Eat A Cranberry Day/Jukebox Day/"What Do You Love About America" Day
2005-11-23 @ 10:58 p.m.

Just went to check out the official House website, and man, this season just keeps getting better. Paper 3 was okay, though I think I messed up the Conrad essay. Quite conscious of what my writing lacks these days, which is good I suppose. Better to realise it now than get screwed in university. Anyway, lunch was at Ambush, which is some new place in Takashimaya that screams PastaMania rip-off! Admittedly, it serves edgier fare, although I didn't care much for the Thai chicken arrabiata I bought, the sauce of which I changed to olive olio anyway. Tasted way too much like satay for my liking, and there was too little olive oil, resulting in a much too dry meal. Spent most of the afternoon trawling through the shelves at Kinokuniya with Eugene and his friend, Wilson, who I happen to think is a nice person. (I've reconciled myself to being judgemental, as long as I maintain enough objectivity to reassess those judgements. Okay, so that sounds like wanting to have my cake and eat it too.) Exchanged Sade's The Misfortunes Of Virture for Coelho's Eleven Minutes. Coelho, in case you were wondering, looks like a kind, genial old man. We found very amusing stuff in the poetry section this time, like 100 great novels compressed into haiku. This is Heart Of Darkness, a novel whose first half I violently detest: "The darkness darkened./Oh the horror, the horror./ It was horrible." This is Robinson Crusoe: "Alone for twelve years,/then a footprint in the sand./Thank God, a servant!" Haha, I think my haiku has more literary merit than that! Ergo, someone should hurry up and knock on my door to offer to publish me. Random factoid: Samuel Richardson's Clarissa is freaking huge! You have to admire the stamina of authors in those bygone eras...

I'm reading Barnes's The Porcupine, which is kind of boring. Only doing this because I'm almost at the end, and I hate to stop reading something unless I really find it pointless, like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. (How can you respect someone whose earlier novels essentially ride on the success of just one bestseller? I've stopped reading Cook, Crichton and Grisham, in case you were about to ask. Not regularly anyway.) I find Barnes's work lacks consistency. It's by turns brilliant and tedious. Very much different from Kundera, who seems to play variations on the same theme, and Ishiguro, whose first three novels obsessively return to memory as their thematic nexus. I think what contemporary literature needs is a towering figure, someone who will write the Middlemarch and Jude The Obscure of the 21st century. Kinokuniya is flooded with books that all seem to have been bestsellers at some point, and which all receive glowing reviews and have snappy blurbs. The trouble is that there's too much to read, and everyone wants to be the next-big-thing. (Heck, I want to be the next-big-thing myself. Ah, the delusions of grandeur...) Okay, so that's being dreadfully simplistic, but it's true! The primary reason why I find it so difficult to take contemporary literature seriously is that so little seems to go into so much of it. (Fine, another sweeping statement. Detractors, knock yourselves out...) This is then further complicated by the neuroticism that runs through the contemporary novel in particular, as exemplified in books like Talking It Over and Love, Etc. Both happen to be by Julian Barnes, having two of his better moments. I'm disgusted that his latest book, Arthur & George, is retailing at over $60 for the hardcover edition. Just because it was nominated for the Booker...