Episode 181: Short People

Got together with Hui Lin, Sarah and Shen Ting to practise the song. Ended up harmonising random songs in the practice room. Worked rather well, especially given the acoustics of an enclosed space. We went back to Hui Lin's place in Tocil to make dinner, which again proves my theory that I eat far better when I'm eating at other people's places. Joanna came over too, and as is usual for Singaporeans, we talked all through dinner and for an hour or so after it. The back door to my hall of residence has had its lock changed, and I have no idea why. I've been spending a fair bit of time since I got back to my room writing my brief review of The Reality Street Book Of Sonnets. I've decided that I like individual poets within the anthology, but as a whole, it doesn't work for me because I'm unconvinced that it's more than 'just another modern sonnet anthology' that 'delves more thoroughly than ever before into the myriad ways poets have stretched, deconstructed and re-composed the venerable form' of the sonnet. So I've cheekily hidden three bastardised sonnets within my review, one each of Petrarchan, Shakespearean and curtal. The last is a form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who only wrote three documented examples of it, one being 'Pied Beauty', which Mr Purvis once showed my class in JC. A curtal sonnet, according to Hopkins, is three-quarters of a Petrarchan sonnet. I'm hoping that my review still reads sensibly as prose, so I'll probably show it to a few people first before sending it off to Michael Hulse.