Luck of the Draw

Having never won anything in a lucky draw, raffle or even a table prize in one of those staff dinners, I was most irritated to receive the following this morning and thus have embellished it with my petty comments:

Dear Sir,

VERIFICATION OF OVERSEAS STATUS

1. On your application, an electronic Exit Permit (eEP) no. IAT 6863, valid from 02/08/2007 to 01/08/2010 for the purpose of your overseas study in USA ["for study in the USA" would be clearer as it gets around the passive construction and still sounds bureaucratic], was issued to you.

2. We are conducting a routine random verification exercise [never win lucky draw can get picked for this kind of thing ...] and you have been selected [as one of 2 lucky winners of an all expense paid trip to climb Peng Kang hill ... ] by our system to furnish documentary proof of your current overseas status [again, "proof that you are currently overseas" would be less clumsy].

3. Please let us have an updated documentary proof ["an" is wrong] certifying the purpose of your overseas stay [Re-write as: "Please let us have a document explaining why you are overseas". I should think that "certification" can't refer to a "purpose" but to the legality of my current status, something which the system already has, since it approved my permit] such as a company letter stating the duration of overseas employment [I think they should have more than one form letter for this, since point one already acknowledges that I applied for the permit "for the purpose of my overseas study in the USA"] with the name and designation of the signatory or a properly endorsed school letter stating the level and full duration of your course. You may email or fax the relevant document(s) to us at 63733173, within 1 month from the date of this letter. [of course, this being MINDEF, there isn't a date on the letter] Thank you.

4. Should you require clarification, please contact the Exit Permit Office at 63733136/38/39 or the MINDEF eServices Centre at +65 65676767, if you are calling from overseas [from "a location overseas" would be more correct, though I will concede that in Singaporean English "overseas" has become a proper noun, in the same way that outremer was the shorthand reference to the Crusader Kingdoms in Medieval Europe] , or [a semi-colon would correct the run-on: "overseas; or,"] 1800-3676767 (1800-eNSNSNS), if you are calling in Singapore.

Yours faithfully, [I'm glad you're still faithful ...]

Susan Woo (Mdm)
NS Registration & Enlistment Centre (NSREC)
Tel : 6373 3139
Fax : 6373 3173

Given that Susan Woo (Mdm) probably didn't write the standard letter and NS
clerks did, it really isn't her fault ...

Sounds and Sweet Airs

I've been listening, quite obsessively, to the British hymn "I Vow to Thee My Country". I've mentioned the hymn in connection to a fabulous movie ("Another Country") on the blog some time back but I've most recently revived an interest in the hymn because it moves me in ways that make me suspicious and worried about who (or what) I am.
Ok, this basically means that listening to the hymn makes me teary. Earlier this week, as I listened to it on YouTube, I was just downright weepy. Here's the version that moved this hard heart as well as the lyrics:

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,

Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;

The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,

That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;

The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,

The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,

Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;

We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;

Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;

And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,

And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

Now, what intrigues as well as irritates me, is how such a nationalistic hymn of jingoism that subordinates choice and freedom to that old lie and masks imperial ambition as obedience to a higher call moves me to tears. Even if the imperial ambitions of the hymn are outmoded the comments on the YouTube video attest to the fact that the hymn stirs lots of feelings of patriotism. (I even saw a comment on another video of the hymn that said "we will have the empire again ... "). An old verse that is now no longer included in hymnal versions of the song underscores the virulent and violent nationalist sentiment that the existing verses make very little effort of concealing:

I heard my country calling, away across the sea,

Across the waste of waters she calls and calls to me.

Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,

And round her feet are lying the dying and the dead.

I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns,

I haste to thee my mother, a son among thy sons.

The use of the hymn in the film Another Country is smart precisely because it questions the values of sacrifice in the name of imperial expansion. Yet I also found myself emotionally stirred when the hymn's melody (from Holst's "Jupiter" and also known as "Thaxted") was used at key points of the blatantly propagandistic film Roaring Across the Horizon, a Chinese film about China's superhuman and successful attempts to develop the 原子弹 (do I have that right?) In that film, Holst's theme swells in the background every time the Chinese manage something amazing -- like flattening the uneven, sandy ground of the Gobi desert with huge rollers driven only by raw manpower, calculating with abacuses what the Americans and Soviets could work out only with the aid of computers, and, of course, firing off the bombs.

Adding another dimension to this question of why I am so strangely moved is the fact that Holst's uplifting and majestic theme really comes in the middle of a very different piece of music. The "Jupiter" movement of Holst's The Planets is also subtitled "The Bringer of Jollity" and its opening strides, as well as the rest of the movement really do create a rather light-hearted atmosphere with its quick tempo and playful call-response accents of the woodwinds and brass: some of it sounds like incidental music for an old Western. Placing the sweeping grandeur of this middle section against the frivolity of the rest of the movement conveys a message that is quite different from the hymn's rather straightforward appropriation of the stirring melody. Especially interesting in thinking about the musical context of the Thaxted theme is the way it returns with the low brass toward the end of the movement, gets taken up by the trumpets but then gets shuffled, unresolved, into the rest of the movement's final seconds.(Here's a video of the entire movement).


So, my question revolves around how someone whose developed so many defenses against nationalistic feeling goes to pieces at something so flagrantly 'patriotic'. Worse, it isn't even 'my own country' that we're talking about here but a wholly irrational response to some vague (but nonetheless dangerous) feeling of .... I don't even know what to call it. Perhaps the idea of sacrifice just gets me. I'd be interested to know if anyone else is strangely moved by the hymn and if they can put a finger on why.

Paella!

I finally took the plunge and tried cooking paella last night. I'd been fascinated by the dish since my first encounter with it in a Cuban restaurant in mid-town Manhattan. It was really a slice of heaven -- great tasting rice with sausage and seafood on top, all served in a huge platter. I was further intrigued by the fact that saffron is required to make it, saffron being that really expensive spice. Anyway, the paella I made ended up okay ... not spectacularly flavorful or anything but still something I was pretty pleased with. (And by the way, that glass of pink juice in the background, is grapefruit. It's our drink of choice now since we can get 18 pound bags -- about 20 + grapefruit -- for five bucks ....)

Those burnt bits of rice from the bottom of the pan are supposed to be highly prized .... Given that connection, I now tend to think of paella as a Spanish version of claypot chicken rice. I guess that's one way to navigate around a world of food ....

There we have it -- the world's most expensive spice. I managed to get this one gram jar for about 5 bucks. Which means an ounce of the stuff costs well over 100 dollars ...!

Books Most Unread Meme

Here's an interesting meme. The list of books below are books that have been most tagged "unread" on LibraryThing. So, go through the list and tag see if you've read them!

In bold = You've read it
In red = Started but didn't finish
In blue= It's still sitting on your shelf untouched
No formatting = don't own, haven't read

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (239)
2. The complete fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm by Jacob Grimm (20)
3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (200)
4. One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (179)
5. Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra (140)
6. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (155)
7. Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (167)
8. Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (110)
9. War and peace by Leo Tolstoy (129)
10. Ulysses by James Joyce (129)
11. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (128)
12. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (159) *
13. The complete short stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway (13)
14. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (160)
15. The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (126)
16. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (106)
17. A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens (123)
18. The name of the rose by Umberto Eco (124) *
19. The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova (113)
20. Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi (97)
21. Middlemarch by George Eliot (92)
22. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (117)*
23. Emma by Jane Austen (123)*
24. The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie (81)
25. Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco (100)
26. The Odyssey by Homer (130)
27. The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding (66)
28. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (96)
29. The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (69)
30. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (64)
31. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (92)
32. Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand (97)
33. The Iliad by Homer (113)
34. The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon (96)
35. Dracula by Bram Stoker (101)
36. The book thief by Markus Zusak (72)
37. The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini (127)
38. The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (96)*
39. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond (103)
40. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens (58)
41. The house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne (61)
42. The once and future king by T. H. White (82)
43. Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence (72)
44. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (98)
45. Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood (79)
46. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (127)
47. The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake (50)
48. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (80)
49. The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (78)
50. Gulliver's travels by Jonathan Swift (83)
51. The corrections by Jonathan Franzen (85)
52. Labyrinth by Kate Mosse (54)
53. Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel (121)
54. The god of small things by Arundhati Roy (87)
55. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond (75)
56. The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck (99)*
57. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers (93)
58. A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce (93)
59. The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (94)
60. The sound and the fury by William Faulkner (82)
61. The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger (113)
62. The known world by Edward P. Jones (57)
63. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (83)
64. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (77)
65. Swann's way by Marcel Proust (61)
66. Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence (62)
67. The bonesetter's daughter by Amy Tan (60)
68. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (101)
69. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (61)
70. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (99)
71. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson (70)
72. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (59)
73. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (56)
74. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (77)
75. To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (76)
76. The mill on the Floss by George Eliot (56)
77. Persuasion by Jane Austen (85)
78. Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (64)
79. Baudolino by Umberto Eco (58)
80. The divine comedy by Dante Alighieri (60)
81. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (53)*
82. Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison (79)
83. Underworld by Don DeLillo (59)
84. Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (64)*
85. The island of the day before by Umberto Eco (54)
86. Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan (83)
87. The man in the iron mask by Alexandre Dumas (42)
88. The English patient by Michael Ondaatje (64)
89. In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its… by Truman Capote (78)
90. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (62)
91. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (79)
92. Les misérables by Victor Hugo (72)
93. The poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver (86)
94. A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess (83)
95. The portrait of a lady by Henry James (59)
96. The phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (55)
97. Silas Marner by George Eliot (54)
98. Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (46)*
99. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (61)
100. One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey (78)
101. Infinite jest : a novel by David Foster Wallace (53)
102. The inferno by Dante Alighieri (78)
103. The ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories by Susanna Clarke (39)
104. Cat's eye by Margaret Atwood (58)
105. Anansi boys : a novel by Neil Gaiman (81)
106. Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West… by Gregory Maguire (91)
107. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (59)
108. Twenty thousand leagues under the sea by Jules Verne (57)
109. Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro (68)
110. As I lay dying by William Faulkner (64)
111. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (74)
112. Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy (58)
113. A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson (78)
114. The age of innocence by Edith Wharton (59)
115. Cold mountain by Charles Frazier (66)
116. Snow falling on cedars by David Guterson (63)
117. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (90)
118. Dubliners by James Joyce (74)
119. The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and… by Brian Greene (56)
120. Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen (87)
121. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (48)
122. American gods : a novel by Neil Gaiman (94)
123. Possession : a romance by A.S. Byatt (65)
124. A princess of Roumania by Paul Park (24)
125. The last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper (51)
126. The Dante Club : a novel by Matthew Pearl (52)
127. The confusion by Neal Stephenson (56)
128. Mark Z. Danielewski's House of leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (60)
129. Uncle Tom's cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (56)
130. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (67)
131. The thirteenth tale : a novel by Diane Setterfield (59)
132. Tropic of cancer by Henry Miller (51)
133. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (54)
134. Cloud atlas : a novel by David Mitchell (58)
135. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (64)
136. Vellum by Hal Duncan (27)
137. Freedom & necessity by Steven Brust (27)
138. The good earth by Pearl S. Buck (56)
139. A people's history of the United States : 1492-present by Howard Zinn (61)
140. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (55)
141. White Teeth: A Novel by Zadie Smith (64)
142. Son of a witch : a novel by Gregory Maguire (48)
143. The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood (51)
144. The return of the native by Thomas Hardy (47)
145. Midnight's children by Salman Rushdie (58)
146. Northanger abbey by Jane Austen (63)
147. Angela's ashes : a memoir by Frank McCourt (73)
148. Villette by Charlotte Bronte (46)
149. The shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (66)
150. Dune by Frank Herbert (85)
151. The scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (79)
152. Everything is illuminated : a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer (64)
153. The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman by Laurence Sterne (46)
154. Naked lunch by William S. Burroughs (56)
155. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (47)
156. Sophie's world : a novel about the history of philosophy by Jostein Gaarder (68)
157. Brave new world by Aldous Huxley (95)
158. The system of the world by Neal Stephenson (48)
159. A farewell to arms by Ernest Hemingway (66)
160. Utopia by Thomas More (52)
161. The Aeneid by Virgil (66)
162. Pattern recognition by William Gibson (55)
163. Pride and prejudice by Jane Austen (109)
164. Prodigal summer : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver (52)
165. The mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (47)
166. The mysterious flame of Queen Loana : an illustrated novel by Umberto Eco (42)
167. The plague by Albert Camus (63)
168. The woman in white by Wilkie Collins (49)
169. Watership Down by Richard Adams (71)
170. East of Eden by John Steinbeck (65)
171. Empire falls by Richard Russo (51)
172. The amber spyglass by Philip Pullman (72)
173. The prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (71)
174. The Eyre affair by Jasper Fforde (65)
175. The inheritance of loss by Kiran Desai (43)
176. Far from the madding crowd by Thomas Hardy (48)
177. Of human bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (44)
178. The idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (56)
179. Light in August by William Faulkner (47)
180. The golden compass by Philip Pullman (81)
181. The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (60)
182. Suite française by Irene Nemirovsky (47)
183. A passage to India by E.M. Forster (53)
184. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into… by Robert M. Pirsig (66)
185. Fragile things : short fictions and wonders by Neil Gaiman (48)
186. The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor (28)
187. The Bhagavad Gita by Anonymous (43)
188. The road by Cormac McCarthy (60)
189. Beowulf : a new verse translation by Anonymous (69)
190. The remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro (54)
191. The moonstone by Wilkie Collins (45)
192. On beauty : a novel by Zadie Smith (52)
193. Women in love by D.H. Lawrence (42)
194. Midnight in the garden of good and evil : a Savannah story by John Berendt (55)
195. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (87)
196. The night watch by Sarah Waters (35)
197. A room with a view by E.M. Forster (47)
198. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956; an experiment in literary… by Aleksander Solzenitsyn (41)
199. The plot against America by Philip Roth (49)
200. Eldest by Christopher Paolini (55)