Passing it on

Sorry not to have updated in so long. And thanks for your e-mails, i am, indeed, okay :)

Big A and i just returned from Texas after retrieving Li'l A. We had ten days to accomplish that mission, so other than the three blissful days we spent eating platesful of my mom's divine food in San Antonio and the one day celebrating Big A's stepmom's 50th at a luau in Jacksonville, NC, we drove ten-plus hours everyday...

I guess that puts us in the 80 m.p.h. range. But please don't tell. It was bad enough that everytime sirens sounded on a hip-hoptastic gangsta track on the stereo, i instinctively freaked and tried to slow our speeds waaaay down.

Anyway, after listening for the 486th time to the same songs we'd originally started off kinda liking on the radio, we had to switch up stations and try not to chortle (ok--who am i kidding?) as evangelical and twangy talk radio went ape after the latest in airport terror.

And in listening to hitherto undiscovered tracts of Big A's playlist, i came upon this reggae gem:

Pass it on;
Pass it on;
Pass it on;
Pass it on.

Be not selfish in your doings:
Pass it on.
Help your brothers in their needs:
Pass it on.

Now you wouldn't be all mean like and tell me that they're not actually talking about a joint ummm property, right?

INVENTIONS

She says, don’t ever ask me where I go--still
last night they asked her
not to go

Then they watch expertly as her smile shamefully
strains through the sieve
of her teeth

And her excuses perform colorful cartwheels
That finish by lashing into perfect
knots inside her

Still last night they ask her not to go and their
voices become bigger and they
Grow better

And they throw words that are as hard and bouncy
Or breakable as things
that hurt

She makes a tall fence of silence and repeats to herself:
monsters should really only scare
themselves

So that by the time the writing gets to the end of the page
the only thing running is
her mouth

War On--

for a consecutive eighteenth day, today. What's left to say?

The Diameter of the Bomb
Yehuda Amichai (Translated from the Hebrew by Yehuda Amichai and Ted Hughes.)

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective
range - about seven meters.
And in it four dead and eleven wounded.
And around them in a greater circle
of pain and time are scattered
two hospitals and one cemetery.
But the young woman who was
buried where she came from
over a hundred kilometres away
enlarges the circle greatly.
And the lone man who weeps over her death
in a far corner of a distant country
includes the whole world in the circle.
And I won’t speak at all about the crying of orphans
that reaches to the seat of God
and from there onward, making
the circle without end and without God.

HEARSAY

Soon there are eyes in the dark
Tongues in the breeze

That talk and talk
To cold reprise

Traffic sets up its uncertain tune
The night dresses down

Under bloody moons.
Under bloody moons,

Frost cracks the first of many frowns
Stories assemble then decide to drown


________________________________________________________
I've slept badly just about every night this week...

Encounters with Writers: Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri’s inspired reminiscence of Bombay in London Review of Books follows in Suketu Mehta‘s footsteps.

I first met AC and his wife in Oxford. We had these slender details in common: he’d been a post-doctoral fellow at my college, his wife’s advisor was my mentor, we were slightly homesick--meaning we found the company of fellow south-asians significantly enjoyable. Later that year, he visited Chennai (Madras) on a book tour for his third novel, Freedom Song, while i was home for a visit. After his reading at the British Council, my mom, my favorite aunt, and i gabbed with him at the reception and ended up taking him to dinner at the Gym (the Gymkhana Club--where a hundred or so years ago, dogs and Indians weren’t allowed). There you have it: Oxford, British Council, Gymkhana…it sounds like i'm *such* a citizen of empire, but i'm not, i'm not!! :/

There were some terrific conversations: my mom and my aunt are among my best friends and AC got along great with them, very sweetly explaining cultural theory and reminiscing about similar childhood experiences. When I saw him during his next summertime visit to Oxford, he invited me to dinner with his wife and daughter and gave me a copy of his new novel, A New World. Since my first reading of ANW, i haven’t been able to escape the sinking feeling that this portrayal of narrator Jayojit’s wife was based on me:

She began by phoning her parents twice a week… it was her mother, he knew who was her confidante, and could chatter and whisper with her daughter as if she were her twin sister, while with her father Amala, on the phone was still the flirtatious, slightly high-pitched little girl, always being reprimanded for not realizing it was a long-distance call…

Help!! Am I really that super annoying or does that depiction fit most Indian kudis?

Touching Tough

Some girls fantasize about book deals or marriage proposals, I fantasize far more frequently about be(com)ing streetwise and street-tough. This morning, i woke up from dreaming that I was threatening some guy, who had dared accost me on the street, with a fake can of Mace (i.e. it wasn’t actually Mace, but perfume or WD40 or something) saying tough stuff like, “You get that one for free, but don’t try it again. Think again, Loser.”

In other news: My friend Clo and Big A and i are on TV today! The Discovery channel--’cos we be wild like that! (Alright, that would really be Cash Cab @ 5:30 p.m.)

Lady in the… Whatever

Night Shyamalan has curly hair--so I mean… of course it’s a no-contest decision that I *love* him, right?

What hangs in the balance is The Lady in the Water (TLITW), his latest movie, that the critics claim to hate and audiences seem to like.

I like it lots.

But then my willing suspension of disbelief is virtually superhuman and improbabilities and plot holes don’t bother me. Much.

When we saw the movie this weekend, Big A set up a parallel snarktrack in my left ear, making me giggle quite a few times, which I would then try to neutralize, a little too late, by telling him sternly that it wasn’t funny. There is plenty to snark about--Shyamalan sets up an entire mythology--a generally difficult task given that the purported events are neither in the hazy hobbited past or in a galaxy far, far away but rather in a contemporary Philadelphia apartment complex. Plus the entire running time of the movie is an hour and a half; establishing a mythology takes lots more time. George Lucas took decades; Tolkien took a lifetime. True, E.T. did a great job in an hour and a half, but then it had superficial trappings of science and zero gigantic flying eagles to baffle us.

But back to the simplistic TLITW. Shyamalan professes that the movie has its origins in a story he made up for his kids--I’ll buy that. There is an innocence and affection about the tale, an earnest conviction in the goodwill of humans, a distancing of evil to television news (footage of the war loops endlessly on the tube) and night-fears; siblinghood is elevated to a powerful influence, and cooperation rules.

The clearly multi-ethnic, but simultaneously ethnically ambiguous, community that is the apartment complex in which TLITW entirely takes place must work together save Story--a nymph from an alternative world--often putting the lives of its members in danger and on nothing but the word of a waifish, half-clad girl. This is the sort of blind, narrative-saving faith that Shyamalan seems to expect from his viewers. But TLITW is not quite Peter Pan, where we can discharge our responsibilities as audience by clapping as if we believe in fairies. Plus, really, blind faith is something no liberal should demand--after all it is superstitious faith in divinely revealed narratives that is the cause of much of the world’s troubles.

To offset what may seem a authorial demand, so often the events on screen seem a collective exercise in creativity and commitment. Saving Story is a process deeply connected to the way in which the story is saved from nothingness by being reconstituted through a Korean bedtime tale, a child reading a cabinet-full of cereal boxes, a cabal of potheads. The story is pieced together, put together by means of trial and fatal error. The implied metacinematic element --the tagline, after all, is “Time is running out for a happy ending”--is pronounced especially in the fate of the character of Mr. Farber, the movie-critic, but the strong suggestion is that the world’s welfare depends on individuals who choose to work towards a collectivist good.

So that’s the warm-fuzzy/nebulous-fuzzy message--that we’re all connected purposefully: the possibility that a writer severely blocked will meet a mystic nymph and then miraculously go on to write a book that years after his death will sit on a shelf in a kitchen in the Midwest and that a young child who reads it will be inspired to become a brilliant orator and the leader of change in the United States.

Possible?

Hell, Yeah. If we’re willing to believe this account of a Welsh lad listening to 60’s pop on the BBC being influenced by the pre WWII Italian thinker Gramsci to the extent that he names his rock band after one of Gramsci’s books--Scritti Politti--and goes from Madonna-ish and Michael Jackson-like pop arrangements to Reggae and Kraftwerk collaborations and despite dabbling in Derrida, begins to focus on the non ironic, life-affirming power of love; sure.

But back again to TLITW. It’s not a scary movie--I was startled a couple of times (but then my mom’s arrival in a room can startle me--much to her distress) and honestly, the scariest bit was recognizing the once gorgeous Sarita Chowdhury.

And I’m not interested in quibbling about whether the Lady (btw, Bryce Dallas Howard‘s flawlessly planed face is magical in the extreme) is really a girl or is in the water or out of it or flying on an eagle, or if Shyamalan is an arrogant, pretentious, film-school egotist or not. Ummm, did i mention that he has curly hair?