Kundera !

“A man longs to be immortal, and one day the camera will show us a mouth contorted into a pathetic grimace-the only thing we will remember about him, the only thing which will remain as a parabola of his entire life. He will enter a kind of immortality which we may call ridiculous. Tycho Brahe was a great astronomer, but all we remember about him today is that in the course of a festive dinner at the emperor’s court he was ashamed to go to the lavatory, so his bladder burst and he departed among the ridiculous immortals as a martyr to shame and urine. He departed among them just like Christiane Goethe, turned for ever into a crazy sausage that bites. No novelist is dear to me than Robert Musil. He died one morning while lifting weights. When I lift them myself, I keep anxiously checking my pulse and I am afraid of dropping dead, for to die with a weight in my hand like my revered author would make me an epigone so unbelievable, frenetic and fanatical as immediately to assure me of ridiculous immortality.”

Immortality, (p-56)

Back to p-55

“Of all the European statesmen of our time, the one who has most occupied himself with the thought of immortality (leaders like Narendra Modi?) has probably been Francois Mitterrand: I remember the unforgettable ceremony which followed his election as President in 1981. The square in front of the Pantheon was filled with an enthusiastic crowd and he was withdrawing from it: he was walking alone up the broad stairway (exactly as Shakespeare walked to the Temple of Fame on the curtain described by Goethe), holding the stems of three roses. Then he disappeared from the people’s sight and remained alone among the tombs of sixty-four illustrious corpses ,followed in his thoughtful solitude only by the eyes of the camera, the film crew and several million Frenchmen, watching their television screens, from which thundered Beethovan’s Ninth. He placed the roses one by one on three chosen tombs. He was surveyor, planting the three roses like three markers into the immense building –site of eternity, to stake out a triangle in the centre of which was to be erected the palace of his immortality."

Incidentally Samuel Beckett’s first work I happened to read was not Waiting for Godot, but his novel Watt. I consider myself lucky to have stumbled upon a copy of the book on the shelves of a small private library opposite Elite hotel in Fort Kochi over two decades ago. I borrowed the book and read it, if I remember correctly, in one or two sittings.

The experience that reading Watt gave me I’m unable to explain in words. So I borrow from Coetzee. (I’m at the fag end of Youth and here the narrator writes about Beckett).

“Why did people not tell him Beckett wrote novels? How could he have imagined he wanted to write in the manner of Ford when Beckett was around all the time? In Ford there has always been an element of the stuffed shirt that he has disliked but has been hesitant to acknowledge, something to do with the value Ford placed on knowing where in the West End to buy the best motoring gloves or how to tell a Medoc (wine) from a Beaune; whereas Beckett is classless, or outside class, as he himself prefer to be.” (p-155).

Thinking about, among other things, the sexual attacks and murder of women in recent months. What makes a human inhuman ? (what about the leaders responsible for genocides and wars and military leaderships...)

Psychology teach us that our behavior, thoughts and actions are produced by working together of a complex system of cells, organs and chemicals.

Sin; in the New Testament the Greek word for sin is hermatia, or quite simply, “missing the mark,” is quite easy to do with poor brain function, says Daniel G.Amen in his Healing the Hardware of the Soul. I personally don’t have much faith in any healing process. The question however is, is it alright to simply blame it on chemicals and poor brain function for our (forget Sin) inhuman behaviors? No, we cannot…
As solution, psychology would offer medications, therapy and even meditation, all that which deals with control of the mind. Not control,I feel, education would help. (Not the commercialized, exam-based education which is in vogue today) Education which enable individuals to think for themselves...This, again, as not a solution. There are no solutions. Seeking solutions to me looks rather naive. We should perhaps leave it to the `straighteners.'
Straighteners? This I came across in Aubrey Menen's The Space Within the Heart.

They are the neo-Freudians (Alfred Adler, Carl Jung...) who announced that Freud's view of the condition of man was altogether too gloomy. "We are not cripples who have been twisted and bent to fit into our nooks in a monstrous society," the neo-Freudians would have us believe. But long before neo-Freudians came on the scene, Samuel Butler, having foreseen them,  summed up in one sarcastic word. He called them ‘straighteners,’ says Aubrey Menen.

(‘Sin,’ says my notebook,’ is not sex any more. That has been coped with by the straighteners. To be sinful is not to conform, points out Menen). 

What an hostile territory we're in!

Then what about the leaders responsible for genocides and wars and military leaderships...Should we look into that matter separately? More to do with power perhaps? 

Antjie Krog

"Firstly, one has one life. It would be pathetic to try and keep it pure and bare in the hope of writing The Big Poem. In my book, The Big Poem compensates for nothing. Being embedded in a full-blooded life could enrich what one has to say; the feeding of your children could feed the writing. In those countries with opportunities, if the feeding of the children destroys the writing, then one should also accept the possibility that one perhaps did not have enough to say anyway. 

Secondly, to accept as the only choice the one that Rumens formulates, is to buy into that very male either/or notion. Male writers never had to “give up” penis, balls and beards – they turned it into the very essence of their writing. They never chose between a family and writing – they turned their singularity into the only category. Why do we assume that to be a good writer we have to be like them? Why do we assume that an epic poem about heroism or the loneliness of choice can be part of the canon, but a short poem about childbirth cannot?"

The full interview :

http://www.oulitnet.co.za/nosecret/antjie_krog.asp

Another link:

http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/collection/article_item/int_article/368

“To use a phrase I have always been fond of, I discovered that I was living on borrowed time.”

--Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions.

I share a lengthy poem by Ron Padgett posted by a FB friend and google to find out about the poet because the poem  impress me. 

This goes for every work of art, photographs, movies, articles which I come across on social media. This is how I learn. Picking up bits and pieces from here and there, like a rag picker, apart from history, apart from experience gained by staying alive each day...

This is perhaps what sustains me, besides my readings (not very extensive) and small happiness I extract out of life.

On FB,  friends (friends as well as strangers) from countries as varied as Philippines, Brazil and Colombia; a glimpse into their culture, language…This is the reason I befriended many on FB. This, the reason why I continue on social media. Just as it is with my small circle of friends in Chennai and elsewhere, less talk (with friends who are eloquent I enjoy listening to them which too is a process of learning) and more effort on discernment. 

Soldiers are pawns in the games of the State.

Today amid war mongering by the media following the so called ‘surgical strike’ by India on PoK/ camps on LoC; things in Syria getting much worse, amid the all round gloom, I chose to leaf through Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. I re-read the passages which I’ve underlined/ marked with blue ballpoint pen and pencil. I also went through some parts that caught my attention. I should say that this activity has spurred me to re-read the work...
About the literary quality of the work maybe some other time.

Now some compelling lines/passages from the book:

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.” (p-7)

“Henry Dobbins carried his girlfriend’s pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a comforter. They all carried ghosts.”(p-9)

“The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition.” (p-12)

“They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections.”(p-14)

They carried the land itself-Vietnam, the place, the soil-a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity…They marched for the sake of the march…and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. (p-14)

It was very sad, he thought, The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do. (p-24)

“The problem though, was that a draft board did not let you choose your war.” (p-42)

“I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.” (p-58)

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. (p-65,66).

J.M.Coetzee's piece on Robert Walser, the German speaking-Swiss writer  in The New York Review of Books, November 2, 2000 issue.
Walser, writes Coetzee, was “a ridiculed and unsuccessful author, who felt oppressed by the censorious gaze of his neighbors, by the demand for respectability."

At his death he left behind some five hundred sheets of paper covered in a microscopic pencil script so difficult to read that his executor at first took them to be a diary in secret code.

Walser, according to Coetzee, is most at home in the mode of short fiction.

The Robber appears a `must read.'

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/11/02/the-genius-of-robert-walser/

Benjamin Kunkel , writing in the August 6, 2007 issue of The New Yorker (Still Small Voice, The Fiction of Robert Walser) says, “ His narrators are all ostensibly humble, courteous, and cheerful; the puzzle lies in deciding where they are speaking in earnest and where ironically.”

Mary Hawthorne (Robert Walser on Everything and Nothing, The New Yorker, March 28, 2012) writes,”  It is one of those perverse ironies of history that this most delicate, self-effacing, and marginal of writers (his books were critically well received and admired by Kafka and Walter Benjamin, among others, but they did not sell), who as a young man enrolled in a school for servants and as an old one dropped dead on Christmas Day during one of his long, solitary walks in a snowy field near the mental hospital he had for more than twenty years been confined to, attracts more readers with every passing year. His completely original voice and sensibility—a blend of sharp and always surprising observation, free-floating digression, ambiguous irony, impishness, tenderness, curiosity, and detachment, all overhung with constant, circling doubt—remain stubbornly resistant to all but ersatz imitation.”

Robert Walser

“Certainly I am poor and up to this day have never lacked in failure,” he admits, but then, in a statement that could serve as his own epitaph, he adds: “life without success can also be beautiful.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dancing-with-words/

Human nature is vicious and predatory.

“I don’t believe that on this earth men, who are wolves preying on their fellow men, will attain global peace. Basically, Fukuyama was thinking about this peace with his idea of the end of history, but recent events have shown that history repeats itself, and always in the form of conflict.”

--Umberto Eco, Some Reflections on War and Peace, Turning Back the Clock.

‘What those people who trot out the jungle analogy really mean, but don’t say because it sounds too pessimistic, too predestinarian, is: homo homini lupus. We cannot collaborate because human nature- leave aside the nature of the world – is fallen, vicious, predatory. (The poor, maligned beasts! The wolf is not predatory upon other wolves: lupus lupo lupus would be a slander.)

--J.M.Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year.

"We cannot call our faults our own: they are invented for us by parents and schoolmasters and the makers of law." --Aubrey Menen

Aubrey Menen & M.Krishnan Nair

If Dostoevsky, Milan Kundera, Coetzee, O.V.Vijayan…are favorite authors, who is Aubrey Menen, a teacher? 

Whatever, I should note here that without the late Malayalam critic M.Krishnan Nair (his column in a Malayalam news magazine) I would perhaps have never read Aubrey Menen. Just as without Kundera it's doubtful whether I would have read Chamoiseau. About Chamoiseau later.

Now, from  Aubrey Menen’s, The Space Within The Heart (p-94)

“Our true self is not superior to other people; it is not inferior either. It is not touched by other people at all. It does not wish other people to be better, or to be worse; it neither punishes nor praises. It can be totally indifferent to the world, as if sleeping; or it can awake and observe, but with the same indifference.

‘Not that, not that,’ say the Upanishads, in the puzzling phrase which has echoed down the centuries. Now I saw its meaning. I was not that; nor anything that you could name in the world around me. I was not good, or bad; I was not a son, or a friend, or an uncle, or a cousin. I was not a success, or a failure. I was not even a middle-aged man in a room in Piazza Farnese seeking to answer a Pope. I was perfectly free of all such things because I had always been free. The world had not made me. It had merely thought it had.”

From J.M.Coetzee, Youth (p-10)

“Besides, who is to say that at each moment while the pen moves he is truly himself? At one moment he might truly be himself, at another he might simply be making things up. How can he know for sure? Why should he even want to know for sure?

Things are rarely as they seem: that is what he should have said to Jacqueline. Yet what chance is there she would have understood?

Surrealism!

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-what-is-surrealism

Two favorite writers. J.M.Coetzee & O.V.Vijayan

“After supper the boy is more forthcoming. ‘Ana Magdalena taught us the numbers,’ he tells them. ‘She showed us Two and Three and you were wrong, Simon, and senor Robles was wrong too,  you were both wrong, the numbers are in the sky. That is where they live, with the stars. You have to call them before they will come down.”

--The Schooldays of Jesus (p-59),

“His most cherished memory was of the sky-watch, a pastime in which his mother joined him, though not often, as she was big with child. She told him stories of the Devas. These dwellers of the sky drank the milk of the Kalpaka fruit, their elixir of immortality, and flung the empty husks down to the earth. If you gazed on the sky long enough, you saw the husks as transparent apparitions. The sky at noon was full of them. Ravi saw them slide over glistening cloud-hems and pass softly over pine and rock and grass. He watched, leaning on Mother’s belly as she reclined on a couch.

‘Thirteen!’ Ravi whispered, unable to contain his excitement.

‘Ah, my child,’ Mother said,’ what did you do to them?’

‘Counted them, Ma.’

The shy apparitions vanished. The sky was deserted now, save for a lone crested vulture navigating the precipices of space.

‘My little star,’ Mother said during one such vigil,’ don’t lean too hard, you might hurt your sister.’

--The Legends of Khasak (p-7)

RIP

It’s sad that one more life has been taken to protect the sanctity of Islam. This time it is Nahed Hattar of Jordan. They hounded Salman Rushdie,  chopped off T.J.Joseph’s hand, gunned down 12 at Charlie Hebdo…The custodians of faith (all religions) are running berserk. There is no sign of this tragedy ever ending.

Nahed Hattar's cartoon Link:

http://www.clarionproject.org/news/jordanian-satirist-arrested-cartoon-mocking-isis


At this juncture I find it appropriate to remember Charlie Hebdo.


https://charliehebdo.fr/en/

Random jottings.

Simon, Ines and David… (The Childhood of Jesus) are back in J.M.Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus!
Coetzee at his best in The Schooldays of Jesus.
Coetzee re-visits Jesus through the young David. Coetzee's Jesus is contemporary (the age of refugees). David himself is the son of boat people who died at sea. (Simon and Ines are not married) There is a sea of difference between Coetezee's Jesus and the Jesus of Kazantzakis, Jose Saramago...

---------

(In a matriarchal society mother is the chief minister. The father, governor)

-----------

Women are alive and living, enlivening.
But what are men?
are they `Death,'
stalking women?
If not stalking, they are setting fire to themselves
for some causes, or...

ATMs like automatic weapons

only they fire currencies

anyway we crouch.

Banks exist for the filthy rich

for the oppressed

its exit!


-----------

* Even if the narrator is dead, the narrative will go on ?

* Beckettian silence as  response to madness!

* Troubled souls seek God, vain hearts rationalize?

* Birds and Bards sing!

* "Now, as Auden wrote, may the 'words of a dead man' be modified in the guts of the living.' " (Krittika Ramanujan, Preface to A.K.Ramanujan's Collected Poems).

-----------

It was during my days in Tirunelveli that I had the chance to meet Thi.Ka.Si (Thi.Ka.Sivasankaran) and Thoppil Mohammed Meeran.  Thi.Ka.Si would be sitting alone in his room crammed with newspapers.  I used to go to his place after work in the evenings.

Thoppil Mohammed Meeran lived with his family. Very down-to earth.  If Thi.Ka.Si’s was animated chitchats, Meeran’s were contemplative deliberations.  Meeran gave me his Koonan Thoppu as a gift.

---------------


I started reading Dostoyevsky’s works, fascinated by Poor People. It was the Russian master’s first novel. By that time I had already read Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s Anuragathinte DInangal. I was amazed by some similarities between the two works.   They say, great minds think alike.

---------------

Amid the sea of forgetfulness I track down an island from memory. Kavaratti.  

Corals strewn beach, narrow concrete roads, bare –bodied men in lungis riding two-wheeler.  Honest, god-fearing people...

 At home, late night’s silence broken by sniffling of domestic discord. Pain that would leave its tattoo marks on my brain…Early morning visits to the farm with father (Twice weekly-to the chicken farm for the weekly ration of eggs and to the agri farm for vegetables).  The flock of pigeons who arrive at daybreak without fail and amble around pecking at the grains I feed them…Fried tuna fish and parattas from the only canteen. 

 The library. 

And Ernest Hemmingway’s- no, not, The Old Man and the Sea, but  For Whom the Bell Tolls!

--------------------

The first copies are full of mistakes. But then one goes back to it time and again, correcting, deleting, adding, grappling with meaning, (meaninglessness) trying, to be exact, to lead it from `darkness to light.' One keeps on improvising, never content, at times assuming this is life..

(In such attempts; chopping, chiseling, shaping words... in an inhospitable terrain, I rarely get anywhere. But can't afford to stay away)

------------------

INTERVIEWER

Do you think it would be better if women ran the human race?

W.H.AUDEN

I think foreign policy should definitely be taken out of men’s hands. Men should continue making machines, but women ought to decide which machines ought to be made. Women have far better sense. They would never have introduced the internal combustion engine or any of the evil machines. Most kitchen machines, for example, are good; they don’t obliterate other skills. Or other people. With our leaders it is all too often a case of one’s little boy saying to another, “My father can lick your father.” By now, the toys have gotten far too dangerous.

----------------

You know, I do not labor to arrive at dizzying heights. High life, High class, High rank,High-profile…

Not the heights, I look for depths. Like in deep love (what Calvary symbolize?), deep sea (like the one on which Christ walked ?).

August 5, 2011/ 0:19 hrs.

(I might have been reading Kazantzakis when I wrote the above lines)

 ---------------------

Genesis:  God made the beast. Then God made man (male, female…)

How inadequate he (she...) is.  To struggle indefinitely seems to be his (her...)destiny. His (her...) deliverance perhaps is in death.

p.s., To be politically correct, I think, is to be clever. Genius has nothing to do with it.

------------------------ 

Don Delillo's Cosmopolis.

The asymmetry:  a counterforce to balance and calm, the riddling twist, subatomic, that made creation happen.

“You know what anarchist have always believed.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me,” she said.

“The urge to destroy is a creative urge.”

“This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be forcibly claimed. Old markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future.”

(p-92-93)

In paths untrodden,” as Walt Whitman marvelously put it.” Escaped from the life that exhibits itself…” Oh, that’s a plague, the life that exhibits itself, a real plague! There comes a time when every ridiculous son of Adam wishes o arise before the rest, with all his quirks and twitches and tics, all the glory of his self-adored ugliness, his grinning teeth, his sharp nose, his madly twisted reason, saying to the rest –in an overflow of narcissism which he interprets as benevolence-“I am here to witness. I am come to be your exemplar.” Poor dizzy spook!...

--Saul Bellow, Herzog (p-324)

Bellow’s Herzog, Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions & Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book.

Bama’s Karukku (Translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmstrom/ Edited by Mini Krishnan)

A beautiful village in southern Tamil Nadu, with mountains ranging around it with names to go by their looks, wells and ponds, where majority of the people are oppressed and agricultural labourers, unlike people from the better-off castes. When there was no call for work in the fields the oppressed people go up to the woods in the mountains and make a living by gathering firewood and selling it. At the entrance of the village is a small bus stand, which is the terminus. Beyond that is a stream. To the left is the settlement where Nadars live. They climb palmyra palms for a living. To the right there are koravars who sweep streets, and the leather working Chakkiliyar. The Paraya settlement is located next to the cemetery. 

The narrator was born in this village as a dalit girl, she grows up, studies, works for five years and enters a convent after learning about how the women there loved the poor and the lowly. But after joining the convent she becomes aware of the true state of affairs there. There was such arguments and dissensions, jealousies, competition, such arrogance, where people accused you of thinking thoughts that you had not thought, of speaking words that you had not spoken… They never asked questions like why do people suffer or what is the state of this country. Finally, she dares to leave the convent, returns to Madurai.

“I don’t know what kind of magic it is that they work upon us in the convent, but during these seven or eight years, my brain has become confused and dulled. In some ways, they actually change you into a different person. ..By being told all the time to repress this and renounce that thought, to act like this, to be like this, eventually we become strangers to ourselves.”

In the author's Afterword to the first edition, Bama notes: I have seen the brutal, frenzied, and ugly face of society and been enraged by it. But at the same time, I have danced with joy because of the sweetness and simplicity of a life that is in touch with nature. Even though I have walked hand in hand with anxieties, I have also recognized a strength and zest within myself, flowing like a forest stream, and this has refreshed me. So, there have been many healthy contradictions in my life."

I would search vainly in myself for the overloaded memories and sweet unreason of rustic childhoods. I never scratched the soil or searched for nests; I never looked for plants or threw stones at birds. But books were my birds and my nests, my pets, my stable and my countryside; the library was the world trapped in a mirror; it had its infinite breadth, its variety and its unpredictability.

--Jean -Paul Sartre, Words (p-33)

Speaking of the way people become locked into mindsets, Rufus says to Frances, “It becomes a habit, you see, passed from one generation to another. That’s just what we’re trying to break out of,” the implication being that without the acceptance that there’s something to break out of, nothing will change. 

War and Grief

Shining Sea by Anne Korkeakivi review by John R. Coats in Consequence Magazine. Link below:

http://www.consequencemagazine.org/reviews/war-and-grief/

Graham Harman interviews Markus Gabriel in Edinburgh University Press Blog.

Excerpts & Link

*In my view, a lot of original work in contemporary philosophy happens where people are self-consciously going beyond the various artificial borders that make dialogue hard. Unfortunately, dogmatism is as widespread among philosophers as their respect for free thought, speech, and originality. But dogmatism and ignorance (however widespread) are still not virtues to be cultivated by philosophers.

*And I also agree that philosophy cannot be reduced to a bunch of unrelated arguments. Any philosophy – whether identified as analytic or continental – that has made an impact indeed is built around a view, or an overall vision. This holds of Deleuze and Butler as much as of Brandom or Chalmers.

*I am interested in revisiting the conceptual links between fiction and imagination and their connection to the human mind insofar as it is embedded in social contexts.

*What I like about the realist turn in continental circles is that in the work of figures associated with Speculative Realism we get arguments embedded in large-scale philosophical visions rather than the kind of fluffy exegesis and endless litanies that critics of continental philosophy identify with the practice as such.

If you read both contemporary so-called ‘analytical’ metaphysics and the debates in Speculative Realism, it soon turns out that both debates converge in manifold ways. Yet, Speculative Realism in my view is more advanced due to its historical context which involves a much more original understanding of the history of metaphysics and its various shortcomings. Both debates are haunted by various kinds of criticisms of metaphysics (Carnap and Quine on the one hand, Kant in between and Heidegger and Derrida on the other hand, say, and Wittgenstein making a comeback to) and all participants offer various grounds to resist the critique of metaphysics.

Generally, I do not believe that there has ever really been a substantial rift between analytic and continental philosophy, but rather different moments of a complicated debate among philosophers, traditions and so on.

https://euppublishingblog.com/2016/09/23/graham-harman-interviews-markus-gabriel/

Skimming through Bama’s Karukku again (I’ve lost count of the number of times), evokes in me images from Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen (children fishing) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names.

Bulawayo  particularly, when reading through passages like, “If you went there and pulled off a cucumber to eat, its touch upon the tongue was wonderful on a hot day. In any case there is a special taste to food snatched by stealth,” and then again, “When we used to go out in the early morning to relieve ourselves, a bright red sun, huge and round, would wake up in the east and climb into the sky.” 

Indeed the experiences of the oppressed are more or less alike everywhere.

To write, paint, to do something, you need to get your hands dirty.

“I think good narrative comes from observing the world and what happens inside yourself. The opportunity to move in and out of two realities, your inner world and the world outside of you, is what I find fascinating about writing. If you just want to tell stories, there are other ways, other media, to do so.”

“For example, one of the most important characters in the novel (Umami), for me, is Linda, the mother of the girl who dies. She doesn't speak in the novel, but everyone has an opinion about her. And in a way, their opinions are all true. We're all like that, we're all many different people.”

Laia Jufresa/ BOMB Magazine

http://bombmagazine.org/article/5523912/laia-jufresa

Separation

Your absence has gone through me

Like thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its colour

-W.S.Merwin

Wet Evening in April

The birds sang in the wet trees

And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now

And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.

But I was glad I had recorded for him the melancholy.

-Patrick Kavanagh

Two beautiful poems from Best Poems on the Underground Edited by Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik & Cicely Herbert.

A Teacher

“To be, or not to be-that is the question,” he often quoted from Shakespeare’s Hamlet whenever I came across him on the streets of Karaikal years after I left school...
Usually he would be returning from a bar near his house.
In those brief chats he blurted out his personal grievances to me.  He deeply regretted leaving the seminary where he went to become a priest. Choosing marital life over priesthood was a mistake which he later in his life realized. 

He taught us R.L.Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Not many listened to his lectures.  The classroom would be the very picture of a market place.“I will kill you” was his usual refrain to silence us. He was not harsh, however. We had fun.

As time passes by, all of us do confront that question several times (like hamlet) although, for different reasons. Because life keeps scowling: ‘I will kill you,’ and unlike the teacher life means it.

“We must give up the belief that a married life of complete service to a man is our only fate. We must change this attitude that if married life turns out to be a perpetual hell, we must still grit our teeth and endure it for a lifetime. We must bring up our girls to think in these new ways from an early age. We should educate boys and girls alike, showing no difference between them as they grow into adults. We should give our girls the freedom we give our boys. If we rear our children like this from the time they are babies, women will reveal their strength. Then there will come a day when men and women will live as one, with no difference between them; with equal rights. Then injustices, violence, and inequalities will come to an end, and the saying will come true that ‘Women can make and women can break.’

I am hopeful that such a time will come soon.”

--Bama’s Sangati (Events) Translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmstrom.

Bama : The one who dared! (Oh, cliche! Wish I would be able to write about Bama's works)

     Earth never grieves!-
Will not, when missed am I
     Raking up leaves.

--Thomas Hardy, Autumn in King's Hintock Park



I’m closer to Thomas Hardy the poet more than Thomas Hardy the novelist.

A haunting poem of Hardy I keep going back again and again is Friends Beyond.

It begins thus:

"William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at

          plough

   Robert’s kin and John’s, and Ned’s,

And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock

           churchyard now!

The poet recalls all his dead friends who don't anymore give a damn about matters which we the living keep worrying about.

The dead murmer mildly to the poet that they no longer need the corn and clothing, feel of old terrestrial stress... even fear of death has bygone them…

According to Philip Larkin Hardy gave most well known poets of today the confidence to feel in their own way. 

Hardy wrote his first poem `Domicilium' when he was 17.

"Let us always keep in mind that the art of the novel yields its finest results not through judging people but through understanding them, and let us avoid being ruled by the judgmental part of our mind."
--Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist.

Books on the Art of the Novel/ Literature, I would suggest as Must Read for those interested n the subject.

Milan Kundera-Testaments Betrayed.

E.M.Forester –Aspects of the Novel.

Italo Calvino-Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Orhan Pamuk-The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist.

"Remembering is a labour, not a luxury." 

--Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.

Like a fine story...

One of the marvelous short stories I have read was unpublished and written in Tamil. 

 It was written by a friend Prakash Ponniah.  

Years later I still vividly remember the ending. The story ends thus: the relatives of the protagonist are engaged in an animated discussion about his marriage and the prospective bride. Amid  the hubbub in the house he hears the clatter (anger?), which he recognizes is coming from next door where she (his neighbor) is washing dishes.

A simple story shaped to fineness by meticulous writing.  

After reading I remember giving the manuscript to another friend. (I encouraged Prakash to write more). But I lost the manuscript. Lately, like the manuscript Prakash too left this world, silently, without having written anything.

“Ah! You want to know why I hate you today,” the poet says. He then adds, “It will undoubtedly be harder for you to understand than for me to explain.”
The reason for the hatred ?

The poet and his female mate have passed a long day together promising each other that they would henceforth share all thoughts, and now on their souls would be one.

They are now in a new, sparkling café, dazzling and cozy with cabaret songs..

However the poet notices in front of them a worthy man of forty-odd, with a grizzled beard; tired looking, holding a little boy with one hand, while on the other carrying a tiny creature too weak to walk.They were all in rags.  “The six eyes,” the poet says, “stared at the new café with the same wonder, subtly differentiated by age…The ‘family of eyes’ makes the poet feel a bit ashamed of their glasses and decanters, much more than their thirst requires. He turns to look at his love in order to read his own thoughts in her.

But to his utter disappointment his love asks him: ‘I can’t stand those people, with their eyes like wide open gates. Couldn’t you ask the manager to get rid of them?’

The rest in the poet’s own words: ‘That’s how difficult it is to understand each other, my angel, that’s how incommunicable our thoughts are, even between people in love.’

Charles Baudelaire’s The Eyes of the Poor.

The Departed...

I’m a regular visitor to Kuppam (Nadukuppam) fish market near the Marina. The quarters where fisher families live adjacent to the market evokes in me memories of Chalil in Thalassery (Kerala) where my paternal kin live. Once I remember my aunt (Thressy Aunty) shooing away houseflies with a hand held fan after serving us rice and mackerel curry as she watched us (me and a friend from Karaikal) eat even as she kept grumbling for not visiting her at least once in a while…

 She is no more. My friend who accompanied me to Thalassery then has also passed away several years ago. So as well, my father.

Next in my list of authors to read is Yuri Herrera, thanks to Aaron Bady's piece 'Underneath the Darkness' in Boston Review.

http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/aaron-bady-yuri-herrera-signs-preceding-end-world-transmigration-bodies

Aaron Bady describes Herrera’s works as, “an exploration of the vertiginous depths underneath and between and around the worlds we thought we knew.”

"Herrera’s prose is beyond hard-boiled: it is baked dry by the unrelenting desert sun, then picked clean by vultures."

'While Dostoevsky proposes suicide as the only logical response to an awareness that God does not exist, Camus proposes that the man without God must not kill himself, but realize instead that he is condemned to death, and live his life saturated with that terrible knowledge: Camus proposes awareness itself." -James Wood in the introduction to The Myth of Sisyphus.

In the Preface, Camus notes: Although The Myth of Sisyphus poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.

Before I write in detail about The Myth of Sisyphus. Here are few more quotes:

"If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences."

"In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth."

"We turn towards God only to obtain the impossible. As for the possible, men suffice."

"The surprising reply of the creator to his characters, of Dostoevsky to Kirilov, can indeed be summed up thus :Existence is illusory and it is eternal."

Work hard, poets, work with good cheer:

Work leads to wealth and freedom from fear;

And butterflies, for all their graces,

Are merely caterpillars who persevere.

--Guillaume Apollinaire, Caterpillar (Selected Poems/Everyman,  with an introduction by Robert Chandler)

Apollinaire: A romantic, a lover of grace and beauty who was unable to stomach the naturalism of Maupassant or Zola. The first important champion of Cubism (avant-garde art movement / Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque…)

`The Pretty Redhead’, written not long before Apollinaire’s death, is both a love song and a poetic testament. The simplicity of the last lines is especially touching: ‘But laugh laugh at me / Men everywhere especially people here / For there are so many things I’m afraid to tell you / So many things you’d never let me tell you / Have pity on me.’ Like ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’, this poem reveals a vulnerability which is part of what makes Apollinaire so very approachable, more so than any other major French poet of the past century, says Robert Chandler.

By creating an Enemy we create Hell on Earth. 

The attack on an army base in Uri (read, not in isolation, instead along with the turbulent history of Kashmir) the vitriolic response of mainstream media, our fascination with an ‘enemy’, and the politics and vested interests that thrive on it; these are my reflections while reading Umberto Eco’s Inventing the Enemy.

It is politics; to pit one nation against another, divide people of different faiths and castes, draw boundaries on the basis of languages people speak…

This enmity has come to the fore in several recent murders and suicides in the state. The offspring of this enmity are words like `love jihad’ coined by the mainstream media. This enmity is what unfortunately overshadows the death of a murder case accused in Puzhal central prison lately. 

Most political outfits prosper by stoking the hatred for the ‘other,’ while mainstream media, overtly or covertly, plays an accomplice in this politics of hatred.

“Having an enemy is important not only to define our identity but also to provide us with an obstacle against which to measure our system of values and, in seeking to overcome it, to demonstrate our own worth. So when there is no enemy, we have to invent one…And so we are concerned here not so much with the almost natural phenomenon of identifying an enemy who is threatening us, but with the process of creating and demonizing the enemy,” says Eco.

Unfortunately this is what we inculcate in our children in our households and institutions.

George Orwell, writes Eco, provides an excellent example of the intensive and continuous cultivation of the enemy in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room….The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it as impossible to avoid joining in…A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. (part 1, chapter 1).

Eco concludes the Essay by quoting Sartre’s most pessimistic vision in this respect in No Exit. "We can recognize ourselves only in the presence of an Other, and on this the rules of coexistence and submission are based. But it is more likely that we find this Other intolerable because to some degree he is not us. In this way, by reducing him to an enemy, we create our hell on earth…”

-----------------ends 

Magnificent Theatre!

“By the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the gloomy festival of punishment was dying out…” Michael Foucault graphically elaborates on the subject in, Discipline & Punish, The Birth of the Prison.

But today the exhibition of punishment--torture/ psychological torture-- as a public spectacle has gained currency, or so does it seem to me, thanks to the mainstream media and news channels.
The uproar over Supreme Court's annulment of the death sentence, awarded by lower courts, to a rape and murder case convict in Kerala is a case in point..
Adding nausea to the putrid farce show is politicians (the keepers of carceral city?) belonging to ruling as well as opposition parties. While the CPI (M) leaders make all sort of confused noises, former chief minister Oommen Chandy, whose party by now infamous for corruption was shown the door by the voters in the assembly polls, to add flavor to the whole episode, visits the victim's mother and mouths drivel in front of microphones, accusing the government of helping the convict escape noose. The chief minister and his cabinet colleagues, who are not far behind, assert and reiterate that they will file a review petition to ensure that the accused gets hanged.


Let me go back to Michael Foucault. In Discipline & Punish, he quotes a correspondent who wrote to La Phalange in 1836, "Moralists, philosophers, legislators, flatterers of civilization, this is the plan of your Paris, neatly ordered and arranged, here is the improved plan in which all like things are gathered together. At the centre, and within a first enclosure: hospitals for all diseases, almshouses for all types of poverty, madhouses, prisons, convict-prisons for men, women and children. Around the first enclosure, barracks, courtrooms, police stations, houses for prison warders, scaffolds...Lastly the ruthless war of all against all."
And Foucault concludes the book thus: That, consequently, the notions of institutions of repression, rejection, exclusion, marginalization, are not adequate to describe, at the very centre of the carceral city, the formation of the insidious leniencies, unavowable petty cruelties, small acts of cunning, calculated methods, techniques, 'sciences' that permit the fabrication of the disciplinary individual. In this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected to multiple mechanisms of 'incarceration,' objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle."

"The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power."
Michael Foucault.

-------------

Beginners keen on Umberto Eco novels should, I would suggest, start with works like The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana instead of Foucault’s Pendulum...

"Too fast, my head spins. And why so much noise?"
--Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.

Noise as a cover.

Noise. Why do we submit ourselves to be held in thrall by Noise ?
From our living rooms (Our 24X7 news channels, shows, movies and music) to our places of worship, our streets and office rooms to the depth of our own self we are assailed by noise.
Is this a ploy devised by us to avoid reality ?

Noise as a cover, censorship, is the argument Umberto Eco puts forth in his Essay, Censorship and Silence, (Lecture given by Eco during the conference of the Associazione Italiana di Semiotica, 2009/ Inventing the Enemy, essays on everything, Vintage Books)

One of the ethical problems we are facing today, according to Eco, is how to return to silence.

Today Veline means Noise.

During Fascist regime, veline were  sheets of paper that the government department responsible for controlling culture sent to newspapers to keep quiet about and what they had to print.

“The veline that we know today-the television showgirls-are, however, the exact opposite…”

“If the old- style velina used to say, “To avoid causing behavior considered to be deviant, don’t talk about it,” the velina culture of today says, “To avoid talking about deviant behavior, talk a great deal about other things.” Here Noise becomes a cover (to silence what is important with trivial information).

Eco reminds that it is in silence alone that the only truly powerful means of information becomes effective-word of mouth.

“And one of the semiotic problems," he suggests, "we might consider is the closer study of the function of silence in various aspects of communication, to examine a semiotics of silence: it may be a semiotics of reticence, a semiotics of silence in theatre, a semiotics of silence in politics, a semiotics of silence in political debate-in other words, the long pause, silence as creation of suspense, silence as threat, silence as agreement, silence as denial, silence as music…I invite you to consider, therefore, not words but silence.”



-----------------------------ends

J.M.Coetzee.

After some meandering I’m back to reading my favorite author J.M.Coetzee.

Hit several stumbling blocks in the course of reading 166 pages of Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings. Hence put it aside for a later time.
Meanwhile, Coetzee, I checked the reports today, does not figure in Man Booker shortlist. Who cares! Reading his Dusklands.  Also have Waiting for the Barbarians and Youth lined up on the table.


Sign of insecurity.

"He's sleeping, his thumb in his mouth, a sign of insecurity." (P-38, Dusklands)

"The thumb in the mouth means insecurity, means a troubled heart." (P-121, The Childhood of Jesus)

"On the near side, curled with her thumb in her mouth and one arm cast loosely over her mother, is Matryona." (P-57, The Master of Petersburg)

"As he speaks he watches the child sidelong. She wriggles and for a moment actually puts her thumb in her mouth." (P-74 The Master of Petersburg)

Children as burden.

In The Master of Petersburg, Dostoevsky visits the cemetery where his step-son was buried He lies flat upon the mound, his arms extended over his head and cries freely.  A terrible malice streams out of him toward the living, and most of all toward living children. If there were a newborn babe here at this moment, he would pluck its mother’s arms and dash it against a rock. “Herod, he thinks: now I understand Herod! Let breeding come to an end!” (P 9-10).
Eugene Dawn in Dusklands, at a certain moment, considers his son Martin, whom he had saved "from a woman of unstable, hysterical character who was bringing him up as a ninny," nothing but a burden to him. He stabs his son with a fruit-knife and lands in an all-male institution under the care of doctors, where he regrets his part for what happened at Dalton.

Waiting for a sign.

"He is waiting for a sign...But he knows too that as long as he tries by cunning to distinguish things that are things from things that are signs he will not be saved" (P-83, The Master of Petersburg)

"The sign did not come." (P-17, Waiting for the Barbarians).

“Nothing in the pressure of her body answers to him. Disgrace, he thinks: this is how one enters disgrace.” (P-59, The Master of Petersburg)

Disgrace is the story of a middle –aged David Lurie’s impulsive affair with a student…

“Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding.” (P-124, Disgrace)

“Science has not yet put a limit on how long one has to wait. For ever, maybe.” (P-125, Disgrace).

But the works of Coetzee that drew me closer to the author include, Diary of a Bad Year, Elizabeth Costello...(Would elaborate later) then there is the bleak and haunting Life & Times of Michael K.

'And so what did you say? ' asked Pilate. ' Or are you going to reply that you have forgotten what you said? ' But there was already a note of hopelessness in Pilate's voice.

'Among other things I said,' continued the prisoner, ' that all power is a form of violence exercised over people and that the time will come when there will be no rule by Caesar nor any other form of rule. Man will pass into the kingdom of truth and justice where no sort of power will be needed.' 
'Go on!'
 'There is no more to tell,' said the prisoner. ' After that some men came running in, tied me up and took me to prison.'
--The Master and Margarita.


I arrived at Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, considered his masterpiece, after reading his The White Guard (Roger Cockrell's translation).
The Master and Margarita is a Beckettian kind of work. Will come to that later.

Bulgakov's style and motifs were not in tune with the proletarian values which the Communists inculcated.
The poet Anna Akhmatova talked of his "magnificent contempt" for their ethos, in which "everything had to be subordinated to the creation of a new, optimistic mentality which believed that science, medicine and Communism would lead to a paradise on earth for all, with humanity reaching its utmost point of development."

“Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man,” wrote 18-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky to his brother in 1839, according to Konstantin Mochulsky in the Introduction to The Brothers Karamazov (Bantam Classic).

 Renown Malayalam novelist M.T.Vasudevan Nair , who in his Randamoozham (Bhima: Lone Warrior, Translated by Gita Krishnankutty) ventured into retelling Mahabharata from the perspective of Bhima agrees with Dostoevsky when he says, ’The human being is a writer’s sole theme.’ 

Svetlana Alexievich :Documenting the history of human feelings.

"This is Russia!..In Russia you cannot afford to be a delicate flower. In Russia you must be a burdock or a dandelion."
--J.M.Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg

-----------------

"Look through any textbook...Not a single coup in history went off without terror, everything always ends in blood. With tongues torn out and eyes gouged out. Like the Middle Ages. You don't have to be a historian to know that..."
--Svetlana Alexievich, Second-Hand Time.

Second-Hand Time is stories narrated by people (docu-novel?) about the fall of Soviet Union ("it was a golden age for jokes! 'A communist is someone who's read Marx, an anti-communist is someone who's understood him.' ") and the two decades that followed it.
As the participants of the socialist drama narrate their tales via Svetlana Alexievich we listen with rapt attention.

While discussing Richard Overy's The Morbid Age, in Fractured Times, Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century, Eric Hobsbawm prefers to call the excavation of contemporary popular reactions to what was happening in and around people's lives as the mood music of history. Svetlana Alexievich I presume, however, does not fit into the category.

Another quote from Second -Hand Time: On the eve of the 1917 revolution, Alexander Grin wrote, 'And the future seems to have stopped standing in its proper place.' Now, a hundred years later, the future is, once again, not where it ought to be. Our time comes to us second-hand. (P-32-33)

From the Ancient Heritage to India and the Modern West, A Cultural History of India, edited by A.L.Basham is an exhaustive and valuable book on the subject.
The chapters include, Asokan India and the Gupta Age by Romila Thapar, on Hinduism by S.Radhakrishnan, Islam in Medieval India by S.A.A.Rizvi, Islamic Reform Movements by Aziz Ahmad and Modern Literature by Krishna Kripalani.

------------
The cultivation of love of humanity was one of the dominant characteristics of most systems of Indian theism. The Christian principle of love and equality is anticipated in Buddhism and Bhagvatism, which flourished in India long before Christ; but the force of innate sin is not emphasized as it is in traditional Western Christianity.
--(Philosophy) A Cultural History of India, edited by A.L.Basham.

An interesting book I'm reading at present is Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm's Fractured Times, Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century.

Significant is the chapter on Karl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind.
The American Cowboy:An international Myth? offers an insight into spaghetti westerns.

Delving into the matter of gender equality, the historian notes that it's  towards the end of the nineteenth century that we find a distinct tendency in Europe and North America to treat women as persons in the same sense of bourgeois society, analogous to males, and therefore analogous towards potential achievers. This applied to significantly symbolic field such as sport which was just then developing.

In 1914 hardly any government had given votes to women, but ten years later the right of women to vote was part of the constitution in most states of Europe and North America.

On the contribution of parents or family authority figures, besides the feminist movement, facilitating women enter public sphere Hobsbawm cites that, "In the biographies and autobiographies of the lower orders, it is more often mothers than fathers who encourage the intellectual or cultural ambitions of sons: D.H.Lawrence is a good case in point."

Another point he makes is that the women of 1880-1914 knew quite well that men and women were not alike, even when they did the same things, recognized each other as complete equals, or played the same public roles, as a glance at Rosa Luxemburg's letters and Beatrice Webb's diaries shows..
"What it does mean is that by this time the insistence that women having a separate sphere, including the claim that they had a special responsibility for culture, was associated with political and social reaction."

On Art, in the author's own words: “At the end of the twentieth century the work of art not only became lost in the spate of words, sounds and images in the universal environment that once would have been calld ‘art’, but also vanished in this dissolution of the aesthetic experience in the sphere where it is impossible to distinguish between feelings that have developed within us and those that have been brought in from outside. In these circumstances, how can we speak of art?”

On Manifestos

"How will manifestos survive the twenty-first century? Political parties and movements are not what they were in the last century and they were, after all, one of the two great producers of manifestos. The arts were the other. Again, with the rise of the business society and MBA jargon, they have been largely replaced by that appalling invention, the 'mission statement.' None of the mission statements I have come across says anything worth saying, unless you are a fan of badly written platitudes."

"..Most of what the manifesto (Communist Manifesto) actually recommended is of purely historical interest, and most readers skip it except for the clarion call at the end -the one about the workers having nothing to lose except their chains, they have a world to win. Workers of all countries unite. Unfortunately this is also well past its sell-by date."


------------------------ends

"Everybody is in need of the death of somebody or the other to leave behind the imprint of power."


K.R.Meera's Hangwoman : The art of the executioner.

A heavy, melodramatic sigh?
Meera, Scheherazade like, weaves a tale of epic proportion with strands of history--ancient and contemporary-- myths and reality that keeps us beguiled.
Hangwoman is the story of twenty-two-year-old Chetna Grddha Mullic. ("Writing, indeed is my Chetna," says Meera) and Sanjeev Kumar Mitra, an overambitious journalist...

Quotes:

"Whenever I visit Nimtala Ghat, I feel that the moment when the clock of life begins to tick backwards is what we call death. After that moment, those who were flesh and blood turn into reflections in the mirror of life. If death is the moment in which we walk away from relationships, then each person dies several times a single lifetime!."

“I remember, when I was in class eight, Jyoti Basu initiated Shilpayan, inviting industrialists, and Thakuma knew what it would bring. Traders arrive by water – they are not of the land, she declared in anger. To seize the land, they need, power.”

Al though I found it tedious in phases, a commendable work still and, an unforgettable experience.

Hangwoman: A heavy, melodramatic sigh?

---------------------ends

Patrick Modiano.

“I think of Dora Bruder.  I remind myself that, for her, running away was not as easy as it was for me, twenty years later, in a world that had once again been rendered harmless. To her, everything in that city of December 1941, its curfews, its soldiers, its police, was hostile, intent on her destruction. At nearly sixteen years old, without knowing why, she had the entire world against her.”

In The Search Warrant, Patrick Modiano, takes the readers with him as he sets out to find out all he can about Dora Bruder, 15, (Height 1.55m, oval-shaped face, grey-brown eyes, grey sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes. All information to M. and Mme Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris, says the notice which the author chances upon in a December 1941 issue of Paris Soir). who goes missing from the convent school which had taken her in during the Occupation.

Modiano: Nazi occupation era memories recalled in slim volumes.  Beneath the calm surface, layers of immense sadness.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/31/patrick-modiano-interview-paris-nobel

For me, it took, a little patience to read Modiano.

`Trouble is: I’m a Jew, I have the survival instincts of a rat.’

--Patrick Modiano, La Place De L’ Etoile.

`Rats are intelligent mammals’ he answered calmly, almost with amusement. ‘They will probably outlive us. Their society, at any rate, is a good deal more stable than ours.’

--Michel Houellebecq, Submission.

----------------

Posted September 20, 2016 (12.30 pm)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/20/man-v-rat-war-could-the-long-war-soon-be-over

Houellebecq’s Submission

In 2004 many of us would have shuddered at the thought of someone like Narendra Modi, then Gujarat chief minister, becoming prime minister of the country one day.  In 2014 the nightmare turned real with the Hindutva party BJP –led National Democratic Alliance scoring a sweeping victory in the general elections over a clueless opposition and thereby paving way for Modi being sworn-in as PM.

Fast forward. 2022, not 2017, presidential election in France is the backdrop of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel Submission (launched on the day of the Charlie Hebdo shooting).  

In Submission Francois, a middle-aged professor and a Huysmanist (Joris-Karl Huysmans is a French novelist) fears, under the prevailing environment, the country will end up in the hands of a Muslim party.  His worst fear comes true when Mohammed Ben Abbes of Muslim Brotherhood, in alliance with the Socialist Party, wins by a landslide.

(How to react: resist or reconcile?)

But with his intellectual life having come to an end, left with his savings and pension and with a Muslim party in power, it suddenly dawns on Francois that life might actually have more to offer.

Before that, faced with the prospect of a Muslim party coming to power his ex-girlfriend Myriam would leave, with her parents and siblings, for Tel Aviv.

The "classy and quietly sexy" Myriam describes Francois as a ‘macho,’ (He replies: Aggression often masks a desire to seduce) but with refined tastes in writers. After completing his dissertation on Huysmans and publishing a book more than ten years ago he feels justified with life and carries on by occasionally contributing articles to journals.  

He reasons:  “but was that enough to justify a life? And why did a life need to be justified? Animals live without feeling the least need of justification, as do the crushing majority of men. They live because they live, and then I suppose they die because they die, and for them that’s all there is to it. If only as a Huysmanist, I felt obliged to do a little better.”

September 8, 2016, 9.18 pm
Meanwhile as France braces up for 2017 presidential poll
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/france-candidate-alain-juppe-has-inside-track-on-presidency-a-1109913.html

Perils of a second Sarkozy presidency, by Matthew Moran (Le Monde diplomatique - English edition, August 2016) http://mondediplo.com/outsidein/perils-of-a-second-sarkozy-presidency

-------------------------------------ends 

Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli: Songs of Sacrilege!

“There is so much spice and wit in his poems…and the contemporary life of the Roman people is so realistically portrayed that you cannot help laughing out loud.” –Nikolai Gogol.

Funny, odd, impish, subversive, scandalous, at times shocking… on the same hand brutally honest, Anthony Burgess describes him as “a scholarly recorder of the filth and blasphemy,” Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli is regarded as one of the finest Italian poets of the nineteenth century. His sonnets (written clandestinely while he led a respectably conformist life of letters and bureaucracy ) were stated to be often satirical and anti-clerical (The Mass they put on is a sad affair;/ they tap Christ's lamp for oil, and take it home/and dress their salad with it all alone) Belli is the greatest poet to have written on Roman (Romanesco is the dialect spoken by the descendants of the original inhabitants of Rome) dialect. He would later renounce the language claiming it is a “corrupt, twisted deviation from the Italian language.” His sonnets will not give him away as a melancholic which he actually was according to his biographers.

If alive and writing today his writings would most likely be either shunned as obscene (Oh bloody hell, so no one kiss from you?/ One little squeeze inside that bra you wear?/ Don't worry, I'll be careful what I do /I only want to feel what's under there...) or banned.

Here's one of his sonnets:

You’re much too nice-why put your back out when

The world goes hurtling downhill anyway?

So what’s the point? Just let it go, okay-

Or do you mean to push it up again?

               

Who cares about the future –now’s enough –

And once you’re dead you’re dead, that’s what I say.

The day to live for, sonny, is today,

Don’t waste your breath on all this stupid stuff.

Just think of Jesus Christ, who sweated blood

In buckets when he tried to do his bit-

But what the hell did he get out of it?!

To live as long as Noah, and you could,

I’ve got a surefire secret- you’re in luck:

A little cure-all called Who Gives a…

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giuseppe-Gioacchino-Belli

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giuseppe-Gioacchino-Belli

He died of a sudden apoplectic fit on 21^st December 1863, sometime between eight and nine in the evening. He was buried at the Verano monumental cemetery in Rome.

--------------------------ends