Little Book of Delight

Read a book in just twenty minutes yesterday over a cup of tea.

It was Auggie Wren's Christmas, another of Paul Auster's, and it came free with a copy of his new novel Travels in the Scriptorium, but can be bought separately.

Auster was asked by the New York Times to write a Christmas short story for the Op-Ed page.

He went on to write a story about a writer who is asked to write a short story for the New York Times to appear on Christmas morning. Stumped for what to write about, he receives some unexpected help from the tobacconist whose shop he frequents, a colourful character called Auggie Wren.

Wren offers to tell the author the best Christmas story he has ever heard in exchange for lunch. And in the diner he weaves a tale ... which is unsentimental, has no santas or angels, or trees or snow, but even as it overturns all expectations and blurs moral lines, still touches the heart.

Now if you don't feel like running out and buying the book, and would still love this taste of vintage Auster, you can read the whole thing online, here.

But then, you'd be missing a dimension, because this limited edition print version has funky illustrations by Isol throughout, and is a bit like a kids' book for grown-ups! (Isol's Auggie Wren, right.)

The little story inspired Wayne Wang's 1995 film, Smoke, for which Auster wrote the screenplay and created one of my favourite movie characters . (Blue in the Face features the same cast of characters and was entirely improvised, and filmed on the back of Smoke in just five days.)

Here's Auggie Wren's monologue from the film script and left, a picture of Harvey Keital in the film role.

And am much tickled reading the cast list, to discover that the book thief was played by Auster's twenty-year old son Daniel! As if it isn't bad enough that Auster keeps wandering inside the frame of his own stories, he wants his family in there too!

Is it too early to start your Christmas shopping for 2007?

New Year Card

A very happy New Year to you all! Wishing you all the best for a great 2007.

And a blessed Eid al-Adha (Hari Raya Haji).

Looking Back, Looking Forward

The year's end brings with it the obligatory look back at the year that was, and the look forward to the year that will be.

Justin Jordan in the Guardian looks forward to the most exciting fiction releases for 2007 in the UK. I have a sense of being overwhelmed as I contemplate this list ... and there's still so much I haven't read from this year, from the year before, from ...

But there's an awful lot of stuff on this list that I desperately covet already. On my shopping list is Haruki Murakami After Dark (June), Graham Swift's Tomorrow (April), Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (April), Peter Ho Davies The Welsh Girl (May), Marina Lewycka's Two Caravans (March), Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions (June), the new novel from Michael Ondaatje (September), and the promised short story collections from Irvine Welsh and Roddy Doyle.

Just for a start, that is.

And then there are this years books that got away. I enjoyed this two-part list by Guardian readers of their discoveries of the year, here and here. (Though their recommendations aren't as interesting as yours in the comments to yesterday's post!)

Elsewhere in the paper, John Dugdale scrutinises this year's best-seller lists and notes some interesting trends in British publishing.

This year, the "Richard and Judy" effect is pretty spectacular. For those who haven't heard of them, these guys run a morning TV book club with books of the month and seasonal recommendations ... doing for the British public what Oprah does for Americans, with similar results. Whatever they recommend hits the best-seller lists, and authors who have benefitted this year include Kate Moss, Victoria Hislop, Dorothy Koomson, Sam Bourne, Elizabeth Kostova, Elisabeth Hyde, Jodie Picoult and even Jamie Oliver.

Increasingly in the UK paperbacks are being sold in supermarkets at prices which undercut the bookshops by a very big margin. (£3.73 = RM25.80 in Asda and Tesco!) Of course, women do most of the food shopping and this has lead to a "feminisation of fiction" on the best-seller lists. (Male authors do better in autobiography and cookery!)

Dugdale also notes that since Richard and Judy like to herald new discoveries, and the supermarkets are constantly looking for fresh produce for their shelves, so to speak, the best-seller lists are dominated by first-time writers.

Which is something of a worrying trend because authors could be in danger of becoming one-hit wonders ...

Update:

More in the same vein from Robert McCrum and Hepzhibah Anderson in the Observer:

The headline news from Christmas bookshops was unequivocal. Diet books and any volume linked to television seem to sell. Literary biographies and prizewinning novels - once the staple diet of the English shires - you can't give them away.

And as far as the new crop of fiction is concerned, they point of that it is impossible to ignore a unifying thread:

... war. Its catalysts, cataclysms and far-reaching fall-out shape an astonishing number of keenly awaited novels.

Postscript:

The view of book retail and publishing trends down under in the Australian* with a list of forthcoming Aussie fiction.

(*From whence I nicked the pic.)

Working Those Poetry Muscles

New Year's resolutions time. Of course. Of course.

And just as we're reving up to drag out lazy selves back to the gym (well I am, at least), poet Ruth Padel begs us not to bother. The road to feeling better about yourself is paved with obsessive intentions about bodily fitness, she notes, but how much better it is to build up our muscles for poetry instead, for a more lasting feel-good factor.

Poetry ... is not only good for you, and protects us against meaninglessness: by the pleasure it gives in its artifice, images and imagination, and in the little nudgy sensual relationships between words and sounds that hint at new ideas, poetry augments and reflects our delight in the world. ... Reading poetry truthfully, responsibly, fortifies your own individual inwardness. Poetry is the art of concentration not just from the poet's point of view (chucking out what you don't need, boiling down the words, the thoughts), but from the reader's. It makes you concentrate on things that matter to you inside. ... If you bring to a good poem all you are, it expands your understanding of yourself and the world. ... In an era when outward things such as bodies, shopping and diet are so obsessing, six lines of these verbal artefacts can let you see your own life and experience with new eyes. That "place for the genuine" opened up by poetry is in yourself. If you're pondering new year resolutions about health and happiness, joining the gym is not in the same league.

Nice try, Ruth, but I'm going to aim for both physical and poetic ... improvement, even if not perfection, this year.

To add to my list of resolutions then: to buy and read more poetry and discover new favourites. And write about them on our poetry blog, Puisy-Poesy, which has made me think a great deal this year about what poetry works for me and what doesn't. (And I will hope to persuade a few more of you to send in a contribution.)

And to get writing more myself. Plans are in place. More news on this later. Promise.

My Best Books of 2006

Okay, time for my personal book awards. (The Bibs?)

Criteria? Reading pleasure!

I'll give my book of the year award to Peter Carey's Theft (he won my award a year or two back for True History of the Kelly Gang. Is this love?)

Close runners-up: Paul Auster's The Brooklyn Follies, Yiyun Li's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Etgar Keret's The Bus Driver Who Thought He Was God.

I've also read and enjoyed several very good memoirs this year, particularly Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters (made me cry) and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson (made me laugh - a lot).

A special mention also goes to the beautiful and informative Malacca: Voices from the Street by Lim Huck Chin and Fernando Jorge. It may have cost a small fortune, but it's a book to treasure.

My reading vows for next year:

To complete the TBR challenge I've set myself up for.
To read and review more books, especially local fiction.
To discover some of the books and authors you guys have been recommending.
To read more foreign fiction and short fiction collections.

That'll do!

So okay then - what were your best books of the year and your reading vows for next?

The Need for "Adda"

The other day when I couldn't happily surf for new stuff hither and thither because of the slow internet, I began sorting through a whole lot of pages I'd bookmarked for possible blogging ... and then over the months forgotten.

Thus I re-encounted and re-enjoyed this article by Navtej Sarna which appeared in the Hindu back in March: there's plenty in it all writers would recognise ... the insecurities, the panic when confronting a blank screen, the desire for a talisman ... but above all, it seems to me that it's about the need for community among writers.

Sarna recalls the adda that Sacred Games author Vikram Chandra (left) used to organise for Indian writers in Washington DC:

The main event of the adda were the readings by the somewhat subconscious just-published or unpublished writers leaning against the wall amongst comfortably old leather sofas and entrapped in the sophisticated decadence of red wine. But the spirit of the evening was hidden in the sub-text. Most of the audience was made up of people who wanted to be writers; many had novels at various stages in their minds, or on their computers. A careful glance around the room would reveal tentative literary ambition and silent envy of the published gods. A desire to seek help with a recalcitrant manuscript usually overcame a natural tendency to shroud the pending masterpiece in secrecy. Inevitably, the writer of the evening would be asked — When do you write? Evenings? Early mornings? In long hand or on the screen? Is it autobiographical?... Sometime the red wine would help foment more private conversations in which the writers in the making would then exchange every possible idea about the writing process, searching for the secret mantra that would finally end the painful search for elusive words for a blank screen and result in a completed book, publication, fame... In one such weak moment I recall telling an- investment- banker-during- day- budding- novelist- by-night that I could write a novel only on a computer screen and a short story only with a fountain pen, and the scratchier the nib, the more time I had to find the right nuance.

Adda is a word I hadn't come across before. Clearly it means something like talk or discussion but it wasn't until I read this defintion in an interview with one of my favourite litbloggers, Huree Babu (of Kitabkhana), that I appreciated the nuances of the word :

In Bengal, we grew up with the idea of the “adda” versus the podium: the “adda” was an informal, but often intense and lengthy discussion that could take place anyway–at the university, on the open lawns of the Maidan, at the local tea shop, a friend’s house. The podium was where the official speeches and the formal arguments were made; the adda was often the place where multiple opinions came into play, where you could go back and forth and discuss several aspects of a book or its author, where there was constant feedback, and constant challenge.

(And interestingly, he describes litblogs as being a type of adda!)

I found more about Vikram Chandra's Washington Adda in this interview on Sonia Faliero's blog:

It's really valuable. It's nice to have a community, even if it's a fractitious one, where people are fighting. ... It's sort of like what in the film industry is called the biradri. ... And the filmi biradri is an interesting one. They bitch about each other, they backstab. But finally, it's nice to have that environment where you are at home and there are other people concerned with the things you're trying to do. So you can have an ongoing conversation with them, not just in the sense of hanging out and talking to each other, but also through the nature of your work. I like that. It's fruitful.

A few years ago, in the late 1990s, my friend Anuradha Tandon and I started this thing called Adda. The whole idea was that once a month we'd meet at (the restaurant) Goa Portuguesa and invite a bunch of people, and someone would lecture, read or do a performance. What was amazing was how fast and vibrantly it took off. Pretty much after the first time we had to do it by invitation only. Some really amazing collaborations came out of that.

Lessons for here?

Elsewhere Blog Things

Somewhere under the sea in Taiwan, a cable got damaged by an earthquake, and the internet in this part of the world became slower than a crawl down the Federal Highway. The problem will take some days to fix. Those of us internet addicted grind our teeth in frustration, though as Shaolin Tiger pointed out on Monster Blog it might be a good time move away from the keyboard and get a life. (Though, I must say that this morning everything is flowing much better.)

In the scale of bad things, an appaulling internet connection doesn't compare at all to the suffering of those caught in the floods in Johor and Amir makes a plea for donations which I'd like to pass on.

Meanwhile, Kaykay, our book club thorn between the roses, is putting up some pretty good book and film reviews on his blog - all guy stuff, of course. The latest novel under scrutiny is Hannibal Rising, which sounds quite tasty!

Another online review I very much enjoyed reading was Zafar's account of Elmo Jayawardena’s debut novel, Sam's Story which I have to read soon. (It's published locally by Marshall Cavendish.) I met Captain Elmo at the Ubud Readers' and Writers' Festival, and he is not only one of the most important Sri Lankan authors, but someone who sets out to change the world through acts of kindness. Deepika has much more about him here.

Eric highlights some of the local books to look out for in 2007. Ted has been posting all kinds of quirky things. I particularly liked his post on why books will never let you down and the amazing tale of the little Malaysian girl who's read 2,000 books (*gasp*).

Glenda gets shortlisted for an Australian Fantasy award ... again. (And since we've been talking about the Johor floods, do read Glenda's account of some of the manmade causes of them ... we're all too quick to blame acts of God, but poor urban planning and deforestation play a large part in many of the disasters we're seeing in this part of the world.)

And Xeus has a very nasty personal experience ... and immediately sees it as material for a story. (Writers are funny people, y'know!) Lydia describes her book launch for Honk If you're Malaysian! Biggest congrats ... and am so sorry I missed the event.

Any more good book stuff I've missed? Do mention it in the comments.

It strikes me that between us, we have a lot more great literary content than any of the newspapers! And doesn't this in itself make a strong statement for the value of blogging here in Malaysia?

Seminar - Post Colonial Malaysian Literature

Poet and academic Faridah Manaf sent me details of a literature seminar to be held Saturday 6th January at the International Islamic University. Speakers include playwright Kee Thuan Chye and poet Wong Phui Nam.

Contact details are on the poster (click and click), and on Faridah's blog.

Maybe I'll see you there?

The Long and Winding Birth-Canal of Elarti

Exclusively guest-blogged by Ruhayat X!

Elarti is a project five years in the making. The idea actually came before Wilayah Kutu, because in our naivete we thought a magazine would be simpler to manage than a book.

Not only is it more expensive to produce, it is also probably as close to a commitment as I will have; in the near future, at least. For, now that the almost-stillborn foetus is ejected into the world, I suddenly find that we have to keep it going.

Alarming, maybe, but true. This was not what I had signed up for. Elarti was merely supposed to be a proof of concept, something to be done just to show that it can be done. It was never meant to be a proper business. But now people are expecting it to be one.

There is a reason for my cautiousness: the magazines that have tried this before had all failed. To me, it's a sign that this is not something you should take too seriously. You do it only because you can, not to profit financially from it.

When you talk about Neohikayat Press, you're not talking about a company. It's just Irman and I, two guys and a Mac who do have daytime jobs. I don't know about him, but ever since I left the corporate sector most of the time I struggle to survive. So we come out with something whenever I have spare change. No, Dorothy, we're not in Kansas anymore.

That's why we can only make Elarti a quarterly -- because that would give me time to save up to fund each issue.

Why self-funding? Advertising would have entailed some kind of compromise; I've been in situations where advertisers insisted on dictating terms concerning the content and placement of the ads. Not acceptable.

Elarti must be completely independent. This is our space, dammit. It is also why we're not going for Government grants or endorsements.

And besides, like I have said before, Elarti is really a social experiment. I want to see if people out there are willing to walk the talk and put money and printouts where their mouths are.

Just as the cover charge for the launch issue was an experiment: Irman was the one who suggested we open it for donations because maybe we'd get a bit more that way for the 50 copies. I was merely interested to see how much value people would put on something like this. I got my answer, and I am not wholly unhappy.

In case you're interested, here is the genesis of Elarti:

The original inspiration was the many zines I'd come across in Malaysia (mainly photocopied cut-n-paste montages done by rabid punk and heavy metal fans) and later the UK (mainly by socialists and artists, which often are one and the same thing). They were produced from the bedrooms of individuals or amateur groups who just felt strongly about something and thought it was too important to not get the message out there.

I am drawn to these things like a fly to a bug-zapper. I've always enjoyed pamphleteering, starting from secondary school to university and then later when I was involved in a small group called the Young Writers Club back in the late-90's. It's kinship.

Anyway. The bunch of us -- Irman, Amir Muhammad, etc -- were sitting around our then-regular teh tarik session in Bangsar before it started going downhill, idly musing about things the way people do. Something needed to be done about Malay writing and someone
should do it, we felt. But for a long while it was just that: talk.

The next inspiration was Rebel Press, an independent setup in the UK that churns out obscure out-of-print works (and, later, original works by relatively unknown authors).

I liked the name. I liked the attitude. I liked the why.

Most of all, I liked the way they worked. My first contact with a Rebel Press production was a tiny book -- a collection of short stories -- given away with a large-circulation men's magazine (no, not the one with bunnies in them, even though I also did buy those for the - ahem - articles and - err - splendid interviews). This was in 1997, I think. My tiny mind was impressed.

Over time I thought about it and felt there was a niche for something small and light that people could buy and read on their daily commute. Hence the name.

And then I came across articles about some company putting up vending machines that dispense mini books for a paltry sum at European LRT terminals (Parisian, perhaps, or maybe London. Who knows -- these Europeans all look the same to me. Wink wink.)

But by far the biggest influence was this magazine called Zembla.

It was hip, kooky or juvenile, depending on who you are. And it spoke of writing in a way that was fresh. One blog described it as a cross between Vogue and a sixth-form school magazine. The layouts were arresting, and some of the articles had intriguing concepts (interview with dead authors, authors reviewing their own books, celebrities like Rachel Weiss interviewing their favourite writers).

Zembla tanked after 8 or 9 issues. You can still see a couple of the covers here.

Elarti's resemblance to Zembla, needless to say, should be apparent.

And then, five years later, here we are.

Sometimes we do something not knowing what the outcome will be. But if you don't reach out -- standing on tiptoe -- and touch the kettle on the kitchen counter, how are you to know that it would scald you? On some days I live for those kind of moments. Childishness -- and a touch of madness -- is what we need in these times.

What struck me most at the launch on Saturday was not so much the expectations people have of the magazine. Rather, it was the experience of having all these writers coming up to me wanting to know if they could please send in their works to be published in future issues.

It seems to me that a lot of creative people here -- new voices doing weird new things, mainly ("My poetry is very, very erotic, is that okay?") -- have been starved of an outlet and here is a platform on which they can be heard.

Which is exactly what Elarti is supposed to do: unearth new talent and present them to the world, without judgment.

Here's hoping it will succeed beyond expectations and then a big publisher jumps in with their own title and kills off Elarti. That would relieve me of my obligation and then I can go off and do something else.

Related Posts:

The Birth of Neohikayat (14/5/06)
All Aboard the Elarti (8/8/06)
Getting Elarti on Track (18/12/06)
Stesyen Elarti (25/12/06)

The Emperor's New Clothes!

I spun out The Brooklyn Follies so that I could finish it yesterday as a Christmas treat. It is a feelgood read and I fell in love with the characters. Auster doesn't need bells and whistles to impress the reader - he's simply a damn good storyteller.

Now am several chapters into The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud. Much hyped. On every best of the year list as you probably noticed.

I am so far completely underwhelmed by what I've read so far. I keep reaching for my editor's pencil to underline sentences where I think the writing is totally shitty! Long winded, with overly convoluted sentences and some strange choice of expression e.g.:

He was a failure at intimacy, if not at sex (he had no shortage of partners; but they were only shortly upon the scene.)

I would have got Messud to rewrite that nasty quasi-Victorianism! Was her editor snoring?

Nevertheless, dear reader, now that I feel better for this sound off, I will get back to it. It surely must improve.

Have also begun Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised as a Man which I think I will enjoy much more, and am finishing the last few stories in the latest Silverfish collection so I can pass judgement on the whole thing.

And you? What are you reading?

Bringing Books to Life

Here's a website to get happily lost in! Meet the Author has more than 800 video clips of authors introducing their books in their own words. It's great if you've always been curious about what your favourites look and sound like. There's also a UK version of the site which features British authors.

You can enter prize draws to win a free signed copies of novels.

Christmas Fiction

In the mood for some good online reading? The book pages of the British newspapers have some great yuletide short stories, so put your feet up and enjoy:

The Blue Carbuncle, a Sherlock Holmes mystery by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the Sunday Times site (and in a companion piece, Alexander McCall Smith examines the appeal of Conan Doyles' work).

The Times also has Jeanette Winterson's Christmas Carol.

An exclusive new short story by Helen Simpson, The Festival of the Immortals, appears on The Guardian site.

And Salley Vickers has written a short story called Mrs Radinsky especially for The Observer.

Enjoy!

Stesyen Elarti

Saturday was of course the launch of the first edition of Elarti at Seksan's. I didn't know who was reading until Ruhayat X (aka Amri Ruhayat) and his sidekick Sufian Abas turned up a short while before the whole thing began, bearing the long awaited first copies.

It's a slimmer volume that Amri had wanted it to be, because he did not get the avalanche of entries he'd wanted and the financing of it was also touch and go. But now the magazine is idea made manifest, I'm sure the project will keep rolling, and the contributions for the next and the next and the next issue will come flooding in! This is the place for your writing!

The layout of the magazine is classy with lots of grainy black and white photos. And there's some very interesting content. The features and fiction are mainly in Malay (a challenge to my reading skills but one I will enjoy!). There's an interview with Nizam Zakaria by Diana Dirani, book reviews by ... Monyet di Mesin Taip (Monkey on a Typewriter - clever monkey!) an exhortation to Penulis dammit menulislah! (Write, dammit, write!) by Ruhayat X, which everyone should take to heart ... and there's much more. And then the best section of all - Zon Kreatif - with stories and poetry from Diana Dirani, Sufian Abas, Dina Zaman, Natasya, Hati Kasih, Tok Rimau, Amaruhizat, Nazri M. Annuar, Animah Kosai, and Muslin Abdul Hamid.

To launch the magazine, we had readings from ...

... Animah Kosai who gave us her very funny The Idiot's Guide to Restricting Books (so now we all know what goes on behind the scenes at the KKDN!) and a very effective poem called Denial ...
... Muslin Abdul Hamid (back from doing the MA in Creative writing at UEA) read the first part of her short story about polygamy, That Shade of Grey, and left us with a cliffhanger! ...

... It was first reading for Vovin (Nazri M. Annuar) who gave us his short story Dogma (which I liked because it has cats in it, having a cat-conversation.)

Dina Zaman sadly couldn't make it, because she is recovering from surgery. Her two short short stories TV Tengkok Aku (The TV is Watching Me) and Ilusi Cinta (Illusion of Love) were read by Sharanya Mannivanan and KG, respectively. ...

... Here's Diana Dirani who read a piece which she said was another piece of chick-lit ... her story in the magazine is called Jin ...

... and Amran who writes as Amaruhizat (and is the little brother of Ruhayat X! See the resemblance?) read his short short That Last Blooming Petal.

If you're wondering why there is a great big (scary!) picture of me and the name of this blog plastered across page 5 ... it isn't that I am so terribly deperate for fame but ... well when Ruhayat X wrote that buying an advertising slot is a bit like:

... buying a plot at the Nilai Memorial Park, really, except that you're not dead yet and we're not a graveyard ...

... I decided to make a bid for immortality ... and support a cause I truly believe in.

My biggest congrats to Ruhayat X and Sufian for making the effort to get local writing out there. Congrats to the writers.

Thanks to to the great audience that turned up and bought the fifty review copies which were sold for a donation (and I was happy to see Ruhayat X with a fistful of ringgit!). Copies will soon be more widely available - check back here for details later on.

And our great thanks, as always, to Seksan and La Bodega for sponsoring the event.

Vegetarian Christmas Card

Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas
Cos turkeys jus wanna hav fun
Turkeys are cool, an turkeys are wicked
An every turkey has a Mum.
Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas,
Don't eat it, keep it alive,
It could be yu mate an not on yu plate
Say, Yo! Turkey I'm on your side.

Read the rest of Benjamin's Zephaniah's poem Talking Turkey on the BBC website and enjoy the video.

And if your Christmas wish is to see the poet perform live ... well it might just come true in 2007!

Wish you all the best for a very happy Christmas!

Sharanya's Launch at Indie Scene Cafe

There's been a lot going on this weekend. and I'm only just getting round to blogging it!

First Sharanya had a do at the Indie Scene Cafe Fiday night to launch her prety chapbook, Iyari. The event was supposed to start at 7 p.m. but it was a total nightmare to get down there with all the jams and it was after 8 when I arrived ... and that after running from the top of Bukit Bintang because I couldn't stand any more crawling in traffic.

Luckily (for me!) the start of the reading was delayed by the carolling "Santarinas" in the foyer of Piccolo Galleria. Sharanya had got a great crowd of friends there, and the atmosphere was just so warm and supportive. Even before anyone began to read, I was glad I had got my lazy self out of the house.

Sharanya has posted everyone's biodatas on her blog, so please go there for more information on her invited "talents". But here follows the pics I took.

Sharanya looked gorgeous in a black sari with gold trim and with big white roses in her hair. (She had also grown a few inches thanks to her platform shoes!) She did her job as host very well indeed - the open mic readings falling between her own readings. it was very special to hear her read poems that I've only seen on the page before.

Hafiz performed a beautiful song called Dengarkanlah (Please Listen) with lyrics by Nizam Zakaria (below). (You can download a demo version of the song here.) I didn't snap Hafiz because I was busy eating pizza!

Roy read a piece about being stopped at a police road block when neither he or his friend had a valid driver's license and ... er ... coming to an arrangement with a policeman.

Datuk Shan and Faridah Manaf did a nice little duet with a poem they had bounced back and forward by e-mail the night before.

Tshiung Han See read his poems ...

... and Priya K read a short piece ...

Nicholas Wong is distressingly talented for one so young (17) and has already won awards for his writing and had his poetry published. He's off to Columbia University in September to read Comparative Literature and Creative Writing.

Another very talented young man ... known simply as KG! His cousin also read a piece.

Somewhere in there too was me. Sharanya introduced me as the matriach of the local writing scene. Aiyoh, that sounds very scary!

I read a short short about an old couple warring over a dining chair that ends up abandoned and ruined in the garden. I wrote it some months ago and still haven't got polished to the point where I'd feel happy sending it out. Maybe after this I'll revise it again.

Thanks to Sharanya for inviting me and putting such an enjoyable evening together. Thanks too to Jasmine and Nicky for making this excellent little venue available to us. Indie Scene Cafe closes at the end of the month. How nice it would be to have a more permananent home for it ...

The Tragic End of Bok House

Sometimes stories are in books and sometimes they are held in the walls of buildings.

I can't let this week go past without this diversion to talk about the demolition of one of KL's most beautiful buildings, Bok House. I feel very emotional about the way an important heritage building is torn down because of the commercial value of the land. (Also see Elizabeth Wong's posts here and here and Dr. Rais' explanation excuse here. Lensamalaysia's account here.)

You do of course, know the romantic legend of the house, right? If not here it is. (An adaptation of info from Badan Warisan).

Chua Cheng Bok arrived as a penniless immigrant from China with no education, and got a job in shop selling spices, but then decided to move into a business of his own.

At night, after his day job was done, he went to “Red Light Corner” at the junction of Ampang which was lit at night to prevent any traffic colliding in the dark, and there he mended bicycles and carriage.

Later he heard of an Englishman up country whose tin mine was going bust and who was about to sack his workers and return to England, and Chua bought over the mine. (Later when he was rich he voluntarily paid the Englishman a pension for the rest of his life.)

The story goes that Chua fell in love with the daughter of a rich man who lived in a big mansion on Jalan Ampang, but the father turned him down because of his humble origins.

Eventually he built a mansion just across the road, more beautiful and grander than that of the man who had rebuffed him. Perhaps it was to spite him. Perhaps (and I like to think this) it was to remind the daughter daily of his love for her.

The company that Chua founded was called Cycle and Carriage, after his humble beginnings in KL. Some of you may have heard of it!

The house was later used as a restaurant - Le Coq d'Or. I went to eat there a couple of times, and while the food didn't delight (steaks, chicken chop - not terribly well cooked ... but I loved the bombe alaska with sparklers embeded in it, which was a birthday treat!)

But it was the ambience of the place that delighted - the statues in the hallway, the sweeping central staircase, the very gothic light fittings, the age-stained oil paintings, the bathrooms with their imported British sanitary ware and one of the most ingenious showers I've ever seen (pipes sprayed water at the bather from every direction!) It was a museum piece, and one that should have been preserved. This photograph by Azrul Kevin Abullah* is sadly captioned "probably one of last times sunlight fell inside this house" is perhaps the most fitting memorial to a piece of KL's history now gone forever.

*His account of the house as it used to be, and more photos here.

You're a Writer, Nathan

"You're wrong, Nathan. After years in the dark you've finally found your true calling. Now that you don't have to write for money anymore, you're doing the work you were set out to do all along."

"Ridiculous. No one becomes a writer at sixty."

The former graduate student and literary scholar cleared his throat and begged to differ with me. There were no rules when it came to writing, he said. Take a close up look at the lives of poets and novelists, and what you wound up with was unalloyed chaos, and infinite jumble of exceptions. That was because writing was a disease, Tom continued, what you might call an infection or an inflamation of the spirit, and therefore it could strike anyone at any time. The young and the old, the strong and the weak, the drunk and the sober, the sane and the insane. Scan the roster of the giants and semi-giants, and you would find writers who embraced every sexual proclivity, every political bent, and every human attribute - from the loftiest idealism to the most insiduous corruption. They were criminals and lawyers, spies and doctors, soldiers and spinsters, travelers and shut-ins. If no-one could be excluded, what prevented an almost sixty year-old ex-life insurance agent from joining their ranks? What law declared that nathan Glass had not been infected with the disease?

I shrugged.

"Joyce wrote three novels," Tom said. "Balzac wrote ninety. Does it make any difference to us now?"

"Not to me," I said.

"Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote The Charterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on Madam Bovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man Without Qualities and died before he could finish it. Do we care about any of that now?"

From The Brooklyn Follies, Paul Auster

The Peril of Bookstores

Writing about books is dangerous. I come across them in bookshops and they feel so much like old friends I have to greet them. "Hey, it's you! Here at last! I blogged about you months ago and coveted you ... and now I have you in my hands. ... I simply must take you home with me at once."

But penury beckons. I was in Atria yesterday, (buying fish from Giant, but found myself upstairs in the Big Bookshops Warehouse Sale again for some reason) and manged to find cheap copies of The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan (a gap in my reading), The Ghost Writer by John Harwood (horror story!) and Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky which is on all the best books of 2006 lists.

Then I was in Bangsar Shopping Centre and my legs lead me to Times where I found Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised as a Man by Norah Vincent, The Ruby in Her Navel by Barry Unsworth, Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl and the graphic version of City of Glass by Paul Auster. (See what you guys have done to me - I've bought my first graphic novel!)

The Pessl and Unsworth books are very nice trade paperback editions, of the sort you have to buy those quickly or you end up with manky mass-market paperbacks with newsprint pages and a shelf-life of six months.

But I was honestly working very hard in BSC.

Well ... it might have looked to an outsider as if I was having my hair fiddled with by Felix and my toe nails adorned by Alice with a silly snowman picture, but actually I was tearing through The Brooklyn Follies. (Of which I say nothing more at the moment ... though to give you a clue about how I feel about it, I ended up buying extra copies as gifts.)

And yes, even in Times, book-browsing, it was work: I was checking out what to buy for British Council Library - especially the latest cookbooks. (Nigellas and Jamies.)

I also ended up selling a few books for the bookshop because I got chatting to other bookslovers! Sadly, no-one wants to give me commission.

I was also mouching around the Amazon site looking for a few gifts for my family in UK. My 14 year old nephew Alex is the hardest to buy for.

Not because I can't think what he might like.

I'm sure he'd love Recipes For Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook A Moveable Feast or Backyard Ballistics: Build Potato Cannons, Paper Match Rockets, Cincinnati Fire Kites, Tennis Ball Mortars and More Dynamite Devices.

But I don't think my sis would still love me if I bought them for him.

Resourcing the Story

Last year I pointed the way to a website which supported Britain's Save our Short Story Campaign. The site has now been redesigned and renamed, and if you are at all interested in writing in this genre, you must bookmark shortstory.org which offers:

... a range of short story information, articles, reviews, commentary, events and prizes and of course some fabulous short stories. You can now read the five stories shortlisted for the 2006 National Short Story Prize on the site and a fabulous article by Prize judge William Boyd ‘A Short History of the Short Story’. And our new very short story which you will find at the top of the home page was commissioned by Small Wonder Short Story Festival from James Lasdun, this year’s National Short Story Prize winner. And if you’re looking for new or indeed old directions for your own reading you can also check out our 75 Great Short Stories list. How many have you read? What stories are missing?

You can also buy from them short story collections published in the UK.

Is the short story in Britain still as imperiled? Looks like it's fighting back valiantly, and the fact a short story collection won a major UK prize this year has undoubtedly given the form a great boost and made both the public and booksellers more aware of its potential.

Reviewing the Reviewers

Raman writes about book reviewing and links to a very interesting article on DailyIndia.com.

Now, I'm not sure whether he was just summarising the Indian article or talking about the Malaysian situation or both together when he writes:

Everyone is a critic. There is no formal training school for writing literary reviews. No formal standards. But we know all about that. We can clearly see from some of the reviews in our newspapers, that often the writer has not even read the book, or else what goes for a review is merely a synopsis of the story. The prerequisite of reading a book before doing a review is also probably one reason for the lack of local book reviews in our local papers, it being easier to source a review of a foreign book using Google.

A bigger question has to be ... where are the reviews in the first place? Of the daily English newspapers only the Star seem to have reviews at all. There's an overview of a whole miscellany of books on Fridays and then a page or two of reviews in Starmag on a Sunday. (Fei wrote to tell me that there is quite a lot more in the Chinese language dailies, which is interesting!)

One of the biggest problems is that there simply aren't enough reviewers. I'm drowing in a kind of guilt here - I need to get some reviews finished and sent out and I'm being much too slow about it (though one of my reviews appears this Sunday, so that's something at least). The first challenge is to increase the size of the reviewing pool. (Not so long ago Starmag put out a plea for reviewers, but i don't think they got an enormous response.)

The lack of space for reviews, the lack of reviewers, means that most books the public would be interested in reading about, just don't get publicised. Not good when we are trying to create a reading public, hey?

The greatest casualties though, are of course local writers. How often does a book by a local writer get properly and critically reviewed? How can a writing community grow where there isn't proper feedback on a writer's work? (Again I feel guilty here ... must make more of an effort! But should that effort be mine alone?)

Can anyone be a critic? Do reviewers need specific training? As Raman says, there is no formal training for reviewing. Not even for those whose reviews appear in the New York Times or The Guardian. Reviewers tend have come in as journalists from other sections of the newspaper. The best reviewers, though, tend to be other writers.

Whatever the reviewers' backgrounds, they need to know what they are talking about, which means that they do need to be enthiastic readers and have sufficient understanding of what the writer is trying to do, as well as be able to place the book in its wider context.

Reviewing, of course, has to be something of a labour of love. I poke my bookloving friends to have a go and they always reply "No time, lah." It takes far longer to write a good review than an article of equivalent length, because real thought has to be poured into it. (And of course, the book has to be read first! It's a busman's holiday if you love the book, but a total drag if you don't!)

Raman does local reviewers a disservice by hiding behind vague generalities when he takes a pot-shot at all of them without pointing to specific pages and specific reviews. I enjoy the fiction reviews in Starmag (when they appear!) and find them well-written ... And in honesty I try to do the best job that I can when I write a review, even if I feel I fall way short of the standard set by the best book pages overseas.

What I'm trying to say in this post is that reviewing is important, particularly of local books, and that perhaps we have a collective responsibility towards making sure books are reviewed.

Raman puts up short reviews on his website, but I wonder if he would ever consider putting his words out for a much larger audience by writing for the papers? His reviews would be ones I'd like to read! ("No time," he'll say. And it's true that one person shouldn't be expected to wear too many hats. All the same ... )

Meanwhile, on the subject of reviewing, New York Times book review editor Sam Tanenhaus answers readers questions about his work.

His mission statement?:

... to publish lively, informed, provocative criticism on the widest-possible range of books and also to provide a kind of snapshot of the literary culture as it exists in our particular moment through profiles, essays and reported articles. There are many, many books published each year - hundreds stream into my office in the course of a week. Our job is to tell you which ones we think matter most, and why, and to direct your attention to authors and critics who have interesting things to say, particularly if they have original ways of saying them. At a time when the printed word is being stampeded by the rush of competing "media," we're here to remind you that books matter too - that reading, as John Updike's invented novelist Henry Bech says, can be the best part of a person's life. There's no plaque on the wall. But there is a framed photo of Kurt Cobain.

Update:

Really enjoyed Alex Tang's post about reviewing ... which incorporates a review about a reviewer!

Also worth a read is this horror story on the Guardian blog about a reviewer who reviewed a non-existent book!

Getting ELARTI on Track

This month's "Readings" is taking place this Saturday.

Ruhayat X and "thoseamazingmalayboys! (TM)" will be launching the long-awaited first edition of their publication Project Elarti with readings from an all star cast at Seksan's this Saturday:

... featuring a monkey on a keyboard and about a dozen
humans.

Date : Saturday, 23 December 2006
Time : 3.30pm
Place : Seksan Gallery, 67 Jalan Tempinis Satu, Lucky
Garden, Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur

Since it's Christmas, why not come wrapped in tinsel and baubles?

The event is generously is sponsored by La Bodega (who provide the wine) and Seksan.

"Readings" is the brain-child of Bernice Chauly, and Sharon Bakar is brain-child-minding for Bernice.

Please pass on this information to anyone you think might be interested and feel free to stick it on your blogs.

Related Posts:

The Birth of Neohikayat (14/5/06)
All Aboard the Elarti (8/8/06)

Poet Mong-Lan at Indie Scene Cafe

Award-winning poet Mong-Lan performed yesterday in the intimate space of Indie Scene Cafe.

We kicked off and ended with a few open mic readers:, Jasmine Low (below), KG, Sharanya, and meself ('cos i knew Jasmine wouldn't let me run away from it again!).

While Antonio Banderas look-alike flamenco guitarist Nick Razman strummed chords to capture the duende of the poems, Mong Lan read from her two collections Song of the Cicadas and Why is the Edge Always Windy ... and a series of love poems to cafe au lait, green tea, spinach, red chilli and taufu!

I had told the audience about Mong-Lan's expertise in the tango, and how she wowed the crowds by dancing at Ubud Festival. Now since Nick doesn't play tango, Jasmine asked "Can you dance flamenco for us?" And you know, she did just that!

After the performance I went to have dinner with Mong-Lan and husband Joe. We went exploring for a little local colour and found it plentifully in Jalan Alor. The seafood was excellent
and Mong-Lan fell in love with yet another dish: kangkung belachan. Expect a poem about it soon!

I was admiring Joe's artistic tie, and it turnss out that Mong-Lan hand paints all his ties!


I recorded Mong-Lan's poem Overhearing Water from her second collection so even if you weren't there, you can have a little taste!



P.S. Don't forget to check the Doppelganger website for news of more events organised by Jasmine.

Snow Drift

Abandoned Snow three-quarters of the way through and then hop skipped to the end to find out what happened to the characters. (Now I understand why it took Starmag reviewer Anu Nathan six months to read it!) No point labouring through something you're not enjoying, hey? I now somewhat reluctantly add it to the venerable list of dumpees whilst trying not to feel too inferior to all those friends who wax lyrical about it.

I only read reviews when I'm done with a book, and very much enjoyed the reviews of Snow on newspaper websites. (Complete Review has a whole list of them.) Despite my own struggle with the book, I have to agree with these words by Laurel Maurey in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Pamuk is a good antidote to the easy answers that so much modern literature offers; if you're a fan of Dostoyevsky, Fowles, Hesse, George Saunders or any other author with the guts to muck with your mind, read Pamuk. ... "Snow" will make you feel the arguments surrounding fundamentalism as a situation of murky grays, where the only thing black is the night, and the only thing white is the snow.

Margaret Atwood's review in the New York Times intrigues when she talks about the Male Labyrinth Novel ... something I'd never considered before:

The twists of fate, the plots that double back on themselves, the trickiness, the mysteries that recede as they're approached, the bleak cities, the night prowling, the sense of identity loss, the protagonist in exile -- these are vintage Pamuk, but they're also part of the modern literary landscape. A case could be made for a genre called the Male Labyrinth Novel, which would trace its ancestry through De Quincey and Dostoyevsky and Conrad, and would include Kafka, Borges, García Márquez, DeLillo and Auster, with the Hammett-and-Chandler noir thriller thrown in for good measure. It's mostly men who write such novels and feature as their rootless heroes, and there's probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she's likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.

Or maybe women have more pressure on them just to get on with things because too much depends on them?

Will try some of Pamuk's other novels later on. Promise.

Now it's back to Auster. I'm supposed to be reviewing The Brooklyn Follies and better get on with it!

Author Blogger

How lovely to see Malaysian author Yang-May Ooi's blog, Fusion View featured inStarmag today in a piece by Elizabeth Tai.

Yang-May is a fairly recent blogger (she began in April) but her space online is a great place to go for useful insights into the writing life and the low-down on getting published.

And for a good read about all things Malaysian written by an expat in London.

I can echo her sentiments about blogging being a great way to connect with people from across the world (how many good friends has it sent my way?) and I find it particularly interesting that she says that blogging has helped her to write in a more relaxed manner.

Yang-May plans to put up extracts from the new novel she is writing, Tianming Triavata "a quirky family drama" set in small-town Malaysia, as well as podcasts of them.

I gotta podcast soon or burst!

Related Posts:
Getting Published: Advice from Yang-May (28/5/06)
The Real David K.T. Wong (5/6/06)

Reading Ain't Just Books!

Daphne Lee interviews reading development expert Tom Palmer in Starmag today, and talk about how his mum got him into reading by giving him football magazines! Now he builds on a love of the game in his own workshops to encourage kids to read.

On getting kids to read:

Often, all it takes is to allow children to make their own reading choices. It’s logical, really. Why would a child or anyone read a book that they find boring? It makes all the difference to identify a subject of interest and use it to lead to reading. Reading is not really perceived as a cool activity, apart from when it’s something like the Harry Potter books – whenever one comes out, it’s carried around like a fashion accessory. So it’s a bad idea to force a child to do something that’s already seen as boring. ... I know boys who say they don’t read and dislike reading, but when you talk to them you realise they spend an hour every day reading blogs, websites, magazines. They do these things unconsciously and because the reading doesn’t involve a book, they don’t see it as reading.

Related Posts:
Football, Reading and Tom Palmer (3/12/06)

Amazing May Zhee

I chaired MPH's Writer's Circle yesterday. The topic was Writing Fiction, but there turned out to be only one speaker.

Lim May Zhee is one determined young lady. She has written and self-published her first novel, Vanitee Bee, which might best be described as chic-lit for teens. Despite being just 16 years old (15 when she wrote the book) she talked and fielded questions from the floor with a maturity beyond her years. And there was a lesson for us all in her experience - if you believe in your book and want to get it out - just go ahead and self-publish.

We were most amused to learn that May Zhee didn't even tell her parents about her project until the book was published. She raised the money she needed by herself. She says she realised that she needed a copy editor and took the manuscript to Silverfish for vetting. Then proofread it carefully again herself, and then sent it to the printer who also designed the cover for her.

She approached MPH's marketing department and they agreed to distribute the book for her, but then her dad had to be called in to sign the contract on her behalf since she was underage!

May Zhee hopes to make a career in writing. I'm pretty sure she will manage to do pretty much what she sets her heart on, she's such a self-starter.

My only (teacherly) advice to May Zhee is that she really should begin to read much more widely - even if she loves chic-lit. She hopes to read literature at university and will need a strong foundation. I listed links to some good sites with lists on teen-reads the other day, and that's probably as good a starting point as any.

Managing the Q&A turned out to be a bit of an ordeal. One gentleman was problematic and started to hog the whole discussion, not giving others a chance - particularly the shier members of the group whom I wanted to coax out rather more. I hope I didn't upset him too much when I had to tell him that his question was irrelevant - but I had to take charge of a situation that was becoming increasingly difficult. (I know the guy in question is burning with the desire to get his books into print, but he does need to think about how other people are feeling ... and not be so ... kiasu. The best way out of his dilemma is actually to pluck up the courage to send out his manuscripts to editors and get professional feedback.)

How nice it was that this guy came along. Recognise him? 'Tis The Great Swifty aka Edmund Yeo, who has been a blog-friend for some time.

I was rather stressed after the session and went to Delicious for a while with David Byck to have something to eat. When I had recovered it was time to head for town for Lydia's booklauch for Honk If You're Malaysian.

I drove through the Saturday jams to reach the hotel ... just a little after time ... only to find it was the wrong hotel. It was supposed to be at the Crowne Plaza and I was at the Crowne Princess. What kinds of idiots gives a hotel a name which is bound to get confused with another? (What kind of idiot doesn't read the invite carefully enough?). More stress.

(Lydia, once again am very sorry ... and glad that the event went so well for you.)

At least a nice tea at Animah's with friends and a good gossip made me feel better.

More rushing about today. Mong-Lan's reading is at Indie Scene Cafe this afternoon at 5. Will maybe see you there!

Update:

Swifty filmed Writer's Circle! I hate to see myself on film so I won't watch it.
May Zhee also blogged it. She thinks I look like a book!

Bounteous Book Bargains

Went along to the Pay Less Warehouse Sale and took along a young guy called Nicholas who writes very well and has just finished his A levels in Singapore. I don't think he expected the sale to be so big or for there to be so many must read books going so cheaply. Yes, it is a very good sale - just have the others have been.

But maybe because I've been to so many sales lately and my shelves are groaning under the weight of unread books, I didn't jump into the fray with such gleeful abandon. Was very picky about my choices. (Not so Nicholas who filled a huge carton.)

Warehouse sales are a good place to socialise. Here's poet and artist Rahmat Harun.

And here's another friend and poet, Raja Ahmad. We went for a drink and chat with them at the A&W afterwards.

I'm beginning to realise that there is a breed of folks you can call Kaki Warehouse Sale. Here's Justin, Margaret and Joel with boxes and boxes of books. I got talking to Justin and Margaret at the last Pay Less Sale, and learned how they are building a library ...

... and they're so systematic about it. Justin has the list of books he wants to find with many of the books crossed off!

I also bumped into Tina whom I'd also met at the last sale and I was adding enthuistically to her pile! And Yvonne Lee. And Simran, who has just joined our book club. And Peter who works in pay Less in One Utama, but couldn't resist coming to look for books on his day off! (He used to work for Tower records and we used to talk classical music whenever I went in there.)

I came home with this pile of books for just RM36. Not a big pile, but good stuff to keep me happy.


So ... what did you buy?

Be Fab - BAFAB!

Came across the BAFAB website in during my perambulations, and it's such a nice meme-ish thing I thought I might climb on board too.

The site is the brain child of lit-blogger Debra Hamel. It urges visitors to buy books "for no good reason" and pass them on during Buy a Friend a Book Week (held in the first weeks of January, April, July, and October) to spread the joy of books and promote friendship. There are some cool stickers to slap on your blog to show you're taking part.

Your reward? Great bookish karma, of course. And warm fuzzies of the heart.