Email address update

Hi everyone,

My ACS(I) email account will expire soon. If you would like to contact me, please email me at jamieinschool@yahoo.com.sg. This email account will work for years and years to come, unless Yahoo! becomes a victim of the recession or is cannibalized by Google.

Thank you!

180 Degrees

For those of you who need extra practice with 'unseen' poetry, here's a major list.

And congrats to the blog-boss, who already has a charming 'assistant' as evidenced by the photo below this post!

The reason why I have not replied to your emails

First, thank you to everyone who has been kind enough to ask after the baby and even to visit and buy gifts, even though I've asked you not to. Thank you especially to 6.14, Maria and Evelyn!

Next, apologies to those to whom I've replied late, or, worse, not at all. Babies are challenging little creatures, and I am unfortunately currently in colic hell, which means I have no time to get on my laptop and read emails or essays.

Lastly, some of you are asking me now whether I would still be able to read your essays. I would really like to - I'm not kidding, strange as that might seem - but I cannot promise, because it depends on when the baby stops crying and gives me time to open my laptop. If you email me I will try my best. If I don't reply, your best bet would be Mr Quek, Mr Connor, Ms Silverajan or Ms Loh. I wish I could do everything but I don't have superpowers.

Stream of consciousness

"As it has been refined since the 1920s, stream of consciousness is the name for a special mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce, without a narrator's intervention, the full spectrum and the continuous flow of a character's mental process, in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings, and random associations."

This is sometimes also called "interior monologue".

James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) has one of the most famous examples of the use of stream of consciousness: this is "a passage of interior monologue from the 'Lestrygonian' episode, in which Leopold Bloom saunters through Dublin, observing and musing:

Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugar-sticky girl shoveling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother. Some school great. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne, sucking red jujubes white."

All information taken from Abrams, MH. A Glossary of Literary Terms (6th ed). Orlando: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1993. Pg.202-3.

Thinking of Literature as Art

We're supposed to be thinking about Art now in TOK, and there are some interesting ideas that can be transferred to English A1 - as to how we appreciate literature as an art form.

Two excerpts from Reuben Abel's Man is the Measure:

"Joseph Conrad's short story 'The Secret Sharer' is about a young sea captain on his first voyage in command. The captain protects a stowaway who is a murderer and a fugitive. The simple adventure has profound and ambiguous overtones - of delusion, homosexuality, the force of authority, the conflict between morality and justice, the story of Cain and Abel, the doppelganger, Conrad's own life. There is little point in inquiring what the author's 'real' intention was, or what the 'true' interpretation is: any hypothesis which can be supported by evidence in the text ought to be thoughtfully examined and joyfully experienced. To insist on the 'real meaning' is to mistake literature and art for idealized science. A work of art is not a sense datum; it is not merely something perceived, but rather something interpreted. And in the richness, multiplicity, and range of its legitimate interpretations lie its fertility and vigor as a work of art" (257).

"The essential requisite [for a work of art] is that the materials be so formed that they are finally experienced as a unity, whether they extend timelessly through space (as do painting and architecture) or whether they cumulate nonspatially through time (as does music). The frame of a painting, the pedestal of a statue, the proscenium in a theater, the silence that precedes and follows a piece of music, and the space around a cathedral all act to enclose the work of art in what Rilke called a 'circle of solitude.' Thus it is experienced as an isolated, unified, instantaneous presence" (258).

Tao

In one of your readings - the one that says 'Rebel-Seeker' at the top of the page - we are told that Hesse "was favorably impressed by Lao-Tse" and "became a passionate advocate of Chinese thought and belief" (Mileck 161).

I was looking at the Tao Te Ching recently and found a few excerpts whose sentiments and ideas Siddhartha seems to echo. I've included one example below, for your perusal and mystification.

"Be done with knowing and your worries
will disappear.
How much difference is there between yes and no?
How much distinction between good and evil?
Fearing what others fear, admiring
what they admire -
nonsense.

Conventional people are jolly and reckless,
feasting on worldly things and carrying
on as though every day were the
beginning of spring.
I alone remain uncommitted, like an
infant who hasn't yet smiled:
lost, quietly drifting, unattached
to ideas and places and things."

(Walker, Brian Browne. The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tze. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.)

Does Time Exist?

Many of the articles I looked at looked horribly difficult, so I've only included a couple of links below that looked more manageable and human:

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: What is Time? (Try the 7th paragraph onwards.)

Discover Magazine: 'Newsflash: Time May Not Exist'

Enjoy!

Buddhist scripture and _Siddhartha_

This is the excerpt from Karen Armstrong's Buddha that I promised:

"... a biography of the Buddha has... challenges. The Gospels present Jesus, for example, as a distinct personality with idiosyncracies; special turns of phrase, moments of profound emotion and struggle, irascibility and terror have been preserved. This is not true of the Buddha, who is presented as a type rather than as an individual. In his discourses we find none of the sudden quips, thrusts and witticisms that delight us in the speech of Jesus or Socrates. He speaks as the Indian philosophical tradition demands: solemnly, formally and impersonally. After his enlightenment, we get no sense of his likes and dislikes, his hopes and fears, moments of desperation, elation or intense striving. What remains is an impression of a transhuman serenity, self-control, a nobility that has gone beyond the superficiality of personal preference, and a profound equanimity. The Buddha is often compared to non-human beings - to animals, trees or plants - not because he is subhuman or inhumane, but because he has utterly transcended the selfishness that most of us regard as inseparable from our condition. The Buddha was trying to find a new way of being human. In the West, we prize individualism and self-expression, but this can easily degenerate into mere self-promotion. What we find in Gotama is a complete and breathtaking self-abandonment. He would not have been surprised to learn that the scriptures do not present him as a fully-rounded 'personality,' but would have said that our concept of personality was a dangerous delusion. He would have said that there was nothing unique about his life. There had been other Buddhas before him, each of whom delivered the same dhamma and had exactly the same experiences. Buddhist tradition claims that there have been twenty-five such enlightened human beings and that after the present historical era, when knowledge of this essential truth has faded, a new Buddha, called Metteyya, will come to earth and go through the same life-cycle. So strong is this archetypal perception of the Buddha that perhaps the most famous story about him in the Nidana Katha, his 'Going Forth' from his father's house, is said in the Pali Canon to have happened to one of Gotama's predecessors, Buddha Vipassi. The scriptures were not interested in tracing Gotama's unique, personal achievements but in setting forth the path that all Buddhas, all human beings must take when they seek enlightenment."

---

Other interesting excerpts:

After the death of Gotama, the monks "started to collect their testimony in a more formal way. They could not yet write this down, but the practice of yoga had given many of them phenomenally good memories, so they developed ways of memorizing the discourses of the Buddha and the detailed rules of their Order. As the Buddha himself had probably done, they set some of his teachings in verses and may even have sung them; they also developed a formulaic and repetitive style (still present in the written texts) to help the monks learn these discourses by heart."

Finally, the scriptural texts "purport to be simple collections of the Buddha's own words, with no authorial input from the monks. This mode of oral transmission precludes individualistic authorship; these scriptures are not the work of a Buddhist equivalent of the evangelists known as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, each of whom gives his own idiosyncratic view of the Gospel..."

---

Can you see the relevance of the above excerpts to our understanding of Siddhartha?

Language, perception and 'The Cool Web'

I first read 'The Cool Web' more than a decade ago and, even though I found its meaning elusive, the words have stayed with me since. I have often wondered - since I deal with language pretty much on a daily basis - whether language is really as Graves proposes: a cool web that shields us from feeling too excruciatingly, but that we might also drown eventually in our own insipid, vapid volubility.

Then today I read an interview with Oliver Sacks, and it threw new light on the poem:

"Savants are people with extraordinary capacities of calculation or music or drawing, mixed with generally low intelligence - a very startling anomaly...

Some neurologists think that what may go on in the savant may be a relative preservation and heightening of primitive perceptual and computational powers in the right hemisphere - powers of a sort that are normally inhibited with the development of abstract intelligence and language. If abstract intelligence and language don't develop, it could be possible that they may be, in a word, freer. Something which might support this idea may be the late appearance of savant-like powers in people, say, with frontal temporal dementia; it is precisely with the decline of verbal and abstract intelligence that we sometimes see this emergence of artistic powers...

...certainly, there's a tantalizing notion that such savant abilities may be universal or latent in all of us, and could be released in certain circumstances. But if the release entails a loss of enunciation - of our higher powers - it may not be such a good bargain."

The Cool Web

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by,

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent,
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.

- Robert Graves (1927)

Wanted: people who have gone through hell and back

If you were in my SL class in 2007, and wouldn't mind coming back to Dover Road to share some tips for surviving Year 6 with my present SL classes, please drop me an email. We need to hear it from those who lived to tell the tale.

Experimental Seances

The experiment has come to an end and we await the results. While we are aware that the experimental hypothesis was impeccable and the protocol was reasonably complete, we are not yet sure how effective and error-free the experiment has been. All of you are now on holiday and some of you will never use your brain cells again. We, of course, are not on holiday yet, still stalking the hallways like the unquiet dead.

Well, here are some activities you can pursue if you do not want a fate like ours. Check out this link. The rest of Velcro City is also pretty amusing. Typical Brit humour, gone global.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop (1969)

Mailer Error

Norman Kingsley Mailer died this morning, aged 84. He was an irascible and somewhat perverse man of letters. I will always remember him for a traumatic O-level year in which he published Ancient Evenings. It was a very interesting, meticulously well-researched piece of ridiculous social rubbish. It was also 704 pages thick. I wasted a lot of time on it. At the end I knew two things: Norman Mailer was a wonderful writer, and this was certainly not a good book.

All the same, wherever he's gone, I hope it's not to his ancient Egyptian hell. There is such a thing as too much description.

Sense and Sensitivity

As IB students (and soon, graduates), you're supposed to develop an international outlook - open, tolerant and sensitive to other peoples and cultures.

When you write in your essay "Huck Finn meets the nigger Jim and they run away together", you will show yourself to be an insensitive - even racist - oaf rather than the IB student we had all hoped for. This is because, as you know, the term "nigger" is an offensive term to many people. So, if you intend to use it in your essay, you must fence it in with quotation marks, to show that you are quoting Mark Twain, and that you are not the one calling Jim a "nigger". OK? Do you know what I mean?

In the same way, please stop saying that white people or the entire white community is corrupt, heartless and hypocritical. Twain does not make that generalization - you are the one doing it. He has many examples of good-hearted white folks in the book. When you malign an entire culture/community so carelessly in an essay, you show yourself to be an insensitive Asian chauvinist. This is not the way to impress your examiner.

The Corrections

If you feel like working your Paper 1 muscles today, you could take a look at the extract below. It's from Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001). Alfred and Enid are an older couple and Alfred is developing Alzheimer's.

---

Enid could hear Alfred upstairs now, opening and closing drawers. He became agitated whenever they were going to see their children. Seeing their children was the only thing he seemed to care about anymore.

In the streaklessly clean windows of the dining room there was chaos. The berserk wind, the negating shadows. Enid had looked everywhere for the letter from the Axon Corporation, and she couldn't find it.

Alfred was standing in the master bedroom wondering why the drawers of his dresser were open, who had opened them, whether he had opened them himself. He couldn't help blaming Enid for his confusion. For witnessing it into existence. For existing, herself, as a person who could have opened these drawers.

"Al? What are you doing?"

He turned to the doorway where she'd appeared. He began a sentence: "I am --" but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he'd entered, he would realize that the crumbs he'd dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn't quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren't uniform, weren't an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he'd encountered the word "crepuscular" in McKay's Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he'd seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn't just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he'd sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he'd entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods -- "packing my suitcase," he heard himself say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He'd betrayed nothing.

But Enid had spoken again. The audiologist had said that he was mildly impaired. He frowned at her, not following.

"It's Thursday," she said, louder. "We are not leaving until Saturday."

"Saturday!" he echoed.

She berated him then, and for a while the crepuscular birds retreated, but outside the wind had blown the sun out, and it was getting very cold.

Think clearly, write to the point

Hope everyone's papers have been going well!

If you're looking to get into a good frame of mind for Paper 1 tomorrow, I suggest that you look at some subject reports, to remind yourself of what IB examiners want or don't want to see in your scripts.

I've put the last 5 subject reports (May 2005 to May 2007) on LMS, so you can download it, scroll to the right pages for Paper 1 (it's somewhere in the middle, after Internal Assessment, aka IOC, and WL), and take a look at their feedback again.

A few reminders:

- Keep an open mind tomorrow when you read the passage and poem. Try not to jump to conclusions about what the piece is about (i.e. if you see a few references to war, don't assume immediately that the piece is about the futility and horror of war; don't make easy assumptions based on the title and year at the bottom - these assumptions are often wrong; etc). Allow the piece to speak to you - every piece will have its own set of concerns and style, allow them to come through. Sit there quietly and listen to it. Don't be too quick to impose your judgment on it. Spend the first 15 mins wisely. Read carefully.

- Do not write a super-long essay. A hefty script at the end of 1.5 or 2 hours may reassure you ("I have a good essay! It's 10 pages!") but it will dismay the examiner before he/she even starts reading ("#%^&*!! Another 10-pager! What is with this school and its students??"). It might be counter-intuitive for you, but please restrain yourself from writing a long essay. We value quality so much more than quantity that when we get a concise essay with good ideas, we are desperate to shower marks on it to show our appreciation.

So when your friend next to you raises his/her hand for the fourth time for more paper, restrain yourself. Write a concise and good essay. That will get you a '7'. Length will not.

- Write neatly. It matters. If you don't believe me, read the subject reports.

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That's it from me for now. You guys have the intelligence and the ability to do well in this paper. Go out there tomorrow and show 'em what you've got! :)

Nov 2006 Paper 2 (SL and HL)

Why are so many people asking me for this paper? It's on LMS - I put it there a week or two ago and I just checked and it's still there.

Go look again, OK?

Dali

For the last time, friends, none of our Part 3 texts are 'surreal'. Stop saying that - it only shows that you don't understand what 'surreal' really means.

In Term 3, we explained to the HL classes that true surrealist texts experiment with “free association, a broken syntax, nonlogical and nonchronological order, dreamlike and nightmarish sequences, and the juxtaposition of bizarre, shocking, or seemingly unrelated images”. Salvador Dali's Premonition of Civil War above is a good example of surreal art.

Siddhartha might be written in a non-realistic (epic, legendary, etc) manner but it is NOT surreal.

Writing 101: Clarity

The problem:

Your essay seems crystal clear to you. But, when it comes back after assessment, your teacher has written 'Unclear' or 'Huh??' in many places. What do you do now?

Suggested solution:

Ask yourself: "When I write, do I write with a reader in mind?" i.e. are you writing for yourself, or are you writing the essay for a teacher/examiner-type person?

- If you're writing for yourself, stop doing that. An essay is NOT a diary entry. You are NOT the intended reader.

- The reader you must keep in mind is someone like me, or like Mr Quek.

You know how Siddhartha has that "clear and certain inner voice" that "had always guided him in his luminous time"? (p.70) That is what you should have.

Ideally, when you look at your essay, you should not only look at it through your own eyes. The clearest writers are able to imagine reading it through their intended reader's eyes. They can critically assess whether their essays are clear by imagining Mr Quek or I reading it, and they are able to see where we might have more trouble understanding the progression of an argument, a sentence, etc.

When I write blog entries, I imagine some of you reading it. That's why I break my writing up into shorter, coherent paragraphs - it's easier on the eyes and the understanding. That's why I write short sentences - they are easier to grasp. If you have not really consciously thought about your reader(s) when you write (your blog, essays, whatever), start doing so now?