Pantai Kasih and Literary Study in Malaysian High Schools

"It is there, where they burn books, that eventually they burn people."

Heinrich Heine

Contain some spoilers for the Harry Potter books.

I am reminded of the uproar I lived through over the Harry Potter books back at the height of their popularity. Predictably, due to witchcraft being an integral element of the series, many folks who are antsy around words like "witch", such as fundamentalist Christians (and Muslims), wanted nothing to do with The Boy Who Lived™ and even sought to ban it from school and library for fear that the books would lead children into ungodly practices of magic. I remember back when I was doing my A-level, I had a coursemate whose parents - strict Christians - forbade her to read any Harry Potter books even though they have not even read the books themselves to see if the writings are as detestable as they were led to believe by their pastor. But that's par for the course: people often complain about things they do have not the slightest clue about.

Now, I want to talk about another similarly controversial, though far less famous book that is facing a similar situation in Malaysia,

The cover art is very reminiscent of the illustrations of school textbooks I used to have.

What it is? Well, it's a novel called Pantai Kasih (Care Beach or Love Beach) by Azmah Nordin. It is the designated reading material for the literary study component of the subject of Malay language for Form 4 students in Malaysian secondary schools.

What's wrong with it? Basically, many people, from teachers to parents to mullahs clutched their pearls and clucked about how it is an inappropriate novel to expose our 16 year old students to because of its "lewd" content and purported "lack of literary merits". They are clamouring for the Ministry of Education to select a more suitable work to put in its stead.

Now, I have not read the novel in question (and I dare wager, neither did most of its detractors). Yet, most people felt that they have formed sufficiently informed opinions on it after reading a passage from Pantai Kasih which have been widely circulated on social media,

My eyes!

The offending bit seems to be that paragraph the finger in the picture is pointing to, and translated to English, it goes something like,

It cannot be held back - Doctor Sadiz was unable to control his lust any longer. Raiha became the victim of his rapacity. Without any design or willingness on Raiha's part, Doktor's Sadiz's genetically 'unique' cells made its way into Raiha's body. Those 'special' cells then swam to meet and united with her healthy, fertile ovum in her womb. A zygote was created and it develops in its process of growth, month to month - a process taking place within Raiha's belly.

I was never particularly proficient in Malay but you get the idea. The passage described a sexual act - a non-consensual one - followed by the act of ejaculation. It then became almost clinical in its very brief birds-and-bees description of how babies form.

Now, all caught up? I confess that that's all I know about the novel in question so far. Even knowing so little, I feel confident in challenging the view that Pantai Kasih is devoid literary saving graces.

Firstly, in my opinion, any book no matter how deplorable or detestable has literary value. I would say that even about Mein Kampf or the Holy Bible. The whole point of literary study is to learn how to engage with literature; how to consume it, interpret it, critique it, and understand its relevance to the greater culture around it.

Yes, there is passage in Pantai Kasih in which a character was raped by another but let's discuss that. Rape, I find, is a recurring motif in Malay romance fiction. Take for example the popular local drama film Ombak Rindu (itself adapted from a novel by Fauziah Ashari): it was billed as a hard-won romance between a man and a woman, but in actuality the male protagonist (Hariz) is a rapist who raped the heroine (Izzah), a pious woman sold into prostitution by her uncle, while she was unconscious. She was then bought and kept as a sex slave by him, and must fulfill his sexual needs whenever he wishes it. She fell in love with him and married him eventually.

Another popular Malay novel-turn-TV show in Malaysia is The Wedding Breaker by Evelyn Rose in which Ariana Rose (the female protagonist) - at the behest of Tengku Juwita - pretended to carry the child of Tengku Adam Kamil (the male love interest) in order to break up his engagement with Tengku Juwita, who did not want to marry Adam. In retaliation, Tengku Adam raped Ariana Rose. The story ended with Tengku Adam apparently reforming after his pilgrimage to Mecca and marrying his rape victim. This too is portrayed as a love story.

Most Malay consumers of such fiction, even women, readily accepts male protagonists who are rapists (evident from the popularity of such works). This ties into the motif of rape in Pantai Kasih too. There is much to discuss on the prevalence of rape culture in Malay communities and what inculcated it. Rape culture is a concept in feminist theory that describes a setting in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality. In fact, many religious scholars in Malaysia does not even recognise the concept of marital rape, and the Perak Mufti even said last year that women must submit to the sexual desires of their husbands, even on camel-back. We also see regular news about how rape victims are frequently married off to their rapists as a resolution to such tragedies.

From a literary study perspective, the theme of rape in Pantai Kasih has a lot of sociocultural relevance and how a blurring of lines between rape and love do in fact exist in Malay culture.

Also, it seems that the consumption of such salacious and sexually explicit content is quite common amongst Malaysian readers, in spite of how conservative Malay Muslim culture actually is. Are these works simply a form of acceptable outlet for Malays who are compelled to live in such sexually-repressed lives - lives in which outright pornography and premarital sex are prohibited?

Another thing I noticed about the passage from Pantai Kasih is that the lusty rapist's name is Dr Sadiz, which sounded like a meaningful fictive name. Authors frequently give names to characters which describes said character, or names which hold some hidden significance. One of the most famous examples in contemporary literature is Lord Voldermort, whose name in French means "flight of death" - alluding to the character's commitment to be immortal. Voldemort may have also been inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's M. Valdemar (The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar), a character who also similarly returned from apparent death. Additionally, Lord Voldemort is an anagram of Tom Marvolo Riddle, his real name. Pretty much every character that J. K. Rowling created has a meaningful name.

Dr Sadiz calls to mind the Malay word "sadis" - a loan-concept drawn directly from the English word "sadist" (someone who enjoys inflicting pain on others, sometimes in a sexual sense). The word sadist itself has its etymological root in the name Marquis de Sade, a French aristocrat famous for mistreating women in cruel, unusual and sexual ways.

See? Even Pantai Kasih can provide very relevant and compelling literary lessons in the hands of someone who knows how to approach literature. And that's how you deal with books - you analyse them, not ban them. Sanctimonious puritanical teachers, parents and religious authorities take note.



P.S. Luckily, it seemed like the Ministry of Education is sticking to their guns and is keeping the book in schools.



A rapacious devourer of books,
k0k s3n w4i

My Kindle was Stolen so I Bought a New One

"I've got kids that enjoy stealing. I've got kids that don't think about stealing one way or the other, and I've got kids that just tolerate stealing because they know they've got nothing else to do. But nobody--and I mean nobody--has ever been hungry for it like this boy. If he had a bloody gash across his throat and a physiker was trying to sew it up, Lamora would steal the needle and thread and die laughing."

The Lies of Locke Lamora (2006) by Scott Lynch

Yeap, my precious Kindle Paperwhite was stolen from under my nose on the 18th of February, 2014. I remember that date because I have just returned from a twelve-day holiday in Northern Laos with Cheryl the day before, and it happened on the overnight bus I rode from Penang to Malacca. I must have fallen asleep when I was reading We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (one of the best books I've read about parenting ever and I think that all parenting books should be written in the style of a psychological thriller). My hands were still clasping my Kindle on my lap when my consciousness slid away into the night.

When I woke up in the Melaka Sentral bus station, I realised that I no longer have the device on me. I searched all around and under my seat to no avail. Some opportunistic thieving excuse of a human being must have taken it when my guard was down, and he could have gotten off at any of the stops preceding mine. Kindles are uncommon in Malaysia and most people don't even know what species of gadget it is when they see me reading from it. As a matter of fact, Amazon.com does not even ship the device to Malaysia so I had to purchase mine from a local third-party reseller. So while I lament the loss of my beautiful state-of-the-art e-book reader, somewhere out there, a thief must be thinking that he or she had just stolen the world's shittiest tablet PC.

With a sigh, I unregistered my missing Kindle from my Amazon account to prevent anyone from buying any books with my remaining gift card balance (about 130 USD at the time, which was no paltry sum), even though I was pretty damn sure he or she is close to illiterate. I was also pissed because I was forced to read the last third of We Need to Talk About Kevin using my smartphone's Kindle app. Grrr.

Okay. Deep breaths.

Last month on the 12th of March, I ordered a replacement from KindleMalaysia.com: a second generation Kindle Paperwhite (the so-called "Paperwhite 2") with ads as screensavers to reduce the cost and no 3G (only Wi-Fi enabled). It was a package deal that comes with a "stylish case". The total came up to RM640. Since I live in Kuching, I expected that it would arrive at my doorstep on March 14 earliest but to my surprise, my mailman brought it to me on the very next day! The Kindle Malaysia team must have sent it off the moment I made payment!

What disappointed me was the "stylish case" it came with. Unlike the case that my previous Kindle shipped with, this new case was way too small to accommodate the device. I had to brute-force it in but even then, the edges of the Kindle stuck out like a burger patty with too-small buns. I suspect that it's a case that's designed to house a different product.

So I wrote to Kindle Malaysia and complained, and they kindly offered to take back the old case and send me an Amazon original leather cover if I would top up what I what I paid with RM110. The "premium case" is selling at RM219 apiece on their site so after subtracting what I paid for the shitty case, I was essentially getting a RM39 discount.

The Amazon original leather cover I eventually got,
made from premium natural leather harvested from premium natural cows.

I paid a total of RM750. If you convert the prices listed on Amazon's page to ringgit for the products I got, it should all cost RM521 at the current exchange rate - so that's RM229 more. I guess that's just one of the extra costs of living in Malaysia since Amazon refuses to ship to their amazing e-book reader here. I suspect that they think we are all illiterate based on everything they have heard our nation's leaders said on the world stage.

Anyway, the case was perfect and is totally worth the higher price. It is secured using a magnetic clasp so there's no fidgeting with snappy elastic bands like the one on my old case. The best part is that it also automatically wakes or sleeps the device whenever I open or close it - so I don't need to fiddle with the tiny on/off button with my sausage fingers.

In case you were wondering, I specifically asked for the pink case (or fuchsia if you are a woman and care about such trivial differences in hue). I like my stuff to be distinctive and brightly coloured so I can find it at a glance and people would always remember what's mine. And besides, I think only a guy who is insecure about his own manhood and sexuality would be afraid of being seen carrying or wearing something pink.

The device fits snugly into the case.

Wait, have I even talked about the new features that are loaded with the Paperwhite 2? Here's a list:

• A higher contrast E Ink Carta display technology. Basically, the blacks are blacker and the whites are whiter.
• Improved LED array in the frontlight, reducing the blooming or "blotchiness" at the bottom of the screen that plagued the illumination of the older Paperwhite.
• 25% faster processor (1 GHz) that allows for faster page turns. I can totally vouch for this -the hiccups evident in the older Paperwhite is noticeably reduced.
• Better response to touch input, but I don't really feel that. In fact, Paperwhite 2 seems to have a clumsier response to my touches than its predecessors. While the old Paperwhite lags behind my typing speed, it catches up accurately. The Paperwhite 2 would skip some of the letters I tap on, necessitating that I type slower.
• The new Page Flip feature that allows the user to skip ahead or back in the text in a pop-up window and go back to the previous page - which is great so when I am reading The Winds of Winter later (heh, wishful thinking), I can summon Page Flip and flip back to the beginning at any time to look at the maps to figure out, for example, where Meeren is in relation to which backwater Daenerys goes to next instead of returning to Westeros. In case you are interested, you can summon Page Flip by swiping upwards from the bottom of the screen.
• Goodreads integration! Goodreads is a "social cataloguing" website that book nerds use to show off to other book nerds just how many books they are consuming. It's how they decide who is the nerd king. I started an account there just because of this feature the came bundled with my Paperwhite 2.

Anyway, all of the above just makes an already excellent device even better. The original Paperwhite was already a near faultless reading experience so no reinvention of the wheel is called for here. However, after being a Kindle owner for near a year, I do think that there is one aspect that the good folks from Amazon can work on: Better integration of diagrams and pictures! It isn't a problem when you are reading a novel with simple illustrations but when I was reading textbooks such as the Principles of Evolutionary Medicine, I found that I could not enlarge the charts and table in it - and that is frustrating. I would totally buy more textbooks for my Kindle and study more if this is fixed.

Aside from that, I love my new Kindle Paperwhite 2 so much that I want to gay marry it.



Kindle-phile,
k0k s3n w4i

The Screaming Staircase: A Review of the 1st Book of Lockwood & Co.

"When I write something that would have made me laugh as a ten-year-old, or would have scared me or would have excited me, I know I'm onto something."

Jonathan Stroud

One of my favourite children and young adult writers working today is Jonathan Stroud who gave life to what is possibly the funniest djinni ever birthed in fiction (sorry, Robin Williams). This is not the first time I have heaped love onto the Bartimaeus sequence of books and if you haven't read them - well, what are you waiting for?

While the titular indentured djinni is certainly the most memorable element of the Bartimaeus books, what really sold the original trilogy is Stroud's vision of a dystopian London run by scheming magician-politicians who enslave spirits and tyrannises non-magic commoners. Bartimaeus' London is simultaneously familiar yet coloured in every way imaginable by its magocratic upper class. There were high end shops in Piccadilly that supply sorcerous artifacts to London's elites. The British Museum contains magical antiques (stolen from foreign cultures, much like the real British Museum) and the mummified remains of Bartimaeus' former employers. Tombs of Britain's most famous sons and daughters in Westminster Abbey are cursed and guarded by powerful spirits to discourage looters. Stroud's immense talent at world-building - or world-tweaking, really - also permeates every pen-stroke in The Screaming Staircase where he introduces us to yet another vision of London slightly askew.

If there's something strange / In your neighborhood / Who ya gonna call?

Lockwood & Co. is one of Britain's many enterprising agencies that had sprung up in the wake of the Problem - which is a typically English way of understating an epidemic of ghosts and hauntings spreading all across the British Isles. Suddenly, the spirits of the dead refuse to stay dead, and some categories of these spooks can hurt or even kill the living, either directly or otherwise. Employing children and teenagers with the psychic ability to sense ghosts, these agencies provide the increasingly valuable service of dealing with hauntings to the public. Stroud then layered this basic premise with commonsensical extensions of the concept by also introducing us to the corporate rivalry between these agencies, governmental offices which regulate them and perform research into psychic phenomena, and the economical microverse that revolves around ghostbusting like the iron and silver industries, lavender horticulturists and purveyors of good tea bags (preferentially by the Pitkin Brothers of Bond Street). If anything, Stroud had gotten much better at reimagining London since Bartimaeus.

The Screaming Staircase is narrated by Lucy Carlyle, a young agent of exceptional talent who joined Lockwood & Co., an agency operating completely without adult supervision. Anthony Lockwood runs it, in Sherlockian fashion, from his residence at Number 35, Portland Street and through the course of The Screaming Staircase, proved to be an able understudy of the Baker Street sleuth. Anthony Lockwood intends to elevate Lockwood & Co. to be the number one agency in London and isn't above endangering his associates to achieve it. His deputy, George Cubbins, provides most of the comic relief in the book and is best described as the overweight, flatulent, male slob equivalent of Hermione Granger of the Harry Potter books and much like her, he approaches every problem by reading and researching the hell out of it.

Reminiscent of the taxonomy of summonable spirits in the Bartimaeus books, Lockwood & Co. categorises ghosts into Type Ones to Threes, in an order of increasing intelligence, autonomy and malevolence. Within those Types are various species of spirits ranging from Cold Maidens to Poltergeists to Phantasms, and they are grouped according to their behaviour and abilities. Unlike the ghosts in Potterverse, the Visitors (as they are euphemistically called) imagined by Stroud are of the horror film variety: creepy, mindless and often violently murderous. Stroud clearly intends to scare his readers with them.

LOCKWOOD & CO.!

Like the Bartimaeus Sequence, The Screaming Staircase is a breezy read - I finished it in a day and found myself hungering for the sequel. I could tell that Stroud already had the mytharc of the series down pat, and the grand  architecture of it loomed ominously over the events of the first book. What is the Problem and what is causing it? I NEED TO KNOW! I guess I'll just have to wait for next year for the provisionally titled second book, The Whispering Skull. to be published. If George R. R. Martin manages to deliver The Winds of Winter next year as well, it would make 2014 a really good year indeed.

I recommend The Screaming Staircase to just about anyone at all. It doesn't matter who you are, how old you are or that you don't even necessarily enjoy reading for leisure at all. Stroud always know how to show everyone an enchantingly good time.



Definitely not on Jonathan Stroud's payroll,
k0k s3n w4i

Why Kindle?

"There are worse crimes than burning books.  One of them is not reading them."

Joseph Brodsky

In 2004, I told the Ex-Grrrfriend™ that in the future, people will read from paperback-sized devices, each capable of storing thousands of books. She laughed and scoffed at that, telling me that it was one of the most ridiculous thing she ever heard and that the idea would never take off. She told me that reading from an electronic display strains eyes and that such devices cannot provide the same tactile pleasure of thumbing a real paper-and-ink novel. Then, we broke up. Probably unrelated.

Later that year, Sony released the LIBRIe, allegedly the first E-Ink e-book reader in the world. A few days ago (or 9 years later depending on how you want to look at it), I decided to buy myself an Amazon Kindle Paperwhite as an early birthday present to myself which, at the time of writing, is the absolute slicing edge of e-book readers.

Now, living on the island of Borneo - the proverbial hairy bottom of the world - I am not privileged with access to Amazon.com's services so I was forced to employ a third party to do my purchasing for me. The wife told me she can get one of her legions of Singaporean friends to help me get one and then mail it to me, but once I start fancying something, waiting any substantial length of time for it will invariably cause me a disproportionate amount of stress. Can't help it. I have been completely spoiled by the culture of instant gratification that the internet engenders. So, I found Kindle Malaysia by way of Google (Praise the Motherboard!) and ordered one from them. I also e-mailed them twice within minutes of purchasing to essentially ask "Is it here yet?"

Kindle Malaysia advertises themselves as a "Painless way for Malaysians to buy Kindle" and boy, they kept their words. They even salved my vexations by answering my e-mails (twice). I made payment on Sunday and my parcel arrived at my doorstep on Wednesday, so I guess that they must have some floor stock ready to ship at a moment's notice.

Damn straight it was urgent, bitches.

I bought the Wi-Fi version of Kindle Paperwhite and a leather wallet plus screen protector for it for a grand total of RM 690. I figured that having constant internet access wouldn't be a necessary feature for a device that can literally store years of entertainment in it. It is also the version with "special offers" that would display unobtrusive ads for deals in the Kindle Store. I opted for it because I might actually be interested in these deals and because it shaved the price of the Kindle down further.

It came in this cool minimalistic chisel-shaped hexahedral black cardboard box,

And I must squee.

After peeling off the seal (which sadly defaced the box a little), I find my newest toy. On it was a screensaver instructing me on how to turn it on,

Technically, the term "screensaver" is a misnomer in this case.

Two of the most irritating things that people say when I told them I bought a Kindle are "Why not get an iPad?" and "Why don't you stick to real books?" So, why indeed? Now, let me take you through my decision making process,



So, Why a Kindle?

I like bright-coloured stuff. Helps me look for them at a glance.

Compared to a smartphone or a tablet PC like Apple's iPad,

• Longer Battery Life: As a heavy smartphone user, I find that one of the biggest handicaps to such devices (with AMOLED or LCD displays) is how long I can use them on a single charge. An iPad, for example, would be drained of juice in just a third of the day. The Kindle Paperwhite boasts that its battery can keep going for 8 weeks at half an hour of reading a day with the wireless turned off and the light setting at 10 (or 28 hours of continuous reading, if you are allergic to hype-speak) because it only needs power to refresh the display.
• Better-Suited Display: The biggest disadvantage of an E-Ink display is that it is only still available only in grayscale (where Kindle is concerned) and users who habitually use smart devices might find the stuttering manner by which E-Ink refreshes a page to be a tad distracting, at least at first. However, its strengths more than made up for its weaknesses. For starters, you can read it just fine under direct sunlight making it much more suitable for outdoor use (and I read out-of-doors a lot when I travel) while the glassy display of other smart devices would be nigh unreadable in the same conditions. And because E-Ink does not glare - a complaint I frequently hear from people trying to read on a tablet PC or smartphone - it reduces eye-fatigue too. Having used it heavily in the past few days, I can attest that it actually looks like there's an actual piece of paper behind the screen.
• Cheaper: Much, much cheaper. More than 2 to 3 times cheaper. Enough said.

An unedited photograph of my Kindle taken with flash at close quarters.

Compared to real ink-and-paper books,

• Lightweight: I compared it to a few paperbacks I have lying around - while it is undeniably weightier than a thinnish novel like China Miéville's The City & the City, it weighs about the same as Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (or Neal Stephenson's anything really). But if I weigh it against my medical textbooks, it is practically feather-light so I can study in bed if I so wish. Also the last time I went on a backpacking trip, my books took up nearly a third of the total weight of of my backpack. Now, I can theoretically carry up to a thousand books with me wherever I go.
• More Ergonomic: I am one of those finicky readers who wouldn't open any book I read more than a 45° angle because I hate creasing the spines (people who have borrowed books from me would know my ground rules). Also when I read a heavy book in bed, I was obliged to rest it on the mattress and turn in bed with every page turn to have the right page facing me. Turning pages is necessarily a two-handed task or I might accidentally dog-ear or fold them. With my new Kindle, I no longer have to worry about all that!
• Read in the Dark: No night-lights or reading lights required. With the illuminated screen, I can read in pitch darkness while my wife snoozes beside me. It's great for when if I go camping as well. With the Paperwhite, I can even finely tweak the luminosity and the gradations run from 0 to 24.
• Special Features: The Kindle Paperwhite comes with a few cool features that real books can never have. For example, I can look up any word using the built-in Oxford Dictionary by just pressing on said word for a second and the definition would pop-up on screen. I can also look at some books with the X-Ray feature that gives notes on who the characters or what objects/places on the page are, and where within the book the same names occur (which would be useful when you are reading a series with a bajillion characters like George R. R. Martin's A Song of ice and Fire). The size of the letters are adjustable, and you can even change the font, the distance between lines and the size of the marginal spaces. There is also a Time to Read feature that tells me how long it would take me to finish the book or current chapter calculated based on my real-time reading speed. Connected to Wi-Fi, I can instantly translate any word or passage using Bing Translator with just a few taps on the screen, or download and read any book I own that I have stored in the Kindle Cloud (which I can access using my PC or my smartphone as well). There are also highlighting, note-making and book-marking features as well, and whenever I open a book, the device and Cloud remembers exactly where I left off.
• Ease of Purchase: One of the most important differences between real books and e-books is that I can have any book I want within seconds. In the past, I had to order them via Kinokuniya or Borders and wait for weeks for them to arrive before making a 2-hour journey from Malacca to KL to pick them up.
• Cheaper: So far, every book I have bought from the Kindle Store cost less than what I would have to pay had I bought them from a conventional bookstore.
• Access to Free Books (Legally): I just downloaded Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species from the Kindle Store's free e-book collection and there are thousands of books there with expired copyrights that you now technically own by just buying a Kindle. Aside from Amazon.com, you can also download free e-books from Project Gutenberg, Open Library, and countless of other websites on the internet. Seriously, you can get a Kindle and read non-stop for the rest of your life without ever buying a single book.
• Greener: No trees ever need to die to support my reading habit.

And unedited closeup of the display in semi-darkness.

The correct question is, why are you not reading from a Kindle?



P.S. I'll admit that the idea of my own physical library still holds a sort of magical sway over me (and I already own several hundred real books). I guess I just need to get over my irrationality about it.



Embracer of futures,
k0k s3n w4i

7 Reasons Why the Red Wedding is So Much Worse in the Book

"And so he spoke, and so he spoke, that lord of Castamere,

But now the rains weep o’er his hall, with no one there to hear.

Yes now the rains weep o’er his hall, and not a soul to hear."

The Rains of Castamere by George R. R. Martin

This article spoils episode nine of season 3 of Game of Thrones and the relevant parts of
A Storm of Swords from which the episode was adapted from.

The day that all book-readers of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire had been waiting for had come to pass. It is the day that the show-watchers who have not read the books experience the surprise, shock and horror that we experienced 13 years ago when we read A Storm of Swords for the first time. Some potent were the words on its pages that I heard it made some swear off the series for good. For me, it was the highest point of the series thus far and the zenith of literary mastery. It made me an undying fan to the books and a relentless proselytiser of Martin's wicked genius.

I saw the Red Wedding episode (or The Rains of Castamere, as it is officially named) with my wife and when the tragedy went down, my heavily pregnant wife was agape in alarm, her eyes unblinkingly transfixed on screen while she held a hand over her slightly open mouth. This is a woman that flinches at the most vanilla of violent scenes in movies but she simply could not tear her eyes away. I must admit I enjoyed her reaction very much and it allowed me, by way of my empathetic mirror neurons, to re-experience the Red Wedding anew. Other book readers all around the world found their jollies by video-taping their book-virgin friends' and families' hilarious responses when they watched the climax of the episode. Red Wedding Day was like a fiesta of schadenfreude for us.

Red Wedding by FatherStone.

Right after the episode fade to black and silence, show-watchers flooded Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere with their oceanic grief, and never before in the history of television had there been so massive a response to a plot development to a TV series. It elicited death threats to the books' author and inspired passionate declarations from people saying that they are rage-quitting the shows for good. The scope and scale of the reaction and backlash was beyond imagining, and the reason why people can feel so strongly about what happened to a bunch of fictional characters was because they were so well-written. It was a testament to how much life George R. R. Martin breathed into them.

Now that the wails of sorrow and the gnashing of teeth are petering off a little, I have something to say to you show-watchers: Quit moaning. What you guys went through was Red-Wedding-Lite. While it was fantastically portrayed on screen, it was positively anaemic compared to how much worse we book-readers had it.

Here are 7 reasons why the Red Wedding was far more traumatic in the novel than on the telly, in chronology and with book excerpts.



1. The Music at the Reception was Awful.

"Music is more of a hobby for us really."

The musicians at the wedding in the TV episode was good. From the generic medieval tunes of merriment to the mournful and foreboding rendition of The Rains of Castamere, they were suitably competent. It wasn't so in the book. In fact, the wedding band was mentioned repeatedly throughout the chapter as being terrible at their job,

The drums were pounding, pounding, pounding, and her head with them. Pipes wailed and flutes trilled from the musicians’ gallery at the foot of the hall; fiddles screeched, horns blew, the skins skirled a lively tune, but the drumming drove them all. The sounds echoed off the rafters, whilst the guests ate, drank, and shouted at one another below. Walder Frey must be deaf as a stone to call this music. Catelyn sipped a cup of wine and watched Jinglebell prance to the sounds of "Alysanne." At least she thought it was meant to be "Alysanne." With these players, it might as easily have been "The Bear and the Maiden Fair."

They were also referenced in Arya's chapter when she was at the Twins,

The music from the castles was louder here. The sound of the drums and horns rolled across the camp. The musicians in the nearer castle were playing a different song than the ones in the castle on the far bank, though, so it sounded more like a battle than a song. "They’re not very good," Arya observed.

The musicians being terrible is one of the earliest clues to the storm of shit that hit the fan later. They sucked because they were not musicians but were actually assassins posing as musicians.

Okay, we book-readers didn't technically suffer from the music (even if the characters in attendance did) but this is such a stellar example of Martin's writing that I couldn't resist including it. Very few authors can write something innocuous (terrible musicians seemingly written in for harmless humour) and also have it foreshadow something far more sinister. It was a masterful contrast of comedy being a prelude to tragedy.



2. More Characters We Care About Were Killed.

 Many show-watchers have griped about the huge number of characters in the show but we book readers are saddled with so much more - and we have come to know and love some of them. Robb Stark did not descend from the North with just Karstarks and Boltons behind him. He had many more named bannermen and personal guards like Robin Flint, Wendel Manderly and Dacey Mormont who had fought with him and protected him in his campaign in the South, most of which were brutally murdered along with Robb, Catelyn and Grey Wind at the Red Wedding.

House Manderly's sigil is a merman. Wendel Manderly was shot in the mouth by a crossbowman.

Greatjon Umber, the head of House Umber, is possibly one of the most fan-loved of Robb Stark's vassals. He initially challenged Robb's authority, going as far as to draw his sword during talks but Robb's direwolf disarmed him and chewed off two of his fingers. Instead of being enraged, he joked about it and became the first of the Northmen to declare Robb King of the North. He is also Robb's fiercest supporter and arguably, greatest champion. While he ultimately survived the Red Wedding, his son, the Smalljon, was beheaded in the mêlée by Roose Bolton's men.



3. Instead of a Knife to the Womb, it was an Axe to the Belly.

Talisa's stabbing was undoubtedly one of the most shocking and gruesome scene in the entire Red Wedding sequence. Right after she talked about naming Robb's heir after his unfortunate lord father, Ned Stark, the Fetus in the North was aborted almost immediately with extreme prejudice by one of the Freys.

I let my pregnant wife watch this scene.

Now, Talisa was a character made up specifically for the show, and Robb's wife in the book (the one which he broke his oath to Lord Walder Frey to marry) was Jeyne Westerling of the Crag who Robb married after he slept with her to protect her honour. It is important to note that the Westerling girl was (1) not pregnant, and (2) did not attend the Red Wedding for fear of offending the Freys. So in a way, Talisa was specifically created as a more sympathetic character whom Robb married out of love rather than honour. It is probably for the same reason that the show's writer gave her a baby and had her go to the Twins just so she could have that conversation about naming the unborn kid Ned to raise the emotional stakes right before she was given that very special Caesarean.

This was the same expression most show-watchers had on their faces when this happened.

In the book, Robb attended the Red Wedding without his wife. One of his battle companions and king's guard, Dacey Mormont (a cousin of Jorah Mormont), was with him. She shared Robb's last dance of the night before the Freys turned on the Northmen. If you think being knifed in the belly was bad, just read what happened to the Mormont girl,

“Mercy!” Catelyn cried, but horns and drums and the clash of steel smothered her plea. Ser Ryman buried the head of his axe in Dacey’s stomach.

Now, imagine that happening in the show instead. While the emotional payoff isn't as big, it would have made for a far gorier scene.



4. Catelyn's Gambit was Far More Unpalatable.

One of the most memorable and character-defining scenes for Catelyn in the show was when she held Walder Frey's wife hostage and threatened her life in exchange for Robb's. This was the last delicious morsel of hope that the show's writers dangled in front of the show-watchers. Sure, Cat's firstborn had a few arrows sticking out of him but he stood up. He might have conceivably escaped too.

"I'll find another," said Walder Frey, disgustingly evil and unconcerned, and for the first time in this series, Joffrey became the second most despised character in the show. Then Roose Bolton stepped in front of Robb and shanked him in the heart with a sword. At that very same moment, the same blade pierced the hearts of a million screaming fans.

She was Walder Frey's 8th wife. Catelyn ought to have known how disposable they are.

Catelyn's grief was a terrible thing to behold. It seemed like all life drained from her face as she cleanly slit Joyeuse Erenford's throat in one smooth motion (yes, she has a name) as she screamed in anguish. The camera lingered on her, standing there ashen and motionless, before someone gave her an identical spurting tracheostomy. By this point, the audience must have yelled "WHAT THE FUCK?!" about a dozen times.

In the book, Cat's hostage was a mentally retarded grandson of Walder Frey,

At his feet sat a somewhat younger version of himself, a stooped thin man of fifty whose costly garb of blue wool and grey satin was strangely accented by a crown and collar ornamented with tiny brass bells. The likeness between him and his lord was striking, save for their eyes; Lord Frey’s small, dim, and suspicious, the other’s large, amiable, and vacant. Catelyn recalled that one of Lord Walder’s brood had fathered a halfwit long years ago.

He was called Aegon "Jinglebells" Frey, and it was implied that Walder Frey might actually be fond of the lackwit. And when Cat executed him in the book, it was a far more grisly scene than the one in the show,

Robb had broken his word, but Catelyn kept hers. She tugged hard on Aegon’s hair and sawed at his neck until the blade grated on bone. Blood ran hot over her fingers. His little bells were ringing, ringing, ringing, and the drum went boom doom boom.

We all know that the murder of defenceless innocents or creatures that are incapable of understanding their plight is a very powerful, very deplorable act. That is why the death of a dumb animal like a dog can hurt more than the death of a human being. Reading about a grief-stricken mother "sawing at the neck" of a mentally-challenged middle-aged man "until the blade grated on bone" certainly weighed much more on our souls than what we saw in the show.



5. Catelyn Went Completely Batshit.

Instant karma.

If you think Catelyn going all Mama Bear and cutting up some bitch up for her son was crazy, you are not prepared for the insanity that began after Jinglebell Frey was killed in the book,

Finally someone took the knife away from her. The tears burned like vinegar as they ran down her cheeks. Ten fierce ravens were raking her face with sharp talons and tearing off strips of flesh, leaving deep furrows that ran red with blood. She could taste it on her lips.

It hurts so much, she thought. Our children, Ned, all our sweet babes. Rickon, Bran, Arya, Sansa, Robb... Robb... please, Ned, please, make it stop, make it stop hurting... The white tears and the red ones ran together until her face was torn and tattered, the face that Ned had loved. Catelyn Stark raised her hands and watched the blood run down her long fingers, over her wrists, beneath the sleeves of her gown. Slow red worms crawled along her arms and under her clothes. It tickles. That made her laugh until she screamed. “Mad,” someone said, “she’s lost her wits,” and someone else said, “Make an end,” and a hand grabbed her scalp just as she’d done with Jinglebell, and she thought, No, don’t, don’t cut my hair, Ned loves my hair. Then the steel was at her throat, and its bite was red and cold.

In the book, Catelyn went violently insane and started clawing and tearing her own face into a mutilated mess. The Freys initially intended to keep her alive as hostage but after witnessing her in her throes of bloody madness, they decided to just put her out of her misery instead.



6.  Arya was Killed.

"What?"

Just kidding, but not really. In the show, we saw the Hound knocking Arya out cold to take her away from the mayhem and slaughter at the Twins.

However, in the books, this was how Arya's chapter at the Twins ended,

Arya spun away from him and darted for the gate. The portcullis was coming down, but slowly. I have to run faster. The mud slowed her, though, and then the water. Run fast as a wolf. The drawbridge had begun to lift, the water running off it in a sheet, the mud falling in heavy clots. Faster. She heard loud splashing and looked back to see Stranger pounding after her, sending up gouts of water with every stride. She saw the longaxe too, still wet with blood and brains. And Arya ran. Not for her brother now, not even for her mother, but for herself. She ran faster than she had ever run before, her head down and her feet churning up the river, she ran from him as Mycah must have run.

His axe took her in the back of the head.

Then, for 12 whole freaking chapters, we were not given Arya's POV again in the book. Many readers, myself included, thought that the littlest Stark girl was killed at the Red Wedding too (the reference to Mycah, the butcher's boy that the Hound rode down in the first book/season, really sold it). More than even Robb or Catelyn, Arya is one of the best-liked characters in the series and her temporary demise was devastating. I was sure that George R. R. Martin purposely delayed slipping in another Arya chapter after the Red Wedding just to extend our mourning. That jerk.



7. They did Things to Robb Stark's Corpse I Spoke Too Soon.

This was what ultimately happened to Robb (and Catelyn) in the books,

"I am not seeing the body, no, Your Kingliness," said Salladhor Saan. "Yet in the city, the lions prance and dance. The Red Wedding, the smallfolk are calling it. They swear Lord Frey had the boy’s head hacked off, sewed the head of his direwolf in its place, and nailed a crown about his ears. His lady mother was slain as well, and thrown naked in the river."

The King in the North by Jorge Mascarenhas.

To be honest, I was actually kind of looking forward to this macabre curiousity in the show but I guess this would ruin the sombre mood on which The Rains of Castamere episode ended.

Addendum (11/06/2013): They show Frey men parade Robb Stark's headless body on a horse with his direwolf's head mounted on his neck stump in the season finale of season 3.

 ***

So there it is, all the show-watchers have caught up to the book-readers where the Red Wedding is concerned. Much like Ned Stark's suprise beheading in season one/book one, this is going to cause a bad case of plot disorientation in anyone trying to follow the story. Where do we go from here? Who can take out the Lannisters now? If Robb isn't the hero, who is?

Embrace that confusion. You have no idea where you are and that's a good thing. For the first time in many years, you are going to hear a new tale.



Drank Red Wedding tears,
k0k s3n w4i

The Lotophagus and Bibliobibuli

"Woke up and wished that I was dead

With an aching in my head

I lay motionless in bed

The night is here and the day is gone

And the world spins madly on"

World Spins Madly On (2006) by The Weepies

I finished reading A Dance with Dragons on the last day of August, and it was a killer of a book (as in, it will kill a full grown man if you swing it at his head). When I stepped into med school, an old friend and a fellow geek told me that I would no longer have the luxury of leisure reading. In response, I made a vow to read at least one novel a month no matter how busy I get - and I kept that vow even through my final exams. When I entered into the workforce, yet another geek friend warned me that I may soon have to abandon my modest little hobby. That galvanised my resolve because that's just the sort of person I am, and I just started on my meal of China Miéville's The City & the City for September. I will make short work of it and then belch loudly in satisfaction.

I daydream longingly and often of my time in the Indian Himalayas, where the days are in slow motion and the nights are not the beginning of tomorrows. What Thomas Wilson - Maugham's Lotus Eater - chose to do seems less and less like folly to me and more and more like a perfectly sensible plan. As a high school senior, it was a moral story about a good-for-nothing layabout meeting an unpleasant end he deserved (or at least, that's how we were suppose to interpret it in our literature studies in order to pass). These days, it makes me question the worth of a long life in service to others versus a shorter one in service to my own happiness.

I read a respectable number of books during my April in the Mountains including Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Dan Simmon's Olympos, Patrick Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear and Dan Brown's delighfully execrable The Lost Symbol. I also managed to rent a perfectly serviceable copy of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World for a steal of 3 rupees from a cosy little café in the Dalai Lama's temple complex. The place serves a mean Roquefort cheese and walnut pizza, by the way - so you know where to look now.

In Huxley's bold neoteric world, people indulge in a state-endorsed, side-effects-free hallucinatory drug called soma - going on what they term "soma holidays" - and enjoy rampant, guiltless, recreational sex. He wrote of a world devoid of angst, strife and individuality, and thus devoid of true art and creation. He wrote it as if it's a detestable dystopia. All along I was thinking: "Look how fucking happy everyone is!"

One character went on a permanent soma holiday and died in imbecilic bliss. Is that such a bad thing? If we measure the worth of our lives in the amount of pleasure it contains, then no - no, it's not. I sought refuge in literature, in art, only to stimulate the dopamine reward system in my brain. It's Pavlovian. I'm a dog slobbering at the ring of fiction's bell; a complex organic robot responding to the ebbs and flows of my chemical circuitry. If I am indefinitely happy and contented, then I would have no need of the books I covet and love.

But we have no soma in our boring old world. The closest thing I will ever come to a permanent soma holiday of my own is to spend the rest of my years reading by the hillside and basking in the orange glow of a McLeod Ganj sunset. Now, isn't that a life to die for?

Don't you just love how the sky is red and blue at the same time?

Lotus-deficient,

k0k s3n w4i

Good News, Everyone!

"There are no men like me. There's only me."

Jamie Lannister in A Clash of Kings (1998)

For my 25th Name Day, I ordered the present I have promised myself earlier this year from a bookstore here in Kuching.

Hell yeah!

It arrived just a couple of weeks ago and I'm already about a quarter of the way through it. I would very much like to take a two-day leave from work and meditate on the tome cover to cover in one long unbroken marathon - that's the best way to digest an epic, if you ask me - but that would also mean I would sooner have to start weathering another few years of waiting for my next fix of A Song and Ice and Fire while hoping that George R. R. Martin remains hale and would not pull a Robert Jordan or a Terry Pratchett. So far, the book is burning rather slowly and that's a bit uncharacteristic for the series in general, but it remains just as engrossing as ever.

Oh, when will The Winds of Winter blow through my life?

I also just finished watching the Game of Thrones HBO miniseries based on the first book before I relocated to Kuching and I must say it surpassed all expectations I harboured for it. I will not hesitate to recommend it to anyone who have not read the books, and to everyone who had.

On a completely unrelated note, I was apparently named the "Blogger of the Week" on DiGi's myInternet homepage last week - something I was unaware of till quite recently. How dare they award me accolades without informing me?!

The important question is: did I win an iPhone 4 or iPad 2?

The bloke or sheila charged with cooking up a cookie-cutter introduction to my weblog clearly hadn't a clue what he or she was talking about. For example, I am no longer a medical student from Malacca but is currently a house officer in the general hospital in Kuching; a major oversight on his or her part considering that most of my recent posts orbited around the renovations in my alleged life. Also, he or she evidently only read my latest post at the time of writing, which was the one about Eddie Izzard.

Um, if there is a good, non-stupid, gender-neutral substitute phrase or word for "he or she" or "him or her", please let me know. And no, I will not consider "shkle", you crazy Futurama fans.

Anyway, I confess that the half-assed measure by which my personal site was described did not feed very effectively into my delusions of grandeur. Besides, any description of your truly is not complete without the inclusions of words such as "godless" or "can be a bit of an asshole". I certainly approve of and appreciate the comparison of my person to a delicious sundae, though.

P.S. I was never one for promoting my blog since I mostly write for my own amusement, but if you like what I'm doing here and think that more people should know about it, do kindly +1, tweet or share my posts on Facebook. These buttons at the bottom of my every post are begging to be clicked on.

k0k bL0k's Blogger of the Forever,

k0k s3n w4i