Episode 1093: TV Tuesdays!

Guess my plan to catch up on How I Met Your Mother before the new season premieres has failed, since the Season 7 premiere aired yesterday. I'm not even done with Season 1 yet! It looks like Tuesdays are again going to be the day with the most shows to watch for me, as many as 10 during this period when summer and fall programming overlap. Just as well that I have Wednesdays free on my timetable, unless I decide to take an academic French module at the Language Centre. The only modules I can progress to both run on Wednesday afternoons. Don't see any point in taking an LLL module, even though I'll get another Open Studies Certificate out of it. If I did, at least it wouldn't be in French. Can't decide if I really want to pay £300 for an academic module though. Totally didn't feel it was worth it when I did that in first year, and while it's not like I haven't learnt stuff over three years of French lessons, it hasn't entirely been what I imagined it would be like either. I'd like to think that by now, I'm capable of maintaining my language skills independently. It has been more than a decade since I started learning French after all...

Episode 1092: Sing The Blues

Went with Bella to catch a local film directed by Kenny Ong, Sing The Blues, at Sinema Old School. (Forgot how tiring going up those steps could be!) It was part of this year's edition of the Singapore International Film Festival. Although the director, producer and screenwriter are all Singaporeans, the film was actually shot in Kyoto with Japanese cast and crew. The film is on par with other independent films I've seen, and the main character is based on Tatsuya Ichihashi, who spent more than two years on the run after murdering Lindsay Hawker. It imagines what might have happened to Ichihashi when he supposedly spent two weeks in Kyoto. The Q&A after the screening helped to clarify some elements of the film that I found confusing on a first viewing, so I'm glad I stuck around for that. Not sure if I'm going to catch any of the other SIFF films within the next couple of days. Might just stay at home and try to get through as much reading as I can before flying back? Aiming to at least reach and finish Issue 4 of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, alongside with as many children's books as I can for EN978.

Episode 1091: Eunoia Review Doubles Up!

Well, to be precise, that's only happening from October 2011 onwards. I was hoping that I'd only have to do double daily posts from October 2012, but the 'backlog' of posts is already into the ninth month and might reach a tenth soon, so I figured it was now or never. Spent a few hours after coming back from church rescheduling 262 posts, while watching new episodes of Doctor Who and Wild Boys. Turned out to be less tedious than I expected, and the hassle had been one of the reasons I'd been putting off making the switch in the first place. In any case, the journal now only has work scheduled until February as opposed to June and all the contributors are going to get to see their work published much sooner. Let's face it, nine months was kind of pushing it for an online publication. I suppose as a guideline for the future, if the 'backlog' consistently stretches past six months, it's time to revise the publication frequency. The easiest solution is to artificially restrict the number of acceptances I issue, but that's just silly! So I'm just going to carry on as I always have and see how things go...

Episode 1090: More Premieres From The CW...

The Graveyard Book was excellent! It's the kind of book whose ending leaves you wanting more, although like with quite a few of the children's books I've read so far, that ending feels too, well, convenient, for lack of a better word. I think I've read enough to keep up for the first two weeks of term, assuming I get that module. Am now watching the pilot of The Secret Circle, where the magic starts out as lame as on The Vampire Diaries, and then quickly gets a lot cooler. (Nice to see Gale Harold on TV again, after being criminally underused in Hellcats. He's definitely starting to get typecast though, but I suppose on The CW, every cast member is reducible to some sort of archetype anyway. Also, how is it possible that Thomas Dekker looks even younger now than he did on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles?) Granted, that show, as the season premiere demonstrated, has more than enough going for it already, even without the witch aspect. Intrigued by Jeremy's seeing the ghosts of his deceased girlfriends though, and it'll be interesting to see where that goes.

Episode 1089: More Children's Books!

Scheduled a bunch of poems that've probably permanently taken Eunoia Review into a ninth buffer month. We've been holding steady at just under eight months for quite a while now, so I guess it was only a matter of time. Went to the library in Queenstown and picked up another bunch of children's books. Don't know if I'll be able to read them all, but I can try in the remaining two weeks! Am now reading Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, which is good fun. If I can get through half of it today, I'll reward myself by watching the season premiere of The Vampire Diaries and the newest episode of Archer. Have to wake up early for dental appointment, or I'd watch the premiere of The Secret Circle too! My plan to catch up on all six seasons of How I Met Your Mother before the new season starts is probably already dead in the water. My only regret is not having watched it sooner, because I could totally have been the Barney Stinson of my circle of friends at university! Well, there's always my MA year, right? Right?

Episode 1088: A Change Of Pace In Reading

Haven't even got back to university and have already received two e-mails about conferences. Registering for neither though. One takes place before I get back, the other's on a topic I'm not interested in. (Modernism, if you must know.) Anyway, I've been reading books for young(er) readers. Finished Katie Davies's The Great Hamster Massacre not too long ago, and now I'm in the middle of Sally Nicholls's Ways To Live Forever. I'm not sure I could write for the age level of the former, but the latter, I could take a crack at that sort of thing. Nicholls's book is great by the way. You wouldn't think a book narrated by an 11-year-old leukaemia patient could be uplifting, but that's exactly how Ways To Live Forever feels. Once I'm done with it though, I need to get on with the titles I'm reviewing. Got another from Vagabondage Press, and a V. S. Naipaul title unexpectedly arrived in the post today. Never been a Naipaul person myself, but this first published novel of his, The Mystic Masseur, is supposed to be really funny and entertaining. We'll see!

Episode 1087: Signing On The Dotted Line...Again

Finally, I've signed my variation agreement for my Master's. Like the last time, there were typographical errors in the agreement! Definitely transcription errors that someone should have caught, had they been doing their job right. (By the way, the MND building looks surprisingly rundown, given the ministry's job scope.) Got my flight ticket issued as well, in the nick of time, as the reservation would have expired today otherwise. So now I've bought my coach ticket from Heathrow to Coventry as well. All that's left to do is e-mail the storage company to let them know when I'll be vacating my unit, and I'm all set to head back. Apart from packing, that is. Since I've already decided to do my annual thing of spending Christmas in Singapore, I probably won't have to carry all the books I need and/or want over on this flight. I guess I can afford to leave all of the reference stuff behind, until I know whether my dissertation proposal has been approved. Incidentally, David Tait's written an article for the National Association for Literature Development, which you can read here. (Full disclosure: He mentions a bunch of people at the end that've been published by The Cadaverine, including yours truly.)

Episode 1086: Studying = Fun?

I've decided! EN978 it is. Sent an e-mail to the department to confirm the switch, then I went to the library to look for books on the recommended reading list. Was surprised that almost all the books can be found somewhere within the library system here, with about half of them available in the Yishun library branch itself. A couple more are at the library in Queenstown, so I'm going to quickly read a few I borrowed today by Friday and swap them for new ones before cell in the evening. I wanted to take a look at the readings for EN973 Poetry and Poetics, but I guess I can't access them yet, so I'm just going to look at the essays on the Poetry Foundation website. Starting to get excited about the modules I'm hopefully doing. Like I told Shirley, if I get all my choices, it'll really be like I'm getting money to enjoy what I'm studying. It's such a foreign concept for a Singaporean student, right? I'm already starting to get ideas on what I can write for the assessment for EN978. Up to 8000 words of fiction for younger readers is no joke! That's actually longer than anything I've had to write in three years of my BA.

Episode 1085: Which Module Should I Take?

Nothing quite like having to Google to check if your work's been rejected because you didn't hear back from an editor, despite being told that they'd get back to you. Seems like basic courtesy, no? A form rejection shouldn't take more than a couple of seconds to copy and paste anyway. I would know, although I actually still type out all my replies to submitters from scratch, even the rejections. Anyway, the title of this post sums up my present dilemma. EN904 Problems and Modes in Postcolonial Literature or EN978 Writing for Children and Young People? EN928 Poetics of Urban Modernism, which I'd picked for Autumn Term, has been rescheduled to Spring Term, so I can't do it anymore because I've already got another module I want to do then, EN911 Creative Writing, and if my dissertation proposal's accepted, the taught module I have to drop comes from Spring Term, for essay deadline reasons, I expect. If my proposal is rejected, then I'd rather be doing EN954 Romantic Elegy anyway! I guess postcolonial stuff would help with my dissertation to some extent, and I do like Neil Lazarus as a tutor, but writing for children just feels like it'd be more fun, and I think I'd like to have more fun with my MA. Not that the three years of my BA weren't, but we did have to slog through things like Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, which I totally appreciate, but in the Modern English translation. Considering I applied to do EN911 in the spring, I suppose in a way I'm trying to have my cake and eat it too for one more year, with half my modules being English Literature and half being creative writing.

Episode 1084: New Local Publisher To Watch...

Rob just told me on Facebook that he's with Nick Chen on the whole Community versus Party Down issue. Sad times! Seems like there's going to be a movie continuation of the latter. Can't say that I wouldn't watch it, especially if they go all Entourage in following Adam Scott's character's story. (Might be a little odd, since Entourage is gunning for a movie too.) In some local publishing news, it seems like Epigram Books are becoming the publisher to go to for Singaporean drama. They've already published Jean Tay's Boom and Everything But The Brain, as well as Haresh Sharma's Those Who Can't, Teach. Now they've put out Six Plays, a collection of Tan Tarn How's plays, with forthcoming collections of Chong Tze Chien and Ovidia Yu. Incidentally, Tan's newest play, Fear Of Writing, just finished its run. Did think about catching it, but wasn't drawn quite enough to make the effort of fitting it into my schedule of, well, doing nothing. Haha! Going down to Robinson Road again tomorrow because my visa has arrived. This new system for Singaporean visa applicants truly is marvellous.