application essays

Writing application essays for things is an interesting exercise. i hadn't realised till today that my writing life was so thick with story. Of course, once you think about it, it makes perfect sense -- i've been doing This Writing Thing for 5 years now; 16, you count those earlier years when i'd already started but was essentially just practising.
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i think what makes it even more, how to say, difficult to articulate neatly, is the fact that most of this wasn't institutionally supported in the conventional sense. i haven't done an MFA or worked full-time in a literary organisation. Instead, everything's been done on an ad-hoc basis, with friends and whatever writing community has happened to come my way, in whatever time i could set aside from work and other commitments. Everything's incredibly disparate.
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Which is a bit of a bother when it comes to writing application essays, because it's hard to fit all those disparate stories into the space of whatever word limit you're given. Not that i should complain, of course. Having too much to say, is actually a very good problem.
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seeds (2)

" . . . history is shaped by the groundswells and common dreams that single acts and moments only represent. It’s a landscape more complicated than commensurate cause and effect. Politics is a surface in which transformation comes about as much because of pervasive changes in the depths of the collective imagination as because of visible acts, though both are necessary . . . Writers need to understand that action is seldom direct. You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them or they might just rot . . . Some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire."

(Rebecca Solnit)
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an advent gift

Allow me to record this: that this has been on transcendent day, when somehow things just felt right, in a way they have not felt right for a long time. For some reason, i just feel assured that, in the words of Julian of Norwich, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
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To feel once again the joy of words, to meet once again (and so unexpectedly) a dear old friend, to feel so blessed to have found a church like the one i'm in right now (and to know that nowhere else in the world will i find a church quite like it) -- all this, on the first day of Advent, is cause for rejoicing.
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a tale of two presidents

Responding to the death of Fidel Castro:
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Barack Obama:
"At this time of Fidel Castro’s passing, we extend a hand of friendship to the Cuban people. We know that this moment fills Cubans – in Cuba and in the United States – with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation. History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him."
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Donald Trump:
"While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve." (And on Twitter: "Fidel Castro is dead!")
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Whatever one thinks of Castro -- and i don't know enough to know what i think -- it seems quite obvious to me which man makes a better steward of the world's most powerful military and most potent cache of nuclear arsenal.
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God help us all.
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the writing life

i haven't felt like this in a long time. That burning passion for good writing. That conviction that this is what i want to do with the rest of my life. For so long, i've just been living off the memory of that conviction, doing the perseverance thing, because the call came in such an unmistakeable way. But it's been ages since i've felt this way.
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Hello, Passion, my old friend,
It's good to talk with you again ...
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Thank you, J.M. Coetzee and Annie Dillard. i owe you guys one.
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seeds

i believe the seeds of the future are found in the present. Or, the seeds of the present were found in the past. Whichever way one puts it -- i believe in cause and effect, karma, things being a certain way which is incredibly resistant to change, unless some bolt from the blue takes place, some miracle.
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This is how i generally have a pretty good sense of how people will choose and act in particular circumstances, and how i'm usually pretty good at predicting how things will turn out in any particular situation (the caveat being, of course, that i have to have a fairly good understanding of the individuals or situations in question). i used to doubt myself -- people, often of the 'positive thinking' school, the kind of people with particularly stubborn wills who like to think that life is within their control: these people would accuse me of fatalism. (Perhaps not in so many words; but that was essentially what they were saying.) Here's the thing though: most of the time, things turned out as i predicted. Now i trust myself more.
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i had a particularly tense conversation yesterday with a friend in which i said that more and more, i've come to believe that everthing in life is 'given' (by God -- since the friend in question is also a Christian), nothing we do is truly 'free'. We may believe we are acting 'freely', choosing 'freely', but our choices and actions are a product of circumstance, temperament, experience, and very often, deep and sometimes unconscious drives and motivations over which we have little control. Given an individual's particular mix of background, experience, circumstance, temperatment, values, etc, there usually is only one way that this person will act in any particular situation. And of course, lots of individual choices made by different individuals, in aggregate, combine to form the larger movements and directions that we experience as "History".
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i know this sounds deeply fatalistic. And in a sense, understood wrongly, it can lead to fatalism.
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The way i like to think of it, though, is like an author and a novel. Within the confines of the novel, the characters think and act as if they have free will. But there is an author who is outside the world of the novel. We have an illusion of choice, i believe, and we should and do act on that illusion, because, of course, how else can one live? But outside the space-time continuum, we really don't have any choice at all.
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So what has all of this got to do with anything?
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Everything, really. i've said before on this blog that i saw the seeds of Trump even in bluest of liberal America when i visited in 2013 and 2014. That is why i think that the Trump presidency is basically just the logical outworking of something that was really decided, long, long ago. As is the way he seems to be peopling his Cabinet. Around the world, too -- i think the seeds of increasing socio-political fragmentation and environmental destruction were sown long ago -- in the desires that people pursue so mindlessly, in the inequalities established by the rich and powerful years, nay, centuries, ago.
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All i can say is, it feels like humanity is heading helter-skelter down a steep and dangerous road that leads to an abrupt precipice, and i fear that we may already be moving too fast for us to stop in time.
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something in the water

我 真 的 很 喜 欢 台 湾 。
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i swear, this place has the nicest Chinese people in the world. Seriously. Is this niceness real?? Is it just a facade?? What do they put in the water here???
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If i ever had to live in some Asian country other than Singapore, this would be it. In fact, if not for the language issue, and the fact that 'my people' are all in Singapore (a fact that's becoming more and more important the older i get ... ), i'd move here in a heartbeat. Good food, nice people, a smart and open-minded culture, a can-do and innovative spirit, varied and beautiful landscapes, a thriving arts scene in the capital (albeit in Chinese ... ). i really hope they manage to stay independent and don't end up getting economically annexed by China ...
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hell in a handbasket

Seeing as much of the world seems to be heading straight for hell in a handbasket, perhaps the thing to do now is to forget about pursuing dreams abroad, and just hunker down here in Singapore and be safe and sensible (and stagnating ... but still safe!) until all this blows over, or until Armageddon, whichever happens first.
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time's winged chariot

Has it really been a month already since the Thai king passed away?
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Time has absolutely flown by.
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both sides now

i didn't think i'd find another cover version of this song that i like almost as much as Joni Mitchell's 2000 live performance. i think that 2000 version still takes the cake with the icing and cherry on top -- simply because it was sung by the songwriter herself after many decades of looking at clouds and love and life, and because JM is such a musician. But this version is interesting and creative, with a whimsical, quirky piano part, and presents quite a different take on the song from the other versions i've heard before.
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curiosity

Considering that most of the media from the US and UK that i (and most of my friends) follow is basically liberal-leaning in bias ... And also that most of the US media that the intelligentsia flock to is liberal-leaning, i'm wondering what exactly is the truth about what's happening in America.
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Maybe it's time to go there and take a look for myself.
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democracy (2)

On the other hand, Obama and Clinton: let's work together to make this work. Sure, they're politicians; sure, they kinda have to say this stuff. But surely, that is the way to handle things in such circumstances, is it not? This is about the country, not about your individual political alliances. You can either throw a tantrum and act like a crybaby because a democratic election process has not gone your way, or you can grow up and be an adult, reach out to the other side and offer your help, and say, Let's move forward together. Thank goodness Americans have leaders who are adults, even if some of the populace themselves are not.
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democracy

Reading about the protests in the US against the election results ...
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And i'm thinking, well, this is democracy. The man won by a democratic process, unfortunately, and whether one likes it or not. And sure, you can protest against his policies, against his hate speech, against any number of things that he has said and done and you do not agree with. That's fine. But to protest against the result of a democratic election process. That's different. That's a contradiction if you say you believe in democracy. Ironically, it is exactly what the man himself said he would do if his opponent won: not accept the result of the electoral process. i remember all of you baying for his blood when he said that -- as well you should have. But now you're doing the same. Perhaps what you're really saying, then, is that you believe in democracy, but only when you're on the winning side.
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rant

Before i start: my deepest apologies to my American friends reading this blog. You may find the rest of this post offensive and insulting. But i have thought about these things for several years and i want to test my thoughts, to essay them, to go back to the old French root of the word "essay". Feel free to talk back. It would be good to hear a different perspective.
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i made my first extended visit to the US in 2013, as a participant in a summer writing programme at UC Berkeley. i had been considering an MFA programme for some time, and after my dad passed away, i found that i was suddenly free to do an on-site, residential programme overseas, rather than a distance-learning programme while living in Singapore. So i thought the Berkeley stint would give me some insight into MFA programmes in the US, and into US culture in general, and that it would help me make a decision about whether to invest (money, energy, time, effort) in an MFA degree that, i knew even back then, gave no guarantee of anything other than the time and space to work on my writing. Certainly, there would be no guarantee of a job after graduation, or publication, or even of good teaching. That much i understood.
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My time at Berkeley turned out to be highly instructive. (Haha!) In terms of the teaching i received, it was decent, but nowhere as life-changing and craft-improving as the Stanford Online course i'd done with OH a few years earlier when i was still stuck in Singapore, or even the quantitatively-less but qualitatively-equally transformative Arvon programme i'd done in 2012, in the UK, just after my dad passed away and i found myself free to travel as and when i liked for the first time in 8 years.
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But i did get a glimpse into American society -- at least, the liberal / Democrat side of American society that tends to congregate in the top universities. And to be honest, i found what i saw disturbing, and to be honest, off-putting. i had decided by the end of my Berkeley stint that i wasn't going to do an MFA in the US, that if i did do a creative writing degree, it would be in the UK instead.
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How do i express what exactly it was about American society that so turned me against it? There was the racism, of course -- not on the part of the individuals i met, who were all good liberals and of course against any form of racial discrimination on a personal level. But it was in the social structures and institutions upon which American life was built: the churches, schools, that people went to. Even the literary scene was organised along racial lines -- "people of color" who were expected almost by default to write about their experiences as ethnic minorities, versus presumably colorless white people who presumably had the freedom to write about whatever they wanted to write about. i even had a well-meaning (colored) writing professor tell me to consider applying to the writing programme she was teaching in because "we are very open to writers of color". It was supremely ironic: she meant well, so well; but in the end it was probably one of the things that most pushed me into making my decision against a US-based MFA.
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Then there was the ideology of individualism and personal freedom that underlay the entire American founding philosophy. i saw firsthand the results of such an ideology pushed to its most destructive extreme: in the breakdown of family structures (so many of the people i met had gone through at least one divorce, or came from broken families), in the drug-and-alcohol-fuelled culture that manifested itself in the numerous stoned-out people i saw on the streets of Berkeley and the way people would stumble into class or whatever in the mornings boasting about how "wasted" they were, in the unquestioning acceptance of a sexual "liberation" which resulted in numerous broken relationships and, of course, the whole "rape culture" that astonished me in its inability to see that the very "liberation" they so worshipped was exactly what enslaved them to a climate in which women felt coerced into giving way to demands for sex even if they were not ready for it, and men felt entitled to take whatever sexual "services" they thought was their due regardless of ... well, regardless of anything, really.
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It was all illogical to me, yet paradoxically so very much the logical outcome of a philosophy that saw individual freedom and doing-what-makes-me-happy-regardless-of-how-it-affects-others as the highest good, and in which responsibility, duty, and care for others was pushed to the wayside and vilified as a prissy imposition of unfashionably puritan values by people who just didn't know how to have fun. It astonished me that people could not see the connection between cause and effect.
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The other thing -- perhaps related to this deep and apparently unconscious ideological conditioning -- what the media is now calling the inability to accept that the existence of people who disagree with you, who see things differently. This is not the same as disagreeing with people. It is not the same as thinking that others are making a mistake. (Heck, i've just spent the last few paragraphs explaining why i think individualism as a philosophy is a dead-end road, in my view.) It's the automatic assumption that yours is the only perspective, the inability to even imagine a different way of thinking, that probably comes from living in a bubble where everybody thinks in exactly the same way as you. The way i see it, this has led to a deep polarisation in American society, probably made worse by their politics and geographical size. It's easy to never have to encounter the other if you're living in America.
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i was astonished also at the inanity of their TV programming -- i remember watching a gameshow with my Berkeley housemates one evening and walking out halfway because it was just so stupid and vulgar. (We have 'stupid' here in Singapore too; but 'vulgar', no. When a society starts celebrating 'vulgar', you know something is not going right.) In my conversations with so many people, it seemed that the average American worldview was not in any real sense a worldview, but a countryview: there was an astonishing lack of knowledge, or even curiosity, about the world outside American borders, and a concomitant inability to truly engage with anyone who didn't already share their perspectives. It was only the Americans who had travelled, either for work or leisure or studies, who seemed able to even do basic things like inquire about the society that i, as an outsider, came from, not even when i was asking them copious questions about America.
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So in a sense, my first impression of the US was of a deeply polarised, parochial, insular, and racist society where knowledge and learning were not valued at the level of the masses, and where openness and curiosity were not valued at the level of the elite. A society which was blind to its own failings and weaknesses, and which persisted in following the very ideologies and worldviews which were leading to its breakdown and destruction.
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i told myself that the US is not headed anywhere good, and decided not to join my fate to such a place.
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Fast forward to 2016, and the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States. Am i surprised? Not at all. Given the current (global and national) economic climate, it makes perfect sense that the people have voted for a polarising, parochial, racist President. He is, in fact, the most natural choice -- the perfect embodiment of the very society that has voted him as their leader.
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It is i guess also deeply ironic, if not illogical, that the US is now on my list of MFA possibilities. Partly driven there by desperation -- i can no longer tell myself that sticking to my current job is the right path for me. i have to give the all-out writing a chance. And that is not something i can do very well here. i guess, in a sense, being right smack in the midst of destabilising change may be just the thing for a budding writer. After all, art does thrive amidst conflict and contradiction. Anyway, it's not like i've finished my applications. i may not even get a place. Who knows. i suppose, perhaps, this too is good position to be in -- if i get accepted, good news for my writing career. If i'm rejected, perhaps good news for my life in general. Let's see where this goes.
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difference

i remember an incident that took place almost exactly 2 years ago, at some friends' home in Oxford. We were talking about some deeply contentious issue on which i disagreed with them, and at some point in the conversation, one of them looked at me and said, "You're shivering. Are you very cold?" And i looked back at her and said, "Yes, i'm trembling. Because all this feels hostile." And it was true. She was so unable to hear a point of view she considered repugnant, that her stance and tone toward me were nothing short of threatening. What amazes me is that she didn't realise this.
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i mention this because that was actually not my first encounter with the hostility of people who think differently from me and are somehow unable to accept that anyone apparently sane and intelligent could possibly hold a different view from them. For my part, i cannot understand such an inability to accept the existence of intelligent people who have different values or perspectives from your own. What kind of bubble does someone have to live in, to not understand difference?
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(Perhaps that is a rather ironic question -- such people are clearly different from me in their inability to see and acknowledge opposing viewpoints -- and here i am saying that i cannot understand them ...)
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post-elections

It's been an odd evening. First the spectre of 4 years with Trump leading the US. And then, PH, my favourite prof from university, launching his new book -- and sitting there at the launch, remembering the way i used to leave his classes with my mind on fire: and reliving a bit of that experience even with the little that he said during the launch. i miss academic life. Need. To. Get. Myself. Into. An. Academic. Environment. And then, supper with some fellow writers, and listening to their conversations, and being asked why i was being so quiet.
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i really need to go talk to people who straddle different worlds. i think that's partly why i so love the way PH thinks -- because he's been in different worlds and therefore doesn't suffer from that peculiar brand of tunnel-vision that afflicts so many people who only mix around with their own.
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psychic

Can i just say, that if Trump wins, that will prove i'm psychic. i've had a bad feeling about these elections ever since Brexit. i just knew something like this was going to happen. (i usually do. Know what's going to happen, i mean.)
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comfortable

Need. To. Get. Out. Of. Singapore.
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i've grown far too comfortable here -- comfortable with being half-alive, comfortable with muting my dreams, my thoughts, my voice.
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Dinner today -- with writers from Ghana, Sweden, the US, Taiwan... made me realise how i really need to get out, for a while, and go and do what i've always wanted to do. After that i can come back having learnt new things, and things will hopefully be different because i will be different, and in a different place.
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The thing about Singapore is that it's so small, you exhaust the possibilities very quickly. Kinda like how, at the SWF, panels about Singapore literature soon more or less all circle back to the same old topics. Part of this may be due to a mental laziness, perhaps, a jumping to easy, well-worn conclusions; but i think most of it is because we're just a small place, and there really is only that much variation a small place can provide. It's not the best place to learn new things.
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In other news: it seems like this has been a SWF of reconnecting and reconciliation. Maybe this means that the next step is to leave. Sort out all the baggage from the past, and then take off. Sounds like a good story.
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a thought

So i came across on the internet today two Pronouncements on What Poetry Is.
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One, from someone i know whom i suspect i have deep fundamental values-disagreements with despite our shared faith, declared that "The best literature is life-affirming, life-renewing and life-directing." The other, from British poet Ted Hughes (he of "twice-married-to-women-who-eventually-committed-suicide-and-you-can't-help-but-wonder-if-the-problem-was-him-or-the-women" fame), asserts: "The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world."
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Two contrasting definitions -- and i'm wondering, why this need to assert one's aesthetic values in such an exclusive, closed-off way? There's loads of life affirming writing (and art, in general) that is, basically, crap; and some of the best writing i know does not so much affirm life, but asks good questions, and makes you think. There is also pain-saturated poetry that is quite frankly unreadable. Why this desire to (over)-simplify, to reduce things to their most obvious and most polemic terms -- and in literature, of all things?
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