Episode 718: Fall Premieres

So network TV's fall scheduling kicks off early with two new offerings from The CW. Hellcats was a bit of a yawn, and it's already being blasted for being Glee-via-cheerleading. Just not as good. I really wanted to like the show, but it's not a good sign if you honestly don't care about the lead character's fortunes by the end of the pilot. Ratings for Hellcats were apparently decent though, doing marginally better than America's Next Top Model, which was its lead-in. Still, I don't see this one lasting beyond one season unless it picks up the pace really soon. I mean, the reboot of Melrose Place and the ill-fated The Beautiful Life had more drama, and look where they ended up. The other new kid on the block is actually anything but. Nikita is a reboot of last decade's La Femme Nikita, which itself draws from Luc Besson's 1990 French film, Nikita, and its 1993 American remake, Point Of No Return. The new TV series seems pretty decent, setting up enough potential drama in the pilot to give this series a shot at finding a foothold among all the other new stuff coming out this year. (Plus the showrunners are clearly not afraid to exploit Maggie Q's attractiveness.) Whether this series can become the new Alias remains to be seen, even if I do think that position has already been taken by the brilliant Covert Affairs. Also, returning this year is The Vampire Diaries, arguably The CW's runaway success of last year. The season premiere totally proves why, enough said.

Episode 717: Screen Protector Woes

Bought a screen protector from Challenger today and got ripped off. It's useless! I was trying to smooth out some small air bubbles, but the screen protector ended up wrinkling, rendering it useless. Am going to follow Audrey down to Bugis next Tuesday and get another one from the shop she buys from instead. (At least I've got enough points to redeem a $20 Challenger voucher. Now all I have to do is collect it.) She's finally got the iPhone she's been hankering after, although she had to switch from SingTel to M1 because the iPhone 4 was out of stock in the SingTel shops she went to. (So why did the M1 shop still have stock? Your guess is as good as mine. Suffice it to say that my impression of SingTel just keeps going down.) Also managed to pay for the books I ordered from Ethos Books, so that's taken care of now. Also borrowed a bunch of humour books, against my better judgement. I figure that they're pretty short, so I should be able to finish them in a few days. Who knows? I might even finish one tonight. On a related note, BooksActually is having a 20% sale tomorrow, but I just don't feel justified in buying anymore books, especially not after having ordered so many local works online, which are what I normally get at BooksActually anyway. Hopefully, my transport reimbursement will be processed quickly and I'll get an additional smidge of money to spend while I'm in Singapore!

Episode 716: Raiding Kinokuniya...

Spent more than $300 on books today at Kinokuniya. Bulk of it was on Vintage Contemporary and Vintage International editions, comprising books by Charles Baxter and Jay McInerney, among others. Tentatively, it's McInerney's and Bret Easton Ellis's novels that I'm bringing over this time, although I might change my mind again nearer to my flight. Also bought some local literature again, from Ethos Books, and I've just been to the Firstfruits website and ordered a whole stack of stuff too. Paid for the Firstfruits stuff using my NatWest account, since Firstfruits takes payments via PayPal. (I'm also running low on Singaporean dollars! See first sentence of post.) Tried to order something from Ethos's website too, but something went wrong when I tried to pay using my NatWest account. To be exact, I was told someone would be in touch soon, and this was after I'd already submitted my card details. I've checked though, and the transaction hasn't gone through, so perhaps they think I'm an overseas customer, even though I'm posting the order to a local address. Oh well. I wouldn't even bother ordering local books online, except I was trying to get copies of Alvin Pang's two poetry collections, and he's one of the local poets I admire. Anyway, I'm thinking if I should bring over local fiction and not just poetry on this flight...

Episode 715: Feedback Session

A lot less people at the feedback session than I'd expected, and I already wasn't expecting that many. It was good though, plus now I've finally met my scholarship officer in person! Had lunch at Spice Peranakan before that, where the waitress was very grumpy towards us, for no reason that we could figure out. Anyway, I've just finished Remainder and without giving away too much of the ending, I'll say it's low-key, but intellectually satisfying in the way that the novel truly remains fixated on the notion of repetition right till the end. Literally. (You'll understand what I mean once you've read it.) It's an impressive display of resistance and defiance in the face of the average reader's instinctive demand for closure, essentially a slap in the face of conventional Hollywood narratives where the good guys win and the bad guys get punished. (Remainder doesn't have either anyway. Just the narrator-enactor, enablers and reenactors.) It's definitely a thought-provoking novel for me, in the way that House Of Leaves is. By the way, before I went to bed last night, I think I might've been indirectly paid the best literary compliment I've ever received to date. Let's just say it's thrown up another factor to consider when choosing between America and England for my MA.

Episode 714: The Remainders Of The Day

Am approaching the end of Remainder, and I'm really keen to find out how it all ends. I'm anticipating a pretty devastating conclusion, or at least something bleak. I will say though, it's hard to root for the protagonist of the novel, if that's even an appropriate term for his character. While his obsession with reenactments does draw the reader in (and this is largely a function of McCarthy's engaging prose style), the manner in which he pursues his hobby-turned-obsession is distinctly unpleasant, at least to me. I suppose what bothers me is that what facilitates his pursuit is essentially his £8.5 billion, and it's the idea that money can buy anything that rankles. On another level though, the novel addresses the question of authenticity, which I actually think is handled very interestingly because of the way in which the narrator's attempts to recapture what he perceives as a natural way of being escalate. Zadie Smith's analysis of Remainder is extremely illuminating, and it's what made me want to read the novel in the first place. You can check it out here.

Episode 713: Pop Dissection

Parents wanted to buy mooncakes from Fairmont Singapore for my paternal grandmother, so I persuaded them to have dinner at Brotzeit in Raffles City. I think the pork knuckles at the VivoCity outlet are better though. The meat was tenderer there! Had a listen to The Saturdays' new mini-album, Headlines!, on the way home from my grandmother's, and it's pretty disappointing as far as pop goes. Lead single 'Missing You' was a strange choice, although the second single, 'Higher', is only marginally better. The problem with The Saturdays is that they don't seem to be able to manufacture the kind of pop anthems that they had on their debut album, Chasing Lights. (That title track, by the way, should totally have been released as a single.) They came close on several occasions with the stuff on Wordshaker, all of which reappear in Headlines! except for my personal favourite, 'Open Up', but it all feels very perfunctory, like it's halfheartedly ticking the boxes. This is definitely one group that hasn't progressed since their debut, which is kind of sad, since the girls actually manage to sound decent even when they do acoustic sets, stripped of the bells and whistles of studio production. It's disappointing, to say the least. In other news, The Cadaverine is looking for book reviewers and I'm thinking of applying. I mean, the worst that could happen is that my application gets rejected, so why not?

Episode 712: Kite Flying

Just went online to apply for travel authorisation under the American Visa Waver Program because from next Wednesday onwards, it's going to cost US$14 for an application that is typically approved instantaneously. (Yes, charging for this totally makes sense to me too, and if it doesn't to you, maybe they don't want your kind at the 'Party In The USA'. Haha!) I don't have firm plans to holiday in America at the moment, but since the authorisation is valid for two years or until expiry of passport (whichever is sooner), there's no harm in getting it done while it's still free! Anyway, I'm a little sunburnt from our cell's kite flying session today. Hadn't expected it to be quite so bad, since there didn't particularly seem to be a lot of sun. Hopefully, it'll fade into a more decent tan over the next couple of days. Incidentally, today was the first time I've flown a kite. (In some ways, I suppose my childhood was deprived.) Was introduced to this place today as well, Once Upon A Milkshake. It's pretty cool, reminds me of Cow Milkshake Bar back in Leamington. Not too keen on the cutesy names they give their flavours, but otherwise, it seems like a great place to grab a milkshake and just chill out for a couple of minutes.

Episode 711: Time To Buy More Books...

So it seems like I've kind of given up on Gurr's book for now and gone back to Tom McCarthy's Remainder instead. So far, it's proving even more readable than I'd hoped, and yes, it still reminds me of Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans. It's more to do with the atmosphere the two novels evoke. Still have McCarthy's Men In Space to get through after Remainder. Have the feeling that I won't get through as many books while I'm in Singapore as I would like! Am probably buying more tomorrow though! Jay McInerney's stuff, as Kinokuniya stocks the American Vintage Contemporaries editions. Would've ended up buying the Bloomsbury paperbacks from the UK if I hadn't realised this. Seems a bit silly to bother about things like this, but I just like my books to look good together on the shelves. Nothing really wrong with that, right? Anyway, Lionel Shriver's written an article for the Guardian complaining about covers for female authors that might prove interesting. You can find it here. She makes some valid points, but methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Episode 710: Discount Codes, Anyone?

Have spent the better part of the evening trying to free up space on my laptop, as I suspect there are a lot of orphaned files that are hogging disk space. Lo and behold, it was in fact things like a backup of my iPhone that I don't necessarily need because I almost never sync my iPhone with iTunes to begin with. That alone took up 2 GB of the drive. I'm pretty sure there should be a way to tweak the backup settings so that the file is smaller, but since I don't normally sync my iPhone with iTunes anyway, I'm not going to bother for now. Now I'm defragmenting the hard drives, hoping to recover a little bit more space. Maybe it's just time to get a new, faster laptop? Allowance has come in, and it seems that it's meant for nine months this time, rather than a whole year. I suppose it makes sense, seeing as we're expected to enter NIE right after graduation, where we'll begin drawing a different level of pay anyway. Just got a bunch of discount codes on Contiki tours, up to 50% off, but I can't go on any of them because they either start too early or too late in September, so I can't fly back in time or term will have begun. What a waste! If anyone in the UK wants to use them, let me know. It's just a code you use when you book, so it should work for anybody.

Episode 709: Skype-ing My Editor

Didn't do any reading today, but I sure watched a lot of TV. New episodes of Warehouse 13, Covert Affairs and the series finale of BBC's The Deep. I thought the ending of that last one was pretty much crap, by the way. Covert Affairs continues to be brilliant, unsurprisingly, although I don't think I can really see Piper Perabo and Sendhil Ramamurthy's characters dating. I'd much rather see her end up with Christopher Gorham because I think they have better on-screen chemistry. Anyway, I just got off Skype with my Evolve Journal editor, who wanted to have a quick chat about the journal. I'm generally quite rubbish at carrying on actual conversations as opposed to sending SMSes, partly because you can't edit a conversation while it's happening, and I have these idealised notions of what a conversation I'm having should sound like, but it never quite works out like the dialogue in a novel. (That sounds incredibly stupid/weird, right?) So we chatted for about 20 minutes, and my editor seems like a nice enough guy. If anything, he was almost as awkward as I was over Skype. Haha!