What have I learnt today? Blogging about books, media, words, Singapore and the world today. The blog that was Blowin' in the Wind.
Singapore is the ideal expat location for both quality of life and career progression, shows the 2011 HSBC expat explorer survey. It says:
When expats were asked what their ideal expat destination would be, the most popular answers were Australia (10%), the USA (10%) and Singapore (9%), followed by Hong Kong (7%), Canada (7%), and the UK (5%).Continue Reading
I saw this book and loved it at first sight. How could I not with its poems about Singapore?
It is called Words: Poems Singapore and Beyond and edited by Edwin Thumboo.
As luck would have it, the very first page I opened had a poem by him about the transformation of Singapore. The poem, Island, begins like a fairy tale:
Martin Amis is 61 today. Happy birthday. Here's his own take on ageing from his latest novel, The Pregnant Widow, published this year. Martin Amis – never amiss with words:
This is the way it goes. In your mid-forties, you have your first crisis of mortality (death will not ignore me); and ten years later you have your first crisis of age (my body whispers that death is already intrigued by me). But something very interesting happens to you in between.
As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get the sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing. And you sometimes say to yourself: That went a bit quick. That went a bit quick. In certain moods, you may want to put it rather more forcefully. As in OY!! THAT went a BIT FUCKING QUICK!!!… Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent. This is the past.
Singapore ranks 20th on the world's best countries list compiled by Newsweek. But it would have the third highest score if the list didn't include the political category.
If you look at the chart, it includes five categories: education, health, quality of life, economic dynamism and political environment. Newsweek says the list gives equal weight to all five categories.
The chart shows Singapore ranked first in economic dynamism, fourth in education, seventh in health and 23rd in quality of life but 67th in political environment. That is what dragged it down. Leave aside the political environment and tot up the scores (shown in brackets in the chart) in the other categories. And only two countries emerge with higher scores than Singapore: Switzerland followed by Finland. Japan comes a close fourth.
Martin Amis (left) describes seeing his father, Kingsley Amis (below), in a dream in his autobiography, Experience. Published in 2000, five years after his father's death, it's one of the most intimate accounts of a father-and-son relationship that I have ever read.
He writes:
Why should I tell the story of my life?
I do it because my father is dead now, and I always knew I would have to commemorate him. He was a writer, and I am a writer; it feels like a duty to describe our case — a literary curiosity which is also just another instance of a father and a son.
He writes about his father explaining the mysteries of sex to him and his elder brother, Philip, when they were schoolboys and the conversations they had when he had grown up.
His father pops up even when he is writing about other things. He recalls the articles he published in the New Statesman following the death of the critic FR Leavis and calling them a "symposium". A symposium originally meant a drinking party, he says and adds:
And that is what Kingsley liked, above all things. Well, he probably liked adultery even better, in his manly noon, but the symposium was a far more durable and unambivalent pleasure — a love whose month was forever May.
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan.
A relationship formalised when her stroking his penis elicits a marriage proposal from him ends on wedding night when her grasping his penis again makes him come all over her, sending her fleeing in revulsion first to the bathroom and then out of the hotel. She is frigid, Edward tells Florence, running after her. And when she tells him she loves him and that if he really wanted –- she doesn’t say what -– she would never be jealous as long as she knew he loved her, he spits out in cold fury: “You want me to go out with other women!…
“Do you realise how disgusting and ridiculous your idea is?”
Humiliated, Florence leaves the hotel the same night — and Edward doesn’t try to make up with her. Her parents set in motion a divorce on the grounds of non-consummation of marriage.
Unusual as it sounds, Ian McEwan brings this short novel to life with his exquisite prose, which verges on music and photography. He describes scenes and feelings vividly from the act of “self-pleasuring” — “a self-made spoonful, leaping clear of his body” — to the virgin Florence’s dread of any kind of physical intrusion. She does not like even French kissing, so when out of a sense of duty she starts foreplay with her newly-married husband, it ends in disaster. They have been engaged and fondled and kissed before, but they have never had sex.
Early Sixties
This is England in 1962, memorably described by Philip Larkin in the poem Annus Horribilis:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP
Edward adores his beautiful wife, and she loves him too -– but she is not prepared for this. She has other interests. As a trained classical musician, she is engrossed in her music and her career and has had girlfriends, not boyfriends, before.
McEwan portrays the differences in class and background between Edward and Florence. He is a schoolmaster’s son, a grammar school boy, she is a businessman’s daughter who has had all the privileges.
Starting with the dinner the newlyweds have before they retire to bed with disastrous consequences, the author tells the story flashing back and forth between the past and the present showing the differences between the couple. In the process one gets a picture of early 1960s England.
A day in the life
The story is set almost entirely in a single day, jumping 40 years to the noughties -– the present decade -– in the last pages.
Edward, now in his 60s, looks back on his life and misses Florence, who has become a famous violinist leading her own quartet.
Regrets
He has changed since he was shocked by her suggestion that he could go out with other women. He absorbed the spirit of sexual liberation that came in the late 1960s, had affairs with other women and went through another short-lived marriage. But he feels his life would have been far more rewarding had he listened to Florence and stuck with her.
The last two pages of the novel, filled with Edward’s regrets, are a meditation on the choices we make and their consequences, success and failure. The story ends on an elegiac note in McEwan’s beautiful prose:
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