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.

Obligatory Shortlist Post

So the Booker shortlist is out, and as usual I find myself wondering whether a quorum of monkeys throwing darts couldn't have done a better job of picking the deserving books. I've only read four of the six books on the shortlist - I can't see myself reading The Northern Clemency (700 something pages about the Thatcher years? No thanks) and I haven't managed to get my hands on the Ghosh yet - but of those both the Grant and the Adiga absolutely do not deserve to be on that list, not at the expense of Netherland and The Enchantress of Florence (I'm not saying the Rushdie deserves to win or anything, only that it's a better book than the other two - NOT a high bar).

I'm particularly pained about the Adiga, not so much because I thought it was unreadable, but because coming so soon after the shortlisting of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, its inclusion means that for the foreseeable future we shall be plagued by this this-should-really-be-an-essay-but-no-one-would-read-that-so-let-me-make-up-a-few-wooden-characters-and-call-it-a-novel school of writing. Even as I write this someone is doubtless hard at work on next year's nominee - a novel about a 'typical' young woman growing up in the 'real' India, told as a hyper-erudite first-person confession to a visiting Martian - secure in the knowledge that as long as you give a few media interviews emphasizing how your book offers an 'alternate' perspective someone, somewhere is bound to find it insightful.

Of the books now on the shortlist, my pick would be the Toltz, though as I said, I haven't read the Ghosh. The book I'm really looking forward to reading, shortlist or no shortlist, is the Berger (which seems to be unavailable in the US at this point - at least the library system doesn't have it), though next on my list is A Case of Exploding Mangoes, which, now that it hasn't been shortlisted, I actually have high expectations from.

Faraz - II (and a bonus Faiz)

Khwab

Vo chaand mera ham safar thaa
doori ke ujaar jangalon mein
ab meri nazar se chhup chukaa hai

Ek umr se mai maloolo-tanha
zulmat ki rahguzaar mein hoon
mai aage badhoon ki laut jaoon

Kya soch ke intezaar mein hoon
koi bhi nahin jo ye bataye
main kaun hoon kis dayar mein hoon.

- Ahmed Faraz

English Translation (mine):

Dream

That moon traveled with me
in this barren forest of distances
now it's hidden from my sight.

For ages now, I, sad and alone,
have walked in darkened ways.
Shall I go on, or return?

What thought makes me stay?
There is no one here to tell me
Who am I? What is this place?

***

Khaamosh ho kyon

Khaamosh ho kyon daade-jafaa kyon nahin dete
Bismil ho to qatil ko duaa kyon nahin dete

Vahshat ka sabab rozan-e-zindaa to nahin hai
Mehero-maho-anjum ko bujhaa kyon nahin dete

Ek ye bhi to andaaze-ilaaje-gam-e-jaan hai
Ay charah-garo, dard badhaa kyon nahin dete

Munsif ho agar tum to kab insaaf karoge
Mujrim hain agar hum to sazaa kyon nahin dete

Rahzan ho to haazir hai mataa-e-dilo-jaan bhi
Rahbar ho to manzil ka pataa kyon nahin dete

Kyaa beet gayi ab ke 'faraz' ahle-chaman par
Yaraane-qafas mujhko sadaa kyon nahin dete

- Ahmed Faraz

English Translation (mine):

Why are you silent?

Why are you silent? Why don't you praise injustice?
Wounded, why don't you bless the executioner?

Your solitude is not some prison chandelier
Why don't you put it out? Extinguish moon, stars, sun?

This is another way to cure life's sadness
O, doctors! Why don't you increase the pain?

If you are just, when will your justice be done?
If I am guilty, why don't you render punishment?

If you're a highwayman, take both my money and my life
If a guide, why don't you tell me where this road will end?

What has come over this garden and its inmates, Faraz,
Why don't my friends from prison call out to me?


Two more Faraz poems. To really appreciate the latter, of course, you have to read it in the context of this Faiz ghazal [1]:

Be-dam hue beemar dawaa kyon nahin dete
Tum acche maseeha ho shifaa kyon nahin dete

Dard-e-shab-e-hijra ki jazaa kyon nahin dete
Khoon-e-dil-e-vahashi ka silaa kyon nahin dete

Mit jayegi makhlook to insaaf karoge
Munsif ho to ab hashra uthaa kyon nahin dete

Paiman-e-junoon haathon ko sharmayega kab tak
Dilwalon, gareeban ka pataa kyon nahin dete

Barbaadi-e-dil-jabr nahin 'Faiz' kisee ka
Voh dushman-e-jaan hai to bhulaa kyon nahin dete.

- Faiz Ahmed Faiz

[1] that I'm afraid I don't have the energy to translate. Maybe some other day.

Go

Jaao

Jaao ki mujhe yakin nahin hai
tum abke gaye to aa sakoge
dahleez se ek kadam utar kar
vo rahguzar muntazir hai
jis par jo koi chala gaya hai
kadmon ke nishan biccha gaya hai
furqat ke diye jalaa gaya hai.

- Ahmed Faraz

English translation (mine):

Go

Go for I do not believe
that once you leave you can come back
one step beyond the threshold
the road lies in wait
on which whoever has passed
has spread his footprints, has left
the lamps of absence burning.


It's been more than two weeks since Faraz died (NY Times obituary here) and I've been meaning ever since to blog about it: one can't, after all, let the death of one of Urdu's finest poets pass unmentioned. I finally decided (partly because I couldn't find any translations of his work in my library) that the most effective way to pay the man tribute was to try my hand at translating some of his poems (what was it Auden said? "by mourning tongues / the death of the poet was kept from his poems").

P.S. I plan to try translating some more of Faraz's work in the weeks to come, so feel free to leave comments to this post with a) death threats for mauling his poems or b) requests for poems you'd like to see translated (preferably with a link to the original in english / devanagari script)

What is, and is not, poetry

Feeling too lazy to blog, so in time-honored 2x3x7 tradition shall take the easy way out by:

a) Pointing you to post where I've left a blogpost's worth of comments, specifically this post by Rahul that Space Bar pointed me to.

b) Posting random poem that I've decided to discard (remember this):

The Boat at Dawn


Like a hand prodding
at the surf, trying to nudge
the ocean awake;

or a dog pulling
at its chain, sensing the sun
about to break in;

or a phrase repeat-
-edly mouthed, as though the sea
were a new language.

Largo

Grief too is a kind of affirmation. You have to be alive, and very brave, to mourn for those you love.

Shostakovich understood this. That is why in quartet after quartet, symphony after symphony there is that moment after the storm when the instruments lift their weary voices and start, reluctantly, to sing.

[inspired by this & this]

Five hundred word exercises

In other news, I've been trying my hand at a few of the Flash Fiction prompts that zigzackly has up on the Caferati QuickTales LiveJournal site - see here and here.

Five Finger Exercises - Part II

[continued from here]

Sunday morning found us in Skaneateles, in the 'Sweet Pea' room (I kid you not) at a bed and breakfast called the Hummingbird's Home. It's a quaint little place, its decor all porcelain and lace doilies, with the kind of pre-World War II ambiance that not only makes you feel clumsy just looking at it, but also makes you wonder if the hostess is going to offer you some homemade wine and whether there's someone digging the Panama canal in the basement. As it turned out, though, our hostess's cooking was unexceptionable, if a trifle elaborate (you have to understand that breakfast, for yours truly, consists of two handfuls of cereal in a bowl of cold milk, and that's when there's milk in the house, otherwise I just pour coffee over my raisin bran; so the combination of artfully arranged watermelon slices, a spinach and egg quiche, three kinds of toast, tea, coffee AND orange juice AND chocolate cake at the end seemed a bit much [1]). Our companions at breakfast were a middle-aged couple who had driven ALL THE WAY from Cortland (thirty five miles away) and who, on learning that we did not, in fact, plan to spend the day in Skaneateles itself, but instead planned to venture further west wondered whether we were planning to go as far as Auburn (six miles away), shaking their bemused heads at the impetuosity of youth when assured that we did, indeed, plan to go that far. They were quite sweet, really, except that their conversation tended to center on a) gardening and b) dogs / cats and since both MR and I live in apartments (well, MR lives in an apartment, I live in a room) and neither of us has pets we didn't have much to contribute.

In any case, by 8.30 we were on the road again, heading first west and then south along the length of Cayuga Lake. Late morning we stopped at the Taughannock Falls State Park, where we took a desultory walk along a mostly dry river bed to the falls themselves, which may be quite impressive when there's actual water in them, but shrunk as they were to what Auden would call a "soodling thread" they proved to be quite the damp squib (in more ways than one). From there we travelled to the town of Ithaca, so I could feel suitably Odyss-ian and MR could eat at what our guidebook described as the "finest waterfront restaurant in the region". Four wrong turns, three different highways and about 12 miles of unnecessary driving later we finally managed to get to the address where said restaurant was supposed to be, and discovered it had been replaced by an Enterprise Car Rental. Not to be disheartened, we proceeded to drive along the waterfront anyway, seeking an alternate waterfront eatery on the principle that if we went they would have built it, and ended up on a dirt road that led to the Ithaca Farmer's Market. Here we wandered among stalls selling samosas, felafel, sushi, spring rolls, cambodian noodles and other such traditional delicacies of the region, before finally settling on a lunch of garlic and mozarella flatbread followed by freshly squeezed lemonade.

Lunch over, we decided to pay a visit to the Cornell campus, and ended up at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. It's a nice, compact museum, with a permanent collection which, if not exactly breathtaking, is fairly respectable, and includes a splendid Chirico, a magnificent Hassam, a bizarrely un-Hopper like Hopper, pleasant minor works by Constable and O'Keefe and a startlingly lifelike John De Andrea. More interesting, however, were the special exhibitions - which included a set of prom night photographs of high school students by Mary Ellen Mark and, most memorably, an exhibition of the multimedia work of Marc Swanson including the fabulous Killing Moon as well as Always and Nothing. Delightful stuff.

From Ithaca, we made our way further west (making a quick stop at a coffee shop, where the combination of good espresso and the guy sitting by the door reading Spinoza restored our faith in the place as a University town), to the town of Watkins Glen and the southern tip of Lake Seneca, where we proceeded to find a shady spot by the azure waters and lie down in the grass to read, our idyll broken only by the presence of two dozen boats, a hundred or so people and the sound of Pearl Jam blasting from a nearby radio. Fortunately for us, the lake was only a few feet deep off the shore where we were, so that the boats were all parked about a hundred meters out in deeper water, like a haphazard necklace strung across the lake's throat, with the people walking to and fro between the boats and the land like so many swim-suited Jesuses.

An hour or so of relaxing by the lake and we were ready to move on, this time to begin an impromptu little wine tour of our own. I didn't know this when we decided to go there, but it seems the Finger Lakes region is wine country; what's more they seem to produce mostly white wine, particularly Rieslings, which I dearly love. It isn't quite Napa, of course, but it's fun going from winery to winery, trying out an assortment of dry whites (and struggling to distinguish one from the other - a sommelier I'm not), and some of the wines were genuinely quite good. I particularly liked the Glenora Pinot Blanc, which struck me as being both subtler and more satisfying than most of the other stuff I tasted, though again, I'm hardly an expert.

Sated with tastings, we headed back to Skaneateles, and our table at the Elderberry Pond restaurant, just managing to make their last seating at 7.30 pm (ah! the simple country life). Food here was only averagely good, and I seriously doubt that any part of my shrimp and scallop pasta included fresh seasonal ingredients grown on the farm; still, the wine (another Riesling - this time a Thirsty Owl dry) was nice, the bruschetta (see previous post) delicious, and the experience of stepping out of the restaurant to see hundreds of stars twinkling above you sufficiently novel to make the evening worthwhile.

The next day - Monday - was relatively uneventful, and involved driving back to Manhattan, making a longish detour into the exotic wilds of the Bronx where we discovered a little known civilization called City Island whose inhabitants make good seafood, and then driving out to Long Island where, driven by visions of shadowy woodlands and quiet walks by the sea, we made our way out to Fire Island. This didn't quite work out, though, mostly because thanks to a process of decision making too complicated to explain we ended up catching a ferry not to Sailors Haven as we had planned, but to a place called Cherry Grove, which, it turns out, is not a part of the National Park service but a predominantly gay residential community, the touristy bits of which are way too touristy for yours truly (I'm up for many things, but dancing at 5 in the afternoon to that Ketchup song is not one of them) and the residential bits of which were, well, a little too residential. At least the beaches were nice.

[1] And that was just the first day. The second day it was fruit salad, french toast with peaches and almonds and sausages.

Five Finger Exercises - Part I

Just got back from a long weekend in the Finger Lakes region of upstate NY - a weekend of classical music and shimmering blue lakes, with a few sips of white wine and a smidgen of art thrown in for good measure [1].

The trip began on a high note (literally), courtesy of the Skaneateles Festival - the last concert of which we drove up to catch [2]. It was, in many ways, a magical evening. There was the setting, to start with: an immaculately white three-storey farmhouse, with the orchestra seated on the porch, facing a semi-circular terrace (complete with a marble balustrade) with chairs for the audience, and behind them, three steps below, a lush green lawn sloping all the way down to the glistening waters of the Skaneateles lake. The whole scene could have come straight out of Henry James (or at least the Merchant-Ivory version of Henry James). And later, when the sun had set, the stars crept into the sky like so many students come to listen to the music with their standing-room-only passes, and when the music stilled you could hear the crickets chirping in the countryside around, the sound a gentle metronome, as though an orchestra of ghostly cellos had decided to join the performance but didn't know the notes.

The performances themselves were good, if not particularly inspired. Given the open-air setting the acoustics were a bit iffy, and I couldn't help feeling that the soloists, though perfectly competent in their own right, didn't really work well together. It didn't help that all three pieces being performed were well known to me - it's hard not to compare what you're hearing to the recording of the piece in your head, even though it's manifestly unfair to use Pierre Boulez's renditions of Stravinsky or Anne-Sophie Mutter's performances of Mozart as a benchmark.

Still, it was quite a program. The first half provided an interesting contrast by bringing together Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks with Bach's Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, the juxtaposition being interesting not just for the banal fact that Stravinsky is explicitly paying tribute to Bach, but for the way it highlights two very different forms of propulsion. Stravinsky's rhythms are unmistakably his own - the pounding tempo, the heart-stopping pauses, the agile, consistently surprising beat - so very different from the mathematical perfection of Bach's flowing counterpoints; yet both share an ability to quicken one's pulse, a sense of something driving and restless and unstoppable, an energy that is pure momentum.

But the night really belonged to Mozart. The Sinfonia Concertante is an exquisite piece in any case, but something about the outdoor setting enhanced Mozart in a way it didn't the others. Both Bach and Stravinsky sounded, if anything, a little out of place in the open air, as though their music truly belonged in a chamber and remained uneasy about being transplanted into this new setting. Mozart, by contrast, sounded as though the music, in being released from the confines of the usual walls, had come into its element. (Auden writes: "he wrote to play while bottles were uncorked / Milord chewed noisily, Milady talked"). Those glorious melodies had the room to soar in, those cheeky allegros could run rampant in the wind. I imagined the music floating out over the lake, caressed by the waters, its faint lilt making itself heard to some listener on the opposite shore, it beauty haunting, intuitive; and it seemed to me that this was what Mozart truly deserved, to be free among the world and under the stars, so that even the ambient sounds - a shout from a passing boat, fireworks over Skaneateles village - seemed not so much interruptions as organic parts of the piece itself (the fireworks, in particular, worked well with the flourishes of the final presto), and the music like some dream of harmony, holding the summer night entranced.

So all in all, it was a marvellous concert, and easily the highlight of the trip (well, for me, at least - I suspect MR was more taken with the bruschetta we had Sunday night).

[More on the rest of the trip to follow]

[1] No, SB, this is not a short trip bristling with disasters. The most scary thing on this trip was the sight of MR trying to eat crab legs.

[2] Okay, so I admit traveling some 250 miles out of the city (350 if you consider I was coming from Philly) to attend a concert is a little excessive, but they were playing Stravinsky, after all. Plus, well, the concert was listed in the New Yorker, so how could we not go?

New Feature: Optional Reading

As some of you may have noticed, blogging at 2x3x7 has been kind of slow lately (I'm down to just about 3 posts a week, imagine that!) and I might as well say right now that it's likely to continue that way for a while to come; if anything, it's likely to get worse.

To make this up to you, I thought I'd add a few links to the sidebar, just a random list of online lit journals that I read if not regularly than at least occasionally, and that you might enjoy as well. That way, every time you come to this blog and find I haven't put up a new post you can do something useful with your time instead of muttering under your breath about people who don't update their blogs. I realize, of course, that 20 journals featuring considerable bodies of work by some of the more interesting poets and writers working today is poor compensation for a daily dose of my inimitable genius, but hopefully it'll tide you over for a bit.

And just to get you started (if on a somewhat morbid note), I recommend, if you haven't read it yet, Fady Joudah's tribute to Darwish over at KR Online and a tribute to Lynda Hull over at Blackbird. Happy reading.

Down Under and Over the Top

Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole

I blame Rushdie. It's been nearly thirty years since Midnight's Children was first published, but the specter of the capacious, gravity-defying, say-it-all novel is still with us, and continues to lure unsuspecting young novelists to their doom. Its latest victim, it seems to me, is Steve Toltz, whose debut novel A Fraction of the Whole, tells the story of the All-Australian Dean family - brothers Martin and Terry (the former a champion misanthrope, the latter a legendary outlaw) and Martin's son Jasper - in "fist-eating, gut-wrenching, seat-edging, nail-biting, lip-pulling, chain-smoking, teeth-clenching detail". A Fraction of the Whole is in many ways a splendid and exhilarating work, but one so overwrought with cleverness, so fraught with baroque contrivances, that it fails to establish an emotional connection with the reader. James Wood would call this hysterical realism; and he would be right.

This is not, by itself, a criticism. Unlike Wood, I don't believe that every novel has to conform to some form of 'lifeness'. I'm quite willing to trade cleverness for authenticity, inventiveness for depth. Done properly, there are few things more mesmerising than truly larger-than-life fiction.

And mesmerising, for the first 200 pages or so, is exactly what Steve Toltz is. That long first section of A Fraction of the Whole is a comic tour de force: vigorous, imaginative, witty, pugnacious and bristling with kind of manic energy that keeps you glued to the page with a big grin plastered all over your face. Judged by the first 200 pages alone, A Fraction of the Whole may be one of the finest books published this year, and certainly one of the funniest.

Which is why it's a pity that Toltz doesn't stop there, but keeps going for another 330 pages, in the course of which the momentum of that glorious opening is allowed to dissipate. Oh, Toltz tries all right, and the book is still funny - there are some electrifying one-liners, some hilarious diatribes and every now and then a genuinely comic situation. But nothing that quite matches the full-throttle brilliance of those early pages. Having started off at an almost Pynchon-ian pitch, Toltz slips into a mode that is half Martin Amis and half Peter Carey - without either the former's sharpness or the latter's gift for character development.

Much of the problem, I suspect, is that having told us all there really is to know about Martin Dean (who is the book's undeniable epicenter) in the first section, Toltz is left with very little to add; so that the rest of the novel becomes a set of repetitive variations on a familiar and, by the end, hackneyed theme. So successfully has Toltz brought Martin Dean to life, so swiftly has he added nuance and depth to this unforgettable character, that we come to know him a little too well, and when no further revelations are forthcoming, Dean Sr., whose only real charm is his ability to shock, quickly turns into something of a boor. And because no other character in the book is half as fascinating as Martin Dean is, he takes the rest of the book down with him.

In part, this is deliberate: the central point of Toltz's novel is that for all his smarter-than-thou intellectualizing Martin will end up a bitter, frightened and deeply frustrated man. But because Martin Dean is too outrageous a figure to merit any emotional investment on our part, his eventual fall from grace inspires not sympathy but disappointment. And the fact that Toltz keeps the story going long after it has lost all dramatic interest - the last section in particular is a terrible miscalculation - only makes this worse. By the time the book finally ends that brilliant starting seems a distant memory, as though from a different book.

All of that said, A Fraction of the Whole is a rambunctious, scathingly funny book that, despite its considerable length, is well worth the read. Even at his most uninspired Toltz is never really dull, and the sheer ambition of what he sets out to do here is admirable, even if his achievement falls a little short of his aspiration. If this book is anything to go by we're going to be hearing more about Toltz in the years to come, and I, for one, look forward to that.

[Part of the 2008 Booker Mela]

No man is an almost

The new issue of Almost Island is out, and features, among other things, this lovely piece by Forrest Gander, some delightful new poems by W.N. Herbert and translations of Joy Goswami's work along with the originals. Go read.

Window Dressing

Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs

Many years ago, as an impressionable young boy just discovering Oscar Wilde, I went through a phase of trying to come up with bon mots - witty yet wise one-liners that I fondly imagined future generations would quote at each other. The fruits of this Rochefoucaldian labor, needless to say, were uniformally ghastly, and included, among other horrors, the following observation: "All clothes are revealing; they reveal who we are". Even to my relatively uncritical twelve year old mind this was a cliche, so much so that I mercifully decided not to share it with another living soul (well, until now).

Linda Grant, it seems, has no such compunctions. Not only does she seem to feel that the idea that the clothes we wear express and shape our identity is a startling new insight (imagine that! the clothes you wear are reflective of who you are! who would have thought it?), but so enamored is she by the thought that she makes it the central motif of her new novel, repeatedly hammering home the point with an avidity that would cut through the thickest of crania. The result is a banal, pointless book that takes a set of stock characters, clothes them in the flimsiest of plots and then pretends that the result is haute couture, when it's really little more than drab pret-a-porter.

Set in London in the 70's (amid the growing popularity of the right-wing National Front) with sidetrips to Nazi Europe, The Clothes on Their Backs is the story, told in flashback (isn't everything these days?) of Vivien Kovaks, a young girl born to immigrant parents, who finds herself caught between the cloistered life of her parents, who fled to England from Hungary just before World War II and have lived fearfully in their adopted country ever since, and the larger-than-life presence of her Uncle Sandor, a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to England in the mid-50s only to become a slumlord and a pimp, and whose flamboyance Vivien finds herself drawn to both because it represents a way of being acutely alive and because it gives her the chance to connect to her family history, a history her parents have kept assiduously hidden from her.

By itself, this is a not unpromising if somewhat hackneyed plot (I found myself thinking, for instance, in my long stretches of being bored by the book, what a fine job someone like Roth would have done with a character like Sandor Kovacs). The trouble is, that's pretty much all there is to the book. That little one paragraph outline is more or less the sum of what the book has to offer. Oh, there are a few additional details of course, a handful of perfunctory characters, a few dabs at plot development, if an accumulation of wildly improbable and arbitrary coincidences can be given that name, but on the whole Grant doesn't so much deepen the story as extend it. True to her central idea of surface appearance being all, Grant's characters never take on the authentic feel of flesh and blood and remain mere mannequins, artfully arranged in deliberate poses to represent the different attitudes and idealogies she wants them to. Indeed, there are points in the story when Grant almost seems to rely on the generic nature of her plot. Rather than describe Sandor's experiences during the War in any real detail, for instance, she gives us only a sketchy outline and falls back on the easy shorthand of tagging him a Holocaust survivor. The result is an underdeveloped book that has virtually no emotional impact and that feels, if not quite formulaic than at least mathematical - a sort of writing by numbers, all the pieces fitting together in a neat but uninspired way.

To be fair, every now and then Grant does exert herself a little, adding a handful of colorful scenes and side stories (a dance lesson, a side-character's half gypsy parentage) to make the novel a little more interesting. These interjections seem unmotivated and unnecessary, though, and while they do little to relieve the tedium of the main story, they make the plot seem even more bizarre by adding a number of peculiar side-stories to a narrative already too weighed down by improbable coincidence. There are moments when The Clothes on Their Backs is genuinely engaging - most notably, to my mind, when Grant describes the sub-culture of 'vintage' clothing and the rituals involved in searching for it - but these are mere flickers in an otherwise stale and unoriginal book.

Overall, The Clothes on Their Backs is not so much a bad book as a trivial one - a novel with so little to offer the reader that it doesn't justify even the three to four hours it takes to read.

[Part of the 2008 Booker Prize Mela]

Sunday afternoon, 4 pm

At the statue opposite the library the line of people waiting for a photograph is four families deep. Cameras are exchanged with a minimum of solicitude, 'just press this button' being the order of the day. Reluctant teenagers are prodded into posing on the steps of the statue by their proud parents; they stand there self-conscious, afraid of being seen. Sometimes their parents join them, which makes them relax a little, perhaps because they feel camouflaged in the midst of their family, perhaps because the presence of their parents in the photograph means that posterity will know this was not their idea.

After the families leave, a squirrel climbs up to the top of the base, crouches at the statue's feet and nibbles away at a morsel, supremely unaware of being watched. Above it, Ben Franklin clutches the arms of his chair, trying to decide whether to scowl or look aloof.

Long lozenges of light melt on the summer lawn. A church bell intones the hour, a baritone rehearsing his notes. In the silence that follows, the rustling of leaves in the wind sounds like distant applause, as though the trees were praising the sky for its blue.

By the flight of steps that lead out of the park, a trio of long-haired teenagers is clattering back and forth on skateboards, practicing the geometry of defiance. They are ignored by the great halls of the University, which have learned to hold their peace.

Shelf Life

So it's been exactly one year since I started putting the books I read up on Shelfari, and it seems that in that time I've read 166 books. Which works out to almost a book every two days. And that's not counting books I've started to read but given up on, lit journals, old favorites I've reread, the books I've forgotten to add to Shelfari, and the books I'm currently reading (there are six of them - including The Lost Dog and The Clothes on their Backs from the Booker longlist, Stanley Plumly's Posthumous Keats, Roberto Bolano's incredible Nazi Literature in the Americas, Marjorie Welish's delightful Isle of the Signatories and Raymond Queneau's Between Blue and Blue). And obviously it's not counting books I've read for my research.

And here I was thinking I don't read enough any more.

Of course, keep in mind that the vast majority of these books are slim 60-70 page volumes of poetry, so 166 books isn't as much as it sounds. Still, I have to admit I'm surprised the number is that high.

On the flip side, I was trying to go over the list of books I'd read and realized that there are about a third that I already have no memory of reading. Sigh.

Two minutes with Joyce and Dostoevsky

Via the New Yorker's Book Bench, I came across this article on a San Fran writer's conference by someone called BS Prakash (the initials are prophetic) who claims to be India's ambassador to Brazil - an article so cringe-inducing it makes you wonder what the good folks at the Book Bench were doing surfing Rediff, of all godforsaken corners of the Internet.

I'm not going to dwell on Mr. Prakash's excessive use of cultural stereotypes (xenophobia is the term the Book Bench uses, which is harsh, but not inaccurate), the quaintness of his 'discoveries' (they actually try to teach writing! imagine that!) or just the overall fuddy-duddiness of his point of view. Nor am I going to comment on the irony of bemoaning the 'American' obsession with publication when the last decade has seen a virtually unchecked proliferation of writers on the Indian publishing scene, the vast majority of whom could frankly do with some lessons in basic writing. And as for Mr. Prakash's chances of ever producing great literature - let's not even go there.

No, what I'm going to focus on, for the moment is the following claim:

You are told that your first chapter, first page, first sentence should be such so as to captivate the reader in two minutes. That is the test. It is another matter that Dostoevsky or James Joyce would have flunked this test and would never have got published

Would Joyce and / or Dostoevsky really have failed this test? I don't know about you, but I would certainly want to keep reading a book if it opened like this:

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face."

or like this:

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

or this, for that matter:

"I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man."

and if you think about it, it's hard to imagine a book more amenable to a two-minute pitch than Ulysses:

Q: So, young man, what's your book about?

A: Well, it's an epic of the everyday: a re-imagining of the Odyssey in which I use the central themes and motifs from Homer's work to tell the story of an ordinary Dublin day from a cross-section of perspectives, using internal monologues and stream-of-consciousness techniques to explore the thoughts, perceptions and memories of ordinary people. The overall structure of the book emulates that of the Odyssey, but every chapter is an exercise in a distinctive style or form - so for instance, one chapter parodies romance novels, another uses a question-and-answer form, a third is written as a play.

See what I mean?

Or, for that matter, how's this for an engaging one-line summary:

My novel tells the story of a young man who murders an elderly moneylender and is then terrified that he won't be punished for his crime, because this would imply that there really is no God.

Afterwards

"You stupid bastard!"

"I know."

"You stupid, stupid bastard!"

"I know."

"Just how drunk were you?"

"I don't know. Enough."

"Obviously."

"Look, it was a mistake okay? I didn't mean for it to happen."

"Yes, well that's besides the point now, isn't it?"

"I guess."

"So what are you going to do?"

"I don't know. I was thinking maybe I'd go away for a bit."

"Running away won't solve anything."

"It might."

"It won't."

"Yes, well, at least it's something to do."

"I guess."




"So where are you going to go then?"

"I don't know. Somewhere."

"Got any money?"

"Enough."

"You're sure?"

"Ya, I'm okay."

"Well, goodbye then."

"Look, I just wanted to say..."

"Forget it."

"I just wanted you to know..."

"Forget it. Just go."

"...that I'm sorry"

"Just go."

"Right. Goodbye then."

"Goodbye."

"I'll be seeing you."

"No, you won't."

"Oh, right. Well, bye then."

"Bye."

Godawful Poetry # 1

Zigzackly informs me that today marks the beginning of the godawful poetry fortnight, so I thought I'd do my bit:

Night Song

Now the moon, like a smallpox victim,
hides his pitted face,
afraid that the sun may evict him
from his nightly dwelling place.

While the sad and unplucked roses
dream in slow perfumes
and rehearse the unconscious poses
of Death in living rooms.

And a little mouse squeaks like a gate
someone has forgotten to oil;
squeaks of Love and Loss and Fate
and Blood and Sweat and Toil.

P.S. Zigzackly also points to a Flash Fiction contest, one that is, alas, only open to those residing in India.

Godawful Poetry Fortnight

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

So much for stereotypes

Over at India Uncut, Amit points to a program that uses your browser cache to assess whether you're male or female.

My score: Probability of being female: 84%. Probability of being male: 16%.

Sigh.

The Last Straw

The pain is excruciating. The muscles in his back ache with exhaustion, his flanks are sore with blisters, and his legs tremble as though about to give way. Bent under the weight of the sacks he cannot lift his hooves, but shuffles forward as though his feet were chained together.

Lord! will this suffering never end?

Yesterday, what a chance! An apprentice was loading him, the new one, and he almost overdid it, almost broke his back. He quivered in anticipation, feeling load pile on load, knowing death was a few handfuls away, craving its release. One more straw would have done it!

Then the foreman came and stopped the boy, cuffed him on the ear, told him to be more careful.

And to think he was so close.

The Master of Go

Over at the Guardian, Mark Lawson has a fun, if somewhat rambling article about sport in books. He even manages to include Roth's Great American Novel, which I was hoping he'd miss so I could do my book snob thing and gloat about the omission.

The book he does miss, and which remains one of the most compelling descriptions of sport I've ever read is Kawabata's Master of Go. It's incredible how vividly Kawabata brings the game of Go to life, even to someone who knows nothing about the sport, how he makes you see the different styles of the two players, makes you feel the palpable tension in the room. It is a testament to the exquisite skill of this subtlest of masters that in his hands the game remains a gripping spectacle even as it transcends its board to become a meditation on the face-off between generations and world-views, between grace and energy, tradition and innovation.

Fiction at Work

James Wood's How Fiction Works

The principal side-effect of reading James Wood's How Fiction Works is an almost overwhelming yearning to re-read the canon - a yearning that can only be fully allayed by taking, say, two weeks off and spending them drowned in a heady cocktail of Flaubert, James, Bellow and Tolstoy. This is great news if, for instance, you have two weeks of summer vacation coming up and have been wondering what to do with it, but for the rest of us, reading Wood's book is liable to lead to a profound sense of dissatisfaction, the direct consequence of having it demonstrated that we haven't really read the books we think we've read [1]. As Wood puts it:

"Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practise on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on. You have only to teach literature to realise that most young readers are poor noticers. I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated twenty years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details and images and metaphors that strike me now as commonplace, while serenely missing things which now seem wonderful. We grow, as readers, and twenty-year olds are relative virgins. They have not yet read enough literature to be taught how to read it."

Touching faith in the power of fiction aside, this is a deeply depressing thought. If even Wood was missing stuff when he was twenty, what about the rest of us? For the point about Wood, the thing that makes him, in my view, one of the finest book critics writing today (aside from the lucid quality of his writing itself) is his eye for detail. In many ways, Wood is a preternaturally careful reader, and it is this that gives him, I think, that most prized of abilities for a book critic - the ability to take a book you've already read and make you see it anew.

These qualities of Wood's criticism are on ample display in How Fiction Works, which is less the coherent statement of a world-view and more a loose association of ideas about fiction, a circling of intellectual wagons around a center that remains somewhat vague. The key insight of the book comes, I think, in the last chapter (though in a way the entire book has been building up to it) and has to do with the nature of realism. Realism, according to Wood, is not a stubborn insistence on depicting the commonplace, but the pursuit of what he calls 'lifeness', an attempt to portray what is 'true', to create characters and situations that strike the reader as somehow genuine, even if they lie outside his / her own life experience. Few people, for instance, have killed an aging moneylender in an attempt to test whether God exists. But that does not make Crime and Punishment a work of speculative fiction or fantasy. Dostoevsky's novels are savagely, hauntingly real because he is able to imagine himself so firmly into the minds of his characters, and make us share so vividly in what he imagines, that his depictions of the Raskolnikovs of the world are instantly recognizable, and entirely authentic [2]. And that, to Wood, is the essence - not only of 'Realism' (a term he dislikes) but of fiction more generally. What realism requires then - and to Wood all good fiction is realistic - is not the recycling of mudane detail into a simulacrum of existence that approximates our own, but an adventure of the imagination that retains our sympathy and our sense of the genuine, even as it widens our idea of what life can be.

Nor is it simply plot or character to which Wood applies this principle, if it may be called such (though his chapter on the development of character, in particular the misleading - according to him - distinction between 'round' and 'flat' characters is fascinating). It applies equally to what Wood calls style. Wood's general idea - or at least my (admittedly unreliable) interpretation of it - is that simplicity is the product of careful artifice, that the skilled writer uses language with carefully studied precision, combining inventiveness, a wide range of registers, and an eye for the telling word or phrase to create prose that is almost transparent, that lives unobtrusively on the page but is successful in operating at multiple levels at once, so that the reader experiences the work both from the narrator or character's perspective as well as from the writer's [3].

This is an exalted view, and an exacting standard. If there is a criticism I have of How Fiction Works it is that its notion of fiction seems, if not quite old-fashioned, then at least middle-aged. Wood is scrupulously fair, but his allegiance seems to lie squarely with the nineteenth century novel. His gods are Tolstoy, James, Bellow, Flaubert and Chekhov; a good three quarters of the books he cites date from more than fifty years ago; and the more recent writers he does praise - McCarthy, Saramago (and, surprisingly, Roth) - he seems to like for the way they carry on the old traditions, rather than for any inventiveness on their part. This is not, by itself, a criticism; this is not a pantheon I would care to take issue with, and it is certainly true, as Wood every now and then bemoans, that a lot of rubbish is written in the name of the avant garde. Still, I can't help feeling that the views of fiction that Wood exposes to ridicule are those of convenient strawmen, and that a book that claims to discuss how fiction works should have more to say about the way in which fiction has evolved in the twentieth century. Wood is quick to give the credit for the development of the modern novel to the French writers of the nineteenth century - Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust - but he's mostly silent on everything that's been done in French fiction (or in European fiction more generally) since.

Wood's defense, I suspect, would be that he's not so much trying to detail all the directions in which fiction can (and perhaps should) go, as trying to establish the central current of what fiction consists of, to which all other innovations are mere distributaries. As he puts it:

"Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life bought to different life by the highest artistry. And it cannot be a genre; instead, is makes other forms of fiction seem like genres. For realism of this kind - lifeness - is the origin. It teaches everything else; it schools its own truants: it is what allows magic realism, hysterical realism, fantasy, science fiction, even thrillers, to exist."

What Wood is trying to do, then, aside from setting down his thoughts about fiction on paper, is establish the basic principles (as he sees them) upon which all fiction may be built, and against which it must be judged. This is what excuses his slightly stodgy approach to fiction, as well as his limiting himself, in his discussion, so firmly to the canon. More than anything else, though, what saves this book from becoming insufferably pedantic is the acuteness of Wood's skills as a reviewer, his ability to make you see established classics in a new light. By itself, Wood's claim that "almost all the great twentieth-century realist novels also reflect on their own making, and are full of artifice" seems a little inflated. What rescues the claim is that it comes accompanied by mini-essays like this one:

"James is really suggesting that he has not formed his character, that she is still relatively shapeless, an American emptiness, and that the novel will form her, for good and ill, that Europe will fill in her shape, and that just as these three waiting, watching men will also form her, so will we, as readers. They and we are a kind of Greek chorus, hanging on her every move. Two of the men, Lord Warburton and Ralph Touchett, will devote their lives to watching her. And what, James asks, will be the plot that poor Isabel will have written for her? How much will she herself write it, and how much will be written for her by others? And in the end, will we really know what Isabel was like, or will we have merely painted a portrait of a lady?

So the vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence and even plain plausibility - let alone likeability - than with a larger, philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character's actions are profoundly important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters. That is how readers retain in their minds a sense of the character 'Isabel Archer', even if they cannot tell you what she is exactly like. We remember her in the way we remember an obscurely significant day: something important has been enacted here." (italics in the original)

It's been eight years since I read The Portrait of a Lady, but even from that distance (or perhaps because of it) this seems both accurate and insightful. Certainly it is impossible to argue with, and once you grant that James is an intensely 'modern' novelist, who can you possibly exclude?

More than anything though, the last sentence of that extract contains the best description of the book it is taken from. Wood's real strength is not as a theorist but as a critic, and he is most sure-footed, and most engaging, when he leaves the big questions aside and focuses on detail. His new book may leave you with some additional, if somewhat obscure, insights into the enterprise of fiction, but mostly it will delight you with the sincerity of its admiration, with its marriage of an active and appreciative intelligence to a deep and instinctive love for great prose. Consider, for instance, one final extract. If this doesn't sharpen your appetite for fiction to the point where you want to drop whatever you're reading and go find your favorite Woolf, I don't know what will.

"'The day waves yellow with all its crops.' That is Woolf, from The Waves. I am consumed by this sentence, partly because I cannot quite explain why it moves me so much. I can see, hear, its beauty, its strangeness. Its music is very simple. Its words are simple. And its meaning is simple, too. Woolf is describing the sun rising and finally filling the day with its yellow fire. The sentence means something like: this is what the field of corn on a summer's day will look like when everything is blazing with sunlight - a yellow semaphore, a sea of moving colour. We know exactly and instantly what Woolf means, and we think: that could not be put any better. The secret lies in the decision to avoid the usual image of crops waving, and instead, to write the day waves: the effect is suddenly that the day itself, the very fabric and temporality of the day, seems saturated in yellow. And then that peculiar, apparently nonsensical waves yellow (how can anything wave yellow?) conveys a sense that yellowness has so intensely taken over the day itself that it has taken over our verbs, too - yellowness has conquered our agency. How do we wave? We wave yellow. That is all we can do. The sunlight is so absolute that it stuns us, makes us sluggish, robs us of will. Eight simple words evoke colour, high summer, warm lethargy, ripeness."

Notes

[1] I had to make do with a re-reading of Joyce's 'The Dead'.

[2] The example is mine, by the way. Wood uses Hamsun's Hunger to make more or less the same point, though.

[3] Did I mention that Wood gives the credit for the creation of the modern narrative to Flaubert? He writes: "Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him."[4]

[4] See my point about the middle-aged thing? In what century do they live, these poets who thank Spring?

The Last Mistress

Okay, give it to me straight. Am I really the last person on earth to discover Asia Argento? To be fair, I'd vaguely heard of Ms. Argento before, but never actually watched anything she'd acted in, largely because her repertoire seemed to consist of vowel-less action flicks and macabre horror films (not my favorite genre) directed by Ms. Argento's father (nepotism alert!). Then, this evening, I watched her play Vellini in Catherine Breillat's Une Vieille Maitresse [1] and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't blown away.

And it isn't the nudity (though there's a lot of it) and it isn't the sex scenes (which are done with Breillat's customary vividness and make Ang Lee's little jaunts in Lust, Caution look like a game of Twister for fourteen year olds), it's the smouldering presence of the woman, the brutal, almost contemptuous sexual confidence that reminded me of no one so much as Jeanne Moreau [2]. This is not some tarted-up siren diverting Ulysses from his Penelope, this is Circe herself, a woman capable of turning men into pigs with a snap of her fingers. At one point in the film Vellini's hapless lover, M. Marigny remarks to the grandmother of his fiancee how she's probably surprised that anyone would be willing to ruin herself for 'such a creature'. The genius of Breillat's film - and an achievement that I have no doubt owes as much to her talent as to Ms. Argento's - is that having seen Ms. Argento's Vellini the idea that someone would want to destroy his life for her doesn't seem surprising at all. On the contrary, you have to wonder what all the other men in Paris are doing that might be equally worthwhile. When Ms. Argento takes a knife and playfully slashes her lover's cheek with it, what you feel is not horror, but envy. Oh to be a cheek under that knife, you think, or words to that effect.

In any case, Une Vieille Maitresse is a mesmerising, subversive and visually ravishing film that is all the more brilliant for having Ms. Argento as its magnetic center. Now if only someone would convince Julie Taymor to do a film version of Carmen with Ms. Argento as the lead. That I would kill to see.

[1] It seems to me that 'maitresse' is one of those few words where the English translation actually sounds sexier than the French word. 'Mistress' sounds suitably sibilant and sinful, Maitresse sounds like a cross between someone who shows you to your table and something you put on your bed (and no, I don't mean it that way, smartass!).

[2] Which, just in case you had doubts, is high praise indeed.

Scooped / War and Headpiece

One of most exhilarating and depressing things that can happen to you as a writer is to discover that an idea you came up with totally out of the blue has already been done (and needless to say done better) by some greater writer ages ago.

Take this sentence from James Wood's new book How Fiction Works (on which more later):

"Tolstoy, again, in an electrifying moment at the end of his novella Hadji Murad, imagines what it might be like to have one's head cut off, and for consciousness to persist for a second or two in the brain even as the head has left the body."

Which reminds me, of course, of this. Needless to say I haven't read Hadji Murad (has anyone? Except Wood?) and had no idea till I read this that it had a similar conceit.

Now one part of me [1] is thinking: "WooHoo! Tolstoy! Him and me, we're like two peas in a pod, see? Okay, so he has a wee bit more published work than I do, but what's a deathless 1000 page classic or two between friends?"

And the other part of me is thinking: "Some writer you are. Tolstoy only beat you to it, by, like a HUNDRED YEARS! Tchah!"

Next thing you know I'll find out that my idea for a novel about a girl who meets this really arrogant guy but then figures out that he's actually quite nice has been done before as well.


[1] These are both parts of Night Falstaff, naturally. Day Falstaff is busy explaining to anyone who will listen how it isn't really that surprising if you think about it; how it's all just random chance and doesn't prove anything. Day Falstaff is perilously close to having a Hadji Murad experience himself.

Longlist

Yup, it's that time of the year again. The Booker Prize Longlist is out, and as usual I've only read two of the thirteen books on it. Well, two and a half.

Of those I have read, my pick would be Netherland (see post about it here) which I really liked and would not be disappointed to see win. I also quite enjoyed The Enchantress of Florence, which felt like Magic Realism without the Realism, or in other words, an out and out fable gloriously told by one of the most silvertongued writers of our age, though not, on the whole, a meaty enough novel for me to want to read again.

The only other novel on the list I've read (or more accurately tried to read) is Aravind Adiga's White Tiger, which was so awfully synthetic that I gave up on it some 100 pages in.

Of course, the real joy of the Booker Longlist is reading the books you've never heard of before (and probably wouldn't have heard of at all, but for the list), which are invariably the best of the lot. That said, I think I'm unlikely to come close to reading the whole of the list this year (too much else to read / get done) though I'm hoping to get my hand on the Barry soon, and maybe a couple of the others.

Sigh. So many books, so little time.

Spoons

"Have you ever considered the immortality of spoons?"

"Oh, Christ! Not that again!"

"Here we sit, you and I, polishing our souls to silver, rubbing language into our wounds. And all the while it is this spoon, this humble spoon, modest, depressed, the perfect servant, that will outlast us all, will outlive every mouth that has fed from it, will taste the lips of our grandchildren as it once savored the tongues of our grandmothers."

"Yes, yes, all right, now drink up and let's get out of here."

"I think I would like to form a religion of spoons. A religion where the spoon was both cross and prayer. Where the spoon was a psalm endlessly lipped, hymn to a convex God."

"You'd better put that thing down before you take your eye out with it."

"Oh, the knife has an edge to it, I grant you, and the fork is more intellectual, but it's the spoon, this balding pot-bellied spoon that carries the weight of the world. Can you imagine what we would be without it? Mere animals, all of us, snouts in the trough"

"Don't you even think about reaching for that bottle! You've had enough!"

"I empty my glass and find the moon at the bottom. Who said that? Have you noticed how the spoons have a special bond with the moon? Lay one out on a table on a moonlit night and you can see it calling, see it yearn. Like some stranded alien calling to its mother ship. At such times the future is very near, very delicate. All you have to do is take the silver spoon from your mouth and cross your palm."

"Yes, yes, all right. Time to go home now. See, the moon is out there, waiting for you, calling you. See it? So come on then. That's right. No, put the spoon back. Don't put it in your pocket, put it back on the table! No, you can't take it with you. Because you can't. Go on, put it down. That's a good boy! Come along now. Sorry about this, Jose. You know what he's like when he's drunk. You'd think at his age he'd show a little more dignity. No, it's all right, I can manage, but thanks anyway. Good night!"

"SO WE'LL GO NO MORE A ROVING, SO LATE INTO THE NIGHT. THOUGH THE HEART BE STILL AS LOVING AND THE SPOONS BE STILL AS BRIGHT."

"Ssshhh! Quiet! People are trying to sleep!"

"THOUGH THE NIGHT WAS MADE FOR LOVING AND THE DAY RETURNS TOO SOON, STILL WE'LL GO NO MORE A ROVING BY THE LIGHT OF THESE SPOONS."

"Quiet I said!"

Martin Adan

Love is anywhere, but nowhere is it any different.

***

The world is not exactly crazy, just overly decent. There is no way to make it talk when it is drunk. And when it isn't, it abhors drunkenness or loves its fellows.

But I honestly don't know what the world is or what mankind is.

I only know that I must be fair and honorable and love my fellow man.

And I love the thousands of men within me that are born and die each instant and do not live at all.

Behold my fellow men.

Justice is a few ugly statues in city squares.

***

I am not wholly convinced of my own humanity; I do not wish to be like the others. I do not want to be happy with permission of the police.

Now there is a little sun in the streets.

I don't know who has taken it away, what evil man, leaving stains on the ground like of a slaughtered animal.

***

I want to be happy in a small way. With sweetness, with hope, with dissatisfactions, with limitations, with time, with perfection.

Now I can board a transatlantic liner. And during the crossing fish adventures as if they were fish.

But where would I go?

The world is insufficient for me.

It is too large, and I cannot shred it into little satisfactions as I would like.

Death is only a thought, nothing else, nothing else.

And I want it to be a long delight with its own end, its own quality.

***

The panaroma changes at every corner like a movie.

The final kiss already echoes through the shadows of a room full of burning cigarettes. But this is not the final scene. This is why the kiss echoes.

Nothing is enough for me, not even death; I want proportion, perfection, satisfaction, delight.

- Martin Adan, from The Cardboard House (translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver)

What endures

Outside the storm gathers. The lightning cracks its whip, as though punishing the thunder, which growls in disdain. Great slaps of rain buffet the window. The world dissolves in a pattern of blurred light, skids down the glass.

Inside Richter is playing Schubert. Sonata in G Major, first movement. The patient dignity of these notes that recognize the moment's sanctity, its delicate precision. And the majesty of spirit that goes to the making of a great pianist, an amplitude of heart that allows the music to assume its rightful shape, then entrusts it, ever so gently, to sound.

And the longing of one who, being mortal and therefore unworthy, finds himself caught between these two weather systems, these two species of awe, the one furious, the other tranquil. Two infinities of turmoil that the mind can barely comprehend, much less contain.

P.S. You may also want to see this. A lot of footage of Glenn Gould talking about Richter, some of it insightful, some rather ironic, but all made up for by snippets of Richter playing the G Major Sonata.

The Dark Pawn

Let's get one thing straight. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is not the new Batman film. The character who calls himself Batman in the film bears a passing resemblance to that superhero, it's true - he has the flying cape, the mask with the pointy ears and a certain facility in hand to hand combat. But there the resemblance ends. This Batman is nothing like the noir crimefighter we know and love. This Batman is all sentiment: he's lovestruck, he has qualms; he's so bad at concealing his secret identity that a quick audit of the Wayne Corporation's accounts will tell you who he is; he likes cooperating with the police and putting criminals in jail but dislikes killing, in fact, he gets so upset when he realizes that people are being killed because of him that he has an existential crisis and decides to give himself up. He doesn't quite say "with great power comes great responsibility" but you can see him thinking it, and it makes you realize that with a different costume this guy could be Spiderman or Captain America or any of a half dozen other superheroes. In short, he's a nauseatingly all-American goody two-shoes, and the most vanilla incarnation of the caped crusader since Adam West's 1966 appraisal of the role. Hell, even George Clooney was edgier than this guy (though only just).

No, what The Dark Knight really is is the new Joker film. Because Heath Ledger's Joker isn't just far and away the darkest villain ever to appear in a Batman film, he is the scariest, most bruisingly magnificent vision of pure evil to appear on screen since Hannibal Lecter. Sadistic, psychopathic and machiavellan, Ledger's Joker is chaos brought to life, a whirlwind of destruction that whirls through the film leaving human debris in its wake. To call him a megalomaniac would be to miss the point, so powerfully does he tower over his opponents that what you're seeing is not delusions of grandeur, but grandeur itself. Callous violence one expects from a comic-book super-villain and a certain amount of maniacal bloodthirstiness is par for the course, but it's the insidiousness of the Joker's villainy, the casual cruelty that hides behind the grotesque slurping exterior, the sense of murder as a vocation, the ease with which the Joker finds the weakness of his opponent, or uses his strength against him, that is both hypnotic and chilling. Ledger's Joker is a modern-day Iago - a villain of such elemental proportions that he transcends the trivial details of plot and action. It's an indelible performance.

Perhaps a little too indelible. The trouble with Ledger's Joker is that he makes everyone else in the film look tame by comparison, so that the movie seems deeply unbalanced, with the viewer wishing the good guys would go away so he / she could see more of the Joker. It is a good thing that the plot, for the most part, goes along with this, ceding almost all control to the Joker and reducing the good guys to little more than trained circus animals dutifully jumping through the hoops the villain lays for them, otherwise the contrast between Ledger's dominance and the Joker's subservience would tear the film apart. As it is, the Joker seems to preside over the action like some anarchic deity, some leering Beelzebub or red-nosed Baal. Even the end seems not so much a defeat as a conclusion - the Joker gets his comeuppance, of course, and Batman 'wins', but it is a pyrrhic victory, and one is left with the distinct impression that the Joker, having inflicted irreparable damage on Batman, has got exactly what he wants.

But all that is not enough. The central conceit of the film (aside from extremely overdone references to the 'two sides of a coin' analogy [1]) is that the confrontation between Batman and the Joker is a face-off between two people who play by very different sets of rules (the Dark Knight and the Joker, chess and poker, see?) with the obligatory connections to 9/11, the war on terror, etc. etc. In truth, however, what we see is a confrontation between two different genres - a scarily real villain matched against a cast of make-believe heroes. The genius of Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the Joker, two decades ago, was precisely that he was a comic-book villian; a bizarre, larger-than-life arch-fiend, who seemed to have stepped straight out of an animation. He was psychotic and scary, but in a way that conformed to the boundaries of the genre, so that the battle between him and Batman was a comic-book battle fought by comic-book rules. And every Batman villain since has more or less conformed to that standard. What Ledger does, however, is step out of that frame, and give us a villain who is not so much larger than life as viciously life-like, a villain who belongs in a hard-nosed crime thriller, not in the make-believe world of Gotham, a villain, in short, who makes the rest of the film's enterprise seem ridiculous by comparison. Watching him toy with Batman is like watching a man-eating tiger take on Mickey Mouse.

To be fair, Nolan tries desperately to find a way to match the gravity of this Joker. The body count gets ratcheted up, both qualitatively and quantitatively, there's a great deal of heartbreak, a lot of 'serious issues' get discussed. There's even a 'people are fundamentally good at heart' scene, which I suspect is meant to be a poignant affirmation of some sort, but comes across as just being corny. None of this does any good. So wholly does the spirit of the Joker rule this film that all Nolan's attempts to counter it just end up weighing the film down further - robbing it off momentum without adding anything of consequence. Nolan even goes to the trouble of giving us a second villain, but compared to the Joker what's-his-face seems so trivial that his scenes prove unintentionally hilarious, as though someone had wandered off the sets of the Mummy [2] to provide light comic relief.

All in all, The Dark Knight is a film worth watching only for Heath Ledger's performance. But that performance alone more than justifies the price of the ticket.

Notes

[1] People who've seen Sholay - which is probably all of you - may recognize a familiar plot device.

[2] Did you know they're making a third Mummy film? I saw a trailer for it today. So apparently Shrek Goes Fourth will not be the most unnecessary sequel ever made. Pity.

Earth's Imagined Corners

Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World

"Here at the actual pole of my existence,
Where all that I have done is meaningless,
Where I die or live by accident alone -

Where, living or dying, I am still alone;
Here where North, the night, the berg of death
Crowd me out of the ignorant darkness,
I see at last that all the knowledge

I wrung from the darkness - that the darkness flung me -
Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,
The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain."

- Randall Jarrell, 90 North

If the line between eccentricity and genius is a thin one, no one walks it more consistently than Werner Herzog. Herzog's latest film, Encounters at the End of the World is half a travel video made by a cantankerous grand uncle, and half a sublime exploration of the human will to adventure whose sheer visual splendor reminds you why cinema is, after all, an art form.

Nominally, Herzog's setting here is Antarctica; in truth, though it is Herzog-land, a stark continent of consciousness through which people wander like stray thoughts come to life. Herzog understands, better than anyone, the true meaning of the word craft, and his work has a raw handtooled quality that stands in gruff contrast to the blank machine-like perfection of so much of what gets projected on our cinema screens. This roughness can be disconcerting, but it is precisely this edginess (in every sense of the term) that gives his films both their power and their poetry. Because Herzog is more concerned with letting the medium breathe than with taming it, his camera captures scenes of bizarre and haunted beauty; images whose very link to the world we live in seems tentative at best. Yet for all that there is something almost preternaturally clear-eyed about Herzog's vision, a directness of gaze so unflinching that even the icy barrenness of Antarctica cannot faze it.

In Encounters at the End of the World, moreover, Herzog has finally found the cast of his dreams. Here is a group of people who are, on the one hand, successful and respectable individuals - scholars, scientists, experts - people with PhDs in charge of important cutting-edge scientific research. Yet they are also, on the other hand, the ultimate outsiders: denizens of a freakish and alienated land that is equal parts utopia and dystopia, dreamers of a half-mythic otherworld that exists on the border of mysticism and intellectual curiosity. It is a world where philosophers operate bulldozers, where a journeyman plumber claims to be the true descendant of the Mayan kings, where scientists celebrate the discovery of three new species of single-cell organisms by playing electric guitars on the roof of a mobile lab parked in the middle of a frozen sea.

And Herzog is the perfect person to capture the idiosyncrasies of this magical yet marginal land, because as a crank among cranks he fits in perfectly. In fact, it is Herzog's very whimsicality that helps bring the more eccentric side of the people he films to life. When Herzog wants to tell you about a project to capture high-energy neutrinos, for example, he doesn't give you computer generated diagrams to explain what a neutrino is, accompanied by professional-sounding voice-overs, and followed by slickly edited soundbites from interviews with scientists that have been pruned to include only the relevant facts. Instead, he just thrusts his camera in the face of the project leader and asks, in his most embarassingly naive everyman voice: "What is a neutrino?" then lets the man in front of the camera talk for as long as he wants.

What you get, as a result, is not some polished lecture about neutrinos that you could have found in any textbook but a sustained clip of a man whose entire life is physics talking excitedly about what he loves, a clip in which he first struggles to describe what a neutrino is in the simplest layman terms, then talks about how he feels about neutrinos, the sense of wonder they excite in him, and ends up comparing neutrinos to a kind of invisible spirit that populates the Universe. There is much that is clumsy and even ridiculous about this speech, but for all that it is genuine and heartfelt in a way that no conventional documentary footage would be. It may not tell you very much about neutrinos, but it speaks volumes about the nature of mankind, and the strange, almost mystic motives that underlie our endless search for the truth.

This then, is Herzog's method - and his true genius. At the heart of Herzog's vision lies the knowledge that it is not our qualities that define us but our eccentricities, what makes us wierd is also what makes us unique. What Herzog is searching for, therefore, is not the representative but the idiosyncratic, not the central but the marginal, not the general but the defiantly particular. His is an art of outliers, and Encounters at the End of the World is a fine addition to that oeuvre. In some of the most spectacular shots in the film Herzog transmutes tiny details of the underwater world beneath the Antarctic ice (bubbles moving across the ice's surface, a luminous jellyfish, the minutiea of some plant) into images of glowing, transcendent beauty. These scenes are breathtaking, yet at the end of the day it is not them but Herzog's ability to find beauty in the plebian details of human life that makes him so fascinating a director.

Herzog begins his film by stating that he has no intention of making a film about fluffy penguins. It is ironic, therefore, that the most iconic shot of Encounters at the End of the World, the one that best captures the spirit, not only of this film, but of Herzog's work more generally, is one that involves a penguin. This is not some cutesy penguin living out its well-regimented family life as part of the flock, however. This is a penguin that, having grown disoriented on its trek to the sea, and having left its companions behind, is marching relentlessly inland, heading towards certain death in the heart of the continent with a deliberateness of purpose that is at odds not only with its lack of true direction but also with the clownishness of its walk and appearance. It is a chilling yet lyrical image, an image made even more heartbreaking by the sight of the scattered humans who watch it pass and do not try to stop it, partly because they are under strict orders not to interfere, and partly because they know that nothing can turn the penguin from its path, that no effort of theirs can shake it off its conviction that those distant mountains are where it needs to go.

It is precisely this kind of dislocation, this journey into a hinterland of doubt, this voyage towards unknown meanings through a great expanse of wilderness that Herzog's films are a testament to.

Two Cities / Cricket

"London is what it is. In spite of a fresh emphasis on architecture and an influx of can-do Polish plumbers, in spite, too of the Manhattanish importance lately attached to coffee and sushi and farmers' markets, in spite even of the disturbance of 7/7 - a frightening but not a disorienting occurrence, it turns out - Londoners remain in the business of rowing their boats gently down the stream. Unchanged, accordingly, is the general down-the-hatch, who-are-we-fooling lightheartedness that's aimed at shrinking the significance of our attainments and our doom, and contributes, I've speculated, to the bizarrely premature crystallization of lives here, where men and women past the age of forty, in some cases even the age of thirty, may easily be regarded as over the hill and entitled to an essentially retrospective idea of themselves; whereas in New York selfhood's hill always seemed to lie ahead and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks: the you might have no climbing boots to hand was beside the point."

***

"Each of us is a year older. Throwing a ball is harder than we remember, as is the act of turning one's shoulder to bowl a ball. The ball itself feels very hard: skyers struck in catching practice are a little frightening. Bats that were light and wandlike when picked up fantastically during the off-season are now heavy and spadelike. Running between the wickets leaves us breathless. Trotting and bending down after a moving ball hurts body parts we'd thought renewed by months of rest. We have not succeeded, we discover, in imagining out of existence cricket's difficulty. Never mind. We are determined to make a clean try at things. We show in the field like flares.

I've heard that social scientists like to explain such a scene - a patch of America sprinkled with the foreign-born strangely at play - in terms of the immigrant's quest for subcommunities. How true this is: we're all far away from Tipperary, and clubbing together mitigates this unfair fact. But surely everyone can also testify to another, less reckonable kind of homesickness, one having to do with unsettlements that cannot be located in spaces of geography or history; and accordingly it's my belief that the communal, contractual phenomenon of New York cricket is underwritten, there where the print is finest, by the same agglomeration of unspeakable individual longings that underwrites cricket played anywhere - longings concerned with horizons and potentials sighted or hallucinated an in any event lost long ago, tantalisms that touch on the undoing of losses too private and reprehensible to be acknowledged to oneself, let alone to others. I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice."

- from Joseph O'Neill's Netherland

I have neither the time nor the heart to write a proper review of Netherland, and anyway James Wood does a finer job of it than I ever could. Suffice it to say that I think Wood's invocation of Fitzgerald in discussing O'Neill's book is apt - a trifle exaggerated, perhaps - but apt. Netherland is a graceful, meditative and quietly compelling book, that manages, despite a few rather ham-handed 'political' passages to be one of the most successful accounts of post-9/11 angst and the means of coming to terms with it. O'Neill succeeds where others have failed, I think, not only because, as Wood says, he has found the perfect conceit to portray the sense of dislocation that 9/11 gave rise to, but because he brings to the subject a depth of perspective other books have often lacked. Because the story is told from the perspective of 2005, and told moreover, from the point of view of one who has made peace with the aftershock of that calamitious day, it has a calmness, a sense of elegaic proportion; 9/11 is important, it is even cathartic, but it is not everything. And because it is told from the perspective of a narrator who is very much an outsider to New York and to the United States, because O'Neill takes the trouble to sketch for us not only the alienation following 9/11 and the reality of the marginal communities and neighborhoods that surround our Sex and the City version of Manhattan, but also the authentic feel of that Manhattan itself, the energy and vibrance of that most idiomatic of cities, we experience a real sense of place, a location that is essential to imagining the dislocation that is the focus of the book. At the same time, O'Neill is careful not to overstep his brief - he keeps the novel closely focused on the specifics of one man's, no, two men's story, and never, for a moment allows ambition to lead him astray into trying to tell the story of a city. Which is not to say that the main action occurs in a vacuum, Netherland is a book firmly located in its time and location, but the guide ropes that tie it in place are provided by a rich cast of marginal characters, who flicker on the outskirts of the story, without ever causing its central focus to shift.

But that's not what I really wanted to say. What I really wanted to say was that Netherland also features some of the finest portrayals of the game of cricket that I've ever seen in print. As regular readers of this blog know, I'm largely uninterested in cricket, to an extent, in fact, that is almost unpatriotic, but reading O'Neill's descriptions of the game even I found myself moved by nostalgia for the old bat and ball. Nostalgia is the operative word here, because the cricket that O'Neill celebrates is the old gentleman's game of elegance and finesse (see, for instance, the final section of this opening excerpt), a classical pastime he celebrates not only in his descriptions of the sport itself, but in the very tone and pace of his book, which with its quiet, wristy touches, its little nudges to the plot, its lyrical strokes of story-telling has the ballet like quality of a well put together test innings. If you love cricket and good writing, this is a book you simply have to read.

Looking Back

There are precepts we must follow, dimensions we cannot escape.

Death is only the first of many finalities. It is the looking back, the retracing of choices now fixed for ever, that turns a life into theater, sculpts coincidence to stone.

In the end, memory is a superior realism. Not what really happened, but what we have come to believe.

Introcide

Introcide n. The killing of assorted bad guys in the first ten to fifteen minutes of an action flick, just to establish the main character's fundamental deadliness.

I always feel kind of sorry for introcide victims. After all, they're villains too. They too must have dreams of world domination. They too must have finely honed personality disorders and suitably psychotic behavior tics. They too must have spent years of deprivation and / or depraved violence getting to the point where they're a real threat to society / mankind at large.

But do they get to show us any of this? No! Five minutes after the movie starts they've been scotched out, usually by as painful a means as possible, and before we've learnt the first thing about them. Just so the star of the film can prove his (or, occassionally, her) action hero chops. And if that wasn't bad enough, they don't even get to put up a proper fight, because the whole point of this opening scene is to show how uber-cool the hero is, and it wouldn't do if he had to actually break into a sweat to get rid of these bad guys.

[I made the mistake of watching Hancock over the weekend [1] - which, as it turns out, is one of the most interesting superhero films I've seen in a while for the first 45 minutes, after which it rapidly deteriorates into a kind of X-men meets City of Angels whose central revelations are that a) Married people are boring and b) Will Smith really is God's Gift to Mankind. Like we didn't know that already.]

[1] I know, I know. But this is what happens when you go to the theater to watch Sex and the City [2] and don't bother to notice that the show's at 10.25 pm not 10.25 am.

[2] Not that I particularly want to watch Sex and the City. It's just that I have such a stinging review of it all composed in my head, and I feel I should at least watch the film before I post it.

Progrestination

Progrestination n. The state of putting off, for one more day, something you've been meaning to do for a long time, on the grounds that since you've put it off this long one more day won't matter.

More Herakles

My other favorite part of Herakles starts at line 819. Herakles has returned from Hades, rescued his family, killed the evil tyrant who was threatening to kill them, and generally proved himself the true champion that he is. Everything looks set for a chorus-filled, they-all-lived-happily-ever-after ending. Then this happens:

Chorus

EA! EA! (cry)
Look!
Terror!
What kind of apparition is that above the house?
Run! Run! Lift your feet!
Lord Apollo protect me!

Iris

Calm down, old men.
This is Madness, daughter of the Night.
I am Iris, servant of the gods.
We do not come to harm your city.
Against one man we have a war to wage -
the so-called son of Zeus and Alkmene.
Until he finished with his bitter labors,
his destiny protected Herakles
and Zeus did not let me or Hera harm him.
But now he is done with the tasks of Eurystheus,
Hera wants to stain him in the blood
of his own children.
So do I.
Come then,
unmarriageable daughter of black Night,
make your heart hard.
Drive insanity into this man - throw
childkilling chaos into his mind and his jumping feet!
Pay out the rope of blood
by which he'll pull his children into Hades
with his own hand.
So he may come to know the rage of Hera,
my rage too!
Either gods are nothing and mortals prevail,
or this man has to pay a price.

- Euripides (trans. by Anne Carson)

And there you have it, girls and boys, a deus ex machina - literally - except one that comes, not to save the hero in his hour of need, but to punish him in his hour of triumph. And why must Herakles suffer? Not because he has done something wrong, not because it is his 'fate' - on the contrary, it is his destiny, ironically enough, that has been protecting him - but because Hera (and Iris!) doesn't like him, because "either gods are nothing and mortals prevail / or this man has to pay a price". The gods inflict pain not out of sport, which would be bad enough (remember "as flies to wanton boys"?), but because they are insecure. From this moment on, Herakles is doomed - he must kill his wife and children, pull down his house and emerge from the ruin of himself a broken man, limping reluctantly into immortality. And all so Hera can feel a little more important.

Has there ever been a playwright more pessimistic than Euripides?

The first time I read this episode, nearly a decade ago, I was disappointed in Euripides [1]. The whole thing struck me as being fairly clumsy. This, I thought, is not how tragedy works - true tragedy is an engine without mercy, that moves smoothly but surely towards its horrifying yet inevitable conclusion. And yet here was Euripides tacking on this arbitrary plot device, just to make the story come out right.

Reading the play again yesterday, and going over Carson's essays on this play and the three others that accompany it, it seems to me that what Euripides is doing here is actually rather brilliant. Subversive, but brilliant. Because arbitrary as the doom Iris pronounces may seem, is anything in classical tragedy really less contrived? Why, for instance, if the gods can cleanse mortals of bloodguilt, do they wait till the final act of the Oresteia before they call off the furies? By showing us the malice of the gods in all its pettiness, by making the interjection of fate seem gratuitious and cruel, Euripides strips tragedy of its lyric mask, makes suffering stand before us naked, shorn of all consolation, stripped to the bare lineaments of anger, humiliation and pain.

Carson, in her preface to Hekabe, cites Beckett (whom she compares Euripides to, aptly) on language, expressing his intention "To bore hole after hole in it,until what cowers behind it seeps through". This, it seems to me, is exactly what Euripides is doing: by placing a scene so dramatically transparent at the centre of his play, he is enabling us to see through the veneer of tragedy, to the corruption that lies growling behind.

(Tomorrow: Alkestis, and the notion of heroic sacrifice)

[1] My favorite Euripides play then, as now, is Hekabe. If, that is, a word like favorite can be applied to something so savage, so gloriously visceral.