i'm in a daze.

just woke up from my long sleep which started at five pm yesterday. so you can imagine. didn't answer many smses and online 'hi's so i'm sorry about that, guys.

celebrated jen's birthday early for her yesterday. and then walked to kinokuniya with jen for a while. got approached by an old japanese writer. he first asked us if we were looking for books that would make us think deeply and told us that all the stuff on the shelves we were standing at was junk [i don't think umberto eco or e.m. forster qualify as junk writers, and as a writer himself he should recognize their good works]. he just continued to talk and talk about good writers - which included hemingway and some writer whose name i cannot spell and have not heard of. now, i have read some of hemingway and i agree he is brilliant. anyway he just had this whole talk about hemingway being his mentor after discovering i read some of his books and then just continued talking about writing and how everything comes from bible knowledge in the end. finally he showed us copies of his novel and poetry collections he published by himself and asked us if we'd like to get a copy, because he is unable to get a publisher. it did look worth a read but unfortunately we really were broke after paying for the meal we just had. he was selling it at $25 for his novel which i found rather 0_0 because most published classics on kino's shelves will probably cost you $17.

though if you search his name on amazon, Hideo Asano, you will find the novel he was peddling - An American Breakfast - and one lone good review given to it, claiming he will be the next hemingway. but the cynic in me says he was out to cheat me, after having this whole long talk about writing and hemingway, i thought he was just one of those literature aficionados genuinely wanting to steer the youth of singapore onto the more enriching path of reading [as opposed to the many who read DAN BROWN nowadays], until he whipped out copies of his book. in the end his motive was to make money, wasn't it? if he really just wanted people to read his stuff [which should be every true writer's wish, rather than the money] he would have sold it at a much cheaper rate. and who knows, maybe he just copies off hemingway wholesale [though not easy to copy the style, but still] - i don't know. but sure, i'd give his novel a chance, and maybe buy it off amazon one of these days.

well, talking to this writer and jen made me realize how little i've been reading. really, how little i have been reading. and so when i got home i started reading Greene's The End Of The Affair which i bought two years back but never got down to reading. and it is enthralling. every word, right from the start is perfectly chosen and crafted into sentences and full of vitality. his writing is alive, each sentence packs a punch, it is amazing! the long period away from classics has really made me forget what a genius Greene is and why he was just one of my favourite authors. and i've also realized that books aren't written to be read once only. you can't read something like The Old Man And The Sea just once and know what it's about. one has to keep reading it over and over again because each time you read it you discover something new. the ingenuity of writers - to produce books which only get richer the next time you read them.

on a more frivolous and happy note, i got a high B for my prac crit paper [and according to whitby, the highest mark he gave]. the paper i thought i would fail miserably - yes, the Tyger Tyger one. finally, i'm actually passing something. kai really was right when she told me lit was unpredictable. one of the ironies of life; i really thought this was my worst paper. and finally, my first ever grade above a D for literature, though it only be one paper. i've regained a little bit of the great confidence i lost, and i feel encouraged to press on and do better. thank you God, i know you did this and not me.

+ posted by M @ 10:55 AM