One of the most ridiculous things about India*

Art by Pavel Tchelitchev

Art by Pavel Tchelitchev

is that, for the longest time, it was illegal for two men to have sex. Imagine how backward we feel compared to countries that actually let two men or two women get married and/or adopt. Now, the Delhi High Court has discovered that Section 377  of the Indian Penal Code, which prohibits homosexual acts, violates basic human rights.

Pretty neat. I hope this means good things for the rest of the country.

I also get to remind my dad that I was right about 377 being a remnant of British colonial law. He was all “Ambedkar invented the Indian Constitution out of the blue.”

*this is for my non-Indian friends who think we’re cool and liberal about sex.

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James Midgley on editing poetry; Two Serious Ladies

Mimesis cover, issue 4

Mimesis cover, issue 4

Nic Sebastian has put up the next interview in her series called ‘Ten Questions for Poetry Editors’. This one is with James Midgley, editor of Mimesis. Check it out. : )

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Currently I’m reading stories by Raymond Carver (Where I’m Calling From) and poetry by Ted Hughes (Birthday Letters). Before that I was reading a novel by Jane Bowles called Two Serious Ladies.

I don’t know if you can call it a novel exactly, or maybe you can: the movement in general is outward.

Some months ago, N mentioned the book to me, saying it was very good. A week or so ago, I stopped by where he works to chat (I do that now; so much free time, I think I’m living someone else’s life) and as I was leaving he handed the book to me.

Now, this is the sort of thing that happens when I’m on a strict reading regimen, of which everyone seems to know (a strict reading regiment is my version of having a lifelong medical condition or trying out different diets). I totally caved. This is why I never managed to be Catholic or stop drinking coffee. Zero will power.

The great thing, though, was that I loved the book. It’s been a long time since I read something in three days flat. The past couple of years I’ve slowed down my reading pace. Most books suffer from being read intermittently along with several other books; rare gems are read slowly and solemnly like bibles.

Recommended

Two Serious Ladies tells of Christina Goering, an eccentric sort of single woman, and Frieda Copperfield, who is equally strange and married. I have to be cautious about saying “eccentric” and “strange” because I don’t want to diminish them in any way. Yet they both seem to be on the edge of insanity. They don’t do the expected thing. Christina seems obsessed with sainthood, and yet she ends up selling her suburban home to live in a much less comfortable house on an island with several different men. What’s curious and refreshing about the whole thing is that Christina is convinced that these affairs will take her towards sainthood. This is what she must do. And it makes you think of the different kinds of sainthood that are possible, that can be created.

The novel begins with Christina and Frieda meeting at a party. Christina then begins her adventures and Frieda leaves on a holiday to Panama with her husband. She spends most of her time in brothels, befriending prostitutes, bailing them out and so on. At the end of the novel, they meet again and are changed.

N had told me that Bowles’s prose is sparse; I expected it to be sparse and affected (natural pessimist that I am), but it’s just very bare. No fancy descriptions, no tricks, no verbosity. I like.

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Question: what is the blogger etiquette when it comes to mentioning people you know? I’m never sure if it’s OK to mention names unless you’re citing or linking to someone. Is it rude? I’ve asked permission a couple of times, but usually I just use the person’s initial instead of saying “my friend” or “an acquaintance,” which is boring and confusing. I’m beginning to think letters of the alphabet are also confusing…

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TFA reading: July 3

Malllika Prasad, Ajith Hande, Balaji Manohar and Ashvin Mathew will be reading Ram Ganesh Kamathan’s new play, Ultimate Kurukshetra, at Crossword on Friday.

Kamatham has created work for the stage, film, radio and video games. His previous works include Project S.T.R.I.P. (2008), Creeper (2007), Crab (2006), Dancing on Glass (2004) and Square Root of Minus One (2002).

Venue: Crossword Bookstore, ACR Towers, Ground Floor, 32 Residency Road, Bangalore – 1

Date and time: Friday, July 3 2009 at 6.30 pm

There will also be a repeat performance at the Rangashankara on July 4 at 11 am.

I should be at the Crossword performance, though, from experience, play performances in a bookstore don’t generally work. Too many strays. Then again, I’m interested in Ram Ganesh’s work. If I’m not mistaken, he was shortlisted for the TFA Award. Gotta show some TFA love.

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May ‘09 in books and movies

Recommended

Recommended

I’ve always wanted to know what “wildly entertaining” meant. In reviewspeak it seems to apply to almost anything that doesn’t involve suicide. I’ve rarely been “wildly entertained” by a book — I may be amused, thrilled, excited, mildly bored but curious, and so on. Most of my favourite books aren’t “wildly entertaining” — that’s a strong pair of words and we should use them carefully, right?

Vonnegut is definitely wildly entertaining. He’s a tricky one though; I can see why he may turn some people off, the way I’m off Martin Amis. But I’m reasonably comfortable liking him after Breakfast of Champions and I’m trying to read Slaughterhouse next.

I’ve become extremely wary of metafiction, especially when authors become characters in the books, but Vonnegut does it well, and by that I mean he does it unapologetically. And he leaves the sly stuff behind.

With Vonnegut as presiding deity, there is a strange, exciting kind of equal treatment meted out to all characters, major and minor. Each is allowed a history and an anxiety.

He’s also wildly inventive — that’s another one I used to never get — he has a hundred ideas for a hundred books at the same time and Kilgore Trout gets to author them.

Highly, highly recommended

Highly, highly recommended

Something has been bothering me about Crime and Punishment. It’s an exquisite book, first of all. I don’t know if you’re allowed to describe Dostoevsky like that, but he’s my poison. There is no use me trying to offer an argument about his work; it’s masterfully written from beginning to end, except maybe for that epilogue. I’m not sure if I’m rejecting it merely because the Christianity isn’t to my taste or of it actually is out of sync with the rest of the novel. What do you think?

I’ve been thinking of how deprived my childhood has been of folktales. My grandparents probably thought it was too pagan to tell us anything non-White. They were strict PG Wodehouse fans and that was that.

But my grandmother (who is still alive) had a friend named Kusum Kapur, this lovely old lady with white hair who lived alone not far from us. It was clear she was developing a bad case of Alzheimer’s and eventually her daughter came and took her away to Pondicherry. Until that time, however, Aunty Kusum would visit Nana, be forced to read one of my stories (all Nana’s fault, I promise) and have tea. Then she would go home and call us several times, thinking she had forgotten to tell us some important piece of news, which she hadn’t. She was the most fascinating woman.

Aunty Kusum used to write children’s books, largely forgotten today. I managed to steal the copy of Stories of Ladakh she had given my grandparents. It consists of a set of folktales of Ladakh which she collected on a trip she made there. It’s sad how badly proofed the book is; and it says “imprint of HarperCollins India” on the cover. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying the stories.

I also read Ballard’s Running Wild, which was a good book to read, but not great. Funny how it’s predictable and chilling at the same time. I loved this line:

In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.

Then there was The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 7, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, which wasn’t all that hot, except for a couple of stories. Took me a while to get through this one.

May was good for movies, but there were some questionable ones like — and I’m going to get flamed for this — No Country for Old Men. Fortunately it’s been too long since I saw this film for me to write a full critique of it, but I will say that it bears an uncanny resemblance to a film I watched long ago  in which someone dropped a Coke bottle from a helicopter onto tribal land.

Not recommended at all

Not recommended at all

The real atrocity was Pi. I don’t what the big deal about Darren Aronofsky is. He seems to enjoy clichés far too much. This is a conversation (edited, more or less) S and I had about the film:

S: First, the premise is wrong. The Hebrew did not have a character for zero, so the whole concept of pi being some sort of code is wrong, because there is a zero in pi. I’m a geek about such things, so it put me off. Plus, the grains in the cinematography hurt my eyes. So i didn’t see any reason to watch a movie with a crappy premise and difficult visual content

A: Yeah, I read about the math problems.

S: Plus I watched it when I was in college, so we were all ready to jump at the inaccuracies.

[...]

A: What you have is an emotionally underdeveloped half-crazed scientific genius (first cliché) seeking to place a design on the world (second cliché).The idea of patterns in the world — scientific, religious, etc — is not new. And it can be very exciting. But then you have this guy with an overblown sense of himself, completely convinced of his own ability to decipher this great code. The way it’s shot it’s almost as if you’re supposed to identify with this man, feel his anguish, but he’s so repulsive. I felt no sympathy for him whatsoever. Then there were the pills. Another cliché. He wasn’t at the edge of insanity (fun) so much as dancing in the middle of it. And of course, there is no pattern for him. He has weird, inexplicable dreams. Cliché. There’s some figure from the corporate world after him — poor genius! — yet another cliché. He pushes away those around him, experiences some weird violent epiphany. I lost my patience at that point. I’m not sure if he found his pattern and then discovered the irrelevance of math, or if he finally got it into his head that there is no pattern/if there is a pattern he’ll never get it and therefore discovered the irrelevance of math, or if he just lost his mathematical genius and therefore became a happier person. Cliché #5 billion — the simple experience life simply and are simply happy all the time.

That was mainly for Lane, who asked me why I hate Aronofsky so much.

There were a few more disasters, like this stoner film made by Jesse Dylan (Bob Dylan’s son), and Deception, but here’s what I really, really liked:

Highly recommended

Highly recommended

The Third Generation is my second Fassbinder film and it’s pretty damn good. It’s one of those slightly difficult films I managed to like for more than just the cinematography and sound on the first go — in other words, I “got” it without having to think about it too much. (Me = dork) Someone else found the noise levels distracting, but that’s more or less the point. Plus, there are lots of queer subtexts.

Highly recommended

Highly recommended

I don’t usually like superhero movies, but Judex is a big exception. The film is a sort of pastiche of a much older TV series. It’s incredibly stylish and very sexy. And there is the famous bird ball scene that you can’t miss.

Recommended

Recommended

It’s been a while since I was told I was too young for something. Apparently A and I are “too young” to watch Rohmer films. That’s what you get for arguing that Le Rayon Vert is “good, but not great” with a diehard Rohmer fan. Heh. Anyway, it is a beautiful film, exquisitely shot and very carefully written and performed. It’s about a lonely woman, Delphine, played by Marie Rivière, who finds it hard to get on with life the way other people do. Even something simple like taking a vacation becomes a source of great anxiety for her. It’s a psychologically meticulous film, but not at all taxing on the viewer. I liked it, even though I still have gripes with the… predeterminism, shall we say?

Complete list: books (in order of completion)

  • The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 7, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, 2008, English (various) (short stories)
  • Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut, 1973, English (UK) (novel)
  • Running Wild, JG Ballard, 1988, English (England) (novella)
  • Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1865, translated from the Russian by David McDuff (Russia) (novel)
  • Stories from Ladakh, Kusum Kapur, 1994, English (India) (short stories)

Complete list: movies (in order of viewing)

  • Le Rayon Vert, Eric Rohmer, 1986, French
  • Judex, Georges Franju, 1963, French
  • Sex and the City: The Movie, Michael Patrick King, 2008, English (US)
  • Made of Honour, Paul Weiland, 2008, English (US)
  • The Pineapple Express, David Gordon Green, 2008, English (US)
  • No Country for Old Men, Ethan & Joel Coen, 2007, English (US)
  • The Third Generation, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979, German
  • A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971, English (UK)
  • Goodbye Lenin!, Wolfgang Becker, 2003, German
  • How High, Jesse Dylan, 2001, English (US)
  • Pi, Darren Aronofsky, 1998, English (US)
  • Deception, Marcel Langenegger, 2008, English (US)
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Poets on Poetry: Walt McDonald

Walt McDonald

Walt McDonald

Abstractions and generalizations are like chunks of lead tossed on a pond of water — ” the art of sinking in poetry.” Abstractions are hired assassins; they’re paid to hold you hostage, to keep you bound to your couch, in house arrest. They don’t want you to travel, to see the vivid images of other regions; they hope you won’t discover what you’re missing

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Appeal to the senses; give specifics, details, for intensity. Open our eyes to the splendors of your imagination; delight us. A poem is not an ink blot.

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Writing poems is invention, making up something as you go along, discoveries you probably wouldn’t have thought of, if you carefully outlined or planned a poem. (But if that method works for you, bravo!) Usually, there’s a surprising difference between writing accurately about facts and events that “really happened” vs. imaginative or creative writing. Believe in the possibilities of discovery, the rich and undiscovered oil fields and gold mines of the imagination -— that reservoir of all you’ve ever experienced, heard about, or read, seen in movies, or glimpsed, all of it jumbled together and waiting to be found.

Source: ‘Advice I Wish I’d Been Told’, Valparaiso Poetry Review

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Synecdoche, New York and a poem

Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) with the actor playing him (Tom Noonan) and his wife, Claire (Michelle Williams)

Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) with the actor playing him (Tom Noonan) and his wife, Claire (Michelle Williams)

I’d been looking forward to this film for a while. After watching it, I’m unsure what to think. It’s the sort of film you don’t want to judge/dismiss too quickly.

What I’m sure of: it’s text-book Baudrillard.

I shy away from reading a lot of theory, but this I can see very clearly. The blurring between the real and the image. Cotard, the protagonist, goes so far as to consider Simulacrum as a name for the play he is building over decades.

In brief, the film tells the story of Caden Cotard, an American playwright obsessed with the deterioration of his own body, the fact that he is hurtling towards death at all times. After his first marriage fails and his artist-wife Adele Lack moves to Germany with their daughter, Olive, he receives a MacArthur Fellowship. Determined to direct a play that will have him remembered, he proceeds to tell the”brutal, brutal” truth about human existence. This truth is his own life in startling similarity. He finds actors to play the people in his life, including himself. The set designer builds a replica of New York within a large warehouse, and another replica within the replica, and so on. The play, of course, is never complete.

The scale of this is startling. I don’t think anyone has done anything quite so vast. I admire the construction of it. Beyond that, though, there’s not much I find stimulating.

There is something inherently ridiculous about a man standing before his (incredibly large) cast and crew, saying “brutal” over and over again. I’d like to think something this meta laughs at its own preposterousness, especially since Kaufman (this is his directorial debut) is known to have a sense of humour. But there’s none of that.

Sometimes I think what artists want to do (and that includes myself) is to create something labyrinthine: a labyrinthine world in which psychologies, realities, emotions, everything is labyrinthine. We’re searching for some sort of core that’s not there. And I can’t help but find it funny.

There’s definitely something missing in Synecdoche, New York. It may not even be the humour I keep talking of. It might just be that it’s shallow. Because after all the elaborate sets, complicated storytelling and symbolism, what you’re left with is the shell of this man, Cotard. He’s absolutely pitiful and pathetic. It’s all very morbid. A and I were talking about how very few directors are capable of filming an interior, human space. Kaufman does not seem to be one of them. What you have instead of Cotard’s or any other character’s interior is a lot of verbiage. I’d recommend reading some of the dialogues before watching the movie. They are rather funny:

Caden Cotard: I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That’s what I want to explore. We’re all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we’re going to die, each of us secretly believing we won’t.

You also have smart alecky references to Cotard’s syndrome, “a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that he or she is dead, does not exist, is putrefying or has lost his/her blood or internal organs” (IMDB).

Despite all of these glaring problems, I don’t want to dismiss the film yet. Maybe I’m missing something. Anyone want to help me out? I’m giving this a couple of months.

_____

My sexy poem

Yesterday I got a comment from someone saying ‘Congrats, Aditi’ with a link to this. It’s the Guardian Poetry Workshop with John Siddique. His exercise was to write a poem about the night and my poem ‘How to experience the night’ got picked. : )

This is the first time my submission has been picked and I’ve been sending them poems on and off for the past two years. Most often my submission suffers from not enough revision, and sometimes I send such awful doggerel, it’s a miracle I don’t realise before sending the damn thing in. I’ve even broken my promise to write for every one of those workshops (even if I don’t send the poem in) when something too difficult came up (read formal poetry). So this was supercool. I was in a really good mood yesterday. I’m back to my subdued self today, probably because I have to go back to work tomorrow.

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How to write annoying fiction

Of geckos

There’s a reason I’m wary of reading new authors, particularly those hailed as creative geniuses or The Next Big Thing. I’m a cautious reader, constantly aware of my own mortality and the absurd number of books that I need to somehow fit into this short window of time. The occasional bad book is fine, particularly when the badness is so outrageous it’s entertaining. Constantly having to engage with bad books on account of being nice to the literary market is too much self-sacrifice for me.

The most recent annoyance is Amit Varma, a famous blogger who has always wanted to be a novelist, and his recently published first novel is a huge hit. He’s the new Chetan Bhagat all right, with one major difference: several supposedly intelligent people think his book is brilliant, managing a precarious balance between “seriousness” and mass appeal. It deals with “issues” while still being easy to read. Easy to read is great; incompetent is another.

My suspicions about My Friend Sancho began when I saw its cover. Based on the artwork (pink heart, kooky font, cartoon lizard), I jokingly suggested the book was a hetero male version of chick lit and got a few laughs. The more serious problem was that I hadn’t read the book and wasn’t qualified to review it negatively (or otherwise, however unlikely). It’s a tiresome argument, so I won’t go into why I think you can often (though not always) judge a book by its cover.

To satisfy my raging curiousity (which existed despite my initial dismissal of the book), I read the free PDF version of chapter one available on Varma’s blog. I’m not inspired to read more. The writing is abominably bad. If you get past the bathos of the news report with which the novel begins, you’ll find yourself dealing with some oddly written conversation (who says “Boss can kiss my buttocks” without being publicly derided?). The clincher, of course, is the  ultra-radical “This is how many times my character masturbates” introduction:

My name is Abir Ganguly. I work for a tabloid in Bombay called The Afternoon Mail. I am 23. I eat meat. I am heterosexual. I don’t believe in God. I masturbate 11 times a day. I exaggerate frequently, as in the last sentence.

It’s funny how I can’t remember the last time writing about masturbation in a dull, declarative fashion was even vaguely interesting. That’s probably because it was before I was born. Maybe it’s a throwback to Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English August. (I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.)

If there’s one thing that annoys me more than a smug writer of literary fiction, it’s a smug writer of popular fiction who wants to be literary. Or who wants to fuse the two, but is thoroughly unsuccessful. At the same time, I don’t doubt Varma’s monetary success. He’s just not coming close to Murakami any time soon.

But that’s just one novel/What’s in a name

I’ve been working on a list of annoying trends in fiction. Varma was just my inspiration to finally write all of this down.

Right on top of the list is the unnamed protagonist. Either s/he is unnamed throughout, slyly referred to as a he or she or the name is only glimpsed once or twice in conversation while the narration consists solely of befuddling “he”s and “she”s. It’s as if your character is saying, “I’m too important to be named!” or “My name will tell you nothing! The essence of me is in all the mundane things I do, think and speak” (my versions) or “I’m so important I refuse to tell you my name” (S’s version).

Here are some reasons why authors should name their characters and deign to use them: 1. People generally have names. 2. If you use your character’s name early on in the novel (for example, “Rahul went to the store to buy some candles for the badly written sex he will soon have with his overdescribed next-door neighbour” is far superiour to “He went to the store to buy some candles for the badly written sex he will soon have with his overdescribed next-door neighbour”) you won’t risk your reader confusing “he” with all the other “he”s having badly written sex in your novel. I’m done.

The other naming trend, which is only marginally less vexatious than the one just mentioned, is to give your character a hyperfictional name for some sort of juvenile teehee effect. It’s an insta-pomo technique used in non-pomo novels. Pretty scary overall.

There are some silly names I’m willing to forgive: Humbert Humbert, because it’s perfect and Nabokov is a genius; Kilgore Trout and the lot, because Vonnegut is one of those rare writers who can go meta without stimulating your gag reflex. But in general, writers should stay away from cutesy names.

Her last breath came out in a stream of yellow butterflies

Lots of amateur writers seem to have taken to writing magic realism. Marquez and Murakami, though more or less blameless in their own writing, seem to be at fault. Or rather, their popularity is. What the amateurs fail to see is the crucial difference between throwing in random supernatural events into a narrative and writing magic realism: the latter is far more readable.

Here’s where I wish I studied harder when I went through my Marquez phase. Recently I read his Nobel acceptance speech, and what hit home for me was the idea that there was no other way to trace the history of Latin America –this continent of excess — but to write magic realism.

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

The best magic realism, in my opinion, is strongly tied to the land, to what it has witnessed and suffered through. I’ve seen this in Marquez and Okri, and more recently in Murakami. It’s an incredibly political mode of writing, and why should we forget that, even as we enjoy it?

The Jhumpa Lahiri narrative

I have to thank R and A for this one. If you’re really clever, you will intentionally annoy me (but I’m just one person, who cares, right?) and write your own JLN. That’s how you get both the big bucks and a Mira Nair film.

The JLN is a typical ABCD* story; the protagonist is a first generation Indian-American (or whatever-American), struggling to reconcile his Brownness with his Whiteness. What you need is breadth. A lazy writer will go back a couple of decades to said ABCD’s birth or thread ceremony or first BigMac and proceed from there. A smart writer will go back several more decades to when and how ABCD’s parents’ marriage got arranged and what food his or her mother ate during her pregnancy. This gives your novel an epic quality.

Then you need a taste for the exotic and the skill to convert the exotic into suitably bland foreign-audience terms. Like calling daal “soup made with lentils.”

You’re still, however, at the short story level, with small, neat revelations for your reader. If you want scope and metaphysical grandeur, you need a literary allusion. Once you have your literary allusion (say, Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat), you need to make several parallels. So name you character something that could be an Indian version of Nikolai Gogol, like, I don’t know, Nikhil Ganguly. Then make Gogol his pet name and also his father’s favourite writer, and make an incident that explains why, and so on.

R made the astute observation that there’s no evidence from the writing that Lahiri has read The Overcoat, or anything on or by Gogol save some sweet little blurb that quoted Dostoevsky or Pushkin as saying, “We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat.” The more I think about it, the more it looks like a cheap trick to end a bland and melancholic narrative in a superficially open-ended way. I’d love to think we all find ourselves in some piece of writing or the other, but how? Tell me how and I might believe you.

Lahiri isn’t the only one milking the allusion-trick. S commented that most new stories are rewritings of the Mahabharata or Ramayana or whatever mythology is dominant in a particular country. The idea that man and woman have the same anxieties as gods, goddesses and mythical beasts is enticing for a while. Unfortunately I’ve read one too many rewritings of Draupadi’s cheerharan to pay such writers (*cough* Shashi Deshpande) any serious attention.

However, rewritings aren’t necessarily bad. Everything’s intertextual these days and there’s no outside of it, really. What I’m asking for, I suppose, is intertextual and inventive. Plus some intelligence. In other words, don’t cheat me.

*For phorin readers, an ABCD is an American Born Confused Desi, where desi = Indian.

Fatigue and the ensuing slow, painful death

I love it when experimental writers aren’t really experimental. They’re just rehashing something old without anything new thrown in. The non-linear narrative; the vampire seduction by media images à la Baudrillard; the intellectual and emotional decay of contemporary existence via white noise (DeLillo is exempt); characters with difficult but unavoidable relationships with their therapists; characters who are film/music buffs peevishly spouting trivia the whole time; characters who observe/make stories and/or conversation up about other people on a train, bus, in a restaurant, or some other urban setting; frustrated opposite sex best friend relationships; characters looking at themselves naked in the mirror and describing their every hair to you (what am I supposed to think? Yay, you’ve read Lacan?); conservative suburban middle-aged women having extramarital affairs; descriptions of insomnia or other sleep disorders; rivers and water bodies as symbols of the divine or of earthly separators; pill-popping maniacs and madmen in the family — haven’t we had enough of these?

My favourite of these despicable tropes is the city as a theme/allegory/explanation for what happens to characters. It can be done well and it has (my favourite is Dostoevsky and St Petersburg), but when you start comparing your character’s life to discarded jasmine flowers in a pool of stagnant rain water in a pothole on a very crowded Bangalore street, you’re in danger of losing your sanity and mine.

The problem with tired tropes is not that they are tired, but that the writer is unaware of their tiredness.Worse than being unconscious of one’s bad writing is being gleeful about it. Too many writers are.

I’ve been thinking about the greatest flaw a writer could have. I used to think it was arrogance. I’ve changed my mind: arrogance may have some basis in fact. A general lack of humility accompanied by high levels of smugness may be the culprit.

Edit: I’ve used the terms “popular” and “literary fiction” in the way they’re commonly conceived. I don’t necessarily agree with the terms, and I’m not referring only to genres when I say “popular”.

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Of interest: Mix tapes, manifestos and cultural subjugation

Katrina Vandenberg on arranging poems for a collection

If you think of a work of art as a physical space, the Beatles have performed the trick of enlarging their space by claiming to narrow it. H. Emerson Blake, former editor in chief of Milkweed Editions, says a poet can perform similar sleight of hand: A title and any section titles or governing conceit probably work best if they expand, rather than limit, the reader’s understanding of the book. And when titling your book, in addition to asking, “What do all these poems have to do with one another?” he says you might also ask, “Who is the author who puts all of these poems — these marmalade skies, tangerine trees, and the Albert Hall — here in one place?” In the Beatles’ case, a psychedelic vaudeville group.

Thanks to Angela France for this link.

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Robert Archambeau on the death of the manifesto

Broadly speaking, writers of poetic manifestos in the early decades of the twentieth century aimed at one of two kinds of things: to challenge the marginalization of poetry in society, and to challenge the center of poetry from the margins of the art. Dada and Surrealism provide examples of the first kind of challenge. If there’s any generalization one can make about such unruly movements, it’s this: that they set out to break down the barriers between art (including poetry) and life. Poetry had become marginal to society because it had been cordoned off by the institutions of literature, by journals and anthologies and professors, and the febrile manifestos of Dada and Surrealism claimed that dissolving those institutions, and the very idea of art and literature as distinct areas of human activity, would return poetry to the broader life of the people. Other groups had the more modest (but still, when one thinks about it, rather grandiose) goal of reforming literature, challenging moribund orthodoxies from the margins and making literature new. Imagism is a good case in point: its well-known dicta (“Go in fear of abstractions,” “Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs”) were meant to clear away the dominant modes of Georgian verse and elevate the taste of a small group of neophytes into a new literary standard. The center, hoped the Imagists, would not hold, and their aesthetic would be loosed upon the world.

At least one of the conditions that led to the flourishing of manifesto writing still obtains: poetry is certainly somewhat marginal in our society. But what about the idea of a central style in need of reform? There’s really no single dominant poetic school in American poetry. Think of some of the most prominent poets, and immediately we see a range: Robert Pinsky’s discursiveness, John Ashbery’s and Jorie Graham’s elliptical verse, the formalism of Kay Ryan or Donald Hall, the Surrealist-inflected work of Charles Simic, the identity politics of Adrienne Rich or Rita Dove, the experimentalism of Charles Bernstein. Their work can’t be said to constitute a single dominant style in any meaningful sense. Certainly there are kinds of poetry (and kinds of poet) that are excluded from prominence, and we should remain sensitive to this and alert to the inequities of the current institutional arrangement. But we really don’t have an official culture like that of the old Soviet Union, nor do we have the narrow establishment taste of, say, France in the age of salon painting.

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Dr Tara Tatiana Pandey deconstructs Savita Bhabhi

The subtext reeks of subjugation. The subjugation, no less of Bharat by India. Savita Bhabhi has power over Manoj even though she is the woman and he the man — an inversion of the traditional power structure. This represents the power disparity between Bharat and India being the reverse of what would be predicted simply by the populations, and therefore raw political power (in a representative democratic system) of the two entities. As Savita controls Manoj’s actions, so does India command the multitudes of Bharat. Savita directs the means of Manoj’s gratification; this parallels the dependence for their entertainment by millions of denizens of Bharat on entities controlled by English-speaking Indians. Manoj must seek Savita’s permission before starting on the means of obtaining release, just as Bharatiyas depend for their sustenance on an economic system controlled by Indians. In Manoj’s unfailing use of the honorific ji is addressing Savita, we may infer the use of honorifics and other entitlements by Indians to cement the seeming of their superiority over the lowly Bharatiyas. In a final, poignant moment in the episode, we see the at the conclusion of his labour, the unsated Savita gives Manoj another chore, holding out the promise of another unequal encounter. This clearly represents the eternal nature of the unequal system they enjoy in the minds of the Indians, and their confidence in their continued ascendancy over the Bharatiyas, whom they intend to exploit forever, a sort of Thousand-year-Reich that lasts forever in the mind of the oppressor.

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For those who don’t know Savita Bhabhi and are planning to google her, expect to find a pornographic comic. Oh, and check out Dr Pandey’s bio: “Dr Tara Tatiana Pandey MA (Sophism) Lund University, PhD (Literary Deconstructionism of Popular Culture) St. Thomas-Freiburg Universität is the Alan Sokal Fellow of Egregious Deconstruction at the University of California, Sunnydale. Her book Tijuana Bibles in Modern Theology is now out in paperback.” :D – A

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Poems in The Smoking Poet

I have a couple of poems (you have to scroll down a bit) in the latest issue of The Smoking Poet. I’m looking forward to reading the issue. : )

Oh, and if you’re curious, I found TSP through Twitter.

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I’ve started work. I’ve been saying that for a while, but it was mostly training and practice until now. Yesterday I found myself walking into a room with sixty students. My mouth went dry. This is the same person who thought she’d be fine TAing in a foreign country if she got the chance.

Most of my classes are small, thankfully. Seven or eight students, and they’re adorable.

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I’m being an unbearably slow reader. Still on The Eyes (Paterson) and I’m also reading Kafka on the Shore (Murakami).

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I watched Videodrome a couple of days with my rat (read brother). I think I’ve gotten him hooked onto Cronenberg. He didn’t complain when I told him to get Eastern Promises the next time. Usually he makes a fuss when I impose my taste on his.

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I’m trying to imagine myself travelling alone (outside Bangalore) and it’s just not happening.

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Rudimentary thoughts on sequencing poems

“What I’ve thought so far is that the poems in a collection should run like thoughts. Like how you think of, say, a sparrow because you saw one on a branch, and then you feel surprised because birds are so rare in Bangalore; then you think of the love birds in school (near the Opportunity school for children with development disorders) and how you used to watch them, and walking down the driveway, and a certain teacher, and so on and on.” 13/06/09

You’ll forgive the childishness of this post. I’ve only experimented with sequencing poems (once for a chapbook contest and once for the manuscript I sent TFA, plus a couple other times just for fun). The above quotation is from a short post on the poem ‘Gloss’ from Don Paterson’s The Eyes. I’ve been reading it for a month-long project. The idea is to write about the poems you read. Mine is turning out like a set of journal entries.

I noticed that Paterson’s poems are tightly sequenced. Sometimes the connections are obvious, sometimes it’s just a word or a feeling. But it’s clear.

Often I find myself wondering how a poet arranged his or her poems in a collection. It depends on the collection, of course. But in general, I think they should run like thoughts, the way I described above.

The difficulty is in balancing the natural and the artificial. The way in which we think is not entirely logical, jumping from one neuron to the next (note: amateur science). There is a lack of control. A sequence of poems, on the other hand, is constructed. It’s unnatural, even if it appears natural. That is, the poems are designed to flow from one to the next.

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