What I think of the Grouchy Grammarian

Regardless of how fluent and skilled you think you are when it comes to the English Language, one is always in need of a refresher course. You never know, that very verb or classic quote you've been so fond of using may actually be off the mark (you will learn how to use may/might properly in one of its chapters). You can learn from the blunders of others, and vow to yourself never to make the same mistakes. But then, old habits diehard. Second language users will definitely benefit from this book, and many of the hits-and-misses and boos-boos were commited by professionals, some of whom use language to earn a living, and many of whom are native users. And my, the mistakes made are quite funny. I had many a good laugh (and laughter is a good antidote for stress and depression, cliche I know) over them, even late into the night (I wonder what my neighbours had thought of all those peals of laughter).

English has always been a slippery one, what with its many past pefect tenses, past participles, progressive tenses, and having to differentiate between gerunds and infinitives, getting the subject-verb agreement right. The latter in itself can give you split ends, if not a splitting migraine. So, why not indulge yourself in some good laughs while learning a thing or two about grammar? And keep this book about you at all times.

My own little review of The Historian by Elizabeth Kostovo

I finished this book, at long last. And I feel myself much closer to the Balkan and Ottoman history than I've ever been before, and in fact, this book has created in me a hunger to explore the geography and histories of these countries with their glorious and terrible histories, which I've flown over but never set foot on.

The book comes to me in many layers. The first layer is the story itself. In documenting the history of Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler (who is the real Dracula to the Dracula of popular imagination), as well as following the lives of the various scholars who were obsessed with finding out more about him and in tracing the mystery that shrouds this cruel man. If you read the book and check out on his history, you will realise that there is as much speculation as fact, and the author has give free reign to her imagination where facts are hazy, and from that, we get an intriguing story (even if it falters slightly towards the end). It all began with the finding of a little folio of a book, with empty pages save for the woodcut of a dragon in the middle. The leaving behind of an unknown book, of ancient but unknown provenance, is a litmus test, is the Dracula's way of satisfying his hunch that he had picked the person with the qualities he was looking for. So that he may bring them into his underworld and have them serve him. Yes, historical Dracula is made the vampire here, though in a way more real and refreshing than all the tired pop-culture renderings. In fact, there was a part in his speech that is chillingly true. About how evil is more easily perfected than good, in this world of ours. And that was further emphasised through the description of the various manuals on cruelties that a human can inflcit on another in the Impaler's library. And there is a strong, yet subtle tying in, to the atrocities and politics of modern times, and the atrocious manueverings of the Impaler would not have been out of place today.

Another layer is that this is definitely a bibliophile's book. Anyone who is a self-professed archivist, historian or lover of books would find much descriptions to delight the senses. In fact, it took me back to the days when I used to explore antiquarian bookstores in my travels in England and the Netherlands. It is the marking of a formerly colonised country that Malaysia does not have much of such collections, save for that brought over by the former colonials, and perhaps bought by some wealthy and cultured collector. I was once told that there are collectors of rare manuscripts in Malaysia, by a source close to these buyers, and I hope to be able to acquaint myself with one of them. Rare manuscripts lie in abundance in this tale, and it is as much a novel as it is a story of scholarship and books as it is of vampires and obscure folk tales. Dracula himself is a biblophile, which explains his interest in anyone who handles books of any sort. The chapter describing his library was astounding, and even tempted me to join the him, had I been a character in the novel, for the sake of thumbing through the volumes, many in languages I would never had understood. Despite the professed anti-intellectualism of Medieval Europe, monasteries remained centres of learnings and keepers of knowledge.

The next layer is a sort of political commentary of the times, and of the countries traversed by the characters. Ancient political history interspersed with current affairs of the twentieth century, and as many former countries of the Eastern bloc are opening up, one wonders what it might have been back then. Today, it would be a lot easier to enter these countries than to travel to what used to be free, democratic countries, due to the change in political climate and the rise of a different sort of terrorism. The irony of it all.


The fourth layer is the religious history that lie heavy in the pages. I just hope that some of the words used by the author, whom I am sure only use them to inject realism into the story, would cause this book to be banned by certain fundamentalist and close-minded factions in this and other countries. Especially since Karen Armstrong's History of God has been banned in Malaysia. In fact, I could only read it at the library of the university I used to attend here, though sadly, I never got around to it. It is definitely interesting to explore the mystical aspect of Christianity that were very much of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and how Kostova has cleverly foregrounded Dracula into the struggle between the Christians and the Ottoman conquerors. I do not see anything biased or judgement of her account, for she is quick to give credit where it is due, for instance, by stating, not once but a few times, to her readers, via her characters, how the Ottoman conquerors could be as benevolent to their conquests, as they were violent during the act of conquering. There were particular mention of Sultan Mehmed II as he lived during the lifetime of Vlad Tepes, this prince of the Wallachian seat. A kind of inter-faith conference seem to take place in this book, via the roundabout route of history and politics, and through the medium of the central character, none other than Dracula himself. The word 'infidel' flows on both sides to refer to the other in ancient epistles. Kostova now and then will have her characters making statements, sometimes political in nature, and at other times an affirmation of a particular person or culture's religious faith. Or maybe of the person's agnosticism. But it is through the figure of the Dracula that has united people of different political, religious and even geographical inclination into a pursuit against evil.

Running through all these heavy layers are individual love stories, which are rather tragic, as the characters in love are star-crossed, and circumstances act to separate them. For the hopeless romantic, there is a story in which one of the main characters in the story, who having met the love of his life while on his trip to Romania to follow the trails of the undead Impaler, swallowed a drink in Greece that made him forget his research and the fact that he had ever set foot in that country, thus leaving the poor young girl (who as you will read further, is pivotal in this tale, because of her ties one of the two main protagonist of the tale)alone and pregnant. It is opened to speculation as to whether his being given this drink had been intentional, since the author never explored this option further. Or that the married life of the two protagonists, having fallen in love during their pursuit together after the trail of Dracula's tomb, because of the contamination of one of them, and Dracula's relentless pursuit of them through their lives, were separated, and even after being reunited, never lived long together in happiness. In fact, despite the rather bland ending, the reader is left guessing as to whether Dracula is well and truly gone. That despite the fact we see him disappearing into dust. However, the drama of the previos pages more or less make up for the anti-climax, as the reader will still find it throbbing in his or her head, and that more than anything make-up for the disappointment.

There are many more minor layers in this book, but I hope that the mention of these existing layers would have convinced a person with a love for history and books to begin reading. Perhaps I might have given some of the plot away, but that is no help to that since I am not really reviewing this book here, but talking about areas of it which intrigues me. The artificial divide of the oriental versus the occidental seems to dissolve under the narration, even if the description occasionally bring them back.

A short review of Tues, 14 Mar 2006, Of Descartes "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and seeking Truth in the Sciences"

There is not much that I wish to say here, other than the fact that the discussion went on well, and even generated much heated debate from one or two of its members who decided to argue for or against Descartes's personal maxims to approaching philosophy, though of course, I think there is a certain degree of misunderstanding of what the poor man might had meant in this treatise, seeing that some of us are too set on our own preconception (something which Descartes did warn against) to try to work out what he might had been saying. However, as one of the discusssants point out, it is important that we can process what the person whose work we are studying has to say, so that we can utilise that in our own thinking, rather than blindly regurgitate the maxims and theorems of the said philosopher. Of course, there might be certain amount of misinterpretation and oversubjectivisation by the person reading Descartes, especially when he or she is ignorant of the tradition from which Descartes has risen from (though this has been severely argued and counter-argued by structuralists and post-structuralists in their deconstruction of the text and the author)

The natural scientist in me rebels over subjectivisation. Despite my personal subscription to the philosophy of quantum mechanics, where there are many uncertainties and errors in human measurements of its functions and variables due to our ability to be doing more than one thing properly at the same time, there are certain levels of precision and arbitrary laws to denote it. Or better yet, a particularly fixed model to which to base all the less easily measured models.

This particular work of Descartes is like a little manifesto that he wrote for himself as a reminder on the method that worked best for him in his dissertation the sciences (sciences here means body of knowledge). Descartes separated "pure philosophy", that which enumerates the truths of the world independent of subject-matter, from "applied philosophy ", that which is the philosophy derived from a particular science (my jargons) and we will see more of this as we study into his other works. We know that Descartes subscribed to the dual mind-body model, and
that he separates the corporeal from the material in his philosophy. Some might consider him an empiricist in his dissection of the material, but was less given to questioning when it comes to dealing with the unseen. Perhaps an area which escaped us that night, which I only realised as I write this, is that the text of Descartes allows us into the limits of the person's mind, and also a peek into the psychological conditioning he has had from his Jesuit education. I see now that his arguments over his religion, which he accepts unquestioningly as the ultimate truth, is reminiscent of the same acceptance of many scholars and philosophers of their religion today.

Quite a number of us who attended this discussion had a real interest in philosophy, and had read into the field, though most of us are not really knowledgeable on Descartes's philosophy. I think at least one of us mixed up epistemology with ontology when he decided to get into an involved discussion on existentialism and God (perhaps a precursor to future discussion on ontology?). I am guilty of encouraging this digression and for not trying to steer it back to the discussion of Descartes's four maxims (please refer to text, Part II, II and IV for more details). The unfortunate part is that not everyone read the text prior to the discussion, so there is no real space for more indepth discussion.

Our next discussion will still be on Cartesian philosophy, this time examining some other texts. I will put up a notice on that later. This time round, different people have volunteered to read different texts and to present their findings to the rest for further debate and discussion. I will put a list of the selected texts up later and say which have/have not been taken up, and you take your pick from texts that have not yet been taken-up.

And let us not get into the bad habit of going off tangent, however learned you might be in the topic you are digressing into, but stick to the agenda of the night, unless you can provide a substantive link between topic of discussion and your examples. And please read the text, or you will not get the fullness of the discussion. Since there might be more than one this time, you might not have time to read them all, but please read the ones you have volunteered to present, and scan through the rest as you have time.

My point of this review is not to report on what happened that night in detail, coz that is too much work and takes too much time (this is voluntary after all). So if you really want to know, come join us. It differs each time, depending on who turns up. There were seven of us that night, though two turned up late.

No date has been fixed for the next meeting. Coordinator, yours truly, might be too busy next month. Will let everyone know later.

A bientot

Ways of Understanding

Understanding, an act we participate in without much conscious thought. An ability that we have been schooled to utilise in our nascent years, and is perhaps the key to our learning of new skills and comprehension of new subject matter. Perhaps the differentiating factor between passing or failing our exams, or being competent at our work. This and its partner, the short term memory, so essential to learning, prior to its confirmation among the filing system of the long-term memory, create a fine line between a person with aphasia or other cerebral dysfunctions, and a person with normal brain function.

Yet, even those of us who believe that we are utilising our brains optimally, we often fail to realise how inefficient we really are, and how often it is that we fail to understand even the most basic of matters. While it would be catastrophic for a doctor, engineer, architect, or any professional dealing with precise sciences, to misunderstand the area of their provenance, more subjective areas (and despite the specificities of the legal system, many laws are more subjective in their interpretation than we think)are where we see the slip-ups and complete miscomprehension of its human actors. Below are some examples of what I meant

1. In the world of political debates, when an issue is at stake, we can find supposedly intelligent people completely misunderstanding an issue that is the topic of their debate, and instead spend their entire time during the debate, moving up the wrong alley. Some of these people are what Descartes would call, those who consider themselves to be cleverer than they are, and are precipitious in their judgements and avowals. Yet, they believe that they have impressed the audience with the pedantry of their arguments. Or that they have fight a good fight.

2. In the corporate world, even in the most highly regulated arena like banking, there is always much room for misunderstanding from different sides. Perhaps they are spurred by an inability to continue their emotions, or are overly easily agitated by perceived slights. It is not unknown for the superior to be inconsistent in their directives, nor for the quacking staff to fail to elicit clarity of a vague instruction given by their superior. Nor is it uncommon for the staff to communicate instructions to each other in such a way that the instructions function more to confuse the communicatee than to shed light on anything. Sometimes, the receiver of the message has to undergo much cognitive decryption to make sense of the message that is trying to be communicated, and when he/she actually make the effort to find out, find the effort to be an almost pointless exercise.

3. A university professor who misunderstands a particular theory or does not fully understand what he/she is trying to communicate to the students tend to confuse the latter, and hence lead to more disinformation. What is more dangerous would be disinformation of the most fundamental of axioms and concepts since these are the foundation to the building of analysis. To base an entire analysis and spurious/erroneous concept is not merely a time-wasting exercise, but could become dangerous when these analysis are used as building bricks to formulate policies that would have its effect on the lives of the masses. A student who fails to clarify or check on the received information, but to continue in his/her miscomprehension, and to accumulate knowledge with perceptions that are skewed, is but building a house on quaking sand.

4.Another common and probably dangerous method of understanding is to see truth as relative, and thus forsake instances when truth might be arbitrary. Whether they be religious precepts, or the laws of physics. Should we build our interpretation on matters over which no authority could certify, because the shifting paradigm necessitates that truth shifts at all times, if it is but an exercise on intellectual play, might be a harmless, and perhaps rejuvenating to the mind. But, it starts becoming dangerous when we use our own subjective understanding (or misunderstanding) to influence and teach minds weaker than ours. Where then is our accountability to them.

At the end of the day, perhaps it is best that we bring the act of understanding into a more conscious position, and to observe ourselves as we enter into the motion of comprehending something which is new, something which we are reading, or information that are entering by way of our senses. Perhaps then can we really understand how and how much do we understand.


The above are partial examples of how understanding courses through human life. The entry is inspired by Descartes's "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting Reason".

The ways of a(n)(un)thinking person?

This abstract act has fascinated people through the centuries, so much so that scholars, philosophers, writers, scientists, artists, and such like-intellectuals have tried to define this process, or at least have attempted to do so, without ever cracking the concept.

However, I am not going to play the philosopher here, but instead would like to use tangible examples on what actually goes on in the mind of an average person, and does the person'a thought become manifested in his/her actions.

Howard Gardner proposed 7 types of human intelligence . Hence, just because that person performs poorly in one area of intelligence does not negate his intelligence completely. So, would it mean that a person who is a fool in his chosen profession means that he has chosen the wrong profession? Likely. Unless he/she was a fool to begin with. (:

While some might argue that intelligence is innate, there are certain psychological factors, as well as training that can influence the way a person react to situation.
Let's take learning martial arts, yoga or even an intricate dance-step. How does a person actually memorise all the right poses, footwork or even handwork? Firstly, there is a need to have visual-spatial intelligence, to be able to easily gauge and therefore memorise the coordinates of each position of the hand, feet and body. And there is a need to think through logically using one's bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. However, could a person who is able to think logically from one action to the next, have difficulties solving more abstract logical-mathematical problems? Highly likely, because some people with high logial-mathematical abilities are not physically coordinated (which would mean that the body does not wire so well with the brain). I myself very well understand how it is to watch a demonstration of an action and to think it either looks really easy only to realise that I am having spatial-directional problems when trying to replicate the process I have just seen. Or even find out that intricate steps, however confounding they look, actually are manageable and even easily emulated once broken down.

And then there is the matter of moving this new piece of information from short term to long term memory. How does one do that? Will do another post on this another time. (: But suffice to say for now that a quick memory does not always necessitate good comprehension. Some people who take longer to remember can remember well and long in the end, and with good comprehension as well. But having the ability to grasp information quickly and sort them out in your brain is a good skill to have, and which many people have been attending courses and reading books to master :)

I have experimented with different ways of thinking, have stumbled along the way, done really idiotic things I would not have done in my right mind e.g. doing something really silly when trying to imitate an action which I've just been shown. I sometimes have difficulties relating phonetic sounds to meaning (e.g. being unable to understand what a person is trying to tell me because of the accent or the modulation of the voice, or being unfamiliar with the sounds of a foreign language which I am trying to master), and have even tried to figure out a way to remember intricate poses for yoga and dances. (:

There are many examples in which people would sometimes do think without thinking (or at least without thinking it through). Hence, I will write about how to lose a guy in 10 days...oops I mean how to lose your brains in 10 ways. There are more, but these examples will do for now. ;)
1. Double-parking when they know they are not going to be within range of sight, or knowing that they won't be taking only a short while.
2. Trying to squeeze your vehicle into a tight spot and then cursing the stranger who knocks into it.
3. Driving in the middle of the road and then wondering why the car behind you is staring daggers.
4. Accelerating and refusing to give way when the car on your left is signalling to move right.
5. Throwing food into water dispenser, knowing full well that you will also have to suffer the consequences of blocked filters.
6. Cutting down trees without thinking how it might effect the ecosystem overall, and your comfortable, urban life in the end
7. Planning the town haphazardly (think of the recent flashfloods in KL)
8. Building roads anyway and anyhow you like, regardless of the effects on the community around you.
9. Students copying results of an experiment which they should be conducting on their own and thus obtain their own results. But they've been doing this all the while, from school to university. Hence, they never learnt to conduct an experiment, or even do anything properly. Which is why our industries and corporate world is so screwed up. Btw, this applies to the medical sector as well.
10. We follow the laws and rules that are given to us unthinkingly, because we have been brainwashed to do so since we were kids. We never thought of questioning the feasibility or even the rationality of such laws.

bonus point : Believing that reform is underway when all that is being done is to cover the subject over with tinsels and glitters. E.g. Does appointing women to a patriarchal system solve the problem of gender inequity? Well, only in terms of having female faces and bodies among the men, honey.

Go figure the rest.

A Statement To Clear Up The Air - Also a writer's manifesto to myself

Have been reviewing a few things, and thinking about the direction of my writing programme. I have started here and there doing some stuff in a small way, but decided that I should now focus more of my energy and shift the gear higher. The giving up of certain commitments will actually allow me more time to concentrate on more challenging writing tasks ahead rather than reverting to the comfort zone. It's a big and dangerous world out there, but I will arm myself as well as I can. Wish me luck!

A few announcements are in order to clear things up.
This article that was written at jalantelawi.com under a different name was actually written by me. Perhaps the choice of that particular pseudonym have been miscontrued as my way of undermining religions (and the hegemony of Islam in Malaysia). Firstly, I would like to say that a name has no religious affiliations. Just because it happens to be a name that came from a race where a majority of the people are muslims, it does not mean anything. I could very well use Mohamad, Ali, Yusuf, Mariam etc, and proclaim my sentiments about anything under the sun (though I have to be careful that I do not sound like I am talking through my arse), it should not be read out of context. The reason why I chose this name is because I want to use a name that is seldom used by non-Malay members of the race in Malaysia, especially since I am a Malaysian. I've been asked as to why I am "Clarissa Lee" since I am not white instead of some local name. Well darlings, firstly, I do not believe in limiting myself to anything and I am sick and tired of superficial nationalism. I damn well can call myself with some name in an unpronouncable tongue to most people in this region if I wish to. And I damn well am proud of my race and heritage (I never am "racist" but the conditions around has left me high and dry), and my name in no way detracts from the fact that I am C-H-I-N-E-S-E in every imaginable permutation even if I've been told that I don't always look THAT Chinese (and yes, my parents DID give me a Chinese name). How should a Chinese look since the nation is made up of a very mixed race and culture. Perhaps they mean I don't look very Han (the race of many southern Chinese originating from China). I can't say I like the way some Chinese have become, but we do have a strong heritage that we can be proud of in many ways. And I really dislike the ethno-centric, small-minded, and short-term thinking that do still permeate the Chinese culture of today (and of yesteryears). Anyway, I digress.

Whatever I choose has long-term implications for me and I am now too old to make choices and change directions on whim. So, one day, I decided to write using a Javanese pen-name and hence I am interpreted as an anarchic atheist. Hello, God belongs to everyone. And I never intend to be a plain jane when I write, regardless of how I might look physically. And to return to that article above, I truly believe in everything I wrote in there, even if you feel that I have mistaken notions about things. Write back and scold me with your own views and take. At worse, we can agree to disagree.

Anyway, I will be discontinuing my writing in a few places and will be concentrating on some new stuff that I have been working at developing. Firstly, I won't be writing for jalantelawi.com for now since I need all that free time I can muster. So to those who have followed my writing there (even if there were just 10 of you or less, don't miss me too much, ya? ;P). And I am also changing direction in the kind of publications I write for, as I intend to develop new platforms and maybe experiment in other places. I'll keep my faithful readers abreast of what I am up to. I welcome all forms of constructive criticism, you can even tell me you hate my style, and why (I am learning to develop a thicker skin over time and also to be even more self-critical). You can even say that you do not like the way I overuse parentheses, asides and appositives. :D
That's what I left the comment boxes for. You can even drop me emails should you not wish for others to see them. (: