Episode 1226: Is Gossip Girl Being Meta Or Not?

One of my hallmates took my food out of the oven to cook his own. I'd have excused him, except not only did he not put my food back when he was done, he left my tray out and turned off the oven! Like, what the heck? Anyway, Gossip Girl aired its 100th episode yesterday, the first of the shows that originated on The CW network to do so. After five seasons of the show though, it is honestly quite hard not to interpret all the dialogue at this point as being some sort of metacommentary on the show's writing. The question only remains whether this is a conscious act on the part of the writers, or have they been unwittingly brilliant in spite of increasingly lazy and loopy storytelling. Anyway, I'm in the middle of writing my next review that I owe Lindsey for Sabotage Reviews because I decided that just because Tuesdays are what I call 'TV Tuesdays', there's no reason that I shouldn't get on with work once all the shows are finished. That and I just found out today that I have to do a lot more for my dissertation plan than I'd expected, which I only realised because I read the handbook. Was actually looking to see if there were any deadlines that I had to be around for in May, before confirming to my mum if I'm flying back to Singapore for a couple of weeks around my birthday. Turns out it's just an essay title for one of this term's modules that needs to be submitted by 27 April, so I'm free to pop off for a few weeks in the middle of Summer Term because there aren't any seminars anyway. Will still need to be getting work done though, even while I'm back in Singapore...

Episode 1225: Thanks, Duckworth Publishers!

So while battling insomnia last night (guess I'm not 100% immune to the caffeine in Coke after all), I decided that I'm going to send one of the flashes I wrote last year and read out to my writing group. Everyone seemed to enjoy it then, so why not use it, right? So that takes care of the Biscuit Publishing competition. On a separate note, I also won some books and a DVD from Duckworth Publishers, courtesy of a competition they ran on Facebook over the weekend. One of the things I've won is a copy of Max Brooks's World War Z, which I'm really pleased about because I've been wanting to buy his books for some time now, I just haven't got around to it yet. Also, it turns out that my review on Sabotage Reviews of Neil Campbell's chapbook has indirectly led to his submitting a story to Eunoia Review, which I'm honoured to accept for publication in mid-May. Sort of a multiplier effect, if you will. Currently considering whether I really want to go and see We Need To Talk About Kevin at the Student Cinema for free. I definitely want to see Contagion on Friday, and possibly Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon tomorrow and A Separation on Thursday.

Episode 1224: Party Costume Sorted

So I still haven't written the flash fiction, unless you count the ridiculous rehash of the beginning of the Gospel of John as some Matrix-type opener that I did yesterday. (It actually kind of works, in a weird way, but since all I've done is substitute nouns and pronouns here and there, I highly doubt it'll be accepted by the competition.) On a completely unrelated note, while in Varsity after church, I decided what I'll be going as to Kat's board game-themed birthday party, and it's going to be Reverend Green from Cluedo. I just need to make a clerical collar and decide which weapon to bring as a prop. I could do a knife, I suppose, since I actually have all those Ikea kitchen knives that I never actually use because I don't cook, but it'd be such a hassle to carry around. I was thinking of just substituting rope with one of the many cables snaking around my table instead. Sort of a modern update on the whole strangulation thing. Plus it'd be way safer to carry around too! Anyway, I started reading Noughties last night, and I had to force myself to put it down and go to bed. It was that readable. I can definitely see this novel becoming a hit among people in their mid-20s to early 30s, if it's marketed well. I suppose it will be, Hamish Hamilton being an imprint of Penguin and all.

Episode 1223: I Should Write A Story About Procrastination

Requested an interview with Jim Harrington's blog Six Questions For..., and I've just sent in my responses, so hopefully that will bring in submissions from an even wider pool of people once the interview's gone up. I was also supposed to write a flash fiction or a review today, obviously what I ended up doing was starting on some TV show instead. I've watched the first series of Miranda, and I'm now two episodes into the second, so by the time the third airs at some point this year, I'll be caught up. It was either this or Becker, and I'm not even halfway into Season 1 of that. Was going to do two submissions for this Biscuit Publishing competition, which is a combo contest, so one submission consists of a short story of 1000-5000 words and a flash of up to 750. I've decided I'm too lazy to write two new flashes by the end of this month though, so I've sent one of the short stories off to a magazine instead. Speaking of which, earlier today I impulsively decided to help The Conium Review reach their IndieGoGo target and donated US$30, in exchange for a copy of the magazine when it comes out and various 'thank you' mentions. Wasn't going to donate that much initially, since there was an option for a smaller amount that would still get me a copy of the magazine, but I figured, what the heck, I like what James Gapinski and his team are doing by bring out a print magazine, and I can still spare the money to bring them up to their target. Still on the subject of new magazines, Jane Holland is starting up a new one online. So any writers reading this, you should definitely consider submitting to Epicentre Magazine.

Episode 1222: Hamish Hamilton's New Wunderkind?

Just got back from the annual SingSoc CNY Dinner, which was actually held in the same restaurant in Birmingham as last year's dinner. Sat in front of this really bitchy guy on the way back, which made for quite an amusing coach ride, I guess. Anyway, my review copy of Noughties, Ben Masters's debut from Hamish Hamilton, has arrived. The guy's 25, a good-looking chap, educated at Oxford and Cambridge, and his signing by Hamish Hamilton seems like it was quite a big thing. It's practically like he was designed in some laboratory to induce literary envy. (Come on, even his name feels perfectly suited for the job. Sort of like how I think regardless of how you feel about Lana Del Rey and whether or not she's 'authentic', you have to admit whoever coined her new moniker was a marketing genius.) Kind of reminds me of the buzz about Adam O'Riordan, who'd be the equivalent in the world of poetry, I suppose. The thing is though, I really like the excerpt his publicist has put on the press release accompanying the review copy, and if the rest of the novel reads like that, I'm completely sold on the novel. I do wonder if it might be the sort of novel that only really appeals to fellow English graduates, so it's definitely something I'll address one way or another in my review for The Cadaverine.

Episode 1221: Campus Encounter

So on my way to yet another experiment (for which I made £7 and a packet of crisps), I was accosted by two people whom I thought were about to ask for directions, but whom I subsequently realised were Jehovah's Witnesses, after glancing at the leaflet they took out to give to me. Thing is, while I was talking to them, nothing gave them away. Nothing theologically controversial came up in the discussion, although reflecting on their comments about the fulfilment of the kingdom of God on this current Earth and how it will 'crush' all other kingdoms/governments, I realise now that the phrasing is quite particular to Jehovah's Witnesses. They initially tried to engage me in conversation in Chinese, but within a few sentences, I told them to switch to English. There was something vaguely condescending/racist in their surprise at how good my English was, considering that the first thing they asked me in English was whether I spoke Chinese, and of course, they assumed that I was from China based on my skin colour, which is one of the things that seriously ticks me off. (Not to mention that when he was taking out the flyer at the end of our conversation, the older man still took out one that was written in Chinese.) Surprised they were actively recruiting people on campus itself though, as I was walking along Scarman Road at the time. Is that actually allowed?

Episode 1220: Progress?

So I think my meeting with Ross Forman went well. Seems like my research might potentially be going in unanticipated directions, like a comparison of the literary representation of urban icons, and a consideration of the ramifications of the divergence and interaction of the Merlion's aspects as national versus tourist icon. I've got rough ideas for my three chapters, but more reading is needed before I can really pin down the details. I guess that's progress, right? Ross is pushing me to interview the poets in the Merlion anthology, since they're all living poets, even Edwin Thumboo, whose 'Ulysses By The Merlion' started it all. I think it's a good idea, but how many do I approach? Should I just ask the younger poets, the ones who've had virtually no secondary criticism written about them yet? Or do I want a mix of views from established and emerging poets? What about only asking the people whose poems I really, really like? Is this making my research unnecessarily complicated? Sigh. Anyway, here's my review, by the way, of the first of four chapbooks from The Knives Forks and Spoons Press.

Episode 1219: Foiled Again!

While reading in preparation for meeting with my dissertation supervisor tomorrow, I've come to realise that once again, what I was thinking of writing about has already been done before. The first iteration of my plan for the dissertation was more concerned with straightforward literary analysis, Bloom's 'anxiety of influence' type of stuff. Had to change that because some undergraduate at NUS published a paper about exactly that. Her analysis wasn't perfect, but it wasn't sufficiently flawed that picking holes in it would take up the whole of my dissertation. So I switched to thinking about the Merlion in terms of the concept of liminality as a springboard for discussing its problematic reception as a cultural icon that is also profoundly implicated in the economics of Singapore. Turns out a pair of academics have sort of done that second half already, so it looks like in order to actually say anything new, I'm going to have to postulate that as a liminal figure, the Merlion is actually fundamentally necessary for Singapore in terms of cultural development, regardless of how it makes Singaporeans feel because of its economic significance as a tourist symbol. I've read one article so far that comes close to suggesting this, although it's phrased in terms of a dialectic that self-critiques à la Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic Of Enlightenment, so my take on it is still sufficiently different to justify being written about.

Episode 1218: Win Some, Lose Some

So Blue & Yellow Dog rejected the lot, mais c'est la vie. I'm starting to notice this weird trend where a lot of the places that I think I might want to submit to have also published people that I've published in my capacity as an editor. In some cases, it's the editors themselves whom I've published. It all seems a bit incestuous, doesn't it? For a change, I sent some poems to Popshot today, which is a print-only publication, and a very well-designed one it is too! I may have interpreted the next issue's theme of 'Power' too liberally, but hey, you never know if something might just click with an editor. Speaking of which, just as I was typing that, an acceptance came in from Quantum Poetry, a publication I discovered via one of today's acceptances for Eunoia Review, whose poem currently appears right below mine on the site's homepage. Link here. (Didn't realise that Quantum Poetry is edited by Jill Chan, who's a contributor to Eunoia Review, until I got the acceptance e-mail.) It's one of my oldest poems, from way back in 2005, so it's nice to know that someone liked it enough to publish it. Don't really have a lot of poems from that period that I'd consider publishable today!

Episode 1217: Four Consecutive Months Of Viewership Growth!

So it looks like my pamphlet didn't make the cut for Iota Shots, so I'll probably send it off to the Flarestack competition later this week. Dusted off a couple of older, slightly weirder poems, and sent them off to Blue & Yellow Dog because they seem like they might be a fit for that journal. We'll see. Also finished my vaguely dystopian story for tomorrow's EN911 seminar. I think it has potential to be developed into something longer, so we'll see. I might trim it down instead and pair it with a longer piece to submit for another competition though, haven't really decided. Anyway, on the editing side of things, Eunoia Review is having a good month. With more than a week to go before the month's over, the journal's already hit a new monthly record for site views, for the fourth consecutive month no less. There's also work lined up for publication until 1 May, assuming none of the simultaneous submissions I accepted are subsequently withdrawn. It's unlikely that'll happen, given my rapid response times. One of the recent submitters did commit the gaffe of forgetting to delete his cover letter to the other journal, but I didn't hold it against him. Didn't even mention it when I sent the acceptance e-mail.