it was good, le jardin io io ito ito. not, i think, especially profound or moving, but very winningly playful and with a marvellously well-timed humour. we even stayed for the post-show dialogue, and von only had to ask and the sound engineer cheerfully gave away his list of tracks used. and i did put my hair up in the end, aha, with only 9 bobby pins and 2 barettes, so feeling singularly accomplished. before that, ate at an italian place, just off stadium cove, oasis i think it's called, (same building as igor's (the name makes von laugh), that awful horror theatre/restaurant) the restaurant had the dubious name of wildfire, but the menu turned out to have a good range of items, and the food was excellent, so hereby it i will endorse. (try the salmon/cod carpaccio) it has also the advantage of outdoors seating (though limited) on some kind of wooden patio, and on a cool grey evening like last night we went right for the table by the water. even though kallang river's not much to look at, there's something pleasing about the lull of darkening water. i must not dislike water, afterall. hm.

i really approve of all these new restaurants at kallang. the place is so inaccessible, and i always find orchard and nicoll highway jammed if i try to eat in town before that. in fact, all my impressions of watching anything at kallang are of a) irritation with traffic and clock watching or b) hunger while lingering in the foyer way before the show starts. it's a pleasant change to be able to eat unhurriedly till 5mins before showtime, and then to stroll over to the theatre with enough time for von to tread on some fragile slippered foot, plonk ourselves comfortably onto our seats, switch our phones' ringers off, and for him to produce a new tube of mentos [not the grape kind? that's bad for sperm. good, i don't have any. yes, but i have lots.] from some unsuspected pocket before the lights dim.

[i will be just in time for my ballet class if i bun my hair now, but i feel lazy as a string and will just sit here tapping. if i can just go to my first class i won't miss one after that no matter what. but i can't get started. no discipline lah.]

spent today reading john fuller's look twice: an entertainment, with its thrilling conclusion. not profound, and not as moving and strange as his flying to nowhere, but very delicious storytelling. i think that's what draws me most about this book. it fits into my growing collection of books that present a journey or a hideout for frame, and assemble a group of strangers to tell their tales. in short, the canterbury tales and the decameron. there are many contemporary writers who are thinking about and fashioning their works after these "tales" though. isak dinesen's the deluge at norderney. cees nooteboom's the following story. jan potocki's saragossa manuscripts. you would think it is not only out-moded but an artificial way of writing fiction, and it is, and what's more, i can't think of anything else that runs such a risk of being laughably badly done, but part of the charm is in that artificiality. look twice knows this; it calls itself "an entertainment." even the names of the three characters: radim grosiewski, rudolf gromowski, and romuald grochow laughs at you: of course we are only illusions of mr fuller. the artist, the illusionist, and the editor of a political paper, leaving the duchy of gomsza on what is likely to be the last train during a period of civil unrest and possible invasion, sharing a compartment with a mysterious josef pyramur. you get a story from each of the men, and four from pyramur, and one from the waterseller. you begin each one sceptically, and then you rise to the surface at the end of each gasping for breath. the scepticism is part of it too, i think. you're so aware of how it can go wrong that when it doesn't you are impressed and a little abashed. the chapter headings read like a book of sensational mystery stories in the table of contents:

the odiousness of the one-handed lover. the principle of the purloined sphinx. the damaging of the dazzling genius. the interlude of the waiter's knees. the trick of the transformed spectator. the authority of the absent arch-duke. the embarrassment of the empty coffin. the problem of pictorial space. the rashness of the pious prisoner. and so on. noticed the alliteration incidentally? i like that calculated flaunting of the artificiality of the whole business. the book is about illusions, afterall, although this type of tale-telling game is invariably about illusions of course.

why don't more people know about john fuller? i think he's awfully good, but there are barely any of his books on amazon, or any reviews or information about them on the web, and i can hardly find any biographical info except that he went to new college and is now teaching at magdalen and edited some auden. i'm now starting on a book of his called "a skin diary" which i only learnt about from a.s. byatt. the diary of a welsh farmgirl, meditating on pregnancy, love, words and her lover. i know it doesn't sound like much, but fuller plots never sound like much until you read them. i will go and read and report back.