In one of my classes tomorrow, we take up Michael Herr’s classic about the Vietnam War, Dispatches. And to come at it from a certain angle, we’re also reading Tobias Wolff’s recent short-story from the New Yorker, “Awaiting Orders.” There are many moments of meanness and humanity in this magnificent story, but what I perhaps love the most is the way in which Iraq enters the narrative only as an extension of the battles right here around us and in our hearts.

Wolff and Herr have both in the past been connected to Syracuse University–and here is Wolff in an interview, speaking about detail in writing:

There’s a famous paragraph in one of Chekov’s letters to his brother Nikolai in which he talks about writing description. In it he says, ‘When describing a starry night, don’t just talk about the beauty of the heavens, and the beautiful pinpricks of stars all over the inky sky.’ He says, ‘describe a piece of broken glass and the moonlight shining in that, and all of a sudden a wolf runs past you like a black ball in the night.’
It’s that kind of odd angle of vision that really captures those unexpected things that you would find in a good story, that broken glass. That’s something very distinctive with Chekov. I translate that into the description of character as well. You can illuminate character by a similar kind of sidelong glance that you can use to illuminate that moonlit night.
There’s a kind of stock repertoire that comes out of drama, mainly of gestures and actions that people perform in stories. You know: the mixing-of-drinks, the-crossing-of-rooms, the-lighting-of-cigarettes. What’s wrong with them is they’re essentially anonymous. They don’t tell us that much. What you want is a gesture that tells you something particular.

And click here for a Salon interview where Wolff offers a marvelous little account of his interest in Chekhov.

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Imperial History in Ninety Seconds

Who has controlled the Middle East over the course of history? Pretty much everyone. Egyptians, Turks, Jews, Romans, Arabs, Persians, Europeans…the list goes on. Who will control the Middle East today? That is a much bigger question. Go here.

Via Freddy Deknatel.

Last night I came across an old piece from the VLS on literary blogging, and since it mentions several of the blogs that I read regularly, I thought I’d link it here. (There was a time in my life, just after I had got my first job, when all I wanted was to publish in the VLS. After I had written to them several times, once even arguing that it was every Third World child’s dream to see their name in that paper, I was given the chance to write an 800-word review of A. Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies. Sent the review but never heard back from the editors. No yes, no no, no maybe. The only time I did get published in the Voice was when I paid them–I can’t remember now how much–for a Valentine’s Day Special PDA section. My ad said something like this: “Hey babe, Let’s snuggle in bed and read the poetry of the future or even Spivak’s Scattered Speculations on Value that you so greatly admire. XOXOXO.”)

It takes five minutes to create a blog, and even the most successful litbloggers say they embarked on the whole thing casually—a kind of public doodle. Maybe they wanted to alert friends to cool articles and reviews, which is how Jessa Crispin of Bookslut started, or distract themselves from the impending war in Iraq, like Brooklyn blogger Maud Newton. Maybe they were bored or just plain procrastinating. But that non-professionalism is a big part of the appeal to readers—the off-the-cuff intimacy, the ornery opinions, the bloggers’ ability to say whatever they think without worrying about editors reining them in.

“What people look for in a book blog is someone whose taste aligns with theirs and who can lead them to some good recommendations,” says Crispin, a former librarian for Planned Parenthood in Chicago, “and that’s where their power lies.” Last month, a British survey suggested that nearly a third of those under 35 considered personal word of mouth the most important motivation for buying a book; only 6 percent based their purchase on ads. Over the years there have been plenty of attempts to bottle this transaction—for instance, amazon.com’s “personalized” suggestions made by a computer. But blogs are much closer to the real thing. Delight and disappointment are transmitted in ways more akin to dinner-table banter than to a verdict delivered from on high.

“Publicists take note—people who love books are making pilgrimages to our sites and they’re taking our word for things and buying books we recommend,” wrote Mark Sarvas of the Elegant Variation in an online essay last year. An L.A.-based screenwriter with a novel in the works, Sarvas started his blog impulsively in 2003. But he began to see it as a forum for championing unsung writers. Now Sarvas wants to prove that these sites have clout. He has recruited 19 fellow bloggers to launch the Litblog Co-op, a virtual collective stretching across the country that will bestow attention on four books a year—literary books that would not, Sarvas promises, get review attention otherwise.

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Want to be the President of the United States? Go on a book tour.

An article on Slate.com argues something like that. (Or so I think. Here are other views from a book tour.) To quote the article from Slate:

Political assumptions can remain constant for long periods and then change very quickly. And so they have in the approximately 10 days since the publication of Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope. In the brief time he’s been on book tour, Obama has overthrown much of the reigning conventional wisdom about what’s likely to happen in the 2008 campaign, how shrewd politicians ought to behave, and what the informal rules of the American system really are. Consider the following statements thought true by the political class in early October but called into question by month’s end.

1. Hillary Clinton is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.
2. John McCain can beat anyone the Democrats put up.
3. Democrats have a problem with religion.
4. Old liberalism is dead.
5. Extreme partisanship works.
6. Politicians must tread carefully.
7. The bubble must pop.

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Here is a report from my birthplace, Ara:

Bhojpur (Bihar): A farmer in Bihar’s Bhojpur district has been under trial for 33 years and is still waiting for justice, while all those originally involved in the case are not even alive.

Back in 1973, Suraj Nath Yadav, a landless labourer, was accused of stealing oxen. Thirty-three years later, the complainant, four other co-accused and even the policeman investigating the case are dead but for Yadav the trial continues with the court yet to deliver a verdict.

“All the papers are lost but I still have to present myself in the court on a regular basis,” Yadav complained.

Yadav was 13 when he was accused of the crime and had he been convicted he would have been imprisoned for a maximum of three years. But the ordeal for him and his family has dragged on for over three decades.

Yadav treks 20 kilometers every three months to reach the court and spends over Rs 200 on lawyer’s fee every month.

“It has been 33 years now. We have sold everything fighting for this case,” Yadav’s daughter-in-law, Kushila Devi said.

Just the other day I was reading a review-essay about Kakfa’s The Trial; the piece took Kafka’s old translators Willa and Edwin Muir to task for ruining the language of the original: “… the Muirs had adapted Kafka’s Prague vocabulary to High German, thereby elaborating upon his classically plain style, a style that Kafka had wrested from the unadorned and dying language of Prague officialdom and transformed into a dream language, the language of the unconscious self.” I don’t mean to go all precious on you, but the language of the report above, about the farmer in Bhojpur, is the language of the “weird and slightly bizarre report” which appears on certain pages of every newspaper. And a part of me believes that if the language were to be changed, it would instead excite horror in the reader.

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Mohsin Hamid has a new novel coming out. I learned about it this morning via Manish, who is the Knight Harbinger of all that is new in the world. I want to read Mohsin Hamid’s book to see what he’s got over John Updike and Martin Amis. Manish’s post has earned a comment from Amardeep who writes: ‘I want to write a novel called “Just an Average Muslim Bloke Driving a Toyota Camry to Work, and Hanging Out Around the Office Cooler.” No terrorism, no fundamentalism. Just maybe a girlfriend, a boring job, and a slight drinking problem he needs to get over.’ Good point. And yet. And yet… A short-story version of this dream exists in the opening paragraphs of Hanif Kureishi’s “My Son the Fanatic.” But fundamentalism comes looking for the protagonist, Pervez. Do you know what would be more boring, and indeed more brutal, than having to confront a Muslim writer addressing fundamentalism once again? To be that Muslim writer faced with the choice of having to face on the page, yet again, the familiar, tiresome questions that people like customs officers ask him or her, and to want, at the same time, as an artist, to free each word on the page from the inevitable politics that that has on its breath the smell “like dead snakes kept too long in a jar.”

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Subodh Gupta’s fabulously titled “Two Cows”

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William Dalrymple’s new book The Last Mughal has just been released. Here is an excerpt from his recent piece in the New Statesman:

One of the causes of unrest, according to a Delhi source, was that “the British had closed the madrasas”. These words had no resonance to the Marxist historians of the 1960s who looked for secular and economic grievances to explain the uprising. Now, in the aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001 and 7 July 2005, they are phrases we understand all too well. Words such as jihad scream out of the dusty pages of the Urdu manuscripts, demanding attention.

There is a direct link between the jihadis of 1857 and those we face today. The reaction of the educated Delhi Muslims after 1857 was to reject both the west and the gentle Sufi traditions of the late Mughal emperors, whom they tended to regard as semi-apostate puppets of the British; instead, they attempted to return to what they regarded as pure Islamic roots.

With this in mind, disillusioned refugees from Delhi founded a mad rasa in the Wahhabi style at Deoband, in Delhi, that went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything European from the curriculum. One hundred and forty years later, it was out of Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history, a regime that in turn provided the crucible from which emerged al-Qaeda, and the most radical Islamist counter-attack the modern west has yet had to face.

Today, west and east again face each other uneasily across a divide that many see as a religious war.

Aamer Hussein reviews The Last Mughal in the Independent.

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Arundhati Roy writes in a cover-story in Outlook magazine:

If opinion polls, letters-to-the-editor and the reactions of live audiences in TV studios are a correct gauge of public opinion in India, then the lynch mob is expanding by the hour. It looks as though an overwhelming majority of Indian citizens would like to see Mohammed Afzal hanged every day, weekends included, for the next few years. L.K. Advani, leader of the Opposition, displaying an unseemly sense of urgency, wants him to be hanged as soon as possible, without a moment’s delay.

It is not the judiciary or even the police (from whom not much better was expected anyway) but our press that comes out looking worst in the story that Roy narrates. (She asks rhetorically, “Shall we pause for a moment to say a few hosannas for the Free Press?”) Apart from this condemnation, the essay pays tribute to the courage of people like S.A.R. Geelani who’ve gone through hell and still find resources to raise their voices in protest. In fact, the same can and should be said about Roy herself, who, despite crude attacks on her as a publicity-seeker, has never taken the easy way out into silence.

Of course, the Roy piece also appeals for justice. Will it be granted? Here’s a question for readers: why is it that any sign of imaginative protest, even when reportedly aided by nationalist Bombay films like “Rang de Basanti,” is always missing if one is dealing with the national question?

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Jeffrey Williams, who teaches at CMU, has a write-up on Terry Eagleton in the Chronicle:

Terry Eagleton has been a quintessential wanderer. Eagleton is probably the most well-known literary critic in Britain and the most frequently read expositor of literary theory in the world. His greatest influence in the United States has been through his deft surveys, variously on poststructural theory, Marxist criticism, the history of the public sphere, aesthetics, ideology, and postmodernism. His 1983 book, Literary Theory: An Introduction, which made readable and even entertaining the new currents in theory and which has been reprinted nearly 20 times, was a text that almost every literature student thumbed through during the 80s and 90s, and it still holds a spot in the otherwise sparse criticism sections of the local Barnes and Noble. His public position in Britain is such that Prince Charles once deemed him “that dreadful Terry Eagleton.” Not every literary theorist has received such public notice.

I was introduced to literary theory via the works of Eagleton, and will be grateful to him for that. Like Williams, I also found Eagleton’s Saint Oscar brilliant. It was witty and acerbic, full of play and also frankly political. I haven’t read Eagleton much recently, although he publishes more than most academics; but I’ve always admired the manner in which the political position that he has steadfastly held has only been strengthened, and not weakened, by the agility of his thinking and his language. Just minutes ago, I searched for, and found, a letter he had written in the Guardian after Derrida’s death. Although the way in which I had received my original Eagleton was as someone who, for political reasons, opposed deconstruction, even this brief letter reveals almost the opposite, which is Eagleton’s contempt for the stuffy shirts and his openness to new, liberating ways of reading.

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