In dis-praise of folly

I have, or currently am, living the life, that psychoanalyst and prolific writer, Adam Phillips, recommend we live without further ado.

Phillips says, like fools, we inevitably end up living two lives, one that we fantasize about, the life that could've been and should've been had not we fallen through the cracks of fate and our own missteps, and the life that we actually living.

It's best and in our very own psychic interest of were to live the one life--one that we are living.

As I was saying, I am living the one life I am. No fantasy parallel life or a moaning for one I could've lived, for me.

In 2000, I got a fabulous scholarship to attend a Summer Institute at Cornell University; it was a rare opportunity to study under the tutelage of Hayden White. However, on account of personal reasons, I couldn't follow through. I was in remorse for a long time. For a long time I thought of what could've been had I followed through and actualized the chance that came my way.

Over time, having lived the life I have been graciously granted by fate, I have whipped me psychically into shape, or have tried to do so. I suffer little in the way of pining away for lost chances, because I remember always that the life that beckoned me away from those so-called "golden opportunities" was the real life I was scheduled to live.

In 2000, the one thing that required me to sacrifice the "golden opportunity" was something real and compelling. The "golden opportunity" was just another chance that didn't unfold, nor was it meant to unfold. In hindsight, it looks neither golden, nor worthy of being pined for.

Adam Phillip begins Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life with 

The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?

His answer is a "no."

Phillips writes heretically against the modern notion that we should all be out there fulfilling our potential. Instead of feeling that we should have a "better" life, he says, we should just live, as gratifyingly as possible, the life we have. Otherwise, we are setting ourselves up for bitterness. What makes us think that we could have been a contender? Yet, in the dark of night, alone, we do think this and grieve that it wasn't possible. 

And what was not possible becomes the story of our lives [...] Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless trauma about, the lives we were unable to live.

Give Me Everything You Have

The writer and critic James Lasdun is the author of several collections of stories, including It’s Beginning to Hurt, two novels, including The Horned Man, three and soon to be four poetry collections, including Landscape with Chainsaw, and most recently a memoir about being stalked by a former writing student, Give Me Everything You Have. In this new book Lasdun explores how his nurturing relationship of a particularly talented student, Nasreen – which he openly states bordered on flirtation at times – unexpectedly turned into obsessive campaign of abuse and anti-Semitism. Here he speaks to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about how culpable he feels in this unresolved situation, the story about D. H. Lawrence denying a seductress that gives him hope and why finding a close reader can sometimes be a curse. 

The documentary The Invisible War is worth watching, I hear.

A brief synopsis: According to Department of Defense estimates, over 19,300 members of the U.S. military were sexually assaulted in 2010 alone. Yet, although the rate of sexual assaults against women in the service is twice that of the civilian population, only ten percent of assault cases end in prosecution, with female soldiers often finding themselves ostracized or pressured into remaining silent.

Notes 1

I had made some random notes in a paper notebook. Here I am transcribing them on to the other "medium".

In Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabakov's description of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering Muzskiks, has an astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning.

How to build a working airplane out of coconuts.

Good writing isn't just about forming the technical guts of a good sentence. It's also about figuring out how to hew serviceable planks in one set of tasks and then in other duties, build syntactic confections that don't taste like wood.

Straightforward envy over everyday objects grew into a kind of existential restlessness.

Andy Warhol once wanted the word "figment" engraved on his tomb.

Capitalism and Christianity conflates into a single ideology.

The narrative freight.

Twenty years ago, Irvine Welsh roared onto the British literary novel that traced the exuberant depravities of Scottish drug fiends. What marked the book wasn't its subject--artists have been mining the manic energies of addiction since the unlikely poetry of its language, a droll brogue relish transcribed in precise phonetics.

Under the spell of Kali

The town of Kalispell in Western Montana has some of the best gunsmiths in the nation. 

In the new geography of a raging debate on gun control and gun-related deaths, Kalispell looms large, even though physically its a scenic yet small place.

What struck me about Kalispell was the name itself. Though pronounced "Cali", the "Kali" part reminds me of the ferocious Indian goddess Kali. In a mythical era, Kali had roamed the earth bedecked with mass-weaponry. She was on a rampage to destroy, albeit for more transcendental reasons (than an Amy Bishop or an Adam Lanza, for instance).

What I mean to suggest is that the town in Montana has a peculiarly appropriate and ominous name.

But dem guns sure are pretty.

Indian writer

Uday Prakash writes primarily in Hindi; he is one of the rare vernacular writers whose novel The Girl with the Golden Parasol will be published in the U.S. by an American publishing house (Yale University Press).

The book is about caste prejudices in modern India seen through the lens of a love story.

Uday Prakash has also answered some questions about writing, and they are of appalling quality.

I love to read interviews of authors and the segment "By the Book" in the NYT Sunday Book Review, is one of my favorite weekly reads. When writers respond to a set of standard questions, they, I believe are at their creative best, because the onus to answer uniquely is on them.

There is a similar segment in the "India Ink" section of NYT, started, I think, in light of the Jaipur Literary Festival. The Indians get less complicated questions.

Look at what the writer Uday Prakash has to say in response to a question about criticism:

"How do you deal with critics?"

No author should deal with critics. Don’t worry about them. They try to stunt your growth.

I haven't come across a more absolutist and irrational position on criticism.

Here is the rest:

Q. What are the occupational hazards of being a writer?

A.This profession doesn’t pay you enough.

Q.What is your everyday writing ritual?

A.I can write when I am alone. I do most of my writing in my village of Sitapur in Madhya Pradesh.

Q.Why should we read your latest book, “The Walls of Delhi”?

A.The overarching theme of the book is corruption and systemic failure. The novel is set in Delhi, and it tells you how difficult it is to make a living in Delhi through sheer hard work and honesty.

Q.Why does the Jaipur Literature Festival matter to you?

A.It is a lottery for me that my work has been shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. It means a lot to me when I see people like Binayak Sen and Mahasweta Devi. This is a liberal platform. It gives dignity to an author.

Ok, so I understand that the interview was conducted in Hindi and translated into English. But even in Hindi, these responses are brusque and silly, and diminish, in my eyes, the stature of the author.

In his master's voice

Ah! The joy of listening to T.S. Eliot recite his poem, Ash Wednesday

The wondrous story of "Ape Woman" Julia Pastrana

The Victorian era was famous for its "freak shows," and in this context who doesn't know the story of the Elephant Man?

I sometimes wonder why Victorian Europe was steeped in a freak show culture. What was so gaze-worthy about disfigured humans? Why hold them in captivity and then put them in the same category of non-human species? Why construct entire circus shows around such folks? There are explanations galore and some touch deeply upon the possibility that freak shows were the era's mass media equivalent. 

We have our own freak shows, except that the freakishness is well-concealed behind glossy veneers.

My mind veered  toward Victorian freak shows because of the story of Julia Pastrana, both the hero and a victim of such shows in Victorian Europe.

Julia was a native of Mexico, but married to a gent who made money by turning Julia into a vehicle of mass-entertainment.

Here is, in a nutshell, the story of Julia:

Born in 1834, in Sinaloa, Mexico, Ms. Pastrana had two rare diseases, undiagnosed in her lifetime: generalized hypertrichosis lanuginosa, which covered her face and body in thick hair, and gingival hyperplasia, which thickened her lips and gums. A Mexican customs administrator bought Pastrana in 1854 and began showing her throughout the United States and Canada, part of a growing business of traveling exhibitions displaying human oddities. (Though slavery had been abolished in Mexico decades earlier, many circus performers were still sold.) In New York Pastrana married Theodore Lent, an impresario who became her manager.

I am thinking that Pastrana's freakishness was further compounded by her foreignness. A large number of freak show subjects were said to have been imported from non-European parts of the world.

But people like Pastrana were "human" as well.

Pastrana, variously described as revolting in appearance and "gorillalike" was a talented singer and dancer and was also recognized for her kind nature, and "perfectly" proportioned feet and hands.

Julia gave birth to a child with similar disorders; the child died in infancy and Julia followed suit. Lent, the husband, took the bodies of both mother and child and displayed them for entertainment. He went on to marry another bearded German lady around whom he organized yet another itinerant circus show.

Pastrana and her child's remains were found in a dustbin, close to a warehouse in Oslo, Norway, in 1976. Since then they were handed over to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Oslo. 

Nearly 200 years later, Julia Pastrana's remains would be buried in her birth city in Mexico.

Pastrana has been the subject matter of many a modern show as well, but the modern shows have mined Pastrana for entirely different purposes:

In 2003 Kathleen Anderson Culebro, produced a staging of “The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World,” in Texas. That play, by Shaun Prendergast, had its debut in London in 1998 and is performed almost entirely in the dark. Mr. Prendergast said in an e-mail that the setting “seemed the perfect marriage — a woman known for her ugliness, but with a beautiful voice, presented in a way which would force the audience to conjure her with their imagination.

Read more about Julia Pastrana here.

An establishment parody

Rarely does an institution parody itself as has the South Korean military in creating a video entitled "Les Militaribles."

I am guessing that the authorities who made this video didn't intend it to be a parody, but a brave borrowing of form and content of the immensely successful film version of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserable". 

Instead of advertising the sacrifice and hard work that the conscripts of the South Korean army undergo "Gangam style," the "Les Miz" style is a more appropriate choice. It celebrates virtues of nobleness and community, while the Gangam culture is a bit on the undignified, lampoon side of things.

"Les Militaribles" has gone viral.

Where have the Raj Bohemians gone?

I just noticed, that I had posted the following on September 9, 2011, on my tumblr.

Yesterday, I was on a Manhattan-bound train. At Prince Street, Soho, two girls board the train. Both look overtly made up. There’s a young black girl, her face awash in blusher, and her companion is a Chinese-American teen.

No sooner than they sit, than the latter opens her purse and whips out a lipstick and waves it like a dandelion as she begins to descant on the virtues of the brand of lipstick she was brandishing.

Here lies the crux of my interest: It’s an Estee Lauder lipstick, in a shade of red. The girl talks and talks about how she adores all things of an Estee Lauderly order. The word “Estee Lauder” perforates the air surrounding her, as though she was making a sales pitch on behalf of Estee Lauder.

I thought much about the girl’s touting of a brand and was reminded of Hari Kunzru’s short story Raj Boheminan (The New Yorker, March, 2008).

Narrated from the perspective of a nameless New Yorker, Kunzru’s story is about a consumerism-driven, shallow social order, where people are less like people and more like Buzz Agents who “monetize their social networks” because they are “early adopters” of trends, and spout buzz lines to their equally trendy friends whenever they can, especially at gatherings inside fashionably dilapidated warehouses in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The protagonist wants to rebel against such “zombie-ization” of the multitude:

I started to notice something odd. Every time I met a friend, he or she would immediately make a recommendation, urge me to try something new. Lucas had been to a club on the other side of town and insisted that it was the best night out he’d had in ages. Janine almost forced me to take home a bottle of her “new favorite nutritional supplement.” At first, I shrugged it off. But, deep down, I knew that it had something to do with Raj and his vodka. Every night, I’d turn the incident over in my mind. I swallowed Ativan and Valium and Paxil (I had a compliant doctor), hoping that my anxiety would pass. It didn’t. There was Joe and his new running shoes. Razia’s bike. All my friends seemed to be dropping snippets of advertising copy into their conversation, short messages from their sponsors. They were constantly stating preferences for particular brands, dishing out free samples.

Whether the girl on the train was a brand-zombie or not I can’t tell, but the possibility is immense.

Bush baths

Just as there is the bubble bath, there is now the "Bush bath." I coined the term to indicate, not the luxurious and largely feminine undertones that accompany the bubble bath, but a more matter-of-fact kind of bathing under the shower. 

The bather in a "Bush bath" is characterized by a certain kind of "introspective self-absorption."

Where am I deriving such stuff from? 

From a recently posted cache of the paintings of George Bush, the 43rd President of the United States. 

The "Arts Beats" segment of the NYT brought the fact of Bush's amateur persuasion to my attention. I liked the paintings and so did the critic who reviewed them, enough to discuss the form, content as well as the possible intellectual and painterly tradition to which George Bush the painter might belong (though there is still that wariness that the painter under scrutiny is none other than the boyo Prez, who was considered to have minimal intellect).

The forms, the critic opines,

[Are] handled with care, but awkwardly, which is the source of their appeal. Things are recognizable but just: you can detect posh details like the shower’s chrome hinge and glass door. Everything is honestly accounted for, not sharply realistic, certainly not finicky.

As for the influences working on Bush, the critic speculates that he might be familiar with Jasper Johns' "The Seasons

[Where] each of the four paintings is shadowed by a male, seemingly unclothed silhouette, or Pierre Bonnard’s strangely chaste, luminous paintings of his wife reclining in a bathtub. And one can imagine them being not too out of place in a group show that might include the figurative work of Dana Schutz, Karen Kilimnik, Alice Neel, Christoph Ruckhaberle and Sarah McEneaney.

Mother India

Annu Palakunnathu Matthews, a Professor of photography at Rhode Island University, has a creative way of critiquing sexism in Indian popular culture, a.k.a. Bollywood.

In a project called Bollywood satirized, Matthews uses digital technology to make changes on Indian movie posters and make a commentary, in turn, on Indian gender norms and stereotypes.

Ms. Matthews recalls being the victim of sexist attitudes as a young girl growing up in India and says she felt very angry at the tiresomely repetitive posters that inevitably showed women in various postures and moods of subordination to the men. They were shown to either cry, or laugh (because they were in love) or sing, or rescued from a dangerous situation by a sturdy male figure.

The poster above is not an alteration of an existing movie, but a representation of a real incident--that of the recent gang rape in India's capital of New Delhi, in which a young woman and her male companion was brutalized in a moving bus. The woman went on to die.

There were myriads of responses to the incident and the most terrifying one's were from the officialdom and the politicians of India. Abhijit Mukherjee, Member of the Indian Parliament and son of Pranab Mukherjee, some Minister or the other in his career of acute sycophancy in the Indian Congress hierarchy, said that women ought not to wear anything but "long overcoats" when they venture out in the streets after dark. By "long overcoats" Mr. Mukherjee clearly didn't mean a fashionable Burberry, but some sort of a loose overall like a bloated top of a salwar kameez, is my guess.

The poster above is a meaningful recreation of the anachronistic-ness of Indian male politicians where women and modernity is concerned. 

Birth of a nation

The title of the NYT video caught my attention because of the nature of the activity indicated by it.

Can a nation be literally "built" from grounds up? 

The "nation" in question here is South Sudan, which, in 2011 seceded from North Sudan and has since been inducted into the hall of nations as the globe's 191st country. 

The contents of the video suggest yet another activity, that of rearing, because a caption describes South Sudan as the world's "newest" country, thereby creating the image of a newborn in my mind. I'm thinking maybe the dominantly white folks (sounded like a bunch of Americans and Europeans to me) who sit around tables inside rooms that look like they've been hijacked from a P.S. in New York City, are discussing the challenges of raising South Sudan properly. What if the "baby" grows up to be an unruly "adult" and create regional mayhem.

(The white folks, by the way, are United Nations officials).

There is a moment toward the end of the video, when a UN representative apprises the group of an infringement by the nascent nation: It is said that the president of South Sudan has just received a call from Barak Obama because the South Sudanese army had tried to invade its Northern counterpart. Obama, we assume, has scolded the South Sudanese for violating the terms of agreement.

As I watched the video, I was impressed by contrasting attitudes of the UN officials discussing, very bureaucratically, the building of South Sudan, and of the Sudanese locals who walk on foot, explaining to the South Sudanese citizens the meaning of the nation and what citizenship rights, rituals and responsibilities are to be shouldered by them.

The South Sudanese are also asked about their feelings.

While the seemingly wealthier and more educated, and thus English-speaking, Sudanese are shown to celebrate abstract values like patriotism and the symbolical richness of the flag (a guy wraps the flag around his portly body), the poorer speak of food, land and livelihood. The latter can't be done without, while patriotism is of secondary significance.

I was touched by the woman who, upon being asked, how she "feels" about coming back to her "homeland" (after remaining in exile), says that in the undivided Sudan she had land, cattle and a house, but in the "new" nation she has nothing. So much for patriotism and belonging in the abstract!

I am reminded of the wholly abstract concept of the nation as propounded by sociologist Benedict Anderson in his 1991 book Imagined Communities. Anderson had contended that a nation transcends being merely a geographical and physical entity; it is imagined into being by those who live in it.

The million dollar question is whether the war-torn, poor and psychically-ravaged-by years of civil war- citizens of this newly birthed nation will have the mental luxury to exert their imaginations thus.

Or, will South Sudan, whose capital city has tentatively been chosen--Juba--effloresce into a full-fledged nation in the imagination of its residents?

The king in bare bones

Regal Bones

I got introduced to Richard III (till date that remains my sole interface with the medieval English king, descending from the house of the Plantaganets), through Shakespeare's Richard III.

I loved the play, though, the king himself was portrayed as evil incarnate. I had the rare experience of reading a Shakespearian play where the protagonist is also the antagonist.

But, in a way, I kind of liked Richard III as well as prayed for his demise. He sounded heroically humble when in that fatal battle of Bosworth, having tumbled off his horse, he had shrieked out the famous lines: "A horse, a horse, a kingdom for a horse." This willingness to barter on such humble terms, indicated a flexibility of spirit that the king, when he was alive and ruling, never showed. 

Throughout the play, Richard was inveterate in his evilness where getting and keeping the "kingdom" was concerned.

So, I liked Richard at the moment of his death, is what I mean to say. I'm thus delighted to know that his skeleton (the skeleton of the real king, that is) has been found under a parking lot in Leicestershire. The ignominy of a legendary king's remains being found under a 21st century parking lot is great, but the discovery of the remains, in and of itself, is testament to the fact that these figures had once lived.

Personally, for me, the bones humanize a fictional hunchbacked king who menaced subjects, enemies and women in Shakespeare's play.

A bit of a biographical detail is in order: Richard wasn't all that evil at all. In fact, the historical Richard was the victim of decades of systematic denigration by his Tudor successors on the throne. He was a reformist king, who introduced kinder laws for the poor and the incarcerated, and most importantly, he eased bans on printing and selling of books. In short, he was a progressive king of his time. My guess is that Shakespeare couldn't have shown the real Richard the way he was because his play was produced during the time of the Tudors.

Life and love in Zombieland

I can't help but archive this story: I am a Zombie in Love. I feel like the story is complex at many levels.

I see it implying the following: we are all zombies under capitalism.

The narrator's voice, deadpan, reminds me of the narrator (role played by Edward Norton) of David Fincher's The Fight Club (based on Chuck Palanhuik's novel of the same name): The man is an insomniac cog in the machinery of capitalism; he looks like he is sleep-walking through life, emasculated, not in control of what he is eating or accumulating. He was a zombie till the time, the arrival of his brute alter ego, Tyler Durden, makes him fall into "life". 

The zombie-narrator of I am is more living than the living of our times are. His observations are taut with irony, a sign that he isn't a stereotypical zombie. The story disabuses us of the immaculate misconceptions of the un-dead and the living that we have. 

Issac Marion, the writer, went on to expand the story into a novel. The film Warm Bodies is based on the novel.

Upon reading this story I have a provisional judgment: the real Zombieland isn't all that bad of a country to live in.