DAPH no i haven't! is it very long? (if it isn't i will look it up!)

and are you in the UK? we should meet? i don't even have your email!!

sorry, i know this reply comes one month late and is consequently probably totally irrelevant ;p

kel! kel kel! have you read the secret history by donna tartt? can you write me fanfic? :D i really, really want secret history fanfic, but i cannot find any and have awful ust.

turkey was great, and the people were the best part. i acquired more penpals than i care to count, most of whom don't speak english (or if they do, not fluently). this happened when i met random people (usually very young or very old) and they thought me and my family cute or curious looking, and we took photographs, and promised to send them. i still have two or three left to send.

i met a girl about our age at the central bus station in ankara. she couldn't speak english but gave me her charm bracelet (you know those typically turkish things? they're made of blue beads painted with an eye, in order to ward off the Evil Eye). i tried to explain to her where singapore was (everyone thought we were from japan, which was particularly embarrassing after japan lost to australia in the world cup, because the men on the street had no qualms about saying things like "japan--harakiri!" to us). we exchanged emails and she added me to msn, but since her english consists mostly of "hello" and "bye bye" and my turkish consists entirely of phrases featured in my berlitz translation guide (which turns out to be entirely useless when it comes to spontaneous conversation) i have only got as far as asking her how she is.

but there's so much culture there it's amazing, really. istanbul was fantastic and the ottoman palaces are truly splendid... in fact "opulent" as miss woon (?) used to say in sec 2 or 3, about the tsar's winter palace in russia. complete with vaguely horrified hand gestures and facial expression. topkapi palace lived up to expectations, even after reading dorothy dunnett's sumptuous descriptions in the lymond chronicles (which i heard you didn't like, incidentally!). the jewellery collection there makes emeralds and rubies look like common stones, and they appear on flasks and crowns and water jugs and boxes and thrones etc with such geometrical regularity that in some ways the items are horrifyingly ugly.

but they do wonderful things with mother-of-pearl and rosewood (i think).

cappadocia is where they have the very phallic rock formations called "fairy chimneys" (formed entirely naturally.. weathering and erosion). it's actually wonderful how you can see secondary school geography come alive like this, in the table-top mountains (which really look like table tops) and the different layers of rock and everything. this is supposedly where early christian settlers fleeing roman persecution came to settle. it's almost desert-like, and they carved caves out of the rock. you can still see some of their staircases and dining places (the stone tables and benches, carved into the earth), and there are frescoes too but those are from a later period.

in cappadocia i met a young man called ismail who said several very flattering things (which i'm sure many people would beg to differ on) about my physical appearance. this was at a pottery-making centre and we were on tour. turks flirt a lot (if they're men), apparently, but this was definitely the heavy end of flirting.. though to be fair it was not annoying or intimidating in any way. i was bemused, and glad that my parents were inspecting pottery and not around to witness it.

a shopkeeper we met offered to give my dad his shop in return for my sister.

and other such incidences.

and yes, i do have photos! here. =)

hi kel!

yeah, it does - "corked my mouth with a kiss", i think. i loved that phrase so much :D

how was turkey? tell all! do you have pictures? can i see pictures?

beautiful, daph.

as usual. actually the beginning reminds of gillian clark's poem about chernobyl.. that year spring was late, or something like that. i don't know, the same wistful sort of feeling to it. and i especially like the second stanza. "You were made of rain: the wind followed like an obedient pup..." somehow very poignant.

does "stoppered them with a kiss" echo that colin tan (?) poem about sailboats (i think) and "poets and their things"?

i don't remember the poem you mention about war. i do remember a war poem in association with a hill but it's a rupert brooke sonnet, and something about how we kissed, and suddenly you cried and turned away.

and on love--i'm reading plato's "Phaedrus" right now because it's closely referred to in mary renault's "The Charioteer" which is very beautiful even if andi and weren't entirely convinced it had enough 'literary merit' to be studied for English S paper... it's about love, and whether it's better to be the beloved of someone who loves you or someone who doesn't. but that was random. why is love the sort of subject people obsess over so much?

i have a feeling that that's a question that's either un-answerable or that i more or less know the answer to already.



and we are, for most part, alive and reasonably well i think. actually i speak only for myself. when do we next see you? do things work that way?

i miss you people lah.

would you believe it? wikipedia has an entry on love. ehehe:


Love is a condition or phenomenon of emotional primacy, or absolute value. Love generally includes an emotion of intense attraction to either another person, a place, or thing; and may also include the aspect of caring for or finding identification with those objects, including self love. Love can describe an intense feeling of affection, an emotion or an emotional state. In ordinary use, it usually refers to interpersonal love, an experience usually felt by a person for another person. Love is commonly considered impossible to define.

The concept of love, however, is subject to debate. Some deny the existence of love, calling it a recently invented abstraction. Moreover, approximately 13 percent of cultures reportedly have no word for love. Others maintain that love exists but is undefinable; being a quantity which is spiritual, metaphysical, or philosophical in nature. Love is one of the most common themes in art. An unfinished debate about the authenticity of love as other-regard began with Friedrich Nietzsche's charge that love is merely an ideology constructed by the weak to mask "resentment" about their lack of power. Critics of Nietzsche's view find gratuitous his assumptions that self-interest and the "will to power" overshadow all other concerns.


somehow it avoids being bashable, something to do with how it's all breadth and no depth. and vaguely pointless, other than in a time capsuley kind of way.

btw does anyone remember the name of this poem - i have this really hazy recollection of it, and of liking it. i think it was in pdd and was quite short, something about the author going off to war, and realising it wasn't the same as his father's war - or not being as poetic as it sounded on the radio or something - and i remember this image of his daughter standing on a hill holding flowers (roses?), but i'm not sure if that was in it or not. i've tried every combination of those snatches of memory on google but it hasn't come up with anything yet.

charm: stanford book prize =)

re the philosophy below:
do you think life is too short for philosophy, anyway? d-l- says he thinks that philosophy (and literature, for that matter) is an indulgence. or do you see it as an essential part of, i don't know, "[living] without opium" (oh dear that must be my most-quoted phrase) in an eliot-esque fashion...
why the need to be rational? you can blame socrates for starting all that (according to nietzsche anyway)... unless you suggest i suppose that rationality is functional in the sense that it lets everyone live together reasonably happily (or not). but rationality and philosophising are not the same thing, indeed perhaps it is not quite rational to philosophise your life away.

this is from evelyn waugh, anyway. (on, ah, living in sin.) /brideshead revisited/ is brilliant.

'No,' she said, 'it's not that. He's quite right. They know all about it, Bridey and his widow; they've got it in black and white; they bought it for a penny at the church door. You can anything there for a penny, in black and white, and nobody to see that you pay; only an old woman with a broom at the other end, rattling round the confessionals, and a young woman lighting a candle at the Seven Dolours. Put a penny in the box, or not, just as you like; take your tract. There you've got it, in black and white.

'All in one word, too, one little, flat, deadly word that covers a lifetime.

'"Living in sin"; not just doing wrong, as I did when I went to America; doing wrong, knowing it is wrong, stopping doing it, forgetting. That's not what they mean. That's not Bridey's pennyworth. He means just what it says in black and white.

'Living in sin, with sin, always the same, like an idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from the world. "Poor Julia," they say, "she can't go out. She's got to take care of her sin. A pity it ever lived," they say, "but it's so strong. Children like that always are. Julia's so good to her little, mad, sin."'

'An hour ago,' I thought, 'under the sunset, she sat turning her ring in the water and counting the days of happiness; now under the first stars and the last grey whisper of day, all this mysterious tumult of sorrow! What happened to us in the Painted Parlour? What shadow had fallen in the candlelight? Two rough sentences and a trite phrase.' She was beside herself; her voice, now muffled in my breast, now clear and anguished, came to me in single words and broken sentences.

'Past and future; the years when I was trying to be a good wife, in the cigar smoke, while the counters clicked on the backgammon board, and the man who was "dummy" at the men's table filled the glasses; when I was trying to bear his child, torn in pieces by something already dead; putting him away, forgetting him, finding you, the past two years with you, all the future with you, all the future with or without you, war coming, world ending--sin.

'A word from so long ago, from Nanny Hawkins stitching by the hearth and the nightlight burning before the Sacred Heart. Cordelia and me with catechism, in mummy's room, before luncheon on Sundays. Mummy carrying my sin with her to church, bowed under it and the black lace veil, in the chapel; slipping out with it in London before the fires were lit; taking it with her through the empty streets, where the milkman's ponies stood with their forefeet on the pavement; mummy dying with my sin eating at her, more cruelly than her own deadly illness.

'Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand and foot; hanging over the bed in the night-nursery; hanging year after year in the dark little study at Farm Street with the shining oilcloth; hanging in the dark church where only the old charwoman raises the dust and one candle burns; no comfort except for a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief; hanging for ever; never the cool sepulchre and the grave clothes spread on a stone slab, never the oil and spices in the dark cave; always the midday sun and the dice clicking for the seamless coat.

'No way back; the gates barred; all the saints and angels posted along the walls. Thrown away, scrapped, rotting down; the old man with lupus and the forked stick who limps out at nightfall to turn the rubbish, hoping for something to put in his sack, something marketable, turns away with disgust.

'Nameless and dead, like the baby they wrapped up and took away before I had even seen her.'


incidentally can anyone explain what julia says up there in the first para about buying them for a penny at the church door? i have a vague idea of what she's talking about but it's not terribly clear.

and this:

Julia said: 'Here in the shadow, in the corner of the stair--a minute to say good-bye.'

'So long to say so little.'

'You knew?'

'Since this morning; since before this morning; all this year.'

'I didn't know till today. Oh, my dear, if you could only understand. Then I could bear to part, or bear it better. I should say my heart was breaking, if I believed in broken hearts. I can't marry you, Charles; I can't be with you ever again.'

'I know.'

'How can you know?'

'What will you do?'

'Just go on--alone. How can I tell what I shall do? You know the whole of me. You know I'm not one for a life of mourning. I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from his mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without him. One can only hope to see one step ahead. But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable--like things in the school-room, so bad they were unpunishable, that only mummy could deal with--the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's. Why should I be allowed to understand that, and not you, Charles? It may because of mummy, nanny, Cordelia, Sebastian--perhaps Bridey and Mrs Muspratt--keeping my name in their prayers; or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, he won't quite despair of me in the end.
'Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.'

'I don't want to make it easier for you,' I said; 'I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.'