Random Notes

What I have been up to these past few days:

- Made new wonderful writing friends, shared poems, and went to my first reading at Joyce is Not Here (that's the name of the bar). This place is pretty much incredible. Alley and I returned the next day and had the most delicious chocolate raspberry filled dumplings with strawberry slices.

- Attended a lecture at Hong Kong University on "obscene books and the law" (on the book The Well of Loneliness and the controversy it sparked). This reminded me of how much I miss taking classes. It was fun to remember my Foucault. And how I forgot to return Kate's copy of Discipline and Punish. Kate, I am sorry. I also went to the art museum at HKU and found these two old Chinese chairs which did not have the expected description tag (the date, the what-is-it-made-of). Instead, it had this little placard above it that read: "To be in a fulfilling marriage is to be like a fish moving in harmony with water."

- Slowly starting to fill out applications.

- Listening to Iron and Wine's new Shepherd's Dog album, a birthday present from Dan and singing the track 12 line "Now I am a fat house cat" while I walk down the street.

- Finally applied for a public library card! I spent the day at the Central Library in Causeway Bay today, reading giant Norton anthologies of modern and contemporary poetry. I was most amused by Kenneth Koch's "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams":

1.

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next
summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2.

We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

- Kenneth Koch

Fun fun fun. I think I laughed outloud and this couple glared at me (sidenote: they were wearing bright yellow croc shoes). I also liked what was written in Lyn Hejinian's biographical note: writing that "lets the seams show between sentences". Also, I was very pleased to find that the library has some Amy Hempel (who was, by the way, a Bread Loaf waiter as well!), Anne Carson, Li Young Lee, and a good selection of classic and new novels. Plus, I am excited to read work from Hong Kong writers, including Leung Ping-Kwan, who I discovered at the "City Under the Sea" discussion on campus. I checked out Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband, this collection of poems by Rachel Flynn called Ice, Mouth, Song, and Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.