"NEW NEW ORACLE
I see darkness spreading. I see empty movie theaters. I see us making millions and millions of dollars anyway. Everything that has a beginning has an end. You have to try to stop Hugo Weaving, because even though he's a piece of software running in a simulated reality, he is impossible to stop. The holes are too big." The Matrix Reloaded: The Abridged Script, from d2r.

Kunzru explains why he turned down the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize: "I chose to do so - and to do so publicly - because otherwise I would have felt like a hypocrite. I understand that some of the judges are angry at the use of the prize luncheon as a political platform. To them I can only apologise and say that sometimes questions of literary value are inseparable from politics." Amit Roy has more coverage in the Calcutta Telegraph.

"In the name of freedom of expression, if anyone decides to wield his/her pen irresponsibly, I will describe his/her pen as chained. I will identify that chain as self-imposed. I will say repeatedly that he/she is chained by his/her own agenda of seeking more fame and so called glory. He/she perhaps will then be seeking greater publicity, bigger sale of his/her books, and so called laurels from the West. We the people of the third world know very well why West praises and dances around some of us." Oh please. Shamsul Haq, who has filed a defamation suit against Taslima Nasreen, might well deserve our sympathy--but he is not going to get it with this specious, pompous attack.

"Mr. Coetzee had finished reading. He provided no other opinions about any issue. He took no questions from the audience. Intent and expressionless, he left the podium and made his way to a nearby table, where he ended the evening signing and selling his books." The NYT, like several other newspapers, struggles gamely to convert a you-had-to-be-there book reading into a proper news story, with absolutely no assistance from The Reclusive Mr Coetzee.

What's the V-word in Gujarati, again? This translation of the Vagina Monologues will also include an additional section on Jaadi--fat--and the way Indian women see their bodies.

Time has a Top 25 graphic novels list. Over at the Babu's homestead, we're arguing about the omissions already.

Everyone's been flamed. Allison Burnett whined about a bad review on Amazon and got roasted by the reviewer and his pals. (Yeah, yeah, they both started it first.) The moral of the story: don't take that garbage on Amazon's message boards seriously in the first place. I mean, come on, Amazon's reviewers love Chitra B Divakaruni. (Link from The Fold Drop.)

"New verb", indeed. Peck off.

"Having thanked the judges, Hari Kunzru explained in his statement: 'The Impressionist is a novel about the absurdity of a world in which race is the main determinant of a person's identity. My hope is that one day the sponsors of the John Llewellyn Rhys prize will join with the judges in appreciating this.'" Then he refused the prize and hammered the prize sponsors, the Daily Mail, for its consistent "hostility towards black and Asian British people". Kunzru joins the small and select club of writers who Just Say No: think J M Coetzee refusing the Booker because the sponsoring company has links to the meat-packing industry, Amitav Ghosh turning down the Commonwealth Prize because he disagrees with the concept of the Commonwealth itself.

Stephen King defends the faith...and, among other writers, John Grisham. (What, no kind words for Danielle Steele?) Which to the Babu is similar to what might happen if Jethro Tull sang hosannas to your friendly neighbourhood boyband. (Via Maud Newton and the Bookslut. I had both pages open simultaneously, so...dead heat.) The Washington Post has a report on the NBA awards ceremony.

It took Calcutta's "intelligentsia" this long to figure out that Taslima Nasreen isn't writing "literature"? Shame on them. The good part about the two defamation suits and the bans in Bangladesh and Calcutta is that the book's sales are up. She may not be the world's most literary writer, but she doesn't deserve to be silenced. If we really believe in freedom of speech, we need to accept that it includes the books we find boring, or that we disapprove of, just as much as the ones we love. End of rant.

Robert Birnbaum talks to Saira Shah: "We finished Beneath the Veil in a feeling of hopeless impotence because particularly of what we had seen in the North. We'd seen people pushed right up against the border with Tajikistan —there was huge mass of population up against that border, and I was absolutely convinced that it was only going to be a matter of months before the Taliban went through and the opposition was wiped out. They would have just been massacred. I remember thinking, "Oh god…" and then 9/11 happened with such strange resonance, really. It was a strange, awful time. I saw the picture coming through and I couldn't believe it. I just didn't want to believe it had anything to do with Afghanistan... Quite early it was people saying it was bin Laden. And when I gradually realized I remember the feeling of shame. I got a huge feeling of shame that it was to do with Afghanistan. Which is strange because my travels there have taught me I am absolutely not a pure Afghan."

* (Salon requires subscription or forces you to watch an ad in return for a free day pass) Ann Marlowe has a point when she slams Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul for her "crude" rendering of stereotypes and her "God's eye viewpoint"--but her rant has more than its fair share of problems. Unless you like wading through paragraphs like this: "Whatever a Westerner writes about Afghanistan is going to be gravely wrong in some respects. But as long as we write with the awareness that we are probably projecting as much as we are describing, we might as well go ahead. After all, the goal of psychoanalysis is learning to recognize the transference and countertransference, not to stop us from ever falling in love again. Or in less specialized vocabulary, we're not OK, they're not OK and that's OK too."

Gerard Jones is doing the guest column at MobyLives this week. "[Now] I could send an individually addressed query letter to 2,000 of the top, most successful, cream of the crop agents and editors in the US, UK and Canada in two days! I could get more rejection letters in a week than it had previously taken me ten years to get! I was in heaven. And I figured when other writers found it, they'd be in heaven, too. I want everyone in heaven, just like me—that's one of my goals in life. I have seven of them, too, but I forget the other six." His website, Everyone Who's Anyone, has some interesting exchanges. Like this one:
"Please remove my name and details from your website. Thank you." Jessica Sykes
"Why?" G.

The Babu's circle of friends suffers from hypergraphia. Most of them, being cats, are more epileptic patient in their processes than Flaubert, however. And this passage from an article in The Chronicle Review explains why most of his friends, cats and humans included, make bad house-guests: they're manic-depressive. Of course.
"Hypergraphia doesn't guarantee writing skill; its products can range from the simple (for instance, an epileptic patient whose copious journal was endless repetition of the thought "Thank GOD, no seizures" in variously colored ink) to the sublime (the novels of Dostoevsky or Flaubert, also temporal-lobe epileptics). But a compulsive need to write may indirectly make good writing more likely by increasing the time the writer spends practicing. This may be one factor in the very high incidence of manic-depressive writers."

What happens when a vibrant reading culture is rendered bankrupt? "According to the Holy Koran, the first message delivered to the Prophet Muhammad was a command: Read. But walk the empty aisles of Cairo's old book bazaar, or visit the weary guardians of the Arabic literary tradition, and the conclusion is unanimous: For titles other than the Koran, that command is largely ignored today." A bestseller in the Arab world is defined as a book that sells 5,000 copies, according to this article. It also mentions the bizarre case of the recent ban on Egyptian poet Ahmed Al-Shahawi's book Commandments for Loving Women, which uses verses from the Koran in conjunction with what his censors are pleased to term "explicit language". Shahawi has said he will defy the ban.

Apropos Monday's 'Literature is Dead' item, we have a minor correction. According to Gordon Burns, it's only contemporary US literature that's dead, or at least bloated, on steroids, self-obsessed. "Why does the American voice, 'the American image of voice', as Harold Bloom calls it in The Western Canon , the voice that the history of the last half-century has been told in, all of a sudden sound so pale, so stale and grating?" Sadly, he loses me when he announces a wistful nostalgia for, of all the animals in the zoo, the English kitchen-sink novel.

The IMPAC longlist is out. Among the 125 authors in contention: Rohinton Mistry, Umberto Eco, A S Byatt, John Updike, Donna Tartt...

"Perhaps Tolkien deserves better, but he's powerless to shape his legacy now. By conjuring for the public an imaginative space with such broad and far-reaching appeal, the Oxford don unintentionally became the author not only of a book but of its unimaginable consequences." That's Ethan Gilsdorf lamenting the commercialisation of Tolkien. He does a pretty good job of explaining why, despite his sentiments, he has a growing collection of Kinder-Surprise 2 inch high plastic Fellowship figures. (Link from ArtsJournal.)

Part 4 of Amit Chaudhuri's five-part series, The Moor's Legacy: "All his life, Nirad C. Chaudhuri strove to both express his Bengaliness and to escape it; if his first act of distancing was to write his autobiography in the English language, his second act of distancing himself from his intellectual antecedents was his lapidary dedication itself, placed at the beginning of the book, which made him infamous in his own land: “TO THE MEMORY OF THE/ BRITISH EMPIRE IN INDIA/ WHICH CONFERRED SUBJECTHOOD ON US/ BUT WITHHELD CITIZENSHIP;/ TO WHICH YET/ EVERY ONE OF US THREW OUT THE CHALLENGE:/ ‘CIVIS BRITANNICUS SUM’/ BECAUSE/ ALL THAT WAS GOOD AND LIVING/ WITHIN US/ WAS MADE, SHAPED AND QUICKENED/ BY THE SAME BRITISH RULE.” (Read Part I...Part II...Part Three)

"If Nepal turns into a Maoist totalitarian state, it could alter the security balance throughout South Asia. In this geopolitically important area, already rent by nuclear-fueled one-upmanship between India and Pakistan, this is a risk the world cannot afford." Samrat Updhyaya, author of The Guru of Love, in the New York Times.

Culturally Sensitive Comparison Of The Week: "Ms. Kirino, who has never lived outside Japan, sees her society as a place of profound contradictions: a country that is deeply unfair to women, immigrants and people of mixed race, and yet, for most, an extraordinarily easy place to live. Her characters often inhabit society's fringes and, like Hindus striving for fruitful reincarnation, yearn for a place in the sun." From Howard French's article in the New York Time. The Babu thinks that the only way he could have improved on this was to spell 'Hindus' the archaic way. We Hindoos, always looking forward to life as a glowworm...

First it used to be just the novel that was dead. Now everything must go. Time magazine, that altar to High Literature, asks whether this is "the end of Western literature as we know it".
Here's Lev Grossman in full flow: "How did America's reading habits become so radically polarized, so prissily puritanical, that at best a quarter of what people read (or at least what they buy) qualifies as legitimate literature? It hasn't always been like this. As recently as the mid--19th century, historians of the novel tell us, there was only one heap. Dickens wrote best-selling novels, but they weren't considered "commercial" or "popular" or "your-euphemism-here." They were just novels. No one looked down on Scott and Tennyson and Stowe for being wildly successful. No one got all embarrassed when they were caught reading the new Edgar Allan Poe over lunch." (Via MaudNewton.)
Clearly, Grossman never came across Saul Bellow's piece for the NYT some years ago: "In the mid-nineteenth century it was Uncle Tom's Cabin that impressed the great public. Moby Dick was a small-public novel. The literary masterpieces of the twentieth century were for the most part the work of novelists who had no large public in mind."

"Bloviations" is my new word-of-the-day, thanks to Jonathan Yardley,who's euthanised Elizabeth Costello this week. To bloviate is "to discourse at length in a pompous or boastful manner", which the Babu thinks is a pretty decent definition of his working life.

Maybe he should become a silbador instead.

The Whitbread shortlists are out: compared to the Booker, they remind the Babu of those old Avis ads--the Whitbread judges try harder. Usual suspects: Vernon God Little in the First Novel category, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time in the Novel category. Not to diss Haddon's book, which I'm reading with great enjoyment, but it puts me in mind of an old SF classic called Flowers For Algernon, which took you into the mind of a mentally retarded man who received medication that made him--temporarily--a genius and that wore off. The story was told from his viewpoint.

The Paris Review has some of its 50th anniversary issue online. Here's a taste: Paul Auster: "Interestingly enough, the literary model I had in mind when I wrote those pieces was the joke. The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count." Jim Crace: "I don't look for information, I look for vocabulary and for the odd little emotional idea that will give some oxygen to my imagination." Chinua Achebe: "Then I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn't know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people." The Babu especially treasured this poem by the late Agha Shahid Ali.

Martin Amis is interviewed by Nerve. Just two observations: one is how Amis makes me nostalgic for the young Norman Mailer, not to mention the middle-aged Henry Miller, when he witters on and on about women attacking pornography and the spilling of seed in fallow ground because it threatens "their sort of raison d’etre: the power to give birth".
He was kind of enlightening, though. The Babu used to think a "facial" was what happened when his sister went to the local beauty parlour and slathered gunk all over her...on second thoughts, never mind. (Via Maud Newton.)

John Pilger on the silence of writers: "That the menace of great and violent power in our own times is apparently accepted by celebrated writers, and by many of those who guard the gates of literary criticism, is uncontroversial. Not for them the impossibility of writing and promoting literature bereft of politics. Not for them the responsibility to speak out - a responsibility felt by even the unpolitical Ernest Hemingway. (Link courtesy Amita--thanks.)

The Woman in the Cape has clamped down hard on the freedom of the press. Jayalalitha, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, objects to phrases like ""stinging abuse", "unrestrained attacks on the opposition", "fumed", "incensed", "chastisement" or "diatribe", when used to describe her speeches. In fact, she objects so strongly, she's trying to arrest journalists from The Hindu. Full coverage from The Hindustan Times; Outlook; The Hindu.
Give Cape Fear, as the lady is often fondly called, enough time and she'll do a Mao. From Jung Chang's Wild Swans, an instructive passage on just how lunatic the cult of personality can get about censorship: "As an indication of the terror of the day, no one dared to burn or throw away any newspapers. Every front page carried Mao's portrait, and every few lines featured Mao's quotations. These papers would have to be treasured and it would bring disaster if anyone saw you disposing of them... A schoolfriend of my mother's was hounded to suicide because she wrote 'Heartily love Chairman Mao' on a wall poster with one brush stroke inadvertently shorter, making the character 'heartily' look like the one meaning 'sadly'."

Speaking of overt and covert kinds of censorship, this excerpt from the testimony of Stanley Kurtz before a US committee on education makes for frightening reading. (Link courtesy Pratibha Ghogale.)

The NYT's featured author of the month is Martin Amis.

And calloo, callay, oh frabjous day, the New Yorker has a new short story by T C Boyle.

The Outlook-Picador Non Fiction Competition has been announced--the theme this year is Food, the deadline is December 15, 2003. Open to all Indian nationals. Interested?

Umberto Eco on translation: "In the course of my experiences as a translated author I have always been torn between the need to have a translation that respected my intentions, and the exciting discovery that my text could elicit unexpected interpretations and be in some way improved when it was re-embodied in another language." (Via Aldaily.com.)

All together now: McJobs are McGood McThings, dictionary people. Not "low paying and dead end work". Next up, we're expecting Ronald McDonald to invite the crew over at Merriam-Webster's to flip a few hamburgers and discover just how intellectually challenging and career-enhancing those days behind the counter can be. Sounds like a load of McBull to the Babu, but then he avoided being a Hamburger Helper. Oops, sorry, that's trademarked too...

"With Dutt originated the literary ambition of going outward, toward England and Europe; occasionally substituted, as in Vijayan, by a journey to a remote place. The journey seems to be followed by a crisis, a break, an epiphany, a spiritual homecoming to the mother-tongue. Chaudhuri muddied and complicated this sequence in all kinds of ways; and it’s worth studying his career and his mental life for their remarkable continuities, and disjunctions, with Dutt’s." In Part III of this five-part series, Amit Chaudhuri continues his exploration of mother and other tongues. (Read Part I...Part II.)

"A recent poll named Don Quixote the greatest novel in the world. Spanish speakers naturally revere the book, in part as the fictive embodiment of the romantic and noble side of their character. William Faulkner claimed to reread Cervantes's masterpiece every year (one can see his novels as working through similar tensions -- the old idealized Dixie of the aristocratic Sartorises and the new venal South of the Snopes clan). Even Stendhal loved Don Quixote, while the most perfect 19th-century novel, Madame Bovary, established its heroine as a kind of female Quixote. The mournful knight and Sancho Panza are clearly the progenitors behind some of the other endearing "couples" of world literature -- Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller, Holmes and Watson, Jeeves and Wooster. And every innovator in modern fiction looks to either this novel or Tristram Shandy as his ultimate inspiration.
So why don't I like the book more?"
The Babu has been trying to resist linking to everything Michael Dirda writes, but the man breaks my resolve every single time.

The Babu knows this is bad for him: linking to rabid rants posing as serious argument. Ramesh Rao, with his prevarications, evasions and wild accusations, is part of the Hindutva's new create-an-intellectual-of-our-very-own project. Allow me to explain that part of my disgust at Rao's attempt to downplay what happened in Gujarat stems from meeting riot victims in Delhi a few months after their lives had been torn to shreds by mobs in Ahmedabad. Rao calls Nussbaum's August 2003 article in Dissent a piece of "shoddy research and dangerous demagoguery"--a criticism that could be applied with far more truth to his own piece, in fact. Rao's statistics, incidentally, are contradicted sharply by this fact-finding report.

We had fun reading about the person who "wretches" in a plane toilet, in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, but now it seems it was the fault of a flunky who opened the wrong file. If you're into book collecting and you have a typo-strewn edition of the book, hang on to it--it should be worth something in another 15 years.

Courtesy a professor in Delhi and Robert Fulford, the Babu has two new phrases to mull over: cyber-coolie and Exploitation Police.

"A culture is the sum of the exterior influences which have enriched it," he continues. "Writers of Indian or Pakistani descent now revitalise the English novel. But in France, when I wrote Landscapes after the Battle in 1982, editors went apopletic when I dared imagine a Paris with the street signs in Arabic. But a culture which doesn't accept enrichment from marginal cultures is doomed." Gerry Feehily meets Juan Goytisolo in Marrakesh.

Jonathan Yardley on Living To Tell The Tale: "This book is not a work of fiction -- the author researched his own life with great care, drawing on extensive recollections of family and friends, though with García Márquez one never knows where fact ends and fiction begins, or vice versa -- but it has the narrative force of a novel and, even more to the point, the beguilingly labyrinthine structure of a novel by the master."

"It felt like a mistake the first time, so this time it's obviously a mistake," said M G Vassanji. He's just won the Giller--for the second time.

"Even the author of a book showing modest to decent sales will likely end up in a Barnes and Noble in Berkeley with only three audience members, two of whom are homeless." Sara Nelson on the unbearable lightness of book tours. Neal Pollack disagrees, in the MobyLives letters section.

Irresistible Quote of the Week: There are two ways in which to say that Prince Charles was present at the opening shot of a Hindi film. The careful way: "'The Rising, take one, start,' Charles said yesterday as he snapped shut a clapperboard to set the camera rolling on the set of the film at a five-star hotel in Mumbai, home of the Hindi film industry." (From The Star.) And the Prince who passed on a social disease way: "Prince Charles gives the clap to the mahurat shot of Ketan Mehta’s The Rising..." (From The Times of India.)

"I do like the idea of there not being any design on the book jacket and just reading every book in the same font. I do think fonts influence the way you read things. Some books by young women who are very talented—the fonts that are chosen are not the best fonts, they are too frilly, and they make you not look at the writing as seriously as the writer intended but not that the font suggests." Robert Birnbaum interviews Vendela Vida, who has plenty of other considered opinions to share.
Like this one: "In the literary world there is too much talking about —this has been said before—talking about reviews of books than about the books. Or they read the reviews more than they do the book. Or there is more talk about the author within the context of their friends." The Babu, not as well up on literary gossip as you may have imagined, puzzled over that phrase--"within the context of their friends"--before a more knowledgeable source informed him that Vida's husband is Dave Eggers. Whatever. What he's really trying to figure out is how everyone at The Believer manages to sound defensive and smug at the same time. It's a minor art form.

"AMIT CHAUDHURI is an unlikely radical. He dresses conservatively. His hesitant delivery is of one who weighs each word carefully before committing it to speech, as though language came to him in a box labelled "Handle With Care". His four novels, A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag, Freedom Song, and A New World, are slim and sensitive — a bit like the man himself." Anita Roy on Chaudhuri as a "fiercely intelligent and non-conformist critic". The second article in Chaudhuri's five-part series on disowning and recovery, exile and homecoming in Indian writing is out. (Read Part One.)

Chaudhuri's insistence on practising crisp and incisive criticism in an uncongenial milieu might be seen as his protest against the cult of mediocrity. Michael Ventura has a nice riff on 'Mediocrity's vengeance'. "[Nelson] Algren wrote, "Mediocrity is never passive; it avenges itself for its deprivation." Tape that on the fridge. It's all about the United States today."

Got my very own copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoirs yesterday. The Babu found himself a quilt, a flask of coffee, some cats and settled in for the winter, ignoring the distant screams of people to whom he owes vast quantities of work. Instead, I listened as Garcia Marquez told the story of a friend he knew in Sucre, Cayetano, knifed by two brothers who caught up with him at the door of his house. Cayetano's mother had hurried to lock the door, believing that her son was already inside: "And so he was the one who could not come in, and they stabbed him to death against the locked door."
Most of you will recognise the embryonic seed for Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which Garcia Marquez wrote thirty years after the incident took place. His mother did not read the book: "Something that turned out so awful in life," she said, "can't turn out well in a book."
* In the NYT, Francisco Goldman sums up this instalment of the memoirs very neatly: "To one familiar with his novels and stories, these pages are uncanny: Garc?a M?rquez reveals the real-life people and incidents underlying even his most fantastic fiction, until it becomes hard to think of anything he has left out."
I have just reached the part where the book he believed he was going to write--La casa--has turned into the book that will be Leaf Storm. For those of you who haven't found a copy of Living To Tell The Tale yet, the Washington Post has a brief excerpt.

Githa Hariharan's argument sounds important, even interesting. The Babu offers a free Coke (what the hell, it's the ultimate symbol of globalisation, right?) to anyone who will dejargonise this for the unwashed masses. Meaning himself.
"We spend a great deal of time commenting on the context of the texts we create and read and write about. Simply, we spend a lot of energy working out the diverse and universal frameworks of a text. The complex coexistence of the particular or diverse and the universals not only allows our texts to travel and endure; but they also give rise to a range of criteria that helps us judge the value of a text."

Peter Carey on the best and worst day of his writing life: "But with this book, no matter how I worked on it and tinkered with the sentences and worked on this and that, all I seemed to be doing was digging myself deeper into the ground. I knew I wasn't going to fix it up by sandpapering it or refining it anymore. So at the end of one day I came to the conclusion that this could not work. As you can imagine, that's a really bad feeling. I had a horrible night. The next day I woke up, and I decided there was a good idea here and there was a good story, and I asked myself if there was another way to do it. All that day I worked very energetically. By the end of that day, I had discovered a totally different way into the material. So it went from one day being probably the worst day of my writing life to the next day being one of the really thrilling ones." From The Atlantic.

The Babu still remembers the time a distant cousin of his announced she was going to join a creative writing course. "Why not do something useful instead?" asked her mother, one of those redoubtable Calcutta matriarchs. "Like...I don't know...ikebana? Handkerchief trimming?" The cousin became a lawyer instead. Perhaps she should have read Charles Johnson on the subject; in his hands, creative writing courses lose every bit of their artsy-craftsy stigma and begin to sound like, well, real work.
"In the period of identity politics and Kulturkampf that swept over American colleges in the '80s like a tsunami, students' imaginations cratered; their stories became depressingly less imaginative and daring, but they were oh so politically correct. Furthermore, I began to notice that some students timidly waited for me to analyze and dissect the fiction we were discussing that day or let a handful of the more vocal class members dominate our discussions. That, of course, would never do. This class was demanding, yes. Students worked hard for their professor and themselves. But what I needed to ensure was that they worked just as hard for one another."

The Complete Review has an interesting essay on translation, with an eye on the perils of 'twice removed translation': ie a translation not from Language A into Language B, and then perhaps from Language A into Language C, but directly from the translated version, B, into Language C. In Indian terms, this might mean translating Rabindranath Tagore's Chokher Bali not directly from the original Bengali into English, but using an extant translation from Bengali into Hindi as the base.

"Given his success as a cyber-prophet, I was curious to find out why Gibson is so stern in decrying the predictive abilities of science fiction. 'I knew when I started that science fiction wasn't about the future,' he insisted from his Vancouver home when I spoke to him by phone. 'Science fiction is a very good tool for getting a handle on an unimaginable present. Forget the unimaginable future, the present is damn near unimaginable this morning.'" The Babu cannot believe this; you get hold of William Gibson, and then you ask him the one question that makes serious science fiction writers grit their teeth in anguish, the one about whether SF writers don't spend their spare time entrail-gazing or checking out crystal balls...