Episode 1052: Exchange Rates Conspiring To Make Me Spend Less!

Kinokuniya was having a 20% discount storewide to celebrate the 12th anniversary of its Orchard store, so I headed down with Jared to buy some books. Ended up buying only books published locally though, as given the current strength of the Singapore dollar against the US dollar and the British pound, it made no sense to pay the Kinokuniya prices for books published on either side of the Atlantic. I'll just have to wait until I'm back in the UK and/or The Book Depository does another 10% discount. Got a bunch of volumes from the Interlogue series put out by Ethos Books though, so I can return most of my borrowed copies to the library. Academic books are so ridiculously expensive! No wonder practically nobody wants to buy and read them, not even university students. (That's what we invented photocopiers for!) Sadly, since these are collections of academic essays on Singaporean literature, it would be nothing short of a miracle if copies of these books turned up in the Library back at Warwick. At least I'm not going to have trouble preparing a bibliography to accompany my dissertation proposal...

Episode 1051: My Bookshelves Are Now A Thing Of Beauty!

Spent the afternoon switching the positions of my cupboard and my bookshelf, which took much longer than you'd think, as I decided to reorganise all my books while I was at it. Hours later, the shelves are now a thing of beauty! All the effort was in preparation for buying a second set of shelves, which I'll fill with the books and literary magazines I've now repacked into various boxes lying around. Hopefully, there'll actually be space left over for future purchases. All this shifting and arranging meant that I didn't get any reading done today, so the whole reading one issue of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern each day is completely not working out. I've been reading the first issue of Lucky Peach though, which is delicious. Literally. I mean, after getting through about half of it, I feel like I know way more about ramen than I'll ever need to in my life, but I also feel like eating more ramen than I have any business doing so. (Who cares if what you get in Singapore is probably a bastardised version of the 'real thing'? There's actually a whole article in Lucky Peach that takes apart the notion of authenticity anyway.)

Episode 1050: What's Up With This Year's NDP Song?

Briefing about MAP took way less time than anticipated (and my batch of scholars isn't even up for the selection process this year, so I bet they'll be calling us back for another briefing next year), so a bunch of us adjourned to Holland Village to catch up. Seems that unlike me, almost everyone is changing universities for their Master's, and there are a lot of people going to Columbia, so maybe I should pay a visit to New York at some point! Incidentally, since it's National Day here tomorrow, can I just say that this year's NDP song, 'In A Heartbeat', is really, really not catchy? I mean, Sylvia Ratonel's got a great voice, no question about it, and Haresh Sharma's lyrics in this song are less cringeworthy than they were in the Fun Pack Song. The song just doesn't work though. It's not the kind of song that you could picture a bunch of Singaporeans singing, which kind of was the problem with Corrinne May's 'Song For Singapore' last year too. Again, great pipes, decently patriotic lyrics, but not very crowd-friendly. I might not like Kit Chan's 'Home' personally, but now that is a song which a huge crowd could belt out together, even if some amongst them went gloriously off-key. (The sentiment behind it though, is so saccharine it makes my teeth ache!)

Episode 1049: It's Tedious When People Withdraw A Submission!

Someone withdrew a poem, so I just spent about 15 minutes bumping all the scheduled posts up by a day, all the way from the end of August. Before that, I finished reading David Mamet's Romance, a play that I bought for $5 at the warehouse sale yesterday. I also picked up Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, which I got because I figured I might as well start building my paperback collection of his novels, having read and loved The Road and all. I also bought Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, which I'd blindly written off because of how Zadie Smith eviscerated it here in favour of Tom McCarthy's Remainder, which is admittedly, excellent. Thought it was only fair that I pick up O'Neill's critically acclaimed novel and read it for myself, in order to judge if I actually agree with all of Smith's assertions. From what I've gathered online, I think I'm quite likely to disagree with her. I must confess I find the idea that Netherland is somehow in dialogue with The Great Gatsby, that great New York novel of the last century, really intriguing. Anyway, I've decided to embark on a project of reading an issue of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern every single day. Probably won't last long, but hey, I need some sort of goal, or I'll never read all these issues that I've bought...

Episode 1048: Chattiest Taxi Driver Ever!

Went to Raffles Hotel today for the lunchtime buffet with my dad. Raffles Hotel is one of those iconic Singaporean landmarks that I've somehow managed to almost completely avoid. Think the last time I was there was in one of the courtyards, the one with a place selling ice-cream. The buffet was reasonably good, and I have a new appreciation for duck after trying the duck confit. The dessert section was the best part though. Crème brûlée made using gula melaka! Was originally going to head to the Borders warehouse sale at Expo directly from the hotel, and then double back to the Marymount area for dinner with Mrs Smith, but the timing for that changed, so it made more sense to head home first. Didn't buy much at the warehouse sale, which has been par for the course, as far as I'm concerned, ever since I started buying books online. Dinner was at Jai Thai, a homely restaurant tucked away in a stretch of eateries along Clover Way, itself in the midst of industrial buildings. It was good catching up with Mrs Smith over dinner and then coffee at Long House. The stuff she told us about the teaching programmes at RI really made me wish I could go back to teach there. Then I had a really interesting conversation with the taxi driver on the way home, who coincidentally, lives on the other side of Yishun, in the Chong Pang area. Chatted for at least an hour, even after we reached the void deck of my block. I mean, Audrey got home before I did, saw her walk past the taxi. He had a lot to say, but I left his taxi with a healthy respect for his can-do spirit.

Episode 1047: Chance Meetings

Posted a Facebook status complaining about slow-moving crowds in Orchard, and Bernice posted on my wall to say she was in Orchard too, at the ION Starbucks to be exact. So since Shirley was running late, and I'd browsed enough at Kinokuniya, I decided to go over and say hello. Think I honestly haven't seen her since JC days? Chatted for a bit, and Shirley arrived in the meantime, so I was about to head off. Only to turn around and realise Ken Cheng and Jun Kai were sitting at the table behind us! Talk about coincidences. Between the three of them, they were effectively blasts from all three phases of my local education past, from NYPS to RI to RJC. Would've loved to have stayed on and continue chatting, but I didn't want to keep Shirley waiting, so I made my excuses and left. I'm sure there'll be chances to meet up with them in future anyway. Ended up being late for cell, but I suppose at least I still went. Had waited so long for the 111 at Orchard Boulevard that I was on the verge of walking back to the MRT station and heading home!

Episode 1046: Burst Of Industry

Turns out I really can get a lot done when I force myself to sit down and do stuff. Scheduled a bunch of submissions for both Eunoia Review and The Cadaverine. Was actually going to put off the latter till Saturday, but there's a Borders clearance sale at Expo that I want to go to, so I figured I might as well get them done today. Last night, I also figured out how to tweak our template so that the default font colour for posts is black rather than grey, so I was quite pleased about that. (David Tait, what would you do without my comparatively greater technological savvy? Haha!) Then I managed to get the review of Brittle Star out in about three hours, finishing just in time for dinner. Would've taken less time if I hadn't been watching Royal Pains, and then Franklin & Bash, but it's a pretty solid review, if I may say so, or at least the close reading bit was spot-on. You can check it out here. (Particularly proud of the brief close reading in the third paragraph!) Also found out that I've been nominated for the PSC MAP. Not sure if this means that I have to do interviews this summer, but I suppose they'll explain everything to us at the briefing on Monday. Pretty impressed that they've scheduled it on the eve of National Day. Would have expected everyone to be in a holiday mood by then. If this were France, wouldn't Monday have been declared a holiday since Tuesday was a public holiday already?

Episode 1045: A Different Sort Of Homecoming

So today I noticed that the new issue of Quarterly Literary Review Singapore is up, and my poem 'Homecoming' is the first in the issue. This was the one that I originally sent in a few months ago, which Hsien Min suggested I rewrite and resubmit for this issue. Dithered and didn't get any further with it, but I did show it to a bunch of poets like Tony Barnstone and David Tait, getting some feedback in the process. When I finally decided to do the rewriting, it came fairly quickly. So now the poem's online at last, and just in time for National Day too! Very fitting, given the subject of the poem is Singapore. This publication's doubly special for me because QLRS actually gave me my first publication in a literary journal, six years ago, with 'Another Night On The Patio', which I wrote during a Mathematics lecture in JC. So to commemorate the occasion for myself, I decided to collate links to all of my published work here. It's just a simple webpage constructed using Google Sites, but it's mostly for my own reference anyway. I doubt that many people are falling over themselves to read my stuff!

Episode 1044: More Books On Their Way...

How have I managed not to discover Archer before yesternight? Sterling Archer is right up there with my list of favourite TV characters now, and he's just an animated figure. The humour actually reminds me of 27b/6: caustic, irreverent and raunchy. I feel about this show like I felt about Better Off Ted, except this show's already got a Season 3 coming up, as opposed to being cancelled. Yesterday, I also suddenly thought of buying some books from The Book Depository. Ended up spending £135.91 on American paperbacks, mostly Vintage Contemporary/International. So thanks Dan, for sending me that coupon code a while ago. Would've spent even more, except that following the Amazon takeover, The Book Depository's prices on British paperbacks have gone back up, whereas they used to undercut Amazon UK by 1p previously. I suppose it makes sense as a way to indirectly finance the free shipping that is for now still available? Even taking that into consideration, it's still cheaper to buy books this way (whichever side of the Atlantic they're published) than getting them from Borders or Kinokuniya. Anyway, I only splurged this time to get the most recent paperbacks from authors I read that I'm currently missing on my shelves.

Episode 1043: Transcript's Arrived!

Degree transcript has (finally) arrived, so a copy's been e-mailed to the relevant people at MOE. Now to sit back and wait! Today's also the launch date for Rum & Reviews Magazine, and you can now read my review of Rachel Boast's Sidereal here! Check it (and the rest of our launch issue) out and feel free to let me know what you think! Now to crack out the Brittle Star review. No rest for the literate! Anyway, I'm watching the final episode of the latest 9 pm Mediacorp drama, and it's so lazily scripted it makes American fare look like the work of geniuses. This happens to be a 25-episode drama, and the pacing was quite good in the first half, but lately, all the episodes have been cramming too much into too little time. Now it's the finale, and they're basically trying to wrap up all the storylines by stringing a series of improbable events together to fill the episode. To be fair, Mediacorp dramas tend to be mediocre anyway, but they seldom get this bad. (I doubt any Singaporeans who read this would bother defending Mediacorp.) Nice to see Zoe Tay can still bring her A game to a role though...