Malaysians ... Still Ain't Reading

Utusan Malaysia this week laments the lack of a Malaysian reading culture. Hardly anyone's reading on the LRT (above) despite the launch of the Baca@LRT campaign on Facebook :

or in other public spots sampled.

And it seems that the branch libraries are not really attracting users either.

Information Communication and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim has decided that the answer to the problem is to set up another study to find out about Malaysians' reading habits.

Readers of this blog may remember me getting very cross about the last time a large scale survey was carried out by the National Library because the results were never properly made public and questions about how the data was gathered were never revealed. It would have been useful for academics, teacher-trainers, teachers,  bookshop buyers, and other stakeholders to have had access to that data. (Some of those in the book retail industry anyway disputed the figures that did get quoted.)

One thing that does give me hope is that when you go along to a cheap book sale or to a book fair in the Klang Valley, the venue is invariably packed out. (I'm sure those of you who went to the BookXcess sale today would bear me out.) I think that a lot of people are keen to own books rather than borrow them. 

I suspect that a lot of people don't read in public because it is considered a slightly odd thing to do:  it hasn't become a part of the culture.  I'd go crazy if I were without a book for any length of time, but unless you have a pretty hungry reading habit, you are not going to think like that.

The Read While Waiting Project was a nice idea, but doesn't seem to have come to anything either despite the hype that surrounded it. Pity!

An Afternoon with Clare Wigfall

2008 BBC National Short Story Award winner Clare Wigfall will be making an appearance in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday March 13, 2010.
 
Clare's debut collection of short stories The Loudest Sound and Nothing was published in 2007 to critical acclaim. In 2008 she won the internationally renowned BBC National Short Story Award for The Numbers, one of the stories from her collection. She currently lives in Berlin.  She is currently working on a novel set in Malaysia, and would welcome an opportunity to talk to you about her research.

Venue: Instant CAFE HOUSE of ART and IDEAS (CHAI)
Date: March 13, 2010 (Saturday)
Time: 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: 6 Jalan 6/3, Off Jalan Templer, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia
Entrance Fee : Donation RM20 (for upkeep of CHAI House)

You can read an interview with Clare on Eric Forbes’ blog, and her prize-winning story is linked here.

BookXcess is Spring-Cleaning!

The long weekend has arrived and what better way to spend it than stocking up on cheapy books. Here's some very happy news from BookXcess :

Hello dear bookworms

We hope you had a good holiday recently! For some, the spring cleaning began before the Chinese New Year festivities. For BookXcess, we're spring-cleaning now... because we're moving out. So we're throwing a Moving Out Sale!

There are over 200 selected titles going on sale at 3 amazing prices: RM3, RM5 and RM9.90! Fiction, non-fiction, children, young adult... with such variety of books, there's definitely something for everybody at this Moving Out Sale. If you're looking for some affordable good reads, come on down to our store this weekend. The sale period is from 26 February to 10 March 2010.

In our last e-mail to you, we mentioned we have some BIG news. If you haven't heard the rumours already, we now confirm it... BookXcess is moving into a BIGGER store! It is just two doors away from our current premises. In fact, it's the previous venue of The Big Bad Book Sale!

As we move into a store that's 4 times bigger than our current premises, we have plans to bring in more books for your enjoyment at prices that cost much less than other bookstores. Look out for another e-mail from us soon with details of the new shipment, as well as some great deals in conjunction of our moving into a bigger store!

Do visit BookXcess for the Moving Out Sale - you never know if you'll find a treasure of a book!

The Writing Advice Industry

The market for fiction shrinks every year, the attention paid to novels by the media diminishes monthly, booksellers demand ever-lower prices, everybody in the industry says it’s the worst it’s ever been. And yet more academic or private creative-writing programs are created every year, and the demand for advice on becoming a novelist remains furiously high. Indeed, the selling of advice on writing has become a self-supporting industry: I know young writers who are doing masters of fine arts in creative writing so that they can in turn become creative-writing teachers in similar programs. Any magazine article like this one generates Internet responses as lengthy as any novella. The discussion of creative writing seems more popular than creative writing itself.

Russell Smith in Canada's Globe and Mail comments The Guardian's recent 10 Rules for Writers lists and remarks on one of the biggest literary ironies of our time - everyone wants to be a writer, we swallow whatever advice we can get about writing wholesale, fuelling a whole advice industry ... but fewer of us can be arsed to read fiction!

Plenty of truth in what he says, of course, but it does seem sour-grapesy.  I for one am grateful for whatever insights about the writing process I can gather from books, article, courses and author chats, and find my appreciation of what I read deepened by such insights.

(BTW Linked to the article in the comments is this rather enjoyable blog post from Lauren B. Davis - Ten Questions Never to Ask a Writer.)

Salinger Remembered

Just got this note from Malachi Edwin Vethamani via Facebook :

The School of Education, Languages and Communications and the Centre for Professional and Continuing Education of Wawasan Open University will hold a J.D. Salinger: In Memoriam session on 20th March at 10 a.m. at Wawasan Open University, 3rd Floor Wisma PGRM, 8 Jalan Pudu Ulu, Cheras, KL. The event is open to all and admission is FREE. There will be readings and some interesting short talks on Salinger and his work. Further details contact Ms Amy 03-92817323.

When Is Buying a Book Like Buying an Organic Tomato?

I blogged earlier about UK small press publishers, Salt, and how they were seriously struggling and initiated the Buy One More Book Campain. yesterday I was chatting by email to Wena Poon about the problems the company faces, and asked her if she would like to write something for this blog.  She sent me this : 

SALT PUBLISHING, OR HOW TO PICK BOOKS LIKE HEIRLOOM TOMATOES

Wena Poon, author and avid book consumer, reflects on a new kind of responsible book buying.

After reading about the swift consolidation of the publishing industry, I now realize that the different brands of books you see in the bookstores are all owned by the same conglomerate. It’s like dim sum – different shapes but all made in the same kitchen.

Now that I have been corrupted by hipster Americans and buy organic produce from local farms, I have also been converted into a new kind of Responsible Book Buying. I make an effort to buy books from Independent Presses. To me, it’s exactly like buying an heirloom tomato, or an artisanal cheese.

Ever since they published my first book, Lions In Winter, for the Western market, I have also begun appreciating the beauty of an independent press like Salt Publishing.

Salt is not owned by Mega Corp. Its books are beautifully designed, bound and printed on quality paper. The ten-year old press has 400 authors and 1,000 books, and is run entirely out of a cute little office in Cambridge, England by a husband and wife team and two young interns.

Salt authors have been recognized by literary festivals and competitions the world over, including, in 2010, the Adelaide Literary Festival and the Willesden Short Story Awards (3 of the 10 shortlistees are Salt authors, including me!)

Salt books are most widely available in England, but if you are not there, there is no reason why you should suffer. Forget it, your local bookstore will never order it. You can die waiting. Try buying a few books of contemporary poetry or short fiction from Salt online. (They’re also on Amazon).

Buying Salt books is the reason why I have started reading modern poetry again, and I find that I rather like it! Like an heirloom tomato, this content is not processed or genetically modified by legions of agents, editors, businessmen, promoters. It tastes real, hopeful, earthy, immediate. Try it!

Recession limited your spending funds? I’ve decided it’s more “worth it” to buy a book than eat a gourmet restaurant meal. The book lasts longer, and it doesn’t show around the waist! The UK tv personality Griff Rhys-Jones said it best: "If the recession is going to take things down, let it be motor manufacturers, let it be bad banks, let it be chains of fast food restaurants. We can lose a few of them, but we don’t have enough small independent and daring publishers like Salt."

Risk averse? Want a recommendation? Try Luke Kennard’s The Migraine Hotel (British Poetry). I bought it and it’s now one of my fav books. Luke is a twentysomething lyrical poet who’s very funny and clever (this is hard for me to admit, since I’m older and get so jealous sometimes.) You can see him on Youtube reading to giggling crowds.

Hardworking student type? Want to read tips about how to write better short stories? Try Vanessa Gebbie’s Short Circuits (Non-Fiction), containing reflections on this art form from Britain’s best short story writers.

Worried about shipping costs to your part of the world, including Australia/NZ/Malaysia? I have not found it to be a problem. Click here to see their reasonable rates.

For updates, and local get-togethers especially if you are in the UK, join the Salt Facebook Fan Page.

The Singapore-born writer Wena Poon lives in Austin, Texas and drinks only small brewery beers. Her latest novel, Alex y Robert, about girl matadors in Spain, is coming out with Salt in July 2010.

Ten Rules

Those of us who write love to glean the advice from those who have made a success of the business of fiction. Crime writer Elmore Leonard's list of ten writing rules appeared in The New York Times in 2001 and has since been much quoted. (Rightly so, because it's sterling stuff.)

1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2 Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."

3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

5 Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "Ameri­can and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're ­Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it

Now a book for writers based on the list is due to be republished next month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.  (You can hear Leonard talking about the book and other writing here.)

The Guardian goes one better, and asks a whole lot of famous authors  - for their 10 Rules.  The result (in two parts here and here) is somewhat overwhelming (24 pages when I printed it off!) but there is a great deal of good stuff in there.  One or two points I highlighted because they rang true with me :

Margaret Atwood :

If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.

Roddy Doyle :

So not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, espcieally if the authro is one of the famous ones who commit suicide.
Do not search Amazon.com for a book you have not written yet.

Anne Enright :

The only way to write a book is to write a book.

Neil Gaiman :

Style is getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.

Andrew Motion :

Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and organise your life accordingly.

Annie Proulx 

Write slowly and by hand about subjects that interest you.

Colm Toibin

Finish everything you start.
Stay in your mental pyjamas all day.

So ... which bits of advice do you like the best? Anything you'd chuck out the window?  (Hari Kunzru on Twitter this morning called lots of these rules "nonsense" - would love to know which and why.)

February Readings

Announcing our next live literature event!

Date: Saturday 27th February, 2010
Time: 3.30pm
Place: Seksan's, 67, Jalan Tempinis Satu, Lucky Garden, Bangsar

(Map www.seksan.com)

The readers for this month are:

Jamie Khoo
David Lai
Chaizani
Damyanti Ghosh
Datuk Dr. SHANmugalingam
Eeleen Lee

Admission free and everyone very welcome. Please pass on the invitation to anyone else you think might be interested.

(For enquiries contact Sharon 017-2644956, sharonbakar@yahoo.com)

The lovely poster for this month's Readings was created by Lydia Chai.

Twitterature!

There it lies, cunningly clad in those horizontal bands of orange, and white, and orange. Penguin-ed. As if to dupe us to its credence, or credibility, or creed. The sheer audacity of that ampersand between their two names. The heart-wrenching horror of truncating centuries of sublime and (almost) metrical composition into something that is less than one long, deep, audible exhalation. The premise sounds downright appalling. The idea of condensing 60 of literature’s greatest works into little nuggets of twitterese — short statements bound by a 140-character limit — sounds like the perfect 4am activity. It is a pursuit that usually follows the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol and the statement: “You know what would be really fun?” And it is fun. But more than that, it is also clever.

Umapagan Ampikaipakan reviews a book that sounds a must-read in The New Straits Times : Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin.

It looks like fun! :

From Hamlet: WTF IS POLONIUS DOING BEHIND THE CURTAIN???

From Dante's Inferno: I'm havin a midlife crisis. Lost in the woods. Shoulda brought my iPhone.

From Oedipus: PARTY IN THEBES!!! Nobody cares I killed that old dude, plus this woman is all over me. Total MILF.

From Paradise Lost: OH MY GOD I'M IN HELL.

Clare Wigfall in KL

(UK) National Short Story Prize 2008 winner Clare Wigfall is going to be working on a new collection of short stories, and a novel for Faber &Faber :

You might be surprised to learn that the novel is set in British Malaya. It will be fictional, but is loosely based on the story of my grandmother who grew up in Penang and about her mother who left her when she was a small baby.

Best news of all though, is that Clare will be here (with baby daughter Elsa Rowan and husband in tow) to research her novel next month.  She told Eric Forbes :

I still can’t quite believe we are making the trip—Berlin is still cloaked under what seems to be a never-ending layer of ice and snow—will spring never come? It will really be surreal to arrive in Malaysia with its tropical climate! Just yesterday I was talking with my husband and saying I wonder what my grandmother would think to know her granddaughter and great-granddaughter are now tracing her footsteps.

And yes, of course, we are going to organise an event where you can all get to meet her.  At the moment e-mails are flying in all directions to get something fixed up - so watch this space for updates.

I think there are some very big fans of Clare's already among those of us who recently attended the British Council's recent workshop as we studied her winning story The Numbers.  

Eric Forbes interviewed her for Quill magazine last year, and you can read the piece here.

Rock Star Professor

My background was in philosophy and I’m a philosopher by training. Much later I moved to political theory and began to work on the history of politics in Malaysia, pertaining to the history of the respective political parties. ... That was when I realised that even political parties distorted their own histories and some party members did not even know their own history. I was shocked when I interviewed a leader of a party who didn’t know the date of its foundation! And that’s when I realised that there were facets of Malaysia’s past that had been kept from most of us.

Farish "Rocky Star Professor" Noor is profiled by Martin Vengadesan in today's Starmag, and talks about his own colourful family history (Jawi-Peranakan, Indian and Arab blood) and parents who worked in broadcasting; his academic background (philiospher and political -theorist) ; and great populariser of Malaysian history via his lecture series at Central Market Annexxe. (The talks are collected in What Your History Teacher Didn't Tell You.)

And one piece of very good news for us -  this already prolific author is planning to retire in three years time and turn to fiction.

Perhaps the best quote about Farish comes from Silverfish's Raman, who is one of his publishers :  

If I have to describe him in one word I would use ‘intense’. He’s an avowed socialist and always on the side of the downtrodden and the victimised, and I can never find fault with his sense of fair play and his sense of humour. ... He is also indefatigable! When I was editing Quran and Cricket, I thought to myself that this guy is crazy. I was amazed at the lengths he went to get the stories, often putting his life (not to mention his sanity) in danger. I was watching a BBC news item on Patani once while editing the book, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, how lame is that?’ Compared to Farish’s reporting, most of the current news media have no clue what is going on. I realise that this is because most reporters cannot (and are not willing) to get down to the ground like him. Can you imagine Abu Bakar Bashir giving such an interview to a Western journalist?

More Bookshop Harrassment

One of Amir Muhammad's books has now fallen victim to this plague of bookshop snafflings.

He received this fax from MPH Distributors telling him that all copies of Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things (Vol 2) were seized from MPH Mahkota Parade, Melaka on Feb 10th.

Amir writes on his blog :

I view this seizure is the latest act of harassment by the authorities against bookshops and publishers.

If, indeed, these people suspect that the book (which has been on sale since December 2008 -- yes, for 14 months-- with no hassle) might "have a negative impact on public tranquility/morals/public safety/relations between the country and foreign nations", why can't they just go through the proper channels by banning the book?

The book has many pictures and very little text; even so, did it really take the authorities 14 months to even suspect that the book committed any or all of those vaguely-stated offences? If so, should we worry about the literacy rate of the members of the police force?

I wonder why the police are being used in this way, too, rather than the Home Ministry's enforcement officers? Wouldn't they be better employed working to reduce some of the crime on the streets?

Writers Helping Writers?

In 2004, Nicola Nikolov, an émigré to the U.S. in 1976 from communist Bulgaria, walked into William Dailey Rare Books in Los Angeles with a small archive of letters.


Briefly recounting a dark biography past and reduced, if freer, circumstances present, he told of his life as a published Bulgarian author and his difficulty establishing a writing career for himself in the United States. It was extremely important to him that his writing be accepted.


In August of 1978, he wrote, heart in hand, two-page long, well-written, typed letters to a small number of American novelists, with full, dire biographical details, limning his struggles to get read by the New York publishing establishment, and sincerely requesting that the novelists read and evaluate a few stories that he had enclosed. He saved their responses.

Stephen J. Gerz on the Bookpatrol blog has a fascinating story to tell about the compassion (or not) of  some successful American authors towards a struggling writer who needed their help.  Kurt Vonnegut (left) emerges as the most compassionate.

Thing is, though, I can really sympathise with the authors who said that they did not have time to read his manuscript too.  Kindness eats terribly into writing time.

Australia-Asia literary Prize Scrapped

Found some sad news at the Literary Saloon website.  Apparently, the (A$110,000) Australia-Asia Literary Award, which gave local writers a very welcome shot at an international award, has been scrapped after just one year. But the decision to pull the plug, of course,  wasn't entirely unexpected. 

Authors Lives Don't Make Great Cinema

The lives of popular writers such as Dan Brown and JK Rowling would make better movies. They are rich, powerful celebrities; they dine with presidents and travel the world. But, for some reason, nobody seems to take them seriously as cinema subjects. Perhaps if they developed crack habits and slept with lots of groupies things might change.

Writer's lives don't always make great cinema, says Evan Maloney on The Guardian blog, unless they :

...cater to the fantasy that writers are drunk, mad, sex-obsessed geniuses inspired by the holy spirit (50% proof). Think Henry Miller (Henry and June), William Burrows (Naked Lunch), Hunter S Thompson (Where the Buffalo Roam, Fear and Loathing) the Marquis de Sade (Quills) and Charles Bukowski (Bar Fly, Factotum).

But the truth is, of course, that most writers lead outwardly boring lives  ... sitting at their desks and yes, putting down one word after another.  Tortured geniuses there may be, here and there, but they aren't usually the guys coming up with the goods.

Maloney's post is inspired by the forthcoming biopic of Leon Tolstoy (played by Christopher Plummer - pictured above), The Last Station.

Leon Roadtests Malaysia's First E-Reader

My favourite tech geek, Leon Wing, was the perfect person to review the first e-reader to be brought into the country. So how does the Hanlin V5, brought in by bookstore MPH, measure up?

MPH hasn’t gone wrong by bringing this one in

he says ... fairly diplomatically, I think.  A little underwhelmed, Leon?

Gong Xi, Gong Xi

Wishing my Chinese friends a very happy year of the tiger.  And the rest of you, a nice relaxing holiday.

Oh yes, and of course, a happy Valentine's day.

Stop Harassing Bookstores!

Dear Malaysian Home Ministry, the message is a simple one (and it's not the first time I have blogged this ) :

STOP HARRASSING BOOKSHOPS!!!

If you say that you want to get your hands on a copy OF a title to study it :

THEN ASK THE PUBLISHERS!

If you decide to get it from a bookseller :

PAY FOR WHAT YOU TAKE!

If a book is not banned and you seize it, you are acting in a bullying, brutish manner and possibly illegally.

News today in The Star that seven bookshops have had copies of the Malaysiakini books 1Funny Malaysia and Where is Justice confiscated/nabbed/grabbed/seized. 57 copies of the books taken in all :

“The books are not banned but they want to seize the books for review purposes,” said Malaysiakini editor-in-chief Steven Gan.

He said ministry officials could get the books from Kinibooks and need not disturb the bookstores.

He added that Malaysiakini had asked its lawyers to send a letter to the Home Ministry asking for reason for the seizure of the books and demand for their return.

“If they want to ban the books, they should just ban it and we will contest the decision in court,” he said.

1Funny Malaysia by Malaysiakini cartoonist Zulkiflee Anuar is the second of the cartoonist’s books to be seized.

His cartoon magazine Gedung Kartun (Cartoon Store) was seized in August last year.
“My work touches on current issues and is designed to arouse critical thinking and encourage healthy debates.

“The Home Ministry and police actions certainly do not encourage the development of the political cartoon industry in Malaysia. It is also a total violation of press freedom, freedom of expression and the principles of democracy,” he said.

Nathaniel Tan, editor of Where is Justice said he does not understand why the Home Ministry was taking so long to review the book as the text was not long.

“The facts used in the books were checked by our lawyers before publishing to ensure we are not breaking any laws,” he added.

This is a pattern of unacceptable behaviour that needs to stop. But then the authorities are clearly not listening.

Postscript (18/2)  :

Amir Muhammad and I got quoted in a piece in The Malay Mail today.  And we discover that lo and behold, the ministry have not, in fact, "confiscated" the copies "for review purposes", but because, according to the ministry's deputy secretary-general Datuk Ahmad Fuad Ab Azizthey  :

... enforcement officers found the titles to be 'offensive' and violated the Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984.

What happens next - whether the books will be banned officially or not - remains to be seen. Meanwhile all we can do is protest against the stiffling of freedom of the press in Malaysia and the heavy-handed tactics of enforcement officers in removing books from shops.

Uma Gets Romantic with Books

Stuck for what to buy your love for Valentine's Day?  Of course I'm going to say "A book".  So did Umapagan Ampikaipakan on his book show on BFM 89.9.  The titles he suggested :

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The History of Love by Nichola Krauss
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Here's why :



(More suggestions for Valentine reading, archived on this blog.)

Also on BFM this week -  Shazmin Shamsuddin  interviewed Chinese Stories in Times of Change author David T. K. Wong, so if you missed the talk the other day at CHAI, you should enjoy this.

David's Dose of Realism

David T.K. Wong's talk at CHAI House on Saturday was aimed at all those in the audience with authorly aspirations, and came in the form of an extended warning with each point backed up with some well researched examples from the lives of authors. (It was such a well put together talk that I am trying to persuade David to put it into the public domain - perhaps as an article or blog post.)

It can be summarised thus : don't become a writer because you think it will make you rich, famous or immortal - in most cases it won't do any of those things. You have to write because you love it. In his own case :
... writing really enraptured me. it was a kind of madness, I suppose.
it was in the Q&A that followed the talk that David really opened up and talked about himself. The question I was dying to ask, and hadn't (despite having had lunch with him a couple of times) was why he had decided to set up the extraordinarily generous award that carries his name.

He said that he first thought that he would like to write in university.  He got himself a room and a typewriter, and he had the money to support himself.  After a year though, he says, he was starving to death and no-one wanted what he had written.  he had only sold one short story :

Being practical, and Chinese, I thought I'd do something else and make enough money.

So for 35 years he did other things and when he had made enough money, he went back to writing.  He thought to himself  "There must be other peole who are like I was 35 years ago and couldn't keep body and soul together, and if there's a little bit of hope that they can make it as writers, they should have a year to test their determination.

He sees the fellowship as :

... paying back something to society. Life's treated me decently. 

But there is a deeper reason:

Most of the problems with the world are at an individual level, and due to an inability to communicate. We don't connect. How do you improve things? As an individual, you can't do much. I beleive in literature is a tool to help human understanding.

Furthermore :

Money's no damn good unless you spend it! You can't take it with you.

He also said that one of the reasons he prefers the short story to the novel is :

I'm ancient and I don't know when I'm going to die, and I'd rather not leave something half-completed.

But I think that was a tongue-in-cheek reply because he is currently working on a novel!

I had brought along copies of his latest collection of short stories (thanks to Mei Li at Marshall Cavendish who brought over a box full for me) Chinese Stories in Times of Change and David signed copies.

It was a very pleasant afternoon spent with friends and I particularly thank Jo Kukathas for giving us the beautiful space.  I hope to arrange more author events there, so if there are any authors out there who would like to talk about any aspect of writing or publishing, please do let me know and I will see what I can arrange.

All the lovely photos were taken by Umapagan Ampikaipakan, so Uma, many thanks for that,

So Where IS Justice?

*Sigh* - here's another incident in which books have been seized  - oops - "confiscated".

This time it's the Seremban police who have confiscated 22 books published by Kinibooks, a subsidiary of Malaysiakini, last Friday from Popular Book Store. The books are 12 copies of 1Funny Malaysia comic books and 10 copies of Where is Justice? 


According to Malaysiakini :

Special Investigation Divisions officer Inspector Bobby Bana said that orders came from the Negri Sembilan police headquarters last week for the books to be seized.


"We are not banning the books but are just taking them to analyse their content," said Bana, who was part of the raiding team, when contacted today.


This is the latest incident following seizures of the same books in Malacca and Penang two weeks ago.


It is understood that the books are being studied for seditious content that could compromise the harmony of the country.


'1Funny Malaysia' is a compilation of cartoonist Zunar's works while 'Where is Justice?' is about death and brutality in police custody focusing on four prominent cases involving Teoh Beng Hock, A Kugan, Altantuya Shaariibuu, and Anwar Ibrahim.

Do get your copies of both books while they are still available, here. 

The Ardent Heart

I knew J.D. Salinger. But he did not know me. I could not call him up whenever I felt like it. No one could. Because I knew J.D. Salinger like you knew him, the way he wanted to be known, through his work.

Umapagan Ampikaipakan mourns the passing of a favourite author in The New Straits Times, and he remembers how he read Catcher in the Rye at 13 :

I did not know J.D. Salinger then. All I knew was what some kid told me at school. He told me that John Lennon was dead, that someone had killed him, and that he done so after reading this particular book. ... For weeks afterwards, I would pore over the 192 pages of my tattered red and white Penguin edition, scanning through its minuscule 10-point font, for hidden messages, for secret codes. For something, anything, that would inspire murder. I read it forwards. I read it backwards. Needless to say, I discovered very little.

I remember reading the novel when I wasn't much older (probably 15 - in those days I had a very long bus journey to school and that was my perfect reading time). It was the quintessential teenage novel, the one that you had to read. 

But it was only last year that I came across his short fiction in Nine Stories (a tatty copy that Dina Zaman wanted "rehomed") and would consider myself haunted by the stories (particularly the autobiographical For Esme With Love and Squalor) and hungry for more.

Much of his short fiction though remains unpublished and there is also the hope (probably unfounded)  that there may be some unpublished works in his safe that  could at last see light of day. I hope so.

Do read Adam Gopnik's moving piece about Salinger in The New Yorker. As he quite rightly says  :

Writing, real writing, is done not from some seat of fussy moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart; no American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his.

(Pic from The New Yorker)

My Writing Workshops

I have news of other writing workshops locally ... and the first one to talk about is mine!

My course Getting Started has found a new home now, and I am very excited at the prospect of starting up again with two new groups in February. I haven't usually announced to the world when my courses were taking place (well, kept secret!) because the British Council put the word out for me, word of mouth was working its magic too, and we more people wanting to do the course than I could fit in since I keep the group size small.

Now Eileen and Dennis of Learning Works have offered me space in a very pleasant and newly renovated house in Bandar Utama, just a short distance from where I live. The feel of a place is very important to me, and without wanting to go all touchy-feely on you, I just felt that the vibes for creativity were right!

You can read about Learning Works here, and find details of my course here. Please can you pass the news on to anyone you know who might be interested?

One of the courses I'm starting is in the daytime, which should help me to tap into a whole new market.

If this works out well for me, I have all kinds of plans for other classes I might teach.

Learning Works is also going to be the home of Daphne Lee's workshops and I will put up some thing about her workshops in another post.

Travels Through Books

Umapagan talks about books that make you wish you were there on his latest radio show on BFM89.9.  Books featured at Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, Ryszard Kapuscinski 's The Shadow of the Sun, A Year in Provence and Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar.   There are links to the books on MPH's website.

BanBanBan!

To update you on the several banned-unbanned book sagas ongoing in Malaysia at the moment, so to keep you up to date  ...

First, the High Court has adjourned to Feb 12 the decision on the application by author K. Arumugam seeking to declare null and void the government’s decision to ban his book on the Kampung Medan.

Secondly, I reported that Barry Wain's book Malaysian Maverick : Mahathir Mohammad in Turbulent Times is banned. It seems I was premature, the book is still being studied by Ministry officials. (There's an interesting article about it here in The Sydney Morning Herald.)

Meanwhile the book is flying off the shelves in Singapore and according to industry sources there are also several hundred copies already for sale inside the country (if you know where to look - which isn't in the bigger bookshop chains) so I don't reckon that anyone who want to reads the book is going to go without.   But I do feel very sorry for the supplier whose copies remain are in limbo ... I am sure that the government is not going to compensate them for losses. 

I reported on Sister's in Islam victory the other day, but I have since heard (via Twitter) that the government intends to appeal the High Court's decision - though I have not seen this reported in the press.

Will keep you informed in all these cases.

Malaysia's Tamil Writers

One can be forgiven if one has never heard of – never mind, read – Malaysian Tamil authors. It’s not that they don’t exist. It’s just that they are not known (or made known) to a non-Tamil-speaking audience. 

and who better than Uthaya Sankar SB to shine a light on them?

of the contemporary Tamil writing scene, Uthaya says :

Generally speaking, this is the state of the Tamil literary scene in Malaysia. Content takes precedence over form. Even then, one need not have a new story to tell – one can always rehash the same story for the hundredth time. In fact, it seems that as long as you are competent in written Tamil, you can see your story in print.

But, Uthaya concludes (based on his experience with financing M. Balachandran's sell-out collection Illa Manathin Vergal in 1997) : 

There is a new breed of talented young writers, and readers are ready for their unconventionality.

Our Event, the Capricorn!

So ... it turns out that our event, Readings, is a Capricorn (since it was born 8th January 2005) which makes it (according to audience member, Dave Tee, "ambitious, strong willed and never prepared to say die"!)

Forgive a short detour to nostalgia.

We began of course at Darling Muse gallery, and later in 2005 moved to Seksan's and have had a home here ever since. Bernice was the mummy of Readings, and I took over as adoptive mum when her mum became terminally ill, and then she fully handed over the event to me and started a new one, Ceritaku!, at No Black Tie.

Over the years we've given more than 160 writers space to read their work and given them a meeting place where friendships have been forged and collaborations born.

And as straits-mongrel (who also gave me permission to use his beautiful pictures) points out beautifully in his post Reading in Colours,  this event has brought together a huge diversity of folks in the kind of Muhibbah spirit that this 1 Malaysia thing is supposed to be about. Frankly, that's never been on the conscious agenda, but has definitely been one of the best things that has naturally emerged from the event.

And now we've launched a book project which hopefully will put event and writers on the map.

So a party to celebrate this was in order, and party we did.

We welcomed back some of our earliest readers and introduced some new ones.

I've been trying to get hold of The Loud girl aka Elaine Foster ever since I first heard her read at one of The British Council's Wayang Kata events.  She could also be crowned slam queen of KL, and is organising spoken word events now in collaboration with Word Forward in Singapore.  I especially loved the first piece she read, which she had written in collaboration with George Wielgus and Tsiung Han See about the coming revolution and what it would not be like!

Jo Kukathas, actor, playwright, director, and driving force behind Instant Cafe Theatre had been one of the participants in the British Council's creative writing workshops earlier this month.  I loved the pieces she brought to share with the group, and she read from one of them - she isn't prepared yet to say whether it is fiction or autobiography ("It's a something.") which tells the story of larger than life family members.  I really am looking forward to more.

Some three years back, O Thiam Chin told the sad story about how hard it was for him to self-publish his first collection of short fiction and get the copies sold.  How far he's come since then, with a very well-received second book, Never Been Better, published by MPH. (And the bookshop sent along copies for sale.)

And then it was time for cake! We actually had three cakes.  Two of them were red velvet cakes with butter-cream icing ordered from That Last Slice, and they tasted every bit as good as they looked. (Thanks, Aishah,  for driving over from Shah Alam to deliver!)

The third was an absolutely delicious chocolate cake which Saras had had a friend bake for us, and very much appreciated. 

We blew out candles and made a wish - for the next 5 - no, 50 years of Readings to be as successful.


After the break, Bernice Chauly read from the book she is finishing Growing Up with Ghosts which she describes as:

... a literary autobiography, a memoir of sorts in five voices ... about her Chinese and Punjabi family and diasporas which span hundreds of years.

It will also form part of her MA in English Literature and Creative Writing at University Malaya.  Bernice has also been chosen as one of four writers worldwide to participate in Winternachten's (International Writers' Festival of The Hague) tour of the Dutch Caribbean and Suriname in April on the theme A Sense of Belonging.

What I've heard of the new work so far (in the workshops and here in Readings) shows that Bernice is working with fascinating material, and as she says, writing of this kind has been very much neglected in Malaysia. I think it also takes a lot of courage to put your own story out there in the public arena.

Do read this interview Bernice did with The Nutgraph last year, in which she shares some of her personal history with us.

Kam Raslan is the writer who has read more frequently at Readings than any other and  we have followed his Datuk Hamid from his first tentative fumblings with a Swiss milkmaid,  appearing in his own column in Off The Edge, and finally getting a whole book - which the Malaysian public took to their hearts - dedicated to his adventures.  Now it seems that there is a sequel in the pipeline, and the extract that Kam read was as endearing and as funny as ever.  It had the Datuk in a department store attempting to choose a perfume for The Wife's birthday, when a whiff of a fragrance called Betrayal sets off a train of Proustian memory ...

I  had to put Rahmat Harun last, because he is just such an impossible act to follow.  And of course the famous  Keranamu Malaysia had to be the centrepiece of his performance ....  This guy is a force of nature!

Thanks very much to Seksan for the wonderful space (though I was a bit sad that for the first time there was no art on the walls), to all who read and all who supported, to Aishah and Saras for cakes, and to all those who helped set up and clear away.  Nothing happens without you all.