Dawn Lim

2010-10-22T12:58:00.000-07:00

My name is Dawn Lim. Find me at www.dawnl.im.

I blog at ScreenShot about the ways we look at technology.

I write for Cybersecurity Report and TechInsider, National Journal's NextGov blogs centered around the business of federal technology.

I curate and shoot multimedia content for the hyperlocal Queens, NY photojournalism website, Shot in Astoria.

I've been published in the Washingtonian, Washington Life Magazine, Government Executive Magazine and the Straits Times.

When one door closes...

2010-01-31T18:56:00.000-08:00

Visit me at mariemarieholdontight.wordpress.com. The brave and strange ways we look at technology.

Moving Pictures: Lucinda Childs at the Joyce Theater, New York City

2009-12-13T21:45:00.000-08:00

After avant-garde pioneer Merce Cunningham’s death this year, the question of how to preserve an artistic legacy is more immediate than ever for the dance community. The image presented by Lucinda Childs in “Dance,” revived in the Joyce Theater this fall, is a graceful and moving picture of how dance legacies will live on—not necessarily in the original form they were conceived—but nonetheless they live on, and on.

As Philip Glass’ exhilarating and intricate score starts up, Sol LeWitt’s film of the first production of this piece begins projecting on a transparent screen. Behind their projected counterparts, Childs’ dancers leap, glide, and spin across the stage, executing the same steps as in the original production. As they chase the ghostly shadows of their counterparts of 1979, what is produced is a doubled work that takes place in two different points in space and time—watching this unfold is thrilling, one feels clairvoyant and powerful.

The piece begins with pairs of dancers doing sequences of leaps and turns across the stage. Each pair is followed by another pair that does variations on the same phrases. Then the piece builds up in complexity; another pair comes in the opposite direction. They crisscross each other; their onscreen shadows follow likewise. The dancers begin to shift their fronts at a more erratic pace, so it almost seems that they are moving directionless even as their movements are completely directed. Suddenly one is aware of the sheer movement and the number of bodies that floods the stage. Yet like the patterns on a lace lattice, these sequences have been woven together another deliberately and artfully. They refuse to dissolve into chaos, but form an organized intricacy that is both mesmerizing as it is maddening. I almost want them to stop: these intersecting lines—on their own, so elementary, but when put together so overwhelming and dazzling—are too much to take in at once.

But “Dance” continues. It's as though Childs is trying to use our discomfort to drum in her point: the legacy of dance keeps going on. It continues to influence, inform and guide others into the future—just as Childs’ sequences keep repeating, recurring, evolving. One gets the sense that even as the pairs leap behind the wings, the dance doesn’t stop.

The differences we see between the dancers onscreen and the actual dancers on stage shouldn’t be seen as a sign of the legacy gone astray. Perhaps this should be an indication that dance techniques move with their times. At some moments the lines on stage seem too sleek, too controlled. There is something about the 1979 dancers captured on film that have a greater softness, fluidity, and unpredictability about them. They aren't in time, they're a little more raw about the edges, more willing to take risks in balance and timing—strangely, they emerge more lifelike than the actual dancers onstage. At one point, one notices gender subversions—the dancer shadowing the female dancer on stage is male—and we are reminded of the egalitarian nature of Childs’ dance that continues into today. There is something reassuring about the mixture of similarity and difference as our eyes move between the projected images to the actual images. Here is repetition with a difference--and the difference suggests that this legacy is an animated one, not the dead, mechanistic repetition of digital copies.

When youthful Childs emerges in “Dance II”, towering over her double, Caitlin Scranton, we are aware of the largeness of the Lucinda Childs legacy that Scranton is expected to fill in. Both of them spin—in collusion, but also in competition. Scranton spins with a certain frenetic hysteria, while her antagonist maintains her coolness. The onscreen Childs seems invincible, the “mixture of angel and alien” that Joan Acocella writes of—till she emerges in the flesh.

In “Largo,” the real Childs reappears again. At age 69, she no longer exudes the same electricity as the larger-than-life Childs. On a dim stage, she does freewheeling spins that are punctuated with awkward shakes on arms—here is the body that is organic, natural, fallible and mortal. Here is the body that asks her dancers to take on what she cannot keep doing, to make her art keep going on, and on, and on.

This was part of my final project on the history of dance criticism in the US.

Ballet and exiles

2009-11-12T10:18:00.000-08:00

I don't usually like the snarky New Yorker party stories, but I did like this one:

Earlier this month, Mikhail Baryshnikov gave a party at his West Side arts center for a Russian citizen who has decided, as he did, thirty-four years ago, to work outside Russia: the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky. Ratmansky is the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, but next year he will be moving to New York, to become the artist-in-residence at American Ballet Theatre. Like many important people who leave Russia, Ratmansky has run into politics on his way out. Moscow’s dance community cannot be pleased that this gifted homeboy is moving his operations to the West. Then, there are local politics. In the past two years, Ratmansky has made two popular pieces for New York City Ballet. So when, in February, the Times reported that he was talking to Peter Martins, N.Y.C.B.’s artistic director, about becoming the troupe’s resident choreographer, no one was surprised. A week later, however, the negotiations came to a halt. According to a City Ballet spokesman, Ratmansky’s busy schedule would not allow him to do the job. Then, in September, A.B.T., City Ballet’s neighbor and rival, announced that Ratmansky was signing on there instead, in much the same post that he had discussed with N.Y.C.B. Why the switch? “I wouldn’t like to go into it,” Ratmansky told the Times. All this added an interesting chiaroscuro to the Ratmansky picture.

Baryshnikov’s party was probably, in some measure, an effort to make everybody happy again. He invited just about every prominent figure in New York’s ballet world. Dancers from both N.Y.C.B. and A.B.T. were there, looking sleek and declining hors d’oeuvres. Board members, in their suits, sat at little tables. A.B.T.’s artistic director was present. N.Y.C.B.’s was not. Nevertheless, the crowd was highly interdenominational.

In a toast, Baryshnikov congratulated Peter Martins for “bravely inviting Alexei” to work in New York in the first place. As for hurt feelings in Russia, he mentioned that Ratmansky would be fulfilling assignments there next year. In other words, Ratmansky had not thrown in his lot with any country or company; he was simply a citizen of the global village. “There’s a new political reality in this world,” Baryshnikov said. “It’s wonderful that an artist of Alexei’s calibre can travel from one country to another—an opportunity that I didn’t have in my prime time.” He didn’t add that when he terminated his relationship with the Soviet Union he had to run for his life, with the K.G.B. shouting after him, but everyone in the room knew it.

photojournalism

2009-11-08T21:17:00.000-08:00

i created a photojournalism page for an application. go and look at the cities where i've shot.

Obamarijuana: Smoke Signals?

2009-10-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

During the months of Obamamania following the inauguration, this awesome photograph of Barack Obama smoking a rolled cigarette with droopy eyes went viral on the Internet. That image spurred delight amongst Obama fans—and lots of passionate debate over the question, was Obama actually smoking a weed joint?

No one is entirely sure. “I think that, at this stage, my life is an open book, literally and figuratively,” Obama once said. Is it?

Since Justice Department announced that federal drug agents would not longer be prosecuting people who are legally using, selling or supplying medical marijuana in the states that permit its use, pundits have been divided over the legal implications of this statement.

Graham Boyd, director of the Drug Law Reform Project was quoted on The New York Times for saying that this memo signaled the Obama administration’s willingness to embrace more liberal marijuana laws. Marijuana advocates see this as an encouraging shift that rides on the recent appointment of Richard Gil Kerlikowske as Obama’s top drug policy adviser, perceived to stand for the broader decriminalization of marijuana.

Perhaps the great thing about this memo—as with that iconic 1980s photograph of Obama smoking lovely—that it could be interpreted to be as controversial or uncontroversial as one would want it to be. Thus lies the ingenuity of this carefully calibrated statement. Smoke signals, anyone?

• New guidelines might be effective in states that are currently considering medical marijuana laws. Slate writer Christopher Beam writes, “Many states take their cues from the federal government when it comes to drug policy. States could take the new policy as a tacit nod from Uncle Sam to go ahead and allow medical marijuana back home.” On the other hand, Beam notes that in states like California, where there is an established system of medical marijuana legislation, “the new policy is unremarkably uncontroversial… If you run a medical marijuana business in Los Angeles that the state deems illegal, the federal government can't help you. In fact, it can still raid your facility.” The status quo, for the most part, remains unchanged.

• The Memo muddies the federal role. Tom Riley, the associate director of the White House Office of National Drug Control from 2001 to 2009 has blogged that “the memo itself is internally conflicted to the point of incoherence. While ostensibly encouraging prosecutors to defer to state and local laws on marijuana, it also recognizes that federal “interest” can still allow the feds, at their discretion, to step in and prosecute.” In other words, this memo sets the stage for a complicated clash between federal and local governments. Riley makes this compelling argument: by giving the green light to medical marijuana, the Obama administration might cause the proliferation of traffickers exploiting the medical label. With that, the hope that more liberal laws will be rolled out would just end up as a pipe dream.

The grey lady talks immigration (barf)

2009-10-12T08:06:00.000-07:00

So the Dallas correspondents in the NY Times wrote this article with the lead:

Eight years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and despite repeated mandates from Congress, the United States still has no reliable system for verifying that foreign visitors have left the country.

So both democrats and republican senators are rallying for more bureaucratic procedures to monitor the exiting of immigrants. Extra paper work to target a minority of a minority. We understand: overloaded elephant of an immigrant bureaucracy forces the unwelcome to slip in under the radar the same way black market goods do. So how do we combat the problem? MORE BUREACRACY, YEAH!

Like all romantic narratives, the article has only one protagonist. The only immigrant highlighted is a Mr Smati, who (of course) is also an Islamic fundamentalist. OK. Where's the other point of view? Why are readers not allowed to comment on this story? The narrative-driven stories of the Times are particularly arresting and manipulative. With their rambling house style and nut graphs all the way at the bottom of the story, how can we not be dazzled? We're all just waiting for the bomb to drop. (Pun intended.)

The best thing is that the bomb does drop, with this explosive closing paragraph:

When the F.B.I. later searched his residence, they found a Beretta 9 millimeter pistol and a box of ammunition, along with his passport and the expired visa, the court documents show.

Ithaca

2009-09-27T15:46:00.000-07:00

Today, I went for Ithaca's Apple harvest fest--it's a country fair where farmers come out to sell apple cider, apples, apple pie. Very rural, very small town. Exoticized oriental food alongside hot dogs. Cotton candy, funnel cakes, kettle corn and granny apples. Junky earrings, carnival rides, mediocre paintings by hobbyists.

It's getting colder, the sort of cold that makes you restive. I met a wine vineyard manager this weekend. Maybe I could help with the harvest one weekend. The town I live in, Ithaca, was named after Greek mythology. It is bordered by the town of Ulysses. The college town does have a lot of Greek life, I guess that's what warrants its name.

According to Dante, after Ulysses had returned home to Ithaca and had settled down to rule his island kingdom, he became restless and desired to set out on another voyage of exploration to the west. In old age, he persuaded a band of his followers to accompany him on such a voyage. "Consider your origin," he addressed them, "ye were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge." I think, he was saying, Ithaca was way too cold.

Remaining dishes

2009-08-26T08:31:00.001-07:00

In the Times food critic Frank Bruni's final column, he listed steps on how to navigate a menu:

Scratch off the appetizers and entrees that are most like dishes you’ve seen in many other restaurants, because they represent this one at its most dutiful, conservative and profit-minded. The chef’s heart isn’t in them.

Scratch off the dishes that look the most aggressively fanciful. The chef’s vanity — possibly too much of it — spawned these.

Then scratch off anything that mentions truffle oil.

Choose among the remaining dishes.

This is my last blog for the summer. So much life has been going on. Merce Cunningham memorial concert, District 9, Terminator, Star Track, Moon , lots of indie free concerts, a publishing job offer (am really bitter I have to go back to school, and as a result, lost the offer), library books at the New York Public Library, teaching justin how to bike at Central Park, beautiful Astoria, shitty neighbors, Montreal, free Norton books, a little thesis writing (not quite enough...) Good friends, good company. New York is where the heart is; Upstate is an overripe banana, long after its sell-by date. I also just found out that the university press can't take any more students as part-timers, and so I've effectively been fired. Hopefully there will be many remaining dishes.

Bright Lights, Big Internet

2009-07-29T21:00:00.000-07:00

From Bill Wasik's sparkling piece about celebrities in a time of the Internet:

And so the move online changes how we make art, but the road ahead there is uncharted and perilous. In the old model, young creatives dreamed of entertaining the millions, but in practice they could do so only by first pleasing a small group of gatekeepers: established figures who controlled access to the audience and, in doing so, protected young people from that audience, its obsessions and desertions, its adoration and its scorn. These old hands had to worry about the numbers, of course, but they rationalized the upticks and downticks through a certain set of professional values, which they themselves spent years imbibing and which they in turn pressed upon their wards.

Online, though, the audience can be yours right away, direct and unmediated — if you can figure out how to find it and, what’s harder, to keep it. What to you is a big break is, to this increasingly sophisticated and fickle audience, just one forwarded e-mail message in a teeming inbox, to be refilled again tomorrow with a whole new slate of distractions. “Microcelebrity” is now the rule, with respect not only to the size of one’s fan base but also to the duration of its love. Believe it or not, the Internet is a tougher town than New York; fewer people make it here, but no one there seems to make it for long.

Merce Cunningham

2009-07-27T21:36:00.001-07:00

Merce Cunningham died today. I spent every other week last summer in the Merce Cunningham studios. Eventually, I stopped. There was no reason, I just decided I didn't want to be a dancer, and I stopped. I wanted to spend the last week with my boyfriend, I wanted to go for shows, read books--anything but dance. It reminds me of the way I stopped doing ballet when I was 12. I had been doing ballet since I was 4, and I had become quite good--I wasn't brilliant and Jean Chan at SCGS didn't like me--but I was good enough to play the walkabouts in the SDT productions, throwing styrofoam snowballs around in Anna Karenina when I was 12 (I walked around with the dancer Paul Ocampo, and I liked the way he held me on stage as my "father," and that was the first time, being touched by a man not my father), loving the way the light blinded everything when I was a cricket/night spirit/clock/the forces of time in Cinderella, braving the dry ice as a swan, ballet master politics. (I have a remarkable memory of a balletmaster screaming at me to get out of the studio cos I threw someone a sly, ironic grin, as he ticked another person off. I quite bewildered and terrified, but I had a lot of 8-year-old pride. I did get out of the studio, as told. I did, however, refuse to apologize, and I refused to cry. He hated my 8-year-old guts and my 8-year-old pride. But I digress.) When I heard news of Merce dying today, my first thought (I was pitching a book for my boss at work) was, wow, what a great publishing opportunity for the New York world. Now that I'm alone and have had some retrospection, I feel really guilty that that was my first thought. Last summer, a large part of summer was Meredith. Meredith is a crazy person. She would come to Cunningham classes everyday (I know this because one week, I actually came everyday). She was learning her 7th or 8th language in between classes while writing her MFA novel. That was when I was trying to figure out my bond issues, and dancing was a good way to escape into my body, and forget. (I have this amazing memory when the instructor stopped all of us at dance, and we all looked out of the Westbeth artist studio window, upon a full half rainbow.) Justin came back from his family holiday, and I resolved my bond issues, and I stopped seeing Meredith everyday because I stopped coming to the lessons. This summer, I told myself I would go for at least one lesson, but I haven't since. So now Merce is dead, and the Cunningham school is preparing the way for its eventual closure when they have figured out how to preserve his legacy. I wish I could be broken up more--something like how Meredith is broken up, using this death as a moment to ponder what it means to be a dancer and an artist and a writer--but I turned away from dance when I was young, turned away from the opportunity to learn more about the Cunningham school of dance. (I turned away from writing poetry later.) What I have left is some memories of the studio, Louise poking fun at me ("Singapore! Use your muscles better!"), teachers telling me my body has so much potential so I shouldn't come for class late, walking to the 1 station with Meredith so I could head back up to Riverside where I was subletting, a fleeting memory of seeing Merce in a wheelchair. Now I have the sense that, I could have done so much more. I could have been an artist, a dancer, a fuller person. I didn't though, and that is why my heart doesn't break as much now.

Gifts

2009-07-24T11:36:00.000-07:00

I just finished The Reader, which was absolutely brilliant. It's this carefully calibrated novel that is written with deliberation and introspection, and in a voice that's both cerebral and taut with emotion (I had to get off the subway 3 times cos I missed my stop while reading, what a stupid idiot right?) Schlink says that by reading you're implicated in history, and reading is the birth of ethical responsibility. There was a huge uproar earlier this year in Cornell when the Kate Winslet movie came out (yes, watch her Oscar speech, it is Hilarious, and orgasmic), because people said that ethical responsibility and atonement SHOULDN'T have to come with reading. But I think people who believe that are missing the point of the novel, which is a work of fiction. If you read too literally, you will miss the point.

For fun, someone did a tarot card reading for me last sunday. Of course you take these things with a pinch of salt. (Tarot cards are such beautiful art works, though, and I'd love to look seriously at tarot cards in the Renaissance as works of literature.) She asked me what was my most important question for the moment. My burning question, was, will I be home? Her answer was, "Of course, you will be home frequently, and each time you will be a different person, but you will bring home a gift each time."

Later: "A gift like me, maybe?" asks Justin, slyly. "NOT you," I say.

The problem with men, is that they are too literal.

H1N1

2009-07-17T13:41:00.001-07:00

Ended the two-month stint in Biology editorial today, moving upstairs to the ninth floor to do professional self-help, psychiatry and designing books. It's been a lot of reading on science (I am a trivia machine now.) It was finished with a decadent lunch (three course meal in the middle of the afternoon in midtown, good god), good conversation, and new friends.

I was sick this week. I'd forgotten what it's like cos it's been a long time of being horribly healthy. You're decked out in a sweater and tights while everyone is gorgeous in summer dresses. Being sick is paralyzing and bewildering and you feel like you're five again. My mom asked, "You're positive it's not H1N1 right?" Thanks, Mom! Some background: my mother is a hypochondriac who collects pills and has a cocktail of vitamins everyday. I've inherited her love of vitamin C bottles--along things like a soft spot for older men (no, I no longer want to bed them. I just stand from a distance and admire their intelligence), and being an emotional driver and emotional cook.

So anyway, I took a sick day, so I lagged a little behind in work, and I still have a last report to write over the weekend--on how biology textbooks present sex and abstinence. It's fascinating stuff. The problem with making claims like "abstinence is the best way to prevent STDs" (and every leading textbook on the market does that, nauseating as it is) is that it suggests that the person with AIDs or herpes or whatever bears the responsibility of having this disease. In other words, it's your fault that you're sick, as it is your fault that you're different. In AIDs and its Metaphors, Susan Sontag writes about the sense of guilt that plagues who are sick with cancer. Because these are diseases that attack from the inside, unlike infections which have a point of origin, the conception that people have is that, "it has to be your fault then." And now, Sontag argues, AIDs is the new ideologically charged illness. As is any STD probably. Herpes is probably embarrassing. As is mono. (Ever heard the parody of "yesterday?" with sexual diseases. In my head, I can hear Huixuan singing it in that lovely melodramatic voice that she used for this song, good times.) And when an entire culture blames those who are sick for being sick, this is a symptom of a society trying to deny themselves of responsibility of care, or just empathy.

Right now I'm thinking of the indignation in my voice when Justin tells me, "Go see a doctor!" I don't believe in doctors, I say, knowing how to hit the spot in the best way possible when you talk to a young medical student.

Hay

2009-07-07T21:04:00.000-07:00

Got back on Montreal on Sunday night. 10 hour roadtrip. Have started Italian lessons--at home!--with a bickering Italian couple who live down the block. I've called more places in America and more small towns than I have ever wanted--work. The happy news is that I'm reviewing poetry slams and children's books for a new magazine. Other things have included: thesis research at NYU, outdoor Shakespeare, plucking herbs in Justin's uncle's herb garden. Summer's half over, I tell myself, make hay, think deeply. Will write back soon.

My life

2009-06-15T19:29:00.000-07:00

He was late for his own birthday. So his friends spiked his drink, and she had to buy a roll of paper, and then take him home. There was the vague memory of a lot of people, and a lot of beer, before everything turned inside out and the whole evening ended up splattered on the sidewalk. She and Andrew took him home in the cab. He said, "you're the closest people in my life, really," and then proceeded to pass out. Then crossing the Queensboro Bridge in a cab. There was a light drizzle. Not cold enough to be cold, but not summer-warm enough to be at all pleasant. They got home. Everything felt solid and defined again. She cooked noodles sometime after midnight. It was really good. The zucchini was cooked till it was soft, like gourd. The tomato halves were soft and sweet. "In the end we are very simple animals."

It's been raining so much in New York. I bring two pairs of shoes to work. On the N train coming into Manhattan from Astoria, there aren't as many buskers as the other trains. At work, I read a lot of biology textbooks. At lunch, I sit out at Bryant Park. Sometimes after work, we go to Anyway cafe, or Rockwood. Always music, a lot of music, rapture. I've also found a regular story-telling slam group. Monday at the Nuyorican cafe, listening to stories about cats. Weekends: jogging around the sculpture park. A lot of cooking. This summer is a lot of cooking and a lot of music, and generally very little space. We take turns to cook, and when I do come home to the smell of food, I am always grateful. But living with someone is like having to live two lives, yours and his. How did my parents ever do this? This is all so new to me. Our neighbor downstairs is still, as bitchy as ever. Our house is as arthritic as ever. I put cushions and rugs all around our floor, as though I am making some Tumbletots playground.

On Sunday, my mother called, and it was magical. The dog, and everyone around Skype with candles, and my sister. My phone buzzed, and I woke up from a stressful dream--something to do with being chased by dinosaurs--was glad to be up. And then we all gathered around my computer and gave him a birthday song. As though willing away the night before. It was magical.

weddings and death

2009-05-24T09:17:00.000-07:00

Moved into our apartment in astoria--Tiff was there to be our first visitor, and to help us transform the dusty mess into something rather pretty and sunlit. We thread lightly, but our footsteps still keep our downstairs neighbor awake. She knocks like an undead corpse at 1 am, hard angry knocks. Startling us as we sleepwalk around getting ready for bed. "I am so sorry, I am a single mother, I look after my son, I have noise muting machines, I am very sensitive," she says, repeatedly. For someone who has lived in a family with chronic insomnia, and battled it with with foam earplugs, and doesn't understand how somehow mothering equates to yelling at 2, I don't buy her story. Then it all explodes into a screaming match and fearful hitting on our metal grilles at 2am the same night I almost got knocked over by a stupid driver. I write a frosty note, and leave my number, and the knocking stops.

Yesterday was my grandfather's death anniversary. I attended a wedding instead. It was my first wedding without my parents, I was attending as a 20-something, and a plus-one date. Being 22 and standing in a wall of girls, waiting to catch the bride's bouquet, and later slow-waltzing to an old song, waiting to be kissed. There was a lot of debauched dancing, drinking, and bawdy jokes by the boys. A bridesmaid-of-honor passed out while the vows were being exchanged. The boys in suits mourn the loss of a friend, and then marvel at how far they have come. Then jokes about in the family would marry next, and the boys telling me to join the family. The family is this Jersey community that is heavily gendered, almost an honor society they have built around themselves over the years. At 4, we get back, and I disperse rose bouquets into the beer bottles that have somehow accumulated in our apartment this week. Somehow, the wedding has been sad. Everyone senses something like irrevocable loss.

Being young

2009-05-12T13:41:00.000-07:00

I've always loved this scene. I read that Mike Nichols simply let the camera roll while The Sound of Silence came on, with Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross, just waiting for the next cue. Perfect, I say.

Dog day

2009-05-11T13:55:00.001-07:00

Me and Justin found a studio finally--in Astoria--so we don't have to stick out in the very Hispanic/Ecuadorian Corona Park, and pretend we speak Spanish. The Times had an article about how Brooklynites and Queens people are cheating on their boroughs to snatch cheap sublets in Manhattan. All I can say, is that, I'm glad I'm not living in Manhattan this summer. Manhattan is over-the-top, over-priced, over-populated, and pretentious. I would rather walk through ethnic ghettos than hordes of tourists. These weeks have been a mad flurry of papers, househunting, Craigslisting, 250-mile drives. This week, I might possibly have to drive into Baltimore to drive Justin's stuff around from Maryland into New York. I finally drove into the driveway at 3am, sufficiently vented my anger on the terrified Justin, revved myself up to finished up a mathematical analysis of the Electoral College, and then slept at 7am. I ate a ton of Indian food, and went to the university press for work. Then I lay on my lawn in a wooly sweater, collecting pollen and grass, like a mat. I am delirious, dehydrated, sleepy, and shedding grass. Jonathan, my boss, got me a going-away-for-the-summer-present: The Tao of Pooh, wrapped up in a dust jacket for Christopher Douglas' "a genealogy of literary multiculturalism," which I helped to publicize.

"When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?"
"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"
"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
"It's the same thing," he said.

some strange music draws me in

2009-05-02T10:53:00.000-07:00

On the last day of term, Cornell hosts a spring fling sort of thing. My impulse is to duck and hide. I hate that kind of sanctioned bullshit fun. So I've been thinking a lot on what it means to be in a "surveyed party." Last night over beers at pixel with F, we started talking about Adorno and the demarcation between work and free time. He spoke about the theoretical concept of free time with a lot of vengeance.

At the same time, he was clearly using this "free time" and hands with a lot of impunity. I drove him home in the rain. We left after I begged him to get out of my car, and almost physically pushed him out. There is nothing more disappointing than realizing you can never be safe with friends you think you were safe with.

the material world

2009-04-29T11:12:00.000-07:00

I went to a dinner party last night at a house by the lake. The professor who taught me about a year ago threw something together, and asked if I was interested in coming. I was the only undergraduate, but that didn't turn out as bad as I thought it would be when I found a Uruguayan grad student, D, who struck up fascinating conversation with me. He talked about being an obsessive compulsive who frequented the Strand everyday, back in the day when it was really, a warehouse of a lot of unorganized junk and some buried treasure, accumulating 40 wine crates of books on royalty, and then, throwing it all away. I talked about how, disillusioned with the people I was going out with in New York, I took all their expensive graphic novels and a particularly prized jazz novel, and threw it all into the pile of 1 dollar books at the Strand. We shared more stories, and professed our mutual love for old things, Washington Square Park, preserved manuscripts, de Casa's writing. Then P, let's call my ex-professor that, disentangled himself from a conversation about de Man, came by with his beer, and looked meaningfully at me. "I've been dying to join both of you all evening," he said, "what have you been talking about?" "Books," said D, and we burst out in laughter. "And?" asked P. "Bodies," said D.

Now were three. And we found ourselves in this strange triangle, arguing about why books should be seen as physical objects. "Yes, Dawn likes that stuff," he said, "But frankly, I don't give a shit about materiality. That's ideology, too much of the "essence stuff," I go for that other thing," he said, too jaunty, all most setting out to test us, test me. "Which is equally of the essence stuff. How is that less of ideology and essence? " I said. "Yes, true. Good, good." "This isn't class," I laughed. "No, but it's hard not to see you as my student," he smiled, and I didn't know how to read his smile.

"So I refine what I say," he said, and took a gulp of his beer, "Maybe I am saying that you have a phantasmagorical relation to materiality, I on the other hand, have a phantasmagorical relation to that other thing," he said, "and we are all products of fantasies, and we are all bodies constructed and perceived within the framework of ideology. Bodies and fantasies."

When I first came to Cornell, P and I, we clicked. He recognized it. We both spent time living in the village, me for a much shorter time. I found myself falling deeper into the seductiveness of his love for theory. We were both lonely, I think, and trying to work out our love/hate relationship with Manhattan. Theory was a refuge. I took his graduate seminar, I asked him to supervise my senior thesis, till he took a semester off, and I realized that life post-P, post-theory, was lighter, happier, more fulfilling. One can get lazy with theory. It becomes a frame that locks you in. I changed my advisor, at the last minute. It was for the better. He was too intense.

We were having a punning competition about who would "get each other." Strange reading games to have on a Tuesday night. It was getting late, D rose, and said he had to go. I didn't want to be left there, navigating the labyrinths in this dark house by the lake. "I'll drive you home," I said, more of a statement of intent. "You sure you're all right with the drive?" P asked, pointing to the bottles. "I'm all right with the drive." There was a rough, sandpapery peck on my cheek, and a close hug. I don't think he smelled like anything. "I'm glad you came," he said, "I won't be in New York this summer, but email me." "I'm glad I came too. Will."

D and I walked out into the cool air. It was not yet summer, and it had been raining all day. Spring showers. We ducked to avoid the drenched boughs, "like Alice in Wonderland," I said, as crawled through a garden archway. I drove down the winding road that would bring us back downtown. "I worry about him sometimes," I say, "he lives in his head so much." "Stay in the material world," were D's last words to me as he left.

Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow

2009-04-19T21:26:00.001-07:00

My boyfriend spent the most of the weekend being incommunicable and just kind of out of it. It's not his fault, I guess. It was his best friend's birthday, and there was a huge birthday bash in New York. For the first time really, I felt alone. In a month it will be the anniversary of my grandfather's death. It has taken a year for me to truly be sad. It's hard to talk about this kind of sadness.

Incantations

2009-04-16T22:21:00.001-07:00

Tonight, I read to Lu while he was high over the phone. I like reading to my friends over the phone when they're high. The last time I read Ozick's Heir to the Glimmering World to Leon. Today I read Diaz's Drown, and Kincaid's Lucy, while Lu spoke about bravado and confidence, the sham of it. Reading out Lucy over the phone seemed so incantatory and perfect, that I decided to write my final paper on incantations and longing and the African-American and Middle Ages tradition of Conjure--and am probably going to tell my professor, Stephanie, about how I got the idea. I'm starting to realise that the work I do--no matter how cerebral or scholarly its final shape takes--rides on my friends, my life, my loves, my fears.

Cooking with my eyes closed

2009-04-13T21:01:00.000-07:00

Nurul tagged me in a note about Singapore and hawker food. My stomach was nostalgic for a little while. Justin is amused at my double standards about food. When I eat in New York, I'm all vegetarian and organic. When I eat in Singapore, it's always pile-on-the-chilli-and-oil-and-all-the-good-shit. "We gotta replicate that shit in summer," I told him. "You'll never make it past pouring the oil," he said. "I got it," I told him, "I will cook with my eyes closed."

definitions

2009-04-06T19:23:00.000-07:00

I miss having the luxury to be careless. But there is no possibility of being careless anymore. I have bitten the hand that fed me. So I trawl through Craigslist a lot, searching for little windows, little doors. I send my car for servicing. I write cover letters and send out resumes. I tumble out of bed everyday into some ambivalent notion of adulthood that I have chosen. I am not lonely. I have a car, the eternal presence of my parents. My boyfriend is going to be a psychiatrist. I never believed I would date a shrink-to-be. We argue about who should pay the gas, snap at each other when we are tired, we also make each other happy. I love him, but I am not in love. We have spoken about the future, our commitment to the future. My friends must think this is completely uncharacteristic of me. I have never remained committed to anything. Except maybe, some vague and childish hope, that one day I will write words that people will feel for. This childish dream compelled me to inhabit multiple lives and live deeply. I still cling on to that. But I think the last boat that brings me to the pool of darkness where I see the frightening image of the truth of who I am, has left. I will never get to see that. I can't live as deeply and savagely, for life calls. Perhaps it is liberating that life is not made out of polarities anymore. But sometimes I miss the days that were so sharply defined that they hurt.

catching my breath

2009-04-02T20:00:00.001-07:00

Been really busy. I went to Philly to see Mr Brown. Love Philly. Beautiful street art, great local culture. I also loved Eva Teng's very nuanced view of what elitism means. She said "you go overseas not to achieve what they wanted you to achieve, but really to see the fragility of life, which Singapore tries so hard to hide." Then barely 24 hours after I got back from Philly, I drove to NYC for another interview. Also did research at the New York Public Library. Basically my summer's been secured. It's going to be filled with a lot of publicity work, and neuroscience textbooks and mental health guidebooks, and some expensive coffee table books. I'm also applying for random freelance gigs over the next week or so, maybe weekend stints at Shakespeare and Co.? or McNally Robinson? for the extra $$?

My story on open-access made the front page of the Sun, and was picked up by a Johannesburg list serve. It's basically a story about congressional bills and their effect on research. It gives me the greatest joy to be able to write a story and mention the name, "Barack Obama" in it, and to know that this story rides on--not to be pretentious, but truly--a moment of ambivalent transition.

Cornell Librarians Protest Bill Closing Access to NIH Research
March 30, 2009
By Dawn Lim
This month, President Barack Obama signed into law a bill that would make the National Institutes of Health public access policy permanent, signaling a move towards greater transparency in academia. Under this policy, NIH-funded research, including work by Cornell faculty, will be publicly available. However, another bill introduced in Congress last month seeks to reverse this public access policy and has prompted Cornell’s librarians to take action. [...]

one by one and two by two and three by three

2009-03-23T19:07:00.000-07:00

On Monday, the Queens-Midtown tunnel is going to be closed--for a parade of walking elephants!

Accompanied by their handlers, the elephants walk in single file, using their snouts to grip the tails of the elephants in front of them.

"They look like a group of kindergarteners walking down the street, holding hands," said Aria. "It's very magical. The tunnel is pretty quiet with that eerie echo effect. You hear the elephants snorting and the horses' hooves on the ground. But the big payoff is when you come out of that tunnel."

Thousands of people gather at 35th St. and Second Ave. to cheer the animals as they exit the murky depths of the East River. With the New York Police Department acting as crowd control, the elephants head down to 34th St. before venturing west.

"That's the most exciting moment of the year," said Griggs. "A herd of elephants walking in the middle of Manhattan just doesn't happen every day. People are going to get a closer look at our elephants than any zoo in America."

There are no chains or whips on the Animal Walks. Elephants are good listeners. They know their names very well and can respond to almost 60 verbal commands. As the massive mammals trod across 34th St., their handlers constantly talk with them as a source of comfort.

the baby in the barn

2009-03-23T14:37:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath, has just died. He hanged himself somewhere in Alaska. Yes, he's the same Nicholas from "Nick and the Candlestick." Remember that poem? We read it in Nick Perry's class. I remember in my first week of school, desperately trying to sound smart, so that he would remember my name. Reading it I can almost taste those hot days. We were fixated on small things then. I inserted a string around the waist band of that school uniform so I could hitch my skirt up and make it shorter. Fireproof, they said. But who was it who got burned while doing something to do with drama that involved flames? I forget. I hated the women who sold the lemon chicken at Coronation Plaza so much because she was an unbelievable sexist. I hated how it was always the same people reading the poems and plays. Nasal, melodramatic voices--mostly male, a lot of Perry really--striving for some kind of timbre. I don't even know why I hated it so much, but I really did.

O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs -

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

Anthologies and roses

2009-03-22T18:54:00.000-07:00

I'm reading up on emblem books. Moseley's A Century of Emblems starts off with this beautiful line:

With whatever care the flowers are cut, anthologies can only disappoint; some readers do not see in them the blooms they expected, others regret the severance of what is there from its native stem.

mellowness

2009-03-19T11:02:00.000-07:00

I got my four wisdom teeth pulled yesterday. When Justin drove me home, I was terribly high and drowsy on laughing gas (Nitrous Oxide, for those in the know). Whitestone Bridge and the George Washington Bridge stretched out like endless waves. I was unable to talk. I've been dealing with car inspections, windscreen wipers, legal things with regards to my student status, and dental issues--all in the past 3 days. Justin has been driving me around, we've been having dinners with good friends, fetching people here and there, being mellow, chinking glasses at the small cafe with Latvian servers on the East Side that is our favorite place. I'm turning 22 tomorrow, but I feel I have been propelled into an ambivalent adulthood.

pre-Spring

2009-03-10T15:27:00.000-07:00

I just discovered Wired (Yes, I am slow!) This article is about Obama and the whitewashing of his "history" on Wikipedia. I don't frankly care about the Ayers stuff, but the suspension of people from Wikipedia, now that is pretty controversial. Michelle Obama was on the homepage of the Times, dishing out organic food--I laughed out loud. She's starting to take on a kind of an Oprah aura.

My bedtime reading is currently Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. I think it's lovely. My Desi room mate, in the way she violently and valiantly resists technology, disagrees.

I hear spring in the air--rain, sloppy sneakers, New York City.

This is my latest dance review of the concert, Glory and Rue.

Ghost stories

2009-03-05T12:35:00.000-08:00

I grew up with Estella and Jay, who would tell me ghost stories. Jay is this feisty freckled woman whose childhood was mostly swimming in the sea, acting like a boy, running from her mother's bad temper (and bamboo sticks), screaming at her parents while breaking them up in their fights. Estella, reminds me of an earth mother, when she is in the kitchen pounding at spices.
One of the stories was about the trolls that inhabited the garden where Jay lived in Mindanao. The trolls were perverts who would peep in on the sisters who were sleeping. They smelled ("like sweat and armpits," she said.) They played on trees, and lived on fruit. Everywhere they went, they would leave a trail of ants. One day, she woke up and realized someone had taken off her shirt. The next day, a little man appeared at the door, asking if she would be the queen of the trolls. The father left a red cloth at the doorstep, as if to say, keep out. The next week the family moved, nearer to the town.
Living near the forest and by the sea, one has to be careful to read the signs. Do not stray where the fireflies are. If you think you see things, make the sign of the cross and say the Apostles Creed, pray that Mother Mary (Oh, Maria!) will save your sorry ass, and you run for dear life.
When I moved into my apartment in the summer in Harlem, the first thing I noticed was the walls were blood red. The first things I like to do in a new place is to dust, clean, rearrange things. Maybe it's an obsessive female thing. But I'd like to think it's like an exorcism of sorts. You check every corner for dust and remnants of the previous tenant: fingernails, a stray earring, a guitar pick, usually lots of hair. You keep what you want, sweep everything else out. When you slowly inhabit the room, everything that is strange becomes familiar.
If I could do a project, I would go around to talk to a million different people in Singapore, and ask them to tell me ghost stories. Not the Russell Lee stuff (guilty confession: I read all that crap as a kid.) I'm thinking of Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales (Harcourt Brace, 1980). Imagine an archive of narrated ghost stories, and even better, like the way the Times documents its New Yorkers, voice recordings cut into slide shows of beautiful black and white photos of their lives. (I would have to learn to speak all the dialects and Malay probably just to do that). And then I would feel better that even in a city where everywhere is lit by fluorescent light, there are haunted, unopened rooms.
Do you have a ghost story?

Reformation v. 2?

2009-03-03T17:50:00.000-08:00

The Catholic church announced that indulgences are back. America's jumped on the bandwagon. This is probably everything to do with the recession (the article politically-correctly didn't mention this).

“Confessions have been down for years and the church is very worried about it,” said the Rev. Tom Reese, a Jesuit and former editor of the Catholic magazine America. In a secularized culture of pop psychology and self-help, he said, “the church wants the idea of personal sin back in the equation. Indulgences are a way of reminding people of the importance of penance.”

Latest dance review: AIDS and New York, 1985

2009-03-03T14:30:00.001-08:00

I had a dance review published today in the Sun. Dance pieces are really exercises in writing more than anything. On principle, I am a nice reviewer. I mean, if it's bad, I don't write about it. I have realized that no one is interested in reading about dance. So the article always to be more than just about dance.

Tragedy strove to reverse itself in Byron Suber’s dance piece, Bach Solo Cello Suite No. 1, Circa 1986. Dancers in black fell to the ground one by one, like birds shot in midair — only to rise again, flinging their skirts with a death-defying joy.
Suber’s dance piece was performed at the State Theatre last Saturday for The Ithaca Ballet’s Winter Repertory Performance alongside with pieces by other choreographers. Bach Solo Cello Suite No. 1, Circa 1986 was an exercise in contrasts.
Dancers whirled together simultaneously with a frightening vigor — producing a dizzying juxtaposition of chaos and order. Neo-classical balletic movements jostled with modern dance techniques for a place in a piece where life and death are intimately intertwined.
Even though the dancers sashayed, strutted and tangoed in pointes across the stage with larger-than-life stage grins in other pieces, they came into Suber’s piece stripped of the theatricality that was characteristic of the earlier pieces on show.
In contrast to classical ballet, which dictates that dancers present themselves in one direction (usually towards the audience), the Cunningham school of dance rethought the concept of the dancer’s “front,” directing the dancer simply to move where they were moving, and adopt multiple “fronts.”
Cunningham-esque in its irreverent treatment of the neoclassical and explicit rejection of the manifestly theatrical, Suber’s piece had a deeply psychological texture and historical cadence.
In the first movement, set to the prelude of Bach’s “Solo Cello Suite No. 1”, eight dancers moved through the stage space. Collapsing their backs, they took on the posture of weepers. Lifting their black skirts up and releasing them, each dancer appeared like a mourner scattering the ashes of a beloved.
The piece was choreographed in 1985, during the escalating AIDS crisis. Then, Suber was living in New York City’s East Village — a bustling, creative community synonymous with the thriving performance and art culture in the 70s and 80s. Then, the AIDS crisis took a toll on the dancing community centered around the East Village.
[The rest of the article is here, and so is another about Marc Bamuthi's slam poetry and hip-hop ballet. ]

Bad food writing

2009-03-01T22:14:00.000-08:00

I love hawker centers. I love the how they lack pretension. Some of my best memories of Singapore are sitting in 40 degree weather, drinking beer, reeking of smoke because we sat too near the satay stand, our lips bright and oily. When I took Justin to Ghim Moh Market in Singapore, he was shocked at the grit and squalor. He was also shocked at how I didn't care about it--even though I'm a neat freak in Ithaca and have to have all my books in order and my shelves regularly dusted. It's funny. I've never seen Ghim Moh as dirty, I'm just used to it. I don't even think about it. It's one of those double standards that if you can't navigate, you end up an obnoxious snob. Shame on ChubbyHubby.net for having such a stupid and ridiculous review of hawker center prawn mee. He doesn't realize how embarrassing it is to try to describe hawker food like French cuisine, and neither does he realize how statements like

She’s more the turned-out-without-a-hair-out-of-place sort than the let’s-sit-around-in-singlets-and-shorts-that-are-way-too-small-for-me-do-you-like-my-tan type. Which is fine with me. Our little nation could do with more of the former and few less of the latter.

are utterly repulsive. I'm afraid elitism is just not classy. I forgot how obnoxious people could sound, when they can afford to sound like that. And if I put my moral repugnance aside, and take a more dispassionate stance, well, it's simply bad food reviewing.

Memento Mori

2009-02-28T19:35:00.000-08:00

This week, we were reading Flannery O'Connor's short stories for class. The Times ran a lovely review of Brad Gooch's biography of O'Connor today. Her weirdness was like a peacock's feather left behind unexpectedly, says the article, and Gooch made it lose its lustre by filling that biography with banal details of what she ate, and the things she did. I processed Gooch's files at Joy Harris (!). I also loved this paragraph:

The first, perhaps, and last, perhaps, kiss she received from a man was in 1954. The man was Erik Langkjaer, a young and handsome college textbook salesman who described the event thusly: “As our lips touched, I had a feeling that her mouth lacked resilience, as if she had no muscle tension in her mouth, a result being that my own lips touched her teeth rather than lips, and this gave me an unhappy feeling of a sort of memento mori, and so the kissing stopped. . . . I had a feeling of kissing a skeleton, and in that sense it was a shocking experience.”