I am back from Canada and will attempt to organize my thoughts chronologically, though it might be an impossible endeavour, the dizzying effects of jetlag and a week that has unfolded like a dream. The evening we landed we took a cab to Verdun, where our first hunt for poutine was a failure, after the restaurant owner convinced us that poutines were “tourist traps” and we were better off having smash burgers for just a couple more Canadian bucks. Sleep was fitful that night: I closed my eyes and opened them again, at various hours.
In the morning we said goodbye to our temporary flatmates, a group of Indian friends, and found ourselves practising French at a diner with the stale smell of grease and waitresses who called you honey, saying “deux” everytime our coffee had to be refilled. I heard someone at the next table say that they fish the lobsters out of St. Lawrence, “not the river but the gulf.” At another table, a kid asked for more bacon. We continued our way north to go downtown, our suitcases straddling behind us on potholed streets like reluctant passengers. The sun glinted off the surfaces of skyscrapers.
At the anarchist bookstore we were introduced to the various shelves – classic anarchy, contemporary anarchy, shelves that deal with class and race, shelves that imagine a future. Though anarchy was distant to me as a concept, I was surprised to find that I had read a lot of related books, that some of my academic research could perhaps even be considered anarchic work but without the activism (which was key). Liz, who gave us the tour of the bookstore, said that the work of ideas is important too, that “we need everyone.” I found her words consoling and learned later that she is the granddaughter of Ksawery Pruszynski, a prominent Polish journalist who was present at the Spanish Civil War to cover the work of anarchists resisting against the Franco regime.
While A. checked in, I got a haircut in Chinatown. After exchanging pleasantries in Mandarin, the hairdresser asked if I was happy in Germany. I shrugged my shoulders and asked if she was happy in Montreal. She said no, but she had moved here 22 years ago for love, and it is home.
On my last day in Stirling, I checked out early and dragged myself to the old bridge to watch the imposing Firth of Forth dissect the landscape into the future and the past: to its South ran the train lines that would take me to Edinburgh, kick-starting a 12-hour journey back to Nürnberg through Berlin; on its other side nestled the university, framed by the towering Wallace Monument and the Ochi Hills, the Scottish highlands further beyond, from where I just came out of a 3-day conference organised by the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS). After uncharacteristically sunny weather, the day had finally turned a more familiar grey, and between the overcast and the gaping hole vacated by the intense intellectual intimacy fostered over a period of time, I returned to myself, allowing the theme of the conference, “What Happens Now?,” to percolate in my head. I am thinking of the 1967 film, The Graduate, where a torrid love affair between Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), Elaine Robinson (Katharine Ross), and Elaine’s mother, Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft) culminates in a kinetic closing scene at the church, as Benjamin arrives to break up Elaine’s marriage to one Carl Smith (Brian Avery). Benjamin’s reckless gesture of love succeeds. Benjamin and Elaine fight off dissenting wedding guests and escape onto a bus, with Elaine still in her wedding gown. But as the bus drives on, their expressions turn from ecstatic to blank – “what do we do now?” – and the screen fades to black.
The first few days I spent wandering around the city, reading at the university park, occasionally cocooning myself in cafes to look for flats and register myself with new doctors. I am housed temporarily in a university apartment in #erlangen for international researchers, an overly bright, glass-panelled three-floor building that reminds me of the office in the Apple TV series, Severance; I guess the resemblance is apt because I feel that there is always a certain amnesia involved every time one moves away into a new environment, as memories of the past contest for space with the unfamiliar. There are supposed to be 11 other residents living in the building though I’ve only seen one of them once, after I inadvertently scared him in the common kitchen when I tried to grab some snacks at midnight. He left before I could properly apologize or say hi.
The evenings can sometimes get quite lonely. After the daylight absconds and the anonymous small city charm reconfigures itself into rambunctious gatherings between families and close friends, I get pangs of homesickness – for Berlin or for Singapore, I’m not too sure, though I suspect it’s a little bit of both – but I’ve also found some daily respite wandering north of the apartment into the woods separating Erlangen from smaller villages in the vicinity. I cherish these moments because once I get my keys to the office, and the programme officially begins at the end of the month, a more familiar busy sets in, one that may allow for less introspection. Anyway, sending lots of love to everyone from Franconia, Charles.
Dear [intended], I am writing to say hello and thought I also frame my greeting as a continuation of a response to the fascinating question you posed yesterday, on how Berlant’s work might be politically useful. I guess my answer now isn’t too different from my initial answer to your question, except the words that absconded from me yesterday have perhaps found a more distinct shape today. I still can’t quite remember where I’ve read it from or from whom I’m citing, but it goes along the lines of how revolution isn’t achieved through the utter domination of the opposition but it only truly arrives when you have found an ideological cause that would compel even the opposing soldiers to drop their arms and stop fighting. When Berlant tries to deconstruct the fantasies sustaining hegemonic structures of power and reconstruct a new kind of “commons” from the dissociative middle, I see a similar impulse towards this kind of ideological cause. I am quoting from pages 123-124 here: “when one’s attention is bound to something that organises one’s energy or interest,” it “provides an infrastructure for understanding and moving through a situation or world” and by freeing this “energy and attention,” you can redirect them towards “recomposing the world, causality, and possibilities.” I don’t want to romanticise and over-determine Berlant’s political usefulness and suggest that reading Berlant will translate to material transformations in the sociopolitical realms, especially with a world out there that seems so keen to move so fast with its violence and destruction, but I found the whole notion of ‘unlearning and relearning’ very emboldening against an easy fall into conformity and nihilism, to think about disrupting our attachments to the status quo and slowly feeling our way towards affective foundations that might eventually transcend late capitalist logic. As Nicholas Brown says in Autonomy (2019), “the power of an argument is of an entirely different order from the power of a union. But you can’t have a union without an argument” (182). And for me, Berlant’s work certainly makes a compelling “argument.” Dreaming of another world, [subject]
Hay-on-Wye greeted me with the smell of manure which wafted intermittently into my psoriatic nostrils as the bus careened through the Welsh countryside, Gran Turismo style. I was here for the last day of Hay Festival, tantalisingly termed by Bill Clinton as “the Woodstock of the mind.” Dubitable quotation source aside, there’s really a lot to like about Hay, a literary festival that combines the alacrity of summer camps and the finesse of interior thought: sweaty bodies meet fluid minds. Alongside tents, food stalls and lounge chairs were NGOs set up in flea market format doing donation and subscription drives: among a few, Greenpeace, theWI, Macmillan Cancer Support, and ShelterBox. People were middle class cordial – progressive and aware but also privileged to some extent. * At the Baillie Gifford Stage, Dua Lipa said that she has no plans to write a book, to the palpable dismay of the audience. But she is fully committed to her music (a new album), her podcast (“At Your Service”), and her book club (“Service95”). The interview, effortlessly and tactfully conducted by Gaby Wood (chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation), offered an intimate insight into Dua Lipa not as global popstar, but as avid reader. It chronologically looked at various chapters of her life – moving to Kosovo, moving back to London, nascent music ventures – through literature: Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. It is a prime example of how when one holds up a book, one sees a part of themselves reflected on the pages. * After a satisfying keralan curry paired with a Welsh lager, I booked a 30-min massage with Jon (without the H, he insisted). Jon worked primarily on my lower back and noticed I had some issues with my shoulders. “Sitting all day in front of a screen is unnatural,” he admonished in a fatherly way. “So don’t forget to move.” With some vitality restored, I made my way back to the center of town.
While we were searching for Kierkegaard’s grave, Em asked if I already knew what I’d write on my headstone. Her question caught me by surprise, its sincerity and intensity doubled by Em’s foggy green eyes. I didn’t have an answer and so spent the rest of the afternoon morbidly scanning gravestones for inspiration, seeing in each of them, a small reflection of my own mortality. When we finally got to Kierkegaard’s grave, it was unassuming, weathered by the elements. Under his name the words of Danish clergyman Brorson were carved: “There is but little time/then I shall have won/then all the strife/will instantly have vanished/then I can rest/in petal-strewn halls/and ceaselessly to my Jesus speak.” * Though Kierkegaard was religious, he believed in the subjective truth of the divine, thus pitting him against a Christendom that was institutionalised and politicized. He was also depressed for most of his life, attributing this state to a Cartesian misalignment, “a suffering which must have its deeper basis in a misrelation between [his] mind and body.” The paradoxes of modern life did not stop him from publishing 38 completed works throughout his life, including the very influential Either/Or, a cornerstone of Western existentialism. Transcending the tyranny of binary, Kierkegaard seemed to suggest, entailed creating meaning as you pass through life: “If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it.” Choices are not inherently wrong or right but objective artefacts imbued with subjective truth. Ultimately, even if life can be understood backwards, it can only be lived forwards (“Livet må forstås baglæns, men må leves forlæns”). * As we were leaving, we stumbled upon a pair of amorous lovers making out. I briefly wondered if their display of affection was amplified by their surroundings, if the absence of life had given a more pronounced present to the living and made them randy. I couldn’t figure out the answer to Em’s question in the end but I imagined it would be, if I choose to be buried, located either in marriage, or not.
Monday’s weather continued from the weekend’s, the sky forlorn, the rain speckled. After Gil and I parted ways at the Berlin Central Station, I was assailed by a revelation of the emotional fullness of the days, which had began Saturday night with Elgar’s elegaic Cello Concerto at the Philharmonie, later reiterated on screen in the movie, Tàr. With Elgar’s melancholic strings still percolating in my head, I slept fitfully, then woke to go to Hamburger Bahnhof for the abstract, but in my head at least, tortured figures of Christina Quarles’s paintings. I ventured deeper, into a separate exhibition on broken music, charting the history of experimentations and innovations in music for the past few decades. A free audioguide is passed to you, on which you can scan QR codes to listen to the sounds from various curated themes in the exhibition – minimal/maximal music, techno, artists’s labels. I was immediately drawn to John Giorgio, who founded the Dial-A-Poem telephone service at the height of the 60s counterculture movement where a random poem is selected for the caller, usually poems with leftist leanings – anti-Vietnam war, pro civil rights, anti-capitalist. Eventually, it got shut down by the FBI in the 70s, not an unusual act of censoring materials that did not fit the status quo. In the Suicide Sutra, inspired by Buddhist chants, Giorgio’s voice is overlaid several times, each phrase, an echo of the last: “you can’t remember, you can’t remember, where you are, where you are, you have forgotten, you have forgotten, who you are, who you are.” Returning to the Central Station, Elgar’s contemplative tune was acoustically superimposed onto Giorgio’s mournful poetry, along with the visceral visuality of Quarles’s paintings. The overall effect was heavy, not the lightness of being of love and sex and living in the moment, but the vague feeling that all of these things have happened to you before, in a past life or an alternate reality. I took that feeling to Beate Uwe, where I met Fiona for the first time, and danced my heart away.
Every 2nd S̷a̷t̷u̷r̷d̷a̷y̷ Sunday of the month, in a dingy Neukölln bar, the convivial fox gathers its skulk for a night of music and storytelling.
The night begins with Olivia Mamberti. The Berlin-based artist from Rio sings of past selves and past love. Her presence is airy, her voice tastes of half-melted gelato on a warm summer day.
Pause, 5 mins. 5 mins to recover from youthful reveries.
Marina Reza goes next. Brazilian summer retreats into New York winter. Blending Moshfeghian ennui with catchy Burnham-esque axioms, her poetry provides reprieve of some kind in an age of “we’re all f-ed in the b.”
Pause, again. We are reminded to use the restroom and tip the bartender, who is working alone tonight. There are thirsty cubs to feed.
Louise Mathilde falls into place on the stage. Her voice perforates. “Septembre” relates a terrible month of loss: the days get shorter; a lover leaves. As “que s’endorme le chagrin” is quavered, I feel her chagrin.
Pause, one last time. I’m on my third Radler. I’ve tipped the bartender.
Anna Pancenko comes on, spring in her steps. She juggles between guitar, accordion and harmonica. A deluge of genres – indie, folk, blues – is backed by quirky details from misbegotten adventures.
For Fuchs’ Sake is a monthly event curated by singer-songwriter, Ella Fuchs, showcasing four artists every 2nd Saturday (sometimes Sunday) of the month. It has been on hiatus since 21 August 2023 but you can follow updates on https://www.instagram.com/for.fuchs.sake.berlin/.
Hot Milk begins with a chapter in #almeria. It is with this book I start my day here, where I will spend the next few weeks under a blue sky that is reflected in my reading screen and the Alcazaba which casts its mournful eye over my sojourn. It is here I hope to be burdened with clarity.
"Today I dropped my laptop on the concrete floor of a bar built on the beach. It was tucked under my arm and slid out of its black rubber sheath (designed like an envelope), landing screen side down. The digital page is now shattered but at least it still works. My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else. So what I am saying is that if it is broken, so am I." - Deborah Levy, Hot Milk
We walked to the university along Paseó Marítimo, a 6.4km stretch straddling desert and sea. On our way we saw white tarps plastered over the hills, greenhouse farms fielded by mostly underpaid North African migrants. “You’re gonna see a lot of them,” Ik said. “Agriculture is Almeria’s biggest industry. Most of Europe’s food is practically produced here.”
Every time I looked at her, Ik was always untying and tying her hair in slow, meticulous waves, mimicking the ebbing of the tides. The view, of two unrelated motions in sync, had an air of finality about it, just as the tomatoes will continue to be harvested and exported, and the workers exploited.
I’m thinking of love today partly because it’s Valentine’s, partly because today’s weather in Almeria is anomalously grey so I’ve been confined to an interior space, with news of global crises splayed out across B’s 65” TV like chaos incarnate and it left me wondering if heart-shaped chocolates can save us.
I’m thinking of love today because it is someone’s death anniversary, near or far, and while we are often bombarded with pictures of love being jovial and amorous, we often forget that grief is also an expression of love, and an expression we wear more often, and I’m trying to remember if it was Spanish philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, who said that love arises out of shared suffering and compassion for others?
I’m thinking of love today because Moth taught me about penguin pebbling and gave me insights into neurodivergent ways of loving and how during our trip to a stationery store they had seen me eye a green-leathered notebook and bought it for me in secret, around the same time I had seen them marvel over a book-shaped wooden box and bought it for them in kind, after which we got coffee and headed down the Paseo to visit an Asian supermarket where I spoke Mandarin with the shopkeeper.
A metal walkway separates B&H’s neighbourhood from La Chanca, a commune carved out of the Colonia Morato caves, home today to fishermen, gypsies and Moroccan migrants. Its colourful facades obscure its impoverished state, its steep streets strewn with rubbish and improvised promenades, refused to be reached by city services except for a bus line that runs reluctantly through every half an hour. Yet life thrives, through various corner stores pedaling different wares, boisterous kids kicking balls about, residents under fig trees seeking refuge from the heat.
In his eponymously titled novel (1962), Juan Goytisolo marvels at La Chanca’s “[overwhelming] geological violence, the nakedness of [its] landscape…” Downtown, at the Museo de Arte Doña Pakyta, which houses a permanent exhibition for Almeriense art from the 1880s to the 1970s, La Chanca was a recurring motif. Through Goytisolo’s words, I can see why La Chanca has captured artistic imagination across the ages: the sublimity of its hazardous beauty, the resilience of the people who call the hills home, like sprouting mushrooms at the end of the world.
Miguel Cantón Checa (Almeria, 1928 – 2004)
Chanca
1965. Óleo sobre lienzo / Oil on canvas
Miguel Martinez Gómez (Almeria, 1920 – 2003)
Belén Almeriense (La Chanca)
Circa 1980. Óleo sobre lienzo / Oil on canvas
Around 6pm, the murmurations begin, over the port which is visible from B&H’s sunroof. On the other side of the roof the Alcazaba stands. Every day, it faces the rocky hills from which its walls are made, a moody child separated from its natural environment: dignified on a clear day, solemn in grey. Today, the sky is dusted pink.
I have not quite decided on what to do with my evening but I already know I will make the 20-minute walk to the beach where horse-cat will greet me with its hoarse meow and the sun will take its time to set, like an overdramatic actor exaggerating their exit scene. When it is finally dark and the streets slowly fill up with expectations, I will make my journey back, past the Moroccan teahouses on quaint alleys, past the jazz bar mounted with a Big Mouth Billy Bass, past gossiping neighbours seated on big plastic chairs. I will open the front door to the smell of homemade tortillas and watch a horror movie over vermouth and crunchy noises. I will remember that notions of home are like sea tides, cascading layers of waters gently beating the sand into formlessness.
Chan Wai Charles Wong 