Stuff I've posted in My Notes in Facebook ( 6 april 2009 - 1 march 2010)

1 march 2010

l'immortel

Il etait ne il y a longtemps, dans un village de samarie. De temperament reveur, il suivit les pas de l'homme qu’ils appelaient Christ, et qui disait etre le Messie. Apres la sanglante fin de cette aventure, il se retira dans les montagnes de Syrie, et ecrivit,au fil des annees diverses versions de qu’avait dit et fait l’homme nommé Jesus. Comme il n’était qu’un hermite inconnu de tous, les gens attribuerent ses récits aux apotres, Jean , Matthieu, Luc et Marc. Lui même se souciait peu de cela, car il etait trouble par les differences qui etaient apparues a chaque fois qu’il avait redige ce qu’il appelait les chroniques du Christ. D’où venait, par exemple, l’épisode de la Samaritaine parlant au Christ, pres d’un puit ? Et celui du Christ et des enfants ? Avait-il vraiment eu lieu ? Pourtant ces images etaient là, flottant dans sa memoire – il se souvenait du roucoulement des colombes, ce matin où les pharisiens avaient apporté la femme adultère devant le Christ, qui dessinait dans le sable avec son orteil.

Plongé dans ses meditations, il ne sentit pas passer les années. Un jour, cependant, après bien des siècles, il descendit des montagnes et se rendit compte que tout avait change, les villes prospères n’étaient plus que des ruines, et d’autres avaient surgi à leur place , et les enseignements du Christ s’étaient gonflés en un culte où prospéraient, une nouvelle fois, les pretres et les rois. Comme autrefois. Décu, il se fit marchand, et partit vers les oasis brulantes d’Arabie.

Là bas,longtemps après, il rencontra un home qui se disait être le dernier des prophètes de Dieu. Il se dit que cette fois ci peut être, le monde pourrait devenir meilleur, et il devint un des compagnons du prophète. Après sa mort, il devint le calife, vivant simplement, comme l’avait fait le prophète, alors que les armées de la nouvelle religion atteignaient les frontières de la Chine lointaine, aux confins du monde.

Puis un matin, un roucoulement de colombes lui rappela ce matin, où le Christ avait jugé la femme adultère, et il se rappela aussi la fraicheur de sa cave, en Syrie.

Tout fut arrange très vite, on enterra un autre, vraiment mort celui là, tandis qu’il partit vers l’Orient, traversant le Rub al Khali pour atteindre les cotes d’Oman. Là, il se promena longtemps sur les quais émerveillé par le grincement des mats des boutres,.

Il apprit par des voyageurs la mort de Hassan et de Hussein, à la bataille de Kerbala, et comprit alors que rien ne changerait, les religions deviendraient toujours des affaires de pretres et de rois, pas de Dieu.
Alors il resolut de prendre la route des mers, ayant remarqué que les navires ne laissaient pas de traces derrière eux, tout comme lui aussi souhaitait se dissoudre, ayant tant vécu.

Une tempete se leva, et la boutre, partie longer les cotes d’Azanie, là où vivent les hommes noirs, ne fut bientot qu’une epave flottante, dans laquelles les hommes moururent tous – sauf lui. Il connut alors la plate horreur de la mer calme, dans laquelle il brulait sous le sel et l’eclat implacable du soleil, jusqu’a ce qu’apres plusieurs jours, il apercut les cotes de cette ile, que les marins nommaient Dina Mashriq, l’ile de l’Ouest.

La, il se plongea de nouveau dans ses meditations, qui devinrent de plus en plus morcelées,a mesure que passaient les siecles, de sorte que sa pensee prit la forme des vagues qui s’ecrasaient doucement contre le sable du lagon, ou celle des nuages en haut des mornes.

Un jour, cependant, les hommes arriverent sur l’ile, apportant avec eux leurs horreurs – d’autres hommes en chaine, la cupidité, leur rage de tout abattre, et de tout tuer . Il se refugia dans les forêts, effrayé.

Mais au fil des siècles, les hommes avancaient dans l’ile, et lui meme, n’ayant guère entendu de voix
humaine pendant tout ce temps , chercha a retrouver le reconfort des foules.

Il eut beaucoup d’enfants – la plupart des habitants de l’ile etaient ses descendants, sans le savoir.

Un jour, il se fit poete, et ecrivit un livre appelé “La Parole Testament”. Une vendeuse dans une librairie lui dit alors par erreur “ Oui monsieur, nous avons bien votre livre, le Nouveau Testament”

Et alors, il se rappela.


(avec toutes mes excuses a Borges, pour ce mauvais pastiche de son immortelle nouvelle, "les immortels")

note: the above was inspired by something which happened to my friend umar timol. he called a library to ask if they were distributing his new book "la parole testament". the salesgirl replied: "yes sir, we do have on our shelves your book Le Nouveau Testament"

27 february 2010

the idea of childhood

I'm wondering whether the people from before the victorians didn't maybe have some point in considering children as miniature adults. it's with the victorians, and their strong middle class family outlook, that we've discovered the world of childhood. maybe the roots of that came also from rousseau, blake and wordsworth. ah mean, at around the time of rousseau, the portraits of the nobility start to change, and instead of being portrayed alone, nobles are painted as a family. that was a novelty, because before that the rearing of children was left to maids, but during the 18th century, nobles started to project themselves as loving parents. maybe it was the influence of rousseau, ah dunno. afterwards we have blake writing "songs of innocence" ( but blake was considered a weirdo until the late 20th century, so maybe he wasn't influential), and wordsworth writing "the child is the father of man". with victorian society, middle class family life gradually became the standard reference, and people even start judging other styles of family life from the point of view of middle class morality. for example, when we look at "dallas" , we are watching all the adultery and tricks of upper class people, as something both sordid and entertaining, from our middle class perspective ( something which people even from the 1950's would have found profoundly strange, coz up to then you looked up at the upper class with an idea of imitating their elegance, their mannerisms, not to judge their family life). with that rise of the middle class family as the model, we also see the rise of the idea of the child as someone living in his own world, and with his own worldview. that's how we have the rise of children's books, like enid blyton, beatrix potter etc.

of course, children do need a literature adapted to their psychological and emotional development, they can't read violent or boring stuff, but when i look at some of the stuff in children's books i take at the library, i find it excessively cute and gentle. i wonder whether we don't exaggerate this idea of children being pure and fragile. children do have an innocence and there are some things which they are not supposed to know until they are teens, but in general i think this idea of kids having specific needs has become a bit of an industry.

got to go.


18 january 2010

About politics and story telling

These are some thoughts about politics and story telling. I’m sorry if the language is a bit rudimentary – I don’t have much time to polish it.

The links between politics and story telling are complex. All politics are to a certain degree, story telling: a politician defines himself by his “life story” which has to include some accomplishments. A government will tell you a “grand story” of its accomplishments. Nationalists have a grand narrative of their country’s glorious past. A writer or a film maker on the other hand will tell their own story, and that story will subvert the grand narratives of politics and religion to the extent that the writer/film maker’s story does not fit in these social narratives.

A writer/film maker can be self consciously ideological, and write stories which are overtly ideological and even didactic, or the ideology can be completely unconscious, to the extent that the writer isn’t really aware that he is making a political point.

Let us see two very different genres, in their “political coefficient”

An apolitical genre ? the Western

Westerns take place in the “naked” world of the Wild West of the 1860’s. This is a world of deserts and new towns, in which politics is at its most rudimentary: law and order is ensured by the sherif, more or less based on his personal judgment. The appeal of the Western lies precisely in this feeling that it takes place in a world of every man to himself. There is a recurring moment in westerns, which is maybe its defining moment: early in the movie, the hero comes in the saloon and for some reason, he is surrounded by the bad guy and his acolytes. They close around him, with their finger on the trigger. Then something happens- the sherif comes in, or the hero fires a single shot. But the feeling of physical danger, of raw intimidation which has been created pervades the rest of the movie.

In westerns, outsiders from the more civilised East coast or from Europe are usually shown as effeminate and cowardly. In Vera Cruz, the Austrian officer accompanying the treasure of the Emperor of Mexico is depicted as a pompous buffoon. This opposition between the wild west and the civilised East coast is dramatically depicted in “The man who killed Liberty Valance” with the rivalry between the lawyer (James Stewart ?) and the cowboy (John Wayne). The lawyer wins, as civilisation must do, but he is aggrieved by the defeat of the cowboy.

Curiously, many Westerns strike me as quasi spiritual movies, in the almost zen nakedness of their world view. The unnamed, laconic cowboy played by Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s westerns is like a cousin of some wandering samurai in a japanese sword story: apolitical and lonely.

We usually associate westerns with conservative values: strongly traditional depiction of masculinity, negative depiction of American Indians. But westerns such as “The man who killed Liberty Valance” or “The good, the bad and the ugly” seem to me to be pretty apolitical. I think their charm comes precisely from their ideal of the cowboy as an embodiment of “pure” manhood, removed from the taints of politics and money, living from his gun and his lasso, in the desert.

A hyper political genre: science fiction

It is curious that science fiction should be such a densely political genre. One would think that the décor of outer space, with its remote stars and planets, would be far removed from the world of politics. Yet science fiction, maybe more than any other genre, brims with politics, overt and covert. The wild possibilities of outer space and futuristic machines are fertile ground for all kinds of political messages, as well as sexual and racial fantasies which come straight from racial and sexual politics.

It did not start that way. Jules Verne’s stories usually centered around an interesting machine – a submarine, a rocket – which would carry the heroes through wondrous adventures. However, soon came HG Wells’ “War of the Worlds”. Wells was a socialist, and the war of the worlds is a biting satire of colonialism, with its depiction of the ruthless extermination of our species by a more advanced alien race.

After HG Wells, the trend was set: science fiction has been the great political genre of the 20th century, abounding with cautionary tales about the dangers of unchecked scientific advance, or throwing back to us twisted sexual and racial fantasies which echo the sexual and racial politics of the century.

The cautionary tales are so many, and so famous, that I only need to mention a few: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, Terminator ( about artificial intelligence), Gataca (about genetic manipulation).

The sexual and racial fantasies are less well known, and quite interesting. On race, there is the fascinating “mirror effect” between American and Japanese science fiction. In “Buck Rogers”, an American science fiction series of the 30’s , the US has been colonised by the hordes of a future Chinese empire, and only a free area, covering New England is free from the rule of the cruel and devious Chinese emperors. If you think the racial stereotypes are crude, then consider the view from the Asian side: in the Japanese animes I watched as a child, the world would be invaded by a race of ugly giant aliens who would throw atomic bombs on human cities, but humanity was defended by a giant robot (Goldorak) who wielded high tech weapons looking very much like traditional samurai weaponry. The defining moment in Japanese anime of those days was: the hero ( frail, long haired, androgynous) is pummelled by a huge, muscular baddy with a squarish face like a caricature of a white man. Finally the hero is thrown against a wall, crashes in it, blood spurts from his forehead and draws on his bandana the emblem of the Japanese Imperial Navy, his eyes go afire, he screams “Banzaiiiiiiiiiii” and bounds back to battle with his last breath.

Apart from the war of the races, science fiction has also been the battleground of the war of the sexes, and the most disturbing example of this is the “Alien” series. The first “Alien” came out in 1979, during the heyday of the feminist movement. Alien is not really a political movie as much as it is a powerful, bizzare metaphor on sexuality: the creature’s huge head is like a monstrous erect penis, its mode of reproduction ( fertilisation of human bodies, followed by a brutal, horrible bursting through the belly of the carrier) is a caricature of human reproduction. There is a powerfully sexual and nightmarish tension throughout the movie, as the creature hunts the girl (Ripley ?) throughout the space station.

Throughout the Alien series, there are scenes of the creature approaching Ripley while she is in bed (these long, flower like beds of the movie, with the room always lighted in a virginal white) or under a shower. And there are innumerable scenes of fertilisation, of bodies trapped in gluey matter, near pods which are going to bloom. Throughout this apocalyptic landscape of sex, there strides the valiant female warrior Ripley, muscular, heavily armed, virginal – yet in the later series, the creature does get to impregnate her ( but she throws herself in liquid metal, to destroy his offspring).

An obsession with politics: mauritian literature

The notion of mauritian literature is intimately associated, in the minds of many, with the left wing movements of the 70’s. “Mauricianisme” was a left wing movement, and the writers of those days wrote heavily political texts such as “Li”.

Maybe because of this hangover, whenever journalists interview writers in Mauritius, they would always ask question such as: “What is your book about ?” or “What were trying to say”. It is always assumed that a Mauritian writer is trying to deliver a message, when he writes a novel or a drama.

For a long time, I had trouble explaining to people that I was just telling a story when I wrote a novel, that my aim was a poetics, not an ideology. However, lately, there has been another trend: people would ask me “what’s is about, your story” but in such a light hearted way that I feel that they are just asking me some idea about the plot, but just to have an idea whether it sounds entertaining or not. This is the new generation, who think of culture only as some kind of light entertainment. They have grown up in a world full of entertaining movies and games, and are a bit light headed about culture. Suddenly, I find myself missing the days when writers were automatically considered as ponderous left wing intellectuals who wrote political tracts.

(to be continued, if I get more ideas)
16 december 2009

help for my new cult

I'm working hard to start up a carey lowell cult. but i'm facing theological difficulties. this particular cult revolves not specifically on the "normal" carey (former james bond girl,wife of richard gere, lives in the hamptons, practices tibetan buddhism) but on her alter ego jamie ross, assistant district attorney in " Law and order" (96-98 seasons), the ultimate tough, glacial, smart dominatrix. so, which metaphysical link shall we decrete to exist between carey and her acting persona ? two-in-one ( catholicism) ? two separate (arianism) ? to proceed from one to the other by initiatic steps (gnosticism) ? one is the manifestation of the other's latent powers (tibetan buddhism) ? one is the lila played by the other (vaishnavism) ? can someone help me on that one ? if you do, i'll appoint you as high priest of my cult (i'm it's pope).

15 august 2009

gardens

Yesterday Jay said: "I don't like Africa" "Why ?" "It's kind of old...." and he added "I'd like to go to another country where I've never been before". I'd like to get out of Addis Ababa too for some time.

Thank God we have a garden, it's our miniature countryside. I'm interested in gardens. Each civilisation had its style of garden; the arabs, with their rows of oranges and jasmine, and numerous fountains ( the arabs adored fountains, the freshness, the wetness, the gurgling of water appealed to them), the Chinese with their rockeries and zig zagging paths ( unfortunately I haven't had the chance to see the more beautiful Chinese gardens like the Garden of the Master of Nets, in Suzhou), the Persians, about whom I've heard that they have grassless gardens. We do not know what the gardens of ancient India were like, coz they've been replaced by Moghul style gardens, but they probably favoured clumps of trees in which to catch shade. In many cultures gardens are the cross roads between the physical and supernatural worlds.The word paradise comes from the Persian word for "grove". There is the Garden of Eden, a supernatural place in which a human drama of temptation unfolds. In Indian mythology, gardens are the place where nymphs seduce sages and kings, and where Krishna and Radha play. In Chinese literature, snake and fox women seduce heroes in gardens. Generally speaking, the forest is a place of raw danger, haunted by demons, and the palace is the world of intrigue. The garden is an intermediary place, of eroticism and surprise. Kings love to play at being shepherds , hence the pastoral amusement, beloved of marie antoinette. interestingly, some people claim to have seen the ghost of marie antoinette in remote parts of the trianon gardens, still disguised as a shepherdess. a garden is a make believe world, in which we play with a tamed nature and pretend to love "natural things" ( we do not, really - very few of us could cope with real nature, the jungle or the steppe). Gardens are ambivalent ( I like Clint Eastwood's film "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"), places in which evil spirits can trick one ( or in which nowadays, junkies lurk) and also places of hidden love ( lovers flee to gardens, away from peeping eyes), yet theirs is a mild ambivalence. tragedies often take place in palaces, whereas the garden is the place of comedy. In gardens, we can play at bit at being God, by redoing the world the way we like it. Gardens, more than palaces, show us the milder and more endearing side of humanity.



7 august 2009

Similarities between chinese and indian mythology

1, Ne zha the child god is mischievous like Krishna. Krishna kills the demon snake living in the river, and Ne Zha kills the dragon king living in the sea. Ne zha was born during the reign of an evil king of the Shang dynasty, who tries to kill him. Krishna was born during the reign of the evil Kamsa.

2. Sun Wu Kong and Hanuman. Resemblance is obvious. Both monkey kings have enormous strength and can change size. Sun Wu kong is the disciple of Xuan Zang, Hanuman is the disciple of Rama. Both are bachelors. In his childhood, Hanuman swallowed the sun. In his youth, Sun went to war against the kingdom of heaven. Both became very wise in their old age.

3. The three Pandavas in mahabharata and the three sworn brothers in the three kingdoms. Yuddhishtira is like Liu Bei, wise and humane. However Liu Bei is a little bit cunning and sometimes pretends to be not interested in power. Arjuna is very much like Guan Gong. Both have superhuman skill with weapons, both are proud and hot blooded. Bhima is like the third brother ( forgot his name). Both have enormous strength and crude appetites ( very fond of food and wine). The pandavas are helped by Krishna, who sometimes uses supernatural powers. The three sworn brothers are helped by Zhu ge liang, who is both immensely wise and a bit of a magician.



11 July 2009

Conversations

giving ambitions to my kid

Jay has built a big lego airplane. Me: "That's a big airplane" Jay: "It's not an airplane, it's a scholarship" (after some minutes) Jay: "What's a scholarship ?" Me: "It's a very nice kind of ship. I hope you get into one, one day"

resourceful government

Yesterday, at the reception at US embassy. American diplomat "So, when is your wife getting the baby ?" Me: "Er, maybe it could be now. Do you have a free room ?" American diplomat: "Ahem, I'm afraid our doctor is not on duty" Me, to Serbian friend : "If she's born here, she gets the green card, right ?" Serbian friend "Well in 1942 the king of Yugoslavia was in exile in the US, and his wife was about to deliver her baby. However according to the Yugoslav constitution, the king had to be born in Yugoslavia. So the US president declared the hotel room in which the baby was being born as Yugoslav territory, for a few hours. So they might do the opposite" I thought of the American ambassador phoning to Obama to have him declare the room at the US embassy in which Sujata was being born, as Mauritian territory, and decided I didn't want to bother everyone like that.


5 July 2009

Below is an extract from a beautiful, impossibly difficult and complicated, unfinished story whose first part i lost long time a ago, let's call it "the meghna cycle" the main character was a girl ( later a prudish young woman) called meghna. who said ah can't do feminine writing, uh , uh , uh ? It's the beginning of the second part.the first part took place in her adolescence. ah read it to umar and azaghen long time ago at zorro's, in vacoas. this is the beginning of the second part, when meghna's in england.

" I was a nomad of the soul, always travelling from imaginary homeland to imaginary homeland. Wandering away from the silvery dew-kissed underwood of nostalgia, in the little hours of the morning, I would reach dreary flat badlands in those sad winter evenings in London. There is no water here, only the sound of water.

Wandering. There was nowhere to go back to. Nowhere worth mentioning. The bogged ship of motherland, stranded in the sandy shallows amidst the fog, was slowly rotting far away in the corners of my mind. A flying dutchman, manned by bogey crew, skips over the waves at night, flying the jolly roger once more. Here I am, a country pasted together, mummy of recollections, and fantasies.

Exile, brief, willed by a fit of bad temper. Strong words flung here and there. Hence the escape. Voyage through life and death. Unto these shores.

-II-

"All intellectual discussions there get bogged down to ethnic quarrels. Your community against mine. Can't lose the argument. Matter of pride. Finding ethnic allusions is every contrary argument. Generalised paranoia" How bad I felt saying these things. Feeling self-righteous. Who am I to criticise. Are we not considered as a model of multicultural harmony, paradise of the southern seas…maybe I am the rotten apple.
Slowly nodding head on the other side of the table. I am only feeding his prejudices. Make him feel priviledged, living in Europe. Civilisation nowhere else.
They want a discourse, a medical description of the island – its lifeblood, sugar, flowing through the arteries of the roads up to the harbour. A description of the state apparatus. How free are you? What is the condition of women there? The literacy rate? The growth rate? Unemployment rate? Income per capita in dollars ( purchasing power parity)?
But I have only images coming back. And I can't talk of images. How can I tell – the hill by the coast on that cloudy day. It was covered by dry yellow grass, and neglected sugar cane. A hare burst out of the field at our approach and sped out, running for its life, as if we were in hot pursuit behind it. We laughed at it. Down at the foot of the hill, a woman was putting clothes to dry on the branches of a bush, beside her small corrugated iron house. A narrow road passed at the front of the house, hugging the coastline, squeezed between the hill and the small pebbly beach. Afterwards was the grave morose sea, muddy brown at its earthtouching fringe, bottlegreen thereafter, deepthinking and sad like a greying man musing upon his life. One felt cold looking at the two fishermen standing up to their heels very far away in the lagoon, near the lacy line of the reef – the line of greying hair on the head of the man."

actually, the second part tells two paralell stories, one is that of the very rational life of meghna ( lecturer at uni of mauritius, brooding, frustrated and intellectual ) and a homeless guy whom she sometimes visits, and talks to in a very patronising tone. He is called sanjay and his life is full of fantastic visions. later on in october 2005 ah was grabbed by the collar by mah friend khal and summoned to write a second novel or else... ah just lifted out Sanjay from meghna's story and made him into a story of his own.

ah miss that lost first part. was not very long but pretty poignant. anyway.

maybe one day ah'll try mah hand again at writing meghna's story.


1 July 2009

A few quick notes, ‘bout the TV programmes I usually watch:

(i) Mickey Mouse Clubhouse: Daisy is smart and sexy, Donald is famously hot tempered, Minnie is caring and maternal. Mickey intrigues me. He is so extremely nice, if he were a person in real life he would be laughed at. He is the only character, out of these four, who strikes me as being only capable on living in a children’s cartoon world. In this way, he is a “real” cartoon character.

(ii) I am so addicted to Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. I love everything in it, the graphics, the constraint imposed by the characters living in an orphan’s home ( modern cartoons often exploit fantasies of power by children – child heroes with supernatural powers. But I feel that children’s stories are made more poignant when the child hero has lost something ( a parent, most often) or is under a constraint ( living with bad foster parents) which only exacerbates the child hero’s will to live. Foster’s Home creates a magic atmosphere out of the wild variety of the imaginary friends, constrained by the rules imposed by Frankie and Mr Herriman. Blooh’s wild energy reminds me very much of the feeling of childhood, with the impossible bets and challenges between children.

(iii) When my wife watches Chinese cooking programmes I watch too, captivated by the extraordinary bonhomie of Chinese cooks. My favourite one was a small, toothy, hypertalkative Taiwanese cook until I stumbled on even better, a Beijing cook with an enormously thick Beijing accent ( corrrrrr, kuarrrrrrr, corrrrrrrrr it’s just a series of burrrrrrrrrs ) and his bumbling associate.

(iv) When will World War two ever stop ? I’ve counted two villains on Cartoon Network with German accents: Dr Duffenshmirz in Phineas and Ferb and Wasabi in Chop Chooky Socks. And there’s a sidekick in The Secret Saturdays with a squarish Germanic face and a monocle. We’re in 2009, 64 years after the end of WW2. Oh yes, Wasabi too has a monocle, if I do remember.

(v) Will History Channel please STOP showing programmes at midnight about Mayan prophecies that the world will end in 2012 ? I wanna go to bed in a good mood.

(vi) I LOVE Tea Leoni in TV series The Naked Truth. She’s gloomy, sexy, bored and has a repressed violence about her that I found appealing. What an underused actress. Her husband is such a jerk ( David Duchovny, that boring guy in that boring , over rated series X Files. That guy can’t even speak properly, he mumbles).

(vii) Why that trend for really spooky characters in children’s cartoons ? I find the atmosphere and the characters in Ben 10 really disturbing. Even the looks in the children’s eyes has something disquieting. The fights are pretty intensely violent. The Secret Saturdays is also rather spooky.

(viii) That guy Mr Big in Sex and the City, he’s a bit of a mirage for Carrie, isn’t he ? Ah mean, look at the subtext in the story, her obsession with New York, its beauty, its power, its glamorous men. Big has no name, but you have a feeling his full name is Big Apple, he’s the personification of what she loves about New York ( he is so “embededded” in the city, seems to have no other past or family) and yet he always remains aloof from her. “Like most big cities, he is ultimately unknowable” ( forgot her name – that famous transsexual writer, Jay something)

9 May 2009

I’m finishing a re read The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields and I find it just as darn good as when I first read it ‘bout 10 years ago. It’s the bloody wonderfully written story of the life of an ordinary Canadian/American woman with the image of stone laced throughout, as a sort of cosmic link to the larger universe, a counterpoise to her very domestic life. That larger picture, as well as the persistent allusions to the world of botany ( her husband is a botanist, she herself is an expert gardener) is like a large window through which one looks from time to time at the outside world throughout the book, while examining the inner life of Daisy, the main character. Stone, solid and ancient, lends its warm strength to the terrible frailty and loneliness of Daisy the orphan, the lone child of a poor quarryman. Yet stone is also sterile and after her marriage with the botanist Barker Flett, she tries to hide the squareness and austerity of her stone house by covering it with a large garden. Later on she experiences a rare rush of happiness when she travels to the Orkney islands with her grand aunt Victoria, looking for a lost relative while Victoria looks for traces of fossilized life in the stony cliffs of the Orkneys – the symbolism seems naïve or heavy when I put it that way, but it is always elegantly placed in the text by the writer.

Ms Shield’s style is deft, masterly and it avoids the traps of excessive psychological or emotional torment in which “women’s” or “domestic” prose can be prone to. Daisy’s sense of powerlessness, or of living an inauthentic, unexamined life bound by social or domestic duty is one which anyone, man or woman will feel powerfully empathy for. Her skill as a master writer is well seen in the chapter “Sorrow” in which different characters each give, in extremely well rendered voices, their explanation of why Daisy falls, some time at the age of 60, into a depression：the young feminist daughter Alice, all shrill from having just read Germaine Greer, the melodramatic Jewish businessman, the shifty editor in chief who had just fired Daisy from her job as columnist in the gardening section of the newspaper, the emotionally vague son Warren, the feisty independent Fraidy with her 1930’s music hall slang.

All in all a splendid book and one which I’d easily read again later. I’ve checked about Carol Shields on google – sadly, she died in 2003 at the age of 68. She was able to manage a prolific and successful career as a writer while raising five kids. Some people are actually born with two heads and four arms, I suspect, and they hide the extra limbs in daytime. Interestingly, her advice to young writers is pretty much what I remember every writer say on the subject: (i) try to write 500 words per day, every day on something of interest to you. In other words, practice, practice, practice (ii) read good books, no junk literature, no tv.


2 May 2009


Mr sewtohul masterfully refutes some common misconceptions held by vulgar minds. Also, a vindication of Malraux


I wonder why people always associate youth with fun and frivolity. When I read interviews of 20 year old pop stars, I expect like everyone else to have them talk about the fun they’ve had shopping in London or frolicking in the Riviera but all they speak about is of their career, their manager, their projects. Some time later we read about them having been admitted to a clinic, looking as gaunt as famine victims. Maybe they are an extreme example, but even ordinary youths are put to so many trials at that age: to have to choose the right course of study, the right university, pass assignments and exams. Of course, not everyone goes to university or even to high school but with the spread of education, it is becoming more and more common. The competition becomes even tighter, and parents’ expectations ever higher and higher. There are also the social expectations: to hang with the right crowd at the right places, to have the right girlfriend or boyfriend, to listen to the right music, wear the right clothes. I remember my teenage years as a period when there was such enormous pressure to blend in the crowd.

There is also the biological pressure: at that age, one takes things so seriously, as if we were the first human beings to ever know love or disappointment. One takes oneself so seriously – young people rarely laugh about themselves, that’s something you learn to do much later. Young people do things with enormous intensity.

So, who got the idea that youth is the time of fun and laughter ? The more I think of it, the more I believe it’s old age which is the time for taking things lightly. In a short story I read the other day, by Scott Mc Fitzgerald ( in the Norton anthology of American short stories), the hero goes to a wedding and there meets the bride’s mother. She thanks him, in a poised, serene voice, for having sent her flowers when she was sick “He realised that it all had the same value for her: her daughter’s wedding, the flowers she had received. She had married five of her children, and had seen two of the marriages collapse” （sorry if I remembered it wrong）Old age, hopefully, liberates us from many expectations. The worst of tortures must be to grow old with a broken, or bitter heart.

I guess it’s just a misunderstanding: we think that youth is the time of fun and games, because young people generally have fun in such a loud and obvious manner, so that we think that that’s what their life is about. We forget that they also spend most of their time working, studying or brooding in their rooms about what it all means, to the sound of The Doors, or whatever ( I know a guy who sincerely and candidly told me, at 16, that his favourite singer was Kishore Kumar. That was in 1988, not in 1958).

Another commonly held idea which I find rather odd is the notion that the artist is necessarily a rebel, an idealist, a pure soul who lives apart from the world. I guess it comes from Byron and before that from Rousseau. There is a long line of Byronic characters in the Western imagination – Byron himself, Rimbaud, Poe, the dada group, Hemingway, Jim Morrison. It is flattering for artists and gives them some licence to misbehave, but I wonder how much longer that idea will survive in the future. After all, it is a pretty recent idea, starting with the Romantics, and especially Byron who more or less invented, personified and popularized that idea. Before that, artists were considered as artisans, respected as masters of their craft but nothing more (“Something merrier next time, Master Shakespeare”). Great musicians would live in a prince’s court, but would dine together with the domestics, something which Haydn accepted but Mozart hated.

Actually, artists who are totally true to their art are few and between, for several reasons: fear of totally surrendering to the daemon’s hold, compromises with commercial needs and exigencies, simple impossibility of doing otherwise. For one Joyce, who lived in poverty writing Ulysses ( which I only half-like, actually, but maybe out of envy too) you have millions of people who use their literary talent to work as journalists, speechwriters, teachers, writers of paperback thrillers. The same goes for musicians, painters and the rest. People do not always treat their children well, so what do we expect them to do with a gift from the gods, of talent and sensitivity? I myself confess to a base craving, from time to time, to be a suit, working in the City. I envy their smugness, their masters of the universe attitude. I know it sounds so last year, with the financial crisis, but the suits will always be with us.

On a different note - I have been rereading some pages of Malraux’s Antimemoires “Car c’est en Inde que se sont le plus largement déployées les ailes nocturnes de l’humanité…” His telling of Vishnu’s famous trick on the sage Narada is simply gorgeous and draws tears to the eyes: “Fetch me water, for I am thirsty….arriving in the village, a young girl opens the door and throws her arms around his neck. His arrival had been awaited since forever…and thus he knows the feel of mud between his toes, in the rice field, the pink flame of the cow dung fires at nightfall, the release of sleep after a day’s backbreaking work… until one day comes the flood”.

Some people always think of Malraux as pompous, the writer who became a minister out of love of “la gloriole”, the guy who did everything – going to fight in the Spanish civil war, or on explorations of the Arabian desert and of Central Asia – just to stay in the limelight. I find him brave, humble and actually fun loving. When he starts writing the Antimemoires, he has been sent to China by de Gaulle to get over his suicidal tendencies, made particularly bad by his son’s death in car accident. True, sometimes the Antimemoires can be unbearably stuffy and gloomy ( that obsession with death) and it is weird to see Stalin, Nehru and Mao all brooding and speaking like Malraux. But why does nobody think that Malraux did all the things he did, all the exploring and warring and politicking simply because he wanted to have fun, and be away from his gloomy obsessions ? He was a restless, virile kind of guy, who liked to be where the action was. We always think of virile men as being physically strong and heavily built – a laughable and absurd notion.

I feel so lucky that I picked up the Antimemoires when I was 17, it gave me such a wide picture of the world, away from the self righteous preaching by creepy shits like Sartre, whom I find genuinely nihilistic and soul destroying.

1 May 2009

Just a few hurried lines ( I am drowning in work since the past few months and there is no end in sight to it), after a short trip in Cairo, to say how much I found it pretty much like Delhi: the crazy driving, the men’s staring ( if not more) at foreign women, the Islamic architecture, the big and decrepit train station, the haggling over prices. I felt like I was back in India in 1998. Back then that had been my first trip out of Mauritius, at the ripe old age of 27. I had despaired of ever going abroad one day.

Our visit to the Pyramids, on the afternoon of the second day, took place after lunch in a KFC and was followed by a stroll in a posh downtown area in the evening. This gave a solid feeling of irreality to the experience. Upon arriving by subway in the suburb of Giza, we took a taxi who brought us deep in a poor neighbourhood, and stopped at a stable of horses and camels deep . A wall ran behind the stable and the owner of the place assured us that he was the “government tourist office” and that we absolutely had to hire one of his animals to reach the pyramids coz “there are no roads to there”. We had fallen in a major tourist trap but we had no choice but to give in, as we were worried about the access being closed, as it was already late in the day. So we were soon riding on a horse and a camel up a steep desert track towards the pyramids, which were on a desert plateau just at the end of the neighbourhood.

As soon as we were a bit out of town, we were wrapped in that eerie silence of the desert. The sky was very blue, a late afternoon blue and the pyramids, which were just a few dunes away, looked extremely remote and, well, mysterious.

The strangeness of the experience lay in the speed with which, suddenly, we were out of the busy town, riding in the desert towards, of all things in the world, the pyramids, the most out-of-the-way, utterly mysterious monuments in the world, and then one hour later, we were back in the town with its dusty suburbs, and its posh downtown hotels ( night saw us entering the Intercontinental, trying to look like rich tourists, so as to visit its toilet, and afterwards we had dinner in a Pizza hut). It was as if, on the way from work in downtown New York to his home in New Jersey, someone had left the highway to drop by on the ruins of Atlantis, half emerging from the sea just over the cliffs.

I could not help but think that it was like a sort of metaphor about the mind, or the ego: Cairo, with its statues of important men, its national museums and theaters, its shopping streets roaring with people at night, its bazaars and military academies – all life, bustle, hurry and worry of money and self importance. And just at the fingertip of one of its grubbier suburbs, the outlandish pyramids, frozen , or rather baked, in the eternal sands. Not to mention the even more freakishly strange Sphinx. All yellow, brown and orange below, and the shining blue sky above. The massive pyramids, the treacherous, shifting sands, and the ethereal sky. The odd feeling one gets, when looking at them, that they look more like the concluding statement of a civilization than its first effort ( let’s not get into conspiracy theories or pseudo history, though).

Monday, April 06, 2009


The other day I was thinking again of what I had written about the difficulty of judging people. I had asked : how do you judge rulers, given that the scope of their actions is so vast, that their effects are so complex, and can entail misery for some and benefit for others. Then I realized something, one of these things that are so obvious that you wonder how come you didn’t realize it a long time ago：there is an evil beauty about being part of the elite, something with a taint of the demoniac or the sadistic, in the sense that when you are of the ruling class, it is the others who bear the brunt of your actions. Of course you are also affected, but not that much. You are like the great ironclad battleships, it takes a lot of torpedoes to sink you. Actually, come to think of it, when you are of the ruling class, you can so easily do damage to others, even by the most innocent or well-meaning of your actions. Scott mc Fitzgerald also felt that, in the Great Gatsby, when he said of that rich couple (I think the girl’s name was Daisy) : “they were tiring people, Daisy and…, they messed up others’ lives, then they retreated into their money”.

Speaking of Scott McFitzgerald, I don’t know much about the subject, but I have a feeling that in his days, people had a powerful feeling that the rich were a race apart, an attractive and dangerous people. I’m thinking of “Gatsby”, and of “The adventures of Augie March” by Saul Bellow, and “the talented Mr Ripley” by Patricia Highsmith.

Nowadays, the truly rich are more discreet. Or rather, people spend much more time reading about pop stars, actors and sportsmen when they want to dream of glamour. That group is an odd species, most of them are from the middle class/ working class, and behave that way. Think of Victoria Beckham, who so actively behaved like a nouveau riche, even when she wasn’t yet there. By doing that, she actually emphasized so strongly her middle classness. So, pop stars, actors and sportsmen are ambiguous creatures, in that they can be awesomely rich yet they never try to behave like aristocrats, on the contrary they seem to work hard to retain something of the common touch. Those who try to do otherwise risk a fall from popular favour. Think, for example, of Nicole Kidman who by some trick of nature, or twist of character, always looks a pretty aloof person, and seems so very disliked because of that.

Up to probably around 1940, someone like Ms Kidman would probably have been idolised precisely because of that something glacial about her personality. People then were still addicted to the sexy unreachableness of aristocrats, their distant manners and exotic codes of behaviour, and the danger of trying to rub shoulders with them, when they could so easily play with you and leave you pregnant, heartbroken or humiliated.

Ours is an age of middle class comfort and fuzziness, nowadays the rich about whom we care and fantasize about must feel like people whom we believe that if we actually met them somewhere, say in a bar, we’d just strike a conversation with them and could even marry them, and our life would afterwards be a sort of enlarged version of being middle class, just having a bigger house and more jewelry but still somehow remaining within the same norms of behaviour.

However, the financial crisis is probably changing our view of the rich, in the sense that it has rudely woken us from our comfortable fantasies about actors and singers, and made us realize that all along, there was another class of rich people, the real rich people, the bankers and financiers who don’t do harmless movies, but do real business moves which have enormous impacts on our lives. All of a sudden, we are realizing, like our peasant ancestors did for thousands of years before us, that our lives are hostage to the fantasies and follies of the powerful. If your king wanted to invade the neighbouring kingdom, that meant your village would have to suffer the horrors of war. Many a thing had remained the same, but we were lulled into a feeling of comfort.
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