we who were fluent find life is a foreign language

great writers are artists par excellence. and through the lineage of time and tradition, ancestor worship and inspiration, the ethereal pens of littérateurs, winged by the magical mastery of language, conjure for us mortals invisible cities spiraled like a dream.
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the man who is traveling and does not yet know the city awaiting him along his route wonders what the palace will be like, the barracks, the mill, the theatre, the bazaar. in every city of the empire every building is different and set in a different order: but as soon as the stranger arrives at the unknown city and and his eye penetrates the pine cone of pagodas and garrets and haymows, following the scrawl of canals, gardens, rubbish heaps, he immediately distinguishes which are the princes' palaces, the high priests' temples, the tavern, the prison, the slum. this - some say - confirms the hypothesis that each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city without figures and without form, and the individual cities fill it up.
-- italo calvino

how is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange? travellers at least have a choice. those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. explorers are prepared. but for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. we who were fluent find life is a foreign language.
-- jeanette winterson
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sylvian love

alf and his sylvian love. strangers striking up conversations, wondering if we were really that old enough to vote; people cheering from across the roads; students requesting photographs; the silver mercedes slowing down to thumbs up; the cab drivers offering discounts. it felt foreign; it felt surreal.

to the boy standing in front of me, clutching a copy of dostoevsky (the brothers karamazov), to the scores of jc students and their excited chatters long after, to all those idealistic young ones who went and gave the air resounding applause and rousing plumes of hope, they re-captured for me, an imagination that i, and perhaps this entire nation, had thought long eviscerated.

for the local media, i only have sheer disgust and contempt at the astounding level of prejudice, unprofessionalism, and mediocrity of coverage and scatological drivel masquerading as 'analysis'. only this time, sparred against a formidable blogosphere, its snivelling, repugnant political motives were ripped bare for all to see. some of those blogs' field reportage, commentaries, insights, *photography*, put theirs to utter shame (and would easily put them out of jobs). this contrast could never be starker. my belief of the mass media now rests on democratic, citizen, journalism, that has exhibited an admirable level of quality and credibility. the abysmal propaganda machine pretending to be newspapers and broadcasts should never, ever, be believed.

bring me to your king

it's an image the national press would do its utmost to obscure (let's all wonder why), where the internet would defiantly grace. it's an image that will be emblematic of a new WP, if not of the general state of opposition in singapore, in the years to come. even if the WP loses hougang, loses in aljunied and elsewhere, loses, this time; this amazing oppositional momentum will likely continue to reverberate long after.

i was there that night with alf and sam, and somehow we'd managed to mouse our way to the front. we were a good hour late, and yet there were still endless throngs of people streaming toward the bright lights. there was a massive jam along the roads because all the vehicles had slowed to a crawl, one side of their windows wound down for a breath of that rare, impassioned air.

that night obliterated my perception of singaporean apathy. the passion and desire - be they deriving from supplicant gratitude or fiery disillusionment - to take charge of, to be interested in, one's country's political trajectories, exist - you create it; you search it out; you keep shoulders with the people, whoever they may be, whichever party they are, who have offered to lay your convictions upon their rightful kingdoms. but you cannot be apathetic, apolitical - because you cannot afford it. because a nation of sheep begets a government of wolves. that night was heartening, it was galvanising, i got my pristine-white, red-and-blue-striped converse shoes muddied, and i had never felt more singaporean in my entire life.

april time past and time future

of all my notebooks, my favourite is the hard-cover, unlined, black-cloth-bound from Borders. they disappeared from the shelves after the christmas i bought it, and i spotted them again last saturday - i shall buy ten and use one a year. it's very sturdy and the size of a novel, i carry it wherever i go and scribble everything inside, from observations and ruminations and to-do lists and phone numbers to book titles and their call numbers. short of losing them on the streets or in a fire, they're more reliable than blogs. i look forward to reminiscing these youthful times decades on, and they're intimate mementos that i can leave to my loved ones when i die. its this reason i always wished my grandparents even parents kept journals - i know nothing about them and their lives. (aside: why are moleskine notebooks so expensive? they're like diors of notebooks sans spring/summer-autumn/winter transmorgifixions.)

one innocent afternoon a hundred years from now, a distant great-grand-nephew of mine, suffering utterly from the ennui of his school vacation (hopefully he's a student of history, philosophy and english literature) would stumble upon my pile of essays and journals and other assorted letters in an obscure storeroom of his granddad's house, and be curious enough to reconstruct my life. stoked by his fecund imagination and whatever little, incomplete details he could glean, a story - never mind it wouldnt be wholly factual - would come into being, that could only become possible from the both of us colliding fatefully along the plane of transcending time.

背影是真的人是假的没甚麽执着
一百年前你不是你我不是我
悲哀是真的泪是假的本来没因果
一百年後没有你也没有我

there is intelligence and there is intelligence

phillip and i had affixed yesterday evening for a phone conversation regarding my research topic. in a last-minute scramble and flipping through his books and articles, i couldnt help but be impressed by his elegant prose and august erudition; a regretfully dying breed in today's publish-or-perish MacUnis. speaking to him work-proper, after these years, revealed (and reminded) how little i know, so much i was half-afraid he'd get bored with me and think me unworthy and subsequently and politely decline to supervise.

there is always this debate between art and utility, although which being the superior entity is obvious. an analogous example/argument could be that flair presupposes technique. some write all technique and little or no flair; some write bereft of both, what remains being wanton, spineless masturbation; and the rare one glides on incendiary sparks of both. while intelligence underpins technique, talent underpins flair. of intelligence, it is harder to think you stupid (not impossible obviously, though mostly are facetious in delivery), than it is to think you unintelligent. the difficulty of quantifying intelligence has often been flagged by the marginalised as both a defence and a justification... of their own fatuity. the dodginess of yardsticks true to an extent, it is nonetheless unconvincing. you need not descend to specificities to gather one is better than the other. it is similarly unnecessary to resort to (and sometimes should not be) referring to the number of academic accolades amassed - or for that matter, how much knowledge you possess. what would be more expedient a method, would be to excavate how your mind process information - in speed, in depth, and in scope. while intelligence might be protean in nature, the potentiality of it, though harder to detect, is ironically a surer indication. an example might be how you need not write intelligent matters to exhibit and prove it. be the output serious or facile, intellectual or sentient, heightened or popular, exalted or every-day, the thought-processes behind these, of quality or otherwise, are the determinants and constants. by and large however, a good mind will show itself unexpectedly and effortlessly; but if you have nothing, then nothing will show other than torturous tripe. it is quite idiotic to be embarrassed by your cerebral lack - though the tendency to, in a society eager to show off and to impress, is compelling - for only from an acknowledgement of this deficit is where knowledge, with its infinite supply and possibilities, can and shall come. and as it were, the antitheses of intelligence are neither ignorance nor stupidity - they are indignance, petulance, and obstinacy.

impoverished students . struggling writers . dishevelled poets

the cold and grey of this morning were unexpected, this being april. it reminded me very much of those shivering and wet melbourne mornings i used to trot through to get to class, snug in my trusty levis and woollen jumper, invigorated by the wintry air. i had lived behind lygon street, the italian alcove famous for its cafes and restaurants. very few things change at lygon, though the crass and the vulgar (e.g. starbucks) have lately begun their invasion. but most of the cafes that had sprouted along it after the war still stands, run by the same quibbling italian families dashing around with pasta and pizza and shots of expresso. and then of course, there are the students and artists - keeping alive the spirits of generations of impoverished melbourne university students, ex-students, faux-students, angry-students, refuse-to-graduate students, struggling writers, dishevelled poets, apprentice philosophers. all who have, over the decades, indelibly left their artistic and intellectual marks - along the sidewalks, by the shopwindows, in the coffee cups. one could almost still hear echoes of their debates, conversations, commiserations. echoes, because like the invasion of fastfood and fastcoffee, so too the harlequin yuppies have begun their intrusions. but it is of course, always easy to pick out these philistine poseurs. the genuine lygon intelligentsia and literati are somehow invariably unkempt and beggared - there they would sit, swigging strong coffee, scribbling into unintelligible notebooks, peering furrowed brows into tattered copies of camus, kerouac and kafka, exhaling cigarette smoke and discarded thoughts, cogitating with the auburn evening as it tanned into the night.

why should i be a corporate fuckwit?

sometime last year when i had this ascetic epiphany was also when this soulless country, with its obscene applause for relentless material acquisitions and standing ovations of skyscrapers do not impress me anymore. given a choice i'd live and work in academia the rest of my life. there is nowhere else i can obtain the intellectual stimulation i crave, and the lofty promises of the vacuous, avaricious world outside have ceased to arouse me. why do i want to be reduced to a pathetic cog in that machinery forever whining about unreasonable bosses, retarded colleagues, and dead-end jobs, where nobody thinks they're ever paid enough yet would never admit to their own ineptitude? why do i want to stuff myself in a claustrophobic panopticon of an office never seeing sunlight and slogging endlessly for yet another paycheque only so i can lust after the next ephemeral bourgeois fandangle, when i can take daily strolls through intellectual bohemia ruminating politics and philosophy, reading the masterpieces of literature, and penning treatises that would always be my name? perhaps i wont be as productive or wealthy as you, but why should i want to be? how many nonsensical self-help books do i have to read and next-door-lims to compare before my esteem and existence can be validated? how many ipods, nokias, powerbooks, volkswagens and condominiums do i need to be happy in this life? i cant take with me any of these when i die and i would rather people remember me as someone who contemplated the world and life, than as someone who could only afford prada and a car.

besotted with form-lit for some time now

besotted with form-lit for some time now, and have attributed it to simply the beauty of elegant, heightened prose itself. winterson, woolf, d.h. lawrence, who made me forget this dull world breathed. then there were the few books due to be returned tomorrow - essays by georges perec, susan sontag, roland barthes - all whom i havent properly sat down to keep company. and this line from barthes's writing degree zero glowed (from the chapter "is there any poetic writing?"): "the word shines forth above a line of relationships emptied of their content, grammar is bereft of its purpose, it becomes prosody and is no longer anything but an inflexion which lasts only to present the word." it was a remarkable sentence! barthes literally, literarily, conjured the elements he was arguing about - the poetic and prosodic. and barthes was a translation! idea-lit worked after all - it unravelled my mind and its ruminations and set free the fishes of ideas to twirl in my head. i realised my obsession with form-lit was cathexis - that everyday for the last few years i had been inundated, harrassed, bombarded by the accoutrements of academia - the newest articles, the hottest books, the latest op-eds, the official pronouncement of american policy of five minutes ago, the death toll of this bombing, the political ramifications of that tsunami, the eventual analyses to offer, the papers to write, the deadlines to submit, the inevitable criticisms - i love my work but the lethality of their deadening qualities manifested themselves in my subconscious evacuation, from the irrepressible hecklings of politics at day to the wine and waterfall world of literature at night. this is also why i love the night and wish day would never dawn again.
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england ... throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. what did it mean? for what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?

-- e.m. forster, howard's end

how not to be awed by his magisterial paean to his beloved isles!

IS MAKING ME VERY PHYSICALLY ILL

THE AVARICE THE MEDIOCRITY THE HACKNEYED ASPIRATIONS AND CLICHED EXISTENCE ALL POINTING TO A HELLHOLE PLATITUDE PRETENDING TO BE A COUNTRY IS MAKING ME VERY PHYSICALLY ILL.

what kinds of forevers are we looking for

would we not love knowing it would end, or would we love nevertheless? do we, love nevertheless? the love could end, but is it pronounced "death"? the dead lives on; we keep them alive. that's what make doomed lovers immortal. lancelot and guinvere, tristan and isolde, romeo and juliet; fallen souls with burning hearts. but why do we keep them alive; what was that incandescent moment that tarried between the two hopeless flames like - fallen souls of burning hearts - before they immolated, fire into fire, swirling ash flakes into shimmery dust motes, into fairytale tragedies snowing eternally in our minds. was it not that furnace of a moment of theirs, that we searched a lifetime on frozen lakes to bear? and yet we love not, knowing it would end. so what kinds of forevers are we looking for; the brief yet true and eternal, or the living long dead?