TMNTLVOX

Tragedy is a spectator sport

nobody@vox.com(wifflewiffle) — Fri, 16 May 2008 06:46:37 +0800

While other people are writing about the arts - literature, the moving picture, music, North European, avant garde, stylish, ironic stuff - I am currently a translator at a tabloid. That means reading loads of gore and trash and death and rape of all sorts and rewriting them for an audience that is actually willing to pay to read these spewings. In the course of my work I have discovered that Malaysia/Taiwan have the best killing and murder down the South China Sea way. We do have limits of course. We don't report on suicides because we don't want copycats. But rape is peachy. As long as the victims don't kill themselves afterwards anyway.

But sometimes even your everyday rapin' and murderin' pales in comparison to the amount of newsprint that good old mother Nature can generate in the span of a moment. She nudges a tectonic plate one way and boom half a civilisation goes down like crumbs and Charon has to start paddling like a motherfucker. What's one dismembered girl compared to thousands buried in concrete and dust? What's a single or even a dozen corpses compared to - I quote a China newspaper story I translated - rows of dead children wrapped in white cloth, like silkworms in their cocoons?

Normally I embrace the fact that I am the definition of not just a pleb, not even merely a non-intellectual, but a counter-intellectual, though I respect genius. Give the people their blood gore and guts man! It's real, at least more substantial than the utterances of economists, the blabbering of politicians, the bleating of reviewers and the mangling of science by idiotic journalists. Face it, shitloads of us are, from the top to the bottom. I know I am criminally stupid though I like to believe I am gifted at recognising a moron when I see one.

But man sometimes it's too much. You know? This is just a long way of saying I'm quite tired of reading and writing about the China Quake. There's only so much sadness you can put down put down what you can. Then it's time to move on to other things, like Britney's underpants. At least those stains aren't tears.

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Worst Last Words Ever

nobody@vox.com(wifflewiffle) — Wed, 14 May 2008 05:53:51 +0800

Dominique Bouhours, Academic and Grammarian. "I am about to - or I am going to - die; either expression is used."

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Artists use words to give life to ideas

nobody@vox.com(wifflewiffle) — Fri, 09 May 2008 05:27:14 +0800

Post-modern academicians use words to strangle them

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Pressure points

nobody@vox.com(wifflewiffle) — Thu, 08 May 2008 01:26:20 +0800

Last year I bought mum a foot massager. My father regularly buys her massage tools. And a few years ago a client gave my mum a giant Osim massage chair. For this Mother's Day we're planning on getting her an eye massager.

I think subconsciously we all think she needs to loosen up.

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Lesson from the Mas Selamat case

nobody@vox.com(wifflewiffle) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:44:15 +0800

Question: What equipment do you need in order to escape from a highly-secure detention centre, operated by a secretive anti-terrorist agency, filled with highly-trained guards, in high-tech Singapore?

Answer: Toilet paper

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The streets after dark

nobody@vox.com(wifflewiffle) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:25:30 +0800

I got off the taxi early today. It was 2am and the streets were still lit. I said goodbye to my colleague, with whom I shared the cab. I said I wanted to buy something to eat at the 7-11 but I really got off because I needed to walk.

Here where I live there are few cars this late in the night. I think this as the taxi drives off behind me and I enter the 7-11 where a middle-aged woman stands behind a counter. She is wearing a badge I think but who cares about her name? I decide I'm not hungry and buy a bottle of chrysanthemum tea. She asks me if I want a plastic bag and I say no.

I am electric with nervous energy. I leave the shop into the equatorial night. It is warm and humid and its frequency is the cricket call. It is also calm, stiflingly so. You need that sometimes because the life of a sub-editor is an exciting one. Especially when there are breaking news and you have already busted offstone for 20 minutes but the newspaper computer system was written by angry, underpaid robots with a touch of Downs' Syndrome because it opposes all human logic. You need it to work now now now holy shit.

By "I" I mean the other subs. The only emergency I got was when I realised one of the copytasted cartons on my page had already been used in another paper yesterday and I had to do a rewrite 15 minutes before offstone. But you feel it. The panic surrounds you. There is tension. There is yelling.

That's why I need the glorious, sleepless night. On neighbourhood roads there are no human sounds but the clanks of my footsteps on drain grilles.

There is no danger walking here. This is Singapore. You can't even get chewing gum on your soles. Well, to be fair, recently there was a robber on the loose. He had a knife and had robbed several people in the area. I was not aware of this until he was caught. I don't think there are too many other weapon-wielding criminals lurking nearby. Even if there were, I think they would be asleep, like most reasonable people.

A few cats cross my path. None of them are black but I'm not superstitious (touch wood). I pass a temple, a large ornate Chinese one that was standing across the road from me. It was bright and workers are walking about carrying chairs and tables. It seems an act of worship had recently concluded. By now all the believers were probably tucked in their own beds, maybe dreaming of whatever they prayed for. In dreams all things are real.

I walk on. A tall Indian man crosses my path. I feel, I admit, a tiny bit of fear, probably more than if it had been a black cat. Latent, inherent racism? It doesn't matter if the conscious brain understands that people, like cats, are mostly the same regardless of coloration and the differences don't have that much to do with melanin content. The reptilian part of the brain never forgets a prejudice. Unsurprisingly, the man does not, in fact, lunge for my wallet.

I was thinking this when suddenly, a massive roar overpowers the combined song of probably hundreds of crickets. A chopper whips past a bend, revving its motor as it went. Such noise from such a small engine! However, the roar has its own velocity, disappearing as quickly as it came, and the night is silent again

I am approaching the exercise park. Just a few days ago when I walked there at a slightly earlier hour the benches were filled with couples, men and women holding each other, whispering words of no significance except in the universe that exists in the space between two hearts. There are no lovers tonight. They have all gone home. There was only one man on a bench in a far corner of the park. Like me, he was alone.

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It's not the religion, it's tribalism that's the problem

nobody@vox.com(wifflewiffle) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 01:11:18 +0800

I hate it when people say that. You've had a thousand years of religious rule. Somehow I doubt more religion isn't the answer to the problem of people kidnapping a woman and the poor father being forced to marry her off to her kidnapper.

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Is it really worth converting to something you despise

nobody@vox.com(wifflewiffle) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 05:56:11 +0800

Even for love?

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The Ghost Of Greek Gods

nobody@vox.com(wifflewiffle) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 02:30:45 +0800

Did they get it right? I mean the ancients, the non-Jewish types, who saw something all-too-human in the churning ways of the galactic winds. Could it be that the engine of fate is driven by many hands, not One? And that they, the gods, are vicious and backbiting and jealous of man and yet they burn just like man. They have no plan, not for you, nor their children, nor themselves.

But they are swift and they see.

The gods despise heroism as one can see from their treatment of Prometheus, he who stole fire to give Man sustenance. Zeus so hated this petty transgression that he had Prometheus tied to a rock where a vulture eats his liver every day, which isn't the sort of thing one really gets used to. Incidentally the punishment for Man was the sending down of Woman, which if you ask me blatantly violates the principle of punishment in proportion to the crime. Pandora the first woman brought in her proverbial box all suffering and death.

It's a universal principle that the powerful prefer obedience to heroism. So that's how it is in myth, and that's how it is in the world. But what are we really obeying? Gods and madmen!

On a positive note, if we didn't have death we wouldn't have death metal.

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The airconditioner has been serviced

nobody@vox.com(wifflewiffle) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 02:07:55 +0800

To breathe cool air again!

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