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(a rewrite of Painting and Poetry styles ) The analogy of poetry to painting is at least as old as Plato and Simonides. "ut pictura poesis", ("as is painting, so is poetry") wrote Horace, but not everyone agrees. As it says on poetrybeyondtext.org , G.E. Lessing in Lacoön tried to split the 2 arts - "poetry should appeal to the ear and consider time based actions, he argued, while painting should appeal to the eye and represent spatial configurations ... Lessing's argument was made in order to claim superiority for poetry. ... For Greenberg and other influential art critics writing in the middle of last century, the dominant art of the twentieth century was painting. Unlike literature, it was argued, visual art could retreat into its own materiality and be purely aesthetic. ... The special power of visual art, these modernist critics argued, was in its opposition to language". Here I'm not going to judge the 2 arts or even discuss Ekphrasis as suc...

Our Pasifika Fono set down for this afternoon has been postponed due to weather conditions.

Addington School will be closed today due to the weather conditions. Stay home and keep warm.

We've had our blackout online protest.  We have done our offline protest at Hong Lim Park.  The blogging community has made a loud enough statement to be heard.  But, as with many things in Singapore, though we might shout out loud, we may still not be heard.  I was at Speakers' Corner on Saturday, 8 June 2013.  It was a remarkable job by the #FreeMyInternet chaps.  They managed to get themselves organized within a short time frame and got the message out to enough people to gather a decent crowd on Saturday.  I know that the #FreeMyInternet movement made it very clear that their primary goal for the time being is the revocation of the MDA's latest licensing rules.  But, I am sure their ultimate desire is also to see greater freedom in terms of the traditional media as well.  There is one thing that we need to be very clear about.  The current licensing rules are set out in the Broadcasting (Class Licence) (Amendment) Notification 2013....

Singapore has come some way since the days of near absolute information control and a pervasive climate of fear.  As a teenager in the 1980s, I remember clearly the oppressive political environment within which alternative voices and opposition politicians were operating.  Even when engaging in coffee shop conversation, there was a tendency amongst many of us to speak less audibly when it came to politics (or not at all) or to cast glances at possible undercover ISD officers.  This was especially so in the wake of the arrests and detention of alleged Marxist conspirators in 1987.  There were many that believed in the official version.  There were many that didn't.  But, one thing was for sure.  We knew that Big Brother was watching.  From the time that JBJ broke through in the Anson by-election in 1981, there arose a certain excitement and expectation that more alternative voices would enter Parliament.  In the years that followed, there...