for the four of us

for the four of us best friends from those days, the sea would claim a significant site in our teenage memories. often we would take our bicycles and head over just as the morning quiet began to disappear, and the sun rose and whitened the sky. sometimes if we were utterly bored we would collect and ride in the bright noon day, the searing reflections from the waves tempting us to jump through them, which once, twice we really did. then we would sit on the sizzling-hot granite breakwater while our clothes spread out to dry. or we would climb the coconut trees and pick its fruit, competing to be the first to crack the husks. the beach wasnt teeming with people and eateries the way it is now, and its sunsets, with the returning tranquil and the occasional dives of seagulls across the orange clouds, were ineffably beautiful. there was a particular spot that had an abundance of palm trees, and from where we sat, its leaves would frame the flaming expanse of sky with sky and its defiant-appearing crescent partner, descending onto the jutting overland in the distance, before being gently engulfed by it, the dark quietly taking over. what remain of those vivid, blazing images soaked in our dilating irises are now sepia snapshots tinged with nostalgia. all five years we never tired of those trips - perfunctory pilgrimages made almost daily, a ritual of our friendship with the sea. without anyone's realising, the lapping waves and the sandy steppes had partook in our conversations, eavesdropped on our secrets, watched us grow up and apart. if we were to return to the sea now after so many years, we would find ourselves alone, awkward and forlorn with the other three, the once-familiar and cherished living like phantoms in our collective and uttered reminiscences. some years ago, we met there for the last time, after not having done so for some years already, each busy living our post-teenage life of freedom and worry. we didnt plan it to be final, of course, such prophecy absurd. but meteor showers were forecast a few minutes after that midnight and we felt it would be fascinating to lie once more on that familiar slab of uncomfortable granite, relive old dreams and share new ones. then there was one long moment, where out of nothing our chatter fell away, and thought-filled silence hung between us, as if paying a homage and bidding a farewell to all that had gone before, and laying them to rest. what more could we ask, when there would be old dreams to live on and new ones to look for? that last night in front of the whispering sea, we hushed our wishes together, yet, alone, under the silvery shooting stars.

obsess my mind

i contemplate the different futures i could arrive at and before having so much as taken a first step i continually re-write them. the only result thus remains, an unwritten future. not too long ago and for not too long a time i had my life laid out a predictable straight-line. i craved for uncertainty and some riot. now that i am in a thrall of incertitude, i am torn between time past and time future, and from which the paradoxical conditions of torpidity and stasis emerge, hijack, and obsess my mind.

___

'it appears unavoidable that physical reality must be described in terms of continuous functions in space. the material point can hardly be conceived anymore.'

-- albert einstein

'what am i? atoms. what are atoms? empty space and points of light. what is the speed of light? 300,000 kilometres per second. what is a second? that depends where in the universe you set your watch.'

-- jeanette winterson

more books

as if i were subconsciously storing up food for the cold months; but the recent additions in the last two weeks (including a mega spree just now to my shelves were quite conscious choices:

john fante, ask the dust

don paterson, landing light: poems

vladimir nabokov, lectures on literature

helen vendler, coming of age as a poet: milton, keats, eliot, plath

paul auster, brooklyn follies

kazuo ishiguro, the remains of the day

philip larkin, required writing

philip larkin, further requirements: interviews, broadcasts, statements and book reviews

n.k. kleinbaum, dead poets society

t.s. eliot, the waste land and other poems (2nd copy, this with frank kermode intro)

nadine gordimer, get a life (because she nobel laureate and i thyroid cancer patient)

kingsley amis, lucky jim

william faulkner, light in august

martin amis, money

philip roth, the professor of desire

ted hughes, collected poems

david remnick, ed., wonderful town: new york stories from the new yorker

john gardner, the art of fiction

thomas hardy, the mayor of casterbridge

thomas hardy, under the greenwood tree

truman capote, answered prayers

mark batty, about pinter: the playwright and the work

john fletcher, about beckett: the playwright and the work

virginia woolf, mrs dalloway (i couldnt resist getting another copy, this time hardcover)

gertrude stein, three lives & Q.E.D.

sylvia plath, collected poems

mark strand and eavan boland, the making of a poem

david lodge, the art of fiction

jeanette winterson, tanglewreck (for my little cousin)

virginia woolf, the common reader vol. 2

shakespeare, the tempest

jeanette winterson, written on the body (for mrs chan whom i'm meeting on tues)

raymond carver, where i'm calling from

raymond carver, call if you need me: the uncollected fiction and other prose

omg.

i used to think i could control my book purchases. but while reading woolf i had an epiphany (she does have that kinda effect) - that for as long as i read books (i'm addicted i'm obsessed) i'll always find new things and names and directions in them that will lead me to further and more and even more literary touchstones, lighthouses, glittering pearls. at this moment if there's one reason for me to continue living it is quite just so i can continue to ravish these rapturous pages.

you regret only the ones you did not buy

i need one more bookshelf. my repressed and starved soul from ten weeks of juvenilia and atrocious handscrawls on tattered foolscap more or less exploded during the just-ended one-week september holidays.

james fenton, the strength of poetry: oxford lectures

mark strand, the weather of words: poetic invention

john ashbery, selected prose

samuel beckett, 3 novels: murphy; watt; mercier and camier

samuel beckett, waiting for godot

colm toibin, the master

haruki murakami, birthday stories

czeslaw milosz, to begin where i am: selected essays

czelaw milosz, the captive mind

james & elizabeth knowlson, beckett remembering remembering beckett

elie wiesel, night

ralph waldo emerson, essential writings

c.s. lewis, reading the classics with

john fowles, wormholes: essays and occasional writings

harold bloom, the western canon

a.s. byatt, on histories and stories: selected essays

seamus heaney, opened ground: poems 1966-1996

jack kerouac, the subterraneans & pic

terry eagleton, literary theory

anais nin, delta of venus

umberto eco, on literature

john bayley, a memoir of iris murdoch

anatole broyard, kafka was the rage: a greenwich village memoir

paul auster, collected prose

anton chekhov, five plays

boris pasternak, doctor zhivago

wallace stevens, the collected poems

elizabeth bishop, the complete poems 1927-1979

adrienne rich, poetry and prose

mark strand, selected poems

mark strand, dark harbor

ernest hemingway, a moveable feast

hmmmm.

actually having bought them a few at a time over the week it didnt seem numerous. i cannot help it. if i've one last dollar in my pocket it will still be used to finance a book. and i dont have many places to wander on this island so i go to the bookstores. and once i enter bookstores i invariably stumble upon books hitherto undiscovered. my fates with books have always been serendipitous, uncanny, apocryphal.

i stand with jeanette winterson who incants:

if you love books as objects, as totems, as talismans, as doorways, as genii bottles, as godsends, as living things, then you love them widely. this binding, that paper. strange company kept ... the world of the book is a total world and in a total world we fall in love.

i didnt buy too many novels this time round, the purchases veering towards the poets and literary essays/criticism (or both: essays of poets). i enjoyed fowles immensely, and am in awe of milosz's intellect, and i'm looking very very forward to ravishing fenton, strand, and ashbery. hemingway was a terrific steal at $1 i chanced upon in the school library. how anyone would want to throw this brand new paperback which would otherwise cost almost $20 is unfathomable and utterly embarrassing. otherwise, of special mention is paul auster's collected prose, which was truly love at first sight. this binding that paper. i love the cover, the texture, and his writings especially those of french poetry and poets inspired deeper interest, and i suspect, opened an eye. also reading alfian's unpublished collection of poetry completed five years ago, the invisible manuscript. it is brilliant, absolutely brilliant, an incandescent manifesto.

i'll end with yet another winterson:

... i have not for a minute regretted it. that is the way with books. you regret only the ones you did not buy.

it's something i've always wanted to do

it's something i've always wanted to do, and now one and a half months into it, having glided through the good days and fought with the bad ones, i am not sure if i am as good as i have always thought myself and made myself out to be. i also cannot but be affected by how they perceive me, judge me, like me. those bad days, like last friday,had been very affecting experiences, hard blows to my esteem. i could be the fiercest, and in turn the most feared, but at the end of the day, if everyone of them thought they'd rather someone else in my place, then i should have failed in this endeavour. and i so badly want them to be nothing but their best.

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.
___

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
___

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.