Lovecraft's phobias

The reason I like H P Lovecraft?

He came up with book titles like Nyarlahotep, Azathoth and, in what might be an ominous portent for a pioneering Indian graphic novelist, The Doom That Comes to Sarnath.

Luc Sante has a more literary appraisal in The New York Review of Books, and a rather wonderful list of the things Lovecraft feared. Not all of them went bump in the night:

Although he was married briefly, and many years later his former wife was moved to state, peculiarly, that he was an "adequately excellent lover," it is clear from all available evidence that sexuality, procreation, and the human body itself were among the things that scared him the most.

He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list.... The things that did not scare him generally are absent from his work.

SF in six words, and Seven

Wired asked SF, fantasy and horror authors to take a shot at the six-word short story. My favourite?

Definitely Joss Whedon: "Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.

The web-only article features short-shorts by William Gibson, Ben Bova, Robert Jordan ("Heaven falls. Details at eleven."), David Brin, and Margaret Atwood. Not that the Babu would presume to improve on Arthur C Clarke's relatively long short--"God said, 'Cancel Program GENESIS.' The universe ceased to exist"--but it did occur to him that a diligent editor might find a way to condense this down to six words: "The universe sucks. Ctrl-Alt-Del."

Indian SF is the Beast Glatisant of the SF menagerie, often sought, rarely found, so I was very glad to see a new anthology of SF for younger readers from Scholastic called Seven, which features work by Samit Basu, Anshumani Rudra, Anushka Ravishankar (no, not the sitar player, the writer woman with the real talent), Vandana Singh, Manjula Padmanabhan, and other writers, including, in an inexplicable lack of judgement on the part of the editors, myself. (Don't let that stop you, the rest of the stories are seriously good.)

I was travelling and couldn't be at the book launch, so The Editor at Scholastic abducted my husband instead (he's such a hardcore SF junkie, we fondly call him the space animal) and asked him to conduct the discussion. He enjoyed himself right up to the moment he read The Hindu's report on the launch, which read in part: "Devangshu Datta, a vivid lover, and avid reader of science fiction..." I've always been impressed by the high quality of The Hindu's reportage, but well, "vivid lover"? How do they know?

Darwin's Origin...

...and a whole lot more, online.

Do read Darwin's Beagle diary, if you haven't already:

1832 Bahia

Feb 28th The houses are white & lofty & from the windows being narrow & long have a very light & elegant appearance. Convents, Porticos & public buildings vary the uniformity of the houses: the bay is scattered over with large ships; in short the view is one of the finest in the Brazils. - But their beauties are as nothing compared to the Vegetation; I believe from what I have seen Humboldts glorious descriptions are & will for ever be unparalleled: but even he with his dark blue skies & the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth. The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind, - if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over, - if turning to admire the splendour of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise. - I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another Sun illumines everything I behold. -

1832 Rio de Janeiro to M Video

July 13th Already in our day-dreams, have we returned heavily loaded with Cavies, Partridges, Snipes &c. - I believe the unexplored course of the Rio Negro will be investigated. - What can be imagined more exciting than following a great river through a totally unknown country?- Every thing shows we are steering for barbarous regions, all the officers have stowed away their razors, & intend allowing their beards to grow in a truly patriarchal fashion. -

1832 Baia Blanca

Sept 15th a fine Ostrich tried to escape; the Gauchos pursued it at a reckless pace, each man whirling the balls round his head; the foremost at last threw them, in an instant the Ostrich rolled over & over, its legs being fairly lashed together by the thong. - Its dying struggles were most violent. - The men then formed a ring & drove to the centre several cavies; they only killed one; but their riding was most excellent, especially in the quickness & precision with which they turn. - The horses are soon fatigued from such violent exercise & it is necessary often to change them & pick out fresh ones from the herd which always accompanies a party. - At this time of year, the eggs of the ostrich is their chief prize. - In this one day they found 64, out of which 44 were in two nests; the rest scattered about by ones or twos. - They also catch great numbers of Armadilloes. - In the middle of the day they lighted a fire & soon roasted some eggs & some Armadilloes in their hard cases: - They had neither water, salt or bread; of the two latter for weeks together they never taste; so that it makes little difference to them where they live. -
Like to snails, all their property is on their backs & their food around them. - It was very interesting to watch, whilst seated.

Supersizing speech

John Humphreys explains why we need to reclaim language:

The supermarkets are masters of the art – always trying to persuade us how thrilling it will be if we share our shopping experience with them. Note "experience". We don't shop any longer. We have an "experience".
At the heart of this hype process, in which the "experience" is all, individual words are given an even sharper 180 degree change of direction. Take "enjoy". You're sitting in a restaurant, the waitress brings your meal and, with a sweet smile, says, "Enjoy!" I want to say: "Don't you know that 'enjoy' is a transitive not an intransitive verb? You should say, 'Enjoy it!' not 'Enjoy!'."

Amen. Out there, a small but hardy band of stalwarts do care, for instance about why the New Yorker would refer to a "six-liter bottle of Bordeaux" when it might have used the term "Imperial of Bordeaux" instead. (Personally speaking, the Babu likes his wine in Jeroboams, if not Nebuchadnezzars, but an Imperial will do in a pinch.)

Reading at random: Parashuram

Sukanta Chaudhuri and his colleagues recently came out with a translation of the stories and miscellaneous writings of 'Parashuram', one of Bengal's best-loved, and most feared, satirists.
Here's a selection from 'The Scripture Read Backwards', a "what if India had ruled over England instead" piece Parashuram wrote around 1928-29:

The Richmond Banga-Ingiya Pathshala. Mr Cram, pandit in charge. Tom, Dick, Harry and other boys.

...Dick: "Where's the Meti Pond, Pandit-mashai?
Cram. Why don't you look at that map in front of you? It's that sea near Italy. It used to be called the Mediterranean. The Indians couldn't pronounce the name, so they started calling it the Meti Pond--just as they call Ulster Belestera, Switzerland Chhachhurabad, Bordeaux Booze-shop, Manchester Nimta. Get on with your reading.

Then there's this, From the commercial columns of The Rashtrabit:

PURE JOY-LADDUS. Don't ruin your health by eating English biscuits larded with fat. Try our Joy-laddus. They strengthen your teeth. Nothing but ground rice and molasses. Not touched by machine: made by Bengali women with their own hands. Five shillings a packet. Available everywher. Manufacturers: Rasamay Das, Lizard Market, Calcutta.

AMBERGRIS POWDER. Memsahibs need not feel frustrated any more. This miraculous powder will remove the unfortunate natural pallor of their complexion of Bengali women. If you want to enhance the dark effect, mix in a little verdigris. As used by Ramachandra-ji. Price five shillings a phial. Marketed by Sheikh Azhar, Leadenhall Street, India House, London.

The first Scots Mughal

Aamer Hussein--who is, for all his fans, with book again, due to deliver next year--has a lovely review of William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal:

On my shelf is the 13th edition (published in 1942) of Begamat ke Aansu, a collection of chronicles of what befell members of the Mughal court during and after the Indian Uprising of 1857. Unrelenting and spare, the book is all the more compelling for its simplicity. Known to several generations of readers of Urdu, and part of oral lore as well, its plain tales of arbitrary punishment, displacement and uprooted lives record the devastation of a thriving culture. They provide a compelling alternative to the views of official historians of the Raj, whose perspectives on the so-called Mutiny are inevitably those of the victorious.
Hasan Nizami, author of these chronicles, is only one among the many indigenous and vernacular sources referred to, and often echoed or endorsed, by William Dalrymple in his diligently researched and densely informative new book....
Dalrymple does not merely map the Uprising, although its tumultuous events do take up much of his book. By choosing to focus on one, major city and its native and foreign residents, he supports the thesis that, far from being a homogeneous movement against the growing supremacy of the British, the revolt emerged from the multi-faceted grievances of an eclectic group. It encompassed rulers, artisans and peasants, with their varied regional interests.

The New Statesman has an excerpt from The Last Mughal:

[In the aftermath of the Uprising]...Delhi was left an empty ruin. Those city-dwellers who survived were driven out into the countryside to fend for themselves. Though the royal family had surrendered peacefully, most of the emperor's 16 sons were tried and hanged, while three were shot in cold blood, having first freely given up their arms, then been told to strip naked. "In 24 hours I disposed of the principal members of the house of Timur the Tartar," Captain William Hodson wrote to his sister the following day. "I am not cruel, but I confess I did enjoy the opportunity of ridding the earth of these wretches."

More from The Telegraph.co.uk on the writing of the book:

Over the past four years, my colleagues Mahmoud Farooqi and Bruce Wannell and I have been working through many of the 20,000 virtually unexamined Persian and Urdu documents, known as the Mutiny Papers, which we found on the shelves of the National Archives of India. These allow the events of 1857 to be seen for the first time from a proper Indian perspective.
It is a commonplace of books about the Indian Mutiny that they lament the absence of Indian sources and the corresponding need to rely on the huge quantities of British material – memoirs, travelogues, letters, histories – which carry with them only the British version of events. Yet all this time in the National Archives there existed mountains of chits, pleas, orders, petitions, complaints, receipts, rolls of attendance and lists of casualties, predictions of victory and promises of loyalty, notes from spies of dubious reliability and letters from eloping lovers – all neatly bound in string.

Found the link to Indy Hazra's piece where he discovers the predictable resemblance between Willy D and the Mughals, and a slightly more jarring resemblance to George Nathaniel Curzon. This is from the e-paper version, so if they ask you to register and you hate filling up forms, punch in username: HurreeBabu and password: hateslogins.

Thande ka Tadka

The Babu isn't sure what Ruchir Joshi's drinking these days, but it certainly isn't Pepsi. Or Coke:

We are a country where international Cola companies find it far cheaper to hire the most expensive movie stars to defend their interests than to clean up the bad chemicals in their plants. We are a country where these stars ask no questions of the companies they front on TV. We are a country where a star like Amir can, in effect, say “Look, my dear public, you love me, don’t you? Well, I am asking you to translate your love for me into trust for my paymasters at Coca-Cola.”
I mean, can you imagine Tom Cruise or Hugh Grant going on national TV after a huge controversy such as this, pulling out a bottle of suspect product from the assembly line and taking a swig? And asking the US or British public to “trust” the product, to let their children quaff it, on the basis of a set-up ad in which, in these days of digital colour-manipulation, the hero-dude could be drinking anything from cranberry juice to the best Pinot Noir wine? No, this can only happen in a media-republic that is even more Banana than the US, a country like India, which is one of the few large economies where the Pesti-Colas can still hope to expand their markets.

Franks and beans

Post-Frankfurt, post-mortem:

Mukund Padmanabhan in The Hindu:

The choice of India as the Guest of Honour (for an unprecedented second time, the first in 1986) is invariably explained in economic terms — as a country "on the rise", as a potentially huge market. Regrettably, literary prowess is mentioned almost as an aside.....
With 70 invited writers, a cultural show and a Dilli Haat crafts bazaar, India makes its presence adequately felt. But one wished that the country's exhibitors had put in a little more thought and effort into doing up their stands. A few posters are pretty much all that is there by way of decoration. In contrast, Hall 8 — where the U.S. and the English publishers are on display — is a pleasure to walk through. The care that has gone into the designing of almost every stand invites you to stop... and look.

In the Indian Express, TLM's editor, Antara Dev Sen, asks, "Have we progressed since 1986?"
We lost a great opportunity at Frankfurt. We have scores of excellent writers trapped in their own regional languages. With proper translations, we could have brought them onto the world stage and flaunted our multi-lingual, multi-cultural literaryscape. In the long run, it would have worked better than parading cookery books, or throwing Karan Johar to the mob among cut-outs of Shahrukh Khan.

Roses are red, cacti blue...

Mitali Saran explains how to enunciate clearly when you're saying it with flowers:

The Shiv Sena is sending roses to the Varanasi police force; students are sending get-well-soon emails to Arjun Singh, and it is rumoured that even Sushmita Sen sent a cactus to Aishwarya Rai.
I, too, want to send flowers to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, to let it know how badly I feel about whatever infirmity has led to the urban planning catastrophe that is Delhi, and to the devil’s choice between short-term individual livelihoods and collective long-term survival which we are being forced to make today....
Saying it with flowers means finding the right blossoms, so I have composed a pithy bouquet of two very special flowers. The first is a Titan arum, or Amorphophallus titanum, (which roughly translates as “gigantic shapeless penis” for reasons that a brief glimpse makes clear).

I wish she had a blog, but in terms of publicising herself, Mitali's something of a shrinking violet. Here's a link to some of her Business Standard columns--go, enjoy.

Vande Mataram: the seven crore question

In the Calcutta Telegraph, Ashok Mitra deconstructs Vandemataram:

What is of much greater significance, the mother hailed with such fervour in Vandemataram is, without a shred of doubt, not Mother India, but Mother Bengal. Consider, for instance, the 8th, 9th and 10th lines in the song: “saptakotikantha-kala-kala-ninadakarale,/ dvisaptakotibhujairdhritakhrakalabale/ abala kano ma at bale”. A rough translation would be: “seven crore voices roar their oath to you, seven crore pairs of arms with raised swords keep vigil for you, why should then one dare to call you powerless?” The population of Bharat, that is India, was surely a goodly number more than seven crore circa the 1880s, despite heinous oppression by foreign rulers, including denial of food to their subjects....
....The early nationalists who latched on to the song and wanted to project it as India’s national anthem were not unaware of the restricted horizon Bankim had in mind. An embarrassment was involved in the assumption that the song as originally written was not a hosanna to Mother India. In the first decade of the 20th century, leaders of the Indian National Congress were advised by some zealots to do a smart piece of editing: just cross out the reference to “seven crore” and substitute it with “thirty crore” (trimsa koti) and, similarly, replace “twice seven crore of arms” by “twice thirty crore” (dwitrimsa koti).

Rediff and the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885

As the head of Rediff.com, which also offers a very popular email service, Ajit Balakrishnan's company often has to deal with jealous spouses wanting access to their partner's email accounts, organisations wanting to read an employee's mail-and police requests. In this column for the Business Standard, he explains why the Indian government gets away with asking to read your mail:

We were quite content to play this routine out—the police inspector sending us a list of names and email IDs to track, us politely asking for the Home Secretary’s authorisation, which would come a few weeks later with some names dropped from the original list. Till, one day, on the list of names the government wanted watched was the name of a nationally known social activist and writer....

(Babu's note: This should be pretty easy to guess, people.)

Balakrishnan and his colleagues at Rediff consulted a retired judge for advice and were told:

“You see, the law that governs this kind of case, the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, was enacted with the shadow of the 1857 ‘mutiny’ still over the Raj government, and is really an instrument to control such events rather than to govern the evolution of an industry. There is nothing you can do but comply if the request comes with the proper authorisation.”
As we left his chambers, the issues started to become clearer in my mind. For the hundred years from 1885, the year that the British Raj introduced the telegraph system in India, it was seen primarily as an instrument for keeping colonial control. And I guess from Independence till the mid 1990s, the post-colonial government continued this perspective and added to this the function of spying on political opponents. All that a politician or a bureaucrat had to do was call up the posts and telegraphs department and tapping would commence unhindered, with no one to raise legal or civil rights issues.

Read the column to see how Rediff handled this specific situation, but Balakrishnan's experience explains a great deal about censorship in India. It may not be prevalent, or even the norm, but the government--and to a great extent, the average Indian citizen--assumes that the rights of the state will always outweigh the citizen's right to privacy.

Orhan Pamuk wins Nobel

Sometimes, those Swedish academics get it right. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006 goes to Orhan Pamuk, "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."

From an interview with The Borzoi Reader:

To be influenced by the western ways of portraiture is a dilemma for the traditional Islamic painter who is devoted to repetition and purification of traditional forms. Beyond this lie two different ways of seeing, painting, and even representing the world. One is that of seeing the world through the eyes of any individual person—looking at things from our humble point of view. The other is seeing the world through God’s eyes, from high above as the Islamic painters did, and perceiving the totality of, say a battle from above. The latter is more like seeing with the mind’s eye, rather than the eye itself.
I tried to tell my story in the manner of these Persian masters. These two distinctive ways of seeing the world and narrating stories are of course related to our cultures, histories, and what is now popularly called identities. How much are they in conflict? In my novel they even kill each other because of this conflict between east and west. But, of course, the reader, I hope, realizes that I do not believe in this conflict.

From the Nobel Academy site, a comprehensive bio-bibliography.

Pamuk's NYRB page; this is from his May 2006 essay, Freedom to Write:

But to respect the humanity and religious beliefs of minorities is not to suggest that we should limit freedom of thought on their behalf. Respect for the rights of religious or ethnic minorities should never be an excuse to violate freedom of speech. We writers should never hesitate on this matter, no matter how "provocative" the pretext. Some of us have a better understanding of the West, some of us have more affection for those who live in the East, and some, like me, try to keep our hearts open to both sides of this slightly artificial divide, but our natural attachments and our desire to understand those unlike us should never stand in the way of our respect for human rights.

From Pamuk's interview with The Paris Review:

...This theme of impersonation is reflected in the fragility Turkey feels when faced with Western culture. After writing The White Castle, I realized that this jealousy—the anxiety about being influenced by someone else—resembles Turkey’s position when it looks west. You know, aspiring to become Westernized and then being accused of not being authentic enough. Trying to grab the spirit of Europe and then feeling guilty about the imitative drive. The ups and downs of this mood are reminiscent of the relationship between competitive brothers.

From a New Yorker profile:

Pamuk waved me out onto the balcony. He pointed to the illuminated mosques on the far shore, then to a Russian oil tanker plowing north on the Bosporus toward the Black Sea. As he was describing the bridges across the Golden Horn, a muezzin, that buzzy summons to prayer present in all Orientalist narratives, wailed reliably in midsentence, and Pamuk laughed. "Sometimes my agent will call from New York, and the muezzin will start," he said. "You can tell that at the other end of the phone line he is thinking, Ah! The exotic East!"

The Complete Review has links to the collected reviews of Pamuk's Istanbul, My Name is Red and Snow.

PEN's Orhan Pamuk Page.

Yes! Kiran wins

Kiran Desai wins the Booker.

From The Telegraph: Miss Desai spent eight years writing her book, The Inheritance of Loss, and becomes the youngest-ever woman at the age of 35 to win the award.

From The Independent: "To my mother, I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine," she said. "It was written... in her wisdom and kindness, in cold winters in her house when I was in pieces. I really owe her this book so enormously. A minute isn't enough to convey it."
But with extraordinary composure, she thanked all the other writers saying: " I know the best book does not win. The compromise wins."
Yet, any suggestion that it was a compromise choice was dismissed by Hermione Lee, the chair of the judges, who said there was "no ambiguity" ­ unlike when she was a judge in 1981 when the comparatively unknown Salman Rushdie controversially beat DM Thomas's The White Hotel with Midnight's Children.

Links to previous reviews/ interviews:

Jai Arjun Singh's interview with Kiran Desai, on Jabberwock:

She’s so fond of relating stories - about the rodent population in Harlem, for instance, which led to the formation of a “Neighbourhood Rat Committee” - that it’s no surprise when she promises not to dally as much over her next book (possibly a novel set in New York) as she did with this one. “It might make more sense,” she concedes with a laugh, “to spread the stories out over many books, and publish them more frequently!”

Pankaj Mishra's review of Inheritance of Loss in the NYT:

What binds these seemingly disparate characters is a shared historical legacy and a common experience of impotence and humiliation. "Certain moves made long ago had produced all of them," Desai writes, referring to centuries of subjection by the economic and cultural power of the West. But the beginnings of an apparently leveled field in a late-20th-century global economy serve merely to scratch those wounds rather than heal them.

The Hindu's Mukund Padmanabhan interviewed Kiran Desai in Frankfurt, just before the Booker win:
I could have carried on [writing] forever if I didn't want to make a novel out of it. It's amazing to me when I write in this way ... it's so easy to exit the world. It's quite shocking really. The door is open and you go. Writing can be a dangerous activity if you really let yourself go entirely. Mentally, it is a strange place to be in.

Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor:

All of the novel's characters eventually come to share Sai's suspicion that life is more often defined by loss than by fulfillment.
And yet, nothing sours the warm heart at the center of this novel. Desai is sometimes compared to Salman Rushdie, and the energy and fecundity of imagination in her works do make them somewhat akin to his. But the tenderness in her novels is all her own.

The Rediff interview, conducted by Lindsay Perreira:
I wrote all the Kalimpong bits in Kalimpong, staying in a house lent to me during the rainy season. It was very wild and beautiful, rain hammering down, mist and fog. I lived alone and learned both the hard and the beautiful way what it means to be a writer....
..I think there's always a degree of loss in being an immigrant. It feels as if one will never be able to tell an entire story ever again. There'll be an aspect of living half a life, having only half a story to tell. We tend to hope for a simplicity of truth, a wholeness which is rarely delivered us.
My book examines lives that are forced, because of circumstance, to be those of hypocrisy, of gaps and fears, or of truths that cannot be simply attained and added up into anything trustworthy. They conflict with other peoples' ideas of things, or they belong to times past and stories that are lost or forgotten.

Aamer Hussein's review, in The Independent:
Nationalism, migration, varieties of belonging: in her hugely ambitious second novel, Kiran Desai gives these grand themes an entirely new spin, unearthing their sources in earlier decades. Is it best to stay in a small place, "the sweet drabness of home"? If so, do we have a right to that territory, and who can stake a claim? These questions shape the destinies of Desai's characters: "the most commonplace of them, those quite mismatched with the larger-than-life questions, caught up in the mythic battles of past and present, justice vs injustice - the most ordinary swept up in extraordinary hatred, because extraordinary hatred was, after all, a commonplace event."

I'd done a brief review, way back in January, for India Today.

Before the Booker

Waiting for the winner of the Booker to be announced?

Read John Crace's parodies of the shortlisted authors while you twiddle your thumbs.

Here's his take on Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss:

The description of the mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of the Himalayas possessed of ocean shadows and depths told Sai that she had inadvertently found her way into a lyrical evocation of post- colonial multiculturalism. She picked up a copy of National Geographic. "That should add a nice post-modern ironic nod to globalisation," she reckoned.
Jemu patted Mutt affectionately. Mutt was a good name for a dog that belonged to a grumpy retired judge who still retained a deep affection for the English way of life, he thought. And dogs were so much more predictable than his 16-year-old granddaughter, Sai, who had come to stay with him.
The cook cut up the deliberately misspelt pertaytas. What did it matter if he was uneducated, he said to himself, so long as my son Biju is making a career for himself in New York.

Gourevitch's Encounters

The Washington Post gives Philip Gourevitch, editor of The Paris Review, an approving nod:

George Plimpton is dead, alas, but the magazine he founded, the Paris Review, is alive and well and resounding with the voices of Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, Joseph Stalin, a Serb terrorist, a Chinese public toilet manager and an American woman who impersonated a fictitious female impersonator.

Gourevitch succeeded the late and legendary George Plimpton, who appears to have inspired websites every bit as eccentric as his life.

And the latest issue of The Paris Review includes a short story by Mohsin Hamid:

Looking back now, I see the power of that system, pragmatic and effective, like so much else in America. We international students were sourced from around the globe, sifted not only by well-honed standardized tests but by painstakingly customized evaluations until the best and the brightest of us had been identified. I myself had among the top exam results in Pakistan and was besides a soccer player good enough to compete on the varsity team, which I did until I damaged my knee in my sophomore year. Students like me were given visas and scholarships—complete financial aid, mind you—and invited into the ranks of the meritocracy. In return, we were expected to contribute our talents to your society, the society we were joining. And for the most part, we were happy to do so. I certainly was, at least at first.

Chabon on "idealized nightmares"

From Michael Chabon's blog:

In October 1964, STERANKO (one senses that he might like it written thus) produced a special number of Genii, The Conjuror’s Magazine, dedicated to Houdini. In it he revealed, in startlingly generous detail, many of the secrets of the liberationist’s art. To my eternal sorrow, I learned of the existence of this remarkable issue when it was too late to be of assistance to me in writing The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
Among the many mad pleasures of Genii, Volume 29, No. 2, are a number of drawings, unsigned but unmistakably the work of STERANKO himself, illustrating a series of truly bizarre liberationist stunts. These images do not, for the most part, depict real, or even possible, escapes; in their modest way they are in the nature of Piranesi’s prisons, or Boullée’s monuments, or Lorraine’s landscapes: dream contrivances, idealized nightmares, deeply rooted, it seems to me, in the vibrant, desperate imaginings of a gifted boy trapped by the crushing prognosis and swift passage of a coal town boyhood. I know how they would have delighted the imagination of Joe Kavalier.

The Art of James Steranko: online gallery

Sixer for Monty, pythons for Piccadilly

From The Times: MONTY PANESAR, the surprise hero of England’s cricket win against Pakistan this summer, is to cap his remarkable six months as an international player by signing a deal to write his autobiography.

(Panesar picked up a three-hundred thousand pound advance from Bloomfield. Not a bad score, no?)

Other desi characters making deal news: Kumari, Goddess of Gotham, created by Amanda Lees, star of a three-book series that's just sold well, in which Kumari, goddess-in-training, finds herself transported to New York. Bachao, Ma, bachao, and sorry, I'm not going to translate that!

R K Narayan and Friends

N Ram uses the occasion of R K Narayan's birth centenary to explain why his work will "still stand tall", when several of today's stars have been forgotten:

For Narayan's `discoverer' Greene, it seemed, nothing could better Swami and Friends, the typescript of which charmed the English writer in 1934-35. Most critics are likely to consider the eighth novel, The Guide (1958), as the writer's most imaginative and accomplished. However, each reader might have her or his personal favourite — The English Teacher (1945) or The Financial Expert (1952) perhaps. (Narayan once related to us what he claimed was the real life story of a practical banker who, beguiled by the title of the sixth novel, ordered dozens of copies for the edification of his employees and then, when he discovered its fictional content, didn't know what to do with his paid-for stock.)

And Mysore blogChurumuri, meanwhile, continues its R K Narayan campaign.

Rushdie in residence at Emory

The Atlanta college gets Salman Rushdie as a writer-in-residence for five years (but will he actually teach?) and his collected papers, for an undisclosed but presumably handsome amount.
It is perfectly true that the collected papers include two unpublished novels, but there is no truth in the rumour that these are the lost, early masterpieces Grimiest: The Collected Dribblings of Snotface and Teatime's Foetuses.
(I jest, but in truth, one of the unpublished novels was The Book of the Pir.*. Information courtesy the Rushdie Timeline. I was wondering whether the second was Madame Rama, which featured Indira Gandhi as a key character, but The Times says it's The Antagonist, described as a "Pynchonesque" novel set in London. Call me a coward but I'm backing away rapidly at the thought of ever reading this one.)

* Minor caveat here: the Timeline says that Book of the Pir featured a character from the advertising world called Hal Valance, but it doesn't mention that the novel wasn't set in the ad world. Ian Hamilton mentioned in a profile of Rushdie he did for the New Yorker that The Book of the Pir was about a Muslim guru (sic) who is co-opted by the leaders of a military coup in an unnamed Islamic country to become the figurehead President. Sounds good, until you read the bit where Rushdie explains it was written in "sub-Joyce". I presume Hal Valance (since Rushdie worked in the Bombay ad industry, anyone prepared to speculate about who inspired the Valance character?) popped up in a cameo role.

The best of "British" fiction

With a little help from former outposts of the Empire. This round-up of the 100 best novels of the last 25 years from basically everywhere that's not the Americas or the North Pole makes interesting reading. And while I wouldn't disagree with Coetzee's Disgrace heading the list, it would have been so nice if Smiley had won.

Robert McCrum writes:

"There was, too, a cut-off problem. 1980 is an arbitrary date. It excludes, by the narrowest of margins, VS Naipaul's A Bend in the River (1979), by any standards one of the great novels of our time. And then, what do you do about John le Carre? Smiley himself was flourishing, imaginatively, until the Wall came down and the three main Smiley novels, written in the 1970s, were republished, in a single volume, in 1994. In the end, le Carre was represented by A Perfect Spy (1986). At one early stage in our polling, it looked as if he might win.
Both Naipaul and le Carre, in different ways, connect the reader to the Victorian hinterland of the contemporary English novel. This poses another question. What might a similar exercise look like for 1880-1905? Ask that question and you get a sense of the complexity of such surveys.
Time is a ruthless critic: RL Stevenson or Thomas Hardy? HG Wells or Joseph Conrad? EM Forster or Rudyard Kipling? Heart of Darkness (1902) or Jude The Obscure (1895)? The Time Machine (1896) or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)? Nostromo (1904) or Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)? This is, of course, a debate that must exclude Henry James at the peak of his powers (Daisy Miller, 1879; Portrait of a Lady, 1881) on the grounds of his American citizenship."

I go blong Vanuatu...

...definitely the country that has my all-time favourite national anthem:

Yumi, Yumi, yumi I glad long talem se
Yumi, yumi, yumi ol man blong Vanuatu
God i givim ples ya long yumi,
Yumi glat tumas long hem,
Yumi strong mo yumi fri long hem,
Yumi brata evriwan!

Next on the favourites list? Japan's economical ode to brevity.

Topping the list of anthems that are definitely not for people with sore feet? The 158-strophe-long Greek national anthem, though this is the bit that usually gets sung.

And in Afghanistan, composing a new national anthem tested poets' skills to the maximum:

"According to the constitution, the anthem must be in Pashtu, has to contain the words “Allah hu Akbar” (God is Great), and it should include the names of all major Afghan ethnic groups....The search is on for a new text, but Afghanistan’s poets are threatening to boycott the process because of the near-impossible task of incorporating all the required political messages into the verses."

New, improved Kitabkhana

Whyphor you read Kitabkhana in Babu English when you are having so much other option?

Courtesy The Dialectizer, my humble blog in:

1. Pig Latin:
Ifelay appenedhay ecausebay Iyay urnedtay ethay agespay~~Albertoyay Anguelmay

2. Elmer Fudd:
If you wook at the wist of the eighteen peopwe who get to choose the next Nobew Wauweate, the weawwy scawy bit is the yeaw of biwth--two membews bown in 1918, eight bown in the 1920s, fouw in the 1930s, two in the 1940s, two in the 1950s. Oh, dat scwewy wabbit!

3. Redneck:
Salman Rushdie writes t'Amitava Kumar:

"Dear Mr Kumar,

Mah attenshun has been drawn t'yer website, whar yo' claim thet ah thrett uped t'cancel mah viset to Vassar eff'n yo' were involved wif it. This hyar is inaccurate. At no time did ah thrett up ennythin' of th' so't. ah did indeed tell th' o'ganizer, Joanne Long, thet ah was unwillin' t'share a stage wif yo', an', af'er she had read whut yo' haf writ about me in th' past, she unnerstood whuffo' ah w'd haf thet view, an' axed yo' t'stan' down, as enny fool kin plainly see. It might haf been mo'e dignified of yo' t'leave this hyar matter private, but as yo' haf chosen not t'do so, yo' ought at least t'strive fo' accuracy in yer repo'tin' of it."

4. And the truly weird Swedish Chef:
Vednesdey, September 27, 2006
Zee Peuleeni Iffffect
Nuncy Lee Fun mekes Chreestupher Peuleeni luuk leeke-a a duddereeng greybeerd. Bork bork bork!

Found in Translation Department:

Tagore's The Gardener, in Cockney

Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, as reworked by a Swedish Chef

Joyce's Ulysses, suitably hacked.

Sarojini Naidu's An Indian Love Song, the redneck version.

Arundhati Roy's Public Power in the Age of Empire, in Pig Latin.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's In The Line of Fire, rendered in Moron.

Thursday next...

...says the Swedish Academy.
This report does a valiant job of the usual "We have no real news, but we're trying" Nobel story, and mentions:
"The Swedish Academy also tapped two writers to replace two members who died this year."
If you look at the list of the eighteen people who get to choose the next Nobel Laureate, the really scary bit is the year of birth--two members born in 1918, eight born in the 1920s, four in the 1930s, two in the 1940s, two in the 1950s. The two new members were both born in the 1940s, so I guess this is the Academy's way of ensuring that the average age remain dangerously youthful.

Houelleraiser (Retd)

Sam Lipsyte spends a week on the road with Michel Houellebecq waiting for the man to do his bad, bad thing; all he gets is "a kind of heavy-lidded stare that says, “Anytime You Want to Shut Your Stupid Mouth I’ll Be Quite Delighted."

How to review a Famous Slacker novel

In bed.

India at Frankfurt

The Hindu delivers the good news:

Bengali writer Mahashweta Devi, the Grande Dame of Indian literature at 80 years, kicked off the Frankfurt Book Fair on Wednesday...."Sixty years after our hard-won Independence, the khadi sari is India just as much as the mini-skirt and the backless choli is. A bullock cart is India just as much as is the latest Toyota and Mercedes car," she said. "Illiteracy haunts us, yet the same India produces men and women at the forefront of medicine, science and technology."
India is guest of honour with a packed programme of readings and debates. The cultural events will feature dance, drama, films and yoga demonstrations. Even the Left-leaning national daily Tageszeitung, recently in the news for creating a political storm between Germany and Poland through its irreverent reporting on Poland's new leaders, got into the mood, printing its masthead on Wednesday in Hindi.

And Deutsche Welle looks at the other side, in this thoughtful piece by Sonia Phalnikar:

...There was standing room only as Amit Chaudhuri and Shashi Tharoor, both internationally acclaimed Indian authors who write in English, took to the stage. In contrast, only a handful turned up a few halls away to listen to Shafi Shauq, one of the most important contemporary poets and critics from northern Indian Kashmir, who writes in his native Kashmiri....
"Indian literature is still largely seen as the literature of authors who write in English. Regional literature hardly makes a dent in the West's consciousness even though it's such a diverse scene," said Peter Ripkin, head of the Frankfurt-based Society for the Promotion of Asian, African and Latin American literature.
The problem isn't exactly new. Two decades ago when India was the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book fair, organizers paid much lip service to promoting regional literature. But since then just about 40 titles have been translated from Indian languages into German.

Phalnikar has another piece here on Indian writers in English at the fair; Ilija Trojanow compares three recent Bombay books (Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games and Altaf Tyrewala's No God in Sight).

Indian authors at Frankfurt: Shashi Tharoor talks about his future career options ("Will you become a full-time author now?" "I don't know if I can afford that, frankly...); Indu Sundaresan explains why Mehrunissa fascinated her to Frankfurt audiences via a webchat; Amit Chaudhuri speaks to Deutsche Welle about the elephants in the living room of Indian writing; Neelesh Mishra takes a look at writers on the margins; and if you read German, here's an interview with Kiran Desai; and Vikram Seth explains why you can't have a single "school of Indian writing".

Run, Updike, run

"Why, oh why, did Salman Rushdie in his new novel call one of his major characters Maximilian Ophuls?" John Updike, reviewing Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown in the New Yorker last year.

"A name is just a name. 'Why, oh why ... ?' Well, why not? Somewhere in Las Vegas there's probably a male prostitute called 'John Updike'." Salman Rushdie answers the question in the Guardian this year. After that, saying that he didn't subscribe to the very predominantly English admiration of Updike seems kind of redundant.

Rushdie's had other things on his mind, anyway, like the Anish Kapoor sculpture based on his work:

The centrepiece is a sculpture made in collaboration with the novelist Salman Rushdie, consisting of two bronze boxes, joined by a wedge of malleable red wax, and inscribed with a text by Rushdie based on an episode from the Arabian Nights. Inside the open boxes is a grisly pile of dark-crimson globs that look for all the world like freshly extracted internal organs.
"It's very gory," the artist says with a mischievous smile. "Salman has written a text about death, blood, men and women, domination – a kind of diary of slaughter. The first sentence says, 'So how many women did they actually kill?' And I thought I would make a shrine. I've been making works with bloody things for a good long while now. Red's a colour I feel strongly about."

Can't wait to see it. And we have it on good authority that none of the "dark-crimson globs" were, in fact, extracted from the innards of Mr Updike.