NUS
Music: Catatonia- Stone by Stone
Book: Pramoedya Ananta Toer- It's Not An All Night Fair Night
It isnt often I would write about my daily life here but I thought I’d let you in into this. I am now, officially, a student at NUS, albeit a temporary one. Taking a single module called literary appreciation and criticism, under a pilot initiative (at least for the arts faculty) termed the Advanced Placement Programme. But before we go into the details of my first lesson there let’s ponder why I chose to go for it.
For one it’s good exposure to literature. This in itself has several advantages: it would supplement, at least in theory, A level lit; improve general well-being of self; and quite importantly, give me a better idea of what literature is all about. There’s a current toss-up between what I would major in U- econs or literature. (Actually still got a few others but we’ll set them aside for now) Hopefully this programme would give me better insights as to what I would want to take in the future. It’s a major headache btw. Some say I should just shelve it till I actually register during NS, but the thing keeps popping back on me. The thing is, what I choose would really set me down entirely different paths for possibly the rest of my life. Economics and literature, self-explanatory.
For another, you get to skip college lessons, if not by very much. And of course, Im doing it for novelty’s sake. If there’s one temptation I can never bring myself to resist successfully, it’s the temptation of being a part of something new, be it new to my experience or new to everyone else’s. Just for info theyre doing this thing now so as to prepare for the new academic revisions scheduled on 2006, where college students would get more distinct chances of doing uni courses; theyre piloting it now and Im the guinea pig in other words. The guinea pig (actually there are 8 of us in the arts faculty) has the power to influence things before they get born—even if they don’t have any say at all. Especially when theyre armed with the knowledge that they are guinea pigs. Go figure. (And even if it’s not the case the feeling alone of being a part, however minor, of a new project is a nice feeling)
That being that, and me being me, I mixed up my tutorial slot and ended up spending a couple of hours exploring the place. I paid a visit to my tutor-to-be, a certain Dr.Gwee. The name is interesting because when I first saw it a portrait of an old, eccentric lady imposed itself onto my mind. It turned out to be a fairly young male. A fairly interesting one at that. Looks like a nerd, with thin hair combed untidily to one side. Talked amusingly too—with whispers in certain sentences and stuffs, a bit similar to uh..me. I felt the urge to be funny with a fellow try-to-be-funny guy but decided against it. Not so soon. Later kick me out of the office.
The food is yucky. Allright maybe not in the position to comment now because only had a meal there. It’s cheap though, 1.8 for a bowl of noodles, 1.5 if you’re a student. And students smoke outside rooms. In areas where there are no-smoking signs.
Im getting abit worried for my future because a general observation made was that the students there are those prim-and-proper English-speaking sort. The sort that jokes and laugh and are very cheerful people, and who speak within a rigid structure of English, and who are actually very inflexible people despite their liberalistic outlook. The sort that I would never be able to get along with. Oh well.
Buy textbooks shen jing bing arh. 17 dollars for a lit text that is 99 pages long (double-line spacing at that), 5 lit text per module, and that’s excluding the actual textbooks—the thick kinds that can go up to 60 per book. And you do, on average, 5 modules per semester, and you’re going to have what, 6-8 semesters? You do the maths.
The lecture turned out to be something I did not envision. I had two main preconfigured images of this whole lit thing. One, it’s going to be full of chummy-chummy English-speaking people, the sort who would give a warm welcome and stuff. Two, it’s going to be full of eccentric people. Warm, friendly people but in a lesser way, those kinds who contemplate on things and go on bouts of solitude and stuffs. Wrong on both counts. I was actually surprised, when I entered the seminar room, to see gaps between everybody. There weren’t many people initially..but still…they were all seated separately… In showing respect to their custom I took a seat that was comfortably placed away from everyone else; it isn’t a totally alien custom anyway, not to me.
Lecture content was heavy, really heavy. The notes are really really sparse and deprived of attention from the lecturer, and you’ve got to be constantly thinking with the speaker. That isn’t hard to do, but when you’re learning stuffs like “differentiation between universalism, humanism and the fallacies of formalist critique”, “psychoanalysis on narrative lapses”, “mental suppression on the psychological realm as a result of realism, and gets a paradoxical release from the effects of the writer’s neurosis (of which this neurosis might be self-imposed; in which case the author is aware of it, in which case does this cancel the theories attendant to psychoanalysis)”, it does get very tough. It’s not so much as the language as it is the concepts themselves. As a side note, I doubt all these could be effectively applied at the A levels. Not enough time, definitely.
A silence ensued when the lecturer singled me out and asked who would like to show me the ropes, me having missed the first lecture the previous week. An awkward one. No one raised their hand. Would feel embarrassed if others were in my shoes I guess, but Ive got quite a good set of armour. Dr Gwee asked and asked and finally said, “I guess you guys forgot what it was like when you had your first semester. Im not going to force you into volunteering..” A female raised her hand then, a female from CJC. It’s always the females that keep popping up into my life, never the males. A brief talk after lecture, a swap of numbers, and there, another stranger just dropped by. To quote from myself, it’s all range and no depth these days; you get to know a whole lot of new people, but rarely do you get to go into substantial relationships. A slight irony here: she belongs to the “bubbly-friendly-inflexible” group of prim/proper English people. The very sort I would never get along with. Second irony is that she might be dropping the module due to a clash or something.
The thing is, when they talk in that kind of way, and think in that kind of way that allows them to speak in that kind of way, they are effectively canceling out my potential creativity in both expression and content. It’s a cancellation I cant get around to date, major major problem. Oh well, we’ll see how it goes.
On a significantly more tragic note, I lost my water bottle.
Book: Pramoedya Ananta Toer- It's Not An All Night Fair Night
It isnt often I would write about my daily life here but I thought I’d let you in into this. I am now, officially, a student at NUS, albeit a temporary one. Taking a single module called literary appreciation and criticism, under a pilot initiative (at least for the arts faculty) termed the Advanced Placement Programme. But before we go into the details of my first lesson there let’s ponder why I chose to go for it.
For one it’s good exposure to literature. This in itself has several advantages: it would supplement, at least in theory, A level lit; improve general well-being of self; and quite importantly, give me a better idea of what literature is all about. There’s a current toss-up between what I would major in U- econs or literature. (Actually still got a few others but we’ll set them aside for now) Hopefully this programme would give me better insights as to what I would want to take in the future. It’s a major headache btw. Some say I should just shelve it till I actually register during NS, but the thing keeps popping back on me. The thing is, what I choose would really set me down entirely different paths for possibly the rest of my life. Economics and literature, self-explanatory.
For another, you get to skip college lessons, if not by very much. And of course, Im doing it for novelty’s sake. If there’s one temptation I can never bring myself to resist successfully, it’s the temptation of being a part of something new, be it new to my experience or new to everyone else’s. Just for info theyre doing this thing now so as to prepare for the new academic revisions scheduled on 2006, where college students would get more distinct chances of doing uni courses; theyre piloting it now and Im the guinea pig in other words. The guinea pig (actually there are 8 of us in the arts faculty) has the power to influence things before they get born—even if they don’t have any say at all. Especially when theyre armed with the knowledge that they are guinea pigs. Go figure. (And even if it’s not the case the feeling alone of being a part, however minor, of a new project is a nice feeling)
That being that, and me being me, I mixed up my tutorial slot and ended up spending a couple of hours exploring the place. I paid a visit to my tutor-to-be, a certain Dr.Gwee. The name is interesting because when I first saw it a portrait of an old, eccentric lady imposed itself onto my mind. It turned out to be a fairly young male. A fairly interesting one at that. Looks like a nerd, with thin hair combed untidily to one side. Talked amusingly too—with whispers in certain sentences and stuffs, a bit similar to uh..me. I felt the urge to be funny with a fellow try-to-be-funny guy but decided against it. Not so soon. Later kick me out of the office.
The food is yucky. Allright maybe not in the position to comment now because only had a meal there. It’s cheap though, 1.8 for a bowl of noodles, 1.5 if you’re a student. And students smoke outside rooms. In areas where there are no-smoking signs.
Im getting abit worried for my future because a general observation made was that the students there are those prim-and-proper English-speaking sort. The sort that jokes and laugh and are very cheerful people, and who speak within a rigid structure of English, and who are actually very inflexible people despite their liberalistic outlook. The sort that I would never be able to get along with. Oh well.
Buy textbooks shen jing bing arh. 17 dollars for a lit text that is 99 pages long (double-line spacing at that), 5 lit text per module, and that’s excluding the actual textbooks—the thick kinds that can go up to 60 per book. And you do, on average, 5 modules per semester, and you’re going to have what, 6-8 semesters? You do the maths.
The lecture turned out to be something I did not envision. I had two main preconfigured images of this whole lit thing. One, it’s going to be full of chummy-chummy English-speaking people, the sort who would give a warm welcome and stuff. Two, it’s going to be full of eccentric people. Warm, friendly people but in a lesser way, those kinds who contemplate on things and go on bouts of solitude and stuffs. Wrong on both counts. I was actually surprised, when I entered the seminar room, to see gaps between everybody. There weren’t many people initially..but still…they were all seated separately… In showing respect to their custom I took a seat that was comfortably placed away from everyone else; it isn’t a totally alien custom anyway, not to me.
Lecture content was heavy, really heavy. The notes are really really sparse and deprived of attention from the lecturer, and you’ve got to be constantly thinking with the speaker. That isn’t hard to do, but when you’re learning stuffs like “differentiation between universalism, humanism and the fallacies of formalist critique”, “psychoanalysis on narrative lapses”, “mental suppression on the psychological realm as a result of realism, and gets a paradoxical release from the effects of the writer’s neurosis (of which this neurosis might be self-imposed; in which case the author is aware of it, in which case does this cancel the theories attendant to psychoanalysis)”, it does get very tough. It’s not so much as the language as it is the concepts themselves. As a side note, I doubt all these could be effectively applied at the A levels. Not enough time, definitely.
A silence ensued when the lecturer singled me out and asked who would like to show me the ropes, me having missed the first lecture the previous week. An awkward one. No one raised their hand. Would feel embarrassed if others were in my shoes I guess, but Ive got quite a good set of armour. Dr Gwee asked and asked and finally said, “I guess you guys forgot what it was like when you had your first semester. Im not going to force you into volunteering..” A female raised her hand then, a female from CJC. It’s always the females that keep popping up into my life, never the males. A brief talk after lecture, a swap of numbers, and there, another stranger just dropped by. To quote from myself, it’s all range and no depth these days; you get to know a whole lot of new people, but rarely do you get to go into substantial relationships. A slight irony here: she belongs to the “bubbly-friendly-inflexible” group of prim/proper English people. The very sort I would never get along with. Second irony is that she might be dropping the module due to a clash or something.
The thing is, when they talk in that kind of way, and think in that kind of way that allows them to speak in that kind of way, they are effectively canceling out my potential creativity in both expression and content. It’s a cancellation I cant get around to date, major major problem. Oh well, we’ll see how it goes.
On a significantly more tragic note, I lost my water bottle.
3 Comments:
it's kinda stupid abt the water bottle thingy...... anw it's realli cool tt u get to go to nus... so envious... hahz...
Wdas so ironic bout droppin subs due 2 clashes? N therie sux. Big Time.
It's ironic because the only person who offered to help me might be quitting the module soon, leaving me with myself as usual.
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