what we hide

Teachers' Day is one of my favourite social constructs. You can suspend the respectful distance between tutor and student to partake in the festivities of the day, while paradoxically celebrating that distance in doing so. It's weird. (In special instances, no one actually involves their teachers in the celebrations.) Occasionally, you get to eat things, play some games, mingle with people, meet old friends, laugh at the performances - all in good fun. Happy happy happy. It's like the NDP.

Because the KI tutors probably don't bother looking for my blog, I can safely write here about how stoked I am about Thursday's surprise tea session. Earlier I went hunting for assorted biscuits from M & S (after meeting Andrea and Serene at Starbucks, a leitmotif appearing frequently within our lives to anchor our volatile realities to a sanity-preserving constant,) only to discover that they weren't within my budget. I bought other lovely tea things to nibble on, anyway.

As if the three hour history timed practice didn't take a toll on my sense of self-worth and Will To Live, I went to run and I now feel healthier and holier-than-thou at the moment. While running, I decided that people suck but I love them anyway because we're all people too. It's true but it's cornaaayyyyye.

In other news, my ISes are starting to feel more corporeal, more palpable. For starters, I have approved drafts out, with nice typography for my cover pages! (gleeful) It's like the third trimester of pregnancy - I can feel the ideas "kick" at me with the joy of cohesion and clarity when I read them. Sometimes they speak to me. I still get sick in the morning when I think of them, but it's always the bundle of joy at the end of the tunnel that keeps me going. In this case, I'll be expecting twins. Fraternal.

A Color of the Sky

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn't make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I'd rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it's spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer's song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She's like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I'm glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It's been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

- Tony Hoagland

LOVES

who do you like more, ping kiat or kiat ngee?

hmmm... kiat ngee. I like the nasal sound in that name.

Ask me anything

second question (: how come your online persona sounds so different from the warm, funny samuel I used to know? hope you're okay and that the A level experience have not left you traumatised

It's mainly self-censorship :P But I think academics-related concerns have entombed the Self in a kind of chrysalis. Maybe I'll emerge out of it soon. Hope you're doing good too? :D

Ask me anything

characteristics of your ideal girl?

We can both agree very pragmatically that neither of us can occupy each other's thoughts 100%, and it's perfectly fine that way. She loves God but isn't dogmatic about it. She loves reading and the smell of books (both old and new.) She has an impeccable taste. She has a voice that can turn a shopping list into poetry. She loves me for who I am. She constantly fascinates me (with her weird camp aesthetics, 19th century stamp collection, surrealist paintings etc. etc.)

This is very (500) Days in a bad clichéd way, but I wish she was real.

Ask me anything

Haha I want to go to williams too(that's why I'm taking SATs), is it true that you get funded as long as you make the mark? Even if you're a foreigner?

kewlz! also, I'm not sure - I haven't done extensive research on that yet, but there's something here about financial aid for international students (scroll to the bottom of the page) : http://admission.williams.edu/apply/international/deadlines

Ask me anything

zero

3 Dreams I Had This Weekend

1. A sheep appears: I spend the entire duration of dream time scratching it. It has no mouth.

2. My mother comes home from the market carrying the school cat, which immediately tries to scratch out my eyes. I negotiate for a compromise and it scratches my arms instead. Blood all over the sofa. I wake up with confused, bittersweet and misplaced feelings about the cat.

3. I live in an old house: am regularly spooked and inconvenienced by the tormented and trapped souls within the mirrors.



Also, I am grumpy this evening. My favourite socks ALWAYS go missing, I have — once again — no time to do something personal for teachers' day, the fanfiction Inception saga I follow on Facebook is facing Suckiness In Plot, no one older than 21 knows what an IS is, I just sat through the most inane facebook parody which begs its own parody, and the smell of durian permeating my house is so pervasive, it has reached even my psyche.

Tomorrow shall be a better day! (This is potentially and unrealistically optimistic, taking into account the KI IS consultation that has always been traditionally spirit-crushing.)

this is where I won't be alone

Listen to this.

Watch Sandcastle. Watch it with a comfy pullover, then go to Daiso after that.

empathy

I'm spending close to a week in a lodge on a very rural mountain in Tasmania after the A levels. It's almost like being institutionalised, only with cutesy Pademelons, prancing about the dewy mountain grass, that we will force feed Iron Man cereal to. (- kidding.) I'm also very thrilled that my botanist cousin is coming along, and will surely impress us to no end with his knowledge of plants and horticulture. Anyway, in preparation for the long, sunny and paradoxically chilly summer days, I'm going to bring along a separate trailer filled with Australian, scenery-specific reading materials.

Reading List! (mainly for my own reference, because I have decided to be focused and frugal when book shopping - a concrete book list will prevent me from buying titles that I will not read. Like The Tate Guide To Modern Art Terms that I bought in the MoMA store in a moment of extravagance. Or an issue of McSweeney's dedicated to obscure and obsolete literary forms. Or even more orange-edition Penguin modern classics purchased solely for the novelty of their covers than actual interest in the text.) -

(I wanted to include the pictures but now cannot be assed to after encountering formatting issues and shameless error messages.)

1. Picnic At Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay - in which I appreciate the rural Australian landscape while reading about schoolgirls disappearing mysteriously, and in the process, giving myself the creeps when alone in the bathroom.

2. Cloudstreet by Tim Winton - in which I laugh and cry at the same time, prompting family members to chaperone me for the entirety of the trip.

3. The Just! series of books by Andy Griffiths - in which I am judged for being either (a) childish and immature or (b) childish and immature in an ironic way, which is, frankly, getting childish and immature as well.

4. Playgrounds: a portrait of rave culture by Tom Griffin - in which I contemplate the nineties all over again.

5. He Died with a Felafel in his Hand by John Birmingham - in which I judge a book based on the premise of its awesome title.

6. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead - in which I ward off inane and premature Michael Jackson-related jokes.

SANITY BREAK! This a cappella is freakin cool. I tear laughing.

two poems to ruin your weekend

Song for Baby-O, unborn

Sweetheart
when you break thru
you’ll find
a poet here
not quite what one would choose.

I won’t promise
you’ll never go hungry
or that you won’t be sad
on this gutted
breaking
globe

but I can show you
baby
enough to love
to break your heart forever

— Diane DiPrima

from Brass Furnace Going Out: Song, after an abortion

XI

your ivory teeth bare in the half-light
your arms
flailing about. that is, you
age 9 months
sitting up & trying to stand
cutting teeth
your diaper trailing, a formality
elegant as a loincloth, the sweet stench
of babyshit in the house: the oil
rubbed into your hair.
blue off the moon your ghostscape
mistaken as a broken tooth
your flesh rejected
never to grow — your hands
that should have closed around my finger

what moonlight
will play in your hair?
I mean to say
dear fish, I hope you swim

in another river.
I hope that wasnt
rebuttal, but a transfer, an attempt
that failed, but to be followed
quickly by another
suck your thumb somewhere
Dear silly thing, explode
make someone's colors.

the sense (five)
a gift
to hear, see, touch, choke on & love
this life
this rotten globe
to walk in shoes
what apple doesnt get
at least this much?

a caramel candy sticking in your teeth
you, age three
bugged
bearing down a sliding pond
your pulled tooth in my hand
(age six)
your hair with clay in it,
your goddamn grin

XII

sun on the green plants, your prattle
among the vines.
that this possibility is closed to us.
my house is small, my windows look out on grey courtyard
there is no view of the sea.
will you come here again? I will entertain you
as well as I can—I will make you comfortable
in spite of new york.









will
you
come here
again



my breasts prepare
to feed you: they do what they can


— Diane DiPrima

These are the two most devastating poems in my study of the Beat Generation. Howl is powerful and horrific, Kaddish painful and On The Road irritating, but these are terribly honest and personal ("your goddamn grin" is a stab in the heart.)

Also, I do not appreciate how the poets were stoned out of their minds when they were writing. It makes close reading and analysis trying and absurd projects.

That I am unable to hate what is necessary to love / That I can't exist in a world that consents / a child in a park / a man dying in an electric-chair / That I am able to laugh at all things / all that I know and do not know / thus to conceal my pain / That I say I am a poet and therefore love all man / knowing my words to be the acquainted prophecy of ll men / and my unwords no less an acquaintanceship / That I am manifold / a man pursuing the big lies of gold / or a poet roaming bright ashes / or that which I imagine myself to be / a shark-toothed sleep / a man-eater of dreams / I need not then be all-smart about bombs

an extract from 'Bomb' by Gregory Corso.

Lovely right. You should read it in its actual form. It's a concrete poem that looks like a falling bomb, with undulating lines and the frantic, almost manic, clustering of disparate verses that display a startling cohesion in the context of each other.

(My ISes are children and I love them so.)

(Also, they tear my things up but that shouldn't be a problem after housebreaking them.)

(I need to whip them into becoming good people.)

love is the only shocking act left on the planet

: the weirdest video you'll be watching all week.

KARLSTAD three-seat sofa

ENGL W3950x Satire and Sensibility 4 pts.

(Seminar). Seminar. British verse, novels, and critical prose from early and mid-18th century, with a view to the satirical and the sentimental as related and complementary dispositions, variously nuanced in the elicitation of scorn and pathos, but reflecting in the main a tragicomic outlook of literary consequence. Our reading, then, of poetry and fiction diversely savage, good-natured, hilarious, and exquisite in derision of vice and folly, shall inquire into the gamut of satiric modalities, from invective to irony, which, bristling at the social frontiers of liberty and faith, ambition and learning, commerce and luxury, sex and marriage, wit and imagination, also targets, and often with charming self-deprecation, the literary disposition itself. In that vein we shall examine aesthetic, religious, and philosophical perspectives that came to bear in the satirist's skillful tacking of blame and praise; likewise, we shall examine stylistic and formal innovations that emerged in adaptations of classical and biblical models to contemporary circumstances. Further, we shall observe, in some novels, an aspect of the satirical and the sentimental combined, which obtains not only in the rhetorical artistry and excess of characters' speeches, but in the way that lyric is incorporated into the fiction, and where characters themselves compose, recite, or criticize poetry. Critical and philosophical writings of the period include, among others, essays by Dryden, Shaftesbury, and Addison. Verse genres include ode, epistle, georgic, elegy, hybrids and mock emulations: Finch, Swift, Pope, Gay, Montagu, Gray, Goldsmith, and others. Our novels and fictional prose include Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Fielding's Tom Jones, Johnson's Rasselas, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, and Sterne's Tristram Shandy.

!!! intellectual orgasm !!!

where are you planning to study and what course are you thinking of taking after A's?

I'm still in the process of narrowing-down my choices:

Where: If I have to stay in Singapore, then it's NUS FASS. However, I really want to study in the US. I'm thinking of Columbia, Brown, Williams or Vassar.

What: English (literature, not linguistics), Comp. lit, Philosophy or Political Science. However, I want to try out something different too, like film studies, art history or museum studies. Or chemical engineering. >:D

Ask me anything

empowerment

Best. Period. EVAR.

with all the fur of time

OK: so my IS "doesn't work" and I'm starting to agree, and thank you for asking how my ISes are but as of now there's no way of describing them politely, and I want a lobotomy because my cognitive faculties suck and my language sucks, my vocabulary is imprecise and I can't write like I used to after forcing every fucking thing into topic sentences like they're the secret to eternal life, I can't even do poetry like before now, I can't even enjoy reading, the world is controlled by text, I am stuck in this language game, nothing has meaning, especially all these stupid clumsy words.

justification

in a borrowed bedroom

Also, B & S was great fun! Takeaways: happy memories and a blue enamel badge.

dear singapore

While your birthday candles went out flooding the night with psychedelic peonies, chrysanthemums and willows, the nationalist in me went again into deep slumber, refusing to awaken until August rears its fervid head next year. But, as the last of sparks disappear into the darkened waters pooled in the barrage, I am kept awake by the resounding echo of armoured tanks and steel amphibians parading proud into our collective national consciousness. Our military entertains and astonishes like a conjurer in an Enid Blyton tale; meanwhile, military might on the Korean Peninsula fires artillery rounds into the sea and reignites age-old tensions. The war machine charms, but also provokes.

As the recent spate of flash flooding subsides, and we all heave a collective sigh of relief while hanging up our damp laundry, floodwaters continue rising in Pakistan, affecting the health, sanitation and housing of more than 15 million people and positioning it as the worst disaster to hit Asia, eclipsing the 2004 tsunami and 2005 Pakistani earthquake. With massive amounts of aid needed for recovery alone, it'll be nice to share some birthday money with those who need it the most. It's not throwing a wet blanket on national day — it's reminding yourself that you share this day with the rest of the world too. August 9 belongs as much to the kid who lost his sister in the mudslides, or the teacher who watched his school disappear while the currents caved its walls in. (I also made them up, but you can't rule out personal tragedies so quickly.)

Dear Singapore, happy 45th and I hope you loved the party. I'm sad I missed most of it, but Jimmy Corrigan The Smartest Kid On Earth was completely unputdownable. It's nice to sing and be "thankful for my Singapore," but is that all we can really do? My thoughts are still fuzzy.

parked in front of little screens

Things I did today:

1) Watched the drama club's national day production, which was hilarious (esp. the parodying of the national day parade and the obvious overdetermination of racial harmony)
2) Gave frank responses during the QSE survey. (Not always a bad thing - but also not always a good thing.) How I love the veil of anonymity and privacy!
3) Burned 3 hours and $45 at Kinokuniya, but purchases were so worthwhile.
4) Watched Precious with Andrea and Mingting, followed by lots of catching up (and a heart-to-heart-to-heart) over Gelare! I feel grossed out by the giant vat of popcorn I consumed, but at least it's high in dietary fibre. (Also, our seats were taken up by some kids who were in for the wrong show, so we had to scoot them away. I'm not so annoyed - at least they chose a good movie.)

star light on the ceiling

SLEEP OVER :: OUTER LIMITS from salad fork on Vimeo.

I'm battling a virus that's eating away my cognitive abilities. This afternoon I found myself flipping mindlessly through pages on recipe books, not quite knowing what I was reading.

Tomorrow I celebrate the sense of nation.

Consuming the Nation: National Day Parades in Singapore



I like this particular cover of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. Check out their 'staches.

autumn sweater

Today, my sister and I decided to pretend that we weren't taking O/A levels this year: we hopped from shop to shop along Ann Siang Hill and indulged in all that is painfully hip and beautiful. Booksactually brought in Made-In-China toy pianos! I am very tempted to get one. (After its period of novelty expires, I will use it to prop my laptop up on the desk.) I've bought a Barthes reader and a collection of Susan Sontag's last essays. Did I mention I have a geeky crush on Sontag? It's a pity she's no longer alive.

In other news, drafts for Lit and KI ISes are done! (Perhaps not so for lit - but hey at least I have 3000 words in there. We all need to start somewhere, I guess.) Unfortunately, I now think that On The Road is a tad overrated. The last thing I want on the cover of my book is Bono/Bob Dylan/another other folk/rock icon saying how "reading On The Road will change your life". It did not change my life. Images of dysentery are also most un-charming.

Anyway, the weather today is amazing: perpetual light rain, cold breezes and cajun chicken in the oven. I ascended the stairway to xiaolongbao heaven for lunch and was left in a state of rapture that lasted for about two hours. Additionally, I am also wearing the most amazing pair of slacks, but that's purely incidental.