I smell the scent of a vanilla candle wafting through the apartment...what is this loveliness?? Where is it coming from???

My speaking skills are unquestionably deteriorating, but whatever I can't translate vocally, it ends up flowing particularly well on paper. This is quite the conundrum! I don't sound intelligent when I speak, but my writing tells a different story (and in volumes, too).

I've neglected this blog, mainly because it's been reserved for commentary on novels and books that I've read, and I've yet to continue reading quality material that doesn't include scientific literature...I apologize. I was in the process of continuing Welcome To The Monkey House (Vonnegut's dark humor never ceases to humor me), but even that progress faltered...but I shall continue (once I get these errands out of the way...)! 

Major Lazer - Get Free

Also, adding "The Stranger" by Albert Camus to my list.

Clazziquai Project - Glory

The good ol' k-pop days.

I really really really like Vonnegut's style of writing. I've jumped ship and abandoned Catch 22, and resurfaced with Welcome To the Monkey House, which is stylized as a series of short stories precluding Vonnegut's publications of his more pronounced works -- his novels.  

I'm reading Catch 22 right now, and I honestly expected the writing style to be more...elevated. Reminiscent of Vonnegut, perhaps, seeing as how both authors produce satirical novels. But I guess that was too much of an expectation on my part. Different authors, different approaches to penning. Oh well. I'm more or less enjoying the novel, though it's sort of a slow read (granted, I'm only on the second chapter). We'll see if I continue with this novel later!

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Memorable quotes, or just, quotes that stood out for their structural coinage ---


"That was what made traveling appeal to him—he always made new friends, and he didn't need to spend all of his time with them. When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person's life. And then they want the
person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own."


" 'It's a book that says the same thing almost all the other books in the world say,' continued the old man. 'It describes people's inability to choose their own destinies. And it ends up saying that everyone believes the world's greatest lie.'

'What's the world's greatest lie?' the boy asked, completely surprised.

'It's this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie.' "

• Almost reminiscent of Bokonism in Cat's Cradle, except the philosophy is reversed - everything about Bokonism is a lie and everything that happens to one in life is what has been destined for them. 

" 'People learn, early in their lives, what is their reason for being,' said the old man, with a certain bitterness. 'Maybe that's why they give up on it so early, too. But that's the way it is.' "


"He was sure that it made no difference to her on which day he appeared: for her, every day was the same, and when each day is the same as the next, it's because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises."


"When I had my sheep, I was happy, and I made those around me happy. People saw me coming and welcomed me, he thought. But now I'm sad and alone. I'm going to become bitter and distrustful of people because one person betrayed me. I'm going to hate those who have found their treasure
because I never found mine. And I'm going to hold on to what little I have, because I'm too insignificant to conquer the world."

• My current take on the world 

"It was the pure Language of the World. It required no explanation, just as the universe needs none as it travels through endless time. What the boy felt at that moment was that he was in the presence of the only woman in his life, and that, with no need for words, she recognized the same thing. He was more certain of it than of anything in the world. He had been told by his parents and grandparents that he must fall in love and really know a person before becoming committed. But maybe people who felt that way had never learned the universal language. Because, when you know that language, it's easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you, whether it's in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one's dreams would have no meaning." 

• I love this passage; he completed his duprass (Cat's Cradle reference) 

"He wandered for a while, keeping the date palms of the oasis within sight. He listened to the wind, and felt the stones beneath his feet. Here and there, he found a shell, and realized that the desert, in remote times, had been a sea. He sat on a stone, and allowed himself to become hypnotized by the horizon. He tried to deal with the concept of love as distinct from possession, and couldn't separate them."

"It was not easy to do; in earlier times, his heart had always been ready to tell its story, but lately that wasn't true. There had been times when his heart spent hours telling of its sadness, and at other times it became so emotional over the desert sunrise that the boy had to hide his tears. His heart beat fastest when it spoke to the boy of treasure, and more slowly when the boy stared entranced at the endless horizons of the desert. But his heart was never quiet, even when the boy and the alchemist had fallen

into silence."

" 'People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don't deserve them, or that they'll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren't, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.' " 

" 'Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him,' his heart said. 'We, people's hearts, seldom say much about those treasures, because people no longer want to go in search of them. We speak of them only to children. Later, we simply let life proceed, in its own direction, toward its own fate. But,

unfortunately, very few follow the path laid out for them—the path to their destinies, and to happiness. Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.' "

Spoiler Alert: [HE ENDED UP RIGHT BACK WHERE HE STARTED; IT WAS A HAPPY ENDING]

Well I just finished reading Cat's Cradle

And I cannot for the life of me gauge what it was about. What the heck was even Cat's Cradle?

I've grabbed a few quotes from the novel that stood out to me for their comedic and satirical efforts at engaging the reader -- really, it was deadpan humor at its finest -- and for their introspective take on truth:

" 'Nothing generous about it. New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.' "
--Dr. Breed (the scientist, not the brother)

• True, in a sense. Richer in knowledge, richer in foundation, richer in monetary measures. 

" 'There are several ways,' " Dr. Breed said to me, " 'in which certain liquids can crystallize--can freeze--several ways in which their atoms can stack and lock in an orderly, rigid way.' "

--Narrator

• Chemistry!!! 

"This gentleman here been paying his respects to Dr. Hoenikker?"

"Yes," I said. "Did you know him?"

"Intimately," he said. "You know what I said when he died?"

"No."

"I said, 'Dr. Hoenikker--he ain't dead.'"

"Oh?"

"Just entered a new dimension. Yes, yes!"

• Time and death are fruitless concepts, for when someone dies in the realm of Bokonism, they are merely transplanted into another dimension. 

"Mother, Mother, how I pray

For you to guard us every day.

--Angela Hoenikker"

"You are not dead,

But only sleeping.

We should smile,

And stop our weeping.

--Franklin Hoenikker "

"They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were, I think, a flawless example of what Bokonon calls a duprass, which is a karass composed of only two persons."

• Tragic (SPOILER) lovebirds 

"It straddled a waterfall; had a terrace cantilevered out into the mist rising from the fall. It was a cunning lattice of very light steel posts and beams. The interstices of the lattice were variously open, chinked with native stone, glazed, or curtained by sheets of canvas."

"Stanley led me to my room; led me around the heart of the house, down a staircase of living stone, a staircase sheltered or exposed by steel-framed rectangles at random. My bed was a foam-rubber slab on a stone shelf, a shelf of living stone. The walls of my chamber were canvas. Stanley demonstrated how I might roll them up or down, as I pleased."

• Descriptive passage for the home that the narrator is staying at while visiting the island. Good GOD this sounds like a description of a contemporary/modern home of today -- pristine, crisp, architecturally structured for aesthetic appeal to marvel at with wonder and sparkly eyes 

"She improvised around the music of the Pullman porter's son; went from liquid lyricism to rasping lechery to the shrill skittishness of a frightened child, to a heroin nightmare.

Her glissandi spoke of heaven and hell and all that lay between.

Such music from such a woman could only be a case of schizophrenia or demonic possession."

• Music so acoustically resonant, it seems to draw from an otherworldly and insane source 

"And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?"

It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.

This is it: 

'Nothing.' "

• Thanks for cataclysmically shattering my hope for mankind there 

Really feeling that impostor syndrome right now.

Short updates

1. Learning more coding with Codecademy! I'm at the stage of sorting my friends with classes and IDs, and it's rather enjoyable. I've also ventured into creating tables and exploring div's. Such fun, so coding.

2. Spent last Friday evening catching up with an old friend while enjoying sushi amidst conversations about love, life, work, and random tidbits of talk. Introspective, philosophical, silly, weird --- there are so many words that can describe the type of comfortable conversing that occurs when hanging out together. And I am glad that my deadpan, matter-of-fact humor is not limited to my own personality--her doctor displays that same type of humor and reminds her of me :]

3. Watched Inside Out...oh boy the feels. The short had me emotional, but what was I really expecting for a short before a movie about emotions. Disrupting my emotions with emotions ;_;

4. Made a new acquaintance on FB...we chatted briefly over twitter and decided to extend it by adding each other on a more expansive (if you can even call it that) social network.

5. Moving soon. Feeling nervous.

Updates

1. Feeling flumped this morning. Was also feeling flumped yesterday, despite having nothing physically straining to do. Perhaps that was the reason why?

2. Continuing to read The Alchemist and mulling over its destiny-based ideologies. Coelho writes something near amazing, and in such a cohesive and flowy manner too! Some of the philosophies on destiny and fate being intertwined and revealing itself through particularly specific events that one encounters, I sort of have qualms with that because it's gotten me thinking how my own life could have been made different if I could be more accepting/tolerant of change...*cries*

3. Resuming coding with Codecademy. Learning HTML Basics, i.e. font size change, font family change, ordered/un-ordered lists, all sorts of fun schtuff.

4. Ate dinner with a friend. Caught up with stories of work, what has changed (for the worse, unfortunately) after I left, and legit ranting about particular individuals at the company while enjoying the aroma of pho and thai tea drifting throughout the restaurant.

Paulo Coelho

"That was what made traveling appeal to him--he always made new friends, and he didn't need to spend all of his time with them. When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person's life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own." 

I've finished reading Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, and I'll blog about it later once I wrap my mind around what exactly it was implementing...but until then, I've created a list of books to read next:

1. The Alchemist

2. Lord of the Flies

3. Lolita

4. The Reader

5. Catch 22

Any more recommendations?

I don’t understand what it is about blogging that makes just the act of pouring one’s innermost thoughts and secrets out so thrilling. That feeling of being able to encapsulate shared personal moments through text posts, openly exclaiming to the blogosphere deep (and sometimes dark) introspective thinking, and being able to shroud one’s stories in such an overt and covert manner, as they’re rendered lost among the many blogs and stories scattered throughout the interweb --- it’s honestly very exhilarating. And sometimes, with the right narrative, one’s shared secrets become the foundation for someone else’s acceptance of their self, that with certain reveals, one doesn’t have to feel so alone and isolated in their experiences.

Lolita

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."

Literature in queue

Things to read, per friends' suggestions when I posed the same question to four different people:

1. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (interestingly suggested by two of my friends, after much consideration on one of my friend's part)

2. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

3. This last friend gave me a laundry list of books, recommended partly from his own backlogged library of things to read; someone's super well-versed in literature...(*hint hint*) --

• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell 
• Freakonomics by Levitt 
• Catch 22 by Heller 
• Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein 
• Ursula Le Guin's work 

Anyhoo, I'm still reading Cat's Cradle before starting another novel. This is an interesting one so far. Bokonism seems like a philosophy built not around proverbial beliefs, but dating back to ancestral times. Little quips here and there on things like belonging to a karass and finding others who are part of your karass, tending to others' souls through the forbidden touching of one's soles with another in an act of boko-maru, and unquestioned travels as a journey towards one's destiny...it's bizarre stuff. One recurring theme that lingers in the story that was reflected in Slaughterhouse Five, I appreciate -- the belief that Death is finite and time is limitless, that even as one's body surrenders to the physical forces that deems them no longer viably existent, their journey continues on via another dimension that can't be gleaned in this one. And I enjoy the satirical and deadpan humor Vonnegut consistently delivers. It vibes well with my own :) 

Notes

The experience of war can leave you in a permanent state of trauma, and one can attempt to cope with it by devising an otherworldly dimension to travel to, where concepts such as death are nonexistent and time is limitless. Never is there a momentary snapshot of months, days, minutes, or seconds -- time is an all-encompassing fluid that exists in a state of being, with the past, present, and future made so apparent and abundantly present. That by even thinking of the deaths of the American soldiers and civilians of Dresden would be ridiculous, for they still exist in pure solid state not in this dimension, but in another. Death remains a foreign concept to those who've learned of the Tralfamadorian ways. At least, that's how Billy Pilgrim understands such an atrocity as the bombing of Dresden.

Spoon - Inside Out (Lyrics)

Something about this song makes me not okay. The song starts off with a slow progression towards the lyrics, before Britt Daniel belts out, "Time's gone inside out". Lyrically, well it sounds somewhat like a love song, of the unrequited sort, lost love, and dejection. Unfortunately, I can relate to the lyrics at the moment, especially the elements,

"There's intense gravity in you

(There's intense gravity in you)

I'm just your satellite

(I'm just your satellite)"

Like the ebb and flow of ocean waves on a beach, with the gravitational attraction that stimulates such a motion towards the shore, something about [name] keeps pulling me towards him, although I'd like to rid of the emotions, the feelings, and the good memories. By pushing the good ones out of my mind (I really don't remember the bad ones), maybe the feelings won't linger and I don't have to imagine how it'd be if my daydreams came true. There's that intense gravity pulling me towards his essence, but I'll constantly remain a satellite, gravitating towards but never really reaching him. It's bothersome, annoying, and hurtful to do this to myself. Nothing done on his part because these feelings haven't been vocalized for fear that whatever cosmetic layer of friendship that currently exists will end up dissolving. But time is slowly taking care of that. No need to fret now. Speaking of time...here's another one that resonates with my current state of mind --

I don't usually lay out my emotions and feelings so openly, sometimes it comes off as too intense and I end up scaring people away. But honesty and communication are supposedly necessary qualities in order to grow as an individual, and in understanding oneself, I guess. 

ODESZA - Bloom

ODESZA. Wrap me up in your wave of goodness and earth-shattering beats, your rhythmic heart beating to the tune of mine. "Bloom" is a superb one. No lyrics, just beats, instruments, and the heavy bass lulling my ears to sleep. When you can key in on certain elements of a song and a tingle runs through your body upon reaching said element...damn, that's a good song.

Is there a name for it? That sensation of being able to speak fluent thoughts in one's mind, but once it exits the mind and finds itself being typed out on the keyboard, all sense of coherency is lost? And what's left over are words best expressed with the mental capacity of a little kid? Even as I'm typing this right now, that ability to say exactly what was running through my mind has been lost, its essence and intensity merely dulled to incoherent thoughts sporadically running around through this text. Is it the action of using the backspace, that by erasing grammatical errors and misspellings in order to craft one's words, you, in a way, backtrack on that grace and sensation of knowing what you want to say? Or maybe it's the typing, that click-click-clicking sound like a metronomic cadence that disturbs your thoughts and leaves your mind floundering for the right words to deliver. Maybe it'd be best to write it out rather than use the keyboard, will that make this task more verbose or verbal? Apologies for the flowery language, it's a flaw of my writing style that I'm hoping to fix.

I just realized something -- my writing style is very spongy. What do I mean by this? Well, just reading a few lines of Ayn Rand's Anthem and I've already been taking her dialogue, her writing style, and her way into consideration. My writing morphs and attempts to mimic what I can read and understand of each author and their corresponding characters brought to life on the pages of each novel. It's conducive to change, but not too much change, hopefully? Billy Pilgrim's journey was sporadic and tense, much like Vonnegut's stylized approach when bouncing from moment to moment in Pilgrim's various time warps. Short, terse narrations with flowery language packed in small punchy bundles -- it works, in his manner, because the message still gets delivered in a cohesive manner. And in writing this stream of consciousness, I attempt to reflect that punchiness as well. I've only begun to dabble in the first page of Anthem, but we'll see how the writing style ebbs and flows, if at all. I heard she's a great writer with great thematic intentions.

P.S. Now normally stream of consciousness doesn't undergo editing or correction, but my approach in writing is oftentimes riddled with "of"s and "and"s when it could very well be shortened to succinctly display what I mean. I'm working on it.