A group blog by people who went to the same international (high) school, the International School of Kuala Lumpur. Now scattered across the globe, also available at theoddword at hotmail dot com.
I knew you slid a poem between those lines to rational goodness. You shouldn't have formatted the thing, it flowed oddly well into that lyric poetry I can't quite understand but feel the beat to. Might think about capping off the stanza? It ends on nothing final. PS: Don't give me bullshit on how the absence of finality at the end of the poem was deliberate blah blah, want to experiment with soft touch blah blah.
stand by redesigning my _language_
I don't have any names to drop. I can drop my luggage. some eggs. my foot. drop a beat. beat some eggs.
What happened to the notion that a piece of writing is self-expression. I remain ignorant to issues I haven't gone through the trouble to educate myself on, I retain a bias against them, and let my instinct guide my judgment - which is seldomly the proper way, considering dissemination of information holds that the most popular opinions will be the most widely available. I am not proud of this ignorance but it is a construction of my identity. I cannot pursue an issue without addressing the fallacy of authority. I hate the tone of authoritiveness in much writing, but when someone tells me of the way it IS, with a tone of humility, I don't question form _as_ much.
Arrogance is a perception of myself. But ultimately, a niggling point, I agree with most of what you said. I'll find some way to involve everyone else. Last year I subverted people's arguments saying stuff like, "I, myself, am fascist in many ways". The fact I was not fatally fleshwounded may indicate the esteem I hold, but fuck that. I read alot, simply, I've noticed I don't read well, I require several attempts to get to the point of a sentence, if there's alot of faff.
Let's take an example, I've been rhuminating, my essay question:
"Despite proclaiming its anger, the literature of the period is less certain of the reasons behind this anger". Do you agree?
Not the best written essay question in the world, but it has taken me about 9 days to unpack, the actual purpose of an essay would be to discuss certainty of anger's direction.
Whether it follows a process of control. I have these anxieties whenever I remember Duncan Barthe at work at the debate table; Terence Lim, when I was partnered up with Li Pu in debate telling me after a certain cross-examination: "Pu essentially got the opposition to expose a flaw in their policy", and I didn't follow-up. I couldn't understand what they were saying. This is a deep anxiety, that I've ignored the obvious. I've approached Waiting for Godot in several ways, and these methods are based on my mood. I find it productive in the wispy sort of way: I got the essay question around the third week of January.
Reading engenders sympathy, but I only want to point out that this is a process I haven't come to terms with. I wrote two essays over the course of two weeks, I wrote grossly overmuch for one of them and when the deadline began closing in (and my dad started exerting some of that everloving, paternal pressure), I cracked, stripped most of the flavor from the text (digressions about Bruce Lee and System of a Down; non-authoritative yet insightful on a personal level) and it became the blandest trash.
A similar process went into handing in the other essay, I eventually arrived at part of the essay-writing process where I reread the piece, in my head I wasn't reading a damn word, and I didn't understand a word I was saying; I used the word "apposite", meaning appropriate, to describe opposition, argh. Among other things, I couldn't follow my logic from paragraph to paragraph. My unsuccessful, irrational, impressionist style is giving me hangovers, turning me, unlike Nosferatu, into some denizen of the night, feasting on yeast and hops and nicotine, yeargh.
It could, of course be the other way round. I keep telling myself, I need to show what I understand in these essays, no more. But I want to resolve my personal interest in what I read, academically, with the bland style of essays. I mean, Swift, Addison, Dr. Johnson, Aldous Huxley all have unique voices in essays, yet they are authorities in some ways on what they write.
London, relieved of snow, needs no more. It is officially Fucking Cold. I've abandoned all plans of seeing the northen abysses of England, Durham included. I was actually thinking of flying to some tropical nameless island in Micronesia and pick up some fierce snakes. The cold makes me want to scream at God to root the world. I have no blogspot, I was thinking of asking someone to create a site for me (not sure what that entails as long as it's not wild party beast-sex). Seriously, I don't have the time, I waste it pretty neatly as it is.
