Guillermo Cabrera Infante

The author of Three Trapped Tigers died of an infection at the age of 75 yesterday.
From The Paris Review interview with Cabrera Infante:

"INTERVIEWER: Surely you believe in immortality, a niche in that book called Literary History?
CABRERA INFANTE: I don't believe in immortality, either of the body or of the written word, my corpus. Remember, when we talk about those immortal writers, like Homer, we are not talking about the writers but their writing. Dead men don't write. Dead writers don't last. Homer exists as a continuous process of rewriting called reading and translation."

My friend the Cynical Writer mourned Cabrera Infante's death, spoke of the Cuban writer's political involvement and finished thusly: "Jaanish, he wrote the best bloody description of a blow job ever. No one else has come close."

It's all about Geelani...oops, not quite

Arundhati Roy is probably the only writer whom one admires with teeth clenched. She rises to the defence of beleaguered lecturer S R Geelani, which is deeply admirable and very necessary:
"Geelani and his family have suffered enough. Can we stop using them to fuel our crude patriotic fantasies and simple-minded cloak-and-dagger theses?"

She should have stopped right there, but no Arundhati essay is complete without her own particular, well-loved blend of paranoia and narcissism:
"That's it from me folks. 'Bye now. Let the insults roll. Oh look! Here's one already...

Dear Sir
Once again you have subjected us to another of Ms Roy's pointless one-sided diatribes. As usual she flays us with her passion and poetry but no facts. When will she understand the difference between fiction and fact? Why can't she go back to writing award-winning children's books and leave us in peace? She is clearly a supporter of Islamic terrorism. She should try living behind a burqa and see what it feels like. Geelani and his ilk belong in Guantanamo Bay. As for Ms Roy and her ilk—they are taking unnecessary advantage of Indian democracy. She is an anti-Indian, anti-American anti-national. Moreover she is also anti-development. The only thing she is "pro" is publicity. She wants to take us back into the Bullock Cart Age. There is no place for people like this in the New India—the foremost, emerging international superpower.
india.patriot@siliconvalley.usa"

The First Rule of Fight Club...

...is don't misquote Uncle Salman.
Amit Roy reports on the makings of a fine literary kerfuffle:
"Rushdie was irritated by a passage French wrote in the review. It said: “Most of India’s eminent writers live outside India, for economic and social reasons, so this is familiar stuff. The visiting insider-outsider can observe the old country with a would-be innocent eye. (‘Rajasthan is colourful,’ wrote Salman Rushdie in 2000, after a long enforced absence.) The cultural confusion of the expatriate — a common enough condition across the world today — has been mined to exhaustion. Mehta, though, soon puts this approach to one side in a book that is part-memoir, part-reportage.”
In a rejoinder, Rushdie’s letter (“Dreams of India”) said: “I should be used to being misrepresented by now, but Patrick French’s attempt, in his review of Suketu Mehta’s excellent Maximum City, to portray me as an out-of-touch ‘insider-outsider’ reduced to describing Rajasthan as ‘colourful’, prompts me to defend myself.”
Rushdie went on: “As a look at my essay A Dream of Glorious Return, published in Step Across This Line, will quickly show, I was talking somewhat satirically about the tourist-Rajasthan that was presented to Bill Clinton on his visit to India (“People wear colourful clothes and perform colourful dances and ride on colourful elephants and these are things a President should know”) while the non-colourful realities of the drought and so on were not drawn to his attention.”
Rushdie added: “It is quite improper to quote my essay selectively so that he can praise my friend Mehta by making me look foolish.”"

French got off pretty lightly. Rushdie apparently offered to use a baseball bat on a reporter, though not without reason. The report is silent on a question that haunts the Babu: what's the Salman swing like?

The SuperBooker? The Bobel?

Brief riff on the subject of naming literary prizes: don't. The Man Booker International Prize is already being called the Superbooker (I suggest the Bobel, as a sort of alternate Nobel thingie, but think that the Binternational might have certain undertones). Perhaps we should call them, I dunno, by fuzzy little Disneyesque names. The Betty Trash, oops, Trask prize would become the Minnie Mouse award, because it always seems to go to cute, little novels that annoy the hell out of you, the Whitbread would be Cinderella and the Ondaatje award would definitely be Goofy. (Donald Duck would be whichever prize gets caught with its pants down most often.)
Anyway. The 2005 shortlist for the Man Booker International is out and I have a vision of the judges' panel telling both Naipaul and Rushdie groupies that they've behaved so very badly that their boys are out of the game this year.
Here's the list of 18 (go, Stanislaw!):

Margaret Atwood
Saul Bellow
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gunter Grass
Ismail Kadare
Milan Kundera
Stanislaw Lem
Doris Lessing
Ian McEwan
Naguib Mahfouz
Tomas Eloy Martinez
Kenzaburo Oe
Cynthia Ozick
Philip Roth
Muriel Spark
Antonio Tabucchi
John Updike
A.B. Yehoshua

Only four American authors on the list. Blasphemy, but could James Wood have been wrong?
And the People's Choice section was gleefully taken over by national partisans. Eva Ras was endorsed enthusiastically by many fans in Serbia and Montenegro, so she got 90 (gasp!) votes to Ishiguro's five, Rowling's two and William Boyd's one. The Israelis launched a fierce counterattack on behalf of Sami Michael but were, at last count, still trailing at 52. The desis never got into the game, a shame considering how good we are at rigging online polls for film actors, Amitabh Bacchan always wins.

The Babu's favourite nomination in the People's Choice section?
"As far as Man Booker men go - I can honestly think of no man\\\'s man (know what I mean? Nudge, nudge, nods as good as w*nk) better equiped in the pen department than the wizard of words - John Self. God love him! (Well, some one has to, right?)"
Horatio Neilsen, Armenia

Room for Ms Nasreen

Should the government of India allow Taslima Nasreen's prayer to be granted citizenship so that she can write in a "familiar" environment, she'll feel right at home. Sure we can accommodate another bad writer, there's tons of them out here. We've even exported a few recently...

The Duke has left the building

"The Edge...there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who know where it is are the ones who have gone over."
Woke up this morning with high fever and serious caffeine withdrawal symptoms, and heard that Hunter S Thompson hadshot himself. Still no coffee, and the Babu is currently teetotalling, so there's no decent way to mourn Raoul Duke. (Someone give me a Harley, a road trip and an unlimited expense account so I can pay my respects.)
In his last column for ESPN, Hunter S Thompson invented Shotgun Golf:
"HST: "I've called you for some consulting advice on how to launch it. We've actually already launched it. Last spring, the Sheriff and I played a game outside in the yard here. He had my Ping Beryllium 9-iron, and I had his shotgun, and about 100 yards away, we had a linoleum green and a flag set up. He was pitching toward the green. And I was standing about 10 feet away from him, with the alley-sweeper. And my objective was to blow his ball off course, like a clay pigeon."
BILL: (Laughs.)
HST: "It didn't work at first. The birdshot I was using was too small. But double-aught buck finally worked for sure. And it was fun."'
For the handful of you out there who never discovered gonzo journalism, Litkicks has a pretty comprehensive profile that covers Thompson's early career.
He believed in the value of paranoia, and sometimes, who knows, maybe he was right. In this 2003 interview with Salon, he said:
"Civil liberties are black and white issues. I don't think people think far enough to see the ramifications. The PATRIOT Act was a dagger in the heart, really, of even the concept of a democratic government that is free, equal and just. There are a lot more concentration camps right now than Guantanamo Bay. But they're not marked. Now, every jail, every bush-league cop can run a concentration camp. It amounts to a military and police takeover, I think."
Thompson wasn't pleased when Trudeau immortalised him in Doonesbury as Duke, but denied threatening to cause the cartoonist grievous bodily harm. On the other hand..."I might shit on Trudo's chest, is that a crime?" he once asked.
The High Lord of Inner Space had imagined a spectacular end to his life--he felt something like a high-speed motorcycle accident would be most appropriate. And whatever you make of his life, he did end it as he'd plotted it.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

Someone reminded me of the standard grammar all of us Angrez-educated types learned the language from. It was a horrible instrument of torture, written by Wren & Martin. Mr Martin is irrelevant to this post, but Wren was none other than Percival C Wren, ex-Foreign Legionnaire and sometime Chief Inspector of Schools in the Bombay Presidency, best known for the Beau Geste trilogy.
Then the partner abandoned the search for suggestive screensavers long enough to seek out Wren's other works.
The man who was responsible for India's grammatical heritage wrote ripe stuff like Snake and Sword and Dew and Mildew.

Here is the first paragraph of Snake and Sword; what with Wren on one hand and P G Wodehouse on the other, I finally know why we write the way we do:

"When Colonel Matthew Devon de Warrenne, V.C., D.S.O., of the Queen's
Own (118th) Bombay Lancers, pinned his Victoria Cross to the bosom of
his dying wife's night-dress, in token of his recognition that she was
the braver of the twain, he was not himself.
He was beside himself with grief."

Oh, give the man a posthumous Bulwer-Lytton.

Everybody sing 'We Are the Champions'

Round Two of The Morning News' Tournament of Books has just concluded, and this is who made it through to the semifinals:

The Plot Against America
vs. The Inner Circle
Judge: Maud Newton

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
vs. Heir to the Glimmering World
Judge: Mark Sarvas

Cloud Atlas
vs. An Unfinished Season
Judge: Jessa Crispin

I Am Charlotte Simmons
vs. Birds Without Wings
Judge: John Warner

The Babu is thinking sadly that Indian literary awards would be so much fun if you could just take the Tournament of Books model and tweak it a little. Like put the authors into the ring (free boxing gloves provided), sit back and watch as Anita Desai tries to punch out Nayantara Sahgal, Amit Chaudhuri loosens a couple of Raj Kamal Jha's teeth, Naipaul and Rushdie judder around whining about their black eyes... Ah well. Back to work, Hurree.

Sahitya Akademi whoops it up

If you're in Delhi, drop by the India International Centre this weekend. The Sahitya Akademi has writers from across the country participating in a festival of letters. As this correspondent has it:
"Soul-stirring poetry recitations, erudite discussions on the universality of literature, tete-a-tete with celebrity writers and thinkers are just some of the appetising items on the platter for bibliophiles hungry for pleasures of the mind."

Insulted by International Gorillay

Without The Hot Spot, I might never have learned of the pathbreaking work of genius known as International Gorillay (read Hot Spot's complete plot summary here):
"This epic creation made headlines when the British censors refused to allow it a certificate thus officially banning the film outright along with the infamous video nasties. However a month later, following a letter by Salman Rushdie himself, the ban was lifted and Gorillay became perhaps the first film from Lollywood to be screened on mainstream British television.
The film is a fabulous concoction and shows the Islamic world tottering on the brink of an abyss. Rushdie is leading the assault on Islam with his Satanic Verses and is targeting Pakistan (the "fortress" of modern day Islam) because once mighty Pakistan is dealt with, the rest of the Islamic world will hardly stand a chance. Rushdie plans to drive the final nails into the coffin of Islam by opening a new chain of Casino's and Disco's spreading contemptable vice and debauchery. Mustafa Qureshi, hen pecked to death by his demented wife, decides to call it a day with his day job at the Police station and induct his unemployed brothers to create a Mujahid (God's soldiers) trio whose sole aim is to seek out and destroy the despised Salman Rushdie before he manages to destroy all virtue and decency on the planet. The trio have a personal axe to grind as their beloved family cherub was recently slaughtered by Rushdie's men while protesting Satanic Verses."
Speaking to an audience in Colorado, Rushdie offered his reactions to this 1990 Lollywood creation:
"His character was cast in “a series of very unfortunate safari suits ... there was the fashion insult to consider, and I was depicted as living in what looked like a palace in the Philippines.”
He wrote to the movie licensing board in Britain when it refused to allow the movie to be shown. He promised to not sue and ask that the movie be allowed.
However, he said it gained no audience, which he said was a testament to allowing it in the first place.
“Nobody went. Know why? Rotten movie,” he said."
I dunno. It sounds pretty hot to me. Especially the bit where the mujahid don Batman suits as they seek the fell Salman.

Valentine's day massacres

The Babu and his partner briefly contemplated going to the Shobhaa De launch. The lady who once brought back fond memories of Elinor Glyn ("Would you like to sin/ With Elinor Glyn/ on a tiger skin?/ Or would you prefer/ to err with her/ on some other fur") has reinvented herself as the aunty-next-door, propagating the virtues of arranged marriages, the need to adjust and the importance of producing cheese-and-crackers at 6 pm sharp for the Better Half, in Spouse. On the plus side, there was the prospect of leering gently at Ms De, who hasn't been withered by age, not 'arf. On the minus, there was the deeply grisly prospect of listening to four (or five, I lost count) of Delhi's Page 3 couples attempting to demonstrate in public on Valentine's Day that they had great marriages, really, honest, cross my heart and hope to die.
We already knew that the lady hadn't lost her claws. We already suspected that the real action at the launch would happen offstage, which it did, much to the disapproval of this reporter:
"Alas, for anyone in the audience, all they heard were snatches of conversation - as they jet set refused to stop their own conversations even as someone was almost shouting into the mike. Despite being reprimanded by Madhu Trehan, one half of the five couples invited for the discussion, the loud hum just refused to die down. Even as the couples - Madhu and Naresh Trehan, Naveen and Raseel Gujral, Chetan and Manya Seth, Dilip and Devi Cherian, Anita and Siddharth Basu went about trying to gamely carry on the debate, the hum just refused to subside."
(Love that bit about Madhu being one half of the five couples, btw. That makes her, let's see, three husbands and two wives. Or the other way round.)
So we ditched, attempted to dust off the tiger skin and gave up when we remembered that it was still attached to the tiger, and let the gossip come to us instead.
First off the mark was Bright Young Woman who sent desperate message: help help help am surrounded by neurotic couples and sinking ever deeper into morass of mush, slush and bad wine.
We told her to drop by and listen to good jazz instead, but she disappeared somewhere between the Jamaican satay (will do calypso in stomach on demand) and sea of air-kissing socialites, not waving but drowning.
Then there was the Cynical Writer, who gives great soundbyte:
Shobhaa's still so stunning, of course her ass is kind of fat in that ghati way and she has a harsh, grating voice but her skin, it's glorious and I'm thinking, Botox? But no, one of her friends swears that it's all natural, Shobhaa just has naturally great skin, and then my eyes lock on to Shobhaa's for a second and there's this moment of, you know, energy... So I'm listening to these people witter on about marriage and I turn around and say to this gorgeous woman behind me--too much makeup, polo socialite but still gorgeous--they should be discussing divorce, not marriage. Take me, I'm a divorced father of two. And gorgeous woman--I hear she's doing some twenty-year-old--she comes right back at me, she says in a you-beginner kind of way, I'm a divorced father of three.
Over at the next table, says another friend, are a bunch of seen-it-all cynics who're looking at the five couples on stage (who're still going on about their happy, happy marriages) and doing the full scalpel job: oh, that one's been cheating on spouse for ages, and that one has her husband's balls in a vise, not to mention the bank locker keys, and that one I might be sneaking off to have a quickie with in the parking lot after the show...
Two of my gay friends got royally sloshed and spent an hour trying to exit from Longchamps, too drunk to carry out their original plan, which was to have Shobhaa kidnapped by the Lesbian Liberation Army and forced to grow her armpit hair until she agreed to add two "Marriage for Gays, OK!" chapters to Spouse.
The original Page 3 girl, Kanika Gehlot, who literally wrote the book on the lives of the Rich and Hollow, was there in red leather jacket, making quietly confident asides and deciding whether she was going to hit the Happy Singles party or the Smug Marrieds do. No contest there.
The only reported casualty of the evening was a friend of the Babu's, who is recovering in hospital from bad cheek wounds caused by too much air-kissing. It's the suction after the mwah-mwah what did her in.

We've got blog !

Plenty of good new ones, in fact. There's a group effort "celebrating South Asian and diaspora literature" called Desilit Daily. Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta runs a crisp selection--links, pithy comments--over at Indian Writing. And Annie Zaidi provides an insider account from a footloose and committed journalist's life at Known Turf.
Oh, yes. And there's this. Heh heh.

The right to be offended

Salman Rushdie speaks out against Britain's proposed new laws:
"The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted is absurd. So too is the notion that people should have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted. A fundamental decision needs to be made: do we want to live in a free society or not? Democracy is not a tea party where people sit around making polite conversation. In democracies people get extremely upset with each other. They argue vehemently against each other’s positions. (But they don’t shoot.)" (Link courtesy Zigzackly.)

Miller, 89, dies

"You know," he said, "a playwright lives in an occupied country. He's the enemy. And if you can't live like that, you don't stay. It's tough. He's got to be able to take a whack, and he's got to swallow bicycles and digest them." From The New York Times obituary of Arthur Miller, who died of congestive heart failure yesterday.
Writing about The Crucible in 2000, he had this to say:
"My fictional view of the period, my sense of its unreality had been, like any impotence, a psychologically painful experience. A similar paralysis descended on Salem. In both places, to keep social unity intact, the authority of leaders had to be hardened and words of scepticism toward them constricted. A new cautionary diction, an uncustomary prudence inflected our way of talking to one another. The word socialism was all but taboo. Words had gotten fearsome."
And here's a favourite story, pinched from Jay Nordinger:
"While I’m on Arthur Miller, I might as well tell my favorite Arthur Miller story — at least, I think it’s an Arthur Miller story. I heard it once; don’t know whether it’s true.
Miller meets an old high-school classmate in a restaurant. The classmate says, “Art? Art Miller? Good to see you. It’s been years.” He then asks Miller what he does for a living, which takes the famous playwright somewhat aback.
Miller: “Um, I’m a writer.”
Classmate: “Really? That’s great. What do you write?”
Miller: “Um, plays, mostly.”
Classmate: “Plays? Terrific. Any success?”
Miller: “Did you ever hear of Death of a Salesman?”
The classmate gets wide-eyed. For a few seconds, he can’t speak. Then he says, “You’re Arthur Miller?”

Not a question I've ever asked myself, frankly

Courtesy BoingBoing:
"One day I thought to myself, 'I love to make books and I love to play the ukulele. Can I put these two loves together? Can I make a book out of a uke?'" From Peter and Donna, creators of what you've been secretly yearning for all your life:
Ukelele Books.

Loosening the muzzle

From The Times Online:
"PERFORMERS and writers, including Rowan Atkinson and Salman Rushdie, have helped to force a government climbdown over new legislation which bans incitement to religious hatred..."
But the best efforts of Rushdie and company might not be enough.
"Fiona Mactaggart, a Home Office minister, conceded that even under its new name the offence would place new boundaries around freedom of speech. 'It is right and the State has a right to put some boundaries on free speech,' she said."
The Guardian covered the issues earlier:
"...the writers said that the legislation would "make it illegal to express what some might consider to be provocative views on religion". It could, they say, serve as a "sanction for censorship of a kind which would constrain writers and impoverish cultural life"."

Maximum Mehta on Bollywood

The last time I bought a copy of National Geographic (no offense meant, great magazine etcetera, but still) was to satisfy the ravening appetites of pre-teen boys who had heard (wild and unsubstantiated rumour) that the mag was running a feature intended to do for supermodel boobs what it had done for grass-skirted Pacific Island women for years. This time, I'm buying for far less scurrilous reasons: Suketu Mehta has an article on Bollywood in the most recent issue.
The National Geographic site has a brief excerpt and Suketu's field notes:
"Hanging out with Shah Rukh Khan was great fun. He told me about the kind of bizarre scripts people propose to him. In one story idea given to him by a politician, Shah Rukh's character dies. But there is no human body available for reincarnation. So he is born again as a dog. After nine months, he falls in love with a woman.
The politician had spent hundreds of thousands of rupees buying puppies and training them. He had many books about dogs on his table. I asked Shah Rukh if he was expected to act as the dog. In answer, he scratched his ear rapidly with his paw."

'Forget Kathmandu' author in hiding?

Manjushree Thapa's book on Nepal couldn't have been more presciently, or dangerously timed: she was here in India giving interviews just before the king announced his coup.
Asia Media says she may be in hiding:
"Dahal [who is currently missing] also edits the weekly tabloid newspaper Saptahik Bimarsh. On Friday, the paper's opinion page was blank, not a word below the opinion masthead. Two weeks ago, Forget Kathmandu, an Elegy to Democracy, by Manjushree Thapa, was published. It is an personal appraisal of what has gone wrong in Nepal since the first democratic elections in 1990. The present king does not fare well. Now the author is in hiding, unsure of her status with the regime."
The Outlook review comments: "The author has spared no one—politicians whether of the extreme left or extreme right, veteran freedom-fighters, Maoist insurgents, civil society ("we, the bourgeoisie")—in her account of the multi-faceted crisis that grips her country today. She is especially irreverential about the occupants of Narayanhity Palace, past and present. Perhaps this was the only way to demystify history and expose the cynical self-serving actions of the Nepalese polity, which has brought the country to the brink."
And The Indian Express said:
"Thapa paints a bleak portrait of a land mired in poverty and desperation, whose fragile equilibrium was made even more complicated by the atrocities of Nepal’s security forces. She lets her Maoist interlocutors speak for themselves and their stories make for compelling reading."

Keep the champagne on hold

Outlook India reported recently: "Noted English poet Saleem Saim has bagged the coveted "Poet of the year 2004-05" award, with a purse of 20,000 dollars, of the US based International Society of Poets."
The award-winning entry by the poet from Moradabad is called 'Kept Apart'. Sample lines:
"Here I think and think of her all time as a mad
There my wife moans
Tossing lone and sad..."
Saim was somewhat sceptical about the high honour bestowed on him. I think he's the victim of a poetry scam--illuminated rather nicely here by Warren Boroson of the Daily Record:
"It may surprise you to learn that I recently was nominated to be Poet of the Year by the International Society of Poets.
Instead of jumping for joy, I thought: Don't these people ever stop? Have they no shame? Are they so contemptuous of the general public that they continue to engage in this insulting behavior?"
Warren has submitted poetry to the Society before.
"The first time, I submit a poem from a collection, "The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse." The author was the late Julia Moore, and here is an excerpt:
"The character of Lord Byron
"Was of low degree,
"Caused by his reckless conduct
"And bad company."
Moore, who died in 1920, was soon informed that she had won honorable mention in the poetry contest, and her "beautiful poem" would be published in a forthcoming volume if she gave permission (and paid to buy the book).
Gushed Eddie-Lu Cole, poetry editor, "I am so happy for you!"

The second poem I submitted was:
"Roses are red violets are blue I don't know what comes next Do you?
"Dandelions are yellow carnations are white That's enough poetry for today Good night."
That also was received with lavish praise..."

Saleem Saim doesn't deserve to be rooked, so here's a friendly warning--this is what to expect if you show up as an award-winning poet for the convention.
From Mary Zayas:
"The open mike rooms were not organized. No sign-in sheets, no time limit. You had to wrestle the mike away from someone. Poets had pages and pages of poetry in some instances. Then the banquet. Chicken, rice, buns, water, iced tea, coffee and dessert. No offer of a soft drink or wine - and my registration fee alone was more than $500! After listening to W.D. Snodgrass you need wine. The Marvelettes were great...the induction ceremony was not. They put glow-in-the-dark circles from Disneyworld on the table, had us twirl them in the air and we were now members! Hooray."

And there is at least one other contender out there for title of 'Poet of the Year, 2004'. Saleem Saim, meet Patsy Lewis. And Becca E Henry. And (scroll down the page) Joyce Ivy. How does the International Society of Poets spell "winner"? To rhyme with S-C-A-M.

Rupa Bajwa on gurdwaras

The Babu was underwhelmed by The Sari Shop (please approach Putu the Cat for the funniest Rupa Bajwa story ever told), but he has to admit that she has the courage of her convictions. Here she is on the Behzti affair:
"This is the kind of intolerance that Sikhs have when it comes to their clergy. Of course, all religions have it, but here I am specifically talking about us, the Sikhs. If a 16-year-old girl doesn’t have the freedom to call a priest a nuisance, it is no surprise that Bhatti’s play evoked such strong reactions.
What blasphemy! How can rape happen inside a gurdwara? But Dark Things do happen in gurdwaras sometimes, the same way they happen everywhere else. I happened to be in Ludhiana when a girl in her early twenties was kept captive inside a gurdwara, and raped repeatedly over three days by one granthi, three sewadars and a tabla-player of the gurdwara. The girl finally managed to open a window and shout for help. By the time the police arrived, four of the men had fled. Only one of them, Satnaam Singh, was on the premises. And our Holy Man, Satnam Singh, was enterprising enough to excuse himself to change his dress from the holy garb into civilian clothes. During this time, he jumped out of the window and ran away."