3 posts tagged “penn”

I returned to Singapore last Friday, and since then I've done nothing conversation-worthy. I like to think that my vacation attachment with CAAS does not qualify as a conversation topic or something that should be prodded into because, really, it belongs to the rest of my life, which is already an inevitability I signed up for one year ago, and that I will have abundant opportunities to talk about.

I miss Penn to bits. I really do. I speak not with a banality that underlies small talk and idle banter, but with a very real inertia that consumes my thoughts almost every second of the day. I've met so many people (I probably should add customarily that they are awesome people) that made me feel awesome and brought me into bits of knowledge and experiences and what-ifs that I used to deliberately exclude from my comfort zone. I was also given an independence that I loved through and through and that I never for once took for granted. Most important was an independence of time. My time was my own, and it was up to me to manage my time relative to others. Right now bits of my time is arbitrarily given to my parents.

Gah. Pictures!

The Antonioni retrospective has sparked within me an interest in 50s and 60s cinema. This interest is by no means epicurist, but rather a childlike wonder at the alterity and enduring qualities of the times. This has been in tandem with another new interest in 18th and 19th Century England, what with my reading The Importance of Being Earnest and Sense and Sensibility. And now, I'm tuning into Turner Classic Movies like nobody's business! The channel is quite a treasure, if anyone should care to tune in every now and then. Beyond the value of screening classic movies, TCM screens them daily by themes. For instance, today they will broadcast movies by Stanley Kubrick, starting the day with a documentary on the director. Tomorrow their listings might include the filmography of Robert Wagner. The last few movies of the day will have both Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood in their cast, then segue into a day of Natalie Wood movies. This day will end with West Side Story, starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer, and proceed into the following day of Richard Beymer works. Marvelous!

I am juggling my movie-watching with another very time-consuming endeavour: reading. I finished Sense and Sensibility in the last 2 weeks, and now I must get started on Penn Reading Project's pick-of-the-year, Your Inner Fish, a book that all freshmen have been assigned to read and that we will discuss in clusters during orientation.

 

 

 

When I was a kid and my mum took me out gallivanting, she sometimes bumped into ex-pals and ex-classmates. The exclamation of choice was always, "It's a small world after all!" And I would snigger. I thought such a notion was parochial and small-town. I didn't believe we were really all that connected. I simply believed we lived within isolated circles of friends, and that if you had maybe, 3 circles you would be the only common thread amongst all 3. So then, it was completely possible to assume different personas with different groups of people, and I mean radically different.

This has changed over the growing years, and I've been proven wrong time and again, and it's always been a pleasant surprise to discover overlaps.

A connected matter is that recently I've been mentally pre-occupied with sociopaths and self-validating internal worlds. Last night I watched Shattered Glass, and it gave me a portrayal of the effects of an individual who managed to create an internal reality and successfully projected it out onto the world. This doesn't just refer to his fabrication of news, but also to his personality and identity. Stephen Glass, the journliast, eventually got caught fabricating stories. Anyway I've been quite intrigued with Glass, and found out that he attended Penn! I know I know, thousands of people enter Penn every year. But hello, there're hundreds of colleges out there, thousands of publicized scandals, hundreds of movies, and I had to find a movie that a) I related to, b) was based on a true story, and c) had a protagonist who attended my school.

Amazing right? So anyway I looked up Penn's alumni, and stumbled upon some childhood heros of mine: Noam Chomsky, John Legend, and Stephen Glass!

Yeah great opening paragraph and discussion, but I really just wanted to state this coincidence.