Molly Bloom? YES!
Two guys, P & T, go into a bookstore, browsing.
– I always like to read the last sentence of a book before I buy it. I find that it tells me most about the book, says P.
– Yeah, me too. Most people grab a book and look at the first sentence, or a bit of the first few pages, agrees T.
– Mistake. First few sentences writer dude’s trying hard to grab the publisher’s attention, you know, like publish this book and give money, sorta thing. It’s not actually what the reader would like he’s thinking of, but what he thinks the publisher will think the reader will like. You know how many subsequent classics have been knocked back by wanker publishers? Lots, it’s fucking criminal. The first sentence can be annoying, but the book still amazingly good. Or the sentence good but the book crap, like the stuff you read.
– Ha ha. But yeah, never thought of *why* I do it, but you’re spot on there. The last sentence or two are about tidying up the plot, the characters. Dude’s only trying hard to impress the reader, make the reader satisfied. Well not always of course, but you know what I mean.
They nod. Such perfect agreement between people is rare.
T, a genre fiction addict, recommends to P a couple of science-fantasy-speculative-horror-magic/realism cult books which he thought everyone should read, but P hasn’t.
~~~~~~~
“He never saw Molly again.” *
” ‘Don’t ask me why, old sport,’ said Stoney, ‘but somebody up there likes you.’ ”
“I know nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.”
“He walked away and he kept on walking.”
~~~~~~~
And a few others of varying merit.
P, a pretentious autodidact who uses words like “autodidact” in general conversation, recommends some slipstream books which don’t quite fit the genres, as well as some modernist and post-modernist classics which everyone should read but, naturellement T hasn’t.
~~~~~~~
“And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.”
“For a long time there is really nothing to be seen; but after Golgotha’s been burning for an hour or two, it becomes possible to see that underneath the shallow water, spreading down the valley floor, right around the isolated boulder where Randy’s perched, is a bright thick river of gold.”
“And all that is left to me is the sound of snow underfoot.”
“It was summoning all the barges on the river, every last one, and the whole city and sky and the countryside and ourselves, to carry us all away, the Seine tooand that would be the end of us.”
“Now everybody”
~~~~~~~~
And he picked up one more of the recommended books and held it open in his hands… And he started to read the last sentence.
P paid for his handful of books, had them demagnetized, placed in a biodegradable bag. He waited by the entrance.
…
Still waiting, he browsed some more new releases that tempted him. The Pale King. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet… He moved his biodegradable bag from one hand to the other, scratched at his groin as a pubic hair seemed to caught over the end of his cock. This irritated him. It was too long since he had last shaved his balls.
He wanted to call out to T to hurry the fuck up, but in a bookstore such as this one in Carlton, it is like a library but with allegedly cool people who have eyebrow studs and ponytails (males) and pierced lips and blue hair (females) behind the counter, and not little old ladies who always recommend Agatha Christie. It is not cool to yell here.
P gives up. Fuck, I’ll go have a long macchiato, he thinks. I’ll met T in the coffee shop he loves, the one next door..
…
His second long macchiato is down, some biscotti down. Despite his shaking hands, he is in a dream world, reading one of the books he has just bought. It is completely weird; moralistic, simplistic, and funny, and he was hooked by the expression “chrono-synclastic infundibula.” T is still not back. P sighs, pays the black-clad, blue-haired waitress with the stud though her lip and heads back to the bookstore and find T, last seen reading over 30 minutes ago.
T is standing where he left him, still immersed in the book, turning a page.
– Come on mate, I thought you were only going to read the last sentence!
– I am.
– What the fuck book are you reading?
– You recommended it, man.
He turns to book over to show P the cover.
P groans.
~~~~~~~
E@L
[Sorry about that folks – it was just meant to be a three line joke but as usual, I got carried a way. The real Tom, from whom this completely imaginary conversation originated when he joked about the title of this post being on a t-shirt somewhere (or something like that), has neither (all) the characteristics of the hyopthetical T nor (all) those of the hypothetical P, but he is a well-read bastard. Both characters, says E@L, c’est moi.
And there is purely the smug satisfaction of being a wanker dilettante like E@L for those who can tell me which books are quoted above: they are last lines, of course. OK, a candy bar or a Guinness, your choice, if you can get more than five. I’m presuming most people I know will get the book T is reading… If not, I’m getting some new friends.]
* The author added this sentence as an afterthought in order to prevent him from writing a sequel, as in hey, she’s dead. It didn’t work. (Thanks Paul.)
Toes
I was going to write a piece about Thai bar girls’ ugly knees (a Bruce story) and the strange looking toes I noticed on one of my colleagues (on her feet to be exact) – they were long and thin and splay-toed, with buttons of yellow callus on the little toes, gecko-like, Gollum-like, and they really freaked me out – until* I read the opening lines of David Foster Wallace’s Broom Of The System…
Most pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metelman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. They’re long and thin and splay-toed, with buttons of yellow callus on the little toes… etc…(No mention of Gollum)
Sigh.
(Wrong picture – I have the new Penguin Ink edition, cover art by tattooist Duke Reilly)
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Finally, yes, I’ve started to dispel the fog of guilt in which I have been literarily (new word?) lost, never having read Infinite Jest. [And now I’ve purchased BotS! What an fracken idiot!]
When Wallace ended the universe of himself – rope, neck, kitchen ceiling (I believe) [I wonder if he wore shoes when he went, or were his toes exposed? Were they pretty toes or ugly ones?]- a few years back, I thought, heck I’d better read it, in memoriam you know? But immediately he went, all his books evaporated into the libraries of similarly motivated but more prompt aesthetes, and I failed in my epicish (new word?) endeavour to obtain an edition of IJ, indeed any of DFW’s books, in Singapore. Consider the Lobster I eventually found in Bangkok, but still it sits unread on my unread-over-weighted shelves. Then, slippery cerebral circuitry, Infinite Jest escaped from my mind for a while.
I was reading about infinity a while back and trying (failing) to come to terms with the Aleph of infinities proposed by George Cantor in the late 19th century, when I saw in the science/mathematics section Wallace’s book on infinity – Everything And More – grabbed it, read it, but it didn’t really help, only frustrated me more. My fault of course – glazed eyes? you have no idea.
Izzy’s friend Tom (hey dude) is a maths prodigy (compared to me, compared to anyone), and he helped; but he was amazed that I hadn’t read Infinite Jest. So, by now it was far enough away from his funeral for the new editions to have returned to the Kinokuniya shelves, at his insistence I took one home. Unread. Guilt. Fog. Book become invisible.
Then on Tuesday (this Tuesday, last Tuesday I mean, a few days ago, remember?) at a pub quiz – beers, pizza, imminent victory, jaws, defeat – the conversation inexplicably turned to DFW. Did I start it**? Maybe I did. Two of the guys, one Welsh (another mathemetician) the other American, went quasi-orgasmic over Infinite Jest. They seemed to have read everything of his, but they didn’t know which week Thanksgiving falls in! So again me, with guilt/inadequacy. Fog. Shuts up. (But I read today – I should be working, not blogging or reading interviews, I know – in an interview with Arundhati Roy that she hadn’t read any William Faulkener, so hey… [oops, neither have I])
So now, two days later E@L is about fifteen pages into IJ; autistic/savant tennis players, dope fiends… and skipping around about too, to sample what’s ahead.
EVERY SENTENCE IS AMAZING and requires you to think and puzzle, find the joke and the wit and the genius, but somehow it is enjoyably readable (once you let it flow, as you have to do with Proust). At one point while browsing ahead, I hiccuped into spontaneous laughter – fat woman’s buttocks inextricably wedged out the window of a bus toilet! One minute hyper-intense, 60 seconds later slapstick.
And I only have 1000 pages of this stuff to go!
It took the below footnoted David Eggers a month to read it he confesses in the intro to my edition. Ha! That’s what my McSweeney subscriber said as well. As I struggled and wanked my way for fifteen years to eventually get over Gravity’s Rainbow, (somewhere, oh that’s right, in Phuket) I doubt I will be that rapid in my reading…
E@L
* the “I was going write”, not the freaked out bit
** Oh that’s right, I had mentioned McSweeney’s in a facile attempt to make me sound smart (iron, Eiffel tower, who woulda thunk?) a propos who the frack knows what, but one of the guys had been a fracking subscriber to McSweeneys (embarrassment, curl up, ball), and then the question (not from the pub quiz) as to who was the editor of McSweeneys (I thought Rick Moody, but fortunately kept my mouth shut) and then up (on my Google phone) came David Eggers and he subsequently led us through the garden of fracking allusional (new word?) paths of semi-drunken one-up-manship to the topic of the works of one David Foster Wallace (deceased).
UlyssesSeen / BloggerNotSeen
Dublin, June 16th 1904.
A comic book version of James Joyce’s Ulysses hits the ether/cloud…
Apart from being free on the triple-W, this awesome effort is also available for free download from iTunes to the iPad and other iProducts… but only now that Apple has rescinded its directive to remove all images containing nudity from the comic book version of the novel. Apparently (in an updated version of the NYT article which I’ve only seen on the TimesReader edition), it now seems that Ulysses is “not obscene” after all.
There’s a revelation.
Prior to its publication as a comic for the iPad, Joyce’s stately, plump book was more often carried ostentatiously through university campuses than actually read. Now just carrying a iPad around is all that is required to evoke mixed feelings of jealous rage and supercilious dismissal in their fellow university layabouts.
Some would no doubt say that Ulysses is more famous for being banned than for being best-sellers – a la The Girl Who Really Knows How To Treat Rapists. Also in this category are that good gardening guide, Lady Lovely’s Chatter and that medical textbook, The Topic of Cancer, amongst others…
Can’t argue there. Nothing like a controversy to boost sales.
There is a fascination tale behind the publishing history of Ulysses.
First published in Paris in 1922, it was banned until 1933 in the USA and in Australia until 1937, only to be re-banned in 1941, which tells you something about how we do over artistic creativity down under.
One wonders if Steve Jobs’ asshat morality guerrillas used the same criteria to assess the comic that Judge James M. Woolsey used in his famous overturning of the USA ban:
— It did not give him an erection, therefore it was not pornographic, therefore it was not obscene. —
Fair call in those heady(npi!) pre-viagra days of course.
Didn’t fuck up the sales too much either.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
These too are the guys who temporarily popped an “Adults Only” rating on the iPhone book-reader Eucalyptus because you could download the Kama Sutra to it. That fact that the Kama Sutra is available for download to ANY book-reader or computer because it comes from Project Gutenberg appears to have been neither here nor there. This version doesn’t even have the highly illustrative, um, illustrations with it.
Arbitrary, inconsistent and often contradictory are most people on the extremes of the moralistic universe.
Of course, Eucalyptus then became THE $10 eBook reader to have on your iPhone after this.
Controversy = cash.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And please don’t ever forget the case of the immensely amusing David over at his once obligatory site for farangs in Thailand, MangoSauce. He lost his GoogleAds account for no good reason at all. Many of his posts are as classics in the expat genre, and thankfully his site is still up.
Oops. Controversy = no cash.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Speaking of arbitrary and unjustified censorship of free speech (no, not here in Singapore – we love Big Brother, and I don’t mean the TV show), over the last week, Blogger and Google had taken down both Canadian blogger MJ’s site, The Infomaniac (and locked her out of her Gmail account) and Spanish blogger Leni at Escritora y peligrosa (not a debilitating skin disease). For about five days MJ was in cloud limbo until Google apologised and reinstated her account. Leni was knocked out for most of Sunday.
WTF? The shivers have been going up Blogspot bloggers’ spines.
A lot of Southern Kerfuffle was righteously raised by one of E@L’s bestest blog-friends, that sweet person and ever-popular Savannah, her support bringing this unjustified and unjustifiable (to coin a phrase) injustice to blog-light.
Mago chased up Leni’s case as well and it all came to a head!
Their efforts at raising online awareness of these cases presumably helped Google/Blogger to right their wrongs.
[Sav mentions in the comments here that eros den was the main guy to push Blogger in these cases.
As Leni reports, the procedure for getting one’s blog back seems complicated enough – a 5-step process that calls for a review request, an appeal, etc… but I imagine it would be even worse if you no longer have an email account, as in MJ’s case!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Why did this happen? Neither blogger is outrageously controversial or frankly obscene (not telling you what happened to my willy) though there might be a bit of flesh here and there or some stories about bits of flesh there and here.
Hell, nothing outrageous. Nothing to explain it at all. Leni talks about being slightly harassed by some religious nutter, but that may not have been the case. Blogger have not told her what happened, and same for MJ, although in her case they did apologize.
Interestingly, Leni’s, MJ’s, and even Savannah’s (!!) blog now have the Blogger “Content Warning” when you go there, as you have should have seen.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There is a hesitancy with which many people are viewing the seemingly arbitrary censorship. Hell some people are blocked just for fucking swearing!
Like both Savannah (personal communication) and Mago (new site here), I have taken the anti-conspiratorial precaution of backing up and (half a day’s work!) exporting all my posts and some (but not all, it seems) of my comments over to a mirror blog using my WordPress account. I’m not migrating completely just yet, but I’ll let you know if I decide that I will.
Depends how skittish we all get with the arbitrariness of the Hidden Ones at Google.
[Addendum 2: Don’t foget that I lost MY old blog TWICE – when hackers used it to send phishing emails out. You still can’t read my old blog in some places, like the BA business lounge at Heathrow. ]
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Oh, yeah, where did this rambling post start? Happy Bloomsday.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Don’t get yourselves banned without a back-up.
E@L
Boring Chess Trivia
There are 20 possible first moves in chess for white and 20 possible first moves for black, giving 400 possible combinations already, for just the bloody start.
Each player has 27 options for his or her second move, bringing the total number of combinations for the game thus far up to 71,852.
After the third move this jumps to around 9,000,000 possible game situations.
After the fourth move, 315 billion.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sigh. Thinking three moves ahead or several billion?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Estimated possible games – 10^126.
Estimated number of electrons in the universe – 10^79.
OMG, no wonder I can’t win.
E@L’s Gameknot.com ranking is in green. It looks like the stock market on Thursday… Interesting thing is that as he played more and more on-line tournament games against higher rated opponents (gray line), or more appropriate opponents such as those of his purported ranking, his took a nose-dive… Funny that.
Other boring numbers trivia is from…
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White(Murphy)
1. P–K4 (b) …(b) The primary cause of all of White’s subsequent difficulties.
Samuel Beckett, Murphy, Novels of Samuel Beckett I, pp145-6.
Love that quote. From the very word go we are doomed to ever escalating complexity…
As in chess, so in life.
E@L
Recommended Reading (Updated)
1. “The Singapore Grip”, by J.G. Farrell, 1978. Available in a NYRP edition these days.
What is this Singapore grip thing exactly? It becomes a bit of a running gag in the novel and you don’t find out until near the end, but it’s worth the wait.
Here is a Great Book of the new old-school, teeming with immense human insight and dark humour. And bloody interesting (certainly to me) information about Singapore in the year leading up to the fall of Singapore to the Japanese. Robber rubber barons and communist mata-haris mix it in the tropical humidity. Yet for all its proselytising and the wealth of opinions espoused by the various characters, the style is easy and relaxed, with a classical feel, perhaps because of the clarity of Farrell’s descriptive powers. It’s one of the few Oriental books where the literally exotic (ex- out of, otic – the east) scenery doesn’t seem to get in the way of the essential plot(s). It’s something like reading Joseph Conrad at his best, but much more funny and obviously with a slightly more modern tale. If only more books were as ‘gripping’ (ho ho) as this.
So, you’re of the It’s Not Set In New York So Fuck It school of literary appreciation, and you don’t give a fuck about the street number accurate depiction of pre-war Singapore and its snobby, foolish British elite, or the bungling pig-headedness of the unprepared British and Australian military, or the exact methods of exploiting the Malayan rubber workers? That’s OK.
Read it instead for it’s universal theme of sexual intrigue. There is the incredibly amusing story of the (perhaps overly) naive, idealistic Matthew Webb who is fresh in town from the collapse of the League of Nations, as he fends off the romantic advances of the pretty white girl, Jean Blackett, the daughter of his deceased father’s partner (who wants to lock together the firm of Webb and Blackett for one more generation and for more profit.) Meanwhile Matthew’s once best-friend is trying in vain to interest Jean in himself by bowing to her every outrageous whim, which of course only makes her respect him less. Then there is Matthew again, instead learning the Chinese way of Yin-Yang sex. Upstairs, cramped in a dark, smoky, tiny tenement in Chinatown with the half Chinese, half White Russian (maybe) femme fatale (feel my breast) Vera, he puts on his glasses and brings the lamp closer to get a better look at her “pearl in a jade sea”… This is one of the unable-to-stop-smiling-and-chuckling jokes with which this book is teeming!
Read it also for the war-drama of the inexorable approach of the Japanese army down the Malay peninsula, for the terror of the soldiers, both Japanese and Allies in the fog of night-time battle, and for the desperate heroism amongst the tragedy of the fire-fighters battling raging infernoes as bombs fall on the Singapore docks – you can’t help but think of the 9/11 fire-fighters at this point.
One of the key themes of the book is how nothing ever really changes in itself, no matter how much it is altered on the outside. Certainly this books raises most of the issues I continually rage about concerning Singapore; exploitation (of maids), nepotism, etc… except maybe for taxi-drivers.
To highlight this, Farrell tells the fable of some King or other (can’t find it now, forgot to bookmark it) returning from the Battle of Arles [sic?] approached by a fisherman (or something) who asks, “Did we win?” “What does it matter to you if we won?” replies the King. “You’ll still be a fisherman.”
Mmm. Singapore is still Singapore.
The book ends as the Japanese march the surrendered westerners to the Changi internment camp. This is where many Singapore war books start.
I loved it, maybe because I haven’t read a book with such high drama mixed with such dry irony and wonderful humour for a while. It’s one of those big tomes (598 pages) that you can’t stop reading once you gather up the gumption to start yet you don’t want ever it to end (yada yada). Big though it is, the style is tight, plot motivates all the action and it’s not overloaded with crap unrealistic dialogue or bullshit diversion like many “novels” these days seriously in need of an editor.*
Note: Ayn Rand would not like this book. Which can only be a plus to my (and Matthew’s) way of thinking.
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J.G Farrell won the Booker Prize in 1973 for his previous book, ‘The Siege of Krishanpour’, and in his speech of acceptance condemned Booker-Connell for the working conditions in their plantations in the West Indies. Those were the days, when it was not an attack on the very fabric of the universe to stand up for those who lack the opportunity and means to speak for themselves. This sense of aggrievement for the oppressed and foreign is one of the many things I like (being an armchair socialist myself) about The Siege and The Grip (I’ve read Troubles too, and the naive newcomer character is there, as is the actual Major, but it is not as politically engaged as the others.)
Farrell was swept out to sea while rock fishing in Bantry Bay, Ireland not long after publishing this book. He was only 41. What a great pity. I would have loved to read whatever he was to write next, and you should read what he has already written.
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2. “The Boat” by Walter Gibson, originally published in 1963, I think. 2007, from Monsoon Books in Singapore. (Review copy. Thanks Phil!)
Another interesting Singapore war-time story in a completely different vein, this is a true first person account of how 135 survivors from a boat that was sunk escaping Japanese occupied Malaya (or Borneo? it doesn’t matter – I don’t have the book with me to check some details) try to survive while clinging to a lifeboat built for 28 adrift in the Malacca Straits for nearly a month without enough water or food, apart from sashimi. Terrible things ensue. Four people survived this amazing ordeal, including the only female, a nurse who was immediately captured by the Japanese as she trudged away looking for food and water and sent to a prison camp. Gibson himself had only just escaped from one of those death marches which are all too popular these days (books about them I mean) before he found himself in this new predicament. The writing is, um, not at Farrell’s level, more documentary style, but it is the steeliness of these people’s will to survive the horrors of their “ultimate escape” journey that keeps you reading with gruesome fascination. Despite it being a stark, ultimately sad tale, I felt warmed by the strength of its depiction of such stoic, human perseverance. How would I manage under such circumstances? Really enjoyed reading it, as it gave me a lot to think about.
And it is only 100 pages.
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[Addendum: a late inclusion…]
3. The City & The City, China Miéville, 2010. Pan.
A murder mystery, corruption thing set in the weirdest cities you’ve ever heard of… Besźel and Ul Qoma are cities with different cultures, different architecture, different languages, different rules… but they inhabit the same geographic space. The towns mesh and weave through each other in the strangest most disorienting ways; buildings on the same street, even on the same side can be in the different city. If you cross a path in the wrong place or stoop to chase your wind-tossed hat you might’ve crossed the border – illegally. You’ve Breached. You’re gone, as in disappeared. Even to look at the other city or its inhabitants is Breach. There is a border point where, after copious paperwork and baksheesh, you can get to the other city, but while you physically walk the same streets, you no longer are allowed to see the city you just left. You have to “unsee” it, just as you “unsee” that city from the vantage of the other.
Traffic, understandably, is a nightmare as you must avoid the cars, buses, trucks and pedestrians you are not allowed to see. To “unsee” other cars is to automatically filter them from your consciousness while physically getting out of their way as well.
In this sense, it reminds me of the traffic in Vietnam and in India.
Another top read. Will no doubt win some award for something.
E@L
* I started some Laurel K Hamilton vampire-hunter novel once (why oh why?) and gave it up when I noticed it had taken over 5 pages for her characters to move from the car to the house as they discuss some hokum irrelevant bullshit and go through five stages of a relationship. Is she paid per word? Padding!
Quotes Of The Day
The Sage of Göttingen
Physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) is not widely remembered outside Germany — which is a great pity, as his notebooks contain some of history’s most trenchant aphorisms:
* If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.
* What they call “heart” lies much lower than the fourth waistcoat button.
* What a pity it isn’t a sin to drink water, cried an Italian, how good it would taste.
* A book is a mirror: If an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
* The often unreflected respect for old laws, old customs, and old religion we have to thank for all mischief in the world.
* It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: If we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.
* Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.
* If walking on two legs is not natural to man it is certainly an invention that does him credit.
* It is almost impossible to carry the torch of wisdom through a crowd without singeing someone’s beard.
* Now that education is so easy, men are drilled for greatness, just as dogs are trained to retrieve. In this way we’ve discovered a new sort of genius, those great at being drilled. These are the people who are mainly spoiling the market.
* Can it be that the evil in the world is in general of more use than the good?
* Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.
The “waste books” were admired by Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud, and even Tolstoy wondered “why the Germans of the present day neglect this writer so much.” He never got an answer.
(This post entirely lifted from the remarkable Futility Closet).
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Love the last one.
E@L
Dunkeln Und Licht
Further on the Darkness and Light motif in
— the often elipsed last verse of Mac The Knife
German:
Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln
Und die andern sind im Licht
Und man siehet die im Lichte
Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht
English translation:
There are some who are in darkness
And the others are in light
And you see the ones in brightness
Those in darkness drop from sight
(from Mystic Bourgeoisie)
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On a related note, Danny Boyle’s new movie Slumdog Millionaire seems to want to put forward the rosy side of having to shit on the street along with 750 million others.
E@L
Back Online – White Tiger
The iMac has been reformatted and lots of stuff reloaded. iPhoto still crashes, but what the fuck. I’ll BitTorrent Aperture at some stage.
Sort of missed today. Was it nice outside? Loading stuff, downloading movies – watched Cloverfield (good idea, Godzilla meets Before Sunset), Tropic Thunder (hilarious!) – and I finished “White Tiger”, Aravand Ariga’a Booker Prize winner.
Hands up if you think this is another magic-realism Merchant-Ivory-Rushdie romance? WRONG!
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Think of this shoe shop…
Then think of one of the guys under the table working to make those shoes.
I’m going to ask you to stretch your imagination – to Aravind Adiga’s lengths. Imagine that one of these shoemakers has written a novel about how he extricates himself from such an impossibly exploitative situation and made it as “an entrepreneur” in Bangalore.
White Tiger is not about a shoemaker of course, I just happen to have these pics, but rather, it ‘written’ by a tea-maker, a clever young boy in “the Darkness” of the slum world of northern India. Balram Halwai (called Munna, “boy”, until a name is needed at school) eventually eavesdrops his way of this, using information he picks up by being practically invisible to the other wealthier classes, to become the driver for a rich family. Here in “the Light” of the rich world, his sense of injustice grows until he commits a horrific crime in order “not to end up in a mound of indistinguishable bodies that will rot in the black mud of Mother Ganga.” It is the only way he can see to get out – a line of poetry echoes in his mind, ironically it is the only poem he knows: ““you were looking for the key for years, but the door was always open.“
The conversational tone (I say it is ‘written’ not narrated, because the format is that of an extended letter to Chinese Premier Wen Jiaboa!) is captivating and easy to read but the themes and the reality depicted are extremely hard-hitting (or least would be if you thought India was all shagging the sadhus at the 5-star ashram, lovely colored saris and smoking good pot in Goa).
This is about the India that flashes past the tinted window of your Mercedes limousine, it’s about the India I see in the clinics and hospitals. Desperately poor people chronically trapped by corruption that runs so deep it has become the supportive skeleton of the country. All I have seen improve in 10 years that I have been going there is the quality of the rich people’s cars.
“…no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality…”
But it does have entrepreneurs… and democracy!
And murderers.
And great novelists.
E@L
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