In the morning, Jimmy came over to paint and I met his Irish poet friend Robert Kiely. He studied English Literature and began hanging out poets.He’s interested in poets like Frances Kruk, Sean Bonney, Posie Rider and Tim Atkins and other small press, often politically active, poets. He did his PhD in English literature and set up some small presses. He sometimes blogs at lithopaedion.blogspot.co.uk. He just organised a conference yesterday on post-crash Irish literature, trying to bring Marxist literary criticism more deeply into Irish Studies, which is too interested in Ireland as a brand. His pamphlets How to Read and Killing the Cop in your Head are out this summer. He teaches Modernism and Romanticism in Hong Kong.
‘Writing for me is an exercise in perpetual disappointment’.
He told me about the rapper Slug Christ. What a name.
Jimmy has taken the zebra he was painting off of the floor and hung it up on the floor. This has changed my view of it, from laying down to being hung. It’s being hung by its shank like a pig. He’s looking into exotic animals being sacrificed as status symbols.
I decided to head out to find something to eat, Jimmy told me about a local food market in the industrial back streets of Wong Chuk Hang. On the way I asked directions and stopped to talk to an interesting man. I asked how he came to be in HK and he said he’d been here for years. I probed a little further and he told me he was a writer an art critic and a number of other things. We talked about the area and the art scene whilst standing under some scaffolding. Look at this typical bamboo scaffolding here. I’m going to meet him for coffee in the morning.
Then I went to the local food Hall. The dish I chose wasn’t too nice.
After lunch I just walked and walked without a destination in mind. I popped into a local sports centre to inquire about Kung Fu classes (I used to love Wing Chun) and swimming. There were crowds of people heading in one direction so I followed them. I arrived at a huge theme park, Ocean Park, with a mountainous backdrop. Why not? I headed in. It’s not often you go to a theme park on your own. The only way I can describe it was Hong Kong on acid. I took a cable car up the mountain with an odd Chinese man. He just sat and smiled at me the whole way. At one point he thumped his chest hard and said ‘Jesus’, then pointed at his wrists. I nodded and continued filming the view. I saw so many wild animals and felt bad for them. I met a Russian man called Sergy and we communicated mainly through Google Translate.We went on a huge roller coaster over the sea. As you can see, we were really excited.
