The Internet suffuses with ideas and images. Everyone has an opinion or a picture. They can 'like' but not 'not like'. Protocol. People write about writing and read about reading. We analyse the artists themselves more than look at their works. We are more interested in how greatness 'pans out' rather more than the greatness itself.

When I was ten, I visited a town called Jesselton flying a DC3. I saw the sea as a gigantic blue waterfall sideways to my right through a square window. It is now called Kota Kinabalu; the capital of the State of Sabah, a part of Malaysia but situated on the north eastern tip of the great island of Borneo.

My family was on vacation. At the time, my father a doctor, was working as a health officer in the neighbouring state of Brunei; a British Protectorate. It was on the sea shore of Jesselton that my father taught my elder sister and I how to swim. The water was beautiful, placid and transparent. It took a while to get it but eventually I could dive fearlessly into the cool clear sunlit water. After a day at the beach, we would stroll the balmy evening in the streets lined with shophouses. The town was immaculately clean and the shops didn't have doors, the front being completely open from one wall to the other. My memories are rather vague, except for the moment when I suddenly came upon the famed ‘dime store novel’.

Unlike the other shops, this store had a glass display reserved only for books. There my eyes were drawn to the lurid covers of tired looking paperbacks lined neatly in rows. They showed scenes of people in dramatic situations: someone with a gun about to shoot, luscious dames being carried up the stairs by muscular men, men smoking cigarettes, playing cards, as a bleeding vagrant suddenly bursts through the door with a knife in his back. Somehow I sneaked a few copies into the shopping bag and I read them avidly. The stories were thrilling and the endings always satisfying.

A little while ago, I read H G Well’s ‘Invisible Man’, which brought back that half forgotten sensation of a compelling read. What is it about these books, that carry your mind somewhere else?

Since the arts are now taught, chunks of human culture have become academic - there to study and analyse. From a certain point in recent history, it is imperative that a ‘serious’ work deals with topical themes. Novels by Thomas Mann, poems by Willian Butler Yeats and plays by Harold Pinter are samples. The fact that there is some mysterious superiority in these works is presupposed, almost, as a requisite to literary studies. There is more in them. Even so aspects of entertainment for the soul abound in closer reading of their works but the teachers will tell you that the 'point' is elsewhere, embedded in its 'contextuality'.

Yet the conversations in boardrooms cannot match those at dinner parties. In all this, perhaps difficult art comes alive not at its display but in subsequent conversations about it. Is this what is meant by contextuality? An enduring love and undying passion for the arts are confessed as qualifications necessary in discussing the Duchess's clothes as though one were expert in such matters.

The same enduring love and undying passion are virtues seldom returned in kind by artists themselves. The modern artist is supposed to disdain the audience and the modern public, unsure, is acquiescent in the face of artistic terror. If fresh eggs and ripe tomatoes were still allowed inside theaters many would not utter a single word, not even in fright.

Who does not suffer through a boring play? Who does not find Beckett, Joyce, Auden, Eliot, tedious if not irksome, all the while thinking at the same time perhaps, indeed, that they are brilliant; inventing as they have a form of literature that is totally incomprehensible? Many disagree on this point praising themselves for being 'close readers'. Supposing they do understood the pure joy of just putting words together, wondering where they might lead one after the other. Being in syntactical order, the compositions make perfect sense but often only at the literary level. Is that not sufficient? The artists say, "Yes." The critics say, "Maybe." The public says, "No." and the magician asks, "What is all the fuss about?"

Some French gentlemen of letters gained popularity in certain circles of thought for pointing out the need to unlock content from the strictures of origin and form in order to undeliberate, and thereby to 'liberate' the true meaning. Plato himself might renounce philosophical musings if he could see how some such sane thoughts degrade once put in the minds of mortals. Unfortunately, not writers but architects jumped on an off-shoot idea of de-construction (perhaps confusing it with destruction); as a seemingly plausible counterpoint to the puzzle of ornamental (architectural) language.

The building, it was thought, must seem like a sliver of luminous vision. The lines and planes may bend and curve. Whatever the mind imagines, it may be made but people object. Inadequate. It is just a silly idea to allow someone to build his egocentric vision just because of the financial backing. It does not speak. It ignores all the the emotional aspects of living, which too, must take place in and around buildings. Some walls have a certain prowess, Too many others are just banal. Some stand, others fall.

Apply the theory of ornamental language back into literature and we see that 'compressed meaning' is what makes a conclusion to a car chase scene thrilling:

"Sally started to scream in unison with the tyres screeching as the black Audi RT8 got closer and closer to pushing our Mini Cooper off the cliff, up a bit and around the looming bend. I had to try something. As an orchestra of obscenities yelled under my ear lobes, I slammed on the brakes swerving the car to the right. The black Audi RT8 blurred a grey shadow on the left, as it disappeared into the sullen haze of its own doom. Sally fainted."

In retrospect, my childhood was a great adventure. I avoided the mass tourism of today, saw many lands and learnt to swim in the tropical seas. Present at that moment was a well built Korean man whom my father had befriended. He was a Tae Kwon Do instructor who had recently arrived in Jesselton to set up a martial arts school. As I was hesitantly trying put head to water, he shouted some words of encouragement and swam off employing a perfect free style technique. I was filled with admiration. Tae Kwon Do eventually became an Olympic sport and Koreans everywhere were very proud at that. Sam sung his nation's anthem when he won the medal. Now they want to astound you with 'Gangnam Style', a parody of the girlish obsessions of global pop culture.