confessions of a book lover

 

My private library exceeds a spare five hundred-some, a miserly collection though not easily amassed in light-speed Singapore. They are darlings which accompany my frequent anti-social episodes and psychotic moments. They are treasure.

 

While friends tremble in adolescent mania over the latest iPhone, iPad and MacBook, my only fiscal vice lie in the stuffy fragrance of dust-powdered hardcovers and crumpled paperbacks. As a child, I did not twist my parents’ arms over an Optimus Prime, a collection of Hotwheels cars or some action figure children at that time go bushfire-crazy over. While my sons struggle to violate my already credit-less wallet over a made-in-china Ben 10 action figure or some Japanese spin-top toy called Beyblade Metal Fight, I remember so lucidly how I howled over my father refusing to buy me a Famous Five storybook or a LadyBird hardcover edition on the animated Brave Starr series. I was like any other boy who loves action cartoons like Transformers, Brave Starr and The Visionaries – but when it came to the tangible, I prefered storybook editions of these animated classics instead of action figures.

 

Many of those books are probably either in some second-hand bookshop or have long been incinerated. Besides, I am not the sentimental fool to hoarde, even books, at the expense of pragmatic housekeeping. My one regret though, was when I dumped my precious Stephen King paperbacks down the rubbish chute during one teenage-spurred manic episode as a result of an evangelical delusion concerning the evils of the horror genre. That was the end of my Stephen King days.

 

Books can be vistas through which we elope to either an alternative or gaiman-esque universe where magic becomes real and the macabre an inch away from reality. Sometimes, they are microscopes into the messy human condition. Many great literary works do just that. When I was still cohabiting with my parents, books stacked themselves liberally on my desk and on the floor, frustrating my brother who shared the already cramped room. He must’ve thanked the gods when I finally moved out to my marital nest, just across the street, and luggaging all my books over.

 

I was orgasmic when my wife and I bought our first bookshelves. I begun to shelve my darlings almost immediately.

 

I still love to gaze at my books and rearrange them, sometimes. The books continue to multiply, with more genres and subjects, and thus my compulsive need to reshelve them properly and neatly. According to my intellectual mood at a particular time, I will display certain books, may it be world history, biblical studies, philosophy, or natural science. I will sardine-stack the rest into the roomy cupboard drawers.

 

I eventually occupy myself in the books trade by publishing and wholesaling them. For a sauna-hot five years. Until I realised that people in the books business are not necessarily book lovers. I was shocked that many of my colleagues do not read. Some of them couldn’t even write decent English sentences!

 

Although I continued to loiter in commercial bookshops like Kinokuniya and Times, my colleagues became somewhat satiated and did not want to have anything to do with books. Books mean work, and outside of work, they did not want to be reminded of it. Familiarity breeds contempt? I don’t know.

 

As a book lover, one recognises immediately the dizzying drumbeats in the chest and the slightly crazed sparkle in the dilated eye as one anticipates the deflowering of a newly purchased book. One caresses the spine and rereads the backcover blurbs. Over and over. Then like a hormonal teenage lover, one rips the shrink-wrapped plastic off the virgin covers. One thumbs through the crisped pages and inhales deeply the musty dank fragrance therein. It is all good.

 

It takes some time before one actually reads the book. All that smelling and fingering is foreplay. The prelude to the real thing, which when occurs, will not stop until climax is reached.

 

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a shrewd political move?

 

Some have lauded the recent expulsion of the Hougang MP by the Workers’ Party (WP) as a brave and shrewd political move. They have “taken, boldy, the moral high ground”, to quote Nominated Member of Parliament (NMP) Eugene Tan, the assistant professor of law at the Singapore Management University.

 

The expulsion was carried out in response to a very immature Singaporean society which still holds on to very quaint ideas of public civil service and its supposed moral standards. The media cannot seem to keep their partisan hands off the poor gentleman and his personal life. It was also his mistake to remain silent amid the media silliness…he should either reaffirm his innocence, if he is, or come out in the open and confess to his indiscretions and apologise to the residents of Hougang.

 

The latter would indeed place him on the moral high ground. I will applaud him for the moral courage and the strength in humility to be transparent to the people.

 

UNLIKE the schemes of the ruling regime…which only “appears” CLEAN because they are craftier and more skilled in covering up their tracks. I always believe in the adage that there can be no senseless smoke without fire…and the disparity is so obvious for any discerning individual – the media is so quick to pick up on any rumour of moral indiscretion on the part of the political opposition but if it comes to the ruling party, ALL IS SILENT.

 

Of course, the testicle-squeezing silence can be attributed to the classic Singaporean fear of being legally sued by the ruling regime if there is any sign of criticism (think of Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam, Chee Soon Juan and Alan Shadrake). The capacity to sue has nothing to do with moral innocence but with resources and power, full stop.

 

We are not fooled, though. Until the day when the Internet is cruelly and senselessly censored and squashed (thank goodness for twinkles of humanity in our current PM) by the powers that be, netizens in Singapore would always be the watchdog against a government that is constantly suppressing our civil rights to free speech and expression.

 

Are Singaporeans so naive as to think that the PAP (People’s Action Party) is really that CLEAN and FREE of moral indiscretions? Have you ever wonder why the people of Singapore are in the dark when it comes to the families of the ruling regime, apart from the Lees? We are hardly acquainted with the kin of most of our parliamentarians, let alone MPs and those on the ground.

 

A very good strategy, if you ask me. If the public knows next to nothing about the personal life of their leaders, there is no way we could hold them to account for any moral indiscretion, if they exist.

 

Contrary to propaganda, the truth is really out there. In the worldwide web.

 

While there is still hope for a liberal society, and a fairly liberal internet, please traverse far and wide for the truth.

 

Before even the Internet is unjustly censored.

 

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“the porn myth”

by Naomi Wolf

 

At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we did not limit pornography, she argued—before Internet technology made that prospect a technical impossibility—most men would come to objectify women as they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a kind of domino theory, she predicted, rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely follow.

 

The feminist warrior looked gentle and almost frail. The world she had, Cassandra-like, warned us about so passionately was truly here: Porn is, as David Amsden says, the “wallpaper” of our lives now. So was she right or wrong?

 

She was right about the warning, wrong about the outcome. As she foretold, pornography did breach the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training—and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.

 

But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

 

Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it. For how can a real woman—with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond “More, more, you big stud!”)—possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?

 

For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.

 

For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual “mission creep” of how pornography—and now Internet pornography—has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value. When I came of age in the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. There were more young men who wanted to be with naked women than there were naked women on the market. If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up. Your boyfriend may have seen Playboy, but hey, you could move, you were warm, you were real. Thirty years ago, simple lovemaking was considered erotic in the pornography that entered mainstream consciousness: When Behind the Green Door first opened, clumsy, earnest, missionary-position intercourse was still considered to be a huge turn-on.

 

Well, I am 40, and mine is the last female generation to experience that sense of sexual confidence and security in what we had to offer. Our younger sisters had to compete with video porn in the eighties and nineties, when intercourse was not hot enough. Now you have to offer—or flirtatiously suggest—the lesbian scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face scene. Being naked is not enough; you have to be buff, be tan with no tan lines, have the surgically hoisted breasts and the Brazilian bikini wax—just like porn stars. (In my gym, the 40-year-old women have adult pubic hair; the twentysomethings have all been trimmed and styled.) Pornography is addictive; the baseline gets ratcheted up. By the new millennium, a vagina—which, by the way, used to have a pretty high “exchange value,” as Marxist economists would say—wasn’t enough; it barely registered on the thrill scale. All mainstream porn—and certainly the Internet—made routine use of all available female orifices.

 

The porn loop is de rigueur, no longer outside the pale; starlets in tabloids boast of learning to strip from professionals; the “cool girls” go with guys to the strip clubs, and even ask for lap dances; college girls are expected to tease guys at keg parties with lesbian kisses à la Britney and Madonna.

 

But does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated—or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity? If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.

 

The young women who talk to me on campuses about the effect of pornography on their intimate lives speak of feeling that they can never measure up, that they can never ask for what they want; and that if they do not offer what porn offers, they cannot expect to hold a guy. The young men talk about what it is like to grow up learning about sex from porn, and how it is not helpful to them in trying to figure out how to be with a real woman. Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don’t know is how to get out, how to find each other again erotically, face-to-face.

 

So Dworkin was right that pornography is compulsive, but she was wrong in thinking it would make men more rapacious. A whole generation of men are less able to connect erotically to women—and ultimately less libidinous.

 

The reason to turn off the porn might become, to thoughtful people, not a moral one but, in a way, a physical- and emotional-health one; you might want to rethink your constant access to porn in the same way that, if you want to be an athlete, you rethink your smoking. The evidence is in: Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity.

 

After all, pornography works in the most basic of ways on the brain: It is Pavlovian. An orgasm is one of the biggest reinforcers imaginable. If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will take to turn you on. The ubiquity of sexual images does not free eros but dilutes it.

 

If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on…

 

Other cultures know this. I am not advocating a return to the days of hiding female sexuality, but I am noting that the power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time. In many more traditional cultures, it is not prudery that leads them to discourage men from looking at pornography. It is, rather, because these cultures understand male sexuality and what it takes to keep men and women turned on to one another over time—to help men, in particular, to, as the Old Testament puts it, “rejoice with the wife of thy youth; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times.” These cultures urge men not to look at porn because they know that a powerful erotic bond between parents is a key element of a strong family.

 

And feminists have misunderstood many of these prohibitions.

 

I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.”

 

When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West. And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.

 

She must feel, I thought, so hot.

 

Compare that steaminess with a conversation I had at Northwestern, after I had talked about the effect of porn on relationships. “Why have sex right away?” a boy with tousled hair and Bambi eyes was explaining. “Things are always a little tense and uncomfortable when you just start seeing someone,” he said. “I prefer to have sex right away just to get it over with. You know it’s going to happen anyway, and it gets rid of the tension.”

 

“Isn’t the tension kind of fun?” I asked. “Doesn’t that also get rid of the mystery?”

 

“Mystery?” He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sex has no mystery.”

 

(source)

 

*******

 

the “myth” of the internet

 

It is common to hear from academicians that the Internet can be a very poor source of accurate scholarship or information, but such assertions have to be elaborated upon for many in the evangelical community often jump on the same bandwagon whenever amateur critics (amateur in the sense that they are not professional scholars) take potshots at christianity, albeit rightly so.

 

I have heard pastors commenting on their pulpits how lay christians who are “untrained in theology” shouldn’t browse around the internet and haphazardly chancing on “dodgy” information about the historical Jesus and all that “demonic” stuff and as such start to lose their faith. The false argument these evangelical pastors often use would be that the internet is a confusing place filled with truths and falsehoods and so one should be “discerning” in sifting out material.

 

The problem with such a sneaky argument is that it presupposes at first hand what is true and what is false information. Evangelical pastors would often dismiss any information that is contrary to their evangelical beliefs as “false scholarship”, a preemptive attack on the credibility of the websites or weblogs so as to dissuade their flock from even checking them out.

 

Besides, what makes them think that being “trained in theology” would begat an evangelical christian? In fact, the opposite seems truer – many who have the luxury of a tertiary education in religious or divinity studies soon realise that christianity is nothing more but a man-made religion like any other.

 

Of course, if you are doing research for a term paper or a dissertation for a university examination, you cannot just lift material from wikipedia or any blog that contains supposedly relevant information. This does not mean that those sites are not “accurate”, in fact, much of the information in wikipedia can be rather accurate stuff for the layperson to know. As a divinity student, I have often perused both normal weblogs, wikipedia articles as well as university-based research websites for material – and you know what – much of the information in wikipedia as well as the blogosphere are generally similar to that of university-based websites!

 

The only difference is the depth of primary sources as well as research quotations and references as well as the “qualification” of the author(s). University-based sites often contain papers and articles written by academicians themselves, and thus have more technical material for the student to get a hold of.

 

But if anyone just want to get a general picture of what historical Jesus research is all about, or about biblical archaeology, or biblical criticism, much of the Internet is relatively “good” stuff. In fact, contrary to the typical evangelical pastor, modern biblical scholarship would often lead to conclusions that are contrary to traditional or classical theology.

 

And that is what your pastor doesn’t want you to know.

 

*******

 

 

intellectuals

 

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

- Albert Camus

 

Scourers of second-hand bookshops, who collect books to read rather than merely to collect, and who delights in those dusty Bohn’s Library and Everyman editions which contain everything and more of the past’s literary treasures, will be familiar with the experience of finding volumes annotated by earlier readers – frequently in ink, and often in beautiful clerkly hands – in which words have been underlined and their dictionary definitions entered alongside, and with names, likewise emphasised, earnestly supplied with one-sentence biographies in the margins.

 

In a collection of Addison’s essays on the desk beside me as I write there are many examples of this studious autodidacticism. I look at random and find the name “Ben Jonson” underlined in blue ink with the help of a ruler, and in the marginn a laborious hand has written, “Playwright and poet 1572-1637 AD”.

 

It is a touching vision; it makes one think of the medieval tanner’s son, one of a family so numerous and poor that they could not afford a candle, and who therefore, after a day’s long labour, took his book to the church so that he could read under its porch lantern. The boy grew up to become a scholar and teacher, and one might say the patron saint of all those people, invariably from among the poor, who discovered books and taught themselves; a numerous, noble, heroic army of men and women, who by their own efforts conquered more than any general has ever done; the fortifications at the foot of Parnassus.

 

The high moment of this epic is the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its story is a fascinating one. Anyone who disdains the educational opportunities now abundantly on offer in the contemporary West should enquire about this period in intellectual history because it illustrates how human intelligence, however oppressed, can slake its thirst for knowledge – or more accurately, since this is the true goal beyond knowledge: for understanding – if given half a chance.

 

What is striking about the variety of autodidact experiences which flowed from the Victorian spread of general education, and the concomitant proliferation of public libraries, is how often the beneficiaries of both produced eloquent and elegaic accounts of the excitement which books – and not just books, but music, theatre, opera, all the delights of high culture – prompted in them.

 

The children of well-off parents, with educational opportunities commensurate with the home environments from which so much cultural familiarity is absorbed, can be denied the extraordinary delight felt by the self-taught man first stumbling across Ruskin or Marx, Beethoven or Rembrandt. A clue lies in this to the reason why these things matter more than the artefacts of the commonplace; one imagines the eager, darting look of an intelligent eye, unblinkered by conventional education, seeing the value in things without having been told to expect them there – and therefore seeing them truly.

 

Ruskin is one of the salient names in this story. He figures at the top of the list of influences for MPs in the early Labour Party, almost all of them men from working-class backgrounds whose educations were substantially, if not wholly, self-provided. An Oldham millworker who became Lord Privy Seal, J.R Clynes, encountered Ruskin when young, having bought The Seven Lamps of Architecture for a shilling he could ill afford.

 

It did not matter that the subject of that book was architecture. One book led to another, breeding a consciousnesss of debate, of ideas unfolding into further ideas, inviting agreement or controversy, raising questions which further books were needed to answer. By this means working people learned of their oppression and their rights, and formulated new hopes therefore. Women learned about their own bodies and how to control their fertility. A worker in the Swindon railway factory taught himself Greek and Latin and thereafter published translations of Ovid, Pindar, Sappho, Plato, Menander and Horace; this was Alfred Williams. The tramp poet W.H Davies could only afford classics sold at second-hand bookstalls, so he had never read contemporary poetry, and when he met other poets he felt mildy embarrassed because they knew his work but he did not know theirs.

 

And so the stories go on – extraordinary and heartening, sometimes astonishing, often moving. Of course these autodidacts were a minority in their own class, and they more often suffered the disappointments of Jude Fawley in Jude the Obscure or the rebuffs of Leonard Bast in Howard’s End than the successes of Williams and Davies. Bast’s haunting fate is illustrative of the terrible snobbery too often encountered by working-class autodidacts. Bast – a bastard in cultural terms, straining to acquire culture, working hard at going to concerts and reading systematically, eventually killed by his own bookcase falling and crushing him – is the target of the uneasy, guilty disdain which led to modernism’s attempts to lock the fortifications of Parnassus again, to keep out book-devouring workers and evening-class graduates by making culture too remote and difficult for them. On this view, access to modernist art and literature required the incrowd knowingness of those already in possession of Parnassus’s keys; so all the Bohn’s Library and Everyman classics in the world were no good to the factory hand who exchanged his luxurious shilling for them, or the dress-maker’s assistant who bought a ticket for the gods at Covent Garden.

 

After 1945 the culture of self-education rapidly declines, partly because of increased formal schooling, partly because of television and other distractions, and partly because increasingly rapid changes in cultural fashion make self-taught classicism look conservative. No doubt the internet will spawn a new, perhaps a better, resource for autodidacts. But it will not be the same.

 

*******

 

This article is written by Anthony C. Grayling, professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London.

 

 

chnge my mnd abt e txtn db8

 

One of my intellectual heroes is Professor David Crystal, of whom I’ve read a couple of works. He gave a lecture at the RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) last month about the English language and technology, specifically text messaging and the tweeting phenomenon.

 

After listening to his very informative and entertaining lecture, I’ve changed my mind about the text-messaging business (he has also written a book on the subject).

 

Prof. Crystal pointed out that much of what we assumed about text messaging and its disastrous effects on the use of English among the young are myths. He mentioned that most if not all students in the UK can tell the difference between the language used on their mobile phones and on their assignments in school. Besides, research studies have also revealed that literacy rates have improved tremendously with the advent of text messaging.

 

To receive text-messages is to read them and to send text-messages (or tweets) is to write them. Anyhow, one has to know how to spell in order to ”create” abbreviations for text-messages.  

 

During the Q&A, one individual asked Crystal about the Internet and its affects on the reading habits of the young. Crystal’s reply was rather brilliant, to say the least. He mentioned that the young has indeed been reading a lot – just not the way his generation is used to. Young people may not read actual books as much as the people of an older era but they are still reading and engaging in the cognitive process by reading off the Internet. They are also writing far more than Crystal ever did when he was a young man, due to the advent of the blog. If practice makes perfect, then the people of today can be said to have better writing skills than most of his generation.

 

But I thought this is where I disagree. There are still a lot of “writing” going on in the Web that is grammatically poor – spelling mistakes abound. Has the advent of text-messaging and Microsoft’s spellcheck system made people lazier in spelling their words properly? During my school days, we did not have the luxury of an instant spell check when we wrote our assignments. We have to look up our heavy paperback dictionaries.

 

It is a matter of pride for me that I’ve never used the spellcheck system in my word processor whenever I am writing! I think it’s a very “lazy” way of learning new English words and spelling.

 

On the other hand, society has changed over the years. When I was a student, I was among the minority of students in Singapore who speak English as their mother tongue. Most young people then spoke their ethnic languages at home (Mandarin Chinese, Malay or Tamil) and only English to their teachers in school.

 

Thus the standard of English used in my generation and older is relatively low. The advent of technology has made it worse for people who already have problems writing well.

 

The younger generation has it much better. Statistics show that the majority of students today speak English at home. This could well be an advantage to them in terms of the English language. Technology simply changes the way they use the language in society.

 

Sigh. Still…I get very annoyed when I read bad English in forums and chatrooms. Do our young people speak like that all the time? I hope not.

 

Bah!

 

*******