Conversations - 2nd February 2007

"Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings." - Evan Esar

***

Someone: I thought left wing = conservative and right wing = liberal

Me: WAH LAO

the labels aren't necessarily that accurate though
especially on the right wing, there's quite a lot of diversity
and where would you put libertarians?

Someone: ... aft?

Me: ...


Someone else: sigh. what's the next fashionable thing after pomo?
­
Me: don't know
can they sink any lower?
­
Someone else: there's always a shovel lying around, no?


Someone: i think you're quite a conventional guy


MFTTW: You know what makes me sick? The PRCs that I meet here who used Singapore as a stepping stone into the US, who go around identifying themselves as "from Singapore" when you ask where they are from. If they don't like the system so much why do they want to identify with it?

i'm not kidding
they are all like "i'm from singapore"
pisses me off

then i'll be like "no, you're from Chinea"
fuckers

oh my friend was even better
there was a post doc who told her she's from Singapore
her reply :"oh, so why don't you speak like a Singaporean?"


Someone else: hey look at this

*** <***@nyu.edu>
to me

show details
12:29 am (11 minutes ago)
Dear ***,

Thanks so much for the typo. I continue to put revisions on my web page
almost daily. If you spot other typos, please let me know.

Best wishes, ***

how fucking cool is that

Me: you deprived lah

Someone else: eh
why deprive
help contribute to the production of a good book leh

he put up the monograph on the website so people can give comments spot errors etc, the book is gonna be published soon
*excited*

Me: pdf on website right

Someone else: yeah
i printed it out a few sems ago
damn cheem

gonna print this email out and frame it. since he's my idol

Me: !@#$
as I said, you're deprived

Someone else: wah lau *** is GOD

Me: yah for killing us

Someone else: haha u all dun appreciate his contribution lah


Someone else: i agree that deconstruction taken to extremes is just plain silly
so is much of modern crit theory

however, they ARE worth engaging with at some level
if only for the fact that new evidence must always be at least considered before either accepting it or discarding

it's a fact that the 2 world wars happened and that this changed how people think drastically

we can't pretend that didn't happen
we also can't pretend that words are always infallible

but neither would i go so far as to say that "text is phallogocentric" or crap like that
or that menaing can't be got at

we have to take into account the inherent ambiguity of language but we shouldn't take it to mean the utter failure of language

or as it is more fashionably known "slippage of language"

ugh
bloody overused phrase

lemme give you another example

we handled a modernist text today
a novel by virginia woolf

it was observed that the pronouns in the novel seemed to slide
wasn't always clear who was being referred to

well, what's gonna surprise us -- what happened next was that we fell over ourselves trying to justify this
trying to figure out what kind of effect that produces

instead of simply saying, look, virginia woolf is a lousy writer