Archive for June, 2003
Things realised at the hour of midnight
June 23rd, 2003 Uncategorized
Romance: when you walk by and he takes you aside by your elbow to ask your name.
Get rich quick scheme: write a novel to be studied for GCE ‘O’ level. (How I wish!)
Part time writer, part time something else
June 22nd, 2003 Uncategorized
Is it possible to hold down an office job while writing your book? Yes, first-time novelists tell Diana Cambridge – as long as you don’t mind long hours, a lost social life and pitiful money…
…”The key to being a writer/PA is be honest as an employee: don’t pretend to be a career PA. There are still good jobs in London for people with the right office skills who also want to do something creative in their own time. It’s good to have both: I wouldn’t want to be at home all day just writing.”…
…”If you write while you have an office job, the hardest bit is tiredness – there’s shopping, home, job, writing to deal with. Plus every office job today demands thinking skills, so it’s not easy to keep your mind clear. It took me a year. Having it published was fantastic. Now I’m in the call centre as I need to earn some cash. The first six months of an office job are always good, then you can start to resent it.”…
Cross ATX
June 22nd, 2003 TreatsTags: Pens
New purchase: Cross ATX The nib is stiff but not scratchy : a surprise, for I’ve been told fine nibs are often scratchy. Cross pens never struck me as a writing pen, more like Mount Blanc, a showoff item. The pen, with its cap posted is too heavy for me and if the hand is sweaty, cold or oily, the pen slides. The pen looks better uncapped: the rhodium design lends an elegance to the pen.
Arts fest 2003
June 22nd, 2003 theatre
am unlucky this year. It seems to me the programming emphasis is on music than theatre. Every year the music stuff rocks, eg, Tan Leng (last year), Dick Lee (this year), Toots Thielemans (this year). The theatre is sometimes overhyped, eg, Alfian Sa’at’s Causeway (last year), Ong Keng Sen’s Global Soul (this year). I caught only three shows this year. Aladeen, Bloodlinks and The Global Soul. I am disappointed. I felt no “KAPOW!” sitting through all three. Aladeen had no hook nor build up after giving away the only surprise, that is Indian call centre operaters have to learn Yankee speak. This aspect occurs in a call center Malaysia, although not because they need to fool customers but it makes customers less likely mistreat a service person. A person who speaks well (that is to say, has an imported accent) is believed to be more professional than a person who does not. I left Global Soul with an appreciation of Victoria Theatre’s ceiling. They might have been singing to a pig. I had no idea what went on, how could I, if no one other than the swiss spoke English? I hadn’t the nerve to be discourteous so I sat through the performance and observed the lighting (which was very good). I was restless at the start of William Yang’s Bloodlinks. His story was the in the hit-me-long-enough-and-i-start-to-believe genre. I left with a sense of loneliness and great sympathy for the emigre.
Manners of writing
June 18th, 2003 Uncategorized
“She taps her fag and tells me, in a breath of blue clouds, gossip from my old office: so-and-so was promoted and left, so-and-so didn’t and left, so-and-so is still the lowly researcher the poor bastard. I have a vague impression of the names she rattled – the one with bushy eyebrows, crooked teeth, who’s the other?”
I’ve always found this sort of writing unbearable. Lots of writers like it. It creates a sense of intimacy, letting the reader there choke himself with the blue smoke. I like to begin with an odd occurance – a strange fact or action and continue my recordings in minute movements.
Gay love stories vs Hetero love stories
June 18th, 2003 Uncategorized
In an entry on his journal, writer Naif logged a monologue titled Blue Fir Trees . I like to read gay love fiction. They are so tender in their affairs. In hetero love affairs, lovers seem to be mourning a death: anguish, pain, denial and final acceptance
Writers: not man, not woman.
June 18th, 2003 Uncategorized
Writers, it struck me, although may appear to have the genitals are, at heart, sexless creatures. Not woman, not man, rather exactly half man, half woman so that the two opposites add up to become an oddball: effeminated man, a macho woman.
The Cultural Meaning of Suicide
June 5th, 2003 Uncategorized
Leaving You
The Cultural Meaning of Suicide
By Lisa Lieberman
Ivan R. Dee. 175 pp. $24.95
In our bold commitment to individual freedom and autonomy, we kindly permit people to live lousy lives.
You want less sex, wealth, land, fine food than the next person? No problem. You prefer to suffer life’s every pain, slight and inconvenience, to end up holding plenty of short sticks – including that cardboard box that serves as home? Your prerogative.
But suicide? Taking your miserable life to one of its possible conclusions by taking your miserable life? That, in many times and places, has been a no-no.
French suicides of the late 17th century would have gotten the message in no uncertain terms if they’d been around to get the message at all.
The “Ordinance of 1670,” reports Lisa Lieberman in Leaving You, her wonderfully lucid and nervy meditation on the various meanings of doing yourself in, “codified the religious prohibitions against suicide into French law. By its terms, criminal proceedings were instituted against the cadaver or against the memory of individuals who killed themselves. The stated penalty was confiscation of the suicide’s property. Additionally, the body was to be dragged, face down, through the streets on a hurdle and hanged by the feet as a public example.”
You already knew that you can’t take it with you. Were you aware that nasty powers might still whack the dickens out of you?
Lieberman, a born-and-bred Philadelphian who teaches modern European cultural and intellectual history at Dickinson College, approaches suicide with a refreshing appreciation for its checkered, complicated past – as well as a personal stake.
Her grandfather, an immigrant to America and the son of an Austrian rabbi, killed himself in 1938 after the Depression destroyed his savings. He left a wife and eight children. Lieberman started to research suicide in graduate school, then worked as a volunteer for a suicide hotline.
As a scholar, she’s acutely conscious of how suicide has often been, historically, “an act of rebellion… a protest at once personal and political. In choosing to die, an individual severs the ties that bind him to others – to family, friends, and community.”
” ‘How could he leave us?’ survivors ask. ‘If only we’d known, we could have helped.’ They feel betrayed and abandoned. Abandoned, but also accused.”
Precisely because suicide can be “an expression of autonomy: a flaunting of individualism that undermines social cohesions and threatens the foundation of public authority,” Lieberman argues, “societies often seek to restrain its disruptive power and deprive the act of its significance.”
In the U.S., she observes, “the desire to die appears self-serving and downright un-American… because it represents the absolute exercise of individual freedom, with no regard for personal obligations or community ties.” The once-common notion of “rational suicide,” she explains, is now, culturally speaking, on life support.
To drive home her point, Lieberman provides an illuminating sketch of suicide over the centuries. Focusing first on ancient times, she looks at Socrates’ drinking of the hemlock, and Cato’s decision to stab himself rather than surrender to Caesar (a type of “suicide of honor” Montesquieu cited as one element of Roman greatness). She further ponders the decision of some early Christians to chose death “over lives of pagan dishonor,” and Augustine’s recasting of suicide in the Catholic tradition “as an act of murder.”
Elsewhere, officials also treated suicide as a severe antisocial act. In England, the crime of self-murder remained on the books until 1823. By the 19th century, with the rise of psychiatry and medical science, suicide took on the aspect of an illness, if not its final symptom.
Lieberman writes that “many doctors seemed to regard suicide, literally, as a contagious disease.” Such judgments received influential expression in the work of such theorists as Emile Durkheim, who, Lieberman maintains, “transformed suicide from a meaningful personal statement into an index of social dysfunction.”
Some of Lieberman’s most enlightening material comes from her prime territory of 19th-century France. French statistician Adolphe Quetelet argued that suicide was “governed by the same general laws of recurrence as any material phenomenon.” A.M Guerry, a lawyer, trumpeted a statistical correlation between, in Lieberman’s words, “self-destruction and the corrupting influence of the urban milieu.” Guerry wrote in regard to suicide: “Among the influences that we have been considering, there is none more remarkable than that of proximity to Paris.”
But Lieberman also roams far afield, constructing a welcome comparative context for her reflections. She brings in the Hindu practice of sati, or widow suicide (which Britain officially banned in 1829), and the “collective suicide” of many 19th-century American Indians who preferred to fight rather than compromise with oppressors. In literature, she examines real cases from Thomas Chatterton to Sylvia Plath, fictional icons such as Madame Bovary, and Holocaust memoirists Jean Amery and Primo Levi.
The absorbing issues Lieberman addresses, and the challenge that suicide poses to everyone it surprises, confront us as much today as ever. No decision by another person remains so over-the-top, so inscrutable, so frightening.
Self-help and popular psychology books already exist to help loved ones and others understand. More controversial how-to guides come from such organizations as the Hemlock Society in the U.S., which urges “self-deliverance” for those with incurable pain.
Lisa Lieberman probes suicide from a different place. Toward the end, she tells the story of a Jewish woman dancer who, moments from being sent to the gas chamber, was ordered to dance naked by an SS officer. The woman danced, grabbed his gun, shot him dead, and was immediately shot dead herself.
Can Lieberman see into her mind? No. But she knows there was something else operating there besides dysfunction.
*Contact book critic Carlin Romano at 215-854-5615 or cromano@phillynews.com.
Impetus from impending birthday
June 2nd, 2003 atwork
The time has come to stop waiting. It’s not enough thinking, “I want to write eventually” or “I want study again some day”. Turning 27 gives me the impetus for decisive action. I don’t think it means I’ve wasted these two years bumming around. I needed to work to realise how bad I am at it the same way I drag myself along at school to satisfy my curiousity: they were all neccessary for me to know there is an inevitable.
On Saturday I had a lovely long dinner with friends L and Z. A grand time was had by all. All the credit was the chef’s: we had a scallop salad, pocini (sp?)mushroom soup and for our mains, beef tripe, truffle flavoured pasta and squid ink pasta. (Yum.) To end the meal, we ordered a glass of very sweet wine each. After Z left, L and I strolled back to the train station to sit at the ground floor bar of Swisshotel Hotel. We took our shoes off and sat chatting until it was one.
