Have been hearing really good things about a recent book by James Wood called How Fiction Works ($14.40 only at amazon.com! already available at 40% discount from publisher's price!). If you google it, you will find many reviews of the book (for example, see links below)... but it also came highly recommended from Amit Varma, whose literary tastes I trust.

Also, in addition to Virginia Woolf's great book on the art of fiction, Mystery and Manners, which I read a chapter from recently, E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel is also a good book to read on the subject. And there is Francine Prose's more recent book Reading Like a Writer.

So much to read...where's the time to write! hah! :)

--
I had compiled links to reviews of Wood's book ...though instead of reading all these reviews, I'm going to try to get hold of the book and read the book itself. Be more instructive and constructive! ;)

NY Magazine
Bold Type
Newsweek
Slate
TNR
Christian Science Monitor
Independent, UK
International Herald Tribune (originally published in the NYT)
Times, UK
Salon
Guardian, UK

--
Also, I had compiled a list of reviews of another book that is also about writing (not a how-to manual but thoughts about the process of writing) - Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running . Like the Boldtype review says:

For acclaimed Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, the act of running and the act of writing are inextricably linked — like two sides of the same track-shaped Mobius Strip. Murakami stresses the importance of training in both disciplines, debunking misconceptions about the writerly life as he goes.”

...

The book artfully marries two topics that many people don't often see as going together — sports and creativity. The result is a fantastic read with broad appeal; beyond just runners and writers, What I Talk About holds inspiration for anyone who's passionate about an athletic or creative endeavor.

Seems like worthwhile reading, though I do not run and since my writing workshop ended, I have gone back to my lazy ways and not attempted writing either! Its a lot of work and needs the kind of discipline that I lack! In Murakami's words:

"The whole process (of writing) — sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track — requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine."

Like the Boldtype review says at the end:

If you're resting on your laurels — or worse yet, your daydreams — What I Talk About will come as a rousing reminder that there's no substitute for hard work. Indeed, practice makes perfect.

Hmmm.. no laurels to rest on here - just me and my daydreams! Or as a friend calls it 'khayali pulao'.

---
In any case, reviews of Murakami's include:

Economist review
New York Sun review
Bookslut review
LA Times review
Telegraph review
Herald Tribune review
Complete Review
The Slate review
Newsweek review
Guardian review
Times Online review

Though I recommend that you skip the reviews and just read the book! Or go running... get some fresh air (like I need to after being at the computer the whole day!)

Found this article in the Boston Globe about the The Burlesque Poetess via the New Yorker book blog.

When Jojo Lazar bursts onstage, she's usually clad in velvet and satin, her glamorous 1920s getup accessorized with evening gloves, a fancy hat, shiny baubles, and, well, quite a bit of original verse tucked into her lacy underthings.

“No venue’s too small for me to take off my trench coat and say, ‘Choose your own adventure. Shall it be the sonnet in my brassiere or the ghazal in my garter?' ”

Now that's one way to popularize poetry. Take note, Charles Simic. :)

P.S. Oops. Didn't realize Simic's year as Poet Laureate of the US was already over. Its Kay Ryan now - a name I was not familiar with before today. How time flies! It feels like it was just yesterday that Simic took over from Donald Hall!

To quote our current poet laureate then...

"Poems are transmissions from the depths of whoever wrote them to the depths of the reader. To a greater extent than with any other kind of reading, the reader of a poem is making that poem, is inhabiting those words in the most personal sort of way. That doesn’t mean that you read a poem and make it whatever you want it to be, but that it’s operating so deeply in you, that it is the most special kind of reading."

So..go forth and inhabit those lacy underthings ya'll! :)

I read three or four pieces from Louis Erdrich's Love Medicine earlier this summer and was very impressed by her voice. I learned at the same time at the writing workshop I attended that she has a new novel called The Plague of Doves, which sounds like something I should read soon.

Like this reviewer in the NYT writes:

In “The Plague of Doves,” Erdrich returns to familiar territory, the stark plains of North Dakota, where the little town of Pluto sits beside rusting railroad tracks, slowly dying. What’s killing it? Old grudges, lack of opportunity, long-haul trucking, modernity itself. A civic-wide aversion to ambition doesn’t help.

..

Pluto’s modest citizens live lives of quiet rectitude punctuated by outbursts of lust and crime, the one often precipitating the other. These folks don’t need closets to hold their skeletons, they need storage units. Not that carnal desire and embezzlement — and kidnapping and vigilante murder and sweet-justice murder and death by bee sting — are such bad things, but the people of Pluto wear the history of these acts like heavy overcoats. They can’t escape their own past, or their grandfathers’ past. No wonder the kids are high-tailing it for the bright lights of Fargo.

(You can read an excerpt from the first chapter here but there was also a piece in the New Yorker a few years ago by Erdrich by the same name.)

I'm going to have to read the book later this year -- too many other books on my nightstand already. But the life of the Indians in the Dakotas is a foreign world to me...and it is for that very reason, more than for the author's wonderful writing, that I want to read more. For we read to go where our lives would otherwise not go, to hear stories that we would otherwise not hear, to experience feelings that we would otherwise not feel, and to realize, through this "interaction" that in the end human feelings and failings are the same everywhere. (Though I would hardly say my life is one of "quiet rectitude punctuated by outbursts of lust and crime." :))

Amit Varma writes:

...I can embrace ambiguity, and follow threads. More and more, I feel myself drawn towards the latter—it makes me more certain of myself, if that makes sense.

I kinda understand and identify with that feeling. For the most part ambiguity is unsettling and discomforting to most but there is also a certain level of comfort in ambiguity. I myself never voice any strong opinions (just not my temperament) and its not all for the good since I am sure I suffer from it too at times. However, when people make broad conclusions and voice strong opinions, they often comes across as know-it-all's, which is rather off-putting. My aversion to religious wingnuts likely stems from the same discomfort with certainty. By its very nature, the unconditional nature of religious belief demands that certainty...but I would rather see shades of gray than black-and-white absoluteness. I mentioned to someone earlier this week that I am kinda tired of books like Freakanomics too that pose as if they have all the answers to understanding society and human interactions. That aversion is likely another manifestation of the same discomfort with certainty.

P.S. Haha...re-reading the above, I saw the 2nd word "kinda" and took it out. Then thought... no... it should stay. It says I am not 100% sure I understand and identify with Amit's feeling. Let that uncertainty remain. :) Kinda hate books like Freakanomics too. Am not completely shying away from reading such books again but I read them with a pinch of salt; like one should read everything, I suppose. :)

Per old records, I had read 3-4 stories from Runaway by Alice Munro in August 2005 and although I do not remember the stories, I do not think "Silence" was one of them. I just read the story, included in the 2005 Best American Short Stories compilation and was reminded of why readers everywhere (and critics, based on how many times her stories from the New Yorker make it to the Best American Short Stories series) love Munro's short stories. Despite her prolific writing, she manages to deliver a punch every time. Like the author Mona Simpson wrote about her, she..

“understands reality in a complex, capacious way, leaving intact its dimensions of dream and wonder, its shadings of the fantastic.”

Or as another great exponent of the short story genre, Lorrie Moore wrote in her review of Runaway,

There are no happy endings here, but neither are these tales tragedies. They are constructions of calm perplexity, coolly observed human mysteries. One can feel the suspense, poolside, as well as any reader of The Da Vinci Code; one can cast a quick eye toward one's nine-year-old on the high dive and get back to the exact sentence where one left off. The thrilling unexpectedness of real life, which Munro rightly insists on, will in her hands keep a reader glued -- even if that reader is torn by the very conflicts (work to do, kid on the high dive) dramatized therein.

Or in Munro's own words from an earlier story, that Moore quotes from in her review:

Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self—my old devious, ironic, isolated self—beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss.

I have long wanted to sit down with a book of Munro's short stories and hope to do just that starting this Friday into the long weekend. Right now, I feel the urge to get Runaway again and read the other two stories "Chance" and "Soon" that narrate earlier stories from the life of the central character of Silence, Juliet but what I will be reading is some of her earlier work, compiled as Selected Stories in 1996. Another compilation of her stories will be published later this year with a foreword by Margaret Atwood - Alice Munro's Best: Selected Stories.

Speaking of her recent work, you can read her most recent story in the New Yorker, Deep-Holes here. (What's with hyphenated story titles. Just heard last month of a good Jhumpa Lahiri story from the New Yorker called Hell-Heaven, which I believe is included in her recently published 2nd collection of short stories, The Unaccustomed Earth.)

P.S. The title of this post comes from the last line of the story:

She hopes, as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, or things of that sort.

P.S. S. I did not realize that Alice Munro is 77 years old!

Just finished Albert Moravia's well-written novel Conjugal Love, a short and delectable 142 pages, though I ruined some of the fun by reading it in many sittings over a month!

Here's an excerpt from the novel, gleaned from a review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.

"A malignant force was driving me to accumulate repetitions, solecisms, unclear limping formulations, uncertain descriptions, emphatic locutions, platitudes, and cliches. But above all I felt that my prose lacked rhythm, that regular, harmonious breathing that sustains flow, just as meter sustains and regulates the motion of poetry. . . . I stumbled, stuttered, lost myself in a tumult of discordances and stridencies."

I won't be writing a review but all I can say is that the novel suffers from none of the above ills and was very enjoyable, even in translation. The much-acclaimed novel, Contempt (made into a movie by the French new wave director, Jean Luc Godard) is probably the next Moravia novel to read. Or maybe Moravia's other acclaimed novel Conformist, which was made into a movie by Bernardo Bertolucci.

Cleansing the undertaking this evening, so to speak, with the amazing voice of Salif Keita (interview) The track's called Folon. (This version has subtitles translating the words too, though I would rather just listen to the voice, even without understanding what he is saying.)




Next is Cape Verde's Cesaria Evora - the Queen of mornas - singing Mar de Canal.




And last but not least, one group that I hope to see live some day - Tinariwen, playing here with Carlos Santana!



Lots of music from Africa on idamawatu's channel on youtube.
--
Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself. ~Henry Ward Beecher

There's music in the sighing of a reed;
There's music in the gushing of a rill;
There's music in all things, if men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.
~Lord Byron

http://www.jazz.com/jazz-blog/2008/1/29/remembering-bill-evans

Date: 8-21-2008
Time: 12.50pm, EST.
Location: my car
Radio Station: WHRB
The song: "I'm so lonesome i could cry" by Bill Frisell (guitar), Ron Carter (bass), Paul Motian (drums). (You can listen to it through Rhapsody.)

For just a few minutes, there was nothing else but me, the music, and a little bee I sighted buzzing around a solitary white flower nodding along in the wind. Now I know what Berthold Auerbach meant when he said: Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

And Longfellow said it more poetically (though this was not night, for a few minutes, the infectious cares did steal away.)

And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs
And as silently steal away.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day Is Done

-
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. ~Leopold Stokowski

Having just listened to Jim Morrison, I ran into a few quotes by him, which I thought I'd add to my blog.

“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you're letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.”

That's what real love amounts to- letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending- performing. You get to love your pretence. It's true, we're locked in an image, an act.”

“Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.”

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on and individual level. It's got to happen inside first. You can take away a man's political freedom and you won't hurt him- unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him. That kind of freedom can't be granted. Nobody can win it for you.”

From Indian classical music to something completely different. Rock music by Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison! (Yeah... just listening to various kinds of music on youtube this afternoon!)

First up, Hendrix - this should tell you why they deify him like they do! See him play the Star Spangled Banner on guitar at Woodstock (August 1969)



Also:

Voodoo Chile also from Woodstock (there's also another longer version.)

Purple Haze, live in Atlanta, 1970

Foxy Lady - 1968

and here some rare footage of him jamming with the Stones!

Top class stuff...even though I usually am more a fan of the blues guitarists who influenced him -- B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Elmore James, Howling Wolf, etc.

Here's one video of Santana, also from Woodstock and a link to an amazing piece by Santana with Clapton (who, as we know IS God.)



And just one video from The Doors - Light My Fire, my favorite of their many classics. (Though many may remember this rendering of the song, when Jim ticked off Ed Sullivan by not replacing the word "higher" with something ....er less innocuous!)



Enjoy! Enough music for now, though I am not done. I'm going to go get ready for some classical music tonight - a free concert, thanks to the City of Boston, featuring the Orchestre Symphonique des Jeunes de Strasbourg.

And following up from Shakti, here are three videos to introduce you to the beauty of Indian classical music - something I have unfortunately not covered so far in my posts on music. African music, jazz, blues... but no Indian classical music so far!

L. Shankar was part of Shakti, but his brother, L. Subramaniam is eminently renowned as a master violinist of arguably even greater repute. First up, a video from a recent performance in April 2008



Here's the internationally renowned (thanks to association with George Harrison and the Beatles) sitar player, Ravi Shankar (father of Norah Jones)



and here's Ravi Shanker introducing the tabla maestro, Ustad Allah Rakha on what appears to be a French program in the 1970s.



There may be other good videos featuring the famed father-son tabla maestros Allah Rakha and Zakir Hussain -- but this video is the best that I found on youtube and will serve for illustrative purposes of what the tabla maestros can achieve in jugalbandhis. Also see this hour long feature featuring Hariprasad Chaurasia on the flute and Zakir Hussain on the tabla. (I have had the pleasure of seeing both of them live in the 1990s.)

And now a change in flavor from Miles Davis's cool jazz*...

..hear this amazing music from the band, Shakti playing at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976.





* Though there is a link .... John McLaughlin was one of the musicians in Bitches Brew and was part of the group Shakti, where he played with 3 famous Indian musicians - L. Shankar (violin), Zakir Hussain (tabla), Thetakudi Harihara Vinayakram (ghatam).

Yesterday, on WGBH's evening jazz program, I heard an excerpt of the track Fisherman, Strawberry and Devil Crab from the Porgy and Bess album by Miles Davis . Sublime!

The album features arrangements by Davis and collaborator Gil Evans from George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess. The album was recorded in four sessions on July 22, July 29, August 4 and August 18 in 1958 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York City.

You can listen to the track via Rhapsody or via Last.fm.

Here's couple other great tracks by The Miles Davis quintet (Miles, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams) from 1967.

'Round midnight


I fall in love too easily


I love the above two tracks much more than the tracks (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) from his much acclaimed album from 1969- Bitches Brew. (I just realized that Teo Macero, who died earlier this year in February, produced Bitches Brew and Miles Davis's famous album Kind of Blue as well as another all-time great Jazz album - Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quintet, which includes what is arguably my favorite jazz track - Take Five, which I had linked to in my first ever post featuring music.

The title comes from something Miles said about the Porgy & Bess album:

When Gil wrote the arrangement of "I Loves You, Porgy," he only wrote a scale for me... gives you a lot more freedom and space to hear things... fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them. Classical composers have been writing this way for years, but jazz musicians seldom have.

An ant's social status

Whether an ant becomes a dominant queen or a lowly worker is determined by both nature and nurture, it turns out. A new study found that an ant's social status in its colony depends both on its genetic inheritance and the food it eats when it is young.

Earlier: Why ants rule.

No point to this post. Its not even blog-worthy perhaps. What can I say! Obviously, I'm just not as busy as an ant. Oh -- the phrase is 'busy as a bee', you say? Oh well -- different species, same order, wiki enlightens. (Wiki has a whole lot more information on ants, if they interest you!)

I have blogged about happiness a few times before -- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 -- but it is amazing how many have tried to analyze, dissect, and quantify happiness, a state of being, in the last few years.

In the last few decades, people have tried to quantify happiness through Felicific calculus and indexing the happiness levels and quality of life in various countries through the Human Development Index and the Well-Being Index.

In the last couple years, the Freakanomics blog has had a number of 'experts' on the subject further dissecting data from these indices and from other surveys. I'll link only to the 2008 posts here; 2007 had its own share of posts that explored the link worldwide between Health, Wealth and Happiness!

In April-May this year, Arthur Brooks, author of the recent book, Gross National Happiness, caught a lot of attention with his opinion that Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals, arrived at from his analysis of several sources of non-partisan survey data. In subsequent posts he explored the reasons for this large, persistent “happiness gap” favored the political right viz. religion* and where d view matters. Apparently, even Princeton professor Daniel Kahneman, who has pioneered happiness measurement techniques, thinks that conservatives think the world is fairer than liberals do, and this makes them happy.

In a fourth piece, instead of bucketing people into liberal-vs-conservatives, Brooks looks at moderates vs. people on the extremes. The result of his analysis may surprise you.

A happiness edge enjoyed by the extremes persists even if we control for the other relevant forces like income, education, race, religion, and so on.

In a fifth post, he explored the reasons why zealots are happier than people with moderate views!

To review, then: Extremists may be the happiest people on both the left and right. But as a general rule, they don’t like you — unless you agree with them.

Being by no means extreme in any of my viewpoints, I now know the source of my apparent discontent. :) More seriously, I think this goes back to the paper I just blogged about and has to do with being content and ignorant in our biases and our perceptions of others but being supremely confident and arrogant about ourselves. If that is what it takes to be happy, no wonder I am anything but.

There has also been a series of articles on the subject by Justin Wolfers but I do not have the time right now to read them all - so will just link to them here, if any one is interested.

Happiness Inequality #3: Putting It All Together
Happiness Inequality #2: Differences Between Groups
Happiness Inequality #1: The Facts
The Economics of Happiness, Part 6: Delving Into Subjective Well-Being
The Economics of Happiness, Part 5: Will Raising the Incomes of All Raise the Happiness of All?
The Economics of Happiness, Part 4: Are Rich People Happier than Poor People?
The Economics of Happiness, Part 3: Historical Evidence
The Economics of Happiness, Part 2: Are Rich Countries Happier than Poor Countries?
The Economics of Happiness, Part 1: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox

Wolfers's recent research with Betsey Stevenson has been recently published as a journal paper, Happiness Inequality in the United States, and is downloadable here. The paper has been summarized here. (Justin and Betsey, who happen to be partners and are both economists at Wharton, have also studied and analyzed the institution of marriage through the lens of economics. You can read some of their Freakanomics posts on the subject, if interested. Happiness of married vs. unmarried people is a whole other topic, which I am not interested in getting into here.)

-
* On a related note, I found this in comments section of a post at Econlog. :)

"atheists are disproportionately rich and educated, have higher intelligence, and are overrepresented among elites."

Aah...nice to know. I'm disproportionately rich and educated, very intelligent, elitist...and unhappy! ;)

Update: Forget everything I wrote about in this post so far. I just read something that has one sentence that probably is all we need to know about happiness.
Seth Godin writes about destroying happiness:

A journalist asked me, Most people have a better standard of living today than Louis XIV did in his day. So why are so many people unhappy?

What you have doesn't make you unhappy. What you want does.

And want is created by us, the marketers.

Marketers trying to grow market share will always work to make their non-customers unhappy. It's interesting to note that marketers trying to maintain market share have a lot of work to do in reminding us that we're happy.

My post is not to highlight the unique way Seth Godin categorizes marketers but to highlight the italicized sentence (his emphasis) about what makes us (un)happy and what does not. It sounds cliched but actually encompasses a deep truism that many of us tacitly understand but likely find very hard to utilize in the way we live our lives.

Seems elementary and cliched but there is a truism here. Emily Pronin, in a paper in the prestigious Science magazine in May this year, writes about how people see themselves differently from how they see others.

They are immersed in their own sensations, emotions, and cognitions at the same time that their experience of others is dominated by what can be observed externally. This basic asymmetry has broad consequences. It leads people to judge themselves and their own behavior differently from how they judge others and those others' behavior. Often, those differences produce disagreement and conflict. Understanding the psychological basis of those differences may help mitigate some of their negative effects.

You can read the above paper as well as many of her other related papers through her website.

Wisconsin bans 8 year old from performing the blues in bars and clubs

When Tallan "T-Man" Latz was 5, he saw Joe Satriani playing guitar on TV. "I turned around to my dad and said, 'That's exactly what I want to do.'" Three years and countless hours of practicing later, 8-year-old Tallan is a blues guitar prodigy. He's played in bars and clubs, including the House of Blues in Chicago, and even jammed with Les Paul and Jackson Browne. He has a summer of festivals scheduled and has drawn interest from venues worldwide.

And what, you might ask, would a kid not even in the third grade have the blues about? The state of Wisconsin for one, and some possibly jealous older musicians for another. An anonymous e-mail sent to state officials complained that Tallan was too young to perform in taverns and nightclubs because of state child labor laws. His booking agent even got an anonymous letter threatening her with death if she keeps booking him.

I'd understand their beef (no..that's not a pun on Wisconsin :)) if they'd crib about him being in bars and lounges, where any one under 21 is normally not allowed... but to claim he as an entertainer is subject to state child labor laws is to say Wisconsin will not allow Dakota Fanning (or any other kid artiste) to come shoot in the state?

Anyways, you are free to sit back and enjoy his guitar strumming though... :)



Also, another 8 year old guitar phenom - Japan's Yuto Miyazawa


And apparently, there is an Argentine whiz-kid who is quite adept on the guitar too - Lucciano Pizzichini.

"Every day and age has its rules. Currently, good behavior dictates that we be politically correct, evade conflicts, espouse tolerance, and make no hasty judgments. To be judgmental is viewed as one of the most reprehensible human traits. People are likely to think today that an optimist is a good person, while a pessimist is the lowest of the low. Picking your nose in public is more forgivable then being pessimistic. [. . .] We live in a time that urges us to behave as if we are in paradise. Yet the world we live in is no paradise. This book breaks the rules of good behavior, because it bickers."

That's from a description of a new book of essays: Nobody's Home by Dubravka Ugresic, a Croatian writer
who left her homeland after being vilified for her uncompromising criticism of Croatian nationalism (see her book: The Culture of Lies),and now lives in Amsterdam.

Reviews of the book, soon to be released in a US edition, can be read here.

I believe I had seen the book - The Novel in Three Lines by Felix Feneon - at the library or in some bookstore during my random perusals through new books shelves last year. I should get it... sounds worth a delectable read, providing...

..quick word snapshots of news from the provinces; other people’s (usually) bad news, served on hors d’oeuvre picks. In Fénéon’s hands, early-20th-century France appears as a slide show, flashing scenes both homely and bizarre.

This sounds interesting for the same reasons, I love Postsecrets as well as some of the better done entries at One Sentence or Six Word Memoirs ..... providing interesting insights into life with a poignancy and wit that only brevity can engender. Or like the above reviewer writes:

Are they semaphores of the political and social world of France circa 1906, glimpses of another time, slices of cruel humanity and crueler fate, human folly etched on the head of a pin? They are all those things, and further evidence that the marks we leave are often humbly disguised. Swift as captions, tasty as lyrics — “novels in three lines” just about nails them.

Enough said! (Brevity is not my strong point. Neither is wit.)

On a day when the world remembers some other adventurers, who unfortunately lost their life on K2 this week, read about Phillipe Petit, another maverick, whose exploit took the world by storm one gray morning in New York 34 years back.

‘O death in life,’ wrote Tennyson, ‘the days that are no more.’ James Marsh’s feature documentary Man on Wire, which revisits Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers is, among other things, a joyous ode to living and a lament for the days that are no more. It makes no explicit mention of the events of 11 September 2001, but death hovers on the fringes, like distant dark clouds threatening the clear blue sky, and our knowledge of what later befell the Towers coats the innocent lunacy of Petit’s actions with poignancy.

Also two recent articles from The NYTimes and The Guardian about his dare-devil act.

I had missed this brilliant New Yorker magazine cover couple years ago on the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Interestingly, the movie, which won the Grand Jury Prize: World Cinema Documentary and the World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary at the 2007 Sundance festival, does not overtly refer to the 9-11 tragedy.

Wikipedia has this rather interesting nugget of information:

Petit's high-wire walk is credited with bringing the then rather unpopular Twin Towers much needed popular attention and affection. Up to that point, many had regarded them as ugly and utilitarian, and the not-yet completed buildings were having trouble renting their office space.

Here's Petit remembering and talking about the act in an interview this year along with the director of the movie.

Apparently, he had left a mark of his bravery - now, along with many lives and a lot else, it is gone.

I just blogged about Michael Cunningham's well-written, much-praised, and innovative and creative novel, Specimen Days.

Such a great book...so much effort... such talent...and Powell.com site says: "List Price $25.00 Your Price: $8.95." Amazon.com has it for $11.20 and through amazon marketplace, you can buy it for prices starting at $0.01 plus S&H. Sad, isn't it? Now see what I meant when I wrote this, disillusioned about writing after seeing the fate of good books in a book store.

Though, as Cunningham himself says in an interview with Charlie Rose, one writes for the joy of writing; not because one hopes to be published in the New Yorker (which Michael apparently did after many many rejections from them) or win the Pulitzer Prize.

And here is inspiration for writers from something else he says in the Rose interview about Mrs. Dalloway, shortly after comparing Virginia Woolf's art to Jim Hendrix riffing on his guitar:

"There are no uninteresting or ordinary lives; there are only inadequate ways of looking at them. If looked at with sufficient penetration and artistry, every single person alive is potentially a great figure of literature."

"Truly new ways and days receive, surround you, and yet the same old human race, the same within, without, faces and hearts the same, feelings the same, yearnings the same, the same old love, beauty and use the same." - Walt Whitman, in Leaves of Grass.

I found the above quote while reading an interview at Powell.com with Michael Cunningham about his novel Specimen Days, in which he uses the above quote as an epigraph. After the success of The Hours and Home at the End of the World, he has written another well-received and innovative novel (actually three novellas), this one featuring..

..three pairs of protagonists: Simon and Catherine, Simon and Cat, and Simon and Catareen; three New Yorks, circa 1850, 2000, and 2150 (or thereabout); and three narrative styles: a Victorian ghost story, an urban thriller, and science fiction.

Or as the New York magazine review put it:

The three novellas—a ghost story, a neo-noir tale, and a turn at science fiction—feel rather like attempts at exorcism. When characters quote the poet, they’re displaying not an affinity but a symptom. A self-destructive boy blurts out lines of Whitman’s verse as if they were the expletives of a Tourette’s patient or the calculations of an autistic. Terrorists cite Leaves of Grass to justify suicide bombings. A robot with runaway emotionality is irritated by an implanted poetry chip, which causes him to say, “I understand the large hearts of heroes, the courage of present times and all times,” to a surveillance drone considering whether to zap him into molten titanium and gobbets of artificial flesh.

I have not read any of Cunningham's novels. Obviously, this needs to be corrected!

In a previous post, I expressed an opinion about how the graphic novel medium allows writers to approach tough topics without getting maudlin and over-sentimental.

I just now noted that Edward Said says similar things (and more) in a preface to Joe Sacco's graphic novel, Palestine:

Comics provided one with a directness of approach (the attractively and literarly overstated combination of pictures and words) that seemed unassailably true on the one hand, and marvelously close, impinging, familiar on the other. In ways that I still find fascinating to decode, comics in their relentless foregrounding - far more, say, than film cartoons or funnies, seemed to say what couldn't otherwise be said, perhaps what wasn't permitted to be said or imagined, defying the ordinary processes of thought, which are policed, shaped and re-shaped by all sorts of pedagogical as well as ideological pressures.

The graphic novel, Palestine, is "about his experiences in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in December 1991 and January 1992. Sacco gives a portrayal which emphasizes the history and plight of the Palestinian people, as a group and as individuals."

The longlist of 13 books, often referred to as the ‘Man Booker Dozen', were announced yesterday. The following titles were chosen from 112 entries.

Aravind Adiga The White Tiger
Gaynor Arnold Girl in a Blue Dress
Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture
John Berger From A to X
Michelle de Kretser The Lost Dog
Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs
Mohammed Hanif A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency
Joseph O'Neill Netherland
Salman Rushdie The Enchantress of Florence
Tom Rob Smith Child 44
Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole

I have not read any one of these novels* and heard of only 3 of them (the one's bolded above) before today - all three by Indian sub-continent authors. More updates later with some reviews of these three books by people who have read them!

* This is true every year -- see my 2006 and 2007 Booker nomination posts!

P.S. I wished him via email but let me take this occasion to publicly congratulate my friend, Amit Varma who made the longlist in the 2nd Man Asian Literary Prize - the Asian equivalent of the Booker - which were announced 10 days back. Quite remarkable for a first novel - one which he himself has said was written under severe time restrictions in a short time-frame. I wish him well. Maybe we can even expect a surprise win even like the one last year? :) Weirder things have happened... like raining frogs. Ok..that was in a movie. Ok..raining fish? Oh..that's a novel I just read! :)

Last week, I picked up Are you somebody - The accidental memoir of a Dublin woman by Nuala O'Faloain: a very unlikely book for me to pick up as firstly I do not like reading memoirs and secondly, if the sex of the reviewers at amazon.com is anything to go by, this is a book that women would enjoy reading much more than men, since it is a bit feminist, (if that's the right word for someone who believes in choices for woman, then I'm a feminist too!) - she talks a lot about what choices were available to women in the Ireland of 1950s and 1960s - very few! [Listen to her on NPR in an interview from 2001, when she published her first novel: My dream of you. ]

Anyways, to my surprise, though unimpressed by the language, I have lasted through almost 40% of the book - jumping through some chapters which were very tedious to read and even excusing the self-pity she indulges in from time to time, with the consideration that this is something I am good at too!

As is my wont, I always try to find out more about the books and authors I read and so I did a google-search for Ms. Faolain and this is what I find:

Nuala O'Faolain died of lung cancer at age 68 in May this year.

What a coincidence that I first hear of this author only a few months after her death. The title comes from something she said in an interview a month before her death: "I don’t want more time. As soon as I heard I was going to die, the goodness went from life". Also, more self-pity:

Shortly before her death, Ms. O’Faolain gave a spirited, tearful interview on Ireland’s most popular radio program in which she reflected on life, love and her impending death. “I thought there would be me and the world, but the world turned its back on me,” she said. “The world said to me, ‘That’s enough of you now, and what’s more, we’re not going to give you any little treats at the end.’ ”

I can understand feeling cheated for one's life ending at age 68. I am sure my dad felt the same; not expecting to die at age 66. Not that it makes it any easier to handle but the fact remains that many men die in their late 30s and 40s due to sudden unexpected heart attacks or women in their 50s due to cancer. Many live well into their 80s and 90s, living full and sometimes not-so-full lives too. Whatever be the age, I think that some day I also might leave this world whining and wallowing in self-pity like that. Until then, I better figure out how to spend my life fully. Easier said than done!

Speaking of Rilke quoting mammoths, here is good advice from Rilke, taken from his Letters to a Young Poet.

Write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty - describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds - wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories?

Also from the above link to the book, this quote:

Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside.

I need to buy the book (only $5.95) and read/devour it; as well as his other interestingly titled book: On Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations, which per one of the reviews at the link has this amazing quote about love.

"What ruthless magnificence and yet how terrible to ignite love; what conflagration, what disaster, what doom.To be on fire yourself, of course , if one is capable of it: that may well be worth life and death."

By the way, I found the above quote in an interesting post about writing by Austin Kleon.

Last night and this morning in 2 short sittings, I finished Frederik Peeters' graphic novel, Blue Pills, translated from the French by Anjali Singh.

Like Frederik says in an interview with the Guardian:

"Words are very precise whereas, with images, you can project a lot of yourself on to them. A person can invest their own emotions in an image, like a mirror. People related to this book in different ways."

Fred's story is not so common-place and it encompasses myriad emotions - from love to anxiety to terror to neurotic self-analysis to surreal moments (talking to his alter-ego in the form of a poetry quote spouting mammoth!). Perhaps it is only through pictures that a person can convey all this without getting melodramatic and sentimental. That may be the charm of graphic novels; especially for a certain kind of poignant and angst-ridden story, since it allows the reader to enter a world where not much is said and a lot conveyed.

Another French graphic novel I read last year - Ordinary Victories by Manu Larcenet - was also a very satisfying read. The author portrayed angst and neurosis - the kind that you wake up from sweating and which keeps you up all night - very well. Like great French directors like Godard and Truffaut, France has some budding artistes in the graphic novel genre, who know how to perfectly execute their art to provide us a with poignant and emotion-laden slice of life, without getting overtly melodramatic or sentimental.

P.S. To understand what the "white rhino" is all about, you'll have to read the book.

Speaking of dreams, here is a great website I found yesterday - The Annandale Dream Gazette, a project started by Robert Kelly to compile people's dreams.

So far, I have only read two entries - both by Indians - and both wowed me - nicely written and very symbolic dreams. People really have such interesting dreams even outside of the realms of literature?! My dreams, for better or for worse - not sure which, are so much more banal.

--
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. - Virginia Woolf

Italian author (and chemist) Primo Levi, who was an Auschwitz survivor, wrote in his novel, The Truce:

[And] a dream full of horror has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals. It is a dream within a dream, varied in detail, one in substance. I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside; in short, in a peaceful relaxed environment, apparently without tension or affliction; yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation of an impending threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds, slowly and brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses, and disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything has changed into chaos; I am alone in the centre of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream; my family, nature in flower, my home. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command, of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, "Wstawàch."

We all have our own personal 'Wstawàch' that keep us awake at night!

Also, I did not know that Primo Levi apparently committed suicide (although I read somewhere else that there was some uncertainty about it also.) This is not surprising since I have not read much about him or his writing, except for reading his book of short stories, Periodic Table, in the 1990s. (In fact, buying books in sales, I had somehow ended up with two copies of the book. I was taking one of the copies - almost new - as a gift for one of my friends in India earlier this year and briefly took it out of my bag on the flight and seem to have forgotten it on the plane.)

In fact, I just learned that Primo Levi left behind an unfinished book, which remains unpublished, which was intended as a sequel to The Periodic Table, which...

... takes the form of letters written by a chemist to a woman whom he is instructing in basic chemistry. Levi titled the book Il doppio legame, which can mean either "the double bond" or "the double bind"; the first term from chemistry, the second term from psychology. The double bond is the way in which organic molecules attach to each other: they connect "at two or even more points, making possible richer but also less stable combinations." The double bind Angier defines as "a crippling conflict between contradictory or unfulfillable requirements, which you can neither escape nor win."

Due to its disturbing nature, I have for the most part kept away from Holocaust memoirs. Having just read Viktor Frankl's Man's search for meaning, I wonder if I should read Levi's Aushwitz memoir: If This Is a Man, which has been described as one of the most important works of the twentieth century although it hardly gathered much attention when initially published:

Publishing can be a brutal game of chance. When, in 1947, Primo Levi had finished If This Is a Man , he found only rejection slips and disillusion. Then at last the house of Antonicelli took him up. But Levi's haunting story of Auschwitz was released almost simultaneously with The Path to the Nest of Spiders, Italo Calvino's buoyant tale of partisan revolt.

Two young and brilliant Italian writers, two accounts of war remembered: Levi and Calvino were reviewed together and sold together. Immediately, the upbeat Calvino, feeling good about the new Italy, had his bestseller. The horror of the Holocaust seemed somehow out of time, too near to confront. It would be a decade before one of the great books of the twentieth century was reissued and seen across the world for what it was.

Such are the vagaries of publishing and life. A great book has great trouble finding a publisher but becomes a classic a couple decades later. A man somehow survives the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp but takes his own life four decades later

And so it goes!