the pencil reads

I've had "blog big fish" on my to-do list for possibly two weeks now. This makes blogging too much like work, but I'm going to suck it in and "blog big fish" even though what I really want to blog about is this really spiffy new free programme I found recently, just so I can finally check "blog big fish" off from my list.

(As a side note, it is interesting how the different personality types think about to-do lists. If you are familiar with the Myer-Briggs test, `J' types see to do lists as an agenda, `P' types see to do lists as a reminder of things they have to do in the future. Guess which I am.)

I think I've been putting it off because I don't really know what to say about this book except to say that it is about myth and myth-making. This guy (see I can't even remember the guy's name!) makes his dad into this giant of a hero to compensate for the lack of communication between them.

Myth-making is not something that comes to me easily. When I tell a story, it is usually fairly factual like this: "Never cycle over bougainvillea because you will puncture your tyres," rather than something fantastic like this: "Man, you should see those thorns on that bougainvillea that ripped a huge gash in my tyres.. they were longer than my index finger and sharper than a steak knife.." You get the idea.

I had a wonderfully eccentric friend in school who was like that. She told a damn good story because of her ability to make a myth out of real life. Of course you never know how much is true and how much is exaggeration, but does it matter?

That's what `Big Fish' suggests, that life is a blend of story and fact.

Remember that friend who tells a great story? She now works in Chicago as a journalist.

And now I have blogged big fish. :)
Read more, or not

An intriguing passage from Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry:

THE FLAT EARTH THEORY

The earth is round and flat at the same time. This is obvious. That it is round appears indisputable; that it is flat is our common experience, also indisputable. The globe does not supercede the map; the map does not distort the globe.

Maps are magic. In the bottom corner are whales; at the top, cormorants carrying pop-eyed fish. In between is a subjective account of the lie of the land. Rough shapes of countries that may or may not exist, broken red lines marking paths that are at best hazardous, at worse already gone. Maps are constantly being re-made as knowledge appears to increase. But is knowledge increasing or is detail accumulating?

A map can tell me how to find a place I have not seen but have often imagined. When I get there, following the map faithfully, the place is not the place of my imagination. Maps, growing ever more real, are much less true.

And now, swarming over the earth with our tiny insect bodies and putting up flags and building houses, it seems that all the journeys are done.

Not so. Fold up the maps and put away the globe. If someone else had charted it, let them. Start another drawing with whales at the bottom and cormorants at the top, and in between identify, if you can, the places you have not found yet on those other maps, the connections obvious only to you. Round and flat, only a very little has been discovered.

Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson, 87-88

tinkertailor wrote about this book in February this year, and it has been on my "to read" list ever since.

Richard Nisbett sets out in this book to show how Asians and Westerners think in completely different ways. For example, take this seemingly simple question: which two of the following three words should be grouped together?

panda, monkey, banana

If you're Asian, you'll probably chose monkey and banana; if you're Western, you'll probably choose panda and monkey. When I read this teaser on tinkertailor's blog, I was intrigued and so asked all of my Asian friends this question. All of them chose monkey and banana. Why?

Tinkertailor doesn't tell you, but I will. The reason why this is so is because Asians tend to see the world in terms of relationships (monkey eats banana), while Westerners tend to see the world in categories (pandas and monkeys are animals).

Westerners love to categorise. A dog is a mammal and so is warm blooded and produces milk. Asians are less curious about categories than in how things are related to one another. For example, the Chinese once thought that the movement of the stars affected important events on earth and so they studied the movement intently. Yet when they realised that the stars moved in predictable ways, they completely lost interest, and thus failed to produce a model. While the Westerners were the first to model the stars, the Chinese were the first to realise that the moon affected the tides on earth, a relationship that the Westerners overlooked.

How Asians and Westerners view the individual is different too. While the Westerner thinks that being distinctive and unique is very important, and that the personal agency of an individual is pivotal to happiness (take for example John F Kennedy's paraphrase of the Greek definition of happiness: “The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence”), Asians prefer the collective. An early primer in America starts with "See Dick. See Dick run. See Dick run and play.", while an early primer for the Chinese starts with "Little brother is sitting on big brother's shoulders. Big brother loves little brother."

Nisbett concludes that no one is completely Asian or completely Western. He does experiments where he manages to succesfully "prime" those from Hong Kong to a Asian or a Western view either by showing them pictures or by reading them passages. I suspect that this is true for me too. After a fairly long visit to the US, I come home frustrated about having to live at home, and with an itch to "grab hold of life by its horns". When I first step on US soil after living in Singapore, I get boiling mad when I perceive US officers being rude to my parents.

If you are dating someone from the other side of the world, or have friends, family, or business there, it would be good to read this book. It explains a lot of misunderstandings, and as tinkertailor says, I wish I had read this earlier.

Find it in the library here (Singapore) or here (the rest of the world).