Divisar

"I look into the distance for those I have lost," says Anna, "so that I see them everywhere."
~~Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero: A Novel 

From distance what are you casting your gaze at? What lies in the deepest recess of your eyes that puts the world in a reflection to which no one but you yourself has the secret access? It's so heartbreaking to hear this of your said.

And your saying that, my dear Anna, must be more heartbreaking.

Kafkaesque Fragment

Reading Kafka's "Wedding Preparations in the Country". A fragment, an incomplete work. A work that might never have had a chance to complete itself, would Kafka have enough time at his disposal.

A trip that averts and abhors its destination is doomed to eternal procrastination. It is a trip that doesn't want to go anywhere and is all but happy to go nowhere. How can anyone, including Kafka, impart to such a trip a legitimate end? An end of any kind thus be given can only be illegal, almost by definition.

A fragment, this fragment, is born by nature.

It is, therefore, already complete.

Reversal

A reversal of fortune, I suppose.

Few years I got a chance to give myself a test of teaching in English. At the last minute, I flinched.

This semester my "Intro. to Western Lit." course has one foreign student whose presence I hadn't discovered until the first class session started. Out of reluctance, I have to teach the course in English the whole semester.

Forced to do so? In a way, yes.

Feel unhappy? No really.  Sometimes one has perforce to do something which, only years later, can prove itself beneficial and worthwhile.

Hope all this effort of mine would pay.

Another Start

It's never been easy to keep the habit of writing, let alone to do so on an electronic platform.

It has already been over 5 years since I first got acquainted with the web blogging system. At that time, I took a short note marking the event as "Origin." Yet it has stayed thus for a long time since. Not too much has been produced or blogged after the start. Probably for the too much time spent on figuring out how the blogging platform works.

Then almost a year later, I finally got the template done for the weblog. Half a year later, I transferred and translated my not too many blog entries to another platform, which was followed shortly after by another transfer to a new platform signaling another, or the third origin. What ensued was more time spent on familiarizing myself with the new platform and the server set-up procedure as I tried this time to house the weblog on my own machine. A bit more blog entries followed this second origin due likely to my feeling not too bad about the new platform. There was at least a short period of productivity.

Yet the process came to a halt suddenly in 2006. Then for almost two years the weblog has been left unattended and almost deserted. No upgrade of codes, no update of writing.

One cannot help thinking about what the hell has been going on during that period of mental blankness.

Now I finally have the site revamped, in a hope that this quite ridiculous fourth origin (isn't this kind of an oxymoron?) can boost me into a continuous life of writing. The layout, though kept the same, is remade for words to be more readable (much to my aged eyes' benefit), and the newly added feature of free-tagging should be more helpful in blogging something other than life snippets (something like research notes).

A comprehensive and automatic backup routine has also been set up to guarantee future restore or conversion of all of my past writings. The Linux server where the weblog resides will also simplify the character encoding problems especially regarding the Chinese characters (which gave me a lot of pain in exporting and importing SQL database).

Though self-ridicule seems a constant in my life, I do hope that this time my weblog can have its last say at least in terms of platform. Then the only problem left worth my full efforts will be the will to write and the perseverance in keeping that will alive.