More on Banker: The Literary Saloon over at The Complete Review comments on Ashok Banker's letter (yup, the one we promised to love, honour and cherish) to us hapless souls at Kitabkhana. And no, the Babu didn't ask them to do this, though he's touched that they did. Scroll down to the posts for July 31--the item's called 'Banker threats'.

Kitabkhana promises to cherish this letter forever--it's the first threat of legal action the site has received this far. Now we feel just like the big brand newspapers. (Don't bother looking for the offending item--it's been removed.) Without further offending Mr Banker, the Babu can say that the brouhaha was over the rumoured Rs 10 crore book deal the media reported the author had received for his Ramayana series. Mr Banker's assertions that he never answered the "how much" question and his clarifications about the amounts received and the sources from which he received those advances are very welcome.

Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 04:19:29 -0400
From: "Ashok K. Banker"
Subject: Your defamatory comments
To: hurreebabu@yahoo.co.uk


Dear Sir,

The following comments from your web blog were brought to my attention yesterday:

[SINCE THE NEXT THREE LINES ARE FROM THE OFFENDING POST, THEY HAVE BEEN REMOVED SO AS NOT TO CAUSE ASHOK BANKER ANY FURTHER DISTRESS.]

The above statements are clearly libellious and defamatory on a number of counts and am in touch with my attorneys as well as my publishers to pursue legal action against your website for publishing these comments. As is customary, I'm writing you to offer you the chance to remove these offensive and defamatory comments immediately, failing which I will have no chioce but to take the strongest possible action against your site adminstrators and owners, as well as the owners of the servers that host your website.

Please be assured that I will take this action and my publishers will back me up as your implications are clearly damaging the reputation of their author, as well as the books in question, namely the Ramayana series.

As for the allegations themselves, you've clearly not read the articles you've referred to comprehensively, or you'd have read both my repeated refusals to answer the "how much" question, as well as the names of my other publishers--AOL TIme Warner Book Group, USA, Random House Verlagsgruppe Germany, Universe Pocket Imprint, France, as well as others unnamed but referred to in the articles, which do indeed contribute the majority of the total advances received by me to date (not 98% but well above 85%).

If you have any queries, I look forward to hearing them at the earliest. Failing which I shall go ahead and take all legal action available to me. You should know that you will then be liable under both civil and criminal law, and that under the relevant section and under certain conditions, criminal defamation is a non-bailable offense. Since I don't seek financial redressal, this is the action I propose to take against all concerned with your website.

Best wishes

Ashok K. Banker

"Depending on one's ideology, Bloom can be perceived in one of two ways: as a Don Quixote tilting at the whirring blades of social progress or as a noble Sir Lancelot, defending a literary kingdom whose nobility includes Homer, Milton, and Dante. In this second paradigm, Bloom's King Arthur is undoubtedly William Shakespeare, the writer to whom he reverently refers as 'my mortal god.'" The Atlantic Monthly interviews Harold Bloom.

Billions of blue blistering barnacles! The Babu learns that the Tintin adventures aren't just cheerfully old-fashioned yarns peopled by a cast of eccentric and chiefly male characters. According to the Times Literary Supplement, they "are also intricate fables which speak to many of the pressing concerns of modern times: they celebrate heroism and the transcendence of self, the resistance of the 'small' person (or institution or country) against larger oppressive forces, the liberating and exhilarating potential of modern technology, and the capacity for human understanding to transcend racial and cultural differences (symbolized by Tintin’s friendship with the young Tibetan, Tchang)." Er...wow?

"Just to exist in Lahore is a sort of inspiration," says Bapsi Sidhwa, in a commentary for the BBC on the cities that inspire writers. Since this is soundbyte stuff, don't expect much more than a sort of Lahore Made Easy guide.

Rushdie takes Padma Lakshmi very, very seriously. They even discuss Prout. Proust. Whatever. (Blame the printer's devil, not Ms Lakshmi for this one!)

* "When, for example, one reads Curzon's opinion, during a visit to Persia, that 'our system may be good for us; but it is neither equally nor altogether good for them the normal Asiatic would sooner be misgoverned by Asiatics than well-governed by Europeans,' the words have a resonance to the reader that they could not have had when Gilmour first wrote them." William Dalrymple on David Gilmour's biography of that most superior person. (Thanks to Amitava for pointing this one out.)

"[Carey] says the other thing about the poetry is that McCauley and Stewart knew that they would be read in two ways: before the hoax was revealed and after. So there is a sense the poems themselves are about the hoax, a coded message for their victim. 'They're very tight, disciplined communication,' he says, 'they're very good poems. The character's known to be a fake; is the poetry a fake? No, I don't believe so.'" Peter Carey's next book fictionalises the infamous Ern Malley hoax.

Slate comes to the defence of one of the staples of dishonest and pathbreaking journalism alike--the composite character. "Gay Talese explained the storytelling liberties of New Journalism by saying it 'seeks a larger truth.' Alastair Reid, who used composite characters in pieces for The New Yorker, said, 'There is a truth that is harder to get at ... than the truth yielded by fact.' Mitchell wrote in his preface to Old Mr. Flood, 'I wanted these stories to be truthful rather than factual, but they are solidly based on facts.'" The Slate piece cites John Hersey as well; however, the Babu has never been able to feel quite as admiring about Mr Hersey since he read Anne Fadiman on the author. In Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman recounts the story of how the dispatches filed by her mother and by Melville Jacoby became "the nearly verbatim basis for about half of Hersey's best-selling Men on Bataan." Fadiman continues, "My mother told me, 'I think Hersey was ruined by the Time Inc method of writing from correspondents' files. He just got so used to running other people's work through his typewriter and calling it his own that he started to think the whole written world was raw material.'"

If your kismet is good enough, you might be able to form an Akademi in Delhi without ever needing to tell any aageywalas to chalo. The latest edition of Hanklyn-Janklin is out.

There are prizes for the best first book, the best second novel (the Encore)--and now the Saga awards for writers aged 50 and over. The profusion of awards in today's literary world reminds the Babu of the birthday parties of his youth, where clever parents saw to it that every child went back home with a prize for something or the other--the Best Funny Walk during Musical Chairs is one that comes to mind.

"Still, I thought, what a clever idea: to publish a book about an author who uses a pseudonym—not to mention somebody else’s work in the first place—under a pseudonym. How funny. How, well, how meta." Sara Lee on how the pseudonym has changed, from useful cover for shy author or second skin for author writing in a different style, to Brand New Publishing Gimmick.

Theodore Dalrymple came down hard on D H Lawrence recently ("an earnest, but not a serious writer"). Poet David Novak comes to the defence of Lawrence, twinkling buttocks and all.

Dirty Harry? A bunch of brave, indefatigable souls have applied their smutty minds to the vexed question of sexual innuendo in the latest Potter book. Way too many wand jokes, and none of them even close to Terry Pratchett's magnificent verse (remember Nanny Ogg rendering 'A Wizard's Staff has a Knob on the End'?), but there is at least one halfway decent entry: "Well--it's just that you seem to be labouring under the delusion that I am going to--what is the phrase?--come quietly. I am afraid I am not going to come quietly at all, Cornelius." (Found on Nerve.com)

The concluding part of Amit Chaudhuri's three-part series on travelling in Germany is out.

Someone needs to do a story on the spurious advance. Arindam Chaudhuri counts his chickens before they hatch, sending out a press release claiming a seven-figure book advance that his publishers then deny. The Babu humbly suggests that authors should shut up about their nonexistent advances and humungous but unsubstantiated book deals and let their work do the talking.

On the other hand, Vikram Seth's (substantiated, confirmed, corroborated) Big Advance actually spurred a paper into doing a decent literary story for a change, as Pallavi Srivastava (her byline has been left off the story for some reason) finds out more about the two protagonists of Two Lives--Shanti Behari Seth and Henny Gerda Caro.

* The US doesn't take kindly to foreign fiction, especially in translation. Oh, and Laos is the new Timbuctoo. (The Babu has great respect for the New York Times, but this is news?) "We have always been sort of monosyllabic in terms of languages, and that extends into ignorance or wariness of other cultures," said William Strachan, executive editor of Hyperion Press. "People look at a work in translation and quite often think, `These themes don't speak to me, these situations don't speak to me.' And the hard fact is that given the reality of the world, we simply don't have to be concerned about Laos, but people there might well want to be or have to be concerned about America."

Hmmm. Hautboys are high-pitched wind instruments, so perhaps they should be sounded, not flourished. (Hot boys are what Germaine Greer's been very publicly demanding the right to lust after.)

Ashok Banker's book deal eclipses Vikram Seth's much-ballyhooed advance. Do the math.

Episode update in the Barbara Taylor Bradford versus Sahara TV soap opera.

Ramachandra Guha on M Krishnan: "Krishnan was an ecological patriot, who believed that the essence of Indian-ness lay in the species and habitats distinctive to the land."

Outlook's web edition has tributes to Bhisham Sahni from Nirmal Verma and others.

Amit Chaudhuri in Germany: part two of a three-part article in The Telegraph.

The Babu apologises for the recent slowdown in blogging activity: every time he wants to do something really useful, minor irritants like work, deadlines and viral fevers intrude. There's a lot to catch up with, so without further ado (flourish of trumpets and hautboys, whatever the latter are):

There's an interesting discussion over at Two Blowhards about the futility of bestseller lists.

That Bible of editors and writers the world over, The Chicago Manual of Style, has been updated.

"The Me Decades are stretching out into the Memoir Millennium. The I's have it," says Linton Weeks in the Washington Post, contemplating a Me-Moir of his own.

Sara Nelson on the fallout after the NYT piece on Peter "I fired him" Olson.

FF8282 is out of jail.

Robert McCrum on why the two-book deal stinks.

* The most anticipated publishing profile of the year is out, and Lynn Hirschberg at the New York Times makes it clear where she's headed from her first sentence onwards: "Although he has never edited a book, discovered a writer or masterminded a marketing campaign, Peter Olson is the most powerful man in book publishing." Olson is better known in publishing circles as the man who fired Ann Godoff, who almost fired the legendary Sonny Mehta, who walks around at the Frankfurt Book Fair pointing out strangers to the NYT writer: "I fired him."

Reetika Vazirani, a noted Indian-born poet, has died along with her two-year-old son. Police in Washington say it's a murder-suicide. This account of her last hours is gut-wrenching.

More from the Filthy Lucre Department: Ashok Banker has picked up Rs 10 crore for his revamped Ramayana--sort of. Read the fine print on this one very, very carefully. I dunno: Banker makes a big fuss over not wanting to be interviewed, then agrees to a long interview with The Week; wrote a column once deploring the tendency of the Indian media to focus on advances, but discusses his own with cheerful abandon; insists that there be no author photographs on the book jacket, but hasn't figured out that he has no control over what magazines will fish out of the files if he does agree to interviews... The Babu hears from friends, though, that the book(s) are fast-paced and impressive. As Outlook noted recently, they seem to have attracted a strong following among sci-fi and fantasy fans.

Vikram Seth's got what he wanted. If you're jibbing at the figure--over one million pounds for a non-fiction memoir of his great-uncle--reflect on this. Hillary Clinton picked up an advance of eight million dollars for her mayonnaise (it's bland, but it spreads in all directions) memoir; I'm willing to bet that Mr Seth's book will be at least six times more entertaining.

* The Babu drew a deep breath and uttered a sharp 'Tchah' (try this sometime, it's harder than it sounds) when he read this non-story in the New York Times, breathlessly headlined Harry Potter and the Internet Pirates. What Amy Harmon neglected to mention was that illegal Potter downloads are available on a relatively minuscule scale, compared to meatspace piracy.

What she appears not to have entirely understood is that the majority of the "pirate sites" are group translation sites where members would have bought the book in German, Czech or Byelorussian for that matter had it been available. In the absence of legally available translations--one of those issues that Bloomsbury wasn't able to resolve successfully--they're doing their own. Is this legal? Of course not. Is this immoral? Certainly not. It's what happens when demand outpaces supply, and the available technology supports an innovative solution. Perhaps a publishing house more open to experiment might have come up with another model--license the right to create individual translations strictly for in-group circulation for a small fee, for instance. I'd bet that most of the HP junkies involved in the translation projects would cheerfully buy a good translation--if it was available, which is not the case here.

Roz Kaveney takes Hitch down. (Link found on Bookslut.)

The Babu used to think that "pre-approved" was a term used in conjunction with "credit card" or "home loan". Turns out that there are "pre-approved" books as well (* From the Daily Telegraph). It's called the art of blurbing, though America, home of the euphemism, knows it as "advance praise"--but the Babu prefers Pico Iyer's sly term, jacketeering.

MobyLives is for angry nobodies? New York Magazine, say you're sorry. (Nope, the Babu doesn't know any of the good souls over at MobyLives. He notes that he finds far more articles of interest at MobyLives than in New York Magazine. Besides, there's a leap of logic involved here: New York Magazine also carried an article on big advances and the new literary lottery, implying that luck's a huge part of getting published--so maybe those "angry nobodies" aren't quite as easily dismissed.)

What is an Australian Bearded Dragon? The winner of this year's Bulwer-Lytton contest owns one. Marian Simms is also an expert on cheese, as her winning entry makes clear: "They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white . . . Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn't taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently."

The Babu particularly enjoyed one of the dishonorable mentions, which should have had its own "Truth in Advertising" category: "As she contemplated the setting sun, its dying rays casting the last of their brilliant purple light on the red-gold waters of the lake, Debbie realized that she should never again buy her sunglasses from a guy parked by the side of the road."

"She had many books left to write": Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Shields died today, after a long battle with breast cancer. Tributes have been pouring in: The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, a 2002 interview from The Guardian and CTV.

Salute Tim Adams: he read everything on Britain's bestseller list in the space of a week. He wrote this report with what was left of his brains.

"But rhetoric is not the preserve of politicians, and sometimes the best of it comes from what we might call the professional margins: not the government, still less the lackey columnists or think-tank CV-padders, but the denizens of what used to be known as Grub Street. Smartypants hacks, in other words, masters of clever polemic about the daily press of events." Mark Kingwell on Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Christopher Hitchens. The Babu swears the idea of calling them the Three Stooges never even crossed his mind. More on Hitch.

Sagarika Ghose, author of The Gin Drinkers and rumoured to be almost delivered of her second novel, reports from the Muslim heartland.

James Long isn't sure he likes being Will Davenport as well. But it's the throwaway line about the clause in his contract that sends shivers down the Babu's spine: is this really how corporatised publishing has become? "Story-telling, which for me is the entire purpose of writing, has been carved up into genres imposed as arbitrarily as the internal frontiers of the former Yugoslavia. It is very difficult to be a Kingsley Amis these days and wander at will into comedy, crime or sci-fi. One of my contracts actually contains a claustrophobic clause saying the contents of my next book must appeal to the same readers as my last."

Placed in the awkward position of writing a history textbook that was subsequently authored by others (think of overwriting on palimpsests), Saradindu Mukherji poses a few questions about the manner in which the NCERT has dealt with him.

"The best writers are those who make the preternatural act of will that it takes to fend off cynicism and despair in the face of all-pervasive cant; to stay fresh, remain curious, and get it right. In this Waugh finally failed, as did Amis and Larkin: All three more or less died of boredom." Katherine A Powers on the unsung malaise of our times, Acute Boredom Intolerance.

* "I suspect that Eliot's The Waste Land was written, much of it, when drunk." A N Wilson explains why he never got around to writing Bin Ends, a book about writers and alcohol--it would have had to be subtitled The Never-Ending Story.

"It's not the screws of the Nautilus you hear, but the combined sounds of Verne, H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. Rider Haggard twirling rapidly in their graves." The Boston Globe laments the dumbing down of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or LXG as the film version is called. (Naseeruddin Shah plays Captain Nemo, if you didn't know that already.)

The Guardian on why books are getting shorter. Odd, that: a short while ago, they had Blake Morrison on why books are getting longer. Might the Babu suggest that if one applies the law of averages, one comes to the conclusion that books are about as long, or as short, as they've ever been since the demise of the three-volume novel?

* It starts with Chaos, but then when you're compiling an authoritative family tree for the denizens of Greek myth, you have to begin somewhere.

"Faced with a doctor's waiting room full of patients with Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease or one of a dozen other dehumanizing illnesses, can we morally say we will not pursue our era's most promising chance to relieve their misery?" Atul Gawande in the New York Times on a book that examines the debate over how far medical research should go.

"On our way back our companion pointed out signs that hung from posts on the pavement, black German words on a white background. I recognized only 'Juden' as common to them all. These signs were meant to remind you of the exact day when, say, Jews became barred from taking PhDs. Another proclaimed the date when they were deemed ineligible to become professional classical musicians. Another recorded the day when Jews were denied access to well-known areas of recreation. The dates ranged from the late Twenties to the late Thirties: no one could claim that they didn’t know what was coming." Amit Chaudhuri in Germany; the first of a two-part article from The Telegraph.

Bhishm Sahni, actor: Saibal Chatterjee pays tribute, Saeed Mirza on the man he worked with, Govind Nihalani on Tamas.

Bhisham Sahni died a few hours ago. Tamas may have become the iconic Partition novel, alongside the short stories of Manto, but Sahni's range was far broader than most fans of either the TV serial or the book realised: he will be remembered as a member of the Progressive Writers movement, as a short story writer, a playwright and a teacher. * Outlook carried an interview with the author in 2001; the Library of Congress has voice recordings and a capsule biography. As far as the Babu knows, one of the last pieces written by Bhisham Sahni appeared in the Little Magazine's Crime issue, but this is available only in the print edition.

"If the Bush ‘Administration’ is the new Al Capone, and Blair’s Labour government its main gangster’s moll, then what does that make the Governments of India and Pakistan, as they fall over each other trying to send troops to Iraq? The phrase ‘Harem Eunuchs’ unfortunately brings visions of sleekly muscled, half-bare, lion-waisted, brown-black bodies holding gleaming scimitars. And this tests the imagination when you try and put Pervez Musharraf, Jaswant Singh or, especially, Brajesh Mishra or L.K. Advani into those flowing pajamas.

However, if you imagine a slightly dilapidated kothaa with a couple of wrinkled old guards — and why insult eunuchs either? — their ageing bodies wasted by a moral syphilis, then you begin to get a truer picture of what the Pakistani and Indian establishments have become."

Ruchir Joshi in the Hindustan Times on 'The God Option'.

Vikram Seth wants a million-and-a-half pounds for his next book. I want to read that book asap. Someone show him the money.

Bhisham Sahni, best known for his Partition novel Tamas, is in a coma following a massive heart attack. He turned in an impressive performance recently playing the Muslim passenger on the bus in Aparna Sen's film, Mr and Mrs Iyer.

Kitabkhana's been getting a lot of mail from people who want to know how to be an author, how to get published and all that jazz. The Babu is slightly puzzled at why you would seek advice on this subject from someone who writes a blog, so clearly has a) far more time to spend doing happy useless stuff than any Real Author does and b) isn't into getting published by anything other than Blogger at present. All the same, I'm happy to direct seekers after wisdom to my all-time favourite author website. Here's A L Kennedy on How To Be An Author and here she is again on what happens once you reach that elevated state.

Seymour Hersh isn't the easiest subject for an interview: "When I first contacted him, his response was unequivocal: 'Leave me alone!' When I phoned him to discuss the logistics of a trip to Washington, Hersh erupted, shouting into the phone, 'What do you want to ask me! What do you want to ask me!'" CJR's Scott Sherman got the interview anyway.

* (Salon doesn't require registration, but it does feature the most irritating pop-up ads in the world.) We don't say, "Pistols or swords?" anymore. But when you see a cold "Excuse me?" in print, you know it means the same thing. In this case, it's Charles Taylor at Salon calling A S Byatt out on her Harry Potter diatribe. It's a contradictory piece and Taylor trips over himself several times explaining why literary critics can love Harry (which is Popular But Good) without having to love Clive Cussler and company as well, but he does get in the occasional decent jab. "...For Byatt, as an academic as well as a novelist, the advent of cultural studies making their way into the sacred halls of academe is a betrayal. She may admit to loving Georgette Heyer's Regency romances as a child, but now, my God, she has lived to see people actually reviewing Heyer. Heaven forfend."

Aparisim Ghosh comes close to explaining why fiction from Asia can elicit such dramatically different reactions in the West and back at the family homestead in a review of Brick Lane: "For those with no personal experience of the book's central milieu — London's Bangladeshi community — it might seem a spicy treat, full of colorful, richly detailed characters and aromatic atmospherics... But if you've grown up on a diet of Bengali and British-Indian literature, Ali's debut is little more than a lentil broth, warm and easily digested, but predictable and lacking in flavor."

Meanwhile, Pakistan is sanitising its Eng Lit syllabus. The process began when the wife of a retired general complained to the wife of the President that Vikram Seth was too Indian, W H Auden had written a pro-Jew poem and Adrienne Rich was--shock, horror--lesbian. Then they left the matter in the capable hands of a certain Dr Arif who began as he meant to go on: "Almost every second text in the syllabus contains direct/indirect references of vulgarity and sexuality." On Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: "All characters sexually astray: men homosexuals; females lesbians/promiscuous; Brett Ashley nymphomaniac and so on." On Pope's The Rape of the Lock: "The title of the book itself shows vulgarity." On John Donne: "Almost every poem has the connotation of sex where the poet wants to take every lady to bed for sexual pleasure." And, as the Guardian joyously reports, here's Dr Arif on a Sean O'Casey play which includes the phrase, "When the song ended, Darry cocks his ear and listens." Dr Arif has underlined the word "cocks". India's Ministry of Education should employ him immediately.

Okay, soapbox time. Stage One in the Hindutva campaign was the naked bullying assertion: Mandir yahin banayenge. Next came the attempts, often ludicrous, to elevate our glorious past: We will replace Western science with swadeshi models--astrology zindabad! (Does the Indian government use Vedic mathematics to calculate the fiscal deficit? That would explain a lot...) Then the strategy gained a semblance of sophistication: hmm, what if we rewrite the textbooks really, really badly and forget all about history as it actually happened? From here to the propping up of pseudo-academics was a logical step.

Partha Chatterjee reviews a new book on demography with growing incredulity and disgust: "But what, we must ask, is this category called Indian Religionists? It turns out that this is simply a residual category obtained by subtracting Muslims and Christians from the total population. Anyone who is not a Muslim or Christian is an Indian Religionist, including Zoroastrians and Jews. True, the authors add a separate chapter in which they analyse the population trends of the less numerous religions, including Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc., but these do not affect their basic conclusions about Indian Religionists... Thus, from anti-Vedic and nastika religions like Buddhism and Jainism, to the deeply anti-Brahminical sects built around saintly figures such as Vasavanna, Nanak or Kabir, to the religions of the adivasi peoples of central India or the Tibeto-Burman or Khmer peoples of the Northeast, everything is homogenized into the timeless essence of sanatana dharma. The theory makes nonsense of all accumulated textual, historical and anthropological scholarship on Indian religions."

The Babu always considered himself non-religious, if not atheist, and is pleased to learn that in the authors' view, this would make him a victim "either of repressive Marxist states or of the individualizing pressures of modernity". He grew up in West Bengal, which presumably puts him in both hitlist categories!

The Babu decided to find out whether it really does end happily ever after for fairy tale and other kidlit characters on the web. Red Riding Hood is a site for children's book writers--but be careful, the big bad wolf pops up in the form of an ad asking whether you'd like to reset your home page to www.munky.com (what big teeth it has, grandmama!). Goldilocks is the number one bakeshop in the Philippines; Mother Goose sells kidstuff, as does Humpty Dumpty. But the Little Red Hen offers country music, and Jack Horner'll be back as soon as he redesigns his communications website. Peter Pan offers everything from hot new Latin music videos to wellness videos; the Sleeping Beauty is in the Internet consultancy business and somewhat appropriately, has been dormant for over three years now. Pollyanna's perennial optimism remains a driver in her apparently thriving designer business, Thumbelina has been quite cleverly adopted by a needlework company, Rumpelstiltskin is coming soon and you don't get to find out what Cinderella's up to unless you're over the age of 18 and into the really crude hardcore stuff.

Does M Scott Peck live up to the precepts he preached in The Road Less Travelled? And if not, do you really think the man who launched a thousand me-too self-help gurus is going to tell The Guardian?

"If American reflects the principles Wal-Mart has lately espoused—prescriptive religion, sexism, corporate strong-arming to prevent unionization—it is bound to be dirtier than Redbook." Slate on why Wal-Mart won't carry Redbook any more.

We give away our gender with every line we write: but we switch mental gears pretty seamlessly depending on whether our audience is male or female.

A S Byatt recently dissected the Harry Potter series through a Freudian perspective. (There should be a law against this. The Babu envisages a future where nothing is safe. In The Wind in the Willows, Toad's irresistible urge to steal motor cars will be revealed as a compensatory mechanism which he uses to conceal his sexual inadequacies; In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy will be unveiled as an attention-seeking rebellious teenager who rejects her family in order to join a bunch of no-good losers; and I just can't wait to see what happens when they get Pooh on the couch.)

Anyway, Caleb Carr wrote a "hear, hear" letter. Someone tell him to quit encouraging the woman before an entire school of Byattian analysis gets off the ground. BTW, she's just plain wrong when she says that no one reviews Terry Pratchett.

* "I have been asked if reading all this science will affect my fiction, and the answer is yes. Some of these ideas have already infiltrated my work-in-progress and I may have to weed them all out again." Margaret Drabble on the joys--and dangers--of judging a science book prize.

No more Mother Teresa Institute of Management. The Missionaries of Charity are copyrighting the Mother's name.

Rock stars, stature stars, department stars, sunset stars, superstars...all to be found at your friendly neighbourhood American university. The Boston Globe reports on the world of academic celebrities.

Vikram Seth is a coconut. Mid-day certainly didn't mean to imply that he's brown on the outside, white on the inside. What they really meant, of course, is that he's a source of fat, a useful rehydrant and "every word on every page of his tome is gripping". I promise I didn't make this up.

Jerusalem's new mayor slugs it out with Arthur Miller at a literary awards ceremony...well, with a taped recording of Miller, at any rate. What did he expect Miller, of all people, to say anyway--that he loved and would permanently cherish the government of Israel?

"You’ve talked about a pretend book, but you haven’t mentioned pretend money. Our fake principles are for sale in exchange for an unprecedented fake advance." So you want to email Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner, authors of My First Presidentiary? You have been warned.

"I guess I'm more interested in the tribe of cooks, and their customs, attitudes, and argot, than I am in ... well, you know, when you write about food it's like writing pornography. I mean, how many adjectives can you use to describe a salad? After 'crunchy,' 'garden fresh,' and 'redolent of unkilled fields,' what are you gonna do? It's like writing for Penthouse Letters." Who else but Anthony Bourdain? (Yes, the Babu knows he only just discovered Rain Taxi, like the complete newbie he is, but he still can't resist telling you to go drop in at the site. And no, they're not paying him for this. Nobody pays the Babu, alas. Ever.)

There is no better way to enjoy your Sunday than in the company of the Asian Age's occasionally bizarre column, Bibliofile, which asks the most unlikely people questions about their reading habits. Thanks to a sub-editor gone amok, this week had even more than usual to offer their readers (sorry, can't link to it because the Age doesn't put this section up on the Web).

The first suspicion that June Maliah (she's defined as a "model-cum-actress", one of those wonderful phrases so reminiscent of "sofa-cum-bed") may have been grievously misunderstood emerged fairly early on, when she listed "Minal Kundera" (brother to Mrinal Sen? One wonders) among her favourite novelists. The other two were Radhika Jha and a mysterious Mark East. The sub helpfully broadened Dickens' canvas by insisting that the book Maliah would make compulsory reading was A Tale of Cities, and added another character to Tagore's Shesher Kobita in the shape of one Amit Sen (Amit Ray I remember, Amit Sen...no). Then the tantalising Mark East popped up again--this time as the author of the book Ms Maliah wanted never to end, a little squib called Love in the Time (Times, according to the helpful sub) of Cholera. Ah, said the Babu, enlightened, Gabriel Garcia Mark East, the Western counterpart to that equally well-known author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But this one was a stumper: Maliah's favourite "school or college text" was listed cryptically as J Nair. Friends dredged up memories of math textbooks written by R Nairs and literary guides by A Nairs to no avail. Then we said "J Nair" aloud several times, and it dawned on us--surely this was the character made famous by Charlotte Barun De, of the famous Barun De sisters?

And January magazine has fallen prey to the Ebola virus of book sections: yes, it now has a summer reading list of its very own. (The Complete Review has a listmania round-up; it doesn't mention, though, that Monica Ali and Hillary Mantel recommend each other's books coyly in The Guardian.)

What the [bleep] is going on? The New York Observer on why we need a replacement for a certain four-letter-word, now so ubiquitous that it has lost all power to shock.

Shashi Deshpande in The Hindu compares a writer's imagination "not to a butterfly's flitting, but to the eagle's swoop and soar in flight". The article is about writers as activists. Deshpande often has the sense of a "finger in my back prodding me, telling me 'now write!'" And she asks big-league questions: "Now, where does the social role of a writer figure in this?" and even more pertinently, "Now, where is the reader in all this?" The Babu is an admirer of Deshpande's novels, but even an admirer has to draw the line somewhere.

The Insider is, well, out.

"It seems only sporting that Wood has joined in the fiction game and, with his first novel, The Book Against God, put his own negative capability —and a version of his own loss of faith—up for review." The New York Review of Books on the first novel by a critic of fifteen years. * The New York Times takes on where the NYRB reviewer leaves off, pointing out: "But it's not very interesting simply to point out (or to exult in) the fact that a first-rate critic can write a novel that's just O.K., as so many have already gleefully done. Far more interesting is that in Wood's case, the flaws -- or rather the fact that there are flaws -- in the novel bring you to the heart of what's wrong with the criticism."

Fahrenheit 451 may no longer be the ultimate curse.

"The best columnists, like the best anthropologists, write from a perspective of curious and enquiring participation. They do sometimes draw attention to themselves, but only to establish the context of what they are writing about." Ramachandra Guha in The Hindu on H Y Sharada Prasad's The Book I Won't Be Writing.

"In fact, Allende should probably get a commission from the Chilean Tourism Bureau - not because her book is an inventory of the charms of this 'slender beard' of land, but because she paints so intriguing a picture of its cultural contradictions, geographical beauty, and social complexity." The Melbourne Age on Isabel Allende's memoir, My Invented Country.

Twenty and done: The founders of Kali for Women, one of India's most respected publishing houses, may be splitting up, but they both have plans. Urvashi Butalia is starting up a new independent publishing concern, Zubaan, along with the redoubtable Anita Roy. Ritu Menon prefers to see this as a period of "positive growth". God bless everyone, says the Babu ala Tiny Tim.

Tabish Khair makes an all-too-brief contribution to the debate over the classic post 9/11 question: why do people hate America?

The US is "in the business of empire", states Robert D Kaplan in The Atlantic. This is his list of "Rules for Managing the World":
1. Produce More Joppolos
2. Stay on the Move
3. Emulate Second-Century Rome
4. Use the Military to Promote Democracy
5. Be Light and Lethal
6. Bring Back the Old Rules
7. Remember the Philippines
8. The Mission is Everything
9. Fight on Every Front
10. Speak Victorian, Think Pagan
The Babu chuckled all the way through the Kaplan interview until a terrible suspicion dawned on him: the man is serious, and this wasn't some sort of elaborate practical joke orchestrated by the Atlantic.

"There is a case to be made that Maigret's life was a projection of a fantasy of Simenon's: returning each night to a stable domestic environment, having mastered the demons beyond. He certainly took pains to look like Maigret, with his soft-brimmed fedora and his ever-present pipe." Georges Simenon provides more fodder than most for the charge that his writing drew heavily from autobiography. He was clearly a man of taste, as this passage demonstrates: "Here is, without question, the world's most famous butt, and the most desired... its firm, sweet contours, its lascivious quivers and wild convulsions. A being apart with a life of its own." The derriere in question belonged to Josephine Baker; the Babu thinks that Simenon's immortal words could well be applied to the far more contemporary rear of Kylie Monogue.

William Gibson meditates on whether authors are human:

AUTHORS: ARE THEY HUMAN?

Perhaps not, "author" in current usage tending to mean something like "massively mediated writer". Your "author", then, being by definition somewhat of an idoru-construct.

Writers, however, are human. All too, in most cases, as becomes immediately evident on reading even a few literary biographies.

I think I was very fortunate, as a child, to love SF. SF was such a marginalized literature, in those days, that its writers enjoyed (if that's the word) very little mediation. There was not much mechanism in place to magnify and distort the image of the SF writer, so that by a very early age (thirteen or so, actually) I think I understood that "writers" were actually just other humans. Who somehow wrote, and were then published.

The exception to this, for me, for quite a while, was William Burroughs, a writer sufficiently ambivalent about being human that one could easily imagine he wasn't.

If you read only one review of Hillary Clinton's Living History, let it be P J O'Rourke's: "If you plan not to read this summer, Living History is just the book."

Charles Paul Freund in Reason on why Exodus briefly "became the popular template for understanding the Mideast, especially issues involving the unending Israeli-Palestinian conflict".

"I was - am still - writing a novel about Brick Lane. Its provisional title was Brick Lane. As might be imagined, I felt sick." Jeremy Gavron, who bears absolutely no resemblance to Monica Ali, on surviving a writer's worst nightmare.

Now you see it, now you don't. Karisma's been stopped in its tracks again after an appeal by Barbara Taylor Bradford. It's a big case, and perhaps Sahara should be willing to sort out the plagiarism controversy one way or another before it's allowed to profit from the serial.

Aniruddha Bahal on the writing of Bunker 13--inspiration, he says, came partly from the old westerns, partly from Bond (uh-oh) and well, having the Indian government stomp on Tehelka helped. The Independent's review radiates bemused approval.

"With Jonathan Franzen and his pals making all the big bucks, times are tough for guys like me." An excerpt from Stephen King's attempted evisceration of the literary big-boys in Book magazine. Should've been subtitled: "I Got Royalties (But No Respect)."

I sense Dusty Springfield serenading Harry Potter in the background: "The only boy who would ever burn me/ Was the son of a preacher man." Forgot to mention that Outlook devoted last week's cover to Harry Potter and covered itself in glory by failing to add anything of remote interest to the Potter media deluge.

"Exeunt: lightning and thunder, shock and awe. Dust, ash, fog, fire, smoke, sand, blood, and a good deal of waste now move to the wings. The stage, however, remains occupied. The question posed at curtain-rise has not been answered. Why did we go to war? If no real weapons of mass destruction are found, the question will keen in pitch." Norman Mailer on 'The White Man Unburdened'. Incidentally, for a very brief while this morning, this is what you got if you hit 'I'm Feeling Lucky' on Google in a search for 'Weapons of Mass Destruction'. Anthony Cox also has a 404 error page for the New York Times. The Babu likes the idea of an 'Invent Story' button.

"...[At] a time when the Indian ruling classes and the new elites that form their support structures vie with other parts of the world to embrace the political economy of globalisation, Premchand’s relentless exposures of the brutal realities of rural indebtedness and the role of moneybags in placing an immiserated nation in economic slavery... can hardly be to the taste of our current vanguards." Badri Raina on why Veer Savarkar shouldn't be allowed to replace Premchand.

The Babu had to look up "immiserated" (to be made miserable; to be impoverished) and devoutly hopes that it will not gain the same buzzword status as the much-abused adjectives "writerly" and "painterly". (He senses "authorly" and "sculptorly" lurking close behind, ready to bring about the end of the world as he knows it.) And no offense intended, but the Babu prefers using the plural of "vanguard" only in this context: 'Mr Singh knew his grand piano would be safe on the train, but had hired two van guards just to make sure."

"I have one foot resting on reality and the other foot planted firmly on a banana peel." Robert McCloskey, who introduced thousands of children to Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack and Quack Mallard, is dead.

It might take a while for their Lordships come to a decision on the question of whether Karisma-Woman of Destiny was nicked from Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance, and they don't want you to miss out on your TV soaps. Not even if they might be tarred with the plagiarism brush.

Would the person who's been clipping out and sending Tim Parks all those negative reviews consider sending him just one good review for a change?

Gene Weingarten takes off on why the TV interview works so badly when applied to authors.

Jane Ciabattari on the contradictions of today's literary world: "While there are three times as many books being published now compared to 25 years ago, many magazine and newspapers that publish reviews have faced page cutbacks." She spoke to some of the more important book review sections in the US. The Babu knows exactly what she means by the phenomenon of the "incredible shrinking book review"--it may be mini-skirt sized in the US, but here in India we play 'Air on a G-String' every time we think of either review length or book page space. (Link found on MobyLives.)

The Babu can see this popping up on some future Comp Lit paper: "Compare and contrast Arundhati Roy and Peter Hessler on Big Dams." But seriously...he found Hessler's 'Underwater', on the Three Gorges project just as eloquent and persuasive as Roy's The Greater Common Good: "In the future, when people look back at China’s transition period, one of the lasting monuments may well be an enormous expanse of dead water in central China." The New Yorker also carried a Q&A.

"An hour or so later, in a gilded salon of the Hotel Bristol, before literary Paris’s smartest, a shabby figure in a baggy sweater and rumpled scarlet jeans took his check and—in the spirit of his novel—declined to wallow in bourgeois expressions of pleasure or gratitude. Not all were charmed. 'It’s an insult to the members of the jury,' one French publisher whispered to me, 'for him to accept the prize without having washed or gone to the dry cleaner’s.'" Julian Barnes on the superb insolence of Michel Houellebecq.

Bookforum is in the news--the Village Voice takes a closer look at the "quiet revolution". Highlights from the summer issue that you can read online: Richard Wolin on Hans Georg Gadamer, Steve Erickson on James M Cain ("how else to take Cain if not perversely?"), and an interview with Robert Stone.

The man responsible for the travesty we've politely been calling "the new NCERT textbooks" takes aim at SAHMAT. The timing of Rajput's remarks is easily explained--the Indian History Congress is turning up the heat.