Sammy boy boy & Cyril's poetry

I think I first browsed through Lim's (2004) book at Borders last year, while waiting for friends to turn up and decide (or non-decide) on where best to have dinner. Didn't quite complete it, but have recently been browsing through it again after finding a copy at the SOAS library.

It's very well written, and very very well researched. A lot of intriguing material, some of which were a little bit surprising. Lotsa thingies one could follow up on and read more about too.

A website, www.sammyboy.com , was mentioned in the book. I just took a peek, and it's actually quite shocking. (To avoid any potential trouble, I would like to state that my mentioning of www.sammyboy.com in this blog does NOT mean that I support, agree with or mean to promote his Sammy Boy's views.) It is primarily a sex site, with a forum on Singapore and Singaporean politics. Also, there are pictures of the homeless in Singapore. It has been reviewed, rather favourably, by Time Asia:

Sammyboy.com is not a website you'd want your 11-year-old surfing into unsupervised. It's deep and content-rich, it's alluring, and, in the main, quite well-written. In places it is also funny. That's the glass half-full way of looking at it. The half-empty way is that it's lewd, crass and offensive. And that there's nothing funny about pornography.

Yes, Sammyboy is a porn site, aimed very directly at the country which arguably least tolerates porn: Singapore. Which is all very well except Official Singapore has yet to close it down. The site has been up and down, so to speak, several times over the past week, and on each occasion it was the site's webmaster, a Samuel Leong, who made the call to shut his own site down. Not the authorities.

The Time Asia article available here: http://www.time.com/time/asia/asiabuzz/2001/01/16/

Another thingy I have investigated since reading Lim (2004) is Cyril Wong, who was one of the interviewees. His website is http://www.cyrilwong.com/ . Some of his poetry is available on his website. A sampler:

Way Out

Such is the violence required
to stop the body in its tracks.
Some say the spirit – if it exists – hovers
permanently within a hundred metre radius
of its busted, flesh-and-bone cage.

I hurried over to the huge, once encumbered
bulk of her; eyes shut behind spectacles
that cling to her face, oddly
unbroken. Her leg, jumped free from its socket,
was held in place
by what must be size-40 Levis.

Blood through a rip in the jeans
flood a long, squint-eyed cut across her thigh:
the inside of her large body
peeking out. I imagine her spirit easing
its way out of that wound

to stand there, gazing skywards at how
far she had come in the gasp of two seconds,
debating if this was a mistake,
and if she had only known
that death was false, that
consciousness would draw her back to itself
even after the end, inescapable,
like gravity.

But I prefer to believe that she
is gone, just as Leslie Cheung
is gone; that death
is not a rapid corridor between one prison and the next;

that the sound she made when the pavement
rose generously to meet her
was not the opposite of a bomb going off.

First published in Three Candles.

Wow!