Ask A Stupid Question Day/Autumn Harvest Festival (West Virginia)
2006-09-30 @ 9:30 p.m.

I started three poems on Thursday evening, and by Friday morning, two were completed. One's a disgruntled, half-hearted, tired protest about the messed up place I live in, while the other's actually structured as a Christian song. I was quite pleased with that one. Two completely different responses to the same event. Aside from finally writing again, I've also been reading plenty of poetry, as I mentioned previously. Today, I've finished reading Maiden by Kensai (real name being Augustine Chan), Last Boy by Ng Yi-sheng and First Meeting Of Hands by Paul Tan, in that order. Next up are Like A Seed With Its Singular Purpose by Cyril Wong and Frottage by Yong Shu Hong. These are the five slim volumes of local poetry, all published by firstfruits, which I bought from BooksActually, a delightful place at 125A Telok Ayer Street, run by Kenny and Karen. Cost me a fair bit, but I'm more satisfied this time. Remember how I complained about what I was reading the last time I bought local poetry? Well, this time at least, I've been particularly impressed by Kensai's work, and that's ignoring the fact that he was still an undergraduate at NUS when the anthology was published. My favourite bits are the prose parts about Avedra and Ronin. A reviewer on QLRS hated the whole volume though, so make your own mind up when, or more likely, if you read it. I also saw Alfian Sa'at's A History Of Amnesia, and an anthology of Eleanor Wong's early plays unimaginatively titled Earlier, but I was kind of broke by then and had to pass. There were not a few Nabokov novels that I want too, and which I'm definitely not going to find on the shelves of Kinokuniya any time soon, so maybe it is time to seriously look into the whole giving tuition thing. Giving into my impulses, I bought t.A.T.u.'s The Best and the Cancer Warriors CD. I actually like the former's music, and I want to hear Fiona Xie sing on the latter. I've also noticed that Clara, from my senior class, happens to provide the vocals on one of the songs too! I'm going off to continue watching Mary Reilly, which is a reworking of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde from the perspective of a maid working in the doctor's house. It's not every day you see Julia Roberts playing the subservient servant.