Listening to Bach on youtube. Is the division between the banal and the delicate necessary anymore? Someone had posted a video of himself playing Bach's minuet. His fingers gliding, floating over the keys, sculpting music, the notes sound like icicles. And the score. I never learnt to play scores. I lack the dedication and discipline. Seems like that is the common theme of my life. And that score, something just seems incredibly moving, the notes through years, translated through time. Perhaps this is a romantic view but it is instruction of the dead on how to make music.
By: Nippy | Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 2:53 PM | | 
I'm almost finishing with Virginia Woolf's
A writer's diary and I'm in the middle of Madame Bovary and starting with James Joyce's Dubliners. I remember Mrs Truman, a teacher I really detested for humiliating me in class once said that
Dubliners is one of her favorite books.
Dubliners is really quite fantastic. I still think that excellent writing is sincere and reading it is like getting in touch with a very deep spring between two people--the writer and the reader.
I'm always amazed by such good writing that I forget I'm reading the words consciously composed. I feel like I have immersed inside a dream. I need to work on my sentences so that awkward strucutres that remind readers of me must be gotten rid of completely. Will I ever get good at this? I wonder.
Amazed, amazed and so impressed by Virginia Woolf for her discipline and hardwork, she rewrote again and again. Sometimes I feel such boredom looking at my old stuff, just think they aren't very good and sometimes intolerably bad. I need that discipline. Rewriting is definitely the hardest part.
By: Nippy | Friday, March 26, 2010 at 3:20 AM | |
I think I will appreciate
The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind a lot more now. Still, I wouldn't change a thing in my life, all the choices I made. I don't need to erase any memories or go back to change any of my choices, although the idea is extremely tempting. Lee asked me once if I would choose to do that if I could. I said no. I didn't say that because I was self-righteous or because I don't regret choices I made. I still remember the first time I felt regret as a child--the feeling is horrible and I think I obsessed about not repeating the same thing in my life again. Still, where would I be if it was not for all those things I look back at and wish I had done different. If I made all those changes, I wouldn't even recognize myself. Perhaps, we hang on because we have all these illusions about how things would have been better if we chose other wise. But here we are, we have one life, one chance to choose all the things we choose. Perhaps, this is pigheadedness or stubbornness on my part, but I believe that we are left with responsibilities for what we choose and we have to stand by them and live out the consequences.
Remember Frost's poem from our sec 3 lit class? Sometimes, I am tempted to laugh at it, because the metaphor seems such a cliche. But still there's a part of me that feels that it still rings true. You can't save that other path for some other day. Indeed, way leads on to way and sometimes you think, how would life be different if I had taken that other path, but perhaps it is better to enjoy the very path you are on. And then again, perhaps they are not all that different, afterall we can only meet one end.
By: Nippy | Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 2:36 PM | |
Reading Madame Bovary--impressive writing--completely sincere. There is nothing forced or fake in it. Everything feels natural at least up to the first 35 pages. It takes great skill to create that naturalness. Just looked at my own writing again, there are so many moments in my own writing that makes me feel artificial and makes me cringe. I want that natural flowing rhythm Flaubert creates. I want that in my own writing. Sincerity, naturalness.
P.S: God. I still can't spell rhythm without using spellcheck. This is so bad.
By: Nippy | Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 2:01 PM | |
Second rejection letter. I don't know what exactly to feel. Disappointment is there for sure, and beneath that, there's also a steady sense of determination. I really want to do this. And if the greater powers allow, I will try, grow and develop myself. Maybe one day, I really will.
By: Nippy | Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 3:33 PM | |
I've decided to be more diligent about writing here again. It's going to be a writing exercise for myself. I've tried writing a diary, but somehow I just can't keep myself motivated. Perhaps the reason why I still write here is because there's this sense that you guys are out there reading, every so often. And even if no one reads this, I still feel more comfortable talking to myself here. Just the other day, I was at a book discussion where Richard Rodriguez was speaking. He despised email and all the new technologies and said that there is something very sensual about writing by hand. Bending over, scribbling--the fatigue of writing he called it. I don't know. I am not someone who can write well by hand. My hand is too slow and it can't catch up to the voice in my head. Besides, the motion of typing seem so natural to me. I just let m fingers fly over the keyboard and they just dictate. There's a sense of freedom in that too.
Other than that, there is not much new update other than the fact that I didn't get accepted into one of the schools I applied for. I'm beginning to think that, perhaps studying is not the way to improve my own writing. What will probably end up doing is me getting stuck in workshops, which I hate. I hate competitiveness, especially when it comes to writing, I think it hurts my writing more than it helps and I believe that what I really need is to read more deeply and work at trying to describe things more precisely--specific yet without losing the instinct of what the thing feels like, not merely what it is or looks like.
I have been reading Virginia Woolf's diaries. She is an excellent writer who is obsess with trying to capture life and its essence. I think her attempt is obvious. As beautiful as her books are though, her sense of life and its essence always remain elusive. Her writing is sensual but yet at the same time, it lacks some of that grittiness of the realists whom I have been reading. Why do things always have to be in two extremes? Either you are cut and dried like Hemmingway and Carver and the impact of their words hit like a boxer or it has to be a meandering form of musing like Woolf's, no one seems to be able to deliver both. Or perhaps it is just a matter of me not reading widely enough. I long to discover excellent new comic writers. SOmetimes, I think writers take themselves too seriously. Want to read someone like Wodehouse or Douglas Adams.
By: Nippy | Sunday, March 14, 2010 at 2:27 PM | |
I admit, I'm just bad at keeping up with writing and updating about myself. Just haven't been motivated or inspired lately. Is it age? I certainly hope not, because I hope to live a long fulfilled life, if it all peaks here and then go downhill, then what's the point. And "what's the point" is always a dangerous question to ask. Because then one either is forced to turn to religion for some consolation, which I already tried and feel that I am unsuited for, or one then drifts into nonchalance where everything goes. I am more in danger of than than anything else. I guess what saves me from thinking-- oh I'll just settle-- is that I'm an idealist at heart. Nothing is good enough (that of course includes myself). I don't know, then again, perhaps it's just discontentment. I know there is one thing I love and one thing that gives me that sense of fulfillment, but I just don't think I'm very good at it (yet). I hope to be and I want to work hard at getting good, but sometimes I just feel like I'm out in the wild, randomly hacking down trees to find the miraculous pot of gold that is there, hovering alluringly for a moment, then on a second look is just a bad lighting trick. I feel like I'm suspended somewhere and the ground is two thousand feet under and I'm still floating waiting to hit the ground. I've been feeling this way for three years now, the scary thought is that this feeling would never end and I will never feel grounded again. Never feel that I'm in my skin. Never feel that I'm doing what I should be doing, never feel that I belong. After this long break from here, all I do is grumble. I know. But the sense of drifting that I had mistaken for freedom is now feeling like being on an unmoving boat waiting for the masoon winds to take off.
Am I making any sense? More than ever this has been the question I have been asking. I look at my writing and ask, does this make any sense? I ask the tutees at the lab if what I said made any sense. Sometimes I just feel blank--does this make any sense? Perhaps growing older is just another curiouser and curiouser experience. I hope I will not become one of those old crackers who lose their teeth and their mind at the same rate. Just today, I saw this old man on the bus, he had this wild yellow flower that he had plucked and he kept smelling it and muttering to himself. It was quite beautiful from where I sat, but the old lady next to him was scared half to death and part of me wondered if it was the man she was scared of, or perhaps it was his fate she was so afraid of.
By: Nippy | Tuesday, March 09, 2010 at 3:27 PM | |
