Archive for November, 2003
More on materialism
November 29th, 2003 Uncategorized
It reminds me of the question on materialism vs spiritualism I posed some time back. It seems that materialism is a shallow worship. Not the ’shallow’ that is sometimes thrown at a person to mock him for reading Stephen King for example (joke! joke!) but that the worship is without depth. For the materialistic, there is no realisation that his need for religion is transferred on to objects, that the worship is a microcosm of religious worship and belief. When I have plenty of stuff, I am distracted from my religious need and the need becomes more manageable.
Other people on writing
November 27th, 2003 books
Louis Menard wrote
“..but at the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician
Greats I don’t get
November 25th, 2003 books
I can’t help nodding when I see Dickens on the list of Greats I don’t get at the Blowhards. I’m disqualified from stating Dickens because of the rule in bullet point #4: “And you’ve given the work or the artist a decent and earnest try”. Because I love Great Expectations I picked up Oliver Twist and Tale of Two Cities and regrettably I hated both. I couldn’t finish more than fifty pages of it.
Appropriated Habits
November 24th, 2003 Uncategorized
I find myself lately collecting bits and pieces of souvenirs as though I was preparing for C’s goodbye or even death. I write down little jokes carefully. (”Wednesday, November 19, 2003: I was reading his horoscope. “You have a new moon.” “Yeah, I just bought one. What the hell does that mean?”) Once when he returned last year, the both of us went downstairs to the noodle store to have brekkie. C likes to have the noodle at his stall, 7.30am sitting crossed legged with a mug of sweet angmoh tea. (Angmoh tea is the kind of tea the English drink – Thick Ceylon tea – not chinese tea.) Now that I am working shifts and have mornings to myself, I have noodles for breakfast. I don’t have breakfast. It’s not my habit. A few days ago, I noticed my teeth especially grimy and then realised I had not brushed it for days. Perhaps that C is not here, I recreate his presence by appropriating his rituals.
Language Barrier
November 24th, 2003 Uncategorized
An English speaking Caucasian, when speaking to a Singaporean often gets confused by what the latter is really saying, even though the communication between them is in perfectly understandable English. Questions, it seems, give us the most trouble. I encountered two examples of these instances when I was at the supermarket. It was early and I had just ended my shift.
I was at the condiments aisle when a french woman – I knew she was french because she spoke it to the man next to her – picked up a bottle of rice wine with a chinese label. “I don’t suppose you know if this is vinegar,” she asked. She meant the white vinegar that is sometimes used in chinese cooking.
Instead of answering the positive first before giving what she requested, I said, “No. It’s rice wine.” She hesitated in confusion before putting the bottle down.
Again, outside, lugging three bags of groceries, a young Malay girl stopped me and asked, “Do you mind sparing five minutes for our survey?” I was exhausted and I minded that five minutes. Instead of answering, “Yes, I do mind” I said instead, “No” and walked away. She was not at all confused. She knew exactly what I meant because at once, she began begging for “just that five minutes”.
At first, I thought it was because of my mother tongue. If you pose the second question in Chinese, however exhausted I would not make the same error. (I’m not sure if the first is translatable in Chinese.) Then I realised it must be some other reason because the Malay girl understood me. Could it be a Singaporean logic? That we cut down to the chase and give you exactly what you want? For instance, we greet,”How may I help you?” instead of asking the person’s day or constitution and so on.
Negative Capacity
November 24th, 2003 books
I first came across the term reading Manhattan by Woody Allen. I was going in my Woody Allen phrase then, and had found a copy of his screenplays at bookshop near school. The term was in a speech by a character named Maragret who was talking about a piece of artwork. I did not understand it but I had no problem not understanding it. The second time was in Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the dead. She explained it in a story about a martian being able to take on the face of whomever the person is thinking of most. She said that a piece of work needs negative capacity: to be able to take on the qualities so wished by its viewer.
Only lately, reading The Edible Woman by Atwood that I realise the more fantastic the story, the more capable it is to have negative capacity. For instance the poem about the Warlus tricking the oysters to eat them, Alice in Wonderland, Alice Through the Looking Glass, and the Wizard of Oz. These stories do not adhere to laws and axioms present in reality. The only thing real is how the characters interact with each other. An interesting idea to experiment with.
Bah Chor Mee Seller
November 19th, 2003 Uncategorized
There is a woman before me but he has already seen me, crossing the street to his stall. He nods, accepting the woman’s order. He looks past her, at me, and asks for mine. His jowls imparts him a hang dog expression. From the way his face is shaped – a long rectangular – you would think the jaws are wired shut, like a person in an bad accident. But he just spoke: Miss, what do you want?
The scratchy bass matches his face: like the growl of a bear.
Mee Kia Tah, one packet, thank you, I say.
He nods again. He is tall so stoops a little over the steaming boiler where he prepares noodle. He doesn’t sweat. How odd. But it isn’t polite to stare, so I rest my eyes on neutral ground, and notice the yellowed newspaper cutting that showed him preparing noodles is gone from the plastic panel. The glue marks from sticky tape remains. He works quickly, picking meat, slices of fishcake, fishballs, mushroom and sauce into a bowl and dunks the raw noodle into boiling water. The stall helper sees him taking the skinny egg noodles.
She clarifies, For the miss, first?
He nods and pushes the bowl of noodle to her. She accepts my money and pours the contents into a plastic packing. He is already preparing another bowl of noodle. She swings the bag around and suddenly it is secured. She thanks me and sends me on my way.
I smile. I feel favoured by Gods.
INTPs
November 16th, 2003 Uncategorized
Internal landscape of NTs. Funny: especially in the description of an NT’s anal need to endlessly improve holds true for me.
Behaviours of an INTP I am oblivious to my own idiosyncracies. How public they are! And how odd.
Online diaries then and now
November 15th, 2003 Uncategorized
I’m pleased that some of the blogs I frequent have xml feeds. It’s a great favour to allow the collection of feeds like threads on a single place in the manner of a newsgroup. This XML developement is probably old hat – I don’t know its history – but it’s new to me. I’m rather in awe of my experience. It’s like watching the famous documentary of a flower blooming and withering fast forward. XML shows the shift from eye candy to individualised content on the web. Couple of years ago, the focus on webpage building is the pleasantness of design, and graphics, and occassionally, the arms race (DHTML, flash, CSS, and what have you). Content is secondary. Web diaries or journals, that were most popular were a fairly dull read. I could never figure out why they were popular. But I remembered looking forward to the web site redesigns, which occurred every few months. They were beautiful and incredibly complex. They were impossible to figure out, much less copy, which many of the builders were worried about and understandably so, considering the vast amount of time and care invested.
Web journals or logs are now better in quality of content. The emphasis on design still exists but it’s less for the sake of itself, rather to produce a copy(?)/design that is easy to read. Here’s a for instance. Previously, for the sake of beauty, the fonts used are miniscule. (This reminds me, it’s like what I did on Headspace – no good.) Now, a lot of effort is placed on good content. You can see a great number of good literary, political, economics, cultural, technology etc, blogs that you don’t see previously. In a blog now, you follow the blog writer’s interests, collecting bits and pieces of interesting things to add to your worldview. It’s mind boggling the depth of the blogs and all these for the price of an internet connection.
Typically, these indepth commentaries are short. Not because of anything else but that a computer monitor is bad for reading. That is to say, what is covered is a very small area, like a pin pushed in deep. Instead of broad understanding, critique and argument of a topic, the topic gleaned from the web is mostly news and mostly borrowed (linked). Would this become a one person’s view of any issue? Would the web create the proverbial frog in the well?
Can’t write? Don’t write!
November 12th, 2003 Uncategorized
In the Evening Standard, a scathing, rant about bad novels found here.
