Reading Update

[jaggedwolf]

Listened to this mellow recording of Whitman’s Song of Myself. (Yes, it gave me more clues to Cain’s Jawbone, but it was also nice to listen to.)

The Egyptian Book Of The Dead

That collection of funerary texts. Didn’t fully follow everything, but I liked the “different texts covering the same part of the underworld journey” aspect, and that parts of said journey involved declaring yourself to be various gods - the deceased is identified with Osiris throughout, but I hadn’t expected that to be extended to other gods. My favorite of the lines telling the crocodile to piss off: “I am safe by reason of my charm; my fist is among the flowers and I will not give it unto thee.”

Bonus egyptian god family tree from the internet

My Nantah Story by Tan Kok Chiang

In 1953, a private Chinese-language university was created in Singapore - Nanyang University, commonly known as Nantah. In 1980, the government merged it with the University of Singapore. This book, written by an early alumnus, covers the history of Nantah’s creation and its demise, with a goal of highlighting Nantah’s accomplishments in contrast with the government narratives and interference with it.

Pretty interesting read, especially since I hadn’t really heard of the university before coming across a podcast episode about this book. Nantah was funded with large donations from various well-off businessman, but also from donations by trishaw drivers, dancing hall hostesses, etc. The only existing university in Singapore at the time (possibly in Malaya?) was an English-medium school, and at the time leaving Singapore to go to China (as for university) apparently meant you couldn’t return, and so graduates of the pre-university Chinese-medium schooling system had no obvious next step.

As with most institutions in Singapore, this is a pie the government gets its fingers in, commissioning various external reports on what Nantah degrees are worth, arresting various students/staff (because communism) along with stripping the citizenship of the businessman behind Nantah (also because communism), and switching the primary medium to English in ‘75. There’s a sort of thrumming governmental anxiety about the school from the start - the British are terrified it’ll be a communist breeding ground till the Americans are like hey what if you ensured it was the opposite, the PAP is also worried about that along with the possibility of racial tensions as the merger with Malaysia approaches, and so on.

(Of course the balancing act of gaining independence at all is in the background. David Marshall - who incidentally donated to Nantah - resigns as Chief Minister because he can’t get the British to give Singapore full self-governance, his successor Lim Yew Hock crushes leftist movements enough to get the British to grant self-rule but then loses elections because the Chinese majority of the population wasn’t a fan of that, and then, y’know, LKY goes ham.)

I don’t enough to know how this went for other SG institutions, but here the slide from privately-owned to government-managed is really hard to delineate. It kind of just...happens? Early on there’s a shift from Nantah itself being happy with doing its own thing to wanting governmental recognition + financial assistance, and perhaps that was all that was needed.

Other random thing: His brief appearance in this book reminded me I should really get around to finding a biography of David Marshall.

Empress Of The World by Sara Ryan

Breezy f/f YA, enjoyed spending a day with some smart stupid teenagers and their shenanigans at nerd summer camp, complete with the protagonist’s need to over-analyze. The three bonus comic stories at the end of my library copy were sweet too.

Comments

[pseudo_tsuga]

I had some inkling of how much control the government of Singapore had over the education but the degree still shocked me, especially stripping the citizenship of the business person behind it.

[jaggedwolf]

Yeah, it's one of those bizarre and terrible things where the man died stateless, never getting his citizenship back, yet later government leaders and universities will publicly recognize his contributions and have named things for him.