This blog is a place for prose, songs, and wanderings – whether literary, musical, personal, & other, in-process or complete….
In 2009, I began working on a song-cycle, titled Requiem for the Migration & Mother(land)songs. This “cycle” of songs was to contemplate the Vietnamese beyond-war/diasporic experience. I began blogging about this project with the Lunar New Year 2010 (with the tentative goal of trying to post something new regarding it at least once a month – a goal I’ve evidently strayed from…. ). Requiem aims to tell stories and impressions of Vietnam, war, myth, migration, exodus & wanderings, other wonderings….and to reflect also on my personal experience being an inheritor of such legacies and consequences. I am also interested in exploring the meeting points of polarities: East/West, ancient/modern, organic/technological, masculine/feminine…. ((sea/mother?))…
At the start of it, my initial statement for this project was: “The Requiem project seeks to manifest as a musical recording, a performance event, and as words/lyrics in printed form, aesthetically presented. Funding for this multimedia project is currently being sought.” (Though, writing this at the end of 2010, I see now that the project is still forming, evolving, blooming & dying, loosing bits and angles of itself I had thought immovable, and finding new holds; funds are still elusive; while collaborators & inspirers also continually change … As I am now beginning to understand these things are just apt to do.)
Since about 2006 I have also been at work on a third book of prose, (working title) Notes From the Southern World, which inhabits a region of its own making, poised in between conventionally defined genres (novel/poetry, fiction/memoir, etc).
Notes and Requiem will – likely or only maybe – come to stand eventually as parallel pieces of work – a multigenre experience and experiment – or at least, for myself, as parallel journeys of attempting to articulate : word and song / mind and breath.
