National Library Board Sale

National Library Board Sale

Date: 8 - 9 Jan 2005 (Sat and Sun)
Time: 10 am - 8 pm
Venue: Suntec Level 4, Halls 402 & 403
Comments: Payment by cash, NETS, cashcard only

Pansing Warehouse Sale

Pansing Warehouse Sale

Time: Noon to 9pm each day.
Date: 17th Dec (Fri) to 19th Dec (Sun) - 3 days only
Venue: 3, Kaki Bukit Road 2, #01-08 Eunos Warehouse, Singapore 417835

Most children's: $1
Most teens: $2
Paperbacks: $2-3
Hardcovers: $4-5
Coffee table: $8-11
All other categories about $5.

Cash only. No NETTS facilities available

Gotai Fumanzoku

Gotai Fumanzoku (Japanese - English version Nobody's Perfect)
by Hirotada Ototake
reviewed by zlel

I could not agree more with the author of this book. I have thought about these issues before, but hearing from one who is, by societal standards, severely handicapped, it both confirmed and expanded what I thought we should be doing for the physically disabled, driving home one basic point - the last thing they need is charity and cheap pity.

Gotai Fumazoku, which title is a word play on "gotai manzoku" meaning"able bodied", preduleds beautifully with how the author was born into a family of love. A mother, who didn't get to see her child for a whole month after giving birth but told that the child had to be kept away because of jaundice, had finally to be told that her child was born without limbs. An empty bed was put on stand-by, knowing that this was probably too great a shock for her. But at that moment she saw her child, there was no wild shouting nor crying. All she said was simply "he's beautiful".

Such was the superwoman he felt his mother was. This was a family that refused to believe that their son could not live up to the challenges of an ordinary education - and made sure their son received one. But it was not so much of this determination or faith that made this book stand out. It was what he thought of himself, and how his peers took to him.

One thing that left a deep impression on my mind was his comment on how his classmates in primary school helped him out in class. Every Art lesson, the students would all rush to the back of the class to collect their Art Kits. Being innocent little children, they would help Hirotada collect his kit too - but the teacher felt very strongly that Hirotada should be responsible for what he could manage himself. So everytime he went to the back of his class on the stubs that were his limbs, the whole class would wait for him. Through this whole episode, the author opened for us two "inside worlds" - first, the thoughts of his teacher, revealing the depth of the education the teacher was offering here, as opposed to our syllabus-driven drills that seem to be in place just so that exams can be taken; and second, how the author felt that his classmates were merely helping him in a manner that was such "a matter of fact" - not out of pity or gulit, but simply and naturally lending a helping hand where one was needed.

I thought these were the two deepest core themes in the book -branching into issues such as "barrier-free" societies, discussing how the responsibility of the society towards the handicapped is not to provide materially nor to give their welfare special treatment, but rather, to give them an equal chance that they may live in the same society just as everyone else does. Coming from a handicapped individual who managed to make it through normal education into university, one cannot but feel that he was one who "got everything right".

I'll leave you with just one more thought. During Hirotada's schooldays, his favourite lesson was PE. He loved Soccer, and was later in the school Basketball team. As for how this was possible...oh well, go read the book.

The Night Listener

The Night Listener
by Armistead Maupin
reviewed by Bin Bin

(warning: certainly not for those who are homophobic)

Story revolves around successful, public radio-syndicated storyteller and host of "Noone at Night" Gabriel Noone. This protagonist is a highly sensitive, emotional and insecure man in his mid-fiftes, coping with the separation with his life-long partner, Jess.

In this phrase that he was going through, he encountered a boy whose experience and well-written biography sparked his interest. He managed to develop a "father-and-son" relationship with this 15-year-old boy, Pete, whom he never met, just by numerous conversations over the phone.

Alongside this main thread, we also uncover Gabriel's problem with Jess, the love of his life who suffered from AIDS, and also Gabriel's relationship with his father, a man who was always at arm's length away.

A book filled with his life's experience, rich with emotions. This book is characterized by the vast amount of dialogues used, making the reader feel like an observer right next to the scenes. Noone's character is somehow very easy to identify with, and I found myself being very understanding towards his flaws and inner turmoils. Another controversial work by Maupin, transparent in his liberal work relating to homosexual living.

Other works include Tales of the City Series, Sure of You, Significant Others and the latest, Maybe Moon.

An excerpt:

Chapter One Jewelling The Elephant

I know how it sounds when I call him my son. There's something a little precious about it, a little too wishful to be taken seriously. I've noticed the looks on people's faces, those dim, indulgent smiles that vanish in a heartbeat. It's easy enough to see how they've pegged me: an unfulfilled man on the shady side of fifty, making a last grasp at fatherhood with somebody else's child.That's not the way it is. Frankly, I've never wanted a kid. Never once believed that nature's whim had robbed me of my manly destiny. Pete and I were an accident, pure and simple, a collision of kindred spirits that had nothing to do with paternal urges, latent or otherwise. That much I can tell you for sure.

Son isn't the right word, of course.

Just the only one big enough to describe what happened.

I'm a fabulist by trade, so be forewarned: I've spent years looting my life for fiction. Like a magpie, I save the shiny stuff and discard the rest; it's of no use to me if it doesn't serve the geometry of the story. This makes me less than reliable when it comes to the facts. Ask Jess Carmody, who lived with me for ten years and observed this affliction firsthand. He even had a name for it 'The Jewelled Elephant Syndrome' after a story I once told him about an old friend from college.

My friend, whose name was Boyd, joined the Peace Corps in the late sixties. He was sent to a village in India where he fell in love with a local girl and eventually proposed to her. But Boyd's blue-blooded parents back in South Carolina were so aghast at the prospect of dusky grandchildren that they refused to attend the wedding in New Delhi.

So Boyd sent them photographs. The bride turned out to be an aristocrat of the highest caste, better bred by far than any member of Boyd's family. The couple had been wed in regal splendor, perched atop a pair of jewelled elephants. Boyd's parents, imprisoned in their middle-class snobbery, had managed to miss the social event of a lifetime.

I had told that story so often that Jess knew it by heart. So when Boyd came to town on business and met Jess for the first time, Jess was sure he had the perfect opener. "Well," he said brightly, "Gabriel tells me you got married on an elephant."Boyd just blinked at him in confusion.

I could already feel myself reddening. "You weren't?"

"No," Boyd said with an uncomfortable laugh. "We were married in a Presbyterian church."

Jess said nothing, but he gave me a heavy-lidded stare whose meaning I had long before learned to decipher: You are never to be trusted with the facts.

In my defense, the essence of the story had been true. Boyd had indeed married an Indian girl he had met in the Peace Corps, and she had proved to be quite rich. And Boyd's parents 'who were, in fact, exceptionally stuffy' had always regretted that they'd missed the wedding.

I don't know what to say about those elephants, except that I believed in them utterly. They certainly never felt like a lie. More like a kind of shorthand for a larger, less satisfying truth. Most stories have holes in them that cry out for jewelled elephants. And my instinct, alas, is to supply them.

I don't want that to happen when I talk about Pete. I will try to lay out the facts exactly as I remember them, one after the other, as unbejewelled as possible. I owe that much to my son 'to both of us, really' and to the unscripted intrigues of everyday life. But, most of all, I want you to believe this. And that will be hard enough as it is.

I wasn't myself the afternoon that Pete appeared. Or maybe more severely myself than I had ever been. Jess had left me two weeks earlier, and I was raw with the realization of it. I have never known sorrow to be such a physical thing, an actual presence that weighed on my limbs like something wet and woolen. I couldn't write 'or wouldn't, at any rate' unable to face the grueling self-scrutiny that fiction demands. I would feed the dog, walk him, check the mail, feed myself, do the dishes, lie on the sofa for hours watching television.
Everything seemed pertinent to my pain. The silliest coffee commercial could plunge me into profound Chekhovian gloom. There was no way around the self-doubt or the panic or the anger. My marriage had exploded in midair, strewing itself across the landscape, and all I could do was search the rubble for some sign of a probable cause, some telltale black box.
The things I knew for sure had become a litany I recited to friends on the telephone: Jess had taken an apartment on Buena Vista Park. He wanted space, he said, a place to be alone. He had spent a decade expecting to die, and now he planned to think about living. (He could actually do that, he realized, without having to call it denial.) He would meditate and read, and focus on himself for once. He couldn't say for sure when he'd be back, or if he'd ever be back, or if I'd even want him when it was over. I was not to take this personally, he said; it had nothing to do with me.

Then, after stuffing his saddlebags full of protease inhibitors, he pecked me solemnly on the lips and mounted the red motorcycle he had taught himself to ride six months earlier. I'd never trusted that machine. Now, as I watched it roar off down the hill, I realized why: It had always seemed made for this moment.

--From The Night Listener, by Armistead Maupin. © October 2000