December 2003

i - 12/12/2003






The Quest motif is the journey of Summer, of the Romance, of the optimistic and the return to the harmonious.  The archetypical quest - the Odyssey.  The Biblical quest - Moses' flight from Egypt then return and subsequent leading of the children of Israel out.  Quests revolve around individuals, so even the social event that was the flight from Egypt is seen through a heroic figure leading an often hard-headed people.  The quest means obstacles, which must be overcome by either violence or guile.  Odysseus is the archetype of the wily survivor whose cunning gets him home.  Moses - gets it right most of the time - but when wisdom was called for - "speak to the rock" - he resorted to violence and struck it - the bitter waters and desire unfulfilled.  The quest is a movement through levels of existence and experience.  In Frye's notion of things - there are four levels -

the highest - the unchanging heavenlies

the next - and Edenic original state or promised land

and third - our world - fallen and chaotic

and beneath that - the subterranean world of hell

To view one's in these terms - sheer hubris.

Another kind of quest - I've just sent off my applications to the US unis - an epic experience indeed in terms of commitment, obstacles (it's amazing how long people take to respond to your requests for documents) and conquests - and tomorrow I take my last GRE exam - the end of one kind of quest - hopefully engenders the seeds of another ...

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Good luck! [Grandioso]

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ii - 12/13/2003






I took the GRE Lit Test today.  It was tiring and because of my usual exam anxieties I didn't sleep a wink the night before but I don't think that had an effect on my performance.  It was harder than the practice that ETS supplies with some options being rather close. 

Interestingly, at the test center, there were hardly any Singaporeans.  The chap in front of my was from the PRC - he was doing Math.  The Guys beside me and behind me were also both fom the PRC - they were doing Chem.  The Row of Guys to my right were from Taiwan - they were doing Physics.  Some other chaps from India in my row were doing the Math test too.  I think there were about 25 of us in the room and not more than 8 of us were Singaporean.  These were mainly doing Bio and Psyche.  Oh yes - as the lady at the reception counter pointed out - "English Lit?  Oh yes - you're the only one."  Story of my Life I guess.

The invigilator was exceedingly irrirating and kept trying to crack jokes before the paper.  I don't think anyone in the room appreciated his rather weak attempts at humour.  He was also rather silly about coming in and out of the room.  He should have just shut the door and left us.  But he kept coming in and going out, opening the door and closing it.  Highly distracting.  However, I must say that he was conscientious about getting us to fill in the form correctly: one of the chaps from India was taking ages with it - I don't think he understood the instructions on the sheet very well - but it doesn't matter if you're a math genius does it - and this added to the tension that everyone was feeling (this plus the fact that come chaps had come for the exam without pencils ... and had to borrow ...)

Half and hour into the paper and my bladder started to urge me to pay the loo a visit.  But I persevered and didn't go until after the paper - two and half hours later.  If I get bladder trouble or tract infection, I'll blame it on my keeness to do an exam properly.

Of interest - there were some playful questions on the paper - such as:

noting that the word "diurnal" puns on the word "urn" thus plays with the notion of being buried ...  noting that the word "embarkation" is another pun that links the action in the poem to the myth of Daphne being pursued by the god Apollo and being changed into a tree - an ironic pun because to "embark" is to go on a trip whereas Daphne's flight was stopped when she became a tree (but of course this enabled her to flee Apollo - another kind of flight) ... see http://www.crawfordmanor.com/daphne.html 

For those interested and very bored - check out the sample test - it's like playing one very long trivia quiz!

ftp://ftp.ets.org/pub/gre/007626.pdf

 

 

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That whole chunk - I couldn't understand anything... Urgh... You're one of a kind, truly...

Hey, any interesting reads to recommend? I'm so bored these days I think I'm slipping into non-existence. Stuff that's preferably palatable and quite accessible to a layman like myself... while retaining some sort of interest. Haha... or is that mutually exclusive?

[Grandioso]

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Thanks for the recommendations! Truth is, I don't quite know yet... I can only tell once I get my results back. It's really russian roulette to me. And preferably local, since I'm not a really adventurous person... but I'll just have to wait and see... [Grandioso]

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29 blinks by the green man is one of the reasons why i still visit your blog. good luck with the GREs, i couldn't open it cos i didn't have acrobat reader :\ oh well, take care now! - fey

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i hate gp and teaching isn't exactly what i want to do. But i don't doubt that teaching at a jc would be more fun, though i still haven't reconciled myself with the fact that i've left jc. ah well.

=)

[cellistic]

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Frivolity - 12/16/2003

see - I told you Karl Marx was still alive and well -

 

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hahaha...i'm speechless~

-Jac [Shores]

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*chuckles* good ol' mr lim... tee-hee~ [AnGeL^6587]

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A friend of mine compared the guy to a photo of Charles Manson. :P

[inner me]

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haha. good one! [public_prosecutor]

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iii - 12/18/2003






Been on a reading binge after the exams and applications and essays that I've had to do.  Finished all 917 pages of quicksilver last week - waiting for April next year for another 900 pages of verbosity - to find ou the fate of calculus -

Reading a biography on Elizabeth I - quite dry but nice bits about court intrigue and some very moralistic writing.  Another book - by Christopher Hill - on radical religious movements during the English Revolution in the middle of the 17th C.  nice details about how martyrs were put to death - yup - they roasted ppl until their intestines were falling out - but made sure they weren't quite dead yet.  And yes - if you recanted (ie embraced Catholicism instead of sticking to heresy) you were mercifully dealt with being stoned to death or buried alive instead of being burnt ...  Another historical book - Trevelyn's Social History of England - some nice details about monastries and the corruption that took place in Henry VIII's england.

As for sci-fi - I finished a Philip K Dick (minority report, do androids dream of electric sheep?) book called "The Man in the High Castle".  It's a "what if book".  What if Japan and Germany won world war two.  Quite a revisionist intepretation of things - of course the perspectives are filtered through characters who have their own prejudices.  Most ppl think that the Jap government is highly benign vs the cold efficency of Nazi Germany.  Anyway - the "clever" bit about the book - is that there's a banned book in the story (the author of the banned book is the man in the high castle) which is itself a sci-fi and proposes a what if - what if Britain and the US had won the war ... Quite enthralling because it plays out  different factions within the Nazi regime - struggling for power (btw Hitler's been committed to an asylum now, in about the early 1960s) ...

Got the books - amongst others at the brilliant penguin warehouse sale - :)

 

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I picked up Quicksilver, though it's kinda driving me nuts - I don't quite grasp what's going on, at least in the first few chapters...

Hmm will read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown first... haha... lighter stuff... fascinating, though - like the Da Vinci Code, another cool book by Dan Brown! [Grandioso]

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i know they have warehouse sales for clothes and creative's disastrous attempt at puns (i.e. prodikeys) but books? and penguin, at that?



why don't you tell me about such things?! :P -fey

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'cos if i didn't tell him he also wouldn't know.

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i'm on pg 400smth of quicksilver ;)

yes, how come you didn't put out a notice or something about the penguin sale? [lassitude]

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argh... what penguin warehouse sale? only managed to catch the library fair this hols... =S

^_^ [moi~]

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