september 16–30, 2018

Books

  • Elsa Morante, The World Saved by Kids and Other Epics, translated by Cristina Viti
  • Giovanni Verga, Little Novels of Sicily, trans. D. H. Lawrence
  • Sergio de la Pava, Lost Empress
  • Fleur Jaeggy, I Am the Brother of XX, trans. Gini Alhadeff 
  • Violette Leduc, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur, trans. Derek Coltman
  • Cesare Pavese, _The Beautiful Summer, trans. W. J. Strachan
  • Cesare Pavese, The Beach, trans. R. W. Flint
  • Goh Poh Seng, Tall Tales and Misadventures of a Young Westernized Oriental Gentleman
  • Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends
  • Sally Rooney, Normal People
  • Lydia Millet, Fight No More
  • Cesare Pavese, Among Women Only, trans. R. W. Flint
  • Charles Bernstein, Republics of Reality 1975–1995
  • Lily Tuck, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante
  • Charles Williams, The Greater Trumps

Films

  • WUSA, directed by Stuart Rosenberg

Exhibits

  • “Wei Leng Tay: Crossings,” NUS Museum
  • “Of Place and A Paradox,” NUS Museum
  • “Yeo Shih Yun: Diaries, Marking Time And Other Preoccupations,” NUS Museum
  • “Chow and Lin: Homeless,” NUS Museum

september 1–15, 2018

Books

  • Jean-Patrick Manchette, The Prone Gunman, translated by James Brook
  • George S. Schuyler, Black No More
  • Eka Kurniawan, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, trans. Annie Tucker
  • Edoardo Nesi, Infinite Summer, trans. Alice Kilgarriff
  • Natalia Ginzburg, The Manzoni Family, trans. Marie Evans
  • Joseph Roth, Hotel Savoy, trans. Jonathan Katz
  • Karel Čapek, War with the Newts, trans. M. & R. Weatherall
  • Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed, trans. Bruce Penman
  • Giovanni Verga, The House by the Medlar Tree, trans. Eric Mosbacher
  • Luigi Pirandello, Each in His Own Way, trans. Arthur Livingston

Films

  • 버닝 (Burning), directed by Lee Chang-dong
  • Trouble in Paradise, dir. Ernst Lubitsch
  • La terra trema, dir. Luchino Visconti

Exhibits

  • “APB Foundation Signature Art Prize 2018,” Singapore Art Museum
  • “Gilles Massot: The Probability of Veracity Part 2: The Reenactments (from analogue to digital),” Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film
  • “Darren Soh: Before It All Goes: Architecture from Singapore’s Early Independence Years,” Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film
  • “Intriguing Uncertainties,’ Parkview Museum

august 16–31, 2018

Books

  • Roberto Bolaño, Woes of the True Policeman, translated by Natasha Wimmer
  • S. A. Chakraborty, The City of Brass
  • Guy Davenport, The Death of Picasso: New & Selected Writing
  • Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
  • Amanda Lee Koh, Ministry of Moral Panic
  • Norman Lewis, An Empire of the East: Travels in Indonesia
  • Redmond O’Hanlon, Into the Heart of Borneo
  • Dorothy Iannone, This Sweetness Outside of Time: A Retrospective of Paintings, Objects, Books, and Films from 1959 to 2014

Films

  • Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back, directed by Maura Axelrod
  • Córki dancingu (The Lure), dir. Agnieszka Smoczyńska
  • Jaws, dir. Steven Spielberg

Exhibits

  • “Spaces,” Ota Fine Arts
  • “From the Archives,” Mizuma Gallery
  • “FX Harsono: Reminiscence,” Sullivan & Strumpf
  • “From Now On,” Partners & Mucciaccia
  • “Si Jae Byun: Momentary,” Chan + Hori Contemporary
  • “Jia Peng: No Phase,” Element Art Space
  • “Kamin Lertchaiprasert: ‘     ‘,” Chan + Hori Contemporary
  • “Ronson Culibrina: Above Sea Level,” Yavuz Gallery
  • “Lim Tiong Ghee: Echoing Fragments,” The Private Museum

august 1–15, 2018

Books

  • Ross Macdonald, The Doomsters
  • Idra Novey, Those Who Knew
  • Roberto Bolaño, The Third Reich, translated by Natasha Wimmer
  • Jean-Patrick Manchette, The Mad and the Bad, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
  • Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding
  • Jean-Patrick Manchette, Three to Kill, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
  • Jean-Patrick Manchette, Fatale, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
  • Iris Origo, A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary 1939–1940
  • William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
  • Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp, trans. Natasha Wimmer
  • Margaret Mazzantini, Morning Sea, trans. Ann Gagliardi
  • Jean-Patrick Manchette, Ivory Pearl, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
  • Elliott Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel
  • Nick Drnaso, Sabrina
  • Emmanuel Carrère, The Kingdom, trans. John Lambert
  • Elizabeth Jenkins, The Tortoise and the Hare

Films

  • My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, directed by Dash Shaw
  • King Kong, dir. John Guillermin

Exhibits

  • “Ein Künstlermuseum für Berlin: Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Leopold Reidemeister und Werner Düttman,” Brücke-Museum, Berlin
  • “Was war Europa?” Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin
  • “Karol Broniatowski: Im Moment,” Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin
  • “Handmade Readymades: Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg & James Rosenquist,” STPI, Singapore

july 16–31, 2018

Books

  • James Hadley Chase, No Orchids for Miss Blandish
  • George Mikes, How to Be an Alien
  • Jeff Wall, Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés
  • Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods
  • Carson McCullers, Reflections in a Golden Eye
  • Ross Macdonald, Find a Victim
  • Ross Macdonald, The Barbarous Coast

Films

  • Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire), directed by Wim Wenders

Exhibits

  • Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
  • “Food Revolution 5.0: Design for Tomorrow’s Society,” Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin
  • “Hello World. Revising a Collection,” Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
  • “Görlitz – A Cultural Heritage Site Resurrected,” Kunstbibliothek, Berlin
  • “Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta,” Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin
  • “Louise Bourgeois: The Empty House,” Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin
  • “Untie to Tie: For the Record,” ifa Gallery, Berlin
  • “We Don’t Need Another Hero: 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art,” Akademie der Künste, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
  • “Gerhard Richter. Abstraktion,” Museum Barberini, Potsdam
  • “Congo Tales. Geschichten aus Mbomo,” Museum Barberini, Potsdam
  • “Vom Expressionismus zum Informel,” Museum Barberini, Potsdam
  • “Kunst in Berlin 1880–1980,” Berlinische Galerie
  • “Loredana Nemes: Gier Angst Liebe Fotografien 2008–2018,” Berlinische Galerie
  • “Carsten Nicolai: Tele,” Berlinische Galerie
  • “Prabhavathi Meppayil: B/Seven Eighths,” Esther Schipper, Berlin

july 1–15, 2018

Books

  • Sheere Ng, This Is Not a Food Magazine
  • Cheryl Julia Lee, We Were Always Eating Expired Things
  • Melissa De Silva, “Others” Is Not a Race
  • Alfian Sa’at, The Invisible Manuscript
  • Vandana Singh, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories
  • Dave Chua & Koh Hong Teng, Gone Case: The Complete Graphic Novel
  • Gwee Li Sui, Myth of the Stone
  • Isa Kamari, Rawa, translated by R. Krishnan
  • Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, trans. Edward Storer
  • Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, trans. Anthony Mortimer
  • Fleur Jaeggy, These Possible Lives, trans. Minna Zallman Proctor

june 16–30, 2018

Books

  • Graham Greene, The Quiet American
  • Eugene Burdick & William Lederer, The Ugly American
  • Emmanuel Carrère, Class Trip, translated by Linda Coverdale
  • Emmanuel Carrère, The Mustache, trans. Lanie Goodman
  • Daryl Qilin Yam, Kappa Quartet
  • Luigi Pirandello, Liolà, trans. Eric Bentley & Gerardo Guerrieri
  • Luigi Pirandello, It Is So! (If You Think So), trans. Arthur Livingston
  • Luigi Pirandello, Henry IV, trans. Edward Storer
  • Pramoedya Ananta Toer, This Earth of Mankind, trans. Max Lane

eugene burdick & william lederer, “the ugly american”

the cover of The Ugly America Eugene Burdick and William Lederer 
The Ugly American
(Norton, 1958)


This is a book that probably isn’t read very much any more, and if it’s remembered, it’s for the title, which has a common usage that is entirely at odds with what the authors intended. But it is still somehow in print – one would expect more for historical interest than anything else, though the Amazon reviews suggest otherwise. I had seen the not particularly good film version with Marlon Brando, which features the Thai novelist and politician Kukrit Pramoj as a southeast Asian prime minister before he actually became the prime minister of Thailand; but despite now being an American who’s lived in southeast Asia for coming up on five years, I’d never actually looked at the book until I finally got around to reading Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and started wondering about American responses to that book. Read sixty years later, The Ugly American is more than a little astonishing.

The Wikipedia page gives a reasonable background on the book some sense of its effects on the world: it’s credited there with being the impetus for the creation of the Peace Corps. It might also bear some responsibility for American actions in southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. While it is hard to make an argument for this being particularly good fiction (it is not a “novel,” as Wikipedia confidently declares), it is clearly successful fiction, shaping American perceptions of what southeast Asia was like. (In this, it’s not dissimilar to Anna Leonowen’s The King and I, a deeply fictionalized memoir of her service to Rama IV of Siam; in several further incarnations, must notably the Yul Brynner-starring musical, it continues to shape American perceptions of Thailand. Peal Buck’s The Good Earth, now mostly forgotten, also falls into this category.) And for this reason, it might be worth reading now: not necessarily to inquire whether the book is an accurate depiction or not, but to think about how this book has been read, and what a book can do.

Read historically, this is a somewhat flummoxing book. Most of it takes place in an imaginary country, Sarkhan; geographically, this appears to roughly be a stand-in for Vietnam, though Vietnam also appears in the book. Confusingly there is no mention of colonialism until halfway through the book, when the ambassador to Sarkhan goes to Vietnam to aid the French forces there fighting the Communists. What the French are doing in Vietnam, or why they should be fighting the Communists, is not explained. Nor is Sarkhan’s colonial status explained. One might assume that since Sarkhan has seemingly not been colonized (and is led by an all-powerful king) that it’s modeled on Thailand, the only state in southeast Asia that was not colonized. These distinctions matter a great deal: Communism’s success in southeast Asia was as a direct response to the predations of colonialism. In The Ugly American, Communism is an evil virus, kind of like hoof and mouth disease, that just tends to spring up among backwards people.

It is not a surprise how much racism there is in this book, or how many grand generalizations are made about the seemingly monolithic Asian character. What’s surprising is how unthinkingly casual it is. Here, for example, is a description of two servants of the American ambassador:

Donald and Roger were both elderly Chinese. The only English words they knew were the names given them by their American employers and a few necessary household terms. They had been trusted servants of the Embassy since an American ambassador to Sarkhan had hired them in 1939. They worked with an efficiency, dedication, and kindliness that never failed to touch Ambassador MacWhite. They often helped Molly with the boys. They were both excellent cooks and superb butlers. They were, somehow, a symbol of the decent Asian, and they made the entire struggle in which Ambassador MacWhite was engaged meaningful and important. They represented the honor and morality which had been taught by Confucius. (chapter 9)

It should be surprising to absolutely no one, after this loving description, that Donald and Roger turn out to know English and to be Communist spies; Donald is tortured into confessing by another “good Asian,” an Episcopal representative of Chiang Kai-shek, over to have martinis with the ambassador. Ambassador MacWhite, whose perspective this is from, is meant to be the keyed-in ambassador, replacing the know-nothing ambassador; he’s the one who goes to Vietnam to help to French fight the Communists. His idea that the “decent Asian” should be a servant educated just to the point of usefulness isn’t examined any further. (There are echoes here, as well, of more domestic American attitudes towards race. Later, a black American turns up, having joined the French Foreign Legion, presumably to distance himself from 1950s America; for his trouble, the authors have one of his eyes torn out by the Communists.) Donald and Roger are symptomatic of the portrayal of Asians in this book: except for one at the end, they all manage to betray their American friends.

Structurally, the book is a collection of 17 vignettes, mostly drawn around one character. Some of these are clearly fictionalized versions of real people; some might be recognizable to a reader with more historical knowledge than I have. Those who work for the State Department are almost uniformly buffoonish. I can’t tell how accurate a depiction of the State Department in southeast Asia in the 1950s this is: maybe everyone was getting drunk all the time, not bothering to learn languages, and glorying in having servants. The solutions proposed (not being drunk all the times, learning languages, talking with locals) do seem reasonable, if perhaps obvious. But the cartoonish view of the locals throws the book off wildly: if only, it suggests, someone smarter explained to them that Communism was evil, they would be on our side. This obviously worked out well.

Two more things worth noting about this book. Someone must have noticed that this seems to be the urtext of Thomas Friedman’s style of column-writing, especially the characters who are lauded, caricatures of hard-working Americans trying to press their commonsense ideas on the less fortunate of the world who haven’t been lucky enough to hear their homespun wisdom. Homer Atkins, one of these characters, is a level-headed engineer, the Ugly American of the book’s title. He knows by looking at his hands that he is ugly, but that somehow reminds him of his superior inner qualities. This hamfisted metaphor managed to enshrine the “ugly American” in the English language, but the book’s complete lack of control over its reception is impressive. The ugly American as now understood has nothing at all to do with what the book is meant to convey. It has a lot to do with what the book didn’t intend to convey.

june 1–15, 2018

Books

  • Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate
  • Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, translated by Dorna Khazeni
  • Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson
  • Charif Majdalani, Moving the Palace, trasn. Edward Gauvin
  • Samuel Steward, Philip Sparrow Tells All: Lost Essays by Samuel Steward, Writer, Professor, Tattoo Artist, ed. Jeremy Mulderig

Films

  • French Waves, directed by Julian Starke

Exhibits

  • “Caravaggio: Opera Omnia,” BACC, Bangkok
  • “Narongyot Thongyu: A Child’s World in the Days of Adults,” People’s Gallery, BACC
  • “Kraiwit Phothikul: Equivalent,” People’s Gallery, BACC
  • “Jittima Pholsawek: Let Me Dance,” People’s Gallery, BACC
  • “Yeoh Choo Kuan: Lights In,” Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok
  • “Rituals: Ink, Oil, Cotton, and Thread,” Nova Contemporary, Bangkok
  • “Designing Informality: Inhabitable Chariots for Daily Rituals,” H Gallery, Bangkok
  • “Mit Jai Inn: Beautiful Futures,” H Gallery, Bangkok
  • “Pericles Boutos: Present – Official Function,” Kathmandu Photo Gallery, Bangkok
  • “Prawit Lumcharoen: Sick Boy เด็กห่วย,” Number 1 Gallery, Bangkok

may 16–31, 2018

Books

  • René Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking, translated by David Coward & E. A. Lovatt
  • Michel Tournier, Friday, trans. Norman Denny
  • Patty Yumi Cottrell, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
  • J. M. Coetzee, Foe
  • Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf 

Exhibits

  • “(Re)collect: The Making of Our Art Collection,” National Gallery Singapore
  • Borobudur, Indonesia
  • Prambanban, Indonesia
  • Taman Sari, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
  • “Artjog 2018”, National Museum of Yogyakarta, Indonesia