The First Weekend of SWF 2020 'Intimacy' :: The Digital Edition

Themed 'Intimacy', Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) 2020 has gone digital via SISTIC Live. I love this format. I don't care if the sessions are pre-corded or live-streamed, it all needs to be as glitch-free as possible. I appreciate that they kept the channel open to ticket-holders as 'video-on-demand replay'. This does away with all scheduling and 'sold out' issues. 

I had thought that the festival should have offered this option for some of their events years ago, for the ticketed events. So those who couldn’t buy physical tickets could get online to watch the livestream. But they never bothered to put up this option. Till this year. There are many sessions I want to watch and many authors whose opinions and thoughts I'd like to listen to. If I can't catch these live, I could get online later and really maximize the $20 ticket. Yay.

SWF 2020: 'Zadie Smith: Intimations'.

My first digital session was 'Zadie Smith: Intimations'. Moderated by Joel Tan, Zadie Smith discussed about her new collection of essays written earlier this year, during the lockdown, titled 'Intimations'. This is a very short collection of six very brief essays. The essays are written now, set in the now, but it doesn't explicitly spell out the protests and discussions of Black Lives Matter, George Floyd's death or the pandemic. Each character lives his/her life in the lockdown as best as they could. Moral stances are clear. Royalties from the book will go to two charities, The Equal Justice Initiative and The COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund for New York. (Reviews of the book here, here and here.)

Zadie Smith shared how the relationship between time and work and shared responsibilities have shifted as we adapt to a new reality. She explores how people have reacted to one another in isolation, and how face-to-face interactions have changed. The author is a great conversationalist. She's so articulate, and her opinions are balanced and rounded. She said that feelings of "depression, panic and uselessness" also affected her as the global lockdowns began. As much as people are alone, 'we're all in this together.' She also read the first story from 'Intimations'- 'Peonies'.

SWF 2020:
'Art Spiegelman: Serious Laughter.' 

Then I spent an hour with 'Art Spiegelman: Serious Laughter'. Moderated by Gwee Li Sui, it looked at how Art Spiegelman uses his craft and art as a medium to address societal concerns. Art Spiegelman spoke of how MAD has influenced his early career and world views, his feelings of displacement and immigration. "You have to understand that the entire adult world is lying to you." Hence his preference of satirical cartooning was born. His current obsession involves keeping a social distance from people, and fact-checking news articles. And aging, making a comic about old geezers returning to their childhood, end times and such. Oof. 

I love Art Spiegelman's graphic novel 'Maus' (1980). I must have read that at least six times. I'm also very familiar with the author's other works (Garbage Pail Kids haha), but I've never actually bothered to check out films or video clips of the author's interviews. Heh. So this year's SWF session was fantastic for me to hear what the now 72-year-old author has to say about comic creators voicing out opinions and writing about painful serious concerns this year. 

He kept mentioning MAD and how it has pummeled in the notion of 'self reflexivity', and how it asks you to remember a comic as a construct, not to interrogate the fact that it's a story. The author opined that comics are an efficient medium, but very inefficient to make (when compared to video cameras and phones), but the communicative quality is high since the words chosen to fit into the speech ballon has to be concise. Or to make comics without any words at all. Responding to the moderator's question of what the responsibilities to the art form itself might me now, the author thinks that it's up to the individual artists- to do political cartoons, to tell goofy stories or otherwise. Comic artists are idiosyncratic. Hahaha.