Ah well. I take my leave of you for the moment. Tomorrow morning I fly off and then I guess I'll be caught up in the whole hectic Christmas thing. It may be a few days before I can get my itchy fingers on a computer keyboard again to report on how the world looks from Britain ....Gerrie Lim is not one to shy away from taboo topics or mince his words. Which is why the 46-year-old pop culture critic, who writes on topics ranging from porn to rock music, is a publisher's dream.* Philip also forwarded the link to another article from the Strait's Times, reproduced here. It makes terribly depressing reading. It also makes the publishing situation in Malaysia seems not quite so bad after all!His book about sex escorts in Asia, Invisible Trade, has shifted nearly 18,000 copies since it hit the shelves last year. He is planning a sex industry sequel next year.
This year, he launched Idol To Icon, which examines how celebrities such as Tom Cruise and Jennifer Lopez become mega brands. It was published by UK's Cyan Books.
The iconoclast says his independent-minded, questioning streak is a result of his disgust for the repressive environment he grew up in during the 1970s. 'The school system here sucked. If you asked a question that was not part of what the teacher put on the board, she would say: 'It's not in the syllabus, you don't need to know.' How stupid is that?' he vents.
In 1980, the former St Joseph's Institution and Catholic Junior College student went to Perth to study political philosophy at the University of Western Australia.
'I didn't really want to do a degree here. I just couldn't see myself fitting into NUS. Yuck! You can quote me on that!' he says.
The eldest of three children of middle-class Catholic parents, Mr Lim went on to attend journalism school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. His brother is a bank executive and his sister is a school teacher in Canada.
It was in the City of Angels, capital of pop culture, that he felt at home for the first time. He spent close to 15 years there, writing features and music reviews for magazines like Billboard, LA Weekly and Playboy from a Santa Monica rental flat, earning 'enough to get by'.
His first book, Inside The Outsider, featuring a series of interviews with rock stars like David Bowie and Patti Smith, was published here by Big O in 1997. It sold just 500 copies.
In 2001, he moved back to Singapore to be with his family and Chinese Singaporean girlfriend. He is now part of a rare species in Singapore - the full-time writer. 'I'm famous but not rich,' quips the writer, who lives off his royalties, in a condominium in Holland Village with his girlfriend.
Quoting an Elvis Costello song, (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes, he says: 'I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused. ... Singapore is basically a country that likes to think of itself as a First World country. But it's not. It's really a Third World country that pretends to be a First World country.'
This Third World mentality, he charges, also permeates the publishing industry. Many publishers are queasy about what can or cannot be published.
'Even expats have told me: 'I'm surprised that your book can be published.' But why? Doesn't it say something?' he asks. 'Creativity doesn't grow on trees. How are you going to create an ecosystem of publishers and authors when everything seems to be done by government edict?'
He is scornful that publishers here churn out cheap-looking books for the local market, 'underestimating the intelligence of local readers'. Part of the problem is that few publishers here are prepared to pay advances to authors, unlike in the US and Britain. He received undisclosed advances for his two books.
'It's very Third World thinking. How are you going to foster a publishing culture if you are going to treat writers like that?' he rants.
Was so busy tending to the sick on Monday that I missed the very useful article in the Star about self-publishing in the local context by Lee Tse Ling.
Surprised though that she did not talk about print-on-demand as this makes self-publishing much more affordable and accessible for those who need a smaller print run.The Book Project’ was conceived to help nurture successful amateur writers. The project, which focuses specifically on the large number of talented, unpublished writers in our midst in Malaysia, seeks to give a means and platform to such talent. ... Ms Theseira said, “The Book Project provides a wonderful opportunity for literally anyone and everyone to showcase their work. Once a writer’s work is published, who knows what other doors may open for them. The first step is to put their stories in print.”I'm still as ambivalent as ever, though I must confess that I haven't yet seen a copy of Book Project 1 and must judge by merit before I sound off. It's great that new writers have a forum to publish their work, we certainly need all the forums for new work we can get ... but how much are they learning by having their work edited for them (not by them), and shouldn't there be a modicum of survival of the fittest to ensure the best work gets through? Isn't The Book Project more about vanity publishing than helping new writers learn the craft?
... questions arise. With such a loose set of criteria, will The Book Project satisfy the expectations of a paying public? If not, is the public supposed to overlook personal satisfaction for the more noble cause of having supported local writing? More importantly, how much has getting published helped these new writers write better for a paying public, if not now, then in the near future?The evidence in the end has to come from the writers themselves and I would love to hear of their experiences. (Yvonne Foong has a story in BP2 so I'm sure she will let us know about her experiences.)
he whips out a scapel. he runs it over my body.Update: Yvonne's account of the launch with pictures. Courage to dream. Of course. Just make this the first published piece of many.
slitting, slashing, slicing and severing.
i think i have died, but not quite, not yet.
and then i feel him lift up what is left of my mangled self. he carries me to the balcony.
"it is yours! devour it in all its perfection!" he shouts to the ravenous crowd below.
i fall into the sea of groping hands.
If you find Agatha Christie unputdownable, there could be a medical reason for it.
Rattawat Lapcharoensap writes with both compassion and maturity and his Sightseeing is a wonderfully self-assured collection of short stories from a first time writer."You give them history, temples, pagadas, traditional dance, floating markets, seafood curry, tapioca desserts, silk-weaving cooperatives, but all they really want is to to ride some hulking gray beast like a bunch of wildmen and to pant over girls and to lie there half-dead geting skin cancer on the beach during the time in between."There's a gritty social realism in his choice of settings: a down-market brothel, a smouldering rubbish-dump, a refugee shanty, cockpits, with many of the characters living on the edge in economic terms. Lapcharoensap has his characters speak in a street-smart, vernacular language which eliminates the distance still further.
The medical encyclopedia is the most used book in our house. The covers are torn, the pages coming loose.
Ursula Le Guin is amazed that critics find Rowling "wonderfully original" and complains that the writer "could have been more gracious about her predecessors". Her Earthsea quartet featured a school for wizards long before Potter was a twinkle in Rowling's eye.
She found C.S. Lewis less palatable: "simply Christian apologia, full of hatred and contempt for people who didn't agree." 
I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk. Fairytale talk. As soon as you generalise, you are in a completely different universe than that of literature, and there's no bridge between the two.The great (and unsmiling!) American author Philip Roth in an interview in today's Guardian. Amen!
THE HISTORY OF LOVE, by Nicole Krauss
At the age of 10, Leo Gursky fell in love with a young girl in his Polish village and wrote a book in honour of her. Now elderly and living in America, he believes that book long lost. Krauss tells what happens when Gursky's world collides with that of a young girl investigating her own mother's loneliness.
THE FARM, by Richard Benson
The first book from a former editor of The Face is the true story of the farm in Yorkshire where his family has farmed for 200 years. It is told through a combination of childhood memories and notes taken in the weeks before the farm is sold as no longer financially viable and the property developers move in.
THE CONJUROR'S BIRD, by Martin Davies
A debut novel from a BBC producer, this story of the search for a stuffed bird is a mix of detection, romance and history. Fitz, a scientist, becomes obsessed with tracking down the Mysterious Bird of Ulieta, one of the specimens discovered by the real-life 18th-century explorer Joseph Banks.
ARTHUR AND GEORGE, by Julian Barnes
Shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize, this is based on the true story of a miscarriage of justice investigated by Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. George Edalji was jailed for attacks on horses but Doyle, believing Edalji to be a victim of racism and sloppy detective work, worked to clear his name.
THE LOST ART OF KEEPING SECRETS, by Eva Rice
Set in post-war England, this is the story of Penelope Wallace who longs to be grown-up and fall in love, but finds that various things - such as her eccentric family - keep on getting in the way. This is the fourth novel from the daughter of the songwriter Tim Rice.
LABYRINTH, by Kate Mosse
Best-selling novel by the co-founder of the Orange Prize, it blends the lives of two women, separated by 800 years. It is an adventure story steeped in the legends and history of the Cathars, the religious movement branded heretical by Roman Catholics, set in the medieval French town of Carcassonne.
THE LINCOLN LAWYER, by Michael Connelly
This is a crime thriller by a former Los Angeles Times police reporter. It is the story of Mickey Haller - a low-ranking criminal defence lawyer who gets his first wealthy client in years when a Beverley Hills rich boy is accused of beating a woman. However, the case starts to fall apart.
EMPRESS ORCHID, by Anchee Min
Min, a former actress who was born in Shanghai but has lived in America since 1984, bases her novel on the true story of China's last empress. She creates the world of the Forbidden City in Imperial China through the eyes of Orchid, a poor girl who beats rival concubines to the emperor's bed.
MARCH, by Geraldine Brooks
The recreation of the life of John March, the father who is away from the family in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. In Brooks's story, March emerges as an abolitionist and idealistic chaplain on the front lines of the American Civil War. Brooks, an Australian, lives in America and is a fellow at Harvard.
MOONDUST, by Andrew Smith
Smith, an Englishman who was raised in America and watched the Moon landings on TV from San Francisco, set out to interview all the astronauts still living who walked on the Moon to find out how their lives were changed by their experience. Smith, a journalist, now lives in Norfolk with his family.
... a brave venture because no-one ever made fame or fortune running a little magazine. They operate on energy and goodwill and generosity. ... What little magazines aim to become are institutions, a fact of life. ...... Simply put, Wet Ink and magazines like it constitute one of the best, and most attractive ways in which the culture of a nation expresses itself.
Apparently though, the dreaded L-word will be nowhere in sight ... because it is thought too scary and offputting for the general reader. (Worth bearing in mind when we plan writing related events here! And here I'm thinking about THAT festival which is even now a twinkle in the eye of Mr. Raman.)
TALK DETAILS
Topic: 'From proposal to publication: Getting your first non-fiction book published'
Date: 17th December (Saturday)
Venue: Starbucks, Borders Bookstore, Times Square.
Time: 11am to 1pm
Cost: Simply purchase a drink from Starbucks!
RSVP: To michaeld@tm.net.my and include your mobile number
Teaching's no Mr. Holland's Opus as I've said before.There is of course E.R. Braithwaite's autobiographical To Sir with Love, which tells of a black teacher's attempts to teach difficult teenagers in a London school in post-war Britain.And now I'd put beside them Frank McCourt's latest volume of memoir, Teacher Man which I'm currently enjoying very much indeed. What I appreciate most about the book is its honesty. McCourt details both his sucesses and failures in the classroom, including the kind of embarassments most teachers would want to downplay even to those closest to them.
There's Ursula struggling with her classes as a student-teacher towards the end of DH Lawrence's The Rainbow. I'd also add his poem Afternoon in School - the Last Lesson to the list.
There's New Zealand writer Sylvia Townsend-Warner's excellent Spinster, the story of a teacher working in a largely Maori school. (Note to self: must reread this soon!)
Helen was my best friend at school, has remained a close friend to this day, despite distance and my laziness to write letters. We've always shared a love of words and books and nature. Helen is now a published poet and working on her PhD.Forest Magician
The first night after our return, I wake to darkness
fringed with sweeping fronds, dense and
breathing with the forest’s mysteries.
I blunder in its strange dark to recover bearings,
locate the lighted exit of the room’s familiar frame.
Now this landscape is a stage removed, half-blurred by dreams,
its shades and shapes encroach on our security.
You had read its signs for us, unravelling the
tangled script, unmasked the secret rituals of animal society.
Quiet impresario, subdued in camouflage, you perched
on the broad rim of the ancient world,
panning its draped stage, twitched the curtain’s cord,
unfurled the rustling screen to lure the
shy performers from their hidden roosts,
enchant us with the patterns of their primal dance.
Master of mimicry, tuning voice and turning gesture,
measuring the pauses and the distances, you
stole the syllables of wild speech, casting voices back
like skimmed stones to dilate and spread
their rolling echoes across space, until
the youngest in our party, quick to learn,
threw the gibbon’s song into the valley’s throat
to rouse a whooping chorus in defiant dialogue,
competing for the territorial privilege.
Modest magician, with casual flamboyance, you
pulled colours from the forest’s folded sleeve to
flourish in the trained sights of the telescope,
ruffled them for our delight into sudden
bouquets of petals, plumage, by day showering
confettis of bright birds, exotic names, to
dazzle the veiled eye with visions of creation’s
blue - gold flowering, warm our dulled sense
with the molten ribbons of its first fires.
Later, challenging the evening’s gloom
with flashing wands of torchlight
you would startle eyeshine in still hunters
draped in shadow-lairs of night-time foliage.
In the ancient trees, the secret bank, we tunnelled
with your eyes, your ears into the core of
our life’s origins, woken to new wonder by the charge
of a forgotten energy
... assesses with 80 percent accuracy whether the authors of fiction and non-fiction books are male or female, reports Phillip Ball in Nature. Patterns detected by the program include the use of pronouns, such as I, you, he, she, them (female) and words that identify and quantify nouns, like a, the, that, one, two (male). The software, developed by Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University in Israel, was designed to "identify the most prevalent fingerprints of gender and of fiction and non-fiction." These fingerprints were applied to 566 English-language works published after 1975. Two titles misidentified by gender were Possession, by A.S. Byatt and Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day. "Strikingly, the distinctions between male and female writers are much the same as those that, even more clearly, differentiate non-fiction and fiction," identifying the genres themselves with 98 percent accuracy, Mr. Ball writes.80% accuracy, my foot! According to the results posted on the website, the programme is right only 58% of the time - not a great deal better than simple guesswork. And it can't be up to much if it thinks Sharanya is a bloke! I ran a couple of paragraphs of an Annie Proulx story by it, figuring if any writer has a gender ambiguous writing style it's her. The programme told me that the first paragraph I enterered was written by a female and the second by a male!
Beds in a bookshop?? I found this story about a bookshop owner who invites customers to actually live among the books on Eric's blog. The cost of lodging at Shakespeare and Co?All he asks is that you make your bed in the morning, help out in the shop, and read a book a day.I think I could manage that! (Okay, the make my bed part is a tad tough but I'd be good at the last bit ...)
The third floor is Social Sciences; the fourth is Language; the fifth is Math and Science; the sixth is Technology; the seventh is The Arts; the eight is Literature; the ninth is History; the 10th is General Knowledge; the 11th is Philosophy; and the 12th is Religion. Each of the Library’s elegantly appointed guest rooms is decorated with framed art and a library of books that relate to the room’s specific Dewey Decimal theme.Health tip. I'm a firm believer in sleeping among books so that words can seep into your dreams by osmosis ...
... two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls ...and set out to find their own version of the American dream while consuming the lot.
Goodness, it's such a slog to read your way through the classics and with all of us so busy these days ...
The film version of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe hits the big screen soon. Do I want to see it? Watched the trailer on TV and thought it had been very Lord-of-the-Ringsified. The version in my head is much gentler, painted in softer colours. And as I've said before, watching the film of the book often destroys my own vision of it.The smuggling of books – therein lies an idea that will give a boost to the Government’s efforts to encourage reading. Instead of banning publications that are injurious to our moral and spiritual well-being, the Government should consider banning books it thinks we should read. Then Malaysians will be hounding booksellers like me for a contraband read, instead of, as in recent days, displaying prurient voyeurism, surfing the ’Net to look at a Chinese squat.Damn. Now why didn't I think of that!
Fiction&Friends decided that this month they wanted to read RK Narayan's A Painter of Signs and last night we meet up to dissect it at La Bodega over several penitential jugs of margueritas (because, if you remember, I was responsible for picking the last book which the others did not like at all and had promised to buy the drinks!).
On paper it is a terrible idea: let every have-a-go writer on the planet publish whatever they fancy and give it all away free. No editors, no agents, no fees, no quality control. ... But a new generation of diarists, satirists, polemicists and poets have made the idea work precisely because they dispensed with paper.That's us, of course, the 19 million bloggers rampaging across the wilderness of cyberspace.
Spike magazine linked to a rather ghoulish article by Dan Alban from The Recorder, the Harvard Law School newspaper. Alban writes about books bound in human skin. There's even a name, apparently for such a practice - anthropodermic bibliopegy!
... Giles Coren, who sportingly turned up to accept his prize (unlike Tom Woolfe last year).
Can you bear more best books lists? Here's one from literary editor Boyd Tonkin in the Independent. Enough suggestions to bankrupt you before 2006 begins!The study also showed that the average number of sexual partners increased as creative output went up. What the artists produce draws attention to them, which seems to enhance their sexual allure.So maybe you should just chuck away your gym membership, forget about wooing the chicks with rippling biceps, and hit the verse?
If we can invoke all the bookshops in the world and hold them up to test for squidginess then let me slip in my favourite, Daunts, on Marylebone High Street, London, specialising in travel books.
There are no sofas, no in-store-coffee-corner, but down the road is Patisserie Valerie. Books can be devoured with grilled goast cheese crostini and red pepper salad in a room decorated with chandeliers, gilt mirrors and pale green and yellow murals of flowery bowers and dhows sailing between mythical islands. And I can never resist a fruit-laden tart from the window display of cakes and gateaux and marzipan animals.
A big hurray for the first timers who climbed that word mountain and proved something very important to themselves about writing. Among them sham, and swifty, and 3rd chimp (even in the midst of packing up all her wordly possessions, three dogs and two cats to go home to the US). 3rd chimp a.k.a Miss Wonderley (pictured left) is a veteran writer and was working on a novel even before this - but she says that she so loved the way this competition forced her to churn out words and the fluency it engendered that she's going to put herself under this kind of pressure from now on.
