Looking forward to 2007. Happy holidays everyone.

Model: Ila Kumar

P.S. I’ll be gone for the next ten days or so.

A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed about my forthcoming novel by Business Standard, and this morning, while reading Maud’s blog, I found out that the interview has been published:

Tell us something about Home Products.

Okay. This is the first time I’m doing a synopsis, so let me take a deep breath.

A Bihari journalist is asked to write a story about a small-time poetess who’s been killed by her politician lover. Instead, the journo narrates the story of his cousin who is in prison for running an Internet porn parlour but who is dreaming of making a film when he comes out. The actor who will star in that film is his old school-friend from Bettiah, a man who is now big in Bollywood.

More.

Here’s another recent interview for the Bangladeshi paper Daily Star.

Photos above and below are of the Hindi film-actor Manoj Bajpai.

Earlier today, soon after reading my own interview, I read Sven Birkerts‘ piece about Vikram Chandra’s novel, Sacred Games. Birkerts says good things about the book, but the piece is as much a tribute to book-reviewing. Birkerts is impressed by Chandra’s book, and, I guess, by Birkerts the reviewer:

I’ve been reading every day, not quite finished, so the one-man jury on ultimate greatness is still out, but I can say that “Sacred Games” is moving right along. It’s working. Page after page it plucks me from the here and now, from the world governed by marketing mentalities, ruled by tasks and anxieties. I really am for long stretches in some phantasmagoric, confusing, reeking, corrupt, overheated, overpopulated elsewhere, a Mumbai of the mind, with characters who surprise me with their look and sound, their twists of behavior. How strange. It’s as if I’ve needed to go through this peculiar re-immersion to get to my turnaround, to remember — again — why I got into this game in the first place. It was out of love.

After all these years I see that love is still the motive force. The honest work of art trumps the cynic, and elevates the critic, every time. When I close the covers, as I do from time to time, to heft the thing, I consider the weight of pages — not just these, but all the hard-won worthy novels, their millions of words coming toward the reader like armies over the hill.

May I add my own two paise on the matter? I often need to read a review like this to be reminded that no matter why I got into the business of writing, and no matter what the specific aesthetic goals or even the achievements of my book are, a reader sitting in the West will get from it whatever the hell they want. And God bless them!

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Now that the winter break is here, I’ve been browsing among the archives of my favorite radio show, This American Life. Yesterday, I enjoyed listening to a segment of the show from 18 November 2005.

Act Two. Johnny Get Your Mouse. Lots of soldiers in Iraq are writing about their experiences online. Producer Amy O’Leary has read through dozens of them and talks about what the soldiers are writing. Then, we hear from three bloggers, reading their own journals, telling their stories from Iraq about the fighting, the locals, and why you subscribe to Details magazine. We hear from Captain Chuck Ziegenfuss, Trueman Muhrer-Irwin, and Colby Buzzell, who has recently compiled a book of his war writing called My War: Killing Time in Iraq.

I liked the candor of the soldier blogs. In one of them, the Marine reports his commander stepping into a discussion, to warn soldiers off any discussion of ethics. He barks, “If you want to do the right thing, go out and rend the Spike Lee movie.” But the real discovery was a segment from 28 October 2005, about a survey that found out that 100,000 Iraqis had probably died over there, most of them the victims of US attacks.

Act One. Truth, Damn Truth, and Statistics. About a year ago, a John Hopkins University study in the British medical journal The Lancet estimated the number of civilian casualties in Iraq. It came up with a number – 100,000 dead – that was higher than any other estimate, and was mostly ignored. This week, Producer Alex Blumberg tells the remarkable story of what it took to find that number, why we should find it credible and why almost no one believed it. (The original Lancet study is online; free registration is required). (36 minutes)

Photo Tyler Hicks

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Walter Benn Michaels writes that the emphasis on race on diversity-conscious American campuses has swept issues of class under the carpet:

Michael Rogin once brilliantly described the use of blackface in Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer as a device through which the immigrant Jew first becomes American by identifying himself with the African-American (putting the blackface on), and then (taking the blackface off) succeeds as an American by becoming white. “The jazz singer rises,” Rogin said, “by putting on the mask of a group that must remain immobile, unassimilable and fixed at the bottom.” There’s a certain sense in which Asian-American studies is a kind of blackface, a performance that produces the image of racialized oppression alongside the reality of economic success.

But there’s a more-important sense in which even African-American studies is a kind of blackface, a performance not only of blackness but of race itself. Asian-Americans are overrepresented in elite colleges like Princeton; African-American students are underrepresented. But no one’s as underrepresented in those colleges as poor people. And no one’s looking to get their numbers up to where, if you wanted to eliminate the underrepresentation, they would have to be. A Princeton that managed to lure enough black students away from the other Ivies to constitute 12 percent of its entering class (just as African-Americans constitute approximately 12 percent of the American population) would be a more diverse Princeton. A Princeton where 50 percent of the entering class consisted of students who came from households earning under $46,326 (the median income in the United States) would be an entirely different institution.

In the Princeton class of 2009, 196 students (out of a total of 1,229, a little under 16 percent) came from households that Princeton characterizes as low-income households earning under $50,900 a year. But even though those numbers aren’t all that wonderful, Princeton is a real leader here: According to Anthony P. Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose, roughly 10 percent of students at the 146 colleges and universities ordinarily ranked as highly selective come from the bottom half of the socioeconomic scale.

But the trouble with Walter Benn Michaels, argues Robert S. Boynton, is that Michaels thinks that the world is an academic campus. And:

That we must choose between a society concerned with race and one concerned with economic inequality is the cornerstone of Michaels’s project. But must we? And even if we must, is it really so obvious that the evils of economic inequality always trump those of racism (or that the two can be so neatly disentangled)? It is telling that Michaels never feels the need to formulate an argument for the superiority of a class-oriented society. It is just assumed; all of his energy goes into debunking race.

Article links from Arts and Letters Daily.

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Journalists love yoga because it fits perfectly into the narratives of everyday life. “Yoga Joins the Treatments for Kids with Disabilities,” reported the Evansville Courier & Press this summer. “Yoga Helps Pregnant Women Prepare for Delivery,” according to WNCN in North Carolina, an NBC affiliate, which recently broadcast a report about a prenatal yoga class offered by Healthy Moms in Raleigh. “Soldiers Shape up with Peaceful Yoga,” an AP-bylined piece about how they are using yoga to both prepare for and recover from combat, ran in the Bradenton [Florida] Herald about the same time.

But wait, there’s more: Tribune Media syndicates a strip called Gangsta Yoga with DJ Dog, which appears in newspapers all over the nation from the Detroit Free Press to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Then there’s yoga to relax sex workers! from the Hindustan Times; and the revelation from Fort Worth, Texas, that yoga is replacing kickball in the city’s high school gym classes. Still not convinced? How about yoga skin care, Christian yoga, iPod yoga, golf yoga, tennis yoga . . . well, you get the picture.

More

Illustration from here.

yoga-love-cjr

From our man in Mumbai

Wyatt Mason in the New Yorker celebrates the new editions of four of R.K. Narayan’s books. I’m looking forward to the winter break because I want to read what Michael Gorra, Monica Ali, Pankaj Mishra, and Jhumpa Lahiri have to say in their respective forewords to the books: Malgudi Days, The Painter of Signs, The Ramayana, and The Guide. Mason writes in his essay:

In outline, “The Dark Room” has similarities to Richard Yates’s first novel, “Revolutionary Road” (1961). Both tell the sadly familiar story of a philandering businessman husband and a miserable homemaker wife. Yates documents the psychological steps—difficult childhood, disappointing adolescence, missteps in adulthood and marriage—that lead the wife, April Wheeler, to end her life. Narayan, by contrast, tells us little of Savitri’s childhood, nor, for that matter, of conditions beyond those of the objective, present moment surrounding the central event of the novel—the night when Savitri abandons her husband and seeks, down by the river, a better place for herself in the universe:

“She rose and stepped down. There was still one step, the very last submerged under water, very slippery with moss; and then one felt the sand under one’s feet; water reached up to one’s hips, and as one went further down, to one’s breasts; and now the running water tripped up one’s legs from behind. She stood in the water and prayed to her God on the Hill to protect the children. . . . The last sensation that she felt was a sharp sting as the water shot up her nostrils, and something took hold of her feet and toppled her over.”

Unlike April Wheeler’s act in “Revolutionary Road,” Savitri’s is averted. A man sees her being swept away and leaps in to save her. By novel’s end, Savitri has returned home to her husband, to serve him as before. There, she is no less miserable, no more fulfilled. Nothing changes. For the Western reader accustomed to the psychological novel of action and outcome, such a story can seem oddly unsatisfying. Western novels about women whose lives are denied free exercise of will—Anna Karenina; Emma Bovary; Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth”; Florence Dowell in “The Good Soldier”; Edna Pontellier in “The Awakening”—have often charted a progression of cause and effect that makes comprehensible, even inevitable, a woman’s final, metaphorical flight to the river. But in Narayan’s world, while there is the same impulse to slough off one’s bonds, it is always without outlet. Indeed, in Narayan’s early novels his protagonists—Swaminathan in “Swami and Friends,” Chandran in “The Bachelor of Arts”—are all trapped by, and strain against, existential bonds that prove unbreakable. All try to flee their frustratingly narrow lives by running away from home, but, like pigeons to their coops, they cannot help returning. In their very form, these novels, in which conflict finds neither psychological justification nor narrative resolution, register “Indian problems” with a cartographer’s watchtower remove: Narayan is showing us the shape of a people being strangled by the contour of their land.

What do those last dozen words mean? I don’t know. The phrase “Indian problems” is V.S. Naipaul’s. They don’t find much favor with Mason. Although I like his more imaginative response to Narayan, and also his effort to engage with the writer formally, I’d prefer to stay away from the clammy mysteries embraced by Mason. In his understanding of why lives found very little resolution, Naipaul’s materialist grasp is mordant and precise. Here is a line, which I very much like, from Among the Believers:

I had been born in a static colonial time; and in Trinidad, where I spent my first eighteen years, I had known the poverty and spiritual limitations of an agricultural colony where, as was once computed, there were were only eighty kinds of job.

Photo

r.k.narayan

Relax, honey—everybody gets buyer’s remorse.

Winning caption: Anisha S. Dasgupta, New Haven, Conn.
Drawing by Tom Cheney
From here

Ever since the New Yorker started its cartoon caption contest, I thought democracy had at last arrived in America. Everyone could be funny now! (Too bad of course for people like me who were unable to conjure a single funny thought when faced with the caption-less cartoon. We would need to be shipped off to unjust, unfair, undemocratic places like Iraq, or Cuba, or Florida.) In any case, I became one of those readers who’d pick up a new issue of the magazine only to see what the readers had sent in. I was–still am–delighted. Week after week.

Then, my dear colleague Judith Nichols began co-teaching a course at Vassar with New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly. And, at the department’s annual party, I asked Liza what she thought of the readers’ captions. She hated them. Then, Judy and Liza organized a panel discussion on campus to which came other New Yorker cartoonists, including the peerless Roz Chast. All the panelists, in particular Peter Steiner, thought the whole idea stupid and very unfunny. There’s some sense of violation involved, it seems, and this kind of collaboration seems to these cartoonists dubious at best and farcical (in a bad way) at worst.

Tonight I came across an interview with Carl Gable of Norcross, Georgia who has now won three (!) of these caption contests. Please read it.

new-yorker-cartoon-caption-contest

According to WYNC:

NEW YORK, NY December 08, 2006 —Sometimes there’s a handy phrase to describe a cultural movement, like punk rock, or hip-hop, or grunge. Sometimes there isn’t, and you have to see a performance or hear an album to decide for yourself what’s going on. “Still Life with Commentator” is that kind of show. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter went out to the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week to take a listen.

You can catch a bit of the performance on Vijay Iyer’s website. The description of the show on that site:

A collaboration of composer-pianist Vijay Iyer, poet/librettist/performer Mike Ladd, and conceptual artist/theater director Ibrahim Quraishi, Still Life with Commentator is a lyrical, darkly comic transmedia performance/opera examining the role of the audience and the media in modern warfare. Also featuring experimental vocal artist Pamela Z, electronic percussionist/vocalist Guillermo E. Brown, cellist Okkyung Lee, guitarist Liberty Ellman, and actors Palina Jonsdottir and Masa Nakanishi.

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Pankaj Mishra’s excellent report from Shanghai:

There are still more poor people in India and China than in all of Africa. But the leaders of both countries, having promised to usher their huge populations into a Western-style consumer society, now make claims on the world’s resources as confidently as their American counterparts. Striking oil deals in Lagos, Tehran and Caracas, they scour the globe for iron ore, steel, copper and timber. China and India also increasingly rank among the world’s largest producers of carbon emissions.

In both countries, the newly enriched have similar aspirations. The wealthy farmer’s house I visited in a tea-growing village in Zhejiang province could easily have belonged to an Indian of comparable wealth, with its marble floor, 26-inch television, big poster of a white girl with an inexplicable tear in her eye, garishly upholstered sofa, bathroom with shower cubicle and open-hole toilet, and kitchen, with a brand new microwave and other underused mod cons.

To be an Indian in a Chinese city is to find familiar not only the vast crowds, the vivid street life, the open-fronted shops and food stalls, but also the malls with their luxury brand-names, the shiny new Mercedes and BMWs marooned in the intransigent traffic, the billboards for reality TV shows, the websites mixing sexual exhibitionism with jingoism.

It is hard not to wonder about the political outlook of the newly affluent Chinese.

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