Episode 738: Flight Drama!

Turns out I'd completely misremembered my flight timing! Not that it matters, since QF9 from Melbourne is currently delayed by at least an hour, if not more. (When I checked in online, it was forecasted to depart Melbourne three hours behind schedule!) Was initially resigned to having to pay £5 to amend my coach ticket, but by a stroke of good fortune, the Internet hotline only operates between 8 am and 8 pm. Otherwise, I'd have wasted good money because Qantas have bumped me to QF31, arriving from Sydney, an Airbus A380 flight no less, and you guessed it, departing at 11:59 pm, which was what I'd been remembering as my departure time all this while! I'm in the bassinet row, but I don't mind because the legroom's fantastic. Much better than my ordinary aisle seat on the Boeing 747 I was originally flying. All in all, pretty impressive customer service from Qantas. Wonder why the flight from Melbourne was so severely delayed though? By the way, I did finish that book by Andrew Gurr in the end, as well as Adam Zagajewski's most recent collection, Eternal Enemies: Poems. Enjoyed the latter greatly, the former was a painful but somewhat enlightening piece of background reading. Now if only I'd actually read any of the plays I wad advised to...

Episode 737: Lone Star Down

So Fox has gone and done it again. They've cancelled Lone Star, a critically acclaimed series that failed to gain a high enough viewership, presumably because the bulk of the American audience is stupid and won't watch a show that doesn't have an unrealistically attractive cast. (That said, it's not as if the cast members of Lone Star are hideous or anything. They're just not as perfect as say, any random person on a show from The CW.) The only good thing about this cancellation is that the premiere date of the new season of Lie To Me has been brought forward a month. To be honest, I didn't think Season 2 of that was all that great, so hopefully, Season 3 sees a return to form, or else it could end up a casualty of the 2010/11 fall season. Then Fox can just fill the slot with another reality TV programme. Perfect! Today's been fairly productive, by the way. I've issued acceptances/rejections to all the submissions in my inbox, and now have enough material to fill almost the whole month of October. Who knows? I might get enough by tomorrow to complete the month. Also finished reading the books I mentioned yesterday, so now I'm going to tackle the Zagajewski collections.

Episode 736: Furiously Reading, Casually Packing

I'm getting really efficient at this packing business. Spent about an hour stuffing things into my suitcases, and I'm pretty much done. I could literally grab my passport and head off right now, if my flight were tonight anyway. Carrying way too much poetry back, but then again, I've always been hopelessly optimistic about how much I can read. Have finished Model Behavior, as well as Ng Yi-Sheng's novelisation of Kelvin Tong's iconic local film, Eating Air. The latter is actually part of a trio of novelisations that were published by Firstfruits in 2008, the other two being James Toh's rendition of Kelvin Tong's 12 Storeys (for which the two actually co-wrote the original screenplay) and Yeo Wei Wei's novelisation of Royston Tan's 4:30. My aim is to finish reading all three by Thursday, which should be achievable. It does mean I likely won't be able to finish those collections by Adam Zagajewski that I borrowed from the library weeks ago though. I never even finished that Andrew Gurr book I meant to before heading back to university! So much for trying to prepare for the new term, huh? On a related note, I'm thinking of applying to blog for The Shakespeare Standard because they're calling for new contributors and editors. Need to pitch them an idea though, so I'm thinking along the lines of something to do with my experiences of studying EN301 in the upcoming academic year, which is admittedly a bit vague, but better than no idea at all, right?

Episode 735: That's Half Of October Scheduled...

Have begun sending off acceptances and rejections. Well, so far there haven't been outright rejections of entire submissions, but there's definitely one coming up. I've also learnt that it's not a good idea to read submissions on my iPhone, as opening documents in it doesn't always preserve the formatting. Have been meaning to e-mail a contributor with a suggestion regarding stanzas, only to discover upon opening the document on my laptop that the stanza breaks were exactly where I was going to suggest them; the iPhone software just didn't register them. Silly, right? Spent a good hour trying to figure out how to get some of the more eccentric identations in one of the poems I'm publishing to show up in WordPress, and finally settled for inserting blank spaces in HTML using ' ' instead. Have managed to schedule posts for the first half of October, so that's a decent buffer in place. Will tweet once the pieces start running! The idea is to build up a certain number of posts, then apply to get listed on Duotrope's Digest, which should hopefully bring more exposure for the journal. Who knows, I might (finally) even post about it on Facebook.

Episode 734: Tap Fish!

That's the latest iPhone game that I'm hooked on. It's quite meaningless in a way, since it just involves breeding fish and selling them, but it appeals greatly to my inner collector. I'm now breeding some of the exotic fishes for sale because they rake in lots of money. Anyway, just one more submission and I've promised myself I'll start going through them and issuing acceptances/rejections. Would've started tonight, except the most recent submission I got was a RAR file from some Chinese e-mail address, and it just really looked like spam. (Plus it wasn't even addressed to my literary journal to begin with.) Not sure how they found the e-mail though, thought I'd already managed to avoid the bots that scan for addresses by not typing it out in the standard format. Oh well! Haven't got quite as far through Model Behavior as I'd planned to, but that was only because I spent an hour watching the new episode of Merlin instead of reading. After all that drama in the first two episodes of the season, this one's pretty mundane. In other words, still waiting for Morgana to go beyond smirking at Merlin as a way of signifying that she's evil.

Episode 733: Would You?

Finished reading Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, which was actually a pretty depressing read. The characters truly raise apathy to an art form. What was most disturbing for me, however, was the fact that while part of me found their lifestyle appallingly meaningless, there was also a part of me that envied them and would be happy to lead a similar life of frivolity and excess. (Then again, wouldn't most people at least consider it, if given the chance?) I'm a bit of a cliché, aren't I? Not so much the drugs, I guess, but the trust funds. Yeah, definitely would like one of those. Am now reading Jay McInerney's Model Behaviour, which skewers New York City rather than Los Angeles. It's also a lot more light-hearted, so I'm going to breeze through it before I fly back on Thursday. Incidentally, in a weird little bit of cosmic synchronicity, I've just got my hands on the new Press Play album, which is titled NY2LA. Haven't had a chance to listen to it yet because I was doing PowerPoint graphics for my dad again, so I'll probably do that on the way to service tomorrow.

Episode 732: What Should I Bring Back?

Just weighed the books that I want to bring back with me on this trip, and the total comes up to around 12 kg. Could probably prune it down a little, get it to 10 kg instead. Wouldn't matter if I don't have a lot of clothes to bring back though, and then there's still another 7 kg that I'm entitled to as carry-on. Not to mention that I can stuff a lot of books into my laptop bag as well, which nobody other than the Emirates counter staff has ever asked to weigh. Most of the books I'm taking with me are poetry, and I'm not even sure how I'm justifying it to myself, beyond the fact that it's almost entirely Singaporean poetry, which I can't find over in the UK. If I do end up flying back in December like I plan to, I'm going to be bringing home my Murakami books, so I suppose what I'm taking over this time can occupy the vacated space instead! Anyway, my review of FRiGG Issue 29 is now up here, and I think you should check it out. (Both the review and the magazine itself, naturally.) Just one more review to write before I head back to the UK!

Episode 731: New Albums!

Almost done with the review I need to write for Sabotage Reviews. Was initially going to be quite critical of this issue's fiction section, a position I would've backed up of course, but having re-read it, I've modified my position, including comments on both stories that I liked and disliked. Just need to finish a paragraph or two on the poetry section, which I generally found easier to enjoy anyway. As for my own literary journal, I've finally received a submission that I can say no to immediately, which has also brought home what my university tutors have said about clanging bad rhymes. I've posted calls for submissions on Craigslist, which might get some attention. Annoyingly, posting to the American or Canadian listings requires telephone verification using an American or Canadian number, so I've had to make do with posting to those of other English-speaking countries instead. Anyway, I've been listening to new albums from M. Pokora (Mise À Jour) and Maroon 5 (Hands All Over). The former is actually really generic pop, and not particularly spectacular either. It's In French though, so it's at least half a step above the gutter. Haha! Maroon 5, on the other hand, have turned out their best pop album yet, thanks in part, I'm sure, to their collaboration with producer Mutt Lange, whose production is a refreshing change from the likes of RedOne. I like RedOne's stuff, but his sound is way too pervasive in pop right now.

Episode 730: Lone(ly) Star...

Mum's finally back from hospital and I got a pair of sunglasses made. Not the pair that I was originally eyeing, but only because I couldn't have got prescription lenses with that frame. (My dad insisted it would've been silly not to get prescription lenses, even though my myopia is hardly at a debilitating level.) Probably going to collect it over the weekend. Managed to make time today to watch the pilot episode of Lone Star and can totally see why critics have praised it whilst audiences have shunned it, to the extent that rumours are already swirling that it's going to be cancelled after just one episode. Wouldn't surprise me if that actually happened, since the show's airing on Fox, a network notoriously incapable of giving shows a chance. To be fair to Lone Star, its premise is pretty different from the usual network TV formulae, and it really might've been a better fit with cable backing, like AMC or HBO, or even FX. Oh well. We'll see soon enough. Or not, as the case may be. Also stayed up last night to finally watch Exam, which I thought to be a particularly impressive directorial debut. I liked that it had a tinge of science fiction, but that this was kept firmly in the background, allowing the psychological drama to unfold as the candidates turned against each other. Definitely should've caught this on the big screen at Warwick Student Cinema last term when it was screening!

Episode 729: Packed Tuesday Viewing Schedule!

No new submissions today, despite trying to get the word out through Twitter. Hoping that'll change over the next few days. The site is getting views, but so far, this hasn't translated into submission numbers. Anyway, Tuesdays look set to be busy for me in the immediate future. Along with Gossip Girl, which premiered last week, I've got Hawaii Five-0, House, Lone Star and The Event. The last on the list feels like a cross between 24 and Lost. The pilot took a bit of effort to follow because it also makes use of flashbacks, but I think on the whole, the series seems quite promising. We'll see if it lasts longer than the last attempt at creating the next Lost, i.e. the short-lived FlashForward. Gossip Girl's latest season continues to impress, and it really feels like a fresh start in some ways, despite the character dynamics having largely stabilised by now. I guess a lot of it has to do with the absence of Jenny and her petty scheming, so patently inferior to Blair and Chuck's machinations that they make Jenny laughable. Juliet's character is getting fleshed out more, although her pairing with Nate still comes across as overly stiff and contrived, so hopefully that improves over the course of the next couple of episodes. As for House, well, let's just say I'm definitely a Huddy fan!