From 'Mem, mem' to memoir

This is a remarkable story, and a compelling piece of writing.

The writer Paul West suffered a massive stroke that caused global aphasia. As his wife records:

"The author of more than 50 stylishly written books, a master of English prose with the largest working vocabulary I’d ever encountered, a man whose life revolved around words, he had suffered brain damage to the key language areas of his brain and could no longer process language in any form. Global aphasia, it’s called — the curse of a perpetual tip-of-the-tongue memory hunt. He understood little of what people said, and all he could utter was the syllable “mem.” Nothing more."

Paul West forced his way through the aphasia. Three years later, he had completed a book, perhaps "the first aphasic memoir" ever.

From The Shadow Factory:

There was a bewildering assortment of false starts and incomplete sentences for the mind only. I no sooner thought of something to say to myself than I forgot it, and I was lucky to get beyond the second or third imagined word....
I formed the habit of forcing language back on itself, beyond even its failure to communicate anything at all, to see what was there. Language, at least as we know it, had ended, and I was left there on countless occasions, with something like a white sheet of dental floss or a carnivorous absence. There was nothing beyond. So I cheered myself up by taking as my starting point the notion that all I had to do was pass the zone of no known language and automatically be speaking English once again. These are mental compensations to be sure, but they serve superbly in times of need.

Ever been to Khaufpur?

Go visit. Khaufpur, a fictionalised version of Bhopal, is where Indra Sinha sets his novel, Animal's People.

From Lucy Beresford's review in The New Statesman:

Nearly 20 years ago, Khaufpur was devastated by a chemical leak at a factory owned by an American firm, referred to by Khaufpuris as "the Kampani". Thousands died during what has come to be known as "That Night", including Animal's parents. Two decades on, women still carry the toxins in their milk, and Animal is condemned to walk on all fours after the poisons attacked his body and froze his spine. Physically deformed he may be, and the butt of much peer contempt, but he is still human - a sentiment he strenuously denies until the book's close.

From Indra Sinha's website:

ANIMAL'S PEOPLE is dedicated to our friend Sunil Kumar, who died in July 2006, aged 34. It had been dedicated to him from the moment I began writing it five years ago. He didn't live to see it published.
Some of the stories Sunil told me about his life found their way into the novel, however the character of Animal is entirely fictional, as are his antics. Following reports in the BBC and elsewhere that the book chronicles Sunil's life, I want to make it clear that it doesn't - although Animal's ability to live on 4 rupees a day (£0.05, €0.07, $0.10) and his sense of humour were certainly inherited from Sunil.

Spend a little time if you drop in at Khaufpur. Browse the classifieds, which include remedies for "sex problems", chakra balancing experts, relief for back pain and neck pain, and this: "Caring for all breathing difficulties, other ailments related to the poison disaster Hills Clinic, Dr Arshad." Don't miss the 'What's On' section, where alongside tantric painting exhibitions, sarangi performances and a screening of Mughal-e-Azam, there's this: " Bob Scheinfeld, Busting Out Of The Poverty Trap. Top US coach shares the secrets of self-empowerment and wealth creation. Few seats left, all tickets Rs 15,000."

Book bookcases

No, that's not a typo. Thanks to the Marginalien, I now know what to do with those hardbound copies of the prime minister's 100 most boring speeches. They're going to the incredibly creative Jim Rosenau, who--well, go and find out. This is the page where you discover the dirty little secrets behind the Humpty Dumpty Story.

The "We Know It When We See It" Department

Been reading about "slipstream literature" with some bemusement. No one seems to know how to define it, but everyone knows what it isn't. It isn't the Dead White Guys Club, it isn't the Literature Sorted by National Flag garbage ("and now ve celebrate the undiscovered gems of bad-tempered birdsong translations into a folkloric template from Vanuatu--truly one of our lost classics, it's such a great pity there are only two readers in the world for this sort of thing"), it isn't the Chicklit/ Schlock Is Great Literachoor, Ya Sucks Boo argument.

Ron Drummond has helped compile a Working Slipstream Cannon, though, and now I know what they mean--"Slipstream" is code for "we're spying on the Babu's bookshelves". Here's the top 25:

The Core Canon of Slipstream

1. Collected Fictions (coll 1998), Jorge Luis Borges
2. Invisible Cities (1972, trans 1974), Italo Calvino
3. Little, Big (1981), John Crowley
4. Magic for Beginners (coll 2005), Kelly Link
5. Dhalgren (1974), Samuel R. Delany
6. Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Fiction (coll, 1995), Angela Carter
7. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, trans 1970), Gabriel Garcia Marquez
8. The Ægypt Cycle (1987-2007), John Crowley
9. Feeling Very Strange (anth 2006), John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly (eds.)
10. The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (coll 2001)
11. Stranger Things Happen (coll 2001), Kelly Link
12. The Lottery and Other Stories (coll 1949), Shirley Jackson
13. Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Thomas Pynchon
14. Conjunctions 39 (anth 2002), Peter Straub (ed.)
15. The Metamorphosis (1915), Franz Kafka
16. The Trial (1925), Franz Kafka
17. Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf
18. The Castle (1926), Franz Kafka
19. The complete works of Franz Kafka
20. V; (1963), Thomas Pynchon
21. Nights at the Circus (1984), Angela Carter
22. The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (anth 2007), Kelly Link and Gavin Grant (eds.)
23. The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories [UK title Busy About the Tree of Life] (coll 1988), Pamela Zoline
24. Foucault's Pendulum (1988, trans 1989), Umberto Eco
25. Sarah Canary (1991), Karen Joy Fowler

Psst... wanna take a look at my slush pile?

The 2007 Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest results are in; the winner says he has an edge because he's an academician:

Gerald began--but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash--to pee.

Jim Gleeson


Also check out the genre submissions--this won the Children's Fiction bad writing award:

Danny, the little Grizzly cub, frolicked in the tall grass on this sunny Spring morning, his mother keeping a watchful eye as she chewed on a piece of a hiker they had encountered the day before.

Dave McKenzie

From the desk of the Babu, please register one numbers laugh, hollow. This is GOOD stuff. I would publish the Grizzly story, especially if we could tie up with bookstores to offer an "Guess What's Eating Gaurav" Grizzly free with each copy. On the other hand, after a mere six months in publishing, the slush pile creepeth up every dayeth. Once in a while you find an interesting project that comes from a complete stranger, but I'm beginning to understand why most publishers' offices are surrounded by barbed wire and why the receptionist carries a stun gun and tranqs.

I can't name names, but let's just say that the poet of the NorthEast who has so far sent in six books of poetry, all of them weighing in at about 250 pages each and written in impenentrably blank verse, needs to stop calling herself the Bad of the North-East. It's Bard... no, actually, let that stand.

What's in the box?

At AlterNet, Vanessa Richmond interviews young Canadian writers and asks what the writing life is really about. All of you out there who would be writing great novels if it wasn't for the job at the bank, consider what Anne Stone once did for a living:

Anne Stone:

"I have actually written porn. I worked for a doctor who also ran a modeling agency and occasionally a depanneur. And he would just speak into a tape and send it home with me, and suddenly we were at page 600. And it became weekly that he would take me out for lunch and send me home with tapes. And he used to give me gifts in this box to thank me, and I never looked in, and I gave it to a friend and told him he could have it as long as he didn't tell me what was in the box."