gravitational collapse

Past page 325 of Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen and the page-counting ceases.

Because the page numbers are no longer there.

A strange book perfumed with exotic scents, allusions to this world but harmless self-references to its own. It may have resembled Infernal Devices but I wouldn't know because I haven't /wouldn't read the latter. A book that talks as much about itself as its subject matter. A book where the author himself is a Creature, a thing of creation, the unknown 'X', as he calls himself in the embedded novella "The Curious Case of X", the unknown in an excruciatingly detailed quasi-steampunk other-world (or if one regards it from the other perspective in which New York and Chicago are as real as they are unreal to the baffled characters of this book, the only known thing among the unknown - unless of course one counts the deliberate fictionalisation of the author even within the bracketing realms of the Introduction and the author's own About page), one story among others in this star-scatter of stories populated by a hodgepodge of characters and genres. One moment a returning priest falls into ditches and falls in love, and the next, couched within a guide to art criticism is the life story of an artist invited to a beheading of a famous composer, a monumental event that changes his art irrevocably, haunting it at every corner of his paintings; the next one is confronted with an intricate monograph detailing the biological characteristics, facts and fiction, of the King Squid. It is a book about a world, really, rather than a world inside a book, a world that doesn't remain inside for very long. The prose is semi-archiac, but not too inscrutable as to resemble something two centuries removed from this particular one. Simpler than Victorian Era prose, but similar. It brings to my remembrance Susan Hill's own writings. The Small Hand. The Woman in Black. But dislocated from, and does not pretend to be part of, the idea of the traditional something, the traditional ghost story, the traditional novel. City is a Frankensteinian creature in its own flesh, an assembled tableau from an array of sometimes still-identifiable parts. But anyone can prune and cut and put together. The genius lies in the making, the bringing to life. The spark.

Reading on.

I have not come this far just to fall. I came with the expectation of flight.

Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, by Jonathan Culler.

"When cultural studies was a renegade form of literary studies, it applied literary analysis to other cultural materials. If cultural studies became dominant and its practitioners no longer came to it from literary studies, might that application of literary analysis become less important? [...] Freed from the principle that has long governed literary studies - that the main point of interest is the distinctive complexity of individual works - cultural studies could easily become a kind of non-quantitative reading, treating works as instances or symptoms of something else rather than of interest to themselves, and succumbing to other temptations.

[...]

If literary studies is subsumed into cultural studies, this sort of "symptomatic interpretation" might become the norm; the specificity of cultural objects might be neglected, along with the reading practices which literature invites. The suspension of the demand for immediate intelligibility, the willingness to work at the boundaries of meaning, opening oneself to unexpected, productive effects of language and imagination, and the interest in how meaning and pleasure are produced - these dispositions are particularly valuable, not just for reading literature, but also for considering other cultural phenomena, though it is literary study that makes these reading practices available." (50-52)

"Symptomatic interpretation neglects the specificity of the object - it is a sign of something else - and so is not very satisfying as a mode of interpretation, but when it focuses on the cultural practice of which the work is an instance, it can be useful to an account of that practice." (69)

Excellent, excellent. There must be a point to the 'oppressed, repressed, suppressed' rant-essay.

"The meaning of a work is not what the author had in mind at some point, nor is it simply a property of the text or the experience of the reader. Meaning is an inescapable notion because it is not something simple or simply determined. It is simultaneously an experience of a subject and a property of a text. It is both what we understand and what in the text we try to understand. Arguments about meaning are always possible, and in that sense meaning is undecided, always to be decided, subject to decisions which are never irrevocable. If we adopt some overall principle or formula, we might say that meaning is determined by context, since context includes rules of language, the situation of the author and the reader, and anything else that might conceivably be relevant. But if we say that meaning is context-bound, then we must add that context is boundless: there is no determining in advance what might count as relevant, what enlarging of context might be able to shift what we regard as the meaning of a text." (68)

Writers, ideas and books of further interest:

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
Roman Jakobson, on metonymy and metaphor

The weather is blistering, and I wager every time I venture outside the air-conditioned shell of the modern double-glass-doored corporate office a bit is cut off the ribbon of my lifespan. It takes courage and no less energy to weather the...weather, surely. Trudging determinedly with an umbrella on my way to lunch I consider tropical vampires with tan lines and sandals and beach shorts. Sipping coconut water, apparently. The strong sun, as evolutionary pressure of some sort, can be said to weed out the weak fairly quickly.

Continuing to read A Severed Head in the most unlikely places, including in a line at the Post Office. Martin Lynch-Gibbon draws pity but not sympathy, a character that just brushes against the glass odd enough for me to pay attention to him; and it is attention I can give, but not my heart. Being written in first person is no guarantee of reader-character proximity and sympathy. The jarring shock of reading an 'I' that isn't framed by quote marks, i.e. "I did not ask for such proximity." A Severed Head is clearly a comedy, a farce - if only because the description/summary at the back tells me so; it does not stoke the embers of my amusement as well as A Fairly Honourable Defeat, thwarted perhaps by this reader's overly-serious hunger for a profound novel.

Still, the conviction that Murdoch is one of the greatest novelists remains untouched, and motivates the growing desire to collect a few of her books, or rather, with the collecting mentality fully inaugurated, to expand the numbers from its current count of two (2). Suggestions: The Black Prince, to start. If I go for the slightly recent Vintage Classics editions with paintings on the covers I will find two relevant interests married into a single book. Oh, and The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, love of loves and favourite of favourites of Murdochs, has a new cover that evokes both protectiveness of the older edition, which I own and am very sentimental about, and desire for the new. But to pick the right books (a parrot-like cry of protest: but what are the right books?) for the library is a grievous, sweet and frustrating affair. For the personal library is messy, and though there isn't much space left, seemingly insubstantial. I rarely find myself intruding into the space between its shelves anymore; I'd rather have the library, and that is saying something.

I have started listening to KOKIA's music. Also this mix, which helps with the sleeping portion of daily life. The thinking I have Emma's Imagination to thank.

Shiawase no Pan is the anodyne to an afternoon of too much sun when I can't go out. It's one of those films which makes one ponder seriously about the beauty of simple lives and opening a small shop of one's own.

DW is open; found something worth looking into inside. Wrote something on my own as well but might be too delirious for anyone else to bother looking into, myself included. These places and pockets to pour oneself into, maybe honestly will seep through, for once. I can't guarantee anything. The style, audience etc differs from place to place - sometimes it's for the soul who finds it who would spend the week wondering who it was who inhabits here, others for an audience I could not care less who or even what, or nights spent typing away, breath-drawn, hidden messages to oneself. Why bother. For fame, glory or another thing set aglitter and aglow by the spotlight and flame.

In the end we are all 'made of the same stuff'. (Unless one believes in philosophical zombies.)

To think is to transcend time and the entire flow of information, to comment on the channel itself, to envelope the entire universe of issues into one's mind. The behaviour of whirlpools & black holes.

Reading Keats' letters.

Putting a name to it. Is it trends?

It stirs up the public and they stare involuntarily. Hello, Hot, Who and their ensuing drivel; I ought to restrain myself from placing the irons of judgement on any one (and any) thing, but there are few things more sorry or more stirring of the soul than helplessness. Fish on the line, we all are to varying degrees, unwilling participants in some cases but hell-bent in others; the worst is ignorance.

And look, all roads lead to Economy.

The Bibliophile's Devotional is a brave, commendable venture but impractical, as the idea it stems from - a book a day keeps the bibliophile akin to a purring cat. Ulysses cannot be washed down the throat in the span of a day, or the ideas it espouses never embeds itself within the mind, defeating the purpose of attempting the precipitous endeavour cover to cover. Think of a restaurant visit: the first satisfying trip has something to do with the curious chemistry of company, cuisine and atmosphere. One returns, repeats - recognises the frequent clients and the fact that one is half-way to turning into their likeness; finds a prized seat; and then the maître d’hôtel knows your name. Soon one is privy to the meaning of Being in a favourite restaurant/cafe with Eggs Benedict. The book (a good one, though one may not judge books these days, acknowledging the treacherous line between Art and Debris; say 'literature' -- it has an august ring and everyone knows what you mean) necessitates repeated excursions. With full recognition that it is a book list in more pages, I would have liked it in the room but goodreads informs me I have a waiting list of over three hundred.

Real life is comedy written by no one and I in all subjective conscious experience aver it. Experiences of the written sort are prepared, then soaked in prejudices, wistfulness and invention before cut-and-dried for all and sundry. Memoirs are steeped in fiction, the only way every minute of the life of the person in question is drawn out in words longer than it is ever lived.

In Vicky's car on the way back from church, traversing Stygian atmosphere and roads under the umbrella of darkness I nursed the complaint that literature should have been my portion. (I'll slay Nietzsche's demon since the demands of that situation are at best aspirations, not goals.) It becomes stronger when surrounded by books. Now it is impossible to touch anything without wondering if I ought to toss it to someone else who could would decipher something more beautiful than I - the tertiary structure of comprehension, venturing beyond plot and script, toying with socio-political circumstances, subtext, and various intricate ideas I am abashed to say I cannot hold in my hand, because I was never acquainted with any of them anyway.

De Profundis is the only essay I read (present and past tense) when benign/debonair/acerbic and it makes one feel better and worse simultaneously.

I am persisting to write in the way I like best.

This is my best guess how the corpses of ancient days felt.

It has been two months. Liberation - a tremendous whooshing feeling, an Icarus sensation the minute he took to the skies; liberation insidious, liberation unintended. Unexpected freedom, boundless; like a currency one knows not what to do with it after the temporal toying with ideas.

Much of my mathematical abilities have decomposed, degraded, worn away. A civil war happened; the linguistic and scientific portions allied overran territory and left it decimated. Trigonometry is beyond me, even the simpler formulae manipulation. Conics and calculus is uncharted territory once more; the waves  have swallowed them up and my footprints, the marked path is obscured beneath the churning waters.

Sick, with worry, fear, disgust. Worry - of misusing time, effort.

Took up sewing; I would not spare my fingers.

Grappling with Japanese verb conjugation.

I am into cultural psychology and anthropology, tracing the fault-lines in humanity and noting portions where the tectonic plates have fused together leaving traces of healed scars - melted and hardened skin, a web and a maze. Reading Why Do Men Barbecue? but it keeps only a pittance of my attention. Read Room in one sitting, on the bed with the duvet over my knees as my legs felt like frozen logs but my palms had a film of sweat and my back aches. Whatever happened to heat circulation I don't know. Few tangible things hold my attention nowadays, when the ability to (day)dream hours away refuses to leave. Well it cannot leave; it is a twisted form of power, a...condition, circumstance. I expect I shall never share the same comfort of readers extolling the romantic wonders of reading in bed, when mine feels like the surface of a cloth-covered stone.

Bed-reading is for amusing paperbacks before a nap but the heavy tomes remain on the desk with the notepaper and pen and good tea. Yes I agree.

My mind stews in the depths of consciousness; it interprets html codes, command physical movements of threads through crochet hooks but has nothing crucial to hold on to. Reality is too much of a laugh, and all to quickly past. It needs something which has already been torn apart, or else something enticing the activity of evisceration. Something's missing - school. Its favourite General Paper and History lessons and associated mental exertions are two months behind. I miss school - if only a Math-less curriculum. Atrophy sticks like a label but now I know what is truly entails, not all the years I was floundering about in a suffocating sea of papers. I crave university lectures on video.

Cawing outside my window. 'Crows are ugly,' Father says. 'There are people uglier than crows,' I replied.

Have a happy Chinese New Year. I did not venture far beyond my domain this year - no house visits and a partial reunion dinner with half the entire family, from both sides. Mother skipped the traditional walk in Chinatown on Eve because of a bad back and I we follow her all the time.

From 1word1day:
L’appel du vide
French “The call of the void” is this French expression’s literal translation, but more significantly it’s used to describe the instinctive urge to jump from high places.

"Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched"

-Victor Hugo

How do bestsellers come about? A book that hooks the imagination or the herd mentality? Or a potent mixture of both?

This afternoon I glimpsed a Northlight School girl and her tiny sister trudging across the road with the green light blazing. No car in sight, but still. Would she be holding her hand in Death?

I fear breaking rules when crossing the road, the notion of people touching my hands.

One cannot help but worry for the youth of this age. But myself, I am still a young one too. Sure, I have been told there are many out there apart from God who love(d) and look(ed) out for me, but who can tell? Who sees this? Who knows this? Or rather, who does it all, and is living and breathing with their air transiting through their lungs like mine? I, for one, the topic at hand and the one in the middle of it all, do not. (The brackets, an explanatory note for them which are perhaps a reflection, a smudge of doubt on this pretty picture of love and happiness and light.)

Arguments with Mother are equal parts rewarding, enticing, asseverating. Invigorating - I like to think of them as a wake up call, the crack in the sky on the portrait she has painted for herself. Our little clashes manifest themselves as part mockery, part reason. The rare performance of my assertiveness. Her emotions in full disarray, her 'how could you speak of things in that manner' look that keeps me going, like a hunter whose arrow is wedged in a spot that leaves its prey vulnerable, exposed, appalled. The hunter who recognises that it is thus. It is always about religion, matters of belief, principalities. My habit of jabbing at her firmest sentiments, questioning, at times tearing them up. I do not think it is because of Nietzsche, though I have the inkling of a relic of his forced down my throat a few months ago while I skimmed through Ecce Homo. He is a little annoying, not to mention idealistic.

Little children shouldn't be allowed near controversial speakers. What? They've yet to cement their own foundations and read their maps and we are going all out toss them off board and rock their boat?

Politics here is all too polarised for my taste. The Straits Times is...all right, though the complaints of the minor (let us face it) political parties could be justified; while the online boards and forums see death and the fault of our government in almost every thing with most posters giving little to no information to justify their choice. Perhaps I am new to this 'let us make up your mind' because I have been bred with the perspective that having no opinions of one's own is the most feasible predicament. All I can say, if I am permitted with my tunnel vision to make a stand, is that we are cruising along, and most (if not all) things are fine. To be honest I am blown at some things we citizens commit to; it is as if we are bereft of a discerning mind.

Too many books at home lying unread. More books borrowed each day.

Goodreads works like a tapestry of life - it is a untruth that no one judges a person by the books one sits down to read, not to mention the ones we skim. I am fond of going down the list - what I have read, and wanting to read. The former is a mark of my dedication and perhaps my permanent fancies. In the latter I decipher the waves of influence/issues of interest which have interrupted my living, e.g. under 'to read' -

2010

• Nazis, war. Bloodletting. The joy of finding a cosy place called History lessons.
• Burma Chronicles. Ms Suu Kyi's Freedom From Fear
• Who Are We? (Gary Younge); Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
• Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and French Literature (Lisa Downing)

2011

• The Moth Diaries; The Work of Edward Gorey
• Much of Agatha Christie's Marple
• Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas
• Camus' The Fall

I found Jim Morey and he's brilliant.

I am dead, but to entertain and surprise everyone, I get up and dance.

I have read Lesle Lewis' Lie Down Too. I cannot figure out if I should treat it as literature or a jumbled collection of sentences arbitrarily assigned a title.

Will writing ever be productive? It is only when walking through a library on tiptoe or leafing through a driving theory book that the more lyrical phrases come to me. Sitting at a desk and staring blankly does not help, neither does reading manga.

-----

Wake up, you say. Reality is here.

I spent all night. I have written another universe. You make a grab at it and it lands in the fireplace.

The people are alive one second when possessed by electricity and dead the next.

I talk like I am stuffing bits of glass into my mouth.

My imagined sun drips lava as it rises.

-----

Yet to conjure up any resolutions and it bites me guilty, even if I know it's all a charade, some banner one puts up at the front of the house, removes it and tucks it into the darkest corner of the shed when no one asks anymore.

Happy new year everyone. The year beckons; mine has an especially dour look on his face and it is not at all surprising.