Masterclass In Session: Starting Businesses With Maresa

The company's been pushing quite a few books out in time for the authors' appearances at the 2014 Putrajaya International Book Fair (PIBF). So yes, we're up to our necks in editing and proofreading for the past month or so.

The actual book, copies of which arrived on 17 March, a few days
after this entry was posted

Among these is Maresa Ng's Guide to Starting a Business, the latest in the MPH Masterclass Series.

Formerly an investment banker, Ng ditched her job for a career helping aspiring entrepreneurs improve themselves and take their enterprises to the next level—a vocation that began as a favour for several friends who came to her for financial advice.

Today, she runs leading business coach firm ActionCOACH Spark Activators and SMETalent, a technology platform that helps SMEs in human capital management.

Ng does not believe that one should just take a leap of faith when it comes to starting businesses. She firmly believes in careful and detailed planning, knowing oneself and being clear on one's intentions to start a business—all born from years of running her own enterprise and teaching others how to do the same.

Her guidebook covers the early planning stages; how to craft that all-important business model, mission statement and sales engine that will drive the enterprise; and how to leverage on good people and good systems to expand and grow the business.

She clears up some misconceptions (sales and marketing are not the same, for instance) and introduces creative ways to get by or get ahead (like renting space in exchange for ads rather than cash). Ultimately, the business should run on autopilot and flourish, even when the owner's not constantly keeping an eye on things.

"My experience has shown me that Malaysians are keen entrepreneurs," Ng writes. "But many simply don't have the know-how when it comes to actually running a successful business. They don't understand the fundamentals of how to grow a sustainable business model. While there are numerous books out there covering best practices in business, not even a handful are catered towards the local business scene.

"My aim with this book is to fill that gap. Having worked with a variety of different businesses, big and small, through business coaching, I've gained insight on dealing with a wide range of different situations. I share these, and more, in this book.

---

Maresa Ng's Guide to Starting a Business

Maresa Ng
MPH Group Publishing
131 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-967-415-194-2

Buy from MPHOnline.com

Ultra-Mess

Before I went to bed yesterday, news came that the Malaysian government banned Ultraman.

I'm too tired for this right now.

It was also 11:45pm and I wasn't exactly lucid.

Things became clearer today. The ban, slapped on one comic book, came about thanks to some shoddy editing by the publisher of the Malay-language version of an Ultraman comic, which included a word that was recently prohibited to non-Muslims in the country.

But first: Ultraman was a familiar figure in my childhood. So the news is kind of shocking, but not surprising. Kids these days have other icons to look up to.

Since its debut, the franchise has introduced other Ultramen. Lore says there's a whole planet full of these silver-skinned giants, mutated thus by an artificial source of light they created to replace their dead sun. The Ultraman described as a "god" in the offending passage is Ultraman King, said to be the oldest and strongest member of that civilisation.

Later, I consulted the Google on the history of Ultraman King. From the looks of it, somebody pulled a Houellebecq.

Curious, I ran the web page through Google Translate. Though not exactly a word-for-word match, the results are, well...

So.

Seems the publisher - a dodgy one, from the looks of it - is guilty of lazy translation and plagiarism.

And it seems the local media didn't pick that up soon enough or chose not to highlight it, to the chagrin of at least one Netizen.

The religious angle here is beside the point. If only the piece had been properly translated and reworded...

However, releasing eye-catching soundbites like "Ultraman banned due to public safety concerns" before following up with the real reason and more details later was probably not a good idea. To much of the civilised world, that statement - taken at face value - makes no freaking sense.

So, once again, we've given the world something else to talk about.

Masterclass In Session: Light Malaysian Bites With Chui Hoong

Malaysians. We love our food. We trawl the newspapers and the Internet, searching for food reviews and accounts by fellow gourmands of their (mis)adventures at latest artisanal coffee joint, high-end Shangri-La of cuisine, or a hitherto unknown hole-in-the-wall that existed for decades. And when someone claims a certain local dish as their own, we will fight tooth-and-nail to keep it Malaysian, however absurd it might sound at times.

But with a growing number of people turning away from such calorie- and sugar-laden, artery-clogging, and liver-taxing delights as char koay teow, nasi lemak, teh tarik, mee mamak and kopi C peng, can we still trump for much-vaunted Malaysian fare?

There might have been some attempts to make some of our local dishes more palatable to the increasingly health-conscious, which purists might consider heresy - what's char koay teow without the egg, cockles and all that garlicky grease?

Goo Chui Hoong's Lite Malaysian Favourites - yes, I believe she
eats what she cooks

Enter dietitian and cookbook author Goo Chui Hoong and her compendium of Lite Malaysian Favourites. After co-authoring and co-publishing Food for Your Eyes, a cookbook of dishes for eye health, with her ophthalmologist husband, Goo goes solo for this cookbook which features healthier options to some Malaysian dishes and snacks. This will be the first of a series of Masterclass Kitchen cookbooks published by MPH.

Goo claims to be a foodie, one who loves to experiment with different ingredients and try new things. Her tendencies to tweak recipes took off when she began studying dietetics and continues, perhaps to this day. Some of the results of those experiments ended up here.

Snacks are improved by baking rather than frying. Coconut milk is eschewed in favour of the lighter low-fat milk and slightly heavy evaporated milk. And can you imagine baking muffins with fruit purées or leftover bits of fruits or veggies from the juicer? Or a dish of oat-and-wolfberry noodles?

Other surprises include banana 'fritters' that's basically bananas wrapped in rice paper or spring roll pastry, not unlike what's being served at several other cafés in the Klang Valley, and cucur udang (prawn fritters) that are baked (not fried) in muffin tins. There's even a low-fat ginger-milk pudding, in case you're hankering for a taste of Hong Kong/Macau at home, minus a few calories.

Like the dietitian she is, Goo tacks on nutrient comparison tables to lay down all the caloric reductions if one uses her recipes rather than the 'originals'. Heresy? So was believing that the earth rotated around the sun.

She also shares some tips on measuring portion sizes when one prepares food or eats out. And you will, at some point, dine out with others who aren't as OCD with calories. The author's advice: moderation, and portion control.

Sadly, not all Malaysian favourites are covered in his book. For one, there is no skinny version of char koay teow, which leads one to conclude that such a thing is impossible.

Perhaps we do need something comfortable to land on should one fall off the wagon. The road to wellness is fraught with temptation, and things can get out of control when one bottles it all up.

But one needs to start somewhere, somehow. Let Goo Chui Hoong's Lite Malaysian Favourites guide the way.

---

Goo Chui Hoong's Lite Malaysian Favourites

Goo Chui Hoong
MPH Group Publishing
188 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-967-415-185-0

Buy from MPHOnline.com

Waiting For Rain

"I miss your old writing," someone commented a while back.

And thus, reality came a-knocking. Again.

I stopped counting how many times.

For weeks I haven't been writing as much as editing. Manuscripts. Lots of them.

I went through some of my old stuff. I couldn't recognise the author. He seems sharp, articulate, and, well ... happier. He also seems to have more time to dream, scheme and pontificate on things that excite him, even if his arguments aren't well thought out.

It has been a while.

And it might be like this for a while or two longer.

I'm looking for real estate. As it is with potential first-time property owners, I'm getting the jitters.

Landed property, especially within the narrow locus of my current neighbourhood, is out of the question. The condo unit I have my eye on looks okay, and rather well situated. Except that it's kind of aged, and is a leasehold unit.

The elders advised caution. As they should. I'm taking this recommendation on the advice of an agent under the supervision of Melody's former colleague, who she says cares a lot about his reputation and therefore does not hawk lemons.

With that comes other worries and fears. Lawyer fees, money transfers, property assessment rates, more taxes, what to do when the lease period draws near and I can't, for some reason, let the unit go...

This, on top of the need to ubah gaya hidup over rising costs of living, water-rationing, the coming introduction of the goods and services tax, as well as worries at work, it's no wonder the ink on the old pen isn't flowing like it used to.

And my health hasn't been fine. For the past several days my blood pressure (top end) hopped past the 135 mark. I haven't been sleeping well. The same lymph nodes are still swollen after about two years.

No more book reviews. No more food reviews. No more opinion pieces. The blog, a pseudo-chronicle of my journey through the world of books and publishing, is as parched as my inkwell.

Yes, I am, like parts of the country, going through a dry spell. The country's will get better, because in this part of the world, the rain has to fall sometime - which it did last weekend.

Me? I'm still waiting.

Hopefully, not for too long.

Media And Publishing Break Into A Gallop In 2014

I kind of dropped the ball on the blog during the Chinese New Year celebrations, but I'm hoping to get back in gear soon; this is supposed to be my life.

Josephine Phang, blogger and founder of online Chinese metaphysics consultancy outfit Bazichic and protégé of Joey Yap (I think), predicted exciting times in 2014 for the media and publishing industries in this radio podcast.

Just days into 2014, both industries got a-galloping like a horse on fire.

After a lot of noise by some Hindu nationalists, Penguin Books India recalled and pulped The Hindus: An Alternative History by Professor Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago as part of a legal settlement (maybe in exchange for not hauling some Penguin asses to jail).

The case, the latest among recent outcries over 'offensive' publications, also raised hackles among the writing community. The author of The God of Small Things railed against these men of (seemingly) small minds over the pulping of the "contentious" book. Some less gracious souls feel that Penguin betrayed Doniger by surrendering to "fundamentalist book-pulpers".

India's laws with regards to hurting people's sensitivities doesn't help at all; as far as I can understand (from this piece in The New Yorker), in India it can be easy to make someone's life hell if he upsets certain individuals or groups of people. "No political leader will dare speak in defense of a text under attack unless the book in question targets his enemies; supporting the freedom of unpopular speech only costs votes and never wins them," says the writer, Jonathan Shainin. "And the state does not offer much protection from physical harm. When death threats are phoned to your home, or a mob comes to vandalize your office, you're on your own."

While Malaysian authorities tried to explain away its slide in latest World Press Freedom Index report by Reporters Without Borders, China simply blanked out all mention of its fifth-bottom position on that list.

Earlier, the publisher of a book critical of China's president Xi Jinping was arrested. Books on feng shui were also banned in China in an apparent attempt to curb superstitious tendencies - inadvertently creating a bonanza for bootleggers who were selling such material online. Ms Phang should probably take note.

Closer to home, a biography of Anwar Ibrahim by Charles Allers is not making an appearance in a local bookstore chain. A radio interview with the opposition leader was also barred from the airwaves, even though the podcast of the interview is available.

At the National Art Gallery, a painting with a not-very-subtle title was taken down along with another piece during an art competition at the premises because they "caused 'distress' among some visitors." No clues so far as to who those distressed visitors were.

And it seems that Boey Cheeming's When I Was A Kid books have been deemed unsuitable for children in Singapore.

But, as usual, "the worst enemy of censorship is always curiosity". The right-wing nutjobs may have kept The Hindus from being sold in India, but they also propelled it briefly to stratospheric heights in the bestseller lists elsewhere. Allers's Anwar bio appears to be selling briskly as well. How will these play out?

Looks like Ms Phang was spot-on.

News: Silverfish Turns 15, And Literary Hipsterdom

• Q&A with Alex Myers, author of Revolutionary, the story of cross-dressing US revolutionary Deborah Sampson.
• "When you work 12 hours a day, and you are a shopkeeper-cum-publisher who translates, edits, critiques, writes, runs workshops, administers and manages a business, is the IT technician, the webmaster, and the plumber who fixes the toilets, time is often short. Still, I have never been afraid to dream. When I wanted to organise the first KL International Literary Festival in 2004, everyone else around me had palpitations, but not me. (It was scary how steely I was.) What do you have to lose from a dream, anyway? Besides the dream itself?" Silverfish Books is now 15. Happy birthday.
• "...the culture of reading can quickly be smeared from a communal and pivotal way to learn and be transformed into an isolating and exclusive way to socially expound personal intelligence." Literary hipsterdom (if there is such a thing) is apparently not worth pursuing.
• Turns out there's an Arab version of the Booker Prize out there: the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. But how many people are reading the shortlisted books?
• Loaded question from Salon: Is the literary world elitist? Here's what Eleanor Catton (The Luminaries) thinks: "The machine of consumerism is designed to encourage us all to believe that our preferences are significant and self-revealing; that a taste for Coke over Pepsi, or for KFC over McDonald’s, means something about us; that our tastes comprise, in sum, a kind of aggregate expression of our unique selfhood."
• Haruki Murakami caught flak from townspeople for a passage in a short story that suggests they threw cigarette butts out of their moving cars. But he's not the first writer to insult a town.
• And the Hatchet Job of the Year goes to AA Gill's takedown of Morrissey's autobiography.
• Could clues to deciphering the infuriatingly cryptic Voynich Manuscript lie in Mexico?
• The late Sudirman Arshad: all-round entertainer, soft-drink brand, and children's book author (posthumously published in 1994).
• How to train your brain to think critically.
• From the annals of H-dropping: It's Y-O-G-U-R-T now.

Hatchets - Not Just For Firewood

The nominees for Hatchet Job of the Year 2013 are in.

Not everyone is happy, though. Here's a much-quoted excerpt of Mark O'Connell's critique of the Award at Slate: "The problem with the Hatchet Job of the Year Award isn’t just that it publicizes and rewards mediocre and shallow criticism by the kind of people who’ll shoot a baboon point-blank in the tits for their own amusement. It’s that it actively promotes such criticism, going out of its way to ensure that more of it gets written."

If O'Connell's rant is based solely on this year's shortlist, I don't think it's fair. The Award, founded by The Omnivore, is three years old - hardly enough time to build a body of "provocative or challenging or insightful" criticism "that makes an argument about and around a book" and "stands alone on its own essayistic merits".

And critics - whatever level of literacy - don't need much encouragement to write a hack job. The hatchet-job avalanche O'Connell dreads is happening - has he seen what's on Goodreads and Amazon? I believe that buried under the avalanche of throwaway one-liners are some real creatively cut gems.

What The Omnivore's encouraging is more thoughtful criticism of what's written out there. Nothing beats a skilful, witty takedown of a stack of written words performed with a surgeon's precision, as long as the positives in it are pointed out. Yelping about what's bad about Fifty Shades is too easy.

So this year's shortlist isn't as outstanding as, say, the one for the previous year. But if EL James's trilogy and its ilk deserve its place in the sun, so do the sharp words of their critics telling us why we should read something else - all in the vain hope that the reading public will wise up and writers will get better.

At least "the scathing takedown rip" that Buzzfeed's books editor Isaac Fitzgerald says is rife in "so many old media-type places" has more thought put into it than the stuff that packs the 'review threads' on some book-related social-media platforms. These days, takedowns appear to be more effective than praise in helping to popularise books.

But as more and more books are being churned out, it'll be tougher to separate the chaff from the wheat, and the book reviewer with too much on his plate will have to cut back on the scalpel-work. Other ways of reviewing books which the general public can better digest, like this "dialogic" marginalia on Dan Brown's Inferno, which USA Today says is the best-selling book of 2013, will slip into the mainstream.

By then, I expect that these hatchet jobs will get shorter, sharper and harsher as the volume of books overwhelm the dwindling number of reviewers because, well, who wants to take a scalpel to a 500-page monstrosity in the future when it's easier and much more fun to use an axe?

When that day comes, The Omnivore might need more than just one year's worth of potted shrimp to convince critics to think deeper before taking axes to bad books.

News: CSI: Metafilter, U-Turn On Mein Kampf U-Turn, And Coffee

So this book got published:

Stronger than an ice-shaken triple-shot espresso

I'm pitching this because I like how it's blurbed. Having proofread some of the stories inside, I can pretty much concur.

The publisher has a habit of stopping reprints of its titles after a certain period, so go get it now.


Other things that happened include:

• Ask Metafilter and ye shall receive (help to solve a 20-year-old mystery): Some "cancer-addled ramblings" may actually be prayers.
• Are stories better than science in helping us approach life's complexities?
• Do these figures show the decline of the American book lover? Has anyone compiled similar figures for Malaysia?
• Was a blind spot responsible for Grantland's inadvertent outing of a transgendered person that ended with a suicide?
• Can you make kids love books? Short answer: No. "...if a parent wants a child to read, then they should not push a book on the child. Let the child discover the book for herself." After all, isn't the adventure and thrill of discovering something great a huge part of why we open books?
• Fifty Shades publisher Vintage Books to release a book on Edward Snowden. Sounds like it's gonna be good.
• Bavaria makes U-turn (away from another U-Turn) on an academically annotated edition of Mein Kampf, a best-selling e-book.
• "Outstanding schools" in the UK are reportedly having trouble recruiting headteachers and senior staff from applicants who can't spell and have bad grammar. Time to recall all the expat English teachers in China, Korea, etc?
• Seems little has changed in South America since the first South American Handbook was first published in 1924. For one, Chilean youths "still stare at ladies" and "make audible remarks on [the ladies'] appearance" because this "is not rude according to the Chilean canons, but rather correct conduct."
• Look, the "DNA" of a successful book. Funny how men don't seem to cop to reading books under the "Adult" category.
• Wall Street Journal Asia talked to maybe three or four people and decides that Malaysia's coffee scene is heating up. Really now?
  
  Elsewhere, like in France, the coffee is bad. Maybe Artisan Roast KL can swoop in and help out.

News: "Overrated" American Literature, Found In Translation, And Books

American literature is "massively overrated" and "our reading habit has totally been transformed by the mainstream", says Jhumpa Lahiri at the Jaipur literature festival, according to dna India. SHOCK GASP WHEEZE ... Especially when The Guardian says that Guo Xiaolu said those words. So, who really said what?

The point of the discussion was about a "global novel", and the writers on the panel, which include Guo, Lahiri and Jonathan Franzen, were talking about whether the tsunami of US literature has washed the stuff from other countries out of our reading consciousness. Franzen didn't seem fazed by what Guo (or Lahiri) said, FYI.

---

A couple of FIXI-related tweets:

"Baru dapat surat tahniah dari MPH yg menyatakan #ASRAMA salah satu drp 20 novel Melayu terlaris di MPH @MuhammadFatrim" - Tahniah dude!

GinaYapLaiYoong @‏Cmate86 • 16 Jan 2014

FIXI Verso, a new branch of Amir Muhammad's mainly pulp imprint that publishes translations of English novels, has released BM editions of Stephen King's Joyland and Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Fans soon asked for more, but:

"@adamSanwar Harap2 fixi translate buku neil gaiman Tuhan Tuhan Amerika. BukuFixi" Nanti JAIS marah.

BukuFixi @BukuFixi • 15 Jan 2014

Well, anyhoo...

• Meet Shirin Segran, author of a 450-page science-fiction adventure novel and founder of a youth NGO, profiled in The Star. Meanwhile, South China Morning Post speaks with Hong Kong-born stockbroker-turned-author Julian Lees. And Lee Su Kim airs some laundry, from kebaya tales to sarong secrets.
• A new Pew study reveals that print is holding its own in the face of growing acceptance of e-books.
• Seems US schools are having trouble getting students to read because of the focus on an exam syllabus.
• Rizzoli, a bookstore on New York's Fifth Avenue that boasts a clientèle which includes Madonna, Michael Jackson, the Queen of Thailand, Elton John and controversial Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, may have to close.
• Why was a book on Air India pulled off the shelves?
• Machines aren't good enough to spot potential best-sellers - but they will be.
• Malaysian publishing house seeking Stuff to publish. FEED ME.
• This year, let's try and stop making these linguistic mistakes. And, by the way, are you using "myself" correctly?
• Is this a kangaroo on a 16th century Portuguese manuscript? And if it is, can it alter a chapter in Australian history?

News: Hellebore, Mein Kampf, And A Hundred Words For Snow

A New Zealand toxicologist thinks Alexander the Great may have died from drinking wine spiked with a toxic herb, most likely "Veratrum album, a poisonous plant from the lily family also known as white or false hellebore."

Won't be the last time somebody comes up with a theory about how The Great Alex died. And the last time I encountered the word was in this takedown of an idea for an urban-fantasy novel. Strange, how different stuff we read eventually link up.

---

Dani Shapiro 'apologises' to a reader for not writing what said reader wanted.

"We choose a view. We pick a story to tell. We shift through the ever-changing sands of memory, and in so doing create something hopefully beautiful, by which I mean universal. We try to tell the truth – by which I do not mean the facts. Listen to me closely, because here is where I apparently have enflamed you so: it is not the job of the memoirist to present you with a dossier."

---

Instead of moaning about how US and/or the West has fallen behind the rest of the world, folks like Thomas Friedman and Niall Ferguson should just accept the dawn of a multipolar world and figure out how t engage it, says an author:

The relative economic decline of the United States is not about gridlock in Washington, stupidity or venality on Wall Street, the lack of can-do spirit among the young, or even the death of “the Greatest Generation.” It is about the rest of the world finally getting its act together. That’s not to say that America is doing everything right, of course; much of the rest of this book is about what the country could do better to engage with a new world of opportunity. But it is important to recognize that policies to “regain US dominance” are destined to fail—and are likely to be counterproductive.

From an excerpt of The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest Is Good for the West by Charles Kenny, of course.

---

"...the sky is falling because a thing has changed books are dead now for sure you guys...." Um, no, Peter Damien says. Also, why the development of books lies with the reading public, not book critics: "It is their rampant enthusiasm for books -- their opinions and their time and effort sifting through the books and finding plenty for everybody in the community to read -- which is sustaining and expanding the book world, which is making it a crowded and noisy and excited tavern and not [a] lonely, pretentious beach...."


OK, what else?

• Emoticon overload is not new: check out these olden-days emoji rebus puzzles.
• Behold, a guide to literary tourism in Edinburgh.
• Link alleged between economic slumps and rise in literary misery. Should we be expecting some downer reading soon?
• Cache of previously unpublished letters by Mary Shelley found, reveals that writers are like everybody else.
• It seems former French president Charles de Gaulle was in the running for the 1963 Nobel Prize for literature.
• Remember how they say Eskimos have at least 100 words (a hundred? Isn't it fifty?) for snow? Phil James listed them all down.
• Hitler's Mein Kampf topping e-book charts, thanks to the "50 Shades of Grey" effect? SHUDDER. But that also means this ban on an annotated edition of the book is probably redundant now.
• "(Munshi) Abdullah's Bible", written by Farish A Noor for the March 2008 issue of the now-defunct Off The Edge magazine. You'd think it'd be dated by now.
• This book says cats think of us as giant (and probably useless) cats. Who, me?
• Looks like more teen writers are finding publishing success.
• Decades-old Al-Saeh library becomes victim of sectarian violence in Lebanon.

News: Books, Buses, And Hidden Snark

Is the corporatisation of book publishing threatening the industry? Seems that way, according to the late Andre Schiffrin, an indie publisher, who was not keen on the profit-driven model for book publishing.

"Whereas before, the average annual profit for a publishing house stood around 3 to 4 percent, now every imprint in a publishing house had to turn 10 to 15 percent profit per year or face closure. This pressure to meet targets, Schiffrin believed, "profoundly altered the output of the major publishing houses.'"

On a slightly related note, there's a study out there that says good fiction "enhances connectivity" in the brain. Until this study is debunked, we now have a compelling reason for the proper screening of manuscripts and publication of good books.

But not everybody agrees that great lit can change your life radically for the better. Nor should it.

"Reading Faulkner doesn’t make me a better person, nor does it teach me much, aside from the realization that Faulkner was a marvelous storyteller," writes Malcolm Jones in The Daily Beast. He adds that "The mid-century novelist Junichiro Tanizaki's women aren't much like my mother and my aunts, but when I read The Makioka Sisters, my family, or at least that sisterly dynamic, snapped into focus like never before. I don't think the pleasure I take from such awakenings will get me into heaven, but it’s enough for me."

All right, moving along:

• Is this really the secret to reading a lot of books or an endorsement of the tools featured inside?
• Hunting for snark in academic papers: Did these people really slip those into the acknowledgements sections? Can't tell, from the way it's written.
• The chief, the "good books advocate", in The Malay Mail Online. Go, chief!
• Forbes's predictions for the book-publishing industry for 2014.
• "...we read or listen to author interviews for the same reason we read novels: to find out how to live. But where novels are often opaque in their wisdom, declining to tell us how to live as plainly as we might like, the interview offers clarity." Seeking writerly wisdom is, apparently, why we read author interviews.
• Laura Miller at Salon couldn't finish these books in 2013.
• "Don't call me an author." This maid in Gurgaon writes books - best-selling ones.
• "Is it time to forgive Greg Mortenson?" asks Jon Krakauer. Short answer: "Nope."
• In memoriam: The Millions remembers some writers who left us in 2013.
• "Speedy consumption of infinite info facilitates short cycles of indignation". How to break the online "rage machine"?
• Dick Metcalf, former Guns and Ammo writer, speaks out in The New York Times.
• Manufacturers of London mayor Boris Johnson's buses want to block a book critical of the design of said buses. Talk about throwing something under a ... bus.
• Got a cocaine habit? If yes, you're killing people. Lots of people. At times, in gruesome ways.

2013: The Year That Was In Words

I'm not generally big on year-end reflections but, given what happened to me last year, I can't help but think back on how ... eventful 2013 has been.

Apart from my steps into the kitchen, I managed to attend a couple of great events.

I didn't expect a whole lot from the inaugural Cooler Lumpur Festival, where I'd hoped to learn more about, among other things, Malay publishing. I probably have enough material from that event for three short pieces or a really long one - if I can get over the information indigestion. Yes, still.

Sadly, pigeonholing seems to still be the order of the day where Malay writers were concerned. The parents of Gina Yap, one of the writers of the Fixi imprint, even refused to attend the launch of her first Malay novel.

Discussing the 'changing face' of the Malay writer (from left): Uthaya
Shankar SB, moderator Umapagan Ampikaipakan, Singaporean playwright
Alfian Sa'at, and Fixi author Gina Yap

But in the overflowing rows of seats in all the events I attended at Cooler Lumpur 2013, I saw a lot of energy and hope and the occasional Kodak moment. If you could just see how close Alfian Sa'at came to tears as Pak Samad recited Balada Hilang Peta (Ballad of the Lost Map) on stage....

Indeed, the future lies with the young. Would it be fine to say that I expect great things from them?

I'm probably not alone in this. Chuah Guat Eng said something about "street Malay" being the language of the young and how they are using that to do their own thing, as well as Fixi's role in that.

Chuah Guat Eng (foreground) in the discussion on "A National
Literature" (with UK writer Suzanne Joinson, Alfian Sa'at, and
National Laureate A Samad Said), live-streamed for the Edinburgh
World Writers Conference

And I'm also looking forward to the next Cooler Lumpur Festival, which is scheduled to take place within the fasting month.

---

When I wrote this response to some "fed-up Penangite's" grouses over the 2012 George Town Literary Festival, adding that I might parachute into it at some point in the future, I never imagined that I'd do it so soon, i.e. one year later.

Things just fell into place that year. I felt compelled to balik kampung then and, hey, might as well be a tourist in my hometown while I'm at it.

So much has changed.

Western-style cafés that look more at home in Publika or Damansara Uptown are now jostling with decades-old kopitiams for customers. Old pre-war shophouses now house cafés, restaurants, art galleries and backpackers' inns. In the city, the skyline has grown higher.

My priorities then meant that I couldn't attend every single event duing GTLF2013, but I managed to catch the Q&A with Datuk Lat as his session drew to a close. I think he was talking about paper.

Datuk Lat (right) fielding questions as his session wraps up; the
session was moderated by the other guy, Huzir Sulaiman

"You'd think that, oh, there's some good quality drawing paper, I think I'll buy some and then you go home with your good paper and you'll start drawing ... that will never happen."

So it's not just writers who draw a blank when confronted with white space.

Whatever can be said about the George Town Literary Festival, I'm glad that there is one. But I'd reconsider getting Huzir Sulaiman and Shamini Flint back for GTLF2014 - those funny, witty, chatty people kept stealing the show.

"...well, I thought it was pretty funny."

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

---

"Too much of a good thing" pretty much sums up the Big Bad Wolf book sale as well. I managed to find a route that took me to the venue, but it was all too much for me. I didn't feel like picking up anything from the mountains of fiction titles.

Still, I ended up with several non-fiction titles, including a cookbook on curry, which I've yet to (and may never satisfactorily) master.

But I'm not sure if I want to go to next year's.

Then again, since production of new books picked up at work towards the end of 2013 I couldn't look at another printed page when I'm home.