Episode 1124: More People Should Watch The Vampire Diaries (It's Really Very Entertaining, I Promise!)

I guess I've never really noticed it before, but practically every episode of The Vampire Diaries is insane. In a good way. (Incidentally, a line like 'Really? You think I'm gonna let a blood addict tell me how to drink?' is definitely why everyone should have vampiric drinking buddies.) My only complaint at the moment is how awkward Bonnie's character has become. She's become little more than the go-to witch when you need a spell to randomly fix something, although I suppose with more ghosts popping up, she's hopefully going to become more relevant again. (I always thought her relationship with Jeremy was plain awkward, especially since I liked his character better with Anna.) At least her spells sound cooler than those on The Secret Circle, which are just a tad lame, being a handful of words that the circle chants over and over again until the magic happens. Just in general anyway, The Vampire Diaries has been schooling The Secret Circle on a weekly basis. I don't think Nick's death last week on the latter is going to have quite the same impact that Vicky's did on the former back in Season 1. Honestly, The Vampire Diaries is the kind of show that could get away with stuffing three game-changing cliffhanger scenes into its last five minutes (like this week's episode). Alongside Community, I think these are currently the network drama and comedy that are criminally underwatched.

Episode 1123: Crunching Through The Spectrum Of Culture

I've come to realise that Dirty Soap, the newest addition to E!'s reality stable, is actually pretty compelling viewing. Oddly, part of the appeal, for me anyway, is that the drama on it is pretty, well, tame. Plus these people are all in their 30s or approaching it, and all but one are soap stars to begin with, so it's almost like there's no need to excessively manufacture additional drama because their daily jobs already involve the hilarious messiness of soap opera plotlines. I mean, there's the usual amount of stagey stuff, but mostly, it's just a bunch of friends (and frenemies) getting along with their professional and personal lives. It's difficult to even find a clear villain among the lot (although Farah Fath is clearly meant to be the closest thing), which is strange because that is usually a must for a reality series. In any case, the cast is ridiculously attractive, so the show's watchable just for that. (The ridiculousness was, perhaps, highlighted in this week's episode when Brandon Beemer literally spent all of it being insecure about walking the runway at a fashion show. Seriously? Yawn.) It's like the cast from one of The CW's teen dramas got aged into people who actually look like adults, as opposed to adults pretending to be teens.

To flip to the opposite end on the cultural spectrum, I've got a new review up at Sabotage Reviews which you can check out here. It's of Sarah Dawson's chapbook, Anatomically Incorrect Sketches Of Marine Animals, self-published for the Kindle. The poems are enjoyably lyrical, but they get even better when you start analysing the play with language that's going on in them, as my review notes. That's one review done, with two outstanding. Would've been three if that collection sent by Drunken Boat ever reached me over the summer. Shame, I'd been looking forward to that one. I also attended a Sidelights on Shakespeare session this afternoon, where Thomas Docherty gave a paper called 'Celtic Shakespeare'. Pretty different stuff from the usual academic papers, e.g. the Celtic being referred to here is the Glaswegian football club. What Thomas was talking about with the politics of education really struck me. It is hard for me to escape the conclusion that to a certain extent, the person that I am, intellectually and socially, has been profoundly shaped by a system that privileges and rewards academic ability with opportunities in an upward spiral, whose endgame is a scholarship for tertiary education. Yet at the same time, the reason I can reflect on my own life and say this sort of thing is precisely because I've received the kind of education that I have. It's problematic, right?

Episode 1122: The Real Thing

I think Tom Stoppard is one of those playwrights whose work is nigh impossible to mess up. My only quibble with the WUDS staging is something that can't really be helped, which is that the main actors look a bit young for the characters they're playing. That aside, I really liked minor details like Charlotte (as the character from the play-within-a-play) and Annie both munching on a Mars Bar while being accused of infidelity, or how the action on the upper stage was playing out the storylines of the secondary characters that I presume aren't in the text, since I don't have the script with me to check. This included a storyline for Max that ultimately led to the call he makes to Henry to announce his remarriage. I thought that was a nice touch, apart from the practical purpose of these segues allowing for set changes on the ground level. It's pretty interesting too, how a play that seems to start out about being about love/marriage/infidelity transitions into being about the politics of language and writing, and then bringing all these things together. I did wonder if the play was intended to contain so many of what felt like false endings, or if that was just a product of the way it'd been staged. Whatever the case though, I think I definitely need to make buying Stoppard's plays a priority.

Episode 1121: I Change My Mind!

The books I ordered have finally arrived, as well as my graze box! Was beginning to get worried there. Would've e-mailed the Post Room if nothing had showed up today. (Randomly, the notification cards are no longer blue but white or yellow instead, and collection is now in a separate section of the building.) Anyway, reaction to my story during this afternoon's EN978 seminar was generally positive, with the main complaint (if you can even call it that) being that the story left people wanting to know more. The feedback was really helpful, and I can see how the story could be fleshed out to easily double its current length or more. So now I'm again in two minds about which module to audit. I mean, I really enjoy the ideas on EN974, but I still can't see how I'd go about writing an essay for that, and if I've got a solid idea with my story that I can run with, putting together the portfolio is basically going to be a lot less difficult. That would in turn leave me more time to do the reading and research for my dissertation. That's the plan at least! Have till the end of the week to actually make up my mind because that's when EMR closes, but I guess this latest development (i.e. people liking my story) pretty much decides things.

Episode 1120: Crisis Resolved, For Now

Finally sent off the revised proposal in the early hours of the morning, and nearly overslept and missed my haircut appointment as a result. Fortunately though, Pablo Mukherjee seems to think that the revised proposal represents a good starting point for my research, and more importantly, he didn't object to my bringing in the concept of liminality, which I wasn't sure I'd applied correctly. He also raised the issue of commodification, which is definitely a good angle to look at the Merlion, which if you go back to its origins, is really a manufactured tourist icon. All this stuff about national identity? It's just writers projecting their own anxieties onto a blank canvas over the decades, if we're being honest about the whole matter. Looks like I've got my work cut out for me in terms of reading anyway. Feels good, knowing that you might be stumbling about, but at least you're more or less going the right way for now. Plus it's only Week 3. I'd be crazy to think I have a perfect idea of what to write for my 16000-word dissertation at this point in time!

Episode 1119: Minor Dissertation Crisis

Minor dissertation crisis before I left for church. Was trying to get on with revising my dissertation proposal, when I happened to come across an article published in PRISM: USP Undergraduate Journal, published by NUS, which basically analyses the intertextual relations in the Firstfruits anthology Reflecting On The Merlion: An Anthology Of Poems, as well as making an attempt to map the transitions between them onto the narrative of the Western literary tradition, and commenting on the implications the poems have for Singaporean national identity. So that's basically my original thesis statement pretty much proven (and then some). Now I'm trying to find a way to take this analysis to the next level, which I think has to involve in some way the argument that the national identity thus constructed has always been provisional and sceptical about itself, fundamentally uneasy about the traditional East/West binary that postcolonialism purports to challenge. This doesn't seem like much though, so I'm thinking of also grounding the discussion of the Merlion and Singaporean national identity within the concept of liminality, and somehow tying that to a postcolonial approach. It's all quite confusing in my head at the moment, and I'm sure as I read more, it'll get clarified more and more, but for now, I just need to get some sort of revised proposal out!

Episode 1118: Yawn...

Went to the Heronbank and Lakeside Welcome Party, but left with one of my flatmates after the prize draw when the disco started. I guess as a postgraduate, I'm at that stage where I'm comfortable not feeling like I have to make new friends under such enforced social conditions like a welcome party. I mean, I'd be cool with making new friends, but it has to happen organically and have some better basis than living in the same hall of residence. Wasn't outraged like some people that you could only get beer, cider, soft drinks or wine for the free drink, though I was amused that the wine came prepacked in plastic bottles. Lizzie was crashing at mine overnight, and she was getting back from a shift at Kelsey's, so I came back to my room to watch Merlin and eat Vialli's instead, which was more entertaining than staying at the party would have been, I should think. Still perplexed by why my graze box hasn't arrived, as it was due on Friday. Maybe it's best just to cancel the deliveries altogether once this one has been sorted out. A delivery from Amazon UK should have arrived by now too, so I will be expecting a little blue notification card on Monday in the post box. Otherwise, something's gone really wrong with the Post Room on campus!

Episode 1117: So Much Love For Community Right Now...

Stayed up last night to finish my story, and it ended up being quite different from the idea I originally had. What I had in mind was sort of riffing on Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. What I ended up with doesn't really remind me of anything specific that I've read, although I'm hoping it's the sort of story that can be read by both younger and older readers. Was almost late for my morning seminar because I went to bed late (man, I'm really getting old!), and I think I'm pretty set on switching to auditing for EN978 now. EN974 continues to blow my mind, largely because Thomas Docherty is great at breaking concepts down so I know what the heck is going on, even though the module is about stuff that I usually don't read/think about. The dissertation workshop today was pretty helpful too, and I've a good idea of how to rewrite my proposal over the weekend. Shouldn't take too long, I think. Anyway, for those who've seen it, how brilliant was the new episode of Community? Alternate timelines and Evil Troy and Evil Abed? I hope those two make a reappearance somewhere further on in this season. I mean, Community is zany enough that it could work, and the show even set up the invasion premise in two episodes ago with the two Model UNs! That's exactly the sort of not-so-subtle cue that this show would put out there.

Episode 1116: Where's My Story?

Okay, the traffic surge seems to have stopped, but it did take the journal past 25000 views. Have put off writing my story for EN978 all day, only to realise in the evening that I was actually meant to have sent it in on Tuesday. This is what I get for not actually reading e-mail attachments! So now I'm trying to turn the idea that I had for a story last night into something that can be workshopped. Except I'm having trouble taking it from concept to execution because the thought that I need to target the writing at a younger age group is getting in the way of my thought process. Guess I'm just going to wing it eventually and hope for the best. The rest of the day wasn't a total waste of time though, as I finished reading Frank Cottrell Boyce's Millions for next week's EN978 seminar. Didn't get to re-read the Montaigne for tomorrow though. Just realised that the translation I read online was by Charles Cotton from the 17th century. No wonder it felt weird! The M. A. Screech translation for Penguin feels a lot clearer to me, but that's partly also because I'm now reading the essay for the second time, I guess.

Episode 1115: New Visitor Record!

Just took out a subscription to The White Review, as part of my goal to start reading more literary magazines. Also finally did my laundry today, but it wasn't without incident. A defective machine ate up £4, which I'm going to get refunded tomorrow, thankfully. (Randomly, also finally managed to get rid of the housefly that's been buzzing around my room.) Had forgotten, however, how quickly the campus laundrettes get things done. A full cycle of wash and dry takes just under one-and-a-half hours! In other news, the spike in visitor traffic to Eunoia Review that began yesterday saw the site get 293 visitors today, which is nearly a 50% increase on the previous high in August. I think it may be because I had two followers retweet my tweet about this week's new work, one of whom has more than 2500 followers. The rise in traffic seems like it's holding steady into tomorrow (the 24-hour cycle follows Singapore time because that's what I set it to), so this week may even end up setting a new record in itself. One can hope! I'm really just happy that more people are reading the work that goes up on the site.