Abstract Bridges

Coincidences And Crossroads

School’s a week in and I’ve been seeing a few familiar faces on campus. Some of them weren’t people I was expecting to see, certainly, but chance deals good cards sometimes. It was nice talking with people whom I had at some point realised I probably wouldn’t ever see again. Some of them, on the other hand, were old friends. Impossibly old friends. And it was nice to bump into them (certainly figuratively speaking) and chat a little while making mental notes that I would catch up with them soon.

A couple of my classmates I’ve grown closer to, like there’s been some tectonic shift of sorts. I guess it occurs every semester or so. They are certainly nice people, so I ought to be delighted to have new people to talk more to these days. (And I am.)

On a couple of birthdays, I wished a couple of friends and apologised for my empty-handedness. One of them was someone I had not spoken to for a long, long time, and it was really good to hear that she was doing well. It was a bit of… mending bridges, I reckon one could call it, though the story’s complicated and I’ll spare you, dear Imaginary Reader. Suffice to say it was a positive sort of conversation.

And with the other, I could not talk much. Though the bridge in this case was always there. It’s just not one we often revisit. Like with those old friends I was talking about earlier. And as with those cases, I promised myself that I would catch up with her soon.

There were a couple of other minor conversations. All have gone into the imaginary folder somewhere at the corner of my brain, with reminders that I ought to keep in touch with them too.

I think this might all sound very happy, very shallow, or maybe just very dull, like I’ve run out of things to write. The truth is, it’s just not very usual for me to go about doing this, though one could argue that it was the circumstances that conspired to arrange these things, and that wouldn’t be far from the truth. In any case, it’s just not very usual, and because this is a very un-unusual journal, I thought it would be wise to point out that this is in fact unusual.

I hope it continues. I’m quite enjoying myself. For reasons that aren’t the obvious ones, but let’s not worry about them.

Elephants

I finished Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes. It’s my fourth Murakami book, and it’s certainly the one I’ve enjoyed the most. I think this is the strongest I’ve read him, although it’s fair to say I’ve not read very much. In spite of my prolonged shortage of sleep, some of the stories got stuck in my head, including the one about TV People, the one about the Dancing Dwarf, and (especially) the love story (about the 100% Girl). It’s a very strong collection of short fiction and I definitely recommend a go at it if you’ve yet to try it.

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Tuesday Photo: the salaryman

Idea Remix

Idea Remix

Sometimes you get up feeling completely lousy. Sometimes you get up thinking you’re being chased down by a bear. And sometimes you get up and all your best ideas don’t seem very good at all. On Saturday, I woke up thinking that everything I’ve thought of for Singapura is actually trash. On Sunday, I woke up thinking that it’s not all so bad.

Things just happen that way. The one conclusion I can safely draw from this is that Singapura is still far too young and I’m not at all ready to try my hand at writing it. The nice thing though is that I think I’ll eventually have two projects to plunge myself into once I sort it all out. One of them is Singapura, of course, and the other is something a bit more unusual, though I’d like to mess around with it to tell what it actually is first.

That one other thing seems like a pretty tasty idea and I’m going to see if it works out over the next few days. It’s a good note to start the week on, if nothing else.

At the same time, I better start making inquiries on making submissions.

A Few Links

The Tournament of Books is going to begin in a couple of months. [via The Morning News] The book I was rooting for last year suffered an early demise, and I can only hope the same doesn’t happen this year.

I saw this very amusing form of the Monster Manual dressed up like a children’s book here. [via io9] It’s a book called Monster Isle by Jeff Miracola. Actual link. [via Monster Isle] I think I’m going to try to find it at a local bookstore.

You can get a free download of The Rake’s Song from the Decemberists upcoming album The Hazards Of Love if you just follow this link. [via The Decemberists] It is a very traditional folktale weaved into a decidedly folk arrangement. Very nice stuff. Not for the kids.

On Saturday, I came across Nikki Farquharson’s site Random Got Beautiful, which is a sort of image mashup based on colours. [via Random Got Beautiful] I thought it was a great site, and so thus the link.

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Blindness

Blindness is my second José Saramago book (the first being The Gospel According To Jesus Christ). I want to recommend it to you, which would normally involve a pseudo-review of some sort full of fancy superlatives and some forms of analyses, but no, I’m not a lit critic or a book reviewer, and so I’ve decided that I’ll just stick with telling you these things directly. In fact, I won’t even do a plot summary, because that really seems a bit silly in the context of what I’m going to tell you.

What I have to tell you will really sound like a bunch of empty words if you didn’t try the book, and I suppose I’m cheating by saying that because this is supposed to get you to read the book. Here goes anyway.

Blindness is a powerful book, the sort that crushes you completely like you would expect the greatest pieces of art to. It is bold and unforgiving, and perhaps to look deepest, that is what we will have to be. It is at one time an unflinching look at the lowest points of human behaviour and a celebration of the human spirit.

The most prominent feature of Saramago’s work (of course, I’ve only ever read two of his books), is his unwavering grasp of the novel. It is this that so assuredly steers the story from start to finish. You always get the feeling that you are in the hands of a true master of the form.

Speaking of Saramago, Blindness wears his defining characteristics proudly. One of these is his style, which I’ve heard complaints about. I think it’s difficult to read for some people, but mostly I find it a breeze to read.

Another trait is its fabulous nature, and that’s where the most important thing I have to tell you come in. Like the greatest of our fables, Blindness casts a tall shadow and it is in this shadow that we consider what it is to be us, or simply to be.

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Thursday Photo: fish symbols

The diagnosis is school.

Tired

School’s only just begun. Really. At the time of writing this, I’m only two days in. For reasons I cannot identify, I am quite exhausted by it all. The first day was actually all rather great, but yesterday it degenerated into the sort of fatigue that I should only be getting weeks into school. I suppose this means it’s going to be a long semester.

That’s not to say that all’s bad. Out of school work, there is some extra spring in my step, mostly because I think I’m making good progress on my work. I think it came with the holidays, what with the third draft of The River, some reading and some short fiction. Oh and of course some reflection too. These things… have had an effect, and I can’t exactly say what, but I’m pretty sure it’s all positive.

That said, those must have been two of the worst paragraphs I’ve written down here in a long time, so before I stop making sense, I better stop writing.

One Link

Danteworlds is an interesting take on Dante’s Divine Comedy. [via Danteworlds] I saw it here first. [via The Book Bench]

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Tuesday Photo: temple sign

New Days And Singaporean Writers

All Over Again

So begins the new semester in a flurry of activity that involves all the usual elements of timetable messes, tutorial balloting, textbook fencing and the dread that usually comes with the acknowledgement that it will bring with it the tests, tutorials, projects and examinations.

I see it as a good thing in the sense that apart from all the school work, I’ll no doubt be compelled to be fulfulling all my other obligations, like that query letter sitting alone in the dark right now. There’s this strange illness where at some point during the holidays you accept that you just can’t do all of these duties anymore and you have to wait till the work (from school) piles up and you are somehow motivated to make your life miserable by piling on the extra commitments. I don’t think it can be treated. However, it does imply that I can finally get some of that work done.

Looking ahead, it looks like a difficult semester, but I’m relatively unfazed. The subjects are definitely not to my tastes, but sometimes you do what you want to and sometimes you do what you must. (I think that came off Sandman. I just finished the Absolute run.) I think I can eke out some okay results. On the other hand, there is quite a bit of uncertainty with the writing, but I’ll get that sorted out. I have no doubt that it’ll make some sort of progress during the term so I’m not entirely concerned.

Oh and friends. Yes, got to sort some things out. Though it’ll mostly be work for these three months, and the three months after that, and then it’ll be the next term!

I would sigh hear but you wouldn’t be able to hear me.

Prizes

I saw a report in the Sunday Times yesterday about how Singaporeans are still waiting on their writers to win a first international prize. If memory serves, it seemed to refer to our recent Olympic heroics. To me, it seems to miss the point because it puts an unhealthy emphasis on prestige and glory when art cannot thrive on those things. And art is nothing like competitive sports, and that reference was poor. That the article was published in our main English paper makes it all the more sad because it shifts the attention of the public away from art and onto the prizes.

You know, the bathroom singer might be a less successful artist than a lit prize winner, but he is no less an artist, and he might even be a more capable one.

Handy Links

Lovely Doctor Who figurines. [via Forbidden Planet] I think there are fifteen of them. (Click around.) You should get them. I shouldn’t because I have neither money nor space for them. Though I want to. So very much.

New SDXC cards to go up to 2TB in storage. [via The Online Photographer] I read this as good news not because I’m going to be using them but because it means that the prices of my camera cards should be going down.

Useful links to sites that deal with books. [via Mashable] Speaking of which, the Web Walrus sent me a link to Reading Trails [via Reading Trails], which looks intriguing. It’s a social site of sorts, as far as I can tell. I was supposed to read more about it and try it out but I haven’t got to it.

Handy WordPress things. [via Smashing Magazine]

And onwards to the new semester.

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Bag Of Curious Things

A couple of days ago, I cleared out my desk (partly out of want of something to do) and it all looks much tidier now. I have no doubt that it will go back to its bad habits within a couple of months.

I came across a few notebooks. I’m in the habit of jotting down all my ideas, half-ideas and non-ideas. I picked up this habit a few years ago in the lame fear of losing some precious modicum of creative insight (it doesn’t really happen, but there is that paranoia there). Sometimes there are huge descriptions of things that seemed so simple in my imagination but so long in the form of text. Other times, there are very ugly drawings or haphazard attempts at mind maps (which, incidentally, have never worked for me, though I still try them). And most of the time, I get lines and lines of fragments. These are mostly in bad handwriting, and happen to me whenever I just feel compelled to put something together. On occasion, I’ve looked back at these fragments failing to recall what I had actually meant.

In any case, I found it most interesting that there’s a surprisingly large fraction of ideas emerging from… well, I don’t know the word for it. Errors, maybe? Misheard lyrics; quotations (deliberately or not) taken out of context; isolated titles of things that I’d never watched, read or heard (and in many cases, still haven’t); mistaken interpretations becoming puns; meaningless phrases; things imagined with the help of songs and yet not at all fitting their lyrics; books that I’d never read and merely tried to guess out of vague ideas gleaned from synopses and clues from their covers; the marrying of elements that have nothing to do with one another; and so on.

A bag of curious things, this. Somehow these things have inspired quite a number of my ideas. (Not always good ones, mind you, but that’s mostly better than nothing.)

It’s intriguing for me because in observing this, I also observe how it’s become less and less of an accident. Increasingly I deliberately pair jarring elements together to emerge with some chimerical invention. My willingness to play, to explore, to be whimsical also seems to have grown; I’m less reluctant to take things out of context and to consider them on completely imagined terms. I delight in misinterpretations because they always lead to other new things.

Maybe it’s part of some subconscious work process. It has after all been pretty successful, so I might have somehow internalised it.

Brr. Then I imagine all the other writers in the world and start wondering about all the strange, strange work processes that there might be out there.

But, you know, whatever works.

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Holiday Review

Last weekend of the holidays, so it’s probably a good time to see what I’d accomplished and what I’d failed to do.

Success

• New draft for The River. I think it’s just about the final draft, so I’m looking to make submissions soon. Relatively happy with it.
• Some plot for Singapura. As is the case with all projects, the first ideas are not the best. That said, it seems to be slowly moving into shape. I’ve no doubt the final product will scarcely resemble the initial concept, but things look optimistic at least.
• Finished my self-assigned readings. Well, actually, I haven’t yet. I was supposed to read the Everyman’s edition of the Flann O’ Brien novels (of which I really liked a couple and didn’t quite like the others as much) and The Absolute Sandman. I’m down to the last section of The Absolute Sandman so things look on schedule, if nothing else.
• Wrote. I wrote one piece of short fiction called Abide With Me. It’s supposed to be edited, but I kind of haven’t got to that. Still, it was nice just to write something completely not related to The River.
• Finished Doctor Who Series 3. It was a nice series. I particularly liked the Family of Blood storyline and Blink. Some parts of the series felt a bit generic, though.

Failure

• Didn’t go on photo outings. I wanted to go take photos, really. Somewhere. Some place. There was just no one, however, and that dampens the mood a bit, so I didn’t go anywhere. I took a few of Christmas lights, though that was it.
• Didn’t draft query. Oh, you. I knew it would be difficult to write you. I knew you would laugh at me when I had no letter to show at the end of the holidays. But mark my words, query, I’ll have the last laugh.
• Plot Singapura? I was initially thinking that I would emerge with a clear idea of where I wanted it to go and how I wanted it to look, but my imagination likes to throw me curveballs so I’m always left with more or less completely new perspectives on the plot. In other words, while I made progress with the plot, I can’t say that I managed what I was expecting.
• Catch up on Doctor Who. I hope they’re showing Series 4.

In The Foreseeable Future…

Here’s what I can see myself doing in the near future (say… this semester):

• Editing. Proofing of The River and editing of Abide With Me.
• That darned thing. The query. I’m looking to find out more of the local book industry, so I’ll get to that as well.
• Minimal writing. I don’t want to write much during the term, but I’ll still try to put to paper two (I think) short pieces. I might also explore a different form. Likely some kind of theatre thing. Though that’s just a self-study thingee.
• Singapura. My main creative output during this period will be to figure out exactly what I want with Singapura, just like with The River last year.
• Reading. Time to kick off the reading for 2009. Many books waiting for me.
• One trip. Somewhere. Anywhere. Preferably not alone. With our cameras. Snapping away.
• The Road. The movie’s coming, right? I hope it doesn’t disappoint.
• The usual shopping. Birthday presents and books, mostly. Oh and the Decemberists album Hazards of Love. I also need to find a nice guide for Ulysses for when the long summer break starts. Of birthday gifts, I only have one to prepare in the near future, though I could be prepared for the Aprils and Mays and Julys.
• Study. Oh what a surprise.

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