Susan Sontag...

...has died at the age of 71. I hope those boys in Stockholm are happy now; they have another name to add to the long, long list of great writers who deserved the Nobel but died before they got the nod. I never quite forgave the Academy for keeping W G Sebald permanently on the Nobel shortlist for years while lesser talents shuffled off with the laurel wreath, and then he died in an accident. Perhaps I'm a little angrier about Sontag being overlooked because I've just finished reading two works by Jelinek, and was left distinctly underwhelmed. Her website has a decent, if clinical, biography; Newsday has an excerpt from a speech she gave this April:
"The truth is, whatever it might occur to you to say about what a writer ideally should be, there is always something more.
A great writer of fiction both creates a new, unique, individual world—through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through commanding forms—and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but that is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in their worlds. Call that history, society, what you will. The writers who matter most to us are those who enlarge our consciences and our sympathies and our knowledge."
Oh, she mattered all right.

We Interrupt Our Usual Broadcast...

...to ask you to visit http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com. It has all the info you need on the magnitude of the disaster (the current death toll has risen to 55,000), where to donate, who to contact and how to help, and it was kicked off by Zigzackly.

The Ban Band

Apropos the previous post, The Guardian consulted five experts on the tricky issue of censorship: when, if ever, should a work be banned?
They hit motherlode with Dr Kanwaljit Kaur Singh, Chair of the British Sikh Education Council.
The good doctor was nothing if not consistent:
About Jim Allen's Perdition--"If Jews found it insulting and offensive to the memory of the Holocaust, I'm glad it was taken off."
On Satanic Verses: "It was nothing but an attack on the Muslim religion. It should have been banned but the fatwa was wrong."
On homophobic dancehall lyrics: "It is nothing but abuse of gay people, and an abuse of freedom of expression. It could incite violence against gay people. It should be banned."
Eminem stopped short of inviting an absolute ban, but elicited this comment:
"This does not provide children with good role models. I would not want my children to hear it."
On Dishonour, a priceless response, suggesting that location, location, location is still the way to go for authors who fear death threats:
"This should be banned, it is insulting the religion by portraying murder and sexual abuse in a Gurdwara. If it was in a community centre, with Sikh people carrying out murder and sexual abuse, I would have been offended but I would not have called for its banning."
But my favourite bit was this riff on the finer points of bans:
"Something should be banned when it insults religion. If it causes offence to people then it should not necessarily be banned."
Two comments: one, did the journo who interviewed Dr Singh merely salivate, or openly drool while taking shorthand? And two, I must thank the good doctor for making a necessary distinction. Religion is not people. As we all know, Soylent Green is people.

Dishonoured?

I caught the Behzti thing in bits and pieces while absconding from Kitabkhana. Bhatti's play has raised a huge furore in the UK:
"An offer to stage a play, which had been cancelled after violent protests by members of the Sikh community, was withdrawn last night following a request by the playwright who has gone into hiding after receiving death threats.
Neal Foster, who runs the Birmingham Stage Company, had called for the theatre world to unite to stage simultaneous readings of Behzti (Dishonour), which has been dropped by the Birmingham Repertory Theatre after the mass protest." The play depicted rape, sexual abuse and murder inside a gurdwara. The BBC profiled Bhatti, and over 700 artists have signed a petition protesting the death threats against her, arguing that the Sikh community's protests threaten freedom of speech. Sikh elders have appealed to the community and asked that the death threats be withdrawn.
Comparisons to Rushdie might seem inevitable, but I'd suggest they aren't in order. I share Rahul Verma's cynicism about the coverage of the Behzti furore.
"Without being overly cynical or conspiratorial, after David Blunkett's resignation, the Blunkett story was over and analysed to death by the end of the weekend.
You can almost see the news editors' eyes lighting up. What have we here? A play causing problems amongst a minority religious community? Sounds interesting? Yes. Get down and cover it. Which is what every single news outlet across TV, Radio, and print did.
With pens, cameras and microphones trained on the difference of opinion between Birmingham Rep and the Sikh community, it was always likely to snowball into a stand off. It's just a shame that it was a violent stand off, that reflects badly on the Asian community as a whole, reinforcing stereotypes of an anachronistic, intolerant community (honour killings, Salman Rushdie)."
The Guardian buried this interesting point in the middle of this piece:
"Inderjit Singh of the Sikh Messenger newspaper and contributor to the Thought for the Day slot on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, said: "The level of protest did not surprise me. This has been building up over a few weeks, they were protesting and not being heeded." He said the depth of anger came from the feeling among Sikhs that the play was singling them out: "It took all the nasty aspects of life, and put them in the holiest place, a temple, and that is grossly insulting."
What is clear is that some in the Sikh community, while unhappy about the play's content, wanted it to continue and are dismayed by its closure."
So there we go again. A community protests at what some members see as a gross distortion of their lives. Some, and the few do not speak for the whole, threaten the writer and force her into hiding. This is terrible; there is no excuse for what happened here. But there is no excuse, either, for the manner in which the Sikhs have been portrayed as just another bunch of ignorant bigots, with no attempt to capture the complexities of the community's reaction. Many Sikhs would not have agreed with those who stormed the Birmingham Rep, just as many Hindus thoroughly deplored the few who ransacked the Bhandarkar Library out of misguided bigotry a year ago.
As for the play, I know that convention says one must not speak ill of any work under threat of censorship. But these two excerpts make it clear to me, at least, that I will be defending Bhatti's right to continue writing plays like Behzti as a matter of principle--not as a matter of literary judgement. Having said that, I'm all for bringing Behzti back to the theatres. Just don't expect me to stand in line for front-row seats.

While We Were Sleeping...

...lots happened and these guys pretty much covered the whole caboodle.
But the Babu had good reasons for disappearing.
He was:
a) packing books and discovering that most of our furniture consists of bookcases, that old books produce very pungent dustballs while new books produce only mildly-scented ones, and most important, the books you've just packed at the bottom of carton number forty are the ones you really, really want to read.
b) learning that when you have two proof copies of your first published book ever, even if it's just an anthology and not a Real I Wrote It All Myself artifact, you do not want to accidentally pack them in carton 39 which is the lowest carton at the back of a row four-deep with six other cartons on top of it.
c) wondering what to do about the identity thingie, since keeping it secret diminishes his ability to brag about the subject of (b) and most of his friends know who the Babu is anyway.
d) wincing at the only picture of the Babu in real life that exists in print, because in it we look lopsided, fat and like Bobo the Clown's sad cousin.
e) in tribute to the holiday season, eating way too much plumcake. We can't stand plumcake or fruitcake or simnel cake, but we hate it so much we can't stand looking at it either, so... we eat it.
f) sending up a huzzah to friends who have been more productive, and who have, in different ways, accomplished much in the last days of 2004.

The OFAC clusterfac

Suppose you were born in a country that fell on bad times, into the hands of dictators. Suppose you and a few other dissidents raised your voice against the reign of tyrants, crackpots, torturers, architects of genocide. And suppose one of the few things you hoped is that your voices might be heard elsewhere.
According to the draft OFAC regulations, you would have been so wrong.
Scott Martelle from the LA Times writes:
"In an apparent reversal of decades of U.S. practice, recent federal Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations bar American companies from publishing works by dissident writers in countries under sanction unless they first obtain U.S. government approval.
The restriction, condemned by critics as a violation of the First Amendment, means that books and other works banned by some totalitarian regimes cannot be published freely in the United States....
The regulations seem shaded by Joseph Heller's classic novel Catch-22. U.S. publishers are allowed to reissue, for example, Cuban communist propaganda or officially approved books but not original works by writers whom the Cuban government has stifled."
The regulations would have covered writers in Iran, Sudan, Cuba and North Korea. Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi filed a lawsuit recently challenging the US government regulations. She was directly affected, as The Washington Post reports:
"Prohibiting her memoir because it might in some way aid Iran is exactly as if we'd prohibited Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" because it might have helped the Soviet Union.
This remarkable woman has a story to tell. It's the story of an everyday working mother who studied her law briefs in a locked bathroom. It's the story of a brave and harassed human rights advocate in a theocracy. But this is a story that cannot be told in Iran and cannot be sold in America."
Reuters just reported that Ebadi's lawsuit may have forced OFAC to back off.
"The United States eased a controversial ban on publications from Iran, Sudan and Cuba on Wednesday in a bid to allow dissidents to be heard while maintaining an embargo on official documents.
The rule change by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control comes after Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi sued the United States because its economic embargo on Iran blocked U.S. publication of her memoirs."
This should make Laila breathe a little easier--but I think all of us are going to wait on judgement until we can scan the fine print.

Go visit...

...the two Author Sites I've added to my sidebar, finally, after meaning to but never getting round to it for ages.
Samit Basu, who is discovering life beyond The Simoquin Prophecy, blogs at Ducks Rule, among other places. He does a pretty good job of simulating writerly angst:
"Still havent started story. Turned down invitation to Salman Rushdie do...pity, but i have to get this story written. Query: Will i manage to get story written, considering all Ive done since morning is flap? Query 2: Is it good that my selfesteem has begun to depend on whether or not i get invited to salman rushdie dos in current unemployed state? Query 3: Should I not read peoples personal blogs, knowing as i do that their lives will be more exciting than mine? Query 4: When the hell am i going to read the book that ive written?
I better go.
What do 10-12 year olds want to read? I was reading anything i could get my hands on at that age.
Gah."

Rana Dasgupta is doing a Decameron with Tokyo Cancelled (Available in bookstores January 14, as the man's card says), and has a website that is to humble blogs what a Lamborghini is to cycle-rickshaws. "Do not urinate on this site or in any way foul or disfigure it." You've been warned. But you have to like the man. Here he is in defence of smoking:
"Though the rising prices of cigarettes might still put an end to this, they are in general subject to a completely different set of rules to pretty much any other commodity. We can easily imagine a banker approaching a lorry driver in a railway station for a cigarette, imagine the driver obliging with no expectation of anything in return, imagine them talking together over the microritual, before stubbing out and going their separate ways. But it is difficult to think of anything else that one of those two people could ask the other for without inviting suspicion (“Would you mind terribly if I had a few bites of your sandwich…?”). The community of smokers is one in which cigarettes and lights are freely, even warmly, given (“Take one for the road”), and in which perfect strangers are willing to share a moment of bodily experience and a few words."

Rushdie's reading

So the Babu met Rushdie during his visit to Delhi, and it was everything he'd thought it would be--ie two ships that passed in the night, one of them an ocean liner, the other a very small dinghy. We exchanged brilliant, sparkling conversation, or rather Mr R tossed off one bon mot after another while The Babu said, "Er, the kababs are that way" and "So how's the Haroun opera doing" and "Um, haven't read the anthology yet" and "Ain't Padma hot?" (Okay, he didn't say "Ain't Padma hot?" But he definitely thought it.)
Then the Babu toddled off to the Rushdie reading. It was supposed to be a William Dalrymple reading, and was billed as such, but was secretly changed to a Rushdie reading, Willy D being a generous man and realising that sharing mike time with Salman R wasn't exactly going to do his profile any harm. The switch was kept absolutely secret for security reasons (the small matter of that fatwa still crops up), which, in Delhi terms, meant that only about 400 people knew it was on five minutes after the plan was made.
So Dalrymple warmed the audience up at the Oxford-Bookstore Gallery with a few Comic Anecdotes. And then Rushdie took over. Two things have to be mentioned here: one, that this was Rushdie's first reading in Delhi in ten years, so this was a very emotional moment for some of us, two, he and William have similar noggins and were wearing white kurta-shirts, so they looked a bit like a Twin Act.
He started off by talking about Telling Tales, which allowed him to mention that though Nadine Gordimer had asked some of the biggest names in literature to contribute, "Lord Vidia" was not one of them. (It is not true, as Putu asserts, that the sideswipe had the Delhi audience stunned into silence. The Babu said "Ha!". Delightedly. But in a lonely sort of way from the back row.)
The reading (The Firebird's Nest, in toto) was...
"Awesome! He's so GOOD!" (dewy-eyed young woman in floaty dress wearing three scarves and much clanking silver jewellery)
"That story, man, that story, it has the touch of genius, pure, jaano, calibre aachey. Each line has the stamp of a Master." (Displaced Bong intellectual wannabe who spent most of the reading with eyes closed in ecstacy that would have been more convincing if he hadn't snored once or twice in between.)
"There's cake? I didn't know there was cake. Where's the cake?" (Man with strong sense of priorities.)
"Hmmm. It's got his--handwriting--but, well, not his best, shall we say?" (Upcoming young writer. Don't even try to guess. There were six of them present.)
"Too long." (Sleepy photographer who wanted to go home but had been told by his editor to stay till the bitter end. "In case," the editor apparently said, "Rushdie gets shot or something.")
"He has a nice profile. And I like the way he tucks one hand neatly into a pocket. Kind of endearing." (The Babu.)
"I saw Rushdie! I saw Rushdie! I heard Rushdie! I saw Rushdie!" (Excitable young college girl. She's new to the city so she hasn't yet realised that Delhi Is Always Blase.)
I wish I could tell you what happened next but my last glimpse of the Rushdies was of them using upturned plastic chairs to hold at bay hordes of stampeding camerapersons and squeaky-voiced journalists asking original questions ("Mr Rushdie! Are you writing a new novel?" "Padma, what's your favourite food?").

Thou Shalt Read My Robe, Worms

"A judge refused to delay a trial Tuesday when an attorney objected to his wearing a judicial robe with the Ten Commandments embroidered on the front in gold." In letters large enough to read. I dunno, judges look Gandalf-y enough without donning bits of the Bible--a pity the report's silent on where his tailor placed 'Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery'.

Muddying the waters

This article by Amalesh Choudhury appears to be a rejoinder to Amitav Ghosh's piece on the perils of setting up a tourism complex in the Sunderbans, but a somewhat misconceived one. Choudhury has two main gripes: he accuses Ghosh of getting some of his details wrong, and painting the Sunderbans as a hellish, muddy swamp infested with dangerous creatures, dacoits and river pirates. He also writes:
"Strangely, Ghosh's worries don't extend to the 4 million people who call the Indian Sundarbans home. If the author is right, this environment that they have been inhabiting for centuries must be a perpetual horror."
I think Choudhury has misread Ghosh. If you're trying to stop a corporation from building another Tourist Disneyland in an ecologically sensitive area, or trying to mobilise public opinion in this sphere, you have two options. One is to talk about the damage this will inflict on the environment and the people who live there--given the levels of apathy in India, this approach is equivalent to lighting a candle in your window in support of some cause; it provides personal relief but changes absolutely nothing. Ghosh takes the tack that if you want to stop a project aimed at tourists, use arguments that might work on potential tourists.
As for whether it's appropriate for Ghosh to criticise Sahara, hey, he's not the only one. And any group that thinks it's a good idea to provide tiger sightings for tourists by setting up a system of cages where retired circus tigers will be kept in captivity needs to have its "systems" questioned.

How to stay celibate

Read these and weep.
Tom Wolfe won; but the Babu notes that the subcontinent is splendidly represented. Two authors from this part of the world, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi and Nadeem Aslam, were also longlisted; Gregory Roberts' Shantaram, set in Bombay, offered (heh heh) stiff competition; and Will Self's entry contains a reference to a character called Shiva who notices truly disgusting details with "lofty, Brahminical pity".
Wolfe had to work hard to beat them, but he managed effortlessly:
"Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns - oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest - no, the hand was cupping her entire right - Now! She must say "No, Hoyt" and talk to him like a dog..."

Rushdie, with quote marks

Looks like the man's being mobbed on his Kolkata visit. He had fun: "In America, we have to deal with strange growths called Bushes." And so did the press. In which Salman chacha reveals that he wants to write a book on Machiavelli, Padma Lakshmi says that his new book has "a lot on cooking", and one news report does its best to put Rushdie's life and works into perspective. Grimus was "a science fiction", and Rushdie also wrote "The Moor's Last Sight". And the anonymous author serves up the most entertaining review of The Satanic Verses yet: "The novel was a story of two Indian actors who fell on the Earth after an Air India aircraft exploded mid air. The book criticised terrorism."

No sacrifice is too great...

From Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City, on doing what it takes to get the inside story: "I almost lost my liver to this book."

Salman on the loose

Rushdie's going to be visiting Calcutta soon, and the city is thrilled. Among the intellectual issues my brethren might want to discuss is whether he is really hotter than Brad Pitt. The only time I met the man, he wasn't in the best of moods because a jury led by Shashi Deshpande had just dissed him and handed the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book of the year to J M Coetzee. All I noticed is that his eyebrows tend to waggle in times of stress. In a cute sort of way, but then I've never seen Brad Pitt's eyebrows, waggling or not.

Wolfed down; threw up

The only good thing about having to read Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons (summary: ageing novelist with failing powers visits college campus, discovers he ain't in Kansas any more) is knowing that I'm not alone. The whole world feels my pain.
From The Guardian: "The Literary Review's annual Bad Sex Award can rarely have produced a clearer favourite."
From Michiko Kakutani's review in The New York Times: "Mr. Wolfe takes on the momentous subject of college life (college life? Yes, college life!), and in the course of a very long 676 pages serves up the revelation -- yikes! -- that students crave sex and beer, love to party, wear casual clothes and use four-letter words."
The last word belongs to Michael Dirda: "But the book remains a (slightly disguised) hellfire tirade, a vision of students who belong in the hands of an angry God. And that God is named Tom Wolfe."

Shama Futehally

Shama Futehally died this week after a long illness; she was only 52. I remember her not just for her books--Tara Lane, Reaching Bombay Central, translations, children's stories--but for her kindness and generosity, not always common traits among writers. She taught English; she was a civil servant; she translated Meera's bhajans; she was so much more than this brief list can indicate.

Doppelgangers

Kishore Singh has an alternative explanation for the whole Kazmi plagiarism thing:
"But on the whole, it did appear that either Roger Ebert and Nikhat Kazmi were the same.."
That clears it up nicely, people. She has a psychic twin across the seven seas.

Things To Do Today

1) Cheer. Now you don't have to explain for the umpteenth time what a blog is: tell the lazy clueless sods to go look it up.

2) Thank Galleycat for watching Book Bites so that you don't have to.

3) Take the Observer year-end book quiz instead of wasting your time with these. My favourite: Which Booker-prize shortlisted author has a tattoo? (What, they stripped for the Observer journo so that he could check?)

Diagnosing Murdoch's manuscripts

Neuroscientist Peter Garrard and his colleagues have analysed Iris Murdoch's last novel, Jackson's Dilemma, and say that it reveals the onset of Alzheimer's disease. (Via MoorishGirl.)
The Guardian explains:
"Using concordance software, they analysed the types of words - nouns, verbs, descriptors and so on - in each novel, and their richness. Comparisons of the three novels showed that her vocabulary became richer in the early stages of her writing career, but showed signs of impoverishment in the final work.
The sentences themselves were well formed, but the words became more commonplace. An analysis of 30 sentences found on average fewer words per sentence, and fewer clauses per sentence, in the last novel."

I dunno. Just finished reading two city supplements that both show distinct signs of impoverishment in the final work, use terribly commonplace words, and lack richness completely. Indian newspapers as Alzheimer's victims? It's always possible...

How To Build A Library (Part One)

From The Globe and Mail (via Arts Journal): 'They don't belong to Harbourfront. They are my books." So declared Greg Gatenby during a testy press conference at his Toronto home yesterday morning, hoping to end the questions surrounding his announcement that he was selling his book collection, about 28,000 volumes worth an estimated $2-million, amassed in part during his time as director of the Harbourfront Centre's literary programming.
Twice an assistant attempted to cut off questions regarding provenance. The issue: When publishers send out free review copies of a book for promotional purposes, are they sending them to the individual or to the institution the individual works for? Gatenby maintained that the publishing industry sends them to the person and that the books then become that person's property.
"One of the perks is that the person to whom the book is given keeps the book," Gatenby said."

I'm not entirely sure I agree with Gatenby. (He clarified that about two-thirds of his collection consists of books he bought on his own; only one-third of the books in his collection are review copies.)
On the subject of whether a review copy belongs to the person who's reviewed it, no question it does. And it should: in India, book reviewing is so poorly paid that you'd be lucky to be making a rupee a word. The only perk of the job if you review frequently is that you get to keep the book.
But if you edit a book section for a newspaper, should you keep the books? One of the places where the Babu worked followed this policy: the editor on the literary pages was told that the books were his or hers to keep. This seemed okay as long as we were talking cheap paperbacks; but it seemed a little wrong to keep expensive coffee table books priced at Rs 3,000 and above, that typically got a two-line or one-paragraph review. I solved my personal ethical problems through a combination of laziness, a lack of space on the shelves at home, and occasional fits of generosity. If someone really, really wanted a book that had been sent to us for review, and if we had an extra copy or if the book wasn't going to be reviewed and would just sit on the shelves forever, they got it. Books that I couldn't be bothered to take back home were sent down to the office library--not for moral reasons, but for reasons of space, this turned out to be most of them. Books that looked rare, or that were obviously expensive, posed a major problem: I'd have to contact the publisher and ask if they wanted the book back if we weren't going to review it. Because of the volume of books coming in to the office, it wasn't always easy to follow up on this.
But most books page editors know that the books are being sent to the institution, not to them. Given this, it might be fair to follow the policy the institution sets: if your journal says it's okay for you to keep the books, build more shelves. If not, donate them to the library. In Gatenby's case, he makes it clear that the Harbourfront Centre could have got in touch with him earlier over the question of ownership and didn't--in other words, they didn't have a policy in place. I guess that makes them his books; I'm just not so sure that this is a principle that would apply in all cases.
Now it's much easier: I either buy the books I need or warn publishers who're sending me books that I may choose not to review the book in question. That way, if they have limited copies or if it's expensive, they can choose not to send me the book at all; if I decide later I'll need it, I can always buy it. Books that I don't want to keep are donated to the defence library, though what a bored soldier up at Siachen is going to do with The Essential Sindhi Cookbook or a treatise on post-colonialism in the modern Indian novel, I have no idea.

Hail to the Hag

The Old Hag has moving blues, but we salute her anyway. Check-in, a collection of poetry, won Caketrain's 2004 Poetry Chapbook Competition. Ed helped out her, tongue-in-cheek, a long time ago, and as you can see, Ms Skurnick's far easier on the eye than any hag has the right to be. Congratulations.

More from the Good News department: Mohja Kahf is back with yet another brilliant story, The Fatima Incident.
"His furtive life was like a fever, a deadly illness, feeding on him. Leaving him more exhausted, mentally emaciated, after every bout. At one point he hated himself so much for his predilections, he resolved to improve his sex life with Aida. This consisted in asking her for fellatio....
His face flushed. It sounded awful, when you put it like that. What kind of a pervert was he? Nevertheless, he plunged on, not looking at her but at the drawer pull of the Shaker style bedside table, part of a matching bedroom suite which had been a wedding gift from her parents. “Well…yeah. But I would be happy to do the same for you.”
“Is that even halal?”
“Yes.”
“…”
“It is. I checked it out on VirtualFatwas dot com. Anonymously, of course. Don’t worry.”"

How does it end? She wants you to tell her.

This textbook has been sanitised for your protection...

They haven't gone that far yet, but given the debate on Creationism and Evolution in US schools, Colin Purrington is offering Textbook Disclaimer Sticker Labels. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)