(Personal note: Griff, trust you're reading this!)
'Tis the Night Before Christmas
The Babu has nothing better to do
Than to link to this page of parodies for you.

The Babu's on the road between now and January 9, 2004; expect a drop in blogging levels, though we'll do our best to keep Kitabkhana updated at least twice a week. Have a great Grinch-free holiday season, and if you're short of Christmas cheer, help the world figure out who's the better creative artist--Shakespeare or Britney Spears. Or Babelise the English language.

The next time we use the term "literary feud", send a prayer up to the knights of the board. When it comes to bodyslamming reviews, writers and fellow players, chessplayers make the rest of us look like wimps. It all started when Nigel Short wrote this review (second item on page).
Justin Horton reacted: "Psychiatric problems are to be treated with tact and intelligence, not used as grapeshot in a feud that Short should have the wisdom to drop."
John Cox weighed in: "[Short's] original obituary was the most outrageous lapse of taste: at a time when quite a few chessplayers here were attending the funeral of someone they barely knew in Birmingham out of respect, Nigel reckoned it was all about whether he'd had Tony's girlfriend."
Short defended himself ably and offered a partial explanation of the apparently personal stuff in his review and his earlier obituary of Tony Miles: "Tony was also seen at one British Championship tearing down BCF posters with my image. He even was known to refer to me in conversation as Nigel Shit."
The exchange is here in its entirety. And nope, literary writers never generate as much fun.

A Few Good Bloggers: Alex Good (Good Reports) hosts a year-end discussion between five literary website editors--Robert Birnbaum (Identity Theory), Jessa Crispin (BookSlut), Alex Good, Maud Newton (MaudNewton.com), and Michael Orthofer (The Complete Review).

Transfer tubes. Playing accountable football. Securing a "strategic oversight" of your child. Don Watson campaigns against the scourge of Modern Management English, "doctrinal in a way that surpasses even Orwellian English. What was the language style of Stalinism, China's Cultural Revolution or the Khmer Rouge's Year Zero has been seized upon by globalised companies and public services". (More.) Good for him, if it means the Babu can stop "ideating" now.

Mahasweta Devi has received France's second highest civilian award. The Babu hears that the ceremony was a media feeding frenzy, with photographers shoving each other aside and almost swamping the author, who is usually not amused by displays of this sort. She's phlegmatic about the award, too: ""I feel happy that my receiving an award has made some people happy, but as for myself I'm unmoved."

Christmas conjures up the Bah, humbug spirit in the Babu. From my commonplace book:
"Newt remained curled in the chair. He held out his painty hands as though a cat's cradle was strung up between them. 'No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's....'
'And?'
'No damn cat, and no damn cradle.'
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

On the other hand, there's always Szymborska. Merry Xmas etc.
Possibilities
I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

Profiles we will treasure: this author's a "compulsive liar", a "hard-drinking, icon-bashing rocker", and the "office stud". Mukul Kesavan provides less hyperbole in his review of Indrajit Hazra's The Garden of Earthly Delights: "Hazra does this seedy, low-voltage world well. The story is told by Hiren in the first person and through his insomniac eyes we experience the world in violent, staring detail. There’s a nightmarish quality to the telling which helps blur the boundary between real and dreamt-up worlds, the stated intention of this novel."

The Babu was moved to contemplation of his favourite words and phrases after he read this piece in The Scotsman. Twittering feet is somewhere at the top--a beautiful phrase, employed to describe the involuntary post-death twitches of a hanged man's feet; ziggurat, because I love the way it sounds; the heebie-jeebies, which always felt like cute and cuddly shivers down your spine; nippitatum, which means exceptionally good ale; and for some obscure reason, dewlap, because it always felt like a fleshy, flapping word to me.

* Sylvia and Ted, the Mills & Boon version: "He was the ''black marauder,'' as Plath called him, a gorgeous hunk from a working-class Yorkshire background, who dressed in raggedy black and wanted to wrench modern British poetry from its fuddy-duddy moorings. She was the genteelly raised girl from New England, a bottle blonde with long legs and a sterling ''bobby-sox'' education, as Hughes would later describe it in ''Birthday Letters,'' the collection of poems about Plath that he published shortly before his death in 1998." If you can forgive Daphne Merkin for this piece of purple prose, the rest of her review is quite acceptable.

From the That's Not Writing, It's Typing Dept.

The SF Gate: "Writers who publish a lot sometimes attain a dangerous proficiency: They can duplicate at will what they have done before, only on a lesser scale. John Updike spent the late '90s in this state; Joyce Carol Oates is smack in the middle of it right now. With "Oracle Night," his slender new novel, Paul Auster sails blithely into his own dangerous proficiency..." I'm begging, no, no, not Auster. Let this not have happened to one of the few writers who's never disappointed me. But then it turns out that Michael Dirda's been grappling with the book, too: "This is Auster at his most oracular -- and probably least satisfying."

"...had an unknown writer submitted this manuscript to its publishers, I suspect it would have been rejected. Hegemony and Survival is badly organised, poorly argued and written with all the skill of an undergraduate essay finished on the last night of term with the help of caffeine." Dennis Altman adds that Gore Vidal did a far better job of criticising the US.

"Easily the most reviewable of Cape's graphic novels, but it only got one proper review, in the Times. The feature coverage was excellent but somehow it just didn't translate into sales. (We've sold 4,000.) In America the story was very different. It was reviewed everywhere and sold 40,000 copies. In France 150,000 copies have been sold." The book the publishers are talking about? Persepolis. Go figure why some books just don't take off.

But don't try reading it in the bathroom...

"After Dostoyevsky and slightly before Arthur Koestler, but contemporary with Orwell and Kafka and somewhat anticipating Solzhenitsyn, there was Victor Serge. His novels and poems and memoirs, most of them directed at the exposure of Stalinism, were mainly composed in jail or on the run. Some of the manuscripts were confiscated or destroyed by the Soviet secret police; in the matter of poetry Serge was able to outwit them by rewriting from memory the verses he had composed in the Orenburg camp, deep in the Ural Mountain section of the Gulag Archipelago." Christopher Hitchens on one of Russian literature's best-kept secrets.
In Bookforum, Matthew Price comments: "But Serge's obscurity is perhaps not so surprising: An unceasing anti-Stalinist but no Communist apostate like Arthur Koestler or Ignazio Silone, he was of no use to either side in the cold war. There are, however, a few welcome signs of a belated Serge revival."

The Dog Ate My Homework Dept: Apologies for the long silence, and thanks for the hundreds of letters asking whether I was still alive. (This doesn't mean you, Person Who Added "because if your dead, maybe I can have your blogspot".)
The Babu realises he owes everyone an explanation (scroll down for today's links if you're not interested), so here goes.
First he took the cats (three, one tom, two queens) to vet on Friday. One cat objected to the car ride and bit his hand, greatly reducing his ability to type except with his toes. Vet says bring the tom back on Sunday to be neutered, he has way too many hormones bouncing around. Also the small queen.
By Sunday, the Babu's hand is looking pretty good, he's flexing his muscles in a blogging sort of way as he shoves cats into new cat cages. New cat cages promise much, deliver zero, as we discover at vet's office, where Beagle Boy (she was named before we figured out her gender) contemptuously dismantles her cage and streaks around the place, spitting as she goes. Beagle is not a biter, but she is a scratcher. By the time she is reincarcerated, in vet lion-safe cage this time, the Babu and the Partner are looking like inept would-be suicides who tried to find veins through wrong side of the wrist. Vet does vicious things with scalpel to protesting cats, plus gives us both tetanus shots.
The Babu resolves to run away and live to blog another day, preferably Monday.
Sunday night is not pretty, what with two cats recovering from anaesthesia, telling us that they were sure they went off to the vets with more bits than they've returned with, and one cat (the unvetted one) saying, "Torturers! Torturers!"
Early morning, we hear howling sounds emanating from walls, do rapid headcount among cats. All present, accounted for, and one at least has thrown up in the Partner's favourite shoes.
Sound emanating from small non-Babu household kitten who has fallen off the roof down an air shaft running through middle of house.
Babu's partner, more athletic than the Babu, does heroic rescue attempt, emerges with one blinking but miraculously unhurt kitten and badly sprained back caused by trying to do pull-ups on drainpipe.
Babu says there, there, and Monday blogging goes down the drain. Monday evening, kitten is restored to one non-Babu household frantic mother cat, who expresses gratitude by reopening punctured vein in The Babu's right hand. Much blood is spilled. Three Babu-household cats sit around looking joyous--"this," they say, "is wot happens to Torturers. Ha!"
By Tuesday the Babu has a football for a hand and a feeble moaning hunchback for a Partner.
On Wednesday the Babu, who has long hair, discovers at just the wrong moment that the cats have hidden the hair dryer, and freeze dries tresses in Delhi cold and fog and sleet.
On Wednesday evening the feeble moaning hunchback has a feeble moaning--and coughing--bronchial Babu for company.
Thursday passes by in a blur. The Babu thinks this may have something to do with him having ingested cat painkiller medicines instead of human painkiller medicines, and is aware of a vague desire to chase his tail and cough up hairballs.
Friday he spends under quilts. The three lumps underneath it are cats that have now forgiven him, sort of, taking into account the fact that he has suffered much. This doesn't prevent them from playing an energetic game of Cup Hockey at night, breaking a glass bowl, and generally telling the world that like Arnold, they're back.
Saturday, he rises from the dead, knowing this will not last. Next Sunday, he and the Partner have to take the unspayed Queen in for spaying. The horror, he says hollowly, staring at his mincemeat hands, the horror.

If you read Bengali: Taslima Nasrin has put her banned books--Amar Meyerbela and Dwikhandita--online.

Put a few good men into corporations, and they become dull, soulless, humourless drudges given to tossing the word "defamatory" around for no good reason. James Wood responds to assertions that he was accusing the Man Booker group of whispering in the ear of this year's Booker judges. (From Maud Newton.)

"Pullman sets out to undermine and attack the Christian faith. His blasphemy is shameless. This production is in poor taste, given the timing and the content. Teachers should steer clear." As the National Theatre produces His Dark Materials on stage, Philip Pullman is under attack from narrow-minded bigots with a penchant for weak logic.

On October 3, Michael Moore posted this message on his website: "I have written a new book, and this Tuesday it's being released. It's called, "DUDE, WHERE'S MY COUNTRY?" Because its content is likely to upset more than a few people, the publisher has "embargoed" the book until midnight Monday (which means no store or media outlet or anyone has access to a copy of the book until then). They have taken these measures because I have written a book that seeks not to defeat the Bush people next year, but to have them removed from Washington right now." Moore has the last laugh.

Yet another bastion has fallen in India as the ICHR chief is axed, victim in the latest round of the ideological wars between the Hindutva rightwing and independent academia.
In a related vein, Vijay Tendulkar is under fire for offering, only slightly in jest, to shoot Gujarat CM Narendra Modi. He was responding to a question put by someone in the audience. Modi, incidentally, is the man who did nothing to stem the riots in Gujarat last year and has done nothing to aid riot victims since then.

Rhizopods! Bashi-bazouks! Abecedarians!
The Babu has no idea why Indians love Tintin and Captain Haddock so much (any more than he understands the Indian preoccupation with TS Eliot), but someone's compiled a list of Favourite Haddock Curses. Including billions of blue-blistered barnacles, but naturally. (Griff, thanks for the link.)

"For most people, Ms Joshi points out, India has no role to play in the story of the novel, which begins and ends with Europe's Flaubert, Balzac, Austen. Quite the contrary. My book argues that India created a novelistic form that was new, and it did so in two ways--through its consumption patterns in the 19th century and later by producing its own novels." Nina Martyris explores the worldview of this outstanding critic.

"I have not seen the unpublished book, but I hope it's not made public. In my opinion, his last published novel was a travesty. It was tragic and was only printed because publishers wanted to cash in on his success. His talent as a writer had been completely exhausted by then." Is the recently discovered Patrick O'Brian manuscript an unsung gem, or just an outtake?

The Big Grumble: It is possible to make programmes promoting books that are so demeaning they do more harm than good. Far from easy, but possible - and The Big Read has pulled off this amazing feat of debasement.

"While everyone complains about the demise of books, it seems to me that there are more than ever: books by serious writers and modern-day hucksters (be gone, Dr. Phil!) and 15-minute celebrities like Jessica Lynch and Simon Cowell, books touted on Oprah and Today and Good Morning America, in Time and Newsweek - books so varied and numerous and needy, all of them jostling for attention, that there's only one sane response from someone charged with covering it all: to turn on the TV, flip to Average Joe and curse the day I learned to read."

Newsweek interviews the man with "the most famous literary bite since Dracula". "I'd be walking down the street and on the newsstand it would say, up by the publication title, MARTIN AMIS IS S--T. It's like watching
your child being ragged in the schoolyard. What's truly galling is when you wake up and it is in your head, when what should be in your head is what you're writing next. But if you answer back, you're accused of whining. You can't win." (Link via ArtsJournal.)

"He lost touch with reality," said Saad Hadi, a journalist who was involved in the production of Saddam's novels. "He thought he was a god who could do anything, including writing novels." The Telegraph on Be Gone, Demons!, yet another failed novel by a certain ex-dictator we know.

* It was Yevgeny Yevtushenko's birthday today. He celebrated by telling an audience in Tulsa that some of what was happening in the United States today reminded him of the "worst of the Soviet Union". Love his poetry, too.

Long live Rick Whittington; bow to Franny and Alexander; and please note, it should be Good Queen Beth, not Good Queen Bess, from henceforth. The Babu salutes the return of politically correct editors, bless their humourless little hearts.

Speaking of political correctness, Doug Marlette explains the importance of offending everyone. "Sadly, the title of my first chapter - "A Gift for Pissing People Off" - proved to be all too nonfictional."

2Blowhards features a lovely introduction to the author of 'Aphorisms on an Implicit Text'.

'Unknown Lady, Aged 26, Formerly Called Mistress Holland.' A playwright thinks he may have discovered the identity of the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets.

"And what of the old man with the bumped head in "It's Raining, It's Pouring"? How exactly did he sustain this head injury? Was he the victim of foul play? Did he have a post-coital heart attack -- the authors note no one ever said he was in bed alone -- that led to the head bumping?" The medical profession takes on nursery rhymes (link found all over the place today). They missed out on Little Miss Muffet and the years of psychotherapy she needed in order to come to terms with her arachnophobia, but that's another case study all together.

"I was crying while reading." This is a good thing, apparently, if you're a juror for the Russian Booker. Ah, cultural differences: the Babu often cries while reading, but instead of recommending the author for a major prize, he prefers filing the offending book in the nearest dustbin.

Stephen King's NBA speech is now available online (link via Golden Rule Jones). It's more coherent than the press reports would have you believe. "Bridges can be built between the so-called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction... Tokenism is not allowed. You can't sit back, give a self satisfied sigh and say, "Ah, that takes care of the troublesome pop lit question. In another twenty years or perhaps thirty, we'll give this award to another writer who sells enough books to make the best seller lists." It's not good enough."
Up to this point, I'm in agreement. But then King goes on to say: "Nor do I have any patience with or use for those who make a point of pride in saying they've never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular writer." This is where I have a problem--two out of the three writers he names are boring popular, airport reading-only popular. It's like science fiction, of which the Babu and his partner are unabashed fans: our worship of Philip K Dick and Ursula K Le Guin notwithstanding, we've waded through a lot of terrible space opera in order to get to the best in the field. Likewise, in order to get to King's Dark Tower series--definitely great pop/ genre lit--you need to wade through the slush of a million Danielle Steeles. Some of us don't have the stomach for it.

The Frivolous Gossip Department: V S Naipaul is rumoured to have finished another novel...in between setting up Tehelka Two and dealing with the fallout from Tehelka One, Tarun Tejpal has written a debut novel, The Alchemy of Desire...David Davidar has finished researching his second novel and will presumably write the book in Canada, where he's taking over as the head of Penguin operations in the land of Mistry, Atwood and co...and someone please tell Vikram Chandra that he's lost the Babu a bet three years running. Way back in the Dark Ages, it was rumoured that Chandra was hard at work on an Inspector Sartaj novel. The Babu's been predicting its imminent release every year since the excerpt in the New Yorker was first published. His credibility is now more endangered than the pink fairy armadillo.

"Bahal’s extensive use of motoring metaphors to describe sex suggests that writers in other fields too could use the same method. Here are a few examples of what can be achieved.
Business Reporter: “Scale, scale, there’s value in scale”, he gasped as he took in her impressive infrastructure. Ever since he had signed the letter of intent, thoughts of the merger had obsessed him. Would he be able to add another prize to his bulging M&A portfolio? He had done his due diligence, of course, but one can never tell what clinches a deal finally." Want an award? Manas Chakravarty offers tips for aspirants to the Bad Sex award.

"[It] can be an uncanny experience to travel halfway around the world to discover a tale you thought you already knew." Kwame Anthony Appiah on African folk tales--not children's tales, not household tales, but community tales. From the NYRB's December 18 issue.

* As you enter the Babu's neighbourhood, a huge banner promises to "teach you how to speak American and get a lucerative (sic) job at a Call Center..." Over in NYC, the rise and rise of the call centre has become the stuff of drama. "...Four Indian students sit at desks like schoolchildren, put through their paces by a brisk white American instructor. In the ruthlessly detached words of their Indian supervisor (seen on camera as if in a training film), they are being taught to get rid of "the mother tongue influence." Her own accent is intact as she explains that the most common Indian mistake is to pronounce "ver" as "wer" ("re-co-wer" instead of re-co-ver"). It's a dead giveaway. All "dialectical variations" must go."

Ruchir Joshi on a recent visit to Gujarat: "...[In] the case of Anandi Patel I had no reason to suspect that her Gujarati wasn’t equal to spelling 'sahishnuta' or 'sadbhavna' or any other useful Gandhian word that could be used as a smoke-screen. Another word I am sure she can spell is 'balatkar' — rape — and she took great exception to my using it while asking her about what had happened to Muslim women in Gujarat."
“I would thank you not to use that word in my presence!” she snapped at me.”But, Anandibehn, how can I not use it?” I asked, stunned yet again at the sheer gall. “Because there have been no rapes!”"

"This is the first letter I’m writing to a murder victim. Either in fact or in fiction. I’m doing this for two, three reasons. No, make it four. Four sounds right—it’s been four days since we first heard the whistle you blew. Four is the number of years both of us spent at IIT. Four sides make the Golden Quadrilateral." Raj Kamal Jha on Satyendra Dubey, the IIT graduate who was murdered shortly after he blew the whistle on corruption. If you feel as strongly about Dubey's murder as many Indians do, please take a moment to sign this online petition.

The end of the year book wrap-ups are upon us. The Independent does several lists; The New York Times has the usual mini-directory; The Guardian has picks from a whole bunch of people; The St Louis Post-Dispatch tries to find a path between commercial bestsellers and serious literature; while The Spectator has a few unusual choices. Jonathan Yardley has finished his Culling of the Files. His list is far quirkier than Anna Mundow's safe and slightly dull selection in the Boston Globe.

The less Coetzee says, the more it's reported. He's still hiding behind his characters--Robinson Crusoe for the acceptance speech this time instead of Elizabeth Costello. The Babu thinks it's mildly ironical that his refusal to play the media game has turned him into the perfect trophy interview--Reuters got four words out of him, in fact: "I am not sure."

"Falling out of love with your father is like falling out of love with anyone else. The body count just gets too high." John Le Carre on Ronnie--con man, sucker, even a "most respectable man".

I have no idea why I love "lost language" stories. I just do.

"At a time when most 20th-century science fiction writers seem hopelessly dated, Dick gives us a vision of the future that captures the feel of our time. He didn't really care about robots or space travel, though they sometimes turn up in his stories. He wrote about ordinary Joes caught in a web of corporate domination and ubiquitous electronic media, of memory implants and mood dispensers and counterfeit worlds." Wired on why Philip K Dick posthumously rules the movies.

"I think Dryden gave it, "What is the point of literature? It's to give instruction and delight." Certain writers will tip more toward instruction, others tip more towards delight, but it's a combination of the two. I want to be getting as much out of it as I can. I think this is very much against the spirit of the time. Certainly in England, where they don't want to be instructed or indeed, delighted much. They want a fifty-fifty, across the table kind of 'you're not telling me anything I don't know, and I could tell you things.'" Martin Amis in conversation with Identity Theory.

"IT is difficult to get over the feeling of being overwhelmed when one thinks of how concerned some Tamil men are about what Tamil women should be thinking, speaking and writing.... Many years ago a male Tamil writer wrote to a senior male writer that reading the stories of Ambai gave him the feeling that she was not physically fully satisfied. The tone of the letter suggested that he was more than willing to do the needful." C S Lakshmi aka Ambai on the politics of writing the body.

"To determine my rankings, I looked up seven times over words that I knew but wanted to understand better (like regret, jealous, and overdetermined); words with disputed usages (including aggravate, disinterested, fortuitous); words with potentially interesting etymologies (e.g., chauvinism, juggernaut, lagniappe); neologisms and slang (e.g., blogger, booty, yay); anything friends had looked up recently (e.g., Panglossian, condominium, alembic); as well as the words I didn't know in the last book I read, J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello." YiLing Chen-Josephson is a brilliant dictionary tester, but restricting the selection to college dictionaries leaves devotees of the unabridged OED, such as the Babu, out in the cold.

Aniruddha Bahal may console himself with the thought that he'll get to meet Sting, at any rate, who presents this year's Bad Sex awards. Bahal won in the teeth of fierce competition from Paulo Coelho ("I was the earth, the mountains, the tigers, the rivers that flowed into the lakes, the lake that became the sea") and Ron Liddle ("She came with the exhilarating whoops and pant-hoots of a troop of Rhesus monkeys, which was flattering, if alarming"). The passage that pipped these to the post concerned a swastika shaven around a key portion of a woman's anatomy. At the book launch in Delhi, one of Hurree Babu's more louche acquaintances asked the author if the swastika in question was clockwise or anti-clockwise--the one symbolising the ancient Hindu luck symbol, the other the emblem of the Nazi party. It was apparently a detail that hadn't occurred to Bahal, who was more concerned with the revving of Bugattis. He's calling the award a "rebellious gesture"; Auberon Waugh, who founded the Bad Sex award, had in mind something more closely approximating the, well, Rockefeller gesture.
Bahal may be pleased to know that Rushdie didn't make the grade when he was nominated in 1999 for a passage from The Ground Beneath Her Feet: the judges considered the passage "too scientific" to enable the necessary suspension of disbelief. Hari Kunzru was nominated in 2002, but lost out to Wendy Perriam.

The 18-page letter sent by the Greater Sylhet Welfare and Development Council deploring Monica Ali's depiction of the Bangladeshi community in Brick Lane has attracted some debate. The Babu agrees that Brick Lane should not become another Satanic Verses--a book to be hated because your community leaders tell you to do so--but he disagrees strongly with this defence of Ali, from DJ Taylor, one of this year's Booker judges. (Brick Lane was shortlisted but lost out to the much-slammed Vernon God Little.) Taylor says in part, ""If Monica Ali wants to write about Brick Lane, which as a Bangladeshi she presumably knows a good deal about, then she should be free to do so."
But the point that many Indian--and Bangladeshi readers--have made about the book is that Ali writes from a tourist's perspective about Brick Lane, and about Bangladesh. There's reason enough for the GSWDC to complain about Ali's "completely stereotypical" portrayal of the community. The Babu's view, however, is that she should be free to parade her ignorance--and insensitivity, which anyone who's read the book and the dreadful patois in which Hasina's letters from Bangladesh are rendered will testify to--without being muzzled. In the bad old days when Edgar Foster Wallace (the Sanders series) wrote about the "natives", the "natives" weren't in a position to write back. Ali is under no obligation to serve as an ambassador for any community, but as Alice Albinia remarked in a review for Biblio (*available in the print edition only), Brick Lane is the kind of book that is written for everyone except those who belong to Brick Lane. Personally, I don't have a problem with Brick Lane attracting a mass audience; I do have a problem when that audience assumes that Ali presents an accurate, insider's view of the community whose stories she mines for her book.

The West Bengal state goverment has banned Taslima Nasreen's Dwikhandita. She reacts with "shock" and "dismay". In Outlook, Sundeep Dougal goes beyond the usual knee-jerk reactions to what lies beneath the surface of book bans: "Was the fear of "communal disharmony" so real that the government thought it fit to ban the book? Will this ban succeed in its avowed aim, of preventing it? I don't think so. If anything, it would be quite to the contrary. While affront to religious sensibilities is a serious issue - as witnessed most recently over the furore over depiction of Ganesha in an old academic book - the genie let out of the bottle by the Satantic Verses case has metamorphosed into a horrifying monster that looms over all discourse surrounding freedom of expression and speech."

Jan Morris says she's retiring from writing, sort of.

"Lucia and Zelda may have been less gifted than the men in question. But there is something else going on here, too, which the biographies-of-the-artists’-women record: that while nature seems to award brilliance equally to men and women, society does not nurture it equally in the two sexes, and thus leaves the women more discourageable. Nor, in females, does the world reward selfishness, which, sad to say, artists seem to need, or so one gathers from the portraits of the men in these books." A biography of Joyce's daughter sparks off this meditation in the New Yorker on the talent, and selfishness, of artists--and where gender begins to matter.

Given the chance to interview Noam Chomsky, the question that you'd be dying to ask him is...why there are so many euphemisms for genitalia. The Observer finds out, inadvertently, how the great man felt about being interviewed by the New York Times.

The Stainless Steel Mouse and two other Chinese Internet writers have been freed; a fourth writer has been charged with attempt to subversion.

"This is not just another of those grammarians' gripes about greengrocers, and, in spite of the reference in the title to zero tolerance, Lynne Truss remains utterly good-natured throughout... She does say that people who put an apostrophe in the wrong place, when they ought to know better, deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave, but it's probably mostly in fun." The Zero Tolerance Guide to Punctuation is under review.

Turkish farmers were responsible for the spread of the English language, so we can quit celebrating the contribution of Kurgan horsemen.