wall of notebooks

Besides creating our own notebooks at Birds & Co., we have been filling our shelves with some of our favourite notebooks from around the world. We like learning the scientific names of birds, animals and plants with Imaginote and bringing them on field trips for tree frottages and pressed flowers. We also like to run our fingers over beautifully letter-pressed notebooks by Serrote, Portugal. Once in a while, we like to cover our eyes and place our finger on a random spot on the map, 'Oh, Iceland !' and write in about polar caps and long winters in our hardcover Cavallini & Co. journal. How about you?

march to the rhythm of Penguins

Everyone's favourite titles in the classic orange Penguin paperback. Available at BooksActually for the price of a packet of cigarettes, just like the old days.

The Sharma Trilogy

Trilogy is a collection of three plays by Haresh Sharma that explore the fundamentals of text and realism by scrutinising pressing issues that affect contemporary society.

Written between 2006 to 2008, the plays – Fundamentally Happy, Good People and Gemuk Girls – feature simple but powerful narratives that question personal, social, cultural and political convictions. These award-winning plays represent some of The Necessary Stage's most critically acclaimed works in recent years and are set to be contemporary classics of Singapore theatre.

HARESH SHARMA 

Haresh is Resident Playwright of The Necessary Stage and co-Artistic Director of the annual M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. To date, he has written more than 60 plays which have been staged in Singapore, Glasgow, Birmingham, London, Dublin, Cairo, Manila, Melbourne, Busan, Seoul, New Delhi, Hong Kong, Hungary, Romania and Tokyo.

Haresh has a BA from the National University of Singapore as well as an MA in Playwriting from the University of Birmingham, obtained in 1994 on a Shell-NAC Scholarship. He has also been awarded fellowships and grants by the British Council and the United States Information Service, and was conferred the Young Artist Award in 1997. His play, Off Centre, was selected by the Ministry of Education as a Literature text for N and O Levels, and republished by The Necessary Stage in 2006. In 2008, Ethos Books published Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature, Vol. 6, written by Prof David Birch and edited by A/P Kirpal Singh, which presented an extensive investigation of Haresh's work over the past 20 years.

Haresh was also awarded Best Original Script for Fundamentally Happy, Good People and Gemuk Girls during the 2007, 2008 and 2009 Life! Theatre Awards respectively.

You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation

Who the heck was Fletcher Hanks?

Fletcher Hanks worked for the first three years of the comic book industry [late 1930s]. This was the birth of the medium (as described accurately by Michael Chabon in The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) when the cheapest publishers and pornographers discovered overnight that there was money to be made in something called the comic book. It is easy to imagine a publisher thrilled to find someone like Hanks. A one-man juggernaut: writer, penciler, inker and letterer who actually got his work in on time, Fletcher Hanks is a rarity among comic book artists of any era. Even hardcore fans and collectors are unfamiliar with his work because he worked on second-rate characters for third-rate publishers and then disappeared.

What happened to him?

As I said, he worked for three years and then disappeared. I did some detective work and uncovered the sordid details that I reveal in the 16-page afterword to my book, a comics story titled, "Whatever Happened to Fletcher Hanks?" Let's just say that the man who delivered his villains to be frozen forever to contemplate their crimes was served up an epic ode of poetic justice.

What are the hallmarks of a Hanks comic?

As there was no one there to tell him what to do or what not to do, Fletcher Hanks's work is propelled by a singular vision and style. No marketing survey guidelines to follow. Hence his various stories tend to follow similar story arcs: crime committed followed by several pages of often savage retribution as the hero sets the world right. His work is at once crude, brutal and breathtakingly beautiful.

How did his drawing style compare to that of other early comics artists?

What sets Hanks apart is the blunt vigor of his iconography. A Hanks villain has a single evil visage, often Cro-Magnon in nature, which barely varies in expression through the adventure. To this end he is the natural heir to the grim world of [Dick Tracy creator] Chester Gould, whose characters are cursed with a particular physiognomy that determines their nature. Stardust, a major Hanks's protagonist, has exactly 1.5 facial expressions: Severe and More Severe.

Where would you place Hanks's work in the pantheon of American comics? In other words, just how good was he?

Cartoonists whose work I generally most admire are multitalented one-man bands playing a syncopated symphony with pen and ink—"syncopated" because comics are a kind of jazz, an essentially American idiom of ragtime improvisation; "symphony" because the best of them create worlds that are rich, multilayered and rewarded by revisiting. This includes such classic masters as George Herriman and Elsie Segar, as well as contemporary artists who are sometimes overlooked such as Ben Katchor and Kim Deitch. Fletcher Hanks certainly belongs in this pantheon.

~ Publisher's Weekly interview with Paul Karasik on Fletcher Hanks

Boey Kim Cheng

In 1987, Boey won first prize at the National University of Singapore Poetry Competition while studying as an undergraduate. At age 24, he published his first collection of poetry. Somewhere-bound went on to win the National Book Development Councils (NBDCS) Book Award for Poetry in 1992. Two years later, his second volume of poems Another Place received the commendation award at the NBDCS Book Awards. In 1995, Days Of No Name, which was inspired by the people whom he met in the United States, was awarded a merit at the Singapore Literature Prize. In recognition of his artistic talent and contributions, Boey received the National Arts Council's Young Artist Award in 1996. After a long hiatus, Boey returned with his fourth volume of poetry in 2006. After the Fire deals primarily with the passing of his father in 2000. Boey's works have also appeared in anthologies like From Boys to Men: A Literary Anthology of National Service in Singapore, Rhythms: A Singaporean Millennial Anthology of Poetry and No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry.

Boey's works are highly regarded by both the academic and writing communities in Singapore. Writer Shirley Lim remarked that he is the "best post-1965 English language poet in the Republic today". His own sense of restlessness about life in Singapore is reflected prevalently in his poems. According to him, Singapore's rapid growth and swift economic success are achieved at a cost. Feelings of displacement and disconnection with the past occurred precisely because places where one experienced his or her sense of belonging, through their childhood are fast disappearing.

T-U-M-A-S-I-K

This volume features contributions from thirty-nine living Singaporean writers, who represent but a sampling of some of the fine creative talent at work in the four major literary languages in Singapore today, i.e. Chinese, Malay, Tamil and English…. Its many voices do not conform to monocultural expectations: they swim between tongues, vernaculars, conventions and codes. But this is not the transient literature of a disparate and dispirited people. Contemporary writing in Singapore may be complex, diverse and cosmopolitan, but it always carries heart and answers conscience.

~ Alvin Pang, Editor of TUMASIK

HERO ~ Ryu Murakami

On a recent trip to Britain, bestselling author Haruki Murakami was asked who his favourite Japanese author was. He replied that it was his namesake, Ryu Murakami.

 

Renaissance man for the modern age, Ryu Murakami has played drums for a rock group, made movies and hosted a TV talk show. His first novel, Almost Transparent Blue, written while he was still a student, was awarded Japan’s most coveted literary prize and went on to sell over a million copies. Prior to Piercing, published in January 2007, his most recent novel to appear in English was In the Miso Soup (published 2005).

 

Audition, published by Bloomsbury in January 2009, is the shocking psycho-thriller behind the cult Japanese horror film.

 

 

write like Orwell

Joining the ranks of the famous five -- George Orwell, Sylvia Plath, James Joyce, William Shakespeare, and Sigmund Freud, our beloved Birds & Co. author pencils are now named after these top seeds -- *new* Rainer Maria Rilke, Enid Blyton, Jack Kerouac, Edgar Allan Poe, Anais Nin, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Bukowski, and J. D. Salinger. Pick your favourite.

Collage of Souls

 

"i trust you know what you are doing when you say you want to implement the original language of men, the language of men when they built Babel, the language that the He understood, and understood that men must never possess it, and He understood to scatter the original language, and afterwards, they say we will never have another Babel - so tall is the abomi(nation) that it will take men three full days to walk out from it's shadow - but here, i hear you say that you have found the original language, and it will not come from your mouth, but the tender lips of an innocent child."

~ Writer 001

The Radio Dept.

 

"Radioavdelningen" our sort of music really.  Reminds us of late night tv(s) and suppers when we were kids. Remind us of cigarettes sneaks during school hours when we were young punks. Reminds us of the un-importance of money when we are working now.

Neo York, Neo York

 

IdN Extra 02: Neo York

Anime and Beyond. For those who aren’t familiar with animé, this particular genre has a long history that has both encouraged and inspired a creative dialogue between Japan and the rest of the world for almost 100 years. In the United States during the 1970's and 80's, Japanese animation was referred to as Japanimation, but was replaced by the term Animé in the mid 1990's as it became more mainstream and evolved in popular American culture.

It’s the evolution of animé that has inspired this book; where this genre came from and how it has come full circle. Post apocalyptic Tokyo is a strong central theme to most anime story lines. We began to ponder what would Neo New York look like, what would be the cultural make up of the city. We invite some great talent to contribute their visions to help with the creation of Neo New York.

ISBN: 978-988-18470-3-4
Size: 210mm (W) X 270mm (H)
Pages: 132 pages

Let's Perch!!

 

 

Ceriph began as a non-profit project between three local undergraduates that noticed friends and acquaintances creating poetry, prose, and photography that deserved to be shared. Thus began a search for a space in print that was accessible to non-professional Singaporean writers, that was neither too formal nor flippant.

The inaugural issue of Ceriph is a compilation of poems, short fiction, pictures and non-fiction that tell quiet stories across busy cities, a thread that binds these tales into a book. The independently published Issue Zero features the works of Laremy Lee, Desirée Lim, Sudev S., Mark Lam, Shane Pereira, Lee Fur-Fur, Cai Li Xian, Ng Yiqin, Andrew Robert Ng, Sharlene Teo, Riot, Captain Crash, Jonah Sun, Wei Fen Lee, Ang Shao-Wen and Linette Lim.

Ceriph's book launch will be held at BooksActually, 86 Club Street, at 7.30pm on the 12th of March, Friday. Join the facebook page for updates, or just cross out those dates on your calendar to have chai and cake with us as we celebrate yet another addition to the growing body of local literature.

Ceriph Issue Zero

Oaksongs Box # 009

  

  

  

  

  

Pictures courtesy of Patrick Ong, who is also the proud owner of Oaksongs box #009.

Humpback Oak ~ Oaksongs boxset