Lolita

Lolita is reading me again as I am reading her. Lolita and I had our first literary-mating (or pedophilic-mating if you prefer) in early 2007 - Lolita since then has continued to prowl my literary apatite from time to time as though she is still continuously and lustfully looking for her already dead-lover HH, or her already dead-godfather Nabokov.

153, if you have the Penguin edition above, is the page-room I am currently in with Lolita - and Nabokov too of course - even though he had fiercely claimed that his writings are original and does not have any influence of Joyce and Flaubert. To a certain degree, he is right because unlike Joyce and Flaubert, he did not transformed himself into an 'invisible God' that is present everywhere in the text, instead he reincarnated himself into Humbert Humbert which allowed him to used HH as a surrogate or zombie or clone that will execute the master's stylish-lust. So it is safe to say that HH is Nabokov, not in a moral sense, but in an aesthetical or literary sense. As for the Flaubertian tradition, Nabokov is still part of it, but he is without Flaubert's universal and ironical vision, and falls short of Joyce's linguistic originality. Nevertheless, I still consider Lolita a great novel and everytime I come back to it (or her) I always find something fresh to learn and apply in my writing. Lolita, with Tristram Shandy and Epitaph of a Small Winner, is one my favorite literary-playbooks. Allow me to share with you an excerpt from page-room 153:

"At night, tall trucks studded with colored lights, like dreadful giant Christmas trees, loomed in the darkness and thundered by the belated little sedan. And again next day a thinly populated sky, losing its blue to the heat, would melt overhead, and Lo would clamor for a drink, and her cheeks would hollow vigorously over the straw, and the car inside would be furnace when we got in again, and the road shimmered ahead, with a remote car changing its shape mirage-like in the surafce glare, and seeming to hang for a moment, old-fashionedly square and high, in the hot-haze. And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called "sage brush" appeared, and then the msyterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway..."

Another Birthday

Indeed another one.

And yet still no flowers.
And yet still no chocolates.
Only a card
only a poem,
as you would have expected

from me.
At the moment I have nothing to say.
I'm sitting in my room
absorbing the moon.
Shall I say the truth?
This is who I am:
your son

who is not a poet
but just a son
who writes poetry
every year
for his mother.

The moon is gone.
I am alone now.
I only have this:
a poem.

And that is all I can say.

Impian Seorang Ayah

Ayah saya ada empat orang anak lelaki. Impiannya ialah melihat salah seorang daripada kami mengikuti jejak langkahnya. Malang sekali anak yang seorang ini telah memilih cabang seni yang lain.

Ini ialah dua lukisannya yang tergantung di dinding rumah saya.

Bloom And Kierkegaard

A young man makes a lot of mistakes in his life. I am no exception. I stand firm by the opinions that have given in this blog, but still I feel a sense of regret over the manner of my expression. Anger and sarcasm have never been the nature of my soul. And yet there were times that I have used them as tools to attack certain issues and individuals (writers mostly). Looking back, I realize that my verbal assaults were motivated by personal lust for fame and recognition. Indeed, a writer, an ambitious young writer, is constantly trying to establish a name for himself. James Baldwin was right when he said that writers are egotistical and demanding. I have known a few writers who cannot stand hearing the success of another writer and thus immediately begin to write a new story or poem. In my writings I have never been motivated by rivalry. The idea of writing as a race seems to me as something ridiculous. Nobody wins in the arena of art. And yet it would be utterly naive to assume that writers are not motivated by fame.

Over the past years there are two writers that have been at the center of my consciousness. One I regard as a personal philosopher whom I see a lot myself in his vision of life. The other is more of a mentor guiding a blind Eastern writer into the chapel of Western Canon. Kierkegaard belongs to the former (the man in the second picture). The first time I read Kierkegaard was back in 2006 at Borders. The store was nearing closing time and I had just around twenty five minutes to browse through his book. However, with every page I read I felt time was stretching in my mind as if I was being thrown into a dark ocean and Kierkegaard was pulling me slowly to the bottom into his world. When I got there I realize that his world was also my world. I was never the same after that. Kierkegaard was my key into philosophy and myself.

But even today, I am still trying to figure out the whole purpose of philosophy. I don’t read them as many as I would want to. I prefer the freedom of making my personal view of life.

The man in the first picture is Harold Bloom. He is a Samuel Johnson reborn and perhaps one of the greatest living literary critics in the Western world. It has been a few months since I last read his books.

Another Self-Contemplation

I rarely think these days. My greatest fear is existing without knowing I exist. My greatest regret will be dying without knowing I have died.

A very close friend drew a picture of me recently. I am very thankful since it has made me reflect and not reflect regarding my existence.

To Alice, I dedicate the following poem by Fernando Pessoa:

Whether I'm happy or sad? ...
Frankly I don't know.
What does it mean to be sad?
What is happiness good for?

I'm neither happy nor sad.
I don't really know what I am.
I'm just one more soul that exists
And feels what God has ordained.

So then, am I happy or sad?
Thinking never ends well...
For me sadness means
Hardly knowing myself...

But that's what happiness is...

Novel Novel Novel

These are the books I'm reading at the moment. I already finish reading Mario Vargas Llosa's novel. It's his ninth novel and he did a detective story for this one. I always find it strange when a 'literary' novelist combines his 'literary' novel with a 'pop' novel genre and still manages to go into the literature section at a bookstore. H. G. Wells and Mary Shelley are two writers that are always misplaced due to the confusion concerning the 'literariness' (again this very slippery term) of their novels. But the bookstores never get confuse with Henry James' The Turn of the Screw or Doris Lessing so called space opera or Orwell's 1984 even though these are books that have been canonized as a classical text in their respective specualative fiction genre. For me, genre is just a label and means nothing actually. There is only a good novel and a bad novel. Greatness however is something more personal. What is great for one person might just be seen as repulsive or immoral to another. In the end, one must hold on to his own anchor when diving into the ocean of a writer's mind.

Jamaica Kincaid

Buku di sebelah ini diterbitkan dengan tujuan untuk menjadi teman pembaca ketika berada di dalam pengangkutan awam dan ruang menunggu (barangkali sebuah hospital atau klinik atau mana-mana tempat yang ada ruang menunggu). Kalau kita ukur dari segi tempoh pembacaan, memang tidak selari cerita yang dibekalkan dengan tempat yang kita patut membacanya. Contoh, editor telah meletakkan beberapa cerpen 'panjang' bagi bahagian Kapal Terbang. Rasanya dalam satu perjalanan kapal terbang seseorang itu bukan sahaja boleh habiskan semua cerpen di bahagian ini malah mungkin satu buku. Jadi, saya fikir editor buku ini telah menyusun cerpen dan puisi dalam buku ini bukan atas dasar untuk mengikut 'waktu semasa' tetapi lebih untuk mengikut 'waktu imaginasi pembaca.' Setiap pembaca ada ruang imaginasi yang berbeza. Bagi penulis, ruang ini pasti lebih besar dan boleh menampung pelbagai input pembacaan dalam satu masa. Namun, pembaca biasa barangkali mempunyai ruang imaginasi yang lebih kecil berbanding penulis dan disebabkan itu tempoh pembacaan mereka hanya singkat. Satu persamaan yang jelas antara penulis dan pembaca biasa ialah keinginan untuk lari sebentar dari "realiti sebenar" seperti yang disebut oleh editor buku ini. Saya lebih suka melihat pembacaan sebagai proses mencari berbanding lari kerana pembacaan ialah suatu proses yang aktif dan kita membaca kerana kita mencari sesuatu yang kita tidak dapat cari dalam kehidupan sebenar. Bagi saya, buku ini mempunyai koleksi cerpen dan puisi yang mampu merangsang minat pembaca (dan penulis) untuk mencari diri mereka dan mungkin makna kehidupan sebenar.

Antara penulis yang dipilih karya mereka untuk koleksi buku ini ialah Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, V. S Naipul, Raymond Carver, Yiyun Li, T. C Boyle, Philip Larkin, dan Jamaica Kincaid.

Saya memilih nama Jamaica Kincaid sebagai tajuk kerana dia adalah tujuan sebenar saya membeli buku di atas dan juga tujuan saya menulis entri ini. Cerpennya berjudul What I Have Been Doing Lately ialah antara cerpen terbaik yang saya telah baca pada tahun ini. Sentuhan pena Kincaid mengalir dengan tenang di hujung bibir imaginasi kita sehingga kita berasa seperti sedang melukis kembali imaginasinya dalam diri kita. Berbanding kebanyakkan cerpenis, bahasa Kincaid mempunyai rentak dan rima yang indah seolah-olah kita membaca sebuah puisi. Sebelum Kincaid, hanya Virginia Woolf penulis wanita yang saya lihat mempunyai tenaga kepenyairan apabila menulis sebuah karya fiksyen. Seperti cerpen Virginia Woolf berjudul Kew Garden, cerpen Kincaid tidak mempunyai plot dan bergantung sepenuhnya pada imejan yang indah dan gaya bahasa yang memukau:

"I set out on a path that stretched out straight ahead of me. I passed a house and a dog was sitting on the verandah but looked the other way when it saw me coming. I passed a goat eating green grass in a pasture but the goat looked away when it saw me coming. I walked and I walked but I couldn't tell if I walked a long time because my feet didn't feel as if they would drop off. I turned around to look behind me to see what I had left behind but nothing was familiar. Instead of the straight path, I saw hills. I looked up and the sky was without clouds and seemed near as if it were the ceiling in my house and if I stood on a chair I could touch it with the tips of my fingers."

Memperkenalkan Isaac Babel Kepada Roslan

Jumpa Roslan Jomel di Pasar Seni semalam. Saya tunjukkan Isaac Babel kepadanya. Dia membaca dengan penuh minat; bibir terkumat-kamit seolah-olah roh Isaac Babel dalam buku itu sedang bercakap dengannya. Cerita-cerita awal Babel memang pendek. Ia sangat berbeza dengan dunia Chekhov walaupun kedua-dua orang mereka mementingkan aspek realisme. Saya tak tahu adakah Roslan akan membeli dan membaca Babel dengan lebih mendalam. Saya selalu meraskan Kafka dan Murakami dan Marquez ialah penulis yang lebih sinonim dengan dunia imaginasinya.

Saya sendiri tidaklah begitu meminati karya Babel. Saya tidak tahu apa yang saya minat sekarang.

Carson McCullers On Writing

... any art form can only develop by means of single mutations by individual creators. If only traditional conventions are used an art will die, and the widening of an art form is bound to seem strange at first, and awkward. Any growing thing must go through awkward stages. The creator who is misunderstood because of his breach of convention may say to himself, 'I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive.'

These are the best words on writing I have read this year. It gives one a sense of motivation to write, write, and write despite being restrain by conventional rules and culture of writing.