Orhan Pamuk
It seems that Orhan Pamuk has become fearful about his safety in Turkey and has apparently moved to New York.
His Nobel lecture - My father's suitcase - is here.
It seems that Orhan Pamuk has become fearful about his safety in Turkey and has apparently moved to New York.
His Nobel lecture - My father's suitcase - is here.
I forgot how pleasantly surprised I was to read this review of R K Narayan in The New Yorker until I read Amardeep's post on it.
On a completely different note, this is the reason I appreciate Kieslowski's ouevre so much. Like many Indians from a certain sociocultural background, Kieslowski seemed very Indian in his pessimistic outlook in life - yet he was deeply humane.
Here is a somewhat mischievous interview with Zoe Heller in Morning News:
ZH: ..... One of the big arguments I am having with their father is whether I should want them to be, really for lack of a better word, cultured. Should I want to transmit to them the things that are important to me? Like reading, or certain kinds of classy music. All that stuff, right? And he says the thing you want to hope for is that they are not at all intellectual. Because what does intellect give you except unhappiness. Intellectually unhappy. What you want most for them is that they are— ...Happy. And honest and decent .."
Marjane Satrapi now has a blog.
(via Laila Lalami)
You can find some links about Persepolis here.
Around 1850, Baudelaire began asserting that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that the artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, in Baudelaire's phrase, 'a botanist of the sidewalk', an analytical connoisseur of the urban fabric. Because he coined the word about Parisians, the 'flâneur' (the one who strolls) and the 'flânerie' (the stroll) are associated with Paris and the kind of pedestrian environment which accommodates leisurely exploration .... Walter Benjamin adopted this concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle. ... His flâneur is an uninvolved but highly perceptive bourgeois dilettante. Benjamin became his own prime example, gathering his social and aesthetic observations from long walks through Paris. Even the title of his unfinished Arcades Project comes from his affection for covered shopping streets.
But then there is Wiktionary, its sister site, which says its a Dutch word:
1. A person who likes to parade about town in order to be seen.
2. (Flemish) A saunterer; a lounger.
From the NYT review of The Best Intentions:
James Campbell of Guardian describes a passage from Philip Gourevitch's book on Rwanda
- A really nice interview that Terry Gross conducted with Kiran Desai and Anita Desai; it aired in Fresh Air on November 20th.
- Another Fresh Air interview with Jhumpa Lahiri from Sept 2003
- A surprisingly good Amitabh Bachchan interview that aired in April 2005
Next week's New Yorker has a new story from Alice Munro.
They also made available from their archives an older story from her -'The Bear came over the mountains'- and an interview that she gave in 2001.
Read The Peace War by Vernor Vinge. It is a great read (i.e. if you have a taste for science fiction). Vinge recently published a sequel to this book (Marooned In Real Time) recently which is supposed to be quite good too.
I thought Jhumpa Lahiri's Indian Takeout provided an apt description of a Bengali household's trip back home from USA:
I also loved the following lines in Rudrangshu Mukherjee essay about myth making in Indian history in the Telegraph (Via Indian Writing).
Then there is this advice on how to deal with information overload:
1. As others have said, get thee to a library--or, if not to a library, to a quiet place where you can listen to music, read books, watch movies, or whatever. For all you know, this quiet place could be home--or it could be a coffee shop. But it helps a lot to have peace and quiet.
2. It also helps to have no internet. The reason the internet is bad is because most of it is meta-information, though obviously there are exceptions. One of my professors in graduate school told me once that the only way to learn anything was by "sustained attention to primary sources." This is an academic way of saying that, instead of spending thirty minutes reading all of the movie reviews on Metacritic, it's better to go see the movie. ....."
Read the whole thing.
Nabokov's Lolita was published 50 years ago this month in France. NPR has interesting audio commentary here.
I have just started reading the book. So the renewed interest - spurred by the 50 year anniversary - kind of works out for me.
Here is an interesting Nabokov site.
I was book-tagged by Anand - like - a few months back. The subject seems to had largely gone off the Blogospheric radar by the time I resurfaced – but I had most of the post written up and it seems too good to miss out on.
Total number of books I own: I have a few hundred books here in Connecticut. A lesser number that I have back home .... If it is a family thingy and I can take the liberty of adding my father’s and my grandfather’s stuff to the over all count, then it would likely be a few thousands. But our tastes in books are often quite different.
Last book I bought: When I originally wrote the draft of this post, it was 'Milosz’s ABC’ by Czeslaw Milosz that I had picked up from the remindered table of Colisium. (Colisium is my favourite place to browse on the way back from work - whenever I am working out of New York. Their remindered books tables always showcase an eclectic and eccentric collection. they have really cool photography or art books that I covet, but can't afford at the exorbitant original price)
But anyway, that was then. Unfortunately, I can't make such high falutin noises right now. The very last (new) book I bought is this . I finished this in 2 nights flat while the Milosz is still in a pristine condition on the shelves.
Last book I read: "Big if" by Mark Costello (interesting interview with Mark Costello here)
Five books that mean a lot to me:
This is hard. I have taken some liberties with this question. Also, in retrospect, considering the fact that I travel so very little now, a surprisingly large percentage of my choices seem to be travelogues.
- Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines: I have very little ‘depth’ on any writer – specially ‘important writers’. Chatwin and Amitav Ghosh are two of the exceptions. At one point of time, I had read everything by or about Chatwin that I could lay my hands on. It is a bit of a struggle trying to decide which one of his books I like most - ‘What Am I doing here’(a posthumous anthology of odds and ends. Delightfully idiosyncratic) or ‘Songlines’ or ‘In Patagonia’. 'Songlines' is probably the book that comes to my mind immediately when I think of Chatwin. I used to run into all sorts of people in all sorts of places for whom that book was a defining experience. On a monnlit night in Kumaon Himalayas on trails all but washed out, walking exhausted behind a British accountant turned climbing guide, both of us thinking only of the next step on that muddly, rain soked trail – he immediately came to life when I mentioned 'Songlines'. ( He thought Chatwin was dishonest in his portrayal of both the anothropologists and the aborigines in Australia) ... in the Nevada desert, in the burning man festival flush with dotcom consulting money talking to a neo-hippy crowd ...
Chatwin was a bit of a fake and his narrative was somewhat made up. His life story lost some of the luster when I got to know more about him. To my Indian middle class mind, he seemed slightly cruel and callous in his personal life. But he wrote like a God. (And yes, I obviously love the chiseled prose of Hemingway too – specially his early short stories. But Chatwin is closer to my times)
-Anything by Amitav Ghosh. His first book - ‘The Circle of Reasons’ was not as enjoyable as the rest of his oeuvre. And I haven’t yet read ‘The glass Palace’ or the ‘Hungry Tide’. But he is probably the only living Indian author whose book I would pick up without even reading the blurbs – whether it is fiction or non-fiction.
- Tagore’s Sanchayita: It is an anthology of Tagore’s poems. It is a part of my childhood. I miss it.
- I am a little hardpressed on deciding the 4th book. This is more about a place than a book. If there is one place that I am in love with and that I miss from time to time, it is the foothills of Indian Himalayas. And three books that bring it alive for me:
Eric Shipton’s ‘That Untravelled Land’
Bill Aitken’s ‘The Nandadevi Affair’
Prabodh Sanyal’s “Mahaprashtaner Pathe” (I can't find it anywhere anymore)
-Peter Drucker’s ‘Adventures of a bystander'. I often think about it and for a memoir - it has had a surprising amount of impact on my thinking. I reread it last year and it still seemed fresh.
- The last guy on my list is someone that I haven't read for a very long time. Syeed Mujtaba Ali's ‘Deshe Bideshe’ (on his time in Afghanistan in the early thirties before he was kicked out alongwith all all other foreigners) and 'Shabnam' (a love story based in Afghanistan) are both incredibly well-written. I wish there were translations that I could hand to people who wax eloquent on the current crop of books on Afghanistan.
(Ok. I cheated. But so what?)
5 people I am booktagging:
Edward Hugh
Rueben Abraham
Prashant Kothari
Nitin Pai
Sathish
I thought this was exceptionally well done. Here it is.
The other commencement address that I enjoyed as much is the one that Rushdie deliverd to the Bard College graduating class of 1996
Last March, I had gone to a SAJA authors event in New York. This weekend, browsing through weblogs, I ran into this description of the event. It captures the proceedings quite well. I don’t have much to add other than to say that I had foolishly carried a bunch of Amitav Ghosh books in the hope of getting them autographed. Ghosh had escaped right after the reading. I ran into other Ghosh fans forlornly hunting for the author during the cocktail hours. Lahiri did seem frosty. But I had quite enjoyed the extract from her story that she read. I felt the same sadness after listening to her that I felt after reading Pankaj Misra’s ‘Butter Chicken in Ludhiana’ from which Misra read during the event (Misra was awesome on stage and captured the heart of the crowd). They all found a rich motherlode of material in the gauche pettinesses of the middle class India and its subterranean racism. I realize that this is what all good writers are supposed to do. But the aloofness sometimes leaves me a little melancholic.
That is why Tagore's humanism is such a breath of cool air for me. The really pleasant surprise of that evening was Anita Desai. Her reading of Tagore’s letters brought back the uncomplicated smell of childhood. It was my last recourse as a child when there was nothing else to read at home (that and the Bengali almanac!).
I have retained very little of what I read of Tagore between Class two and Class ten (after which I read very little Tagore for a very long time). Except for an irritating habit of loud opinions on all things Tagore through the greater part of my twenties and a sometimes impressive ability to spout uninternalized bits and pieces of his poetry and songs, I have very little to show for it.
What I do remember are the letters that he wrote before he formed a firm worldview. They were a joy to read and accessible even to a child. In that gathering in New York city, Anita Desai unexpectedly brought two of these letters to life for me.
Some Bengalies find it hard to accept the fact that that Tagore is hardly mentioned anymore in the fashionable literary circles. I do not completely understand why writers move in and out of public consciousness. in case of Tagore- it can probably be partly explained by the fact that the political and cultural center of gravity in post-independent India moved in different and unexpected directions.
Part of it is probably the lack of good translations in English (this is unfortunately true of almost any good Indian writer not writing in English). As Andrew Robinson said so perceptively wrote about Ray and Tagore:
…..Non-Bengalis now have at least two good reasons for wishing to learn that beautiful but elusive language.; to read Rabindranath Tagore on the original, and to follow Satyajit Ray’s films, ‘I think that is still true, but perhaps Ray’s name should now come first. In his time, Tagore’s fame far exceeded Ray’s – It was almost like that of his friend Einstein. – both as a man and an artist. Today, the picture is more confused. In the future I believe the world is more likely to watch Ray’s films (including his inspired Tagore adoptions) than to read, look at, sing and perform Tagore’s work. Tagore, however, will remain the more compelling, indeed legendary personality. For Tagore was an artist in life as Ray was in film.. Neither man, of course, lends himself easily to biography.”
I feel that the larger reason for Tagor's becoming so inaccessible lies in the fact that in Bengal we have managed to idolize him. Tagore (except for his songs) is more admired than understood. For a generation after his death, Tagore’s Santiniketan continued to produce people with a certain capacity of thinking outside the narrow contours of social, cultural or racial boundaries. But over time, Viswa Bhartati seems to have turned into a dry, parochial custodian for Tagore – they turned him into a God.
As a child, I remember reading an essay by Tagore called ‘Byaktipuja’ (idol worship of men) where he lamented the Indian tendency of putting great men on a pedestal and worshipping them. It is ironic that this is exactly what we have done to Tagore in Bengal.
It was perhaps not coincidental that the best write up on Tagore that I can find on the net is by Amartya Sen (he was named by Tagore). In spite of my mild and irrational sense of hostility towards Sen, I must admit that Sen does his subject justice.
Here is the essay.
Desperate to finish that book? But can't master the discipline or the creative juices right now?
Here are 50 strategies for making you work.
Here is some more.
I am told that Bird by Bird is excellent too.
Doug Henwood's Wall Street is now availble free for download under a Creative Common license (Here are the recent Crooked Timber and Brad Delong posts on the subject)
Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson is also available free for download.
(links via Mefi)
From The Writing Life by Meg Wolitzer:
To write in fast and furious mode is to leave the world completely. This kind of writing requires the self-involvement that the young do best. ... A novel written in a kind of hypergraphic mania often possesses an excitement and passion that survive the journey from the writer's mind to the reader's mind. These hurried novels have a recognizable urgency about them, while the slower ones tend to possess a careful stateliness. Neither is objectively "better," but personally I often like the fast ones more. They're feverish, eager and rarely bogged down with excess weight. More slowly written novels are bigger, more complicated, less sleek.A writer starts a novel not knowing exactly what kind it's going to be or how long it will take, but the answers soon become apparent. F. Scott Fitzgerald spent a matter of months on much of The Great Gatsby, and nine years on Tender is the Night, a disparity that seems about right to me. They're both beloved books, but Gatsby is the one that's nearly perfect and practically recitable. Flaubert's Madame Bovary is an example of a "medium-slow" book (five years), full of suspended, minute description, but it reads in part as if it might actually have been written fast, so inevitable and whirling is Emma's downward spiral. And you just know that Henry James never wrote -- or did anything -- in a madcap rush. Fast and loose writers, however, sometimes have an impressionistic, intuitive, streamlined vision, as if their observations were made from the window seat of a bullet train. (Ed: Vikram Seth apparently wrote Golden Gate in seven days. i.e. the first draft)
(via Behenji's blog)
Steve Almond has a terrific column on MobyLives:
Because what really bummed me out about the Amazon haters (Ed: here)wasn't that they disagreed with my politics, but that they immediately summoned such genuine outrage at me for deigning to express a political opinion at all.They regarded Candyfreak as entertainment, which meant, basically, that I was supposed to serve as a candy monkey for them: swinging from my zany licorice ropes and making funny gibbering noises. By including my political views, I was in direct violation of The First Law of Social Apathy, which holds a popular culture should exist divorced from any of the moral facts of its current political condition. What folks want from the pop — hell, what we deserve as tax–paying Americans — is a nice soothing mind bath. ... This is the reason, for instance, that so many people can vote for a party that believes gays are sub–human but still watch "Queer Eye For the Straight Guy," (because fags are so darn funny!). It's also the reason liberals can drive around in SUVs, while decrying policies driven by oil–dependency. (Ed: Ouch! Now is the time to claim center-right beliefs - really, almost ...)
But of course it is one of the functions of art (yes, even popular art) to call people on such bullshit, to raise people's consciousness, to awaken their capacities for compassion. William Faulkner probably put this best in his 1951 speech, upon accepting the Nobel Prize: "The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." It seems to me that the time has come answer this call.
It is a well written piece.
I have often questioned the desirability of writers holding forth on everything under the sun. Good writers often have terrible political instinct (Hitchens, Naipaul, Chatwin et al). I have always felt that the lively prejudices that makes one an interesting writer is often an hindrance in other aspects of life. And Steve Almond knows this:
RB: Are you suggesting that arts and writers are morally superior?SA: No. I don’t think so. I wish they were. Because in my idealization of art I view someone like Saul Bellow— who is capable of writing such beautiful, compassionate, deeply empathetic works, so insightful and so merciful—I actually assume that if they are conscious enough to do that then they are good to the people around them. That’s a bunch of crap. It’s a bunch of nonsense. Not just in Bellow’s case, but in many people’s cases. I don’t think they are morally superior, but I think when they are good as writers, in the moment that they are creating, they are exquisitely human and in a way that is Christly. That is, they love their characters unconditionally and not for their nobility and good deeds but for their inequity, their wickedness and they are totally unjudgmental in the best moments.
Be that as it may, Almond makes an impassioned and persuasive argument that contrasts my own views on this subject.
Charles' Orwell links is a great George Orwell resource. Over at that website, I read Politics and the English Language. 59 years after Orwell wrote it, it still feels fresh.
Towards the end of this essay, Orwell wrote that all writers should follow the following rules:
"-Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous".
Now that's hard! I almost wrote 'like a breath of fresh air' at the end of the first paragraph and 'easier said than done' at the beginning of this paragraph ....
On my bookmarks waiting to be read ...
Short short stories by Dave Eggers (via Kingshuk)
Best Russian short stories
Surrounded by Sleep by Akhil Sharma
Hills like White elephant by Ernest Hemingway
Hell Heaven by Jhumpa Lahiri
(The last three links via Another Sub Continent)
Did you know Dante's Divine comedy is available online? (And no, I am not planning to read THAT!)
How big an advance can an unknown novelist expect on her Debut book?
Justin Larbalestier asked a lot of novelists. Overwhelmingly, the answer seems to be - not much. You most certainly can't quit your day job banking on that advance.
John Scalzi initiated a good thread in Metafilter on the subject. In his weblog, he had earlier suggested that expecting to make a living writing -specially if you are a genre fiction writer- is unrealistic. He also has good pointers for those writers who aren't scared off by such assertions!
I can't conclude this post without referring to this awesome interview on Slashdot, in which Neil Stephenson claimed (in answering the second question) that unlike 'literary fiction' writers, sci-fi writers actually make a living writing. He was probably talking only about well-established writers.
I think this comment on Crooked Timber about endings just about sums up all Neil Stephenson books:
While I won't go so far as to say it is one of the best novels out there, it is certainly a jolly good read! Entertaining, stimulating and yes - interspersed with Stephenson's mini-lectures on whatever catches his fancy. He is a bit of an acquired taste - like Jazz or good red wine. Try it - if you haven't already read it.
Interesting writing competitions/opportunities:
Lonely Planet's travel humour writing competition is open to all. The last date of entry is Nov 30.
Outlook Picador Non-Fiction Competition (site registration required) is open to all Indian residents. The last date for entry is Nov 30th.
Caferati short fiction competition is also open to all Indian residents. The last date for receiving entries is Oct 31.
Nanwrimo is a global Internet jaggernaut that you may already be familiar with. As in previous years, you start writing on Nov 1. And anyone, anywhere can participate for 30 days for caffeine soaked writing adventure.
Over the past 2 years, I wrote a few essays on South Asia for a few other webzines / publications. The majority of them are accessible through the following links. (When I manage to add the rest of the links, I would notify though the home page of this weblog).
SatyaCircle
The Jammu and Kashmir Dispute: At the Crossroads
Fighting AIDS in India
Deconstructing Hindu extremism
A cheer for South Asian writers
Outsourcing, its backlash and where we go from here
Living in India
Mr and Mrs Iyer
Greetings from Varanasi
(The formatting on Living in India seem to have gone a little topsyturvy on migration from their previous content management platform)
Others
For sometime last year, I collaborated on an interesting group weblog called IndiaEconomyWatch. It still has some very interesting posts. A good number of these posts are also available here on 'Living On India' into which we had subsumed Indian Economy Watch last year.
Michael Young's 'The rise of meritocracy' is a book I want to get to at some point of time.
Here is a short story by Timothy Noah on Michael and Toby Young, the father and son. Toby Young's tribute to his father is also interesting reading.
In my first year in college, I ran into Peter Drucker's brilliant memoir Adventures of a bystander in our hostel library. It was one of my favourite books in college and made a lasting impression on me. After many years, the month before I ran into another copy of the book in our local library. It was relief to find that it is still a gripping read.
It is a gem of a book. Smart, erudite, well-written, a joy to read. It doesnt require great concentration as some of Drucker's management books might do, but it still has brilliant insights. Read this book just for the pleasure of reading a good non-fiction.
In those dieing days of what used to be the Austro-Hungarian empire, Austria still played host to some of the most brilliant and eccentric people in Europe. The book shines thanks also to this cast of charecters. Consider for example this exchange that Count Traun-Trauneck in Austria (one of the forgotten players of Europe' pre-world war underground socialist movement) had with young Peter Drucker when he was just out of school in the mid 1920s:
Traun-Trauneck
Of course you'll tell me that there are more socialism voters around in Europe these days than there were before 1914. But then socialism was based on hope and not on numbers. Now it is based on envy. That unspeakable clown down in Rome (Ed: Mussolini), understands this. Before the war he was the most militant Socialist and always tried to make up to us and get our people to write for his newspaper. At that Vienna Congress of 1911 he was the firebrand who promised to deliver 'the revolution' should war come to Europe. But then he saw what really happened- and he understood, I'm afraid. to be sure, socialists here in Austria, and those in Germany and France, and the labor party in England are decent enough chaps; I prefer them to the clericals and priests who now rule us here in Austria. Indeed, if I had been in a visible position in the civi service as the one your father held, I would have resigned with him when the Monsignors took over the Austrian government two years ago. But still, that's all the socialists are today - decent chaps who won't do any good or too much harm by timidity and stupidity. But if Socialism really should come to power anywhere in Europe from now on, it will either be a tyranny like the ones you see it Russia and Italy, of it will be a government by chief clerks and paper pushers. The dream is gone. ...."
Later Drucker continued:
The socialist parties in Europe did have the votes the period between the two world wars. But that was all they had- and it did not make the slightest difference. For they no longer had vision, belief, commitment, creed, or credence. ..."
Last week I finished reading "The Elephant Paradigm" - an extended essay about contemporary India' struggle with change and economic liberalization.
Das is an unrepentant social liberal and a champion of free trade. For those familiar with current thinking on trade and globalization, some of what he says may seem to tread over well-worn grounds. Some of the stuff sounds a little breathless too. But the book is still a very good read for anyone interested in India. He is incredibly well read, has a refreshing intellectual honesty and is not afraid to champion unpopular or unconventional opinions. At his heart, Das seems to be a liberterian, but one with deep humanitarian instincts.
I did not always agree with him. But I found myself surprisingly engaged by the book.
The book is primarily concerned with the economic and social liberalizations of the nineties and their impact on our private and public lives. In the last few chapters, Das charts out a broad agenda that he feels that India should follow if it is to pull its people out of grinding poverty and illiteracy. He covers a lot of ground and as a result the book lacks in depth. But scattered throughout the book is a lot of food for thought for anyone who frets about India.
Unfortunately, it is not available through Amazon.
Amitav Ghosh has a new book out in the market! 'Hungry Tide' is not yet available in US bookstores, although it seems to be available through Amazon in UK.
This page links to its reviews in British newspapers. Outlook also reviewed the book here. Indrajit Hazra, another Bengali writer writing in English, interviewed Ghosh about his book and reviewed it for Hindustan Times.
Also, Ghosh's website now sports a new look. Page navigation is still rather painful, but there is a lot of interesting content -specially for us Ghoshofiles.
Kingshuk sent this to me a few days back. I thought it is very good.
We drop you at O’Hare with your young husband,
two slim figures under paradoxical signs:
United and Departures. The season’s perfect oxymoron.
Dawn is a rumor, the wind bites, but there are things
fathers still can do for daughters.
Off you go looking tired and New Wave
under the airport’s aquarium lights,
with your Coleman cooler and new, long coat,
something to wear to the office and to parties
where down jackets are not de rigeur.
Last week winter bared its teeth.
I think of summer and how the veins in a leaf
come together and divide
come together and divide.
That’s how it is with us now
as you fly west toward your thirties
I set my new cap at a nautical angle, shift
baggage I know I’ll carry with me always
to a nether hatch where it can do only small harm,
haul up fresh sail and point my craft
toward the punctual sunrise.
—Mark Perlberg
'I tend to send my copy in on deadline, which by New Yorker standards is tacky. It has to go through three or four proofs. The fact-checkers proof; the grammarians proof. And it is amazing. Someone does go to see the film, to make sure I'm not lying. If I'm reviewing a Tim Burton film and I say that Ewan McGregor's wearing a bright blue shirt, they'll say to me, 'It's more like bright turquoise'. But you should get it right, especially if you're going to have some fun with it. Otherwise it's cheating. The New Yorker is the only place in the world where you can pull a piece to change a comma to a semi-colon. It's a haven for the pedant. I love it."
Anthony Lane (via Bookslut)
Identity Theory has an interesting interview with Saira Shah here. (I have another post on her memoir here)
The article by Hari Kunzru on why he refused the Llewellyn Rhys Prize is touching. There is actually some precedence for this sort of stuff. Amtav Ghosh refused the commonwealth writers prize for 'Glass Palace' in 2001. And of course Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood to the Brits in 1919 in the wake of Jalianwala Bagh.
Andrew Arnold has a nice lineup of the books from the last 25 years of graphic novels.
Kinky Friedman wants to be the governor of Texas. For a moment there, I felt like writing that people get the politicians they deserve, but the risk of an odd Texan coming back and reminding me of Indian politicians was too great.
Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis made waves in Europe. The English translations seem well received in USA too:
Here is the Guardian profile
The Time story
And the NYT review.
Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran is another memoir out of Iran that sounds interesting. Atlantic Monthly has an interview with Nafisi here. The Guardian story is also nice.
'The Storyteller's Daughter' by Saira Shah got reviewed in NYT recently and does sound like something I would like to lay my hands on (via Oxblog). I dont think there has been an insider's perspective (well, it is not quite that, but at least she has an Afghan ancestry) on Afghanistan in English language for quite some time. A very long time back, I read Syeed Mujtaba Ali's travelogue of Afghanistan in Bengali (I also talked about it here). Ali was in Kabul in the thirties right before a coup, during a time when coups in Afghanistan used to be family affairs. This was in the thirties, set approximate around the same time as Byron's celebrated travel history Road to Oxiana. It is extremely well written, but unfortunately not available in English.
Anyway, I don't think these women are representative of either the education or the freedom that is available to most Muslim women in Middle Eastern or Central Asian countries. They mostly come from the educated, city-based upper middle class families that have always been more Westernized, more liberal than the traditionalist rural folks in Asia. But they do go a long way towards demolishing the image of Muslim women that the Mullahs have been trying so hard to project.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over talent and craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
NanoWrimo is a wonderful site with terrific forums, great ideas and cool functionalities. If you have been thinking of writing fiction for the last so many years and it is just that you have been waiting for the right time, mood, leisure etc., I think you should check this out. Many of us need some sort of artifical external pressure to get us kick started. The Nano community does it very well for writers.
Check out this David Thomson interview. Thomson is one of the most erudite and readable people out there on the subject of films. He wrote the 'New Biographical dictionary of films; a book I plan to read.
Guardian has a story on online fiction. The best thing is the links at the end of the article. There is another Guardian story called Envy extracted from the current issue of Granta that is quite well written. I feel some things are best left unsaid and feel a little ambivalent about this story.
Jessa of Blooksluts, from where we love to steal links, has finally written about her addiction.
There was an opinion poll on Best female novelists in Bretain sometime back that BBC reported. Four of Jane Austen's books make it to the top 10. BBC also says that Gurindher Chadha (the director of 'Bhaji on the beach' and 'Bend it like Beckham') is busy making a musical loosely based on a Jane Austen novel. The Jane Austen adaptation that I absolutely adored was Sense and Sensibility. The script was written by Emma Thompson and the movie was directed by Ang Lee. (There was great story on The New Yorker on Ang Lee a few weeks back that included hilarious anecdotes about the making of Sense and Sensibility).
I read Alexandra Fuller's memoir of her African childhood, 'Don't let's go to the dogs tonight'. Check out the book if you get a chance. There is a Random House interview with the author is here. Guardian also has extensive reviews and excerpts from the book.
Guardian, incidentally, is coming to America. Michael Wolff has the scoop.
I also finished reading Evenlyn Waugh's Decline and Fall which was great, dante Club which was good and ....yes J K Rowling's new Harry Potter book which I finished over a weekend (No jokes allowed!).
It occurs to me, that lately I have been reading a lot more writing about writing or writers on writers than actually reading new fiction. I feel a little frustrated about this. There is a stack of half finished books on my bedside. I feel bad just looking at them!
Anyway, I always wanted to check out Zadie Smith's then new book White Teeth. I had forgotten all about it, until a few days back when I read this delightful essay that she wrote, about the experience of having her book being turned into a movie.
It is not strictly true that I am not reading at all. I am in between 'Decline and Fall' by Evelin Waugh and fat WebMethods manuals. I quite like 'Decline and Fall' so far. I am not sure I can say the same about the WebMethods product line.
So I was quite looking forward to reading this essay on Waugh by Hitchens. It is well written, but ultimately disappointing. I wonder wheather Hitchens realizes that what he said about Waugh is equally(if not more) applicable to Hitchens.
Tantalizing as this may be, in conceding that moral courage may be shown by reactionaries or good prose produced by snobs, it does not make the leap of imagination that is required to state the obvious: that Waugh wrote as brilliantly as he did precisely because he loathed the modern world. Orwell identified "snobbery" and "Catholicism" as Waugh's "driving forces," ....
If you replace "catholicism" with atheism and "snobbery" with a certain kind of social insecurity, we probably reach closer to what are Hitchens' driving forces. I am not sure Hitchen would be as enjoyable a read if he did not specialize in intellectual hatchet jobs.
Incidentally, Sid Blumenthal seems to have finally gotten his revenge in his new book 'The Clinton Wars'. (For those not clued in on this, the linked story should provide the background. Also, for accessing Salon, click on the free one day pass thing. You'll have to view some annoying ads before you can access the rest of the content). The book seems to be doing well. New York Observer joked this week about the poor Clinton staffer whose job must had been to shuttle between Bill Clinton's book editor, Hilary's book editor and Sid's editor trying to make sure that these people don't contradict each others when describing the same events.
Appropos of nothing, this literary quiz in Guardian and this world news quiz in BBC are very good exercises for bruising your ego. I am not gonna tell you how I did!
Steve Almond's primer on writing pornography is very cool. I blogged his interview in Identity theory a while back. I really ought to read the book (Of course all the Steve Almond links are stolen from Jess Crispin's weblog who seems to post anything that Almond writes).
Anne Burke in a rather well written rant about nothing in particular:
Rebecca Traister managed to catch the interesting side of LeRoy in a story about him and his rather strange world:
(The last two links via Mobilives)
Reason online has a very good essay on Vaclav Havel by Matt Welch. (Welch also maintains a popular 'warblog', a genre that that I find a little disturbing).
I find Havel one of the most enigmatic people in contemporary Europe. I am ambivalent about the quality of his statesmanship or the wisdom of his politics. But his courage and humanism has never been in question.
Sometime back there was also very good profile of Havel by Remnick in The New Yorker. It is very well written. I saved the link somewhere for weblogging later (with suitably weighty sounding commentary) and forgot all about it until now. (Thanks to google, I rediscovered it in