Texts October 2008

Slight Middle Eastern overload here, but not much. It's good to be reading.

And oh yeah - who on earth can actually believe that "Dr. Strangelove" is a good movie by today's standards? It's draggy and clumsy and the comedic timing is lousy. Watched it during my five-movie-marathon on my SIA flight from Egypt.

*POETRY*
+Mahmoud Darwish’s “Unfortunately, It Was Paradise”
+Farid Ud-Din Attar’s “The Conference of Birds”

*FICTION*
+Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours”
Fred Hoyle’s “October the First is Too Late”
+John Grisham’s “The Runaway Jury”
+Alaa al Aswany’s ”The Yacoubian Building”

*DRAMA*
+David Hare’s “Via Dolorosa and When Shall We Live?”
+Li Lienfung’s “The Sword Has Two Edges”
+Sophocles’s “Philoctetes”
+Haresh Sharma's "Walking Into Doors"
+Eve Ensler’s ”Necessary Targets”

*NON-FICTION*
+Amos Oz’s “Let Us Divorce”
+Chris Berry, Fran Martin and Audrey Yue’s “Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia”

*DIVINE REVELATION*
+C. S. Lewis’s “The Great Divorce”
+Benny and Alice Lim’s “Killer Vampires from Hell” (probably actually by Ralph Modder)

*PERFORMANCES*
NUS Stage’s ”backtoback”
+Teater Ekamatra’s “Sidang Burung (Conference of the Birds)”
+Langkan Budaya Tartak's "Malam Bangsawan"
+British Theatre Playhouse’s “Blonde Bombshells of 1943”
+Spell#7 and Evan Tan’s “Sky Duet”

*EXHIBITIONS*
+The Israel Museum’s “Unexpected Connections”
The Helena Rubinstein Museum’s “ARTLV”
The Substation’s “Flipside”
+Valentine Willie’s “REFRESH”
+Kenny Leck’s “A Literary Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas on the Human Condition”
+Asian Civilisation Museum’s “Asians in Monochrome”

*FILM AND VIDEO*
M. Night Syamalan’s “The Happening”
Brian Robbins’s ”Meet Dave”
Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”
+ Chris Miller and Raman Hui’s “Shrek the Third”
+Wong Kar Wai’s “My Blueberry Nights”
+Singapore Malay Film Society’s “Purnama II & III”
Michael Wang’s “The Carrot Cake Conversations”
+Way too much US election coverage on "The Daily Show with John Stewart" and "The Colbert Report"