Can't beat a golden beet

When it's roasted and along with lettuce and tzatziki (Lebanese yogurt sauce) housed inside a pocket pita.

A book in my father's bookcase

Grace Metalious' novel about life in small town America of the 1950s, Peyton Place.

I had read the book at a very young age, during lazy, scorching afternoons, in my hometown of Kolkata. The book's contents had shocked me.

I have a hazy memory of the book's details, and only recall an impression of encountering scenes of sexual violence. The word "rapista" had nauseated me.

Essentially, the novel brings to the surface the violence embedded in the structures of small town life in America; the violence comes across as very masculine and consequently very gendered.

Critics, revisiting the novel 50 years later, have compared Grace Metalious to Jacqueline Susann. Coincidentally my father's bookcase was graced by the presence of Susann's novels as well.

The violence of the novel notwithstanding, Peyton Place had strong women characters.

Susann's novels both exploit and champion women, and the duality of her treatment of women comes through pretty starkly in Valley of the Dolls.

Perhaps it's the presence of strong women characters that drew my father to a novel like Peyton Place?

Additionally, Peyton Place, a bestseller of its time, defied the dominant image of America as a place of boundless freedom and happiness. It showed America as petty, dysfunctional; a society riven internally.

My father had a rebellious spirit; it had simmered inside of him. Peyton Place was a novel by a rebellious female author, a rarity of her time and gave a contrarian picture of a nation that folks had inordinately hero-worshipped in Socialist India.

I plan to re-read Peyton Place.

In my father's bookcase

...There were many books. 

One too many for me to remember and over the years, intermittently, I have been trying to make a mental catalogue of the books my father had collected in his over the years.

My goal is to derive a picture of my father's literary taste, so as to further derive a sense of who he was in terms of his values, likes/dislikes and beliefs.

I and my father were both extremely close and distant at the same time. In middle-class Indian households of the 70s and 80s, daughters and fathers would not be typically close in contemporary American/Western way we define closeness between parents and children.

After all, Indian households are a microcosm of Indian patriarchy, a system that still prevails in India today, and under the aegis of which fathers are in general their daughter's caretakers, not their emotional soul sisters. 

Yet, my father was very close to me as he was to my mother and to his own mother. I mean to say that in a predominantly female household, my father wasn't just a provider and a protector of our collective hayas, but also our emotional soul sisters.

I carry with me till this day, an imprint of my father as a feminist male.

But there was a distance as well between I and my father; not a debilitating distance of any kind, but of a kind produced by the fact that my father spend long hours at work and frequently went on official tours to various parts of India. 

I do not claim to know my father in all his complex humanity. Whatever I know of him isn't enough to me, and now that he is no more, I try to know him from remembering, among other things his literary tastes.

Can we know people from what they read?

I believe we can, unless we are talking of folks who randomly gather books and randomly watch films and theatrical shows and visit art exhibitions, simply for the sake of passing/filling time, overcoming boredom and entertainment.

My father wasn't that kind of a book-collecting fellow at all.

There was a pattern behind his reading: Overall, I can say that my father avoided British fiction (barring an odd copy of T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and George Orwell's 1984), took to non-British European fiction in English, like the Germans and the French, and he was a voracious reader of American fiction.

In my remembrance of my father's reading taste, I see a predominance of American fiction.

In follow-up blogs, I'll be listing some of the works of American fiction in my father's bookcase, and try to draw some impressions of my father's values from that endeavor.

The sad state of Detroit

Where was I when the Twin Towers fell in New York City?

Detroit; not in the city of Detroit, but in Metro Detroit. I had a brief stint as the Director of the Writing Center at the University of Detroit Mercy, in inner city Detroit.

When I took up a teaching job in an University in the plush demesnes of the cities of Rochester Hills and Auburn Hills, I spent a summer teaching a class to first-generation college goers from Detroit's inner cities.

University of Detroit Mercy was less like a college campus and more like a gated community with a degree of security at the gates that would put the security measures of an Institution in post-9/11 New York City, to shame. We were advised never to step out of campus, even if for lunch. There was nothing to step out to, as I found out. The streets were empty (which is a byword for "danger"), unkempt (sporadic garbage collection), stores and ramshackle houses lay abandoned, in ruins or were boarded up.

Along both sides of Jefferson Avenue, known as a scenic drive, would be more of the same: stores that were boarded up and side walks sprouting weeds. The one structure that stood beautifully was Fox Theatre, but the area surrounding Fox Theatre was in disrepair. 8 Miles road, made (in)famous by Detroit's native son, Eminem, was a replica of what the eponymously titled movie said it was--pretty run down.

My experience of Detroit was limited, but then again, the city was discussed only as a negative space, to be rescued, despaired about or avoided. Overt and covert expressions of anti-Detroit sentiments hovered in the periphery of my consciousness.

Detroit was a city that was dangerous, Detroit was a city that was dangerous because it was Black, and Detroit was a city that has fallen into hard times and would gradually become untouchable if it wasn't emptied of Blacks. 

Having experienced Metro-Denver and Greater-New York--as urban geographies that centered around the commercial and cultural hub of cities, "Metro-Detroit" sounded like a misnomer to me. Detroit could have very well been named "Metro-Troy" or Metro-Madison Heights" (I lived in Madison Heights, which bordered the city of Troy, cities dominated by the auto companies).

Today, Detroit has become the center of a whole discourse on economic mudslide, depopulation, and a site for ruin-porn. Perhaps Detroit's all abysmality has reached a tipping point, else the Michigan Governor would not have come up with this plan for Detroit's economic revival.

Michigan's Governor is a Republican and a businessman; he wants to populate Detroit with 50,000 highly educated immigrants from China and India over the next 5 years. His conviction is that the flow of knowledge, cultural and real capital that will ensue as a result of immigration will stabilize Detroit into an economically viable city once again.

At first I thought this was a fictional plan, part of a story based in Detroit. Having bumped into the plot of Chang Rae Lee's On Such A Full Sea recently--a plot that plays with the consequences of populating a city with outsiders--I thought perhaps Detroit, would make for a good place in a story that's about socially engineered de- and re-populations.

Can a city, in which I have lived, albeit briefly and a bit cursorily, become so hopeless as to descend into the state of a metaphor?

Businessmen like Snyder (the case of Michael Bloomberg, the visionary Mayor of New York City for 12 years, is different as he's a rarity), tend to see complex organisms like cities like corporations; while an infusion of high calibre knowledge-workers can resurrect a struggling corporation with new life, the same can't be foretold of a city or a nation, at least not in a mere five years.

A New York Times Editorial reasonably scolds the plan as disrespectful and accuses the Governor of treating the city as a blank slate upon which a rebuilding experiment can be launched. 

Where do the native Detroiters fit in this picture of rebuilding? The Blacks don't figure at all. It seems like yet another plot (not a fictional one) is being hatched to dislocate the Blacks from a city which they have taken to be their own since the time of its glory days as a "motor city."

The thoughts of a plot to dispossess natives brings me back to my tangential experience of Detroit's inner city through the kids I taught. Lovely kids, as I remember them taking my class seriously and laughing and sharing ideas and a hope that they would in the near future be going to college.

I feel sad.

P.S. just read that the idea to revive Detroit through repopulating it with immigrants, belongs to Michael Bloomberg. Last year Mayor Bloomberg had suggested the following on Meet the Press: That all immigrants be allowed to come into the U.S. under the condition that they reside in Detroit for a minimum of 10 years. He was criticized as a fascist, because repopulation has a fascistic stink.

The fill-cities-with-immigrants ploy is taken up seriously, especially by Rust-Belt cities like St Louis and Dayton, which are losing populations because of the recession.

O Sweden my Sweden!

Two of my best lesbian friends have tied the knot and migrated to Stockholm.

I am jealous, because Stockholm, though not a perfect Lesbos, is one of the many dream cities I want to live in.

Till the time I get to migrate physically to Sweden I'll live vicariously through my friends.

Raising a toast to the beautiful city and to my beautiful friends!

Transtromered

Transtromered could be an yet unverified process of falling into a trance upon reading the poetry of Nobel laureate Tomas Transtromer.

When asked if poetry was for entertainment, Transtromer said,

[Poetry] begins in delight and ends in wisdom (quoting from Robert Frost). [Poetry] reclaims an awareness of the world (quoting from Allen Ginsberg). [Poetry] strikes the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts (quoting from Keats) and when power power corrupts, poetry cleanses. 

When asked what he wants to achieve through the medium of poetry, Transtromer said, that in poetry he is seeking a kind of meaning in being present, in using reality in making something of it and not seeking empty calories of superficial entertainment.

And here is Tomas' Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

Strands of (other people's) thoughts

The writing is both charming and infuriating, built of plain prose that blooms without warning into carbuncular vision.

She speaks as if the entire acreage of her skin were a listening device.

Vanishing is a way of life, of coping with the unbearable, of transmuting identity into something more manageable, if anonymous existence. Identity, like so much unwanted history, is a burden to be shed.
Relieved to be excused from love and marriage and all the preliminary and subsequent complications and mortifications that involved.

Fog banks of neuroses, in which even the most inconsequential gesture settles, like a heavy woolen blanket, over an aching heart.

Literature in Russia is not as neutral a commodity as it is in the West.

Josef Stalin was like a Genghis Khan with a telephone; he made midnight phone calls (to end lives).

Gibbons tied up in the ribbons of my memory

This is a book that adorned the bookshelves of a majority of book-loving, a bit of Anglicized, Indians, especially Bengalis.

It probably lay in my father's bookcase as well, but I never got a chance to read Edward Gibbon's famous seven volumes on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (I just checked, it's now available in WalMart, indicating not only a decline and fall in the value of such books in contemporary America, but a total eclipse of it as well).

I carry with me an impression of the book as a "male" book, the product of male cogitation, i.e. greatly worried about things tangential to the minutiae of daily living in Victorian England.

Nonetheless, I am moved by what Gibbons said after he finished writing the book:

I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober, melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken away everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.

Notes transferred (in Stanley Fish's words)

I think these are the words of Stanley Fish, from his book on how to write sentences (and appreciate the gems).

In college I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page.

[To me] these were a handful of words artfully arranged to stop time, to conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimension.

From James Joyce's Araby:

The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.

The sentence is measured, unguarded, direct and at the same time transcendent. It distills a precise mood; radiates with meaning, yet sensibility is discreet. The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.

Only certain sentences breathe and shift about like live matter in a soil.

Not sure who wrote the following:

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in grammatical relation to one another, is the most basic, ongoing impulse in my life.

On days when I am troubled, when I am grieved, when I am at a loss for words, the mechanics of formulating sentences, and of stockpiling them in a vault, is the only thing that centers me again.

Contrasting a sentence is the equivalent of taking a Polaroid snapshot: Press the button, wait for something to emerge.

Notes transferred (on David Foster Wallace)

For some time, I've been transferring notes I had hand-written, on to my blog.

To me, this sort of action is like a potent brain-therapy, as I believe, when I write and rewrite, even when the activity of the rewriting is a mere copying of stuff I had written, my brain cells are enlivened.

Some things somebody had said about the novelist David Foster Wallace:

He has an astounding voice that is "hyperarticulate" and "plaintive." He is self-mocking, diffident, overbearing, needy, ironical, almost pathologically self-aware.

Says Wallace of his own writing voice, "The voice is in your own head; intimacy is an errection of the heart, as the importance of bearing witness bumps up against the danger of trivialization and exploitation."

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.