You love me, you really love me

[complete list of winners]

Well, well, what do you know?

Day Falstaff is thrilled about this. Night Falstaff is wondering if he's the only one who sees the irony in spending a lifetime trashing popular taste and then winning what is essentially a popularity contest [1].

The key with winning things like this, of course, is not to let it go to your head. Five minutes a day of telling yourself "I'm the greatest! I'm the greatest!" and before you know it you're invading Iran or turning into Wordsworth or marrying someone whose name sounds like an underwear brand and then shaving of all your hair as a way of coping. As my namesake would say: "If I do grow great, I'll grow less, for I'll purge, and leave sack, and live cleanly as a nobleman should do."

Still, it feels like some sort of speech is in order (Shoefiend actually asked me for one). Something stirring and poetic. 'The blog was mine before I was the blog's'. That sort of thing. The trouble is, there's so little great poetry about winning. What can one say, after all? "Now all the truth is out / Be secret and take victory"? "Success is counted sweetest / By those who e'er succeed"? "Say nought the struggle plenty availeth"? "What though the field be won? / All is not won"? "The rest is cheerful music"? See what I mean?

At any rate: a big thank you to everyone who voted for me [2]. It's a great feeling to know that so many of you enjoy what I write. It's like my ego's been let out of the dark mines it usually slaves in to attend the company picnic. Tomorrow I'll probably go back to being insecure and depressed, but today is a good day.

I'd also like to thank (in no particular order) my parents, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Starbucks, the agent I may some day get, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, all forms of dark chocolate, my advisor, Absolut Mandarin, the three and a half women who have ever smiled at me when I wasn't taking their photograph, Blogger (you are the wind beneath my widgets), Constantine Cavafy, the Indibloggies jury, heh heh and Zen for convincing me that this blogging thing may actually be worth doing, Humphrey Bogart, the folks behind the Yahoo News service who have provided me with so many things to make fun of, Salvador Dali, the sponsors of the contest (Black Panther, I love you, even though I have no idea what a gym kit is or what I could conceivably do with one), my fifth grade English teacher, Pablo Picasso, the geeks in school whose obsession with IIT-JEE convinced me I didn't want to be an engineer, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jacqueline du Pre, Mozilla, Lucky Gents Heir Cutting Saloon (my hair stylist), Netflix, the Van Pelt Library, Google, Anna Karina and the guy who gave me change for a 20 yesterday because really who carries around 4 fivers and is willing to part with them to a complete stranger?

Right, now to go see about those troop deployments.

Notes:

[1] Last heard, Night Falstaff was consoling himself with a half-empty bottle of scotch and the knowledge that 78.5% of the people who voted in the contest didn't think 2x3x7 was the best Humanities Indiblog.

[2] This includes those of you who voted for Momus. I'll be thinking of you when I finally kill myself while listening to Sinfonia Concertante.

Ready

He is ready, he says.

To prove it, he blindfolds himself, takes his gun apart, reassembles it.

I watch the clockwork of his hands dismantling the familiar arguments, putting together the pieces of someone else’s death.

The parts fit perfectly. He is done in a minute.

“See!” he says, beaming proudly.

Guns are not countries.

[55 words]

(Not quite) religious poetry

But now when I gaze
at the framed postcard
of Ganesh on the wall,
I also picture a rotting carcass
of a beheaded elephant
lying crumpled up
on its side, covered with bird shit
vulture shit -

Oh that elephant
whose head survived
for Ganesh -

He died, of course, but the others
in his herd, the hundreds
in his family must have found him.
They stared at him for hours
with their slow swaying sadness...
How they turned and turned
in a circle, with their trunks
facing outwards and then inwards
towards the headless one.

That is a dance
a group dance
no one talks about.

- Sujata Bhatt, from 'What Happened to the Elephant?'

[First published in Monkey Shadows (Carcanet, 1991); later included in Point No Point (Carcanet, 1997)]

***

On a lighter note, KM points to series of hilarious haikus and demands Haikus for Hindus. Well, you know me and challenges...(see the comments section)

Non-trivial pursuit

Have you ever thought about the phrase 'pursuing a degree'. As in "Harry Wainwright is currently pursuing a degree in Diacritical Uncertainty from the University of That Little Bit of Florida That Doesn't Look Like your Appendix".

Isn't it a wonderful way of putting it?

What form does this pursuit take, one wonders. Is it a hot-footed chase after a delinquent qualification, complete with screeching tyres and pistol shots gone wild? "Calling all cars, calling all cars. Suspected PhD currently heading down Route 83 between Oaktown and Ashburg. Degree may be armed and dangerous. Pursue with caution." or "Quick driver! follow that dissertation!"

Or is it a more metaphorical pursuit - something out of Browning - a degree to be wooed and won over? Does one show up at the beloved qualification's door bearing bouquets of ideas, does one stand under its window on a moonlit night, singing citations till dawn?

Or perhaps it's a more zoological thing. The PhD not a malevolent or demanding intelligence, but a thing of nature, arbitrary, fickle. Must one wander through forests of regression, net in hand, seeking the butterflies of statistical significance? Must one sit crouched in a machaan over the dead horse of one's thesis topic, waiting for a contribution to emerge?

And is it really we who are pursuing the degree? Is it not the other way round? Are we not, Acteon-like, hunted by course requirements, hounded by time tables, laid low by committee? Who is the predator here, who the prey? Are we really the wolf that follows, and the degree the fawn that flies [1]?

Ah, the chasms that yawn beneath the most ordinary phrase.

(exits, pursued by a PhD)

[1] Bonus points for knowing where that particular gem comes from.

And speaking of incest...

You know, it just occured to me that in the litany of incestuous acts in literature (going all the way back to the Old Testament and the plays of Ancient Greece) I can't think of a single one that involves two people of the same sex. Think about it. Father and daughter - check. Mother and son - check. Brother and sister - check. But brother and brother? Mother and daughter? Even Turgenev's promisingly titled Fathers and Sons turns out to be depressingly non-sexual.

Incest, it seems, is the last bastion of heterosexuality.

I could argue that this is a reflection of the superior moral fibre of gay people through time. They may play for the other side, but at least they follow the rules. But that's obviously ridiculous.

What we have here, I think, is a grave lacuna at the heart of the literature that deals in taboo sexual acts. Why should straight people have a monopoly on this stuff? What we need is an all male version of Mourning becomes Electra, or a version of Oedipus Rex where Oedipus, returning from a foreign land a stranger, accidentally kills his mother and takes her place in his father's bed. The day we give homosexuality its rightful place in the canon of lyric tragedy, is the day we move closer to a more egalitarian society.

Where's Sophocles when you need him?

P.S. If you're wondering what brought that on - it's probably a combination of all this talk about incestuous bloggers and this lovely piece in the New Yorker by David Sedaris.

The Uncut-est kind of all

You know the expression If you can't beat 'em, join 'em?

Well, since I don't have an earthly chance of beating Amit Varma in this Indibloggies thing, I figured I'd be proactive [1] and go over to the da...errr...Uncut side.

Besides, how can you say no to someone who actually invites you to pontificate about your favourite books / movies / music? (though, alas! without footnotes)

So, go check out the new and (hopefully) improved India Uncut site [2].

[1] It's been sssoooo long since I used that word. *sniff* Sometimes I miss consulting.

[2] aka The Coven of Incestuous Bloggers

Hecate:

O well done! I commend your pains;
And every one shall share i’ the gains;
And now about the cauldron sing,
Live elves and fairies in a ring,
Enchanting all that you put in.

Love Sonnet to a New Post

When, in disgrace with Orkut and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my sitemeter;
Trouble other bloggers, crave replies,
Fisk Paul to be blogrolled by Peter.
Wishing myself like to one more rich in prose,
Features like his, like him with links possess’d,
Wanting this man’s template, that man’s jokes;
With what I most enjoy commented least.
Then, in these thoughts at myself griping
Haply I think of thee, and then my state
Like to a million monkeys at daybreak typing
Writes Shakespeare, or something approximate.
For thy sweet love conceived so perfectly maddens,
That then I scorn to change my site with Scott Adams.

With apologies, obviously, to William Shakespeare. Part of this contest (hat-tip Neha, whose own contribution to the contest is not to be missed).

***

Meanwhile, over at Slate, Robert Pinsky compiles a set of poems about sex, proving that Valentine's Day can make even respectable poets act like hormone driven school boys. I couldn't help but think of an episode Stuart Dybek relates in the latest issue of Poetry:

"In college, the first love poem that I felt written, not for me exactly, but directly to me, a poem I memorized in the way that as a child I'd memorized other love poems - "The Highwayman" and "The Raven" - without realizing that's what they were, was a poem by Auden from a set called 'Five Songs'. Coming from the erotic tradition of Buddy Holly, I must have needed that transition of song. The Auden poem made its own melody:

That night when joy began
Our narrowest veins to flush,
We waited for the flash
Of morning's leveled gun.

I found it in Sound and Sense, the text for the first lit class I took after dropping out of pre-med. I still recall the essay I wrote in answer to one of the questions: what is "the flash of morning's leveled gun"? I said it might be an orgasmic spurt, and received a deserved F, accompanied by the admonition, It's tougher to write something beautiful than to be a wiseguy."

Up, up and award

As you probably already know by now, 2x3x7 has been nominated for a couple of Indibloggies. Not that I have a ghost's chance of winning. I'm like one of those films with subtitles (the pretentious French kind, NOT the Babel kind) that the Academy includes in its list of Best Pictures only because the alternative is nominating Mel Gibson. Still it's nice to be nominated. I'd ask you to vote for me, except I figure you either will or you won't and if the last 625 posts haven't made up your mind either way, this one is unlikely to.

I have to say I'm a little conflicted about the whole Best Humanities Indiblog thing. It's not just that it turns out I'm competing against myself (since Momus got nominated too) making me feel like a motivational lecture run amok; or the fact that being called the Best Humanities anything brings back memories of the days when 'Humanities' was a euphemism for 'can't do math to save his life'. It's more that the category seems to have two very different kinds of blogs mixed up in it - creative writing blogs (hi, Shoefiend, good to see you in there) and review blogs (including Prufrock, Chandrahas and Amardeep, all of whom I read avidly) and I'm not sure how to compare the two. I feel like I'm trying to choose between writing with cheese on a blackboard or sprinkling chalk on my sandwich.

All is not lost though. The folks at Flog the Blog assure me that they're commited to including me in their awards, and with 2x3x7, Momus and Poi-tre to my...err...credit (sorry, BM) I figure I have a pretty good shot at beating Amit Varma for the Dilip Kumar award. All I need is a couple of posts about cows...

P.S. It goes without saying (at least it did so far) that if you're one of the people who nominated me - Thanks. You probably won't be rewarded for it in the next life, but at least the coffee will be hot where you're going.

The Island

[Second of my submissions to the Caferati contest]

He was walking by the shore when he saw the bottle, green wink of glass amid the jostled crowd of the waves. He had to wade out to get it, trousers rolled up to his knee, seizing it as it eddied at the edge of the turning tide, as if hesitating to commit itself to the reach of the land.

It looked like something out of a dream, or a book of fairy tales. A green bottle, label free, with a slip of something white inside. For a while he tried to uncork it, but the salt water had caused the cork to bloat and eventually he had to break the neck of the bottle against a rock to get to the message. It hurt him to do this. It felt like ingratitude.

Inside, on a ragged scrap of paper were the words “HELP ME! I’M STRANDED AND ALL ALONE. PLEASE HELP!”. The writing was poorly formed, as though written by someone whose strength was ebbing. Something dark and a little runny had been used for ink. Possibly blood. Possibly shit. There were no coordinates, no other information that could help pinpoint where this message had come from.

He stood on the shore and stared out at the horizon. Where in this whelmed and restless expanse of the world could he be – this soul crying out for help? After a while he threw the scrap of paper aside. It didn’t matter anyway. He himself was stranded, marooned on this island of his own, awaiting a rescue he knew better than to expect. Even if he knew where the message came from, there was nothing he could do to help.

Opera-ting

It's turned out to be quite an operatic weekend.

Saturday was spent listening to Gluck's Iphigenie and Tauride (in a lovely Gardiner conducted performance) - which turned out to be a sweetly rewarding experience, despite the terrible travesty of its plot. And then today I attended an intimate little performance of Verdi's Macbeth by the Center City Opera of Philadelphia.

It was an intriguing performance - making up in charm what it lacked in power. I suppose the best term for it would be an opera reading. It was held in this smallish studio in the basement of the Kimmel Center, meaning a piano instead of an orchestra, and a lot of fairly quaint stage directions, with the singers entering from behind the audience and walking down the aisles, singing. The whole reminded me, in a way, of the Ramlila performances I attended as a child. One missed Verdi's orchestration, of course (with only a piano he begins to sound suspiciously like Puccini), and it was a little bizarre to see people reading from the score while they sang, but the singing was generally good - I thought Banquo (Jorge Oscasio) and Macduff (Daniel Holmes) in particular were excellent, as were the Witches, who had a nice Mother, Maiden, Crone thing going on; and Lady Macbeth (Lori Lind) did an admirable job despite having a bad case of the sniffles. Overall it was about as pleasant a way of spending a Sunday afternoon as I can think of.

The problem I have with opera adaptations of Shakespeare is that I always end up missing the words [1]. The trouble is that Shakespeare himself is so fundamentally operatic that even Verdi's histrionics seem like a let down. Take the scene where Lady Macbeth learns that Duncan is coming to visit. Verdi gives her a stunning aria here, but no soprano, however fierce, is ever going to be able to match the sheer bloody-mindedness and exquisite frenzy of:

The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry 'Hold, hold!'

Oooh! Now I want to go read all of Macbeth again.

Meanwhile, tomorrow, to round out the trend, Scott Joplin's Treemonisha. Who knew Joplin wrote opera?

[1] Actually, I have the same problem with ballet versions of Shakespeare. In Midsummer Night's Dream, in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's poetry outdoes all dance.

Stay back Moses

Gabriel hated detention. It was such a bore, sitting in an empty classroom, completing some mindless task. And it wasn’t his fault anyway. It was that prig Michael, with his shining metal ruler and his Monitor badge. He’d been asking for it. But Mr. Jaweh would never punish Michael. Oh no. Michael was Mr. Jaweh’s favourite. So it was Gabriel who’d ended up staying back after hours, copying “Thou shalt not throw chalk in the classroom” five hundred times. What a pain.

By the three hundredth line, Gabriel was drowning in boredom. He needed a break. He didn’t dare move from his chair, though – if Mr. Jaweh caught him he would have to spend a whole week scribbling out some stupid edict or the other. Staring at the lines laid out before him, ten to a page, Gabriel had an idea. Why not make up his own lines? Like “Thou shalt not make love to a goat”. Or “Thou shalt not bathe Mr. Jaweh’s beard in gasoline and set fire to it”. Staring at the words on the page, Gabriel felt a moment of panic at their terrible finality. Then he chuckled. This was fun.

Ten minutes later, Gabriel heard footsteps. Mr. Jaweh must be coming to check on him. With desperate haste, Gabriel tore the pages with the offending lines from his notebook, slipped them under his desk. When Mr. Jaweh had gone (having scolded Gabriel for writing so slowly) he slipped them out from their hiding place, put them away in his bag. It was strange though. He could have sworn there had been three pages but now there were only two. As he went back to work, he wondered, idly, where the third one had got to.

[One of my three entries for the Caferati Flash Fiction contest (where, as usual, I won nothing - I don't know why I even bother). The second tomorrow. The third at some undefined point in the future]

Walking on eggshells

Do you ever get the feeling that walking home with eggs in your hand makes you more vulnerable? As though you were somehow implicated in the eggs' fragility?

Like yesterday. There I am with a half dozen super-special nature brown organic eggs [1] in a shopping bag and suddenly I'm imagining accidents everywhere - speeding cars at every crossing, a bus ploughing onto the pavement, my feet slipping on a patch of ice. It's as though I'm haunted by this vision of my body and the eggs both lying broken on the sidewalk, my blood mingling with the spilled yolk.

This is why I don't make omelettes.

Notes:

[1] I'm not, in general, big on the whole organic thing - but the only eggs available in a half dozen pack at my local grocery store are the la di da organic ones. And buying twelve eggs for one person (me) seems like bahut nainsaafi. Oh, for the good old days of walking down to the khokhawalla at the corner and saying "do ande dena". (though to be fair, even he used to give me pitying looks).

The dolphin torn, the gong tormented sea

There is a point in Debussy's La Mer where, for a moment, the stage is transformed into the deck of a storm tossed ship. The violins panic like oarsmen, the cellos flounder, the bass growls like the sea. Roused from the deep, drums batter against the prow. The blast of the trumpets is a shrill, shrill wind, tearing the masts of the silence. The seats of the auditorium rise row upon row, like a great wave, towering above the struggling orchestra. The flutes cry out for mercy and the conductor, like some dishevelled captain, gesticulates wildly, trying to control the fury of the tempest, his instructions lost in the music's roar.

The hallucination passes, the scene grows still, you remember where you are. But the blood still pounds in the seashell of your heart, and the song on your lips tastes a little like salt.

***

An incredible double bill by the Philadelphia Orchestra tonight. Debussy's Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune and La Mer, followed by seething and boundless energy of Schubert's Ninth.

There's just something about Ninth Symphonies, isn't there?

Hum Log

After months of assidiously avoiding any and all references to Aishwarya Rai on the blogosphere, I was finally tricked into reading the latest about the Rai Bacchanalia by this post over at Amardeep's (is nowhere safe). Apparently, Ms. Rai, demonstrating a marked inability to tell wood from the trees has been going around betrothing herself to the local flora [1]. The Ent in me is horrified. Inflicting cruelty on movie star's sons is one thing, torturing genuine life forms is something else. Trees may not be able to talk, but they aren't dumb, you know [2].

Resisting the urge to make jokes about how trees are peepul too, or to conjure up visions of Ms. Rai and a tree running around Mr. Bacchan, or to point out that with her thespian talents and his personality the happy couple will probably be breeding dining tables before they've been married a year ("Darling, I think it's time we talked about having a second sofa, don't you?"), let me say only that I'm intrigued by the particularly unflattering view of the Fates that this bizarre practice (which I, obviously, had never heard of before) seems to imply. I mean think about it. There's this dread and awesome force that governs the universe, turns the planets in their courses, scatters the stars like so many pistachio shells, and yet apparently it can't tell the difference between a man and a tree. Here's the fate that governs all things and not only does it fall for the first trick in the book, but (given that this is apparently a traditional rite) continues to do so time and time again, for centuries. Not very bright, this evil fate.

It makes you wonder how gullible the forces of the supernatural really are. Will they believe just about anything? Can you fob Death off by telling him "My soul's in the mail". Can you avert the watery grave by saying "Don't call me - I'll call you". If disaster stares you in the face, does it help to shout "Look! Behind you!" Is dodging misfortune as simple as giving it a fake e-mail address?

Is this why the Gods get happy when you offer them prasaad, and don't notice that two minutes later you're snacking away on it yourself? Is this why one tiny black mark, easily washed away with diluted soap solution is enough to ensure that malign forces don't notice how beautiful the baby is? Who would have thought it? The Evil Eye - with perspicacity of Lois Lane.

Personally, I think we don't use trees as proxies anywhere near enough. Think about the possibilities. Don't want your son to wreck your car when he's learning to drive? Get him to practice on a tree instead (oh wait, is that why traffic in Delhi is the way it is?). Hate having to break in a new secretary? Install a shy little cedar outside your office and bawl it out when it doesn't take dictation properly. Want to invade a country but are worried what people will say when thousands of your soldiers get killed and there's no end in sight? Just plant a bunch of trees in the desert and when they wither away for lack of water describe it as an "intelligence failure". And why bother with stem cell research when you can make path breaking medical discoveries with saplings?

Me, I'm off to ask that thornless honey locust outside the library if he's willing to be my advisor.

Notes:

[1] Okay, okay, I realise I'm probably the last person on the planet to learn of this.

[2] I have to say that being married to a family of trees would probably be fascinating:

"No, no, this box really is a family heirloom. That's no ordinary sandalwood, it's Shankar Mama"

"Packed? Why, of course my trunk is packed."

"That's my cousin Percy. He's, you know, that way. I mean, he's into wood peckers."

"Don't be silly, Marge, of course she's not a natural blonde"

"So he says to me, 'Take a bough' and I say..."

"The trouble with this younger generation is that they've lost touch with their roots"

"I don't like that Harold much. Nasty, sly, deciduous kind of creature he is."

"No, no, I've put that all behind me now. I'm turning over 12,689 new leaves."

"Yes, that's right. We're all so proud. It's a real feather in his nest"

"'You're my prisoner now, Captain' said Long John Silver Tree, 'and begads you'll be planking the walk before the day is through'".

Sticking to your gums

Did you know that chapsticks have no adhesive properties whatsoever? No, really, none.

So there I am with an envelope to gum and what I think is a gluestick in my hand and I'm applying coat after coat of the stuff to the flap and wondering why the damn thing won't stick even though by this point the paper is all greasy with it. And then a faint hint of aloe mixed with vanilla makes me realise that it's a chapstick I've got hold of.

You know how when one was growing up there were all these kids who thought it was really clever to write 'Open With A Smile' on the flap of the envelope. Usually with the I in the smile converted into a little smiley? Well, this one's now Open with an extremely well-moisturised smile. Gah!

I guess it could have been worse. I could have ended up gumming my lips together. [1]

[1] Many people would claim, of course, that this would be an improvement.

A Country Cracked from Side to Side

Another day, another film. Just got back from watching James Longley's Iraq in Fragments, which is among the nominees for this year's Academy Award for Best Feature Length Documentary. A three part film, Iraq in Fragments tells the stories, in sequence, of an 11-year old Sunni boy in Baghdad, the growing Shia unrest in Najaf and Nasiriyah, and a Kurdish family in the North. It's a visually stunning film, and a considerable cinematic achievement, combining brisk, almost chaotic editing with breathtaking use of colour and a flair for the dramatic. The last section in particular looks like every frame could be an award winning photograph all by itself.

How insightful the film is as a documentary is another matter. Longley's decision to let the film reflect the chaos and incoherence of Iraq as it exists today, rather than trying to draw out a consistent message, is a bold one, but it leads to a film that, true to its name, is fragmentary and somewhat bewildering. The film has the immediacy of lived experience - nothing is explained, no facts are double-checked, no stories followed back or forward in time - it is as thought the viewer had been plunged deep into the intimate heart of Iraq and had just enough time to gather a few quick impressions and opinions, before he was whisked away. This makes the film exciting to watch, but it also makes it frustrating to think about. The fact that in all but the second section Longley chooses to go micro, focussing on particular individuals and never really drawing back to look at the big picture, only makes this sense of fragmentation more severe.

Two things do emerge consistently. First, the unsurprising fact that many people in Iraq really, really hate the Americans. Time and time again we hear people proclaiming that the coming of the Americans may have helped get rid of Saddam (which they see as a good thing) but on the whole, it's made things in Iraq worse. It's not hard to see where this idea comes from. As Longley faithfully portrays, Iraq's cities have been turned into battlefield. In Baghdad, as the film shows, tanks and humvees ply the streets while helicopter gunships roar through the skies. In a scene from the Shiite south in the second section, two old men sit smoking their hookahs and complaining about the US, their conversation punctuated by the sound of gunfire and explosions.

Second, the film highlights, I think, just how much the mess in Iraq is an administrative failure. If the people of Iraq are unhappy with the Americans, it is not out of some sort of Islamic idealism, certainly not out of loyalty to the old regime - it is because their day to day lives have worsened with the coming of the US invasion - law and order has broken down completely, cities are in shambles, unemployment is rampant. Longley doesn't quite explicitly say this, but it's not hard to see looking at the disillusioned faces of the young men in this documentary, hearing their stories about the absence of jobs and the pointlessness of schooling, where the next batch of terrorism recruits is coming from.

Not that there isn't hope. Iraq in Fragments ends on a note that is hopeful, if guarded. Longley shows footage of an election in the Kurdish provinces, where a voice exhorts the people to vote, telling them that their vote in the ballot will be worth more than thousands of bullets for the propagation of Kurdish interests. We see the shoving, chaotic lines outside the polling booth, we see the woman handing out the ballots helpfully telling everyone to vote for number 130, since he's the Kurdish candidate. The flowers of democracy blossom in the Kurdish spring, though whether they will bear fruit remains to be seen.

[Cross-posted at Momus]

Dreaming Lhasa, Ranting Man

Went for a special screening of Tibetan feature Dreaming Lhasa last night. It's an interesting film, though (fittingly enough) one fairly conflicted about its own identity. At its heart, it's an exploration of the Tibetan struggle for independence from China and the lives of Tibetan refugees living in India. As such, it explores the familiar themes of exile - memories of one's homeland, the quest for identity in an alien world - spliced together with vignettes of the atrocities being commited by the Chinese authorities in Tibet. All of this is moving purely for its genuineness, and the film serves as a guilty reminder of how overlooked the cause of the Tibetan people is internationally.

Dreaming Lhasa's central achievement is that it manages to show, somewhat gawkily, not only the long-suffering dignity of those committed to an endless fight for their homeland, but also the way this dream of Lhasa permeates a younger generation of Tibetans - these young people hang out in night clubs, play rock music and pool, exchange e-mails with their friends in the US and dream of going there sometime themselves, and yet when the demonstrations calling for a free Tibet go out, there they are in the front ranks, waving their candles, shouting with the rest. There is nothing particularly astonishing about this, and the film does tend to wax a little too nostalgic, but its affective purely because of its genuineness.

All of which makes you wonder if the film maker's wouldn't have been better off making a documentary. Instead we get a cliched plot, complete with a film-maker from New York, an ex-monk on a mission from his dying mother, an entirely implausible love interest and scene after scene that has been put together for the sole purpose of giving expression to an idea or a point of view. It doesn't help that the acting is definitively amateur; the two leads aren't so bad - Jampa Kalsang manages his role as the questing monk with economical competence, and Tenzin Chokyi Gyatso has her moments of inspiration, and is beautiful enough so that you don't notice the rest - but if you're looking for anything above the level of high school theatrics from anyone else, forget it. Much of this is deliberate: the cast of the film was selected for authenticity rather than experience, and includes former resistance fighters, leaders of the Tibetan government in exile and even the Dalai Lama's personal driver, so it's a little unfair to judge them on the merit of their thespian talent. The trouble is that the film seems unable to make up its mind between being authentic and being cinematic, and ends up lost in an uneasy compromise between the two.

Take this Karma person, for instance - the young film maker from New York, making a documentary about the Tibetan exiles, and searching for her own identity as a Tibetan in the process. Aside from the fact that everything about her is a cliche, why, exactly, is she part of the film at all? Only because the producers needed to raise money from the West and so needed to have a character that Western audiences could relate to? Karma's romance with Dhondup is one sustained false note from beginning to end, and her assistance in his search is largely illusory - there's really very little the two of them do together to find the man Dhondup is seeking that he couldn't have done just as well by himself, much as the movie tries to convince you otherwise.

I see why the producers chose not to make this a documentary, why they felt the need to include Karma - it doubtless increased the visibility of their film immensely, and attention, more than anything else, is what their cause really needs. But it's still sad to see the integrity and dignity of this potentially beautiful film sacrificed to the political need for quick publicity. The real poignancy of this film lies in seeing statesmen like Phuntsok Namgyal and Tsering Topgyal having to put on make up and mouth inane dialogue just so the world will finally listen to them.

***

The other exciting event of the screening was that I got buttonholed at the door by an irate 50-something who ranted at me for five minutes about how pathetic young people these days were. I mean, okay, so he had a point. It was an on-campus screening of the movie as part of a series of films dealing with human rights issues from across the globe, and there were about 15 people in the audience, about 4 of them under 40. Still, as I repeatedly (and unavailingly) tried to point out to him - I was there, so there wasn't much point haranguing me about it. And anyway, my youthful good looks notwithstanding, it's been years since I was an undergraduate, so speaking of them as 'my generation' makes no sense. None of this got through though - I got five minutes of accusing stare, coupled with questions like "What do you people do on Saturday nights anyway?" and "How can you not care about these issues?" Talk about blaming the choir.

The Drowned

We come into the world weightless. Swimmers slipping into the water, our eyes tightly shut. In the world, but not yet of it.

For a split second there we are still bouyant, still capable of flight. For a moment we could still rise and get away.

These are the things we are never told.

This is what the placenta is for - to keep us anchored to the earth. This is why the nurse or doctor or midwife will hold us carefully tight until we have taken our first breath, have opened our lungs to the world and been drowned in its gravity.

This seems cruel, I know, but it is for our good. Left to ourselves we would run out of air before we had drifted away completely, we would discover too late our absence of wings. The fall would be severe.

Yet this is why we bawl, why we cry. This is why, as children, we love balloons, remembering what we could have been.

It is not the womb we are trying get back to. It is the sky.

Beep beep

Extracts from Karl Shapiro's The Bourgeois Poet, which I'm currently reading [1]:

" Between the Times and the Partisan, Sestos and Abydos of aspiring poets. Between the itch for popularity and the refined thirst for the avant-garde. Between the picture on the opening page and the quiet hieratic promotion. Between the happy handshake and imperceptible nod of acceptance. Between the goose that lays the golden egg and the tailor who weaves the emperor's clothes. Then silence."

***

"But I'm no different. I arrange my books with a view to their appearance. Some highbrow titles are prominently displayed. The desk in my study is carefully littered; after some thought I hang a diploma on the wall only to take it down again. I sit at the window where I can be seen. What do my neighbours think of me - I hope they think of me. I fix the light to hit the books. I lean some rows one way, some rows another.

A man's house is his stage. Others walk on to play their bit parts. Now and again a soliloquy, a birth, an adultery."

***

"When I say the Hail Mary I get an erection. Doesn't that prove the existence of God?"

***

"This is a paragraph. A paragraph is a sonnet in prose. A paragraph begins where it ends. A paragraph may contain a single word or cruise for pages. Good writing rids itself of style, sanctifies no grammar, is silent more than it speaks. Most writing is bad because the writer never sits down to think until he sits down to write. Most writing is dishonest because the writer doesn't believe what he writes but is honestly trying to find out. Most writing is at the expense of the reader, a kindly fellow who would like to believe you."

***

"Photograph album lying on the grass, the wind reads you lazily. The wind thumbs my episodes. A few drops of rain splatter my years. There's plenty of sighing for the impossibles. I love the wine stains of certain accidental poems, pale purple Matisse wallpaper. Who spilled that? Some faces are already repressed."

***

"The molasses of lecturing is sweet and the rum of polemic is good for the stomach. I write prose to find out what I think. Then it is printed. The whole business is irresponsible. But it's getting somewhere: if the polished paragraph won't work I'll pick up mud. There are no rules in this game. You can skewer a king or throw him in the big pond."

***

[to Baudelaire]: "In fact, aren't you a children's poet? Aren't you the Lewis Carroll of small vice? Your shabby Wonderland of pus and giant nipple, your cats and jewels and cheap perfumes, your licking Lesbians and make-believe Black Mass, O purulence of Original Sin. And always playing it safe in the end, like Disneyland. So many safety devices, pulleys, cranks, classical Alexandrines."

Good stuff. Also watched Venus this evening, which is notable only for Peter O'Toole's mesmerising presence. O'Toole projects a kind of weary classicism effortlessly, and his voice is so exquisite that finely aged whisky would kill to get into that throat. Particularly memorable is O'Toole's rendition of Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day") - in general I would have dismissed a script that uses Sonnet XVIII as hopelessly banal, but O'Toole rescues it from cliche and converts it into something sublime and moving.

Come to think of it, that's pretty much how the whole movie goes.

[1] Thanks largely to this piece by Jim Harrison in the New York Times.

Segovia

To sit on the porch at dusk, playing the rain on your guitar. The wind dancing in your courtyard - its swirling skirt, its branches rattling like castanets. The thin trickle of the sound flowing up through the house to drown in the attic's dust.

This is no time to be sad, you say. Never mind the days falling like bunches of ripe grapes. Never mind the man riding to your gate through the storm, death written in his eyes. Never mind the battered suitcases and the photographs of sepia ancestors you can no longer name.

Today you have fingered the silence intricate. Today you have given the butterflies shelter. Today you have taken the wrist of your guitar and known the leap of its pulse. Today you have tied impulse to impulse, woven beauty out of fragile air.

And the light shall never forget how you opened your doors to it. And the moon shall return to silver your palm. And the rain shall haunt your records like a scratchy ghost. And the constellations of the stars shall tremble like strings.

And music, like a young girl, will come when you call her; will thrill to your touch, will forget to be shy.

So little below zero

Walking on the sidewalk, the crunch of rocksalt and ice. The world eggshell white, crackling under my feet. Brittle patches of sunlight that I crush with every step and a thin trickle of melt snaking its way into the gutter.

On the other side of the street an old man in uniform is clearing the hotel driveway, scraping his shovel back and forth across the road as if trying to read a text newly unearthed. The snow mixed with mud now, blotted with footprints, streaked with wheel dirt. Like the soiled wing of a runover bird.

If there is an epiphany here, it is as thin as our breath misting the air, as secret as this common prayer that murmurs from every lip. This morning the earth looks as if it had been dusted for fingerprints and found clean. And the glass of this building, catching the sun's eye, winks back at it.

DON'T PANIC

No, there's no mistake. You have reached 2x3x7. And no, it hasn't been taken over by Aliens from Outer Space. At least, not more than it already had been.

It's just that Blogger finally browbeat me into switching to New Blogger and I figured while I was making changes anyway, why not try out a new template and give all those people who've been complaining about the black background the opportunity to say they told me so?

So. Here's a new template. I'm not crazy about the colour scheme, but I recognise that it's more restful on the eyes. Let me know what you think. Meanwhile, regular blogging continues.

UPDATE (Rinse and Repeat): So you like the fact that it's more reader friendly but you think the colour scheme is boring and not really 'me'. See if you like this one better. No greens, nothing too cheerful - just your basic black, grey and blue. But still fairly readable.

I have to admit I'm kind of partial to this one. I love the all black thing too, but it is kind of hard to read - plus after some 18 months I'm a little bored with it. If you absolutely hate this one, I might think about changing it. Otherwise it stays.

An Old Pillow

After he leaves for the airport she goes back to bed for a while, nuzzling into the pillow as if to blank out the day, trying to find in it the sleep she has misplaced. Absently, her hand slips inside the pillowcase, finds a small tear in the fabric's skin. When did that happen? For a moment her fingers slip right inside the pillow, feeling the dry, crumbling texture of its foam. It's an unpleasant sensation, like touching mouldy bread, and she withdraws her hand quickly.

She supposes it's inevitable. This pillow is old, after all, it's been years since they bought it. How plump it had been then, how soft and fluffy, how easy to sink into. Not this thin rectangle of shrivelled foam lying defeated under her head.

Perhaps it's time to get a new pillow. But she likes this one now, has grown used to it. She remembers that night in the hotel room a year ago, when they'd gone for his aunt's funeral, how she'd tossed and turned all night until he thought it was because the ceremony upset her, when really it was just that the pillow was too thick and she'd felt suffocated. How she'd eventually had to throw the pillow down on the floor and sleep without. And the pain in her neck the morning afterwards.

No, better to stick with this old pillow - the one that she has adjusted to, the one that has adjusted itself to the shape of her sleep.

She sighs. No chance of sleep now. She gets out of bed and leans over to straighten the pillowcase, making sure the flap of cloth overlaps the pillow completely. Then she puts the pillow back on the bed and looks down at it. From up here, she thinks, no one can tell the difference.

Contraband

Getting it past the guards was easy. He put on his good suit, his lucky tie. He wore dark glasses to hide his eyes, smiled as he wished them good morning. He walked through the familiar rituals of the security check with the easy, slightly bored confidence of the professional traveller. No one gave him a second glance.

He couldn't fool the dogs though. One sniff at him and they knew just how much sadness he was carrying. And they barked and barked until he broke down and wept.

When they opened his suitcase they thought at first that he was a cross-dresser. Until he explained about her, about how she had died, about why he hadn't been able to leave her clothes behind.

They understood, they said. They were sorry. But there was nothing they could do. No charge on which they could hold him. He was free to go.

Magical Moment # 67

Walking out of a performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons into a light snow shower. Snowflakes melting on my nose and eyelashes while that electrifying violin solo from the first movement of Winter runs insistently through my head.

Filming Over

As you've probably heard by now, the Oscar nominations are out. It's a fairly pathetic line-up, though I'm still trying to decide whether that's a testament to the insularity of the Academy, the sad excuse for film-making that is Hollywood or both.

I'm also trying to make up my mind whether I want Scorsese to win or not. God knows he deserves it, but having him win for something as ordinary as The Departed seems too derisory a joke. Plus I'm torn between wanting to see O'Toole win and wanting to see Ryan Gosling's performance in Half Nelson get the reward it deserves, knowing full well that Forest Whitaker is the man who's likely to be walking away with the golden statuette (yes, yes, I know that the Academy has to pretend that they're different from the Golden Globes, but I'm hoping they'll do that by screwing Babel). And I suppose it's idle to hope for Alan Arkin as well.

Oh well, at least Mirren will count as one truly deserving win. God bless the Queen.

Meanwhile, by popular demand (one person asked for it) here's my review of Babel.

If I was a drunk man

From the latest issue of the Atlantic:

Drinking may impair your motor skills and romantic judgment, but—if you’re a man, at least—it can fatten your wallet, two new studies suggest. In the first, a pair of health economists found that American males who drank heavily when they were tenth-graders in 1990 earned more money in 2000, on average, than their peers who were teetotalers as teens. (The researchers found no such link for women.) Meanwhile, a study from the libertarian Reason Foundation reports that self-described drinkers (male and female) earn 10 percent to 14 percent more than nondrinkers. Drinking, the authors argue, may help build the kinds of social networks that lead to workplace success. The Reason study also finds that men who frequent bars at least once a month earn a further 7 percent wage boost. For women, however, regular barhopping has no discernible effect—on earnings, anyway.

Dammit, I knew I should have spent more time getting drunk in college.

***

While I go drown my sorrows in alcohol, you too can be depressed - go check out the growing list of potential sources of sublime misery over at the Guardian blog. Good stuff, though why someone would watch Sasom i en spegel when Nattvardsgasterna or Skammen were available is beyond me.

Oh, and here's my review of Martin Amis' House of Meetings. A depressingly amateur one, given that I actually read the book the whole way through before I reviewed it (which, apparently, is no longer the done thing). Sigh.

The Movie Theatre

To enter a movie theater is to embrace the darkness of your own anonymity. To retreat from the sunny compulsions of the day into a cave of undeciphered fires.

You are always alone in a theatre, no matter whom you go with - your intimacy not sexual but religious. You are here to witness a ceremony, you are prepared to believe, and the hush that falls all around you as the screen flickers to life has the weight of surrender. And yet it is not the image on the screen that bewitches and reveals - that is only projection - the true magic, the real possibility, lies in the sacred pregnancy of the dark.

And so here you are again, in this inner sanctum, having mumbled the name of the day's chosen deity and averted your eyes from the ticket counter's assumed disapproval, from the afternoon's imputed guilt. Clutching your bagful of popcorn and smelling the grease of its corruption on your breath, telling yourself to wait until the movie starts, but taking a few bites anyway, just to keep from spilling.

And then the trailers start, ephemeral like dreams - the fractured play of images from which a story could be pieced together if only you had time, but that you will later struggle to recall. And then the credits of the main feature come on, and you let the self go, tossing it aside like a coat into the empty seat next to you.

If you are lucky, you will not need to remember who you are for a few hours now, shrugging back into the knowledge only as you leave, feeling the realities reestablish themselves, emerging into the light of a world that is never as different as you had imagined.

P.S. If you're wondering where that came from - no, I didn't spend the day watching movies. It's just that I've been reading Martin Amis (I'm halfway through The House of Meetings) and have this urge to string phrases together.

Snowfall

He looks up from the table for a moment, seeking inspiration, gazing out towards the sky.

White, powdery flakes dance before his eyes. It's snowing, he realises. When did it start? He goes over to the window, looks down at the street. Snow covers the grass verges like foam on a beard and the road has turned a slushy white. True, it's a heavy fall. But still, it must have been snowing for twenty minutes, maybe more. And he never even noticed.

It frightens him that this could happen. That on an day of such ordinary promise the atmosphere of his luck could change, that somewhere a line could be crossed and his world could turn blank. That calamity could come upon him unheralded, even unheard. That forgetfulness could fall from the sky even as his back was turned, erasing every colour, concealing every road.

He draws the curtain, switches on the light, goes back to work. But he can sense the fear settling over him; he can feel the silence fall.

Yes, but why are you watching Big Brother?

Of all the silly, irrelevant non-issues ever to have gained public attention, this one has to take the fruitcake.

Never mind that the GoI should have better things to do than waste its time getting indignant about UK television shows [1]. Never mind that saying something nasty to a person of a particular race doesn't automatically imply racism. Never mind that this Shetty woman is obviously acting (who knew she had this much talent?) and that the whole thing is a carefully planned piece of fiction in the first place. Never mind that the woman is on the show voluntarily and could always leave if she's feeling unhappy. Never mind that anyone who signs on to be on reality television is, by definition, a loser who will do anything for publicity, so expecting civilised behaviour from these people is a contradiction in terms. Never mind that it's idiotic to fight a TV show by giving it more publicity and that the producers of the show are probably sitting around this very minute trying to figure out how they can make this controversy last, because their viewer numbers have never looked this good.

It's Television. TELEVISION. This means a) it's NOT real and b) it's supposed to be idiotic and to shock you in the crassest, most obvious way possible. That's what television (especially reality TV) is about. Can you imagine a reality show where everyone sat around and behaved graciously and politely to each other and played tiddly-winks? Who would watch a show like that? In fact, who would watch a reality show where the participants weren't pathetic human beings whom you could compare yourself to and feel superior? Isn't that the whole point of the genre? Complaining that they're not behaving decently is like griping about how the Rambo films have too much violence.

Here's my suggestion: If you find Big Brother offensive, turn off your television sets and read a good book instead. Not only will this mean you'll have a more meaningful experience, leaving reality TV shows to the brain dead troglodytes they're meant for, it's also the most effective way to make the producers of the show sit up and listen.

Notes

[1] What's next, I wonder? Are we going to demand that George Clooney be put on trial because of that scene in Syriana where a couple of Indian immigrant workers get beaten up by the police? Are we going to threaten the US with nuclear strikes the next time a US film critic describes Aishwarya Rai as wooden and talentless, since that is clearly a racist slur?

Update 1: Reading through the discussions of this 'issue' in the media and on the blogosphere, it seems to me that what we're seeing is a demonstration of the addictive power of television, which I've blogged about before. In that post, I point to a considerable body of research which demonstrates that television watching is highly addictive, despite the fact that television delivers little or no real enjoyment and may, in fact, be associated with malaise. These studies argue that the reason people continue to watch television is because it creates the illusion of engagement with the real world - that people become unable to distinguish between what is real and what's on television.

That, I think, is exactly what's at play here - here are a bunch of well-meaning people who find what they're watching deeply unpleasant but can't seem to find the will-power to turn it off. And because they're afraid to admit to their dependence, and because they no longer see or acknowledge the difference between a fictional portrayal and a real event, they insist on making the whole thing an issue. It's a fascinating pathology.

(Self-deprecating Personal Note: While I find reality television itself unspeakably dull and annoying, I find the reality of people's engagement with television great fun to watch. There's an irony in there somewhere.)

Update 2: I'm also intrigued by the phrase 'racist bullying'. What has one got to do with the other? Are we to assume that bullying is okay as long as it's not racist? Go ahead and beat up the kid who's smaller than you and steal his lunch money, but for god's sake, make sure he's the same race as you first? Or would it be okay if they were racist but were more civil about it? I wish people would stop confounding the two things.

Update 3: It's been brought to my attention that Ms. Shetty may not, in fact, have known what she was letting herself in for and may not be able to exit the show now because of contractual obligations. Personally, I don't think she's that dumb, but I suppose it's possible. I'm not aware, however, of any evidence that suggests that Ms. Shetty has tried to exit the show and no reason to believe that she wants to or is being constrained from doing so. For the record, though, if she does in fact, feel trapped, and wants to get out, I see some merit in helping her do so, or in having her sue Channel Four for emotional harm caused by incomplete disclosure. Just spare me the crocodile tears.

Ode to Toe Nails

Memes are all very well, but if you really want to know what I would say about clipping my toe nails:

Ode to My Toe Nails

O to be clipped and repentant,
groomed and discreet;

O to wander these rooms like a God
leaving crescent moons all over the furniture,
trailing chipped constellations on the carpeted night;

O to be free of the debris of living –
shedding hair, clothes, cuticle, Love –
everything bloodless and too soon outgrown;

O to believe in the smallness of sacrifice,
abandoning claws and the hardening of flesh,
growing the pain out, then cutting it away;

O to stare down at the provinces of my feet
watching them encroach on territories of emptiness
savage colonies of the body’s imperium;

O to be a farmer of the incidental,
gathering the fruits of my bitter harvest
from beneath society’s downtreading toe;

O not to fear the sound of Death’s clippers,
learn not to mourn these everyday losses,
the imagined hurt of what we had to let go.

Nocturne

It took him four days to reach the village. Four days of riding across the scarred back of this land, the barely healed scabs of the mountains and the canyons like low dry welts. Four days of a desert liquid with mirages, his teeth gritty with defeat and the disbelief shimmering in his heart. Four days with no company but the parching sun and the indifferent moon, and the creak of his old saddle calling out like a bird, and the rope of the thirst tightening around his throat. Four days in which the idea of destination, of arrival, grew hazy with dust, and the news he had brought rattled about in his head like water in an emptying canteen; the conviction growing on him that there was no road, no village, and that he was out here searching for something else - perhaps Death.

Four days in which the wound in his side had turned dry as a mouth, the raw lips of the flesh drawn back to reveal the dirty teeth of the sutures. At least the stitches had held. The old woman who sewed him up had promised nothing - I am a seamstress, she had said, what do I know of wounds? And he had felt like telling her that they lived in times when skin and muscle were cast off as easily as a dress, and men ran through the streets with nothing but their thin bodies to disguise the nakedness of their violence, their nude anger, their obscene hate. Instead he had waved his gun at her and she had done as he had bid, the fear trembling in her eyes, but her hands miraculously steady.

That had been five days ago. Just before he left on this expedition, one solitary rider bringing tidings of destruction into the heart of nowhere. He was there now, staring down at this village he had heard of only in rumour, its ramshackle huts scattered across the desert floor like abandoned packing cases. Or like skulls - the empty sockets of the windows, the front stoops rigid like mandibles. And he imagined the village as the enemy would see it, sitting their horses on this low ridge; how they would pour down upon this sleepy hamlet with their cries and guns, how the bodies would lie fallen in the streets, their shadows lengthening with blood; how the hands of the fire would snatch greedily at these dry roofs, and the screams of flame would rise howling into the sky. He had seen it all before. They called him a boy because as the seasons were counted he was still young, and they sent him out on a boy's chore, but he had seen more horrors in his days than most men were allowed in an entire lifetime, until even despair no longer seemed like a prophecy. He had been sitting there for ten minutes. They had not seen him yet. They would have to be more vigilant.

Riding into the village with the sun going down behind him, he saw an old woman washing the steps of the cathedral. She didn't turn to look at him. The water she was pouring onto those steps was muddy, its colour like rusted iron. And the image of it stayed with him as he rode down the street - the feet of the church being washed in blood while a bell hung from the steeple like a dead man's helmet.

Why am I here? he wondered, as he tied his horse to the hitching rail. This was not his home, these were not his people. Or were they? Did war erase personality, make identity binary? But even if the people of this village were part of this Us that he belonged to, what good would his message do them? How could they fight against the troops that were coming, where could they flee? Death was inevitable here, and his news would only bring its certainty a few days closer, as though he had ridden through the village leaving its mark on every door. Wouldn't it be better to spare them the agony of knowing, to let death surprise them, find them like a bullet in the dawn? No, no, they had a right to know. To be prepared. That is what the captain had said when he ordered him to go. It had not occured to him then to ask how death could be prepared for. It would have been useful to know.

He walked into the saloon, surprised to find it empty except for a grizzled old barman and a drunk unconscious in a corner. He had a couple of drinks, swallowing them down too fast because he was thirsty. "Where is everybody?", he asked. "They've all gone", the bartender replied. "Haven't you heard? The enemy is coming. A man arrived with the news yesterday. Most of the townfolk packed up and left this morning. There are only a handful of us old timers left. They say they'll be here in couple of days. They say they'll destroy everything."

So. He had ridden all this way for nothing. Defeat had got here before him, as usual. He felt disappointment, but also a sense of relief. "You didn't go with them?" he asked the bartender. The man shook his head. "I'm too old to make it across the desert", he said, "and besides, I don't see why they should kill me. I'm not fighting them - I don't even own a gun. I figure they'll come in here and I'll give them all the drink they want and they'll leave me alone. That's how it was in the last war, and the one before that. I figure I'll be all right."

He shrugged. The old man was wrong, of course. This time the rules were different, this time the enemy would destroy everything. But that was the old man's problem. He himself was tired. Tired from the long ride across the desert, but also from all that he had seen in the last few months. Tired of this long harvest of war where he had felt himself grow taller and taller even as those around him had been cut down. He needed a bed to sleep in now, and a clean place where he could dress his wound. Tomorrow he would leave. Maybe he would get clean away. Maybe the enemy would get him. Maybe the desert would. What did it matter? Tonight he needed to rest.

Then he saw the piano. It had been pushed into the far corner and covered with a dirty sheet, but the shape of it was unmistakable. "Does that work?" he asked the bartender. "It hasn't been played for a while" the bartender said, "but, ya, I guess it works." He went over to it, pulled off the covers, lifted the lid of the keyboard, dusted the top of the stool and sat on it. It had been a long time. Imagine finding a piano in a place like this.

He stared at the familiar arrangement of black and white, this pure, touchable altar of harmonic certainties, of unwavering ups and downs. He touched a key or two and listened to the way the sound sharpened the silence, made it more exact. Yes, this old piano was terribly out of tune. But no matter. So was the world. He listened to the silence reverberating around him, the fading ripple of the notes he had played, and thought about the parlour back home, the weekend socials, the sunlight of women's laughter and him so serious and unsmiling, dressed up in his coat-tails, playing mazurkas and toccatas for an audience that sat with smiles at once indulgent and appreciative. Carefully, he slipped his boots off, to get rid of the spurs. Then, with a deep breath, he began to play.

At first he fingered the keys tentatively, not sure if his hands, soiled with months of cordite and gunsmoke as they were, could still recall the fragility of those notes, their exquisite tenderness. Slowly, it came back to him though, the fluency, the song. No waltzes for him tonight, no merry polkas, no sonatas to structure feeling with. Only Chopin, the nocturnes, the nostalgia for that rubbed rose, for an immense beauty shattered into fragments, the notes spilling out of him faster than suffering now, carried by soft winds into the consciousness of the stars, into the unrelenting heart of the desert night, where the wolves waited to howl at the moon and the dust from the passing hoofbeats hung still in the remorseless air.

Marine Drive

Coming around the bend at Walkeshwar, he sees Marine Drive open out before him, its lights glinting off the water. Like a woman admiring her new necklace in a glass. At the other end of its lazy crescent the towers of Nariman Point rise like columns of some star-labelled histogram, impossibly close, and the red glow of the Air India centaur tightens its bow towards the invisible West. The nearness is deceptive, though. This is a city of concavities, of points that have learned to keep their distance, of a future that curves away. The traffic of the years passes swiftly here, but even so the road proves longer than you expect.

And so he drives on: past the aborted flight of three neon birds winging their way off the beach in some grotesque advertisement for the fundamentals of gravity and escape; past the iron-barred gates of Wilson college, its courtyard dusty with summer daydreams; past the battered facade of Crystal and the long line of cars standing outside Bachelors; past the footbridge and along the railway track to the Aquarium, across from which he has seen the waves on wild days fling themselves across the road in suicidal missions, while crowds danced on the parapet, their trousers rolled up around their knees; past the cricket grounds and the flyover; past the long stretch of salt-speckled houses battered by sea-wind, their old-world charm punctuated by gyms and ice cream parlours, by the ship-like stateliness of the Marine Plaza and the alien intrusion of some new hotel that he vaguely remembers being built; past the curving windows of Not Just Jazz, its windows agleam like the deck of some beached ferry; past the last hurrah of the houses to arrive finally at the feet of the towers he once thought were the tallest in the world (told so by a friend in school and not knowing better) but that now seem as ignorant and mortal as giants out of some fairy tale; the tang of the sea breeze through the unrollable windows of his black and yellow Padmini taxi mingling with the smell of horse-shit as he tells the driver, right here is fine, thank you, yes just here, on the side, that's fine, STOP.

He pays the taxi, feeling again the small surprise of not having to haggle or argue over the fare (he lives in Manhattan now, but cannot shake the Delhi reflex that makes him ask the cab driver "How much?" and wait tensely for the answer), walks past the gap-toothed ranks of the parked cars out to where the land ends, not sure what he is looking for.

This is not really land's end, of course - somewhere, in the far reaches of Colaba and Cuffe Parade the land goes on, life continues, opportunity stretches away. This is only a comma, a punctuation mark in the earth's calligraphy. And yet from this point there is no road forward, no path across the sea gleaming like wet tarmac. Only this spine of black rocks disappearing into the water as though the city were some giant reptile clawing its way out of the depths. Or slinking back in. The sea is calm tonight, its subdued lapping no match for the tremendous roar of the metropolis stretching away behind him. And among the boulders the couples he tries not to stare at are holding hands, lost in a memory of the sunset, not trusting themselves to speak. Knowing that from here there is nowhere left to go.

[Reading Vikram Chandra - I'm on page 380 of Sacred Games - always does this to me: makes me nostalgic about Bombay. Ah, well].

A Three-minute Silence

Meanwhile, the world mourns Momofuko Ando - the inventor of Ramen noodles - a man whose work has touched so many of our lives.

Here's the PhD Comic Tribute

And here's a lovely appreciation by Lawrence Downes over at the New York Times.

Personally, I don't eat anywhere near as much Ramen as my single student status would suggest, and then only with additional vegetables to make it a better, more balanced meal (Mom, Dad: Please note!), but I still can't help feeling a sense of attachment to the man who single-handedly doubled my cooking repertoire.

The thing about making Ramen is, it's such a mystical experience, isn't it? It's almost like inspiration. There you are with this set of notions curled and tightly packed together, and then you break this mass of solid confusion into a few smaller pieces (taking care to catch the little bits that fly loose when you do this), let them simmer for a while, and before you know it you can reach in there and draw out one clear strand of an idea, which you then have to loop about in words to keep it from slipping back into the general mess. And each time you do this it seems a little bit of a miracle - you're never sure at what point the dense coils of data turned into a palatable idea, and it's always hard to believe that the transformation really worked. People say PhD students eat a lot of Ramen because it's cheap and easy to make, but I think it's because of the nature of this transformation, because we secretly dream of the day when our research can go from data to results in just three minutes [1].

Notes

[1] This 2-3 minute thing, is, of course, a total con. Sure, cooking Ramen takes three minutes - assuming you just happen to have a pot with 2 cups of boiling water handy and like your noodles on the seriously al dente side.

I wonder if there are people who seriously time themselves to make Ramen? Do they spend years in training try to break the 2-minute Ramen? Is it likely to become an Olympic event?

National Chauvinism Week

Did I miss the memo that declared this National Chauvinism Week?

First we had this graduate of the Larry Summers' school of thinly disguised chauvinism, telling us that Men and Women are Different and that some things are more suited to Men and others to Women (presumably any differences within Men and within Women on these dimensions - whatever they might be, since 'Shanky' is not kind enough to spell them out for us - are insignificant compared to this yawning gap between the quintessential Man and the stereotypical Woman) and that you can't be a Man unless you protect your women and carry their 80 kg suitcases up the stairs [1]. It follows from this 'argument' (though calling it that is a travesty) that Feminism is flawed because it keeps Men like Shanky from being Men, which, obviously, is what feminism has been trying to do. [2]

And now we have this Good Samaritan who wants women to stop wearing skimpy dresses, which, according to him, put their underwear on display. Not that he's saying this because he's offended or anything, oh no, he's only trying to protect the Dignity of "our Indian girls" and saving them from the Big Bad Influence of Western Culture. And lest you misconstrue what he's saying, he's not advocating that all women wear burqas (yet), it's okay with him if you wear "not-too-long tops (which some girls can carry off with class)" - isn't that kind of him? What a nice, upstanding, kind-hearted soul he is, doling out advice to women suggesting that they cut back on their individual freedoms in order to uphold his prejudices, and putting in the "little proper thinking" (which, he informs us, is all that is needed to make the right choice between the "right way n wrong way of doing things") so that they don't have to worry their pretty little innocent heads over it. He's even conscientious enough not to put pictures of these dignity compromising dresses on his blog! (Girls: deep breath, then all together say: "Our Hero"). Now if only he'd told them what they should wear so that their appearance can meet with his approval, which, presumably, is their only purpose.

Do the caves these people live in get cold in Winter or something? If this goes on, DesiPundit (who linked to both the posts) is going to have to create a separate section for insecure men threatened by female independence.

Notes

[1] Now that I think about it, he may have a point. The world would be a better place if Real Men like this [3] were restricted to hard physical labour leaving the rest of us to do things we're good at, like logic, or grammar.

[2] See also Gawker's response here

[3] I, of course, am not a Man. Not only can I not lift 80 kg suitcases, I'm also firmly of the opinion that anyone who packs an 80 kg suitcase deserves to have to carry it herself / himself.

Three Fun Poems

...because who says poetry has to be staid and serious:

Counterman

- What'll it be?

Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo.

- Whaddaya want on it?

A swipe of mayo.
Pepper but no salt.

- You got it. Roast beef on rye.
You want lettuce on that?

No. Just tomato and mayo.

- Tomato and mayo. You got it.
...Salt and pepper?

No salt, just a little pepper.

- You got it. No salt.
You want tomato.

Yes. Tomato. No lettuce.

- No lettuce. You got it.
...No salt right?

Right. No salt.

- You got it. - Pickle?

No, no pickle. Just tomato and mayo.
And pepper.

- Pepper.

Yes, a little pepper.

- Right. A little pepper.
No pickle.

Right. No pickle.

- You got it.
Next!

Roast beef on whole wheat, please,
With lettuce mayonnaise, and a center slice
Of beefsteak tomato.
The lettuce splayed, if you will,
In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus,
And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded
In a multifoil arrangement
That eschews Bragdonian pretensions
Or any idea of divine geometric projection
For that matter, but simply provides
A setting for the tomato
To form a medallion with a dab
Of mayonnaise as a fleuron.
And - as eclectic as this may sound -
If the mayonnaise can also be applied
Along the crust in a Virtruvian scroll
And as a festoon below the medallion,
That would be swell.

- You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva?

Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette
In the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

- You got it.
Next!

- Paul Violi (first appearance in Shiny; included in The Best American Poetry 2006)

***

George W. Bush in Hell

(Inferno, Canto XXVI)

Rejoice, America, risen to such glory
That over land & sea your eagle wings have flown
Imperiously, & all the depths of hell resound your story.

Among the caverns there, O sorrowful to set down,
I came upon many of your citizens, a fact
Which can bring no honor to your name.

Upon a blazing plain they lay; my guide picked
His way upon the bridge above, & meekly
Did I follow. Over geysering fires we trekked

& deep within each column of flame could we see
A figure in torment writhe. As on a June night.
When farmers of Vermont watch moon-bright fields seethe

With fireflies—teeming, darting lantem lights
In stands of soybean & com—so it was then
That this eighth ditch gleamed, fire-tongues bright

As midnight LAX or Houston from a DG 10,
The landing wheels opening. The flames along the stygian floor
Streamed like interstate headlights, flaming ribbons.

My guide now spoke, sensing my fear "There dwells
Within each flame a soul in permanent
Auto-da-fa, his sin an inexhaustible fuel.

An oil rig derrick blackening the firmament
With fires unquenchable. These are the givers
Of fraudulent counsel, whose arrogant

Disdain of truth has brought them here."
The flames like flashbulbs crackled the dark.
& as he spoke a single flame drew near.

Inside, a wavering face, lips parted as if to speak.
"Master," I inquired, "Can these shades
Converse with us? For this one I know & seek

To hear his sorrowful relation." My guide bade
The form approach: "This one is also familiar to me,"
He answered. "His deeds of infamy have made

His name renowned in hell. Princeling of a dynasty
Of blackguards, his forebears & brothers likewise bum
Within these terrible precincts." Then suddenly

From the white-hot pyre the face emerged
& spoke: "So great was my lust for power, to lead
My land as my father—now consigned also to these fires—

Had done before me, that I came to believe
In the God-ordained virtue of all my deeds.
Truth was my toy. No counsel could dissuade

My certainty, nor satisfy my cronies' greed.
For to exercise my zealotry I gave them leave
To pillage & bring havoc. Their coffers overfiowed

With booty. O how deeply did we crave
To level Baghdad, to suck its oils dry.
That first night, when my pilots rained a spray

Of fire on its neighborhoods, I cried
For joy. I watched the smart bombs seek their prey
On a television screen three stories high.

Even my generals gasping—such dazzling display.
What thundering shock & awe had I made.
Great Babylon did grovel on its knees.

How mighty was my sword. What matter that so many died
Below, or in the months & years to follow.
My father was revenged, my longing assuaged,

& haughty I walked the West Wing hallways
To the Lincoln Bedroom, where I slept as deeply
As a man can sleep, my enemies laid low.

My apotheosis complete. But see where this has taken me.
Who brought two countries to shame & ruin.
My every cell is napalm. Take pity

On me, you who may leave this fiery tomb
& walk again among the living." With this
the flame drew back & took its place among

the woeful throng, the other flickering tapers.

- David Wojahn (originally appeared in The Kenyon Review, Fall 2005; now published in Interrogation Palace)

***

Plus Shipping

"inspired by Kokopelli, Golfer-Pelli is a fun-loving symbol for our times."

from one of the 400 mail-order catalogs we received last year.

Certainly it was a premonition of a Navajo warrior that men
in plaid would take up sticks and club a ball into a hole's

submission. And that a god of prosperity and joy, flute
player, source of the wind's conversational obsessions,

secretly longed to represent the beef-fatted, tax-sheltered,
divot-spewing tribe in their hunger for real estate

made green and blemish free, acres of fertilized eternity.
It happened like this: someone named Stan or Rita

spanked their cell-phone open in Manhattan traffic, called
Lou Ellen or Robbie and went on at an ecstatic pitch

about a program they saw on the Learning Channel last night
that document cave paintings in Arizona of this guy

with hair like spiders and a body twisted as if
he'd swallowed a hurricane, and wouldn't it make a hot

knick-knack if we put him in knickers with a seven-iron
in his hands? And later, after the market research,

after paying one company to come up with a name, another
to design the eyes, hips, the casual-yet-indigenous-gestalt

needed to represent a sport built around the prophecy
of leisure, Stan or Rita will confess to something like

inspiration, a little zing, a small frisson disrupting
their preoccupation with fear that screamed low

cost, high profit. And I wouldn't mind if I were ten
or drunk most of the time, if I'd missed

even half the commercials utilizing the dramatic skills
of Super Bowl quarterbacks, the winks of senators

who reached for president but fell one scandal short,
wouldn't care if I forgot Michael Jackson

trying to sell his crotch, Elizabeth Taylor
hustling the diamonds of her scent, if just once

someone would stand before a camera and simply say
I've made this offensive thing but won't leave you alone

until you send me ten bucks. Golfer-Pelli's destined
for mantles, to fill that hole between vase and clock

where space bleeds, needing the bandage of artifact.
And what of the Buddha alarm clock, Shiva spice rack,

the shoe polisher in which red and green fuzzy wheels
pop from Mohammed's ears and spin your leather clean?

Give it time and you'll get a crack at each
and more, for as we eat and sleep there's someone

flipping through a magazine, strolling the open veins
of ruins, touching forgotten texts, sculpted faces

of a people centuries gone, who can't help but think
there's beauty and sorrow and money in every one of these.

- Bob Hicok, from Plus Shipping


Categories: Poetry

Random Memory - Take 2

Over at his blog, Heh heh describes one particularly drunk and eventful weekend that we spent at WIMWI five and a half years back.

My initial plan was to write up my version of the story - subjecting the whole incident to a Rashomon like retelling - but I realise you're probably better off hearing his version because I don't remember that much of the evening.

Here's what I do remember: I remember meeting up with s. and heh heh and going from dorm to dorm looking for alcohol, like some nomadic tribe that would move on to new hunting grounds when all the prey in the area has been exhausted. I remember eventually making our way to Dorm 13, where fool-jhadu handed me a big coffee mug full of neat bacardi and told me to drink up because we were going to miss the show. I remember thinking this might not be such a good idea, then (because I was already half a dozen drinks past the point of sober reflection by this time) complying by downing the entire contents of that mug down in about three gulps. I remember walking to the auditorium. I remember getting really pissed off because people weren't letting the facchas perform and wrestling s. to the floor in order to teach him a lesson (the fact that I did this in the middle of the stage, and knocked over half the mike equipment in the process did not, at the time, strike me as a contradiction).

I don't remember being carried out of the auditorium and placed on a table in the open air. I don't remember rolling off the table and hitting the ground (though in hindsight it doesn't seem so hard to predict). For all that you need to rely on Heh heh.

I only remember waking up with a bruised feeling in my side, being carried to some unspecified destination by s. and p.j. I remember s. cribbing about how they were only doing this for me because of the grades I got and if he'd got drunk and passed out no one would have cared. I remember p.j. deciding to use this opportunity to demonstrate the Correct Way of Hauling a Human Body, a technique he apparently learnt long ago in a mountaineering course. His demonstration of this consisted of first showing what happened when you held someone the wrong way (the body in question - mine - ended up face down in the flowerpots) or held someone the right way but didn't coordinate it properly (same result) before finally demonstrating the proper way to get the job done.

The next thing I remember is waking up in the basement of D-1 (the girl's dorm) where I was staying (my only friends in my junior batch were both women), and realising with horror that I had an early morning flight to catch in order to make it for the introduction and training program for my new job. I remember thinking I needed to get out of the dorm and find someone who would get me to the airport. I remember standing up. I remember wondering why people say you can't feel the earth rotate, because there it was, spinning about all around me. I remember marvelling at how clean the floor in that room had been kept as I flopped down on it. I remember wondering why I hadn't noticed this when I was standing up. I remember realising that I couldn't see anything more than four feet away. I remember wondering where the hell my glasses were.

And I remember standing in the doorway listening to the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs to the basement. Without my glasses I couldn't actually see who was coming, but I figured there was a 50-50 chance that it was someone who knew me and I could ask her to go fetch one of my friends who would make sure I made my flight (I remember trying not to imagine what would happen if I missed my first day at work because I was too drunk to make it). I remember saying "Hi! Do I know you? I was wondering if you could help me..." and hearing a sudden gasp followed by the sound of running feet, a slammed door and three bolts sliding shut. I don't blame her. I'm not a pretty sight even when I'm sober, and at this point I was unshaven, dissheveled, bleary-eyed and must have looked like something out of a B grade slasher movie. I remember trying to explain to her that I didn't mean any harm and getting no reaction. I remember going back to bed and thinking about how I would spend the long years of unemployment ahead of me.

Eventually MR came and found me and got me out of there. Eventually I made it my flight (thanks to the able stewardship of n.) after sharing a last minute chai with u. and heh heh. Eventually I got cleaned up and by the time the training session started I was my crisp, professional self again. But I have this clear memory of wondering whether I could make it up those steps if I crawled up them on all fours, and not being sure I could.

It was one of the best nights of my life.


Categories: Personal

A Small Disappointment

January 6th, 2007. Temperatures in the high 60s. It's a record for this time of the year, the radio says, and still the people out on the streets wearing their sweatshirts and their light coats, having learnt not to trust the weather, knowing well her fickle ways.

Only the squirrels are deceived. I watch them gambolling in the trees, calling out to each other from the high branches. Lacking calendars, it does not occur them to doubt that Spring is here, to suspect nature of playing tricks on them. They scamper chuckling up the tree trunks, grateful to have made it through another winter.

What will they think, I wonder, when the mercury sinks tomorrow, when the snow eventually comes? How confused they will be, how bewildered. How much they will regret the energy they have spent on this false reprieve, not realising that there may still be bitter days to live through.

I must learn not to think of the squirrels. Of their quiet tragedies, their handfuls of despair. Of these small disappointments that the margins of our lives are filled by.