Worth Traveling For

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the Year of the Metal Rat brings some good news. In response to the cancellation of Alfian Sa'at's "Dialogue and Dissent" class by Yale-NUS last year, Yale University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Senate passed a resolution recommending "the establishment of clear criteria and procedure" to handle such episodes involving free speech and academic independence. Singapore Unbound supports the recommendation wholeheartedly, but we are disappointed that the Senate "did not express explicit regret that, due in no small measure to this flawed institutional process, the victim Alfian Sa’at was publicly pilloried, including in [the Singaporean] parliament by the minister of education," as Linda Lim, Yale alumna and professor emerita at the University of Michigan, was quoted in the Times Higher Education.

You may have heard that Gaudy Boy's author Lawrence Lacambra Ypil has just been longlisted for The Believer Book Awards 2020. The Experiment of the Tropics is one of only 12 titles selected by the editors in the poetry category. The short list and winners will be announced in April/May, and the winners will read at the 2020 Believer Festival in Las Vegas. We wish Larry all the very best.

This year, in October, we will be organizing the 4th biennial Singapore Literature Festival in NYC, so we are especially pleased to find out that the festival has been named one of "8 Literature Festivals Worth Travelling For" by Ezvid Wiki. An honor to be included with the famous festivals at Jaipur, India, and Durham, UK. Founded in 2011, Ezvid Wiki was the world's first video wiki, and is now among the top 3,000 websites in the United States. Big thanks to past festival participants, supporters, and volunteers for putting the Sing Lit Fest in NYC on the map.

Singapore Unbound is offering two fellowships to Southeast Asia for promising younger writers from Singapore. See details here. The deadline for applications is March 31, 2020. Invest in us so that we can invest in writers, literature, and human rights.

Jee Leong Koh
January 30, 2020

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Thumboo's "Ulysses by the Merlion"

I've just revised a poem written years ago, a poem that delineates the different responses of four readers, of different generations, to the seminal nationalistic poem by Edwin Thumboo . Thumboo is reckoned to be the first major Singaporean poet writing in English. First, Thumboo's poem, then followed by mine. ULYSSES BY THE MERLION (for Maurice Baker) I have sailed many waters, Skirted islands of fire, Contended with Circe Who loved the squeal of pigs; Passed Scylla and Charybdis To seven years with Calypso, Heaved in battle against the gods. Beneath it all I kept faith with Ithaca, travelled, Travelled and travelled, Suffering much, enjoying a little; Met strange people singing New myths; made myths myself. But this lion of the sea Salt-maned, scaly, wondrous of tail, Touched with power, insistent On this brief promontory... Puzzles. Nothing, nothing in my days Foreshadowed this Half-beast, half-fish, This powerful creature of land and sea. Peoples settled here, Brought to th
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic
Read more

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Examples from ar
Read more