"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference." - Elie Wiesel
I am glad that Singaporeans are no longer indifferent about politics or issues or voting.
29 April 2011
18 March 2011
The Human Condition
This is taken from John Armstrong's In Search of Civilisation:
"A human being is the only creature which can reflect upon its own existence, conceive of its own death, and fake orgasm"
So much for writing, or speech and language, or the use of our opposable as what separates us from being mere animals.
"A human being is the only creature which can reflect upon its own existence, conceive of its own death, and fake orgasm"
So much for writing, or speech and language, or the use of our opposable as what separates us from being mere animals.
3 March 2011
More on Books and Love
This quote is from a character in the classic novel Zorba the Greek: "I had fallen so low that if I had had to choose between falling in love with a woman and reading a book about love, I should have chosen the book".
This had a painful sting of truth to it.
This had a painful sting of truth to it.
28 February 2011
Oscar Remarks
So the Oscars have been given out again, and most of the predicted favourites have won. Of the main contenders, I have seen The Social Network, The King's Speech, Black Swan, The Fighter and Inception.
Of the lot, I believe that the two supporting awards given to Melissa Leo and Christian Bale were enormously deserved in a movie where the acting was just all around superb. Amy Adams was excellent as well but lost out to Leo and Mark Wahlberg was unfortunately overlooked due to him having the most understated of the roles. Bale, in particular, did an excellent job of embodying the accent and mannerisms of a great prize fighter turned junkie.
I was less enthused by the main acting awards. Firth worked suitably hard in the role, putting on a stammer and doing an excellent job mimicking the accent. But it certainly seemed a case of him being rewarded for a string of work rather than a particular stand out piece. I am a huge fan of Natalie Portman and I have had a schoolboy crush on her since I saw her in Leon (The Professional), but I thought the film as a whole (and her performance) rather overcooked. It was a perfect role for her in many ways (sweet, innocence finding a darker side) and one almost paralled by her taking on edgier roles (for her) - Closer, V for Vendetta, No Stings Attached.
The techncal awards largely went to Inception, though a thought must be spared for the great cinematographer Roger Deakins. That he is still Oscar-less is a great travesty that the Academy must rectify at some point.
In terms of the Best Picture winner, the King Speech was a very well made film. A film that used the best of what it had to the maximum in what was essentially just a film about a friendship between two strong individuals (albeit a rather unique friendship). The Social Network might have been edgier, and more consistently captivating throughout, but the King's Speech featured understated direction, an excellent cast (Rush, Bonham-Carter, Firth, Guy Pearce and Michael Gambon among others in cameo roles!). Though making the audience feel a sense of sympathy for a character like Mark Zuckerberg (as played by Jesse Eisenberg) was perhaps a harder feat than the unashamedly sentimental patriotism of the King's Speech.
Of the lot, I believe that the two supporting awards given to Melissa Leo and Christian Bale were enormously deserved in a movie where the acting was just all around superb. Amy Adams was excellent as well but lost out to Leo and Mark Wahlberg was unfortunately overlooked due to him having the most understated of the roles. Bale, in particular, did an excellent job of embodying the accent and mannerisms of a great prize fighter turned junkie.
I was less enthused by the main acting awards. Firth worked suitably hard in the role, putting on a stammer and doing an excellent job mimicking the accent. But it certainly seemed a case of him being rewarded for a string of work rather than a particular stand out piece. I am a huge fan of Natalie Portman and I have had a schoolboy crush on her since I saw her in Leon (The Professional), but I thought the film as a whole (and her performance) rather overcooked. It was a perfect role for her in many ways (sweet, innocence finding a darker side) and one almost paralled by her taking on edgier roles (for her) - Closer, V for Vendetta, No Stings Attached.
The techncal awards largely went to Inception, though a thought must be spared for the great cinematographer Roger Deakins. That he is still Oscar-less is a great travesty that the Academy must rectify at some point.
In terms of the Best Picture winner, the King Speech was a very well made film. A film that used the best of what it had to the maximum in what was essentially just a film about a friendship between two strong individuals (albeit a rather unique friendship). The Social Network might have been edgier, and more consistently captivating throughout, but the King's Speech featured understated direction, an excellent cast (Rush, Bonham-Carter, Firth, Guy Pearce and Michael Gambon among others in cameo roles!). Though making the audience feel a sense of sympathy for a character like Mark Zuckerberg (as played by Jesse Eisenberg) was perhaps a harder feat than the unashamedly sentimental patriotism of the King's Speech.
Ideal Partner
A friend posted this a link to this wonderful blog post on Facebook titled "Date a Girl Who Reads". She also commented that if it had been written by a guy, she and others should date him immediately (it was not). The post struck a chord, because I might have written something like that (though in a wistful what if tone of voice, as opposed to the exhortative it currently is).
I wish I could date a girl who reads, who loves books. I wish I will find a girl who will find the fact that I have a personal library of 2,000 plus books, an enormous turn on rather than a puzzling, impractical extravagance.
I wish to find a girl who reads, and loves good movies, and who loves the theater like me, who likes long rambly conversations over a glass of wine. A girl who is intense and intellectual. Who might possess a somewhat mordant wit.
I would date a girl who reads. Now I just have to find her.
I wish I could date a girl who reads, who loves books. I wish I will find a girl who will find the fact that I have a personal library of 2,000 plus books, an enormous turn on rather than a puzzling, impractical extravagance.
I wish to find a girl who reads, and loves good movies, and who loves the theater like me, who likes long rambly conversations over a glass of wine. A girl who is intense and intellectual. Who might possess a somewhat mordant wit.
I would date a girl who reads. Now I just have to find her.
10 February 2011
The Accidental Asian
The Accidental Asian | Eric Liu
Eric Liu epitomizes the typical second generation American: the son of two Taiwanese immigrants (who met in America) he went on to graduate from Yale and serve in the Clinton White House. This is a deeply personal collection of essays, which is equal parts memoir, and equal parts reflection on race, culture, and identity. Liu examines issues ranging from his own 'Asian-ness', the typical ideas associated with Chinatown, the Asian as the 'other', and the viability of the Asian American identity, in the prism of his own experiences and those of his immediate family.
One powerful aspect that ties his essays together is a ceaseless questioning, and a refusal to accept the widely held notion or the commonplace assumption. This is immediately evident in his first piece, a deeply moving reflection on his father rooted in questions about Chineseness and assimilation - both his own and his father's. His father was in many ways typically Chinese, proud of Chinese culture, deeply familiar with the Chinese classics with a grasp of the language equal to that of any Confusian scholar-official. Liu, despite attending Chinese classes, soon lost all facility for the language and with it his cultural roots as he grew increasingly American.
This could be seen as the typical immigrant story as Liu so eloquently writes:
More than that, assimilation is never the easy transformation for the second generation child as it is made out to be. As the author himself freely admits he often attributed his father's actions to his "Chineseness" but as he admits, with considerable insight this was often in response to his own cultural insecurities : "it was I who boxed against the shame and shadow of racial stigma" as a Chinese boy in an American world; to "cloak any handicap, real or imagined" that might accrue, to his race. Often, it is the second generation that is the one truly caught in between.
This overturning of easy assumptions is again at play in his essay "The Chinatown Idea". The very idea of a 'Chinatown' is often cited as evidence for a Chinese tendency to cling together, to refuse to assimilate. He again examines this through the lens of personal experience, in this case a powerful and touching portrait of a grandmother who lived for more than two decades in the same cinder-block apartment in New York's Chinatown. She seemed a powerful symbol of the typical immigrant Chinese, separated by a linguistic and cultural chasm, comfortable only in a familiar environment. Except Liu always felt that she had a desire to be somewhere else.
As Liu notes, we all have a certain idea of Chinatown, specifically that:
Liu calls this the "cruellest myth" because many of those who are in Chinatown do not wish to stay there, like his grandmother. Far from cloistering themselves they too wish for the American Dream but for them, whether due to their illegal immigrant status, or some vast linguistic chasm, assimilation is distant and unattainable.
It is thus not the insularity of the Chinese that sustains Chinatown, but the determined blindness of the rest of America in creating this myth of a separate entity, where the Chinese often exploit the Chinese, subject to different rules and standards, a "potemkin village" that hides a "nasty brutish shadow world".
After reading the essay, I felt a distinct sense of unease. But as Liu notes there are many Chinatowns: the insular enclave of foreignness, the shadowy world of exploitation, the thriving self sufficient community and the worst mistake one could make is the one that I made: to try simplify and generalize such a diverse portrait.
Ultimately, though, it is Liu's second essay that I could relate the most deeply to. The larger question of the essay (the "accidental Asian") is presented immediately and forcefully in a list of what makes him "white". Among the items he lists are: listening to NPR; marrying a white; speaking flawless, accentless English; subscribing to Foreign Affairs; not being too ethnic; and being mindful of minority militants, among others. As he notes: he never asked to be white, never sought out such a status but he found himself being "white by acclamation". Thus he has become an honorary white to some, a banana to others.
That certainly brought back memories. Of being called Sergaent Kantang (potato) in the army for my english speaking proclivities, as opposed to the Chinese speaking Hokkien swearing rice eaters that were typical of my race. I was a banana (yellow on the outside, white inside), a man with 'atas' (high) tastes - i.e. European cultural tastes. White by proclaimation, then?
I've made my own list: I am functionally monolingual, I speak in grammatically correct, complete sentences, I love the theater and musicals, I enjoy trivia nights, I drink my beer in British pubs or trendy bars (not coffee shops), I listen to jazz, I listen to classical music, I read literary novels, I have many foreign friends.
Of course this status came as much from the things I didn't do, a negation of the typical Chinese Singaporean: I don't speak mandarin (well), I don't speak a dialect, I do not listen to Chinese pop music, I don't watch Korean or Taiwanese TV serials, I hardly karaoke (and only English songs if I do), I don't use singlish. The only mainstream local custom I seem to enjoy doing is eating. That if anything is something that is truly universally Singaporean.
The bizarre fact is that our experiences are parallel, very similar, but like two lines running opposite to one another. As much as we have both become white, or been labeled white, for him it is as a minority Chinese attempting to assimilate into the larger culture. For me it is being born into the racial and cultural majority but have been emplaced into my own cultural (even linguistic) niche, as a result of background and education. As he has become part of the status quo, I have lost my place in it.
Yet in a sense he has become part of the majority, but a minority within the majority. He is not just white, but a certain type and class of white. Upper middle class, confident, socially mobile a far cry from the white trailer trash that used to hurl abuse at him on the bus. I too am a minority within a majority, culturally and linguistically. In that regard, though for different reasons, we are the same. We are both "accidental Asians".
Even though Liu's essays are deeply personal, it is has voice and his aptitude for the stirring image that captures the imagination. This is something unsurprising given that he was a Presidential speechwriter. I wish to end off with a sample from his final essay, Blood Vows about his marraige to his wife:
In this powerful memoir, and in his hands, one is impelled to believe that race doesn't really matter that much, and if it does, there are other greater things that can surpass it.
Eric Liu epitomizes the typical second generation American: the son of two Taiwanese immigrants (who met in America) he went on to graduate from Yale and serve in the Clinton White House. This is a deeply personal collection of essays, which is equal parts memoir, and equal parts reflection on race, culture, and identity. Liu examines issues ranging from his own 'Asian-ness', the typical ideas associated with Chinatown, the Asian as the 'other', and the viability of the Asian American identity, in the prism of his own experiences and those of his immediate family.
One powerful aspect that ties his essays together is a ceaseless questioning, and a refusal to accept the widely held notion or the commonplace assumption. This is immediately evident in his first piece, a deeply moving reflection on his father rooted in questions about Chineseness and assimilation - both his own and his father's. His father was in many ways typically Chinese, proud of Chinese culture, deeply familiar with the Chinese classics with a grasp of the language equal to that of any Confusian scholar-official. Liu, despite attending Chinese classes, soon lost all facility for the language and with it his cultural roots as he grew increasingly American.
This could be seen as the typical immigrant story as Liu so eloquently writes:
In our archetype of the immigrant experience, it is the first generation that remains wedded to the ways of the Old Country and the second generation that forsakes them. This we learn is the tragedy of assimilation: the inevitable estrangement between the immigrant father who imagines himself in exile and the American son who strains to prove his belonging.Except that Liu questions this assumption of the first generation immigrant, and the inevitable estrangement with their new adopted culture because:
we let ourselves think of the first generation's life as a mere chrysalis, an interlude between the larval existence of the homeland and the fully formed Americaness of the second generation. But the truth is that the father can become his own form of butterfly.In fact, his father did transform. A deep love and facility for languages was soon applied to English, and an understanding of culture enabled him to rise to respectable middle management in IBM. It was this very ability to adapt, and this openness to a new culture that gave his son the opportunity to transform himself fully into a typical American.
More than that, assimilation is never the easy transformation for the second generation child as it is made out to be. As the author himself freely admits he often attributed his father's actions to his "Chineseness" but as he admits, with considerable insight this was often in response to his own cultural insecurities : "it was I who boxed against the shame and shadow of racial stigma" as a Chinese boy in an American world; to "cloak any handicap, real or imagined" that might accrue, to his race. Often, it is the second generation that is the one truly caught in between.
This overturning of easy assumptions is again at play in his essay "The Chinatown Idea". The very idea of a 'Chinatown' is often cited as evidence for a Chinese tendency to cling together, to refuse to assimilate. He again examines this through the lens of personal experience, in this case a powerful and touching portrait of a grandmother who lived for more than two decades in the same cinder-block apartment in New York's Chinatown. She seemed a powerful symbol of the typical immigrant Chinese, separated by a linguistic and cultural chasm, comfortable only in a familiar environment. Except Liu always felt that she had a desire to be somewhere else.
As Liu notes, we all have a certain idea of Chinatown, specifically that:
Chinatown chooses to exempt itself from America: that it is purely the product of Chinese clannishness and insularity.Indeed, this is a particular cliche that I am ashamed to say I have repeated on countless occasions. After all it is only us Chinese who have Chinatowns all over the world (San Francisco, New York, Sydney). It must be a sign of our unique unwillingness to adapt to cultural morays, to assimilate. After all, Americans go abroad all the time and do not create "little Americas" all over the world now do they?
Liu calls this the "cruellest myth" because many of those who are in Chinatown do not wish to stay there, like his grandmother. Far from cloistering themselves they too wish for the American Dream but for them, whether due to their illegal immigrant status, or some vast linguistic chasm, assimilation is distant and unattainable.
It is thus not the insularity of the Chinese that sustains Chinatown, but the determined blindness of the rest of America in creating this myth of a separate entity, where the Chinese often exploit the Chinese, subject to different rules and standards, a "potemkin village" that hides a "nasty brutish shadow world".
After reading the essay, I felt a distinct sense of unease. But as Liu notes there are many Chinatowns: the insular enclave of foreignness, the shadowy world of exploitation, the thriving self sufficient community and the worst mistake one could make is the one that I made: to try simplify and generalize such a diverse portrait.
Ultimately, though, it is Liu's second essay that I could relate the most deeply to. The larger question of the essay (the "accidental Asian") is presented immediately and forcefully in a list of what makes him "white". Among the items he lists are: listening to NPR; marrying a white; speaking flawless, accentless English; subscribing to Foreign Affairs; not being too ethnic; and being mindful of minority militants, among others. As he notes: he never asked to be white, never sought out such a status but he found himself being "white by acclamation". Thus he has become an honorary white to some, a banana to others.
That certainly brought back memories. Of being called Sergaent Kantang (potato) in the army for my english speaking proclivities, as opposed to the Chinese speaking Hokkien swearing rice eaters that were typical of my race. I was a banana (yellow on the outside, white inside), a man with 'atas' (high) tastes - i.e. European cultural tastes. White by proclaimation, then?
I've made my own list: I am functionally monolingual, I speak in grammatically correct, complete sentences, I love the theater and musicals, I enjoy trivia nights, I drink my beer in British pubs or trendy bars (not coffee shops), I listen to jazz, I listen to classical music, I read literary novels, I have many foreign friends.
Of course this status came as much from the things I didn't do, a negation of the typical Chinese Singaporean: I don't speak mandarin (well), I don't speak a dialect, I do not listen to Chinese pop music, I don't watch Korean or Taiwanese TV serials, I hardly karaoke (and only English songs if I do), I don't use singlish. The only mainstream local custom I seem to enjoy doing is eating. That if anything is something that is truly universally Singaporean.
The bizarre fact is that our experiences are parallel, very similar, but like two lines running opposite to one another. As much as we have both become white, or been labeled white, for him it is as a minority Chinese attempting to assimilate into the larger culture. For me it is being born into the racial and cultural majority but have been emplaced into my own cultural (even linguistic) niche, as a result of background and education. As he has become part of the status quo, I have lost my place in it.
Yet in a sense he has become part of the majority, but a minority within the majority. He is not just white, but a certain type and class of white. Upper middle class, confident, socially mobile a far cry from the white trailer trash that used to hurl abuse at him on the bus. I too am a minority within a majority, culturally and linguistically. In that regard, though for different reasons, we are the same. We are both "accidental Asians".
Even though Liu's essays are deeply personal, it is has voice and his aptitude for the stirring image that captures the imagination. This is something unsurprising given that he was a Presidential speechwriter. I wish to end off with a sample from his final essay, Blood Vows about his marraige to his wife:
Let me explain why I married a white woman. It wasn't as if I had a plan. I wasn't trying to prove a point or defy convention. It was simply a matter of who was there and what was possible. Why did Carroll marry a Chinese man? Why do people of different races marry at all? For the same reason today that they go to school together, live together, travel together, work together: because they canwhat should immediately strike you is the fact that any explanation is even necessary. As he soon makes clear:
I chose. I chose to enter into a relationship with Carroll. Not with a "white woman", not with some nameless paragon of "white beauty" but with Carroll Haymon, who has always had an uncanny knack for finishing my sentences; who knows when to humour me and when not to; who, as a Southerner schooled in the North, is no stranger to acculturation; whose neck bends just so when she reads; who sings a soulful alto and scorns the designated-hitter rule; who has a way of putting complete strangers at ease. Nobody - and nobody's subconscious tricked me into falling in love with her.
In this powerful memoir, and in his hands, one is impelled to believe that race doesn't really matter that much, and if it does, there are other greater things that can surpass it.
7 February 2011
30 Books Before 30
I've decided to amend my previous list to keep things along the lines of the '30' theme. The 30 selections I have made are a rather eclectic bunch. The only defining criteria was that I do truly want to read all of the books on this list, and more than that I can actually stomach reading them.
It is for that reason that you won't fine Dante's Divine Comedy (too intimidating), Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (yawn), Chaucer's A Canterbury Tales (interesting but just too long and difficult), James Joyce's Ulysses (I would probably end up going what the hell?). There is one notable exception. I forced myself to include the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms; it is shameful enough that I am reading it in an English translation.
I will try and explain the stranger of my choices at some point, but here is the list for now in random order. Suffice to say this is quite a daunting list, and I had better get cracking!
It is for that reason that you won't fine Dante's Divine Comedy (too intimidating), Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (yawn), Chaucer's A Canterbury Tales (interesting but just too long and difficult), James Joyce's Ulysses (I would probably end up going what the hell?). There is one notable exception. I forced myself to include the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms; it is shameful enough that I am reading it in an English translation.
I will try and explain the stranger of my choices at some point, but here is the list for now in random order. Suffice to say this is quite a daunting list, and I had better get cracking!
- The Illiad
- The Odyssey
- The Analects | Confucius
- Romance of the Three Kingdoms
- Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained | John Milton
- The Rights of Man | Thomas Paine
- Moll Flanders | Daniel Defoe
- Emma | Jane Austen
- Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte
- Wuthering Heights | Emily Bronte
- Middlemarch | George Eliot
- Great Expectations | Charles Dickens
- Madame Bovary | Gustav Flaubert
- Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain
- War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy
- The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Moonstone | Wilkie Collins
- Walden and Civil Disobedience | David Henry Thoreau
- Democracy in America | Alexis de Tocqueville
- On the Origin of Species | Charles Darwin
- The Complete Sherlock Holmes | Arthur Conan Doyle
- Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man | James Joyce
- Lolita | Vladimir Nabakov
- Catch-22 | Joseph Heller
- 100 Years of Solitude | Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Trial and Metamorphoses | Franz Kafka
- Under the Volcano | Malcolm Lowry
- Murphy, Malloy, Malone Dies | Samuel Beckett
- The Spy Who Came in From the Cold | John Le Carre
- The Book of the New Sun | Gene Wolfe
5 February 2011
30 Movies Before 30
I had earlier created a list of fifty movies to see as part of a thirty before thirty list. After a conversation with my sister who is creating a similar list (albeit with much more time to spare), I have decided to trim the list to thirty, in keeping with the general theme of 'thirty' before 30.
The new list is largely based on the previous one, with some simple rules: obviously only movies which I have not already seen will be added to the list. Additionally, there can only be a single film from a particular director represented on the list (this made for some very difficult choices).
Finally and this turned out to be a very important rule, the list is a mixture of aspiration and personal pleasure. In other words, this list in part represents films that are definitive, critically acclaimed, and otherwise essential works which I feel is vital to my film 'education', but tempered by the simple rule that I have to want to watch them. We often feel compelled to watch or read things which are recommended by critics, on the supposition that they are supposed to be good because some superior authority has decided it to be so. Part of turning 30 is the realization that life is too short to slavishly follow critical opinion and must see lists. Trust informed judgment but in the end, watch what you really want to. It is in this spirit that the following selections were made.
The list (with short explanations where appropriate) can be found below, followed by a section detailing some discarded choices and the rationale behind them:
More interesting are some very well known films that I have chosen not to include because they fail my acid test rule (I just don't feel like watching it):
First, All About Eve. Screwball comedies or even intelligent comedies have just never been my thing, besides which I find I am much more attuned to British as opposed to American humour. Besides, Wilder, despite being famous as a comedic director, also made Double Indemnity, which I consider to be one of the greatest of film noirs, and of course Sunset Blvd. another noir masterpiece whose cynicism I can relate to far more than his later comedic works.
Some Like It Hot is probably considered to be the greatest American comedic film of all time. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are supposed to be one of the greatest comedic duos on film. It has Marilyn Monroe in one of her strongest performances, where she transcends her dumb blonde persona. Sadly it just doesn't appeal.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a huge academy favourite. It did the grand slam of big five Oscars (only It Happened One Night and Silence of the Lambs can match that feat), it has Jack, well being Jack. A good friend, Jake, who knows more about movies than most people I know, loathed it, saying it was completely over the top (then again Jake also disliked Shawshank for being fake, and sentimental). Still, based on what I saw of Amadeus, I could see how this criticism of Milos Forman might be accurate. Also, I already have Jack in Chinatown. If anything, I would be more curious to see another Forman film - the adaptation of the notorious 70s musical Hair featuring hippies, LSD, marijuana and unusual sex practices.
American Graffiti is a cult movie. It shows a different side of George Lucas before he went megabucks. But do you really want to be watching a coming of age in 60s America movie when you're going to be turning 30? Forget the post WWII boomer generation optimism. You're supposed to be far too close to a mid-life crisis to be watching stuff like this. If you feel nostalgic you could at least put on a re-run of Grease. And realise that John Travolta is now fifty. And Olivia Newton John has sagging breasts.
Easy Rider - yet another cult movie movie involving Jack. Two men riding around on motorcycles going against the establishment. You know what they say about mid life crisis - you know you are having one when you buy a Harley, and a motorcycle jacket to go with it. Do I really want to see a movie about two men riding on motorbikes exploring "freedom"? On the one hand it is cliched; on the other, it might just cause me to wonder what the hell I am doing with my life and quit my job and move to Tijuana. Better not push my luck.
E.T: The Extra Terrestrial - I know this is supposed to be brilliant. But I just could not bear a film that was liable to be far too sentimental (an early Spielberg trait). The thought of watching a little alien that looks like a shriveled prune riding in a bicycle basket is vomit inducing enough, worse is me remembering that when I was five and on a visit to Universal Studios, I was chosen to stand in for Elliot in showing how the shot was created (the magic of cinema!). Ergh, no.
The Exorcist: probably the greatest horror movie ever made. Problem is, I have never seen a point to horror movies, period. Except campy Zombie ones. Go George Romero.
Early silent classics: The Battleship Potemkin, Metropolis, Intolerance, Birth of a Nation, early works of Luis Bunuel. Sound is an essential part of the cinematic experience. That is why movies have been shot in sound since The Jazz Singer. I've made one exception - a Charlie Chaplin film, given the man's endlessly acclaimed genius, and out of sheer curiousity. Besides, physical humour I can see transcending the need for speech or sound (there is a reason why one of the most popular comedies of recent times is Mr Bean).
The new list is largely based on the previous one, with some simple rules: obviously only movies which I have not already seen will be added to the list. Additionally, there can only be a single film from a particular director represented on the list (this made for some very difficult choices).
Finally and this turned out to be a very important rule, the list is a mixture of aspiration and personal pleasure. In other words, this list in part represents films that are definitive, critically acclaimed, and otherwise essential works which I feel is vital to my film 'education', but tempered by the simple rule that I have to want to watch them. We often feel compelled to watch or read things which are recommended by critics, on the supposition that they are supposed to be good because some superior authority has decided it to be so. Part of turning 30 is the realization that life is too short to slavishly follow critical opinion and must see lists. Trust informed judgment but in the end, watch what you really want to. It is in this spirit that the following selections were made.
The list (with short explanations where appropriate) can be found below, followed by a section detailing some discarded choices and the rationale behind them:
- 81/2
- 400 Blows
- Apu Trilogy, The
- Apocalypse Now
- Bicycle Thief, The
- Big Sleep, The
- Blade Runner
- Blue Velvet
- Bonnie and Clyde
- Brazil
- Breathless
- Brief Encounter
- Chinatown
- Chunking Express
- Clockwork Orange, A
- Donnie Darko
- Fight Club
- Great Dictator, The
- On the Waterfront
- Roman Holiday
- Rules of the Game
- Seventh Samurai, The
- Seventh Seal, The
- Shoah
- Taxi Driver
- Touch of Evil
- Tokyo Story
- Umbrellas of Cherbourg
- Unforgiven
- Vertigo
More interesting are some very well known films that I have chosen not to include because they fail my acid test rule (I just don't feel like watching it):
First, All About Eve. Screwball comedies or even intelligent comedies have just never been my thing, besides which I find I am much more attuned to British as opposed to American humour. Besides, Wilder, despite being famous as a comedic director, also made Double Indemnity, which I consider to be one of the greatest of film noirs, and of course Sunset Blvd. another noir masterpiece whose cynicism I can relate to far more than his later comedic works.
Some Like It Hot is probably considered to be the greatest American comedic film of all time. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are supposed to be one of the greatest comedic duos on film. It has Marilyn Monroe in one of her strongest performances, where she transcends her dumb blonde persona. Sadly it just doesn't appeal.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a huge academy favourite. It did the grand slam of big five Oscars (only It Happened One Night and Silence of the Lambs can match that feat), it has Jack, well being Jack. A good friend, Jake, who knows more about movies than most people I know, loathed it, saying it was completely over the top (then again Jake also disliked Shawshank for being fake, and sentimental). Still, based on what I saw of Amadeus, I could see how this criticism of Milos Forman might be accurate. Also, I already have Jack in Chinatown. If anything, I would be more curious to see another Forman film - the adaptation of the notorious 70s musical Hair featuring hippies, LSD, marijuana and unusual sex practices.
American Graffiti is a cult movie. It shows a different side of George Lucas before he went megabucks. But do you really want to be watching a coming of age in 60s America movie when you're going to be turning 30? Forget the post WWII boomer generation optimism. You're supposed to be far too close to a mid-life crisis to be watching stuff like this. If you feel nostalgic you could at least put on a re-run of Grease. And realise that John Travolta is now fifty. And Olivia Newton John has sagging breasts.
Easy Rider - yet another cult movie movie involving Jack. Two men riding around on motorcycles going against the establishment. You know what they say about mid life crisis - you know you are having one when you buy a Harley, and a motorcycle jacket to go with it. Do I really want to see a movie about two men riding on motorbikes exploring "freedom"? On the one hand it is cliched; on the other, it might just cause me to wonder what the hell I am doing with my life and quit my job and move to Tijuana. Better not push my luck.
E.T: The Extra Terrestrial - I know this is supposed to be brilliant. But I just could not bear a film that was liable to be far too sentimental (an early Spielberg trait). The thought of watching a little alien that looks like a shriveled prune riding in a bicycle basket is vomit inducing enough, worse is me remembering that when I was five and on a visit to Universal Studios, I was chosen to stand in for Elliot in showing how the shot was created (the magic of cinema!). Ergh, no.
The Exorcist: probably the greatest horror movie ever made. Problem is, I have never seen a point to horror movies, period. Except campy Zombie ones. Go George Romero.
Early silent classics: The Battleship Potemkin, Metropolis, Intolerance, Birth of a Nation, early works of Luis Bunuel. Sound is an essential part of the cinematic experience. That is why movies have been shot in sound since The Jazz Singer. I've made one exception - a Charlie Chaplin film, given the man's endlessly acclaimed genius, and out of sheer curiousity. Besides, physical humour I can see transcending the need for speech or sound (there is a reason why one of the most popular comedies of recent times is Mr Bean).
25 January 2011
Sexism in Football: No Gray Areas
Richard Keys and Andy Gray should be asked to leave their jobs as commentators on Sky Football with immediate effect. There is just no two ways about it. This might seem strong words, but given their blatant and inexcusably sexist comments caught off air about an assistant referee, I see no other recourse.
For those of you who haven't heard, Keys and Gray suggested that someone needed to explain the offside rule to female assistant referee Sian Massey after a controversial decision (which ironically she actually got spot on and they got wrong), saying the league had "f**ked up big time" in appointing female officials, and castigated a previous female referee's assistant as "f**king hopeless".
The response? Sky called their comments completely unacceptable and stated that the pair had been suspended from broadcasting the Monday night match between Chelsea and Bolton. I find this woefully inadequate. By way of comparison, let's examine instances where broadcasters have made blatantly racist comments (both on and off the air) and the consequences they suffered.
One famous incident involved Ron Atkinson, who was commenting for ITV on a Champions League semi-final match between Monaco and Chelsea when he stated that Marcel Desailly was "stated in some schools as a f**king lazy thick nigger". He had thought he was off the air, but the remarks were broadcast. He immediately resigned.
In another non-footballing incident, a New Zealand TV anchor Paul Henry deliberately mispronounced Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit's name as "dick shit" and "dip shit" adding that it was somehow additionally appropiate "because she is Indian, [so] she would be walking down the street dick in shit wouldn't she, you know what I mean?". He resigned shortly afterwards.
The footballing community has sent out a very strong message that racism will not be tolerated in the sport, in any shape or form. This has gone a long way to address the blatant and horrific racism that pervaded the game. In the past, fans found it not merely acceptable but fun to make monkey noises whenever an opposing black player touched the ball. Bananas were even thrown onto the pitch.
Racism has not been completely eradicated. The treatment Marco Balotelli has received from opposing fans in Italy is just one case in point, more so our own intrinsic tendency to still stereotype players based on race (black players are big, physical; white players are smart and cultured footballers). However, a clear message has been sent that any blatant racism will not be tolerated. When Atkinson made those comments, he knew immediately that he had no recourse but to resign.
Keys and Gray are not about to resign. The fact that do not feel the need to is telling. Sexism is as ingrained in football as racism was in the past. Football is a lads game after all, a Saturday afternoon pastime at the pub with your mates. We've all made similarly sexist jokes about the game. How many of us have casually joked about our girlfriends never being able to understand the offside rule? Women also do the same and laugh about the fact that only men would take pleasure and interest in watching 22 other men run around a field for 90 minutes.
What is not tolerable is when gender becomes grounds for baseless facile personal attacks as was the case with Keys and Gray. What is most shocking, as a colleague and friend put it, is their casual banter suggested that they thought every other footballing bloke would feel the same way, though they might not express it as openly (and as unwisely) as the two of them did. The notion of female assistants, let alone referees? Woman having a serious part in top flight football? Ludicrous!
Really? There are female referees in many other top flight leagues such as the Bundesliga, which can lead to the occasional awkward moment as Peter Niemeyer of Hertha Berlin found out recently. Women have run the lines in the last two Champions League. Women are refeering at the Rugby World Sevens, even at the Snooker World Championships (arguably a sport which is even more of a male preserve).
Football is lagging behind. What needs to be done is to send out as clear and unequivocal a message condemning sexism as the sport did in taking a zero tolerance policy towards racism. That is the only way we can eradicate it from the game.
Let there be no gray (pardon the pun) area about how football deals with blatant sexism. It is completely and utterly unacceptable. Anyone guilty of it should have no place in the game, in any capacity. Keys and Gray have to go.
For those of you who haven't heard, Keys and Gray suggested that someone needed to explain the offside rule to female assistant referee Sian Massey after a controversial decision (which ironically she actually got spot on and they got wrong), saying the league had "f**ked up big time" in appointing female officials, and castigated a previous female referee's assistant as "f**king hopeless".
The response? Sky called their comments completely unacceptable and stated that the pair had been suspended from broadcasting the Monday night match between Chelsea and Bolton. I find this woefully inadequate. By way of comparison, let's examine instances where broadcasters have made blatantly racist comments (both on and off the air) and the consequences they suffered.
One famous incident involved Ron Atkinson, who was commenting for ITV on a Champions League semi-final match between Monaco and Chelsea when he stated that Marcel Desailly was "stated in some schools as a f**king lazy thick nigger". He had thought he was off the air, but the remarks were broadcast. He immediately resigned.
In another non-footballing incident, a New Zealand TV anchor Paul Henry deliberately mispronounced Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit's name as "dick shit" and "dip shit" adding that it was somehow additionally appropiate "because she is Indian, [so] she would be walking down the street dick in shit wouldn't she, you know what I mean?". He resigned shortly afterwards.
The footballing community has sent out a very strong message that racism will not be tolerated in the sport, in any shape or form. This has gone a long way to address the blatant and horrific racism that pervaded the game. In the past, fans found it not merely acceptable but fun to make monkey noises whenever an opposing black player touched the ball. Bananas were even thrown onto the pitch.
Racism has not been completely eradicated. The treatment Marco Balotelli has received from opposing fans in Italy is just one case in point, more so our own intrinsic tendency to still stereotype players based on race (black players are big, physical; white players are smart and cultured footballers). However, a clear message has been sent that any blatant racism will not be tolerated. When Atkinson made those comments, he knew immediately that he had no recourse but to resign.
Keys and Gray are not about to resign. The fact that do not feel the need to is telling. Sexism is as ingrained in football as racism was in the past. Football is a lads game after all, a Saturday afternoon pastime at the pub with your mates. We've all made similarly sexist jokes about the game. How many of us have casually joked about our girlfriends never being able to understand the offside rule? Women also do the same and laugh about the fact that only men would take pleasure and interest in watching 22 other men run around a field for 90 minutes.
What is not tolerable is when gender becomes grounds for baseless facile personal attacks as was the case with Keys and Gray. What is most shocking, as a colleague and friend put it, is their casual banter suggested that they thought every other footballing bloke would feel the same way, though they might not express it as openly (and as unwisely) as the two of them did. The notion of female assistants, let alone referees? Woman having a serious part in top flight football? Ludicrous!
Really? There are female referees in many other top flight leagues such as the Bundesliga, which can lead to the occasional awkward moment as Peter Niemeyer of Hertha Berlin found out recently. Women have run the lines in the last two Champions League. Women are refeering at the Rugby World Sevens, even at the Snooker World Championships (arguably a sport which is even more of a male preserve).
Football is lagging behind. What needs to be done is to send out as clear and unequivocal a message condemning sexism as the sport did in taking a zero tolerance policy towards racism. That is the only way we can eradicate it from the game.
Let there be no gray (pardon the pun) area about how football deals with blatant sexism. It is completely and utterly unacceptable. Anyone guilty of it should have no place in the game, in any capacity. Keys and Gray have to go.
14 January 2011
Books Bought Recently
In a vain attempt to reduce my already overflowing bookshelves (or rather to prevent further additions to them), I decided to begin taking note of my book purchases, and the rationale behind them. At year end, I will also do a review of how many of these books actually got read. This is also part of my long term aspiration to try and write about the books that I read, given my utter inability to remember anything I have read more than a few months afterward. Anyhow, this is the latest installment from January:
Beginner's Guide to Epistemology | Robert Martin: I obviously do not need yet another introductory book on epistemology, at least not for my own purposes. Since I am teaching it for Knowledge and Inquiry this year, I am buying this in view of mining it for teaching resources later this year. Or so I tell myself.
Lectures in the History of Political Philosophy | John Rawls: Despite the mind-numbing dullness of much of A Theory of Justice, Rawls was actually a good engaging lecturer, by all accounts. Given my genuine interest in political philosophy, this is a good addition, particularly since I never had a chance to examine historical thinkers (Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau) at University. I also managed to justify this on account of my involvement in the Raffles Renaissance Programme - I will be doing the Social Contract later this term and I need to read up. As a programme covering great books of social and political thought, this book will definitely come in handy.
Justice: Key Concepts Series | Tom Campbell: I have been eyeing this book for some time and I was initially put off by the price before I finally caved. It looks to be an excellent summation of the various theories of justice. I have learned never to underestimate the usefulness of books which effectively summarize complex ideas and debates. This looked to be one of them. Now, I just have to get round to devoting time to examining the issue of justice in greater detail and reading all the stuff I accumulated on political philosophy in the first place.
The Wind-Up Girl | Paolo Bacigalupi: Who would have thought! A book purchase made as a result of reading the Straits Time Sunday life section! It is a sign of how much I have neglected Science Fiction that I had no idea that this novel won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel. In times past I read Hugo and Nebula winners fairly voraciously. Bacigalupi was interviewed in the paper and my interest was definitely piqued. A novel set in 2030 Bangkok involving genetic manipulation and a mysterious made to order (genetically that is) girl? I just had to get it!
Worlds of Exile and Illusion | Ursula K Leguin: I was speaking to one of my student's last year about Ursula K LeGuin and she was lamenting how Le Guin's earlier "Hainish" novels were largely out of print and very difficult to find unlike The Left Hand of Darkness (which won both the Hugo and Nebula). Then I chanced upon this reprint, a compendium of the first three hanish novels, and I decided that I just had to get it. One of my quirks is that I still try and collect out of print, good science fiction, despite largely neglecting the genre in the past two years (or more). Science Fiction is probably the only field in which my knowledge extends beyond the status quo (what you would find in bookstores) to past works which are no longer well know, or commonly available. As an aside, I used to bump into that student many mornings coming out of the MRT station on the way to school. Inevitably, we both would have a different book in our hand each time. As two of the few people who were truly voracious readers, we would have a short chat about books, and authors. I certainly will miss those conversations.
The Secret Speech | Tom Rob Smith: I first chanced upon Tom Rob Smith when I borrowed his debut novel Child 44 from a university library. It was one of those impulse borrows ( book looks interesting, let's just grab it) which are less damaging that the impulse buys that might result from one being at a book warehouse sale or a bookstore. I was looking for an easy read on the train ride home, instead I got that rare thing - a taunt well written thriller which was an intelligent exploration of Stalinist Russia. The premise itself was mind-bogglingly simple, yet compelling. A young child is found murdered, a detective sets out on the trail and discovers more deaths. What seems a simple run of the mill idea takes on huge significance in the context of an utopian communist system, where serial killing is simply deemed to be impossible. I was delighted when the book was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008 given its obvious quality, but still surprised (how often do thrillers get such recognition?). On the strength of Child 44 alone, I bought this follow up novel. While it has been out for some time, I haven't seen a copy in a bookstore until now, so once I chanced upon it, I naturally bought it rather unthinkingly. Let's just hope Tom Rob Smith doesn't suffer from the curse of the second novel.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders | Daniyal Mueenuddin: The subcontinent is known for producing brilliant writers, and a seemingly never-ending conveyor belt of new talent - Arundhati Roy winning the Booker prize with her debut novel, Kiran Desai with her sophomore effort, Aravind Adiga rising suddenly to prominence with his first book. Mueenuddin seems to be the latest subcontinent writer to rise to garner such attention. He certainly fits the mould - ivy league educated, worked in white collar job (banking) before returning to his home country to manage a farm. Mueenuddin is Pakistani and is already being touted as an authentic voice of his country. I bought it, as one often does, purely due to the lavish praise heaped on it, and the fact that it was nominated for a slew of awards. I also thought of a colleague who loves fiction from the subcontinent when I bought it - the fact that I could lend it to her, and introduce her to yet another exciting young writer somehow added justification to the purchase.
A History of Christianity | Diarmaid McCulloch: Why oh why do I keep doing this? If there is one area where I have collected massive (both in quantity in number and the size of the books themselves) unread volumes it is history. I find a new history of say The Nazi Regime, or a new volume in a multi-volume history of Europe, or a new book chronicling Krushchev in the Cold War. It is highly acclaimed (by fellow historians). I, of course, would love to find out more about that particular historical period. I buy the book. I put it on a shelf - all 600-700 pages of it. At best, I skim a couple of chapters. The book is never read. When it comes to volumes of authoritative history, I suffer the ultimate manifestation of the book buyer's curse - the myth of best intentions. That myth goes along the lines of - I have always wanted to learn more about this subject; this book is well written and critically acclaimed; I might not read it immediately and it does look a bit daunting, but of course it will be worth the effort and I will get round to reading it eventually. Eventually never happens. So why did I buy a 900 page history of Christianity? Because I am interested in the subject. Because Diarmaid McCulloch is the foremost historian of Christianity writing today, because the book was lavished with great praise, and book of the year awards from individuals ranging from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Melvyn Bragg. Because I will read it someday. Perhaps after I finish McCulloch's own history of the Reformation (purchased at Oxford in 2005, not yet started), or perhaps after I have read equally noted historian Paul Johnson's own History of Christianity (purchased Sunny bookstore Singapore, read first 60 pages out of 700). Perhaps never.
Beginner's Guide to Epistemology | Robert Martin: I obviously do not need yet another introductory book on epistemology, at least not for my own purposes. Since I am teaching it for Knowledge and Inquiry this year, I am buying this in view of mining it for teaching resources later this year. Or so I tell myself.
Lectures in the History of Political Philosophy | John Rawls: Despite the mind-numbing dullness of much of A Theory of Justice, Rawls was actually a good engaging lecturer, by all accounts. Given my genuine interest in political philosophy, this is a good addition, particularly since I never had a chance to examine historical thinkers (Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau) at University. I also managed to justify this on account of my involvement in the Raffles Renaissance Programme - I will be doing the Social Contract later this term and I need to read up. As a programme covering great books of social and political thought, this book will definitely come in handy.
Justice: Key Concepts Series | Tom Campbell: I have been eyeing this book for some time and I was initially put off by the price before I finally caved. It looks to be an excellent summation of the various theories of justice. I have learned never to underestimate the usefulness of books which effectively summarize complex ideas and debates. This looked to be one of them. Now, I just have to get round to devoting time to examining the issue of justice in greater detail and reading all the stuff I accumulated on political philosophy in the first place.
The Wind-Up Girl | Paolo Bacigalupi: Who would have thought! A book purchase made as a result of reading the Straits Time Sunday life section! It is a sign of how much I have neglected Science Fiction that I had no idea that this novel won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel. In times past I read Hugo and Nebula winners fairly voraciously. Bacigalupi was interviewed in the paper and my interest was definitely piqued. A novel set in 2030 Bangkok involving genetic manipulation and a mysterious made to order (genetically that is) girl? I just had to get it!
Worlds of Exile and Illusion | Ursula K Leguin: I was speaking to one of my student's last year about Ursula K LeGuin and she was lamenting how Le Guin's earlier "Hainish" novels were largely out of print and very difficult to find unlike The Left Hand of Darkness (which won both the Hugo and Nebula). Then I chanced upon this reprint, a compendium of the first three hanish novels, and I decided that I just had to get it. One of my quirks is that I still try and collect out of print, good science fiction, despite largely neglecting the genre in the past two years (or more). Science Fiction is probably the only field in which my knowledge extends beyond the status quo (what you would find in bookstores) to past works which are no longer well know, or commonly available. As an aside, I used to bump into that student many mornings coming out of the MRT station on the way to school. Inevitably, we both would have a different book in our hand each time. As two of the few people who were truly voracious readers, we would have a short chat about books, and authors. I certainly will miss those conversations.
The Secret Speech | Tom Rob Smith: I first chanced upon Tom Rob Smith when I borrowed his debut novel Child 44 from a university library. It was one of those impulse borrows ( book looks interesting, let's just grab it) which are less damaging that the impulse buys that might result from one being at a book warehouse sale or a bookstore. I was looking for an easy read on the train ride home, instead I got that rare thing - a taunt well written thriller which was an intelligent exploration of Stalinist Russia. The premise itself was mind-bogglingly simple, yet compelling. A young child is found murdered, a detective sets out on the trail and discovers more deaths. What seems a simple run of the mill idea takes on huge significance in the context of an utopian communist system, where serial killing is simply deemed to be impossible. I was delighted when the book was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008 given its obvious quality, but still surprised (how often do thrillers get such recognition?). On the strength of Child 44 alone, I bought this follow up novel. While it has been out for some time, I haven't seen a copy in a bookstore until now, so once I chanced upon it, I naturally bought it rather unthinkingly. Let's just hope Tom Rob Smith doesn't suffer from the curse of the second novel.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders | Daniyal Mueenuddin: The subcontinent is known for producing brilliant writers, and a seemingly never-ending conveyor belt of new talent - Arundhati Roy winning the Booker prize with her debut novel, Kiran Desai with her sophomore effort, Aravind Adiga rising suddenly to prominence with his first book. Mueenuddin seems to be the latest subcontinent writer to rise to garner such attention. He certainly fits the mould - ivy league educated, worked in white collar job (banking) before returning to his home country to manage a farm. Mueenuddin is Pakistani and is already being touted as an authentic voice of his country. I bought it, as one often does, purely due to the lavish praise heaped on it, and the fact that it was nominated for a slew of awards. I also thought of a colleague who loves fiction from the subcontinent when I bought it - the fact that I could lend it to her, and introduce her to yet another exciting young writer somehow added justification to the purchase.
A History of Christianity | Diarmaid McCulloch: Why oh why do I keep doing this? If there is one area where I have collected massive (both in quantity in number and the size of the books themselves) unread volumes it is history. I find a new history of say The Nazi Regime, or a new volume in a multi-volume history of Europe, or a new book chronicling Krushchev in the Cold War. It is highly acclaimed (by fellow historians). I, of course, would love to find out more about that particular historical period. I buy the book. I put it on a shelf - all 600-700 pages of it. At best, I skim a couple of chapters. The book is never read. When it comes to volumes of authoritative history, I suffer the ultimate manifestation of the book buyer's curse - the myth of best intentions. That myth goes along the lines of - I have always wanted to learn more about this subject; this book is well written and critically acclaimed; I might not read it immediately and it does look a bit daunting, but of course it will be worth the effort and I will get round to reading it eventually. Eventually never happens. So why did I buy a 900 page history of Christianity? Because I am interested in the subject. Because Diarmaid McCulloch is the foremost historian of Christianity writing today, because the book was lavished with great praise, and book of the year awards from individuals ranging from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Melvyn Bragg. Because I will read it someday. Perhaps after I finish McCulloch's own history of the Reformation (purchased at Oxford in 2005, not yet started), or perhaps after I have read equally noted historian Paul Johnson's own History of Christianity (purchased Sunny bookstore Singapore, read first 60 pages out of 700). Perhaps never.
7 January 2011
The Haunted Hotel
The Haunted Hotel | Wilkie Collins
It has been my practice over the past few years to start the year with a flight of fancy, usually a fantasy novel of some kind. I had purchased The Haunted Hotel while browsing at Kinokuniya Bookstore at Bugis Junction, killing time before dinner with a friend. Having read the first forty pages in the bookstore itself, I was intrigued enough to purchase it and find out whether Countess Narona's marriage to Lord Monbarry would result in the dire premonitions she so feared.
Wilkie Collins was familiar to me on the stength of his two most famous works - A Woman in White, a staple of Gothic literature; and The Moonstone, considered by many to be the forerunner to the detective novel. I had never gotten round to reading either of those two works despite studying Gothic literature in school, and being a fan of detective and crime fiction, with The Moonstone being an influence on many fine writers in the genre.
It is tempting to see The Haunted Hotel as an interesting mixture of these two genres - the gothic novel and the detective novel. Elements of the supernatural do seem to be at play in the novel - dark premonitions, disturbing visions (or possibly hallucinations), a clearly overwrought and thus unreliable narrator, but these are tempered with rational explanation based on systematic enquiry (such as a report from an insurance office). This delicate balance is seen most clearly in the denoument of the novel's final act with a clever little plot device that offers the readers the chance to believe the conclusion as either the fantasy of a deranged mind, or the confessions of a dark and deadly crime.
Wilkie Collin's writing style is engaging, and captivating. You won't find here the long, conjuncted sentences of his peers such as Charles Dickens (who acted in two of Collin's melodramas). The novel is very readable (as much as that is an overused term), and it builds up the story and the tension gradually. It takes reading the great Victorian mystery and crime novels to appreciate how dire modern thrillers are (I insist on making a distinction between thrillers which I view as pulp novels, and crime novels which is a genre with more artfulness). This novel, slight at 200 pages, made me want to read Collin's two most famous works mentioned above.
All in all, this was a much darker flight of fancy than I am used to starting the year with. It was certainly no sword and sorcery fantasy novel, but it was perhaps a richer experience for that. Besides which, it is also in keeping with 2011 being a more serious, focused year for me.
It has been my practice over the past few years to start the year with a flight of fancy, usually a fantasy novel of some kind. I had purchased The Haunted Hotel while browsing at Kinokuniya Bookstore at Bugis Junction, killing time before dinner with a friend. Having read the first forty pages in the bookstore itself, I was intrigued enough to purchase it and find out whether Countess Narona's marriage to Lord Monbarry would result in the dire premonitions she so feared.
Wilkie Collins was familiar to me on the stength of his two most famous works - A Woman in White, a staple of Gothic literature; and The Moonstone, considered by many to be the forerunner to the detective novel. I had never gotten round to reading either of those two works despite studying Gothic literature in school, and being a fan of detective and crime fiction, with The Moonstone being an influence on many fine writers in the genre.
It is tempting to see The Haunted Hotel as an interesting mixture of these two genres - the gothic novel and the detective novel. Elements of the supernatural do seem to be at play in the novel - dark premonitions, disturbing visions (or possibly hallucinations), a clearly overwrought and thus unreliable narrator, but these are tempered with rational explanation based on systematic enquiry (such as a report from an insurance office). This delicate balance is seen most clearly in the denoument of the novel's final act with a clever little plot device that offers the readers the chance to believe the conclusion as either the fantasy of a deranged mind, or the confessions of a dark and deadly crime.
Wilkie Collin's writing style is engaging, and captivating. You won't find here the long, conjuncted sentences of his peers such as Charles Dickens (who acted in two of Collin's melodramas). The novel is very readable (as much as that is an overused term), and it builds up the story and the tension gradually. It takes reading the great Victorian mystery and crime novels to appreciate how dire modern thrillers are (I insist on making a distinction between thrillers which I view as pulp novels, and crime novels which is a genre with more artfulness). This novel, slight at 200 pages, made me want to read Collin's two most famous works mentioned above.
All in all, this was a much darker flight of fancy than I am used to starting the year with. It was certainly no sword and sorcery fantasy novel, but it was perhaps a richer experience for that. Besides which, it is also in keeping with 2011 being a more serious, focused year for me.
28 December 2010
Other Media
Computer Games
- Battlefield Bad Company 2
- Call of Duty: Black Ops
- Mafia II
- Starcraft II
- Halo II
- Mass Effect II
- Medal of Honour
- A Little Night Music (Play)
- Blackbird (Play)
- Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral (Play)
- The Masrayana (Play)
- Ignite (Live Music)
- Those Who Can't Teach (Play)
- Verdi's Requiem Mass (Concert)
- The Tempest [Bridge Project] (Play)
- Chico Valdez (Concert)
- Vashti Bunyan (Concert)
- Kings of Convenience (Concert)
- Pink Martini (Concert)
- St Vincent (Concert)
- Melanie Gardot (Concert)
- Daisy Pulls It Off [Stage Club] (Play)
- Can Change (Play)
Movies Seen in 2010
Movies seen in 2010. Bolded titles recommended.
- Tron Legacy
- Tangled
- The Battle for Terra [DVD]
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 1
- G.I Joe [DVD]
- The Red Shoes
- Megamind
- Dial M for Murder
- The Chess Players
- Apur Sansar
- Aparajito
- Sandcastles
- Inception
- Toy Story 3
- The A-Team
- Shoah
- Mary Poppins [Outdoors Sing-A-Long]
- Star Trek [2009] [DVD]
- Iron Man 2
- The Limits of Control
- Shake Hands With the Devil
- How To Train A Dragon
- The Man Who Stared At Goats
- A Single Man
- Whip It
- Green Zone
- Summer Wars
- Nine
- The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
- Invictus
- Sherlock Holmes
Books Read in 2010
Here's a list of books I read in 2010: 91 titles in total. Bolded titles are recommended.
- Very Short Introduction to English Literature | Jonathan Bate
- How Did You Get This Number? | Sloane Crosley
- Bangkok Haunts | John Burdett
- The Baker Street Phantom | Fabrice Bourland
- Glasgow Kiss | Alex Gray
- Nemesis | Philip Roth
- Bring on the Apocalypse | George Monbiot
- Another Point of View | Lisa Jardine
- A Good Talk | Daniel Menaker
- Why We Love Dogs and Eat Pigs And Wear Cows | Melanie Joy
- Manchester United: The Biography | Jim White
- The Fry Chronicles | Stephen Fry
- Conned Again Watson! Cautionary Tales of Logic Mathematics, Probability| Colin Bruce
- The Harmony Silk Factory | Tash Aw
- Cigars in Camelot | William Styron
- I Was Told There'd be Cake | Sloane Crosley
- Nothing to Envy | Barbara Demnick
- Soccernomics | Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski
- The Sleepyhead's Companion | Sean Coughlin
- This Book is Overdue | Marilyn Johnson
- C | Tom McCarthy
- Parrot and Olivier in America | Peter Carey
- The Finkler Question | Howard Jacobsen
- In A Strange Room | Damon Galgut
- Bottlemania | Elizabeth Boyte
- Howard's End Is On The Landing | Susan Hill
- I Feel Bad About My Neck | Nora Ephron
- Long for This World | Jonathan Weiner
- The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest | Steig Larsson
- The Girl Who Played with Fire | Steig Larsson
- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo | Steig Larsson
- Truth and Beauty | Ann Patchett
- The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked A Technological Revolution | Henry Schlesinger
- The Life You Can Save: Acting Now To End World Poverty | Peter Singer
- The Housekeeper and the Professor | Yoko Ogawa
- The Dawkins' Delusion | Alister McGrath
- Sunshine | Ian McEwan
- High Noon in the Cold War | Max Frankel
- Globish | Robert McCrum
- Ani-Mattar | Frank Close
- The Conscience of a Liberal | Paul Krugman
- The Case of the Missing Books | Ian Sansom
- Sway | Ori and Rom Brafman
- Conversations on Ethics | Alex Voorhoeve
- Friends in High Places | Donna Leon
- A Brief History of Liberty | David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan
- A Million Words and Counting | Paul Payack
- The Varities of Scientific Experience | Carl Sagan
- Fatal Remedies | Donna Leon
- Poe | Peter Ackroyd
- In Search of Orwell In Burma | Emma Larkin
- The Singapore School of Villainy | Shamini Flint
- Justice: The Right Thing To Do | Michael Sandel
- The Kings of New York | Michael Weinreb
- The Race of A Lifetime | John Heilemann & Mark Halperin
- The Man Who Was Thursday | G.K Chesterton
- The Hero and the Crown | Robin McKinley*
- The Millstone | Margaret Drabble
- Lustrum | Robert Harris
- Brilliant Orange | David Winner
- The Evening of the Holiday | Shirley Hazzard
- Bangkok Tattoo | John Burdett
- Indignation | Philip Roth
- Porterhouse Blue | Tom Sharpe
- The Pianist | Wladislaw Spzilman
- The Yiddish Policeman's Union | Michael Chabon
- Austerlitz | W.G Sebald*
- Let the Great World Spin | Colum McCann
- The Cult of the Amateur | Andrew Keen
- Oedipus Rex | Sophocles
- SuperFreakonomics | Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
- Trick or Treatment | Simon Singh
- Alex and Me | Irene Pepperberg
- A Noble Radiance | Donna Leon
- Neverwhere | Neil Gaiman*
- The Lion and the Unicorn | George Orwell
- The Communist Manifesto | Marx and Engels
- Decline and Fall | Evelyn Waugh
- Ender in Exile | Orson Scott Card
- The Falling Woman | Pat Murphy
- Demolition Angels | Robert Crais
- 700 Sundays | Billy Crystal
- The Cutting Room | Louise Welsh
- Take Me To The Source | Rupert Wright
- Pitching My Tent | Anita Diamat
- The Confessor | Daniel Silva
- Shopgirl | Steven Martin
- The Boy in the Striped Pajamas | John Boyne
- The Children's Book | A.S Byatt
- Fatal Remedies | Donna Leon
- Poe | Peter Ackroyd
26 November 2010
The Year in Review (So Far)
2010 is hardly completely over, but I thought I would do a brief year in review.
Best Book Read (Fiction): Let the Great World Spin was beautiful and much of the writing was lyrical (as much as it is a cliche to refer to writing as that). Involving the interlocking stories of several individuals set around the famous tightrope walk across the twin towers, it's brand of fluent storytelling and compelling characters made for a great read. More than the eventual winner of the Booker Prize, Parrot and Olivier in America was filled with Peter Carey's trademark wit and humour. It was fun, hilarious, and filled with immensely well drawn characters. C, by Tom McCarthy was considered by many to be the front runner for the Booker and it is easy to see why. It has the edgy experimentalism that is a trademark of past Booker winners. Set in the decades from the turn of the century, it is in many ways a technological fable, each section hinging on the emerging science of telegraphy or signals.
Best Book Read (Non-Fiction): Nothing to Envy presents a harrowing portrait of North Korea through the oral testimony of a small number of individuals who defected. A book that is wonderfully woven together, it is a painful, shocking and flabbergasting read. In Search of Orwell in Burma follows a British journalist who traces Orwell's time as a colonial administrator in the country, and how it affected his life and writings. There are definitely chilling and Machiavellian parallels that can be drawn between the two (think 1984) and this book is effective for not over-reaching with the metaphors.
Best Film Seen (Current Release): Inception is a superior movie: thought provoking, multi-layered, filled with brilliant ideas. Oh, it also contained some excellent action sequences. A movie only Christoper Nolan could have pulled off.
Best Film Seen (Other Release): The National Museum's cinema has been a virtual gold mine since it opened, offering the opportunity to see great cinema classics in full restored cinematic glory. I am still kicking myself for missing the Fellini retrospective they staged, but the chance to see the great holocaust documentary, Shoah, was one that I thankfully grabbed. It is a film unlike anything ever made - nine hours that never feels overlong. A documentary in its most traditional form - just interviews, no recreations, no gimmicks, no set pieces. But what testimony, what horrifying details. We all owe Claude Lanzamann a great debt. Of equal worth in upholding a basic sense of the innate worth of every human being was the Apu trilogy. Satyajit Ray manages to create beauty and poetry out of the life of a young Bengali boy. A movie captivating in its simplicity. Surely the bildungsroman to make all others irrelevant.
Best Performance: Pink Martini were a real treat - an enormous multipiece band led by two wonderfully charismatic individuals. China Forbes did not disappoint with her superb vocals and presence. Tom Lauderdale was kooky, random, and very funny. And boy can he play the piano.
Other Media: I never played the original Starcraft. But there was enormous hype over the sequel. Ten years in the making. Talks of extensive delays. Was it worth the wait? No doubt about it. Starcraft II must rank as one of the greatest computer games ever created. Superb cinematic quality cut scenes, very well developed characters and voice acting. Well crafted individual missions with varied maps, and objectives. My only beef - you play for the most part as the Humans only. Still, an immense game. Simply superb.
Best Book Read (Fiction): Let the Great World Spin was beautiful and much of the writing was lyrical (as much as it is a cliche to refer to writing as that). Involving the interlocking stories of several individuals set around the famous tightrope walk across the twin towers, it's brand of fluent storytelling and compelling characters made for a great read. More than the eventual winner of the Booker Prize, Parrot and Olivier in America was filled with Peter Carey's trademark wit and humour. It was fun, hilarious, and filled with immensely well drawn characters. C, by Tom McCarthy was considered by many to be the front runner for the Booker and it is easy to see why. It has the edgy experimentalism that is a trademark of past Booker winners. Set in the decades from the turn of the century, it is in many ways a technological fable, each section hinging on the emerging science of telegraphy or signals.
Best Book Read (Non-Fiction): Nothing to Envy presents a harrowing portrait of North Korea through the oral testimony of a small number of individuals who defected. A book that is wonderfully woven together, it is a painful, shocking and flabbergasting read. In Search of Orwell in Burma follows a British journalist who traces Orwell's time as a colonial administrator in the country, and how it affected his life and writings. There are definitely chilling and Machiavellian parallels that can be drawn between the two (think 1984) and this book is effective for not over-reaching with the metaphors.
Best Film Seen (Current Release): Inception is a superior movie: thought provoking, multi-layered, filled with brilliant ideas. Oh, it also contained some excellent action sequences. A movie only Christoper Nolan could have pulled off.
Best Film Seen (Other Release): The National Museum's cinema has been a virtual gold mine since it opened, offering the opportunity to see great cinema classics in full restored cinematic glory. I am still kicking myself for missing the Fellini retrospective they staged, but the chance to see the great holocaust documentary, Shoah, was one that I thankfully grabbed. It is a film unlike anything ever made - nine hours that never feels overlong. A documentary in its most traditional form - just interviews, no recreations, no gimmicks, no set pieces. But what testimony, what horrifying details. We all owe Claude Lanzamann a great debt. Of equal worth in upholding a basic sense of the innate worth of every human being was the Apu trilogy. Satyajit Ray manages to create beauty and poetry out of the life of a young Bengali boy. A movie captivating in its simplicity. Surely the bildungsroman to make all others irrelevant.
Best Performance: Pink Martini were a real treat - an enormous multipiece band led by two wonderfully charismatic individuals. China Forbes did not disappoint with her superb vocals and presence. Tom Lauderdale was kooky, random, and very funny. And boy can he play the piano.
Other Media: I never played the original Starcraft. But there was enormous hype over the sequel. Ten years in the making. Talks of extensive delays. Was it worth the wait? No doubt about it. Starcraft II must rank as one of the greatest computer games ever created. Superb cinematic quality cut scenes, very well developed characters and voice acting. Well crafted individual missions with varied maps, and objectives. My only beef - you play for the most part as the Humans only. Still, an immense game. Simply superb.
12 September 2010
To Boldly Go
Star Trek fans are well known for being extremely obsessive creatures, going to extremes because of their love for the TV series. They imitate characters, dress in Star Trek uniforms, and are privy to the most obscure references from their TV series of choice. I consider myself a Star Trek fan, though not a Trekkie. The difference is more than a mere linguistic one. A Trekkie is a mark of status, and must be earned or bestowed by other fellow Trekkies. It means attending conventions, learning how to speak Klingon, and doing the Vulcan split finger salute.
I am hardly that obsessive, yet in many ways I have an enormous soft spot for Star Trek, particularly the Next Generation series, which I grew up watching. It must be one of the great incongruities, and such a tremendously fortunate one, that Patrick Stewart, great thespian and Shakespearean actor, plays a science fiction starship captain. It was thus tremendously heartening for me to meet S. recently, someone who shared my interest in Star Trek, and the Next Generation in particular, even admitting to watching TNG episodes when she was depressed.
While randomly surfing the net, I have found two examples of how extreme Trekkies can be in their obsession. The first is this man who turned his entire flat into something straight out of a Star Trek set complete with galley, transporter area, ship schematics, original computer display panels (LCARS to the Trekkies) after his wife left him. The attention to detail is truly stupendous, and has to be seen to be believed. The second is the group of individuals in the Hague who have decided to stage an opera - completely in Klingon.
All of this is certainly a nostalgia trip back to my own days watching Star Trek The Next Generation on late night re-runs (it was usually shown at midnighton terrestrial), reading Star Trek novelizations, particularly the hugely funny ones by Peter David, and generally believing as teenagers are wont to do, that we can "boldly go where no man has gone before".
I am hardly that obsessive, yet in many ways I have an enormous soft spot for Star Trek, particularly the Next Generation series, which I grew up watching. It must be one of the great incongruities, and such a tremendously fortunate one, that Patrick Stewart, great thespian and Shakespearean actor, plays a science fiction starship captain. It was thus tremendously heartening for me to meet S. recently, someone who shared my interest in Star Trek, and the Next Generation in particular, even admitting to watching TNG episodes when she was depressed.
While randomly surfing the net, I have found two examples of how extreme Trekkies can be in their obsession. The first is this man who turned his entire flat into something straight out of a Star Trek set complete with galley, transporter area, ship schematics, original computer display panels (LCARS to the Trekkies) after his wife left him. The attention to detail is truly stupendous, and has to be seen to be believed. The second is the group of individuals in the Hague who have decided to stage an opera - completely in Klingon.
All of this is certainly a nostalgia trip back to my own days watching Star Trek The Next Generation on late night re-runs (it was usually shown at midnighton terrestrial), reading Star Trek novelizations, particularly the hugely funny ones by Peter David, and generally believing as teenagers are wont to do, that we can "boldly go where no man has gone before".
7 September 2010
A New Hair Day
I have a strange relationship with my hair. As I tell people, I tend to cut it when I get bored with it. Often, the best that can be said of my relationship with my hair is that I pay it no attention. I ignore it, willfully or otherwise.
The phase of willful ignorance was a legacy of my time in Junior College, where there were two main fashion statements pertaining to males. One was to wear incredibly baggy trousers that threatened to fall off at any moment and which reduced the wearer to walking in a strange sort of shuffling gait in order to ensure that said trousers did not actually fall off. The second was to style one's hair such that there was a peak or pointed end sticking out at the front, or for the more adventurous, to ensure that there was a kind of ridge or crown running from back to front. If one stops to think about it, both fashion trends resulted in behaviour or appearances not dissimilar from the mating rituals and exhibition displays of some birds of paradise, but I digress.
Everyone is young and idealistic during Junior College. I chose, in my own inimitable way, to take my own chosen stand against such vacuous exhibitionism, such facile displays of irrelevant fashion. So I refused to gel, or style, or even comb my hair. It saved me a few minutes every morning, and it certainly saved me a significant amount of youthful angst regarding my appearance (or so I thought). I went to school on some days with tufts of hair sticking out on one side, making me look rather unbalanced (both literally and metaphorically). On good days, my hair would be a shapeless mass, on bad days it would be an unmanageable mess.
Two kind classmates, hoping to save me from myself, once attempted to do me the favour of trying to make order of all that chaos. Given that we were part of a humanities class, they clearly had not heard of the second law of thermodynamics, or they hadn't figured that my hair would follow that law so closely, or else they might not have even bothered. After a PE lesson, they whipped out a comb they had specially brought (a key tool of young adolesence, to be found sticking out of the back trouser pocket, which I of course lacked), and after an attempt to solicit my permission, dragged me in front of row of mirror lined sinks in the boys bathroom and attempted to gel my hair into a semblance of what was then considered fashionable. They ended up aghast at its state, appalled at my indifference. And for all their well-meaning intentions, they decided that it would be all but impossible to convince me to abandon my folly regarding my follicles.
Now that I am older, I have given up the willful rebellion of my younger days. I am no longer (alright, less) inclined towards taking stubborn principled stands based on some fundamental notion of what is intrinsically right. Thus, my attitude towards my hair has gone from one of willful to benign indifference.
The phase of willful ignorance was a legacy of my time in Junior College, where there were two main fashion statements pertaining to males. One was to wear incredibly baggy trousers that threatened to fall off at any moment and which reduced the wearer to walking in a strange sort of shuffling gait in order to ensure that said trousers did not actually fall off. The second was to style one's hair such that there was a peak or pointed end sticking out at the front, or for the more adventurous, to ensure that there was a kind of ridge or crown running from back to front. If one stops to think about it, both fashion trends resulted in behaviour or appearances not dissimilar from the mating rituals and exhibition displays of some birds of paradise, but I digress.
Everyone is young and idealistic during Junior College. I chose, in my own inimitable way, to take my own chosen stand against such vacuous exhibitionism, such facile displays of irrelevant fashion. So I refused to gel, or style, or even comb my hair. It saved me a few minutes every morning, and it certainly saved me a significant amount of youthful angst regarding my appearance (or so I thought). I went to school on some days with tufts of hair sticking out on one side, making me look rather unbalanced (both literally and metaphorically). On good days, my hair would be a shapeless mass, on bad days it would be an unmanageable mess.
Two kind classmates, hoping to save me from myself, once attempted to do me the favour of trying to make order of all that chaos. Given that we were part of a humanities class, they clearly had not heard of the second law of thermodynamics, or they hadn't figured that my hair would follow that law so closely, or else they might not have even bothered. After a PE lesson, they whipped out a comb they had specially brought (a key tool of young adolesence, to be found sticking out of the back trouser pocket, which I of course lacked), and after an attempt to solicit my permission, dragged me in front of row of mirror lined sinks in the boys bathroom and attempted to gel my hair into a semblance of what was then considered fashionable. They ended up aghast at its state, appalled at my indifference. And for all their well-meaning intentions, they decided that it would be all but impossible to convince me to abandon my folly regarding my follicles.
Now that I am older, I have given up the willful rebellion of my younger days. I am no longer (alright, less) inclined towards taking stubborn principled stands based on some fundamental notion of what is intrinsically right. Thus, my attitude towards my hair has gone from one of willful to benign indifference.
2 August 2010
30 Before 30
There is something about turning thirty. One remembers the number of great rock musicians who have died before they are thirty: Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Jimmi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Buddy Holly. Einstein came up with his major theoretical breakthroughs a few years before his thirtieth birthday. Newton revolutionized physics before that age. By thirty, most great sportsmen are seen to be on the decline, be they footballers, basketball players or tennis players.
When you approach thirty, there is palpable sense that you should have achieved something, come close to establishing yourself. If not securing some little nest egg, then at least deciding what you are going to do with the remaining fifty years you have on this planet. This makes this particular turning point ripe in significance (and for a existential crisis). This has led to an online trend for creating a mini bucket list of things to do, loosely, thirty before thirty.
I am probably being premature about this, but I thought I would start early. All too often people begin this existential soul searching after they cross their 29th birthday, and the tasks they set themselves are a little on the frivolous side (e.g. go sky diving, visit the Pyramids, bake a pumpkin pie!). This is certainly important, but I also wanted concrete (and even occasionally difficult) goals which might take longer than a few months to achieve. Doing 30 things in a short space of time is difficult, giving myself the better part of two years to do so enables me to set harder tasks.
There weren't many ground rules for coming up with the 30 things. The first is, unlike normal new year resolutions they should not be merely aspirational. There should be a degree of achievability. So no vague resolutions of wanting to exercise more. Stating something like, I want to learn how to be proficient in rock climbing, on the other hand, is more specific, and something that can clearly be attained.
Many of the items on the list were things that I have been meaning to do for awhile. The hope is that setting them down in a concrete way will give me the added motivation to actively pursue them.
In no particular order, the thirty things are:
When you approach thirty, there is palpable sense that you should have achieved something, come close to establishing yourself. If not securing some little nest egg, then at least deciding what you are going to do with the remaining fifty years you have on this planet. This makes this particular turning point ripe in significance (and for a existential crisis). This has led to an online trend for creating a mini bucket list of things to do, loosely, thirty before thirty.
I am probably being premature about this, but I thought I would start early. All too often people begin this existential soul searching after they cross their 29th birthday, and the tasks they set themselves are a little on the frivolous side (e.g. go sky diving, visit the Pyramids, bake a pumpkin pie!). This is certainly important, but I also wanted concrete (and even occasionally difficult) goals which might take longer than a few months to achieve. Doing 30 things in a short space of time is difficult, giving myself the better part of two years to do so enables me to set harder tasks.
There weren't many ground rules for coming up with the 30 things. The first is, unlike normal new year resolutions they should not be merely aspirational. There should be a degree of achievability. So no vague resolutions of wanting to exercise more. Stating something like, I want to learn how to be proficient in rock climbing, on the other hand, is more specific, and something that can clearly be attained.
Many of the items on the list were things that I have been meaning to do for awhile. The hope is that setting them down in a concrete way will give me the added motivation to actively pursue them.
In no particular order, the thirty things are:
- Obtain a place in a Phd program and choose a specific field of study at an overseas university
- Learn the basics of English grammar and linguistics
- Complete a short collection of essays or similar literary endeavour (and attempt to publish it)
- Master a third language to at least basic conversational level (or improve mandarin to such a level)
- Develop an understanding of film theory, film criticism and practical film making
- Create a wardrobe that is comprehensive, fairly stylish, and most importantly one that I am comfortable with
- Create and maintain a website
- Blog regularly (4-5 posts a month)
- Host a formal dinner party in which the dishes are all prepared by me
- Learn how to cook basic dishes and to be comfortable in a kitchen
- Keep a monthly budget and manage finances closely
- Learn about investing, stocks and shares and create a portfolio (however meager)
- Climb another mountain (at least Kinabalu, preferably Kilimanjaro)
- Master the basics of rock climbing
- Open a really expensive bottle of wine and share it with some close friends
- Obtain a driver's license
- Finish watching a list of 50 classic films (see list in another blog post)
- Read twenty classic works of literature (see list in another blog post)
- Finish in the Top 100 of the World Quizzing Championships
- Make a return trip to the UK, catch up with old friends, watch Wimbledon, visit Hay-on-Wye (for the literary festival)
- Write regular film/theater/book reviews and attempt to parlay this into a freelance position
As you can tell this list is still a work in progress. Suggestions for the remaining things to accomplish are more than welcome.
22 June 2010
A Million Words and Counting
A Million Word and Counting
by Paul Payack
Citadel Press, 2008
There have been innumerable books and articles on the notion that English has become the global language, the international language of business and the chosen medium of cross-cultural communication. Much has been made of how globalizing forces has cemented English's status as the lingua franca (perhaps lingua anglia?) - the majority of web pages and blogs are published in English, hundreds of millions of people around the globe want to learn it and it is the only feasible medium of exchange either in the corridors of power in Brussels or when a Chinese investor attempts to seal a deal in Africa (and vice versa).
Paul Payack, a self-styled word maven has shown a penchant for self-promotion when his site, the Global Language Monitor claimed to have found the millionth word in English. As many linguistic scholars have already pointed out, such as David Crystal, the doyen of word popularizers, the very exercise was a "load of rubbish". It became more so when the millionth word turned out to be the completely insipid choice of "Web 2.0", a selection made more out of self-interest and one that hardly fulfills the goals of highlighting the "diversity and dynamic growth of English" that was the supposed aim of the whole exercise.
This book turns out to be a prelude to all the needless hoopla. Payack claims himself not merely to be a word maven but a trivia fiend, and these qualities are on display here. He gives us numerous lists and groups of facts, no doubt culled from the archives of the Global Language Monitor. What he is forgotten is the basic principle that lists (and reams of trivia) are never interesting in themselves, but only hold value if they are relevant, and are fascinating only when they are out of the ordinary and not completely mundane.
What this book primarily consists of is groups and lists of English words organized according to various topics such as 'the silver screen', television' and 'celebrities' (including a random list of weird celebrity children names), most of which are pointless and mundane. A list of Top 25 'Bushisms' is hardly original though at least randomly funny. I hardly need a book like his to tell me that the top phrases associated with Hurricane Katrina were "disaster, catastrophe, apocalypse and end of the world" among others; nor was his Katrina word explainer really illuminating: explaining what cajun is was interesting, but do I really need a defintion of 'search and rescue', or 'superdome' or 'recovery' or 'sandbag'? Similarly, I nearly fell out of my chair in surprise and shock when he listed the frequently used tech words of 2007 as 'iPod, nano, cookie, megahertz, plasma, and blu-ray', among others.
The biggest disappointment is that when Payack veers away from the mundane, which is rare enough, he fails to go beyond listing various words and phrases to explaining how they might come about. So as an example, it was interesting to me that in Finnish English a "noobie" is a slang word for a rookie, or in Polish English "thanks for the mountain" roughly means thank you in advance. The problem is, Payack never does explain in any kind of detail how these terms might have come about, something that was supremely unsatisfying.
Worse is when Payack inundates us with completey pointless lists of facts, often without ever revealing their significance. So he gives us a list of the Top 25 Fashion Cities based on his company's predictive quantities indicator, saying that it is "surprising" but failing to reveal how he came by this list at all. More pointless are lists of every country and its capital city, or the names of powers of ten up to a googolplex and other reams of random information that anyone could probably find in an almanac. Within the random lists there are some nuggets that I found of genuine interest, such as a list of countries without a national language (now that is certainly something that never crossed my mind), but it was rather tiring sorting through all the chaff.
In sum, Payack's book is a disappointment in a field already chock full of books celebrating the rise of English as a global language. With such a broad and fascinating subject area, what is truly is amazing is that Payack has produced a book that contains so much that is insipid. Rather like Web 2.0 if you ask me. Global English, in all its varied diversity certainly deserves better.
by Paul Payack
Citadel Press, 2008
There have been innumerable books and articles on the notion that English has become the global language, the international language of business and the chosen medium of cross-cultural communication. Much has been made of how globalizing forces has cemented English's status as the lingua franca (perhaps lingua anglia?) - the majority of web pages and blogs are published in English, hundreds of millions of people around the globe want to learn it and it is the only feasible medium of exchange either in the corridors of power in Brussels or when a Chinese investor attempts to seal a deal in Africa (and vice versa).
Paul Payack, a self-styled word maven has shown a penchant for self-promotion when his site, the Global Language Monitor claimed to have found the millionth word in English. As many linguistic scholars have already pointed out, such as David Crystal, the doyen of word popularizers, the very exercise was a "load of rubbish". It became more so when the millionth word turned out to be the completely insipid choice of "Web 2.0", a selection made more out of self-interest and one that hardly fulfills the goals of highlighting the "diversity and dynamic growth of English" that was the supposed aim of the whole exercise.
This book turns out to be a prelude to all the needless hoopla. Payack claims himself not merely to be a word maven but a trivia fiend, and these qualities are on display here. He gives us numerous lists and groups of facts, no doubt culled from the archives of the Global Language Monitor. What he is forgotten is the basic principle that lists (and reams of trivia) are never interesting in themselves, but only hold value if they are relevant, and are fascinating only when they are out of the ordinary and not completely mundane.
What this book primarily consists of is groups and lists of English words organized according to various topics such as 'the silver screen', television' and 'celebrities' (including a random list of weird celebrity children names), most of which are pointless and mundane. A list of Top 25 'Bushisms' is hardly original though at least randomly funny. I hardly need a book like his to tell me that the top phrases associated with Hurricane Katrina were "disaster, catastrophe, apocalypse and end of the world" among others; nor was his Katrina word explainer really illuminating: explaining what cajun is was interesting, but do I really need a defintion of 'search and rescue', or 'superdome' or 'recovery' or 'sandbag'? Similarly, I nearly fell out of my chair in surprise and shock when he listed the frequently used tech words of 2007 as 'iPod, nano, cookie, megahertz, plasma, and blu-ray', among others.
The biggest disappointment is that when Payack veers away from the mundane, which is rare enough, he fails to go beyond listing various words and phrases to explaining how they might come about. So as an example, it was interesting to me that in Finnish English a "noobie" is a slang word for a rookie, or in Polish English "thanks for the mountain" roughly means thank you in advance. The problem is, Payack never does explain in any kind of detail how these terms might have come about, something that was supremely unsatisfying.
Worse is when Payack inundates us with completey pointless lists of facts, often without ever revealing their significance. So he gives us a list of the Top 25 Fashion Cities based on his company's predictive quantities indicator, saying that it is "surprising" but failing to reveal how he came by this list at all. More pointless are lists of every country and its capital city, or the names of powers of ten up to a googolplex and other reams of random information that anyone could probably find in an almanac. Within the random lists there are some nuggets that I found of genuine interest, such as a list of countries without a national language (now that is certainly something that never crossed my mind), but it was rather tiring sorting through all the chaff.
In sum, Payack's book is a disappointment in a field already chock full of books celebrating the rise of English as a global language. With such a broad and fascinating subject area, what is truly is amazing is that Payack has produced a book that contains so much that is insipid. Rather like Web 2.0 if you ask me. Global English, in all its varied diversity certainly deserves better.
15 June 2010
World Quizzing Championships 2010
As my friends will know, I am a huge fan of all things trivia and quiz related, so one of the highlights of my year is the World Quizzing Championships. This year marked the second time that I officially took part in the competition - I had previously been a competitor in 2006 while studying in England, deciding to make the trip to Cardiff (where it was held) despite the fact that my final PPE exam was just two days later. That experience, as well as trying out the 2008 and 2009 sets of questions underlined that the World Quizzing Championships provides high quality but extremely challenging questions.
I had planned to take part in the quiz in Manila, and the Philippines itself has the strongest quizzing culture in Southeast Asia (though a distant second in Asia to the quiz mad Indians) but I ended up organizing a small leg of the competition in Singapore instead (Malaysia also has a tiny leg with around 2-3 competitors). In the end, we held the Singapore leg at The Yard, a small quiet British pub on River Valley Road (with claims to be the oldest British pub in Singapore). Joining me in this trivia madness was Jake, an American friend of mine who has partnered me in many quizzes in the past, and Kenneth, whom I met at the weekly quiz at Brewerkz and who hopes to take part in College Bowl quizzes in America, where he is headed to study.
A bit on the rules of the competition. Basically, there are eight categories - Culture, Lifestyle, Media, Entertainment, Sport and Games, World, History, and Science. They are divided at random into two parts of four categories each. There are 30 questions in each category for a total of 240 overall. The quiz is done individually, with no conferring, and competitors get an hour for each part. Their total score is tabulated by dropping their worst category and adding together the scores for the remaining seven, for a maximum total of 210 points. If scores are tied the person with the higher score in their worst category is ranked first.
What makes the quiz very tough is the quality and difficulty of the questions and the question of speed. Having 1 hour for 4 categories works out to 60 minutes for 120 questions or 30 seconds per question including reading the question itself, trying to recall the answer (or in some cases trying to work it out) and of course trying not to second guess yourself. The questions are often much tougher than your average pub quiz. All in all it makes for quite a challenge.
I set myself a number of goals for this year's quiz. First, I hoped to crack 100 points. Seemingly modest considering that the highest possible score was 210 (eight categories of 30 questions each, with the lowest scoring category disregarded), so surely scoring 50% or 105 should be a easy right? I knew from past experience that attaining even 15 in any category was a major challenge though I did hope to break 100 and if possible score 50%.
Besides that, I hoped to be the top scoring competitor in Southeast Asia. For that reason, I had hoped to fly over to the Philippines, where the best competitors are to take part there. It would also be a good opportunity to meet other quizzers which would have been nice.
In the end, I accomplished neither. I ended up with a respectable 98 points, good enough for a 127th in the world. A Filipino quizzer by the name of Leonard Gapol scored an even 100 to beat me by a mere 2 points. To break the top 100, a score of 105 was needed (which was coincidentally exactly half the marks). To put the result in perspective, there were over 1200 competitors taking part in this year's WQC, so my placing puts me just fractionally outside the top 10%. Not bad, even if I failed to accomplish my two other targets.
As for the questions, I was particularly proud because I didn't drop that many questions and managed to work out those that I knew I knew but took some time remembering. In my case it was the British fashion designer that committed suicide (Alexander McQueen), the French city where there was an alternative papacy (Avignon), the standard measurement of distance in Ancient China (the li) or the very young British diver who one of the youngest competitors at the Beijing Olypics (Tom Daley). In a quiz of this difficulty there is nothing more irksome that to have an answer at the tip of a brain which you can't quite pull out.
Of the ones that got away I should have gotten the clue to the Tuileries Gardens in Paris (mixed it up with the Luxembourg Gardens), and a music clip clue from the musical Hairspray, but there weren't that many dropped points for me in this particular quiz.
This turned out to be especially important this year as it was a fairly tough quiz compared to the ones in 2008 and 2009. I struggled on Sciences (which includes the Social Sciences), which was expected, but I didn't even manage a score of 10 in History, which is surprising, given it is a subject I am normally quite decent at. In the end I managed 19 in Media, 16 in Sport and Culture, 14 in Entertainment, 13 in Lifestyle, 11 in World, 9 in History and 8 in Science. Here's to more quizzing and a better score next year!
I had planned to take part in the quiz in Manila, and the Philippines itself has the strongest quizzing culture in Southeast Asia (though a distant second in Asia to the quiz mad Indians) but I ended up organizing a small leg of the competition in Singapore instead (Malaysia also has a tiny leg with around 2-3 competitors). In the end, we held the Singapore leg at The Yard, a small quiet British pub on River Valley Road (with claims to be the oldest British pub in Singapore). Joining me in this trivia madness was Jake, an American friend of mine who has partnered me in many quizzes in the past, and Kenneth, whom I met at the weekly quiz at Brewerkz and who hopes to take part in College Bowl quizzes in America, where he is headed to study.
A bit on the rules of the competition. Basically, there are eight categories - Culture, Lifestyle, Media, Entertainment, Sport and Games, World, History, and Science. They are divided at random into two parts of four categories each. There are 30 questions in each category for a total of 240 overall. The quiz is done individually, with no conferring, and competitors get an hour for each part. Their total score is tabulated by dropping their worst category and adding together the scores for the remaining seven, for a maximum total of 210 points. If scores are tied the person with the higher score in their worst category is ranked first.
What makes the quiz very tough is the quality and difficulty of the questions and the question of speed. Having 1 hour for 4 categories works out to 60 minutes for 120 questions or 30 seconds per question including reading the question itself, trying to recall the answer (or in some cases trying to work it out) and of course trying not to second guess yourself. The questions are often much tougher than your average pub quiz. All in all it makes for quite a challenge.
I set myself a number of goals for this year's quiz. First, I hoped to crack 100 points. Seemingly modest considering that the highest possible score was 210 (eight categories of 30 questions each, with the lowest scoring category disregarded), so surely scoring 50% or 105 should be a easy right? I knew from past experience that attaining even 15 in any category was a major challenge though I did hope to break 100 and if possible score 50%.
Besides that, I hoped to be the top scoring competitor in Southeast Asia. For that reason, I had hoped to fly over to the Philippines, where the best competitors are to take part there. It would also be a good opportunity to meet other quizzers which would have been nice.
In the end, I accomplished neither. I ended up with a respectable 98 points, good enough for a 127th in the world. A Filipino quizzer by the name of Leonard Gapol scored an even 100 to beat me by a mere 2 points. To break the top 100, a score of 105 was needed (which was coincidentally exactly half the marks). To put the result in perspective, there were over 1200 competitors taking part in this year's WQC, so my placing puts me just fractionally outside the top 10%. Not bad, even if I failed to accomplish my two other targets.
As for the questions, I was particularly proud because I didn't drop that many questions and managed to work out those that I knew I knew but took some time remembering. In my case it was the British fashion designer that committed suicide (Alexander McQueen), the French city where there was an alternative papacy (Avignon), the standard measurement of distance in Ancient China (the li) or the very young British diver who one of the youngest competitors at the Beijing Olypics (Tom Daley). In a quiz of this difficulty there is nothing more irksome that to have an answer at the tip of a brain which you can't quite pull out.
Of the ones that got away I should have gotten the clue to the Tuileries Gardens in Paris (mixed it up with the Luxembourg Gardens), and a music clip clue from the musical Hairspray, but there weren't that many dropped points for me in this particular quiz.
This turned out to be especially important this year as it was a fairly tough quiz compared to the ones in 2008 and 2009. I struggled on Sciences (which includes the Social Sciences), which was expected, but I didn't even manage a score of 10 in History, which is surprising, given it is a subject I am normally quite decent at. In the end I managed 19 in Media, 16 in Sport and Culture, 14 in Entertainment, 13 in Lifestyle, 11 in World, 9 in History and 8 in Science. Here's to more quizzing and a better score next year!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
