We need a bigger boat...

Mechanical sharks, meanwhile, were conspicuous by their absence at the recent Neemrana writers' festival. Instead, Outlook did its bit by sending in the real thing:

Everyone knew the risks of organising such a mammoth meet of writers from across Africa and Asia. And the second Neemrana litfest seems to have succumbed to them all: quota-filling, string-pulling, backdoor entries.... The result: a roll call of has-been and never-was writers who will probably pay for their ambitions by long sessions on topics chosen by some especially inventive torturers of the literary-minded. A sample of what's in store for writers at the heritage resort 126 km from Delhi: Legacy and Assertion—History and Ethnicity, Language and Culture (Politics of writing and language.... Race, ethnicity and hegemony... "Margin" to "Centre"). And in case they didn't have enough, an after-dinner session with this ominous agenda: Articulations of the poetic medium... Orality and enscriptions. Translated into English, this probably means poetry reading by Sudeep Sen and Co.

And just as you were saying, come on, 40 writers from Africa and Asia meeting in a Rajasthan heritage hotel can't be all bad, the headlines told their own story:


'Asian, African writers celebrate identity, legacy'


'Is identity a form of racialism?'


'Power of word, biggest deterrant [sic] to dictators, say writers'

Oh well. We trust the kababs were good, the Rajasthani dancers did their thing with the matkas on fire, the Scotch and wine flowed, and that every panel discussion topic had the requisite three colons and a 'Whither' inserted.

Bite me

In tribute to the late Peter Benchley, lists of absolutely no worth whatsoever:

Alternate titles for Jaws:

Silence in the Water
The Jaws of Leviathan
(Contributed by his father, Nathaniel Benchley): Wha's That Noshin' On My Leg

Jaws sequels we really wish had been made:


Jaws 3, People 0: with an opening sequence that featured Peter Benchley being eaten by a shark in his private pool.

Favourite sick-making line from the Jaws film:

Mayor Vaughn: This is not the time or the place to perform some kind of a half-assed autopsy on a fish... And I'm not going to stand here and see that thing cut open and see that little Kintner boy spill out all over the dock.


And favourite bit of trivia from the Making of the Film:

One of the mechanical sharks used in Jaws was lost at sea. So if you're ever out swimming and you see a shape in the water and smell rust...da-da-da-da-da-da, prepare to die of tetanus.

Wooster sauce

The Times explores India's fascination with Wodehouse:

I have come to explore the curious Indian obsession with P. G. Wodehouse. Nearly 60 years after the nation’s British rulers packed their bags and legged it home, his books are on sale in most bookshops, sometimes nestling nervously between Jeanette Winterson and Virginia Woolf....
Educated Indians look fondly back to the antics of the St Stephen’s Wodehouse Society. Now disbanded, it ran an annual Practical Joke Week, that was abandoned only when the hoisting of the women’s basketball team’s shirts on a flagpole was deemed a silly-ass prank too far.
The club’s president in the mid-1980s, Thomas Abraham, is now president of Penguin Books India, the country’s largest Wodehouse publisher. “We’ve all grown up with Wodehouse,” he says. “It’s a phenomenon here. When one of his books goes out of print, everyone goes ballistic. My publishing counterparts in the UK are very amused.”

In this 2002 article, Shashi Tharoor explained the Wodehouse obssession:

Some foreigners have seen in Wodehouse's popularity a lingering nostalgia for the Raj of Kipling. Malcolm Muggeridge once remarked that "Indians are now the last Englishmen." The very notion is, of course, more fatuous than anything Wodehouse himself ever wrote. Wodehouse is loved by Indians who loathe Kipling and detest the Raj and all its works. Indeed, despite a brief stint in a Hong Kong bank, Wodehouse had no colonial connection himself and the Raj is largely absent from his books. There is only one notable exception I can recall from his oeuvre, in a 1935 short story: "Why is there unrest in India? Because its inhabitants eat only an occasional handful of rice. The day when Mahatma Gandhi sits down to a good juicy steak and follows it up with roly-poly pudding and a spot of Stilton, you will see the end of all this nonsense of Civil Disobedience." But Indians saw that comment was meant to elicit laughter, not agreement.

Messrs Tharoor and Abraham will be pleased to know that they share their admiration of the man who immortalised aunts, pigs and drones with none other than George Orwell.

Kunzru on the Prophet cartoons

Hari Kunzru makes a very valid point on the Jyllands Posten cartoons:

The Jyllands Posten cartoons, while purporting to be some kind of gesture supporting the notion of free speech, are shot through with the same kind of latent racism as I met on my Danish press trip. Not the kind of intense racism that leads to lynchings, but the soft kind, the kind that lots of middle-class people express to one another at dinner parties when they think nobody from an ethnic minority is there to hear.
They're full of hook-nosed bearded figures and big-eyed veiled lovelies - stereotypes straight out of 30's Hollywood B-movies. I found them offensive, not because I believe that one shouldn't represent the Prophet Mohammed but because they're nasty and small-minded. They come from a position of ignorance rather than enlightenment.
That said, the question becomes one of finding an appropriate response. As a newspaper editor I wouldn't have reprinted them, because they're trashy and provide very poor ground on which to base an argument about free speech. I believe strongly in the principle and as a member of PEN, the writers organisation, I'm involved in fights to defend it, but these particular examples of the practice deserved to wither and die.

Coetzee on Marquez

In the NYRB, J M Coetzee examines Garcia Marquez' Memories of My Melancholy Whores, via Kawabata, Cervantes and company:

There is always something unmotivated about conversion experiences: it is of their essence that the sinner should be so blinded by lust or greed or pride that the psychic logic leading to the turning point in his life becomes visible to him only in retrospect, when his eyes have been opened. So there is a degree of inbuilt incompatibility between the conversion narrative and the modern novel, as perfected in the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on character rather than on soul and its brief to show step by step, without wild leaps and supernatural interventions, how the one who used to be called the hero or heroine but is now more appropriately called the central character travels his or her road from beginning to end.
Despite having the tag "magic realist" attached to him, García Márquez works very much in the tradition of psychological realism, with its premise that the workings of the individual psyche have a logic that is capable of being tracked. He himself has remarked that his so-called magic realism is simply a matter of telling hard-to-believe stories with a straight face, a trick he learned from his grandmother in Cartagena; furthermore, that what outsiders find hard to believe in his stories is often commonplace Latin American reality. Whether we find this plea disingenuous or not, the fact is that the mixing of the fantastical and the real—or, to be more precise, the elision of the either-or holding "fantasy" and "reality" apart—that caused such a stir when One Hundred Years of Solitude came out in 1967 has become commonplace in the novel well beyond the borders of Latin America.

Friedan's just another word for nothing left to lose

To me, the big difference between The Feminine Mystique and The Female Eunuch was that I'd give the first book to members of my mother's generation every time they hassled me and my partner for not having kids and living the bohemian life; The Female Eunuch was what we read in college in the glory days of bra-burning. (No one really saw bras burning on Indian campuses: Buddhist monks, protesting Dalit students in the Mandal Commission days, anguished Tibetan refugees and student leaders who went easy on the kerosene, yes, bras, no. Given that the only bras available in my days were those starchy constructions that resembled chastity belts for the boobs, we missed out--if ever a bra was made for the torch, it was the Liberty bodice with those guaranteed-to-rust hooks.)

Germaine Greer shares her memories of Betty Friedan,
who died last week at the age of 85:

As we were leaving our farewell party to go back to the hotel, Betty propped herself in front of our Cadillac and refused to get in. "Dammit!" she shouted, "I wunt, I deserve my own car! I will nutt travel cooped up in this thing with two other women. Don't you clowns know who I am?"
"Mrs Greer," pleaded the courtiers, who were shaking with fright. "What shall we do? Please make her quiet! She is very drunk."
Betty wasn't drunk. She was furious that the various dignitaries and ministers of state all had their own cars, while the female guests of honour were piled into a single car like a harem. Helvi and I looked on from our Cadillac at Betty standing there in her spangled black crepe-de-chine and yelling fit to bust, "I will nutt be quiet and gedinna car! Absolutely nutt!"

And Anne Summers remarks:

Friedan famously warned of a backlash against women's equality and, as with so many of her pronouncements, she has proved to be chillingly prescient. The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd asks in her newly released Are Men Necessary?: "If we flash forward to 2030, will we see all those young women who thought trying to Have It All was a pointless slog, now middle-aged and stranded in suburbia, popping Ativan, struggling with rebellious teenagers, deserted by husbands for younger babes, unable to get back into a workforce they never tried to be part of?"
If this happens, says Dowd, these domestic robots will be "desperately seeking a new Betty Friedan".
The old one would be appalled.

Travel writhing

Robert D Kaplan writes in the CJR:

Journalism desperately needs a return to terrain, to the kind of firsthand, solitary discovery of local knowledge best associated with old-fashioned travel writing. Travel writing is more important than ever as a means to reveal the vivid reality of places that get lost in the elevator music of 24-hour media reports. In and of itself, travel writing is a low-rent occupation, best suited for the Sunday supplements. But it is also a deft vehicle for filling the void in serious journalism: for example, by rescuing such subjects as art, history, geography, and statecraft from the jargon and obscurantism of academia, for the best travel books have always been about something else....
...If anyone deserves a public service award for peeling back the curtain on distant societies, it is less the publishers of major newspapers and magazines than those of the Lonely Planet Guides and The Rough Guides. These two series combine historical and cultural depth with intrepid, solitary research by young travelers who get to every remote location in a given country; and in the course of informing the reader about where to stay and where to eat, say much about public health, crime, the economy, and politics in a society.

The Australian takes a look at the history of guidebooks:

Guidebooks have undoubtedly been around for millennia - what were the Ten Commandments if not a travellers' guide to Mount Sinai? - with the oldest surviving guidebook written by a peripatetic doctor named Pausanias in about AD 160. Believed born in present-day Turkey, Pausanias travelled extensively around the Mediterranean, through Jerusalem, Jaffa, Cairo, Macedonia and Italy but it was a decade spent in Greece that resulted in Descriptions of Greece.
Written for wealthy and erudite Romans as both travelogue and guidebook, Descriptions of Greece was no 20-countries-in-200-pages handbook. Stretching across 10 volumes, it was as detailed as an instruction manual. It trawled through every moment in Greek history bar toilet stops and contained virtual brick-by-brick descriptions of Peloponnese towns, indulging especially in the sights of Delphi and Olympia.

And Pankaj Mishra returns to his days as a fellow traveller of the Soviet Union at the tender age of 11:

In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English. The subject was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - or the Soviet "intervention", as I termed it, in a "fraternal communist country threatened by imperialism". I had followed events in Afghanistan anxiously if somewhat fitfully; we had no television, and the newspapers, arriving in Jhansi, our small Indian town, from Delhi a day late, reported American threats to boycott the Moscow Olympics but said little about what was going on inside Afghanistan. Nevertheless, I boldly predicted that the Soviets would modernise a backward and feudal country, revolutionise its relations of production, and set it on the path of prosperity and peace, inflicting, in the process, another crushing defeat on the forces of reaction and imperialism.
In December 2004, I travelled on the road from Uzbekistan across the Oxus River on which the first Soviet convoys had rolled into Afghanistan 25 years before. Fearful of ambushes, the Soviets had mined the surrounding desert right up to the verges; and venturing out of the car for a pee I walked into a minefield - one of the many across Afghanistan that had killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people - and then had to learn, for some long minutes, how hard it is literally to retrace one's steps.
What goes around comes around, even if the intense fear of losing one's life, or a limb or two, seems a very severe karmic punishment for some youthful cliché-mongering. Later that evening, drinking alone and hard in my gloomy hotel room in Mazar-i-Sharif, for the first time in many years I remembered my essay, and I couldn't help but wonder: what the hell had I been thinking? Perhaps I was no more deluded than people in Europe and America who thought that the Soviets wanted to conquer the world and who had made elaborate plans to fight, and survive, a nuclear war. At least I'd had the excuse of being 10 years old. But it was still odd to remember how during my childhood and adolescence I was an admirer and supporter - unpaid and thus very sincere - of the Soviet Union.

The Fingersmith returns

The Babu, who spent far too much time recently sharing a plane with ten assorted screaming infants (none of them his property), wishes he could get Sarah Waters to tell them bedtime stories:

From The Scotsman's profile of Sarah Waters:

She then recounts the story of the couple who tempt fate by wishing on a mummified monkey's paw. First they wish for £200 - this comes in the form of compensation after their son dies a horrible death, mangled by factory machinery. "Then," says Waters, "the woman wishes for her son to be returned to them and one night they're woken by this terrible sound of someone, or something, dragging themselves up the garden path..."
But where I shudder, she shrieks with delight.

Theo Tait takes a look at Sarah Waters' latest, Night Watch:

I would guess that the germ from which The Night Watch originally sprang was Radclyffe Hall’s short story “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself”. Published in the early 1930s, it tells the tale of a mannish woman who has no interest in marrying or romance, who thrives during the First World War as the leader of an ambulance corps on the Western Front, but afterwards finds herself more of a misfit than ever. Kay, the first character encountered in the new novel, was also an ambulance woman, on the Pimlico night watch during the Second World War. Two years into peace, she is living in a rickety house in Lavender Hill, surrounded by bombsites. Dressed in a man’s shirt and tailored slacks, she wanders the streets in a desolate way; she is often mistaken for a “good-looking youth”, and she occasionally buys a drink for a pretty girl.

And Michele Roberts comments:

Rather than fearing being pigeonholed as a gay writer - as though a gay writer cannot speak to all of humankind - Waters simply makes lesbians the centre of the world. An ex-academic who knows that writers, however committed, must also be voracious readers, she writes in the feminist tradition that draws on both male and female writers for inspiration.

Er, yes, there were books...

...at the Calcutta Book Fair. But also jhal muri, phuchka, assorted delights at the Benfish stall, a million mishtis and, as Great Bong reminds us all in this lovely post, six kinds of mishti doi.
The Babu spent some time at the Delhi Book Fair, too, but despite the food stalls at Pragati Maidan, his stomach rumbled nostalgically for sandesh. Instead, he was offered salvation, sex and the superconsciousness and other forms of relatively indigestible spirituality.
Some of his colleagues spent their time more profitably. The Jabberwock, for instance, interviewed Rough Guides' Kevin Fitzgerald: "We initiated the idea of travel-blogging before it was a widely known term."

Tequila Mockingbird

The New York Times tells you where to find Harper Lee:

An awards ceremony for an essay contest on the subject of "To Kill a Mockingbird," the occasion attracts no actor, politician or music figure. Instead, it draws someone to whom Alabamians collectively attach far more obsession: the author of the book itself, Harper Lee, who lives in the small town of Monroeville, Ala., one of the most reclusive writers in the history of American letters.

In retrospect, what surprises me is that Harper Lee stayed a one-book wonder. This often-cited 1964 interview makes it clear that she had planned to continue writing after To Kill A Mockingbird:

I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better, not worse and worse. I would like, however, to do one thing, and I've never spoken much about it because it's such a personal thing. I would like to leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world. I hope to do this in several novels‹to chronicle something that seems to be very quickly going down the drain. This is small-town middle-class southern life as opposed to the Gothic, as opposed to Tobacco Road, as opposed to plantation life.
As you know, the South is still made up of thousands of tiny towns. There is a very definite social pattern in these towns that fascinates me. I think it is a rich social pattern. I would simply like to put down all I know about this because I believe that there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing.
In other words all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama.