Literature of the World map by Backforward24

[Source]

Not perfect (e.g. the Reddit commenters are complaining about how she didn't put down Don Quixote for Spain, and why is The God of Small Things in the pride of place for India instead of the Ramayana? But the creator is still in school, judging from the comments.

Click here for a zoomable image.

Multicultural Singapore? Really?, 23 July 2016

So I'm still diligently reading Nikolai Gogol (which is fun, since his Ukrainian stories are ripping stuff). But I figured I might as well fill you in on one of the events I'll be doing:

Date: Sat 23 July, 2016
Time: 2pm-8pm
Venue: The Projector, 6001 Beach Road #05-00 Golden Mile Tower, Singapore 199589
Tickets: $40 from The Projector

Cultural diversity has long been a hallmark of Singapore society. We boast about being a bustling global city with a multiracial and multireligious society. But just how deep is our cultural diversity?

To what extent do our different groups and cultures understand and accommodate each other? Do our daily intercultural encounters lessen or harden social prejudices? Join us for a thought-provoking day with heartfelt poetry, insightful discussion and a screening of the award-winning film, Dheepan.

Keynote Speaker:
Assoc. Prof Daniel PS Goh

Panellists:
Asst. Prof Imran bin Tajudeen
Assoc. Research Fellow Mr. Pravin Prakash

Poets:
Divya Victor
Karisa Poedjirahardjo
Ng Yi-Sheng
Shivram Gopinath

Schedule:
1.45pm: House opens
2pm - 3.15pm: Poetry Reading
3.15pm - 3.30pm: Intermission
3.30pm - 4pm: Lecture
4pm - 4.45pm: Panel Discussion
4.45pm - 5.15pm: Audience Q&A
5.15pm - 6pm: Intermission
6pm - 8pm: Screening of “Dheepan”

Another event organised by the Singapore Advocacy Awards. Find us at https://www.facebook.com/SingaporeAdvocacyAwards/.

If You Like This Book By A Man, You’ll Love This Book By A Woman

Came across this wonderful Buzzfeed article by Jennifer Schaffer. I especially appreciate the multicultural selection of authors:

1. Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredible Close → NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby → Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

5. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita → Marguerite Duras, The Lover

8. James Joyce, Ulysses → Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

10. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover → Anais Nin, The Unexpurgated Diary

11. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath → Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half Of A Yellow Sun

13. Justin Torres, We The Animals → Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic

15. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas → Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

21. Art Spiegelman, Maus → Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

22. Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 → Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

Someday, maybe I'll read only women for a year, just to find out what it's like...

Happy New Year! On #sgreads

It's a New Year! I suppose I should be making up new resolutions about how I'm going to save money, write in a more disciplined way, and generally be more focussed about achieving my long-term goals.

But I think I'll just begin a habit of tweeting every new book I finish instead. Here's my first for the year:

I'm not a big user of Twitter, but I have been using the app to publicise my (sadly rare) sightings of people reading books on Singaporean public transport.

It's a trend started by the Straits Times journalist Corrie Tan aka @corrietan, and every tweet is hashtagged #sgreads. 

If you wanna join in, please, be my guest - I hardly ever take any MRT line but the East-West one, and my pickings have been decidedly slim.

(No idea why more people don't read on the bus. Do you?)

My Book of the Year

Just a quick little entry to mention that I submitted a nomination for Book of the Year at the Singapore Poetry Website.

There's 26 different respondents - check 'em out. Weirdly enough, though some of us nominated foreign books, most of us (me included) stuck to choosing stuff by our fellow countrymen. Patriotism, or parochialism? Or just plain old nepotism?

Ah, what the hell. I just went with what touched me most.

On Queer Singapore Lit!

Confession: I haven't started reading War and Peace. I've downloaded it onto my Kindle and dipped into the reader-friendly preface (carting this thousand-page tome around in hard copy did not seem to be a wise decision), but what's been occupying my intellectual space recently has been the literature of Singapore.

Specifically, the queer literature of Singapore. I've been invited to contribute an article for an academic journal on the subject. And even though there are multiple wikis about it, and numerous essays (including one I wrote as part of the introduction of GASPP: a Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose), I've found them to be woefully incomplete.

For instance, if you want to talk about the first queer Singaporean work, then you run into some murky ground. Most people say it was Chay Yew's short play, As If He Hears, in 1988.

But then what about the highly successful 1987 play Army Daze by Michael Chiang, which features a flamboyantly effeminate ensemble character, Kenny Pereira, with a heartstring-tugging monologue about how much his parents are forcing him to be a real man? What about Wei Tongque's Mandarin short story Mei Jiang/媚将, which won the Golden Point Short Story Competition in 1986? What about the codedly queer poem gaudy turnout by Arthur Yap, published in 1977? And what about James Eckhardt's Singapore Girl, a memoir of a young American's passionate love affair with a Singaporean transwoman, scribbled down in 1975 and left unpublished until 2007? And what about the weirdly homoerotic Michael and the Leaf of Time by Gregory Nalpon, which could've been written anytime between the 1950s and the author's death in 1978 - and which wasn't published until 2013?

Should we incorporate these works into any kind of queer Singaporean canon, given that they're either oblique or written by straight people?

Even after queer people started writing openly queer books, there's weird gaps in the academic record. These two books, for example were mainstream publishing successes:

But today they're not only out of print - you can't even find them in the National Library's reference section. I had to get a Temporary Readers' Permit for the National University of Singapore Central Library to hunt those two down.

(They're Joash Moo's Sisterhood: The Untold Story - a collection of short stories inspired by the lives of transwomen, published 1990; and Bonny Hicks's Discuss Disgust, a semi-autobiographical novel, published 1992. I'm not sure if the second book has queer content, but Hicks was quite open about her bisexuality in her 1990 memoir, Excuse Me, Are You a Model?)

And of course there's all the unpublished plays, and all the new books published in the last four years, and all the new live poets who're gracing the stage, being loudly and proudly lesbian (or bisexual, or pansexual, or queer), as so few Singaporean writers were before.

Basically, there's a lot of ground to cover. And I am fiendishly late with getting started on the actual writing.

Story of my life. Tolstoy will have to wait.

On comics.

I'm not done with King Stakh's Wild Hunt yet - turns out travelling for work purposes leaves you with a lot less random reading time than travelling for leisure.

So I'm just gonna seize this opportunity to talk about comics. For starters, here's a few of the graphic novel series which I finished in the earlier half of this year:

Mind you, I wasn't introduced to these comics recently. I got into comics all the way back in the nineties, with Neil Gaiman's Sandman and The Books of Magic. Then Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen got published, and what with me being such a literature nerd, I followed it religiously (I'm still thoroughly digging his Captain Nemo series now) and began scouring New York comic shops for his other works - From Hell, Top Ten, V For Vendetta, Promethea, Supreme - plus other lauded graphic novels like Lenore, Zero Girl, Snake 'n' Bacon's Cartoon Cabaret...

(You'll notice, strangely enough, that I wasn't hooked in by conventional superhero comics, but by literary ones. Does that make me more of a nerd, or less of one?)

Along the way I started reading the above titles: Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan and Planetary; Garth Ennis's Preacher. But I never got to the end of them, 'cos they were multi-volume, epic stories which would've cost megabucks to buy and ship all the way to Singapore, and the National Library never managed to stock all of them either. (Methinks the high levels of violence may have turned them off. Kudos to them for having a graphic novel section at all, though.)

It was only when I was at UEA that I got round to stopping by the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library (which I first investigated because I wanted to borrow textbooks instead of buying them for classes). Turned out they had a wealth of graphic novels, ready on display on the first floor, which was the only bit of the library that was open on Sundays.

So I started finishing the epics. Fantastic stuff. Didn't pick up any new series while I was there, sadly. Old dogs, new tricks?

One reason I'm bringing this up is that I'm frankly a little ashamed of the fact that I'm not including graphic novels and comics on this reading journey. I'm not sure how it happened. Perhaps it's because comics as we know them aren't really a universal art form - though I did grow up with Old Master Q / 老夫子 comics in my mum's hair salons, and my childhood and adulthood love of Lat's Kampung Boy is so profound that I listed it as THE Malaysian text to read in my Read the World Proportionally list.

I suppose my limitation is because there's no nation (not even Malaysia) that regards a comic as its greatest literary achievement, and most comics are fairly easy to digest anyway. There isn't the same kind of intellectual heft in reading Maison Ikkoku as there is in reading War and Peace (which I'll be getting to,  soon).

I do try to keep up with the non-Western graphic novel form, though, at least with regards to how it's developing in my neck of the woods. I've bought every one of the Liquid City anthologies of Southeast Asian comic artists, for instance:

And I freaking love Troy Chin's The Resident Tourist:

Otherwise, alas, I'm mostly following nerdy American webcomics. But if there's other international graphic novelists you wanna point me towards, I'm all ears. :)

Speakeasy #16: Featuring George Szirtes and Ng Yi-Sheng

I've got another event coming up next next Wednesday! It's a duo poetry recital organised by my friend Pooja Nansi:

Speakeasy #16: Featuring George Szirtes and Ng Yi-Sheng
Date: Wednesday, November 19
Time: 8:00pm
Venue: Artistry, 17 Jalan Pinang, Singapore 199149
Website: https://www.facebook.com/events/836486609705776/

A refugee from the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, George Szirtes moved to England as a child. His first book of poetry, The Slant Door (1979), was joint winner of the Faber Memorial Prize. In 2004, he won the T.S. Eliot Prize for his 12th book of poems, Reel. He was shortlisted for the prize again in 2009 (The Burning of the Books) and 2013 (Bad Machine). His translations of Hungarian writings have won various awards. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (UK) and the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts (Hungary).

Ng Yi-Sheng is a poet, fictionist, playwright, journalist and activist. He is the youngest winner of the Singapore Literature Prize (for his debut poetry collection, last boy). His second collection, Anthems (2014), consists of slam poetry works. His other publications include the bestselling non-fiction book, SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, and a novelisation of the Singapore gangster movie, Eating Air. He also co-edited GASPP: A Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose and Eastern Heathens: An Anthology of Subverted Asian Folklore. He has recently completed his MA in the University of East Anglia’s creative writing programme.

I'll also have a couple of my poems in the new anthology, A Luxury We Cannot Afford. (It's poems inspired by Singapore's old political patriarch.)

A Luxury We Cannot Afford + SingPoWriMo 2014 Anthology Launch
Date: Sunday, November 23
Time: 4:00pm
Venue: Arts House
Website: https://www.facebook.com/events/728439027239028/

Singapore Writers Festival

Happy Halloween and Day of the Dead!

For the time being, I'm still in Mexico City, updating the SOGI News page about events happening in the ILGA World Conference 2014. But I'll soon be in Singapore for this:

I'm currently involved in three events:

"All Art is Quite Useless"

1 Nov, Sat 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Singapore Art Museum, Glass Hall

Featured authors: Ng Yi-Sheng, Darryl Wee, Lutfi Ishak

Moderated by: Edith Podesta

Reprising last year’s popular panel inspired by Oscar Wilde’s quip, we delve into the role of the arts in our daily lives. A source of insight, a distraction or a nice-to-have? You decide.

Loud Mouth Vol 1

3 Nov, Mon 8:30 PM - 9:30 PM

SMU, Campus Green, Makeover Tent 

Loud Mouth Vol 1 celebrates eight dynamic spoken-word artists that have risen through the ranks of Singapore’s poetry slam scene during the past few years: Stephanie Chan, Jennifer Champion, Deborah Emmanuel, Nabilah Husna, Victoria Lim, Marc Nair, Ng Yi-Sheng and Charlene Shepherdson. These poets speak intimately and stridently, as they follow the traditional oral culture. 

Off the Page - Reads: Coffee Reads

9 Nov, Sun 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

SMU, Campus Green, Gazebo

Start the day with piping hot coffee and literary readings. Today’s reading puts the spotlight on Divya Victor, Ng Yi-Sheng, Chen Yu Yan, Latha, Golden Point Award winner Gu Xing Zi and Man Asian Literary Prize winner Miguel Syjuco.

Hope you can come! And yes, I will be using every opportunity I can to talk about homophobia and censorship.

Text in the City: Boogie

Guess what? I'm in Europe again! Travelling with my family. And since I'm organising this trip, I haven't had all that much time to read on Kertész on my Kindle.

So I'm just taking this opportunity to mention that I'm a featured poet in the Arts House's Text in the City project:

Text in the City is a nation-wide campaign to boost the awareness and appreciation of Singapore poetry among Singaporeans.

Featuring more than 100 poems by some of Singapore’s most well-loved and emerging poets about various places in the country, the Text In The City mobile app invites users to uncover the stories and secrets surrounding the places, some of which have vanished from the Singapore landscape.

Many poems of places in Singapore, past and present, are yet unwritten. Be part of the movement to contribute to Singapore’s literary legacy and contribute your poem today.

My poem's about Bugis Street.

Starry Island/Singapore Writers Festival 2014

I haven't even been to the library to pick out my Liechtenstein book yet, so I'm just going to use this space to advertise two things:

1) I've got a story in Starry Island: New Writing from Singapore, an imprint of the University of Hawaii Asia-Pacific literary journal Manoa. My contribution is a tale called Lion City, which may be one of my best.

2) I'm gonna be a featured writer in the Singapore Writers Festival 2014. I feel weird about this because a number of my friends are boycotting the event, since it's co-organised by the National Library Board (of recent book-pulping fame).

What's even more absurd is that I'm in very few events - one 7pm panel discussion on 1 November called All Art Is Quite Useless (hasn't that been discussed to the death already?) and the book launch of Loud Mouth Volume 1 on 3 November at 8:30pm. I've been in more events during years when I wasn't a featured writer!

Of course, as promised, at my events I shall rail against the establishment for censorship. Hopefully, everyone else will too.

PS. The Royal House of Monaco is still MIA. I think I'll have to pay the bloody fine. Zut alors.

Gah! I've gone and lost my book!

I was reading this yesterday on the train:

Later I checked my bag for it and found it was gone. I think I mislaid it somewhere in Bugis Junction. Am quite pissed because it was full of juicy gossip about the late Princess Grace of Monaco and her ridiculously wealthy and privileged and dysfunctional family, plus the absurd casino-driven dictatorship where they make their home.

It also happens to be a National Library book, and their last copy. Ah, but I shouldn't feel bad for them. Plus, I've noticed they've started monitoring our borrowing record and using it to recommend books to others online. Creepy.

Further IndigNation events!

I'm in Singapore now! And since I haven't picked up my Monaco book from NLB, so I'm gonna promote a few more literary events at IndigNation!

For starters, this Sunday we're having a queer feminist performance poetry event!

Mass Hysteria: Relapsed
Sunday August 24
3pm and 7pm
The Arts House, Play Den

Attention: Health Notice

Mass Hysteria has spread beyond detention and secondary school graduation. There are no expiry dates, no LUGs, but some spectres continue to haunt.

Shrugging off uniforms and habits, the queerdos set their sights on the world outside, to re-act and negotiate the hysterical and the historical, great tropes and expectations, memory and homophobic violence, nightmarish dyke drama and the life cycles of lezbo love.

Come quantify the insanity. Come queer the jealousy. Just come.

*********************************************
Featuring words and performances by:
Ad Maulod, Germaine Yeo, Mrylyn Tn, Rak Shakalaka, Sage Lee,Stephanie Dogfoot, Vanessa Victoria and music by: Illi Syaznie

Organizers:
AMOK Collective and Sayoni

Also, our closing event: A Minor ContraDiction!

A Minor ContraDiction:  Indignation SG 2014 Closing Night
Saturday August 30

7:30pm
The Reading Room

To bring Indignation to a close, take a peek into the future of Singapore’s queer literary community as present you with a night of readings and performances by some of Singapore’s most dynamic emerging LGBTQ voices. Raw. funny, honest, angry and hopeful, these young writers will show you what it means and how it feels to grow up queer in 21st century Singapore.

Organizers:
Ng Yi-Sheng, Stephanie Dogfoot, Vanessa Victoria, Eugene Tan

ContraDiction: Ten Year Series on Fri 1 Aug, 8pm

Almost forgot to post about this! TONIGHT is the opening of the tenth ever IndigNation Queer Pride Festival in Singapore, and it's taking the form of an evening of LGBT writing and music, at the Arts House!!!

ContraDiction: Ten Year Series

Fri 1 Aug, 8pm

The Arts House, Chamber

http://indignationsg.wordpress.com/2014/07/26/opening-event-contradiction-10-years-series/

https://www.facebook.com/events/1457258121195821/

This is gonna be an event featuring some of the most prominent names in queer Singapore writing: Ovidia Yu, Cyril Wong, Joel Tan, Tania de Rozario, Adrianna Tan, Iris Judotter...

I won't be there, alas. In the UK now, back home in two weeks. Which means I'll be involved in other IndigNation events. 

Check out the full calendar here:

http://indignationsg.wordpress.com

Random review: C. Rajagopalachari's "Ramayana"

I'm in Ireland! And I haven't made much progress on Proust, I'm afraid - been too busy finishing other books, including my friend Mark Chaiken's dissertation for our creative writing program. (Trippy heaven and hell cosmic apocalypse novel? Yessiree.)

I'll just take this opportunity to dwell on another book I've recently finished:

This is a short but fairly comprehensive 1957 retelling of the Ramayana legend - Rajagopalachari was a Tamil scholar who was also well versed in the Sanskrit classics: as such he's able to detail at points what happens in Valmiki's Ramayana and then compare it with Kamban's Ramavataram and Tulasidas's Sri Ramacharit Manas, while also dropping comment on modern interpretations of the characters. I believe the chapters were first published serially in a magazine - there's an avuncular voice here, as if he's a grandfather seeking to educate you as well as entertain you, and also to uplift you spiritually.

And yes, he is quite religious. He goes on about the incomparable glory of Rama with no sense of irony or restraint - though he does purposefully leave out the final sequence of the story, wherein Rama banishes Sita for supposed impurity, as he cannot reconcile this cruelty with the character of one so great. (Turns out that Valmiki didn't include it in his version, either. Rajagopalachari does concede that the story may predate Valmiki though... His take on the inviolate divinity of the texts themselves is a little puzzling.)

This book was my constant companion when backpacking through Greece, which made for some pretty crazy on-the-spot musings on comparative mythology - ever notice how the trope of the sinful city brought down by noble barbarians pops up in three different world mythologies: Hindu, Greek and Hebrew? Lanka is burnt up in the Ramayana as punishment for Ravana's abduction of Sita; Troy is decimated in the Iliad and the rest of the Trojan War Cycle because of Paris's abduction of Helen; Egypt's capital is brought down in Exodus because of the Pharaoh's refusal to let his Jewish slaves go.

I got all moody at one point and thought about Singapore's sins, and how we ought to be brought down for our abuses of the rights of migrant workers and prisoners. How we're all rich and civilized, and some of us are even fundamentally good, but the sins of our rulers will be the downfall of us all...

But then I finished the book and everything was better. Hare Rama!

Seriously, this is a good edition for beginners. Plus, it's printed in India for Indian readers, so it's cheap. :)