Ideas

 

1.  Parents even help in new location search (Linette Heng, TNP, 22/11 , p24-25)

Report noted that Mothergoose Preschool was on the verge of closing down after it was outbid by a preschool franchise in August 2013.  It had not been able to find a new place after lease expiry at the end of the year.  The centre manager had submitted nine possible locations to URA, out of which eight were rejected as they did not meet URA’s guidelines.  Report also noted that parents had joined in the hunt for possible sites for relocation.

2. 
People who hoard are often, like Vojtko, intelligent, creative, and endlessly curious, according to psychiatrist Randy O. Frost, a leading researcher on hoarding. They don’t easily distinguish between valuables and trash because they see beauty and potential in mundane objects, and because they worry that they might make a mistake by throwing away something they’ll need later. They use objects to help them remember the past.

 http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/education/2013/11/death_of_duquesne_adjunct_margaret_mary_vojtko_what_really_happened_to_her.html

 2. Downsides of taking a personality test at work 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/14/AR2010011401910.html

love this idea!

  Parents even help in new location search (Linette Heng, TNP, 22/11 , p24-25)

Report noted that Mothergoose Preschool was on the verge of closing down after it was outbid by a preschool franchise in August 2013.  It had not been able to find a new place after lease expiry at the end of the year.  The centre manager had submitted nine possible locations to URA, out of which eight were rejected as they did not meet URA’s guidelines.  Report also noted that parents had joined in the hunt for possible sites for relocation.

It is finished

Portfolios 1 to 4 are done! These 12 weeks have been so gruelling, it's amazing I only fell sick on the last day, and even then, it's just a sniffle that seems to only come on when I'm at the office.

What I've learnt in the last 12 weeks:

1. It is possible to write stories longer than 1000 words. I really liked writing The Pots story, though it was such a pain to develop. I'm looking forward to thinking about a novel next. *cross fingers*

2. Experimenting with different styles is pretty fun. I'm glad I tried out a range of styles for these 4 portfolios, from It (psychological turned non-fiction-ish) to The Pots (absurdist reality corporate story) to Next (what I call 'jerk lit').

3. Re-visiting and revising old stories really can make a difference. I think the biggest skill I learnt in these three months, was editing.

What to do next:

1. Catch up on reading -- I borrowed 'The Piano Teacher'

2. Start writing a series of 'very Singaporean stories'

3. Revise It, The Cat Story, Next and Pecked and see where they can go to
    

Whither reliability, engagement?

While writing Craft essays 3 and 4, I kept going back to the idea of reliability. What makes a narrator reliable? Do we expect all our narrators to be reliable?

I get the sense that in the past, when people were supposedly more innocent (pre-Watergate, pre-World Wars, pre-technology, pre-JD Sallinger, pre-sex scandals), readers believed writers. Period. But somewhere along the way, human beings began getting suspicious of well, everything. And this affected reading too.

So the reader no longer trusts the narrator wholeheartedly. That kind of authorial trust has to be earned. The modern reader can smell a rat a mile away now, it seems. Locate your story too far back in your past? Unreliable. Tell the reader too much? Unreliable.

Yet is reliability really that important? Do we all want to read only reliable stories?
In a sense, reader reponse theory seems like a study on how humans would like to be treated, in a perfect world. We want people we can trust wholeheartedly, we want the narrator to feel like our best friend. We want to relate to the story.

Part of that need to feel somewhat connected to the story is how we want to place that story in our reality, to make it play by our schema, our rules. The group of us in Singapore who have been meeting monthly to workshop our stories often talk about how they don't feel such and such a character would do/say "something like that". Writers are people making sense of the world, and trying to recreate that world that they are still understanding in their stories, and when someone comes along and shows them a reading of the world that does not align to what they think, that sticks out, seems artificial.

The journal article I found for the 4th critical essay talked about engagement in a very flighty sort of way, referring to engaging the reader as a promise of commitment to the story, akin to an engagement to marry. In education, we talk about engagement all the time; the belief that engaged students (with the lesson, not to each other) would result in higher quality of learning. In class, it's active listening (taking down notes, participating in class discussions, asking questions). [Actually, this might just be the Western view. The Eastern view, apparently, is students simply keeping quiet and listening -- in Japanese lesson study, students' 'bright eyes' are what teachers look for.] In stories, would engagement require some form of multi-modality as well? The easy answer would be that the story needs to engage the reader's senses and have enough sight, sound, feel, etc., balancing setting and dialogue and action together.

 

The Pots plan

Plot: Voice of dissent, background, meeting, problem, quest, solution

Problems:
- not everyone can sew
- their articles are scams
- what they are selling is not needed (their purpose for existence is tenuous)

What if:
- sewing challenge
- expose of articles
- people start losing language
- boss has to learn how to sew (humbled, emotional change)

POTSMOTSP:
- new graphs to show "new findings"
- sudden changes
- prizes and games (like kids)
- innane fights
- adages about sewing on the walls

History

I started volunteering as a guide at the National Museum of Singapore early this year because I wanted fodder for writing. It's actually been really fascinating so far, re- and un-learning the history of this island. Just being a guide alone, looking at tourists' reactions to some of the more absurd parts of our history is amusing. Especially when everything before colonialisation almost appears to be completely made up, and everything after the war, white-washed.

I haven't actually found anything worth writing about though, though I really want to write The Fake Guide to the National Museum.

Editing the POTMOTSP story

After doing the craft paper, I began thinking about the POV of the POTMOTSP story, and the whole point about the toad in the garden.

Choices:
1st person immediate engaging (but not likeable) narrator
close 3rd person
omnicient

The story seems to wantto be written from a 1st person -- but from whose POV?

Narrating agent: Narrator in the present (recounting immediate past)
Focalizer: Narrator in the past
Focalized: Charles

Choices for narrating agent:

1. Louis
- Middle management type
-head of sales team
- 45 years old
- misogynist
- player
- cannot sew; he is insecure about this fact
- Attitude towards job: 'been there, done that', cynical, conceited about achievements
- Educational background: degree in Logo design

2. Jim
- Slacker member of the team
- 34 year old
- dreams of being a typographer, studies fonts at work
- Attitude towards job: que sera sera, wants to cruise by, doesn't want trouble
- Educational background: trained in F & B

3. Charles
- Newest member of sales team
- 26 years old
- married to an artist
- has quintuplets
- can sew; did sewing course to save money on children's clothes
- Attitude towards job: earnest, ambitious
- Educational background: MBA from top university (sponsored by the state)

POTMOTSP creative brief

Who am I talking to?

People accustomed to the absurdities of corporate life/civil service

What is the thing I want to tell them?

Talk is cheap. Workplace inertia is anathema.

Questions

What will happen when one is working in a place where talk never ends?
What if the words that we use start overtaking us?
What if words rebel?
What if words lose their meaning?
What if language starts to fight back after years of being abused?
How would it fight back?
People's words get jumbled up. They start saying what they really mean, without filters.

What is the desired response?

Use words carefully.

Key message/Single Minded Proposition:

If you abuse words, they might abuse you.

Being Singaporean

Inspirations

Singapore Bienalle artworks at National Museum of Singapore (NMS)

I love being Singaporean. It's just that I don't know how to write about it. Making the familiar unfamiliar is a tough task, I think. This point was brought home last weekend when I was on a currator's tour of the Singapore Bienalle artsworks at NMS.

Initially, I was pretty apalled by the lack of depth shown by the two artworks by Singapore artists. One was entitled 'Chalk and Cheese', and comprised marble mops and brooms made of some old-fashioned soap that apparently people used to use a lot in the past. I wanted to roll my eyes at the lengthy description, especially the way the word 'labour' was linked to birth pangs and politics.

The other was basically just a reaction to quite a stunning piece of 31 chandeliers made of uranium-dipped glass, glowing in UV light. The piece looked like corals, and was so inconspicuously hidden in one corner of the dark gallery space that I would have missed it if the currator hadn't pointed it out.

These are the write-ups to both on the Singapore Bienalle page(http://www.singaporebiennale.org/?page=artist_bio&artist=64):

 

Chalk & Cheese 2013
Marble, Lam Soon soap and wood
Dimensions: Various
Collection of the Artist
Singapore Biennale 2013 Commission
Sofyan’s installation of ‘brooms’ and ‘mops’ – implements used for the menial and laborious task of cleaning – casts the spotlight on that which is occasionally valourised but largely overlooked: labour. It fuels political parties and manifestos, even as it wears people down in the daily grind. It also describes the pain a woman endures in giving birth: labour underpins society and human life at its most basic. This work, part of Sofyan’s ‘Whitewash’ series, delves into the metaphorical implications of cleaning when situated in a museum dedicated to preserving and presenting the nation’s history. In a country’s quest for progress and ‘upgrading’, what space is left for the old and obsolete, what dirt has been removed, and what sparkling story has been set in its place?

Moment 2013
Mixed Media
Dimensions: Variable
Collection of the Artist
Singapore Biennale 2013 Commission
This site-specific installation is informed by Tan’s pursuit of a deeper meaning of self in response to the world. We often forget what is important to us and stop connecting with our surroundings, the people around us and our inner selves. Ultimately, our existence in this world is temporal and will come to an end. How then do we ‘find’ ourselves in this changing world? Handcrafted on site from a combination of industrial materials, this low-lying, landscape-like form reacts to the ultraviolet light source emitted by the overhanging Crystal Palace installation by Ken + Julia Yonetani. The glowing installation embodies humans’ instinctive nature to make and create. The hand underscores the intention of making – making hope, meaning, memory, connection.

While trying to make 'Next' a bit more Singaporean though, I struggled with explaining what a pasar malam, or night market, looked like, and cut out that bit. It was tough trying to describe something that I know so well. Plus, I had nothing to say about it. I'm guessing maybe the 2 Singaporean artists must have struggled with that as well: What to talk about in Singapore. The Cambodian and Vietnamese artists seem to like to talk about their resilience to outside influences, the seepage of Western culture. The Indonesians like to refer to nature and a simpler way of life. The Filipinos like to talk about survival and joy in adversity. I think post-colonial Singapore art and writing has always been about identity: what it is to be Singaporean. Now though, what does it mean to be a Singaporean writer? I attended a talk with A the other day on cultural identity and writing at the Singapore Writers Festival. Ma Jian was one of the speakers and he said something very interesting: Writing should be about traumatic events, and it should be to give hope. I'm still wondering how that is possible without being too cliched, and if that should be my writing goal.

P is visiting from NYC next month and I'm bringing her around all the touristy spots. I'll also be preparing to guide at A Changed World exhibit on Singapore art from 1950-1970 -- hopefully I'll gain some insights on what it means to be Singaporean now, and how my writing should respond to my environment.


 

Editing

At the Fall mini residency, I realised for the first time what editing is. After years of getting my students to edit their compositions and editing other people's work, I think it was only then I realised what it meant to edit, in the sense of re-writing and re-crafting.

Some tips I picked up:

1. Write on screen, then re-write long-hand, then type it out
2. Re-write taking inspiration from another writer (e.g. David Foster Wallace), just to see where your story goes
3. Don't be afraid of doing seemingly random things to your story, just to see what will happen to it.

The mystical idea of the story 'knowing where it wants to go' and the tussle between instinct vs intellect stayed with me after the residency, and I tried looking at It through that lens. I thought it would take one night, two at most, but it took three. It was more emotionally draining and exhausting than I thought it would be. When I tried to do the same thing to 'Next', I found that I didn't know where to take the story further, so I changed POV. I  still think there's something wrong with the story though -- no depth, something. For the Cat story though, I've looked at it so many times that I honestly don't know what to do with it. It's some sort of paralysis and tiredness, I think. I'm guessing something is wrong with the shifts in POV, or the fact that we spend so long in the girl's head.

After spending the morning on the couch with the NYT

http://nyti.ms/1edFLVH

In line with the whole theme on obsessions, I find hoarding a riveting subject. What makes people hoard, what do they hoard? Why is it a stigma? 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/opinion/nocera-a-world-without-privacy.html

The exerpt from Dave Egger's new book has shades of 1984, 'tis true. I want something like that for the POTMOTSP story. Absurdist yet familiar. 

Writing 

Reading this blog post http://www.mrbrown.com/blog/2013/10/special-children-are-born-to-special-people.html about parents of a special child whose dinner was paid for by a random couple at a restaurant here made me pause and think. 

Train of thoughts:

1. It has story potential. Unexpected kindness to marginalised section. 

2. Who are the most marginalised in society? Or the ones who are suffering the most? 

3. Does fiction in general give voice to them? 

I was in a coffeeshop the other day and thinking roughly the same thing. Looking at the drink stall seller, thinking, what is his back story? 

I think, outside my cushy pampered life, I want to explore characters I don't usually encounter. To give them a voice and to stretch my own viewpoints. 

A list: 

1. Abused wives -- I've been strangely drawn to this topic for a long time. There's something terribly odd, yet at the same time frighteningly relatable about suffering wives, although I've never been in a abusive relationship, and never really encountered one in close proximity (unless you count some friends and relatives). 

2. Hen-pecked husbands -- With the rise of the career women, hen-pecked, emasculated men make such great characters. 

3. People with special children 

4. Orphans and neglected children 

5. Singles -- by choice (ma jies, nuns, priests), by circumstance (widows, illness, responsibilities), by random social lottery 

6. Foreigners -- children of ghurkas in Singapore, expats

7. People who suffer beyond comprehension -- chronic illness that science and faith cannot help, death of a child (stillbirth, accident, illness)

8. Abandoned old folk 

 

Writing

Writing the POTMOTSP story was a personal challenge to go beyond a 3000-word story. At the  2000-word juncture, I wanted to give up. At 4000, I whined that it was too grueling. When it did creep up to 6000, I thought my original ending was too cliche. Then I got rid of 1000+ words and re-wrote, thinking that I wanted to try doing an unreliable narrator.

It was a crap ending.

This is like a beast I need to tame. 

Writing  
 
I was so close to reaching my targeted word count for the corporate story yesterday when I decided that it was too staid, sounded too much like a Primary 6 composition piece, and decided to experiment with using an unreliable 1st person narrator.

Arguably I could have planned better and avoided this change, since it was something I was toying with doing after reading 'Japanese Tales'. But somehow it didn't occur to me to do it with this story, now, 3 days before I'm supposed to send it out. Augh.

Reading

Read 'Write Before Writing (1978)' last week, apparently a classic chapter from 'The Essential Don Murray'.

It was part of work, and these were the questions we had to answer:

1. Please select a thought / idea / phrase that interested you in this chapter and share with us why you found it interesting. Does it affirm something you already believe in? Do you disagree? Why?
2. Murray describes four 'pressures' that move writing along. Which of the four is your personal push factor? How does it influence what you write and how you write?

These were my answers. 

1.  The sentence 'The writer who starts to write a solemn report of a meeting may hear a smile and then a laugh in his own words and go on to produce a humorous column' (p34) resonated with me. Writing NOMs can be strangely inspiring (sometimes). I also found the idea of genre exploration interesting -- I recently heard that in order to break the rules of writing, one needs to know the rules of writing. I think there's the same for genres. In order to subvert a genre, you need to understand the features of a genre.
2. Definitely an approaching deadline. I wrote 1 short story in 2 years because of the Law of Delay (such a great phrase!), but ever since I have writing submission deadlines, I find myself setting my alarm at 2 am just to plough through a story. A deadline forces me to focus and to push myself to experiment within a limited time frame.

Completely feeling number 2 now.

Inspirations

Went on Architours for the 1st time. I've been wanting to go for an Architour for years, but for some reason, never registered. It was serendipitous that E was one of the architects involved in the first site, Singapore Life Church. I think I'm intrigued by industrial design and architecture because of the balance between functionality and aesthetics.

Links to writing

Singapore Life Church: The architects had purposely created a narrow corridor that opened up into a large auditorium space with a high ceiling for the main sanctuary, to create a sense of awe and smallness. A middle-eastern-looking architect in the group compared it to the design of old cathedrals, where most of the building is dark, except for the natural light coming in from the steeple or stained glass. In architectural terms, the building serves to compress, before expanding. I wondered how that would translate to writing. Compression --> opening. 

House at Victoria Park: Only 1 thing stood out for me at this house. It was so massive that it had 1 floor for entertainment, and another 2 for the family area.  The entertainment floor looked like a hotel lobby, with a show kitchen, infinity pool and a small gym at the end of the garden, while the family area looked like a 5-room HDB flat had been transplanted there.

Chiltren House: I was fascinated with the attention to detail at this house, which was built by a couple who owns an architecture firm. I'm using off-form concrete walls in the setting of the corporate story because of the walls from this house, as well as a conversation I had with E later on the pros and cons of off-form concrete. The house reminded me how much I used to like hiding in nooks and corners in my house -- the wife purposely created a long low baywindow that guests could tuck themselves in.  

Reading 

Reading has been terribly slow. I only finished the Japanese tales book.

Writing

I've been waking up at 2 plus each morning to attempt to work on the corporate story. I'm at 4500 words, out of 8000. It's a personal challenge to see if I can sustain a long short story, especially the ending portion, which I always have trouble with. This time, I attempted to write the ending just after I wrote the introduction.

I attended a writing session yesterday by a colleague. For one of the activities, we were told to pair up and face each other. 1 person had to keep asking 'who are you?' in as neutral a tone as possible while the other person rambled on. The point of the activity was to bring out the personal voice of the writer, but I found it too touchy-feely. I generally dislike these kind of bare-your-soul, tell-me-about-your-childhood kind of sessions. I'm sure there are other less psychoanalytic ways to explore one's voice as a writer. Over Summer, there was a session where we listened to a recording of Proust and shared what we thought about it. That was okay. Then there was another session where we closed our eyes and imagined our childhood home. That did not work for me because I've lived in the same house since I was 2 or so, moving out when I was 8 and moving back in when I was about 17.

Submissions   

I missed 2 deadlines this week, but I've been concentrating on that corporate story anyway, so I guess I can go a bit easy on myself this time. 

Writing

I've started a corporate story, based on work. It's extremely cathartic to write the crazy decisions that I see made in a satirical form, but I can't think of a story arc. Every meeting I attend has so much fodder, but I just can't seem to get it into writing yet. It does feel very exciting and liberating though, to be able to have something to write about that does not involve whining about some woman thing.

This morning though, I wondered how my life would look like on a written sheet.

My phone alarm went off at 5.55. It's a trick, 5.55. 5 minutes before 6, just so I can say I wake up at '5 plus', I guess. I copied it from my dad. Maybe he just decided to set his alarm at 5.55 after those cheap little notebooks they used to sell with the numbers '555' printed on the covers. In any case, I didn't have time to laze around. I turned the dimmer knob on my bedside lamp and quickly made the bed, picking up the pillows that had fallen on the floor during the night. The bus would come at 6.19. I had precisely 24 minutes. To brush my teeth, slip on gym clothes, choose a dress, zip it up in a garment bag, boil water for a quarter cup of Milo, slide my sports shoes on, and walk out to the bus-stop.  The bus used to be more punctual.  I used to feel quite proud of the transportation system. Used to marvel at its efficiency to friends. Maybe we've finally reached the Swiss standard of living, I used to say. But now it comes it 6.14 on some days, 6.22 on others. Complacency. I wonder who I can write in to. I like to sit at a place on the bus where I can  hang my garment bag. I lumber up the bus, my many bags --- 1 for the laptop, 1 for the gym things, 1 for the other things I need (umbrella, watch, water bottle, spare shawl, dust mask in case the haze makes a sudden return, fan from my mum ('for when the MRT is smelly'),  luggage combination lock for the gym locker, spare book).
7.45. The 30 minutes of cardio is done. I shower and get to the bus stop by 8, grabbing a bun and some juice along the way. This, I eat at my desk, after squeezing my way onto the packed bus.

Terribly boring. Why would anyone want to read that?

Update on writing: I woke up at 2.30 am and worked on the corporate story till 4.30. I can definitely write better from 2-5, methinks. 
  

Reading

I've gotten hold of 'Seven Japanese Tales' by Junichiro Tanizaki. The first story is the story of Shun-Kin. Reading it has made the play clearer. 

In the original short story, multiple narrators exist: 
1. The narrator, who is a man interested in the story of Shun-Kin 
2. Quotes from Sansuke's book on Shun-Kin's life
3. Quotes from a girl who helped Sansuke and Shun-Kin after both went blind 

In the play, 2 more voices (more commentators than narrators, really) were added: the actor who transforms into Sansuke, and the lady who is reading the play for a radio station. 

I've enjoyed the rest of the stories in the book too. It wasn't a surprise to find out that Tanizaki was a fan of Edgar Allen Poe, because his style is very similar. 1st person narrator who seems trustworthy at first, then gives the reader room to doubt. Storylines that veer into the fantastic. Heightened sensory descriptions. It's all very gothic. Terror, horror, beauty, sublime. (It's amazing how the mind can remember 'A' level Lit things)

Reading
Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists has been a very good read. It's not as dense and meandering as Bolano's 2666, and is a very gentle sort of fiction. I'm discovering that I really like his tone a lot, and like the way the story is moving. I'm guessing it's the amount of text he devotes to nature and the amount of introspection by the protagonist, and maybe even sentence length. I think I might do a craft essay on it -- either on descriptions of nature or internal dialogue or sentences.

Writing
I'm beginning to think more and more that I want to explore memory and obsessions more in my writing. How does memory work, what do you remember, how much of memory can be controlled? How far can obsessions take you? What makes people obsessed? What are people obsessed about? I think this is in line with an ongoing fascination/intrigue with relationship breakdowns and repair/endurance. e.g. why abused victims stay with their partners, what causes hoarding.

Inspirations

Ai Wei Wei's 'Baby Formula' 

On Friday, I went to look at Ai Weiwei's first solo exhibition in Singapore. It was meant to be a statement on the tainted milk scandal in China. He had arranged 4 of Hong Kong's leading brands of infant milk cans in the shape of China on the gallery floor and on the walls, mounted tweets that people wrote in response to it on glossy paper, with milk labels in bright colours as backgrounds. Apart from the fact that the mounted tweets were being sold for SGD $36,000 each and the fact that it was an Ai Weiwei piece, I wasn't particularly impressed by the work. There didn't seem any depth. (Side criticism: The pillars in the middle of the artpiece were distracting -- Gillman Barracks, if you want to be a proper art gallery, you need to have some pillar-less spaces!) 

2 answers that stuck out from an interview with a newspaper that was reproduced in the exhibition catalogue:

Q: Many of your works are commentaries on current affairs. Do you worry that they may not endure and may not be seen in museums, say, a hundred years later?

A: This is the case only for fossils I think. My works for sure have a definite shelf life. The fresher something is, the quicker it rots. 

Q: How do you keep balance and not do something flash in the pan though?

A: I keep coming up with new things, there's no issue. I will still have new things. It's like having a meal. Some people keep eating left-overs. If you always have freshly-cooked meals, you don't need to eat left-overs. I feel the basic condition of Chinese culture is about eating left-overs. All our food has been pickled or left there for a long time. After a while, you begin to have a distaste for fresh dishes. In matters of culture, people are eating leftovers. They are taking in what are considered masters' works. But they have never thought about how, when these works just emerged, they are not seen as masterly but were things that were dangerous or not recognised.

I'm not sure I agree that only the Chinese eat picked food or that the 'basic condition of Chinese culture is about eating left-overs', but these 2 questions centre on the idea of artistic immortality. I always feel this pang when I walk into 2nd hand bookstores or go to book sales filled with dusty paperbacks going for $2 each. So much time thinking and writing and editing, only for the book to be shunned, then probably pulped.


Shun-Kin

On Sat, I watched Shun-Kin, a play directed by Simon McBurney that is based on a short story by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. The director made waves in London when it opened at the Barbican. This fact initially made me a bit wary, and I braced myself for a too-western, overly exotic interpretation. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it in the end, not just for its stylistic theatrical elements (use of light and shadows, use of tatami mats and sticks to create or restrict space, blending in of technology) but by its restrained portrayal that seems very inline with Japanese Noh theatre.

In terms of the narrative, the play uses multiple narrative voices, something I think I want to experiment with in my writing, but wonder how to do so without confusing the reader. (I've reserved the book from the library to find out if Tanizaki does this in the original story). The play starts off with an actor talking about his own life (he is 80, every year he goes to his father's grave and plants a wooden stick in the grave that has a prayer and the name of the dead), first in halting English, then in Japanese. This then transits to him stepping into character (this is done by other people stripping his western garb off him and changing him into traditional Japanese robes) and becomming the old Sasuke. The focus then shifts to a man who is looking for Shun-Kin's grave, and who finds it beside Sasuke's. Then, the narrative splits again, with the introduction of a lady in a modern radio recording studio, who narrates the story and applies it in her own life (she is dating a much younger man, and clearly dominates the relationship), as well as another young man, who sits and writes on a low desk. Throughout the play, this young man, the old Sasuke, and the lady take turns to narrate, and sometimes, they repeat their lines, and tell different versions about what happened. For example, the blinding of Shin-Kin. One version is that she was blinded by a venereal eye disease. Another version is that an evil nurse somehow blinded her eyes with her urine. (Missed some details there about how her urine could blind the girl. I think that's one of the problem with translations -- the subtitles seemed a bit too sparse at some points.) I wonder why McBurney chose to use an all-Japanese cast as well as stage the play entirely in Japanese. For realism or exoticism?

Summary of story: Sasuke is a pharmacist who stays in a rich household. At the age of 13, he falls in love with the master's daughter, a beautiful 9-year-old blind girl named Shun-kin, who insists that he become her guide. What he becomes for the rest of his life however, is an incredibly devoted and much-abused, but never acknowledged lover, while still remaining a servant. They have 3 children, a girl, who dies, and 2 boys, who are given away at birth. When Shun-kin gets attacked at night and her faced is burnt, Sasuke blinds himself with a sewing needle because he wants to reassure her that he will not look at her scarred face.

In terms of obsessions, Shun-Kin is obsessed with her beauty. She keeps larks and makes Sasuke apply their droppings on her skin to keep it soft. She also makes him use his chest to warm her feet. From a young age, she abuses Sasuke physically, slapping, kicking and stepping on him repeatedly. Sasuke however, does not retaliate. In fact, he asks for more, and in his old age, after Shun-Kin has died, he repeats with great fondess 'how soft Madam's feet was, and how small -- they could fit into the palm of my hand!' One narrator (I think it is the young man) makes some reference to sado-masochism, and the lady at the recording studio tells her boyfriend that the story is 'about the 'S' in S & M'.

Singapore Night Festival

There was a segment of the Night Festival this year that was held at Fort Canning. It was a concert organised by Lianhe Zaobao, and which had the T'ang Quartet playing while an opera singer from the Kunqu Opera sang from the Peony Pavillion at one point. I didn't understand a word of it and there were no subtitles, but It struck me how one genre of art (Western classical music) and another (Peking opera) could collaborate.  

A large part of the concert was dedicated to xinyao, a brand of Singaporean Mando-pop that was popular in the 90's, and which I missed, presumably because I was listening to boybands/oldies from the 60's during those years. This made me think about what 'Asian music' is -- a hybrid of Eastern and Western elements or indigenous tunes that might only be familiar to a portion (albeit a large one) of society or just borrowings from the West? I guess it's in the same circular argument as what 'Asian writing' and 'Asian art' is -- which may or may not be due to a sense of cultural inferiority and uncertainty, post-colonialism. 

Reading

Over the last 3 weeks, I’ve been reading 5 books at the same time: Karen Russell’s ‘St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves’, Roberto Bolano’s ‘Last Evenings on Earth’, Tan Twan Eng’s ‘Garden of Evening Mists’, Roberto Bolano’s ‘2666’ and ‘True Notebooks’ by Mark Salzman. 

Initial thoughts:

St Lucy's -- quite a fun read. The same jaunty tone as 'Vampires in the Lemon Grove', with equally wacky characters. I think this would qualify for the YA shelf...

Last Evenings on Earth -- I'm enjoying this a lot. But there's something about the narrative arc of each story that I don't get.

2666 -- This reminds me of Dubliners. It's so meandering.

True Notebooks -- I've only gotten past a couple of pages, but it feels like 'Dangerous Minds' already.

Submissions 

I’ve also attempted to submit writing to some writing competitions/anthologies just to get ideas/keep the momentum going: 

1. The Elle short story competition 

I reduced my Summer Residency 2013 workshop piece to 800 words and changed the story from third to first person because the given starting line was in first person—this was a good exercise in perspective changing, I think – I had to cut out a lot of descriptions and think about the story from a completely different angle. (no email acknowledgement though -- wonder if it went through)

2. Proposal for the Botanic Gardens writing residency 

It was supposed to be a YA novella proposal, but on hindsight, it might not be that appropriate for YA. <Addendum: I later submitted a more YA-appropriate propsal after this post -- with the POV of a 10-year-old girl who stumbles on a secret garden that houses discarded hybrids of plants>

3. Flash fiction piece for anthology organised by Books Actually 

Wrote 240 words on ‘MSG’ – it was a food-themed anthology

Meta-writing 

The whole YA novella thing made me want to explore what YA fiction is. What I've learnt so far about YA fiction : protagonist is young, coming of age theme, fantasy element. I'm still not entirely sure what YA 'fantasy' is though. The Roald Dahl-esque/ Neil Gaiman/JRR Tolkein/CS Lewis sort of fantasy? 

I tried to use the web-based ‘Write or Die’ app to brainstorm some ideas for a YA fantasy set in the Singapore Botanic Gardens. Some possibilities – but the inner critic keeps saying that they are all hackeyed and clichéd. I do like the proposal I submitted in the end -- might write that up as a short piece to see if it could work, just for the heck of it.

Inspirations

I've been trying to look to other sources for inspiration: 

1. Eames exhibition at the Artscience museum

Charles & Ray Eames sought inspiration from toys, something I thought was very interesting. 

'Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games can be precursors to serious ideas.'-- Charles Eames

Maybe a toy-inspired story -- Traditional toys: five stones, chapteh, pick-up sticks (pick-up stories?) 

I guess it's like those choose your own adventure type stories -- a playful element

There was also a quote about how a work is never finished -- even if it an Eames chair.  

2. Exhibitions at the Art galleries at Gillman Barracks 

2a) 'Protagonists'  by Adeel uz Zafar

Pakistani artist who scratched painted of gauze bandages wrapped around stuffed animals. 

Some interesting quotes from the exhibition catalogue: 

On opting for the more challenging path, instead of a simpler one, he says, 'There's a voice in my head that keeps reminding me that I must raise the bar for myself. It would have been simpler to use a pencil or marker and create a similar effect. But why make it easier if you can make it harder?'

Quote from Mark Rotho on his own expansive works: '..I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However, when you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command.'

This is possibly why I cannot fathom writing a novel as yet -- it seems terribly uncontrollable. 

 

 

2b) 'Birth and Death Bridge'  by Keiichi Tanaami

I mistakenly called this the 'Japanese cartoon one' at the Fost gallery, where the Adeel uz Zafar exhibition was being shown at, and the lady in charge of that exhibition was quite aghast. Pop art, apparently, the term is. Not comics. And definitely not cartoons.  The girl at Tanaami exhibition (what are these people called?) was talking about the artist, and about how he likes to insert Mickey Mouse ears in his paintings because they represented him. She mentioned something about how he saw/painted a picture of Mickey Mouse looking at Bridget Bardot and thereafter identified with the Mouse. This made me think how my short stories all seem to sound alike. It's the Mickey Mouse factor.

2c) Korean artists (all red, squares, flora and cartoons)

Moon Kyungwon 'Operant Conditioning' series

Seahyun Lee 'Between Red' series

Hyungmin Moon by numbers series: Art in America 2008, 2009

I thought the Korean artists were all very good, but I didn't understand exactly what they were doing. One used plants and cartoon princesses, another painted landscapes of the DMZ in red, another painted small blocks of colour. A lot of the accompanying explanations were lost in translation, unfortunately.

3. The Mystery of Picasso's Creative Process 

   

 

Went for this in July actually. I thought how ironic it was that his last piece looked like it should have been his starting piece. This made me think of the editing process -- in the process of editing and editing and reworking and reworking, does the end product get so reduced that the effort that went into its creation is almost obliterated?