Episode 1192: David Eagleman Is One To Watch

Finished reading Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives by David Eagleman, one of my discoveries at MPH yesterday. It's an interesting collection of flash fiction, reminiscent of Borges in its philosophical bent, and playfully imagining possible versions of the afterlife, occasionally accompanied by speculations as to the nature of the presiding God. What's especially interesting to me is that Eagleman majored in British and American literature as an undergraduate, before going on to become a neuroscientist. That kind of cross-pollination isn't unheard of (David Morley immediately comes to mind), but it's pretty counterintuitive to anyone who's been educated in Singapore, where the separation between arts and sciences is still pretty rigid. Spent an hour or so this afternoon scheduling submissions on my dad's laptop, a tricky affair because the WordPress page kept going crazy in the old version of IE installed on the laptop. Got them all done though, so the journal's all set till the end of March. Tomorrow it's back to Singapore, when I might finally be able to start on my essay on Christian Bök's Eunoia. I'm kind of starting to think that my essay title is too precise and therefore restrictive, but I suppose I could still make it work. Just need to think more deeply about the structure of this long poem. Annoyingly, Marjorie Perloff has done a succinct yet illuminating close reading of it in a chapter in Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy, so I'm going to have to work hard to avoid merely parroting it. (Also, we randomly met Khaw Boon Wan at the hotel today!)