A Mirage of Space and Time

Dickens, Representation and Chocolate Biscuits

2012-02-29T19:53:00.000-05:00

When the poster advertised ‘High Tea with Dickens,’ celebrating the author’s birthday, I expected a few pots of hot water and a discussion. But I was mistaken. They were serious about the high tea, and Lang Cafe boasted a sumptuous spread: different types of teas, cheeses, fruits and vegetables, breads and spreads, and even chocolate biscuits. Toothpicks stood in little cups to facilitate retrieval of tea bags, cucumber slices and crumbly chunks of cheese. I happily filled my plate and cup.

Associate Professor of Literature Carolyn Berman presented a talk on ‘Dickens and the Art of Representation,’ which I found more palatable than the food (even the chocolate biscuits). Berman studies 18th and 19th century fiction and is currently working on a book on Dickens, Parliament and the media. The text and images she showed us connected lightly with the research for this book, but are not a part of her manuscript.

To open a discussion about representation, Berman started with images. She showed us an illustration from Nicholas Nickleby, of Miss La Creevy painting a miniature portrait of Kate Nickleby. As you can see, Miss La Creevy is depicted almost larger-than-life, with an enormous hat, elaborate outfit, and surrounded by her paintings, making very clear to the reader that Miss La Creevy is a painter. The details of the image are inaccurate--one did not use a paintbrush for miniatures, for example--but Dickens and the illustrator were more interested in the representation of the characters by their accoutrements and descriptive characteristics. In fact, Miss La Creevy later describes the difficulty of miniature painting, since heads have to be enlarged, eyes widened, noses diminished and teeth invisible. Cut to a miniature portrait of Dickens when he was 18 years old, painted by his aunt, and those techniques are apparent. At the time that Dickens was writing, stories were printed in installments in publications, and generously illustrated. This allowed for conscious and unconscious collaborations between the writer and illustrator, where prose tried to approximate image, and vice versa. Characters, therefore, came into existence flush with adjectives and accessories, their representation confirmed and compounded by each other.

From there Berman moved to textual representations of characters -- the bit I found most interesting.

She read aloud the second and third paragraph of the first chapter of Great Expectations:

“As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above," I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.”

Young Pip probably could not read at this time, and yet he drew information from text, from letters, about his parents -- that we, as readers, similarly were drawing from to learn about the characters. Berman pointed out the refraction of information and experience here: where illiterate Pip is responding to the appearance of the words, the lettering on the tombstone, we are fully literate and converting Pip’s intuitive reactions into realities for his parents’ characters. Dickens found unconventional ways to represent characters to other characters, and, one layer later, to us.

“At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.”

Berman marveled at this passage for a few reasons: it being a confident run-on sentence, Dickens’ deferral of the subject (Pip) until the very last word of the last line. I enjoyed it for the wording: I can imagine a long quiet river being a “low leaden line” and the source of the wind, yet unexplored by a young character, being a “distant savage lair.”

Dickens learned shorthand to become a Parliament reporter. His fascination with graphic representations continued as he imagined the ‘arbitrary characters’ of Gurney’s Shorthand as arbitrary characters in his works, playing with the words, the implications, and the characters themselves.

For a man whose vocation was words, art was never far from his mind.

20,000 Books Under His Roof

2012-02-22T00:12:00.000-05:00

You hear about privileged 6 year-olds with educated parents entering school with a 20,000 word vocabulary. But it’s not a given that 81 years later, that privileged adult will possess a home library of 20,000 books. Professor and writer William H. Gass is one such revered bibliophile, even more esteemed for his love of not just books, but grammar and sentences themselves. He spoke at The New School about his love of libraries, sentence structure and Plato’s philosophical writings.

He read aloud from 'Shelf Life,' an essay published in St. Louis Magazine in December 2007, and here I have pasted some bits he did not share in person. To him, “a good library is miserly, as proud of its relics as a church, permitting even a cheap novel to be useful to the study of the culture it came from, an institution, consequently, that won’t allow ephemera to ephemerate and is not ashamed of having the finest collection of bodice-rippers in existence; a library that has sat safely in the same place and watched like a sage its contents age, consequently a library whose dust is the rust of time; a library that never closes on cold days and will allow the homeless to rest in its reading room; a library that will permit me to poke about in its innards as long and as often as I like.”

A Ph.D student working day after day in Cornell’s library, whose steel infrastructure and dim lighting evoked his days in the Navy, Gass grew accustomed to sharing air with a paginated population rather than a two-legged one. The endless rows of books quickly became his world: “sitting there, day after day in dusky light, my conception of Eden began to change. It had no location on a map, but was a destination determined by the Dewey Decimal System.”

What were the rules of this world, if there could be any in such a diverse and profound environment? He told us a few:

A sentence “must not forget its way and wander in the wilderness.”
Sentences are like fences, to be “left open...or prudently closed.”
A powerful sentence does not require a reader to reflect its intensity: “not even a bored eye can rob a Rembrandt of its greatness.”

There was a reason, Gass pointed out, that in the olden days, elementary and middle school were simply called Grammar School. It sparked Gass' attitude to later declare, “I love words and arrangements. I want the reader stopped short at the language.” in a letter to Charles Shattuck, editor of the University of Illinois journal Accent (read it here).

From his 2000 essay collection, The World Within The Word, he expounded further: “Sentences like this create a world in which you very well may turn a corner in a marble hall and find yourself in a shack; in which every custom is a cover for novelty, and novelty is normal; where you may learn to proceed with caution because a wave of meaning may flow back over you and alter everything; that its you and not your husband who is leading a double life.” (p.334)

When asked about his philosophy background -- from his Cornell Ph.D to his teaching experience at the University of St. Louis -- he quipped, “most philosophy is fiction, I think.” He explained that each sentence in a philosophical treatise, or novel, is a microcosm of the work and its argument. For example Faulkner, he said, would produce six chapters riffing off a single sentence, given his style of prose. His favorite philosophers? Hobbes is “magnificent despite T.S.Eliot’s dislike”, and Plato is “unmatched,” he said conclusively.

What about other famous authors? Proust? Gass admitted to only having read Proust in translation, so “I guess I don’t know much of him at all.” Gass shared his deep respect for Henry James, and remembered his fiery writing in The Wings of the Dove, written, as he put it, at “the edge of the First World War.”

Gass ended his speech differently but this part of his 'Shelf Life' essay stuck a chord: “Collectors who do not care for books but only for their rarity prefer them in an unopened, pure and virginal condition, but such volumes have had no life, and now even that one chance has been taken from them, so that, imprisoned by stifling plastic, priced to flatter the vanity of the parvenu who has made its purchase, such a book sits out of the light in a glass-enclosed humidor like wine too old to open, too expensive to enjoy.”

Not Gass, though. And his extensive, exhausting writing proves it.

Reviving Tolstoy in a Chelsea Bookstore

2011-12-02T01:48:00.000-05:00

Tenth avenue is its usual blur of color, wind and noise, covered in two-legged, four-legged and many-wheeled commuters. Some of the two-legged ones plant themselves on four-legged chairs inside 192 Books, a serene, studio-sized room wallpapered with books and floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto the cacophony. They are here for a talk organized by The Coffin Factory, the literary magazine whose mission is to bury the “pessimism that literature and reading are dead.” Featuring Dr. Rosamund Bartlett, translator of and expert in Russian literature (particularly Tolstoy and Chekhov) and NYU Creative Writing Professor Lara Vapnyar, the evening is to discuss and celebrate the legend of Leo Tolstoy: his impact on literature back when he was its contemporary and what resonates today, for his descendants (geographically, literally, emotionally), our contemporaries.

Dr. Bartlett began with Tolstoy’s legacy: while he is best known today for four very long novels (including War and Peace and Anna Karenina), he also compiled a huge religious and spiritual body of writings in the 1870s and 1880s that was as popular as his fiction at the time. He translated the Gospels and “reinvented Christianity in his own image,” creating for the Russian masses a new narrative of the unrelenting search for the truth and meaning of life--and inspiring Mahatma Gandhi and other pacifists with his famous book The Kingdom of God is Within You. Not surprisingly, he was excommunicated from the church in 1901.

Bartlett described him as a “walking one man reformation” in a country that had never had a reformation or a renaissance--back in the 1880s, she pointed out as an example, that “it was a bit cranky to be a vegetarian.” Throughout her research, she was stunned by what a prolific “dissident in imperial Russia” he was. (As struck by our speaker was Lenin who penned seven essays about him including “Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution,” in 1908, which promptly became required reading in schools all over the country.) Over time, however, and especially posthumously, he has been a “rather difficult figure to deal with.” 2010 was Tolstoy’s centenary and Chekov’s 150 year anniversary, and while the former was barely noted, the latter involved President Medvedev making a personal visit to Chekov’s hometown of Taganrog.

Prof. Vapnyar resurrected him for us with less technical, more personal respect, nostalgic for a childhood growing up with his books. To her and her generation, Tolstoy was always “more for us than just a writer,” and War and Peace, her favorite novel, was simply “beyond literature.” Fifteen years old and reading the book, she had one of the most significant revelations of her life: “I am going to die.” She admired how truthfully Tolstoy treated the “grandeur of the events” of life and death. Bartlett added that Tolstoy’s “unstinting honesty,” “enormously long sentences” and complete avoidance of rhetorical devices made for a completely unique literary language. Ever the rebel, Tolstoy did not merely play with language, he reconfigured it.

Therefore it did not seem surprising to hear Vapnyar confess to measuring “what happened in my life by Tolstoy.” Living a quiet childhood, “I had to fall in love with literary characters,” and found herself comparing real life lovers to the character of Prince Andre--not necessarily a pleasant undertaking. Bartlett concurred: Tolstoy was a “genius for universalizing” and “going into the tiny gradations of human experience.” She admired how nakedly he worried about “the thought of his not being alive” and the strength that this fear gave to his writing.

“It’s not that Tolstoy resolves something...that’s not what literature is supposed to do,” Vapnyar explained, alluding to the questions Tolstoy grappled with in literature and in spirituality. “You come to the fact that peace is impossible” because “he doesn’t lie to you.” Having extensively taught Tolstoy, Bartlett admitted that “you get a bit fed up with his moralizing,” but she happily rediscovered her love for him when writing his biography.

A “very mercurial young man,” Tolstoy seemed to steal even language from other nations, speaking “absolutely flawless French,” enjoying Dickens and Trollope (he named his dogs after Dickensian characters) and outdoing language professors in Greek and Hebrew after just a few months studying the languages. Bartlett was satisfied sticking to Russian. “For me, translating is one of the noblest activities there is,” she said, and praised Russian for being such an intimate language. To read Chekhov and Tolstoy in their native tongue is “just a different world...you feel closer to the writer.” Here, Bartlett shared another tidbit from her research: Chekhov, poor and of the lower class, wrote his short, simply sentences in tiny, “modest” handwriting. Tolstoy, however, was an aristocrat who chose to identify with the peasants, and employed “huge, very aristocratic” handwriting.

Bartlett taught us that the Russian language has two words for truth: pravda refers to daily, common truths while ista refers to the deep truth. Tolstoy unanimously wrote in quest of the latter, whether he was interpreting religious teachings or divining some of the longest works of literature known today, and Bartlett connected this single-mindedness to “something perhaps innately Russian about this idea of rebellion.” Vapnyar was more weary of such writing. “I don’t think people are looking for deeper truth in literature anymore. Period,” she said.

But all is not lost. While Vapnyar insisted that as a writer she is “absolutely not” influenced by Tolstoy, she gracefully concluded that: “there are some writers you can’t learn from because they are too perfect.” Knowing this, and hearing Bartlett say that “no one who writes about Tolstoy can cover everything,” it might be enough for new writers to know that Tolstoy is better as inspiration than as someone to aspire to.

An Hour with John Edgar Wideman

2011-11-16T01:19:00.006-05:00

When John Edgar Wideman (PEN/Faulkner award winner twice, MacArthur "Genius" award, Rhodes Scholar and more) speaks, you listen, because Wideman speaks with the eloquence and sparkle of his writing, and if you are a writer, you don't want to stop reading. I scribbled down a few moments of wit and wisdom from a conversation he had with my Literature Seminar this Fall--

In response to a scene of a woman walking into a lake, holding a sickly baby in her arms, from The Cattle Killing -- “A lot of ladies disappear into lakes in literature, in folklore...a lot of ladies disappear in life...I didn’t have to dream that up, it dreamed me.”

Wideman holds the imagination in high prestige, and rages against its obstacles. Speak your mind, he says, and more importantly, write it. As he says of his writing process, he tries to "midwife the imagination...” since “there are many windows in the house of fiction” and “stories don’t exist until they’re told.”

When Wideman was 13 years old and commented that high-priced foods in a store window were ‘exorbitant,’ the white woman standing behind him was floored. But everyone is entitled to all language and vocabulary, even if certain individuals do not expect it. “The language belongs to me, all of it...” Characters do not speak a certain way--a "black" way or a "white" way, and authors should not be expected to think or write a certain way. Bringing it back to his earlier point, “race is a stunting of the imagination.”

He pauses, making a critical observation about the gaps between words. If you spoke too soon after another person had spoken, he remembers from a book he has read, it was a sign of disrespect. As if you didn’t need to take a moment to think about what the other person had said before you responded. “Don’t fill the space, feel the silence.” Rhythm is the “modulation, the relationship to silence.” Writing plays with rhythm and movement, it follows a meter, and writers must remember that “time speaks” (ticks, static on an old recording, an old video), and also “never speaks.”

Another thought: writing should be as much of a challenge and an experience to the reader as it is to the writer. Reading is “like meeting another mind...if I don’t have industrious writers, I’m in trouble.”

And my favorite, when asked how much of himself he puts into his work: “If I was absolutely certain of who I am, then I wouldn’t mind being accused of autobiography.”

Kirpal Singh's Shadows

2011-10-05T15:17:00.008-04:00

Shadows. Attached to us. Distortions of us. Surprising us. Scaring others. Following everyone. Universal, yet so personal. How do different people, different cultures, respond to this concept that everyone has experienced?

Kirpal Singh, author, poet, professor and creativity consultant expounds ad hoc on the idea of a shadow narrative: "Literature," he says, "has all kinds of shadows; some are dark, some are not so dark."

I. A Literature of the Colonized?

In 1824, through the self-aggrandizing "barter trading" that was happening between colonizers, Britain took Singapore and Malaya (now Malaysia) and Holland kept Indonesia. These countries' histories developed accordingly in English and Dutch -- but for a slight change in history, "I would be here speaking Dutch," Sin

gh says. History, culture and community grow, autochthonous traditions must coexist like bitter siblings, and societies think multilingually. Perversely, Asian languages are considered "underdeveloped;" are they a shadow of their colonizers' tongues, Singh wonders. Which is the language of authority, of origin? Which language lives in the shadow of the other?

Singh recounts a story, back when he was about 7 years old and his village was buzzing with the anticipation of someone famous coming to visit them. It was a British District Office (DO) -- cue a reference to George Orwell, his position as a DO in Myanmar in the 1920s, and his corresponding literature -- who drove through, all pomp and fancy, and he happened to notice Singh and call him over. He tapped Singh's nose lightly with his cane, as if playing with him, and asked him in a British accent dripping with condescension, "and how are you, my boy?" Singh remembers being disgusted with this man of status, his voice, his words, his cane, and realized then that "I could wawk and tawk [British accent] if I wanted to, or I could walk and talk [Singaporean accent]." One could be colonized by the English tongue, or one could resist. And Singh resisted, achieving in English what few native speakers have, speaking at the House of Lords and winning numerous literary prizes.

Singh points out that "America has a very strange history…[it] has not been colonized in the way Singapore was colonized by the British." He quotes Robert Frost who read his poem, 'The Gift Outright', at JFK's inauguration: "The land was ours before we were the land's." This was America, but what was America? Who was it a gift to, who was it a gift from? How does one explore ideas of possession versus owning; and owning versus ownership? Colonization blurs these concepts with the confusing palette of morals, tradition and modernization, and North America's literature reflects a similarly rich and diverse set of narratives that define what it means to be American. Singh remarks on America's break from the English language which was a breach of "the compact, a creation of shadows" obscuring and enlarging the voices of America. As the Spanish Ambassador reportedly once said to Queen Elizabeth I, "the most potent instrument of domination is language."

II. Form and Experimentation in Shadow Literature.

What is 'form' and literature to story telling and oral cultures? "Can a story teller become a novelist? Is a story a novel?" What is the purpose of a story? How experimental is storytelling? "How do you experiment with voice?" he asks, a glint in his eye.

Comparing Chinese literature to Western literature, he shows us how human characters in the former are typically "very diminutive" while those in the latter are very large. This is an indication of different cultures, the shadows they live with, and how those inform literature, reveal and single out details, and become part of narrative. Here, experimentation with form is a commentary on a community; the literature serves a purpose. Experimentation for its own sake is "masturbatory, narcissistic;" writers today need to read more and discover how writers from the past would experiment, before they lay their own creative schemes down on paper.

He defines the spectrum of experimental creativity. On one extreme is the Demonic: the writer wants to hypnotize, enrapture reader, draw him in, spellbind him, create an addiction, propagate the idea of 'evil'. The other extreme is the Divine: the writer wants to focus on good, which is ultimately a fragile concept and always "under threat from the evil that is lurking everywhere." His point? "Experimentation must not be so unique as to leave all your readers confounded. There must be a point of contact between you and your reader." Therefore, when playing with this form, "be sensitive to the promptings that come from within, and grounded in the reality around you."

III. Writers v. Readers.

Singh agrees with Italo Calvino who advocated in an essay that a writer needs to be humble with and respectful of a reader engaging with his work; he cannot treat his reader as inferior. At the same time, he lavishes praise on author Wilson Harris (who wrote Palace of the Peacock) and describes him as "a man who is tormented -- because writings live on forever -- in life."

He writes mostly poetry, short fiction and creative non fiction and is working on a long piece now, confessing that it will take him a very long time to write. He closes with this scene from the 1994 movie 'Il Postino' --

Mario Ruoppolo: My dear poet and comrade, you got me into this mess, you've got to get me out of it. You gave me books to read, you taught me to use my tongue for more than licking stamps. It's your fault if I'm in love.

Pablo Neruda: No, this has nothing to do with me. I gave you my books but I didn't authorize you to steal my poems. If you think you gave Beatrice the poem I wrote for Matilde--

Mario Ruoppolo: Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, but those who need it.

"We go through life, and we fall in love, and more often than not, there is a rude awakening," he says. Explore it, indulge it, feel out its shadows and if there's a story there, write it, as Singh seems to have done with his life so far.

War and Fiction - Speaking with Helen Benedict

2011-09-13T15:44:00.004-04:00

Her wrists are thin, her neck adorned with pearls, her voice soft, her accent British. Helen Benedict could pass for a professor at Columbia University's Journalism masters program, but an anti-war activist with spools of interviews and notes with women from the American military? Unlikely.

Then again so is Columbia's Oral History Masters Program, I'm surrounded by its students waiting to be addressed by Prof. Helen Benedict. Familiarity suspended, I shall let her do the talking.

Her latest non fiction book is THE LONELY SOLDIER, a haunting account of how women soldiers are treated in the American military -- the Air Force, the Navy, the Marines, in school, on tour, everywhere. With her quiet voice she stresses her concerns about the military as a "rape culture" and describes her interactions with the roughly forty women she interviewed when writing the book. Most relationships deepen with time, most interviews become more revealing, but not in this case: Benedict found that her time with these extraordinary women, her questions and prompts, and therefore her voice, became the source of their Post Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD). How ironic that in unlocking their voices via hers, Benedict also encouraged the ghastly memories they had stashed away to scream back to life, shattering mental and emotional barriers the woman had constructed in trying to acclimatize to civilianhood.

"What does remorse do to a person," Benedict wonders. What was she to do with the pages of torment she had documented, whose question-and-answer surveys only just scratched the surface of these women's stories? Her answer was to write SAND QUEEN, a fictional story tracing the lives of Kate, an American soldier, and Naema, an Iraqi woman. Benedict knew she had a plethora of detail, but she had to be careful about constructing a landscape she had never encountered, a country she had never visited, and a job she had never held. SAND QUEEN is a work "mostly of my imagination, fed by interviews," she tells us, and remembers how patience and compassion were key to winning the trust of the women she spoke with.

Fiction that is too close to the facts can "hamper imagination" and sound like "thinly veiled journalism," which Benedict wanted to avoid. It would take a fine balance of reality and its riffs to best launch her narrative and she combined her knowledge about and frustration at the war and how it was being handled, with honest questions to a female Iraqi friend: for example, "is my character angry enough." Such research helped her concoct vivid sentences, such as when Naema watches her father and brother being beaten by American soliders and taken away, no reasons given: "That is when I felt the anger grow over me like a skin," Benedict's voice making Naema sound grim.

Trained as a journalist, Benedict revels in fiction because, unlike non fiction, an author can give characters a voice that they do not have yet. One can go deeper into a character's interior, and it is always easier to "lay bare a made up character than a real person." The book is in three sections, each told by a different narrator. There is Kate, Naema, and finally a third person perspective, which is "where I get literary," Benedict explains. Kate is desperate as a prison guard in the middle of a desert, a "grey blur, dusty grey sand obliterating the horizon." Deprived of humanity in her fellow soldiers -- all men -- she befriends and talks to a tree, Marvin, "whose every twisted branch I know." Driving through the charred remains of a freshly bombed city she recalls the "corpses on the side of the road, like deer back home except with human faces." Fiction, Benedict believes, can "can come closer to the truth in profound ways," being the "old fashioned" approach to telling someone's story.

War stories belonged to men first -- Homer, Joseph Heller, Tim O'Brien -- and Benedict is grateful for the women's voices that are entering the genre today. They are still considered "outcasts," but they are an adamant and emerging community, not unlike Benedict and her followers. SAND QUEEN received all kinds of criticism: it was considered "gloomy" and "unpatriotic", not as "authoritative as a man's book," and, worst of all, made the military look bad -- although she has since spoken at West Point and engaged the government in D.C. to advocate better conditions for and treatment of women in the military, with positive responses. Benedict is inspired by the women she has come to know, whose voices and stories float through her mind, and is determined to be "fair and furious" when she writes, for them as survivors and for us as readers.

More details here: http://www.helenbenedict.com/

Book Reading - "We The Animals" by Justin Torres

2011-09-12T17:58:00.006-04:00

Most writers do it. Good writers always do it. And best results are achieved if it's done in the morning.

Poetry. The perfect warm-up for a writer, to loosen his linguistic muscles and get the words flowing. Justin Torres, first-time and successful author of WE THE ANIMALS, opens his book reading at The New School with an Emily Dickinson quote: "After great pain, a formal feeling comes—" and it is clear from the passages he reads us just how lyrical a sentence can be. As moderator Jackson Taylor points out several times, Torres' book toys with all the conventional aspects of a story -- plot, structure, character, voice -- and forces you to question them as lovingly and deeply as he does his own life and family. WE THE ANIMALS sounds (I haven't read it yet) deeply personal, but Torres is careful to separate autobiography from fiction. Certainly, characters in the book have been inspired by people he knows, but the reader should not be fooled by the use of first person. When poets use the first person, the reader doesn't immediately assume the poet is talking about himself, Torres points out, so why is fiction treated any differently?

Prodded by Taylor, Torres opens up about his life (although not as much as Taylor seems to want) and his artistic and aesthetic style of writing (I think, more exciting for the audience). He believes that events in real life do not follow a practiced and proper sequence, so why should a story in a book be told in chronological order? His books ends at a very different pace from the rest of the book, and this is deliberate: Torres maintains that plot and structure mirror each other, so a jarring scene can be more arresting to the reader with an unexpected and dramatic structural change. The main character is a young boy and Torres plays with the idea of an "emotionally sharp child, but very limited adult" to tell the story -- the result is powerful imagery, subtle perception, pure nostalgia and innocent humor, and the little boy is totally believable. More interestingly, so is the rest of the boy's family, who could on paper read as very dysfunctional. This is a label Torres avoids. 'Dysfunction' and 'abuse' are "easy labels," too hastily attributed to family. How can a group of people who love each other be dismissed so quickly? Torres demands that the reader ask this question throughout the book, defending the inherent nobility in a family's stories and traditions -- no matter how quirky or destructive they may appear to others.

Dickinson continues:

This is the Hour of Lead --
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow --
First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go --

Torres has remembered his past (but NOT autobiographically!), outlived his labels, stupor'd over the pages of his book, and our reward is to read chapters redolent with emotion and wonder that his protagonist will never let go of.

A.O.Scott at The New School: The Critic's Critique

2011-09-07T17:25:00.010-04:00

Introducing the prolific byliner A.O. "Tony" Scott to the crowd, moderator Greil Marcus is generous and honest -- Scott has a flair for writing, can grab a reader's attention, but fashions his essays and reviews in the New York Times in such a way that the reader is often left wondering what Scott is trying to say. This is the motivation, Marcus believes, for the reader to watch the movie Scott has just written about, or to think more deeply about Scott's underlying message, and is the mark of a successful critique, but are we convinced? Scott fidgets with the papers in his hand and we wait for his response -- a collective of piqued curiosities, pens in hands poised over notebooks, underdressed students and faculty settling into the start of a new semester.

Scott begins his talk with a warning that panels on any kind of cultural criticism -- literary, performing arts, music -- tend to be "predictable, dispiriting and masochistic affairs," so be warned. He grins, clears his throat ad adjusts his glasses. Who is a critic, and who deserves to provide criticism? Who is the audience, and what are they expected to know? He draws a quickcomparison between mainstream criticism -- the stuff in books and print media -- and the blogosphere -- that whiny crowd of "self-credentialed elite." But perhaps the old-fashioned critics are just that, "dinosaurs," and it's the information-at-their-fingertips generation who craft more nimble opinions. Does criticism follow any rules, or does the "wide open space" of the internet that encourages such "unregulated discourse" allow for more free-flowing thought?

Visual cues help. Scott asks: who do we imagine a critic to be and recalls Anton Ego from the Pixar film Ratatouille -- a word he elocutes cautiously, giving each 't' a moment to resonate -- who, if we recall the movie, is a gaunt man, perennially frowning at the plate of food cowering before him. "Weirdly monastic," Ego is that stereotypical critic who is "devoted to an art form" but a "miserable, terrifying authority figure" at the same time -- an "intrinsic tension" ubiquitous to art and criticism. Ego's name isn't a coincidence, either; critics are known for thinking highly of themselves and for the opinions and reactions they are about to unleash upon an ignorant crowd. As the infamous Addison Dewitt from the movie 'All About Eve,' says in one scene:

Those of you who do not read, attend the theater, listen to unsponsored radio programs, or know anything of the world in which you live, it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself. My name is Addison DeWitt. My native habitat is the theater. In it, I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the theater.

Back to that intrinsic tension: the critic doesn't toil, but he can only survive in his native habitat; the critic doesn't perform, but he is essential. When people ask Scott if it's true that all critics are failed artists, Scott jokes that in fact, all artists are failed critics. The point is, one feeds off the other: an artist is inspired by an audience's reaction to his work, just as a critic is engaged in reacting to piece of art. And so what can seem too analytical, impatient or caustic is also the critic expressing his depth of knowledge -- and, therefore, appreciation -- for something. As 20th century American critic and poet R. P. Blackmur wrote in his widely received essay 'A Critic's Job of Work,' "criticism is the discourse of an amateur." And 'amateur,' etymologically, comes from French, meaning 'lover of' or from the Latin amatorem or amator, meaning 'lover.' So, really, Dewitt's biting criticism is an ode to an art he can't live without!

Scott notes the rising "mistrust of one's own reactions" from which people suffer -- another reason for valuable criticism. Mistrust is a dangerous thing, as is mutation, but Scott -- a self-confessed "cynical, overeducated 45 year old man" -- urges the audience to respect the goal of criticism. To know enough about something and "judge fairly" is difficult, so be sincere.

In his speech 'The American Scholar' given at Cambridge University in 1837, Ralph Waldo

Emerson described the multifaceted community that is mankind, in which he asserted that "the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking." (Read the full essay here.)

Scott concludes that criticism is not meretricious* (I had to look that up), nor should it be sclerotic** (yup, that word, too). Society thrives on debate and campaigns, especially when these originate from honest, if audacious, premises. Does Scott prefer writing a kind review or a nasty one? He quotes W.H.Auden's in response: "Pleasure is by no means an infallible guide, but it is the least fallible." Coherency v. truth, scholarship v. intuition, your opinion v. mine -- such is the nature of the beast, and one which Scott will continue to explore as long as his job (a word highly disputed by 9 year old skeptics of his) will allow it!

* Apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity

** Becoming rigid and unresponsive; losing the ability to adapt

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: An Intimate Evening with Salman Rushdie

2011-08-21T13:13:00.002-04:00

It’s neither a clipped British spittle, nor is it a noisy Indian monsoon. It’s a slippery drawl of rain that collects on the roadside so that the puddles can molest my toes. So that when a taxi driver ignores me pointedly ignoring him and idles hopefully past me, I’m left splashed and stained. The raindrops splotch my wrap-around dress but I’m not visibly dripping. Today’s force of nature is passive aggressive at best – something Mr. Salman Rushdie is not, and never will be.

Drying off inside Tulsi Restaurant, I study the rest of the gathering that has collected inside. We are bourgeois brats out and about this slow Sunday evening, eager to dine in the acknowledged proximity of Salman Rushdie, and elite enough to afford it (tickets weren’t cheap, and for that I owe my generous sister). Aroon Shivdasani, Executive Director of the Indo-American Arts Council (IAAC) and tonight’s event organizer, leads with her easy laughter, polished speech and impeccably British-Indian accent. Among the familiar and the envious, she is relaxed in a light blue kurta. In contrast, the rest of us draped in silk, satin and jackets use our indoor voices and try to act dignified.

Rushdie comes through the door, an umbrella on his arm. His small, bright eyes are tucked into an expansive forehead that has usurped most of his head. Whatever hair is left has abandoned any attempt at density except in tufts on the sides. Slight, angular eyebrows direct our attention past his tiny pupils and thin lips to a better groomed ’stache and goatee. When he smiles there is a bulge of cheekbone. He kisses cheeks and shakes hands with Aroon and her crew while the rest of us sip our wine with a fresh focus; we have paid good money for this after all. A hostess carves our crowd of 55 into tables seating 4, 6 and 8. My sister and I luck out at a table with a friendly couple from New Orleans. We are two tables away from Rushdie, who sits at the head of his with that permanently bemused look on his face.

Aroon introduces herself, the IAAC, its growing importance supporting the arts in the Subcontinent and its steady success attracting cash and (Indo-American) celebrities in America. In fourteen years the IAAC has staged plays at the Apollo, operas at the Met and most recently, the annual Erasing Borders dance festival in downtown Manhattan. Coming up is a special tour of the Vishnu exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum followed by dinner with the curator, and did she mention the two book launches next week?

What she doesn’t mention – need not mention – is the panoply of accolades decorating Rushdie’s name, like accents in the Polish alphabet. Instead she tells a story: some winters ago, a New York City fundraiser for Bombay’s street children had sold only 30 out of 200 tickets. Once Aroon “let slip” that “my friend and author” Rushdie would be attending, the show’s attendance jumped six-fold. To applause, she hands the mic over to Rushdie, who opens with a glib “Thank you to Aroon, who continues to pimp me out as the years go on.” Pause for laughter, and there are the inevitable few who roar. More acknowledgments to the IAAC, its recent half page in The New York Times this weekend and his increasingly regular “dual acts” with Shashi Tharoor with whom he “got to play the Apollo,” something he never dreamed he would do.

He dutifully shares his current projects with us. First, a film version of Midnight’s Children. “It’s taken me thirty years to say this,” for the book first came out in 1981, but the wait and the work has been worth it, and he expects it to reach the Toronto Film Festival, if not Cannes and Venice. Having praised the director and actors (the young Saleem is played by the little boy from Taare Zameen Par), he pats himself on the back for the screenplay: converting a 600-page book into a 130-page script is a trying “work of condensation;” better done by him than someone too intimidated to go at Midnight’s Children with a machete. Flirting with the idea of making two movies, Rushdie learned that “everybody wanted to finance the movie Midnight’s Children, but nobody wanted to finance two,” and sculpted his novel into a movie “two and a quarter hours long.” Movie making is a “lesson in real life,” he explains: you do whatever you can within the budget you have, and that’s it.

Second, his memoir. Never desirous of an interesting life, he insists, “unfortunately, my life became interesting,” and now it has become a book. No title and no publishing date yet, but expect to hear something next year.

“And now, I think, it is time for dinner,” he concludes, and we turn to our appetizers. About an hour and a half and three delectable courses later Aroon makes a round of the tables, beaming at everyone’s full mouths and quickly reminding us that our privileged guest is leaving so we should take pictures and get books signed now. A line has already formed and Rushdie signs books, Kindles (has it come to that?) and wine bottles with that mildly sour snarl always pasted on his face. My sister and I wait for him to wave us over, we share a few words, he wishes me good luck on my MFA and the photographer clicks twice. Next.

When we leave the restaurant the rain has slowed but our eyes are bright, our stomachs are full, we are heady with wine and the fact that we just had dinner with Salman Rushdie! Or something like that ;)

Thank you, Thangachi!

"I say that the Library is unending."

2011-03-11T23:55:00.010-05:00

Don’t be fooled by the New School venue and the prominent writers at the podium; this event is a fundraiser for the little known Brooklyn Waldorf School where two parents happen to be Sean Wilsey and Jhumpa Lahiri (and both happen to know Jonathan Franzen), and they happen to have literary clout, and if they charge money to speak, people will come.

So here we are: arms sore with copies of Franzen’s Freedom (and, I begrudge the audience, Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth) we want signed, eyes sore from scanning the auditorium for empty seats and drawing near blanks. Wilsey gamely welcomes the audience and explains the importance of libraries, and libraries for children. He quotes Jorge Luis Borges—a librarian as well as a writer—whose words I must include here, because he is tremendous:

Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.

—Borges’ short story “Library of Babel”

Moderator Sean Wilsey, initially overwhelmed by Lahiri and Franzen’s entries in his anthology State by State, confesses to us that his praise for their pieces was received with more sedated emails from them: “you really need to try to reign in your hyperbole.” But his child’s kindergarten teacher need not, he assures us in his introduction that is anchored in the glory of libraries and literacy (hence Borges earlier). She is teaching her students the alphabet—specifically, the “spatial relationship of lower case letters”—and “baby j,” for example, “dips its feet in the water and likes to play ball.” Creativity, humor and word-making have no bounds—like Borges' library.

Time for the authors to indulge us and themselves a little. Lahiri goes first. She is precise at the microphone, holding her manuscript up firmly. She inflects such that each clause ends on a minor note, hooking lugubriously onto the next. Her excerpt is from a novel-in-progress: two urchins who have stolen onto a golf course in their hometown of Calcutta where they marvel at its manicured elitism, its “perfect little [golf ball] holes like navels in the earth.” These are boys whose youth unabashedly drives their subconscious into smorgasbords of adventure, so that they have to “[step] so many mornings out of dreams.” Another character compares the colors outside her window to the jars of Indian spices on the sill; very clever.

Franzen follows with self-deprecating and snarky remarks, already he is more appetizing: “Intergenerically; I’m going to read some nonfiction...Apologies if you’ve read it, hopefully I can add some value by reading it in my voice. I’ve never read it before…may never read it again.” He flicks a glance at us over his glasses.

“The Mediterranean,” he begins, “is nothing but extremely blue.” He is stooped over the mic, having not adjusted it after Lahiri, and looks casually at the audience, naturally lifting his eyes off the page to talk to us (I don’t mean to compare him and Lahiri, but I shall anyway). He doesn’t just frame a precise picture with poise—usually authors read only enough to give us an outline—but tells us a story easily, informally. However this is nonfiction, and after a sip of water, he dramatically unplugs a flow of facts about birds damned to extinction, and we are both amused and informed. “There ensued a blur of fighting,” he writes of a group of men confused in their confrontation. One character’s fanaticism is “matter-of-fact,” and so is Franzen when he looks up to tell us that “it’s just really stupid” to hunt migratory birds in the Spring when they’re off to reproduce. Later he can’t tell if a bird meat’s bitterness is “real or the product of emotion.”

One of my favorite lines is by a Cypriot in his piece who says, “we’re a middle Eastern country that’s part of Europe by accident.” [Read a larger excerpt in The Telegraph, here.]

Back to Wilsey to address questions of his own and from the audience to the authors sitting on either side of him, and he is utter unpreparedness is visible in the boy’s smirk across his face. Franzen responds with witty impatience, masterfully trading words for silence, lost in thoughts and gazes before speaking. Stalling humorously, Wilsey circuitously asks the authors about geography. Franzen talks of investing his characters—often Midwestern—with “explanatory power to make life more interesting…our own watered down version of myth.” Lahiri says that geography “is increasing for me as a preoccupation of work.”

In the case of Fiction v. Non-Fiction, Franzen argues that Non Fiction is “playing the game of writing, waiting for something to happen,” whereas fiction “seems somewhat indulgent” since the author gets “really involved in stuff you’ve made up”. But he is clearly an author since he finds “straight up journalism...incredibly confining.”

One Brooklyn Waldorf parent to another, Wilsey asks Lahiri about kids. She advocate reliving childhood through them since it’s “nourishing to question things, struggle with things.” Fiction writers are “repeatedly decoding the world, an unsolvable puzzle,” as parents do for their children.

Paradoxically, Franzen claims to hates research and Lahiri believes that when writing there is “some sort of research going on continuously to create a life through language.” Franzen teaches us that when Kafka wrote Amerika (aka The Man Who Disappeared) set in Oklahoma, “Oklahoma was just a word he knew.” He thinks for a moment. “I don’t think he did too much research on bugs either.”

PS. Happy Birthday, Anusha!

Carnatic Music at the UN

2011-03-08T23:37:00.001-05:00

In a large auditorium in the EcoSoc building, where the East River Breeze can’t find us, we arrange ourselves in rows behind long desks, eager on this Wednesday evening for a concert guaranteed to impress. Dignitaries and civilians mill about me, shaking hands and smiling, knowing they are being observed. The room buzzes gently with polyglots whose passports are as thick as their resumes are long; I’m helplessly impressed.

Promptly at 6:45 p.m., Secretary General Ban Ki Moon greets the audience with folded hands and in Hindi, delighting the mostly Indian crowd. Living in New Delhi for three years “I learned diplomacy,” he tells us, describing the “high ambitions” he had then, that he hopes he has achieved since. “I really enjoyed Indian music when I was tired, afraid,” and used it to “relax, reflect and recharge.” Moon gestures to the empty offices surrounding us: “music can be enjoyed just as it is, that is why we don’t have interpreters here this evening.”

After a brief opening aarti, Dr. L. Subramaniam and his son Ambi are tuning their violins on stage. Father and son sit erect, smiling, relaxed. Senior introduces the pieces with a short explanation, included in the program, before beginning the performance, while Junior accompanies as a second shruti box until invited to join in. They are two violins in harmony without actually harmonizing—another irresistibly Carnatic trait. Senior closes his eyes while his fingers help us see the intricacies of a ragam; I am blinded by his speed. Junior balances his violin on his chest and leg, his arms free to keep talam and transcribe in his mind the melodies he will share.

I have heard varnams sung and performed countless times, but never in 4, 5, 6 speeds. Senior’s bow stutters over the strings with precision and clarity; Junior’s echo is equally sharp. Three notes are jammed into the space of one, but each one resonates distinctly. Senior wields 4 octaves of Kalyani at the touch of a finger, never misses a count; Junior keeps up with a smile, never loses a breath—in the end, it’s us who are breathless. Senior is supported by mridangam and moorsing; Junior jams with a gatam and tavil: being accompanied by 4 percussion instruments creates a thrilling and robust orchestra.

In between the first and last piece, Senior jokes with the audience that “in Indian concerts, a ‘short piece’ can be one to three hours, but it’s the UN so we’ll stick to the time.” Exactly an hour after they started, Senior and Junior are bowing to applause, and along with their percussionists, accept flowers from Mrs. Moon. I leave with an elevated heart rate that’s still trying, in vain, to keep pace with the swift see-saws of the Subramaniams’ bows.

Paging Dr. Strandlove

2011-02-16T17:50:00.008-05:00

The Strand is crowded this Wednesday evening, I’m late and find the one available chair, vacant because between it and author Ariel Sabar is a wide pillar perfectly obstructing my view. But no worry; the stories he is telling tonight don’t require that he be seen; they are the stuff of fantasy, movies and circumstance. Smiles snuck onto a subway car, hope littered around a park bench, and Sabar’s sharp eyes and ears bringing them to life for us. I lean back—the chair creaks—and listen.

Sabar’s book, Heart of the City: Nine Stories of Love and Serendipity on the Streets of New York, stars that “natural love potion that is adrenaline,” that allows “two strangers with seemingly nothing in common” to share a moment witnessing something bizarre on a New York City street. Inspired by how his parents met in Washington Square—they’ve been married many years since— Sabar interviews 9 couples whose first meetings were chance encounters in New York City’s vast inventory of public spaces. The oldest story occurs in 1941, the most recent is a 2009 nuptial; the dazzle never dulls. Tapping into “beauty, density, adrenaline and spectacle,” Sabar concocts this anthology of “hopeful endings.”

Some stories include broken engagements, couples facing ups and downs before they “finally find their footing.” He enjoys the stories of couples who figure they were never “meant to be;” what would you say when your grandmother heard that you “picked up a guy at the park?!” Sabar doesn’t “sugarcoat the rough patches,” but maintains that the book is meant to be hopeful. It’s the pride— not vanity— and an “abiding wonder” about their own stories that Sabar wants to capture.

His methods are organized: he digs up potential stories searching catch phrases – “met in Central Park” + “married” – in newspaper archives; he tracks down characters on Facebook and turns up curious stories using Google. He is careful to interview each story’s spouses separately. “You know what happens when a couple tells a story,” he reminds us. “It gets political!”

One woman’s 50^th wedding anniversary present to her dying husband is a short piece she wrote about how they met, published in Newsday; Sabar is not alone in wanting to celebrate chance. Yes, he admits, he is “shamelessly romantic.”

Sabar reads from one of his stories: the girl is a loner and tries to “discharge all social debt” with an annual Christmas party. This particular year she cooks a “traditional Dutch-Indonesian feast” and revels in her party guests—everyone from ballet dancers to anthropology students—milling about her apartment, playing records and keeping the December gloom at bay. Regardless of how the story ends, I’m already smiling at its fiercely cosmopolitan start, just the kind of eclectic New York City gatherings I’ve cherished in my time here.

The couple’s first sighting of each other is at the Met, a “kind of secular temple.” His first advances flop—she turns to him just enough “for him to see her roll her eyes.” And she is right to be cautious: Sabar describes her as “a loner with too much would-be company, most of them male.” But he persists and their conversation takes root, right there in the Met, at a tapestry exhibit. Here, he pauses. “As a non fiction writer you’re always happy when a factual story lends metaphor,” and he credits the exhibit, exploring history and religion, for the conversations and imagery it inspired.

One of Sabar’s finds that didn’t make it into his book is about 2 people getting “quietly drunk” on the Brooklyn Bridge, each equipped with their own bottle of champagne. Sabar tracks them down on Facebook to find out that their marriage lasted all of 18 months. The woman is re-married and tells Sabar, as she declines to be interviewed, that she and her second husband met under much more normal circumstances, and they’ve been married a lot longer. Hopeful, but not the way Sabar wants! They keep their story and he skips that chapter. Next.

How does Sabar recreate these intimate moments, how accurately can one reproduce their ‘how we met’ story, and how intact do the characters’ voices remain? Sabar is meticulous about recreating the whispers and wiles in each story, he assures us. He writes based on “what I knew of the couples…what I knew of their voices,” keeping in mind that his stories are about getting “something essential about [the characters] right.” One woman in his book thanks Sabar: “you saw into my soul”, she reflects. “Thanks for making an old lady happy.”

Like his parents, immigrants in the city spent a lot of time outside, keeping away from the prohibitively expensive restaurant and residential interiors. Navyman “Prince Charming” Willis and runaway Joey “Park Bench Cinderella” meet in Central Park back the 1940s, as journalist Helen Ward documents. Their meeting is serendipitous, their marriage serpentine—he is posted to Philadelphia the day after they meet. Sabar is as hooked today as readers were when Ward gushed about them—instantly dropped when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and journalism opens with a drastically different lede. 70 years later, Sabar contacts one Mr. Willis off a Google search for the full story, asking, is he the Prince Charming who married Joey from Central Park?

“Yes, I am indeed the same party,” is the response he receives from 80-something year old Willis. And so that chapter is written.

Does Sabar have a theory on public spaces being such an aphrodisiac? Is there one public space that’s more effective than another? “I think beauty matters,” he says, it’s important that the space is “visually inspiring.” Crowds help, too; “you always have a plan B in a crowd”, feel a little safer, are less likely to have your guard up. “People are always pressed up against each other” in this city—duh—and the fact that “New York keeps both residents and visitors alike in this highly physiological state” lends itself to casual brushes escalating to something more. I agree; although I believe there’s an equal chance of such a chance encounter leading to something friendly and something highly irritating—even dangerous!

He describes the ideal public space, per an urban studies / architecture friend's perspective. The more complex the better: a variety of texture and levels, a clash of old-fashioned cobbled streets and modern architecture, for example. Such spaces have a sense of mystery to them; you don’t know what’s around the corner. A sense of enclosure, like a narrow European street, lends coziness and intimacy. Proximity to water induces reflection, pause, a penchant for beauty. The legibility of a public space, that sense of bearings on one’s surroundings, put you at ease, challenges you to extend your connection to it, and next thing you know, you’ve just given someone your number. “The best love stories start with a game of chicken, right?” Sabar asks us. It does if you’re one of the couples in his book who meet in Central Park (complex; mysterious; water bodies—check) who stared at each other in “wordless intimacy for a full half hour” until she went up to him and said, I’m hungry, want to get something to eat?

Sabar turned it over to us: what stories did we have to share? One girl in the audience described how her Vegas showgirl mother and flamenco guitarist got together. An Argentinian girl remembered her now-boyfriend gesturing to her with a nod from across a noisy bar. One of my good friends—at the reading with me—met her boyfriend at the start of a New York Road Runners race. What's your story? Comment if you like!

So keep your eyes out the next time you’re walking to the subway, on the subway, cutting across Central Park, sharing an elevator, being ID’d at a pub—oh, anywhere you might be in this lovestruck city. And when you’re not mobile, feast your eyes on these enjoyable reads online:

A hilarious Twitter feed of text messages sent to ex-lovers: http://twitter.com/textsfrommyXes
Six-word love stories (of success, heart break, regret and hope) in the New York Times: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/whats-your-six-word-love-story/?apage=1#comments

Submit to We'll Never Have Paris

2011-02-14T12:08:00.005-05:00

I typically use my blog to do the following:

a) blab about traveling someplace cool (Egypt, Tanzania, Rwanda...and soon enough, Austria!)
b) blab about attending something cool (talks, readings, performances, etc.)
c) blab about books (hopefully more interesting book reviews than the ones we wrote in Middle School)
d) blab about blabbing (my attempts at creative writing)

What they all have in common, besides being pure blabble, is that magical moment when art and music and history and love and surprise and discovery come together -- on top of a mountain or in a climactic book chapter, in a perfectly crafted sentence, at a brilliantly executed play. And so it makes perfect sense that I should advertize my good friend Andria and her lovely zine, We'll Never Have Paris, right here, while I have your attention (whoever you are, you friendly, obliging blog reader, you).

We'll Never Have Paris, as its blog will tell you, contains narrative nonfiction 'for all things never meant to be'. It's a "NYC-based, print-only small press lit zine published twice a year." WNHP7 is on sale -- you may have seen them at Andria's and my reading at Angels and Kings in January -- and WHNP8 is looking for submissions! The upcoming zine's theme is Rejection. Andria writes:

It's cold and I'm broke. how about you? maybe this is a good time to write. send a submission to WNHP8 deadline is March 31. the theme is always nonfiction memoir 'all things never meant to be', but specific trigger for this issue is Rejection. send a rejection letter to you or from you. tell us how you never recovered not wining the lead role in the 3rd grade play.
neverhaveparis.blogspot.com or neverhaveparis@gmail.com

I stumbled across this zine at Bluestocking Bookstore in the Lower East Side around this time last year, submitted something on a whim, miraculously snuck into the zine and promptly found myself smack in the middle of this city's burgeoning zine culture. They're at book fairs, flea markets, on the radio and in little pubs all over town: pocket- or palm-sized packets of personally compiled works of art. How can one resist submitting to such an earnest creation?

So do it. C'mon. You've definitely been rejected at some point in your life, unless you're flawlessly flawless, in which case, you can write about rejecting rejection (and maybe Andria will reject you, just for good measure). You have until March 31st!

Poetry by Robert Hayden

2011-02-04T23:40:00.002-05:00

Thanks to Mikey Brofman and the Brooklyn Art Song Society, I was introduced to some of Robert Hayden's beautiful poetry:

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Frederick Douglass

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,

this man, superb in love and logic, this man

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Foot Fetishes, Freud and Writer’s Block

2011-02-03T12:52:00.012-05:00

There are as many bodies packed into this 40^th floor auditorium as there are lit up windows in the surrounding skyscrapers. Here in 7 World Trade Center, peering into Ground Zero and glowing amidst a thrum of office buildings downtown, we are gathered for a talk organized by the New York Academy of Sciences. Neurologist V.S.Ramachandran will speak about the human brain via a number of patients and case studies he presents to us as stories, slides and snide asides. But first, a word—or several—about Ramachandran. The smiling emcee quotes reviewers of Ramachandran’s latest book, THE TELL-TALE BRAIN (“neuroscientist’s quest for what makes us human”), who lavish titles upon its stubbornly curious author such as: “the latter day Marco Polo journeying the Silk Road of Science,” the “modern Broca” and “the Galileo of cognition.”

The 2007 Padma Bhushan recipient leaps onto the stage—gangly, curly hair, bright eyes. He starts with a basic introduction—how else can one begin to understand the brain?—cupping his hands together: “the brain is a three pound mass of jelly, flesh you can hold in your hand. It contemplates vast space, God…it contemplates itself contemplating. This is an organ of staggering complexity.” I’m only mildly distracted by his accent, an Indian-American hybrid with the occasional ‘r’ rolled long enough to expose his South Indian roots (holla). He maintains eye contact with the crowd and cracks sudden smiles at the audience when explaining particularly unexpected outcomes. His subject matter and presentation technique make him irresistible to listen to.

How do we understand such a rich organ, Ramachandran asks. There are three ways:

1) Brain imaging. Ramachandran alludes to the “brain imaging mania going around,” likening it to “giving an eight year old a knife and having him cut into everything!” But such an approach isn’t all bad, some accidents do lead to discovery.

2) Recording brain signals. It’s like eavesdropping on the activity of brain cells, Ramachandran says, and a different way to understand brain behavior.

3) “Structure function correlations.” Patients with brain lesions produce a highly selective loss of functionality, he explains, allowing for very specific and very revealing experiments. What is surprising and interesting about these syndromes—say, not being able to recognize a person by face, but instead by voice or gait—is a “lovely example of what we call neuroscience,” he gushes.

Ramachandran and his colleagues get to “play detective on these patients” in paradoxically elementary ways, using games and pokes to understand the brain’s nonstop electric activity. He mentions the tension between neurologists who study hundreds of patients and their data, and his own approach: astute observation on a few patients. Either way, “nine out of ten studies are a waste of time;” it’s with the 10^th study that you “hit the jackpot.” Ramachandran stares at us for a moment. “I’m telling you only the success stories, obviously,” given his one-hour time slot. He pauses again. “By the way, am I going too fast?”

Cabgras Syndrome

Ramachandran’s focus is the third technique of brain study he described: understanding lesions in the brain that interrupt otherwise normal behavior, showing how the brain typically functions, how it adapts when something is amiss, and how human behavior is affected as a result. His first story is about a patient, one of his students, who has been in a car accident and injured his head. When he wakes from his coma, he seems fine, showing self-awareness, communicating clearly and playing chess with his professor. But, he insists that the woman standing in his hospital room who looks exactly like his mother is not her but an imposter, even though she is very much his mother.

The background, some argue, is Freudian: the Oedipal argument that seeing a woman who resembles your mother but also generates sexual arousal in you cannot be your mother. The part of the cortex that controls sexual attraction is damaged in this patient’s case, hence the peculiar reaction. “Thank God” for the cortex, Ramachandran says, “otherwise you’d be sexually aroused by your mother.”

“Now, this is a very ingenious explanation, as all Freudian theories are, as you New Yorkers well know,” he continues. But can it be taken seriously? What about when patients are unable to recognize their pets? Do we have to invoke ideas of “latent bestiality?” Ramachandran emphatically discards the Freudian theory, advocating his own. It features the Fusiform Gyrus, which recognizes objects, and the Amygdala, which fills in emotional significance—is the object a predator, prey, mate or boss?—so that you can understand who/what you are interacting with. When you are nervous and start sweating, for example, your body is anticipating muscular exertion from fleeing or pursuing the entity before you. So if the Fusiform Gyrus and Amygdala are no longer connected, what happens? You see a person standing in front of you—say, your mother—but there is no physical reaction—that is, skin temperature doesn’t go up, you don’t start sweating—nor is there an emotional one. Everyone sweats when they see their mother, Ramachandran reminds us; “you don’t have to be Jewish!” so such a lack of reaction leads you to conclude that the person standing in front of you cannot be your mother.

When testing patients with a normal Fusiform Gyrus for physical responses to people, neurologists have seen consistent results:

Strangers – no galvanic response
Lion – huge jolt in electrical activity
Mother – start sweating!

Ramachandran’s student has no trouble recognizing his mother on the phone. The connection between his Auditory Cortex and Amygala is intact, so he can recognize her voice on the phone and respond with the expected, appropriate physical and emotional reaction. The Fusiform Gyrus is specific to visual recognition, so when confronted visually, the patient’s delusion kicks in: that woman is not my mother.

Phantom Limbs

Not all amputations are injury or disease-driven. Ramachandran describes patients who demand to have a limb removed. Other than their desire to have an arm amputated, he insists, “ they’re perfectly normal,” and I wonder what ‘normal’ means to someone who studies the brain! Why would someone ask to have something taken away from their body? Could there be a Freudian explanation, where the patient is looking for attention? What about the Freudian idea that the stump remaining resembles a huge penis “This is bullshit,” he declares, and seeing our raised eyebrows, clarifies that “I’m not making these up!”

Phantom limbs extend from arms and legs to internal organs like the uterus, even menstrual cramps. What’s the Freudian explanation now, Ramachandran challenges the audience. “Again, all of you know, that’s nonsense.”

Ramachandran closes his eyes, demonstrating how his brain can construct an image of where he is—self awareness—and what he looks like—body image—without explicit visual feedback. But what happens if, eyes open or closed, you perceive a natural part of your body as unnatural? He explains that if the brain doesn’t receive signals from a part of the body, it can seem intrusive to the person. Such a discrepancy in neuro-signal reception can make a part of the body seem “too much a part of me,” as one patient complains. Take the left arm as an example: brain signals above the elbow are normal, but below the elbow are missing, so the patient reacts adversely to his lower arm. It makes sense that he wants it removed.

Clicking to the next slide in his presentation, Ramachandran shows us a man’s face with a map drawn on his cheek. It is a complete mapping of an amputated left hand that the brain now perceives on this patient’s cheek. Ramachandran pauses. “Actually there are several maps [mapping brain and body signals] but I’ll pretend there’s only one for this lecture.” He explains that the hand area of the brain is hungry for stimulation and totally deprived, since the hand has been amputated, so the face region of the brain, adjacent to the hand region, becomes over-stimulated. Signals cross over from the hand to the face region of the brain, and when the patient with an amputated left hand is touched on the cheek, he feels sensation in his phantom left hand.

“It’s kinda fun to do these things,” Ramachandran admits when describing how he touched his patient’s cheek with ice cubes. The cold water trickled down the patient’s cheek, which the patient felt as water trickling down his arm. When Ramachandran had his patient lift his arm up, and then touched his cheek with an ice cube, the patient felt the trickle of water down his cheek as a gravity-defying trickle up his amputated arm. This is how sophisticated the mapping of the brain is, Ramachandran announces triumphantly.

His next story is about a patient with an amputated foot. He shows us the mapping of body parts in the brain and we can see that the region receiving sensations from genitals is neighbors with the region receiving sensations from the foot. “Makes you wonder about foot fetishes,” and tap dancing, Ramachandran quips. The patient had described to Ramachandran how sex felt:

His orgasm is “now much bigger than it used to be,” Ramachandran shared with another neurologist.

“It’s all in his head,” the neurologist scoffed to Ramachandran.

“Of course it is!” Ramachandran rejoined with a totally straight face.

“Phantom paralysis,” when a phantom limb is paralyzed, sounds like an oxymoron, but isn’t. First we must understand what “learned paralysis” is: the visual feedback when signals are sent from the Cerebellum to an unresponsive arm that informs the patient that his arm is paralyzed. This persists once the arm has been amputated, so when a paralyzed arm is amputated, the phantom arm feels paralyzed too.

How can we address this problem? Create a virtual reality to access phantom limbs? For $2 million? “Forget that,” Ramachandran told himself when he was first investigating the problem; surely there was a smarter and cheaper solution. “Then we hit on the idea of using a $2 mirror.”

A mirror plays the critical role of providing visual feedback during neuro-rehabilitation. A patient missing his left arm can “see” it by placing his arm in Ramachandran’s mirror box creation, that reflects his right arm 180 degrees and positions it, in the mirror box, where his left arm would be. A patient can experience his phantom limb moving (out of an uncomfortable position) by moving his intact arm inside the mirror box. Brilliant in its simplicity but Ramachandran prefers to joke: moving a phantom arm is, “if you think about it, a completely useless skill.”

Not so useless for one patient who took the mirror box home to exercise his phantom arm with. He called Ramachandran two weeks later, happy to announce that his phantom arm, until now in excruciating pain, had disappeared! The qualifier? His phantom fingers had relocated to his shoulder! “Can you redesign the mirror box to reach that height?” the patient asked Ramachandran.

The mirror box can ease the pain the phantom limbs experience, reduce their inflammation and regulate skin temperature overall, by providing feedback to the brain that the phantom limb is neither intrusive nor unreal. Swollen phantom limb? Equip the mirror box with appropriate lenses so make the body part look smaller, and the phantom limb’s swelling “reduces.” The phantom limb is a “curious disorder,” Ramachandran says, his voice rising and falling like he is narrating a story about a wild animal with that respectful tone of wonder and wisdom. That the brain can be taught to unlearn the pain is a “completely zany idea!” He cautions us about the heavy press mirror neurons have received recently, but reminds us, sardonically, that such “media hype doesn’t mean it’s not important!”

Glancing at the podium, Ramachandran addresses us with an aside. “By the way, is this count down or count up? Oh, count down. Looks good, I still have another 18 minutes—” and he jumps back into his lecture. It takes me a moment to realize he’s looking at a clock on the podium, the only thing in the room more informed than him this evening!

We discuss a fundamental human trait, empathy, and learn about its corresponding empathy neurons: seeing someone else do something, such as touch a hot plate, causes your neurons fire and allows you to imagine the sensation of the hot plate, while, simultaneously, your own body sends null signals to the brain indicating that you are in fact NOT touching anything hot, so what you are seeing happen to someone else is NOT your reality. One set of neurons partially veto another, so we experience empathy instead of projection. This becomes tricky for people with phantom limbs, where absent body parts cannot produce null signals, and the brain cannot distinguish his own experiences from another person’s as clearly.

“I’m not saying mirror neurons --> culture --> civilization!” but Ramachandran believes that empathetic behavior by the brain is vital to emotional development and human interaction.

Describing what he has dubbed “Gandhi neurons” that dissolve the barrier between “your consciousness and mine,” he warns that it “smacks of Eastern mysticism.”

He glances at the clock. “Ok, next topic.”

Synesthesia

Ramachandran opens with a conclusion: Synesthesia is genetic, and also 8 times more common in artists, poets and novelists. He shares the proposed causes of synesthesia:

1) Synesthetes are crazy. Ramachandran rejects this categorically: “that’s not a theory.” In neuroscience, he says, if a patient sounds crazy, it’s because the neurologist isn’t smart enough to figure out what the problem is.

2) Synesthetes did lots of acid and smoked lots of pot. Ramachandran allows for this theory to make more sense at Berkeley than UCSD, but so what? Synesthesia is not a consistent outcome, so the correlation is not up to snuff.

3) Synesthetes played with the same fridge magnets as kids, he jokes. But that isn’t consistent with the disorder being genetic!

4) In that case, is synesthesia just a metaphorical view of the world? Ramachandran shrugs: “what the hell is a metaphor?”

Ramachandran shows us how a synesthete would look at an arrangement of numbers identifying patterns that we take longer to see (the triangle of 2’s in this diagram). “If they’re crazy,” he wonders, “how can they be better [at this brain exercise] than us?”

His theory is that there is accidental cross-wiring between the number and color areas of the brain, which are adjacent to each other. When he shows a patient a color, the number area of the patient’s brain lights up instead. In a fetus there are tremendous redundancies of connections in the brain which are pruned away by pruning genes. But what happens if these genes are defective?

Shakespeare said, ‘It is the East and Juliet is the sun.’ Ramachandran points out that Shakespeare didn’t say ‘yellow ball of fire.’ (“Schizophrenics would say that, but that’s another story.”) We say that cheddar cheese tastes sharp—“what?!”—and people understand that that means. So returning to the theory that novelists, artists and poets are more likely to be synesthetes, it becomes clear that they are more likely to use metaphor, and therefore more likely to be novelists, artists and poets!

“I have 3 minutes left but I don’t know what to talk about,” Ramachandran says, glancing as his clock once again. He closes with the reminder that neuroscientists can begin to make progress by asking the right questions, correlating psychophysics, phenomenology and more, to continue to explore and understand the brain, that most complex of human organs.

A Tryst with Destiny, One Billion Strong

2011-01-10T19:30:00.005-05:00

You’ve heard of childhood and adulthood, but have you heard of ‘personhood’? You’ve heard of the middle ground, or the middle child, but have you heard of ‘middleness’? Can you hear India calling?

Anand Giridharadas (AG) can, and it’s not just because of his kickass mountain-scape-like, 5-syllable last name (that I’m sure gives him sharp eyesight and keen hearing). A journalist for the New York Times and International Herald Tribune, he spent 4.5 years living in and reporting on India, and returned to the United States in 2009, where he continues to transcribe the Subcontinent’s rumblings. His book, INDIA CALLING: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking, was published by Times Books last week, and he is touring North America publicizing it, armed with books to sign, spiffy blazers, a microphone and refined ideas about India.

The evening starts with an excerpt from AG’s book which he reads easily, stretched comfortably in his chair. He selects an excerpt about the Dube joint family where cousins grow up as siblings and adults are parents, aunts and uncles at the same time. The “noisy, overwhelming love” that such families cultivate in small spaces is that unmistakable trait of Indian families, the “ambient love…unlike the kind that I had grown up with,” AG tells us. This is a traditional family where sagacity comes experience: “old always has the upper hand; new always stands on the defensive.” The providers in the family are “Upstairs Chacha” (uncle) and “Downstairs Chacha”—childhood brothers—who live, appropriately, in the upstairs and downstairs sections of the house.

Over time, AG observes the “family Marxism” morph into separate households each Chacha has “cleaved” for his family. “A rupture was torn,” AG writes, which manifests in the house’s physical upkeep, the parents’ ambitions for the children and the methodical expansions of parts of the house. “Money makes a man perfect,” Upstairs Chacha explains to AG, which used to “come from love” but no more. Recognizing this, Upstairs Chacha reconfigures his priorities while Downstairs Chacha enjoys the complacent pace of life, the conversations “filled with banalities and gossip.” Upstairs, time is to be seized; downstairs, it is to be endured. Which is right?

After a 15-minute reading, Aseem Chhabra moderates a discussion with AG, opening with a reference to Slumdog Millionaire and the can-do attitude creeping over India’s farthest corners like a fat monsoon cloud. Specifically, can AG tell us about one particular character who really made an impact on him?

Most of the books characters represent a “sliver” of India’s bulging populace, but if there is one person who “stands for the transformation in India,” it would be Ravindra Misal from Umred, an unexceptional town in Maharashtra, who climbed up in a world that “no one sensibly would think anyone could get out of.” He has developed a new genre of entrepreneurship, stemming from the “great epiphany” that he is not alone in wanting to do more, be more, receive more. AG finds it a “fascinating and complicated question” when a child of squalor wakes up and declares, ‘I will not become like my parents.’ It is can-do in its rawest form. Misal leaves the classroom after surrendering to an unforgiving exam system, picks up a series vocational skills and returns as a teacher—a triumph of karma? Realizing that he can channel hope and dreams into the town’s youth, Misal creates an English Academy and organizes roller skating classes.

Chhabra interrupts with a smile. Roller skating?

To people who come from such poor, rural backgrounds, “simple, meritocratic competition appeals” the most, AG explains, so the idea is that cheap “two by two” roller skates are sufficient to create a game and enliven an entire town.

It is a matter of time before the roller skating amateurs turn into pros competing in international competitions. Gregarious, talkative Misal—India’s roller skating team manager—is unusually tacit on the plane to Hong Kong, where he “just kept his camera on the window, pointed down at the farmland” he was leaving behind. AG pauses and we reflect with Misal about how far he has come, and how different home looks from so high up.

Chhabra describes the typical, and now more frequent, Indian story of the poor villager traveling to a city, his success culminating in a house, employment and an upgraded dignity: the ol’ rags to riches tale.

“I think the reason I like [Misal’s] story is because he didn’t reach a Bombay or a Delhi,” AG says. He believes that the “story of modern India” is a million “incremental bumps up” rather than a stampede to Bombay or Delhi, cities which are rapidly reaching critical mass, as the New York Times reported last November. Success comes from the more inherent acknowledgement of “personhood,” recognizing that you are a person, a body of potential that ought to be tapped.

Chhabra connects this new sense of independence to India’s economic liberalization. Does AG agree?

Not quite. Not all of India’s development should be attributed to India’s new economics or the “gust of capitalism.” Sure, “capitalism is a contributor,” but AG sees something larger: the mind shift from society being God-made to being manmade. He quotes Dr. Reddy, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 2003 to 2008, who praised the marriage of economic empowerment and social empowerment that enabled millions of Indians to recognize that “they are people.” The term ‘emerging market’ is “such a reduction,” AG continues. You can’t tell one billion people with millennia of history that they amount to an emerging market. Look at Russia and China; they have had and continue to show extraordinary growth; but do they have the same “people dynamism” as India does? Finding their voices, Indians are evolving from a culture of “paupers and maharajas” to a culture of “middleness” – it’s the middle class who are shaping new developments, championing causes, and demanding change.

Chhabra asks about angry reactions from NRIs that AG has faced in response to articles about India’s less uplifting statistics: high farmer suicide rates, ultra-poverty and gaping corruption, to name a few.

AG shrugs. “It makes your blood curdle driving through India even if people in big houses don’t want to read about it in the New York Times.”

Does AG want to comment on the “monstrosity” of Mukesh Ambani’s billion dollar home?

Another dismissal. “I don’t care… He spends a lot less on housing than you or I do…I’d rather he also create an AIDS foundation…I don’t begrudge him for what he does.” AG points out that an Ambani endowment could be the next world-changing foundation. “It’s not the Gates Foundation; it could be.”

Chhabra tries another angle: having returned from India, is there anything AG reflects on from his time there that saddens him?

AG returns to Misal’s incredible story. It’s “so striking what these kids learn,” he says; they are so “hungry to get ahead.” Misal is imparting concepts like SWOT (a strategic planning tool, popular in consulting-speak, which stands for ‘Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats’) to 16-year olds; most Americans don’t encounter it until their first job in their early twenties. AG observes some of Misal’s classes and sees that, in teaching these eager adolescents how to speak, you are trimming what they think about, focusing on ambition and independence. “They are being trained, not necessarily educated,” he says, which means there is no priority to learn “Tagore, Ashoka, Kabir.” India has 5,000 years of history but that is being put aside, and “that’s what worries me.”

AG turns to the audience: students at Columbia’s Journalism School have made a choice not to go into investment banking but instead to “make less and make a difference,” which is a culture that has not yet come to India. Right now there is “ambition and private dynamism,” but what about collective endeavors, what are the “social tradeoffs?” He reminds us that “just making money won’t bear out.”

Chhabra opens the discussion to the audience for questions.

Q: Is the ongoing psychological revolution—this new-found sense of opportunity and entitlement—creating a culture of evils, inciting more clashes between the old and young?

A: You can draw a million lines in India—upper/lower caste, upper/lower class, rich/poor—but the most important is young/old, since they span the psychological rift spreading over the nation. America went through this evolution of thinking over 150 years and India’s now cramming it into 20 years in an “orgy of development” where “churn is the only kind of change.” That is a “very bitter truth” for an older person to reconcile with, given that he cannot adapt as quickly. Whether he is rich or poor, the old man is resentful because his plans and dreams no longer apply; the rules, the landscape, his world, have changed.

Q: Has Ravindra Misal’s story and success spread to other villages, are others adopting his ideas?

A: Only a few people know his complete story the way Giridharadas has chronicled it; one or two are aware of his success. However, he is the “ambassador of escape,” the “most respected young person in that town,” which is a strong currency in India. “There is a change in the hierarchy of respectability,” demonstrated in Umred both dangerously and comically: During a motorcycle joy ride—Misal driving, Giridharadas behind him—they were stopped every few minutes by townspeople eager to greet their village hero. They wished him with folded palms—namaskar—which Misal happily returned with his own palms folded, casually taking his hands off the motorcycle and giving Ghiridharadas several heart attacks!

Q: Is there any disapproval by the youth to India’s rising growth and consumerist attitude?

A: It’s too soon for such a reaction to manifest. The current young generations see their future in this growth; it’s too early to tell. Consumerism isn’t all bad, after all. A “consumer-based pecking order” is a “lot less stupid” than doling out respect and opportunity based on one’s great-great-great-great grandfather’s profession. Money can be the “gush” to break up such thoughts of caste-driven respect, and it “needs time to do its work.”

Q: Do India’s elderly show dissatisfaction with India’s goal of modernization because they didn’t have that freedom or chance to do what their progeny are doing now?

A: Absolutely. Today’s elderly are in a sad state of limbo and can still remember being restricted in their youth, something their children and grandchildren are no longer stymied by.

AG’s grandmother lived through this. At first, she said she was thinking the ‘wrong thoughts’ by seeking more in life beyond her role as a woman/wife/mother/daughter-in-law. So she stopped vocalizing them. Then she just stopped having thoughts: “I just realized that I wasn’t supposed to talk.” Today, however, she is the head of an NGO working in the slums. Similarly, and on an inspiringly large scale, people from tiny villages in rural India passionately express their opinions in response to an AG article, because they finally feel that sense of entitlement, that they matter, that their voice ought to be heard. History, politics and culture did a bad job instilling a land teeming with people with the notion that they have a legitimacy to assert, and the tides are slowly reversing.

Q: You were recently in China, have you written about the India/China contrasts in their approach to the 21^st century?

A: Yes, an essay called ‘Chinese Dreams’ that was published in the Antioch Review. The key difference is that the Chinese realize that they’re on the verge of becoming a “big stinking economy”…with no personality. China “wiped out everything”—Confucius, Mao—to get to where it got. “India didn’t do that. Wisely.” India’s a little soulless, but not as bad. If anything, AG adds, it’s a “little frustrating how often the past wins.”

Q: How is India’s youth reacting to the environmental risks of such aggressive development?

A: It’s a “really, really tough issue.” Two-thirds of India lives in villages, most of which are yet to enter consumer culture, so it’s hard to tell them to stop when they haven’t yet started. A villager brings home his first electric lamp, and you want to tell him to cut back? After watching An Inconvenient Truth, AG’s young Indian friends reacted with, “Man, America really needs to do something.” It’s not yet (the bulk of) India’s responsibility or prerogative; they aren’t there yet.

If one follows the Western road to modernism—summed up by AG as rural to urban; clan-based to independence-based; women’s rights; and so on—you can see how things end: marriages don’t last and the environment starts to crumble. The question is, can we liberate women and not get stuck with a 50% divorce rate, or give 100% of India electricity without increasing pollution? Is it possible to pick the positives without the good-and-bad “prix fixe” of Western development?

Q: How can we reconcile all this development with the boss of indigenous knowledge (native languages, etc.)?

A: Misal, for example, is neither a master of English, Hindi nor Marathi. Hillary Clinton and William Dalrymple describe India as a nation of “linguistic half-castes.” But is that so bad? AG dismisses this as the “transitional stuff of a country figuring itself out.” He’s less comfortable with the 48% child malnourishment rate.

Q: Aren’t Indians in India still figuring out who they are relative to Western societies?

A: AG responds two ways, both heralding promise. “The happiest thing that I’ve found,” he starts, and “the most important drama of Modern India” is the “erosion of that inferiority complex.” No longer feeling the effects of the “old colonial hangover,” Indians are “falling back in love with themselves”.

He presents a couple examples:

Speaking with a strong Indian accent no longer precludes someone from being part of the “bona fide Indian elite,” a la Mukesh Ambani.
Indian advertisements in the 1920s and 30s were inaccessible to the majority of the country. Their slogans read, “…pause that refreshes:” definitely indecipherable to non-English speakers. Fast forward to the past decade; Dominos in India tempts customers with “hungry kya?”

Today’s thinking is: address the masses and their responses will resound. Send a text message—I mean an SMS—in that ghastly text-speak “u r 2 sweet 2 b 4 got 10’, comment on the news with poor English, create English Academies that teach catch phrases and corporate jargon, it doesn’t matter; your voice will be heard. The new is on the offensive.

It’s “such a profound revolution,” AG enthuses, and remembers a recently returned-to-India friend’s description of India: “it’s like a big dance party!”

India is calling, and this is one call you don’t want to miss.

Watch AG's INK by TED talk here: http://anand.ly/in-the-news/five-ideas

Read The Indian Express' miffed and witty opinion on the book here: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/anything-to-declare-at-immigration/751914/0.

Adopt a village in Tamil Nadu for just $500; help kids learn to read!

2010-12-18T19:25:00.004-05:00

Balaji Sampath speaks at Princeton University about AID’s revolutionary Eureka SuperKidz Initiative

My Plea

Tamil Nadu has one of the lowest child literacy rates in India. As of 2002, schools boast an enrollment rate of 99.5% (and that number has increased since then), but over 80% of 5^th standard students can’t read. What does that say about the state’s education system?

Plenty, if you’re Mr. Balaji Sampath, Founder and CEO of the Association for India’s Development (AID), which has been working with the Indian government to revolutionize the way students are taught basic language and math skills. He believes in “education, health and livelihood:”

set clear and simple goals for the students
cultivate a healthy environment for learning
translate parents’ livelihoods (however small) into teacher accountability

On December 18^th, he showed us with slides, handouts, chalk and a blackboard how AID is implementing these principles today. Read his story below, and if you’re inspired, donate to his project, Eureka SuperKidz by December 31 for your donation to be matched by generous donors. I believe I have enough family and friends to adopt a chunk of the 88 villages left, and I hope you will help me in this worthy campaign!

Sampath’s Story

Kerala and Himachal Pradesh have the highest children literacy rate, while Tamil Nadu, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh rank at the very bottom. “Learning was just not happening,” Sampath says matter-of-factly, the preface to his 15-year-long story about AID’s introduction to and involvement with Tamil Nadu’s rural poor.

In 1994, the World Bank launched the District Primary Education Program (DPEP) in India, in parallel with AID’s surveys and assessments. “No organization works in a vacuum,” Sampath says, and explained some of the crucial realizations the collaboration yielded:

While student enrollment—that is reported on—is high, so are dropout rates. Angry, frustrated and embarrassed parents pull children out of school as early as the 3^rd standard when they find out their children are performing poorly, or failing, and the child has slim chances of returning to school.
The Tamil Nadu government, eager to maintain high school attendance rates, instituted an “all pass” through 5^th standard policy, uniformly passing all students regardless of their performance. Parents didn’t know any better and the students continued in school and continued not learning.
Re-evaluations at the end of the 5^th standard showed similarly low literacy rates, so the government remedied the problem with an “all pass” policy through the 8^th standard. It was a “short-sighted” solution, Sampath says, and created a “brain drain” situation from primary school onwards.

Partnering with Pratham, the largest education NGO in the world, in 2004, AID took a sample survey of schools across Tamil Nadu to see how the government’s new policies were faring. The results weren’t promising. With more funding and attention in 2005, AID surveyed every district in Tamil Nadu and Bihar and found approximately 53% illiteracy among school-going children. But the infrastructure seems to be in place; Sampath tells us that every school has 2 teachers for a classroom of 80 students spanning 1^st through 5^th standard, so how can the quality of learning be improved?

“If you make it fun, kids learn better,” Sampath says with a smile on his face. “When subtraction becomes a game that you play with 4 friends, you want to play it, and you end up learning.”

He demonstrates on the blackboard, drawing 8 Tamil characters with chalk. He rapidly explains them to us, “this is ma, pa, tha, ka,” and erases them as quickly. He draws just one character: which one is this? The non-Tamil readers/writers in the room (including me) identify them with some accuracy, mixing up ka with tha, but not ka with pa. Sampath’s point is that it’s easier to mix up letters, objects, numbers—anything—that look similar, such as ka and tha, or, switching to English: b, d, p and q. “It’s easy to see that a and b look different; one has a stick attached to it. So how do you tell the difference between b and d, that both have sticks and balls?”

Make it fun! The more fun a task, the more appealing and the less difficult or cumbersome it becomes to children. He shows us a math jigsaw puzzle, 9 individual number squares that make up a 9x9 box. Each tile has 4 numbers on all 4 edges, written as arithmetic problems (4+15; 13x2) instead of the answers (16; 26), and the objective is to piece the puzzle together by matching the numbers on the edges of each tile with the 8 other tiles in the puzzle. It’s a basic game, made out of paper and requires a lot of arithmetic to play and complete. “Our resources are limited to paper, cardboard, markers, so we keep our games simple,” Sampath says.

Games are effective because kids work together, challenge each other, and learn in the process. “Attention span increases, focus increases.” Voila: a learning environment.

Next, AID introduced their learning-through-games methodology in 2 schools in Tamil Nadu which quickly showed positive results. They talked to the government about expanding the program, which seemed skeptical at first. But a government assessment in 2005 showed that AID was right, 5^th standard students really could not read. Frantic, they demanded state-wide intervention from AID, who responded with a plan to work in 5, then 10, then 15 districts, scaling up the program over time. AID has created the 6^th standard text book for schools all over Tamil Nadu. Sampath switches to the next slide in his presentation, showing us impressive quantitative results:

The government funded teacher training in 7,300 schools
Pratham funded reading campaign in 13,000 villages
UK-based Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) provided monitoring in 7,219 schools

“The goal is not to improve education as a whole but, more simply, to teach kids how to read,” Sampath reminds us, reiterating the need to keep targets simple.

AID sustained a 3-year continuous focus on 10 districts, reaching 1 million kids, training 18,000 teachers and running AID-designed classroom lessons for 1 hour a day in the classrooms of all 10 districts. As important as exposing the children to these creative learning incentives and techniques, was exposing the teachers to the reality of their students’ abilities. The AID assessment showed the teachers that more students than they thought could in fact not read.

The response to this glaring gap in the children’s education was straightforward: set a goal that all students will be able to read sentences. Simple goals and strategies are far more effective than complex ones when working with 18,000 teachers. “Take the example of India’s freedom struggle,” Sampath reminds us, “make salt. You can’t get simpler than that!”

Draw up two lists: students who can read and students who can’t, and work with the students in the latter list to move them to the former. Leverage kids who can read, have them help those who can’t. Involve the students because “you can’t hide things from children,” Sampath laughs, and simple goals appeal to kids. “They have an incentive to move lists. They set goals for themselves. If I read a sentence will I get a certificate? Will I move to the other list? Ok, I’ll do this.” Sampath assures us that sentences are picked at random when testing the students’ reading ability to ensure they actually can read and have not just “mugged up” a passage.

Percentage marks in an assessment doesn’t show students what they have learned and not learned; it is unclear what they have to improve upon to move from 60% to 80%. Tell the kid what is to be learned—a to read a sentence, a paragraph, 2-digit subtraction, etc.—and the students can go about it more effectively.

AID’s assessment highlighted another glitch in children’s education. Most of the children who could not read had parents who were illiterate and not involved in their children’s schooling, and could not provide any homework or other after-school support. Typically being from lower communities, they did not feel confident to approach or confront teachers—literate, better paid, higher status— with concerns about their children. “Getting the parents involved matters as much as, if not more than, game learning and regular assessments,” Sampath concludes.

He paints a picture for us: a classroom in rural Tamil Nadu today holds 80 students spanning 1^st to 5^th standard, with2 teachers attending to the entire group. Obviously, this makes individual attention very difficult, if not impossible. How can this be addressed?

Eureka SuperKidz!

Sampath describes how AID visited several villages and appointed 3 “young people” as after-school teachers trained by AID. Each is paid $1,000 / month, which is split between AID (Rs. 500) and the village, who further divide the fees between all the parents, so each family contributes Rs. 25. The afterschool program runs from 5 p.m. – 8 p.m. daily and leverages materials (assessments, workbooks, games) supplied by AID.

Such materials show the village that AID takes literacy and after-school programs extremely seriously, exciting the parents to be equally engaged. Now everyone is working towards the children’s development. More importantly, perhaps, is the approach that the after-school teachers take, which is to move away from the “I teach” attitude to the “you learn” attitude. Progress is measured by output from the children versus input from teachers. The teacher’s agenda isn’t to push material onto the students, but to pull learning out of them. A simple attitude shift, but so critical!

Sampath reads out names from a visual check-mark chart showing students’ progress afterschool, in fundamental concepts in English, Tamil, Math(s) and Science). “Janet has learned 2-digit subtraction; Monisha has learned 2-digit addition but not subtraction; Armstrong has also learned multiplication…by the way, names in Tamil Nadu have changed quite a lot!” he jokes. “We have a lot of Stalins and Marx also!”

A mentality shift is taking place: take the example of microcredit. Poor women thought themselves separate from banks, in no way connected to them or reliant upon them. After international organizations and NGOs set up microcredit programs, bringing women together, having them meet regularly—very important, we learn— the women recognized that they were making the effort, saving money, maintaining personal accounts informally , and believed that the bank did owe them something. A new market was created.

Similarly, teacher/parent reciprocity and accountability is very important. The after-school teachers in the villages are from those villages, locals that the elders have seen grow up, so even if the parents are illiterate, they do not feel inferior to these teachers. They are confident enough to confer with them regarding their children, since they, like any parent, want the best for their children. The students feel the benefit of the encouraging educational environment they’re in after school, at home and with their friends, and are motivated to excel.

In Bihar, the same after-school program is in place, running earlier in the day, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. since it gets dark quicker. “Some villages have solar lights for our programs; that’s the only part of the village with lights in the evenings,” Sampath says.

Now What? The Perfect New Year’s Resolution!

Here’s where we come in as interested donors, inspired individuals, locals, NRIs and firangis with networks of family and friends who believe in education. AID has identified a group of generous donors—Prithvi Solutions, Prabhu, Shiva, AGK and SAVLAC Fund—who have put together a Seed Fund to support the Eureka SuperKidz project in 250 villages in Tamil Nadu. A village costs $1,000 to adopt so we need to provide just $500 per village. You can do so here: please include my name and ‘Dec 18 Princeton University talk’ in the Comments section. Donate as individuals, families, student groups or however you choose, the money’s going directly to Sampath and the villages!

Hopefully these folks will nudge you in the right direction:

A UChicago MBA student is providing additional funds to sponsor students who complete school to attend college.
Mohana, a 7^th standard girl in one of the villages, called “makku” by her friends and deemed an expense to her drunkard father, sells her dad’s liquor bottles to pay the Rs.25 teacher fee.

Still Not Convinced? Maybe the Internet can Help

Kirsten Anderson worked with Sampath for 2 years in Madras as an American India Fellow (an AIF peer of my dear friend Hamsa Subramaniam) designing an English reading curriculum, and helped produce this video about AIDs efforts in Madras: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRSPg-fy02w&feature=related

And on a lighter note, here are some of the outtakes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sv_8iDXdsM

Charles Leadbeater, an expert in “innovation strategy,” gave a superb TED talk on different and creative ways to educate the children in burgeoning cities in the developing world. Like Sampath, he believes in the “push, not pull” approach; it’s not what the teachers teach, but what the children learn, and he praises Pratham’s creater Madhav Chavan highly. Watch the TED talk here, it’s just 20 minutes: http://www.ted.com/talks/charles_leadbeater_on_education.html

For even more inspiration, here’s what kids all over India are doing to effect social change in India, an idea discussed by educator Kiran Bir Sethi in another TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/kiran_bir_sethi_teaches_kids_to_take_charge.html

If you don’t want to donate to this cause, check out some other organizations featured by the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/opinion/19kristof.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage.

If you made it all the way to the end, thanks for reading, watching and, hopefully, donating!

20 (Writers) Under 40 (Years) in 80 (Minutes): Authors selected as The New Yorker’s best 20 UNDER 40 speak at the 92Y Tribeca

2010-12-15T00:08:00.009-05:00

It’s always satisfying to put a name to face, and even more so to put a voice to a face. Deborah Treisman is the Fiction Editor of The New Yorker magazine, and interviews writers and holds consistently eloquent discussions about writing on her weekly podcasts. Today she is stylish in a grey dress and shiny red leather boots that I now want (I’m a sucker for red). Thank you all for coming in spite of the cold, she greets us, “I probably wouldn’t have made it out.”

But she is clearly happy to be here and glows like a proud parent about the provocatively ambitious list of authors she and fellow editors conceived, whose gestation period involved expansions (so many authors to consider!) and contractions (so little time!), and which eventually birthed a brilliant collection of stories. It was “exhausting and thrilling,” she says, and she’s overjoyed at the result, to have all the stories “united” in one issue. She is standing at the podium on stage with a hemisphere of empty chairs behind her. “These aren’t for Chinese dissidents,” she cracks, but for the writers to occupy after their readings, when the audience can ask questions. Without further ado, the writers begin.

First up is David Bezmozgis: tall, dark-framed glasses, tame in a sweater and collared shirt. Treisman describes his writing—primarily about immigration, culture shock and identity— as “politically savvy and emotionally deft.” Bizmousis reads a section of THE TRAIN OF THEIR DEPARTURE, dealing with a romance between a male and female protagonist. The thorn here is a pregnancy and a perplexed is-he-or-isn’t-he father, who thinks of babies as being “the size and vascular transparence of a gooseberry,” floating around in the “red convection of the womb.” The weary maybe-maybe-not father reflects that “life, which he treated as a pastime, which he thought he could outdistance, had caught up with him.”

Second is Nell Freudenberger, praised in an article following her first book as being “too young, too pretty and successful.” With a bashful smile and a calm monotone she reads from her story AN ARRANGED MARRIAGE, which came to her after a chance conversation with a stranger on a Jet Blue flight, an involved email correspondence, and an internal compass directing her towards a plot. Amina is soon to be married to George who she met and is getting to know over email. When she first sees a photo of him she observes his “large uncolonized expanses of cheek, nose and chin,” which she later decides she can love. Her parents debate hiring a rickshaw to bring the visiting fiancé from the main road to their house, about 200 ft of unpaved path away, but decide that such a gesture would be “more of a spectacle than it was worth,” and I am struck by what the ‘spectacle’ of an arranged marriage conveys to readers both familiar and foreign to the concept. Amina wonders what George looks like and her mother—who met and married Amina’s father of her own accord, via a ‘love marriage’—placidly reassures her that he looks the same as he does in his photo: “nothing is wrong,” and I wonder if it's ironic or intended that I think of the prevailing American sentiment that we are innocent until proven guilty. Before Amina moves to Washington, DC to be with her fiancé, her mother exacts a promise from her not to do “that” before they are officially married. Amina is emboldened by the intimacy of proximity and inevitable propinquity, and breaks her promise to her mother. While she does not like his facial expressions while he’s on top of her—“as if he were in pain somewhere very far away”—she has no regrets the next morning, a significant marker of who she is and who she is becoming.

Third is Rivka Galchen who, Treisman says, draws from a “closet of curiosities” and a “grab bag of interests,” a sort of “Thomas Pinchen meets Kafka meets Oliver Sacks” for the scientific, technical and colloquial happenings she writes about. Galchen reads from THE ENTIRE NORTHERN SIDE WAS COVERED WITH FIRE that begins with a bit about the dearth of readers these days being a “felicitous injustice.” Galchen is expressive and performs her story with expression, comedic hesitations and flawless timing. Her hair is tied in a ponytail that looks like it was an afterthought, but is actually skillfully done, much like her writing, which reads like a casual conversation because of how finely it is crafted. The main character, Trisha, is in the middle of being pregnant, left by her husband, lectured by her brother and tempted by filmmakers, and Galchen manages to bring into context romances between land animals, Parmesan cheese graters without the “unappealing ‘comfort’ grips” and money being “also very winged.” She is hilarious and poignant!

Fourth is Karen Russell, the shortest and most cherubic of the bunch. She writes about things that are “both singular and universal,” Treisman tells us, and whose “cultural references are sweeping.” Russell sweetly thanks Treisman. “It’s great to be here with this rad team,” she says, drawing a chuckle from the audience. Her story is THE DREDGEMAN’S REVELATION and the main character is someone who works on a dredge for so many hours a day that “lately he preferred to think of himself as a profession.” Russell’s voice is soft and airy, musical and sounds practiced; I could listen to her read for a long time. She smiles when her main character starts reminiscing and “trying like the other guys to turn his life into theater.” She boldly uses Southern and Turkish accents for other characters, making us laugh again. After a traumatizing delivery that leaves a baby near-dead and its mother dead (prompting its adoptive father to later repeat like a chant, “you were born dead,”) the audience is as grateful as Russell that the baby chose life: that “windy interval between birth and death.”

Fifth is the one author I recognize because of his distinctively receding hairline, dark hair and perpetual boyish grin on his face. Gary Shteyngart manages to be “hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time,” per Treisman, and effortlessly applies his “well developed satirical skills” in his writing. His 3-line biography includes the sentence, “Gary Shteyngart lives in his own head” and Treisman invites us to visit it with her. His opening line to the audience is, “I can’t believe I’m not 40 yet! I feel like I’m 80! Jeez!” with mock truculence. He reads from SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY which is set in the future and where everyone’s quirks are magnified. There’s the group of scientists that is “trying to find a cure for death,”—Shteyngart starts laughing, heh heh heh—“not going so well.” There’s the protagonist’s mother who welcomes him home with “some Russian garbles of amazement” and uses her “post retirement English” when addressing his non-Russian, non-Jewish (the latter a reason to disapprove) girlfriend. Shteyngart mimics with his hand the action of the mother running her hands through her son’s hair and describes how she quickly covers the couch before her son sits on it, since he’s wearing “compromised Manhattan outerwear.” There’s the father who, when he hugs his son, leaves behind some of the “grey carpet of hair that my father wore with a touch of class.” When he pulls his son into the living room for a father-to-son talk, they discuss “all the monetary things that kept us fearful and connected.” Shteyngart hops nimbly between the narrator’s American accent, his girlfriend’s question-mark-at-the-end-of-every-sentence American accent and his parents’ eager, affectionate, thick Russian accents. The novel may be super sad, but this bit is pretty damn funny.

Sixth is the author with the coolest name: Wells Tower (who names their kid Wells?). Treisman says of Tower that he captures the “panoramic cavalcade of American life” and has a “cinematic eye for the details that both stab and tickle.” Tower reads smoothly from THE LANDLORD about a real estate “investor guy” going through some “stuff” whose 31-year old daughter, Rhoda, creator of uniquely incomprehensible yet message-driven art, moves in with him unannounced, and continues to stump him with her work. “Her field is bummers,” the father tells us, since Rhoda makes “leukemia-cluster art, floating-yuan art, water-rights art, and mental-health-funding-cuts art,” among others. When Rhoda speaks, Towers impressively executes her waterfall of dissent, disdain and disgruntlement with rapid-fire diatribes about the recession and her ex-boyfriend and her father’s porn collection and that creature from the ‘Black Lagoon’ movie they saw together when she was 8. Her father convinces her to go out for dinner one night, and drives her through the scenic route—how about a sunset for message-driven art— made more beautiful by Towers’ light, rhythmic alliteration: in the “late light” of sunset, “each blade [of grass] looks hand-tinted;” sneezeweeds “dot the ditches” and are “woozy with the weight” of their heads. Writer Gary Lutz, known for his essay ‘The Sentence is a Lonely Place,’ would be proud. Rhoda complains of a “massive Old Testament magnitude of guilt” from her childhood, and confirms that being exposed to “a walking compound genital” in ‘Black Lagoon’ didn’t help. What would? Seeing “a Pegasus fucking a unicorn.” Good to know!

After being read to about porn, arranged marriage, cheese graters, Turkish doctors and abortions, we are primed to ask the writers questions. They arrange themselves on the stage and finger their microphones with varying levels of awkwardness and habit.

Books versus electronic media? Shteyngart responds that reading a book means “completely shutting myself off, which you can’t do with an electronic device.” Booya.

How should an audience member write her autobiography? Russell offers friendly advice: “act like a tennis shoe” (and just do it!).

How do these writers deal with rejection, and what does it mean to have been elected to this prestigious list? Bezmozgis responds: “the nature of the job is rejection, it continues,” and urges people to keep at their work regardless of how tiring or obstacled it seems.

Do any of them teach writing or English classes, and why? Russell enthuses about how fun it is to “get to read closely” other people’s work, especially younger people who are “free.” “You have to wear pants in a room; that’s always good,” she adds. Hmm...

Do they find themselves being more subversive than usual in their stories, to pack a stronger punch? Towers says, “I vent a lot of bile and sorrow on the state of American politics” in non-fiction magazine pieces, but fiction is a space “where I can intrigue myself” and explore the “more fundamental artifacts of human emotion.”

A question to Treisman reveals that this same list from 11 years ago recognized 15 men and 5 women, and this year has yielded 10 of each. Hurrah!

How can first-time writers find their voice? Shteyngart says that reading aloud helps activate the “bullshit meter.” “There’s kind of a shame to reading in front of the mirror, but it’s helpful…do it naked if you have to.”

Sounds like a plan. Although, maybe I’ll keep those tennis shoes on.

PostScript: I haven't read any of these stories in full yet, but based on what I heard tonight, here's how I'd rank them:

1. Towers

2. Galchen

3. Russell

4. Shteyngart

5. Freudenberger

6. Bezmozgis

You?

Those who see him gush: Colum McCann at the Hunter College Writing Series

2010-12-07T10:12:00.006-05:00

Colum McCann is a writer, poet, singer and comedian rolled into one inimitable Irishman. He paints sentence landscapes with his lilt-tipped brush, interjecting a sprightly “emm” between words, and amazes us with the pictures he effortlessly, eloquently conjures up.

He starts the evening, as he does the rest of the talk and the Q&A, with a story. Two funny things happened to him that morning, he tells us. He was walking through the park early this morning and a passerby recognized him and commended his “great book.” It was a “gorgeous moment, the sun was coming up,” and McCann was delighted. Moments later, someone ran by him and shouted, “get of the way, you baldy prick.” Flicking dried paint off his face—he was moving house that day—he smiles at the memory, perhaps trying to temper the glowing praise he has just been delivered by the woman who introduced him (I have shamefully forgotten her name, which is unfortunately because McCann says she throws the best parties). Her thin eyebrows arched in admiration, her hair perfectly pouffed, she shares some of the late Frank McCourt’s recognition of McCann’s 2009 National Book Award winner, LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN: “of course it took an Irishman to get to the heart of New York City.”

But enough chatter; there are real words to be spoken and heard this evening. McCann tells us he’s not going to read from LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN—“I’ve been doing that all year”—but instead retreat into his past and treat us to something dated, something dusty. He’s chosen a short story from his 2004 collection FISHING THE SLOE-BLACK RIVER which describes struggling humanity in different pockets of the world when money and cheer was short, a sentiment neither dated nor dusty in recent headlines about Ireland’s impending bailout. The book in his hand lacks a jacket cover; McCann admits he left it at home because the photo was “so embarrassing…jeez!” He’s charmingly—or maybe I mean disarmingly?—candid, telling us he thought his first story was “completely twee.” Today, armchaired in literary stardom and unsolicited compliments (even if they are directed to his “baldy” head), he is ready to give it some attention. I assume ‘twee’ is slang for crap, but (Merriam-Webster and) Urban Dictionary tell me otherwise: in British English it is used much more widely for things that are nauseatingly cute or precious. It comes from the way the word sweet sounds when said in baby talk. McCann stops after the first couple sentences, informing us that the 26 women he’s begun reading about represent Ireland’s 26 counties. This is a “meticulous story,” he explains; hardly seems twee to me.

He has a musical voice, a cadence of patience. He reads the way one enjoys a glass of wine: respecting the fragrance with a deep inhale and a swish, playing with the liquid in one’s mouth, tasting and swallowing it with focus, and McCann relishes each word as he says it aloud. When he reads, his eyes flick upwards, as if looking at the Aurora Borealis in the story that is “fingering the sky.” Each time a woman casts her net into the river, she catches sadness, reflection and humor—one woman reflects that a man in the story is “not worth a barman’s fart.” He mentions Jameson and I cringe at how I ruin the name each time I order it with a crass American accent. He pronounces ‘white’ and ‘when’ with an ‘h’ in front of the word; I blithely imagine that he has perfect pitch, too.

After a water break, he shares from a new novel he’s working on, acknowledging that such premature exposure is “terribly reckless.” He explains how he “found this story,” being inspired by Frederick Douglass’ travels through Ireland in 1845 during the Potato Famine, and the crowds of 30,000 and 40,000 he drew each time he spoke: “a black man in Ireland speaking about temperance and abolition.” McCann starts to describe his protagonist, but stops himself: “I don’t even know what protagonist means, and I’m supposed to be a teacher at a writing program!” To stop himself from “jumping all over the place” with too long a preface, he jumps right into a chapter about two pilots flying an air-mail plane during the Second World War (if I remember right). The plane is a “nippy little thing” and the characters reflect upon its “shadow shape on the clouds” as they coast through the sky, a “species of abyss,” with “long scarves of tarmac” beneath them. War has turned Europe into a “carnival of bones”—what a stained image of despair.

McCann is deliberate with his tone and tempo: he starts off slowly, introducing the grim characters, and once the plane takes off and land skims underneath them in gulps, McCann’s voice becomes light and quick. He hops over the 3 syllables of a German word like a stone skipping over water – hurriedly, skimming the surface with a flourish, effortlessly landing elsewhere. “Oh, there’s a mistake; ok!” he chuckles in an aside, spotting an error as he reads. The section is a hybrid of impressively technical aviation and the haunting, beautiful imagery he so uniquely concocts.

After the two read-alouds McCann invites questions and waxes eloquent about the power of storytelling. Needless to say, his answers are the perfect blend of wordplay and delivery.

When asked if his novel will be ready for eager audiences soon, he replies, “I hope! We shall see. These things take a long time…As my students very well know, I’m very fond of throwing things away.”

Whether it’s a famine or a financial recession, McCann believes in the old-fashioned tale: “I don’t know if storytelling can save us, it can certainly hold us up.”

Compared to novels, McCann believes that “short stories have to be more perfect.” And then the zinger: Short stories are “imploding universes with round edges” while novels are “exploding universes that move in all directions.”

An audience member congratulates McCann on his convincing section about aviation; is he a pilot, too? No, he shakes his head, he spent a lot of time in the New York Public Library. The “benefit and beauty of libraries,” he says, is the “deep, deep stuff… in our library systems, you cannot find this stuff in Google.” The challenge is to write not just about what you know, but about “what you want to know.” Then it becomes “an adventure, you travel and you journey with it.”

In response to several compliments on his reading voice, McCann is, of course, ready with a story. He remembers when friends suggested that he make an audio book of LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN and the woman he spoke to on the phone about doing so. She hesitated, then asked him to come in to audition. “For my own book!” McCann laughs. “I thought, fuck it. I went in, did an hour-long audition…and I didn’t get the job!” He believes the musicality and poetry in his voice and words “has to do with the music” of Irish culture. He refers to Hiberno which, Wikipedia tells me, is a dialect of English spoken in Ireland, a sonorous mix of tongue-twisting vocabulary that is clearly conducive to the spoken word. “I always get my kids to learn a poem for Christmas,” he concludes, and the crowd gasps with collective endearment. I vow to do the same with my kids.

McCann was inspired heavily by his father, a journalist. He narrates a quick story about traveling back to Ireland recently to visit his ailing dad who has 2 broken hips and is in bad physical shape. As McCann walks through the door, his father gets up to greet him, falls over and breaks his shoulder. Later in the hospital he quips, “I’m just like the Irish economy, amn’t I?”

A talk by a writer isn’t complete without encouragement from the horse’s mouth to get through whatever project us budding writers are working on:

“The really hard work comes tomorrow morning when you sit in front of an empty page,” he states matter-of-factly, and if you keep at it, “the hard work, the good work, will come out in the end…It will break your heart but you’ve just got to keep on fighting the fight…Accept that it’s never as good as you want it to be, when it comes through your fingers. Accept that you can fail better.”

McCann says repeatedly that his first book was a “deeply flawed novel in a number of ways,” but as the protagonists—whatever they are—in his work-in-progress point out, “failure didn’t interest them.”

Nor does it interest McCann, nor Philippe Petit, nor I, goddamit!

The following day, McCann was at Symphony Space on the Upper West Side where actress Amy Ryan read his short story, EVERYTHING IN THIS WORLD MUST. Read about their rehearsal in New York Magazine.

The hotter the fire, the better the thtory: Salman Rushdie and Suketu Mehta at the 92Y

2010-11-22T17:59:00.005-05:00

Listening to Salman Rushdie read and speak in public is like eating a lot of dark chocolate; it’s sinful, delicious, addictive, with a bitterness that stings at the end of each delectable bite. Rushdie toys with words on paper and in conversation, and is consistently arrogant enough to offend some of his readers/listeners all of the time, keeping all of us on our toes. It’s brilliant!

Suketu Mehta, famous for Maximum City – a book about Bombay; an ode, really – and a regular contributor to the NYTimes, introduced and interviewed Rushdie. I know Mehta him to be an insightful writer and journalist; he teaches journalism at NYU. Reading him, however, I didn’t hear his bashful Indian accent and lisp, and it was endearing to see him stand at a podium and talk about “thitting in thith thame auditorium where you all thit now, homethick for Bombay, lithening to a writer from Bombay talk about Bombay.” This man with thinning hair and twinkling eyes had heard Rushdie speak at the 92Y in 1981, after Midnight’s Children was published, and approached him afterward, brimming with Indian familiarity: “Mr. Ruthdie, I, too, am from Bombay; thall we take dinner?” Rushdie gently declined, but after Maximum City was published in 2004, he wrote a glowing review and invited Mehta out to dinner. “And here we are.”

They have become close friends and their sons play together. While putting off the children’s book(s) his son Prakash wants him to write, Mehta obliges him with “Salman uncle’s” words and, most recently – and tonight’s cause for celebration – Luka and the Fire of Life. “And now let uth hear from Thalman uncle,” Mehta said, concluding his introduction.

Rushdie explained that his foray into children’s literature came about at a writers’ conference in London – full of writers famous for their “egghead tomes” – where a famous German author pulled him aside, with the dramatic grip-on-the-wrist that an older and wiser writer has the authority to use, and instructed him, “You must a children’s book write.” When Rushdie’s first son, Zafar, was 8, he asked his father when he would write a book that he could read. Rushdie promised his son he would write his son something as soon as he finished what he was working on. That was Satanic Verses and the earthquake that followed gave Rushdie the perfect excuse and reason to work on something less…incendiary. Haroun and the Sea of Stories was Rushdie’s way to explain to his son what was happening to his father: Haroun’s father is a story teller who faces obstacles when creating and telling his stories, and is nearly silenced forever.

Rushdie became a father for the second time at the age of 50: “I took a break between parenting – my sons are 18 years apart,” and it wasn’t long before Malin was asking him when Rushdie would write a book for him; Zafar already had one. Rushdie remembered Paul Simon’s song St. Judy’s Comet:

Cause if I can't sing my boy to sleep
Well it makes your famous daddy look so dumb
look so dumb

and said he would write something. “The engine” of his book is a father reflecting upon his mortality and age, being that he is considerably older and having a child nearly twenty years after he had his first.

The storytelling father in Luka and the Fire of Life falls into a deep sleep – a coma? – and Luka, younger brother of Haroun from Haroun and the Sea of Stories has to enter his father’s world of magic to rescue his father from his inevitable doom.

At this point Rushdie read 3 excerpts from his book, establishing its setting – the World of Magic – its main characters – Luka, his pets Bear (a dog) and Dog (a bear), a phantom of his father (named “Nobodaddy”) and his adversaries in the World of Magic – and its plot – how Luka tries to prolong his father’s life. Rushdie is a terrific reader, and neither the density of Midnight’s Children nor the linguistic playfulness of Luka and the Fire of Life impedes his narration. He used his reading glasses for the longer passages “that I’ve not yet memorized” and added commentary where necessary:

“I should mention that “Nobodaddy” is not my invention. William Blake used it first in his poem To Nobodaddy, and later James Joyce in Ulysses.”

“I have always wanted a flying carpet in a novel and I finally got one.”

After Rushdie entranced us with his magic for forty minutes, he sat down with Mehta to answer questions and shed light on his book. Mehta asked what his son thought of the book, and Rushdie proudly answered that Milan enjoyed it very much. Rushdie refused to show it to his agents and publishers until his son had finished the book, which he could only read after he had finished his daily homework, and Rushdie liked nothing better than keeping his people waiting while his son slowly made it through the book after Chemistry homework was done. He reminded us that his older son Zafar, to whom Midnight’s Children is also dedicated, has not read Midnight’s Children, but saw a play of Midnight’s Children in London, and considers that the same as reading the book. Rushdie doesn’t mind: “It doesn’t matter if you’re a writer or a singer. To your children, you’re Dad.” And reading something your parent has written can be strange: “if you read about sex in a book written by your father, it’s deeply humiliating.”

Rushdie attributed inspiration for this book to oral storytellers in Kerala (in South India), a flourishing state known for its 100% literacy rate. “And highest suicide rate,” Mehta interjected, to which Rushdie rejoined, “These things may be highly related.” Rushdie continued: “The oral storyteller knows exactly when he loses his audience – it’s when the audience walks away.” This motivated Rushdie to create some “playful pyrotechnic storytelling,” a multitude of plots and characters that he’d have to sustain over several pages. It’s like a juggler with many balls in the air, he explained. “The fun is in wondering when he may drop one. But in fact he adds another ball to the mix and keeps on juggling.”

Mehta asked a question about setting, making references to controversial regions around the world – the Middle East, the state of Arizona. Rushdie didn’t miss a beat and added Kansas to that list, for its state-wide rejection of evolution. “The people’s opposition to Darwin was the disproof of Darwin’s theory. Evolution can go backwards – and produce Kansas.” OH SNAP.

Rushdie described his childhood literary and cultural influences. Growing up in a city like Bombay, he said, culture arrives haphazardly. The Ramayana and the Mahabharatha are daily fare. There are the (Aesop’s Fable-like) Panchatantra tales. The Arabian Nights. Enid Blyton. He gorged on Superman and Batman comics as a child, claims to know more about kryptonite and superpowers than most, and prefers Superman to Batman because, “how fond can you be of someone who hangs upside down at night?” In a cosmopolitan Indian city, there’s a plethora of stories one reads as a child which have formed the “fictional mulch” he works with. Mehta asked if his Hindi character names were a private joke between him and 1 billion readers. Rushdie corrected him: it was more a joke between him and “people with culture.” Oh snap AGAIN.

Several scenes in Luka and the Fire of Life have the appearance and feel of a video game, with characters collecting lives by stepping on mushrooms and shaking trees, and a digital counter in one corner measuring the number of lives left. Mehta asked him about his video gaming prowess, and he responded, “There was a moment when I got really good…depressingly good at video games,” when he played them years ago with his first son, back when video games were linear, like Super Mario Brothers, and not as complicated and destructive as Call of Duty and Halo. Nowadays he watches Malin play, and limits his engagement to iPhone apps, his current favorite being Angry Bird which, he boasted, he has mastered. “Blackberry users, weep,” he scoffed.

Mehta: What are your thoughts on reincarnation?

Rushdie: Negligible. Once is enough. I’d rather not come back as an ant or gogo doll or whatever the options are.

Mehta asked him the apocalyptic question about novels v. e-books, the internet and other digital technology. Rushdie argued that the novel is in fact the most sophisticated technology: “You can drop it in the bath and it preserves all its data. It gets a little wet, but you can dry it. It’s more interactive and has greater failsafes than any other technology.”

Mehta: Have you read the Harry Potter books?

Rushdie: I’ve read them all, all 7 of them; God help me. If you want to talk to your children, you have to know what they’re talking about.

He admired JKRowling for turning a generation of children onto books but said he’d be happier if they were reading books written by other authors. (Oh SNAP for the third time, shizzam.)

About the memoir he’s currently working on, Rushdie admitted, “I’ve had the misfortune of acquiring an interesting life.” Is it stranger than fiction, Mehta asked, and Rushdie said that life is always stranger than fiction. He quoted the writer’s creed: “The worse it is, the better it is.”

To which Mehta responded, “well, leth hope it geth worth.”

Safarewell

2010-10-06T00:15:00.003-04:00

[Manyara National Park --> Ngorongoro Crater National Park --> Arusha]

Sunrise on the hills of Manyara is like no other. The hills glow red before the glow of the sun comes into view.

The morning improves with a hearty breakfast, then we’re off to Ngorongoro Crater after thanking our chef for the safari, Dickson, for his enjoyable meals.

Since Ngorongoro is a crater, we drive up up up to top at first, and then still more up up up to the crater entry gate. We pass Maasai laborers on our way, gathering fruit, wood, working. Then we head down down down into the crater where animals aplenty wait.

A queue of jeeps announces a male and female lion “on honeymoon.” If we wait “12 to 20 minutes,” we may see them “make love”. The most we get is some stretching, she rolls over, he licks her for a while. Not as exciting as we’d hoped. Still, when he stands up, he is intimidatingly tall and large!

The zebra and wildebeest are much more used to humans here than in Manyara, and don’t dart out of the way when our jeep approaches. We take advantage of the close ups for better photos and more involved observation. [Enjoy some terrific wildlife footage by a dedicated South African couple who befriend a leopard, drown $2 million worth of camera gear and film a pride of lionesses attacking an elephant here: http://www.ted.com/talks/beverly_dereck_joubert_life_lessons_from_big_cats.html.]

Lunch is at a lake where all the other safari goers have gathered to eat, like a herd of wildebeest grazing in the shade, close to the water; good thing we aren’t anyone’s prey. Hippos bask in one corner, a few surface and submerge near us. I eat my hardboiled egg and remember cracking a similar egg at Mawenzi Peak just a few days ago.

It’s hard to fight sleep after an early morning and so much food. We don’t have to do anything besides sit and look, which is also conducive to a snooze! I wrap Hamsa’s kanga tighter around me to keep the cold air from making the hair on my sunburned arms stand on end. Amazing how cold it is down in the crater!

Walter nudges me awake as we ascend the crater on our way out. Still no faru, or rhino—the last of the ‘big five’ animals to spot—and we take in the rainforest views for the last time. We get to the Ngorongoro gate where Dickson and a van driver are waiting. Walter and I transfer our bags to the van, say kwa heri to John and we head for Arusha. We pick up 4 other passengers along the way—Dickson is comfortably sandwiched between driver and a passenger and they heatedly debate which of the 2 reigning political parties, CCM and Chadema, should win the upcoming elections. ‘Salaam Maria,’ a radio show, Walter and I gather, comes on the radio which quiets them down; in time for a flaming sunset, even. Walter and I talk culture differences between Americans, Europeans and Indians. I learn that Gouda (as in the cheese) is pronounced “howda.”

Back in Arusha, I am reunited with my Tanzanian family. Katana’s mother has had our hiking shoes washed! They are no longer mud-and-dirt splattered from climbing a mountain. “It is a mother’s work,” she says simply. And next morning, as I gather my things for the bus back to Dar Es Salaam and bid farewell to my new-found family, she is equally sincere and says what all of us are feeling: “it is very hard to say goodbye.”

Go Placidly Among the Animals

2010-10-05T23:54:00.004-04:00

[Tarangire National Park -->Manyara National Park]

We’re up by 6 a.m., in time for a spectacular sunrise, delicious breakfast, and more fun in Tarangire. It’s quiet and empty and then—lionesses, 3 of them, 10 feet away from us! First we spot one twitching ear, then a nose, then a terrific yawn and 3 brown blotches camouflaged in the grass turn into sleek, drowsy lions. They’re by a tree near the river, snoozing until their prey comes to the water for a drink. Later we see them get up, stalking the antelopes!

Our luck continues; driving through the park we see 2 cheetahs, unmistakable with that height and gait, walking along the river bank, making the zebras up ahead nervous.

The main performance today is by the tembo—the elephants—who arrive en masse at the river. They arrive in a line, spread out along the bank and the older elephants—mothers and grandmothers—methodically start digging for water since it’s tastier the deeper one digs, out of reach of antelope urine and other dirt. The babies entertain themselves, get in the way of their protectors and every now and then a frustrated mother bats her baby away from her freshly dug hole, while an indulging grandmother shares hers. We watch them for at least 45 minutes.

After lunch back at Zion Campsite, we leave Tarangire and drive to Manyara National Park, sampling red banana from a street seller along the way—sweet, cheap and delicious! The campsite is up a mountain and the drive is exhilarating. We scope out our sunrise spots.

Back in park land, we see hippo, an assortment of grazers—i.e. more punda nilima (zebra), wildebeest, and pumba—and birds chilling at the river. Baboons and other monkeys boldly pass by. The elephants are shy, the zebras confused when we get too close, and they stride and gallop away as we furiously snap pictures.

Manyara is lush, green, fragrant with flowers of the white Mango tree; the sign at the entrance was clearly onto something, which reads: "Remove nothing from the park except: Nourishment for the soul; Consolation for the heart; Inspiration for the mind."

The sun sets behind the mountain, we head back to the campsite. Before, during and after dinner, Walter and I embark on quite the conversation—Ramana Maharishi (“Purpose of this world is to transcend it.”), Eckhart Tolle (“I am not perfect, I am whole.”), the Bhagavad Gita, marriage, a definition of the soul, a collective mind 6-billion strong, alcohol, and time warps. I read him a poem I stumbled upon at the safari office in Arusha, Desiderata, posted below for your enjoyment:

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

PS: Happy Birthday, Aparna!

Leopards, Bows and Arrows

2010-10-04T23:26:00.005-04:00

[Arusha -->Tarangire National Park]

"It's Kili time" no longer; it's safari time! I meet my safari driver and fellow safari-goers a few hours after I was told to be ready and waiting at their office—good thing I can kill time with Katana until they show up. The driver is John, a tall lean man with a permanent smile and an egg-shaped head. The others are Walter from Holland, and Dirk and Diana from Germany. We all speak English, which makes for fun conversation on the long drives to and inside the parks.

We munch on lunch in paper and plastic bags as we leave colorful Arusha for the dusty palette of the road to Tarangire. We drive past a Maasai market, Maasai bomas or villages, and cattle herders on the way; they are effortlessly natural in the landscape. It is discovered at a quick grocery store stop to pick up water that one of our jeep doors doesn’t open. After trying to fix it with the help of some eager-to-impress village boys, we give up. Walter and I climb out of the top of the jeep to get in and out for the rest of the safari.

Arriving at Zion campsite outside Tarangire National Park a couple hours later, I run into Kilimanjaro climbers Vincent and Felitcitas; quite the coincidence! We enjoy a brief rest and then we’re back in the jeep and headed into the park. Walter and I sit in the back, the roof is raised, and the wind and dust blow through us, it’s fantastic.

Our animal sightings that evening are encouraging: gazelle, impala, elephant, a lioness in shade of a tree, a leopard in a tree(for which much pointing through powerful binoculars is required), some vultures, tons of zebra and wildebeest, warthog who seem completely unaware and high rats scrambling in and out of tunnels on the sides of the hills. The baobab trees make the flat parks seem even more flat, compared to the jagged and pointy baobab branches. And when it’s time for the sun to set, everything turns a deep shade of red.

Over dinner that evening, back at the campsite, I learn some Swahili / Maasai from John, specifically, what the park names mean:

Tarangire: in Maasai, ngire is pumba (or warthog; remember Lion King?) and tara is river – this park has lots of water and lots of pumba!
Serengeti = endless, in Maasai
Manyara = a type of tree in Maasai
Ngorongoro = the sound of the bells the Maaasai used to chase out the Bague tribe from the area
Tuta o nanu kesho = we’ll meet tomorrow.

Post-dinner I’m too tired to keep my eyes open much longer. We retire to our tents for the night and in the clear stillness I can hear Shakira’s “Waka Waka” song playing from a nearby campsite. A security guard walks around the tents scattered through the campsite and bids us all goodnight. He’s armed with a bow and arrow. What?

(Guess I needn’t worry about being attacked by a stray kiboko [hippo] or restless hyena.)

Kilima Njaro: Check

2010-10-02T23:16:00.000-04:00

[Horombo Hut --> Mandara Hut --> Park Entrance --> Arusha]

We wake up leisurely, close to 8 a.m. The day yawns before us, hours of walking downhill, succumbing to gravity; what a luxury!

I take the time to observe vegetation stretching higher into the sky, eventually we are back in rainforest. Specks of color from flowers, massive tree trunks, and sound travels uncannily through foliate to alert us to waterfalls, birds and monkeys. We happen upon a cow!

We receive certificates, take our final photos, leave Kilimanjaro National Park with fond farewells.

Now that we’re back at ground level, all the mundane thoughts I left behind for more pristine air are back. But there’s one surprise left: we visit the Marangu Falls for a final shower of nature before taking long showers in Katana’s house to compensate for days of sponge baths. We eat hungrily and sleep deeply.

Mt. Kilimanjaro was a humbling, exhilarating test of endurance with some of the kindest strangers I've ever meet. Hosea belongs to the Chaga tribe and therefore speaks Chaga in addition to Swahili. In Chaga, Kilima Njaro means “our hills,” he explains. There are other translations of the mountain’s name, but I like this one the best.

Twende Part II - Like Cheerleaders on Steroids

2010-10-01T23:02:00.003-04:00

[Uhuru Peak --> Kibo Hut --> Horombo Hut]

The walk from Uhuru Peak to Gilman’s Point is slow and surreal, and we stop for tea at Gilman’s Point, stretching out, pouring hot tea from flasks, sipping deliberately, sighing with happiness, joy, relief. Hamsa and I don’t want to use up too much breath so we gush to each other with our eyes; our guides watch on in amusement. The tea is over but we don’t want to get back up and start walking again, although we really should; it’s high time—no pun intended—that we descend from this absurd altitude. “Let’s get our twende on,” Hamsa says. Alright, I agree. Let’s do this.

Descending is double the fun in half the time, double the pace and half the pain, double the oxygen and half the snot, double the disbelief that we actually summitted and half the painstaking reality of marching ahead one step, one breath, at a time.

As Saint-Exupery writes, “nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions,” and everyone we encounter on the climb down, back in Kibo Hut, and on the walk back to Horombo Hut we greet like long lost family and encourage like cheerleaders on steroids.

Walking near-vertically down the steep slope that we crawled up and cried over just that morning, we leave entrails of dust behind us as more rocky slope comes into view. I almost become frustrated at one point: where the hell’s Kibo, dammit? Why are we still walking? But I can’t complain; I’ve been lucky enough to reach the top with no complications, and I’m going to be grateful for each easy step I have to take to return to thicker ranges of oxygen.

After a brief stop at Kibo Hut for lunch and more hot tea, we continue onwards to Horombo Hut. I remember the view, having walked the same path the previous day, but it feels completely different now that I’ve touched heaven. I’m moved to sing—good thing I’m walking ahead of Hamsa and Katana, and well behind Hosea!

Walking on flat ground leaves room for reflection: there are so many words and there are also no words to describe what I’ve just done. Surrounded by so much nature, so much sky, so much openness, so much potential, so much air to breathe, so much of everything—where is the room for language? It’s just amazing to experience something this big, that you climb for days and days!

Twende Part I - Snot

2010-10-01T17:29:00.006-04:00

[Kibo Hut --> Uhuru Peak]

[This post is dedicated to my brother, the king of snot.]

It's freezing. When we retired for the evening I hastily covered myself with my sleeping bag instead of climbing into it, and now my few hours of attempted sleep are interrupted by irate toes and numb fingers; never mind that they are covered in layers of socks and gloves. My nap is fitful, but how are you supposed to sleep knowing that you are 1.5km shy of heaven?

At 11 p.m. footsteps crowd our already crowded room: our guides have come to wake us up. Slowly, lights are turned on, our day begins—in the dead of night—and it’s time to get dressed. I put on almost every article of clothing I have brought with me, as do Hamsa, Katana and our new friends. A Coloradan offers the Swiss woman pills for her headache; I share my cough drops with the group. We all met no more than 24 hours earlier, and 24 hours from now we will be going our separate ways, but for this window of time, we are smitten with the same love, feverish with the same excitement; we are summiting this mountain as family. As Saint-Exupery says about flying “you have reached an altitude where all loves are of the same stuff.”

My head lamp cuts through the thick blackness when I go outside to use the bathroom. Squatting over a hole to pee is tricky when I am so heavily bundled up! I return to the room of bunk beds to lather one more layer of Vaseline on my already burned, already peeling skin. I hope it lasts until I reach the top. I hope I last until the top. Conversation is limited; everyone is saving their energy and breath for the hike, but our eyes shine with anticipation. I tuck my camera battery into my bra to protect it from the cold and conserve its juice until we arrive at the summit. I’m wearing my brother’s fleece—a man’s jacket—and I gratuitously stuff the chest pockets with chocolate bars for energy and tissue for my leaky nose. It’s been dripping since dinnertime and I hope it doesn’t get too bad.

By the time we are fully dressed, we bulge with cloth—my toes can hardly wiggle, my forehead and ears are hot under my woolen cap and my camera battery is probably sweating. We trade last minute advice, encouragement, hair ties to hold broken head lamps in place. Pole pole, we remind ourselves. I remember the 2 Israeli men from Horombo Hut, who said it is not as difficult as it looks, and my nervousness is tinged with relief. The air is fresh, I am alert, I feel ready.

Twende! Let’s go!

Each group forms a queue behind their guide, and off we go, linear constellations of light underneath the scatters of stars above, blinking fiercely at our endeavor. Our first steps from the door of Kibo Hut are easy but I am already imagining the ground getting steeper. Someone calls out to look to the right, and we see the sun. It is unlike anything I have ever seen in the sky before, it is the best sneak preview to a sunrise I have ever witnessed. A burning red arch shimmers in mid air, as if contemplating which way to go next, up or down? Up, I hope; same as me. It goads me and tempts me and warns me—I am even more determined to follow its trajectory now, and make it to Gilman’s point, 5,685m high, before this maroon sun turns gold.

We can’t see anything in front of us. I look for the rock I spotted earlier that evening that marks with arrows the way to the summit, but every rock looks the same, and now that they stand between me and the summit I no longer feel as fond of them. I pace my breathing with my footsteps and my nerves settle. My mouth is clamped shut so I’m forced to breathe through my nose—to conserve energy—but my blocked nose protests with wheezes and whistles. I persist, adamantly tearing toilet paper out of my pocket to keep my nostrils open. This turns into a choreographed dance: I hold both poles under an armpit, take one of my gloves off, unzip a pocket, retrieve tissue, pinch-sniff-wipe furiously, stuff the soiled tissue into another pocket, zip the pocket closed, wipe my wet hand on my jacket (sorry bro), put my glove back on, grip both poles, and keep going, hoping I’ll last a few steps longer before I have to rinse, lather—well, blow—and repeat. After half an hour fighting with my snot, I concede defeat and let it take over my face, collecting and dripping. I’ll deal with it later, like when I reach the top, like if I reach the top.

We can’t see anything in front of us—this is now a good thing because I don’t want to know how much farther I have to walk. I walk directly behind Hosea, copying his every step, placing my feet where his just were, breathing like him, pacing like him, trying to think like him, the man who calls himself a mountain goat, who’s reached the summit hundreds of times. There’s not enough air for thinking and breathing and doing, I quickly realize, so I stop the first and focus on the breathing and doing parts—left, right, left, right, up, up we go.

At the sign marking 5,000 m I take a triumphant swig of water. I feel good. No, I feel great. No difficulty breathing, no lightheadedness. I have chocolate in my pocket and, having given up on my nose an hour ago, I am no longer bothered by the quasi-frozen snot plastered to my face. It’s too dark to notice, too cold to feel and I’m too high up to care. In fact, we’re pretty much done here, I have just 800m left to get to the top. How long can 2 laps of the track take, I mean really?

The euphoria doesn’t last long. It takes a slow and breathless 40 minutes to walk a measly 150 meters to reach Hans Myer Cave and I use the pit stop to catch my fleeting breath, down half a bottle of water and promptly pee half a bottle of water—peeing in the dark and on a slope, by the way, is as challenging and fun as it sound, you should try it some time. Twende, Hosea, let’s keep moving!

We pass some people sitting on rocks, catching their breath, struggling to open chocolate wrappers with gloved hands, weakly drinking water, clutching their stomachs. Others walk strongly by, singing songs, calling out jokes to their climbing group. Everyone does what they can to maintain composure. I sing every single song I know in my head, grateful to my cousin Abhishek for the many mixed CD’s he’s made me. (Star Star Star was my summit soundtrack, dude!)

It feels like forever before we stop for a breather and a drink again. I don’t want to waste breath on words but I ask Hosea anyway, how far have we walked? He gives me a look. “About 100 m,” he says. That’s it?! That’s all we’ve managed?

Twen…de…let’s…go.

We continue zigzagging up the mountain, lunging, stretching, reaching over rocks, the incline has become very steep, it’s very cold and the air is very thin. I resist the urge to stop for as long as I can, telling myself that each step I take is one step closer to the top when I can finally stop and sit down, goddamit, and I convince myself that Hosea will stop us when it’s appropriate to take rest. But we’re stopped again before I know it, and Hosea watches me patiently as I breathe deeply, though my nose, calming my heart. “How far have we gone?” I ask, even though I know the answer won’t be good.

“We’re almost at 5,200 m,” he says.

Oh man. All that effort and not even another 100 m. And I need to get to 5,800 m.

T..w..e..n..d..e..let’s wait a few more minutes before we go.

At about 5,300 m, the slope becomes near vertical and we are pulling ourselves over the rocks to climb up. It’s no longer just our legs that are moving but our entire bodies, and each time I haul myself up my entire body resists, and that’s a lot of resistance. I want to stop but I know that if I sit down I may not get up.

Once in a way Hosea, one rock higher than me, reaches down and pulls me up; one less step for me to take on my own; one less moment wasted while the countdown to sunrise ticks away. We turn off our headlamps as the sky’s brightness creeps up on us from all sides—there are no clouds, trees or buildings to block it—and Hosea suggests that I take a picture as bands of fire stretch out before us. “No,” I snap. By the time I dig my camera battery out of my bra, put it in my camera and take a picture, I will be out of breath and motivation. “We’ll take a picture at the top, let’s get there first.”

Hosea and I have picked up the pace in the latter part of the climb up to Gilman’s Point, which is the rim of the crater and 2oo m shorter than Uhuru Peak, the highest point of the mountain, and in all of Africa. When we pass other climbers I whisper words of encouragement; when they pass me a few minutes later they echo it back, and we volley the few words we can spare back and forth. I stop when I can hear the voices of encouragement from Gilman’s Point, the final destination for some, the almost-final destination for those of us aiming for Uhuru Peak. Let those voices carry us, mine’s not getting enough oxygen anymore!

Somehow, in a blur of stumbles and lunges and heave-hos and heavy breathing, I reach Gilman's Point by sunrise. I’m overlooking an ex-glacier filled volcano crater on one side, my back to the unforgiving slope of Kibo Peak. I’m actually here! Hosea is very proud and promises me that the hardest part is over, now it’s flat land to Uhuru Peak. It's a blatant lie since we have to go 200 m UP, but I eat it up with joy. I remember that my unattended nose has strewn snot all over my peeling face and I attempt, foggily, to clean my face before I face Hosea and the rest of the group at Gilman’s Point; the sun is up and everything is visible now! “Don’t cry,” another friendly guide says to me, and instead of wasting breath correcting him, I wipe my snotty face instead.

“Twende?” Hosea asks me with a grin.

“Twende,” I manage.

We start the slow stagger to Uhuru Peak. At first, I proudly highfive the climbers on their way back from the top. “Great job,” I say, squandering my oxygen and energy, amidst gasps of joy, exhaustion, almost-tears. One charming British man, elated at his success, gushes back: “Thanks, sweetness, and don’t worry, you’re almost there. The hardest part is over!”

LIES, I tell you, all lies! More than fatigue or pain, I am seized by an overwhelming desire to sleep, to stop walking and curl up in a ball on the side of the path, to fall asleep standing up, to close my eyes and give up. All I want to do is sleep, and Hosea reminds me that we can’t quite do that, ultimately slipping his arm through mine and walking me some distance. The way is light uphills and downhills and some flat bits, and I dread each step downhill for the uphill it means I have to make afterward. We stop to breathe every 30 seconds—or so it feels—and cover 200 m in 2 hours, I think.

We reach the very, very top where a team of English climbers are cheerfully taking pictures at the wooden post marking their triumph. I sit down for the first time in seven hours, fish out a juice carton and chug it for dear life. When Hosea suggests I take some pictures I glare at him, territorial in my fatigue, so he takes my camera and wanders off, blithely taking photos of the chunks of glacier left, the walls of ice staring impassively at us, blinding us through our sunglasses. I refuse to move for a solid ten minutes, and then consent to taking pictures at the flag. Uhuru means freedom and I know there hasn’t been a place or time more freeing in my life than this moment on this mountain top.

But as Saint-Exupery says, “you cannot convey things to people by piling up adjectives,” so I’m going to shut up and take a moment.

(Now if only I can grab a nap before we have to start heading down…)

'I've Gotta Feeling / That Tonight's Gonna Be A Good Night'

2010-09-30T14:35:00.000-04:00

[Horombo Hut --> Kibo Hut]

It’s time to leave now-familiar Horombo Hut for higher grounds. We depart after breakfast, passing Zebra Rock, Mawenzi Peak, getting higher above the clouds, a view we keep turning around to enjoy. It’s hot but I keep my hoodie on to protect my already scorched and flaking ears.

Moorland subsides into the monotony of desert for the next 10 km. Large rocks and boulders shrink into small stones that climbers have arranged to spell names, countries and turn into smiley faces.

The minute we stop moving and sit down to eat lunch on a rock outcrop, the cold wraps around us hungrily. All-knowing ravens join us, expertly finding all the bread and biscuit crumbs we throw in their direction. Little mice crawl about the rocks, thrilled at bits of hardboiled egg and sandwich stuffing that miss our mouths and fall to the ground instead. They are cute—karibu, Hosea greets them—and I remember their cousin, our restless friend from last night, who insisted on trying granola, chocolate, glucose and whatever else he could open while rummaging through our stuff and interrupting our sleep.

Katana engages in lively debate with whoever he meets, standing out as the only local climber, and blending in with the guides and porters as just another Swahili-speaking Tanzanian. He’s the perfect climbing buddy—a doctor, a native, an experienced climber, a friend. He has our back in too many ways to count and I am eternally grateful to him for spending this week with us.

The flat ground makes the peaks swooping above us that much taller and more angular. We walk through this valley of triangles, Mawenzi behind us, Kibo ahead, and start preparing ourselves for the climb that night. We will not spend a full night at Kibo Hut like we have at the 2 previous camps. Tonight we leave for the summit, starting at midnight, and 24 hours from now, will be on this same path but headed back to Horombo and leaving the summit behind us. Will we make it, will the weather cooperate, will altitude sickness suddenly hit us? Only time will tell!

We pass Onja, who is feeling a little uneasy and walking slowly with her guide who encourages her with a calm voice and small steps. It’s amazing that someone can show up here, alone, partner up with a guide, trust him entirely, and climb a mountain—or do her best to, anyway. The mountain brings out the courage in you, offering you company along the way to make you feel comfortable. Really incredible. Good for Onja, and all the other single climbers we encounter—mostly women, I notice.

At Kibo Hut we have a snack and head out for a short walk. The air feels significantly thinner here, 4,700 m above sea level, and our impromptu dance party outside the dining hall, DJ’ed by Katana’s iPhone, is a result of oxygen-deprived delirium, view-induced excitement and the physical and mental thrill of being hours—not miles, not days—away from the highest point in Africa. Our rave lasts about 5 minutes as we’re quickly out of breath, breath that we need to conserve for climbing, silly! The guides, porters and fellow climbers around us seem unhappy that we’ve stopped entertaining them with our brazen dance moves. I’m glad I can’t see myself!

From a rock outcrop that we climb up, the trail snaking away from us back to Horombo Hut looks too narrow for people; Mawenzi Peak looks disarmingly small. We feel disarmingly small.

Every bite of our early dinner is the magic potion of physical energy, mental strength and altitude sickness antibody that we need to make it to the top, and we chew deliberately and mull silently. Katana plays 'I've Gotta Feeling' by Black Eyed Peas on his iPhone and we remember to smile. We’re so close, so close!

We aren’t sleeping in huts tonight, but a dormitory-like room with several bunk beds. We reunite with the Coloradans, Onja, the Swiss man in his neon orange jacket and his quiet wife, and the half-Tanzanian half-German brother-sister pair, and freely share sleeping pills, Vaseline, tissues, chocolate and stories. It’s a slumber party at the almost-top of the world! Once lights are out, I toss clothes from my hiking pack onto my bunk bed to change into: a writhing and wriggling affair in darkness. Taking layers of tight-fitting clothes off and putting layers of tight-fitting clothes on is hard with just a headlamp on to see what’s what!

We have a few hours to rest before we start climbing at midnight. Obviously, I can’t sleep.