- David Ferry’s Beautiful Thefts | The New Yorker
“One reason people’s aversion to poetry sometimes passes over into strong annoyance, or even resentment, is that poems steal our very language out from under us and return it malformed, misshapen, hardly recognizable”. - Poet’s Kinship With the President | The New York Times
“‘Richard was always a complete engineer within poetry,’ Professor McGrath said. ‘If you said it needs a little work here or there, a whole transfiguration of a poem emerged. He understood revision not to be just a touch-up job but a complete reimagining, a reworking. I know that’s connected to his engineering skill.'” - The pun conundrum | BBC News
“The late William Safire, the New York Times’s long-time language writer, wrote in 2005 that a pun ‘is to wordplay what dominatrix sex is to foreplay – a stinging whip that elicits groans of guilty pleasure'”. - Samuel Beckett meets the Teletubbies | Improbable Research
A possible reason why the Teletubbies always had that element of “[n]othing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”. - “Jane Austen, Game Theorist”: Full Transcript | Freakonomics
“…in Pride And Prejudice, Mrs. Bennet is not a very sympathetic character, and she seems to be very foolish. But if you look at what she accomplishes it’s pretty good. She gets Jane married and she even sort of incentivizes Lydia…the younger sister, who in a very sort of crisis-y kind of way…runs off with Wigham without being married, which is a scandal. But I argue in the book that maybe she does that because she realizes the only way she can get some money in her marriage is to marry somebody who is not necessarily super committed to her…to create [a] crisis situation so the richer members of her family will then solve the problem for her. And that’s what happens”.
Tag - literature
Since 2011, when I reviewed Tan Tarn How’s Six Plays, I’ve made it a point to review a Singaporean literary text for each Jul issue of the Quarterly Literary Review, Singapore (QLRS).
This year, I’ve reviewed Eastern Heathens: An Anthology of Subverted Asian Folklore (Edited by Amanda Lee-Koe and Ng Yi-Sheng).
I forgot to mention this on Facebook, but special thanks to Jessie Koh for helping me bring the text up to Korea when I was there from April to May 2013.
I like having some lead time to read and digest the text/stories so that the review can ferment on its own and more or less write itself by the time I begin writing.
Bending laws, reclaiming lore
Writers (re)narrate traditional tales for a contemporary audience
Literary writing in Singapore has entered a renaissance; a Reformation, in terms of both the amount of literary work and the type of writing produced. The last half a decade or so has seen a marked increase in the number of Singaporean writers publishing and performing their literary works. Within these works, a further trend can also be observed – the subversion, reclamation, revision or redirection of narratives (traditional or otherwise) in Singapore writing, evident in works such as Jean Tay’s Boom (2008), in which the modern Singaporean narrative of economic progress and prosperity is given a careful rethink, through to Ann Ang’s Bang My Car (2012), a novella that challenges form by mixing multiple writing genres and using Singlish in place of Standard Singapore English.
These counter-narratives are indicative of the post-postmodern Singapore zeitgeist: a desire to reclaim narratives as an act of remembrance of a Singaporean past that is constantly being demolished and, at the same time, to wrest power away from the ones who traditionally tell the narratives by retelling the same narratives in different ways. It is in this context that Eastern Heathens: An Anthology of Subverted Asian Folklore is situated, inhabiting an equally important space in this segment of Singapore literature that focuses on revising or unearthing narratives for a contemporary Singaporean audience and beyond.
山木自寇也，
膏火自煎也。
桂可食，故伐之；
漆可用，故割之。
人皆知有用之用，
而莫知無用之用也。
Mountain trees self-destruct,
Lamp tallow self-immolates.
Cinnamon is edible, so it is cleaved;
Varnish is useful, so it is cut.
All men know the advantage of being useful,
but none know the advantage of being useless.
— 莊子 [Zhuang Zi], Zhuang Zi, “Transactions in the World of Men” (“人間世”).