…but you can paint the colors in with a broom! Nacche baliye!

Via

Do you regret referring to Bill Clinton as the first black President?

People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.

Toni Morrison in TIME

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Outside In
70s & 80s
A Tale of 3 Cities
Photographs by Pablo Bartholomew
8th May - 14th June, 2008 at Bodhi Art, New York

A visual diary of Pablo’s earlier days, Outside In 70s & 80s A Tale of 3 cities… comprises of resonant photographs of people whose youth is variously evoked and celebrated. This work is, at an important level, what Bartholomew calls “documentary photography”, a valuable record of the metropolitan Seventies and Eighties in India. But neither the autobiographical nor the documentary would have been of enduring interest, if both had not been made part of another journey altogether.

More

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There was nothing neutral about watching fellow white southern Africans – one who lives in the U.S. and one who lives in South Africa – talk about their powerful, groundbreaking memoirs (Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Scribbling the Cat and Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart). It was a meal where everything was served up – loathing, longing, “ordinary murder” (Malan’s phrase), betrayal, complicity, family dysfunction southern African-style, marinated in a mix of racism and booze. On the subject of whether or not their families had read their books, Fuller responded first with, “My mother organized a one-woman boycott of my book.” After she suggested to her father that he listen to it on tape, “I can’t listen to any bloody tapes. I’m deaf. You even say that in your book”. (which led Fuller to believe that he had, in fact, read it.) Malan said his mother had read My Traitor’s Heart but his father hadn’t. His mother was mainly concerned about his description of how he had lost his virginity to a black maid and that this story would come out in public.

Anne Landsman reports from PEN World Voices. Also, reports from a reading by Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, and Mario Vargas Llosa here, here, and here.

I walk along the beach, on the hot sand, until I reach one of the piers. Long and thin, it stretches into the ocean, like some menacing reptilian claw. The beach is chewed away here. I can see the hard red sediment that was once compressed several layers below the surface; centuries of beach have been washed away in a matter of months. The roots of coconut and palm trees poke through the sediment; some of these trees have already been uprooted.
In the distance, I can see the town of Pondicherry, its sea wall a dark blur through the heat waves. I can’t see the port from where I’m standing, but I know that the Pondicherry government is talking about building a new and bigger one, just south of the existing site. Local environmentalists have warned that a new port risks destroying a hundred-mile stretch of the coast. But the government is insistent: India is developing, modernizing, and Pondicherry can’t be left behind.

I haven’t received the new Granta in the mail yet, but here’s the link to the piece by Akash Kapur on Pondicherry’s disappearing beaches. It’s a brief report, but conveys a lot of urgency and gloom. And because it tells you that erosion has been the result of bad planning, the reader imagines that even if the changes are irreversible they can be prevented in the future, that there is hope.

There’s an interview with the new Granta editor, Jason Cowley, in Time Out Mumbai. Here’s an excerpt:

Do you think there is a special association between Granta and India?

I think India is such an astonishingly interesting country that has a big influence in this country with the connection between the British in India and now the Indians in Britain. My own father was a regular visitor to India over many years and I have many Indian friends. Why Granta and India? Because Granta is interested in the world and in publishing good writing. There are few more interesting countries than India, and India produces a lot of good writers – both fiction and non-fiction.

The new website for Granta also has on “online only” page where young Karan Mahajan has a piece on a museum in his dorm-room. (Once when I was a visit to SF, Karan took me to the Pirate Store on Valencia which he mentions in the essay.)

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Click here for a 2006 lecture “Primo Levi for the Present” by Judith Butler. What is on view here is a characteristic ability to make important philosophical distinctions which allow a case to be made for progressive politics.

Also, in the same series of lectures from the European Graduate School, you can listen here to Slavoj Zizek critiquing, in 2007, the vulgar materialism that denounces religion (a la Christopher Hitchens) and that is twin to the religious fundamentalism it purportedly opposes.

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“The reviews tend to be repetitive and tend to be so filled with error that they’re kind of unbearable to read, even the nice ones,” Franzen said. “The most upsetting thing nowadays is the feeling that there’s no one out there responding intelligently to the text,” he said. “So few people are actually doing serious criticism. It’s so snarky, it’s so ad hominum, it’s so black and white.”

“The stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times,” he added, referring to controversial, Pulitzer-Prize winning reviewer Michiko Kakutani.

Jonathan Franzen was a recent visitor in James Wood’s class at Harvard. Go here and here. (Via)

Talking of public lives etc. it is worth checking out the reports from the PEN Global Voices here, here, here, and here.

“If you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?” are the first words you read in Jeffrey Eugenides’s short-story “Great Experiment.” (I know, I know, blogs are supposed to report on breaking news and things of the moment, and here I am, providing a link to an ancient New Yorker published on March 31. But I’ve been busy. This week is the busiest of all, my days a swirl of student conferences and readings of paper drafts. Before falling asleep last night, I wanted time for myself and I picked up that old issue from the top of the dresser. I take up the old, and present it to you as new. A postmodern gesture.) Such intelligence in the story. And the sense of things gone wrong and the desire to set them right again. The enormous futility, and yet, the quick frisson of the con job, or of change. A story very much worth staying up for.

“O.K., forget Jimmy for a minute,” Piasecki said. “I’m just saying, look at this country. Bush–Clinton–Bush–maybe Clinton. That’s not a democracy, O.K.? That’s a dynastic monarchy. What are people like us supposed to do? What would be so bad if we just skimmed a little cream off the top? Just a little skimming. I’m telling you I think about it sometimes. I fucking hate my life. Do I think about it? Yeah. I’m already convicted. They convicted all of us and took away our livelihood, whether we were honest or not. So I’m thinking, if I’m guilty already, then who gives a shit?”

When Kendall was drunk, when he was in odd surroundings like the Coq d’Or, when someone’s misery was on display in front of him, in moments like this, Kendall still felt like a poet. He could feel the words rumbling somewhere in the back of his mind, as though he still had the diligence to write them down. He took in the bruise-colored bags under Piasecki’s eyes, the addict-like clenching of his jaw muscles, his bad suit, his corn-silk hair, and the blue Tour de France sunglasses pushed up on his head.

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Click here to watch the Mission Accomplished ad.

I thought of the ad because of the AP news item today that the White House admits fault over the Mission Accomplished banner.

This just in a man has begun writing a poem
in a small room in Brooklyn. His curtains
are apparently blowing in the breeze. We go now
to our man Harry on the scene, what’s

the story down there Harry? “Well Chuck
he has begun the second stanza and seems
to be doing fine, he’s using a blue pen, most
poets these days use blue or black ink so blue

is a fine choice. His curtains are indeed blowing
in a breeze of some kind and what’s more his radiator
is ‘whistling’ somewhat. No metaphors have been written yet,
but I’m sure he’s rummaging around down there

in the tin cans of his soul and will turn up something
for us soon. Hang on—just breaking news here Chuck,
there are ‘birds singing’ outside his window, and a car
with a bad muffler has just gone by. Yes … definitely

a confirmation on the singing birds.” Excuse me Harry
but the poem seems to be taking on a very auditory quality
at this point wouldn’t you say? “Yes Chuck, you’re right,
but after years of experience I would hesitate to predict

exactly where this poem is going to go. Why I remember
being on the scene with Frost in ‘47, and with Stevens in ‘53,
and if there’s one thing about poems these days it’s that
hang on, something’s happening here, he’s just compared the curtains

to his mother, and he’s described the radiator as ‘Roaring deep
with the red walrus of History.’ Now that’s a key line,
especially appearing here, somewhat late in the poem,
when all of the similes are about to go home. In fact he seems

a bit knocked out with the effort of writing that line,
and who wouldn’t be? Looks like … yes, he’s put down his pen
and has gone to brush his teeth. Back to you Chuck.” Well
thanks Harry. Wow, the life of the artist. That’s it for now,

but we’ll keep you informed of more details as they arise.

“Man Writes Poem” by Jay Leeming, from Dynamite on a China Plate. © The Backwaters Press. Buy the book!

[Memo to didactic self: Great to discover a poem that could be used in a writing class and also in a media studies class.]