Rollercoasters & Bedsheets

On 11 March 2016, ‘Rollercoasters & Bedsheets - an anthology of sex in minutes’ was launched at China Square.

Published by Pillow Book Media, this poetry collection was edited by Charlene Shepherdson and Muslim Sahib following an open call. 

Like old movies I tend to gloss over, or chortle quickly through, the sex scenes in my saintly prose. 

So as one of the world's last innocents I found this book of poems educational and encouraging. 

Some of my favourite turns of phrase/lines include:

"Till my legs utterly succumb
To kinetic Stockholm syndrome"
Muslim Sahib

"Noses take in the salty tang of simmering abalone and tongues"
Ignatius Tan

"The way you eat a river snail,
she says, is to put the shell to
your mouth, and your tongue
over half the opening."
Stephanie Chan

"In me there
moves an
other

spilling like
a sound

sliding
into fire."
Samuel Caleb Wee

"... Yet if familiarity
is what it takes for you to be here,
your lips persevering in
its gentle craft, its whispers
roaring across the infinite dormant
caves of my body, so be it. There will
be fresh sheets when you call."
Jerrold Yam

"Falling asleep with the wonder
of what your bedsheets would say
if you let them speak."
Charlene Shepherdson

Images and posts on other Singapore Writers & #SGLit event can be found here.
 

LKY One Year On

One year on and memorials to The Man are everywhere. Time to:

• turn to the poetry anthology, A Luxury We Cannot Afford, edited by Joshua Ip and Christine Chia
• reread Gwee li Sui's poem about Ah Kong
• visit the Royston Tan curated video installation 'A Moment of Unity'
• buy Left-Right, a new photo book put together by Geraldine Kang & Kenneth Tay.
  'A record of our complicities and anxieties surrounding Singapore's image factory.'
• look again at my four photo stories on LKY's passing taken last March with some favourite images shown below

Vigil, Singapore General Hospital

Tribute, Tanjong Pagar Community Centre

After, Lee Kuan Yew Lying in State

Cortege, Goodbye Lee Kuan Yew, Kampong Bahru

Waiting for news at SGH

People waiting at SGH

Bell at SGH

Paying tribute at Tanjong Pagar Community Centre

Tribute at Tanjong Pagar Community Centre

A child leaves Tanjong Pagar Community Centre after paying tribute

Crowds leave Parliament House after paying tribute

Waiting for the funeral procession outside a fancy dress shop on Kampung Bahru Rd

Waiting for the funeral procession on Kampung Bahru Rd

Waiting for the funeral procession on Kampung Bahru Rd

Waiting for the funeral procession on Kampung Bahru Rd

Waiting for the funeral procession on Kampung Bahru Rd

The funeral procession on Kampung Bahru Rd

The funeral procession on Kampung Bahru Rd

A Moveable Feast

Full of gossip and acute observations, advice on the craft of writing and how to make your money go further, together with a great deal of bitchiness and not a little sadness, there is something compelling and immensely entertaining about Hemmingway’s memoir of Paris in the 20s, A Moveable Feast.

Hemingway’s personality shines through and his colourful sketches are often tinged with a comic, juvenile, macho competitiveness. Highlights include: 

- Slagging off Ford Madox Ford (‘holding himself as upright as an ambulatory, well clothed, up ended hogshead.’)

- Revelations of intimacy involving Gertrude Stein & Alice B Toklas

- Poking fun at F Scott Fitzgerald’s anxiety about size induced by something Zelda said

- Reflections on Zelda’s impact on Scott’s writing, his hypochondria, and insecurities regarding The Great Gatsby (’To hear him talk of it you would never know how very good it was, except that he had the shyness about it that all non conceited writers have when they have done something very fine …’)

- An inability to distinguish between the wickedest man in the world, the devil worshipper, Aleister Crowley, and Hilaire Belloc

- Trying to get TS Eliot out of the bank

I read the earlier edition and I would like to read the 2009 Restored Edition put together by Sean Hemingway. The differences between editions provide an insight into authorial intent and authenticity.

I understand Mariel Hemingway has bought the film rights. A movie of the book would be something to see. Leo as Hem, Danny de Vito as Gertrude Stein, Tom Hiddlestone as F Scott Fitzgerald … ? 

Mates, Jakarta Selatan

What a week. I was on a prose panel at NTU for their English & Drama Society, Epiphany. One of my favourite writers, Nicholson Baker, was on the panel too together with the talented Agnes Chew and Diana Rahim. I have vivid memories of borrowing Vox & Fermata in the mid '90s and finding I loved the very different Room Temperature. Nicholson Baker was warm and generous. We talked about photography and he mentioned how his father once had a Rolleiflex.

Just a heads up on my To Do List for the next few months.

I need to finish: 

• my story, Brothel in the Jungle: a dark tale of lust from Spottiswoode Park  
• a draft of a story/essay on The Eurasian in History (Tales from the Uncanny Valley) 
• a draft of my creative non fiction book on foreign workers in Singapore

Images to be published in 2016:

• images supporting Verena Tay’s words in a new photo book Left-Right curated by Geraldine Kang & Kenneth Tay
• a photo story with a construction worker who broke his leg in This is Not A Safety Barrier (Ethos Books) to be published in 2016

Stories to be published in 2016:

• a story in In Transit edited by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow & Ruihe (Math Paper press) to be published mid 2016
• a story in Esquire Singapore in April 2016
• A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea will be published in Singapore Love Stories (Monsoon Books) sometime in 2016
• Two stories will be published in the US edited by Jee Leong Koh

Other stuff:

• a prose piece for SWF’s Poetry Among Stars
• SOTA writer in residence in October 2016

I have to go back to work to feed the family soon - before then I will try to write as much as possible

The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye at NUS, Nov 2015

Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye was released internationally by Pantheon Books last week to overwhelming critical acclaim.

Crumbs, Charlie Chan even made it to the book pages of The Economist & the airwaves of NPR. This must make Charlie Chan the most critically successful Singaporean book of the 21st century.  The hope is that this success leads to greater interest in other Singaporean writers and artists.

Last November, Professor Philip Holden gave a fascinating talk on The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye at the National University of Singapore. It was quite an occasion. The room was packed. Edmund Wee, Dan Koh, Jason Eric Lundberg, Laremy Lee, Amos Yee were all in attendance. Even Sonny turned up half way through. 

Prof. Philip took us deeper into the text and the discussion included:

1. How the text raises questions about the way we tell stories and how these stories impinge on the personal, “our” story
   
   I think this is key to the book’s success.
   
   The book covers so many themes that relate not just to a Singaporean experience (how the individual relates to the state & the enormity of LKY in the Singapore Story), but on a broader level to so many (like myself, who have laid down ‘roots’ in Singapore) looking back on their their past, at what has been left behind: neglected creative urges, choices made between comfort and security and the passions of youth, and the sacrifices made in pursuit of wealth over art.
    
2. How fiction rethinks the dominant narrative of the developmental state and the ‘Third World to First myth’ in Singapore, and critiques the priorities and privileges of pragmatism and common sense - housing, education, transport, security etc - over artistic, creative values.
   
   Artists and writers have explored this for a long time in Singapore but no-one’s ever done it quite like Sonny.
    
3. The development of Singlit from allegories of national identity, post colonial expatriate Singaporean paeans to nostalgia and home, through to more individual stories of excluded minority identities and now to the outer reaches of historiographic metafiction.
   
   When I read Charlie Chan the first time it reminded me of the individual vs the state/corporatism stories (Troy Chin's Resident Tourist, Simon Tay’s City of Small Blessings and Philip Jeyaretnam’s Abraham’s Promise).
   
   Charlie Chan explores this theme with a protagonist who is passive in the face of the State - but resilient in his quiet pursuit of his art. It is in acts of the imagination that the protagonist finds agency, despite the lack of material and public success this brings.
    
4. How the text explores the redemptive possibilities of storytelling
   
   Charlie Chan's Welsh rarebit dream is coming true (see pg 109).
   
   There is a lot in the book to explore on aspects of fiction writing craft e.g. the role of the author, implied author, the reliability of the different modes of narrator, the use of the documentary mode, stories within stories, how written text interplays with the graphic styles, the protagonist living within his own creations etc. This analysis will have to wait for another time.
    
5. How the text presents not just alternate realities but explores the way all historical narratives are formed.
    
6. How the text, as a form of historiographic meta fiction, doesn’t just present a representative character as the proper subject of history but presents an unreliable, marginal character as protagonist to carry the narrative forward and provide fresh perspectives on historical narratives.
   
   Charlie Chan is not just unreliable and marginal, he is grumpy, solipsistic, and a dreamer. His story is not a presentation of objective history, but about his own path towards coming to terms with his place in the world (‘the routes of his story’) as he grows old and looks back on his life. 
   
   This emphasis on a subjective story prioritises ‘routes’ over ‘roots’ (see Stuart Hall). The process and conditions for generating history are the key.
    
7. I think this is one of the reasons why Charlie Chan Hock Chye hits a cultural bull’s eye in SGP. Compare the PM’s view of history as fixed, objective, indisputable, hard truth vs the journey of Charlie Chan that has a meaning that changes & is diverse, that transcends space and time, soars far beyond reality and celebrates imaginative possibility.
   
   Here’s Stuart Hall:
   
   “Instead of asking what are people‘s roots, we ought to think about what are their routes, the different points by which they have come to be now; they are, in a sense, the sum of those differences. That, I think, is a different way of speaking than talking about multiple personalities or multiple identities as if they don‘t have any relation to one another or that they are purely intentional. These routes hold us in places, but what they don‘t do is hold us in the same place." 
   
   "We need to try to make sense of the connections with where we think we were then as compared to where we are now." 
   
   "That is what biography or the unfolding sense of the self or the stories we tell ourselves or the autobiographies we write are meant to do, to convince ourselves that these are not a series of leaps in the dark that we took, but they did have some logic, though it‘s not the logic of time or cause or sequence. But there is a logic of connected meaning.”
    
8. How all history is provisional. This is the nature of history - both personal & state histories are born and bound up in each other and the way we think about our lives.
   
   The way Charlie Chan is written is the way we look at and read our own lives: in fragments, excerpts, different styles, with self deception, clarity and ambiguity, shying away from pain, cognitive dissonance, reinventing, recasting, reframing events. Always, we are nearly the hero of our own lives.
   
   The story we tell about ourselves is the truest story of all, the choices we make, and the glimpses of the other self we could have been.

This is not an exhaustive list of topics discussed. The layered depth and richness of the book leaves a reader with much more to think about. 

More images from the launch of The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye at Kinokuniya in May 2015.

We Rose Up Slowly

To what extent is We Rose Up Slowly autobiographical?

• Hmmm. Is this a question about narrative theory or whether I have cycled into the sea or chopped off anyone’s finger with a miniature guillotine?
   
• These stories are not autobiographical. This is fiction. Writer’s lie. It’s a mistake to privilege the author or idealise their role and intentions too much. The text is all. The reader is everything.
   
• Stories do not reflect reality - they create their own reality from: 
  • everything the author has collected from their life (including false memories and outright lies) & selected to be transformed by language for presentation in a story
  • everything the reader has collected from their life (including core assumptions and prejudices) used to find meaning in the text
     
• There are, however, aspects of the writer’s personality and experience built, baked or bleeding into their narrator and characters. 
   
• The play and leakage between the persona of the author, the narrator and characters is fascinating.
   
• Influences, the tone and emotion of experiences and incidents from the author’s life do permeate We Rose Up Slowly but it would be a mistake to conflate the author and any narrator or character in We Rose Up Slowly too closely.
   
• Events and episodes plucked from my life include:
  • The experience of unrequited love (We Rose Up Slowly, A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea, Other People's Cats).
    Loving someone more than they love you. On reflection and in time you realise it was for the best you never ended up together.
  • Not knowing WTF I’m doing with my life (Rashid at the Sail).
    On reflection and in time you realise that’s part of the the anxiety and exhilaration of being alive.
  • Adoption issues (Death of a Clown, A Girl and a Guy in a Kijang in Kemang)
    Imagined accounts of finally meeting your natural father or mother - [Spoiler Alert *****] resulting in thoughts of violent murder and an accidental tryst in the back of a Kijang.
  • Privilege (The Finger)
  • Casual racism (Idiot and Dog).
    On reflection and in time hopefully you realise, and reflect on your cognitive dissonance, prejudice and privilege.
     
• The important question about these stories is not are they autobiographical - because this privileges the author too much.
  
  Isn’t it more important to ask: who is the reader?
  
  And what does this text mean to them?
  
  And how does this book change the answer to the question the reader always asks, when he/she puts down any book:
  
                                               what am I going to do next?

More Q & A on We Rose Up Slowly

Speakeasy #25: Valentine's Edition

Speakeasy #25 was held on 12 Feb 2016 at Artistry in front of a warm and boisterous (now paying but its worth it) audience and featured a range of traditional, pop, contemporary, queer, and #SGLit poetry selected by the following talented poets/writers/impresarios/wannabe Lotharios/flaneurs/etc.

• Jennifer Champion: Kiki Dimoula's "Diabolical Coincidence", Andrea Gibson's "Love Poem"
• Stephanie Ye: Carol Ann Duffy's "Death of a Teacher", Eric Low's "An Assumption of Light and Motion" and Hemingway killing a beloved cat
• Sean Tobin: Cyril Wong's "Zero Child Policy" and Yong Shu Hoong
• Joshua Ip: Ann Ang's "Valentine for your Hair", Benzie Dio's "Stamford road" and Cheryl Julia Lee's "How We Make Love"
• Jason Wee: Carl Phillips and Sean Tobin 
• Mrigaa Sethi: Audre Lorde, Joan Larkin and other lesbian poets
• David Wong: Jack Herbert, Ruth Stone and Yousuf Komunyakaa
• Richard Angus Whitehead: a Shakespeare sonnet, Chaucer's Squire and Bob Dylan introduced by tales of dubious antics from 1978 Cambridge
• Christine Chia: Cyril Wong Boats, Elisabeth Jennings, Elisabeth Bishop and others
• Verena Tay: a Shakespearen sonnet, John Donne & a very sassy, The Owl & The Pussycat
• Lucas Ho: 14 year old Charlotte and Thom Gunn
• Becca D’Bus: as ever delicious and decadent, argued with herself over the boy being mine, and told us very clearly that children are our future.

More images from Speakeasy's past:

• Speakeasy #16 George Szirtes & Ng Yi Sheng
• Speakeasy #17 At the Mill with Banglar Kantha Literary Association
• Speakeasy #18 Valentine's Edition 2015
• Speakeasy #19 Deborah Emmanuel

Kamilla, Wahwah & Friend, Jakarta Selatan

It's been over a month since I've posted due to Dengue Fever, trips to the UK and Jakarta. I hope to be a little more regular over the coming few months.

Best of 2015

More images at:

• Speakeasy#17 at The Mill
• Cortege, Goodbye Lee Kuan Yew
• HOME Academy
• HOME Showtime Pageant
• Kamila getting a haircut
• People looking at paintings, National Gallery Singapore

If you'd like to read a story of mine, The Finger is featured in Singapore Poetry. 

Further background to the story can be found here.