This isn’t to say that the pogrom of 2002, where Muslims were massacred in public view in the presence of policemen, wasn’t on the minds of the bombers. It may well have been. But it’s hard to believe that anyone who had been directly affected by the killings would have plotted his revenge in this preening, taunting, clever-dick way. “The Indian Mujahideen strike again!” — this isn’t raging grief from a pogrom victim; it’s a line out of Zorro.

Because revenge for the Gujarat pogrom this is not. If anything, the bombings will help consolidate the systematic subordination of the province’s Muslims that has been accomplished over the past six years. Every bomb that exploded (or didn’t) helped demonize the community further, justified greater police surveillance and encouraged talk of ‘the enemy within’. There’s something surreal about an act of allegedly Muslim vengeance that allows Narendra Modi to look statesmanlike in the face of violent provocation. One newspaper speculated that Modi’s restraint was part of a concerted effort to re-make his resume for a future bid at becoming prime minister. If it was, then the ‘Indian Mujahideen’ were supplying the cues for a script not of their devising.

Mukul Kesavan on the “remote-controlled cleverness” of the recent bombings in Gujarat.

In a 2004 piece by the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, recently exhibited at the Guggenheim, a pack of life-size tigers writhe in midair, bristling with scores of arrows. They should be dead, with all those wounds. Yet they still live–or appear to. There is no more perfect emblem of China, or so might agree Ma Jian, on the basis of his new novel, Beijing Coma, in which the country is portrayed as “a vast graveyard” with “a gruesome history.”

Detailing just how gruesome is part of Ma’s project, and it takes nearly 600 pages to record a mere slice of the brutality and carnage wreaked by a government bent on controlling every aspect of its people’s lives, from the way they profess their love (only recently could anything more direct than “You’re nice” be uttered out loud) to their reproductive fulfillment. Then, whenever a soldier shot a civilian, “the victim’s family was made to pay for the bullet.”

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Buy Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma

Tulsi Badrinath, Melting Love
Hans Billimoria, Ugly Tree
Ian Rosales Casocot, Sugar Land
Han Dong, Banished!
Anjum Hasan, Neti, Neti
Daisy Hasan, The To-Let House
Abdullah Hussein, The Afghan Girl
Tsutomu Igarashi, To the Temple
Rupa Krishnan, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Murong Xuecun, Leave Me Alone, Chengdu
Kavery Nambisan, The Story that Must Not be Told
Sumana Roy, Love in the Chicken’s Neck
Vaibhav Saini, On the Edge of Pandemonium
Salma, Midnight Tales
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Lost Flamingoes of Bombay
Lakambini A. Sitoy, Sweet Haven
Sarayu Srivatsa, The Last Pretence
Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado
Amit Varma, My Friend, Sancho
Yu Hua, Brothers
Alfred A. Yuson, The Music Child

More here. Congratulations and best luck!

It strikes me that those most happy about the number of Indians on this list might, in fact, be the same ones pissed off about this other list.

This collection is named after its final image, at the end of Mahmoud Darwish’s sprawling poem, “With the Mist So Dense on the Bridge.” A female soldier on patrol pleads to her lover across the night sky, “Promise me nothing, / do not send me a rose from Jericho!” The Jericho Rose, also known as the Resurrection Plant, is renowned for its ability to survive as a lifeless, dehydrated tumbleweed, drifting across the desert for years until it eventually reaches a water source and blossoms into the green and flowering plant it once was.

Who is this woman soldier appearing so abruptly, inexplicably for two stanzas after a dozen pages of oblique dialogue between two men? To what side does she belong? In the fractured world of this poem, where even identity and location are ambiguous, the possibility of resolution, like the flowering of the Jericho Rose, is too uncertain, too painful to bear. Darwish’s poem captures the mood of many in the collection—an endless and confusing wait for something that is implicit but unspoken, a hope that cannot be directly expressed but only hinted at in symbols.

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Via Morgan Meis

“Days with my father” is a loving meditation on the relationship that a photographer, Philip Toledano, has with his 98-year-old father who is without any short-term memory.

Thanks for sending me the link, Filmiholic.

(Talking of fathers, here’s a link to my little daughter’s new blog, Ila.)

Shoot the freak Cold wind, boardwalk nearly empty You know you wanna / A cluster of hip-hop Lubavitch punks, shirt tails out, talking tough You shoot him / he don’t shoot back / Keeper-flatties thrashing in buckets, out there on the pier / Shoot the freakin’ freak A regular family of man out there, fishing for fluke / and blues in that wind How you gonna build memories Everything shut down / or gone Let the lady have a try Sponge Bob, Spookerama, Luna Park / Shoot ‘im in the head the Mighty Atom, Thunderbolt, Wonder Wheel / He likes it when you shoot ‘im in the face SurfHouse, Astroland, Shutzkin’s / knishes, A real live human target ‘Hungry for Fun’, fried clams / Everybody’s gonna ‘Bump yo’ ass, bump bump bump yo’ ass’ / You know you wanna You know you wanna You know you wanna

…

I had taken my daughter to Coney Island last week and when my eyes fell upon the above opening lines–no, just the title–of a poem by August Kleinzahler in the LRB, I recognized the landscape instantly. “Shoot the Freak”–I was feeding French fries to my girl and saw those words in the distance and wondered about them. I like the poem because it evokes all those details, sights and sounds and smells, that remain in my mind, like sand, after our afternoon’s visit to boardwalk. But what the poem also does, the rest of it which I haven’t copied down for you, is that it quickly sketches into the horizon the human drama of fame and mortality, a commentary on something that is worn and vital at the same time.

(Click on the poet’s name above to read Marjorie Perloff’s more critical assessment of Kleinzahler)

It must be rather shocking for Shyamalan, but his latest movie, The Happening, is one of the most interesting movies of the year, despite being one of the worst. It offers a study in what happens to the mind of a talented moviemaker when he is caught between commercial hysteria and his own engulfing ego. When books go nutty it’s all just prose – or the history of prose – but when it happens to films people start losing their jobs and their houses. That is why so many film directors behave unnaturally and why good films are very hard to make nowadays.

Andrew O’Hagan on M. Night Shyamalan’s latest

Julia, who sits at an outdoor table with a sign that says PSYCHIC READING AND PALMISTRY, has been watching me each day as I walk past her to the subway in this Brooklyn neighborhood. When I finally stop at her table, she tightens her head scarf and gives me a big smile. “How much for a palm reading?” I ask. “We will talk about money later, darling,” she says, grabbing my hand with delight. Behind her is a shop full of Indian paraphernalia — a Ganesha idol, incense sticks and OM signs, along with Tibetan scrolls of the Buddha. It strikes me that an American psychic in New York City must regard it as a coup to be seen in public with an Indian customer like me — the same rush that a white basketball trainer would get if LeBron James stopped by for a lesson.

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My new friend Aravind Adiga gets his palm read in New York City. He has a forecast or two about the fate of the West, which is all fine and good, except that I was never fond of Nature and Scientific American when I lived in India. There were racier magazines to read from the West, and TIME magazine wasn’t one of them. Also, I always felt guilty when I went against my father’s directions about which days were auspicious for travel or weren’t. I think Aravind has a valuable lesson to offer to Julia, no doubt, but he also seems to be in denial about his love life.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz recites his poem “Aaj Bazaar Mein” and, later in the video, Nayyara Noor’s rendition of the poem is set against disturbing images from Zia’s Pakistan.

Via

Kafka frantically pursued Felice, and then he tried to escape her, Begley writes, “with the single-minded purpose and passion of a fox biting off his own leg to free himself from a trap”— a line with more than a little Kafka spirit in it. “Women are snares,” Kafka said once, “which lie in wait for men on all sides, in order to drag them into the merely finite.” It’s a perfectly ordinary expression of misogyny, dispiriting in a mind that more often took the less-traveled path. Apropos: having had it suggested to him by a young friend that Picasso was “a wilful distortionist” who painted “rose-coloured women with gigantic feet,” Kafka replied:

I do not think so…. He only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror, which goes “fast,” like a watch—sometimes.

Kafka’s mind was like that, it went wondrous fast—still, when it came to women, it went no faster than the times allowed.

I’m being devoured by mosquitoes and fear I’ll turn into a mosquito—but here’s a quick link to the review by Zadie Smith of a Kafka biography that removes the metaphysics from the man.