These crustaceans

Have you ever seen such an enormous mouth-watering crab? I’m not the sort to take pictures of food, but this certainly took the cake! Thankfully I was with small eaters Jason and Jong Yann, and I could relish a large proportion of this crab all to myself. The place: Mellben Crab at Blk 232, Ang Mo Ko Ave 3.

Hail to the crab, which like the lobster, doesn’t bark and knows the secret of the sea…

Anyhow, while eating this (since Jason was concentrating on his plate), I was also thinking of Eliot’s phrase from “Love Song of Alfred J Prufock”, where there is a famous mention of a sea creature: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”  But do these claws refer to a crab or lobster? or neither? The academic brouhaha about the image is a real hoot. Just read the following:

Claude Rawson, professor of English at Yale University: “I think it’s almost certain that Eliot was thinking of a crab. After all, the poem invokes Prince Hamlet, who once spun a crab metaphor of his own: ‘For you yourself, sir, should be as old as I am–if, like a crab, you could go backward.’

Richard Poirier, eminent literary critic, insists lobster: “crabs are endowed only with rudimentary claws, when they have them at all,” and concluded that “these are most likely the claws specifically of a Maine lobster.“

Louis Menand, professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center: “Definitely lobster. Crab claws are too prehensile anyway for the sexual misery ‘Prufrock’ means to evoke and not nearly funny enough. (I could never have guessed, Prof) Lobster claws are a witty variation on Tennyson’s super-eroticized hands in In Memoriam: swollen with longing but clumsy and vaguely mutant, desiring but undesired.

Positively hilarious, all this much ado about a crab!

Boots made for walking

Here’s a bare-bones lesson in simplicity and direction:

Don’t ask for the true story

Why do you need it?

 Its not what I set out with

or what I carry

What I’m sailing with,

A knife, blue fire, 

luck, a few good words

that still work,

and the tide. 

 –Margaret Atwood

And did I mention that I also need my costly new pair of Aldo shoes to get me there too?

Just a lil’ reminiscing…

Man, I miss Leeds and the UK. We were given special treatment at Elland Road because evidently, the club organizers were surprised to see “asians” still supporting the once high-flying club. You’re very welcome, LUFC! Though I had to wear a Leeds scarf to blanket my true Liverpool loyalties.

Everything was perfect in Leeds. Close to home ie. York, Good Hotel and bathtubs, good shopping, (nice lingerie along the window aisles), good Chinese food, great company except for the snoring etc. Now if only I owned a concord to take me back every weekend… Sigh.

The Rock and Sole Plaice

Winston Churchill called Fish and Chips “the good companions”. With good reason. London’s oldest and best F & C eatery is named the Rock and Sole Plaice, a true bastion for all chippies and hungry travelers.

It’s run by Cyprean Fishermen and the haddocks and cods are wonderfully battered to perfection. Haddock is slightly larger than a cod and its meat is more delicate. More sweet. The key to perfection here, or so I read, is the proportion of batter to fish. So overpuffed batter which makes the fish look larger are nasty ploys by nasty restaurants (so now you know, but nothing of that sort here).

They’re all cooked in peanut oil, which makes them marginally healthier than the standard Fish and Chips. But for the skeptic, take a look at this picture and decide if it’s worth a trek to 47 Endell Street near Covent Gardens.

Pork scandals

Though the English have mastered the art of pre-packaged microwaveable food (Any Marks and Spencers food package is a treat), their country still brims with meat: Steak and ale pies, goose fats, matured beef, pork pasties with mint and vinegar. Here, in Leeds market, I’m dazzled by the range of well-hung meat sold by these well-hung butchers. The Chinese would be envious…Here’s a poem I was reminded of when I was at this particular butchery:

The butcher carves veal for two.
The cloudy, frail slices fall over his knife.
His face is hurt by the parting sinews
and he looks up with relief, laying it on the scales.
He is a rosy young man with white eyelashes
Like a bullock. He always serves me now.
I think he knows about my life. How we
prefer to eat in when it’s cold. How someone
with a foreign accent can only cook veal.
He writes the price on the grease-proof jacket
and hands it to me courteously. His smile
is the official seal on my marriage.

–Hugo Williams

England, oh England…

There are many versions of England; a land of watercolours rather than oils, miniatures rather than monuments. Take George Santayana’s vision for example,

“England is pre-eminently a land of atmosphere…charming, clement and eminently inhabitable, it is almost too domestic, as if only home passions and caged souls could live there. But lift the eyes for a moment above the line of roofs or treetops, and there the grandeur you miss on the earth is spread gloriously before you”

The vision partially coincides with mine, but these are the things I remember best about England from 4 years back…

In England, I’ve felt happiest reading Titus Andronicus in my cold, cosy room in Wentworth College, while the drizzle peters down my window pane, and I’d just come back from a Chinese New Year dinner at Netherpoppleton.

I loved my walks around York’s Roman walls after my day trip to Scarborough, a town I’ve held a special fondness for…By a squint of memory, I also remember my walks to town, to Halifax College and James, Alcuin, Derwent College, savouring the cold. There’s also something about the wind that gets to you too. It’s so quiet in England, there are no vehicle noises at night especially and the desolation makes it easy to exaggerate the person you are. The devout pray, the literary-minded get more literary, the lonely get lonelier, sometimes fatally. Though the telephone rings sometimes to remind me that I’m no island.

And though my affair with her is as torrid as a short-lived tryst, I’ve never felt happier before than when I was in England. How different would things be if I stayed on?

10 on the sleaze-o-meter

Golden Mile Complex is a sanctuary for all things Thai, mostly unsavory.

I came out of my cave recently and was shopping at Beach road, when I decided to take a look inside this shopping centre. The first thing that wafts over you is the acrid, pungent smell of Thai herbs displayed untidily along the air-conditioned halls, and the smell clings to your shirt long after you’ve quit the place.

The place is a mixture of odd-looking cafeterias, money-changers and dubious phone sellers. Everywhere you look, large ghastly banners in Thai festoon the grimy walls. The Sports shops hawk their items with aplomb, despite me knowing that the shirt materials feel like paper.

Men with triangular tattoos on their foreheads and arms (most likely fugitives from Thailand) are conversing in a vernacular mix of Hokkien and Thai with the Thai girls. While some look keenly attractive, the rest wear an expression of bored but benign condescension as they assess me over, no doubt having seen Hell more times over.

Here are some pictures of the place, (note the Thai dungeon, disco) but they are too lightly brighted and optimistic to be accurate. Think a dozen shades of monotone gray darker, and you’ll get a snapshot of a shopping centre out of joint with time and place.

You take the blue pill…

Popular Culture tells us that if you take the blue pill, you continue blissfully unaware of the cantankerous reality we live in…for me, I’m taking this prophylactic to ward off a little organism that is plaguing my poor foot! (Athlete’s Foot, you see, and I haven’t been in the jungles long enough recently to deserve such company)

The pill is quite a mouthful, called fluconazole, an antifungal drug that suppresses the growth of this yeast that is growing happily on my right foot. A little information on this microbe: Yes, it’s a yeast (but why do I think of warm breads and hot oven stoves?), and yeast comes from the Old English, gist, which in turn, comes from the Indo-European variant, meaning boil, bubble and foam. Quite accurate if you look at the moccasin patterns of shed skin on my leg! (Pictures not included)

But I’m just amazed at how this drug works; pharmacokinetics like poetry can be such fun stuff. How do the ingredients of the tablet travel down the length of my intestinal tract, locate the source of misery, know its job and wipes out the adversary? You have to thank Wikipedia for the kind of humourless information it provides on this subject; just take a look at the process:

“This inhibition prevents the conversion of lanosterol to ergosterol, an essential component of the fungal cytoplasmic membrane, and subsequent accumulation of 14α-methyl sterols”

And looking at the molecular structure of the drug below, I’m vaguely reminded of my Chemistry classes with all the hoohah about co-valency bonds. It’s a mass of ciphers which are really Greek to me…

Heart of the Matter

To the Bibliophile, if you wanted your book cravings satisfied, you’d go down to Kinokuniya in town. Soft-eyed, you would wander down the organized aisles and glance at the books by the hundreds. It is quite the dreamy pasture.

If however, you wanted to leave a bookshop red-eyed, and wanted books glistening and brimmingly full, (and I don’t just mean being saturated by the truckful or the plane-load, but a continent, a calvacade of books) you would head to Foyles at Charing Cross in London. Which is exactly what I did. I mean I splurged before on books, but this was ridiculous. Loving books but also aware that I don’t command a 5-figure salary, I knew I was in trouble when my friend casually quipped:

“Oh did you know Foyles claims to have every book published?”
“Really?”
“It’s just a claim. Hmmpf…”

I kept silent when I saw the building directory. I cannot shape the magnitude, the inchoateness, the abundance and absolute all-inclusiveness of Foyles, with enough superlatives. It really is a gem of a place.

“This is a very bad place to be in, Cohen” I muttered despondently. I kept to my resolve and concentrated on the areas of interest for the fastest half-hour of my life. Literary Biographies. Check. Poetry. Check. Lesbian Studies?! Wondering how this topic became sui generis I had to investigate, however nonchalantly I tried to appear in a crowded London bookshop.

Back in Singapore, I’ve had time to ponder this: why Lesbian or gay studies for that matter? And why five shelves dedicated to this topic? Passionate love or whatever its variant, it has been suggested, requires taboos, obstacles and barriers; so that the great love stories naturally dwell on frustrated yearnings and clandestine embraces rather than contented fulfillment. Why be artificial like the Admiral and Mrs Croft in Persuasion when you can suffer so deliciously with Tristan and Isolde, or Paolo and Francesca in the third circle of Hell? “My spine tingles with little white flames…“

And writing about homosexuals now, and the kind of futility or impossibility of desire that is associated in their context, I’m always awed to recall Rupert Halselden’s words in the left/liberal newspaper The Guardian:

There is an inbuilt fatalism to being gay. Biologically maladaptive, unable to reproduce, our futures are limited to individual existence and what the individual makes out of it. Without the continuity of children, we are self-destructive, living for today because we have no tomorrow.

And does this fatalism then explain why love is made as ardent and relentless as quicksand? Or why the Library’s Dewey decimal classification has to carve a difficult niche for them? ;)