My books are available on Google Play Books!

Dear readers

Story of Lee, Fourteen Sunflower Seeds, and A Little Sweet are now available on Google Play Books – for easy downloading onto your smartphones/pads/e-reading devices worldwide!

To search, just fire up your Google Play app and type each title into the search bar or my name ‘Ernie Yap’, where all 3 titles will pop up.

Testing from an Android phone (Samsung) has been smooth. Do let me know if you encounter any hiccups. I will personally attend to it as soon as possible.

As always, all feedback welcomed. You may leave them here or at my Amazon website. Thank you all for your support!

A Little Sweet is now on Kindle!

A Little Sweet is now available on Kindle! For non-Kindle users, all you need is a Kindle app on our smartphone/tablet.

If you like it (or don’t) leave a review!

Share this:

Disclaimer: Will not be responsible for any minds blown at the end of the article

Pictured is the NGC 604 nebula, a massive swirling galaxy of hydrogen molecules.

Being the most abundant chemical in the universe and relatively simple atomic structure, molecular dynamics of Hydrogen was only understood more fully in the 20th century with the advent of group theory, a mathematical advancement developed in the 20th century.

What other modern goodies has group theory brought us? It helped solved the Oppenheim Conjecture.

The picture on the left is Tan Sri Professor Alexander Oppenheim, (1903 – 1997) a world famous British-Jewish mathematician. In 1929 he proposed the Oppenheimer Conjecture, a mathematical postulation which was not solved until 1987  – some 50 years later! by Margulis, a Yale mathematician,;with the help of group theory. 

Oh, and Alexander Oppenheim was also the first vice-chancellor of University of Malaya.

During the Second World War, he was interred in the notorious Changi Camp and underwent unspeakable sufferings. An academician even in such times, he set up a “POW University” for his fellow prisoners

Nonetheless, along with others, the good professor was sent to work on the Death Railway on the Thai-Burma border. (which he survived; naturally)

The cover to A Little Sweet was a countryside snapshot of Kanchanaburi taken by me while on a train along The Death Railway in 2013.

Excerpt #1

“He just needs a real friend,” Siew Po was saying.” We all had imaginary friends when we were young. Didn’t you?”

“Yes but under the altar?” Ma asked incredulously.

“Small children have incredible imagination. Perhaps I shouldn’t let him in my séances anymore,” Siew Po said.

“Imaginary friend huh,” Ma said. “ You sure it isn’t…you know…those things?”

“Shush!” Siew Po slapped Ma on the arm. “Of course it isn’t! Our altar is sanctified by gods! Evil spirits won’t dare come near!”

“Lam Lam, about Little Sweet..” Ma turned to me.

“No don’t!” Siew Po interrupted, forcefully standing between Ma and I. I managed to catch her little gesture to her. She tapped her chest with her hand- signifying

‘I’m scared.’

A Little Sweet, ERNIE YAP

 

A Little Sweet – my 3rd book

My blog posts for the last few days comprised of:

novellas, Spiritualism, Neurology, Infrasonics, Beat Generation, counter-culture, Surrealism

Read how these themes come together in my latest work ‘ A Little Sweet’, a novella.

This is a tale told by the grandson of Siew Po, the Most Awesome Medium of the Village. The narrative is split into two different eras, 30 years apart:
Siew Po holds seances, bringing up the dead to assure the loved ones of the dead the continued existence of the departed. Having a pass across the Netherworld is not without its costs however, as her occupation imposes its toll on her family.

30 years later in the 21st century, a neuroscientist attempts to study the scientific basis of seances and debunk ‘meaningless superstitions’. In his pursuit, he was led to a remote village where a ‘Most Awesome Medium’ used to live with her family, all of whom died in horrible circumstances.

A story within a story explores the life of ‘Little Sweet’, the toddler ghost who lives underneath Siew Po’s altar.

There is a lot of ‘firsts’ for me in this. My first time attempting horror. The first time writing a novella.( I like it; smoother story-telling compared to a novel or short stories). Readers who’ve read Story of Lee will find the east-west, objective-subjective, logic-morality dichotomies familiar as its hard for me to change my ways.

Now available as paperback on Amazon!

Share this:

who needs Photoshop when you have Baroque masters?

Christina wrote a great piece on The Impressionists that reminded me of an old story about the founder and possibly the greatest of The Impressionist Movement: Jean-Claude Monet.

Now, the Impressionists were a new breed of radical artists who painted their subjects as their eyes directed them, instead of conceptually with extravagant trimmings and creative details, like the more popular Baroque style; that led to blonde, blue-eyed Jesus and Caucasian Father Abraham portraits to litter all over the Renaissance.

 

Monet  (1840 – 1926) towards the end of his life was afflicted with cataract. Being a true master of Impressionism, he painted nature as he saw them; without embellishment.

Below is Woman in a Garden, painted in 1867 when he was 27 years old.

Now compare with Nymphéas, reflets de saule, completed in 1919, when he was 79 years old:

With cataract, one’s vision will continue to deteriorate. In 1923, cataract surgery development was at an early stage. Monet decided to undergo it; after which he produced the following:

…the outcome from cataract surgery is definitely better these days

 

Beatniks

Pictured: Quietly rising

In the 1950s, while most of Asia was shaking off the dust of imperialism and the Second World War; quietly rising from the ashes, the Surrealism movement in Europe hovered across the Atlantic to America’s shores.

The early adopters were budding artists, musicians and authors in New York City. Their works and lifestyle soon coalesced to form what is known as the Beat Generation.

The Beats characterized creativity with non-conformity, anti-establishment attitude and rejection of accepted conventions. In other words, these guys redefined ‘cool’.

Pictured: Cool

The founders comprise of authors such as Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg who alluded to (and practiced) sexual and substance experimentation, anti-academic approach and bohemian lifestyle in their works. Kerouac’s sprawling novel ‘On The Road’ became widely read and its influence reverberates today.

Today ‘beatnik’ is a rarely used word outside of San Francisco’s Mission District. The movement later morphed into the ‘hippie’ generation during the Vietnam War era. If one stretches long enough, you could probably draw lineage of the ‘Occupy Movement’ from the Beat generation.

However, popular as they may be, American literature of the 1950s did not belong to the Beats. That was an important decade for a nation that was poised to become a superpower whose establishments and culture would dominate the world for the next half century. Influential non-Beat authors and their espousements at that time include:

Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)- libertarianism, social welfare

Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea)- naturalism, gender equality

J.D Salinger (Catcher in The Rye)-  youth empowerment

Lee Harper (To Kill a Mockingbird) – racism, Civil Rights Movement

John Steinbeck.(Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men) – unbridled capitalism, socialism

Eh, who’s Steinbeck? He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. His magnum opus was East of Eden

So?

I wrote a book about it.

Check It Out

Surrealism

With reference to my last post, while America was partying throughout the 1920s, their European counterparts were getting real, surreal; as a matter of fact.

Emerging from the ashes of the Great War (if only they knew what’s lurking in 1942), European artists were dabbling in a counter-culture movement called Dada, which would eventually evolve into Surrealism. And one of their foremost evangelist was Salvador Dali.

Salvador Dali (1904 – 1989) There will never be another… man or moustache.

Besides possessing a historic, medically important moustache, Dali’s revolutionary artistic style, eccentric behavior and public outbursts continued to fuel speculation as to the severity and extent of his migraines. Refer to my previous post of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome which describes ‘shrinking sensation, or loss of visual, auditory and time perception…’

surrealz

Surreally

So what about his moustache?

The EKG abnormality to recognize in cases of digoxin toxicity is ‘sagging’ of the ST- segment

It’s called the Salvador Dali sign.

Share this:

I had intended to write about the Beatniks but inspired by Christina’s movie review of The Great Gatsby I shall retrace about 30 years back.

Don’t worry ladies, will get back to you next post.

The Great Gatsby, as with author F Scott Fitzgerald’s other works, was an indictment of the Roaring Twenties in America. The peak of that generation featured the Jazz Age, motion pictures, cars and radios became commercially available. Women’s Suffrage was getting traction (women got to vote in the US in 1920) and most titillatingly, women slipped out of their Victorian corsets and launched the flapper culture; basically flipping off the subjugation of the previous centuries. Read: Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.

It was a golden age of excess and decadence. All

Convertibles- the classy way to roll

this would come tumbling down when The Great Depression hits in the 1930s but hey, that’s like years away so let’s just partayy!!

In other places around the world however, ‘Roaring 20s’ was having a different connotation. China was imploding in a civil war and the locals were struggling against the British yoke in India.

Chiang Kai Shek inspecting his straw- boots wearing soldiers – not a very golden age.

Nonetheless, this era of peace and prosperity in America laid the foundation of cultural dominance that is still evident today and saw the emergence of many legendary icons such as Charlie Chaplain, Edwin Hubble as well as the discovery of Penicillin.

http://www.amazon.com/Story-Lee-Steinbecks-Chinese-Cook/dp/1470167107/

http://www.amazon.com/Fourteen-Sunflower-Seeds-Ernie-Yap/dp/1479313122/

Mackenzie King – An unflattering biography

Dr King- The other one..the white one.

First, the good stuff: Mackenzie King is considered one of the most influential Prime Minister in Canada. He was also the longest-serving (22 years) and holds the record for being the only Canadian PM to date who had 5 university degrees and a PhD. He was responsible for bringing Canada into full autonomy from the British. He anticipated and guided the nation through World War 2 and left an socialistic imprint on Canadian society that is still evident today. Today, his portrait adorns the Canadian $50 note.

Secondly, Mackenzie King was crazy as a loon and an outright racist.

He  sent 22,000 Canadian Japanese to internment camps despite advice from his own military that they were law-abiding and not a threat.

His PhD dissertation? -it was titled ‘Oriental Immigration to Canada’ where he argued against immigration of Asian peoples and that ‘Canada should remain a white man’s country is believed to be not only desirable for economic and social reasons but highly necessary…’

“We must seek to keep this part of the Continent free from unrest and from too much intermixture of foreign strains of blood”.

From King’s Diary, 1938. Prime Minister of Canada 

And he thought Hitler was a ‘Joan of Arc’ and subsequently blocked Jewish refugees into Canada.

More pertinently, Mackenzie King liked to call up the dead. He was deeply involved with Spiritualism and frequently held seances to consult dead spirits. That’s not too crazy for that time. After all, Arthur Conan Doyle and Abraham Lincoln were known to dabble in mediums. But who did Mackenzie wish to speak with from the realms of the dead? His pet dog.

Loon in Canada