Season Of Love

In And Out Of Love

People around me all seem to be so busy falling in love, falling out of love, or just sitting on the fence, never giving up even when signs are mostly pessimistic. And some just keep on looking. It’s an interesting thing to watch evolve, see how people react, note how different folks are at different stages, both in terms of their romance and their lives, and how these two things affect one another.

I suppose it’s a silly writer’s thing that you do. You just see how the social balances shift, or you observe how the characters change. Their reactions to the different little things that happen are of particular interest to me because of how silly things always look when you’re on the outside.

It made me think a little about my work, because my worlds tend to be ones with with some fantastic, chaste love, some mad and sprawling romance. I think one of the reasons I write like that is because I’m somehow still a sappy romantic deep inside, and also perhaps I have some kind of naive faith in love as a force and as an article of faith. Maybe my conviction is stupid. Maybe I’m never really going to one day see that, but hey, I suppose you always need a little blind faith with what you’re writing.

Still, I just wanted to say this because of the way this semester has been going. There’s an extra sense of expectation, I think, as you turn up in the lecture halls and classrooms every day, even if you’re not exactly the one involved. It just throws in a bit of spice, and maybe forces you to think a little about what it all means, what life is, what love is, and what you’re really looking for.

Or, i’m just dreaming and you ought to ignore me.

What About You?

Me? Let’s just say there’s a reason I’m listening to early Beatles and Blonde On Blonde. Let’s just say that there’s a buoyancy to my thoughts these days. Let’s just say that it’s really a lot of happy, and just that tiny bit of sad.

It’s curious, really, but expectations really ought to be tempered, being the pessimist that I am.

Yet the breadth of romance makes it all a bit difficult. In some sense, what makes love beautiful is that it hurts you so deeply. Or maybe you could put it the other way round. It hurts you so deeply simply because it’s beautiful.

Strange days, these.

d

Nobel Prize Winners In Physics

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics goes to these guys. [via Nobelprize.org]

Two more days to Literature.

I mean, not that it matters, but it’s always fun to satisfy one’s curiosity.

(Except when being tracked down by sneaky ninjas.)

d

Tuesday Photo: fracture

Change

And So…

My dad spoke to me about the whole retirement thing, and he told me of his plans and all. He intends to look for another job at least for the next couple of years, basically, and we’ll work it out as we go along.

As he told me about the situation at his current workplace, I couldn’t help but think how proud and sad he looked. He looked like he was going to cry, and I remember thinking, Don’t break down. Please don’t break down. I think it doesn’t matter what you think of your job; you’re always going to have some pride in what you do.

The questions are still hovering, and I suppose changes are in order. It’s the sort of thing you’ll just have to face with a measure of resilience.

Reckoner

Here’s a video for Radiohead’s Reckoner:

Radiohead – Reckoner – by Clement Picon

[via dead air space]

Shadows

I saw this thing about Linger In Shadows yesterday. [via PlayStation Blog] It is a sort of experimental interactive experience for the PS3. From the article:

Linger in Shadows was created by Plastic, from the demoscene. It is an experiment with the demoscene and it is an experiment in Interactive Digital Art.

I think it looks great. And I especially like the panda. And it’s the sort of thing that I’m keen on, so I’ll be looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

Love Story

Someone sent me this yesterday, and I thought it was beautiful. It’s by Carlos Lascano and I figured you ought to visit his main site to have a look. [via carlosloscano.com]

A SHORT LOVE STORY IN STOP MOTION from Carlos Lascano on Vimeo.

d

Singapura (The World Is Yours Now)

Three-Year Plan

Since Wednesday, I’ve settled on a direction and an approach. It was always a bit hazy and unclear for me before, what I was going to do with this writing, what it meant to me, and what I was going to do, but I think there are some definite answers now. Not every answer, mind you, but answers enough for me to move on.

In that spirit, I’ve found a new sense of imperative and have started on a new project. This project currently goes under the working title of Singapura, and as I’ve decided to tell most people, I’ll tell you that it is based in Singapore, it has a love story somewhere inside, and it is currently being worked on. The last thing you already know, but I just wanted to to get a little practice at delivering that line.

I can’t tell you much more for now except for the fact that it’s very early days and I really have nothing more than a few paragraphs and some vague ideas. I will say that I have a pretty clear idea of how it begins and ends, so it’s really a matter of trying to figure out what happens in between.

It is remarkably different from The River, in a sense, because I don’t have it planned in detail. In a sense, things are not so set-in-stone, and I’m kind of taking it as it comes with the confidence that the experience gained from writing The River and the strength of the concept are going to pull me through. I’m reasonably confident, and fairly excited about this, but then again, all new projects tend to be exciting.

I have it mapped out in the short term (well, relatively, anyway) and I hope to have it in good shape by my 25th birthday. That gives me about two to three years to hammer it into shape, which is far more time than I afforded The River. I also realise that it’s a little after I graduate, so I guess I can consider Singapura something of a thesis project.

In the meantime, I’ll still be touching up on The River. I also won’t be opposed to diving into other projects, though I suspect Singapura will take up the bulk of my creative energy.

It seems unlikely but I hope to have more to tell you about it soon.

Tempered Radicals

It ought to then be a happy time, bubbling with exuberance and positivity for the future. Just yesterday, though, my mother told me that they asked my father to retire.

There is a strange contradiction of emotions here, and it’s hard to explain. Hard to describe, even.

One moment, you’re going, I’m gonna’ take over the world, I’m gonna’ do this, I’m gonna’ do that. And then the next, you find that the keepers of the world are stepping down and they’re telling you, This world is yours now. So, alone and in a slight state of shock, you start to think about those ambitions you had before, and then you see that you have the world in your hands and you don’t know what to do with it. And it makes you scared.

That’s kind of what it feels like.

To be fair, the shock probably comes from how I wasn’t expecting it to happen so soon, and also how there wasn’t much in the way of a warning. Yet, it goes slightly deeper because everything now seems more tenuous and far less secure than it used to be. I’m sure if I knew what exactly was going to happen, it’d be slightly better. No one has said a word to me yet. I haven’t asked. I know they’ve plans of some sort. I wonder what they are.

To be honest, I don’t even know exactly when my father will stop working.

There is a deeper fracture in this, mainly in that it returns me to the choice between pursuing the arts and getting a steady job. Sure, they’re not exclusive, and it’s all a little hard to explain, and I expect plenty of people to make their assumptions and say, That’s not a problem; you can have both, but that’s not really what I mean.

To condense this and not turn it into a whiny post, let’s just say that I think there is a certain pressure, in actually ‘getting serious’ about one of them. A choice, in that sense. It doesn’t mean that I have to give up one or the other, but I don’t believe that it’s possible for me to set myself up to take on both. And in that, questions start piling up, like if writing is all it’s cooked up to be, then why is it that whenever I make up my mind to do something about it, to work on it, I feel like I’m letting somebody down? And if that’s the case, what does it really mean to me?

The questions have always been there. The answers are not always obvious, if they should exist at all. I think this new development tempers the world-conquering positivity I was having just a couple of days ago with a sharp tug at my ankles, dragging me back to the dirt. The imperatives and priorities have shown up to remind me that they haven’t gone away, and the questions still need answering.

Did I get answers back then? I thought I did. Now I can’t be sure.

The problem is, I could actually make something out of this, or my blind faith could really just be the only thing keeping me from recognising that I’m just a clown. I can’t tell. Taken that way, the arts seem like a gamble at best, and a childish idealism at worst. And I think I’ve just run out of time and the world is not going to wait any longer for me to grow up.

d

Highway 66

New Phone

I got myself a new phone, being the Nokia E66. I had to get rid of the rewards thing that my provider was giving me so I had to do it by this week. I couldn’t decide on a phone I really liked so I settled with this, mainly because reviews and opinions have been almost uniformly positive, I know I can more or less trust Nokia with their software, and it has a boatload of features (that I probably will take the time to explore).

When I first got my hands on it, I was surprised. It’s much sexier than it is in the promo pictures. At least, I had the idea that it was some fat plastic piece of thing, and I was wrong. Oh boy, I was so happy to be wrong.

So far, it’s been great. I don’t ask a lot out of my phone, but you must also remember that not many phones get the basics right. This has good performance, a reasonably nice interface, and it all comes together in a sleek package, so I think I could really get used to this.

Nominees

Nominees for the Singapore Literature Prize have been announced. I couldn’t find a link anywhere, so you’ll just have to imagine there are a few nominees. I have to admit to only knowing a couple of the works that have been nominated, one of them being Wena Poon’s Lions In Winter. [via Lions In Winter] And even then, I haven’t read a single one of them.

There’s a reason I don’t read much local literature. Actually, there are probably many reasons. But I tend to think that one of them is based on a want to approach Singapore in my own way, to deal with the notion of this country in my own terms. The Harold Bloom term “anxiety of influence” comes to mind, but with a sort of twist. I think it’s a fear that in seeing how others paint the country, I might feel a pressure to move in some similar way.

Of course, another reason is that we don’t exactly have a bustling scene in literature over here, so you don’t hear very much of things and aren’t compelled to pull yourself away from the latest Coetzee or stuff.

But I’ll get to it one day, when I have that bit more confidence in what it is I do.

This Might Work

If it does, the following is an embedded player that has Neil Gaiman reading you the first chapter of his new book, The Graveyard Book. He is a great writer, of course, but he also reads (or maybe performs might be the better term) texts wonderfully.

I’m looking forward to reading it.

d

Thursday Photo: parking lots

Wonky iTunes

Really Crazy

I’ve never been one to complain about iTunes. In fact, I quite like it, contrary to the opinions of many friends. Recently, though, it’s been hard to maintain that stance.

You see, my iTunes is going insane. Seriously. Like an angry panda. It started quite a long time ago when it wouldn’t play some tracks completely. They would always skip to the end after reaching a certain point. I assumed I had bad sectors or bad files. Then the problems disappeared for a while. I thought that maybe it was just acting up.

Then cover art began to disappear. Not completely, of course. That would be too obvious. My iTunes Evil Edition is far more devious than that. They started to disappear from select songs within albums. In other words, the album art would suddenly not show up in my iPod.

I thought it had something to do with the fact that I had loaded up my iPod library on an Eee PC and maybe it just screwed up the cover art.

I found out I was wrong when more cover art began to disappear. I hadn’t changed a thing.

Then just last week, I had trouble editing ID Tag information. With some files, the information would be lost forever and I appeared to have some form of file corruption because the files when replaced by exactly the same ones from my back-ups would turn out to be a tiny bit smaller. Like 0.01MB smaller. I’ve since learnt that this happens when I change ID Tag information in bulk. Specifically cover art information. And it only happens to one or two files in a lot of ten to twenty. When it happens, I can’t change any information on the tag.

And just yesterday, I noticed some inconsistent genre labelling which wouldn’t happen since I label everything by the lot. But it happened. Like they refused to be changed along with them others.

I did correct them, but it was unnerving to see.

Today, I played one of my favourite albums, only to see that the second track had mysteriously been pushed to the last. This occurred only on my iPod. It’s still the second track on my iTunes.

…

I’ll have to see where this goes. There are few things on this earth that make me glum to see, and angry pandas are one of them.

The Graveyard Book…

…has been published. [via Neil Gaiman's Journal] Congrats to Mr. Gaiman, and I look forward to reading it soon. After I get tomorrow’s test out of the way first, of course, and then make my trip down to the bookstore.

d