Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . "Art can activate the inert," I heard the Singaporean theater artist Ong Keng Sen say in his keynote lecture for last weekend's 6th biennial Singapore Literature Festival in NYC. "It can activate what is latent, what is potential." This is one of many gems that I will carry with me after the festival. Another is the story that  Ajoomma  writer-director He Shuming told about joining a group tour from Singapore to Korea to research the aunties for his film. Hearing that he was single, the ajoommas wanted to match him with their daughters, but on learning that he was a filmmaker, they stopped.  The stories were both funny and sobering. Filmmaker Dev Benegal shared his memory of sitting besides a famous film editor for four whole years in order to learn how to direct. Author and curator Simon Wu explained his urgent and joyful discovery of forgotten Asian American artists in NYC. Theater-mak...

 I had a lovely, wide-ranging conversation about my book SNOW AT 5 PM with poet Indran Amirthanayagam. Originally from Sri Lanka, which Indran still calls by its older name Ceylon, Indran is a naturalized American who used to work in the diplomatic corp. His own poetry is powerfully influenced by Whitman, O'Hara, and Lorca. 

 Flaubert's contemporaries praised Sentimental Education for taking the moral pulse of his generation. Reading it at this radical and reactionary time, I think it takes the moral pulse of my own generation. Here are the fanatical ideologues on the left and right, the cynical opportunists, the pure-hearted idealists, the private egos, the public facades, the loves, the lusts, the confusions, the contusions. After Frederic Moreau and his friend Deslauriers have gone through so much personal and social upheaval, how does one read the ending of this highly ironic yet deeply passionate novel? It's not simply nostalgic, that's for sure: They told one another the story at great length, each supplementing the other's recollections; and when they had finished:  'That was the best time we ever had,' said Frederic. 'Yes, perhaps you're right. That was the best time we ever had,' said Deslauriers. (translated by Robert Baldick and Geoffrey Wall)

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Do you play chess? I do, and I used to play it every day during recess in secondary school with a friend who was as keen on it as I was. As I knew from that young age, chess is a sport. It requires intense focus, discipline, and the will to beat your opponent. It is also an art, as I also knew, because it demands creativity, subtlety, and a love of beauty. The sacrifice of a rook to launch a mating sequence. The stark precision of an endgame with just the kings and four pawns. When I stood before the early Russian novels by Vladimir Nabokov in Eslite Bookstore in Kuala Lumpur, where I paid a short visit in August, it was an easy decision to pick up  The Luzhin Defense . I knew the Russian writer loved chess almost as much as butterflies. I wanted to know how he would deal with the game in a work of fiction. From his third novel written in Russian, translated by Michael Scammell, I learned that chess is...

 I read Nabokov's third Russian novel The Luzhin Defence while on vacation in Penang, after picking up the book in Kuala Lumpur. The novel is very enjoyable. There is a deep paradox in Nabokov's treatment of his chess-playing protagonist: it is at once warm and cold. The warmth comes from the Bildungsroman mode, the loving recreation of a Russian setting, the tender analysis of exile, the sympathetic understanding of artistic passion. The cold comes from the art of fiction itself, since the author knows that his fictional creation cannot escape whatever fate he is designing for him. The logic of chess underlines, in this novel, the logic of fiction. Appropriately, I started reading Sandi Tan's novel Lurkers when I returned from Malaysia to Singapore. Appropriately because Sandi grew up in Singapore. Her first novel The Black Isle is obviously based on Singapore. It is nothing like any Singaporean novels that I have read. She has lived in Los Angeles county for many years n...

 This book of essays by Singaporean journalist and activist Kirsten Han is informative, clear-eyed, and nuanced. Every Singapore should read it.