Life After Corelli

The Independent has a profile of Louis de Bernieres--Birds Without Wings is just out. "Visiting the battle sites, he found their past darkness made all too visible. 'The bones of the corpses come to the surface,' he recalls. 'I found quantities of bones when I was there. You look on the war memorials and it says, 'Their name liveth for evermore.' And you have this totally anonymous bone in your hand.'"

Ghosh on Ray

I've got just a couple of minutes before an old friend drops by for dinner--enough time for two quick posts.
Outlook carries an essay by Amitav Ghosh on Satyajit Ray:
"Ray was for me, not just a great artist; he was something even rarer: an artist who had crafted his life so that it could serve as an example to others. In a world where people in the arts are often expected, even encouraged, to be unmindful of those around them, he was exemplary in his dealings with people. This was, I think, one of the reasons why he was able to sustain his creative energies for as long as he did: because he refused to make a fetish of himself. As a student I had heard him speak on several occasions: it always seemed to me that there was something very private about his manner. I had the sense that it was by holding the world at arm's length that he had managed to be as productive as he had. This was a stance I respected then and respect even more today, now that I am more aware of how easy it is to be distracted by the demands of public life."

The Knowledge Web

I find Danny Hill's idea of the Knowledge Web deeply seductive, though possibly this is the outcome of studying in a convent school where knowledge was disseminated via the Turkey Stuffing method: how much can you cram into the trussed-up object before you, how humiliating can you make the experience, and never mind that most of what's going in is crumbs.
Danny Hill explains the idea of the Knowledge Web in detail on Edge:
"Let's put aside the World Wide Web for a moment to consider what kind of automated tutor could be created using today's best technology. First, imagine that this tutor program can get to know you over a long period of time. Like a good teacher, it knows what you already understand and what you are ready to learn. It also knows what types of explanations are most meaningful to you. It knows your learning style: whether you prefer pictures or stories, examples or abstractions. Imagine that this tutor has access to a database containing all the world's knowledge. This database is organized according to concepts and ways of understanding them. It contains specific knowledge about how the concepts relate, who believes them and why, and what they are useful for. I will call this database the knowledge web, to distinguish it from the database of linked documents that is the World Wide Web."
Don't miss the responses; Edge has some of the most impressive commentators in the universe today.

Banned Books in India: Call for Help

Kitabkhana's trying to put together a list of books banned by the Indian government or by various state governments from 1947 onwards in independent India. The obvious examples are there: Stanley Wolpert's Nine Hours to Rama, Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, but we can't locate a broader master list. We did the rounds of the Ministry of External Affairs, where a suffering PR person directed us to the Ministry of Home Affairs, where a suffering PR person directed us back to Point A. If readers know of a list of banned books or know where such a list might be compiled/ found, please email the Babu at hurree@gmail.com. Or leave a comment (yes, we have comments finally after a year of holding out against the dern things, and are we learning how to fight spam!).

"I read; I sail; I write"

Arturo Perez-Reverte, once a captain in the merchant marines, now hailed as Eco's heir, is interviewed by the Baltimore Sun:
"Every one of my novels is a story of a lost soldier in enemy territory," he said. "But instead of placing the person in a war, I put the person in cities, in history, in drug dealing, in libraries or in paintings. But they are always war stories."
Perez-Reverte's latest book, The Queen of the South, has been translated and will, as is increasingly the norm, arrive in India at a leisurely pace, taking almost longer than the former sailor's ships would have to cover the distance. Aargh.

Text message

The new Indian government has finally agreed to scrap the hideous, error-filled, ungrammatical and violently biased abominations their predecessors had commissioned as history textbooks. (For background on India's textbook wars, read this article.)
"Asked what students may do with the existing books, 'perhaps, they be could be good souvenirs', Prof Settar quipped."

How Late It Was, How Late

Should've posted this link eons ago, but my erratic blogging practices got in the way. (The Babu is slightly alarmed; his blogging follows exactly the same patterns as malarial fever, manically up one moment, desperately down the next.)
Anyway. Maud has a new short story, Post-Extraction, up at Swink. If you've noticed, I steal my best links from her and Ms Aulenback, and I intend to work up to the point where I steal my best lines ditto.

Saddam, Rose of Romance

From Jo Tatchell's piece on dic(tator)-lit in Prospect (link via Arts & Letters Daily):
"Does Saddam have talent in the romantic fantasy genre? To determine the answer, I sent extracts of Zabibah and the King 'blind' to some experts. The editor at Mills and Boon, after agreeing to comment, backed out when she discovered who the author was. But JoJo Moyes, winner of the Romantic Novelists' Association novel of the year award, agreed, and was alarmed by the style. With the first four paragraphs of the book containing no less than 13 rhetorical questions, she pointed out that the author was not interested in his readers. 'I had a fear that it was by Osama bin Laden or Alastair Campbell,' she said, trying to guess the author. 'Once I knew who it was it all made sense. His writing was the literary equivalent of those lurid fantasy murals he had painted all over his palaces.'"

Dasht-e-Tanhaii, United Kingdom

Kamila Shamsie explains the setting of Nadeem Aslam's Maps For Lost Lovers:
"The English town of Dasht-e-Tanhaii? It sounds more like something out of a fairytale than a place off the M4. But no, it is a town with a large community of Pakistani migrants who have renamed their new home Dasht-e-Tanhaii: The Wilderness of Loneliness or The Desert of Solitude. Aslam has populated this place with a remarkable cast: Jugnu's brother, Shamas, a gentle, liberal man with no time for the orthodox form of Islam to which so many in his community cling; Shamas's sons and daughter, part of the generation that must attempt to forge a link between the Pakistani and British parts of their lives without being consumed by anger or pulled apart by conflicting demands; Suraya, who was "mistakenly" divorced by her husband in Pakistan while he was in a drunken rage, and now (by the precepts of the Islamic sect she follows) must find someone else to marry and divorce her before she can return to her former husband and their son."

Poison PEN?

"When it reached the point where Mr Niven sought a vote of confidence in his leadership the dispute became one of freedom of expression after Ms Smith demanded an opportunity to refute allegations the president had made against her, but was refused.
She had allowed her letter appealing to members to be edited after objections from Mr Niven and PEN's executive director, Susanna Nicklin. But Mr Niven's counter-letter went out unchanged despite her complaints that it was unfair.
Ms Smith said last night: 'The whole point of PEN is that you meet speech with speech. What Alastair Niven appears to have done is abrogate that principle to give himself an advantage in the confidence vote.'"
I have trouble taking ANY of this seriously. Sounds just like the kind of brouhaha that used to happen on the playground back in ye olde convent school.

The Only Clinton Article We're Linking To...

...is the spoof suggesting that Clinton stole his book's title from a Billy Joel number.
"Legal experts suggest that Joel may have a solid case, particularly when you review the lyrics of the song. "It's a quarter-century old," noted attorney Mark Tunnell, "and yet the lyrics eerily foretell Clinton's scandal-ridden second term, both in terms of his initial denial of impropriety,
"I don't need you to worry for me 'cause I'm alright
I don't want you to tell me it's time to come home
I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life
Go ahead with your own life and leave me alone"
and later the fallout when he supposedly was relegated to the couch by his wife,
"They will tell you, you can't sleep alone in a strange place
Then they'll tell you, you can't sleep with somebody else
Ah, but sooner or later you sleep in your own space
Either way it's okay, you wake up with yourself"

Will that be mineral, Evian or plain?

Jeffrey Whitmore on language traps:
"They laughed when I sat down at the table and ordered a glass of laxative.
I think that's why they laughed.
Maybe they were just amused at the sight of an old gringo fumbling with his school books, dictionary, street map, reading glasses, and the Spanish language.
I wanted a glass of purified water, but I couldn't remember the term agua purificada.
I gave it my best shot, and came up with agua pura.
Because my New England accent makes "water" sound like "watuh," I tried to emphasize the Spanish "r" in pura. I tried too hard and -- as I was told later -- my pura sounded like purga, meaning laxative.
Fortunately, they gave me what I wanted, not what I ordered."

Abol Tabol: Bong chauvinism

Picture this. You're angst-ridden, deeply traumatised by the global hegemony of English, concerned about the lack of respect shown to the mellifluous Bengali language. How do you demonstrate your deep dissatisfaction with the state of affairs?
From The Statesman: "After playing a couple of songs apparently to promote their cause, the language cops proceeded towards the KC Das confectioners. Near-violent by now, the mob painted “Banglay chai” on the walls and glass windows. Pamphlets, demanding immediate inclusion of the “ignored language” on signboards, were pasted all over. Sunil Gangopadhyay himself tried to stick some posters as well. Shops alongside JL Nehru Road were not spared blotches of red paint either, red symbolising “the blood of martyrs confronting the social evil of language hierarchy”.
The same author had some years ago condemned the blackening of non-Bangla billboards at Kolkata Book Fair by another group.
Mr Santanu Sen of VIP World, one of the shops targeted, looked shaken. The activists threatened to ransack the shop if he failed to put up a Bangla signboard in three days. “Well-known personalities were rude to us. They wanted to know why the name of our shop was in English,” he said."
Aside from the observation that the line about "well-known personalities" is priceless, the Babu would like to know what Sunil Gangopadhyay, endlessly prolific author of note, is doing sponsoring the kind of hooliganism good Leftists in Kolkata ritually deplore when it's carried out by Hindu right-wing groups.
Perhaps we should be kinder? Perhaps we should feel their pain? Rubbish, says the Calcutta Telegraph. "It is, indeed, a lamentable reality that the substandard teaching of Bengali is largely responsible for the young Bengalis’ ignorance of and profound lack of interest in the language and its literary traditions. The degradation of the language in the contemporary media and political rhetoric is yet another manifestation of this neglect. To link, moreover, the demise of Bengali with the rise of English is to give this mix of insecurity and chauvinism another unthinking twist. Supporting such a crass expression of “love” for a language undermines not only the value of the language, but also the principles of democratic politics itself."
Nicely orotund, that.

Harry Potter and the Dark Arts of Book Publishing

Daniel Stolar's book came out at the same time as Harry Potter, and his account of what happened next is blunt: Boy Wizard-10, Talented Young Writer-0. The Reading Experience puts Stolar's story in perspective.
"We live in an era in which books are 'units' to sell just like any other product, and the process of regarding them as such is only going to accelerate. Self-promotion isn't going to help as long as you're only trying to do it within the existing system. Stolar speaks of a 'tipping point', but ultimately such a point will be reached within mainstream book publishing itself: Printing books that can't get into bookstores or can't get reviewed will become unsustainable, and fewer books will be published. Unfortunately, the books not getting published will generally be the better ones rather than the trash."
(Link via the formidably well-read Sarah Weinman.)

And Homer Simpson wrote The Iliad

"The De Vere Society is marking the 400th anniversary of the death of Elizabethan nobleman Edward de Vere, who it says is the 'real Shakespeare'.
'To put it politely, they're barking up the wrong tree,' the Birthplace Trust's chairman Professor Stanley Wells said."
Or just barking. De Vere gained ground as an alternative candidate for poor Will after the Bacon theory started looking shaky, but the main reason for suggesting that the Earl of Oxford was the Bard is plain old-fashioned snobbery: you can't have just any old churl from Stratford contributing to England's literary heritage, can you?
Oh well. I says you can and you did.

The Ballard of East and West

The Guardian has an interesting interview with J G Ballard. I'm beginning to warm to interviews conducted by email and fax: they tend to be less likely to degenerate into stitched-together soundbytes.
Here's the man on art: "Meanwhile, too much is made of conceptual art - putting it crudely, someone has been shitting in Duchamp's urinal, and there is an urgent need for a strong dose of critical Parazone."
And on 9/11: "What is so disturbing about the 9/11 hijackers is that they had not spent the previous years squatting in the dust on some Afghan hillside with a rusty Kalashnikov. These were highly educated engineers and architects who had spent years sitting around in shopping malls in Hamburg and London, drinking coffee and listening to the muzak. There was certainly something very modern about their chosen method of attack, from the flying school lessons, hours on the flight simulator, the use of hijacked airliners and so on. The reaction they provoked, a huge paranoid spasm that led to the Iraq war and the rise of the neo-cons, would have delighted them."
See what I mean about soundbytes? Go read the whole thing. It's worth it.

A Saint He Ain't...

...but Peter Finlay aka DBC Pierre, has found expiation of a sort after his Booker win, repaying friends and associates whom he'd conned or borrowed large sums of money from. He has interesting plans for his third novel (the second is already finished).
"I've found a way to write a bannable book but not have it banned. It's been a while since anyone did a good decadent novel. It would be about the most extraordinary wealthy and useless child ever raised and his insatiable desires."

Manna for the Starving

"You don't have non-fiction in India," a cynical publishing veteran told the Babu once, "you have naan fiction. It's flat, mass-produced and not very satisfying on its own." Ask Indian authors why there is only one Ramachandra Guha and only the occasional Princely Impostor, and they'll tell you that money's the stumbling block. A good work of non-fiction can take anywhere from five to ten years to research and write; the Babu met a fiendishly talented writer recently who's taken eight years on his book and who produced 1,676 pages as the first draft. He couldn't have done that without support from his publishers, but Indian publishers, given the small print runs of even successful books, aren't able to pay high advances.
The New India Foundation, which includes Andre Beteille, Ramachandra Guha and Naina Lal Kidwai among its trustees, is offering fellowships that could change the situation. "Given India's size, its importance, and its interest, and given that this is our country, the lack of good research on its modern history is unfortunate. It is this lack that the New India Foundation seeks to address, by sponsoring high quality original research on different aspects of independent India."
Here's a bit more about the Fellowships:
"The New India Fellowships are open only to Indian nationals, including those currently living abroad. Fellowship holders shall be expected to write original books. Their proposals should be oriented towards final publication, and outline a road map towards that destination. The Foundation is ecumenical as regards genre, theme, and ideology: the only requirement is that the proposed works contribute to the fuller understanding of independent India. Thus Fellowship holders may choose to write a memoir, or a work of reportage, or a thickly footnoted academic study. Their books could be oriented towards economics, or politics, or culture. They could be highly specific-an account of a single decade or a single region-or wide-ranging, such as a countrywide overview."
They're also inviting recommendations for the New India Book Prize, "to be awarded for the finest book on independent India published between 1 April 2002 and 31 March 2004".
All the Babu can say is, bless 'em.

The HNWIs are different!

The rich have their own chateaus, their own jet planes and now, their own language. You don't get to do richspeak if you're merely "mass affluent", though. The Babu thinks it's time to evolve a new language for the section of society he comes from: people whose ancestors have long since squandered the family millions, but who can't stop talking about their long-lost loot--we're the nouveau pauvre.

Simon Says Bilinguals Rock

Apparently we're less distracted, less prone to Alzheimer's and more able to keep our attention on complex tasks despite the onset of old age. The Babu's a bit worried, though; he spoke pidgin Bengali, then heavily Anglicised Bong as a child, and began reading in Bengali only in his late teens--studies tested people who've been bilingual since the age of ten. (Ah well; I guess this explains why I'm distracted half the time.) Perhaps learning a third language, even at this late stage, will buff those leetle grey cells to the point where I can catch up with the other multilinguals in India.

More reviews: Transmission, Hungry Tide

Dirda seems to have liked Transmission--for those of you in Delhi, Hari Kunzru's in conversation about the book at the British Council on Wednesday evening--in a slightly baffled way:
"Like most people, I understand next to nothing about the arcana of computer programming. I also possess only the fuzziest conceptions -- misconceptions, more likely -- about venture capitalism, interactive online games and e-mail viruses. As for jet-setting Eurotrash and Bollywood movies, well, I've looked at pictures in magazines of sloe-eyed Italian beauties (of both sexes) and had a few casual conversations about Indian film-making with friends who are far more knowledgeable on the subject.Transmission, however, touches on all these trendy matters, and is utterly captivating: a deliciously satirical, humane and very enjoyable novel. Hari Kunzru, who lives in London, may be a new name to many Americans, but he is an exceptionally ingratiating writer, with a skewering wit, wide sympathies and a gimlet eye for the killing or illuminating detail."
Alfred Hickling deals with Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide in more depth:
"But Ghosh's subject remains the mutability and mysteries of language. Urbane, educated and more than a little arrogant, Kanai is a businessman who abandoned his early enthusiasm for Bengali poetry to found a successful interpretation agency in New Delhi, specialising in the lucrative field of accent modification for call- centre employees. "There's a lot going on in India right now," he says complacently, "and it's exciting to be part of it." At the behest of an aunt, Kanai returns to his homeland in the Sundarbans, the hostile archipelago of islands at the mouth of the Ganges, and for tuitously bumps into Piya, the dolphin specialist, on a train.
If Kanai seems to represent the commodification of Indian languages, Piya stands for their suppression. Raised in Seattle, she remembers Bengali simply as the language her parents argued in. As a child she tried to shut her ears to these sounds: "She wanted ... sounds that had been boiled clean, like a surgeon's instruments, tools with nothing attached except meanings that could be looked up in a dictionary - empty of pain and memory and inwardness."

He's been waiting for the phone to ring...

The Babu watched Bowling for Columbine thrice; he's waiting for Fahrenheit 9/11 to reach India; he even buys the man's books, sometimes. But Michael Moore, you do not a) steal a Very Famous Book Title and b) make Ray Bradbury wait six months for you to call back. That is just plain rude.

Killing me softly

The Babu stopped taking his partner out to poetry readings because two things would inevitably happen: a) the partner would go off to sleep in self-defense as someone mangled already mutilated verse b) the partner would chortle happily, under the impression that the comic effect of the verse we were being subjected to was intentional, and the author would have a quiet nervous breakdown.
Over at the Independent, Christina Patterson shares our pain (link via Zigzackly):
"The poem is the beautiful "Wild Geese" by the American poet Mary Oliver, but this is for the performers to know and us to guess. They've already done a medley of titles and we're not going to be bothered with such prosaic trifles, or their authors, tonight. As they work their way through the rest of the poem, they look firmly, and unsmilingly, ahead. Perhaps it is, after all, a funeral.
But no, this is only one in a full repertoire of facial expressions. Next up comes a little tableau that has the two women staring out at a fixed point in space and the young man looking extremely startled. A Puckish figure with fine teeth and a sweet smile, his poetry default mode appears to be edging towards the manic. "The word goes round," he intones in an Oz accent, offering a clue, perhaps, that this one's by the Australian poet Les Murray. But the rules of this guessing game are not consistent. American poets, for example, appear in a variety of guises: New York, Southern belle, estuary English and good old RP. Smiles, frowns and hand gestures appear to be optional, and random. So does the creative use of chairs.
One by one, they massacre them, these poems I love. "Poem from a Three Year Old", a beautiful child's-eye view of the world that I'm used to hearing in Brendan Kennelly's own mellow, Irish tones, sounds like a spoilt rant from a particularly precious Home Counties child. "What Every Woman Should Carry", a wry and touching poem by my friend Maura Dooley, is played for laughs with the full panoply of smiles, frowns and dramatic pauses. I pray that she won't hear it."

Kilaq Kanth? Baroze Bannerjee?

Move over Peter Parker; Pavitr Prabhakar's on his way. As Spiderman dons a dhoti (even sillier than Superman's undies-inside-out look, and I'd have said a kurta-churidar combo would have given him more leg room) and goes desi, you have to wonder who's next. Clark Kent, meet Kilaq Kanth; Bruce Wayne could be a bumbling Bong called Baroze Bannerjee.

The IMPAC...

...passed us by, sorry. But Moorishgirl has good coverage. Scroll down to her June 17 post; she even offers a link to winner Tahar Ben Jellou's website.

Shoots Truss and Leaves

If you're going to criticise Lynn Truss and her apparently misguiding punctuation guide, the New Yorker's Louis Menand shows you how to go about it.
"The preface, by Truss, includes a misplaced apostrophe (“printers’ marks”) and two misused semicolons: one that separates unpunctuated items in a list and one that sets off a dependent clause. About half the semicolons in the rest of the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes. Sometimes, phrases such as “of course” are set off by commas; sometimes, they are not. Doubtful, distracting, and unwarranted commas turn up in front of restrictive phrases (“Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions”), before correlative conjunctions (“Either this will ring bells for you, or it won’t”), and in prepositional phrases (“including biblical names, and any foreign name with an unpronounced final ‘s’”)."

Mustapha Kemal Bonaparte?

Geraldine Bedell on Louis De Berniere's new book: "[It] is, pretty obviously, an attempt at a modern War and Peace, with Kemal Ataturk standing in for Napoleon. It is perfectly possible that it won't sell as well as Captain Corelli. It's very long, the Turkish names look more forbidding than the Greek, the history and geography of the collapse of the Ottoman empire are unfamiliar (where does Thrace begin and end exactly?) and, most significantly, there is no single central story, no Pelagia and Corelli, to carry the reader through."
I'm not sure how I'll hold up through all its 625 pages, but I did like the first line: "The people who remained in this place have often asked themselves why it was that Ibrahim went mad." And to the Babu, who's used to the twists and turns of Indian names ("Gopijanaballabapodhorenopankajashankaroranjanabagchi" was one of the more celebrated, if fictitious, Bengali names I came across in my misspent youth), Turkish names are a breeze. Karatavuk? No problem. Philotei? Perfectly normal. Mihrimah Efendim? Poetic. And if you're going to complain about names like Ibrahim or Charitos, you are clearly meant never to stray from fiction featuring characters with names like Jane and Dick.

So you've written a book? Ha!

Step One: Welcome to the e-slush pile
Jeffrey Trachtenberg on why you're unlikely--yet--to find an editor over email.
"News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers, for instance, accepts e-mail pitches on its romance Web site -- and gets a mind-numbing 10,000 online queries annually. "We're starting to get them from other countries, sometimes in broken English," says Morrow/Avon Executive Editor Carrie Feron. E-queries have arrived from Italy, eastern Europe and Asia. At least a few top editors are frankly irked. Diana Baroni, an executive editor at Time Warner's Warner Books imprint, says she deletes e-mail queries as soon as they arrive. 'I don't know how they get my e-mail address, but I'm getting so many I don't respond.'"

Step Two: And if you do get published...
Literary agent Simon Trewin on what first-time authors should expect: very, very little.
"We are in a market now where the poverty gap is yawning: the small books remain small and the big books get bigger and bigger and swallow up most of a publisher's resources. Of course, if you are a Zadie, a Monica or a DBC with large advances that really focus a publisher's mind, your book will be the publishing "event" that everyone craves; but with thousands of book published each year, they can't all be "events". It is a sobering thought, but the majority of debut novels will be published to deafening silence, and without ringing tills and positive sales figures the publication of Book Two is likely to flounder and Book Three will probably remain on the hard-drive forever. Bookshops base their orders on precedent, and publishing can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Far from untold wealth and being feted in the media the reality is that most writers make less than £9,000 a year from their craft. Clearly, the compulsion to write should come from a genuine desire to say something, rather from a baser desire to get rich fast. Writing for the market is the quickest way to produce a hollow novel which won't get off the starting blocks."

My two bits: There are very few literary agents in India at present, but this is going to change very soon--my guess would be within the next four years. Editors at large publishing houses think they're inundated with manuscripts; what they're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg.
The Indian publishing industry is insular and clubby, everyone either knows everyone else or went to school with everyone else; it's difficult for a rank outsider to break in, but not impossible yet. Some authors do come out of the slush pile; editors do read their mail; authors can still get away with sloppy covering letters and bad proposals. This is likely to change in India.
In the global marketplace, very few Indian authors who found publishers abroad went down the slush pile route. And increasingly, very few have approached publishers directly; most have started getting their own agents. Even more have absolutely no idea of how to go about the business of finding an agent or finding a publisher. They're going to have to find out pretty damn quick.

The Babu was going to make up some specious reason for not being able to blog this week (ill health, the dog ate my keyboard, aliens held me hostage--no actually, they had scary probes and highpitched voices and an ability to make you do strange perverted things like *shudder* work, so they must have been editors), but the truth is somewhat different. He was composing his own version of Miss Otis Regrets:
The Babu regrets, he's unable to blog today, madam,
The Babu regrets, he's unable to lunch today.
He is sorry to be delayed,
but last evening down in Grub Street he strayed, madam,
The Babu regrets, he's unable to lunch today.
When he woke up and found that his deadlines had gone, madam,
He ran to the man who had led his paycheques so far astray,
And from under his velvet (dressing) gown,
He drew a gun and shot the son of an editor down, madam,
The Babu regrets, he's unable to lunch today.
He was also laughing his head off at this profile of Shobhaa De in The Nation: "There's no point in me writing for the poor because they are illiterate." And entertaining himself on the Pravda website, where machine translation lends a strange and sublime glory to stories that would make any self-respecting tabloid Just Say No.
"In 1997 the announcement was posted in the Internet on sale of the mummy of extraterrestrial visitor found in Russia. What is this? Is somebody selling fake mummy of the well-known alien? Maybe no aliens took the mummy to their planet? Probably both the statements are correct. Selling fake mummies of Aleshenka became profitable business. Aliens from Alfa-Centaurus did not stop the woman's vehicle. The mummy is likely to be under the research in some special services laboratory, or just destroyed because of careless treatment. Aleshenka"s remains may also be in the collection of some rich man fond of UFOs."

Krishna Dutta raises a contentious point in her review of Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide:
"But Ghosh endeavours to make his story accessible to a readership who will not recognise a host of cultural references.
In familiar contexts, this works well, but with the unusual it becomes tricky. When an everyday Indian object such as gamchha - a light piece of chequered material used mainly as a towel - is introduced, Ghosh has to use some 400 words to do justice to the concept before he supplies the Bengali word. This looks contrived. In places he gives a translation in parenthesis, making the text cumbersome...
Strangely, postcolonial Indian writers like Ghosh feel the need to insert the local bhasa (tongue) and cultural anthropology for authenticity, whereas their predecessors - such as Anita Desai and RK Narayan - did not. They were confident enough to transport readers to a different society using brilliantly executed English. Their works are still read fairly widely, whereas Ghosh can expect a limited readership - however interesting his theme may be."
This is the old debate between "authenticity" and "exoticism" rehashed, and I'm not sure I agree with Datta's conclusions. Many of this generation of writers, from Amit Chaudhuri to Ruchir Joshi to Ghosh, employ Indian words and phrases in exactly the same way us postcolonial desis do in our native place, so to speak: we flip between languages, we think in more than one tongue, and perhaps our writing might be allowed to reflect that. I don't know whether Ghosh has over-explained, or whether his riff on the gamchha sticks out as sharply as Dutta says it does; but to seem to argue that Indian English should remove the Indian bits from its speech is to argue for a less colourful language.
If you grew up reading English in India, you stumbled over cultural minefields all the time--try reading Philip Roth on baseball when all you can visualise in the place of America's favourite game is street cricket, try reading books that lean heavily on dialects that come from Yorkshire to Harlem when all you have for comparison is Bong-flavoured Eengleesh versus robust North Indian Angreji. The bottomline? It doesn't matter, so long as the author moves between languages with conviction and without embarrassment. If Dutta's arguing that it needs to be done better, I couldn't agree more; if she's arguing that it shouldn't be done at all, all I have to say is--don't neuter my language. I speak Brahmo English; my friends speak everything from Hinglish to Tam Bram variations, and I like the wide range of options we have, the flavour it adds to plain vanilla English.

Joyce to the world, etc. Rebecca Caldwell covers Bloomsday, the branded version. John Banville delves a little deeper into the myth (*from the New York Times):
"BLOOMSDAY (a term Joyce himself did not employ) was invented in 1954, the 50th anniversary, when the novelist Flann O'Brien and the writer and magazine editor John Ryan organized what was to be a daylong pilgrimage along the ''Ulysses'' route. Accounts of the venture are given by Ryan in his book of reminiscences, ''Remembering How We Stood'' -- renamed by Dublin wits ''Remembering How We Staggered'' -- and in ''No Laughing Matter,'' a biography of O'Brien by the poet Anthony Cronin, who was one of the pilgrims. Cronin's downbeat version of the ''structured and, in a way, humorless'' event is probably the more accurate one. The tour began at the architect Michael Scott's house beside the Martello tower in Sandycove, where the effects of the drink that Scott had laid on caused a scuffle between O'Brien and the poet Patrick Kavanagh. As might be expected, matters went downhill from there, and the pilgrimage was abandoned halfway through, when the weary Lestrygonians succumbed to inebriation and rancor at the Bailey pub in the city center."
On the subject of anti-Ulysses rants, I particularly like the "anonymous reviewer" who said the book was "enough to make a hottentot sick".

The Guardian has a roundup on the Orange Prize--Andrea Levy's Small Island walked away with the laurels. Katharine Viner, one of the judges, has a nice and much-linked-to piece on how the job charges the "langorous pleasure of reading" with a not-always-welcome intensity. I'm impressed that she survived this particular day intact:
"The second low point, I remember very clearly, was on February 9. I was way behind schedule, so took a day's holiday from work with the aim of reading three novels - one each in the morning, afternoon and evening. The first book was Anne Tyler's fabulous The Amateur Marriage, which was about mistakes and regret and which I found deeply affecting. I cried in my local cafe. The second book was Julie Myerson's Something Might Happen, a superb but cruel book about terrible things. I sobbed the entire time I was reading it. This was in a different cafe. That evening, at home, I read Stella Duffy's devastating novel about terminal cancer and death, and how it is worse to die than be left behind, and, well, I could hardly walk. The trouble with really good novels is that they make you engage, make you experience the emotions of the characters as if they were your own. It was a terrible day, and yet these remained three favourites for me throughout the judging process."

"Stephen Joyce, the grandson and last surviving relative of the writer, has caused consternation by declaring that any public reading of what is regarded as the most influential novel of the 20th century will be a breach of copyright and cannot go ahead without permission and payment. Readings in both London and Dublin to launch the first ever unabridged audio CD of the book - the 22 discs last 27 hours - have been cancelled because of fears of litigation."
It's going to be a very Beckettian Bloomsday if S. Joyce has his way. "A reading from The Dead", the organisers will announce, and 'The Lass of Aughrim' will play in the background while nobody speaks.

Ben Brown posted earlier at Bookslut about this promo site for a book, which includes a make-believe local paper about a make-believe town whose make-believe inhabitants don't want you to buy a (real) book, the point of which is to drum up interest in the book etc etc. (I believe The Blair Witch Project did this sort of thing--ie the fake but realistic webpage--aeons back, in which case it has a lot to answer for.) Now of course the fake editor of the fake paper is trying to stir up a fake controversy by calling Bookslut names. Frankly, m'dear, I don't give a damn, darn, poot, or dang.

I think of the NYT's summer reading special as the writers' answer to Googling themselves: you check to see if you exist, but it doesn't really matter what anyone says about you.

"I am the author of the acclaimed Alex Cross and Women's Murder Club series.
My love story Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas was a runaway success and my top bestseller. I live in Florida."
He calls it a blog, I call it a publicity stunt, my partner calls it something so rude it can't be printed in Kitabkhana. James Patterson's just plugged into the joy of blogging and he wants to Share The Love. Don't mind me, I'm just going to puke quietly into a dustbin.

Michael Quinion explodes etymology myths in this new series for The Telegraph. (Some are well-known but recur so often that they need to be debunked again and again, like the one about"Port Out, Starboard Home" being the origin of the word "posh". Scroll down the page for the entry.)
"On the other hand, sometimes a term really is adapted from another language or dialect, or from a once-common word that has become archaic or rare. Either way, it is strange, and so is modified into something that sounds like a current English form. Our minds search for familiar patterns and make mistakes. For example, when the second half of "bridegome" for the male half of a marrying couple became obsolete, people borrowed "groom" instead (making "bridegroom"). The Spanish cucaracha made no sense to English speakers, so they transmogrified it into "cockroach". People translate the defunct word "umbles" for the innards of a deer into "humble", as in "humble pie". British Tommies in France in the first years of the First World War heard il n'y en a plus, "there is no more", and condensed it into "napoo", finished, done for, dead; they did much the same with ça ne fait rien, it does not matter, which became "san fairy an". There are hundreds of such examples. When they first appear, they are often viewed as mistakes, as indeed they are, but they can become accepted in time."

Reviews of Hari Kunzru's Transmission have been pouring in, and reading them consecutively can be, with the better ones, like watching a debate unfold:
Siddhartha Deb, in the New Statesman: "Kunzru's first novel, The Impressionist, was a whirlwind tour of British colonialism, demonstrating a relish for all the ideological and cultural props of empire, shuffling stock characters and situations into an atmospheric and passionate narrative of miscegenation and identity. In Transmission, where the subject is the new imperium, demanding libations of Starbucks lattes rather than gin and tonic, we see the same voraciousness at work on characters, places and ideas, in an energetic exploration of what lies beneath the rhetoric about seamless networking and open borders."
Andrew Crumey in The Scotsman: "Transmission is a novel of ideas, a political satire. Its message is that if you are a white European, you had better keep a tight hold of your Club Europa membership. It is only an accident of birth that entitles you to its abundant privileges.
French aristocrats watching Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro slapped their own cheeks in acknowledgement that they were the butt of a good joke. A few years later, their heads were rolling. Transmission follows in the same tradition - a sly comedy that is in reality a deeply subversive and truly important book about some of the most crucial issues facing the world today. As we slap our cheeks and laugh, we had better hope that when the world’s inequalities come to be righted, we are allowed to keep our heads."
In New York Newsday, Dan Cryer writes: "Long live the British Empire. In the wake of World War II, Britannia's imperial rule collapsed under a global tide of anti-colonialism. Yet in the decades that followed, the empire's literary offspring from India, Nigeria and elsewhere invaded the home island, invigorating English fiction with their talent, energy and multicultural perspectives. Long live Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, Hari Kunzru and their numerous cousins."
In Outlook, Sandipan Deb comments: "And now comes Transmission, the very fact of whose appearance is impressive; Kunzru is that rare big-ticket young Indian/ Indian-origin novelist who has been able to produce a second book...
At its core, Transmission is about the twin
forces mutating our 21st century world: globalisation and information technology. Men and women—bodies—cross international borders legally or illicitly as pawns in the planetary game of labour arbitrage. But the arteries of this world are also enmeshed in the invisible circuitry of another—a virtual universe where electronic impulses move at light speed in borderless inter-dependence: a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can actually set off a tornado in Texas. The impulses can be anything: sometimes they pretend to be money, sometimes sex, sometimes an epidemic."

Remembering Dom Moraes: tributes from Rediff...the Indian Express...Outlook...more.
In July 2003, Jeet Thayil had written about an early encounter with Dom Moraes:
"As his voice began each new poem it would start off sounding unsure, but soon it would be pure and strong, the words perfectly articulated, not a single misstep or hesitation. I closed my eyes and heard the words ring in my head like a prophecy, or an angel's promise. I think I heard in his words the possibility of redemption. More than anything, I heard power. When I opened my eyes it was difficult to connect the words, which rang in the air as if they had been carved in stone, with the frail man who was reading them.
I left after the reading, too shy and unhappy with myself to go up and say hello. I remember going back to my room at the Y feeling as if a door had opened in my head. Moraes was an Indian poet, who conducted himself as if he were part of an international community of writers. I realized that it was possible to write as if your life depended on it. After all, he obviously did."

Dom Moraes died of a heart attack this evening in Mumbai. He was 65; he will be remembered for his poems, for being a good drinking man, for typing with one finger to the end.
Jerry Pinto wrote the best profile of Dom I've read so far.
"I cannot remember the first time I met Dom Moraes. I know that he was a part of my growing up. My father recommended his prose "to clean your palate". And so in some distant way, I knew a lot about him before I ever heard him call me fucker in rich, soft, plum-cake tones. I knew, for instance, that he read a book a day and that on the day a certain column appeared, it had been the Wisden Almanac. I knew that he had met Stephen Spender when he was young, very young and that Spender had told him that he was a poet, an affirmation that most poets seek. I knew that his father was Frank Moraes, who had written a biography of Jawaharlal Nehru and that Dom had written a biography of Indira Gandhi, in a dynastic parallelism. I knew that he was married to Leela Naidu, the woman who was once chosen by Vogue as one of the ten most beautiful women in the world, of whom a photographer had said, "She has no bad angles". I knew also that he drank, seemed to drink copiously."
Dom took cancer in his stride; when he turned 65 a few months ago, he told Outlook that 2004 was going to be one of his most prolific years--he had two already out, and planned three more.
He was at Neemrana, one of a flock of writers clustered uncomfortably under the large umbrella of "Indian literature", where he played eye-witness in inimitable fashion to one of the more incendiary moments of the conference, which featured Sir Vidia in the lead role.
In his seventh collection of poems, Typed With One Finger, a verse goes, in part:
"When I am not there in the maze
where the long road ends, think
of the clumsy stutter of my limp
behind you always, hindering you,
trying to help you, all my days"

He'll be missed. Raise a glass to his memory.

Interviewing Colin Wilson can be a very alienating experience: "He picks me up from St Austell in his ancient Jaguar and seems like the sort of amiable tweed-jacketed cove you see in glucosamine sulphate ads. But as we tootle along the lanes his con versation became increasingly odd - he periodically throws out the word 'fucker' with extraordinary venom, accompanied by a sly sideways glance to see if I am shocked."

"Having spent many years of his life in the department of south Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago, A.K. Ramanujan liked to describe himself as the hyphen in 'Indian-American'. Re-reading the work of this poet, translator and curator of folklore, it strikes me that Ramanujan is also a hyphen, that valuable go-between, among Indians." Githa Hariharan reexamines the idea of a literary heritage.

It's the summer of the serial killer. Hari Menon sees the usual summer reading special through a glass, darkly. Patrick Anderson isn't impressed: "The serial-killer thriller is the cicada of popular fiction. The damn things are everywhere."

A student at Princeton has figured out the How to Get Published in the New Yorker formula using statistical models. Of course it doesn't work. It's a thesis. It's not meant to do anything remotely useful.

I'm still having fun at Zigzackly, but here are a few quick links:
Kamala Markandaya, author of Nectar in a Sieve, has died. Obituaries are here and here.