the universal male suffrage already long-established in the United States would not be introduced until 1918; the democratization of English politics was already past the point of reversibility by 1870."

That was from the 782nd of 1184 pages of unrelentingly turgid prose.

And I cannot stop reading.

You see, I've trapped myself inside this paperbacked prison. I started reading the book three or four times, and each time I gave up within the first fifty pages of multiply-nested subordinate clauses. Eventually I started thinking of the book as a living adversary that was determined to prove I'm too stupid to read it. It was disturblingly like the feelings of clumsiness and inadequacy that dogged me through high school.

"This", I told the fat snob sitting on my bedside table, "is now personal. I will defeat you". No I didn't. I'm not yet deranged enough to talk to books; only enough to feel intimidated by them.

So I made one more attempt and this time forced myself through the polysyllabic sludge with bloody-minded determination. I was an invincible hero forcing my way through dense enemy ranks. I was a fearless explorer trudging through an arid, oppressive desert. I was a moth wading through molasses, and about equally elegant.

But more successful.

I have now bludgeoned my way through six hundred pages, and just about passed the halfway mark. I'm winning my struggle against my inanimate adversary and it's doing me no good. In one of history's more savoury moments, the Greek king Pyrrhus commented on his own losses after winning a battle: "Another such victory over the Romans and we are undone". I can empathize.

Finishing the book will probably destroy my surviving brain cells, and leave me a gibbering idiot who is unaccountably knowledgeable about seventeenth century European power struggles. Finishing the book will probably take me another year; evry time I open it and start reading, I fall asleep within ten pages. Even so have I made my way to this present pass, reading three pages a night before passing out with my nose pressed into the binding.

It's in front of me now, just lying there inertly. As if I don't know that in a matter or hours it'll be in my hands again, gnawing away at the edges of my consciousness.

I swear to you, the next book I read will be a graphic novel.

Not Akademia, But Academia Nonetheless

Usually if people pay attention to what I'm saying at 930pm on a Friday, it's because they've been drinking. Last Friday was an exception. At least, I hope it was. Because if it wasn't, then I spent a couple of hours giving a guest lecture to a class of drunk graduate students.

Not that it would bother me terribly if that was the case. I was there just so I could say that I once taught at a university. Whether anyone actually learned anything was really quite incidental.

Earlier this week I'd had an encounter with a rather more accomplished set of teachers. The Singapore National Museum had an exhibition of Greek sculptures on loan from the Louvre, including portraits of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates.

Two and half thousand years ago Aristotle lectured on philosophy as he walked through the gardens of his school, the Lyceum. His students followed him as he walked, which is why they were called the peripatetics. I, of course, could not take that sort of risk. If I tried to deliver a traveling talk through the walkways of Nanyang Technological University, I'm certain the class would melt away in search of more pleasant occupations. So I did my rambling verbally instead, within the confines of a rather stark and antiseptic classroom.

Instead of Aristotle, I took inspiration from Plato. That was partly because Plato was rather less choleric looking than Aristotle. (Either that or his sculptor was more adept at flattery. Plato is the one on the right below.)


But more importantly, Plato had a healthy respect for both abstract and applied science. He advocated the study of number theory by philosophers, and of arithmetic by businessmen and military commanders who "must learn the art of numbers or he will not know how to array his troops". So after my professor friend had talked through the theory of evaluating marketing campaigns, I described some real world examples from my professional expreience.

Plato himself was a student of Socrates, who had a rather fun approach to teaching philosphy. He would discourse in a symposium. Our modern-day symposia are drab affairs in stuffy conference rooms with uncomfortable chairs and bad coffee. But in ancient Greece a symposium was a drinking party. Gentlemen of leisure and refinement would gather in a room, stretch out on couches, and talk long into the night on love, ethics and the nature of truth.

Since then standards for drinking party conversation have fallen a little. Last night, for instance, I was at a St. Patrick's Day celebration where the talk centered on rugby, cellphones, and the excellentness of the meat pies. And that was before someone hooked up the karaoke microphone.

Plato's school was at Akademia, a sacred grove dedicated to Athena. She is one of the most interesting characters in any mythology. I find it fascinating that she is the goddess of both wisdom and of victory in war. That seems like an odd combination at first. But it does make sense because in pretty much every instance where she favours someone in a battle, she does so by showing them how to win against great odds through the use of stratagems and ruses. The most famous example is the wooden horse that she told the Greeks to build so that they could defeat Troy.

I've had a soft spot for Athena since I was an undergraduate student. Back then the odds of me ever graduating were very grim. I decided I needed a patron deity, and I picked Athena. I figured that if she could get Odysseus out of the pickle he'd landed in by upsetting the sea-god Poseidon, then extracting me from the academic quicksand I was thrashing in would be a piece of cake. I loved driving my friends crazy by insisting on pouring libations to her in every party. "The first drink belongs to Athena", I'd proclaim and pour a little on the floor. We were all penniless students, and the look of horror on my friends' faces at this wasteage was priceless.

It worked. I did eventually graduate by the skin of my teeth. And if any of my professors in college knew that I had been turned loose on a class of graduate students, they would certainly keel over in shock.

I guess the moral of this story is that you should never depend on a university to educate you - you never know what half-baked idiot they might set to take your classes! It's much wiser to place your fate in the hands of a Greek goddess. ;-)

But Where's The Missing Link???

A couple of weeks ago Quirky quill snagged me with a tag that was deceptively simple. I was in a blue funk at the time, but I did promise I would take up the tag when I returned to humanity. So now it is time to pay my dues.

The tag instructions were to recall five previous posts, pertaining respectively to my family, my friends, myself, my love, and anything else I like. I did consider taking the easy way out, which would have been to link five times to a post about myself. But where would be the fun in that? So I'll do it the hard way.

My family, then. A little over a year ago I wrote about the monster in my life. And then there was the one about my dog. I've been really lucky that both of them are seriously eccentric creatures with enough character to make up several different alphabets. There's never a dull moment when either of them is around. Oh, how I yearn for dullness. (Not!)

I hadn't really ever written about friends until a very odd phase in January when several things happened almost simultaneously. They made me re-examine the friendships that I had and acknowledge how fragile they can be. And (which was the best part) they reminded me that it's always a good idea to let the people who matter to you know that they matter to you. These posts are so recent that it seems superfluous to link to them. So as a bonus I've also flashedback to a rather embarassing reunion from a year ago.

How do I link to a post about myself when this entire blog is really about me? The only way to choose a particular post would be to do it with a touch of whimsy. And since I just happened to buy some seriously funky t-shirts today, I suppose I should cast my memory back to the day Hollywood awakened my inner fashionista.

A post about my love? You won't find one. You will find fleeting references. I'm generous enough to tell you that, and jealous enough to not make it any easier for you to find them.

As for likes, I have many. One I have a particularly soft spot for is coffee. back in college I had painted onto one of my t-shirts a picture of Garfield holding a steaming mug, and captioned it with "Happiness is a poor substitute for coffee". There are still times when I think that might be true.

Oh, and the final part of the tag is to tag five others to take it up. But I've been so slow to complete this tag myself that anyone I might have thought to pass this onto has already recieved it from someone else. So I'll be the terminus on this particular line (QQ - hope you don't mind). Regular service will soon resume with a new post.

Language, Timothy

I'm standing at the counter at Subway, waiting for the guy in the green cap on the other side to wrap my dinner and slip it into a plastic bag for me to carry away. He has an odd accent which I simply cannot place. I pride myself on having a good ear for languages and accents (it compensates for being blind to other peoples' faces), and I don't like being unable to place his accent. So I unobtrusively lean forward to read the name on his tag in the hope that it will give me a clue.

It turns out his name is "Sandwich Artist". Sure, that would explain his accent and my inability to recognize it. After all, I've never before met anyone from the Sandwich Islands.

(Irrelevant geographical note - the Sandwich Islands, currently known as the Hawaiian Islands, are not to be confused with the South Sandwich Islands which are in the South Atlantic.)

Seriously, what is it with these ridiculous job titles? I could even accept the guy being known as a sandwich technician, but an artist? I'd love to walk up to him one day and ask for a toasted post-abstract neo-classical club with extra cheese and sweet onion sauce. Oh, and can I have some French impressionist fries with that? I'll concede that his sandwich tastes good, but what does it mean?

I'm convinced that the sandwich artist was dubbed thus by some dimwitted business school graduate. I was taking job interviews at a business school last weekend when one eager young newbie proudly told me that he had run something called Schmeezer (name changed to protect the asinine).

"What the hell is that!?" I asked, momentarily relinquishing my usual suave dignity. "That", he told me sagely, "is our communication platform". I asked him to try again, in English this time. He did, and confessed that "communication platform" is idiot-speak for "college magazine". And on that high note, the interview ended.

I wonder where it will all end. My poor pet dog will probably mutate into a canine social accessory. Bless her shaggy little soul, she does love her tissue-based dental resistives (that's chewy bones to you). She's asleep now, sprawled on the domicile/inhabitant ambulatory interface (floor), blissfully unaware of the perils of human language.

I'd like to take all this dumbass jargon, bring it back to the weeds who invented it, and get them to make a solar-deficient depository credit.

Oops. What I mean is that I'd like 'em to stick it where the sun don't shine.

Redemption

We live embedded in a mosaic of people. And some of its parts matter more than others.

The one who who seemed so alien until the first time you talked...
... deep into the night. And then you realized that you could have been twins. Years later you have the same connection. You spend months in silence. Then you pick up the phone and in an instant it’s as if you’re in the same room again, talking about the discoveries you’ve made and the life you’ve lived since the last time you talked. Everything's changed around you but nothing's changed between you.

The one whom you did not expect.
Lunchtime conversations. Exchanging notes on movies, on food, on the past and the future, and on yourselves. And just like that, you were friends - long before you realized it. And when you did realize it, what a delightful surprise!

The one who was cool and then became warm.
You were boys who thought they were men and together you set about making mistake after mistake. Back then it seemed better to be clever than to be wise. Back then it seemed style was substance. When your paths crossed again you had both realized it was okay to not be as cool as you used to pretend to be. You sat across a table and showed yourselves and you liked what you saw and it felt good.

The one whom distance brought closer.
When you were in the same place you were unfailingly cordial. It was only after you went your separate ways that you started talking. Most bonds abrade under the twin frictions of space and time. Unexpectedly, this one matured and strengthened.

The one who laughed...
... who laughed hysterically with you as you traded whimsical theories on the extinction of saber-toothed tigers. You wouldn’t dream of saying that you value each others’ friendship (that would be too … transparent) but you show it at every opportunity. Perhaps it is time to put it in words?

The one you saw once and could never forget.
Maybe it was the tilt of the head. Maybe it was the open, utterly uninhibited smile. Maybe it really was the purple eyeliner. Who knew that two people so far apart could be so inseparable? Despite others. Despite even themselves. Perfectly unmatched, but a perfect match. The most important piece of the mosaic.

(There are others but these are the ones whom, over the past few days, I’ve had the chance to let them know they matter. I hope they heard me.)