Distraction

As I grow older, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the pretence of reading from reading itself, so that I begin to suspect that theree is a quality of attention I am no longer capable of, a willingness to be absorbed by the page that I no longer possess. As it is, I find myself glancing at my Blackberry every ten minutes, holding it's gaze for the two seconds necessary to ascertain if the light is blinking, the tiny wink that tells me I am wanted, that my attention is required, as it already is, elsewhere.

Brazil in Pictures

You ask for photographs, I give you photographs. Now you may have been thinking Brazil = pictures of beaches filled with hot bikini-clad women, but you really should know me better than that. Instead I give you:

Christ on the Mountain
Corcovado, Rio de Janeiro



Beach Debris
Ilha Grande

Boat passing in the twilight
Ilha Grande

Dry Salvages
Angra dos Reis

A Wilderness of Flamingos
Parque des Aves, Iguacu

The March of Progress
Itaipu Dam

Cathedral
Itaipu Dam

And just to prove that it wasn't all depression and gloom:

Iguacu Falls

2009

1. Turned 30
2. Got PhD
3. Got job
4. Moved to new city
5. Read, no, finished reading 122 books
6. Published 1
7. Put up 220 blog posts (or 221 depending on how tomorrow shapes up)
8. Listened to 15 Shostakovich symphonies. Twice.
9. Started 68 poems, completed 52, did not regret 6.
10. Baked one batch of cookies, regretted them all

All in all, not a bad year.

Acclimatization

You know you've been living in Minneapolis too long when you check the temperature outside and it's 10 F (that's -12 C, btw) and you think "Ah! A warm day."

***

In other news, don't miss this wonderful live chat with Lydia Davis over at the Book Bench blog. The woman writes short short fiction, loves Bach, Beckett and the piano, says most of what she writes is finished quickly and used and spends time arranging her stories but is then happy for people to jump back and forth through them. Sound like anyone we know?

Loneliness is underrated

I've probably said this before, but there's really nothing like watching a movie when you're the ONLY ONE in the entire theater. It's like having a living room with a 20-foot high screen and impeccable surround sound. Plus, someone else makes the popcorn. What more could one ask for?

P.S. The movie, if you must know, was (500) Days of Summer, and is the source of the title of this post.

Bookstore neurosis

Stock home syndrome: The urge to buy a book in order to 'rescue' it. Like finding a copy of Catcher in the Rye tucked away on a shelf of Harry Potter and Twilight books, and taking it home out of pure sympathy.

Deweydecimania: The need to rearrange books in a bookstore to restore them to proper alphabetical order. May be accompanied by indistinct muttering about people who put Marquez after Maugham.

You know you've hit writer's block when...

...you consume a pint of Guinness and six Barthelme short stories for lunch, and you still can't find the inspiration to write.

In other news, can I just say that I feel personally betrayed by Capitalism. What's the point of free enterprise if you can't get proper service even if you're willing to pay for it? Thrice in the last week I've ordered things on 'expedited' delivery, only to receive apologies and a refund when they didn't arrive by the agreed deadline (NOTE to vendors: I don't want a @#%&!ng refund, I want my shipment!!).

I don't understand why Capitalism is doing this to me, after all that we've been through the years. Can it be she finally found out about by affair with Marxism in college? Is this her way of taking revenge?

Joblessness redefined

Ron
is gone
but the con
goes on

- placard at Anti-Scientology demonstration outside the Church of Scientology, Minneapolis.

Personally, I have no use for scientology (or any other organized system of faith), but I can't help thinking that organizing a demonstration against it, complete with placards and masks and loudspeaker and soap bubbles (don't ask!) is overkill. One protests evil, not silliness.

Oh, and as the more lynx-eyed among you have already noticed, I've bid farewell to Philadelphia and moved to Minneapolis, where I'm currently busy assembling furniture (correction: trying to assemble furniture) and stocking my kitchen and generally being depressingly domestic. Will return to blogging once I've managed to wrestle myself back to civilization.

That's Dr. Falstaff to you

5 years

= STATA + JSTOR + rewrites + conference presentations + the annual caffeine output of a medium-sized Colombian plantation

= 49,000 words + 300 references + 24 tables

= 15 slides + 1 hour defense

= 1 dissertation, signed and delivered.

And it's barely lunchtime.

Four years

Depressing thought # 1461: This blog has now lasted longer than any relationship I've been in.

Interpretation

Does it still qualify as a nightmare if it makes you sad, but not afraid?

***

In the dream I'm meeting with my analyst and we have a breakthrough. I discover that for the last 25 years I've been repressing the memory of a tragic accident I had as a child. I can't believe I've been hiding this from myself all these years. It explains so much.

When I wake up I think - what was the dream trying to tell me?

***

I don't believe in psychoanalysis. Apparently, my subconscious does.

The Basics

Writing 4,000 words of my dissertation in a single day

+ Discovering a new poet

+ Simon Rattle conducting Bruckner

+ Dark chocolate

= Happiness

A bookstore near you

Remember how I said the release of Shahid's Collected Poems was the best news I'd had all year? Well, thrilled as I am about that, there is one other publishing event that I'm even more excited about. That's the release of études, a collection of short fiction by my dear friend and occassional alter ego Aseem Kaul, now available - either in bookstores or online - to those of you in India. A book, needless to say, I strongly urge you to go buy (or at least find in your local book store and read the back cover of).

Not that études is a great book or anything. There are days when I'm not even sure it's a good book. But it's different and fun and bizzarely imaginative and there are so many different pieces in it that you're bound to like something. Plus if you're sitting around reading this blog you're not exactly spoiled for choice are you?

As a matter of fact, regular readers of this blog may find significant similarities between the writing on this blog and the work in études. It may even, at times, be hard to tell the two apart. This is not, however, reason to type 2,569 indignant blog posts and put them up on DesiPundit. The writing seems similar not because Mr. Kaul has been stealing my work (nor because I've been stealing his - how dare you even suggest such a thing!), but because the two of us think so much alike that sometimes it's as though we have a single extremely demented mind between us.

What this overlap in styles does mean is that if you enjoy reading this blog you're almost certain to enjoy études, and should go out and buy it without a moment's further hesitation. Not only will you get a nicely bound collection of classic Falstaff-like pieces that you can pass on to your grandchildren, you'll also get to read 16 brand new (Never seen before! Untouched by hand!) stories that cover such diverse topics as deviant omelet recipes, kinky sex, a retelling of the Orpheus myth as a Fernando Meirelles short and the horrifying secret behind Facebook. Plus that way you can enjoy the blog / website that goes with the book with a clear conscience. And if enough of you buy the book it will restore light and hope to my world so that I won't kill myself out of sheer depression and may even go back to writing posts that are more than two sentences long [1].

Those of you who live outside India are, I'm afraid, going to have to wait before you can get your hands on the book - I'm told the book will eventually be available on Amazon, but I can't say when / if that will happen. I did manage to get hold of a few copies myself, but shall be distributing those to people who:

a) will sign off on my dissertation
b) will do my taxes
c) are sleeping with me
d) have slept with me
e) would sleep with me if they didn't have this rare, little-known medical condition
f) are liable to beat me up if I don't give them copies (hi MR!)

in that order.

The rest of you can either be good dutiful children and buy the book the next time you're in India, or watch this space for further information on availability, while hopefully whetting your appetite for the book by reading about it on the site.

Happy Reading!

[1] and with footnotes

Thirty

Many years ago
I was sent
to spy out the land
beyond the age of thirty.

And I stayed there
and didn't go back to my senders,
so as not to be made
to tell
about this land

and made
to lie.

- Yehuda Amichai

***

30. Keats never made it this far. Nor Shelley. And Schubert, poor syphilitic Schubert, had just over a year left.

These old P.M.s are gruesome.

Why do I do this to myself? Indulge in these gentle luxuries? In this regret that is not even regret but the shadow of my disappointment for the sun I could not touch.

A ritual preposterous but necessary, like knocking on a door when you know no one will answer.

***

Beyond a point, every birthday becomes a monument to failure, a milestone marking how far I have failed to come.

My life a ladder of lines behind a door that now belongs to someone else.

***
Will you look at this? I've been officially middle-aged for all of 90 minutes and I've already I've started to whine. By the time this day is over I'll probably be complaining about my sciatica.

BWV 1004

As everyone 'knows', I dislike children, and disapprove of any and all attempts to introduce them into the public sphere. I'm particularly critical of parents who bring their 4 /5 year olds to classical music concerts; a sub-class of quasi-criminals who, were it left up to me (though it mercifully isn't) would be shut away in a dark cell for a minimum of five years and be made to listen to six hours of ABBA everyday.

Every now and then, however, children will surprise me by turning out to be human. Last Thursday, for instance, when the 5 year old [1] sitting in front of me at a violin recital spent much of the concert with the score open on his lap, valiantly and self-importantly following along as Christian Tetzlaff scraped his way through Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin. It wasn't just that he behaved like an angel - didn't fidget, didn't start to talk loudly in the middle of a movement - it was the fact that he was so interested, that he was enjoying himself so thoroughly. It was the first time in half a decade that I've actually felt anything approaching affection for a child.

***

In the meantime, I find I'm becoming completely obsessed with the Bach pieces for solo violin - particularly with BWV 1004 (with its mesmerising Chaconne), which I've heard four different versions of in the last 8 hours alone. It's incredible how Bach can construct so compelling a conversation with a single instrument - there are entire Haydn string quartets that have less going on than the final movement of this Partita.

***

Meanwhile, if I'd ever had any doubts about being in the wrong demographic for classical music concerts, they were put to rest today. Someone in the row behind me happened to mention that it was the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, which prompted everyone else to begin sharing their personal memories of that fateful day. And I mean everyone.

I don't know if I'm going to be alive on 09/11/2068 (I kind of doubt it to be honest), but if I am I'm so going to a concert and talking about it.

The really marvellous thing is: they'll still be playing Bach.

Notes

[1] Well, he looked five. But he could have been four. Or three. Or eight. How are you supposed to tell with the little blighters anyway? It's not like you can cut them open and count the rings.

Late Beethoven

No one deserved it more than he did. No one fought harder, or more fiercely, or against greater odds.

No one saw as clearly that triumph is a demon. That fury sings. That beauty, at its heart, is an act of will.

No one learnt at greater cost how wild perfection is, how savage - how it destroys those who nurse it, must be tamed by brute force.

And yet, listening to these final works - these quartets with their voices that meditate on silence, these sonatas where the piano is an animal set free - is it possible not to envy him? Envy him neither his suffering nor his glory, but what lies beyond both - the knowledge that moves beneath these pieces, informs them, inspires them. The sure-footed intuition of a mind at peace.

We may never be old enough for this music. We may not live so long, or so intensely. But it comforts us to know such harmony is possible: a season of soft promises, of beauty both ripe and bare.

My life as a culture vulture / Creatures of a Day

It's been a hectic but satisfying week. In the last ten days, I've managed to catch:

a) Three Philadelphia Orchestra concerts (in addition to the Penderecki, I also attended a performance of the Lutoslawki Piano Concerto by Krystian Zimerman - have I mentioned that Lutoslawski is my enthusiasm of the month? - and a performance of Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet)

b) Six films at the New York Film Festival (the highlights being Agnes Jaoui's delightful Let it Rain, Kazakh director Sergei Dvortsevoy's charming and bittersweet Tulpan and a screening of Oshima's surreal yet incredible The Man Who Left His Will on Film; low points were Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence - why, why would anyone make a movie starring David Bowie? - and Jaime Rosales entirely pointless Bullet in the Head, a film that confirms all one's worst stereotypes about experimental cinema being self-indulgent and tedious.)

c) A performance by the Emerson String Quartet

d) An adaptation of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor for the stage

e) A performance by the Parsons Dance Company, which I may get around to ranting about one of these days

f) A screening of Juan Antonio Bardem's Death of a Cyclist.

g) A cello recital (followed by an evening spent obsessively listening to alternate versions of Beethoven's Third Cello Sonata, trying to make the impossible choice between Casal's furious, growling rendition with its menacing first movement and explosive finale, and the experience of hearing Du Pre transform that first movement into pure song, the sound so exquisite it moves me to tears; and I haven't even got to the Rostropovich-Richter recording yet. Sigh)

Good times. Good times.

***

Reading's been taking a bit of a back-seat this week (see above) but did manage to read Reginald Gibbons' new collection Creatures of a Day, which is on the shortlist for this year's National Book Award in poetry. It's not a particularly exciting book (I suspect Silliman would describe it as School of Quietude) but in many ways it's a sublime one, its quiet, meditative poems sneak subtly up on you until you find yourself unexpectedly moved.

The pick of the poems in the book is undoubtedly 'Fern-Texts', a glorious palimpsest of a poem in which Gibbons weaves together his own memories and extracts from Coleridge's notebooks to create an almost fugual exploration of youth, poetry and political engagement; a poem about the meaning of dreams and the dream of Meaning; about the inevitable and endlessly repeated betrayal of both what we thought we stood for, and what we felt but could not say. Describing Coleridge's views on poetry, Gibbons writes that C. saw poems as being "at heart / a dreaming, with states and shifts / of feeling and image and / narratives moving with that / peculiar syntax of con-/ nections that lie beneath what / we think we think." And that's exactly what 'Fern-Texts' is: not thought made transparent, but the movement of the mind captured on the page.

There's also the lovely 'Ode: I had been reading ancient Greeks', in which images of water, a young girl's suicide and the Antigone myth come together in a poem of dark yet artesian power; and the pitch-perfect evocation of an urban landscape in 'Where moon light angles through'. All in all, a book well worth the read.

In which yours truly, like, totally fanboys out

Oh my god! oh my god! You're not going to BELIEVE who I was sitting next to at the orchestra today! Krzysztof Penderecki! In the flesh! No, really, I swear! He was sitting right across the aisle! I could have reached out and touched him! I would have needed arms 7 feet long, but you know! Oh my god! oh my god!

The worst part is, I didn't even realize it was Penderecki until after the performance ended. There I am applauding away, when Dutoit turns and gestures in my general direction, and the next thing I know the genial old man with the overgrown beard sitting opposite me is hobbling down the aisle while the audience rises to its feet. It had occurred to me that Penderecki may be somewhere in the audience, given that it was the US premiere of his Concerto Grosso No. 1 for three cellos, but who would have imagined he'd be so close?! I was so totally overwhelmed I barely even noticed that Han-Na Chang was sitting two rows in front of me in the second half.

The Concerto Grosso itself was glorious. Not quite as striking as some of Penderecki's early work, perhaps, but profound nonetheless, combining melancholy with savagery, 19 century romanticism with propulsively modern rhythms. Most of the time, the interplay between the three cellos sounded like it could have come straight out of Dvorak, but then the piece would shift unexpectedly into higher gear, the combined menace of bass and percussion reminding us that this was, after all, Penderecki.

And the fact that the Concerto was preceded by Dumbarton Oaks (which I never tire of, though this is the third time I'm hearing it performed this year) and followed by Sibelius' First Symphony, only made things better.

I have to say that from my perspective this season is turning out to be the Philadelphia Orchestra's most promising ever. Three concerts in, and already I've got to hear Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Lutoslawski, Penderecki and Sibelius. Even the one 'classical' piece they played - Haydn's Sinfonia Concertante - was one I'd never heard before, which made listening to its unlikely but sublime combination of bassoon, oboe, violin and cello a genuine revelation. Now if only they keep this up.

Chopfallen

"Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set to table on a roar?"

- Hamlet Act 5 Scene I

There was a time, in the mid-90s, when every time I walked into a bookstore I would ask if they had a copy of Infinite Jest. At first this was because I actually wanted to get my hands on the book - I was going through an intense Joyce phase at the time, and from the reviews I'd read DFW sounded like the logical progression - but after a while it became my preferred way of testing how good the bookstore was.

I'm not sure that any bookstore in Delhi actually passed that test [1] (I have a feeling the Book Shop in Khan Market did) but I never did get around to buying a copy of the book back then, and even though I do have it sitting on my bookshelf now (having picked it up at a used book sale a year ago) I still haven't got around to reading it.

This may explain why, hearing about DFW's suicide last night [2], my first reaction was one not of shock, but of guilt - as though by being too lazy to read his opus I'd let him down. But that's not what I wanted to write about. I'm trying to explain (to you nominally, but mostly to myself) why it is that though I've read so little of Wallace's work - just a few essays here and there - the news of his death yesterday filled me with such a sense of loss. I think I mourn Wallace not for who he was but for what he represented - something large on the landscape, either giant or windmill. There are some books that are so ambitious, so massive, that they exercise upon us a kind of gravity, loom over our imagination, draw us into their shadow. War and Peace is like that, and Ulysses and A la recherche du temps perdu. And for me, growing up in college, trying to expand the horizons of what I was reading, Infinite Jest was like that too. So it's sad to have to say that it's taken Wallace's death to get me around to reading it. Though I suspect that's true for a lot of us.

All of which makes me wonder whether bookstores in Delhi (or elsewhere, for that matter) have begun stocking Infinite Jest yet. So do me a favor, will you? The next time you're in a bookstore, ask them if they have a copy. And if they don't, ask them to get one. It's the least we can do.

Notes

[1] It wasn't just a either-they-have-it-or-they-don't test, you understand. There were all sorts of subtle gradations. Like if they didn't have the book but had heard of it. Or they hadn't heard of the book but at least they didn't need me to spell infinite jest out for them, or didn't take me to the sports section to show me other books on chess [3] - something that happened more often than you'd think and always made me want to hit the salesperson on the head screaming "It's Shakespeare! you idiot".

[2] If I weren't so shocked I'd be tempted to make that old joke about how Post-modernists don't die, they deconstruct.

[3] I suppose I should be grateful they didn't think I was asking for Infinite Chest. I hate to think where that would have led.

This day that year

I can't remember now why we were going drinking. After all, it was Tuesday night, the middle of the week, and I don't recall there being anything to celebrate. Still, there we were, four of us crammed into a rickety cab, making our painfully slow progress from Nariman Point to Bandra.

Somewhere around Prabhadevi, I get a text from heh heh (who is still at work in BKC and is supposed to join us later), saying that a plane just flew into the World Trade Center. We figure it must have been a small plane, one of these silly four seaters. We wonder how dumb you have to be to hit the WTC. I mean, it can't be that hard to miss.

Then, around Mahim, another text. Another plane just hit the WTC. Oh, come on, what are the odds? Clearly heh heh is screwing with us. Some sort of stupid joke. And to think we actually took him seriously the first time.

Wait, a third message. The Pentagon this time. Ya, right. Like all of a sudden planes in the US have started to plough into buildings. Just like that. See, that's the trouble with heh heh. He doesn't know when to stop.

Five minutes later we walk into the restaurant and there it is, on the TV screen, that indelible image of the two towers billowing smoke. Wait, you mean heh heh wasn't joking? What the fuck? As we settle into our chairs the news shows a replay of the second plane hitting. Holy crap! That was a full-sized Boeing. Look at the explosion. It's amazing the towers are still standing. What are they saying - can anyone make out? Wish the folks at that table would shut up. Is this for real?

For the next two hours, working our way through copious quantities of beer and biryani, we watch the news. We see the towers come down. We see the footage from the Pentagon.

Someone on another table gets up and tries to change the channel. Apparently his favorite TV show is on. The manager politely tells him to get lost.

Does anyone we know work in the WTC? What firms have offices there? We should call someone and check. Hello? Hey, it's me. Have you seen this? Dude, it's fucking unbelievable. Listen, do you know what firms are in the WTC? Any I-banks? Check online, na, if you're near a computer. What's that? Merril? And MSDW? Are you sure? Any others? Okay, let me know if you hear anything. Bye. Merril and MSDW, apparently. Do we know anyone there? Who did they hire this year? Last year? Didn't P---- join them...but wait, he's in London, isn't he? The folks in New York would know. Someone try calling them. No answer. The lines must be down. Shit.

So how long do you think before the US starts bombing the crap out of the Middle East? A week? Two? Man, this is going to make getting a tourist visa so much harder.