Episode 1316: Temporary Departure...

Having talked it over with a bunch of people, I think I've got a better idea of what sort of questions I want to put to Thumboo now, so I'll get around to that once I'm back in Singapore and over my jet lag. Have also finished packing, more or less, and am hoping my carry-on doesn't get weighed this time. If it does, I'll just have to take out all the really heavy Brian Selznick hardbacks, put them in a plastic bag, and pretend that I just bought them at the airport or something. Would have even more books to bring back, except I rediscovered yesterday that all the books I was planning on bringing back to read for my dissertation are actually available at the Yishun library, which is great. Now it's a question of whether I do work on my dissertation while I'm in Singapore, apart from trying to interview various people. First though, I probably need to clear this backlog of reviews that is building up. Was going to write one over the weekend or today, but then I got caught up in packing and stuff like remembering to print my boarding pass and coach ticket for tomorrow, and finishing all my food in the refrigerator. Definitely not looking forward to having to reclaim my fridge space when I get back in a month...

Episode 1315: Awkward...

So I finally sent an e-mail off to Edwin Thumboo, asking if I could interview him. He replied about five hours later, and it was slightly awkward because he seems to expect me to have really specific ideas of what I'm trying to find out, and how it fits in relation to the scope of my dissertation. (It would be really awkward if after explaining in my eventual reply what exactly my dissertation is proposing, he completely disagrees with my analysis of his poem.) Fair enough, although the thing is that I'm not even sure if any of the interviews will end up being useful for the dissertation. Trying to find out what the poets think was never really my goal in the first place. I've always felt it would be nice to know what they thought they were saying if I could find out, but my dissertation's largely trying to tease out what most of the poets seem not to (want to) say. (Except maybe Aaron Lee, so I should definitely find a way to get in touch with him.) Frankly, part of me now just wishes I'd gone with my gut and eschewed the interviewing thing altogether. Not Thumboo specifically, but the whole idea of trying to get all these poets to talk to me.

Episode 1314: Marginal Cartographies

So today has been pretty cool. Short version: I finished reading Brian Selznick's Wonderstruck, Gregory Sherl added me on Facebook, I gave my first (and sadly, probably last, for the time being anyway) conference paper, Daren Shiau added me on Facebook, and I came home from the conference with enough teabags and sugar to last me the rest of the year. If you're short on time (and patience), you can stop reading now. I won't get upset. Now here's the long version, if you have time. I read Selznick's The Invention Of Hugo Cabret a couple of nights ago, and it was just as beautiful as the movie adaptation. Wonderstruck was great as well, in a chills-down-spine way, even though I figured out the book's twist before it was revealed through the storytelling. After not enough sleep, I woke up to discover Gregory's added me on Facebook, and I'm glad we agree on the non-creepiness of adding each other. Still love your writing (and that poem on The Rumpus today). Conference paper ended up being way too short, but I just played it like it was intentional, and thankfully, people seemed to find my paper interesting. (Saying stuff in an even tone always makes it more convincing!) Turns out someone else who turned up in my session is also from Singapore, studying at Sussex, which was a nice surprise! Then Kenny tagged me in a Facebook note, and I presume because of that, Daren added me, which is helpful because I might be able to talk to him about his Merlion poem now. (Maybe I should just get Kenny to help me out? I'm sure he's got the contacts. Will ask him when I next pop by the bookstore.) Then to cap off a great day, I ate lots of sandwiches and crisps at the wine reception, and took home lots of teabags and sugar sachets. Would've preferred for the vending machine not to eat up my £1.50 when all I was trying to do was buy a bottle of Coke, but hey, I've had worse days.

Episode 1313: Un Peu De Tendresse Bordel De Merde!

To be honest, the nudity in this Canadian dance production from Dave St-Pierre wasn't so shocking after the first couple of minutes. Even when all the naked men were clambering over the audience at the start, the balance between funny and uncomfortable was tipped firmly in the favour of the former, at least for me. I did find the first half of the production harder to get into, as I couldn't quite see how the scenes were adding up in relation to the theme of tenderness. The second half, however, was perfect. From the solo female dancer twirling as the male dancers came up one by one to kiss her, to her stumbling and falling into their arms minutes later, to the very end of the performance, when they poured bottles of water on themselves (after threatening to empty them on us), thus transforming the stage into their own slippery canvas. Thematically, I found myself reminded of LOL (Lots Of Love), although at the surface level, Un Peu De Tendresse Bordel De Merde! didn't feel as bittersweet when it finished. I think if I tried to start interpreting the nuances of this production though, I'd find that it was actually just as challenging and complex a work of art.

For example, that one scene where the male dancers start out as camp parodies of gay men, then slowly clothe themselves, and ultimately, shed their blonde wigs, all the while declaiming 'Frappe-moi!' (shifting from falsetto squeaks to chest voice, of course) and striking themselves (their faces had turned red by the end), that was extremely uncomfortable to watch. Were we supposed to tell them to stop (the performer-audience divide had already been blurred earlier by the burlesque-style 'hostess', Sabrina)? What did it mean for such an overt (and stereotypical?) form of masculinity to be asserting itself and yet turned against itself in that act of assertion? It was moments of rawness and violence like that which made the performance thought-provoking. To sum up, never has nakedness looked so unsexy. Yet it wasn't as though the nudity was somehow being elevated and sacralised, the way it could be in something like sculpture, the sexual frisson turned into pure aesthetics. It was, as Claire put it, like another costume to put on and take off. I find it hard to summarise what the production was like, so if you're in the area, it's on for another night at the Warwick Arts Centre, and I highly recommend seeing it for yourself.

Episode 1312: Stupid NatWest!

Thanks to the erratic nature of American network television scheduling, I only had two shows to catch up with today, which in turn meant that I had time to pop down to Leamington to deposit the cheque the DVLA issued me as a refund for my application fee. Had to go all that way because NatWest have only gone at shut down their campus branch! (First they restricted my debit card to withdrawals from RBS and NatWest machines, now this?) Clearly should also have tried to organise my time better so that I could reread Nathan Thompson's chapbook and finally write the review for it. Going to aim to do that tomorrow, at least the rereading anyway. Anyway, I read Gregory Sherl's Last Night Was Worth Talking About on the bus journey to Leamington, and I really liked it. You can buy it here, and you could wait but you probably shouldn't since the chapbook has a limited run of 150 copies. I like Sherl's writing so much, I might even try adding him on Facebook. It wouldn't even be that stalkerish because we have six friends in common. That's more than one hand, so it's okay, right? On the subject of limited runs, I've also bought a copy of Roddy Lumsden's book from Penned in the Margins, The Bells Of Hope. It's an elegantly minimalist red hardback, and there are only 200 copies of it. Mine was 76/200 (and signed, which I wasn't expecting), so if they're sending them out in order, you should probably also get your copy here soon, if you want. Credit goes to Claire for showing the book to me halfway through our drive to Chipping Norton last week, as I probably wouldn't have known about it otherwise.

Episode 1311: Whew!

So it turns out my supervisor quite liked my conference paper. That was a relief. Didn't really know how he was going to react to it. He did have some small suggestions that he'd jotted down here and there, some of which I've incorporated, some of which I'm leaving till when I actually write the dissertation. He also corrected some of my words, but the corrections didn't seem to make sense. Why substitute 'forebears' with 'forebearers', or 'behoves' with 'behooves'? Pretty sure in both cases that my usage is the dominant form in British English! Have finished the PowerPoint presentation that I'm going to use on Saturday, and I'd forgotten how ugly PowerPoint is. On a happier note, after last week's massive order from Mud Luscious Press, I've made a more modest order today from YesYes Books. It's also finally been confirmed that I'm getting a review copy of Ryan Frawley's Scar sent to me in Singapore, which was the book I was approached by a PR person to review a week ago. Quite excited because it sounds like the kind of postmodern fiction that I'd enjoy, as opposed to finding tedious. That and it's of course still really cool to have your reputation as a reviewer precede you. Haha!

Episode 1310: Glutton For Punishment?

Double rejection today, almost exactly 12 hours apart. So after feeling a bit blue for a while, my response has been to send out even more work, including a postal submission for the next Unthology. It's probably a long shot, that one, but it would be pretty awesome if my story actually made it in. I definitely go through phases when it comes to submitting my work. I'll do a sizeable batch of submissions at one go, and then I'll go for weeks, even months, without sending anything else out. Then something will set me off again, and the cycle just repeats itself. I think the reason why I don't submit regularly is that I don't really think I have a lot of work that is good enough to send out, so once the good pieces are sent out, they're tied up until I hear back from the various editors. I'm also thinking of sending a pamphlet-length submission to Holdfire Press, although I feel even less optimistic about that, since the past few pamphlet submissions I've made have all led to nothing. Sometimes I just feel like there's this disconnect between the feedback I get within a classroom setting, and the judgements being made by editors out there. So either I'm a far worse writer than I've been told I am, or I'm just not targeting the right publications (though I've improved on that front since I first started out). Or maybe I'm just on the right side of mediocre, but not so far enough across the line as to stand out from the millions of writers out there, all also trying to make their voices heard. This is possibly one of the few areas of my life that I can actually get quite insecure about.

Episode 1309: Paper's Done!

I did manage to finish my paper last night, but then I couldn't get to sleep, so I just stayed up catching up on all the TV shows I'd put off watching over the weekend. Did nap for a couple of hours sometime around 6 am, although I kind of slept through my alarm and scuppered my own plan to get an English breakfast at University House before my EN911 seminar. I'm still super sleepy now, so I'm not going to start on the review writing till tomorrow. Once I do though, I'll be a machine! In fact, I tempted to just go straight to bed after this new episode of Game Of Thrones, rather than staying up to read like I normally do, even though there's heaps of stuff that I want to dive into, now that I can temporarily put aside my dissertation. Would like to start reading for my EN954 essay (for which I also need to decide on a title by Friday), as I'm trying to return all the elegy-related books I'm holding onto, so that my friends taking the module can pick up the books. Plus I'm going to be away for a month, so I figure that it might be a good idea to return all the Library books I have on loan, in order to avoid a repeat of the debacle over the Christmas holidays. Haven't quite decided on that yet, as in many cases, the odds that anyone is going to want to borrow the books I have are quite slim. Pretty sure nobody is going to place a hold on any of the four books from the Schools Collection that I've had since I can't even remember when!

Episode 1308: One Does Not Simply Finish Writing A Paper...

Am going to press on and finish the conference paper before I go to bed, instead of putting it off for another day. Surprising amount of discipline, right? (More like I just want to be done with it so that I can have a fun first week of Summer Term, before I fly home for another month of, well, fun.) I do hope my supervisor will be somewhat happy with the result when I meet him on Wednesday. It actually feels kind of good, knowing that when I've finished the paper, I'll have around 2500 words down on paper, all of which will be making it into some part of my dissertation, and given that the dissertation is only 16000 words, 2500 is quite a fair proportion of it in the bag, so to speak. It's definitely not as detailed in its analysis as my academic writing usually tries to be, but I'm aware of this and it'll obviously be addressed when I have to rewrite the paper for my actual dissertation chapters. Once the paper's done though, I also have heaps of reviewing work to catch up on, but that'll be more fun to write than the paper's been. Pretty much have to write two reviews by the end of this week, but it should be okay because I've already read the stuff to be reviewed.

Episode 1307: Chipping Norton Literary Festival

Finally made a trip to the Post Room this afternoon to pick up all of this week's parcels! I might just spend tomorrow reading Luke Kennard instead of writing the rest of my paper. Am slightly behind on the word count now, as I was at the Chipping Norton Literary Festival this evening. (Thanks for the lift, Claire!) Really enjoyed the poets featured, especially Paul Askew, Laila Sumpton and Anna McCrory, whose poems I felt were brilliant when read aloud but I can imagine would also work very well on the page. Came back and got a tweet from an author promoting his new audio book, which got me thinking about whether the next area Eunoia Review might expand into is publishing audio work. Not just writers' recordings to accompany their texts, but actual audio-only work like The Drum Literary Magazine does. I think it's be pretty cool, but I'm not sure if it'd be feasible, logistically speaking, in terms of hosting the audio files. If it really took off as a thing that the journal does, I doubt I could rely on the space provided by WordPress for uploading files! Plus I'd probably need to get someone involved in handling audio submissions, just because I don't think I could handle the extra workload. Ah well, I'll think about it when I've got more time on my hands.