with or without $$$

More ruminations, this time about wealth and poverty, which i've been thinking a lot about recently.
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It seems too obvious to even point out, but poor people and rich people have very different attitudes towards the world, very different values and expectations. Obvious -- but very rarely said, because it is so politically-incorrect. But i've been looking at my (mostly rich) friends, and thinking about the way they think, and i've been thinking how different they are from the people i know who are from poorer backgrounds, or who continue to remain poor.
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i wonder if these people realise how their income / wealth levels affect the way they see things. Possibly not. i'm recalling in particular a conversation i had with a friend last year, about the purpose of education. She came from a very well-to-do family -- something that i sometimes think she should disclose (see: 'full disclosure') especially when she makes pronouncements in public about government policy and our country's values etc -- and she said that education is about finding what you're passionate about, caring about knowledge, serving society, yada yada. i pointed out that for some people, education is a way out of poverty and into a better life. It's an aspirational thing. She found that shallow and wrong. Education should be for the love of learning, she said, and not for making one's way up in society. It's funny that she, of all people, should think this way -- seeing as one of the corporate social responsibility thingies that her own company engages in aims to help 3rd world villages out of poverty...
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i could go on, but should probably stop here before i say something really offensive ....
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two old friends

i've always thought that older people have a lot of wisdom to share with the world. Here are Helmut Schmidt and LKY shooting the breeze back in 2012.

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Fascinating stuff.

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to go (2)

It's funny how something that's happening halfway across the world, in a country that i feel emotionally tied to simply because i'd lived there, and in a sense grown up there, for three years, can have such an impact on me now. Even taking into the very real (mainly economic) consequences that this is going to have on Singapore. This strange sense of loss i'm feeling -- is not (just / primarily) about the economy.
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bookstores

Bookstores are dangerous places. You wander in, determined not to buy anything because you have no room for any more books, and then, predictably, ludicrously, you walk out having broken your promise, and with entire worlds battering at your eyelids, demanding to be let in.
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full disclosure

Here's something i've been thinking about for over a year, but never got round to articulating. Putting it here so that i can try to put my half-formed thoughts into words, and to see what those words might look like in "print", so to speak.

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There's something i want to say at some point about how people who write opinion pieces should state, upfront and right at the start of their piece, exactly who their opinion piece is addressed to. Because, of course, whatever opinion you're expressing is really just an opinion, one that is might be applicable to particular groups of people, but definitely not to everyone. But that is not how the rhetoric of an opinion piece works. Opinion pieces are written to persuade, and to state a case as strongly as possible, and therefore usually employ language that (falsely) suggests universal applicability.

Stating upfront exactly who the intended audience of your opinion piece is, would probably save a lot of grief for the (i suspect many) people who read such pieces looking for insight on how to live their lives because they themselves are confused and uncertain, and therefore unable to critically assess whether or not that particular opinion actually applies to their situation. Such people may actually end up taking advice that is unsuitable or even bad for their specific circumstances, simply because an opinion piece is written so persuasively and with such apparent authority, and apparently addressed to a universal general 'Reader', that they think it applies to them.

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For example, in all the recent hullaballoo in the world of education over 'grit' -- its importance, its limitations -- the one thing that poor Angela Duckworth probably should have said was that she was addressing a particular audience (probably Western, probably liberal) that has, for a long time, undervalued perseverance and discipline, and over-valued other traits like creativity and adaptability. She was not addressing Asian tiger mums -- who probably need to be told to get a grip and for goodness sakes stop pushing their kids so hard and give their poor kids a break, just once in a while. But she didn't say so explicitly. So, of course, the predictable response has been that Asian tiger mums are using her research as ballast for their own over-zealous, excessively-pressurising parenting techniques.

So now there's the inevitable slew of counter-arguments on "the limits of grit" -- all stating (what to me appears to be) the obvious: that dogged persistence is not always a good thing if the goal is poorly chosen; that other qualities like empathy or integrity need to be taught in schools as well; that sometimes telling people to "just grit yer teeth and get on with it" may be a way of evading the collective responsibility of changing unjust social structures by laying the blame for failure on the individual alone. If Duckworth had just stated the limits of her research focus in the first place, then the entire conversation could have been far more balanced and sensible right from the start.

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i can think of so many other examples of advice that is implicitly directed at just one group of people, but instead gets swallowed wholesale by an entire society, including people who should not be following that advice and who in fact need advice in the opposite direction. One example: Christian writing that extols the value of serving other people. Well and good, of course, if the person reading that advice is a selfish egotist with a track record of choosing self over others in all of her life decisions. Perhaps not so great if the reader is a stressed-out, burnt-out stay-at-home mum who gave up career and other opportunities to look after her kids, and with a track record of being a general doormat, and whose greatest need at the moment may simply be to ask her husband to look after the kids for one weekend while she goes off on a holiday to recharge her batteries and get some well-deserved rest and relaxation. 

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My thoughts on this are still not fully articulated -- but what i'm thinking along the lines of is something like a full-disclosure statement -- in which the writer states, clearly, where he/she is coming from, who he/she is addressing (and perhaps also who he/she is not addressing.... ), what prompted the writing of that piece in the first place.

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Full disclosure:

i have long been disturbed by the one-sided conversations that tend to develop when communities embrace a certain viewpoint unquestioningly, or the lopsided thinking that takes place when a certain slant of advice is given (and taken) without careful thought and discernment. The examples i cited are taken from the educational and Christian communities of which i'm a part, but the same problem is really rife everywhere, i suspect. It's just the human herd instinct at work, and probably other things like the politics of publishing, etc etc. The general point being, i think, that writing that does not state its intended audience clearly, can be very dangerous if read uncritically. Not that it's the writer's responsibility to ensure that his/her readers are also thinking sensibly and rationally; but it doesn't hurt to make the extra effort to make sure that one's writing is correctly understood by the people who end up reading it.
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PS:
Perhaps another way to put this, is to say that i'm against packaging an opinion or piece of advice that is directed at just one spot of the spectrum of human experience as a be-all-and-end-all solution that is normative for everybody.
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Or perhaps what i'm really pleading for here is some simple common sense and balance.
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PPS:
i know how politically-incorrect it is to say this, but Angela Duckworth is herself the daughter of first-generation Chinese immigrant parents -- albeit of the extremely high-achieving kind. So the Asian immigrant story is very much hers as well. Which kinda puts her research on perseverance and grit in a slightly different light -- it's like Amy Chua but with statistics and minus the ethnic slant. Smart of Duckworth not to use her Chinese surname (Lee) -- if she had done so, her research would have been immediately typecast in the whole 'Asian tiger mum' light, and would therefore be far more controversial, and taken far less seriously.
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this is water

i want to read David Foster Wallace. Anyone who can write something like this:
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"I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fictionists they pose terrifically vexing problems."
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obviously had a thoughtful, questioning mind, a mind unafraid to say things that others considered politically-incorrect or unpopular. And that is a mind worth listening to -- whether or not one agrees with what it's saying.
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That, and also, of course, This Is Water, his famous 2005 Commencement Speech at Kenyon College, which is well worth listening to in all its 22-minute long entirety. (i only just realised that he spends at least 30 seconds in that speech talking about suicide -- tragically prophetic, as it turned out. i'm only now starting to feel the full sadness of the loss.)
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There's also this interview with Charlie Rose -- there's something about his honesty and forthrightness, not to mention the brilliance, that i find very compelling.
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Infinite Jest is 1079 pages long. i think that perhaps his essay collection, Consider the Lobster, will be a better, more manageable place to start.
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weather report

It's been a long time since there's been rain like this -- steady, gentle, lasting long enough to wash away the heat radiating from the asphalt and concrete, the kind that will leave the world looking clean and new after it stops. A sunbird appeared on my window this afternoon, its feathers looking rather sad and bedraggled. It may or may not have been the same one that woke me with such rambunctious singing a few weeks ago. Still, i like to think it's enjoying the rain. A shower once in a while never did anyone any harm.
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missing

Many years ago, i had a conversation with a Canadian colleague about the US. "America's very beginnings are rooted in violence," she said. "And that legacy continues today."
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Clearly, she was no big fan of the USA. Maybe that is typical of Canadians. But i've never forgotten what she said -- partly because i found it so startling when i first heard it.
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i wonder what she thinks of this weekend's happenings in Florida. IC moved back to Canada 3 years ago, when she retired. i miss her wisdom and insight. She was one of those quietly observant folks who have lived through a lot, and who see a lot more than many other more noisy types. She was almost always right about things and people. i wish we could just sit down now and have a nice lunch or tea the way we used to do, even after i changed jobs, every year, until she left Singapore.
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numbers

i wonder how many people the average city-dweller, or maybe the average Singaporean, for ease of reference, meets and talks to in a lifetime. The total number of people, that is -- including one-off encounters like the ones you have with waiters, taxi-drivers, cashiers, people who ask you for directions on the street. Tens of thousands? If you meet and talk with at least one new person every day, and if you then add all the family, friends, colleagues, etc you interact with on a more regular basis, and if you live to say the age of 70, it will be in excess of twenty thousand. And each interaction changing your life in some sort of way, however minuscule. The mind boggles.
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pithy aphorism #387762

Excellence is the antidote to cynicism.
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doubling the point

i've long wondered what it is about Disgrace -- and by extension, most of Coetzee's work up to Disgrace -- that so holds my attention, that i feel such an affinity with. It certainly isn't the politics, and definitely nothing to do with "the itch of the male flesh". i've always known it has to be something about the spirit of his work, the particular kind of intellect and way of thinking that animates his writing. It's something to do with the mind doubling in on itself, i think -- 'doubling the point', as Coetzee himself called it in his eponymous collection of critical essays. That, and i think, the harrowing austerity of his created world, reflected in the knife-like starkness of his prose. And there's something else, i think -- something far less easy to articulate, and that fewer critics have picked up because, i think, the secular mind is simply not as primed to notice these things as someone with a strong spiritual faith might be: i think his earlier novels are deeply concerned with the question of What will save us from ourselves? They ask questions that are religious in aspiration -- but his answers are secular, and preclude a sense of the divine. That alone makes them deeply fascinating, i think -- the struggle is there, and it's real. i wonder if he's come to any peace about it after all this time.
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Here's another stab at the beast that is the mystery of my Coetzee fascination, this time from a Guardian review of Disgrace which puts it at #99 (only 99?*) of a list of 100 best novels (presumably in the English language ... ):
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"Any novel set in post-apartheid South Africa is fated to be read as a political portrait, but the fascination of Disgrace - a somewhat perverse fascination, as some will feel - is the way it both encourages and contests such a reading by holding extreme alternatives in tension. Salvation, ruin. Even a single paragraph can accommodate the transformation of hope into its opposite ..."  (Adam Mars-Jones)
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(* 'only 99' -- because the list is in chronological order)
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quotable quote

"An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind. It tracks the evolution of a single consciousness in order to give us an experience—an experience of looking for something and then finding ourselves in a different place by the time we’ve finished our journey. It doesn’t mean that the thing we went in search of has been found or that a problem has been solved; it doesn’t mean that the world has changed, or has been fixed. It means that our understanding of the initial question or subject is different. It’s clearer—or maybe muddier—but it’s at least different. And that experience that we’re allowed to share with the writer feels very pure because the whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out. That’s the thing that moves an essay forward, that inquiry. It’s not narrative posturing or poetic costuming. It’s just thinking, and sharing the experience of thinking.
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Is that too bullshitty? That might be too bullshitty."
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(John D'Agata, in an interview with Guernica)
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