Author: Wilfrid

Categories
Diary

See If You Can Solve This Puzzle … Kekeke

A puzzle, created by me, for you!

If you read Dan Brown, especially his latest work, this puzzle of mine should be cake.  Your job is to replace the question marks with letters.  Once you solve this, it would be great if you could drop a “I got it” comment here without sharing the answer.  And I would love to hear what do you think of the puzzle.  Too simple?  Too hard?  Something can be improved?  Etc.  How would you know if you got the answer?  When you get it, you get it.  Trust me.  It is that obvious.

After I have created this drawing, I tested it out on Cynthia.  OK.  It wasn’t that cake for Cynthia and I made some minor adjustment to the drawing.  Time to take out your pen and paper and work this one out!  Have fun.

Categories
Comedy Foreign Movie Reviews

My Girlfriend Is An Agent – So Very Hilarious!

What a funny show!

Once in a while, there are movies that are so beyond expectation that you thought: Wow, I am so glad that I’ve picked it.  Maybe my week has been somewhat humdrum, maybe there are just too many sad news of old wive poisoning old husband, young teen stabbing his young girlfriend to death, or the groom jumping off from the hotel’s rooftop dead while the new bride was showering, I am so in need of something funny, something to make my day.  So I picked “My Girlfriend Is An Agent”, and mobilized the Movie Review Squad.  Not sure why, I was half expecting something like “My Wife Is A Gangster”.  But the resemblance stops at the title.

This movie is closed to two hours.  And the audience was awesome!  Quite a few were clapping hands and all of us were laughing out loud throughout the show.  To the crowd at The Cathay for the 7.30 pm show last Friday, you guys rock!

OK.  To be honest, there isn’t much storyline per se.  Whether some Koreans are selling some very dangerous bio weapon ingredients to some Russians is not quite what I am interested to find out and follow through.  The main storyline, to me, is merely a background and setup for the comic scenes.  I was pleasantly surprised to see how happy Cynthia laughed inside the theater, knowing that Korean films are usually not her cup of tea.  The overall storyline may not be memorable.  But some of the comical materials certainly are.

Categories
Diary

Composition Of “A God That Sleeps”

This one is for you, Alex.  The only person I know who is curious about the composition of my drawing “A God That Sleeps”.  For those of you who have no clue on what I am talking about, please refer to my previous entry first.

*     *     *     *     *

An elephant, a whale, a turtle, and a volcano

The driver for the theme of a sleeping God is natural disaster, represented by the volcano in the center of the drawing.  Behind the volcano is an elephant.  You may not see its ears – though I did struggle to fit those into the picture and have decided against it – you should however see the trunk, the tusks, and the back (and the tail too!).  Upside down is a whale.  Elephant is the largest land animal now living; whale is the largest mammal living in sea.  Together they represent the land and the sea; the legacy of our world.  Initially, I wanted to draw the sky and the sea but have chosen the animals instead.

I am much affected by the recent news on the environmental impact due to climate change.  And that is the disaster I am trying to depict.  Later, I have added a sea turtle (the head is on the right with the eyes that have the same style as the elephant) that largely encompasses the entire drawing, for a few reasons.  First, it fits the theme of the animals and the volcano.  Second, turtle lives in both land and sea so the engulfment of the other two animals seem appropriate.  Third, I remember seeing ancient drawings that depict our ‘flat’ world as a turtle (I could be wrong!).

Man and God

Within the perimeter of the volcano is a sleeping God and a man.  Only the face of God is shown, with eyes closed.  When I compose this, I have Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” in mind (on the ceiling of Sistine Chapel).  Instead of God creates man in his own image, I deliberate choose a contradiction that the two do not resemble one another, that man looks nothing like God (and God looks awfully like us!).  Also, I have recent read the latest fiction written by Piers Anthony from the Immortality series.  That reminds me of the storyline of how the Incarnations collaborate and overthrow the Office of Good – a.k.a. God – for God no longer responses to us.  Hence this composition of man attempting to awaken the sleeping God.

Another point of interest to note is that when I compose this face of God together with the elephant and the whale, I had in mind the stretching arms of God (depicted by the elephant’s trunk and the whale’s tail) as though God puts his arms behind his head, sleeping.

A woman

How can a drawing with a man and without a woman?  I love balance.  And I have deliberately space out the heads onto each one-third section of the drawing.  On the left, the turtle and the whale; in the middle, the man and God; and on the right, the woman and the elephant.

In the old days, mankind invented many ways to interact with God, to please God, and to tame God’s wrath.  And I have in mind the sacrifice of the virgin into a volcano for this purpose.  I have also decided on the 7 strands of hair.  According to the Bible, the number 7 signifies completeness, perfection.  She is not just any virgin, but a perfect one.

Can God be awaken in time before the volcano destroys the world?  No one knows.  Every entity in this drawing are waiting.

Buttons

Like Alex has rightfully pointed out, buttons and zips have become a ‘trademark’ of mine.  I am obsessed with putting this ‘kinetic’ interaction into my drawings, urging the viewers to unlock the mystery within.

I have resisted writing how I compose this drawing because it may read silly (and long!).  Some may think that I am a lunatic.  But for the few curious ones, well, the composition is not at all random.  Now that I have probably said all that I should, I better … zip!  Thanks for your interest.

I love this zip!

Related Blog Entry: Making Of “A God That Sleeps” (And The 9 Years Of Togetherness) – for the original drawing.

Categories
Diary

Making Of “A God That Sleeps” (And The 9 Years Of Togetherness)

Another doodle of mine

I wish I could draw or make music for a living.  But reality is not as such.  My recent passion is to doodle.  Simple composition, when I first started.  Now, the drawing is getting more and more complicated.  I wonder why.

Just when I was done with taking photos of this drawing, past midnight, Cynthia returned from her business functions, planted a kiss onto my lips, and said, “Happy anniversary!”.  9 years.  And she continues to put up with my bizarre new passions spawning out from nowhere.  I too wonder why.

Ever since I have started or rediscovered doodling, some readers have inquired how I create these drawings.  Many have the impression that a lot of digital touch ups are done at the computer.  In fact, a lot of time is spent thinking about the composition.  I would stare into space, intensively, as I envision the different ways to articulate my thoughts.  One time, I was in the zone while brushing my teeth.  All of a sudden, Cynthia appeared from nowhere wanting to tell me something.  I screamed, got shocked out of my socks.  She in turn was shocked at my shock.  Such intensity I have when I think about the composition, that can take days, or weeks.

A lot of time, too, is spent on drafting the drawing on pieces of paper.  Until I am confident, I draw it for real, using whiteboard marker.  Unlike oil painting, I can’t make any mistake.  Pretty breathtaking towards the end of the drawing.

The working title of this drawing is “A God That Sleeps”.  Below are the photos taken during the drawing stages of (1) shaping, (2) detailing, and (3) decoration.  As you can see, computer touch ups are minimal.  By the way, if I was to remember that by the time this post is published, it is our anniversary, I would have drawn something more appropriate for the occasion.  Oh well, I will have to think of something else then.

Related Blog Entry: For those of you who are interest in what the composition means, please click here.

Categories
Snippet of My Life

Snippet Of My Life Episode 23 – All Saints’ Day And The Ha Ha Ha

Working Title: Body and Blood of Christ

The working title of this drawing is “Body and Blood of Christ”, inspired by All Saints’ Day.  Explanation of the composition is at the end of this post.  Last Sunday morning, Cynthia asked while we finally settled down inside the Church, “Why this eagerness?”  Nothing escapes her observation, on me.  That’s scary.  True, of all solemnities, I am in particularly drawn to All Saints’ Day.  Maybe it is the vivid images of the Book of Revelation, maybe it is the sheer number of Saints involved – ten thousands and counting – or maybe we or rather I am drawn into the stories of the Saints, how holiness can be manifested in mere humans, closer to our timeline, outside the Biblical literature.  Maybe Heaven seems so real knowing some of us do make it there, somehow.

Some sermons are more engaging than others.  It’s true.  On that particular Sunday, the Priest began with a story of a little girl insisting that Jonah survived inside the stomach of a whale, as told in the Bible, for three long days.  I should have paid more attention as I have no clue how the teacher comes into the picture.  Anyway, the teacher corrected the little girl that no one can live inside a whale for three days, set aside getting swallowed by one.  The little girl insisted that God intervened and spared Jonah’s life.  And she continued, “When I go to Heaven, I will ask Jonah.”  “What if Jonah is in Hell?” asked the teacher.  “Then you’ll go and ask him yourself,” replied the little girl.

We all laughed.

I read in CNN that recently, our Pope has canonized Father Damien, the leper priest.  The story of Father Damien is inspiring.  He was on a mission on the island of Molokai in the Kingdom of Hawaii – a leper colony back in the mid 1800.  After 16 years of caring for the needs of the colony, in which most who were healthy wouldn’t want to stay, Father Damien contracted leprosy and died.  There must be a God inside Father Damien, one made such a comment in his deathbed when he finally believed in God after years of denying Father Damien’s preaching.  When our Priest in his sermon accounted the brief life story of now Saint Damien (more in Wikipedia), I was deeply moved.

*     *     *     *     *

Our band was in hiatus for half a year.  Our drummer Wieke couldn’t join us in the last minute.  That left the three of us.  Time flies.  Jason, Cynthia, and I have been jamming for 5 years.  Started in the very living room we had our session last Sunday afternoon.  During our practice, Cynthia showed us the print out of one of the emails I wrote during the infancy of the band, a list of to-do and what not.  I cringed of course.  And we had a good laugh.  The session went well.  We played some of the older stuffs.  We took our time to review our recordings, keeping only the decent tracks for our listening pleasure.

*     *     *     *     *

I woke up at 8 am on a Sunday morning feeling excited to review the brand new SanDisk memory card.  The first time is always intoxicating.  Like the first time I wrote book review for McGraw-Hill.  Or my first time participating in a Nokia media event.  Reviewing that memory card turned out to be less dramatic than I have anticipated.  And I laughed at myself, in a good way.

*     *     *     *     *

My zest for vegetarian diet seems infectious, to Cynthia that is.  Saturday evening, right after I have washed the car, there was a heavy downpour.  Checking on Facebook I read quite a few of my friend got stranded somewhere in town willing the rain to go away.  Cynthia and I, on the other hand, braved the rain and had a delicious dinner at Living Greens – a vegetarian restaurant along Beach Road.  That burger.  That pumpkin soup.  Thinking of my meal makes me hungry.  And we made it back to watch F1 qualifying session in time, before 9 pm.

Sunday evening, was not so lucky.  We were seated at the hawker center at AMK waiting for our vegetarian food to arrive, for 45 minutes.  As the time was drawing close to 9 pm – the opening of the last F1 match this season – we left, with empty stomachs.  Ordered a vegetarian pizza on the phone and it arrived in less than half an hour.  Again, thinking of that pizza makes me hungry, now.

Strange to say, I was not at all upset by this little episode.  It is a message, for certainty.  In order to sustain a vegetarian diet, we or rather I need to be able to learn how to cook the dishes, delicious enough to want to eat a vegetarian meal every day.  For 2 decades, I have been cooking meat dishes, and vegetable dishes are not meant to be main dishes.  What shall I do now?

I have taken stock on what are the common vegetables sold in the supermarket – a lot more than I have imagined – wrote them down somewhere.  Next, I need to find a nutrition table as a guide and design my own dishes.  It may be a lot harder or easier than I think.  Maybe I shall document my cooking journal here so that we can laugh about it one day.

We shall see.

*     *     *     *     *

PS. Centered to this drawing is a celebrant holding up the chalice of the blood of Christ during the most solemn part of the Mass: through Him, with Him, and in Him.  I got this image during the Sunday’s All Saints’ Day celebration.  The larger encompassing triangular object I have envisioned as bread  (like the oriental rice roll), a.k.a. body of Christ.  The zip is important to this drawing.  I hope to draw viewers into the pondering of what lies inside.  To invoke the urge of opening the zip.  But what is inside cannot be seen.  Remains as a mystery, like the theme of our teaching.  On the right is a button that signifies more than one way to access the mystery within.

I have also taken the artistic license to put in a bit of my personal life inside this drawing.  The triangular object also depicts a guitar pick (as we jammed during the weekend) and Jenson “Button” has won the F1 season (as the season ended in the same weekend).  Hence the button.

Categories
For the Geeks Photography

SanDisk Extreme Pro, In Fire And Ice We Trust

SanDisk Extreme Pro ... 90MB/s!

I love photography.  And it is not everyday news that you wake up one day discovering that the product you use has a new model is double as good.  I am a proud user of SanDisk’s Extreme IV CompactFlash cards for my Nikon D700.  It was their top of the line product trusted by the professional photographers.  Then comes this new Extreme Pro.  The maximum capacity has doubled to a jaw dropping 64GB.  The read and write speeds have been boosted up to 90MB/sec, double of my Extreme IV cards.  That is shocking, on paper at least.  But how does the card perform?  Well, here is a little test I have done on a lovely Sunday morning.

Simple Test Setup

The three memory cards on the tests are (1) SanDisk Extreme Pro (90MB/sec), (2) SanDisk Extreme IV (45MB/sec), and (3) Lexar Professional (300x speed).  SanDisk cannot test with their competitors’ products, but I can.  To be fair, all my cards – including this new review unit from SanDisk – are pretty respectable, in terms of performance, reliability, and durability.  SanDisk has provided me with some testing procedures.  But I prefer to test it under a real life scenario.  So, below is my setup.

If you take single shots, it does not matter too much if you memory card is fast or not too fast.  Though once, a friend called me up and asked, “You told me to shoot in RAW but it is just too slow to take one photo!”  I wanted to pull a fast one on him and tease him that his is not a Nikon, like I have advised him to buy.  Instead, I told him that his memory card maybe too slow.

In this test, I put my camera on continuous shooting mode.  I chose a slow 3 frames per second for my Nikon D700.  Simply because any higher it would be difficult for me to count the shots.  I switched off as much post processing of the photos as possible in order to put extra emphasis on the memory card performance (and in real life too, I switch them off for high speed shooting).  Of course, no image review.  Who would care about image review in sport shooting scenario?  During each test, I shot 40 photos.  And I shot in 14-bit RAW, which is higher than the rather common 12-bit RAW format.  I resisted shooting in RAW+JPG because (1) I seldom do that and (2) converting RAW to JPG takes time and may alter the result.  RAW is good.  It is what I shoot.

To recap: 3 memory cards, 40 shots, 14-bit RAW, 480MB of data, one camera.

Test Results

Lexar Professional (300x speed) – On paper, this card has a similar speed the Extreme VI that I own.  The entire 40 shots took 22 seconds to complete the transfer from the camera buffer into the memory card.  However, after 30 shots, my camera slowed down and the frame rates dropped way below 3 frames per second.  That is disappointing of course, although I was not surprised.

SanDisk Extreme IV (45MB/sec) – My bread-and-butter, these are the cards that I am happy to spend money on.  40 shots took 21 seconds to complete the transfer with no slow down to my frame rate. An additional 8 seconds to complete the process (40 shots should take about 13 seconds to complete using 3 frames per second setting).

SanDisk Extreme Pro (90MB/sec) – Less than 15 seconds was what it took to transfer all 40 photos (total of 480MB).  In fact, the write speed of the card no longer seems to be a limiting factor (the entire shot of 40 photos took more than 13 seconds to complete).  For the testing of this particular card, I have increased my number of shots to 100, almost instantaneously, all the shots are stored.

Afterthought: For my 12.1 megapixel full frame camera, it seems that SanDisk Extreme Pro is all I need.  I could of course up the frame rate from 3 to 8 per second (which I may if I can find a suited theme for my next photo shot).  One participant at the media event has maxed out his Nikon D3 camera buffer in continuous shooting mode and it takes 130 shots to do that, with this Extreme Pro card.  I doubt if I would be that extreme.

Who Needs This?

Although my test centers towards speed, SanDisk Extreme Pro has lots to offer too.  The card works in an extreme temperature range of -25°C to 85°C (hence the picture and the title if you get the drift).  It is designed to be durable for humidity and accidental drops too.  In terms of reliability, it uses a wear leveling technology to spread the data across different blocks of memory so as to maximize the lifetime of the card.

For those of you who have to have the largest capability available (e.g. sport photography and underwater photography), the 64GB version is too good to be true.

And for those who want to tap onto the potential of a higher speed, your camera needs to be able to utilize the UDMA 6 technology.  My contact in Nikon has informed me that all their high-end cameras – D3x, D3, D700, and D300s – are able to support UDMA 6.  It appears that Canon 5D Mark II and Canon 50D are able to support that too, though I have no means to verify.  As the image size getting bigger and more photographs elect to use their dSLR cameras to film HD videos, write speed of a memory card becomes a crucial attribute.

If you own a high end camera(s), you really need a memory card of a similar caliber to match.  For more information on technical specifications and pricing and etc., please click here.

PS. I have not tested on the download speed as the card has gone beyond USB 2.0 speed.  But I reckon the speed would be amazing, judging at what I have seen so far.

Categories
Drama Movie Reviews Romance

Love Happens, A Misleading Title?

A mismatch of expectation?

Do bloggers know no bounds in what they write?  Do I know no bounds in what I write?  I am not sure if fellow bloggers have faced a similar situation.  At times, in a friendly catching up occasion, my friend would suddenly turn to me and ask, “You wouldn’t put that into your blog, would you?”  The dilemma of wanting some friends of mine to know – or not – that I have a website.

Of course I know the boundary.  And so, Mr. TK, if you are reading this, our little episode is safe with me.  Though we will likely to laugh over this for years to come.  And until I do the same thing you did, then we would laugh at each other for years to come.

Our band’s drummer wanted to watch that Michael Jackson film.  So I mobilized the Movie Review Squad in the morning.  TK suggested “The Hurt Locker”, a war film (which I promise to loop in another friend, Ng,  to watch).  Cynthia suggested “Love Happens”.  If it was up to me, I would love to pick “My Girlfriend Is An Agent”.  I love watching girls kicking asses.  In retrospect, I thought “Love Happens” is “NewYork, I Love You”.  Since all of us seemed happy about “Love Happens”, “Love Happens” it was.  (Still quite amazed that TK could decipher my morning SMS: Love happens today or tomorrow?)

I think the movie title “Love Happens” is misleading.  If it was to be branded not as a romance movie, it would have attracted lesser criticism just on the title itself.  I walked into the theater thinking it was another show, so obviously, I have little expectation on the outcome.  If we take away the notion of romance, and look at Jennifer Aniston’s role as helping Dr. Burke Ryan (played by the talented Aaron Eckart) – together with everyone in the workshop of how-to-get-over-the-loss-of-your-loved-ones hosted by Ryan – to come to terms with the loss of his wife, it is quite a decent movie to watch.  Some scenes are emotional.  Some are somewhat inspiriting (like taking the ‘stairs’ to see things in a different perspective).  The little word games Eckart and Aniston played onscreen makes the film interesting (to be honest, I know none of the three English words they use).  Cynthia and I have been a big fan of Aaron Eckart since the days of “Thank You For Smoking”.  And acting-wise, I think he delivers.

It is unrealistic – in my opinion – to expect a man to fall madly in love with another woman before he has even come to terms with the loss of his beloved partner three years ago on an accident that he blames himself upon.  In as such, the lack of the elements of romance or the presence of a glimpse of what is to come is only appropriate.  Unfortunately, the movie title and the excerpts suggest that “Love Happens” is a romance story.  Personally, I would prefer the filmmakers to use the title of “Brand New Day”, a variation of what the working title was.

Categories
Diary

The Vegetarian

The Vegetarian

The title of this doodle is “The Vegetarian”.  Yes.  One day I may look like that.

Recently, I have become a social meat eater.  But why?  Nothing as dramatic as quiting alcohol since January 2008.  Of which, I still owe you a why.  And I will.  Meanwhile, why give up on meat?

A simple answer would be: romancing with a different lifestyle.  To be frank, I have little feeling towards another chicken dies because I want one of its legs for my lunch.  Though now that my dietary doesn’t necessarily require the killing of say a chicken, it seems like a good thing to do.  I am more intrigued by the studies that say meat takes much longer time to digest compares to vegetables.  Or in one of the talks, the exact words used was “meat rots longer inside our stomachs”.  Gross, I know.  But maybe there is an ounce of truth in it.  Maybe we don’t need to eat meat to live.

I do eat vegetarian meals from time to time.  Catholics abstain from eating meat on the Fridays of Lent.  Or to follow the older tradition, the entire 40 days of Lent.  My Chinese heritage encourages me to abstain from eating meat during key occasions, such as the first meal of the Chinese New Year.  Even when I am outside Hong Kong, I still follow that tradition till today.  It was hard, especially when I was studying overseas.  No one around me seemed to understand.  But I know if I do follow, my parents would be happy.  Even when I am thousands of miles away from them.

What on earth is a “social meat eater”?  If I am on my own, I would stick to vegetarian diet, provided that I can find it.  If I am with my friend, I would order vegetarian dishes if it is not too much of a trouble.  Otherwise, my next choice would be seafood.  I probably wouldn’t feel bad eating meat with my friends.  Because this decision of mine is neither based on religion nor on the basis of health.  It is a lifestyle choice.

Now, how do I feel eating vegetarian dishes most of the time?  Initially, I felt unfulfilled, to be honest.  I got hungry very often.  Normally I would get depressed.  Like during the days when I have to stick to non-meat dishes (such as Lent).  This time round, unknown to me, I do feel happy not eating meat.  More than one week has passed and I think my body begins to adapt to the lack of meat diet.  I eat fruits when I feel hungry at night.  I choose brown rice when it is available.  Back to how I feel.  In fact, I feel great, happy.  Seems more agile.  Less lethargic.  Maybe because my body doesn’t need to work so hard to digest the food, I don’t know.  All of a sudden, I feel like doing more exercise.  What a transformation!

The next thing I wish to do is to work out a nutrition table.  If I am going to be a serious vegetarian, or social meat eater, I need to make sure that all my daily nutrition intake is taken care of.

Categories
Book Reviews Fiction

The Memoirs Of A Survivor By Doris Lessing – An Amazing Journey Beyond Survival, Beyond Time And Space

A book by Doris Lessing published in the 70s
I deeply respect Doris Lessing’s ability to breath life into characters, and in “The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)”, she breathes life into rooms and walls and more.  Doris Lessing is one of the most intelligent writers, certainly one of my favorite.  I wish I could have a glimpse of how she creates her works.  Such coherence and linkages as though the beginning is planned as the ending is written, and vice versa.

For example, the ‘it’.  Only when I re-read parts of the book did I noticed that on page 9, she wrote:

I shall begin this account at a time before we were talking about ‘it’.  We were still in the stage of generalised unease.  Things weren’t too good, they were even pretty bad … But ‘it’, in the sense of something felt as an immediate threat which could not be averted too.

I did not take much notice until I read towards the end of the book, on page 130, she wrote:

Very well then, but what was ‘it’?  I am sure that ever since there were men on earth ‘it’ has been talked of precisely in this way in times of crisis, since it is in crisis ‘it’ becomes visible, and our conceit sinks before its forces.  For ‘it’ is a force, a power, talking in the form of earthquake, a visiting comet whose balefulness hangs closer night by night distorting all thought by fear – ‘it’ can be, has been, pestilence, a war, the alteration of climate, a tyranny that twists men’s minds, the savagery of a religion.

‘It’, in short, is the word for helpless ignorance, or of helpless awareness.  It is a word for man’s inadequacy?

I would have missed that linkage.  Also, only when I re-read from the beginning, I can attempt to understand the concept, her concept of ‘they’ and ‘them’.  Attempt, as this book is anything but an easy read.  On the surface, it is a simple story being told from the eyes of a woman – the narrator.  It is a time of near-future when an unspecified disaster causes our society to plunge into the age of barbarism, when people are constantly on a move based on scarce news to a better and more livable place, when no one possesses anything but to constantly make do with what they come across and pass them on, when there is no law and order, and when survival matters.

One day, a small girl Emily is given to this woman’s care.  And comes with this girl is an ugly dog with the look of a cat.  For that part of the story, it reminds me of her book “The Story Of General Dann And Mara’s Daughter, Griot And The Snow Dog”.  A young girl and her animal companion.  The story spans the several years of the little girl’s growing up, the crowds gather at the ‘pavement’ in front of the house they occupied, the emergence of children from the sewage system not brought up by humans, but rather behave like monsters.  Monsters.  Such ugliness that strongly reminisces of the main character of “Ben In The World”.  How Emily has fallen in love with the young leader Gerald, helping him to build communities, authority, and how Gerald – when everyone has given up on those monstrous children who kill and destroy all that they see – never gives up on these children.  A close reference to W. H. Auden’s ‘We must love one another or die’ (a poem called “September 1, 1939”).  Someone has made a note “Lord of the Flies” in the library book that I borrowed.  It is a classic written by William Golding in 1954.  I think there is a certain level of validity on that association.

Layer on top of this straightforward storyline is how the narrator – the woman – sees the surrounding walls transform into images and messages that transcend space and time.  It is when the woman sees the past of Emily – her father, her mother, her little brother, and the babysitter.  Each past from each room, each wall, comes with different metaphor that explains the certain current state of Emily as the narrator observes.  Emily initially is described as ‘invincibly obedience’.  As the narrator observes, there are more and more flaws, then explained by the visions from the walls.  More and more respectable capabilities are observed, as the story unfolds.  That is what I meant by breathing life into a character that Doris Lessing has done it so well.  The narrator never gets too close to Emily, always observes from a distance.

It is hard to describe how Doris Lessing manages to make the ‘walls’ sound so convincing.  She describes the wall as ‘personal’.  In my limited understanding – perhaps I need to read the book again several more times – in that world, nothing is personal as no one truly owns anything.  The only thing ‘personal’ is our memory and our vision, hence represented by the ‘personal’ wall.  And as dramatic as her stories that I have read, just when I was deeply depressed by the gloominess towards the end of the story, a wall – that the narrator promises to show no more – ‘appears’ in a different capacity, in hope and beauty.  That ending, lifts my soul high.

“The Memoirs of a Survivor” lightly explores the concepts of community, feminism, survival, administration, government, and authority – or simply put, humanity.  The most memorable metaphor is how our next generation take what we have used and discarded and create something of their own, something beautiful and useful.  In the story, the narrator’s job is a news gatherer.  Doris Lessing does not tell the readers how important news is in time of uncertainty.  She starves the readers with meagre amount of news that every little plot she discloses I hold dear to, digest and re-digest again.  But still, what causes the disaster?  Are there really big blue fish in the sea?  Or yellow?  No one knows.

Note: Doris Lessing is the Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature 2007 – “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”.

Categories
Announcement

Nokia Comes With Music Vouchers For You To Grab! Hurry!

Contest, A Contest!

Latest update 31/10/2009: This contest is now closed.  I thank you for your support and participation.

Dear Readers of My Site,

For months, some of you may have heard again and again how happy I am with Nokia Comes With Music’s unlimited songs download.  If you are residing in Singapore, you stand a very good chance to win yourself a S$200 voucher.

All because I love you!

Nokia has allocated a bunch of vouchers for my readers, you.  All you need to do is hurry, email the answers of the questions below to …

You will stand a very good chance to win the S$200 voucher. You can use it to buy a Nokia Comes With Music device, for yourself, or your lover, or your lover’s mom slash dad slash best friend.  Or you could give it to your best friend!  Are you ready for the questions?  They are:

  1. What is the top International Single on the Nokia Music Store charts in Singapore this week?
  2. List three free tracks currently available on the Nokia Music Store in Singapore.
  3. List three new releases in the Singapore Nokia Music Store this week.

OK.  These are not easy questions.  But because I love you, you may wish to head to the Nokia Music Store to hunt for your answers (best open with Microsoft Internet Explorer).  Play around with the banner, OK?  Oh crap.  I hope I won’t get into trouble by saying too much.

Best of luck!  And spread the words!

Cheers,
Wilfrid

PS. To read more on Nokia Comes With Music, please click here.  The winners will be selected based on Nokia’s discretion.