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.