Still, I hope I cope.

I’m currently on Coetzee’s Disgrace. I’m just about to finish it actually. Then I’ll go about doing the presentation thing that we’re supposed to do in the tutorials. I will probably talk about animals.

Meanwhile, I think I will take a bit of a break from reading my texts and do some other book next, just for personal reading pleasure. I’ll figure out what that is soon.

On the topic of enjoying myself, I shall take myself to the pictures in the weekend, I hope, and catch a movie or something. Or maybe I should go loan some movie. I was thinking either an Ingmar Bergman or a David Lynch picture. I haven’t done a David Lynch film for a long time. I want to watch his most recent film, Inland Empire, so I might consider going to look for that.

On a side note, I might go to the PC Show/IT Show/PC Fair/IT Fair/Whateveryoucallit this weekend. I’m not looking for very much though it’s nice to drop by once in a while. I could do with a hard drive just to fill up the slot I have to spare. I could pick up a monitor because mine seems to be having a bit of a problem, though I don’t think that’s too great of a worry right now and that’s a few hundred dollars I don’t quite want to spend right now. Then there’s the issue of my speakers but I don’t think you can get very good deals on speakers at these events anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. In the end, it’s more of an excuse to actually go out and buy something, really.

Right, time to polish off Disgrace.

• Elizabeth Costello, J. M. Coetzee. My favourite Coetzee book; one day I just felt the need to get it onto my shelves, so there it is.
• Tinkers, Paul Harding. Recent Pulitzer Prize winner; I have no idea what it is about.
• Collected Poems, Philip Larkin. Hello, Mr. Larkin! Always good to see you.
• The Ruined Map, Kōbō Abe. Probably less well-known around these parts; here is a tasty article about him. [via The Millions]

Textbooks I Need

So according to the reading list of my two subjects, here are the texts that I need:

• Crick Crack Monkey, Merle Hodge.
• The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro. As you will know I have never read this before; people always talk about it, and I’m quietly hopeful that it’ll be as good as Never Let Me Go, if not better; I was somehow quite disappointed with Nocturnes.
• In the Castle of My Skin, George Lamming.
• Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie.
• Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee. I have this; my first reading of this was a library copy so this is brand new; it was on my waiting list; it is one of the few books that I won’t have to buy.
• Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. I have this too, and it is in fact one of the oldest books on my shelves; it is somewhat out of shape and very yellow, but that only adds to its charm; one of the books of my youth and therefore a personal favourite, but I’m not too sure about how it will fare with all of these years that have passed.
• Texts for nothing, Samuel Beckett. I suppose this means Stories and Texts for Nothing, though it could also mean that without the three stories.
• Contempt, Alberto Moravia.
• Marat/Sade, Peter Weiss. Ah yes, otherwise known as The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.
• A Woman Alone, etc., Rame and Fo. Hmm, I guess I’ll have to ask about the et cetera bit.
• A Heart So White, Javier Marías. I was actually planning to get started on Marías because I’ve read more than a few recommendations for Your Face Tomorrow; I had not quite anticipated that school would give me a helping hand of some sort.
• Crabwalk, Gűnter Grass.
• Selected poems by Zbigniew Herbert. I’ve only read one of his poems, so this is pretty much a great opportunity.

Meanwhile, Movies

Oh yes, we’re doing a few movies too:

• Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola. This is the only film I’ve watched on this list.
• Ararat, Atom Egoyan.
• Ulysses’ Gaze, Theo Angelopoulos.

Time, Mr. Freeman?

That’s actually more to cover than I thought, so I don’t know where my normal day-to-day reading will fit in, but I hope I manage to make time. Here are some of the immediate highlights from my waiting list:

• The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), Macedonio Fernández. I’ve been waiting a long time to read this.
• To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf.
• Rimbaud Complete, Arthur Rimbaud. Hello, Mr. Rimbaud! Always good to see you, too.
• The Implacable Order of Things, José Luís Peixoto.

And of course, a bunch of other things.

“Ordinarily, I wouldn’t contemplate them… but these are extraordinary times.”

d

Today’s edition of the Big Breakfast takes on a less critical and more personal tone because the past two stories have dealt with something of considerable importance to me. Both “Malvern Hills” and “Nocturne” deal in part with the cost of making music, and in that way, explore the nature of art-making. So it’s going to be less critical and more reflective (or rambling, depending on your mileage).

In “Malvern Hills”, the narrator—I don’t remember him having a name—struggles to find acceptance among the music circles. The first reason that he proposes is that he doesn’t have the equipment, which is all quite fair, to say the least. The second reason perhaps comes across as being more perplexing. One would think that the fact that he writes his own music should be something of a bonus. That creativity is frowned upon seems inherently self-defeating in the field of music.

Whatever the reasons, it leaves the narrator more than a little frustrated with the state of affairs. He doesn’t give up, though. He retreats to the hills with every intention of writing more music and even starting his own band when he leaves the hills. It’s a position that involves quite a bit of confidence, and it says something that he keeps going. “If disappointments do come, you will carry on still.”

If you think about it, he must have some remarkable sense of self-confidence if he carries on in the face of such persistent disappointment. It is a hard thing to trust yourself; it’s easier to have someone to tell you that you’re on the right track. For the most part, the narrator doesn’t, and in spite of this, his passion for making the music that he wants to make subsists.

Whether you like him or not, the narrator stands firmly for what he believes in. It is a stance that causes him much frustration, as epitomised by the encounter when Maggie asks that he stop practising. Her manner comes across as condescending, which infuriates the protagonist. At this point, there is no question of the selfishness exhibited in his reaction, but his anger suggests a permanent friction—permanent, that is, as long as he stays the course.

The world around us is a practical one. Pragmatism is in fact sensible. The making of art, on the other hand, requires a definite degree of romanticism and dreaming. In an artist, the two necessarily have to find a balance, a task that can seem all rather Herculean. To me his indignation is promising because it means he hasn’t yet given into fear. (Compare this sense of coherence to Steve’s uncertainty.)

In short, the narrator in “Malvern Hills” has a stubborn insistence on making music his way. There is nothing to suggest that he is on the right track. In fact, almost everything seems to tell him otherwise. Therefore, it stands to reason that he persists out of belief in his work and his fairly tremendous self-confidence. The truth is, he may have no choice. No matter what happens around him and to him, his mind will always return to “that bridge passage that [he] still hadn’t got right.”

On the other hand, we do not find the same courage in Steve from “Nocturne”. If anything, these two protagonists share similar beliefs in terms of their music, but differ Steve is not quite as brave as his songwriting friend. To my mind, Steve sees the worth and measure of art, despite the admission that he’s “no stickler for artistic integrity”. Yet, not being quite as confident as the songwriter, finds himself hoping to get into the “big league”

Surely I can’t be the only person in recognising that this “big league” is nothing but the price of admission. If he doesn’t make it to the big league, Steve will essentially find himself left with the odd jobs and daily rehearsals. In effect, he will just remain trapped in his soundproof room, oblivious to the rest of the world as it is oblivious to him. It makes one ask: is it enough for a musician to hone his craft all by himself, to hear himself approach some kind of greatness alone? And how does a musician know if he’s any good anyway?

If you look at it this way, Steve’s ambition to make it to the “big league” is nothing more than a method of authentication—it allows him to say that there is some universal or even artistic quality to his work, that it’s no longer simply a functional undertaking. His aspiration to succeed is arguably driven by the want to prove—to others and to himself—that his music is more than just a form of employment.

So, poor Steve, left with little choice, it seems, buys into the commercial world—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he sells himself to the commercial world. After some halfhearted displays of defiance, Steve finally agrees to an op. Admittedly, he seems to have been duped into doing so by the preposterous lure that his manager lays out for him—“Once you’re healed up, she comes back…” It’s so preposterous that I cannot bring myself to believe that Steve seriously buys it. It appears to be more of an excuse, a shield to hide behind in case anything goes wrong or if he changes his mind. It allows him to hide his shame should he have to—notice how he blames Bradley for talking him into it near the end of the story.

Steve is a man who is not willing to allow his music to speak for itself. Fair enough, since this approach has never got him anywhere. It has, in fact, left him quite aggrieved, as with the case of Jake Marvell. Yet he forgets that in our world, popular opinion does not often affirm artistic merit. Nevertheless, very little avails him, and if he doesn’t have the nerve to believe in the isolated music of his soundproof room, then he’ll have to buy his metaphorical ticket and get his true and unappealing looks altered into the constructed image of a popular musician. The “real world”, so to speak, forces him to forge an artificial self.

The thought of it is somewhat depressing. After all, what sort of perverse game would have you sell your artistic dignity and integrity in order to prove your artistic merit? Musicians struggling to find validity in a society of commercialism; art fighting for its life in the face of pragmatism. It’s not a theme that’s by any means new to fiction, but it remains a compelling one because it describes part of the process of creating art.

Ishiguro’s musicians are not saints—they shouldn’t have to be. It’s true that they’re not always likeable, that they are often morally challenged, and also that they’re sometimes infuriatingly impractical. Maybe it is in this way that Ishiguro reminds us that they are human, as all artists are. That art is a human endeavour is fundamental to understanding why we champion it.

It is in this way that we find some of the challenges of making art illustrated in reading these two stories. In particular, they show how difficult it is to authenticate the value of one’s work—that is to say, how difficult it is to tell how you’re making anything that’s of any good. Steve chooses to do so by chasing after the “big league”. The songwriter in Malvern Hills is stubborn enough to stick to his guns. Whether or not either is ill-advised is up for debate, but what is clear to me is that they’re both going to keep going. Perhaps that is the nature of art, and, as Beckett would have it, even when we can’t go on, we’ll go on.

I’m reminded of the courage that the artists I admire possess. It is the courage to dream and to remain defiant. It is the courage to stand against the tide when you have to, even with the looming possibility that you’re on the wrong track. Most of all, it is the courage to face the soundproof silence, the blank page, the empty stage, and come out with the confidence that you can and will say what you have to say.

There is a scene in “Nocturne”, the most absurd scene, in which Steve, face bandaged, stands on stage with a turkey in his hand—or rather, his hand in a turkey—and is faced with a stranger talking on the phone. The stranger dismisses this curious sight as “some kind of magic show maybe”. I wonder how differently he would think if he had heard—or, indeed, read—the whole story.

It’s probably not so far removed from watching one of his performances. Imagine that: an anonymous man on a stage stands with a saxophone, an instrument that you recognise but can’t quite identify with—a metal turkey, if you will. If you don’t dismiss it all as just some kind of magic show, how he got there and what he’s going to tell you could actually be magic. It could be a jazz piece, a ballad, or indeed a nocturne.

But until he gets that affirmation, this anonymous man will have to find hope in the hopelessness. Whether or not he does so by staying true to himself may be a secondary point, because whatever it is, an artist must first be able to keep going.

d

In “Come Rain Or Come Shine”, we are presented with a story about unfulfilled potential. It is a tale that uses the idea of what could be and what is to illustrate the nature of life in terms of how we find—or fail to find—meaning and completeness in living.

What was perhaps most striking to me about the story at first is that it’s steeped in artificiality. Characters, for instance, keep the truth from one another. Charlie adds something to Raymond’s room every time he visits, but the addition is typically superfluous and therefore pointless. The apartment seems to us contrived, bought, manmade. Charlie also makes up excuses to visit the dentist, as you will recall. One may even argue the way in which Raymond is used “as a tool to express your rage and frustration” (and more) carries with it a certain sense of falseness. Initially, no one wants Raymond there just because they want Raymond the person there. He is simply an apparatus for Charlie and later Emily.

At first glance, this appears to be used in order to criticise hypocrisy and dishonesty, in terms of how people lead their lives. For one thing, the deterioration of Emily—forgive me the avarice to say so—and Raymond’s increasing age seem to make their lives appear even more hollow when placed side by side with all of these deceits.

Interestingly, however, the story is concluded with a lie. Raymond has to pretend that he has forgotten about the music he used to listen to for the sake of his friends. The entire resolution is supposed to hinge on this. It all works out, but it then that asks the question of what is more true: that Raymond tells the truth and remembers all that music in front of Emily or his friendship and the sacrifice that he ends up making. The truth, it seems, might have kept Ray from truly fulfilling himself. A lie can be more than a lie; in this case, it can reveal Ray’s true nature, intentions, and the things that are important to him.

This sort of doubling effect occurs throughout the entire story. Ishiguro provides an early indication of this through his descriptions of music—a line that is sung ironically; Georgia as being a place and a girl; and Ray Charles singing the happy lyrics of “Come Rain Or Come Shine” as “pure heartbreak”.

In a similar way, Raymond somehow threads the fine line between being a friend and a lover to Emily, and if you look at it, it’s a little hard to divorce Raymond from Charlie. The two of them define one another. Charlie is what Raymond ought to become, with all of his success and money and all that, but he doesn’t; Ray has the one thing that Charlie can never have, a supposedly good taste in music. They’re only complete with one another, and it’s little surprise, then, that Ishiguro picked the names—ahem—Ray and Charles for his two leading men.

This raises the important notion that something can be described in two seemingly opposite ways simultaneously without a contradiction. “Come Rain Or Come Shine” can be both happy and heartbreaking. Similarly, the people in this story have to juxtapose what could be and what is, because it is only thus that they become complete.

In a sense, it can be argued that the greatest juxtaposition occurs between the unfulfilled potential of the people within and the reality of what they already have.

There are so many things in the story that are presented as things that could have been. A child never comes along for Charlie and Emily, for example, and Raymond never gets to be godfather. Speaking of Raymond, he is a guy who is essentially a failure. Charlie even comments on him and tells him what to do and what not to, but he just never gets to it. Meanwhile, Charlie has a pursuit of the “other” him, or maybe we can just say that he’s just interested in someone else, even knowing that it is never going to work. Emily too has similar dreams, hoping that one day she will find the ultimate guy, someone even more successful than Charlie.

This extends to the images used. Notably, there is the image of the roof terrace, complete with two picture-perfect lovers in the imagination of Raymond. Then there is Emily’s party image, where you’re dancing and the people don’t go away as you’d expect them to. It is an image made for a motion picture, and perhaps that is precisely why it fails to materialise.

And ultimately, Raymond has to become less than he could be—by feigning ignorance—in order to help his friends.

In summary, the folks within this story are always left to rue what could have been, which also explains why they always seem to be looking for some more. The irony is, these are people who keep looking, just barely realising that they’ve always had what they needed. Raymond the Prince of Whiners is really the best friend that Emily has and the sort of friend that she needs. Emily is the girl for Charlie, always has been, even if he’s convinced that there’s an “other” him. Similarly, Emily knows she’s always loved Charlie, even as she looks at men with even more success.

So look at it this way: “Come Rain Or Come Shine” is not a story about artificiality. It is also simplistic to suggest that it is a story about tearing up the constructed and manmade beauty of the apartment to get to the truth—the metaphorical destruction of artificiality, if you will. It is clear that life is rarely black-and-white, but Ishiguro takes us further into a meditation on the nature of life.

In this story, lies become necessary, living is characterised by failure, and the world around us seems almost entirely artificial. It is tempting to think that the story describes life in this sort of miserable way—albeit with a sense of humour. Yet, remember that Ishiguro still provides a measure of hope, because while these people (and we) never actually find the perfect things and fulfil the perfect destinies, they find love and friendship. Perhaps it is in this way—a combination of idealism and reality, aspiration and failure—that we complete the human experience. Life is, after all, more than a single thing at any one time.

d

Here’s a picture of the old rack where I displayed some things. I had to clear this out because there isn’t space for it anymore.

These are some of the things I displayed. They’re going to some dark corner, or some happy buyer.

Here are the empty shelves. The new one is on the right.

I wanted to sort out all of my books properly, so I took them all out. Here you see all of them on the floor, about 250 of them and 30 waiting to join them. You’ll also notice a jar under my bed. That’s my pencil jar. Beside the jar are an assortment of little things, mostly keepsakes and mementos, because I’m too sentimental for my own good. These sit in the free spaces of my bookshelves.

Photography books went in here. The space here is slightly longer. We chose this new piece of furniture deliberately because it’ll accommodate the larger photography books.

Here are the books all sorted out. On the left shelf, you’ll find most of the fiction. Of interest, there’s a music section in the lower part of the shelf. The right shelf comprises mostly of graphic novels. There’s a section for academic writing and other forms of non-fiction. There’s also a children’s section right at the top. It all looks rather empty now, but I’m sure it won’t be long before it fills up.

There’s some stuff left to do before I can consider the packing done. One of those things is hanging up these lumadessa prints, which I received for my birthday all those months ago.

Looking ahead, I’ll want to fill up that top space so that the jar isn’t so lonely. I’m also trying to think up a nice way to make platforms such that more books can go in. The problem with that is that the books are all of different sizes so I can’t just put planks in or the like.

d

On the surface, “Crooner” has quite a simplistic plot. It seems to have a direct message about love and practicalities, and I think it’s fair to say that that’s a description that’s perfectly reasonable. Yet, the story also presents us with a number of slightly unusual elements, like a curious fixation on nationalities and a rather implausible excuse for the whole divorce. In a sense, the story works fine if you take it at the surface level, but it also makes certain implications that may hint at a more complex truth. In fact, this image-truth duality is found within the story as well, and it’s what we’re going to talk about in our inaugural edition of this commentary column.

“Crooner” is a story built on—for the lack of a better word—images. There is a sense of fabrication that permeates the tale. In particular, Venice has turned into a farce. It builds itself on the expectations of tourists. As a result, musicians are selected based on the modernity of their instruments as well as their nationality. Poor Jan is forced to play through a boring repertoire that’s not quite the “classical stuff” or the “latest pop hits” but something that the audience will recognise, like music from “The Godfather” (which almost seems to mock the fact that this takes place in Italy).

On the other hand, consider Jan, who lives by forging an image for and of himself. He is compelled to do so because he’s not well-liked but also indispensable. (Speaking of which, consider the somewhat contradictory nature of how it is perceived that tourists will not like guitars even if guitars are indispensable.) He has to get himself a jazz model guitar so he doesn’t come across as being a rock n’ roll musician. He even has to disguise his real name Janacek as a nickname. Jan is a foreigner even if he does everything in his power not to come across as one.

One of the things that I found difficult to reconcile at first was the nationalities. It’s harped on again and again by Tony Gardner, who insists that there are things Jan will not understand because he came from a “communist country”. Think also of the scenes on the gondola, where the three men are of completely different nationalities. What’s particularly interesting to me there is Jan’s relationship with Vittorio—the foreigner becomes the insider because of the presence of the American. The idea of foreigners first appeared significant to me because of how Ishiguro goes back to it time and again. If you look at it this way, “Crooners” is really a story of two foreigners—a guitarist attempting to fit in among the Venetians and an American tourist who cannot resist distinguishing himself from the people he comes across on the basis on nationality.

In the context of what I’m saying here, perhaps Ishiguro is pointing out to us that people react to others based on such generalisations, that there is significance in a person’s image (or the lack of one). This whole idea is reinforced with Tony’s Pork Chop Tutorial, which is essentially a hilarious generalisation of Milwaukeeans.

To put it simply, one’s image has definite power, and this is why nationality matters so much. Generalisations such as those we make based on nationality allow someone to shift in identity, in image (as Jan attempts to). I’d like to think, therefore, that it’s a signal from Ishiguro to realise the dual nature of an actual object or person and the corresponding image.

The relationship between an image and a true self—if it may be described as such—is explored throughout the story. In a way, things are never what they appear to be on the surface. There is the farcical Venice of tourism; there is Jan the faux Venetian; and there is the way in which love is never like in the love songs. Most cutting, perhaps, is the scene in which Jan proclaims, “We did it. We got her by the heart.” In a cruel turn of events, he finds that he’s right, but just not in the way that he had initially imagined—first the image, and then the truth.

The most fascinating presentation of this image-truth pair to me is presented in Lindy. When we first meet her, she is talkative, rude, and almost a caricature of a person. This side of Lindy seems to be more of a symbol than a human being. In fact, when the trio in the gondola see her at the window, Jan comments that she “wasn’t much more than a silhouette.”

Yet the moments where Lindy really comes alive are in Tony’s stories of her. Here we see her more thoroughly characterised. We see her ambition, her charm, and why Tony fell in love with her. It is curious to think, then, that it is this version of Lindy, living in imaginations and stories, that comes off more vividly.

More than with anyone else, of course, the image-truth idea surfaces with Tony Gardner. In fact, it practically defines him. Gardner is right at the heart of the story, but who is he, really? To me, he is first and foremost a man intending to leave things behind. The question then becomes if he actually manages to do so. It’s an easier-said-than-done task, as Jan’s mother will tell you. “If only we could leave things behind like that.”

The two Tony’s in this story are easily identified. First of all, there’s the human Tony. It is he—not the guy on the cover of those records—whose hair turns grey. Consider Tony in the gondola. At first, he sits down so hard he nearly makes it capsize. Then, as he calls out to Lindy below the window, he rocks the gondola “alarmingly”. While singing to her, his posture is such that Jan fears he will lose his balance. Tony the human being is a clumsy old man whose best years are past him.

Compare this to the Tony who sings, whose “voice came out just the way [Jan] remembered it.” This is the same Tony who will live in the memories and imaginations of Jan, Jan’s mother, and all of his fans. This is a Tony of importance. Even the title is telling. It is not Tony the lover, Tony the humbled man that survives, but rather, Tony the crooner, the celebrity, the star. This is Tony’s image, and it is powerful because, in a way, Tony the crooner is deathless.

Yet the question returns: Does Tony succeed in leaving things behind?

The implausibility of the notion that he has to go ahead with a divorce in order to make his comeback successfully disturbed me to no end initially. (It still disturbs me now, though to a lesser degree.) How could he possibly even think that it’s a good idea?

To justify that, it’s imperative to keep in mind that, if we are to believe everything he’s told us, he clearly loves Lindy a lot. This whole incident torments him, and I think it’s clear how distraught he is by the end of the story. With that in mind, losing Lindy is a painful price to pay for Tony to return to being a star. It’s not something he manages without reluctance. He has a very callous way of putting it all—what with the new young girl he has his eyes on and all his that’s-just-the-way-things-are explanations—but it seems to me that it’s actually agonising for him.

Having established this, I propose that the whole conceit of the divorce being related to his comeback succeeds best when you think of Tony’s image and his true person to be so removed (or, ahem, divorced) from one another that he sees it as a necessary step to lose all traces of Tony the human being in order to make his comeback. The divorce is more painful for him than he tries to make it sound, and if you follow this train of thought, it then becomes a price that he’s willing to pay, but for what exactly? Well, if we go along with that, then it becomes logical to think that what Tony cannot let go of is in fact his former stardom.

In the choice between true love and his comeback, it is the latter which Tony Gardner fails to resist. He explains it quite clearly to Jan, that he’s not finished yet, always seeming to be in control, but I am of the opinion that this is in fact the thing that he has to leave behind. And having seen a more vital Lindy thriving in memories rather than real life, who is to say that he’s making the wrong choice?

Ultimately, what emerges is a picture of Tony as a man in love with the idea of what he could be, a man intensely attracted to his own constructed identity, and perhaps most of all, a man attempting to resist his own humanness. He is an old man, a clumsy man, and arguably an unhappy man, but these are elements that affect Tony the human being, not Tony the star. In a manner of speaking, this fear of his is greater than his love for Lindy. Or to put simply, he does what he does because he isn’t able to let go of his towering image as a star.

In this respect, Tony may not be at all different from Jan’s mother, a woman who “never got out”. He is a man unable to get out of the trap of his own image and therefore unable to leave things behind. The relationship between Tony’s image and Tony’s true self is comparable to the beautiful image of the gondola and the restaurant of lights. He appears to be in control of his own trajectory, but that control may be entirely illusive. Much like the gondola and the “party boat”, it is hard to tell who is leaving whom behind.

I’m very tired now. It is a good time to sleep. Particularly because I need to get up early tomorrow despite it being a public holiday. Of course, every time I say something like this, it means I probably won’t be sleeping any time soon.

Today was a particularly hot day. That is, even for our sunny country. I guess I picked the wrong day to have a rest. While I was doing my laces before leaving the house, I’d already begun to sweat. And of all things, I had to spend the whole day outside, walking in the open quite a bit too.

This looks like a busy weekend, and I’m not sure how much work I’m going to get done, but I’d expected weeks like this. It’s why I don’t feel particularly good about myself whenever I seem to be cutting into bonus territory. Typically it ends up being a sort of buffer for days like these.

The book club is… hmm, it’s probably too early to tell. I have cause for optimism and also cause for pessimism. I think we’ll see in a week or two.

I’m not particularly tired now, but judging by the structure of this post, my brain is already working out of order. Just let me ramble for a tiny bit more.

It was nice to see all of those friends today. Sure beats the typical stay-at-your-desk day, but it can’t happen every day. Partly because I need to work. Partly because they need to work. And partly because we would really get sick of one another.

I want to drop by at IKEA and get one of those glass oh wait I think I’ve mentioned this before.

Results are coming out on Monday. Exciting times, these. I don’t really know what to expect, particularly because NUS results days are like a whole season of 24.

Finally, I want to say that I just finished Flowers For Algernon, one of my first loves, for the second time. I think I look at it very differently now, though. I also bought a book for two dollars yesterday. It’s a second-hand (third? fourth? fifth?) copy of Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness.

Okay, I’m done for the night.

d

This week, I’m going back to camp for some physical training before my IPPT. That’s a ways away, so this thing will last a few weeks.

Apart from that, I’m also gunning for a giant milestone with respect to my current project. I think I might hit it by tomorrow or Wednesday. I can’t really tell. I’m unpredictable in that sort of way, even as I try to assert a degree of routine into my work. The thing that remains predictable, however, is that I’m a relatively slow worker.

My book club is supposed to get started next week, so this week will likely be used to make preparations of some sort. Saying that is comforting because it makes me feel like there is something to prepare for. The truth is, I don’t actually know. We’re doing Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes (did I say that already?) and taking it all very slow. I hope it’s a nice book, and I hope we talk about interesting things. Most of all, I hope it’ll be fun.

I think new furniture is supposed to arrive this week or the next. My bookshelf is one of the pieces, and it looks like we’ll be sorting the whole library all over again. I’m considering sorting books by different categories, and by first names instead of last (a practice that I have in place now), and we’re also thinking about ways to expand the storage capacity since we don’t have all that much room and the number of books is only going to get larger.

I should drop by at IKEA one of these days and get those lovely glass things that look like candy containers. Do you call them bottles? flasks? I was all rather sure that there was a specialised name for them; I’m not so sure anymore. I want to use those for my pencils.

I’m looking for nice art. Maybe some natural history would be nice. I’m putting it on one of the walls. Whichever wall remains. Any suggestions? I’m trying to make it a bit compatible with my lumadessa prints and the rest of my furniture.

Right, onto work.

d

I’m now approximately two thirds of the way into the first draft by estimation. Well, actually, I’m more like four sevenths of the way into it. This is about the time where I start to wonder whether all of this actually works. You see, if it doesn’t work, then this will all have been a very bad idea and I probably shouldn’t have started on it. If it works, then… well, great. I’ve not grown a lot better at identifying these things, unfortunately.

I will more or less only know by the end of it. That’s just the way I am. It is partly due to how I basically don’t have very clear ideas about where I’m headed about 80% of the way. It just evolves as I go along, and things can change fairly drastically before I’m done with it. So there’s no real way for me to get a feel for whether or not it’s going to be a success until it’s all done and sitting in front of me.

Meanwhile, the best thing I can do is just not to worry and to try to get it done, making it as good as I can in the process. Worrying really just incapacitates you and gets you nowhere. I’m already a slow writer to begin with, so I don’t really need anything debilitating.

Books Arrived

All of my books have arrived rather safely and they make me very happy. Slight damage here and there but that’s okay. A few of them have really surprised me because they’re prettier than I thought they’d be. I’ll get to wrapping them soon enough. Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow night. Just as soon as I pull myself away from work.

Movies, Orwell

I’ve been watching old videos and new, revisiting film favourites and trying to unearth new ones. I try to do that on a regular basis though I can’t say I’ve been very diligent. I’ve also tried to be diligent with my volume of Orwell’s essays. I’m going at about a couple a day, though that seems to mean that I might end up taking a very long time. Oh well, patience, as they always tried to tell me, is something of a virtue. I sure hope it is.

d

Initially, I thought there would be two books inside, because it was just so big. But no, there was only one and it was Hatfield’s Herbal in a nice hardbound edition. Because I’d seen the more recent paperback before, I didn’t think that the hardback would be this big, but that’s certainly fine with me.

It’s a really nice looking book and I haven’t felt so happy about the simple fact of getting a really pretty book since… Heck, I really don’t remember. It’s probably a sad reflection on how I’ve not got a purely pretty book in a long, long time. Oh well, this more than makes up for it.

It smells wonderful. The pages are lovely to touch. And all this for just fifteen dollars. Thank you, Book Depository; thank you, Penguin; and thank you, Ms. Hatfield.

On a slightly different note, still five books to come, though I kind of doubt any of them will be as pretty. They are all standard paperbacks that is the norm for giamsiap students such as yours truly. Besides, paperback editions really help save on the shelf space, or so I would want to believe.

I think I’ll have to build a couple of platforms into my shelves so that I can put a few more books in. I’m not sure how that’s going to work. The new one will be coming in a week or two, but if nothing else, it serves as a very decent reminder that I don’t have as much space as I would like to have…

Meanwhile, I’m going to add my new book to my growing waiting list…

d