Writer and teacher Alexander Chee reads a story by the killer and interprets it as if it were a dream:

The story was overdetermined, in other words, and I might have tried to engage him in why. Things happened in a way that told you it was like a dream and had no relationship to anything except what the author wanted to have happen. The logic ruling the actions of the characters was a deeply held unconscious belief of the author’s about the way the world works. He was brutally teased, the papers report, by the kids of his high school, for being Korean, and for the way he spoke. The step-father in the story is the US, clearly, the mother is his parents, who immigrated and brought him with them from Korea. The dead father is Korea. But this is all visible through the enormous stereoscope that is the news. In a conference with the student, though, it would have to be a lot of questions, asked gently. And in the end there would be a lot I wouldn’t know. I’d have urged counseling, and in an extreme case like this, I’m sure I would have sought out the help of other faculty and administrators. I would have done, in other words, much what they did at Virginia Tech, and that is part of what’s disturbing. It would be an understatement to say I’m re-evaluating my strategies right now.

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(Thanks, Sagal Abshir)

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In my “Work” seminar today, we discussed Andrew Ross’s Fast Boat to China and Isabel Hilton’s report “Made in China” from the Granta special issue “The Factory.” Here’s a brief excerpt from the latter:

There are some sights in China I shall always remember: the young women from a battery factory, poisoned by cadmium, who pushed forward their thin haired, yellow faced little children for me to look at (they had passed on the contamination, unwittingly, to the next generation); the men who gasped for breath as they contemplated an early death from silicosis; the workers hideously mutilated by a factory fire for which they received no compensation. For the last two decades men and women like them have provided the labour that has given us cheap goods (on the shelves of Wal-Mart and elsewhere) and put fortunes into the pockets of local officials and factory owners.

Also, Lacy Galen brought this to our notice, an article by Joshua Ferris in the Guardian, about literature and work:

The workday proves dull not only to the Computer Programmer, but to the novelist. When there’s war to attend to, and heartbreak, and class struggle and familial strife and rage against the dying light, why would one preoccupy oneself, when endeavouring to write fiction, with the nine-to-five?
Work does play an important role in literature. It just doesn’t mirror the importance or merit the attention it gets in real life. In The Great Gatsby, after surviving “that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War”, Nick Carraway heads east to learn the bond business. His decision comes swiftly, within the novel’s first few pages; next we know, he’s living in West Egg gainfully employed.

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Because of my recycling, the bomb squad came, then the state police. Because of my recycling, buildings were evacuated, classes were canceled, the campus was closed. No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No. Not even that. Because of his fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the culture of fear, mistrust, hatred and suspicion that is carefully cultivated in the media, by the government, by people who claim to want to keep us “safe.”

A poetry professor with his roots in India, Kazim Ali, becomes a terror suspect. More.

Thanks, Maud.

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A shot of Ila getting ready for a dance in distant Mumbai.

(For Elizabeth.)

Ilija Trojanow and I will be reading and conversing at the Goethe-Institut in New York tomorrow. The event is part of the PEN World Voices 2007. Ilija Trojanow’s novel, Der Weltensammler (The Collector of Worlds), won rave reviews and the Fiction Award at the Leipzig Book Fair. Told from multiple perspectives, the novel relates the adventures of real-life 19th-century British eccentric and explorer Sir Richard Burton.

Also see this by Ilija.

Reading and Discussion
04/25/07
6:00-7:30pm
Goethe-Institut
1014 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028
Free and open to the public. No reservations.
Tel: 212-439-8700

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Amit Chaudhuri provides several good reasons for why we must read Ramachandra Guha’s history of modern India, but it is his assertion that Guha explains the settled complacency of the Indian middle class that is going to make me buy the book:

And yet, despite Kashmir, and various forms of governmental wrongdoing and blunders, the Indian middle class and intelligentsia, unlike their counterparts in Japan, England or Pakistan, have never really known what it means to inhabit a morally uneasy position. There’s a mysterious surplus to being Indian, a feelgood element comparable only to the sense of self that Americans possessed until Vietnam. Visitors wonder at how happy the poor are in India, putting it down to ancient reserves of spirituality; equally wondrous is how impervious the Indian secular middle class is, despite all sorts of setbacks, to the sense of guilt, of being morally compromised. This has less to do with spirituality than with the unassailable constitutional promise of what it means to be an Indian. The absence of moral ambiguity means that there sometimes seems to be very little critical thinking in India, only one kind of debate, a nationalism in various forms, repeated infinitely. With a few exceptions, Indians don’t know how to fashion eloquence out of a sense of being wrong or having wronged, at least not without the unmistakable timbre of self-congratulation.

Photo by Chris Steele-Perkins. From Slate.

Just as I was settling down to write a review of a book on Bollywood films, I came across this post about the great actor Balraj Sahni, among the last of the leftists in modern Hindi cinema. (You can count the names of the living radicals in Bollywood today on the fingers of one hand.) Siddharth Varadarajan has provided a link to a speech that Sahni gave at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1972. What we get here in this speech, from the man who had portrayed the rickshaw puller in Bimal Roy’s “Do Bigha Zameen,” is a meditation on freedom in everyday life. It is also a call for social justice and honesty.

(When you go to Siddharth’s site, read this essay about the Bengal tiger in Belgrade zoo and his robust polemic against Thomas Friedman.)

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Last night, at NYU’s Cantor Film Center, Hanif Kureishi didn’t want to sit through his film “My Son the Fanatic” and went for a beer and oysters at the nearby Knickerbocker Bar and Grill. Returning five minutes before the movie ended, all he saw was the conversation between Parvez, the Om Puri character, talking to his wife and then Bettina, the prostitute played by Rachel Griffiths. There was a question from the audience about fundamentalism and Kureishi said that having just watched that scene toward the end it struck him that “the film was really about a man leaving a woman for another woman, something which had happened to me. The fundamentalism stuff was less important.” In other words, one sticks to one’s obsessions throughout one’s writing career. I asked him whether the new films made by British Asians, films like “Bradford Riots,” while political and intense, didn’t also leave a smaller canvas for artists to explore. Kureishi said that he wouldn’t have written “My Son the Fanatic” now. “When a subject is so public, it is dead. It is pointless now. It is not a secret anymore. When I did “My Beautiful Laundrette” it was the first gay film. Now all films are gay.” You have to write from the margins, and the margins can only be found on the margins. That is why he wrote “Venus.” It is his subject at the moment, what he called “senior sexuality.”

The photo above is of the room where Hanif Kureishi writes. The link was sent to me by Sukhdev Sandhu, the organizer of the film festival that Kureishi had come to inaugurate.

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Uma at Indian Writing provides a link to a rediff story about girl-children in Bihar.

Mintu Kumari, age 11, Class VI (in picture above):

I always wanted to go to school but my mother told me I had to go sweep leaves and gather them for building a fire for cooking at home. So everyday I had to go and collect dry leaves instead of going to school.

My brother — I don’t know his age — but he didn’t go to school either and works in a bangle factory. My father works as a labourer in Punjab. He has lost sight in one eye (starts crying). He came to see us last year, I don’t know when he will come again.

Also read the Hindi poems in translation that Uma has posted, including one by Baba Nagarjun that I’ve loved since I was a boy.