It is what it is

Most of my friends
are musicians in the subway stations
Making amends with a dark and different world
Paying their dues like a faulty underwater mortgage
Taking the cues from a nonexistent fantasy girl


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Gold Motel's latest, brimming with good summer vibes, as always. As if one needs a reminder that we're right smack in the middle of the hottest season of a calender year. Currently living under the oppression of a colossal heat wave, one which I can barely walk straight in.

Time's passing quicker than I could have ever imagined, which is strange, because the days seem fuller as compared to the past academic semester & I'm wondering why my weeks fall through my fingers faster than I can flip through my daily planner. Just came back from church camp a couple of days ago, which was an amazing but mad tiring experience, one I'm sure to blog about if time allows (great worship, lovely people, 3am nights). Then there's the endless parade of paperwork for Sweden, decorating up the studio for our acoustic sessions that's launching in July, time with family & friends & of course, church stuff. There's always something to do.


Everyday's an adventure; I'm wondering when things will finally slow down, slow down enough for me to catch up.

Within & WIthout

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” 

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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I recently caught up with a dear friend C, who is currently studying journalism & English literature in the dreamy city of Paris. We talked like how old friends often do: naturally & unabashedly & sometimes absent-mindedly & so it was shocking when she suddenly stopped in her tracks & scolded me for the way I blogged. C, one of the few loyal readers left of this forgotten online space, told me to blog about something concrete, & not to be so vague & nebulous (a word we are fond of throwing around lately) as I 'always' am. It was puzzling to me at first, but it's true. Many writers do feel an obligation to always write about a compelling issue, to publish a review on an art film or an electronic product, or to update his/her readers on a life-changing moment, but the thing is that life isn't always about great, big stories like that. Life isn't just made up of momentous events; it's made up of a million minuscule occurrences too.

So here are a few 'concrete' things that have been happening in mine lately. For starters, the entire office spent an entire Saturday celebrating Alarice's & Calvin's wedding union two weekends ago. What can I say? The chapel was resplendent, the ceremony was lovely & the dinner after was intimate & special. It was a wonderful way to spend an evening, getting drowsy with beer & sleep with friends under fairy lights & flags. I couldn't be happier for Rice, who's been like an older sister to me the past couple of years, at my workplace & elsewhere. The journey is only beginning & I'm so stoked to see how God uses this amazing couple in his kingdom :)

Have been meeting up with the girls (& a couple of dudes) from church often too, for meals or movies or just pure conversation. It started out with a strict sense of urgency, where the ending of sophomore year made me realise how quickly I would be leaving this country for exchange in Sweden & well, I really did want to meet everyone at least once before that. This quickly changed though, with teas turning into dinners & shopping trips turning into 4 hour-long talks at the nearest coffeehouse. I love spending time with these friends & mentors & younger youth. These are the people I've taken for granted for more than 15 years but I am certainly grateful for every one of them.

There are so many more things to write about. Books I've been reading & music I've been listening to. Art exhibitions & time spent with S. The Great Gatsby film. Secret tea sessions & bizarre socials. Work & my hilarious colleagues. I love writing at this time of the night, where the air is still & the world stops, if only for this twilight hour. It's as if God reserved this time, or created midnight at all to let people think & write. But for now the hour is late & that will all have to wait till next time.

P.S. I hope this is concrete enough for you, C. Love. 

Poetry bites

Housewarming 
(As it might have been written by Sylvia Plath)

It is noon & I am already wilting

the landscape cringes &

unhinges

while the second-hand in my wrist ticks on

but only faintly.

I need quiet,

I need space
but all there is, is waiting
& more of falling apart
at the seams

Somewhere else, the real belltower rings.

If this goes on, I might

crack

like an egg

& slide across

the bottom

of a porcelain bowl.

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Currently finishing up two poetry collections that I purchased earlier this year, the first being Wendy Cope's Two Cures for Love & the second being a Sylvia Plath anthology. I have always been crazy over Wendy Cope's work, which is always filled with witty social commentary & counter-balanced with bare-faced honesty about the lesser-known (or less-talked about), embarrassing experiences in life. Her poems, above all, are a celebration of simplicity & uninterrupted streams of emotion, which I like very much. My two favourite pieces from this particular collection were written in two famous poets' 'voice' & style. Here are the excerpts:





A Nursery Rhyme 
(As it might have been written by William Wordsworth)

The skylark & the jay sang loud & long
The sun was calm & bright, the air was sweet,
When all at once I heard above the throng
Of jocund birds a single plantitive bleat.'


&



A Nursery Rhyme 
(As it might have been written by T.S. Eliot)

Because time will not run backwards
Because time
Because time will not run
(Hickory Dickory)




When I say that the poem is written 'in Sylvia Plath's voice', I don't mean to completely copy & paste her style over into my poems because that would just be plain disrespectful. It's just that sometimes, when you have been reading the work of a particular poet over a long period of time like I have, their style automatically becomes familiar to you & sticks, & certain emotions you feel somehow translate themselves into lines that reflect the poet's language & voice greatly. & this isn't disrespectful, or plagiarism in the least, but quite a beautiful thing: a young novice writer paying homage to one of the literary greats by almost becoming one with him/her. I love that idea, that nothing is original, but everything can be authentic.

Well I definitely need to start writing again... & updating this space on everything that's been happening. More to come! 

Out of bed, out of comfort

Antlers - We Were Evergreen

Tell Us Your Name - The New Limb

Drifting In & Out - Porcelain Raft

Overjoyed - Bastille

Build Your Kingdom Here - Rend Collective Experiment

Collective Mon Amour - Éléphant

Entertainment - Phoenix

Pompeii - Bastille

Everything's Gonna Be Undone - Band of Horses

No Other Plans - Sunny Levine feat. Young Dad

Big Parade - The Lumineers

Towers - Bon Iver

Charleston - Set Sail

Son My Son - Milo Greene

Wild Things - San Cisco

Cousins - Vampire Weekend

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Here's what I've been listening to lately, songs plucked out from youtube obscurity & also my Facebook timeline (!): The latest from WWE, tracks from the Celeste & Jesse Forever OST & the lesser-known from Coachella. These are the songs I could spend entire rainy days listening to, days like the ones we've been having, falling asleep beside melody & lavender tea.

I also received my We Were Evergreen package I blogged about earlier this year (x), all the way from London! I had to stifle screams of excitement as I ripped apart postage paper & airmail bubblewrap to get to its contents: a signed poster, handwritten lyric sheets for Penguins & Moonboots by Fabienne & best of all, their first album from 2010! Every track is different, slightly incomplete, but beautiful. There's a fifty-second demo at the end of the record entitled Verano ('summer', in Spanish), a mere fragment of a song which begins with nothing but whistles & a plucking guitar & repeats the lines 'Hang on to summer / Don't let go / Don't let go' over & over. It's perfect in its simplicity. I love how much you can fall in love with a song & how much comfort it can give & how it never asks for anything in return.


I don't know... I'm feeling strangely content right now, just listening to fresh music in my room. Haven't felt like this in a while & it's nice.

Blue

Hello, San Francisco
City, not of dreams,
but little things
how blue one feels
without you

Hello, San Francisco
so spartan & in sync
a city that beats
I'm glad I caught you
with my teeth
& sank deep, sank deep

Don't you know
my sea-salt love
I would go
to north Sausalito
& beyond
to taste you on my tongue


Hello, San Francisco
A paperback dream
& the flush of spring
I will learn to love
all the unsavoury parts of you


Oh San Francisco
perhaps this is long overdue
but I hope you know
that I will learn to love
all the unsavoury parts of you

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It's been about a year & I haven't written many songs or poems about my trip to San Francisco CA last summer, which is strange because I remember so much of it; the dreamy carousel fraught with fathers & their pink-frocked daughters, the tang of salt on my upper lip, sharp smells of clam chowder & seafood & freshly-baked sourdough on the pier at eight-thirty in the morning. I should though, before these tactile & sensory images turn to dust. It's how one preserves special memories, by turning it into song...

Thrifting & Prufrocking & Other things

In summer, I came over
& made you my lover
& do you remember 
how you said
show me your bones &
I'll show you mine
so I did

we went to the market
not to buy
but to kiss & see
& the rest of autumn we did nothing 
but build birds out of paint & parts 
& make sense of nothing at all
one surely must wonder
when it went wrong

Perhaps I was remiss 
when I thought
that voices might burst from 
my cavity's chest &
turn into song

(29/3/2013)

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Summer break is finally here! There's nothing more refreshing than leisurely thrift-shopping & an iced-tea in a forgotten coffee house & of course... the end of sophomore year! Like most 'vacationing' college students, there's a massive list of things to do during this three-month-long holiday, starting with getting a job to cure the state of being perpetually broke. Then there's errands we've been putting off, old school friends to meet, reunions to plan, missed birthdays to be celebrated... but that can wait, if only for a little while.

First, more lazy afternoons like these. Simon Armitage poetry & the Beach Boys on repeat. An ice-cream cone in one hand & a camera in another, a solitary walk, the start of all adventures. All because T.S Eliot once said that 'There will be time / there will be time / to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet' but then today isn't one of those days. Today, time is yours & yours alone but only if you let it be...



I'll write again soon. Have a wonderful summer

'That time was like never and like always'

What an interesting semester it's been... Wouldn't trade a moment of it for anything.

Roma

'We are in a painted room, rising from a new world. Here, there are no mirrors, only eyes. Only a trunkful of vinyl & the clicking of hearts in the insides of ears. In the course of the night the world has already changed remarkably & yet you & I have remained almost exactly the same which is sad but also very beautiful. You open your mouth & taste the edges of the day that is yet to come, so warm & so bare. This is the space we have come to inhabit or the space love inhabits or the space the idea of love inhabits. All around us, words settle like flecks of dark chocolate. I say, it's this part I enjoy most, the morning arguments about nothing at all. Is it only the conversation you like? Well no, but I like it best. Like the fizz that spills over a tall glass of root beer. You laugh. So stick out your tongue. Morning peeks through, & then floods. One cannot help but feel walled in, familiar as the shadows that lie on the floor may be, or however lovely the comfort offered by hollowed bed cocoons may be, because after all a room is a room is a room & a room must have walls. You are usually a person filled with light, very much of zeal but today you have gone to seed. Lie down and talk to me, you plead but already your eyes are like dark caves & once again you are alone in sleep. So I leave. Outside, the city throbs and I try very hard to be in the same vein, weaving through oceans of people & its smells; buildings sweating with toil & the crisp metallic tang of pavement stones. I ache for something else altogether. Nature, maybe. Anywhere away from here. In this crowd, I can't help thinking: If I cried out now, would anyone stop? Would anyone hear me? Perhaps I should have stayed with you. You, who are so young, not quite ripe, not a boy but certainly not a man yet. Now we will be children together, that is what you said when we met, when I was still not yet sewn into the fabric of this landscape. The tender flesh of the inside of a tomato, a song made out of milk & honey, racing profiles & patterns across a darkened room, intoxicated by liquor & the promises of a night forgotten before it can be created. Skin & a lock of hair... could you carry me off to an unfamiliar room? I wonder if I would ever again have the opportunity to fall in love with a stranger. Universes & fragments... Suddenly I want you here with me very, very badly. Mi amado, de alguna manera nuestras formas encajan...

Even when I walk the streets alone, I wear your love like a soft scarf.

The darkening sky will soon sweep the light away. Tonight we will go out & take in, inhale this territory still so foreign to me. Perhaps you will take me dancing after, or for a music show in a clandestine loft only we & a few know of, where the air is stale but the sound is fresh. When the bass kicks in, perhaps the crowd might surge with the exhilaration that lasts only for a span of a song. Perhaps, when we fall back onto the sheets together & ride the soft velvet waves back into dream, the city will feel more like home.'

Writing the City

'Prose is all well & good, but it seems to me that poetry is full of music...'

Julia Bell

Last week, our creative writing fiction class attended a short seminar entitled 'Writing the City' by Julia Bell & Jean McNeil from the British Council & that was a nice change from the lessons that we've been having. Creative writing classes have always been a beacon for me in the past two years of college, with the exposure to interesting literature & the rediscovering of an innate hunger to write, but somehow this semester's fiction course was a little... drab. Perhaps it was the way classes were conducted; three hours of sitting in a circle & workshopping other people's work, which sometimes tended to go in circles without answering any quintessential questions (What does it mean when one says that a novel has a voice? When does one draw the line between fiction & autobiography?). Talking about writing, to me, is always necessary but often dull. Perhaps it also had to do with the kind of fiction my coursemates & I were producing, a lot of it being self-absorbed & overly-personal biography, only with disguised characters & changed names. Most of all though, it was largely because fiction doesn't come naturally to me at all, like how poetry or songs (sometimes) do, & these thirteen weeks were spent feeling largely like a fish out of water. Last week's class however, felt a bit like a breakthrough.

It was more of a reading of their work & discussion than a direct teaching seminar. The pieces they read, both excerpts of work-in-progress-novels & poems, were impressive & on occasion, brilliant. Jean, a travel writer whose work encompasses both Antarctica & Africa, talked about how good writers never let their life experiences & people & current landscapes directly translate into their writing, but how they used these tools to provide a template, a vibrant background for the invented story they had to tell, & I could definitely see how that was the case in her stories. There's a certain richness & creativity & also a curious authenticity, when a writer infuses the surrounding culture & his/her own life into a story without allowing it to be a true reflection of their own lives.

Julia also addressed the issue of fiction vs. autobiography, where she talked about how writing fiction isn't equivalent to ranting on the author's part. Throwing up your emotions on a page is the least of any kinds of writing, which often happens to writers in their early stages. Adolescent angst & bitter romances & painful experiences are treasure troves because of the strong emotion it invokes in the writer & his/her readers, but truly magnificent writing pays attention to how all of it translates onto a page & transforms personal experiences into something powerful & sublime. That is why writing is above all an artform, where things like rhyme & form & style are utilized to craft stories to the best possible form.


It was a good hour. What a terribly awful rant that must have been to some of you, but it was an eye-opener for me... I enjoyed it tremendously! Anyway, I haven't been blogging nearly enough & I promise I will soon when the obligatory final exams are over & summer holidays kick in. Till then... au revoir!



P.S. You can read about Jean's work here, & read some of Julia's poetry & short stories here.

In paper & ink

Sometimes, stories are the only things that matter.