Shrinking Salzburg

Just as I’m considering an expensive foray into the world of analog photography, some cool digital effect has come by to upset the apple cart. I’ve just learnt how to do this miniaturizing effect on photos. Especially good for landscapes and buildings taken from far. It’s dead easy to apply this in Photoshop CS.

Here’s the original – my favourite European town which I’ll hope to drive to from Singapore one day — a good 10,000km.

And here’s the toy version — You could take a picture of it using it tilt-shift lens, but I think it is not an accessory you find everyday in your camera shop. So thank Photoshop CS!

Sweet memory!

I just spent an hour browsing through coverart of old games! Really felt so nostalgic after that, I mean it’s amazing how pictures can be such a hotline to memory.

How furious I was when I found out that my ‘88 XT said NO to “Might and Magic” diskettes. There was something like an mechanical bronchitis coming from the steel casing that told me installation failed! I screamed at mummy, asking her to break the bank so I could play the game. Mummy said “Ok lor, you want to make us all poor for your game, go ahead.” I’ll never forget that.

Then I remembered the good old SJI days, when the seedy Katong shopping centre was the haunt for 5.5 inch diskette games, all wrapped up with their covers in nice sleeves. Who could forget unforgettable Pauline who worked at BASIC computer centre? Where is she now?

Those were also the salad days when games like GOLDEN AXE, KYRANDIA were the staple of the EGA 16-color screen. This was something bigger than a quantum leap for mankind, bigger than anything else combined, especially for a struggling student like me trying to pay $6 a week for his gaming needs. I also recall fighting with papa over the purchase of the 256 VGA monitor, which I kept shouting to him “Photo Quality you know!” over and over again.

But having recalled all these wonderful memories, I’m glad I was such an avid gamer. Seeing all these game covers brings that flood of memories back again… long, long before love, academic and work began their assault on my future years.

“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

How would you interpret Conrad’s infamous quote “The horror, the horror”?

I’ve always been enthralled by this Conradian take on man’s disease, his vagrant misdirections and the values he scrawls on the blank moral world around him. I think it’s wrong to conceive of the Heart of Darkness as a safe literary destination; nor can it be considered a cliche. It is a Conradian trait to give readers nauseating bouts of fever, of being swamped by sentences and sun alike…

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.

The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances …

Penguin, with their trademark assiduity, has recently commissioned Phil Hale to paint 6 titles of Conrad. I think they capture the temperament of the book best. Here’s an evolution of Conrad’s covers below:

The unquiet pen

 

Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave ranks as one of the strangest non-fictional books of the twentieth century. Its references are as complicated as a eightsome reel dance, and strange as a flock of burning birds, but hugely enjoyable nonetheless.

It’s not recommended bedside reading, but here are the memorable excerpts on women, written with ferocity and wit.

There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover. When we see a woman chewing the cud meekly beside her second husband, it is hard to imagine how brutally, implacably and pettily she got rid of the others. There are 2 great moments in a woman;s life: when she finds herself to be deeply in love with her man and when she leaves him.

I like the first bit…no fury like an ex-wife’s relentlessness. Extremely antagonistic; surely Flaubert anticipated this when he had Emma Bovary giggling (she’s having an affair you see) as if in a second puberty, “I have a lover! I have a lover!” Furtherdown, Connolly continues coolly…

In the sex-war thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated, but a woman’s desire for revenge outlasts all other emotions.

“And their revenge is as the tiger’s spring,
Deadly and quick, and crushing, yet as real
Torture is theirs, what they inflict they fell”

Hear! Hear! Any contenders, feminists?

On good writing…

But in response to the post below, I’ve always kept one of my Secondary one student’s Geography answer on the formation of waterfalls…

“When there is hard rock on top of soft rock and water flows quickly, a waterfall will be formed. When the water flows over the hard rocks, and land on the soft rock, the soft rock will be washed away, creating a hole in the soft rock. After a long time, the hard rock will remain there and the soft rock will have a larger hole. That is, when water will fall onto the soft rock, creating a waterfall.”  

Analogies can be so wonderful :)

His bulging trousers and stiff… (on bad sex writing)

 

It’s tough to write good sex scenes.

Does it sound gratuitous with clichés and dirty words? Is there excessive description of body-parts and noises? It’s a potential minefield of banality out there.

I remember reading some of Eric V. Lustbader’s books in my Secondary School days, with no guiding markers on what constituted “good” sex writing, (heck, as long as they were titillating and brutal to an adolescent mind) but nowadays, I’m assuming there is a politically correct standard here in such matters.

Who are the ethical guardians of good/bad sex writing then? Did you know there is a yearly “Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award” whose aim is “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.” (I like the last bit)

Here’s this year’s winner, the late Norman Mailer on Adolf Hitler’s conception (taken from “Castle in the Forest”):

“So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips.

Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless… The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again! His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety.“

Kowloon – Phantom City

 

I’m fascinated by the now Demolished city of Kowloon, once the oldest part of Hong Kong. It is seedily magnificent. It has dripping corridors, makeshift plumbing and dank interiors so dark that you even have to use a flashlight in the day. It’s life at the margins banged into shaped, and held together by restaurants in the city’s outskirts, unlicensed dentists, and even kindergartens.

It’s the slum city par excellence and it’s a tell-tale peep-hole to get a proper view of how recessive humans can become.  Why am I attracted to the ghosts of this place?

I remember all too well a dream of waking up in one of its upper enclosures on a dark Saturday morning to the clacking of Mahjong Tiles and cooing of pigeons. What did I do after that in Kowloon? Play my SEGA 16-bit Genesis, of course…

Be a bookslut

Damn those graphic designers at Penguin; How on earth do they encapsulate so well the essence of a book? Penguin has certainly come a long way in design and illustration, just look at the banner below and you see something of a Zeitgeist distilled there.

I get all covetous and anxious whenever Penguin releases a new series like The Great Ideas, Great Loves and now the Great Journeys. The latter is especially beguiling for its selection of intrepid explorers who have really gone into the heart of darkness and back again, all before tha advent of the jet age. And looking at these finely-clad covers, I’m beginning to think publishing is only vaguely about writers – next to the carousing, the deals, and the piled-up ‘product’, not to mention the endless designer conflicts about the right typefaces and whatnot. It’s probably carnage in the genteel world of books.

 

But heck, if attractive covers promote reading, go forth and splurge!

Man, you gotta go…

I’m sorry for the name droppings in this post, but wasn’t it some French philosopher who once said “Our nature lies in movement, complete repose is death”?

And then you have ideas similar to this repeated in David Wojnarowicz’s terrifying memoir Close to the Knives (1991): ‘Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition . . . I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom..”

Thinking about these ideas after playing too much Need for Speed, perhaps travel doesn’t annul disappointment as much as it suspends it, thus giving new meaning to the old saying that it’s better to travel than to arrive.

And here is one of Thom Gunn, the leather-donning English poet who could always turn revolt into style; with “Man You Gotta go” (not one of my favourites, but the opening stanza is good)

On motorcycles, up the road, they come:
Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boy,
Until the distance throws them forth, their hum
Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.
In goggles, donned impersonality,
In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,
They strap in doubt–by hiding it, robust–
And almost hear a meaning in their noise.

Exact conclusion of their hardiness
Has no shape yet, but from known whereabouts
They ride, directions where the tires press.
They scare a flight of birds across the field:
Much that is natural, to the will must yield.
Men manufacture both machine and soul,
And use what they imperfectly control

To dare a future from the taken routes.

A minute holds them, who have come to go:
The self-denied, astride the created will.
They burst away; the towns they travel through
Are home for neither birds nor holiness,
For birds and saints complete their purposes.
At worse, one is in motion; and at best,
Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,
One is always nearer by not keeping still.

Biology for the layman

A decade ago, I remember writing an essay on biological processes that made up the body, this “quintessence of dust”, in some awkward way to come to terms to the wounds of JC life. (Really, what needless angst!)

I remember writing a lot about clots of blood and the miraculous powers of healing and haemoglobin. A decade later, I dread to think what a horrible Science essay that was. I’m contented to let prose speak for life and healing now. Here is Diane Ackerman, writing poetically, sans medical jargon about guts and evolution:

“I often marvel how something like hyrdogen, the simplest atom, forged in some early chaos of the universe, could lead us and the gorgeous fever we call consciousness. If the mind is just a few pounds of blood, dream and electric, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time and motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser mayhems of the heart?”

“How can a neuron feel compassion? Why did automatic hand-me-down animals like our ancestors somehow evolve brains with the ability to consider, imagine, project, compare, abstract, think of the future? If our experience of mind is really just the simmering of an easily alterable chemical stew, then what does it mean to know something, to want something to be.”

What riotous riddles … Take that, Descartes and Darwin!