Hush, hush, nobody cares...

...Disney just kicked Chris Robin downstairs.

Yup, they're trying to replace the boy who loved Winnie the Pooh with a six-year-old redheaded girl. Pooh fans are furious, but then this is Disney. It's best to take Eeyore's view on this:
"Ha-ha," said Eeyore bitterly. "Merriment and what-not. Don't apologize. It's just what would happen."

P.S. Six-year-old redhead? Did the geniuses at Disney marketing figure out this was Their Demographic, or was someone creative trying to cross Anne of Green Gables with Charlie Brown's little redheaded girl?

Stuart, Remembered

Alexander Masters' Stuart: A Life Backwards, about a homeless man, has won The Guardian First Book award, beating out aapro Suketu among others. Masters met Stuart in 1998 when he was interviewing homeless people for a Cambridge newspaper, and began slowly collecting Stuart stories. In July 2002, Stuart killed himself.

It can't have been easy to write Stuart's story.

From The Guardian interview:

If Masters picks the wrong day to talk to Stuart about being raped, for example - if it is not "at the end of an untroubled week, when he has money to spend from the dole, so there's a distraction to look forward to in the evening" - Stuart "drinks, cuts himself, and then injects citric acid".
I wonder if Masters thinks his questions ever made Stuart worse, maybe pushed him over the edge? "I don't know," he says. "It has occurred to me. He was questioning himself all the time, anyway, but that doesn't get me out of it, because I was focusing the question and giving it a sort of a push. And there were times when it was uncomfortable, and he'd have to tell me to stop. It could have made him worse. I hope it didn't. I don't think I would have gone on had I felt it was making him worse".

Hinglish accents

Ruchir Joshi on fake Yankee twangs, Indian Neutral accents and the politics of language:

"Can you really ask people struggling to learn English for their economic betterment, people who have no love a priori for the language, to not only appreciate say, irrelevancies such as Shakespeare or Yeats, but also to appreciate them in a prescribed elitist ‘Indian’ accent? Would you try to proscribe English, or a certain kind of English, even if the spread of its usage meant a massive uplift in millions of people’s living conditions? What is more important: rozi, roti, kapda, makaan and dignity, or some obsolete local language that can’t even keep up with the times?"

Damn. The Babu meant to send Joshi the Mallu rap thingumbob months ago, but he forgot.

Calassol

Roberto Calasso writes in The Kolkata Telegraph:

Whoever becomes interested in India can only have as his invisible patron Anquetil-Duperron, the youth who boards a ship full of convicts in order to go and search for a book. Dozens of grave conferences on multiculturalism, hundreds of lofty mediations on the Other’s dignity (or rather, the “autre”, which sounds better), are emptied and reduced to their natural fatuity by one single saying of Anquetil-Duperron: “Why have you come to India?” “To see you”. In the first place it’s necessary not to be a soldier, nor a missionary, nor a merchant. Not to be a representative of one of the three powers of oppression and devastation that the West has wrought and goes on exercising, with untiring good conscience. And then: to be endowed with an inborn curiosity of the eye — that is, with the simplest wish to see and to understand. Human beings are by nature metaphorical and plastic, able to take on all kinds of forms and also to understand themselves in all kind of forms. If we set aside this quality, man is a rather modest being, less interesting than many animal species. As Canetti wrote, the power of metamorphosis belongs to each of us, “but very few realize that they owe to it the best part of what they are”.

If you're in Calcutta, Calasso will be lecturing tomorrow (Monday December 12). The Jabberwock snatched ten minutes with the man and didn't let that stop him from getting some frumious bandersnatching on. Back in 1998, Sunil Khilnani surveyed Ka for the New York Times--read the whole thing.

Pinter packs a punch

Harold Pinter wasn't well enough to show up for the Nobel banquet, but the Babu bets he enjoyed recording this acceptance speech. Love the expression on his face here, don't you?

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

And go here for the usual howls of protest. The Houston Chronicle hints darkly at Reds under the Nobel bed: "The literature prize has in recent years often gone to writers with left-wing ideologies. These include the European writers Jose Saramago of Portugal, Guenter Grass of Germany and Dario Fo of Italy."

Wilson, Epsteined

Joseph Epstein re-examines Edmund Wilson:

"In the history of literary criticism written in English, very few names have survived, or probably deserve to survive. Samuel Johnson is one, perhaps the only true genius who put his mind chiefly to criticism; and Johnson also happens to have been a great man, which gives his writing all the more authority. Matthew Arnold is another, not so much for his particular pronouncements, which could be very smart and sharp, as for their cultural sweep and continuing relevance.
Some might include William Hazlitt in this company, though he was a better writer than critic, and what he thought of the actors, poets, and painters of his day is less important than that he understood the spirit of his age and wrote brilliantly and courageously about it. Others might claim a place for T.S. Eliot, but much of Eliot’s best criticism is rather narrowly confined to adjusting the canon of English poetry—Metaphysical poets up, John Milton down—and to the principles behind literary creation.
Does Edmund Wilson belong in this short list of critics of enduring interest? I certainly thought so once—and I was hardly alone. To his many admirers, Wilson—courageous in his opinions, deep in his culture, broad in his point of view, unassailable in his integrity—seemed to exist in the closest possible relationship with literature itself. Versatile, productive, cosmopolitan, he was a being organized for writing. To judge by the reverential reviews of Dabney’s biography, this is still the received opinion."

Epstein isn't always this reverent; earlier in the piece, he has a devastating summary of Wilson:

But he wasn’t just prose, and he certainly wasn’t poetry. He was instead a bald, pudgy little man with a drinking problem and a mean streak.

Change your life...

...in half an hour. Go read short stories by:

A.L. Kennedy:

The telephone rang again.
I needn't have answered. It's partly the volume that seems demanding and a level of curiosity leaks in and there was a tiny chance that something important, some assistance, might be asked of me.
So, "Hello." Quite an abrupt tone from me, nonetheless, no more time for nonsense.
"Ah...I'm sorry." A man speaking, blurry with some kind of personal dark, but sounding quite regretful and there's this other voice, shrill and digging behind his, "Go on. Tell her. Her." A woman shouting, "Go on! Try it—as if..." and slightly in the distance, "As if!" although not so far away that she has to shout, "Go on! You called her, you tell her, you just fucking tell her." She is plainly screaming because she wants to, because her emotions are leaning that way.

Alice Munro:

It had not occurred to me, either, that the undressing might be a prelude to rape, or to any ceremony but supper.

And Ali Smith, with True Short Story:

Are you on your mobile? she said. Don't, Ali, it's expensive on this system. I'll call you back.
No worries, I said. It's just a quickie. Listen. Is the short story a goddess and a nymph and is the novel an old whore?
Is what what? she said.
An old whore, kind of Dickensian one, maybe, I said. Like that prostitute who first teaches David Niven how to have sex in that book.
David Niven? she said.
You know, I said. The prostitute he goes to in The Moon's a Balloon when he's about fourteen, and she's really sweet and she initiates him and he loses his virginity, and he's still wearing his socks, or maybe that's the prostitute who's still wearing the socks, I can't remember, anyway, she's really sweet to him and then he goes back to see her in later life when she's an old whore and he's an internationally famous movie star, and he brings her lots of presents because he's such a nice man and never forgets a kindness. And is the short story more like Princess Diana?
The short story like Princess Diana, she said. Right. OK.

Licence my roving hands and etc

Giles Coren wins the Bad Sex award with an unpunctuated 138-word sentence; meanwhile, Belle du Jour examines Good Sex in literature, arriving via John Donne and Nabokov at this:

"I particularly relish the description of Solanaceæ, the Nightshade family, in the Rev C. A. Johns’s Flowers of the Field (1905). Flowers are after all the reproductive organs of plants. The book was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and indeed, with anthers all a-burst and calyces deeply cleft, it could scarcely be more biblical.
“Calyx inferior, deeply cleft; corolla hypogynous, gamopetalous, plaited when in bud; stamens in one whorl, alternate with the petals; anthers bursting either by terminal pores or slits down their inner surfaces; ovary 2-chambered; style 1; sigma simple; fruit a 2-4-chambered capsule or nuculane; seeds numerous.”