Edmund Yeo

Posted this on Facebook a few days ago. Post by Edmund Yeo . (So I will post it here too, but with amendments. And links to previous blog posts related to these books. To help me remember.)

I was in Bali the past 10 days for a film shoot that I wasn't exactly involved in. (Basically, I was renting out my Blackmagic Cinema Camera for an Indonesian-Japanese film shoot, and had to stay around to ensure that no one was going to break my camera... of course, a free trip to Bali, which I've never gone before, was too tempting an offer to turn down) While I was seemingly trapped in a time warp (like all film shoots tend to feel, despite my lack of involvement in this one), many things had happened in this world, mostly tragedies. One of my favourite wrestlers from my childhood, THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR, passed away on the day that I was flying off to Bali. Since then, there was the South Korean ferry disaster in April 16, followed a day later, on April 17, by the deaths of Malaysian opposition politician Karpal Singh and literary giant Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Now that I am back in Malaysia for a day before I return to Tokyo tomorrow, I feel nothing but melancholy f

I never forgave my secondary school for banning us from bringing novels to school. That is why I constantly speak about it. Back then, unable to accept such a rule, I occasionally brought a book to school for some reading pleasure. Alas, the school prefects deemed me, a guy who was just sitting at the corner, quietly reading a book, a threat to school safety, thus my books were sometimes confiscated. I had to write eloquent letters to the prefects just so I could get them back. That is why, in some of my angry rants over the years, I couldn't stop blaming the local education system for not emphasizing the importance of literature and culture to its students, that we lived merely to score well academically, that our education was more on learning how to deal with exams, instead of preparing us properly to contribute to society. That our country is full of highly-educated folks who don't give a crap about literature. Many years ago, back in Perth, Justin (who used to con