Episode 1306: Buying Spree!

So today, Gregory Sherl's The Oregon Trail Is The Oregon Trail arrived in the post today, among lots of other things. The buying spree I went on not long ago is finally starting to arrive, so the time seemed right to go on another one. I bought Sherl's book because Chris Emslie (whose taste in writing I trust) has been raving on Facebook about him and I was curious. Turns out though that Sherl's book is part of Mud Luscious Press's Novel(la) series, and you know me, I love collecting, so I've pretty much ordered the whole print catalogue of Mud Luscious Press, and also that of its imprints Nephew and Blue Square Press. Helped that I randomly found USD 10 in my PayPal account, apparently a cashback for having bought something last year using PayPal, so clearly I had to spend it on something immediately. As expected, between my abysmal sleeping patterns (couldn't get to sleep, so I ended up watching the latest and very brilliant episode of Community twice) and meeting MA people for drinks in the afternoon (until late at night), I didn't write anything today for my paper, but it's still clear where it needs to go next, so I should be good for at least a few hundred words tomorrow before I need to head to Leamington to catch a ride from Claire to the Chipping Norton Literary Festival.

Episode 1305: Just Keep Writing, Writing, Writing

That post title's sort of a Finding Nemo joke. I know, it's really bad. My second day of writing has gone a lot smoother than the first though. Took an afternoon nap, woke up and started writing, and have more or less reached my word count for the day. I'm still a bit bothered by how my argument has to be sketched out rather than elaborated because of lack of space, but at least it keeps things clipping along at a good pace while I'm writing. I feel like I'm not doing justice to any of the poems I'm examining by spending just one paragraph on each of them, but I guess it can't be helped! I'm thinking that I might actually try to write beyond my daily 500-word goal tonight, since things are going well, and it'll let me have some wiggle room in the next couple of days, especially if I'm meeting MA people for drinks tomorrow and going to a reading on Saturday. I mean, I don't have to do either of those things, but I'd very much like to. Alternatively, I could just try to finish watching all three remaining episodes of Unriddle 2 on YouTube. It's such a hilariously bad sequel to the original series, but it's like a trainwreck, you know? You just can't look away.

Episode 1304: How Flattering...

Received a pleasant surprise in my inbox today from Craig. A PR person e-mailed Rum & Reviews Magazine, asking for me by name to review the debut novel of one of her clients. Coincidentally, there's a Coventry connection as well, as the author was born and raised here, but now lives in Vancouver. In a further twist, that's also where the previous author whose book I requested to review for The Conium Review is based! Was quite surprised that this PR person found me via Rum & Reviews Magazine though, as it's been a few months since I reviewed anything for that site, and I've only ever done three reviews there anyway. Still, it's quite flattering to be sought after, even in such a minor way. It does mean that the reviews are starting to pile up again though, so I'll have to get cracking once my paper's written. I'm probably going to be on track for my 500 words a day from today till Sunday, so that's good. Once I've got past the introductory bit, the rest of the paper should pretty much write itself, just because it's mostly going to be close readings of poems with the occasional critic thrown in to give my argument greater weight.

Episode 1303: Kept Yesterday's Promise!

Have done some work today, which I'm ridiculously proud of. Read a bunch of articles and essays, and also decided a bunch of others weren't exactly relevant to the paper per se, so I'm not going to spend time reading them because I'll just use it as an excuse to put off actually getting on with writing. Am reworking the abortive draft I was supposed to turn in last term into part of the conference paper, so the word count is off to a bit of an artificial boost. I will get at least the first paragraph down before bed, and I'll hopefully write a more substantial chunk tomorrow. I mean, I literally have to do about 500 words a day to get this done, which is entirely manageable even for my advanced level of procrastination, given how the conference paper can't possibly delve very deeply into anything anyway, due to time (and therefore space) constraints. Tomorrow, I'm going to read the opening bit of Gérard Genette's Palimpsests: Literature In The Second Degree, just to see if I can fit it together with the Eliot essay as a theoretical scaffold for my argument. I suppose the Bloom reference in my paper's title can be excused because it's practically become theoretical shorthand for a sort of Freudian understanding of literary inheritance, even if according to Bloom, most people have 'weakly misread' his book if that's their takeaway.

Episode 1302: Tomorrow, I Really Will Write Something For My Paper Tomorrow

So today hasn't exactly been productive, at least not when it comes to my conference paper. Unsurprisingly, the realisation that the paper only has to be 2500 words long has had the effect of prolonging my procrastination further. To be fair, I also spent the afternoon buying groceries and doing my laundry, as well as dealing with half a dozen Eunoia Review submissions, most of which landed in my inbox around dinnertime. Thankfully, most were short, or I'd probably still be reading them and then editing the accepted ones for the site until past midnight. As it is, I'll be lucky to get any reading done even, before going to bed. I am absolutely going to force myself to fashion some sort of opening paragraph tomorrow though. Just a paragraph because I'm being realistic, knowing the number of TV shows I watch on Tuesdays. Plus an opening paragraph wouldn't require me to have done all that much in-depth research, although I'm starting to think that a lot of the reading I was intending to do might be targeted at the wrong stuff, i.e. reading up on Edwin Thumboo as opposed to more generally, given that while I do want to talk in some detail about Thumboo's poem, it isn't necessarily within the scope of my paper (or my dissertation) to do a dissection of his oeuvre.

Episode 1301: Hillsong London

Was pleasantly surprised by the Hillsong London service this afternoon that I attended with my cell. Everyone knows megachurches tend to attract criticism, but if this was a typical service, I personally wouldn't have many qualms about attending Hillsong London on a regular basis. The band, of course, was great, but actually, the number of musicians they had was pretty normal (although they did have six backing vocalists). I'm one of those people who don't agree that just because 'it's worship', good musicianship is suddenly optional and only the intent matters, so no complaints about the band from me. It was interesting how everyone was so cool and trendy though (even the speaker was wearing skinny jeans and bright yellow shoes), which is part of the appeal of a megachurch like Hillsong, I guess. That said, in the row right in front of us at the Dominion Theatre was an elderly couple. On an entirely different note, this is my new favourite YouTube channel. I've never actually heard most of the songs being parodied, but the ones that I recognise, I think are absolutely brilliant. The only way they could be better would be if the production quality were on par with the original songs, in which case, I might actually stop listening to the originals in favour of these educational parodies. The 'Bad Romance' one about the French Revolution is a particular favourite, and I have a sneaking suspicion even Mr Rollason would have approved of it!

Episode 1300: Shifting Ideas...

So I've just found out that my conference paper needs to last for 20 minutes, which translates to around 2500 words. Definitely can write that within a week! I've started reading, and even have a serviceable opening sentence in mind. Started reading Bloom's book, but the more I got through it, the more I became convinced that my supervisor's suggestion at our last meeting to take those portions of Bloom's theory that suit my purposes instead of just rejecting it wholesale isn't going to work out. The reason is that the theory advanced in The Anxiety Of Influence appears to me to be precisely the sort of totalising framework that Ross Forman was warning me against trying to impose on my readings of the poems in Reflecting On The Merlion, and as such, to extract bits of Bloom's theory seems to be a wilful distortion of his ideas. More and more, I'm starting to think that a return to Eliot's essay 'Tradition And The Individual Talent' would prove more clarifying. There is even a helpful connection within Bloom's book, where he refers to the sixth (and most advanced) revisionary ratio as 'the return of the dead', even if the sense in which he means it isn't as benign as Eliot's. I think what I'm struggling with is wanting a critical vocabulary that conveys antagonism, yet increasingly realising that while the various Merlion poems do have a tendency to critique their antecedents, only Lee Tzu Pheng's 'The Merlion To Ulysses' is openly and unambivalently hostile to Thumboo's original poem. All the other poets are either critiquing the Merlion as an icon (rather than Thumboo's poem and its intentions) or expressing a level of hesitancy or self-doubt about themselves.

Episode 1299: Lots Of Literary Goodness!

So today, three NAP chapbooks arrived in the post. Two more will be on their way once they've been published. I also bit the bullet and bought the back issues of [PANK] (digital, because that was the only way to get the earlier issues, even if they're somehow taking forever to download onto my iPhone) and Electric Literature (paperback, because there was no additional shipping charge and I do like holding a physical magazine to read). I also bought Sleepers Publishing's app that gathers together the stories the Melbourne-based publisher puts out through The Sleepers Annual. Didn't neglect the print side of things though, as The Book Depository finally made a 10% discount coupon available, so I finally ordered all those books that have been in my basket for about a month, and then some. The coupon's valid till mid-May, so I might end up buying some more books before then. I'm only willing to spend so much because I'm going back to Singapore in just over two weeks for a month, so I'm just treating all the money I've spent today as being what I would've spent in May anyway if I'd been in the UK.

Episode 1298: Unwittingly Wasting Time, But Google Saved The Night

So once again, I had this grand plan to read after dinner, and it was ruined. While preparing to upload a new piece to the WordPress site of The Cadaverine, I decided to update our theme, thinking that this would just optimise the underlying code. Turns out it significantly altered the layout! After spending an hour or so trying to tweak the updated layout to resemble as closely as possible what we were using previously, I managed to discover through the miracle of Google that the original theme files could still be downloaded from WordPress's own website. So once I'd done that, it was simply going to be a matter of a few tweaks, right? Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. I could figure out minor things like getting the font on all our posts to appear as black (I'd done this before), but I couldn't work out how to get our navigation bar to look like it used to. The trouble was that the site originally had a mixture of pages and categories in the navigation bar, but the older version of our theme doesn't support custom WordPress menus. So I either ended up with just the pages (and a duplicate Home button) or the categories. After another hour of trial and error, once again it was a fortuitous Google search that allowed me to figure out what part of the code to modify in order to get pages and categories to appear together in the navigation bar. Turns out it wasn't that difficult, and if I'd actually known how to do coding, I probably would've figured it out straight away, as opposed to spending the entire evening on this and rendering moot any attempt at reading. Guess that's another day of putting off getting started on my conference paper...

Episode 1297: Oliver!

Went to the Birmingham Hippodrome to see Oliver! I thought it was okay for a musical. The Dickens source material is so emotionally affecting to begin with anyway, so that's a ready-made arc. Trouble was, I felt like the plot of the musical ended up feeling quite choppy somehow. Almost every other song ended in a picturesque onstage montage, so the scenes didn't so much transition as suddenly switch. (Plus the first couple of songs didn't really grab me.) While the songs were melodic, I thought lyrically they had a tendency towards too much repetition. The one time this worked though, was in the scene after the intermission where Oliver wakes up in Mr Brownlow's house. The slow layering of the five voices in that scene was my favourite moment of the whole musical, and then when it transitioned into a full-on scene with the ensemble singing as well, I liked how the original melody was tweaked from melancholy to cheerful. Also, I'm not sure if it was the venue's acoustics, but occasionally, I couldn't really make out the lyrics as they were being sung. I'll admit to being mildly confused that a musical entitled Oliver! ended up being more about the interactions of Fagin, Bill Sykes and Nancy, with Oliver more like a pawn being traded back and forth. I suppose that's one way of interpreting the source material.