Blowin' In The Wind

Playwright with a punch

What a man.

Wilson wrote standing up, at a high, cluttered accounting desk. For years, an Everlast punching bag was suspended from the ceiling about two steps behind. When Wilson was in full flow and the dialogue was popping, he'd stop, pivot, throw a barrage of punches, then turn back to work. Pinned on a bulletin board were two quotations, as bold as street signs: Take It to the Moon (Frank Gehry) and Don't Be Afraid. Just Play the Music (Charlie Parker).

That's the Pulitzer-winning black American playwright August Wilson (1945-2007) described by the New Yorker's John Lahr in the Guardian. "Write, stop, pivot, punch" is the arresting headline over a face shot of him looking authorial with his cap and goatee. (Photo: Guardian)

I have never read his plays but he must have been a remarkable man, a self-taught genius. He had never read Chekhov, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Nell, Tennessee Williams, or so he claimed.

There are shades of Obama:

Wilson's white father abandoned him and his black mother when he was five years old.

But he had a much harder time. Lahr tells an inspirational story:

The African-American community in Pittsburgh embraced him, nurtured him, educated him and contained his rage at his father's abandonment. Wilson learned of a cigar store and pool hall in his neighbourhood called Pat's Place, where community elders congregated. Pat's Place became his Oxford, and its garrulous denizens -- "walking history books", Wilson called them -- his professors.

In April 1964, Wilson walked to downtown Pittsburgh, put $20 on the counter of a pawnshop, and came away with a heavy black Royal Standard typewriter. He had decided to reinvent himself in the heroic mould of the poet. "What I discovered is that writing was the only thing society would allow me to do," he told me. "I couldn't have a job or be a lawyer because I didn't do all the things necessary. What I was allowed to do was write. If they saw me over in the corner scribbling on a piece of paper, they would say, 'That is just a nigger over in the corner scribbling on a piece of paper.' Nobody said, 'Hey, you can't do that.' So I felt free."

This is a story worth saving.

Honey Ryder, Pussy Galore, Goldfinger

Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder in Dr No was perhaps the most famous of the early Bond girls. But did Ian Fleming name Honey Ryder after the beautiful blonde Muriel Wright, who was nicknamed Honeytop?

Ben McIntyre, author of a new Fleming biography, does not say so in his article in The Times but says the wealthy aristocrat, who made a lot of money modelling swimsuits on the beach at Monte Carlo, loved Fleming. But Fleming called her "Mu", not "Honeytop".

McIntyre says Fleming named many of his characters after friends and acquaintances, some of whom did not like that, though. The architect Auric Goldfinger threatened to halt publication of the thriller, Goldfinger, when he discovered the villain was named after him. McIntyre writes:

Fleming is said to have disapproved of Goldfinger’s love of concrete and the destruction of Victorian houses to make way for tower blocks, and so used his name for one of his most memorable evil-doers.

The villains Hugo Drax in Goldfinger, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the evil head of SPECTRE, and Francisco "Pistols" Scaramanga, who appears in The Man with the Golden Gun, were apparently named after Old Etonians who had been in school with Fleming.

But where did Pussy Galore get her name? Remember the Bond girl from Goldfinger played by Honor Blackman?

McIntyre does not go into that, but his article makes enjoyable reading. It even begins like a story:

One morning in February 1952, in a holiday hideaway on the island of Jamaica, a middle-aged British journalist sat down at his desk and set about inventing a fictional secret agent, a character that would go on to become one of the most successful, enduring and lucrative creations in literature. Ian Fleming had never written a novel before. He had tried his hand at banking, stockbroking and working as a newspaper correspondent. Only during the war, as an officer in naval intelligence, had he found a task – dreaming up schemes to bamboozle the enemy – worthy of his vivid imagination. By 1952, he had settled into a job as a writer and manager on The Sunday Times, a role that involved some enjoyable travel, a little work and a lot of golf, women and lunch. Even his best friends would have snorted at the notion that Ian Fleming was destined for immortality.

Oh well, read on the Times article. YouTube has the famous scene from Dr No. It's pretty amusing. The year was 1962.

And don't miss this love story, also from The Times: Sir Paul McCartney on Linda.

Technorati Tags: ian fleming,james bond

Rushdie wants to write another children's book

Salman Rushdie has the same literary agent as Martin Amis and Philip Roth. Andrew Wylie must be three times lucky to represent such a triumvirate. Or is he? I don't know about Roth, but Rusdhie and Amis are two of the most controversial -- and stylish-- writers around. But Rushdie is better. I would say that, of course. "To Indian people, he's as large as Faulkner or Hemingway," says the Observer interview with Rushdie today. It's a must-read. Rushdie uses the F-word and the Observer prints the full four-letter word. He also disses the Archbishop of Canterbury and praises Margaret Thatcher. He always makes good copy.

Now that Rusdhie's latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, has appeared to rave reviews, he wants to write a children's book next for his second son, Milan.  Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written for his first son, Zafar, was certainly fantastic. But when did Rushdie ever write a bad book? I don't know about The Satanic Verses, though. It is banned both in India and Singapore.

Here are the Enchantress reviews from the Guardian and the Telegraph.

 

Technorati Tags: salman rushdie

Writer says his porn lit outsells his fiction

Bestselling writer Lawrence Block wrote lesbian porn as "Jill Emerson" in the 1960s! So says writer Rupert Smith. He confesses the books he writes in his own name are consistently outsold by the gay porn he writes under the pseudonym, James Lear.

His gay country house murder mystery, The Back Passage, outsold books by the acclaimed thriller writer Alan Hollinghurst and there have even been calls from Hollywood for screen rights, he says.

I first saw his article in The Independent, but The Arts and Letters Daily has linked to it, so it's going to get more traffic. It's quite a revelation. Smith writes:

Pornographic fiction, erotica, "one-handed reading", call it what you will, is a publishing parallel universe. Books sell in large quantities – The Back Passage is now in its fourth reprint – and are gobbled up by extremely diverse audiences. James Lear's most enthusiastic fans are straight women, who love reading about male/male sex. There's an alternative constellation of literary stars in the world of porn...  who enjoy bigger sales than their legit counterparts.

The internet is largely to thank for the rise of erotic literature; it's easier, and less potentially embarrassing, to buy dirty books from Amazon than from your local Waterstone's (who don't stock them anyway). Thanks to networking sites like MySpace, writers can market their work to its target audience – and, if you can't find a publisher, who cares? You can publish it yourself, either in print or online. A lively blogging community reviews and discusses the latest releases with a healthy lack of pigeonholing...

If the readers are diverse, the writers are even more so. It's a field dominated by women, who approach any and every kink with gusto. There are Surrey housewives turning out explicit male homosexual porn. There are specialists in sub-genres like crime porn, horror porn, fetish and historical. In America, there are writers who make a very good living out of nothing but erotic literature.

Smith has two websites -- one in his own name, and a MySpace site as James Lear.

I once came across a whodunit in a Singapore public library where the detective was a lesbian with a steady relationship. I can't recall who the author or the detective was. The sex seemed peripheral to the story: the author merely described the relationship without getting into the actual sex up to the point I read.

Give me Michael Connelly, Elmore Leonard and Ian Rankin any day.

Naipaul, grammar and biography

 

Look at Naipaul. And look at him now. But this is not about youth and age -- but the wrong pronoun. Look at the photo caption:

Naipaul with his long-term lover, Margaret Gooding, who he abandoned for another woman after the death of his wife.

Yes, even Homer nods -- and so does the Telegraph. Both pictures are taken from the Telegraph which has a not so flattering article on Sir Vidia. The headline says it all:

Sir Vidia Naipaul admits his cruelty may have killed his wife.

It's referring to his first wife, Patricia, who died in 1996 after they had been married for 41 years. Naipaul admitted he had been cruel to her. He told his biographer, Patrick French:

It could be said that I killed her.

Two months later, he married his current wife, Nadira, a divorced Pakistani journalist, abandoning his mistress of 24 years, Margaret Gooding.

Read extracts from Patrick French's biography of Naipaul on the Telegraph. You can also listen to French reading from his biography.

French says Naipaul read his manuscript but "requested no changes".

A handy guide against howlers

What The Straits Times needs is a language guide like Bill Walsh. Singapore's main newspaper is prone to the kind of howlers Walsh is paid to prevent.

Walsh is the Washington Post's copy desk chief for national news. He has to edit the news, correct mistakes, trim the fat and polish the copy. He enjoys playing the language cop. Going beyond the call of duty of making the Post shine, he blogs about language and has written books on grammar and style. Lapsing into a Comma contains useful tips which could help prevent boo-boos like these. All the examples are taken from the first three pages of yesterday's Straits Times.

• Armed with their resumes, their questions flew thick and fast at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Boston last month, where Singapore was making its debut. (From the front-page story: Singapore on radar of young scientists)
• Before Boston, Mr Lim was in Pennsylvania, where he scored another coup. (From the same story.)
• The country's scientific output increased by 72 percent from 2000 to last year, according to Wiley-Blackwell, a leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical journal. (From the same story.)
• The Education Ministry says there are more university places, relative to the size of the cohort, this year than any previous year. (From the page 2 blurb: No squeeze on university places.)
• Controversial International Trade Minister Rafidah Aziz was the most notable absence from the new Malaysian Cabinet unveiled yesterday by Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi, who sought to walk the line between reform and strengthening his position in Umno. (From the page three story: KL Cabinet pared down; some fresh faces.)
• He also roped in Umno warlords who lack popular support but will be able to help consolidate his position in the Cabinet. (From the same story.)

Even if you see no need to explain what's wrong with sentences like these, you may still enjoy reading Walsh. He covers a lot of ground. Lapsing into a Comma is a concise, practical, no-nonsense guide useful for bloggers and newspaper writers. But habits are hard to break. If I have broken any of his injunctions here, put it down to the old adage: You can't teach an old dog new tricks.

Naipaul interviewed

The Observer has an interview with Naipaul today. It begins with a delicious anecdote. When the head of the Swedish Academy called him at his home in England in October 2001 to tell him he had won the Nobel Prize, his wife picked up the phone and said he could not be disturbed: he was busy writing!

The interviewer, Robert McCrum, writes:

Everyone agrees that VS Naipaul is fully alive to his own importance. (A) volatile mixture of pride and insecurity illuminates everything about him. 'I am the kind of writer,' he once said, 'that people think other people are reading.'

In the interview:

Naipaul says that A House for Mr Biswas (1961) is 'of all my books, the one that is closest to me'. Its success marked the climax of his youthful career, and he believes that its two years' gestation were 'the most consuming, the most fulfilled, the happiest years of my life. They were my Eden.'

But though it was hailed as a masterpiece and sealed his reputation, which had started growing with his first novel, The Mystic Masseur (1957), there were some unfavourable reviews. Time magazine famously said:

Naipaul's House, though built of excellent exotic materials, sags badly; economy, style, and a less elastic blueprint would have done wonders.

I finished reading A House for Mr Biswas for the second time a few days ago. So I know why it may not be everybody's cup of tea. I myself have mixed feelings about Mr Biswas. I see myself in his ineffectuality. And then all that dialogue in Caribbean English can get a bit tiresome. Do people really speak like that? But it's also a story of progress, of ambition and triumph over adversity. The son of a sugarcane plantation worker, Mr Biswas gets an education, starts life as a sign painter, becomes a journalist, buys a car, becomes a homeowner, sees his children get educated abroad. The success is tempered by failure. He loses his job, the house is jerrybuilt. But that is what makes the story all the more realistic and touching. It's a great book about the immigrant experience. Not even in remote Trinidad do the Indians lose their Indiannness.

McCrum notes Naipaul isn't liked by his fellow Caribbean Nobel Prize winner, the poet Derek Walcott, who said: 'If Naipaul's attitude toward negroes, with its nasty little sneers... was turned on Jews, for example, how many people would praise him for his frankness?'

Naipaul is a deeply polarising figure, reminds McCrum. Even after winning the Nobel Prize, he is still competitive. McCrum writes:

India and the Booker

   

The Booker Prize (now the Man Booker) has been won by novels set in India six times in the 40-year history of the Commonwealth's biggest literature prize. That's excluding The Life of Pi, the 2002 winner by the Canadian writer Yann Martel, which I haven't read but which is also partly set in India. I discovered that going through the list of winners published by the Observer, which is asking readers to name their favourite Booker winner.

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the 1981 Booker Prize winner, was declared the Booker of Bookers in 1993. The other India-based Booker winners are:

• The Siege of Krishnapur, by JG Farrell (1973)
• Heat and Dust, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975)
• Staying On, by Paul Scott (1977)
• The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy (1997)
• The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai (2006)

The Irish writer Ann Enright's The Gathering was the winner last year. Also on the shortlist was the Indian Indra Sinha's Animal's People along with former Booker winner Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Nicola Barker's Darkmans and Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip. (The winner is chosen from a shortlist of six.)

While Kiran Desai won in 2006, the only other Indian to make the shortlist since 2000 was Rohinton Mistry for Family Matters in 2002.

Kiran Desai's mother, Anita Desai, made the shortlist in 1999 for Fasting, Feasting. Apart from Roy, who won in 1997, the only other Indian shortlisted in the 1990s was Mistry, again, in 1996 for A Fine Balance.

India's early success and long dry spell

Indian writers and novels set in India seem to have done best in the Booker's early days. They won four times between 1973 and 1981 but never again until Arundhati Roy took the literary world by storm in 1997. Rushdie was shortlisted twice, for The Satanic Verses in 1988 and Shame in 1983 -- but Vikram Seth never. That is really surprising: he is one of the finest contemporary writers.

Personally, I think the Booker is overrated. I didn't enjoy reading Margaret Atwood's Blind Assassin, the 2000 winner. Some of the winners between the late 90s and the early noughties were a little too trendy for my taste. Reading the reviews was enough to put me off.

But there's no denying that nothing moves books like a Booker. Although this year's longlist -- the initial nominees -- won't be announced till July 29 and the winner revealed only on October 14. the Booker website is already busy. The judges' panel is headed by the former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Portillo and includes writer and broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli.

Here's the complete list of Booker Prize winners:

Copulative conjunctions and more

Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies by June Casagrande

This book is as entertaining as Eats, Shoots & Leaves. In fact, it's naughtier. June Casagrande not only devotes a chapter to "copulative conjuctions" (about which more later); she has another chapter titled "I'm Writing This While Naked". There's this scene as well:

Male student: You sure make love good.

Female teacher, in bed next to male student: Well, I make love well.

It's all for a good cause. The scene is meant to be instructive -- a lesson in the proper use of adverbs.

Copulative conjunctions, on the other hand, don't live up to their billing. Casagrande explains:

Copulative conjunctions add on more information to the first part of a sentence. The Chicago Manual lists "and", "also", "moreover" and "no less than" as copulative conjunctions and gives the following examples: "One associate received a raise, and the other got promoted", and "The jockey's postrace party was no less exciting than the race itself."

But there are more exciting chapters. For example, the author -- whose pretty face appears in the book -- invites readers to visualise her lying naked in her bath. She wants to make a point about the "predicate nominative". Come again? She explains:

Have you ever wondered why it is that when you call, for example, my house and ask to speak with the naked sex symbol, I answer, "This is she"? ...

Why would I say "she" instead of "her"? That is to say, why would I use the subject instead of the object pronoun?

Before I answer that, let me slip into this claw-foot tub full of hot, steamy water and bountiful bubbles. Aah! Delicious, isn't it?

Now where was I? Oh yes...

The reason, as you all eager enthusiasts have already guessed, is the predicate nominative.

Here's how it works. Whenever you have a noun or pronoun, followed by a form of the verb, "to be", followed by another noun or pronoun that's basically the same as the first noun or pronoun, that's called the predicate nominative.

She may be right. But do you say, "It's me" or "It's I"? "It's him" or "It's he"? "It's me", "It's him", are perfectly acceptable, according to The New Fowler's Modern English Usage. In fact, Michael Swan in Practical English Usage calls "It's I", "It's he," "overcorrect". Go, figure.

Casagrande is an Angeleno who writes for the Los Angeles Times community supplements. Aah, she is an American: that explains it.

There are other instances where she carps about what's perfectly acceptable in British English. For example, she finds fault with this sentence: The college which I attend is better than the college which you attend. According to her, it should be either: The college that I attend is better than the college that you attend. Or, better still: The college I attend is better than the college you attend.

But, according to the New Fowler, all three sentences are correct: "which" can be used as a substitute for "that" in restrictive clauses such as "that I attend" or "that you attend".

Still, this is a book worth reading. Casagrande shows how English can't be tied down by simple rules.

For example, she writes, it's better to say "a friend of Dick's" rather than "a friend of Dick", but "a member of the church", not "a member of the church's". She explains,"Try replacing 'Dick' and 'Dick's' with pronouns. It becomes immediately clear that the possessive pronoun 'his' is better than the non-possessive 'him'." But why then should we write "a member of the church" and not a "member of the church's"? She quotes the Associated Press: "Two conditions must apply for a double possessive -- such as 'a friend of John's' -- to occur: 1. The word 'of' must refer to an animate object, and 2. The word before 'of' must involve only a portion of the animate object's possessions."

Phew!

But don't be intimidated by grammar, she says. She certainly has fun.

Naipaul on "the last great Indian kingdom"

I am reading William Dalrymple's City of Djinns after finishing VS Naipaul's Magic Seeds. The two books couldn't be more different. Dalrymple's book is a delightful read, rich in anecdotes about modern Delhi and loving evocations of its past. Dalrymple admires the Muslims who ruled Delhi for centuries for their beautiful buildings, their love of poetry, music and the arts, the courtliness of their manners and the sophistication of their society which was hedonistic and given to sexual pleasures. He shows the beauty of Muslim India. Naipaul, on the contrary, shows how destructive it was.

He does it almost as an aside in his novel. Magic Seeds is the sequel to Half a Life. Willie Chandran is encouraged by his radical sister in Berlin to join Maoist guerillas in India and ends up in prison, but is eventually released and returns to London. There is a long account of his guerilla activities, his prison days, how and why he is released and his life in London. But there are a couple of pages early in the book where Willie, in south India, meets Joseph, an academic who is a Maoist sympathiser, who brings him up to speed about local history.

Joseph tells him about the destruction of the Hindu kingdom of Vijaynagar by the Muslims in the 16th century. It was total destruction. There is still Old Delhi, Taj Mahal, the Red Fort as well as numerous other places dating back to Muslim rule. But only the ruins remain of Vijaynagar, in what is now the state of Karnataka, the capital of which is Bangalore. Even the Indian historians I read in my school and college days had little to say about Vijaynagar.

I have no idea why Vijaynagar was neglected. Naipaul has written about it before. His anger is almost palpable here, where Joseph describes the destruction to Willie:

All the land of India is sacred. But here we are on especially sacred ground. We are on the site of the last great Indian kingdom, and it was the site of a catastrophe. Four hundred years ago the Muslim invaders ganged up on it and destroyed it... They levelled the capital city. It was a rich and famous city, known to early European travellers. They killed the priests, the philosophers, the artisans, the architects, the scholars... The only people they left behind were the serfs in the villages, and they parcelled them out among themselves. This military defeat was terrible. You cannot understand the degree to which the victors won and the losers lost. Hitler would have called it a war of annihilation, a war without limits and restraints, and this one succeeded to a remarkable degree. There was no resistance. The serfs in the villages policed themselves. They were of various low castes, and there is no caste hatred greater than that of the low for the low, one sub-caste for another. Some ran before and after the horses of their lords. Some did the scavenging. Some did the gravedigging. Some offered their women. All of them referred to themselves as slaves. All of them were underfed. That was a matter of policy. It was said that if you fed a slave well he would want to bite you...

Oh. And they were taxed and taxed. There were forty kinds of taxes... this was the origin of our sacred Indian poverty, the poverty that India could offer to the world. Thirty years after the destruction of the last Indian kingdom the conquerors built a big gate of victory. That gate of victory is now an Indian heritage site. The destroyed city has been forgotten...

Dalrymple took exception to Naipaul's "failure to recognise Islam's contribution to India" in an article in the Guardian.

 

Confessions of a famous American newsman

Confessions of an American Media Man by Tom Plate

This is a book anyone interested in newspapers and magazines will enjoy. The American journalist Tom Plate, whose syndicated column appears in The Straits Times, looks back on his working life before he became a full-time teacher at the University of Calfornia, Los Angeles. And what a life he had -- Amherst, Princeton, Newsday, the New York magazine, the now defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner,Time, Los Angeles Times.

And, by the way, he was first offered a job by Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post after a summer job there as an intern while an Amherst undergraduate. He turned it down, saying  he wanted to go to graduate school after finishing college. "Graduate school ain't worth shit," scoffed Bradlee. Plate disagrees. Every journalist should have a master's at least, he says, preferably in public policy, international relations or economics. Though now teaching journalism himself, he doesn't much care for J-schools except for the very best -- Columbia, Annenberg.

Plate, who made his name as an editor, not a reporter, admits he was an earnest, young man who read the Newsweek before he read Playboy. No wonder, he admires Singapore, where Playboy is banned. He did write for Playboy later and says he liked its editors and Hugh Hefner.

This is a book with a rich cast of characters. Virtually every famous American journalist and publisher is present:

• Bradlee in the Washington Post newsroom "on the prowl like a cat looking for a fight"
• Bill Moyers and David Laventhol, who mentored Plate at Newsday
• the legendary editor Clay Felker, who lured him away to New York magazine 
• the writer Gail Sheehy who worked for Felker and was his girlfriend (they later married)
• the brilliant Tom Wolfe, who was then writing for New York magazine, was so polite he could never say No
• Rupert Murdoch who, Plate says, sussed him out but didn't give him a job after taking over New York magazine
• the late Sir David English of the Daily Mail, who, according to Plate, was the greatest newspaper editor (Plate worked briefly for him in London under a friendly arrangement with his then employer, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner)
• Strobe Talbott at Time magazine, who later joined the Clinton's administration
• the USA Today founder Al Neuharth
• the former Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler

The list goes on and on.

Plate, to his credit, writes intimately and entertainingly about public figures and the news business. He describes how he got an impromptu interview with then president Bill Clinton during an economic summit at Davos by getting Clinton to pose with an attractive Chinese newswoman from Hong Kong or Taiwan.

He recalls how one section of Time magazine used to close every Friday night with a resounding thud on the floor. Its top editor, who used to start drinking beer and move on to Scotch while going through the copy, would pass out once the job was done.

Plate recalls when the Time editors gave him a farewell party at the chic restaurant 21 in New York, even one of the speakers passed out while proposing a toast.

Plate was unhappy at Time and was asked to leave. It's the mark of a great journalist that he writes candidly about his humiliation. The hours were very long, he was regarded as an outsider, he says. But he also admits his editing deteriorated as a result of the long hours and though he was looking for another job, it was the top editors at Time, not he, who decided he should leave. But they gave him time to find an even better paid job as the editor of another magazine.

The Longly-Weds Know

It's Valentine's Day. So here's a poem to all those lucky couples who like me and my wife have been married for decades. Many happy returns of the day!

The Longly-Weds Know

By Leah Furnas

That it isn't about the Golden Anniversary at all,
But about all the unremarkable years
that Hallmark doesn't even make a card for.

It's about the 2nd anniversary when they were surprised
to find they cared more for each other than last year

And the 4th when both kids had chickenpox
and she threw her shoe at him for no real reason

And the 6th when he accidentally got drunk on the way
home from work because being a husband and father
was so damned hard

It's about the 11th and 12th and 13th years when
they discovered they could survive crisis

And the 22nd anniversary when they looked
at each other across the empty nest, and found it good.

It's about the 37th year when she finally
decided she could never change him

And the 38th when he decided
a little change wasn't that bad

It's about the 46th anniversary when they both
bought cards, and forgot to give them to each other

But most of all it's about the end of the 49th year
when they discovered you don't have to be old

to have your 50th anniversary!!!!

 

Technorati Tags: leah furnas,the longly-weds know,valentine

Dylan Thomas and Fern Hill

I was surprised to find I had never posted my favourite poem here. I had quoted a couple of lines a long time ago, but never posted the whole poem. The poem: Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas. I have loved it ever since I read it in my schooldays in Calcutta (Kolkata). That was a long time ago.

I just came across a website where the poem is explained. But I think the poem can be enjoyed on its own. Just read it aloud and visualise the scene. The last lines linger in your mind.

Further down is another favourite poem of mine: In My Craft Or Sullen Art, also by Dylan Thomas.

I have loved Dylan Thomas since my schooldays. It might have had something to do with growing up in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Dylan Thomas can seem almost psychedelic at times. One of his poems which first made a deep impression on me was Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines. Those who remember the music of the Sixties will know what I am talking of. Not that Dylan Thomas had anything to do with psychedelia. He was born on October 27, 1914, in Swansea, Wales, and died on November 9, 1953, in Greenwich Village, New York, less than a fortnight after his 39th birthday.

I won't pretend to understand all his words or allusions. But it is impossible to resist the magic of his words.

Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

The Inheritance Of Loss

The Inheritance Of Loss by Kiran Desai

The Inheritance Of Loss, which won the 2006 Man Booker Prize, is like the world itself, both tragic and comic and with moments of great beauty.

The protagonists are misfits one and all -- Sai the orphaned teenager, her grandfather the retired judge, and their cook preserving an English lifestyle in a crumbling house in an Indian hill station, and the cook's son, Biju, an illegal immigrant drifting from one menial job to another, unable to make it in America.

Whether in India or America, they are all living in a hostile environment. Sai suffers agonies in love when ethnic unrest breaks out among the local people and she and her grandfather and the cook are ostracised as outsiders.

But there's more to the story. Set in the Himalayan foothills, it's sheer poetry. Like this description of the judge's dog cowering during a thunderstorm:

A lightning conductor atop (the house) ran a wire into an underground pit of salt, which would save them, but Mutt couldn't understand. With renewed thunder and a blast upon the tin roof, she sought refuge behind the curtains, under the beds. But either her behind was left vulnerable, or her nose, and she was frightened by the wind making ghost sounds.... whoo hooo hooo.

"Don't be scared, puppy dog, little frog, little duck, duckie dog. It's just rain."

She tried to smile, but her tail kept folding under her and her eyes were those of a soldier in war, finished with caring for silly myths of courage. Her ears strained beyond the horizon, anticipating what didn't fail to arrive, yet another wave of bombardment, the wound of civilisation crumbling -- she had never known it so big -- cities and monuments fell -- and she fled again.

There's humour too. When two elderly ladies -- one with a daughter working for the BBC in England, and the other with a daughter working for CNN in America -- meet, each snubs the other in a polite war of words over whether England is superior to America:

Perhaps England and America did not know they were in a fight to the death, but it was being fought on their behalf, anyway, by these two spirited widows of Kalimpong.

India: A partial story

Temptations Of The West by Pankaj Mishra

A young man at an Indian university library chanced upon a book that changed his whole life. He wanted to read everything by the author and all the things he had written about. He ended up in America, writing for the New Yorker, New York Times and the New York Review of Books.

The young man was Pankaj Mishra (photo from Columbia website about him), and the writer who changed his life, Edmund Wilson. Mishra describes what a deep impression Wilson made on him in Temptations Of The West -- it's the best part of the book -- but not how he ended up in America. Instead, he describes the India he left behind and his subsequent trips to the subcontinent as a magazine writer.

He writes about the plight of Kashmiris, discrimination against Muslims, the spread of Hindu nationalism. His sympathetic accounts of the Kashmiris and the Muslims were appreciated by Pakistani diplomats in India, who gave him a visa to Pakistan, and led Indian intelligence officials to question his parents, he says.

Now, even the Indian government admits there has been discrimination against Muslims. Delhi last year urged the various state governments to recruit more Muslims as teachers, police officers, health and social workers.

And there's no denying the plight of Kashmir. Even the India media has written about voting irregularities and police and military excesses, though it has no love for the terrorist insurgents about whom Mishra has little to say. He writes at length instead about how innocent Kashmiris have been framed, tortured and killed as terrorists.

This is a courageous book.

But Mishra's account of Hindu nationalism is greatly exaggerated. India is not dominated by the Hindu nationalists. They have no influence at all in my hometown, Calcutta (Kolkata), and my home state, West Bengal, where the communists are in power. The fight between Hindu upper castes and lower castes described by Mishra  is virtually unknown in West Bengal. We have intercaste marriages. There are other Indian states where the Hindu nationalists have never come to power. Even in the states where they are strong, they have to compete with other parties and are regularly voted in and out.

But Mishra does not write about West Bengal or other states outside the so-called "cow belt" where the Hindu nationalists are a political force. He focuses on the "cow belt", where he grew up, and Kashmir, which he visited as a writer and reporter. He is a good writer, but this is a lopsided book.

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Sex and children: Two poems

One of these is a famous poem by one of the finest 20th century English poets, the other written by a contemporary American poet. Here are the opening lines from both poems. Guess which one is English, which one American. One is witty, the other... well, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

 

We try to be discreet standing in the dark
hallway by the front door. He gets his hands
up inside the front of my shirt and I put mine
down inside the back of his jeans. We are crazy
for skin, each other's skin, warm silky skin.
Our tongues are in each other's mouths,
where they belong, home at last. At first

John Fuller's Valentine

 

I posted Auden's beautiful love poem last night from a selection of his verse edited by the poet, John Fuller. The name sounded familiar. I wondered if he was related to the poet, Roy Fuller, whom I read long ago in the '70s. Checking on the net, I found, yes, John Fuller is Roy Fuller's son. It's remarkable both father and son became poets. I couldn't find any of Roy Fuller's poems online except at a website which one has to pay to access. So here's just a love poem by John Fuller. It's a little naughty but fun:

Valentine

By John Fuller
     

The things about you I appreciate may seem indelicate:
I’d like to find you in the shower
And chase the soap for half an hour.
I’d like to have you in my power and see you eyes dilate.
I’d like to have your back to scour
And other parts to lubricate.
Sometimes I feel it is my fate
To chase you screaming up a tower or make you cower
By asking you to differentiate Nietzsche from Schopenhauer.
I’d like to successfully guess your weight and win you at a fete.
I’d like to offer you a flower.

Romantic Auden

 

 

Nothing touches the heart more than a beautiful love poem. And here is WH Auden at his finest. He wrote it in 1940 when he was 32 or 33 years old. The poet John Fuller in his selection of Auden's poems gives no further information, no annotations. But it is so simple, so beautiful, no explanations are needed.

If I Could Tell You

By WH Auden

Time will say nothing; but I told you so
Time only knows the price we have to pay
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

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Dorothy Parker's reasons to live

The 13th of the month is as good a day as any for an affirmation of life. Grin and bear it.

Résumé
Dorothy Parker

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Now read her New York Times obituary published in June 1967: Dorothy Parker, 73, Literary Wit, Dies. (She had a heart attack.) The obit's full of lovely gems such as this brilliant quote from her:

Wit has truth in it. Wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

It also quotes this brilliant putdown:

"Are you Dorothy Parker?" a woman at one party inquired. "Yes, do you mind?" the humorist retorted.

Bookmark the obit if you like -- and see what happens if you try to copy and paste.

So long Fraser, hello Flashman

 

 

 

All good things must come to an end. There will be no more adventures of Flashman. His creator, George MacDonald  Fraser, has died of cancer at the age of 82.

The late, unlamented British empire has lost its funniest chronicler. There can be few more entertaining accounts of the British empire during the reign of Queen Victoria than the adventures of Flashman, the hard-drinking, womanising self-confessed coward who is undeservedly feted as a hero in every military action he is unwillingly thrown into from Africa to America, India to China.

Poltroon, braggart, bully, rogue, he is a more successful version of Falstaff . After retiring from military service as a much decorated hero, Brigadier General Sir Harry Paget Flashman, VC, KCB, KCIE, looks back on his colourful past.The books pretend to be his memoirs. Fraser presents them as the Flashman Papers, releasing them in instalments, each covering one war or another, such as the Opium War and the Indian Revolution of 1857. The wars are covered in detail but the narrative is spiced with sex, scandal and irrevererent pen portraits of historical figures from Queen Victoria to Bismarck.

Flashman's one redeeming quality is he is admirably free from hypocrisy and it's amusing to read about his encounter with Tom Brown. In Tom Brown's Schooldays, the Victorian classic, Flashman is a bully who is expelled from school. The Flashman adventures spoof the earnestness of that novel by presenting Flashman as the hero. In his eyes, the athletic, hymn-singing Tom Brown is a fool, but he takes a more kindly view of Harry "Scud" East, who also appears in the adventures.   

As an Indian living in Singapore, I am especially drawn to the books where Flashman finds himself on the Indian subcontinent (Flashman in the Great Game, Flashman and the Mountain of Light), in Singapore and Southeast Asia (Flashman's Lady) and farther East.(Flashman and the Dragon.) But I enjoyed the others too, such as Royal Flash, Flash for Freedom (the US before the Civil War) and Flashman at the Charge (the Crimean War.)

Fraser's other books are entertaining too, for example, The General Danced at Dawn and The Pyrates. But he will be remembered for Flashman. The books may be a little too raunchy, But Fraser has to be admired for his talent to entertain, tell a good story and bring history to life. This excerpt from Flashman and the Mountain of Light on Amazon.com gives his full flavour.

A poem about a computer

I just came across this poem about a Mac (it had to be a Mac) but it could apply to a PC too. Anyone who blogs, surfs the Internet or is otherwise hopelessly addicted to computers will be able to identify with this poem. We can't do without our computers. Trust a poet to articulate our feelings perfectly. The ending is beautiful.

The poet: Gary Snyder. (For more about the Pulitzer-winning American poet, see Wikipedia, Modern American Poetry and Blue Neon Alley) 

The poem: Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh

Because it broods under its hood like a perched falcon,   
Because it jumps like a skittish horse   
and sometimes throw me   
Because it is poky when cold   
Because plastic is a sad, strong material   
that is charming to rodents   
Because it is flighty   
Because my mind flies into it through my fingers   
Because it leaps forward and backward,   
is an endless sniffer and searcher,   
Because its keys click like hail on a boulder   
And it winks when it goes out,

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

(Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, picture from Answers.com)

Anyone who has dreams, and seen some dreams die, should read Breakfast at Tiffany's. He or she will empathise with Holly Golightly like her real friends, who -- to a man -- are her silent lovers. Like the author himself. This is a love story told by the silent lover, a prose version of Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. Think of the lover and the maiden in the poem, and you know the ending of Breakfast at Tiffany's. It's just as tender and romantic.

Holly is fascinating from the moment she steps into the author's apartment, slipping out through a window of her own apartment to escape from a drunken lover. She is so mixed up you want to straighten her out, and so irresistible you want to be the man in her life. But that's like playing with fire. Smart, manipulative, entertaining men to marry someone rich and successful, Holly is no respecter of the law. But she shoplifts and helps the Mafia so blithely it's hard to think of her as a criminal. She is warm and and lively and fiercely independent. "I want to still be me when I wake up one morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's," she tells the author, sharing her dream.

But Breakfast at Tiffany's is no fairy tale. Holly Golightly gets more than her just desserts. But that doesn't kill her spirit. A "lop-sided romantic" in the author's words, she is willing to pursue her dream to the ends of the earth.

This is a story of dreams and spirits undiminished even in defeat and adversity.

Truman Capote tells a heartwarming story in just over a hundred pages. The writing is simple and vivid.

What makes Holly unforgettable is scenes like the one where she introduces herself to the author and, later, when they have their quarrel. While giving her an oil massage in her apartment, he accuses her of being a mercenary, hooking up with a rich man for his money. Holly is furious. Capote writes:

She sat up on the army cot, her face, her naked breasts coldly blue in the sun-lamp light. "It should take about four seconds for you to walk from here to the door. I'll give you two."

Holly is tempestuous, vulnerable, beautiful and unforgettable. Her image is all the more indelible because beautiful Audrey Hepburn played her role in the film.

Indira Gandhi

Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi by Katherine Graham

I just finished reliving my school and college days, reading Katherine Frank’s biography of Indira Gandhi, who was India’s prime minister almost throughout that era.  Any nostalgia I feel for those days evaporates when I recall the Indian newspaper front page headlines of that time, extolling Moscow and the non-aligned movement and warning against the “foreign hand” (that is, America ). Indira Gandhi was undoubtedly popular for a long time. Spirited, courageous, cultured, artistic, she had many admirable qualities. But I wouldn’t want her back as a leader. Nor her father, Jawaharlal Nehru.

He might not have been authoritarian like his daughter. But they were both British-educated leftist patricians who smothered India in a protectionist cocoon in the name of nationalism and achieving self-sufficiency while they themselves travelled far and wide in pursuit of their own agendas. It is no surprise that they were drawn to the Soviet Union and the non-aligned movement whose leaders tended to dominate their countries.

Indira Gandhi had genuine grievances against America. She had to devalue the Indian rupee by more than 50 percent under American pressure when she visited President Johnson seeking aid after drought and famine ravaged the Indian economy. Later, she failed to persuade President Nixon to stop the Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh. Instead, he sent the US Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal to intimidate her when she intervened in Bangladesh in 1971. Never mind that Pakistan struck first, bombing Indian air bases. Never mind that millions of Bangladeshi refugees were pouring into India to escape the genocide. Nixon remained hostile to India. It was only then that India sealed a military alliance with the Soviet Union. The US was already committed to Pakistan.

But the problem started with her father. Jawaharlal Nehru’s foreign policy was quixotic, to say the least. He preached solidarity with China, for which he was duly rewarded when China attacked India in the 1962 border war. He preached non-alignment but was friendly to China, Ho Chi Minh and the Soviet Union. It was President Roosevelt who urged the British to give up India. Yet, Nehru never built up a close relationship with any US president.

Both Nehru and Indira Gandhi felt more comfortable in London than in Washington. Blame it on their British education. Though Nehru had been beaten and jailed by the British during the Indian independence movement, yet he shared their prejudices. The Americans apparently were brash, crass, materialistic. Nehru was not even impressed by President Kennedy. Indira Gandhi later made fun of President Reagan. But she enjoyed a warm relationship with the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. It is telling that in her early days she sometimes thought of leaving politics and moving to England.

Katherine Frank relates all this in intimate detail in her biography of Indira Gandhi. It is balanced and well-written. The book gives a marvellous picture of the entire Nehru family starting from her grandfather’s time. We see her as a girl, a young woman in love, her conflicting feelings for her father and her husband, her fierce maternal instinct which would tarnish her final years.

I wouldn’t want her back as a leader, but there is so much to admire about her. Beautiful and spirited, she was certainly not lacking in courage. Consider the manner of her death. She was shot dead by two of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. They said they wanted revenge because she had desecrated their holiest shrine. (She had ordered the army into the Golden Temple in Amritsar to deal with Sikh extremists fighting for an independent homeland.) Commentators wondered why she still employed Sikh bodyguards when their loyalty might be suspect. But that was Indira Gandhi. She couldn’t be seen discriminating against Sikhs. “I am India’s leader,” she said.

The Highwayman

Reading brings such unexpected pleasures. I was reading The Fallen, a whodunnit by T Jefferson Parker, when I came across The Highwayman, a poem I had last read in school.

It was such a surprise finding this romantic ballad in a hard-boiled cop story set in modern-day America.

I have read no other poem by Alfred Noyes ((1880-1958). The English poet was too old-fashioned to be taken seriously by critics who admired TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Dylan Thomas and other more modern poets. But he did teach English literature at Princeton from 1914 to 1923, according to Wikipedia.

The 18^th century England described in the poem couldn’t be more different from dusty Calcutta (Kolkata), where I went to school on a double-decker bus or a rattling tramcar. But the poem is so vivid that reading it was almost like watching a period drama, with the highwayman riding to meet his beloved innkeeper’s daughter in the dead of night.

From Alfred Noyes to Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson

Coming across the poem in a modern-day American crime story made me think of the other Highwayman –- of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. The indomitable highwayman who is hanged, killed, buried but still lives on. The highwayman who sings:

I fly a starship across the Universe divide
And when I reach the other side
I'll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
Perhaps I may become a highwayman again
Or I may simply be a single drop of rain
But I will remain
And I'll be back again, and again and again and again and again.

There's idealism and poetry in the lyrics. This video shows Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson in concert.

But The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes is a genuine ballad, romantic and tragic. Here’s the first verse of the poem which I found on the Internet:

THE wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
    The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
        The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
        And the highwayman came riding—
                          Riding—riding—
        The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

And it gets better as it goes along. It's a long poem and doesn't have any profound message, but it tells a touching story and reads beautifully. Click here to read the complete poem.   

Blame the Brits for the Iraq war?

The White House and the rest of America seem to be divided on whether Iraq could become — or already is — another Vietnam. But they are reaping the whirlwind; the wind was sown by their friends who want to get out of the war: the Brits. The Iraq war may have been unpopular in Britain from the start. But it may be the result of their own divide-and-rule policy, writes Pankaj Mishra in the New Yorker.

Reviewing Indian Summer: The Secret History Of The End Of An Empire by Alex von Tunzelmann, he blames British colonial policy for exploiting religion to keep people divided.

That was the policy of Winston Churchill, according to the book. He encouraged Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Muslim League leader in India. Jinnah opposed Gandhi and Nehru and their freedom movement which he claimed would lead to Muslims living under Hindu rule. He cooperated with the British. As a result, Churchill became “instrumental in creating the world’s first modern Islamic state”, according to the book. Jinnah got his Pakistan from the Partition of India.

Reviewing the book, Pankaj Mishra writes:

Little did Churchill know that his expedient boosting of political Islam would eventually unleash a global jihad engulfing even distant New York and London. The rival nationalisms and politicised religions the British Empire brought into being now clash in an enlarged geopolitical arena…

The review doesn’t go into the Shia-Sunni clashes threatening to tear Iraq apart — after all, the book is about India — but that’s the result of the power structure the British left behind. Iraq, like most of the Gulf, was once controlled by them. And there are similar tensions in other Gulf states too.

The smoking guns of Eng Lit

All working Singaporeans aged up to 50 will have to buy annuities. The government fears they might otherwise run out of savings as people live longer now. But that’s a risk that could have been avoided in another way. The government could have lifted the tobacco tax.

Perish the thought and long live the people? I wholeheartedly agree –- but consider this:

What do the following have in common: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis?

Every one of them was a writer and a smoker.

The writer, AN Wilson, who makes this point in a Telegraph blog, writes:

Is it mere chance that the lifetime of Sir Walter Raleigh (1552?-1618), who introduced tobacco-smoking to England, was also the time when the great story of English literature really began? Milton -- a smoker -- and Ben Jonson -- a smoker -- ensured that the Elizabethan glory-age was not to be a flash in the pan.

I have been racking my brains to find a single non-smoker among the great English poets or novelists of the 17th, 18th, 19th or 20th centuries. Possibly, Keats had to lay off the pipe tobacco a bit after he developed tuberculosis.

Otherwise, from Swift and Pope to Cowper and Wordsworth, from Byron to Charles Lamb, they were all smokers.

Tennyson… only stopped smoking in order to eat and sleep...

Robert Browning… quickly adapted to the new cigarette craze…

C S Lewis… smoked 60 cigarettes a day between pipes with his friends.

Tolkien was a pipe smoker.

Of course, smoking wasn’t universally approved of even then. Thomas Carlyle’s wife allowed him to smoke only in the kitchen.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey would have been, of course, jailed or halfway-housed in Singapore for opium smoking. So indeed would have been Sherlock Holmes.

But it was almost de rigueur for writers up to the 1960s to be photographed with a cigarette or a pipe. I remember the old Penguin paperbacks with tiny photographs of the authors. Sartre could be seen wreathed in smoke, Camus with a cigarette stuck in his mouth. Kingsley Amis can be seen with a pipe on a Times Literary Supplement cover.

No wonder literature has declined in popularity. It can be so unhealthy.

But apparently writers too are seeing the light and stubbing out. Wilson writes:

Heroic Beryl Bainbridge keeps on smoking for England, but will there be any more writers in the years to come, following in her heroic steps?

Heroic indeed, my wife would say. Not that I would be caught dead with what she sees as a coffin nail. She doesn’t hold with smoking.

All The King's Men

All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

The New York Times called it: “The definitive novel about American politics.” It is seen as a roman a clef, whose hero, Willie Stark, is said to have been based on the Louisiana governor and Senator Huey Long. But I would call All The King’s Men, which won the Pulitzer in 1947, an autobiographical novel where the politics is secondary to the personal element. It is as much about the narrator, Jack Burden, as it is about his “Boss”, Willie Stark.

Of course, there is politics –- and plenty of it –- since Burden is friend, confidant and aide to Willie Stark, a small-town politician who becomes a powerful, populist governor. We see Stark’s rise to power and his transformation from a bumbling idealist to a cynical manipulator who is prepared to sup with the devil to achieve his aim, which is to help the poor and perpetuate his own power.

Naturally he is resented by the old elite, who see their own power and influence slipping away. Conflict is inevitable with dire consequences. 

All The King’s Men is a double tragedy. There is the tragedy of Willie Stark. But what gives the novel poignancy -- and turns it into an oedipal conflict -- is Burden’s story. Working for Stark, he finds himself at odds with his family and friends. He discovers to his pain how little he knew about them. But, just like Oedipus, he doesn’t realise what he has done until it’s too late. Yet even then he doesn’t blame the “Boss” for the tragedy. For this was a secret known only to three people on earth.

There are surprises, ambiguities, very complex emotions at work in this big novel with a memorable cast of characters. It is unpretentious, unliterary, but deeply felt and all the more poetic for that. It may be “the definitive novel about American politics”, but it is also about a young man’s loss of innocence -– and the upright men and beautiful women who populated his world before he went to work for the “Boss” and the scales fell from his eyes. But even when he sees their real selves, that does not make them any less attractive but all too human.

Oh, did I say this novel is set in the South? What i