Musings. Ex Libris

Studying Children’s Literature and reading several likeminded young adolescent fictions these days remind me of tireless repetition, which is believed to be a significant technique widely used in those books. I never really like repetition, nor assume it dreadfully dull, for with the evocation of both rather wicked-looking twins in Diane Arbus’ picture and The Shining, an odd feeling of grotesquerie creeps up behind my back. Yes, it is certainly the image of two identical selves that really scares me, for whom are you going to fight off first? Nevertheless, the benefit of employing repetition in children books is psychologically affirmed. It is generally believed that there is no better way of memorizing things promptly and effectually than having a nagging one dinning them like rambles into your ears. Therefore, with children books once grasping the template of plots in the first chapter, the other ones are just another flip of the coin. I reckon the complacent predictability of those...

When being asked about the drawbacks of her budding career, Diane Arbus revealed a rather unsettling facet of her job as a photographer to get almost perversely intimate with the people in her shots. Having the reluctance to intrude upon others’ personal lives is just a euphemism for snooping too closely around them. An impish peep show turns into a grotesque freak show eventually, hence the harrowing effect of how Arbus’ works present. Both Rear Window and Blowup tackle the unexpected outcome of an initially random peeping. The antics in the movies are ubiquitously replicated still now, that whenever a curious george peeps, it is merely and ultimately a highly-entertaining murder he will seek out. The abode I’m currently staying in offers a grand view which is fortunately not plagued by any buildings flanking by or protruding in front. For Monet he would probably look beyond to the infinity of the sky and marvel at its subtle vicissitudes; Munch, on the other hand, transfix his eyes o...

I conclude the incident that evokes my greatest bewilderment is getting lost. Lost not in an utterly unfamiliar land but a familiar labyrinthe where all paths lead to the same starting point. It is like tracing your way out in the lines of God’s palm which proves indisputably futile the attempt. Several synonymous experiences I’ve had, much to the general disbelief, stamp on my nightmarish horror. Few of the many trips to Singapore consist collisions with festival days. I slink from overwhelming hubbubs so any authentic festivities are stranger to us. However once after a gorged supper on greasy Thai culinary, I raised an uneventful suggestion of taking a walk around the vicinities. My curiosity of nightlife was then still in its embryonic and most fermenting stage, and a further suggestion was made of ambling to the harbor through the festive crowd. An outrageous stomachache ensued when my family and I were obscured and almost swallowed by a looming mob of people. Witnessing lines of ...

Ever since relocating in Auckland to complete my university education, life has become more or less pseudo-vagabond. The whole year can be chopped into numerous portions, with me traveling tirelessly between Taiwan and New Zealand, neither of the two places in which I spend for a considerable period. A change of pace is essential but a change of ‘accelerated’ pace might appear overwhelming. Thankfully I do not have any glaring symptoms of disorientation. It is overtly pretentious for some to divine their ceaseless traveling as a cause leading to a subliminal consequence of ‘calling every place home,’ which is equivalent to ‘calling nowhere home.’ And a prolix of how they find their vagabond lives dreadfully lonely and inconceivable for human beings is expected to follow thus. As the intensity of my traveling increases, the first thing I perceived was how everyone seemed sulkily lonely or mad. Yes the whole world seems to be pervaded with extreme madness. I feel peculiar and dull of bei...

I’ve always aimed to be a nice girl, or I’ve being brought up to be one. It was transparent recently that I was gradually derailing from the justly road onto which a nice girl duly treads. Being in a certain character is not something that is delineated or suggestive, but rather an empirical awareness manifests in that person’s temperament. I sketched in my head surreptitiously the world I map out with which came intuitively one without boundaries or disciplines. I’m still holding the dogged belief that nothing can be explained by anything. It sounds prematurely maddening but I used to keep in my mind that everything I’d done was done for the sheer effort of striving to be a paragon to my children, if I did have one in the future and I’m sure I will have no matter what. However, the ideal starts to fragment when I’m having troubles impressing my parents. I may be pleasantly malleable but am sure can never be shoehorn into the mould my parents idealized. That was the time when I was ala...

Categorically I dislike melodramatics. People devote to melodramatics to perfect their creation. The purposefully-furrowed faces some adopt when boasting about the piquancy of a severely-tragic story which influences their creation. The faces that are teemed with wrinkles and creases, on they put an unworldly veil. If I happened to be an ant I would take refuge in one of those crisscross lines and guarantee the longevity of my inhabitation. I used to hold the receiver conventionally like how everybody holds, but now I have the natural inclination of holding it lateral, does that make me admirably histrionic? Vacillation is the commonest and dreariest symptom of a young adult who is trying too hard to assert himself. I’ve been vacillating like a tumbling ocean whose tides are already fizzled with cloying foams. The result is a doubtlessly exhausted body causes by constant rotundity. Headaches also occur occasionally. But my soul is never exhausted. It is generally believed that vacillat...

For days the odd feeling of a defunct mind is acute. All the fuelling motivation of undertaking some constructive task is nipped in the bud when all the words and ideas are suspended in a hackneyed chaos. Therefore I've sit and waited for the moment, the moment which some will divine as a slip of a thought across the mind, to come. I made it a goal of writing some proper songs this holiday but have yet to land in any presentable works. There are only snippets of songs which sound no smarter than nursery-rhymes, crop up uneventfully with distorted notes. Listening to those dreadful demos disgorged everything from my head into a notorious hole. A hodgepodge of anger and befuddlement tumbled in my stomach. I dislike the self-glorification of writing kooky songs only due to one's futility of producing beautiful if not coherent notes. It's the sublime excuse for those dogs in the manger. My stupidity of following the masters of Syd Barrett, Donovan, Marc Bolan and Jim Morrison o...

I deem that everybody is at least a monomania. Life will be lifeless if without a fixation. Some high-minded bigwig might dismiss fixation as the snag of the road to success, but they are too indifferent to calculate the impossibility without it. Those who are dogged about relinquishing fixations are the ones who sit in the pitch-dark. Sheer darkness they can only witness and hallucination comes imminently afterward. Sheer hallucination their mind ecstatically dwell upon, and monomaniacs they all somehow become. A fixation offers an excusable explanation to hound after something. The real intrigue behind such pestering perseverance is the feeling devoid of extreme indignation or hatred. There are certainly frustrations encountered from time to time, but with a fixation one will never grind his teeth and bite it from sheer impulsion, because the larger the wound the longer one will take to heal it. Heal the wound so you can try to woo your fixation back, and once you fortunately hold th...

Somebody used to have the illusion, or the obsession, of becoming a bird. Therefore he flapped his scraggy arms as violently as possible, in a vain hope of conquering the gravity and eventually gaining elevation. What he had been anticipating wasn’t the posture he had painstakingly practiced to fly like a bird, but the pain on his head he was told to get when rocketing out of the roof. From day to day he glared at the leak on the roof and spurred him on to tearing it even asunder. It wasn’t until some balmy day, while taking a stroll with my mom in a nearby park she mentioned randomly of some pathological case of people who dream of becoming birds, did I realize the severity of the aforesaid incident. It won’t become a talking point if there weren’t at least a handful of similar instances. Thus it wasn’t merely my whimsical fabrication, people do dream of flying. Levitation is what I came the closest of flying. Sorrow, exaltation and excitement prompt the inclination of levitating. Pre...