Lit S

Hehheh been doing Olds this weekend. Well, mostly been playing Red Alert and redesigning my website, though neither one has been completed. But this afternoon really got down to doing Olds. Phwah, her stuff still packs a mighty punch. Especially when you read her work in chronological order. It's like reading a condensed autobiography. And the thing is her precision in description. I mean, I'll never experience childbirth, but the attachment between mother and child is crystal clear in her poems. In her powerful and frank way, she manages to leapfrog over conceptual boundaries. Puissant work.

A note on her tone. I don't know why it works so well. Most of the time it's frank, urgent, earnest. Yes, earnest. And yet it manages to fit all sorts of situations, from describing the poetry in her daughter's body to her first time in a flophouse and then to her feud with her dying father. It's the frankness in her writing that allows all the emotions to surface so easily, I guess. She's baring herself to her reader, unabashed, unpretentious. In her tone, there is a quality of respect, because she doesn't shy away from describing things as they are out of consideration for her reader's sensibilities. There is also a quality of trust, as must be the case when you're discussing things as intimate as sex and childbirth. And there's an element of intimacy, too. A naked soul burns on those pages.

I wonder how she can bear to do it, to write herself down and present herself to the world like that. How can her whole family take it, her exhibition of her feud with her father, her graphic descriptions of sex with her husband and her previous boyfriends? Of course, it may be that all of it is fiction. To be sure, her poems read like a storybook after a while, with plottable plotlines and linkages between poems. But the sincerity adds such a strong impression of authenticity that I think this stuff really happened. Such intense experience in the hands of such a good writer; a coincidence of the two doesn't happen often. What is remarkable is that these things really happened, and what is doubly remarkable is that in reading her work, you can see her life experience materialising in front of you in terms you'd understand.

Heh, real decadence, this is. Studying for Lit S. I wonder if the people doing Econs S can ever rave like this. There is really nothing more liberating or satisfying than such good reads, I think.

Reading Olds's work this afternoon, a wave of moroseness suddenly struck me. I find that I am learning a lot from these books, and when reading a poem about the aftermath of lovemaking, there was a sudden need to reach out to other people. It struck me then, the weight of all those people that I have left behind over the years, the people who did not follow this path that I walk on. These people, crystallised, distilled, romanticised even in the balm of memory, each one representing a tangential path that I could have followed instead. Why is it that the intersections between our individual experiences must be so temporary? And it makes it even sadder that the world gives us so many obligations that eat into the time we have to spend with other people. Especially now; exams are lethal for society.

Anyway, at any rate, it will be all over soon. Already I feel myself on the downslope of the exam experience. Two Econs papers and the two S papers remaining, and then we'll be free to replan our time, regroup and plan our next big offensive. And the best thing is, around this time, everyone will be finishing their exams. Not only the other JCs, but also the people in the polys. Reading all these blogs, and seeing all the happy happy posts about exams ending, one cannot help but be infected by the spirit. This is one of the best times in the year, an islandwide coincidence of relief and satisfaction.

Lately my family's been considering a possible holiday at the end of the year. Slotted precariously between the A Levels and enlistment, somewhere in the middle of December. The possibilities ranged from a return to the free-and-easy of Australia, to a packaged tour to the snows of China, and the latest one, a visit to Oregon to drop in on my mum's old friend. But one that I really like is the idea of a cruise. The only one so far was when I was about to go to P1, on the Superstar Aquarius. (For some reason I always remember meeting my kindergarten classmate on that ship in a lobby with a sculpture of the waves of the sea, a girl called Grace. I'm pretty sure that never happened, but somehow or other my memory says otherwise.) The sea always has a special allure, and the notion of being on a ship is really enticing, especially after Gut Symmetries. Imagine...being on a cruise, tacking along the Asian coastline, every day waking up to a new town, a new port. I'd love to go on a trip like that!

pondered by phoenican @ 18.9.05