Letter from Asturias

I am in Asturias, in Spain. Up in the hills above a town called Santa Marina on a little peak called Pico Los Rozos.  We are staying in a small farmhouse here, composed of three or four buildings of which we occupy a room.  From here the views are extremely pleasant, full of contours and angles and on top of some hills are wind power generators. I notice most of all the silence, so profound that each noise, when it does reach me, is magnified and travels long distances.  The sound of bees and flies and insects of all types, which I think I recall now only from childhood (so much urban living), almost numbs my ears if there are more than just a few buzzing past.  I hear the clanking bells around cows’ necks, but it is difficult to pinpoint the source of the noise, as the wind — a noise in itself — spreads the sonic waves, so that you feel at times surrounded.

Time for Real Communication

A London acquaintance of mine, John Freeman, was on the Diane Rehm Show last month discussing his new book, The Tyranny of Email.  Some of what he talks about is obvious, and the discussion occasionally veers toward a radio call-in sentimentality, but there are some nice moments in the conversation about letter writing in particular.  It reminds me that just as important (and difficult) is taking the time to consider — really consider — the people and experiences one has in life.  I only met John once in person, over coffee at Paul near the Granta offices.  He seemed hurried (and was late), but I remember enjoying the book I was reading while sipping coffee on the sidewalk that morning as much as the brief chat we had about supporting Granta’s work.  It would have been nice to have had time for a longer discussion, but in many ways that’s the point.  We’ve emailed a few times since that meeting and gone about our working lives.  Good to see he’s doing well.

At McDonald’s August 14, 2008 or What Happens When You Read Naipaul

(written on the back of my appointments schedule)

That became the tread of my days.  Some days up and then suddenly a fantastic low, a mood that hollowed me out; where I sank into an approximation of gloom burdened with a nagging guilt at my unease.  It felt wrong to be ungrateful, and this was the worst part of those down days.  One day I envisioned what a graph of my life looked like and saw a sine wave, like a radio frequency with sharp oscillations of static noise.  Was that really what life was meant to be?  It seemed illogical really — here I was with every opportunity (including the opportunity to be left alone if I so chose) and daily I struggled still.  There were few useful comparisons and even less sympathy for my condition.  My family couldn’t understand my lack of conviction, to them it seemed I was creating problems where none had existed.  This was because they lacked the capacity for self-reflection.

There were many who had moved on of course. Often I noticed that these types quickly became possessed by a missing zeal which is ever present in American society — to “do good” or “give a voice to the voiceless.”  The ferocity with which they began to champion causes of all sorts astounded and unnerved me.  Sometimes I found myself engaged in a debate about a topic for which I cared little or not at all.  Often I sounded ridiculous, as anyone might who was arguing a point about which he didn’t truly have a a feeling one way or another.  Before I became too disturbed by my losing record as a debater, though, I began noticing a commonality in the people I argued with.  They all showed signs of — and some eventually became — a strain of nihilism in their discourse.  Behind the passion and conviction lay the real sense that there was no answer, that things, all things, would in the end fall short, achieve little, and bring ruination.  The world had become (frequently “because of the West”, whatever that meant) hopelessly corrupted and broken.  Even if they won their argument with me, they lost.  The game had been pre-cooked.  It was beautiful how their notions contained a rejection of fate and repudiation of any natural balance to the universe.

A Mediocre Medium

Sometimes, as I anguish over the number of books, articles, blogs, Op-Ed pieces, reviews, and commentaries that I attempt to read, just sometimes, I recall a simple truth: I love words. That passion, which is not expressed in any knowledge of poetry nor in an ability to rattle off and insert literary quotations into my everday speech, is why I cannot escape the desire to tap on computer keys or dangle a pen from my fingers or carry around a scrap of notebook.  This is a constant presence — the belief that I may have something to write.

This is What I Did

It’s been a week to obsess about – what else? – writing.  The Kolkata Book Fair got off to a fine start by ending before it began — the High Court ruled against it being held in Park Circus, the Booksellers Guild said okay, then we’ll have to cancel it because we don’t have a Plan B.  Mad scramble as everyone looked for alternative venues to host the writers who had traveled serious distances to attend .  And it even rained one day.  Still, the US folks hosted a nice reception. Paul Theroux, Bharati Mukherjee, Amit Chauduri, Governor Gandhi, Chris Merrill, and others attended and I had a chance to interact with these literati, who I have to say were quite entertaining. Paul Theroux may be a sourpuss, but he’s effing hilarious. Blunt, uncowed, and really very interested in the world around him. I was impressed.

Ok, Sir, put down the magazine and step away

I’ve been trying since the 2nd half of 2007 to catch up on my New Yorkers. For a long time I remained about two months behind, unable to break that 8 week barrier. I’ve made progress though, and I think it was the switch to reading backwards from the most current issue that has somehow sped things up. Who knew? But it’s given rise to the unexpected — I’ve begun to think about my life as a New Yorker article.

Speaking

Last year I wrote briefly about listening to Amit Chaudhuri, a well known Indian author. In that post, I found him to be…well…arrogant. I was wrong. I had the pleasure of participating with him on a panel discussion earlier this week about fiction writing. The topic was “creativity” and he spoke about his experiences discovering what kind of writer he was. I hadn’t prepared much – not knowing the audience, being on planes for hours on end the past month, and because I tend to prepare at the last minute – but it’s getting easier to be calm about these sorts of things. It also helped that the first panelist delivered a quasi-academic, not well thought out lecture that meandered through stereotypes of creativity.

From Lectures 394 and 397

In 1990 in Madrid I saw a series of Picasso’s sketches called “The Bull”. Picasso began, as most would, with a quick rendition of the animal, head hanging low, exposing massive shoulders and an expansive flank. From there he proceeded to reduce the representation, removing specifics portions, erasing form and curvateurs until the final sketch was the “essence” of the toro in Picasso’s mind.

And so it can be with people too. Sometimes a person can live long enough that the layers are stripped away by the passing days and when you look at them you notice that each movement of the body and every phrase they utter is both measured and relevant. This is what it’s like when you meet Professor P. Lal. He is the founder and architect of The Writers Workshop, a publishing house run in minimal terms with maximum output. Check out some of the names who first found a public space with him. He gave me a small packet one day, which contained a book listing Writers Workshop publications, some postcards, and other inserts and bookmarks. One postcard just shows his profile, done carefully but with apparent ease. At nearly 80 years of age he is something of a caricature anyways; from a generation that breathed the bloody, exhilarating dust of Partition and in a mere 60 years since that time now checks emails.

Why I Write

Reading Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus (which I hope to review here later) has brought me back to an age-old question: Why do I write?  Kapuscinski connects Herodotus’ desire to write his Histories with the need to preserve memory — of cultures, and peoples, events, and experiences.  Today, unlike in Herodotus’ time, we have institutions such as universities, libraries, books, and the Internet to preserve these memories for us.  All the things that we learn are from those memories that recite histories of peoples.  These histories were originally passed on by word of mouth, and story, and believed to be true because they came from our ancestors.

For me, though, that still didn’t answer the question of why I write.  Because what disturbs me is the feeling that I write because I have no history.  Or said another way: I write to create my history.

A Note in the Mail

Last month I wrote a short piece for the American Center Bulletin — a triple-fold, 4-page newsletter that gives American Center members updates on activities, future events and other news. It’s not anything glossy and there have been problems justifying its publication month after month. I wrote about Black History month, and wondered about the type of person who would read the newsletter. To be honest, it looks like those pamphlets in a doctor’s office that are placed next to badly outdated copies of People magazine.

Today I was pleasantly surprised to receive a small note card in the mail from a woman I didn’t know who had read my article. I’m reproducing it below because it provides some great insights into the older generation from this city.

Booker Prize Attitude

So yesterday I heard Kiran Desai read from her novel The Inheritance of Loss.  Introducing her was Amit Choudary, no slouch himself in the field of letters.  Choudary, however, didn’t really introduce Desai so much as engage in what I would describe as a cross between and interview and an exposition of his own thinking as it related to Desai’s novel.  It had some strange results and wandered into strange territory, such as both of them criticizing American writing as becoming “simple” in form and structure, with the implication of a resulting decrease in quality.   Also included was a discussion of some Latin American writers, including Gabriela Garcia Marquez and Italo Calvino, who, I’d like to point out to them both is Italian, not Latin American.  (No one mentioned this, incredibly.)  And Choudary even went so far as to let us know that he didn’t think much of Marquez, although he said he was joking (I’m not so sure).

Facing the Cult of Authenticity

Some years ago, Vikram Chandra – author of Red Earth, Pouring Rain, Love and Longing in Bombay, and the eagerly anticipated (two articles in the NYT — score!) Sacred Games — got into a spat with some members of the Indian academic literati. It began with their questions attacking the contents of his fiction, and clearly was an attempt to claim possession of the Indian literary voice, if you believe such a thing exists in the first place. Chandra’s response was a spirited, often sarcastic attack on the “Cult of Authenticity.” His essay appeared in the Boston Review, and you can read it here. Chandra points out that no one has a right to say who does or doesn’t speak for Indian writing, certainly not the cultural commissars who question his “Indianess.”