just me

Just bought my ticket to Europe! Oh joy.

QANTAS AIRWAYS SINGAPORE TERMINAL 1 TO HEATHROW TERMINAL 4

DEP CHANGI 2255 3 OCT2005
ARR HEATHROW 0530 4OCT2005
Duration 13:35 nonstop

QANTAS AIRWAYS SINGAPORE TERMINAL 1 TO HEATHROW TERMINAL 4

DEP HEATHROW 2200 2JAN2006
ARR CHANGI 1835 3JAN2006
Duration 12:35 nonstop

Actually scared stiff. Often am about things I've always wanted.

In other news, have just bought Shel Silverstein's "Where the Sidewalk Ends", ostensibly as a gift to my cousin's 6 year-old daughter.

JUST ME, JUST ME

Sweet Marie, she loves just me
(She also loves Maurice McGhee).
No she don't, she loves just me
(She also loves Louise Dupree).
No she don't, she loves just me
(She also loves the willow tree).
No she don't, she loves just me!
(Poor, poor fool, why can't you see
She can love others and still love thee.)

awright!!!

In fact, my semipublishable corpus includes a sonnet, a villanelle, a sapphic ode, a sestina, and a halfhearted attempt at a ghazal. Plus I'm reading Blake independently.


You are 'regularly metric verse'. This can take
many forms, including heroic couplets, blank
verse, and other iambic pentameters, for
example. It has not been used much since the
nineteenth century; modern poets tend to prefer
rhyme without meter, or even poetry with
neither rhyme nor meter.
You appreciate the beautiful things in life--the
joy of music, the color of leaves falling, the
rhythm of a heartbeat. You see life itself as
a series of little poems. The result (or is it
the cause?) is that you are pensive and often
melancholy. You enjoy the company of other
people, but they find you unexcitable and
depressing. Your problem is that regularly
metric verse has been obsolete for a long time.

What obsolete skill are you?
brought to you by

this is happy

On the plus side, today I discovered how make male orgasms last for fifteen minutes. A professional Tarot card reader in Yio Chu Kang demonstrated. Twice.

this is sad

YS: I just got a rejection letter from Monsoon Books. A very nice rejection letter, but I'm peeved anyway, cos no-one else seems to be interested in publishing my 20something college memoirs.

Dear Yi -Sheng

Thank you for submitting diary of a stone monkey to Monsoon Books and sorry for the slow response, we've been flooded with manuscripts these last few months. I though your manuscript was a breath of fresh air compared to the usual offerings and I found myself reading it on my own time, which is always a good sign. Unfortunately I just don't feel I can take it on for publication. Although we did publish a similar (in terms of style, not content) title recently, I just don't know how receptive the local market is to diary/email/blog-style books. Your writing reminds of Christos Tsiolkas in his gay coming-of-age book Loaded. I would love to see a hard-hitting coming-of-age book from Singapore and diary of a stone monkey is part way they although it was probably not intended to be so.

Have you had any luck with other publishers? I'll KIV this manuscript and take another look early next year but I don't think we will be able to publish it. Are you working on anything else at the moment?

Thanks and regards
Phil Tatham
Publisher, Monsoon Books

YS: The similar style book he refers to is "My Kiasu Teenage Life in Singapore", an epistolary account of a Malaysian Chinese girl's ASEAN student life. Haven't read it, but I'm certain my memoirs are cooler. I bet she doesn't end up losing her virginity in the back of an East Village Club.