I’m a bit of a dinosaur. The fact that I am posting this video six months after it was shot proves this. My discomfort with social media means that for the last eight years I have avoided doing much online beyond reading email, blogging in spurts, wasting time on YouTube and scrolling through The Guardian. I have never understood how the internet aids what I do as a writer. It’s an obvious promotion tool, but, so far, it has had little impact on what I actually write. It has been noted that we writers of literary fiction and poetry act as though the internet did not exist, and I think it’s because the   model/medium – pen and paper – is still the same, as is the aim – publication. I am aware that this is evidence of a chronic lack of imagination.

After yesterday’s post, I was wondering how I might be creative without having to produce anything. What I really mean is how I can be creative without falling into the inevitable trap of publishing / printing / distribution / old school reviews. My suggestion that the next phase of literature be as difficult for critics as possible finds an analogy in this video by Roger McNamee; I don’t claim to be as knowledgeable as he is, or to necessarily understand the implications of HTML5 (he doesn’t either). But as someone who essentially identifies as a writer – worse, a writer of poetry – and who has no practical skills beyond a basic understanding of html, I found his emphasis on content and creativity exciting. Much more interesting than the “social” emphasis you usually hear about and which makes me want to quit humanity all together. If you too are feeling a little strange or as if you’ve missed something over the last decade, take heart.

Flicking through various poetry books to find ideas for writing makes for eerily familiar reading. Books such as Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and the Teach Yourself: Poetry book all suggest writing more as a way of dealing with the fact that you haven’t written anything. Very like the commentators who suggest that we should spend more money because, in spending too much, the economy has collapsed, but depends on spending to be revived again. I was reading this article, and thought, what about another solution? Isn’t the drive to be creative too limited to the idea of production?

In my own work, there is often very little that is worthy in the pieces I write for the sake of getting through my block. Plus, who’s to say my frantic morning pages are effective? Sometimes, when I haven’t written anything for a while, I’ll sit down and bang out three or four new poems that I then perform ad nauseum for the next six years…

Why treat performances like auxiliary aspects of poems? I think a performance is less wasteful than writing a poem, just as using a mooncup is less wasteful than using a tampon. It would probably be better for everybody if I started using old work as a catalyst for something new. In other words, taking the things I’ve written and published and giving them new life by riffing off them on stage. A totally improvised piece with chunks of old poems for support would be a) fresh each time, b) a calibration for skill (just as freestyle is among rappers / emcees), and c) creativity without wasteful production!

I know it’s nothing new. But I’ve been reading a lot about conceptual art, particularly in relation to the current “death” of the novel. Specifically, how ideas about copying others, having non-physical artworks and fucking with the audience was a new lease of life. What’s hilarious about the announcements pertaining to the “death” of the novel, is how much it shows that death is socially constructed. In an introduction to Anthropology, I read that, for westerners, death is the point at which there is no detection of electrical activity in the cortex; in Polynesian cultures death is not a particular incident, but relates to a process that begins when the individual withdraws from society and refuses the food and water that support life; in Austronesian cultures – Borneo, Sulawesi and Madagascar – a person isn’t dead until the flesh has rotted from the bones. For some, literature is dead when the stuff doesn’t sell; according to Lee Seigel death is confirmed when someone like James Wood emerges as top critic; back in 2001 Andrew Marr said death took place when the novel simply wasn’t exciting; For others, it’s when Time Magazine can’t recommend anything decent to the average reader.

And we don’t need to point out that poetry is already dead and buried and, like, doesn’t exist anymore.

I’m not going to argue that conceptual-art-as-we-know-it-meets-literature is necessarily the new way forward, since I dislike the clucking for first-dom among people trying to make their name with an idea so ‘out there’ as to be unrepeatable. But I think the idea that we might need literary techniques that curb productivity rather than increase it is a funny one. Not only because it flies in the face of every book and every writing workshop on earth, but, let’s say we did all stop writing novels/poems and did something else. Preferably something that the average desk-bound critic couldn’t keep up with, such as an oral culture of nightly, improvised performances that used slang and references of rapid obsolescence. That disallowed video cameras. Wouldn’t it send critics / academics into the kind of existential crisis we’re seeing among the apoplectic money-lenders in the face of digital publishing, file sharing and copyright indifference? Wouldn’t they deserve it? And wouldn’t it be fun?

I often wonder whether the things I think about are really so strange, niche and eccentric – and the answer, which is a resounding yes, is answered in places like USP where many students look at you in mild amusement when you tell them you write poems for a living. Thankfully, this was not the case this evening. I brought along my (much diminished) collection of zines that I’ve gathered since leaving the UK and we spent nearly three hours cutting shit up, to make a mini-zine of our poems.

I’ve done this with lots of people, and I can say that if you feel like doing something similar with a group of novices, keep the materials limited and the options open (I once made the mistake of trying to explain the golden mean to a group of feminists during a short hour-long session.) It often feels as though no-one really understands anything I’m saying – and indeed they don’t – until they get stuck in, and see that it’s really very simple. Not only is it simple, it’s absorbing. On top of that it’s rewarding, especially when you find a way to make something cool out of something very ordinary, like old issues of The Straits Times. I don’t think making a zine will improve your poetry, but I think the ideas behind it – experimenting, trying things you haven’t done, cutting and pasting and building on the ideas you see in other zines – are the same as writing poems. And since I’m the first to confess that you can’t really teach people how to write poems, you must find techniques askance for limbering up the hesitant mind.

If only there was such a technique for awkward social situations. I’ve just come back from a really nice night which was a nice mix of performance art, dance, music and life-drawing. At such events you meet a lot of expats, and I’ve had many conversations about how weird / irritating it can be when ex-pats talk to you simply because you have foreignness in common. But as someone who mixes among artists because I am one, this becomes complicated when you meet someone with whom you have both foreignness and artistry in common. I will be blunt: blackness and foreignness is a rare combination in Singapore. But I’ve watched people squirm and cross the road enough times to know that some people are uncomfortable with talking to someone of the same race when in a different culture. You feel as though you’re being honed in on, scrutinised, singled-out, or that you’re a magnet for the creepy person with no social skills who needs an excuse to talk to people. I fit one or two of those descriptions, but I never make up excuses for talking to people. You’re either interesting to me or you’re not. And I always hope, despite the strangeness of the context, that people will be gracious enough to assume interest, not desperation, when I speak to them.

But it’s common in every social group, particularly for people raised in a Diaspora and/or within the dominant culture. How many times have I sensed some kind of weirdness when I’ve introduced two people of the same cultural background, not my own? And how many times have I found it weird when someone has done the same for me. On the one hand, there’s an obvious sense that you should know the person already – why have we been introduced by someone totally different, when we live in the same place / go to the same clubs / attend the same university? And yet, it’s really weird if you speak to someone because you have your blackness – or foreignness – in common. I think it’s to do with the fact that we’re at a fault-line when it comes to thinking about how we interact with people from different social groups. I’m not sociologist, but I know that this has been documented: we want things to happen naturally,  but there are no social codes (after all, manners are there to make awkward things easier). I would have thought that, as a rule, having at least one other thing in common besides your foreignness would help, but I guess I’m alone on that one too; the chances are not everyone feels as conspicuous and self-aware as me, and possibly they don’t over-think it later.

No worries.

Weirdness, onwards.

I’ve spent the past few days down at the Substation. There was a zine fair which was very different to what I’m used to. In London, the punk origin of the zine has subsided in favour of an art school aesthetic. I’m used to cupcakes, grown women wearing kid’s party dresses, and lots of chic sourced from Top Shop / Oxfam / Travels to Japan. It was curious to see a bunch of guys wearing bomber jackets, rolled up jeans, polo shirts, suspenders and doc martens. As the band started up, they started pushing each other and pogoing until they fell over; then they continued on the floor in a kind of angry writhe until someone else came and broke it up. When the singer held the mic out, they shouted “Oi!” or “Hooligans!” in English accents. People had the flag of St. George sewed on to their jackets or stitched into their polo shirts, and when the band stopped between songs, football chants started up. It was surreal, but the fact that these guys are wearing the outfit of the British working class circa 1980 is continuous with the tendency of Singaporeans to wear Anglo-American styles.

Also: got to see OffCuff. I will never tire of sitting and watching beautiful colours on an overhead projector.

My Ray Morimura arrived. I bought it at the affordable art fair. Given that my days have become little more than writing at my desk, eating ice-cream and staring at the wall, I figured I should have something nice to look at. I would like to accompany this with prints by Romare Bearden, Ingrid Pollard and Emory Douglas. In fact, I’d like to accompany it with most of the work I saw at the Thin Black Line exhibition at the Tate Britain shortly before I left the UK.

I’m working on a piece for a new anthology set to come out mid-2012. It’s called In Their Own Voicesand will be edited by Helen Ivory and George Szirtes. Fifty or so authors will each talk about their “poetics”. I’m having trouble working out what that means. I understand that “poetics” refers to discourse around the theory of poetry (thank you wikipedia), but every attempt I’ve made to apply the term to my work seems false. So I’ve been concentrating on the tension between my self-identification as a writer and my tendency to perform rather than publish. In doing so, I’ve been reading lots of fascinating essays and article, including a piece by Peter Middleton called “The Contemporary Poetry Reading.” It was written in 1998, so a lot has changed since then, but I love that he begins with a description of a reader on stage and then this:

“This ritual is an ordinary poetry reading of the kind that has become widespread in the past forty years, and is therefore so familiar to most readers of contemporary poetry that its strangeness requires an alienating description to be visible at all. Listeners and poets have had almost nothing to say about this phenomenon despite its importance for financing and fostering their careers, assisting the distribution of their poetry, and even shaping its very forms.” (p.262)

There’s a lot to be said for writing about performance as opposed to published material. For one, the rules are different. There’s no point talking about the usual parts of poetry – metre, rhyme, structure etc – because they’re superseded by the fact that I’m ON STAGE, usually doing something strange with my hands, as I try to make the next thirty minutes as enjoyable as possible. I’m trying to work out a way of talking about the gestures and intonations that almost all poets from a certain scene will use. This pieceby Mairead Byrne is a very funny comparison between the FUN of stand-up comedy and the ANGUISH of poetry readings.However, taking the piss out of poetry is par for the course, and although I find such self deprecating humour useful for understanding the conventions / mechanics / affectations of being a poetry-reading-type-person, I think many of the conclusions people come to about poetry in performance are wrong. Just because we use a mocking tone to talk about ourselves doesn’t mean we must necessarily conclude that what we do is rubbish or lacking. (Most) poets know this, but I wonder about critics and audience members. Specifically, I wonder about people who come up to me afterwards and say that they wish they could read the piece about X, because they need the words in front of them to understand / savour it better. I have never felt this way after a reading – even if I then buy the person’s book. I wonder if other people who are regulars at poetry events find that they can follow the poet, remember the good lines, guess at the form and structure, recognise clever uses of vocabulary and so on without having to see the text. And do other people find that they go to a reading not to see someone once, but to find poets they’d like to see over and over again? This talk of attending a poetry reading and hearing something once isn’t a true reflection of how poetry readings work, nor the reason some people might enjoy them.

Anyway, I thought the above video “An Idea in Search of Light” was apt for a number of reasons. First, the fact that I am trying to see my own ideas more clearly. Second, I like the theme of wonder. Third, I am mining ubuweb for all it’s worth – even if the house killed SOPA, you can bet there are people who’d like to see it destroyed.

Last night was technically my second performance of the year (the first was in New York, at an event with the rather opulent title of “Rivers of Honey.”) Bani and Riduan were cool to work with and I think the final result made for an unusual night out in Singapore. Seeing Riduan’s collection of drums and his loop machine made me want to experiment more with music. Without using the R word, maybe that’s an idea for 2012.

Check out Riduan Zalani here. And Bani Haykal here.

“No heroism, just… basic human decency.”

Last night, the motion for the debate was: ‘Cultural boycott can be an effective, indeed morally imperative, political strategy’. Speaking in favour was Omar Barghouti and Seni Seneviratne. Against, Carol Gould and Jonathan Freedland.

To cut a long story short, the discussion became very heated and there was a lot of heckling. Gould in particular received a lot of laughter and shouts when she talked about the attacks on Israel. An audience member shouted out that people were heckling because you could not compare the thousands of Palestinian deaths with the relatively few Israeli casualties.

Freedland made two very direct points: first, that he was not discouraging of action taken against the Israeli government he regularly criticises, but that a boycott, specifically, will not work in the country he “knows well”. Second, he said that the audience had revealed that they were against the principle of a Jewish state, not just the military actions of Israel. “It might make you feel good,” he said, “but you won’t change anything.” He called it “aromatherapy”.

Seneviratne made several comparisons with South Africa, which is the most obvious; the boycott of South African goods was an act of solidarity which did, eventually, contribute to the end of Apartheid. Despite Freedland’s claim that it was a “comfortable” analogue, she made the point so straight-forwardly that it was difficult to see how Freedland and Gould could bounce back. They didn’t, to be fair. In the face of Barghouti’s clear, articulate and compelling arguments emphasising the boycott as an act of non-complicity rather than heroism, Freedland and Gould were very much on the back foot.

No-one in the audience stood up to make any arguments against the boycott either, except one woman who asked why Jews were also referred to as a homogenous group. In this vein, Gould asked how one could call Israel an apartheid state if Barghouti himself had studied at the university of Tel Aviv – after all, did black people routinely study at Witts in South Africa? Barghouti dismissed any personal definitions of apartheid and stuck to the UN definition. I feel he’d already put the nail in the coffin when, during his speech, he said that the boycott was about ordinary people in allied countries refusing to be complicit in the actions of their government; that this boycott was to be taken up by Westerners because Israel is the only country that contravenes international law, but is still welcomed by countries like Britain and America; and that you cannot stand by and let culture be used as a tool to sweeten controversial military action. Gould said this was a shutting down of dialogue, and Freedland said it would make Israel even more isolated and belligerent because they’d believe that the world hated them. Freedland asked why Seneviratne, as a Sri Lankan, was not rooting for Tamils – or any other country with human rights abuses. She said if they called for a boycott she would happily join them too. Freedland was trying to make her look like a hypocrite, but unfortunately that argument is a bit like asking him why he doesn’t also become a doctor or a general, as well as a writer, if he cares about tackling injustice. Obviously, one person cannot do everything, or wholly support every cause.

At the end of the debate, the audience were asked to raise their hands if they were pro, anti or ambivalent about the current boycott of Israeli academy and culture. The vast majority were pro. Had there been a compelling moral argument that didn’t fall back on Nazi rhetoric, the Anti-boycott side might have been more interesting. Gould was heckled a lot, and this I thought was disrespectful in the context of the discussion, but she didn’t make compelling points in response the way Freedland did.

Barghouti shone and thus he wins the t.shirt. He had an endless bank of quotations at his disposal and nothing ruffled his feathers. As problematic as the comparison is, time will tell whether the result of the boycott will put Freedland and Gould in same position as white pro-apartheid South Africans, most of whom will deny they ever held that position.

I’m blogging for the Southbank Literature Festival. Just put up my first post.

People often say things that would be excellent on a t.shirt, especially at literary events. So that’s what I’m doing on the blog – posting potential t.shirt quotations alongside the write-up. These are the first, from Tim Graves and DJ Connell respectively. There are more to come. At the end of the festival I’ll get two of them printed. Huzzah.