May 16, 2003

I don't know why, but you lose the text formatting if you try and edit the blog entries.

my hairline reaches from my feet to somewhere upon my widow's peak. But If you titter at my wig I will tell you to go, "fig off! You lousy bugger and be sure to leave a tip". "My hair makes me look rugged which I can't say about that hairy lip"

Merely the maid stepped from the pantry
and dearly she churned the milk
and without peer she
steered the mixture from
tasting foul to silk.

I fail nothing. I don't understand these suicides around term-time. People endure the miracle of childbirth, pierce their clitoris (these aren't comments restricted to women), and some people kill themselves over exams. The sheer invented pressure must be enormous. As if I was perpetually rushing.

May 15, 2003

School is fun at the moment. Gave a fun talk on the KKK today at the end of which I almost puked because I tend to get emotional about these things.

May 09, 2003

The germ of many rants. heh.

Where the fudge is Meeko? If he's acting the fly-on-the-wall tell him I actually downloaded his article he wrote in that newsletter a year ago. I haven't read it yet. But it doesn't matter because he's not listening.

A couple weeks left. Mein gott! My pulse skipped a beat, just writing the words.

May 05, 2003

Step Lively


Joli, I don't know what I'm doing after graduation. Guess where I am right now? In Vinny's room. I came up a couple of days ago. I had to get away from my situation in London. I box myself in with illusory bullshit. Then reinforce it with indifference and promises. My housemates, contrary to what I say, are lovely. They suffer weird shit.

Durham, for all its niceties all and around, is only nominated for the 'quaint' award. The cathedral is gothic. The bar's are typical watering holes. The university is expansive. The library like all university libraries has tinted windows, a glimpse of the books from the outside and the brick-and-mortar spiel. It takes a good ten minutes to reach anyplace of significant monetary transaction which is comforting.

I arrived on saturday, because I missed my bus on friday. I think that's why I have such a jones against traveling, because I always miss my bus/plane. The time I was returning to Malaysia for the Christmas break, I stayed up all night finishing an essay that I slid under my tutor's door around 7am, then rushed back home to pack for a 9 o'clock departure. This was mistimed. If I left at 9 o'clock, I would've arrived approximately an hour before my actual flight. As it turns out, I arrived at the wrong terminal. Then I had to shuttle back and forth across terminal 3 to see whether or not my ticket was still viable (during the confusion, my plane took off). There are only two flights a day to Malaysia, I waited around the airport until 6 pm, when the Malaysian Airlines information booth re-opened. I was zoning in and out of consciousness, the fatigue was getting to me. I bought a coffee and after barely a few sips, I passed out. I spilled the coffee over myself. Luckily I was wearing dark trousers. The only person who noticed was the vagrant sitting beside me.

In trying to make my way to Durham this saturday, I arrived at Victoria train station and I was charged a 10 pound penalty fare for not getting a ticket at my place of departure. If there was no proof of embarkation, then I could've got on in surbiton and ridden the transport company for all it was worth. I was gonna argue semantics when I realised I didn't have the time. I don't appreciate having to pay 10 pounds for a ticket I was willingly standing in line to pay for.

It's stereotypical for something to turn your life on its head. India profoundly changed the Beatles and Alanis Morisette. In fact India predicates some kind of spiritual re-awakening. This is nothing like that. This is the re-examination of my life up to a certain point and coming to the vague conclusion that I am conceited and close-minded. I could excuse myself on the basis of being human. I think without really putting too much thought into the matter, I have been mortifying myself about the fact my life has no substance beyond the hunger of information. Information in the unfamiliar. Abstract information. The obtuse experience conveyed in words. Theory books. Translated life experience of a multitude of different people. As a companion to Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why, I picked up the collected essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson believes in self-trust; the ability of trusting oneself of understanding the depth and range of human experience _through_ yourself. Theory _may_ explain a abstracted knowledge of the unfolding of history, ie: the precise order of events. But things that are true need not have happened. A person at every single stage in his life is a microcosm of the history of mankind. The experience of the world is encapsulated in a father's first denial, to instill discipline, of his child's desire. Emerson believes that if you ever removed the human from the supplementing term, "experience", you arrived at something akin to forgery.

I think of Emerson when I read nowadays. I makes me eschew reading over a sentence I have just read. It reflects a distrust of the mind, being unable to perceive something the first time and removes the aesthetic reaction to the words. It ties closely to the last book I finished before Handmaid's Tale, Primo Levi's Periodic Table. Critics characterise him with a gentleness when describing humanity. He sometimes feels like an observer in Turin. The novel is a collection of short stories, thematically linked by the periodic elements. The first story starts off like an etymology of Jewish names and ends in detailing the eccentricities of his extended family.

I've been wanting to read this book for a long time. Ever since I saw an art display at the Tate Modern in my first year in Uni, where the artist tried to visually epitomise each story through a series of paintings. It was fascinating, it read like a non-sequitur comic book. I eat surrealism up because the response itself is the _point_ of the art. This one somehow felt special because something tangible actually held the unsequence together. It was also done in pop-deco. Thick black lines you'd almost associate with Wittgenstein. Mesmerising.

I'm not sure if I agree with the critics. I can't deny his writing is passionate. Because it impressed me with powerlessness. My life is spiraling out of control. I have been sitting in my room for the past 5 months reading voraciously. But I haven't been living on a same level. I had been reading voraciously. I haven't been living voraciously.

There is an irony beneath all this. I am taking these feelings of experience and of fatalism from, of all things, a book! But these aren't theories that were told to me. This is the way I have seen life has been lived, a sense that comes out of certain forms of writing, and I have realised that I haven't at all felt especially connected to anything else I have read over the past several years. For example, there is a hard-on in literary criticism these days to 'genderise' literature. One of literary criticisms many hard-ons. It's valid. I a racialised discourse, a writer who leaves a reader with the impression all his characters are white shows rigidity. Critics should address this because it reflects instinctive bias that may not be conscious at all. Biases are made to be overcome.

To an extent it's unimportant. To politicise a good story might destroy it's appeal. I wouldn't want to look at Jorge Luis Borges through racialised eyes. Granted that race is deliberate effect writer's control. In itself, race, like gender is a microcosm of ambiguity. I'm tired of seeing the overburdened and victorious housewife. I'm tired of seeing the roles of women being subordinate to men's roles. I'm sick of seeing white people exchange witty banter and arrive at clean and cut-and-dried resolutions. I'm sick of dialogue being spoken without pauses, without hesitations, without the consideration of the eyes (maybe it's the reader's job?).

Does Han have a point? Up until now I've been dithering. I've been trying to articulate what I've been feeling through the tools. I've felt there are difficult things to understand in my books. But to theorise upon the construction of a novel by abstracting the themes reduces the impact of someone else. Think of an eloquent friend who veils his answers in rhetoric. Envision the rhetoric taking a life of it's own. That constutites a narrative. We dismiss the impact these novelists can have on our lives because they are unrealistic, sexist, bigotted, fascist, nazi sympathisers. In effect, this is self-censoring.

I've been studying literature through labels. I suppose this extended bonus rant is about my anxiety about facing this. Fear is implied in reluctance. I've been living in a box. I thought I had been seeing how the other half lived, but I've been compiling data towards whether Shakespeare was homosexual or not. It doesn't _matter_ if he was homosexual. It doesn't reduce the passion in his plays, the complexity of emotion. (In the end, I've discovered even this thought isn't mine. This is Harold Bloom's belief. I haven't read enough Shakespeare to come to this conclusion.)

I don't like how I've been held up in my room. I don't like how I'm antisocial. I don't like how detached I've become. I don't like the fact the word frigid flashes in my head every couple of weeks. I don't like inferring from conversations with friends that I need to broaden my experience. I don't like feeling green around the ears. Especially since the day is short and the night is young and I am twenty one and there is much to do.

I don't like how it takes me several hours to write a proper essay. I don't like how I can't write how I speak.

These are the reasons behind this rant. These are the feelings coming to a head these days. Having said them, they have exceeded their due date. I will shortly lose all sense of the despairity I've been describing. And I think it will be because I have isolated it. Because I have said it. Because I know the demons true name, like in Arabian mythology, I control it.

I'm gonna push this writing gig as far as it can go. I deal with thought differently when I have to write it down. Once I find a way of being faithful to the complex emotion I feel towards my parents and family. Once I can fictionalise isolation that is comical, sad, enlightening and red, I think I'll have stepped lively.

May 02, 2003

Han: what are you doing after graduation?

I think a trip to Australia is in order.