Over the weekend, I didn’t do very much except for… contemplating some ideas on romance, editing The River, sashimi, revisiting some Beatles albums and playing some PixelJunk Monsters.

Anthrax

The culprit of the post-911 anthrax mess has been identified with… electrons. [via Scientific American]

More Love

Speaking of the Beatles, a DVD of the documentary accompanying the LOVE project will be released next month. [via The Beatles] This makes the Beatles nut in me very happy. This makes the wallet in my pocket very unhappy. October is a month of many games, and a Beatles DVD to top it off isn’t exactly going to help.

But that said, I remember being sceptical about LOVE at first, but it’s turned into one of my favourite albums of all.

More On Roth

Another review of Roth’s Indignation, this one by Mark Sarvas. [via Barnes & Noble] Certainly gives me second thoughts about getting the book. I’ll probably proceed with my plans to go back to classic Roth and leave this a little lower down the priority list.

Work, Work, Work

Okay, I think I’ve got to leave it at that and get to work on a number of random things.

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Just yesterday, I became rather sad at some random thing and it kicked me into the next gear. It always happens that way. I just get hurt or upset or unhappy about some… thing, and I start to write. It probably isn’t related, it probably is, but all the same, the energy just goes into the whole writing thing.

I suppose the natural state of imagination for me is just that. It’s that sadness. That unhappiness. That bad mood. I think figuring out how to channel it into something that wasn’t emo nonsense probably took a bit of experience, but ever since, my writing has come to depend partly on such bursts of energy. It’s kind of a morbid way to look at it, I suppose.

Okay, let’s not. Let’s just say that it’s therapeutic.

Brr.

But I wanted to tell you this because I got to scribble down (well, figure of speech, since I really typed it out) some fragments of the new project and it all looked promising.

Kurosawa Revisited

They’re restoring Kurosawa films for screening. [via The Envelope - LA Times] Such news makes me happy.

Roth Reviews

The reviews of Roth’s Indignation are coming in. Here’s one you might be interested in reading (the Michiko Kakutani one). [via The New York Times] Somehow they kind of put a damper on my spirits. Oh well, I’ll just pick it up when it hit paperback then.

Not So Tough

I crashed a lit lecture yesterday, and it really wasn’t all that bad. And today’s the last day of school before the mid-term break. Let’s get it out of the way first.

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Yesterday was the 16th, meaning it was the date of release of the new Philip Roth, Indignation. I suppose that’s something you already know and I don’t have to tell you about, but so there.

In celebration, I’m planning to read a couple of Roths that I’ve missed, like Everyman, and reread a couple of classics, like American Pastoral. It’ll be a good excuse for me to add them to my library too. I won’t be able to get my hands on them so soon, so it’ll probably be… by the end of the year. A Roth Winter, so to speak.

Other Readings

Of course, just reading Roth alone would kill me. Apart from the usual fiction and graphic novels, I’ll probably identify a couple of writers I want to re-explore along the way. A sort of targets thing, I guess. I’m thinking Borges and Nabokov now, but I’m sure I’ll change my mind by year’s end.

School =(

School leaves me very tired. It’s not like it’s tremendously busy or anything. It’s more like a vampire visited during my sleep and decided just to leech me of blood and never turn me into another one of the undead because… I suppose it means more competition.

Oh, and tomorrow, I’m going to drop by at an advanced literature module just to have a look. I have a feeling I will be terribly out of place, considering I haven’t even one basic literature module under my belt, but hey, the academia doesn’t worry me that much. Hope it turns out interesting. I think they’re doing Jeanette Winterson, which, curiously enough, is the one writer in the whole module whom I’m not familiar with. =S

Test today. Wish me luck.

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