Hardback or Paperback: Paperbacks, as I believe in the ephemeral existence of words
Highlight or Underline: Highlight, the colors are psychedelic and fade with time
Lewis or Tolkien: Tolkien, as Lewis cannot deal with his loneliness
E.B. White or A.A. Milne: White, the spider made me cry
T.S. Eliot or e.e. cummings: cummings, for his prescient post-structuralist iconoclasm
Stephen King or Dean Koontz: King, for the images of abject desire
Barnes & Noble or Borders: Shaman Drum, the fave indie book haunt of Ann Arbor, the town of the original Borders
Waldenbooks or B. Dalton: Huh?
Fantasy or Science Fiction: Reality, as it has both
Horror or Suspense: Reality, as it is both
Bookmark or Dogear: Bookmark, pretty ones
Large Print or Fine Print: Who the hell reads large print?
Hemingway or Faulkner: Hemingway, for the self-indulgent narcissist in each of us
Fitzgerald or Steinbeck: Steinbeck, for his grapes
Homer or Plato: Late or early Wittgenstein? Homer, poetic wisdom, I prefer language games over logic tracts anytime
Geoffrey Chaucer or Edmund Spenser: Didn’t read either
Pen or Pencil: Pen, the clicking type, the clicking is therapeutic and i like to chew (i hate wooden splinters in my mouth)
Looseleaf or Notepad: Sketchpads, no disciplining lines and the fantasy of never-ending blank slates.
Alphabetize? By Author or By Title: Prefer to color-aestheticize
Shelving? By Genre/Subject or All Books Together: By interest subjects: postcolonial literature, modernist literature, postmodernist literature, Singapore literature, biographies, religion, art, world history, southeast asian history, anthropology, parochial Singapore, social movements, cultural studies, sociological theory, globalization/empire, Marxist theory, historical sociology, postcolonial theory, cultural theory, methodology.
Dustjacket? Leave it On or Take it Off: Hate dustjackets, I like dust on my books, but somehow can’t bring myself to junk them
Novella or Epic: Novella
John Grisham or Scott Turow: Who?
J.K. Rowling or Lemony Snicket: I don’t care
John Irving or John Updike: Updike, only because I can’t stand Garp and Meany for textual erectile dysfunctionality
Salman Rushdie or Don Delillo: Rushdie, East, West, I reject you both, you hear me?!
Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte: Austen, something I share with my love
Dorothy L. Sayers or Agatha Christie: No interest
George Eliot or Edith Wharton: Eliot, dirty London over teddy-bear New York
Toni Morrison or Alice Walker: MLK or Malcolm X (okay, maybe this is facetious)? Walker, more edgy
Fiction or Non-fiction: I don’t see the difference
Historical Biography or Historical Romance: History
Reading Pace? A Few Pages per Sitting or Finish at Least a Chapter: Depends on how long the traveling or shitting is going to take
Short Story or Creative Non-fiction Essay: Creative non-fiction essay, because Singaporean writers know only how to write good short stories, time to move on you stuck-in-the-rut-spinners-of-empty-yawns
Blah Blah Blah or Yada Yada Yada: Whichever is more irreverent in the particular context
“It was a dark and stormy night…” or “Once upon a time…”: Dark and stormy night, it conjures up a whimsical beagle with perpetual writer’s block
Books? Buy or Borrow: Buy, their presence on my shelves offers me comfort that this world is ultimately meaningless save for the meanings we construct with grace and good faith
Book Reviews or Word of Mouth: Mystical process of serendipitous revelation
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
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5 comments:
hi dr goh!
this may sound really childish because it's a stupid dare... but oh well, here goes..
are u married?
Yes. I buy them too, exactly for the same purpose you stated but I don't understand what you mean by 'good faith'.
Hey Kean Bon, been thinking about this for a long time (if you are still lurking and reading this). I have in mind the rant of the mad or the cry of the brat, for whom meanings are mere instruments in the pursuit of desires, tools to manipulate a world peopled by interpretations. Good faith lies somewhere in between the cynical use of language and the naive enunciation of innocence. It comes with a consciouness that all meanings are constructed, nothing fundamentally real, but refuses (see post, 4 jan 2007) to conclude therefore that there is no meaningful reality that we can pursue and live. The denial of truths is as fundamentalistic as the assertion of Truth. The former stems from a disheartening, a disillusionment, disenchantment that follows the realization of meaninglessness without giving up the absolute need to be enchanted that is characteristic of the latter. In other words, the nihilist is only but a disenchanted fundamentalist. --- "But the point is to live." Albert Camus
Thank you for explaining, Daniel. Which is why "ambivalence comes when one sympathises with individuals experiencing alienation in global modernity, when the sociologist can understand their opting for Fundamentalism" (Goh, 1999: 108). I have dishearteningly fallen into what you've called the disenchantment derived from constantly denying truths. For sure it hasn't made daily living any happier; it instead became a chore. Got to snap out of it.
[ed: understand]
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