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Sze Yung is back from Japan, with Miki Imai's 'Ivory II'!!!!!!! Honestly, the CD is more for the cover than the songs. Of course, track 7 ('short-sleeve' or 'half-sleeve') itself is worth the price too. It's a vintage or classic CD for collection. Classic vintage or vintage classic --- whatever.Was on the topic of writing. I mentioned about reading Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the Bible...Bertrand Russell, the other spiritual texts, the famous poetry etc etc. Must one really read so much in order to write well? For now, my answer is yes. Let's put it this way.
My first belief in writing: all good writers are by default good readers. If only I've read my Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Trollope, Dickens, Joyce, Woolf, Auden, Eliot, Yeats, Frost, Plath etc etc, I'm sure I would be a *MUCH* better writer writing better stuff than the kind of thirty-five cents writing I'm producing now. On the Japanese map alone, there are the great Tanizaki, Mishima, Soseki, Dazai, Oe, Kawabata etc. to be read (know these masters before we move on to Banana Yoshimoto or even Murakami). In Latin America, Garcia Marquez, Isabelle Allende, and Llosa. Former Russia: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, as well as Nabokov.
There are at least a hundred other great writers I can list...
Myself now? My many volumes are collecting dust...my recent three books being Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse' (this woman is seriously deranged), Tanizaki's greatest classic 'The Makioka Sisters', and Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot'. I simply have no time!
To top it off, I revived an interest in the Transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau etc.) I spent $11 buying a pocket version of Thoreau because 'Walden' is too bulky to carry around. It is now one of my pocket Bibles.
Okay...apparently I've strayed off topic. Anyway, good writers must have kaleidoscopic knowledge. (Brian made me think of Italo Calvino for a start) Good writers can create a world out of their texts. If Ireland were to disappear because of an earthquake, we can construct it out of Joyce's 'Ulysses'. If South America were to disappear because of a whirlwind, we can construct it out of Garcia Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. If certain cities of Japan were to disappear for whatever reason, we can construct them out of Tanizaki's 'Makioka Sisters' or Kawabata's 'Snow Country'...do we have anything that we may call a Singaporean novel? It would be too ambitious. I strongly believe it will not happen in my lifetime. Someone to write a novel with full knowledge of our colonial past, our War and Post-war years, our independence, our industrialisation years and our cosmopolitan years, all encapsulated in a kaleidoscopic novel with full flavour of the rich living at Holland Village with haute couture and cafe culture and the poor living in Whampoa Drive with pasar-malam and kopi-tiam culture, with the different registers of language from the elite's standard English to the down-to-earth singlish. There must be a mish-mash of community clubs, aunties, prata, coffee, char-kway, popiah, bengs and lians, KTV, sushi, Citilink mall and many more....
But again, that is an over-ambitious writer's dream. One should be content if one can be the next Arthur Yap or Catherine Lim...no...Catherine Lim should stick to short stories...Tan Hwee Hwee's 'Mammon Inc' is the closest to the Singaporean novel, but let's hope we can have something better than that.
Let me however be honest on this: concerning art, I'm not so Singaporean. I think the Po-Mo (postmodern) culture has opened the floodgates to allow almost anything to be called art. My belief is that the world is still more global than local (though we are trying to be localised in one way or another, whether naturally or in a contrived manner)...and my philosophy now is to assimilate and select. To assimilate blindly is to ape. Besides, I'm more of a universalist where art is concerned, since art is a universal language.
Oh wow...I've blabbered so long here...time for a shower...and some quiet time for myself before going to sleep and to awake too soon and prepare for yet another long hectic day....
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