Did not realize that the 2007 Man Booker longlist was out. Seems like this year's nominations include a set of low-profile names that I have not heard of, with Ian McEwan being the most famous one* on the list. Previous year's winners are compiled here.

I know that the Booker is "awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of either the Commonwealth of Nations or the Republic of Ireland" but it is still interesting to note that 3 of the names in this years list, highlighted by me below, sound like of Indian/Pakistani origin.

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker (4th Estate)
• Self Help by Edward Docx (Picador)
• The Gift Of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon)
• The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
• The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies (Sceptre)
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
• Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (Viking)
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
• What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn (Tindal Street)
• Consolation by Michael Redhill (William Heinemann)
• Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)
• Winnie & Wolf by A.N.Wilson (Hutchinson)

Update: Anne Enright won for The Gathering.

Booker trivia: Beryl Bainbridge has been nominated twice in the 1970s and three times in the 1990s but has never won the Booker prize. Nobel laureate, J. M. Coetzee, on the other hand, has been nominated twice and won both times. Margaret Atwood has also been nominated five times but won in 2000, while Iris Murdoch is the only 6-time nominee, with a solitary win on her 4th nomination in 1978.

* I am a big fan of McEwan....having read couple of his books - the Booker prize winning Amsterdam and The Comfort of Strangers - in the last year. Also started but didn't read much of Saturday and Black Dogs. Will have to check out this latest nomination - On Chesil Beach - some day... but next on my to-read list is his previously Booker-nominated, Atonement. Another very good recent author whose novels I have unfortunately not read so far is Kazuo Ishiguro (though I did see the movie, Remains of the day, based on his novel of the same name.

Like all unsustainable pyramid schemes, a scary scenario looms... and to think some people think we may live to be a 1000!

A metafilter entry reports:

Animated population pyramids project a steady increase in the median age. England and Wales. United States. Canada. China. Japan. "The number of older persons has tripled over the last 50 years; it will more than triple again over the next 50 years." [pdf] There will be a shortage of workers to support the retired and disabled. The looming crisis has been predicted for years. Proposed solutions include robots and immigration. [previously, previously]

Aah...for a little whiff of genuine life!

He talked of the old college days... ...of the days of keen and blind ambitions and large intentions. Now there was left with him, at least, a philosophic acquiescence to the existing order--only a desire to be permitted to exist, with now and then a little whiff of genuine life, such as he was breathing now. - from A Respectable Woman by Kate Chopin.

Kate Chopin was a genius to write short stories that were not only ahead of her times but also to pack such a punch with so few words. Her short stories, which I am reading a collection of, are just 3-4 pages long but she packs such a wallop that the characters and the story stays with you for hours after that.

...and it is as if death has owned this life all along.

That's from the first para of The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster.

I found it via amazon.com and reproduce the first para through a screen-shot below.

Also, found this very interesting statement in a comment by someone called Lyn Bann at the amazon.com link.

The task of writing has no ultimate goal; life itself is full of hollow spaces, so why would we want to transcribe it into a work of art? ....... Reading, writing and living are all part of the same ludicrous, meaningless wandering.

Just finished reading the graphic novel, City of Glass, with the story by Paul Auster and artwork by Paul Karasik & D. Mazzucchelli.

The book has received some rave reviews - both as part of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy series but also as a graphic novel.. but I did not enjoy it much at all. However, this is mostly because of my limitations in understanding it. When I picked it up, I thought it had lot of promise but it turned out to be quite a bizarre story and a bit too surreal for me. I didn't quite follow much of what was going on* but kept reading till the end hoping things would get clearer - but it only got more confusing! I understood that it was about losing yourself in trying to chase the truth.... but some of the deeper and subtler nuances were certainly lost to me. That said, I did appreciate the artwork and enjoyed it more than the story. The panels on the back of the book was what seduced me into picking this up....and that remained the best part of the book even after I was done reading it.

I have not found a link to the back panel and do not want to scan it in myself to avoid any copyright violations... but you may be able to see it via Google Books here. The words on the back panel read...

New York was a labyrinth of endless steps,

and no matter how far he walked, it always left him with the feeling of being lost.

Each time he took a walk, he felt he was leaving himself behind.

All places became equal,

and on his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere.

This was all he ever asked of things:
to be nowhere.

Each line above was one panel in the 9-paneled back page. A couple of panels were completely dark black panels with no words. Like I said, I thought this had great promise and I picked it up thinking this is going to be a very intelligent book about angst, urban loneliness, and such... but it turned out to be a whole lot more (like an amazon.com commenter writes: "There are so many levels in this story you need an elevator"...and perhaps too intelligent for me!

--
* This comment by C. D. Murphy that I read at amazon.com just now has shed some light about the story but even so... there are probably many other nuances that didn't get to me! (Sorry.. not sure how one links to a comment at amazon.com, just the commenter)

... Campbellian march through the four phases of life......look for this as you read it: from his birth as Auster, to understanding language with Stillman, the identity crisis with the father, the mid-life crisis after meeting his namesake, the question of paths during this, the isolation of late life and finally the fading away.

Also, this essay by Bill Johnson breaks down the first few paras of the book.

This story beautifully explores the modern day terrain of what it means to live in an age where so many people appear as fragments not only to others, but to themselves. At each stage of the story, the audience is taken not only deeper to the resolution of the story's surface mystery, it's taken into an examination of the role of chance upon the formation of fragments of personality.

Wish someone would break down the whole book in more simple terms for me to enjoy! Let me know if you know of some such site or yourself have read this and understand more than I did!

Related: Britain finally embraces the graphic novel.

What a haunting song....had never heard it or about it before.

Billie Holiday sings the very moving and horrific song, Strange Fruit.



Apparently,the images conjured by the song are so horrific that Billie Holiday often performed it with her eyes closed. This piece in the Guardian traces the song's dark history.

Needed to hear this song a few times after hearing Strange Fruit -- The Blues are Brewing, also sung by Billie Holiday, with Louis Armstrong on trumpet.

When the moon's kinda dreamy
Starry eyed and dreamy
And nights are luscious and long
If you're kinda lonely
Then nothin' but the blues are brewin'
The blues are brewin'

Five poems this Sunday morning. Wish I could write poetry again... but the muse seems to have died these past few years.

-

In the window, the moon is hanging over the earth,
meaningless but full of messages
....
If there’s an image of the soul, I think that’s what it is.

- from Village Life, a poem by Louise Gluck, in the New Yorker.

--

Canned laughter in the empty house
Like the sound of beer cans tied to a hearse.

-- from Driving Home, a nice little poem by Charles Simic, also in the New Yorker.

Just learned that earlier this month Simic was appointed as the 15th Poet Laureate of the US. (They really should make these at least a 2 year appointment. Seems like yesterday that the esteemed poet, Donald Hall, was appointed to the post.) Incidentally, Gluck was the12th U.S. Poet Laureate from 2003-2004.

---

But see how each busy capitalist
stares serenely through an exhibit's glass
to gaze at lotus flowers, a phoenix,
or philosophers on a mountain path.

- from a poem, In the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, by Sarah Wardle, who won the Poetry Society's Geoffrey Dearmer prize in 1999.

---

Some people sell their blood. You sell your heart.
It was either that or the soul.

- in Heart by Margaret Atwood, from her book, The Door

---

If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.

If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.

If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.

If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.

——

Let us touch each other
while we still have hands,
palms, forearms, elbows . . .
Let us love each other for misery,
torture each other, torment,
disfigure, maim,
to remember better,
to part with less pain.

-- Two of the Four Poems by Vera Pavlova, also published in the New Yorker.

Do read the other two poems also - even in translation (from the Russian), this is good stuff. And this interesting interview from 2002 with Pavlova, where she says:

"Men became so female, that women had to take on the male part themselves. How did all this resolve itself? Towards the end of the century, women poets became far more radical than men. Stylistically and spiritually."

and later...

"In art the basic distinction is not between male and female, but between dead and alive."

Not a book I have read but have merely found it via a review.

House of Meetings by the widely talented British author, Martin Amis.

The book, which is about the grim days of Russia under Stalin... but I won't get into the horrors that be*. Instead, I want to merely highlight this paragraph, that I found in its entirety at this blog post..

“There is a Western phenomenon called the male midlife crisis. Very often it is heralded by divorce. What history might have done to you, you bring about on purpose: separation from woman and child. Don’t tell me that such men aren’t tasting the ancient flavors of death and defeat.

In America, with divorce achieved, the midlifer can expect to be more recreational, more discretionary. He can almost design the sort of crisis he is going to have: motorbike, teenage girlfriend, vegetarianism, jogging, sports car, mature boyfriend, cocaine, crash diet, powerboat, new baby, religion, hair transplant.

Over here, now, there’s no angling around for your male midlife crisis. It is brought to you and it is always the same thing. It is death.”

* I own copies of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 and Gulag Archipelago Volume 2 but have never had the heart to read them! Some day I will stop getting books from the library and read the ones I already own - which for the most part sit in boxes in the basement!

Interesting excerpt from this 2003 article about the author, Amit Chaudhuri...(emphasis mine):

"..it is the imperfect, the flawed, that Chaudhuri celebrates as allowing not only great creativity but the possibility of a truly liberal, open society. Talking not of Lawrence, but of Indian society today, he laments the fact that nowadays there is no place for daydreamers, for those that "yearn for the irresponsible", for what he calls "the cult of failure": "When I was growing up (in Kolkata), if you were sensitive and intelligent, basically, you must be a misfit. I used to laugh at the cult of failure, but now I do believe that there has to be a place for the misfit, for the outsider. The person who lacks ambition or is an outsider is seen to mount an implicit critique of the value systems which people live by, and is therefore looked upon with great intolerance in this society."

Also later in the article...this phrase: "a heady cocktail of outrage and despair." Now I know how to describe how I feel about India sometimes. Having said that... Jai Hind... Happy Independence Day (whatever that means!)

http://picks.yahoo.com/picks/potw/20070808.html

Life is so sad and unfair sometimes..... cannot get myself to read this heart-breaking letter from a 12 year old daughter to her father, who lay dieing after being beaten up by hooligans! He later died. My heart goes out to this very brave but unfortunate 12 year old, Amy Love of the UK.

(I read this at a post at India Uncut.)

I tried to read the short novel, Marisa by Peter Cowlam, over the weekend. I had picked it up at the library since I found the gist on the book flap intriguing but I found the writing style to be difficult and gave up, perhaps prematurely. This review at amazon.com (by Jennifer Armstrong of Perth, Australia) is really well written and makes me want to attempt another read.

The book..

…explores a broad range of intellectual themes, such as the psychological dynamic of left-wing and right-wing politics and their relation to art, male and female conceptions of love, our intuitive conceptions of time and the tragic nature of humour.

…the social mores we take for granted every day' might give us less than the full serve demanded of our human desires in this world. This intoxication is not to be imbibed in the form of seemingly lowbrow student confections, however. Form is not only as important as function - it is the fundamental key for Bruce, aiding him to determine his class function on the basis of certain straightforward and external social signs. Therefore, it must be via his own elitist social circle where he receives the artistic message which can reach him, the one whereby the `whole cosy notion of what civilisation is, is undermined.'

.. but one big step for music lovers in Saudi Arabia?

Saudi Arabia produces first music video

Maybe not -- considering the first clip to be fully produced in Saudi Arabia sounds like a propoganda video made by religious leaders to try to reign in their youth. But music is music - so what if the message (“You can be cool and devout") is different than music videos you and I watch and does not feature any "sexy performers in revealing clothes crooning about love."

Al-Khatib, 37, who heads an advertising agency, has previously produced music videos, but this is the first that is an all-Saudi work. It was filmed along Jiddah's boardwalk on the Red Sea, a popular hangout for youths. He said he wanted to give Saudi youths an alternative to music videos produced abroad but popular on satellite TV. "The problem is not the music. It's how you utilize it. We wanted to talk to them in their own language.Instead of saying, 'Don't listen to music,' we're saying, 'Listen to music that's good for you," he said.

Viva music.... once you give them a taste of music, they'll want more and that can only be good. (Of course, the reality of this is that people probably enjoy good music from around the world anyways through "illegal" means... this big show-n-tell by the government just makes for fluffy news as the "first ever" music video! Ok...the cynic in me has to come out. Back to reality!)

Speaking of first-ever music videos, August 1^st was the 26th anniversary of MTV, which launched in 1981 with “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. Like Freakanomics Blog pointed out -- "Appropriately enough, during the 2006 MTV Video Awards the Raconteurs performed a parody of that song, called “Internet Killed the Video Star.”

Indeed… I could blame the internet for preventing me from reading good books, seeing good movies, and getting some exercise.* But in the end, it is my own lack of discipline and will-power, isn’t it? Didn’t you just read – “It isn’t the internet…it’s how you utilize it.”

* Here is a good cartoon that captures my life very well. Sorry.. I saved this online some time back and do not know the source. If someone does, let me know and I will give due credit.

Narcisstic perhaps... but an interesting photoset - 365 days of me..me...me! (some of the pictures may be NSFW - Not Safe For Work. Please do not click on the link if you are at work.)

Amazing pictures from Alaska - the link also includes some great photoshots from Zion, Yosemite winter, Canyonlands, etc. My own picture sets from some of the same places pale into insignificance compared to the photography here!

Summer short story special... via the Guardian Unlimited.

The short story is exquisitely difficult.'- VS Pritchett

Aztec pyramid ruins found in Mexico City

Egyptian Mummy's Fake Toe - The world's first prosthetic?

Korean Mummy Holds Clues to Disease

Archaeologists locate what they believe are funeral chambers of Aztec emperor

Archaeologists discover 8-million-year-old forest in Hungary

Largest Known Exoplanet Discovered

Scientists Create 12-Headed Jellyfish

The excerpt below is from the first chapter narrated by Greta, Gregor Samsa's sister.

I was twelve. Then I was seventeen. Like driving or music, when you are gliding through those years, they feel they will never end. Once they are finished with you, you have such a difficult time recalling them in any sort of detail it seems they very well may have happened to a friend you no longer see, and you just heard about them secondhand, or maybe you read about them in a letter. It isn't you any more. Imagine all the people you no longer are. - from Anxious Pleasures, a novel after Kafka by Lance Olsen.

I also loved the paragraph below, which is from the last chapter narrated by Greta. It delves into an interesting existential theme of "seeing yourself as a stranger in your own mind".

They say people travel either to find something or to lose something, but I wonder if maybe it isn't a little bit of both. The shock is how, returning from a foreign country, returning from crowded dreams or a piece of gorgeous music, you discover you are precisely the same person you were before setting off. Precisely the same person, and precisely a different person. Traveling always makes you at least two people at once. It is good for you, this doubleness. It allows you to see yourself as a stranger in your own mind.

That last sentence is a gem! Coincidentally, my quote-bot on the left of my blog spits out this Socrates quote - The unexamined life is not worth living. Update: On a second refresh, this Oscar Wilde quote: Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about. Hmm....!

Unfortunately, although Anxious Pleasures is a very creative and interesting novel*, I will have to get back to it at some later date as various other things have taken over my life these past two weeks. I should perhaps read Kafka's The Metamorphosis again before I read this one to enjoy it more thoroughly. Olsen is also the author of Nietzsche's Kisses, a novel that I had once perused through and put on hold to be read at some later day. Hopefully the day when I will get back to all these books-to-read arrives soon!

* In this novel...

Olsen takes on Franz Kafka's surreal novella, The Metamorphosis and ingeniously adapts the story line to multiple perspectives. In the original, Kafka chose authorial omniscience to recount the misfortunes of traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who awakens one morning to find himself transformed into a "monstrous vermin." Olsen surveys the unsettling events in the Samsa household from the viewpoints of, respectively, Gregor's sister Greta, his parents, the kitchen staff, and even a contemporary London woman perusing Kafka's yarn in a British Museum reading room.

You can read an excerpt of the book here and a review here.

Amit Varma has started a new category called 'Excerpts', where he will post about short excerpts he has enjoyed from books he reads. Its something I often do here.. and remember doing this right from 9th grade, when my interest in literature was lit. I started writing down quotes and excerpts from poems and books that I read. I probably ought to do it a lot more often these days as I read a lot more but giving my reading habits these days (reading as I sleep in bed late in the night or as soon as I wake up - its strange - I need reading to lull me to sleep as well as to wake me up!), I do not get the chance to write things down.

Anyways, in addition to Amit's post today about "remembering what you want to forget and forgetting what you want to remember" there is another aspect about remembering & memories that I find very interesting... it is related to what we call nostalgia. In 20/20 hindsight (to loose a cliched terminology with a slightly different meaning), even the bad/sad memories of the past seem to become wonderful memories.

Kundera has used the Spanish word - añoranza - to capture what nostalgia can mean...

A comment by a reader at this thread (on architectural photography, no less!) explains this concept better than I can:

"The word (nostalgia), as Kundera reminds us, is derived from the Greek nostos ("return") and algos ("pain, grief, sorrow"). In Kundera's novel, however, the term assumes a double meaning: not only of sorrow caused by the desire to return but also of pain caused by actual return. For Kundera, nostalgia is a profoundly deceptive sentiment. The author points out that in Spanish, the word for nostalgia or longing is añoranza, related, via the Catalan, to the Latin word ignorantia. We feel nostalgic because we no longer know the place or person or the moment in the past we long for. When nostalgia settles in, the object of desire is already fading. Nostalgia, writes Kundera, is a self-sufficient sentiment, "fully absorbed ... by its suffering and nothing else." In other words, it is a form of not knowing, and it rarely survives a confrontation with reality"

I got introduced to Kundera in the early 90s and have been a big fan since...though admittedly I have not read his last 3-4 books.