I hate sentimentalism. And I think I qualify as a cynic.

I seek refuge behind this GB Shaw quote usually.

"What is the use of straining after an amiable view of things, when a cynical view is most likely to be true?"

But this nugget from an old 1999 interview in Salon with the author, Paul Auster, is particularly eye-opening for me.

"..cynicism and sentimentality are just two sides of the same distortion."

Stephen Mitchelmore writes, in a book review of Paul Auster's novel Oracle Night. (Emphasis is mine because the words are as good an explanation as any of why I (we?) read, I think.)

Anything can happen. We are free. The beginning of the story is our windfall.

So why is do we feel an urge to continue reading rather than to throw the book aside and live that freedom? Probably because we prefer the illusion of freedom, the possibility of freedom rather than the real thing. We read to enjoy the specific story that replaces the vertigo of infinite freedom. As with a horror movie, we aren’t really horrified. Horror is only the playful withdrawal of a guaranteed safety. And narrative is the guarantee. With a novel, we know we have a circumscribed adventure before us.

Yet that narrative also makes our freedom come true for a moment, even if it is only an illusion. The open future may contain infinite possibilities but it never seems to happen for real. Consumed by habit, we lose contact with our freedom. Reading, or watching a film, reminds us of possibility even as it is removed. And in that reminder, it comes true. The obscure attraction of a book or a film might be, then, the pleasure of contact with possibility and relief in its withdrawal.

Update: I just noticed this -- this is my 1000th post! Wooohoo... that's a milestone, I suppose.

This paragraph from Paul Auster's Invention of Solitude, describing something he did one day in Amsterdam, reminded me so much of his famed novel, City of Glass. (Actually, I have not read the novel - only the graphic novel adaptation.)

How many of us have been lost and wandered in a new city? How many of us have been inspired to write about it like this!!

He wandered. He walked around in circles. He allowed himself to be lost. Sometimes, he later discovered, he would be only a few feet from his destination, but not knowing where to turn, would then go off in the wrong direction, thereby taking himself farther and farther from where he thought he was going. It occurred to him that perhaps he was wandering in the circles of hell, that the city had been designed as a model of the underworld, based on some classical representation of the place. ........

...And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was memory, then he realized that perhaps there was some purpose to his being lost. Cut off from everything that was familiar to him, unable to discover even a single point of reference, he saw that his steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him nowhere but into himself. He was wandering inside himself, and he was lost. Far more troubling him, this state of being lost became a source of happiness, of exhilaration. He breathed into his very bones. As if on the brink of some previously hidden knowledge, he breathed it into his very bones and said to himself, almost triumphantly: I am lost.

Exhilaration indeed -- from reading Auster!

Some more excerpts gleaned from Paul Auster's Invention of Solitude, which I am currently reading and enjoying very much.

Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. ..... Solitary in the sense of retret. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else.

Impossible, I realize, to enter another's solitude. ....... Where all is intractable, where all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely.

Like everything else in his life, he saw me only through the mists of his solitude, as if at several removes from himself. The world was a distant place for him, I think, a place he was never truly able to enter, and out there in the distance, among all the shadows that flitted past him, I was born, became his son, and grew up, as if I were just one more shadow, appearing and disappearing in a half-lit realm of his consciousness.

"Habit," as one of Beckett's characters says, "is a great deadener." And if the mind is unable to respond to the physical evidence, what will it do when confronted with the emotional evidence?

And as the young Marx wrote: "If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of separation?"

In the void between the moment he opens the door and the moment he begins to reconquer the emptiness, his mind flails in a wordless panic. It is as if he were being forced to watch his own disappearance, as if, by crossing the threshold of this room, he were entering another dimension, taking up residence inside a black hole.

No sooner has he woken up in the morning that he feels the day beginning to slip away from him. There is no light to sink his teeth into, no sense of time unfolding. Rather, a feeling of doors being shut, of locks being turned. It is a hermetic season, a long moment of inwardness. The outer world, the tangible world of materials and bodies, has come to seem no more than an emanation of his mind. He feels himself sliding through events, hovering like a ghost around his own presence, as if he were living somewhere to the side of himself -- not really here, but not anywhere else either. A feeling of having been locked up, and at the same time of being able to walk through walls. He notes somewhere in the margins of a though: a darkness in the bones; make a note of this.

Solitary consciousness. Or in George Oppen's phrase: "the shipwreck of the singular."

Auster quotes this from Wallace Stevens' Opus Posthumous, something I am still trying to understand and get my heads around (philosophically speaking):

"In the presence of extraordinary reality, consciousness takes the place of imagination."

Some more excerpts that I found here i.e. I did not have to transcribe it from the book to here, like I did the lines above.

Memory as a place, as a building, as a sequence of columns, cornices, porticoes. the body inside the mind, as if we were moving around in there, going from one place to the next, and the sound of our footsteps as we walk, moving from one place to the next. "One must consequently employ a large number of places," writes Cicero, "which must be well-lighted, clearly set out in order, spaced out at moderate intervals; and images which are active, sharply defined, unusual, and which have the power of speedily encountering and penetrating the psyche... For the places are very much like wax tablets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and disposition of the images like the script, and the speaking like the reading.'

[...] Memory as a room, as a body, as a skull, as a skull that encloses the room in which a body sits. As in the image: 'a man sat alone in his room'. 'The power of memory is prodigious', observed Saint Augustine. 'It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain? Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How, then, can it be part of it, if it is not contained in it?'

"Sometimes it seems as though we are not going anywhere as we walk through the city, that we are only looking for a way to pass the time, and that it is only our fatigue that tells us where and when we should stop. But just as one step will inevitably lead to the next step, so it is that one thought inevitably follows from the previous thought, [...] so that what we are really doing when we walk through the city is thinking, and thinking in such a way that our thoughts compose a journey, and this journey is no more or less than the steps we have taken, so that, in the end, we might safely say that we have been on a journey, and even if we do not leave our room, it has been a journey, and we might safely say that we have been somewhere, even if we don't know where it is.

"For if words are a way of being in the world, he thought, then even if there were no world to enter, the world was already there, in that room, which meant it was the room that was present in the poems and not the reverse.

[...] which is to say: who seeks solitude seeks silence; who does not speak is alone; is alone, even unto death."

"Every book, is an image of solitude. [...] A man sits alone in a room and writes. Whether the book speaks of loneliness or companionship, it is necessarily a product of solitude."

"For no word can be written without first having been seen, [...] Memory, then, not so much as the past contained within us, but as proof of our life in the present. If a man is to be truly present among his surroundings, he must be thinking not of himself, but of what he sees. He must forget himself in order to be there. And from that forgetfulness arises the power of memory. It is a way of living one's life so that nothing is ever lost.

[...] the sudden knowledge that came over him that even alone, in the deepest solitude of his room, he was not alone, or, more precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak of that solitude, he had become more than just himself. Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history -which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once."

"Language is not truth. It is the way we exist in the world. Playing with words is merely to examine the way the mind functions, to mirror a particle of the world as the mind perceives it. In the same way, the world is not just the sum of the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other."

More excerpts from the book are discussed here.

Quotable quote for the day

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it—all my life." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

He's speaking there about one of his famous novels - either Tender is the night or This side of paradise, not sure which one as the book I started reading yesterday - Take Joy, A writer's guide to loving the craft by Jane Yolen - says its the former while this link quotes the latter. I believe the latter is right since I found another page - from Garrisson Keilor's The Writer's Almanac - that also refers to the latter book. Here are the details from The Writer's Almanac:

In April of 1920, at the age of 23, he published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which made him an overnight sensation. A month later, for the third printing of the book, Fitzgerald composed a one page "Author's Apology" to be included and distributed at the May 1920 convention of the American Bookseller's Association. He wrote: "I don't want to talk about myself because I'll admit I did that somewhat in this book. In fact, to write it took three months; to conceive it -- three minutes; to collect the data in it -- all my life. The idea of writing it came on the first of last July: it was a substitute form of dissipation. My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence: An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward. So, gentlemen, consider all the cocktails mentioned in this book drunk by me as a toast to the American Booksellers Association."

Anyways, here's another good quote that I found in Yolen's book:

Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions - Henry James, The Art of Fiction.

Actually, there are quite a few good quotes Jane Yolen has gleaned in her book and there are a few quotable nuggets in her own writing too... but more about that later. Maybe.

Salil Tripathi writes about crisis, danger, and opportunity (in the financial market, in particular but the thoughts apply to life in general, I think):

Crisis, then, is a moment. That moment can be terribly painful. It could defeat — or transform — a person into someone sterner, stronger and wiser. We recall the cliché because we like success, and victors write history. The marginalized get forgotten, until an Amitav Ghosh comes along, writing about their pain with exceptional compassion, as in his new novel, Sea of Poppies. In a crisis, thousands lose; there is an element of randomness to those losses — we are fooled by the randomness of success. And we try to see a pattern, even if there is none. And we confuse a Chinese character, reading into it the meaning we want to read, and not the idea — and the gravity — it represents.

Reality is always messy: options and alternatives that complicate our lives. We muddle through crises, emerging whole, somewhat wounded, often chastened, with the hope that we might be able to handle the next crisis. But, as every investment advisory notes, past performance is no guarantee of future success. And like all generalizations, it is only partly true — like this one.

I also like this quote which PV Narasimha apparently said after the dissolution of the Soviet Union:

“Choices are easy when no options are left.”

Well said. And well-written, Salil.

Action is my antidote to anxiety or lack of inspiration.

That's from Eros-Alegra Clarke, the winner of the 2007 Writers Digest Contest; as quoted in the December 2007 issue of Writer's digest.You can read her prize-winning story online. She blogs here.

Enough dreaming, time to act. Enough thinking, time to do. Enough hesitating, time to move. Enough said.

-
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living. - Anais Nin

Great voice! Hear her here.

She's a Belgian singer with Arabic/North African influences in her music. I heard her through Charlie Gillett's World on 3 radio program on BBC Radio, where he has featured a few of her songs with the Mazeeka Ensemble.

Found the above quote via this essay on challenging the limits of memory.

Memory has its own story to tell. - Tobias Wolff

Another quotable quote, this from the essay itself:

And if memory is what people are made of, then people are made of loss.

Indeed! And so it goes...

Oh cosmic landscape, where art thou!

Creativity is a subtle and magnificent dance between the rational and the intuitive, between the left and right parts of the brains, between technique and imagination. Both partners in this dance are absolutely necessary and needed in equal proportion, which means imagination is as important as technique, and vice-versa. If you live only in the imagination, you'll never get organized; you'll never complete your story. However, if you start from the rational, linear, organizational part of the process (e.g. must have the perfect opening sentence and first paragraph), you'll never fall into the rich, passionate, cosmic landscape of the imagination where anything is possible. - Emily Hanlon in her short piece, How to fall down the rabbit hole, in the Writer's Digest, December 2007 issue.

So, where are the the "Cheshire cats, the Mad Hatters, the Tweedledees and Tweedledums, mad queens, dragons, flying monkeys and monsters" lurking? And how do I tap into my "creative unconscious" - the place of "feelings, dreams, and images; the place of intuition and imagination" -- and experience writing as a "visceral experience," that it always is.

In the above piece, Emily Hanlon also writes: "It's in the process of writing that the writer experiences the deeper, life-enhancing journey of creativity." Reminds me of what a friend asked me last year (and I paraphrase): Do you like the idea of being a writer or do you like the process of writing? Because a lot of people want to be writers or are in love with the idea of being a writer but do they love the process of writing? That's something I am going to find out soon!

-
Emily Hanlon is also the author of a book on writing: The art of fiction writing, or, How to fall down the rabbit hole without really trying, which she appropriately starts with Einstein's famous quote: Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Dan Barden, in a rant against creative writing classes, as published in the Poets & Writers magazine (March/April 2008 issue).

Most workshop stories that I’ve read are missing that crucial element of conflict. It’s little wonder. We’re terrified of the pain and suffering it takes to become a good writer, let alone the pain and suffering that’s inherent in good writing itself. Desire is important to creative writing because it’s the only thing that causes conflict. Conflict is important to writers because it’s the only evidence of desire. So few of us have faced up to the fact that we are at war with ourselves, with others, with the very conditions of our lives.

Having joined a writing workshop last week and facing the daunting prospect of starting on my first "assignment", I am filled with terror alright. But what about the desire?

Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill

:)

if u like jazz...Chris Grumbley had a wonderful program this week. AWESOME!!!!

Listen: Jazzbeat with Chris Gumbley

Just see this sequence in the lineup...amazing!!!

Sensation - Fletcher Henderson & his Orchestra
One Hour - Mound City Blue Blowers
Sweet Georgia Brown - Coleman Hawkins & his All-Star Jazz Band
Royal Garden Blues - Benny Goodman & his Sextet, featuring Count Basie
Soft Winds - Benny Goodman & his Sextet
Honeysuckle Rose - Benny Goodman & his Orchestra
I Can't Give You Anything But Love - Benny Goodman & his Sextet
Moonlight Becomes You - Chet Baker
I'm In The Mood For Swing - Marian McPartland Trio with Benny Carter
Fascinating Rhythm - Art Pepper Quartet

1920s-1940s was the greatest time in recording history of jazz music, wasn't it!!

Inspired by Michael Pollan's “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” message to promote his book, “In defense of food: An eater's manifesto", Tara Parker-Pope asked readers "to submit their own 2-3-2 word sequences sharing advice for the rest of us."

The contest has since ended but why stop now? Add to the collective wisdom. Add comments here or at Parker-Pope's post. Just remember the rules: "Dispense wisdom. Don’t be gross. No profanity."

Be inspired by the list of winners. Speaking of brevity, what can you say in six sentences or in six words?

Note: Although I arrived at the above post by Parker-Pope via a Shifting Careers blog post about the Webby awards, where the winners had to accept their awards using no more than five words), I just realized that coincidentally just an hour or so ago, I blogged about and quoted extensively from an article by Ms. Parker-Pope.

Quotable quotes from The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke (edited and translated by Ulrich Baer)

" The strings of sorrow may only be used extensively if one vows to play on them also at a later point and in their particular key all of the joyousness that accumulates behind everything that is difficult, painful and that we had to suffer, and without which the voices are not complete."

"I believe that one is never more just than at those moments when one admires unreservedly and with absolute devotion. It is in this spirit of unchecked admiration that the few great individuals whom our time was unable to stifle ought to be presented, precisely because ourage has become so very good at assuming a critical stance."

"After all, life is not even close to being as logically consistent as our worries; it has many more unexpected ideas and faces than we do."

"You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but by plumbing its depth."

Life and Living: "How good life is. How fair, how incorruptible, how impossible to deceive: not even by strength, not even by willpower, and not even by courage. How everything remains what it is and has only this choice: to come true, or to exaggerate and push too far."

Art: "The work of art is adjustment, balance, reassurance. It can be neither gloomy nor full of rosy hopes, for its essence consists of justice."

Faith: "I personally feel a greater affinity to all those religions in which the middleman is less essential or almost entirely suppressed."

Love: "To be loved means to be ablaze. To love is: to shine with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to last."

"Good novels, great ones, never actually seem to tell us anything; rather, they make us live it, and share in it, by virtue of their persuasive powers."

"Writing novels is the equivalent of what professional strippers do when they take off their clothes and exhibit their naked bodies on stage. The novelist performs the same acts in reverse."

The Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, in his essay, Parable of the tapeworm, included in his book, Letters to a Young Novelist, writes:

Your decision to claim your literary leanings as your destiny must lead you into servitude, into nothing less than slavery. To put it graphically, you've just done what some nineteenth-century ladies, concerned about their weight and determined to recover their slender silhouettes, were reputed to do: you've swallowed a tapeworm.

...

The literary vocation is not a hobby, a sport, a pleasure leisure-time activity. It is an all-encompassing, all-excluding occupation, an urgent priority, a freely chosen servitude that turns its victims (its lucky victims) into slaves. Like Jose Maria's tapeworm, literature becomes a permanent preoccupation, something that takes up your entire existence, that overflows the hours you devote to writing and seeps into everything else you do, because the literary vocation feeds off the life of the writer just as the tapeworm feeds off the bodies it invades. As Flaubert said: "Writing is just another way of living."

There's a lot more I could quote from the essay - especially the parts where he argues that "the source of the literary vocation, for inventing beings and stories" is rebellion.

I'm convinced that those who immerse themselves in the lucubration of lives different from their own demonstrate indirectly their rejection and criticism of life as it is, of the real world, and manifest their desire to substitute for it the creations of their imagination and dreams.

....

What matters is that the rejection be strong enough to fuel the enthusiasm for a task as quixotic as tilting at windmills -- the sleight-of-hand replacement of the concrete, objective world of life as it is lived with the subtle and ephemeral world of ficti

But I better stop here... the essay is best read and enjoyed in its entirety. On to essay # 2, which is intriguingly titled: "The Catoblepas".

Picked up a book of essays, On Writing, by Eudora Welty from the public library this afternoon. Expect many quotes from this book in the near future. There are quite a few sentences on every page that I want to write down or quote!

For starters, here is one which I found by randomly opening the book while walking back from the library. Its from an essay titled, "Must the novelist crusade?".

Writing fiction is an interior affair. Novels and stories always will be put down little by little out of personal feeling and personal beliefs arrived at alone and at firsthand over a period of time as time is needed. To go outside and beat the drum is only to interrupt, interrupt, and so finally to forget and to lose. Fiction has, and must keep, a private address. For life is lived in a private place; where it means anything is inside the mind the heart. Fiction has always shown life where it is lived, and good fiction, or so I have faith, will continue to do this.

And another random jump, to an essay "Words into fiction", where she writes:

Fiction is not the cave; and human life, fiction's territory; merely contains caves. I am only trying to express what I think the so-called raw material is without its interpretation; without its artist. Without the act of human understanding - and it is a double act through which we make sense to each other - experience is the worst kind of emptiness; it is obliteration, black or prismatic, as meaningless as was indeed that loveless cave. Before there is meaning, there has to occur some personal act of vision. And it is this that is continuously projected as the novelist writes, and again as we, each to ourselves, read.

If this makes fiction sound full of mystery, it's fuller than I know how to say. ........ The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.

And more later...

Here's an interesting excerpt from Hemingway's posthumously published memoir of his life in Paris in the 1920s, A Moveable Feast; as gleaned from an article in the WaPo by Jonathan Yardley, who finds the book to retain a "certain irresistible charm" even on its fourth re-read -- although, in general he regards Hemingway's venerated style of writing "as more self-conscious and mannered than pure, declarative and spare; I realized that in almost all of his writing, he had little of interest to say; and I came to loathe his worst traits of personality and character -- meanness that often turned into cruelty; self-centeredness; bluster and braggadocio; exaggerated, showy machismo."

"It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. . . . If I started to write elaborately . . . I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline."

I'm just waiting for that first true simple declarative sentence to sneak up on me. (Tsk tsk.. not going to happen, Sanjeev. Writing is hard work. Much against what I have long thought, like all other arts and talents, this one will not come naturally either and needs much practice, honing, and is sheer hard-work, laden with anxiety, frustration, and when successful is rewarded with endless joy!)

Excerpt from the introduction to Rules of Thumb (73 authors reveal their fiction writing fixations); edited by Michael Martone and Susan Neville.

Writers write. But writers more often than not are not writing. They are waiting to write, preparing to write, rehearsing, practicing, taking notes, outlining, reading. On top of the anxiety of writing (or not writing) is this other anxiety - that all the activities of the prelude, in reality, are not prelude at all, but a symphony of fiddling around, a divertimento of tuning up.

Oh...so that's what I've been doing when I'm fiddling around: tuning up! :)

Now I know why I have been forgetting things lately! :)

Common Sleep Problem Linked With Memory Loss

The part of the brain that stores memory appears to shrink in people with sleep apnea, adding further evidence that the sleep and breathing disorder is a serious health threat. The findings, from brain scan studies conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, show for the first time that sleep apnea is associated with tissue loss in brain regions that store memory. And while the thinking and focus problems of sleep apnea patients often are attributed to sleep deprivation, the scans show something far more insidious is occurring.

Heaven's having fun rocking with Ali Farka Toure. This video's from last.fm and is a live peformance of the track 'Amandrai' (from Talking Timbuktu) from the Segou Festival in Mali and features Bassekou Kouyate on ngoni along with Farka Toure.



Previous posts on Ali Farka Toure: 1, 2. Also two posts on his son, Vieux: 1, 2.

Some of my earlier posts about music from West Africa, in particular Mali: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

via http://blog.prathambooks.org/2008/06/is-google-making-us-stupid.html

via http://blog.prathambooks.org/2008/06/is-google-making-us-stupid.html

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

So asks Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic.

“For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

I should have gone to see her when she performed in Boston last year at the Berkeley Performance Center.

Cesaria Evora, the singer from Cape Verde, in a haunting performance of a morna, Besame Mucho.



Also: An interview with the singer on NPR's All Things Considered from June 2007.

Presenting three videos featuring a Malian singer, Rokia Traore, whose voice I have loved second only to the incomparable Salif Keïta (illustrative songs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), ever since I first heard her in early 2007.







P.S. Another very capable Malian singer is Oumou Sangare (songs: 1, 2) but more about her some other time.

Brilliant performance by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan from 1985, thanks to youtube. A shorter excerpt of the same is here. "A Voice from Heaven" indeed [1]!

A more recent performance is here. (Many other shorter clips also on youtube, available through "Related videos" at the above links. I've spent a good hour or two listening to the Ustaad this morning.)

Sometimes, you become famous 10+ years after your (premature) death, thanks to a TV show watched by millions.

Jeffrey Scott Buckley (November 17, 1966 – May 29, 1997), raised as Scotty Moorhead, was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. (In 1997), while awaiting the arrival of his band from New York, he drowned during an evening swim in the Wolf River. His body was found on June 4, 1997

Buckley's first #1 came posthumously in March 2008 when "Hallelujah" topped Billboard's Hot Digital Songs following a performance of the song on American Idol.

The song was originally written and sung by Leonard Cohen. You can see Buckley performing the song live here and here. There are quite a few other singers who have attempted this song, as seen unde related videos at the above youtube links.

A well-written biography of Buckley can be read here. It seems that, sadly, like Jeffrey, who drowned and died at age 30, his father, Tim Buckley (also a musician), died from an accidental drug overdose in 1975 at age 28!

On June 25, 1975, at the age of 28, Tim Buckley was dead from an accidental drug overdose.

Another interesting tidbit gleaned at the above link:

An ardent enthusiast for a myriad of musical forms, Jeff Buckley was an early champion among young American musicians for the work of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the world's foremost Qawwali (the music of the Sufis) singer. Buckley conducted an extensive interview with Nusrat in Interview magazine (January 1996) and wrote the liner notes for the singer's The Supreme Collection album which was released on Mercator/Caroline Records in August 1997.

Hmm.. I thought it was the soundtrack in the movie, Dead Man Walking, that introduced Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to the western world. Maybe the music connoisseurs knew him - the movie just made him more popular; just as American Idol has popularized Buckley.

Note: Found out about Buckley and this song via this question in India Uncut's Workoutable section.

Literary feuds are fun. Naipaul is in the news again, this time not for throwing pointed barbs at others but for a pointed vitriolic attack on him by a fellow Caribbean Nobel laureate.

The distraction of Walcott vs Naipaul: With his poem, The Mongoose, Derek Walcott attacked his literary contemporary and nemesis - and overshadowed some great new work.

Rhyme and punishment for Naipaul: A wickedly humorous poem by a Nobel prize winner has drawn more blood in a vitriolic feud between literary lions.

And here's an excerpt from Walcott's poem, The Mongoose':

I have been bitten, I must avoid infection
Or else I'll be as dead as
Naipaul's fiction
Read his last novels, you'll see just
what I mean
A
lethargy, approaching the obscene
The model is more ho-hum than
Dickens
The essays have more bite
They scatter chickens like critics,
but
each stabbing phrase is poison
Since he has made that snaring
style
a prison
The plots are forced, the prose
sedate and silly
The
anti-hero is a prick named Willie
Who lacks the conflict of a Waugh or
Lawrence
And whines with his creator's
self-abhorrence

Sam Jordison at the Guardian wonders who amongst fthe amous writers today will be 'lost' and unknown in the near future. The comments from readers below Sam's post provide some exciting food for thought. (Strangely, he lists authors that I have read and loved: Auster, McEwan, and Rushdie (only pre-2000 though). I have read a little bit of Bellow (who I often confuse him with Salinger) but have not read anything from Pynchon yet.)

Plenty of the authors who seem terribly important today will soon be stuck on the shelves gathering dust just as fast Delderfield and co. Paul Auster, Thomas Pynchon, Saul Bellow, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie ... It's hard to say who will stay and who will go - but fun to guess. So now it's over to you. Who will disappear, and why? And if I do decide to make that link and read a book by Delderfield, can anyone tell me a good place to start?

RIP, Bob Diddley, the undisputed heavyweight champion of rock.

Diddley's gonna play on in heaven (if there is one), and he'll live on in our memories through his music.




And here's Bo in 1955 on the Ed Sullivan Show, where, as wikipedia enlightens:

...he infuriated the host. "I did two songs and he got mad," Bo Diddley later recalled. "Ed Sullivan said that I was one of the first colored boys to ever double-cross him. Said that I wouldn't last six months". The show had requested that he sing Tennessee Ernie Ford's hit "Sixteen Tons", but, when he appeared on stage, he sang "Bo Diddley" instead. This substitution resulted in his being banned from further appearances.

and here's Bo Diddley in 1966.



Thanks to the Guardian, they've compiled some YouTube clips of Bo Diddley here.