Musings. Ex Libris

Sometimes when a story is so powerfully fabricated, it horrifies you. This eventually leaves an imprint in your memory that galvanizes you whenever some evocations appear. The fact well-applies to a story I just finished reading, and a subsequent reference is drawn between the deserts in the story and the world I’m situated in. I hate to dredge up world-weariness when there are actually so many other things I can relate to. It is such a self-centered awareness to impose every story onto oneself. So I will only make it brief by concluding that my conception of the world is like a desert where one is encompassed by hazards, and it is impossible for him to escape far since supplies must be begged first. But nobody will be that benevolent to lend you anything when every entity is on the fringe of demise in this dreadful desert. I tend to stay in one spot and shut up my mouth so I won’t be overcame by thirst too soon. Most of the things I’ve read are abound with people. Vile bodies, goodie-...

One night I was waken by the noise of a couple bawling to each other outside on the corridor. Being galvanized up at such untimely moment, I resolved in switching the channels desultorily while the bawl heated on. Motions and images flipped through the screen like batches of vignettes. The ebb and flow of the noise outside kept with the fleet of the channel, thus a comical consequence was induced. It is funny how people are implicitly inclined to match their lives onto the screen, and into the screen however they result in. Some concierge, I presumed, settle the argument briskly and everything restored to its order like every yesterday. People can be categorized into three: one with those who are always brimming with confidence and wielding their dominance wherever they go- they are the victors. Most people in general should be in the second one, who surface and sink just like every other but refusing to sail close to the wind, they secure themselves a perfect spot where they can witne...

As I drew out the curtain I saw almost nothing before me but clouds of white smoke predominating the scenery. It was one of those few days when fogs descend the city. I have an inexplicable penchant for fogs, which are impressively neutral, positioning between the drab clearness and the radical inclemency. I saw the fogs cleared before me, gradually, in dribs and drabs. Without any assistance from the sun the fogs petered out until dim traces of buildings or every-day-matters crept their way back in their forts. I’ve been aspiring to do music and working diligently for years to hone my ability and knowledge just to make me eligible for the career. Owing it to my volatile taste in too many genres I have yet pinpointed of what direction I should tend to. The problem surfaced as well on my writing, which are frankly a batch of desultory rots that offer no fruits for your grey matter. It is a topic or a concept that I’m constantly stressing upon and groping for, or else things just litter ...

I felt forlorn watching the calamity of Japan on the telly since months ago I just spent my most brilliant time traveling around its capital. It was one of those chill but not bleak days when I strolled about the streets of Tokyo. I had an image of colours instantly, of a swaying white and grey. For me it was the cleanest and most impressive combination of colours, and the one that exuded the most contented serenity. The titillated image of white and grey rarely popped up in my life. Besides the aforementioned the closest one I can conjure up is when scouring around the vicinity of my house after a washover rain. I deem the white-and-grey incidents my happiest moments in life. When such moment occurs the colours are wrought in a most cliché romantic veil where they will dance and swirl around me like bubbles. And like bubbles they pop and vanish within a blink of an eye. Everybody has his own definition of what a suffering will be. It would be indubitably ungrateful for me to acknowled...

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...

I’m afraid I have to say I have long passed the teenybopper phase of keeping idols. Someone you revere is most suggestively not to be met brusquely, it is believed. I once read how Robyn Hitchcock met Syd Barrett after the former Pink Floyd lead vocal retired from the music scene, and the encounter was apparently too disappointing that he did not even bother to prolong the description. Sometimes you have to put into account that your idol still runs to the grocery and wears shorts. Therefore while walking to school I try not to dwell too long on one specific object lest the longer I dwell upon the oftener I will like to come across it every day, and an astonishing disillusion is prophetic and imminent. People often end up reversing to what images you inflict upon when you first meet them, and being one who affirms accurately of how one’s appearance suggests, I feel like the easiest math question which contains merely a + and =. Incredulity is often foolishly magnified when countering s...

The gust exerts its full force and crackles mercilessly the frail windowpane, well-secured from the impervious inclemency, the owner of the room quibbles with a trifle cold. A dismal day reminds me of some Impressionist painting- blurry, sombre, patchy, with smudges of blue there and grey here. An indisposed state evokes the childhood memory of incessant bedridden days, in which the vapid image shows its rays of hope with the installation of the sickly heifer’s mom. Story after story the mother tried to invoke, her incantation even more alluring than the Magical Flute, and image after image those stories played up before that heifer, with snots ceaselessly dropping into her wide-opened mouth. My mom loved to read me stories when I was young. However, while most of my childhood memories are recklessly blocked out, it is often those unfestive moments that I remember the most. The bedtime stories that still retain their vividness are those I used to digest when I was overcome with a fever...

Passed the scaffolded History department while nipping to my class. A strong desire of barging into that dilapidated building welled up in me. Ever since I had the fortune of visiting that building every week for one of my class last year, I have deemed it my favorite spot in the campus. The interior of the History department is an unsolvable arithmetic question itself. Corridors coming out of nowhere, leading to nowhere, and rooms with mysterious doors that are inexplicably sealed. The building is also pungent with the smell of rotten wood, the smell that I could still catch its whiff under a drizzling day. I went to the History department every week to attend the sexual history class, a class with which I still lament of my inadequacy of delving more into. I happened to come across a Martin Price’s literary criticism in which he tries to draw a resemblance between reading a fictitious character and staring at a nude model. His theory is thus: a fictitious character can be as tangible...

On the eve before coming to Auckland last year, a question was seriously pondered about in my head. For a brand new chapter of my life, shall I be more of a submissive person or a self-assertive one? I’m never one who relents to neutrality so I must choose to be either, and while “reticence” had been tagging along like a dogged will-o’-the-wisp, a decision was made within seconds that I would stride in New Zealand burst with indestructible boldness. And one year later I’m still thinking about the same question. Apparently the ceaseless alacrity exuded from the Kiwi’s baffles me, and has left me tongue-tied whenever I was good-humouredly confronted. Most of the posts I’ve written since studying in Auckland are more or less dealing with the record of my amateurish linguistic study of Kiwi’s accent. Those posts are no less than sheer nuisances, but what I’ve always wanted to expound on is how accents can cause a stirring among people. And even typify people. Not intending to sound scathin...

I’ve long held a firm belief that once you start fussing over the inadequate amount of time for finishing piles of readings you oblige yourself to do, your academic occupation has a budding potential to take flight. Whatever dazzling pictures you have of your near future when you’re certain that once the attitude is set, nothing can be in the way, something still stands in the way nonetheless, and with a wry smile it holds a scintillating knife, ready to kill your ephemeral ideal with no vestige of mercy whatsoever. For a well-organized expert will reduce his words into extreme brevity, precise and nail-on-the-forehead. A woeful disorderly one like me will eventually extend his sentence so tediously, that a comma or a dot can hardly finds its niche to fit in. Stripping bare of the superfluous rhetoric, it is exactly organization that I should do, with which also creates a distinction between a substantial consequence and a eternal illusion. I also learned the importance of organization...

It seems needless to elaborate our horror more when seeing the dreadful calamity on telly the past two days, and it is always at the likewise moment that we have the inclination of closing our eyes and rattling off profuse gratifications like how wonderful it is that we are here at this time/ at this moment, and how the incident gives us a lesson of seizing every moment we breathe. And how life is more worthwhile than to be frittered away in front of a computer I’ve got a bitter lick of techno-misfortune (that is literally how I like to term it!) for days, and the situation seems hopeless to look up even for the much-exploited weekends. I reckon it a sort of backlash of what I’d been fatuously prophesying on a few past posts: of how I lamented about several mishaps in my life which truthfully after hindsight were hardly hassles; of how I thoughtlessly expressed my ideal of living as a recluse, hemmed in by trees in the middle of nowhere, living in some place with wall-to-wall books, re...

With the herald of the sixth post of my Down Under journal, a fundamental question triggers: of all the posts am I always specifying the truths? Aren’t there some bits that I inevitably need to conceal or fib about? Exactly how much rate of credibility can be found in my journal? Before clearing off the above suspicions, I should first refer to how I visualize my journal; how I want my journal to be. A lonesome tourist wandering on a foreign territory- passersby sense something outlandish about this person but pay no heed to suss him out; that tourist, on the other hand, detects the queer nature of his surroundings yet refuses to slow down his pace and relish upon everything. The passersby and the tourist bump into each others multiple times in various occasions, every time with complete reticence. Two curved parallel lines they are walking about. My scrawl matches the route the tourist traces, and you passersby judge me as if I was some drunkard drinking to his fill of alienation and ...