Q

1.

recently i read two book consecutively and by pure coincidence they echoed each other, at least in a skeletal manner.

Amélie Nothomb’s Book of Proper Names and Anais Nin’s Children of the Albatross. at this juncture i need to confess that i’m now and always biased towards Nothomb. besides her ridiculous endings which are surreal to the point of being sublime, i can hold nothing against her. she’s refined but wild, seldom predictable and never pretentious. i don’t think i knew how to read before i read Nothomb. but that’s just me.

both were of orphaned dancers centering their life around ballet. Nothomb’s pursuing perfection in dance and the body, Nin’s similarly exploring the beauty of dance.

the Book of Proper Names was a Mobius strip of un-orientable surrealism – you start out thinking okay, i’ve got this, but it unravels somewhere (you don’t know where) and you find that you’ve exited reality so quietly you’re standing in exactly the same place but everything’s been warped to be completely unrecognizable. Nin’s on the other hand, starts with a creeping sense of unknowing but settles into what i call Coffeehouse Romance.

i dread Coffeehouse Romance in every book/film/cartoon/show i encounter. basically it is anything romantic that is pretty. i don’t know why it scares me so much, but love should be ugly and confusing and completely flawed and wrong because that’s the only way i can believe it. this is not me being disillusioned. Coffeehouse Romance has this insidious way of making me highly conscious of myself holding a book and reading words that are putting images in my mind. it reminds me that i’m reading which is probably the worst case of book-cock-block there is to reading.

probably the best book you can read that balances absolute strangeness with sheer truthfulness in relationships is Shopgirl. it’s highly cognitive, and this analysis is at work even at the novella’s most compact mass of weepy. read if only for Ray Porter’s dissection of how to romance and Jeremy’s intellectual breakthrough which was frankly incredibly sexy and makes me very hopeful about life and men.

the Book of Proper Names, fortunately, had a very hideous streak of romance that was completely weird – and came up only towards the end with a brilliant little front piece about it. like i told Celine, Nothomb’s endings are a shitload of crap. deliberately and rightly so. endings are probably the least important part of the book, and it is probably the least important thing about ourselves too. look at it this way – when it ends, you’ll have to no way to cerebral-ize, celebrate, or mope about it. in a way: it doesn’t matter at all. by extension – book endings don’t matter.

also. i always feel uneasy with endings. because from there there a million billion permutations of how it will. even if it ends in the protagonist’s death, what happens to everyone else? an ending that very explicitly feels like it says: ‘yes. it ends here. it is happy/sad and how it will be forever’, i feel cheated. of course there’s no way around this catch-22 so i live with all the endings i read and get blown away by crazy ones like Nothomb. maybe i should try sci-fi with gimmicky time-travelling. also i suck at writing endings.

2.

i stopped caring much about University. or at least not as much as people want me to. it’s not that i’ve gone complacent or nonchalant about education, but these few months made me realize how minimally school affects what i know.

i get excited thinking about re-entering a place where i’d be given topics to study and where i’d get to learn, but then i thought that right before JC as well. in a way it’s my own fault. i constantly compartmentalize ‘learning’ from ‘school-studying’. the only real way of learning is to build them neuron links – where you actually become more intelligent and shit. somehow i’ve stubbornly offered only the most shallow information-storing, copy-pasting part of my mind to school. we like to think that the education system is flawed and all – which partly yes because it’s time constraint practically forces us to offer only that shallow brain bit (most efficient in the short-run), but it’s about how much i wanted to give as well i guess.

also i have a serious thing about competition (I AM MORTALLY AFRAID OF IT) and i almost never want proper help from people. in J1 a teacher had me aside because she noticed that i seemed averse to asking for help from teachers. and i’ve known this about myself all along – i study best alone and in fact, i learn best when i do everything myself. by everything i mean picking what i want to learn, researching for information on my own, and self-evaluating. (that is probably most of my friends too.) this also means i am academically anti-social. competition paralyses me into wanting to give up and i’d actually much prefer if lessons go like: ‘ok go home and learn about the Cold War by yourself good bye.’ and then also i am incredibly adhd and distracted during everything except lit lectures.

in a very strange, warped way – the better and more effective my teachers are, the less likely i might actually perform.

that’s basically the summary of my schooling life from p1 – j2.

the only reason why i’ve not failed immensely in school is because nearing major exams (and when you’re near death you get that whole gungho, take the plunge shit)  a part of me goes – dammit i don’t care already just do anything i want to do. and i’d basically do everything i’m not supposed to do and throw away a worrying amount of notes i’ve been hoarding and sieve out the essential parts and sleep A LOT and watch A LOT of TV (which i maintain is the only way to regulate brain activity). and somehow these techniques always work out right for me. but i don’t want last-ditch successes all the time.

i really, really want to have a stretch of school life where i actually start out right – meaning no one’s telling me how to do it or giving me resources that distract me from my own strangeling learning patterns. so while i’m excited about entering Uni, i’ve pretty much stopped caring which course i’m taking or where i’m going. because i realized it doesn’t matter. wherever you go you’re just learning the same thing. TO THINK. i just want someone to bark at me to learn something and i’ll head off on my own to be some kind of self-built supergenius.

3.

have you watched The General?

you haven’t. go watch it.