Stuff from My Notes on Facebook

7 may 2011

william and kate wedding

ah been thinking recently 'bout what a stroke of public relation genius the will and kate marriage was for the royal family. after years of being accused of being snobbish and too far removed from the common people, this was the best thing the royals could have done: marry the future king to a commoner, and yet at the same time a commoner who actually looks much more regal and sophisticated than many in the royal family ( just compare kate to fergie).

ah think the response from the british public was pretty overwhelming in its warmth and goodwill, and that was coz it sprang from a deep root in what defines britishness: the good feeling which runs between their social classes. we all know how british society has well defined social classes, each with their own accent, habits and lifestyle. but a core aspect of british life has been the good natured relationship between these classes. according to whig historians, especially, that good relationship has been core to the great triumphs of great britain. it was this bond which enabled the british nobility to dismount from their horses at agincourt, to fight together with their bowmen and thus destroy the proud french nobility. again, it was british social harmony which meant that noble and seaman blended into such superb sailing teams in the royal navy, and sunk down the spanish fleet, where the soldiers treated sailors like galley slaves. most of all, it was this british ability for social classes to talk to each other which enabled the birth and growth of the mother of parliaments.

well anyway that's they whig thesis 'bout what makes britain great. anyway cheers to will and kate.


9 march 2011

'bout women's day ( one day late)

the world is becoming more feminine. it's a general feeling i have and which i guess others have too.



one curious example 'bout this is space exploration. a journalist once pointed out that up to the 70's, space exploration was all about some tough air force guys flying in space capsules, going to the moon, and scientists sending probes to the outer planets. however, the seventies saw the rise of the feminist and ecological movements, and by a curious process of influence, space exploration also became more inward-looking. skylab, the world's first space laboratory was sent into orbit. more and more satellites built for observation of the earth ( weather patterns, vegetation patterns, simple observation). the trend was no more towards colonisation of mars, but on the observation of mother earth, her moods and hiccups. space exploration has evolved from being "john wayne" to a more "touchy-feely" tone.


23 february 2011

two years in africa

yo it's been two years that ah'm in africa. ah'm sorry that ah'm gonna write touchy-feely stuff. bear with me.



plus side of the last two years in africa:



(i) the money. ah think most people go to work in africa coz of the expat allowances. or else, why come here ?

(ii) sometimes it's been interesting. in africa, a mauritian diplomat is a real diplomat. in europe, you spend your life picking up ministers at the airport to take them to the hotel. you're a nobody.



the minus side:



(i) extraordinary loneliness.

(ii) african towns suck. dirty and chaotic. no parks, no green areas.

(iii) the diseases. lots of them.

(iv) the crime. that one is more for mada. ethiopia is very safe.



about the interesting bits:



(i) at the AU, there was an interesting debate 'bout which one is more important: justice or peace ? should you seek justice against dictators or rebels who have made crimes, or make peace with them ? the fascinating aspect is that it was not a theoretical debate, but something that was happening every day in africa.



for example, uganda was contemplating at one point to make peace with the lord's resistance army. the most horrible of criminals. that would have meant an amnesty for joseph kony, their leader. but what about the victims ?



the International criminal court has issued a warrant of arrest against sudanese president omar al bashir for crimes against humanity, and war crimes in darfur. there was furious debate about this at the AU. basically, "muslim" countries (north and west afr) said (i) why not issue a warrant against israeli leaders for the war in gaza (ii) the warrant will complicate peace talks with darfuri rebels. "christian" countries (south and east africa) mainly supported the warrant arrest.



I was in the debate coz I participated in meetings re. the ICC. the passion with which each side defended its position was very striking. in particular, it's interesting to see that there are people in africa fighting for victims of atrocities to receive justice.



but should justice be at the cost of peace ? Later I met a very senior personality who told me: "what do they mean about justice ? We had to make peace with those criminals [there was a civil war in his country]. I personnally had to negociate with them and yet they have killed so many members of my family" and he added "There is no such thing as justice !"



In the case of his country, a union government was formed and amnisty was given to some people who had made some horrible crimes. yet, the formula has worked: that country is now peaceful.



(ii) another interesting bit: to see famous people. Or rather infamous people. Gaddafi: I've been in a room with him, late at night. Thank god there were other people in the room, ha ha. the man is not well in his head.



Talking of meeting people: i wish i had met more people here. there are interesting people in africa, like everywhere else. but of course it's so difficult, when you have work and have to take care of the family.



for example, there are two malagasy lawyers from harvard who do some pretty remarkable work here, they give lectures 'bout the new constitution, to explain its defects etc.

24 january 2011

the murder in the hotel

everyone's been talking of THAT murder in THAT hotel and they're talking talking 'bout death penalty, hang them high etc. ah'm thinkin' this way: instead of "hang them high", one big step we should take to address the social problems in mau would be to first ACCEPT that we are a modern society. it seems weird to say that but actually we in Mauritius don't accept that we have become a modern society. that's because the org socio culturelles keep telling us that basically we're a traditional, pious society and that of course there are problems but the remedy lies in prayer. the org socio have an approach of "exorcism" towards our social problems, ie that these problems are "demons" which can be exorcised by prayer and virtuous living.



there's nothing wrong with prayer and virtuous living but all the teenage mothers, drug addicts, sexual perverts, divorced couples, people with suicidal tendencies, etc in mauritius do also need the help of psychologists and therapists. But especially, we need first of all as a society to understand that we study our social problems in a methodical manner instead of relying on common wisdom and ethnic stereotypes. for example, we need social surveys on alcoholism ( what age do mauritians start drinking ? who first encouraged them to drink ? do rich or poor people drink more ? etc).



as a society we're very much afraid of doing surveys on social problems. i think we're afraid of annoying those horrible organisations socio culturelles. these guys will surely be livid with rage if one day the state does a survey on, say, divorce. why ? because according to their "traditional" approach, a social phenomenon like divorce should demonised and exorcised. whereas, when we do a social survey, we are suspending judgement and analysing the social phenomenon in a cool rational way. it's this shift in approach, from one of exorcism to analysis which the org socio culturelle are very afraid of.



yet it's clear that our society needs to wake up to the fact that it's become modern and suffers from the ills of modernity. and that it also needs to analyse its ills in a modern manner, being non judgemental, and analysing social phenomenon with parameters such as age, social class, psychological profiling, etc instead of considering any social problem as a "demon" and a "taboo" and someone who suffers from a problem as being "impure" and "sinful".


2 january 2011

two images of loneliness


two images of loneliness which have hanging in mah head these last few days:


the first one is of the last scenes in "the french lieutenant's woman" that movie with a young mery streep (yes, meryl streep was once young. how strange, i imagine her as having been forever middle aged and imperial), when the guy finally traces back the french lieutenant's woman. she's the governess in a house near a lake, and her employers are apparently modern, liberal people who know a bit about her past. the guy comes into her room upstairs, it's a room with a strangely modern look, not in a pleasant way: cold, bare and rather ugly. and something of the ugliness of that room tells us about the woman herself : she has escaped the horrors of victorian society, has found a job, she is free and lonely. the ending is "happy" in that they are reunited, but there is also something eerie about it. the furniture in that room makes one feel as if they have travelled in time, out of victorian times into the early 20th century.

the second image is that of the last moments in sissi's life. she is walking on the quay along the shore of lake leman in geneva, when a young man approaches her and stabs her heart with a thin knife. the knife is so thin, that at first she believes she has been punched. the man runs away, and she continues her walk. it's only when she comes aboard her boat that she collapses and dies.

elizabeth of wittelsbach, better known as sissi, empress of austria and queen of hungary, was in so many ways a forerunner of the typical woman of the 20th century: she freed herself from convention, she was not a little bit obsessed with her looks (she invented a private gym, and also suffered from anorexia). there is something touching, in that image of her walking incognito on the streets just before her death - like the french lieutenant's woman, she has achieved freedom, with a touch of loneliness. but of course, that final scene of her life has a grander pathos, because it seems like the prologue to so many of the horrors of the 20th century - which would engulf her husband, emperor francis joseph. maybe her death was an act of mercy by god, to spare her that vision.

25 september 2010

what the pope's visit to the uk got me musing about

so the pope's been to england and has beatified cardinal newman. ah haven't read cardinal newman's spiritual autobiography, the Pro Vita Sua though it's high on my must-read list, it's considered one of the great prose masterpieces of the english language.



thinking of cardinal newman has stirred some old longings in mah tired heart; on the one hand, it has briefly revived my episodic desire to convert to catholicism, a creeping desire which i've been having for the past ah dunno, five or more years, i think. ah like catholicism, ah like the old creaking structure of it, the lies, the power games of the cardinals, the nobility of soul of (some) priests and monks. it's only a lingering feeling of loyalty to the goddess durga that keeps me within the fold of hinduism. i like the virgin mary, i very much like to read the litany of loreto from time to time. but the goddess has her hold on me.



but the pope's visit to england has also stirred in me an old, old feeling for longing for that country. My interest for england goes back to the days when some of friends from high school went to study there. and i remember reading one morning in the culture page of l'express about zadie smith's first novel, "white teeth", with a photo of her (lovely girl), and i sighed at the idea of how exciting it would be there, in that magical place where black people and indian people and whatever could publish fresh, funny exciting books. london felt like the place where it was all happening, where salman rushdie and ben okri and kazuo ishiguro and michael ondaatje all converged to.



ah've only been there for a few days, a long time ago. to make matters worse, in a way, ah stayed in the house of the aunt of a friend of mine, and the aunt was quintessentially british, she had studied latin in cambridge ( they say "read" not "studied" in oxbridge, i think), was the descendant of an old line of latin lecturers in cambridge, actually, had two cats called homer and hercules. i'm saying it made matters worse because it was just so exactly the best of britain - so strongly itself, and hospitable at the same time. i was a paying guest, but for a very nominal fee. the other paying guest was an iranian student whom i never met.



actually many things felt exactly like i imagined they would be. london had precisely the grey dull weather and architecture that it's supposed to have. the milkman delivered his bottles in a funny little green eletric car, in the suburb where i lived- rows of houses, with narrow little living rooms inside. a crowded island. but british girls were much prettier than i expected ( i had expected horse faced creatures, like princess margaret). it was a bit like in japan, where i had expected the women to be all ravishing beauties, and the men to be little toothy gnomes, carrying suitcases half their height. actually i found japanese men to be rather taller, smarter and more handsome than i thought, and the girls were mostly ordinary, and didn't wear outlandish fashion, but then i didn't go to ginza.



it was a short visit, of only three days during which i bought about 10 kg of books in a second hand bookstore, and visited the british museum. i wondered once more, while i was there, what it would have been to actually have studied there. to have my character shaped by the british mould, like those mauritians who've been there - some of whom, for the rest of their lives bear an air of unfathomable gloom and boredom in the presence of others. the oxford air of effortless superiority and lassitude in being in the company of others.



actually i wonder whether the pinched snobbish air we always associate with the british is not a bit of a myth. isn't it just the style of some of the upper class ? and were the british upper class always like that ? i've been reading the history of the british kings since 1707 ( the year of the actual creation of the united kingdom, by the act of union). You think of George IV ( king from 1820 to 1830), infamous for his life of dissipation and wild extravagance. Even his successor, the more moderate, down to earth William IV (1830 -1837) , did bring nine illegitimate children to the altar when he got married at the age of 50, to the young princess Adelaide of Saxe Meiningen, aged 25 ( the marriage was apparently a happy one and the young princess took care of the illegitimate children, one of whom is the ancestor of the present British Prime Minister David Cameron). When William IV's niece Victoria ascended the throne, she decided to put an end to the wild lifestyle of the British royals and that's how we've had the victorian age of primness.



I think another source from which we get the idea of the british as prim and prudish is from reading jane austen. But the world she describes, of young girls from country gentry going to balls and trying to get married, is just one facet of the great britain of the 1800's. What about London, where an estimated 10 % of the female population worked as prostitutes ? These were the days of Emma, Lady Hamilton, probably the world's first supermodel. Lady Hamilton was born in a blacksmith's home, and from the age of 12 became a maid, then an "entertainer" for a dissolute man called Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh, who apparently liked to make her dance naked on the table for his guests. A young noble called Greville promptly fell in love with her - she was a great beauty and had become a famous model for artists- but when he decided to look for a wealthy bride to marry, he sent her basically as a gift to his elderly uncle Sir William Hamilton, the British Ambassador to Naples. He thus hoped to gratify himself with the uncle, and get a good mention in the latter's will. However the old Ambassador promptly also fell in love with her and married her, thus making her Lady Hamilton. In the meantime, she had become famous across Europe for her "Attitudes", poses she made at dinner parties in greek dress, to which guests had to guess the classical figure she was referring to. She actually started the fashion for greek dresses, which we see in paintings of women of those days, like the famous portrait of Juliette Recamier. lIn the middle of all this jolly scene in Naples arrived Lord Nelson, the naval hero and it is said that on their first meeting Lady Hamilton literally fainted in his arms, probably more out of admiration of his heroism than of his physical beauty, for he had been to sea since the age of 12, and his hair was white from sea salt, his skin was wrinkled like parchment, his teeth had been knocked out by scurvy, and he had one hand blown out by a french cannonball. Lady Hamilton, Sir William Hamilton and Lord Nelson then moved to London where they soon settled in a happy menage a trois which scandalised and fascinated all London.



So all this to say that the British are certainly not as prim as we often think them to be, and also that the likes of Lady Di and Prince Harry are actually very tame compared to what the British upper class used to be.



But to come back to my feelings about the UK, I can say it's a country I would love to know more about. London strikes me as one of the few truly international cities in the world, along with Singapore, Dubai and New York, cities which thrive on diversity. The UK has survived the anguish of the loss of empire by opening and mixing British culture with that of the immigrants who have settled there, thus making this country a thriving modern hub. Far from losing its own identity, it has kept a very strong national personality. I think it's a country which will still keep a vibrant presence in the world for the next 100 years.

16 june 2010

FDR the great aquarius ?

Writing 'bout Nixon as the archetypal capricorn has made me think of FDR. If N was the great (or terrible) capri, then was FDR the great aquarius ? Aquarians often have faces of striking nobility: great foreheads, aquiline noses, a grave, profound look. FDR had oodles of that. I especially love a photo of him, on the deck of the HMS Prince of Wales off the coast of Newfoundland in 41 , during his secret meeting with Churchill. He is staring away from the camera ( just like in the famous Yalta photo), like he's looking for someone, I wonder if it wasn't a politician's trick of offering his best face angle, because he must have known that he had such a striking profile. Meanwhile, Churchill is stodgily chomping his cigar, looking rather smug and crude ( I don't like Churchill very much).

Apart from the great looks, Aquarians believe very much in the brotherhood of humanity, and FDR was basically the founder of the UN. Interestingly, the other great believer in the UN at the time was his secretary of state Cordell Hull, a Libra. The UN charter was drafted by Hull and his staff.

FDR and Hull must have been quite a fascinating pair: FDR, the East Coast aristocrat par excellence, born in the lap of wealth and privilege, made an arranged marriage with a woman of distinction in her own right, basically the kind of man Nixon hated and envied from the depth of his soul. Hull, on the other hand, was the archetypal, almost mythological American: born in a log cabin in the depths of tennessee, on land given to his ancestors for distinguished service during the war of independence. Probably went to school barefoot, a la Tom Sawyer. Was admitted to the bar as a teenager, a bit like Lincoln, and was elected chairman of the clay county democrat party at the age of 19. Served as a captain in the tennessee volunteer infantry in the spanish american war.

When you add to the two of them Vice President Truman, the typical small town politician from Kansas with its gangsters and bootleggers, you have a pretty interesting cross section of american society of the time.

But among the three, it is to FDR that the eye naturally turns to: the grand statesman, looking not diminished, but ennobled by his wheelchair. I wonder if God was not merciful to him, when he made him die in 1945, sparing him from having to decide whether to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. What would he have decided ? How do you drop an atomic bomb on people, and then go on to found the UN ? You would look like a hypocrite.

Got to go to bed.


15 june 2010

nixon, the archetypal capricorn

One and a half years in ethiopia. Not a bad place, once you get used to some discomforts. It is much more a place for young people and people of an adventurous disposition, in general. If you are here with children, there's not many places to go to. I've been seriously bored here, on sundays !! The good side of it, is that this sunday boredom drove me to write this (almost) 100 000 words story, which i am slowly trying to finish. I wonder what Gallimard will make of it....

Apart from forcing me to write, boredom in ethiopia has made me pretty much addicted to television. Once Jay and Sujata have been put to bed, at around 2030 hr, I settle for tv. I guess it's denial of reality, but since the past year,i plunge in the world of dr house or jack "hang them high" McKoy ( the ADA in Law and Order) to escape from the murky intrigues of the african union.

Yesterday saw me glued to tv until one in the morning, I was watching a riveting movie called "Frost/Nixon". it's a dramatic re enactment of the famous interview of nixon by british talk show host david frost in 1976. Basically, it's the journalistic equivalent of "Rocky". David Frost, a talk show with some career problems, risks his personal fortune to buy 25 hours of interview time with Nixon, who has been living in isolation since resigning from the presidency in (72 ?). Nixon sees the interview as a way to show himself in a favourable light, coz he believes that Frost is an intellectual lightweight and cannot corner him with difficult questions.

American channels are reluctant to buy the interview coz they also believe that Frost is no match for the awesome intellectual power of Nixon, a man who once stood up to Khrustchev's bullying ( the famous "kitchen conversation" in 53), held tough political debates against JFK ( in 62) and negociated arms reductions treaties with Brezhnev, not to mention his extraordinary visit to China, etc.

And at first, Nixon does makes mincemeat out of Frost, evading questions, throwing homilies, self serving anecdotes, and just looking grander and out of reach from the poor Brit. But in a dramatic last minute round, Frost is able to corner Nixon about Watergate, and have him admit that he "let down the American people", and capture him as a tortured, tenebrous and lonely figure.

I have this odd fascination for Nixon, as one of these archetypal capricornian figures, to me he is one of the people who capture the best and the worst of that sign. The best: his enormous political endurance, his giant intellect ( he could have been one of the greatest ever presidents. Even with Watergate, his record as a statesman is pretty impressive). The worst: his penchant for shady deals, backroom intrigue, his rancour and jealousy. He was famously ill at ease with people, clumsy and aloof. Maybe Samantha in Sex and the City had a point, when she said: "Presidents should be good looking. Look at Nixon, he could not fuck anyone, so he fucked the country".

It's extraordinary that 30 years later, people should still be interested enough in nixon, to make such a film as "frost/nixon" ( it came out in 2008). I wonder if young people have even ever heard of Nixon or of Kissinger.

The strange thing about Nixon was his rancour against "the establishment" and "the snobs". He had this enormous envy and hatred of the East Coast families, of JFK's good looks and charm. Maybe it was a souvenir from his college years. After high school, he got admission to Harvard and Yale but could not go there coz his family was too poor. He went to Whittier college instead, a small college in California. However, afterwards he got a scholarship to Duke University, a place pretty full of rich kids. Something really bad must have happened there.

What I don't get about the guy was why, after he had achieved so much, could he still let his feelings of envy and insecurity make him abase himself to low acts. How could he, on the one hand, be a giant statesman that opens China to the world, that calms tension in the Middle East and negociate historic disarmament treaties with the USSR, and yet despite all that, still be insecure enough that come the elections in 1972, he felt the need to create a committee of thugs to sabotage the democrat party ( the "Committee to Re elect the President") ? What was the need to send burglars to the headquarters of the Democrat party in the Watergate hotel ? When in fact, he won his re election with a landslide victory ?



23 may 2010

notes from watching tv:

sex and the city vs desperate housewives: I'm interested in that off voice at the end of each desperate housewife episode, which gives a sort of moral summary to each episode. that pattern started in the first season, with the ghost of the murdered woman who makes comments on the lies of the living. you gather the impression that the creators of the series want to give a sort of moral compass to the series, maybe as a reaction to "sex and the city" which is seen as too hedonistic.

actually sex and the city seems to me to be a fusion of two different genres. the first one is sexual comedy, which is about as old as humanity itself. at the greek theatre, for example, tragedies were played together with bawdy comedies in which the actors wore big wooden penis, about which they made jokes. sex is an activity which lends itself to comedy, given the height of the expectations, and the reality of the performance. the second strand in sex and the city is the novel of feelings and relationships, whose most famous writer is jane austen. you see it especially in those moments when sarah jessicah parker, the would be jane austen of the series, writes some question on the blue screen of her computer. that moment of introspection is always followed by a scene of bedroom comedy, involving one of her sidekicks. i guess the alternation of these two genres in each episode of the series gave it its dynamism.

in the long run, the irritating thing about sex and the city is sarah jessica parker's ( i forgot the name of the character she plays) obsession with glamour. there's a scene in one episode, in which she goes to a wedding, and she watches longinly at the male guests ("schoolmates from dalton, philips, andover" her voice-over says wistfully).

the four women are all after rich men, i'm not saying it as a reproach, my point is that: in the case of the three others, samantha, the redhair and the brunette, in a way, they're entitled to it, because samantha owns a pr company, the redhair is a graduate from harvard law, and the brunette is a rich heiress, from a boston brahmin family. but s.j. parker ( was her character called carey? ) is just a newspaper columnist. the way she drags herself to the heels of mr big, begging him to care for her - i feel like telling her: forget it, girl, this man is just out of your league. mr big is a mirage for her, i would say his full name is : Big Apple. He embodies everything she longs for, in that city, and is reflected in her obsessive shoe-buying.

walt disney cartoons. in french "disney" has a pejorative connotation, to denote a work of art which is seen as excessively cute, oppressively wholesome and a bit hypocritical. there's also the image of the disney company as a media empire which brainwashes you with an endless stream of sanitised, feel-good products. but was it always like that ? I've recently watched two old disney classics, dumbo and pinochio. they don't look shallow and commercial to me, i think there was a real feeling to these cartoons. while being children's cartoons, they do carry quite some sadness with them. especially you can feel the loneliness of gepeto, the puppet maker who creates pinnochio. and then there's the famous scene where dumbo visits his mother, who's being put in a cage as being a mad elephant. i think the guys who made these cartoons were children of the Great Depression of the 1930's, and they really knew what it was like to be poor, sad and lonely. i suspect disney lost its feel somewhere in the 1950's, at around the time when they opened disneyworld park in california, and became a money making machine, in a 1950's america that was obsessed with consumption.

george of the jungle. it's the title of a cartoon i sometimes watch with my son on cn channel. it's an update on the tarzan myth. while the original tarzan character was the archetypal macho character, his successor ( george) is depicted as a sort of moron, who lives a quasi domestic life with two (?) teenage girls. why two ? i don't know. and the nature of his relationship with them is rather unclear, but it's not a romantic relationship. the two girls sometimes seem to be big sisters, and at other times are maternal or manipulative towards him. in any case, his real friends are a gorilla and an elephant. I wonder whether it all reflects the ambiguity of gender models in our times, or if i'm reading too much into that cartoon.

18 may 2010

thinking of the 60's

Such eloquence. This is an improvised speech made by Robert Kennedy in 1968, minutes after learning the assassination of martin luther king jr. He was on his way to a public meeting and was told about the assassination, and was advised not to go to the meeting, as the audience was mostly black, and in a dangerous neighbourhood. He insisted on going to the meeting and said this:

Ladies and Gentlemen - I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening. Because...

I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.

For those of you who are black - considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible - you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization - black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

(Interrupted by applause)

So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, yeah that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love - a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke. We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.

(Interrupted by applause)

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much. (Applause)


When you listen the audio version, you get a much better sense of the degree to which this speech is spontaneous.

These Kennedys, they were really something. The whole 60’s period in the US fascinates me. Especially that, because there is so much material available as it is a modern period, yet at the same time, with the passage of time, it is acquiring the patina of legend. I remember reading transcripts from the oval office during the Cuban crisis. At one moment, the President is alone with his brother Robert, and they exchange a few words: “How is it going ?” “It is looking pretty bad”, followed by a silence. You can feel the tension of those moments.

I have this impossible dream of a sort of mystical novel, taking place in the 60’s in a parallel kind of US. Throughout the novel, we hear the voice of Walter Conkrite, who is God ( in his obituary in the Economist last year, the journalist said: “Throughout the 60’s, American listened before going to bed to his voice, telling them about the state of the country, and of the world. It was as if, Walter Conkrite was God”). The novel would start with the Nixon Kennedy television debate, and end with the landing of Appolo 11 on the moon. In it, the different regions of the US would have distinct colours to their sky and earth: New England ( black, cloudy sky, deep green earth), MidWest ( grey sky, grass green earth), South ( hot, moist white sky, red earth), West ( shining blue sky, yellow earth) California ( golden sky and earth). The heroes would be a travelling preacher and a housewife from a 1950’s tv series, dressed like Wilma in the Flintstones. There would be an alien invasion, with flying saucers just like in a comic book of the time. There would be a very long sequence taking place at night in the immense basement of a skyscraper in New York, which would be like an underground city in which people live in at night, to escape from some danger above the ground. The aliens would arrive on earth following the discovery of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon in the library of an Ivy League university ( someone reads the incantations from the book, which opens a crack through the dimensions). The Beatles would land on the East Coast as mystical bards, emerging from a yellow submarine, and would chase away the aliens, with the help of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.


17 may 2010

'bout the master disciple relationship

I wonder whether it’s possible to have a master –apprentice relationship between writers. I don’t know many examples of that. There’s Maupassant, who used to visit his uncle Flaubert. I also heard of Naipaul acting as “guru” over Paul Theroux when they were together at Makerele university in Uganda but it seems more to have been an exercise in bullying (Naipaul: “What are you reading ?” Theroux : [some novel] Naipaul: “Throw this away. Read Thomas Mann, Death in Venice”).

Most people know how to write, in the basic meaning of the term. What technique would you learn from another writer ? Of course, every writer is influenced by the style of some other writers, especially those he read in his early years. But it’s hard to imagine one writer teaching another how to write a dialogue or an opening scene.

Other art forms lend themselves more readily to the master apprentice relationship. Painting, sculpture, music spring immediately to mind.

Maybe this difference between writing and the other arts tells us something about the nature of writing itself. Maybe writing is a kind of inferior art, if there is so little that one writer can transmit to another.
Or maybe we rarely find writers who consciously take their writing to the level of a fine art. Proust and Flaubert are examples of writers with a deliberately ornate style. It is interesting that we can easily associate each of these writers with the graphic style which was in fashion in their days. In the case of Proust, his style reminds us of Art Nouveau in its languid and ornate embellishments. There is an overripe smell about Proust’s writing, and the feeling of a civilization that has reached its summit, and whose elite are now languishing in the fumes of opium, in a bordello. In the case of Flaubert, his writings, especially Salammbo and the Tentation de St Antoine inevitably bring to mind the heavy symbolist paintings of Gustave Moreau. There is the feeling of a mind which is screaming to escape from the fumes of the Industrial Revolution and reach back to a fantasy land of antique orgies and barbaric wars.

But few writers can achieve such levels of ornate artistry, maybe because of lack of time, due to publishers' demands, or simply because most writers do something else to earn a living. or even, most
writers are afraid of going to the extremes which really intense writing will demand. you think of james joyce toiling at "ulysses" in utter poverty, while his daughter is slowing going mad, and he himself is losing his eyesight. or of thomas pynchon, living a life of seclusion to write "gravity's rainbow", and probably going to the limits of mental sanity too.

I guess what writers can give to each other is encouragement and some advice. This is actually something very important because writing a novel can take years, without you knowing whether your manuscript is interesting.

but i guess i do envy people in other artistic fields, who are able to have an "initiation" into a skill by an elder master. there's something noble about the idea, which brings us back to the medieval guilds.

One example of a master disciple relationship which has fascinated me for some time, is the meeting between jean renoir and satyajit ray. Renoir (who was the son of the famous painter, Auguste Renoir, and was himself one of the Great Film Directors of cinema history) came to Calcutta in 1949 to shoot “The River”. There, he met Satyajit Ray who was a graphic artist in an advertising company, and he more or less taught him the basics of film making, and gave Ray encouragement about his project to shoot “Pather Panchali”.

What I find fascinating about that meeting is the two drastically different cultures the two men came from, and the fact that they still could communicate about their love of cinema. I always imagine Jean Renoir as coming straight from that harsh world of 1930’s Paris. Ever since the days of Hemingway and ScottMcFitzgerald, Americans have always imagined Paris to be “A moveable feast”. But the 1930’s France you see in the films of Carné like “Le jour se lève” and “Quai des Brumes” is a grey world of factories, peopled by tough orphans and war veterans. You also feel that toughness in the voice of Edith Piaf, and in the characters played by Jean Gabin, and also in the poetry of Jacques Prévert.

I imagine Ray coming, on the other hand, growing up in the rather cozy world of well-off Indians ( his father and grandfather were leading intellectuals of Bengali society), with maids and gardeners at the family’s service. He was on to a pretty comfortable life, even if his job at the advertising agency was not so well paid. But instead, he went on, with considerable courage, to shoot Pather Panchali largely from his own money, and with inexperienced crew and amateur actors. With all those difficulties, the film actually took three years to be completed, with shooting only taking place whenever he had scraped enough money.

Ah well, that’s the kind of stories which have the stuff of legend about them.


6 may 2010

on this rainy day in addis ababa, while our glorious mauritian republic goes through yet another election (with the same people in the forefront) , let's go for some serious navel gazing. after all those years where i've been surfing the web, it seems to me i'm reaching the contours of myself. ah mean, more and more ah'm googling the same stuff, so in that sense the web has helped me to know what i'm interested in ( following is a list in random order. i probably forgot some stuff):

- irak. i'd like to know whether it will become the arab world's first big democracy or another saddam type will take power.why can't the arabs have a genuine, stable democracy, i keep wondering.

- world war 2 fighter planes. spitfires, hurricanes, messerschmidt. battle of britain in general. it's a heroic fantasy from childhood.

- new york, its neighbourhoods, its administration, its history. also upstate new york and new england in general. i like the idea of old puritan cemeteries, villages with history of witch hunting, ivy league universities holding dark secrets in their frat libraries.

- demographic trends of mauritius. fascinating subject which nobody bothers about. we have low fertility rate and high rate of emigration. at this rate, our population will start shrinking in the next 20 years or even before. what happens then ? new coolies ?

-zadie smith, john updike. pure envy.

-astronomy, especially terraforming of mars. an extension of my dreams to emigrate.

- christian heresies, and christian dogma in general. i'm fascinated with heresies because of the "what if ?" question. suppose the heretics had won the political battle and become the mainstream ? out of this, a growing interest in byzantium, the forgotten empire.

In general, I think I'm interested in lost glory, forgotten ideas and empires, fading states. i like the idea of the strange artefact, washed up ashore a river bank, from some long forgotten culture which was once powerful. Examining it, we discover another way of thinking, and we realise that our way of life could have been different, had that other culture won some battle, or had had some better king at the crucial moment.

as a counterpart to that, i also like the idea of new countries ( US, Australia, Canada, maybe Mars, one day).


18 april 2010

'bout the nature of evil

I am having a bit of an unhealthy curiosity about francisco macias nguema, the first president of equatorial guinea. the man was one of the worst tyrants in history, basically killed everyone or every living thing far and near. under his rule from 1968 to 1979, a third of his small country's population was killed or ran away (even his wife ran away). he abolished the national bank and took all the money to his house in his village. he abolished public schools. he abolished the catholic church and basically declared himself a living god. he forbid the use of the word "intellectual" and basically killed anyone in his country who could read and write. he forbid fishing and fishing boats ( that one, ah dunno why). if any foreign cargo ship dared to venture into the harbour, he quickly had its cargo looted for himself. if any foreigner dared venture into the country, he or she was quickly kidnapped and only freed against ransom. i can't help ask myself: what if he had not been arrested and executed in 1979, by his chief of security ? could it be that he would have been the first ruler in history to have actually EMPTIED his whole country ? It was ( still is) a small country, with a small population and little wealth. Imagine that, a guy who actually killed and plundered so much, that in the end, there was NOBODY left and NOTHING to steal. What would he have done next ? Maybe my deeper question is, is there an end to evil, or does it just go on and on, into deeper perversion. It is a question about the nature of evil. In Goethe's Faust, Faust asks Lucifer about his nature, and Lucifer answers " I am a part of the primeval chaos, which hates creation". It's a beautiful definition, and also one which cannot be understood, because we cannot understand the primeval chaos ( our minds function according to categories and notions belonging to the nature of creation itself). It's also a frightening definition, because in oriental religions we tend to believe evil to be caused only by ignorance of one's divine nature. in christianity and islam, evil is seen as a rebellion against god by an angel, out of pride. but in goethe's definition, evil is more sinister, it aims not just to rebel, out of jealousy about man, or out of a rebellious spirit against god's power - it wants to destroy the very fabric of creation, maybe bring us back to the cosmic soup.

why are we fascinated by evil, and a bit bored or disdainful of goodness ?

Why are we fascinated by evil, is it because it is sexy and full of guilty pleasure ? why is goodness unsexy and not so popular ? I suspect that it's because evil KNOWS what it wants, knows what you want. It takes you there, whether you likes its methods or not. the problem with goodness is that it is clumsy. good intentions land us into trouble, all the time. good people do often a mess out of things. we often wonder about the mystery of evil, as if evil was a stain on the beautiful structure of the world. maybe we should rather wonder about the mystery of good. what does it really mean, to be a good person ? to do no harm to others ? ok, but what about their demands on you ? coz everyone wants something from you, and you want a lot from them too. we ask the moon from politicians, yet we know lots of them are selfish and vain people. we want goodness everywhere, from everyone, yet we are scared, rightly so, of people who want to create paradise on earth, through the words of marx or the bible or whatever. if good is such a pure power, why are we best served by political compromise, rather than the rule of good ?