I first read Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke in the late 1980s, just as the Soviet empire began to totter and crack. An English version of the book, published in 1961 in Great Britain, had been re-issued in 1986 as part of Penguin’s “Writers from the Other Europe” series, edited by Philip Roth. Other Europe: how tidy such a distinction seems now, as we commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the toppling of the Wall. The Penguin series aimed to make available the work of Eastern European writers not sufficiently visible in America: a worthy project, though judging from the rather cobbled-together edition of Ferdydurke—offset duplication of the British text, a Czeslaw Milosz essay from another occasion tacked on as an introduction—one that didn’t have much of a budget, and sure enough the book came and went in a whisper. By the time I laid hands on a battered copy in a used bookstore in Chicago, the Penguin edition, a quiet byproduct of a Cold War suddenly racing to its close, was fast becoming a relic.

Still, Ferdydurke beckoned. The book’s packaging spun a web of contradictions. There was Gombrowicz the genius mired in obscurity, “the greatest unknown writer of our time,” in the words of the French magazine L’Express, cited on the back cover. The brief biographical note explained that during Gombrowicz’s decades of exile toiling away at novels and plays in Argentina he was “virtually unknown,” and presumably that meant everywhere. But then you were given “The History of Ferdydurke,” a chronological survey of the book’s peculiar life that recorded its initial sensation, scandal, and banning in Warsaw after its publication in 1937 and the 1957 re-issue that sold 10,000 copies in a matter of days, which led to Gombrowicz being lionized by the press in Poland—“the pride of the nation,” declared a leading critic—and elsewhere in Europe, especially in France (where a translation had just appeared). The Communist authorities in postwar Poland, for their part, suppressed Ferdydurke and other works by Gombrowicz soon after his moment of open literary stardom at home. Perhaps his falling into disfavor with the State explains why the book was advertised (again, on the back cover) as “the revolutionary satiric masterpiece,” even if it’s difficult to imagine, on the basis of Ferdydurke, what sort of revolution the fiercely skeptical Gombrowicz would have fought for. “Who Is Gombrowicz?” asked the title of Milosz’s introduction. Its readers might have been forgiven for asking the same question.

By now Gombrowicz’s reputation as one of the indispensable moderns has been secure for quite some time, aided by the English translations of his magnificent Diary and his novel Trans-Atlantyk, as well as regular stagings of his plays. The broad outlines of his life are more familiar, the tale of his exile in Argentina yet another contribution to the anthology of unlikely compromises forced on European writers fleeing the onslaught of the Second World War. Gombrowicz’s fate was sealed in a split-second of vertiginous decision during a visit to Buenos Aires in 1939. Eleven days after his arrival, the Nazis invaded Poland. “The first chord we choose ourselves,” he had written two years earlier in Ferdydurke, “the rest is merely a consequence,” a statement that takes on an eerie sense of foreboding in light of the life that followed. Gombrowicz chose to remain abroad and would never see Poland again.

What my Penguin paperback didn’t mention was its regrettable textual situation: it was in fact a translation once removed, an incomplete adaptation by Eric Mosbacher based on French, German, and perhaps Spanish editions of the 1940s and 1950s. The more recent version by Danuta Borchardt coaxes the recalcitrant Polish original into English, and on the whole it’s an intelligent, boisterous, infectiously readable effort. It is also the first complete English translation of the Polish text.  Borchardt’s language is brawnier than Mosbacher’s, which occasionally retreats into a buttoned-up, Anglicized idiom, and she spans a wider tonal spectrum, moving from the colloquial to the formal without apparent strain. This is no mean feat. While not as daunting for the translator as his Trans-Atlantyk—“too Polish to be Englished,” write its translators Carolyn French and Nina Karsov, necessitating the “experimental” English version published in 1994—Ferdydurke does not submit willingly to the alchemy of translation. Here it is less a matter of irreducibly Polish references and idioms, though there are plenty of those, than the irruption into discourse of the nonsense, farcical wordplay, and linguistic violence running amok all over the novel. Look no further than the title, an invented word that shames attempts to tease meaning out of it. I’ve held a whimsical and entirely baseless belief that it means “horseshit”—completely implausible, but perhaps more in the spirit of Gombrowicz than the critical suggestion that it makes allusion to a character in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Freddy Durkee.

The book opens with a monstrous metamorphosis, but unlike those in Ovid or in Gombrowicz’s nearer cousin Kafka, the transformation is locked within the history of the self. Joey Kowalski, the novel’s protagonist, is wrenched back into his own adolescence as prelude to his abduction by the fussy, risible Professor Pimko. The professor, a pedantic “great Belittler,” leads Joey to a high school classroom divided into opposing factions of innocent idealists and their knowing, earthy defilers. Eventually the factional leaders duel by flinging facial grimaces at each other, culminating in the “psychophysical rape” of Kneadus, the head of the idealists, when his swaggering arch-enemy Syphon whispers filth in his ear. The savagery is typical of the satire in Ferdydurke, always corporeal, always perched on the border between language and violence. Ferdydurke is an assault against coherence. Things fall apart at breakneck speed, and mere anarchy—petty, regressive, and brutal—bursts forth at every turn. The story’s movement is one of incessant decomposition, relentless breakdown, especially of the body, whose parts sever themselves and make furious war on each other: “I felt that my body was not homogenous, that some parts were still those of a boy, and that my leg was laughing at my head, that my finger was poking at my heart, my heart at my brain, that my nose was thumbing myself at my eye, my eye chuckling and bellowing at my nose—and all my parts were wildly raping each other in an all-encompassing and piercing state of pan-mockery.”

And the pan-mockery never lets up, moving beyond the nightmarish classroom and into the all-too-modern home of the forward-thinking intelligentsia (dominated by the sullen boredom of a schoolgirl Aphrodite) and, later, into the countryside, with its stultifying ennui and unbridgeable chasm between gentry and peasantry. Between the episodes with Joey are two self-contained and complementary tales, “The Child Runs Deep in Filidor” and “The Child Runs Deep in Filibert,” each with a preface in which Gombrowicz gives glancing flashes of what he is up to—or maybe not. For he also intimates that he is pulling a colossal prank, and that you, dear reader, are the butt of the joke. Go read the book’s last words, restored in Borchardt’s edition: “It’s the end, what a gas, / And who’s read it is an ass!”

Joey gives vent to bewilderment and outrage in fleeting patches of awareness; often he endures his belittlement as if it were in the natural order of things. And indeed, in the madcap world of Ferdydurke, humiliation is a fundamental condition. We have all been infantilized or—to use the novel’s terminology—dealt the “pupa,” a key word in the novel that the old edition translated variously as “backsidikins” and “bum” but that Borchardt wisely decides to leave in the original Polish. A battery of paroxysms and grotesque gestures inflicts humiliation without mercy; spasm is heaped upon disfiguring spasm with the inevitability of divine damnation. But Gombrowicz believes not in God but in something he would later call the “interhuman church,” a phrase that in the mouth of another writer would smack of tepid, episcopal humanism. Coming from Gombrowicz, it provides the merest scrap of shelter in a storm of debasement, boredom, and the socially mandated “maturity” that stifles the process of self-making.  And this is where the satire turns serious if not quite earnest. However ferocious Gombrowicz’s lampooning of the adolescents in Ferdydurke, it is nonetheless immaturity, the freshness and crudeness of youth, that offers a way out of the deadening banalities forged by the “demon of order.” “Are we not mortally in love with youth?” he asks in the “Preface to ‘The Child Runs Deep in Filidor.’” “Are we not obliged then, at every moment, to ingratiate ourselves with beings who are below us, to tune in with them, to surrender, be it to their power or their charms—and isn’t this painful violence that’s being committed on our person by some half-enlightened, inferior being the most seminal of all violence?”

“He feels that he is a voice of this generation, and he listens to what it has to say.”

“Each person…is a victim of the commercialization of life.”

Every time I begin to transcribe something – anything – it’s difficult to overcome the inability to completely answer the question “why.” This is, I think, one of the biggest challenges for anyone who strives to answer that question in their writing, but often only comes up with slanted structures, distant slippage, unresolved tension, unexplained actions, emotional barricades, uprooted and dislodged metaphors, progressive sadness, and, sometimes, the detail that we *hope* will explain the whole beautiful mess: that which makes us nostalgic for a future we haven’t yet experienced.

Thus, despite my attempts to the contrary, on my third reading of the Transcendentalist  tract Nature I feel a real affinity for R. W. Emerson - because, deliberately or not, his search for the answer to why we need Nature -  and why we need others, as he often includes society within Nature - next to our inclination to hide in our own skins has him perpetually looking to the horizon, to the sunrise, to specific and synchronic moments of joy which are *almost* irreconcilable with human nature’s propensity for self-destruction. And the end result is a stack of explanations which search for hope in the beauty of the detail, but ultimately indicate the egotism and isolation of the artist’s thwarted love for others which is never fully explainable, never fully reciprocated. Why, Emerson asks, can we not understand ourselves in relation to others anymore; what function does unworked nature play in this comprehension; why are we perpetually blocked from fully experiencing communion with others? He tries to answer these questions with a formal figuration of man’s soul in relation to all that is outside his soul. A bourgeois 19th century figuration of man’s “nature” and “natural” instincts to explain man’s “natural” inclinations for progress and industry, Emerson ultimately comes face to face with increasing industrial*ism* of America, that which he cannot explain away as natural, that which cannot be commanded by any perspective within society itself but only from a perspective outside of society: only through untouched land can Emerson see the complete effects and implications of commerce which distances man from himself and others; and only there can he attempt to repair this distance with aesthetics.

Does Emerson’s synchronic detail speak to the whole, though? Can he explain the relationship of one man to society, one action to universal law, one wrong move to universal corruption, one correct responsible reading or “eloquent” thought to universal redemption? His struggle with this question is *why* he cannot: what is the slippage between the particular and the universal which he continually grasps at. The metaphors he keeps coming back to are man’s relationship to the horizon, and man’s relationship to property.

Can he transcend the mind in order to achieve universal absolution of responsibility?

“There are new lands, new men, new thoughts” – 7

Man’s soul vs. Nature: how to repair the rift? Nature includes:

                                Nature

                                 Art

                                Man

                               Man’s Body

In the beginning of the essay, in the Chapter 1, “Nature,” Emerson proposes the possibility of beholding the landscape without wanting to own it, and thus being able to transcend the self through aesthetic, poetic efforts and commune with nature. Yet property interferes with his vision even at first glance of the landscape: “When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title” – 9. The poet leaves nature untouched and in that way “owns” more “property” than if he had actually owned it: by not wanting to own it. Thus the landscape is, in its poetic qualities, not to be owned by anyone but the poet, who only possesses without legal possession.

Yet Emerson cannot get past his own self when attempting to transcend the self to access nature’s property-less qualities: “In the woods, we return to reason and faith…Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God…In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature” -10. Soul (man’s self) can overcome body if the egotism of the body is not in the way: but only with distance can man behold something as beautiful as his own nature: because if distant, he does not have to confront the egotism of the self. Emerson will proble the causes of this egotism of the self, the grasping, greedy “debt” of the self, later in the essay.

Nature is still, Emerson insists, connected to man, because it is not only worked on by man to create commodities but is also the cause of man’s desire to work on nature’s material, and the result of man’s material products. And man’s relationship to society should mimic man’s relationship to nature (13). Man shapes his view (his consumption) of nature with his eyes, but leaves nature untouched  (14) – or at least he tries to. When he cannot do this anymore, create on his own, though, he tries to *own* nature itself.

“The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough” (15). But this distance between man and the horizon is necessary so that  man can maintain enough distance from himself. What happens when man must examine the particulars, the particular aesthetic details which could allow him the passage from the self to Nature and thus a path to the horizon? Are these particulars, up-close, uncorrupted? E. writes, “A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in minature…A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace” (18). But these single objects do not always show universal grace.

Emerson wants to argue for the universal as shown by the particular, but cannot reconcile this with the possibility that not all parts are pure; that man is not doing enough to create and is simply taking from nature: “Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men” (21). This universality indicates “natural” causes for social life and organization, which is attacked by scholars like Marx later in the 19th century. Emerson wants to attribute individual’s life to natural patterns, but cannot, ultimately, completely divorce man from his surrounding society and society’s corruption. Reason, according to Emerson, is Spirit in man: Man needs Reason or Spirit (the force of the aesthetic instinct, the creative instinct) to overcome himself and access nature: Man –> Reason/Spirit –> Nature.  Reason or Spirit is that which creates art, which does not take away from nature by ownership but reflects on it and is a combination of man and nature. Is this possible?

Emerson then confronts the overwhelming egotism and greed of  society, which he cannot escape and overcome. “A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, – and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults” (22).

Understanding = Logic

Reason = Spirit or Aesthetic Instinct = Culture – 33

Emerson writes in “Discipline,” Chapter 5, that Nature disciplines man to understand the order of truths and the structure of truths. Discipline is differentiation: “of ascent from particular to general; of combination to one end of manifold forces” (26). But social property also disciplines man to understand truths and himself: and property’s lesson is not benign, signalling the fact that nature has already been corrupted by property, and that we must confront the lessons that property’s discipline teaches us. The implication is that Nature can never be Property, but that if we view Nature as property, wanting to possess it irresponsibly, we will be taught the same lessons:  ”The same good office is performed by Property and its filial systems of debt and credit” (27). Therefore man needs to discipline himself and take lessons from Nature in discipline to not want to possess; yet Emerson is already suggesting that it is too late, that Property is teaching us lessons which nature should already have told us but which we ignored.

Emerson then proposes that Reason (Culture) can help us connect with Nature again, if we are eloquent and produce an American literature based on experience and not on the past; an American literature based on the new landscape we are encountering. But he constantly raises the problematic of the perspective of the horizon which might already be tainted by man himself - which the poet can shape and change and leave physically unaltered, but which others have invaded and corrupted and which the poet himself might not be able to remedy. Man –> Culture/Reason –> Nature. If done appropriately: “By a few strokes [the poet] delineates…not different from what we know them, but only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew” – 34. By this means man and the poet *could* transcend the self and connect the self to nature.

But in actually, transcendence seems to be more difficult than that for Emerson: details are not only indicative of the unity of nature, but they are also cumbersome, and some do not point to beauty: “In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observations in a single formula”  (37). If this is the case, if the particulars are now cumbrous, what does that say of the ostensible universality of the whole: that this universality is not as well-ordered, not as solidly structured, in society as it is in the natural world, as much as Emerson wants it to be: and one cannot transcend society to attain communion with nature if society is corrupt and its own details do not correspond to nature’s structures.

Emerson now comes down on the corrupton of man, and the metaphor of the distance between man and the horizon is once more employed, but now to demonstrate that this distance is instructive because we insist on maintaining distance, and do not even desire to overcome it: ”The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man…But it it differs from the body in one important respect. It is not, like that, now subjected to the human will…It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our departure. As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident” (42) and thus the space between us and nature to be shaped by the poet is greater and greater. Often culture cannot serve to bridge this space, and society overtakes man’s individualism.

Then Emerson directly sketches the outlines of laborers on the horizon, a synecdoche in visual metaphor of the social problem he has been leading up to, that of increasing industrialization and indiscrete ownership and possession: “Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him? Yet this may show us what discord is between man and nature, for you cannot freely admire a noble landscape, if laborers are digging in the field hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his delight, until he is out of sight of men”  (42).

Emerson then takes the Enlightenment to task, stating that empirical science inhibits man from comprehensive knowledge of the entire relationship between man and society. Thus his constant emphasis on the particular’s relationship to the universal and the necessity of continuously identifying this relationship, as we have seen. But, he has demonstrated that the particular can be corrupt: that man himself can be corrupt in relation to other men, that the universal of the horizon has been tainted by the presence of the particular laborer.  He would like to “behold a rich landscape” and not have empirical science stratify his appreciation of the whole, so that he can commune with it; but as we have seen in the previous section Spirit, there is already a laborer on that landscape: so it is neither here nor there to appreciate the landscape anymore, though it is possibly a *result* of empirical sciences and thus of industrialization that the laborer exists on the horizon and that “it is less to my purpose [when beholding a rich landscape] to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity. I cannot greatly honor minuteness in details, so long as there is no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts” (43).

Man now, Emerson writes, “works on the world with his wisdom alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage. His relation to nature, his power over it, is through the understanding [logic]; as by manure; the economic use of fire, wind, water, and the mariner’s needle; steam, coal, chemical agriculture [industrialism]” (46). Thus a man now labors in the world without thinking of the implications of his labors; without comprehending his own alienation and further alienation by this laboring within society, and the results of this are increasing industrialization, which further alienate man from himself. He cannot “satisfy all the demands of the spirit” (47) when working in the world so fully.

Thus corruption has already occurred in the form of excessive and meaningless labor, which has led to alienation of man. “The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opake. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself” (47). Man is thus alienated from himself, and Emerson still cannot answer the question “why” materially, except to continuously gesture to labor, to property, to half-attempts at creation and wholehearted attempts at ownership, consumption, and possession.

“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common” (47). And only, Emerson states, aesthetics – “eloquence” (47) invarious forms – can see the miraculous in the common. Why, though, is this so difficult? Because man is alienated from himself, because property interferes on the line of the horizon, because laborers invade aesthetic perspective, because through man’s alienation with himself, his own “egotism” blocks his transcendence into nature. Why is the particular corrupt? Because man has allowed his life to be pervaded not by nature but by society, which has become corrupt. Why has society become corrupt? Because man has labored without understanding why, and has therefore allowed the empirical sciences and all that drive them – neverending progress, as opposed to historical cycles of reason – to define his labors for him, and to define his Reason and his Spirit (his own production) in relation to others rather than in relation to himself.

Ce lit pour chien est particulièrement élégant avec son intérieur en imitation peau de mouton et son extérieur en imitation daim. Ce lit est plat et donc facile à ranger. Repliez et nouez les quatre coins et il deviendra un petit nid douillet pour votre chien (ou chat). De quoi faire de gros et bons dodos !

Retrouvez ce lit pliant et douillet sur www.duchien.fr

Political Buffer Space and Chinese “Black Jails”

According to the New York Times, there is, in Beijing, “a secret network of detention centers used to prevent aggrieved citizens from lodging complaints against the Chinese government.”

It is part of a “Byzantine network of interceptors, guards and holding pens,” the article continues, “used to put off the petitioners who flock to Beijing in the hope that the authorities will resolve longstanding grievances, many of them involving official corruption in their hometowns.”

Like a deleted scene—or alternate ending—from Zhang Yimou’s film The Story of Qiu Ju, we read that “those grabbed off the street often have their cellphones and identification confiscated before being locked away in guesthouses or dank basements. After being held for days or weeks, inadequately fed and sometimes beaten, they are shipped back to their home provinces with the admonition that they stay away from the capital.”

It’s The Trial all over again. From The New York Times:

Although the right to petition the authorities is enshrined in the Constitution, that right is frequently swallowed up by the reality of contemporary China’s system of governance: local officials, facing pressure to maintain social stability, are penalized for allowing too many complainants to find their way to the offices of the central government.

…

By comparing the incarceration of Chinese citizens to a Kafka story, however, I don’t mean to diminish the very real sense of political alarm one should feel at the existence of these “black jails” in Beijing; I do mean, on the other hand, to point out how different political philosophies spatialize themselves, enlisting architecture—here, an off-the-books architecture forming unofficial spaces of detainment—as a realization of their own sovereign philosophies. That is, certain building types befit certain political philosophies—and unacknowledged prisons are a particularly alarming example of this. Geographer Trevor Paglen’s work becomes especially disturbing in this regard, as he takes us through places like Camp Delta or the unregulated networks of CIA rendition, and so on.

But I want to go back to the less than reassuring political message of The Story of Qiu Ju, mentioned earlier. The bulk of that film presents viewers with a self-possessed heroine who has stood up, once and for all, for her and her husband’s rights in the face of locally corrupted bureaucrats; but her chain of unaddressed complaints leads her to pursue higher and higher levels of governmental authority, including physical trips outward through more and more distant urban spaces. She soon finds herself emotionally alone in a strange city she cannot navigate, tracking down officials by way of nonsensically over-formalized channels of communication.

And, at the end, she seems to go nowhere. It doesn’t work. She lodges her complaint—and returns home.

But when things suddenly seem to go her way—spoiler alert—it’s at exactly the wrong moment, as if she never should have started the complaint process in the first place. It’s as if, the film ambiguously suggests, the very act of petitioning her government has resulted in these previously unseen layers of government coming into being, materializing out of the haze of invisible sovereignty in order to respond to her call.

She brings the government into existence, in other words, by turning to it for guidance and complaint.

(…)

(Via New York Magazine)

You seem to really love French women. Do you love watching women ride bikes in Paris, smoking and carrying a baguette?
Young women on bicycles I find very erotic, I have to say. Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.

In my sleep, my body is engaged in a curious act of conversion between things that are and things that aren’t.  What to make of everything?  A new work, winged, is stretching and unfurling.  I dream I am sitting cross-legged and explaining to an uncle of mine about the need to write the real world, but people the shadows with frets and anticks and grotesques.  When I wake, the idea is made, almost from beginning to end – it’s an old, old idea and it isn’t even mine.  But I can see, now, what I’d do with it.

And this is old news, sort of, but ever noticed how this

is this

Must the morning always return? Will the despotism of the earthly never cease? Unholy activity consumes the angel-visit of the Night. Will the time never come when Love’s hidden sacrifice shall burn eternally? To the Light a season was set; but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night. — Endless is the duration of sleep. Holy Sleep — gladden not too seldom in this earthly day-labor, the devoted servant of the Night. Fools alone mistake thee, knowing nought of sleep but the shadow which, in the twilight of the real Night, thou pitifully castest over us. They feel thee not in the golden flood of the grapes — in the magic oil of the almond tree — and the brown juice of the poppy. They know not that it is thou who hauntest the bosom of the tender maiden, and makest a heaven of her lap — never suspect it is thou, opening the doors to Heaven, that steppest to meet them out of ancient stories, bearing the key to the dwellings of the blessed, silent messenger of secrets infinite.

?

(translation found here)

par Martin Siebenbrunner

In a garden-variety review about the movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Ann Hornaday takes some swipes at the novel as a “thin, hopelessly mannered story” that offers “thoroughly undeserving source material” for director John Hillcoat’s film. “Mannered” for me isn’t necessarily a flaw, as it implies some kind of imaginative excess and go-for-broke risk-taking, but for Hornaday it’s a pejorative dismissal—though I wonder if she’d apply the same adjective to a play by Samuel Beckett, whose looming presence haunts The Road. That McCarthy’s story is “thin” seems a dubious judgment, if we imagine a novel more to Hornaday’s liking. Would we really want an involved backstory explaining The Road’s mysterious apocalypse and the chaotic years that followed? Wouldn’t a fuller and less stark story simply involve us in needless complications and narrative digressions?

McCarthy has been awash in plaudits and accolades for some time, but not everyone has hopped on the bus. If they aren’t repulsed by the violence in the novels, McCarthy’s detractors have homed in on his prose style, regarding it as an elaborately wrought sheath around a hollow core. Once he could be faulted for aiming to be a latter-day Faulkner and coming up merely as a derivative follower (I’d take the view that, with Toni Morrison, he’s one of the few American writers to have fully absorbed Faulkner’s style and taken it somewhere new); with No Country for Old Men and now The Road, he’s been criticized for dressing up genre material in pompously literary garb.

Such a distinction depends on a separation of genre and literary fiction, but is such a strict split even tenable anymore? Genre writers seem more literary than they once did, and “literary” writers, whatever that even means, tend to value genre writers and take what they can from them. For those who remain unimpressed with McCarthy, he is at once too literary—all those biblical cadences and occasional obscure words—and, in his use of genre, not literary enough. But perhaps his sense of the literary is simply more expansive, and more contemporary, than those of his critics.

We just need to go on record as stating that we think the “Pimp My Bookcart” competition was fixed. The winner, “Good Humor”, is cute and all, but come on!  How could it possibly beat out our personal favorite, sheep/book dog on wheels?

My opening remarks before a conversation with O’Connor biographer Brad Gooch last month as part of the National Book Awards’ “Best of the NBA” series.

The story begins innocuously enough in a living room in Atlanta. A wound-up, hectoring grandmother harangues her family about a serial killer reportedly on his way to Florida, where the family is headed the following day. Her son, Bailey, ignores her as best he can from behind the sports page; the grandchildren throw some mocking barbs her way in a tone of teasing, irritated tolerance. When the elderly woman’s daughter-in-law is introduced, in a typical O’Connor gesture, as merely “the children’s mother,” the begrudging acknowledgment neatly telegraphs a history of chilliness between Bailey’s wife and her mother-in-law. A further domestic grace note is added by having her feed her infant some apricots on the sofa.

We are seemingly in the realm of a lightly satiric, homespun family comedy, an impression reinforced when the group sets off on its journey: the supposedly reluctant grandmother installs herself in the car well before anyone else does, takes pedantic note of the mileage on the odometer, and hides her cat in a basket beneath the front seat “because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself.” It would appear that we are being led by a wry, sophisticated humorist who foregrounds the foibles of her characters—who are patently her lessers—in a gently chiding tableau; that these characters are from the South, with its well-known picturesque idiosyncrasies and long tradition of anecdotal, local-color fiction, makes it even easier for us to feel we know in which general direction the story is heading. The opening paragraphs, if we knew nothing about Flannery O’Connor, suggest that we are reading a sort of southern-fried James Thurber, and, as Brad Gooch’s recent biography suggests, this would be a reasonable assumption: as an undergraduate at Georgia State College for Women, O’Connor was a gifted graphic artist who worked seriously at her cartoons and aspired to be as popular and successful a cartoonist as Thurber had become at the New Yorker. (It’s an intriguing thought experiment to speculate about the work O’Connor would have produced had she followed this career path rather than going off as a graduate student to the University of Iowa, enrolling first in journalism and soon afterwards in the Writers Workshop there; all the same, given the depths she plumbed in her fiction and the intricate paradoxes she explored, it’s hard to imagine that she would have been able to achieve the same scope.)

But soon the slice-of-life Georgia comedy begins to absorb other elements. It takes up tropes and themes that evoke different registers than the humorist’s winking knowingness. O’Connor gives us a hint of lyricism when she describes “the brilliant clay banks slightly streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the ground” and notes how “the trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.” And the grandmother’s offhand observations and spells of nostalgia seem more pointed than they might be were she just a bearer of colorful eccentricities, a risible figure of fun. Receptive to the lament of the countrified restauranteur Red Sammy that “a good man is hard to find” in a world in which serial killers run free and “Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now,” the grandmother indulges fantasies of an airbrushed Southern past. She sees a black child standing in the doorway of a shack and effuses “Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!” and says, “If I could paint, I’d paint that picture.” A graveyard on an old plantation brings to her mind—inevitably, though jokingly—Gone With the Wind. Through the grandmother’s silly clichés and reflexive mental associations, O’Connor holds up to scrutiny the sentimentalized myths of the Southern past, those kitschy reveries that for many had stood in for the region’s conflicts and muffled their horrors in gauzy ribbons of feeling.

Thus when the family makes their fatal turn off the highway, they do so in search of a plantation house rumored to have hidden within it a cache of silver, a trove that somehow Sherman’s plundering armies skipped over in their looting. A romantic fantasy, and one that the grandmother freely embellishes when she claims that the house has secret panels within it as well. The car turns on to a dirt road and, shockingly, this antiquated notion of the gothic yields to a contemporary gothic scene, one that is austere, malevolent, and terrifying. Of course there is no grand estate house—not in Georgia, anyway—and what the grandmother and her family discover along the dirt road, after their car falls in a ditch and the children delightedly call out, “we’ve had an ACCIDENT,” is the serial killer, the Misfit, with whom the grandmother has been preoccupied since the story’s opening paragraph. Although O’Connor—in the spirit of Chekhov’s famous dictum about the onstage gun needing to go off before the play is over—has in one sense carefully prepared us for the appearance of the Misfit, in a more profound sense she has radically rewritten the very rules by which her tale had seemed to be governed. The effect is dizzying, and becomes even more so as we realize that the family will certainly be murdered by the Misfit and his men, no matter what the grandmother pleads. That most of the killing takes place on the story’s peripheries suggests the decorum of classical tragedy and imbues the episode with an eerie, discomfiting gravitas. And in their uncouth vernacular cadences the Misfit and the grandmother are having what is, at its core, a theological discussion. As readers the ground has shifted beneath us, and we now brush up against questions that we hadn’t expected to face when this humbly flawed, ordinary family set out on their roadtrip—questions about mercy, punishment, and justice, and the inscrutable ways of God. For in what sense could these people deserve what is happening to them? And if we may have wished, as the grandmother had prattled on about how things in the past had been just so much better, to see her given her comeuppance, was this the sort of fate we’d ever have imagined for her?

We have left the world of the humorist far behind, yet the comedy remains—O’Connor’s humor can be as black as Goya’s in Los Caprichos, but she also had a fabulous ear attuned to ironies in our commonplace expressions and a sense of timing that would be the envy of many a Hollywood screenwriter. Her darkly funny, violent world continues to exert tremendous appeal—and surely fascination as well—because its vitality originates in the collision of incongruous elements: the low and the transcendent, the comic and the speculative, the grotesque and the divine. In her meticulously crafted fiction, these opposites resolve via the unlikely transmutations and orderings of the creative act. For within her peculiarly personalized spiritual orthodoxy, ultimately nothing is incongruous, even if this may not seem entirely so to us; all is one. As she wrote, quoting the French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “Everything that rises must converge.”

par Julian Humphries

les pieds sur le lit.

Exemple type d’un pantalon moche acheté y’a bien 5 ans à pas cher. Jamais mis parce que hautement importable (bien que très confortable). Par contre je ne me décide pas à le jeter, je l’aime beaucoup. Il a toute sa place dans mon placard et on peut faire des chouettes photos avec…

]]> http://vol1brooklyn.com/2009/11/23/i-missed-chelsea-hodson-read-at-chris-leos-thing/ Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:03:43 +0000 Jason Diamond http://vol1brooklyn.com/2009/11/23/i-missed-chelsea-hodson-read-at-chris-leos-thing/

Thankfully, Chelsea Hodson had somebody recording her.

Reading at Lolita Bar from Chelsea Hodson on Vimeo.

Grasse mat'

Le réveil n’est pas renversé, c’est juste que Mimo trouve plus facile de faire lit->table de chevet ( je renverse le réveil >je fais tomber 1 truc ou 2) >je saute par-terre > cuisine > gamelle (ou litière). Et la journée peut commencer.

Donc au bout d’un moment et de plusieurs débranchages de réveil, j’ai mis le réveil à l’horizontal.

Pour monter sur le lit par contre il fait : je monte sur le fauteuil > je saute sur le lit. Y’a un calcul de trajectoire qui peut durer assez longtemps…

En même temps je le comprends. Moi le grand saut j’ose pas…

]]> http://kategale.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/lit-mary-karr-too-late-for-therapy-living-without-fathers/ Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:28:09 +0000 kategale http://kategale.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/lit-mary-karr-too-late-for-therapy-living-without-fathers/

November 22, 2009

 Sundays are amazing.  You can sleep in.  At 7, I got up and ran my ten miles and then went off to the pool for a swim, but got there late so only swam a half mile, but it still felt great especially after a long run.  Mark had great chicken chili ready when I got home.  Chili swarms with flavor.

 Lit still haunts me.  How her father and husband only meet once and then to nod and not speak.  My father and husband have never met.  But then, I’ve only been with Mark for 15 years, I suppose we haven’t had the chance.  Some day, I tell myself, I’ll do something spectacular that will impress my father and he’ll see I was worth knowing all along.  Things I wanted when I was younger:  To know my father, to be thin, to have a job.  If you’ve made it to 46 without these things, I think that’s proof, you can make it the rest of your life.  You don’t need to be thin, you don’t need a “job,” you just need stuff to do, and you clearly don’t need a father. You can be spectacular anyway.  But just because you don’t need a thing doesn’t stop you from wanting it anyway.

 I like how Mary Karr keeps going back to therapy; she has the money and insurance to support it.  I never had either.  I’ve had Kaiser for twenty years and with Kaiser you don’t get long range personal therapy.  A few times I went with my kids to group therapy.  We were the star of the show.  The leaders could sit back and watch us.  We made it look easy like drinking peach schnapps. We were stars; we were entertainment, I needed a nap afterward.  I think about therapy.  Would I get now if I could?  Isn’t it too late?  Shouldn’t I have fixed myself earlier?  Or better question, am I fine now?  I can’t tell.  My friends in therapy quote their therapists like religious people quote the Bible.  Here’s a life quote that I like, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” 

 Tonight we’re going to Disney Hall to hear the music of the Left Coast including my favorite composer Lauridsen.  I can’t wait.  It will be like flying.

 http://lamc.org/0910-091122-concert.php

Nicolas Sarkozy provokes French left by honouring Albert Camus

French intellectuals have heaped scorn on a proposal by Nicolas Sarkozy to bestow the country’s greatest posthumous honour upon the writer Albert Camus, accusing the rightwing president of trying to cash in on the thinker’s popularity with little respect for his politics or personality.

Sarkozy said in Brussels last week that he thought it would be an “extraordinary symbol” to transfer the Algerian-born author’s remains to the Panthéon, the resting place for heroes of France, on the 50th anniversary of his death in January.

“I thought it would be a particularly pertinent choice,” he told journalists, while cautioning that no decision had yet been taken. “[It is] a project which is extraordinarily close to my heart.” An Élysée adviser, Georges-Marc Benamou, told journalists last month that Camus’s “non-conformism in relation to France’s elites” appealed to the president, the son of a Hungarian immigrant who prides himself on not having come from the conventional politician’s background.

But the idea of a rightwing leader often accused of authoritarian tendencies and anti-intellectualism celebrating the life of a man who made a career out of political resistance and literary endeavour has outraged many Camus experts.

They suspect Sarkozy is using a golden opportunity to bask in the reflected glory of a charismatic hero, whose ideas are being feted by the mainstream half a century after he died in a car crash. (…)

(Hat tip: Keith Hart)

_______________________

Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Is it fair to be jealous of a guy dead since 1837?

A marvelous painting of a gourmand at his table hangs in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris — a portly, pink-faced figure happily gorging on a regal casserole, with a bottle of wine at one elbow and a luscious-looking soufflé at the other.

I’m also going to go ahead and assume that this is the guy they got the name for the bakery that serves my favorite almond croissant in New York.  Either that, or as I found out through Wikipedia, the Godfather of Gargamel from The Smurfs.

I AM FEELING GOOD

Short Fiction   -   Pure Romance   -   A Love Story

By 

VIKRAM KARVE

Dear Reader, it is a cold morning and during my morning walk this story, one of my earliest writings, suddenly came to my mind and then perambulated in me. It made me feel good. I am sure it will make you feel good too!

I felt good.

My eyes feasted on the snow-clad Himalayan Mountain peaks painted honey-gold by the first rays of sunlight.

Behind me, deep down, was the resplendent Doon valley.

I breathed in slowly, mouth and nose together, relishing the pure, cold, nourishing mountain air.

I felt on top of the world, literally and figuratively, as I stood high in the middle of nowhere on a refreshingly cold bright morning, undecided what I was going to do, or where I was going to go.

What greater freedom than not having anything to do or anywhere to go!

I felt I was flying like a bird in the sky, with no one to take my freedom away.

“Something exciting is going to happen today,” said a tingling sensation within me, as if I were on the top of a high roller-coaster ready to plunge into unknown depths.

Suddenly, at the spur of the moment I decided to visit Victor, and with a spring in my step started walking towards Landour.

“Who’s Piyu ?” I asked Victor, picking up and opening the book lying on the bedside table.

“Piyu?” Victor said, his voice feigning ignorance but his eyes gave him away.

“Yes. Piyu! It’s written here in this book…‘ To my darling Victor, with fond memories of those wonderful moments at Port Blair. Love Piyu ‘… And Wow! Look at the lovely cursive feminine handwriting. So delicate. If her handwriting is so beautiful, she must be really gorgeous. A real beauty! Tell me. Who is she?” I asked teasingly.

“Shalini, you shouldn’t pry into others’ private matters,” Victor said.

“Private ? This is no personal dairy. It’s ‘Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov’. I’m taking it to read.”

“No,” Victor shouted and started to move his wheelchair towards me.

I know I had touched a raw nerve.

“I’m sorry,” I said and gave him the book.

He opened it and stared at Piyu’s handwriting.

“I thought there were no secrets between us,” I said.

“There aren’t,” he said.

“Except Piyu?”

“Please Shalu…….”

“You want to tell me about her?”

“Okay,” Victor said. And then he told me. About Piyu. And him. And their days in Port Blair. Maybe not everything. But whatever he wanted to tell me, he told me.

“Piyu ? A funny name?” I said.

“That’s what I called her. Like you call me Victor.”

I left it at that and said, “Now there are no secrets between us?”

“No! Now there are no secrets between us!” Victor said and gave me the book, “Read it, Shalu. There’s a story called ‘The Darling’. You’re just like the heroine. Always trying to mother me.”

“That’s because you are a naughty boy,” I teased.

“Naughty boy? I’m almost an old man. You should play with girls of your own age.”

“Play? You think I’m a small kid to play Barbie Doll? And you’re not that old either. You are just thirty.”

“I am twice your age.”

“Girls mature faster,” I said. “And your mental age is the same as mine.”

“Come on. You’re just a kid compared to me. I am a man of the world with a lot of experiences.”

“Like Piyu ………” I bit my tongue and said, “I’m sorry.”

“Piyu is a closed chapter,” Victor said.

“I’ve forgotten her,” I said “Piyu will never come between us again.”

“Promise?”

“I Promise.”

“Shalu, why don’t you come to meet me more often?” Victor asked.

“I don’t want to disturb you too much,” I replied.

“Disturb me?” he smiled. “It is impossible to disturb me. You see, I never do anything. Every day is a holiday for me, from morning to night, from the moment I get up to the moment I sleep, there is nothing to do, nothing to look forward to…”

“Don’t speak like that,” I said.

“Okay. But please come more often, Shalu. You make me feel good.”

“You too make me feel good!” I said.

It was true.

Talking to someone who needs comforting seems to make one’s own troubles go away.

“I’ll come on Wednesday. We’ve got a holiday,” I said.

“Promise?”

“Yes. We’ll discuss Anton Chekhov,” I said holding up the book.

“The Darling?”

“The Darling!” I said.

“Okay. Bye. Take care,” he said and lovingly looked at me as I began to walk away.

Victor had come into my life on a cold and rainy evening just a few months back.

I had slipped and fractured my leg playing basketball. It was a simple fracture.

Victor was convalescing from a severe injury to both his legs. His was a complex case, and for months he was confined to a wheelchair not knowing whether or when he would be able to walk again.

Actually, his name wasn’t Victor – he was Vivek – but everyone called him Victor, so I too started calling him Victor.

At first I called him Victor uncle. But as our friendship grew, somewhere on the way, the ‘uncle’ dropped. And now there were no secrets between us.

On Tuesday evening I rushed to see Victor bunking the self-study period.

“A clandestine visit,” I joked.

“Better be careful, Shalu. If your warden finds out, she may think something.”

“Let her,” I said, “I came to tell you I won’t be coming tomorrow.”

“Oh, no! I was looking forward to discussing Anton Chekhov with you.”

“Daddy is coming to Dehradun for some urgent work. He wants me to meet him at the station. He rang up the Principal for permission.”

“That’s great. I’m dying to meet your Dad. Make sure you bring him up here to Mussoorie.”

“I’ll try,” I said.

“You must. I want to ask him for your hand,” he said, tongue-in-cheek.

“How cute,” I said coyly.

“I’ll miss you,” he said.

“Take care.”

“You too take care. Okay Bye,” I said and rushed back to my hostel.

On Wednesday morning I left Mussoorie at six by the first bus and reached Dehradun railway station just in time for the express from Delhi which steamed in at eight.

Daddy was the first to get down from the AC coach and the moment he saw me his face lit up and he gave me a tight warm hug and smothered my cheeks with kisses.

“Please Papa,” I said embarrassed, “People are looking.”

“I feel so good when I see you, Shalu,” he said.

Papa kept the bag he was holding next to me and said, “Look after this. I’ll get the rest of the luggage.”

He beckoned to a porter and went back into the coach.

“Rest of the luggage?” I wondered.

Normally Papa travelled light, with just one bag.”

Soon there were three bags, a basket and a tall young woman with a small child in her arms standing beside Papa.

“Shalu, this is Ms. Bhattacharya. We travelled together from Delhi,” Papa introduced the woman, who smiled a sweet hello, and we began following the porter to the exit.

I looked at the woman through the corner of my eye. She was a real beauty, fair, with a skin like smooth cream. She looked straight ahead, as if looking at a distant object, and walked on expressionless.

But I noticed the way my Papa stole glances at her when he thought I wasn’t looking and I knew that she was much more than a mere fellow passenger.

I felt a tingle of excitement. Something was brewing. Maybe Papa was falling in love. Ten years after mummy had gone.

My father walked with a spring in his step, pulling his stomach in and thrusting his chest out.

“You seem very happy, Papa,” I said mischievously.

“Yes. Yes.” he said, “I’m so happy to see you, Shalu. You look so good.”

He opened the door of the taxi and looked at her, trying to mask the undisguised love in his eyes. It seemed a desperate case of thunderbolt.

I decided to have a bit of fun, quickly got in the car, and said, “Thanks, Papa, for treating me like a lady.”

Then I looked at the woman and said, “Bye Auntie.”

“Auntie is coming with us,” Papa said, “Shalu, you sit in front.”

“It’s okay, I’ll sit in front,” Ms. Bhattacharya said.

“There’s place for all of us at the back,” I said. “We can keep the basket in front next to the driver.”

I shifted, she sat next to me with the baby on her lap, Papa next to her on the other side and we drove in silence through Palton Bazar towards Rajpur road.

I kept quiet, waiting for Papa to tell me everything, but he too remained silent, probably because of the driver.

He got off outside an office. “You two can go to the guest house and freshen up. I’ll join you after finishing my work.

We sat alone at the breakfast table. The baby was sleeping inside. I looked at Ms. Bhattacharya. She looked so elegant yet youthful.

Late twenties? Maybe! Or maybe a bit younger.

I was dying to ask her everything, wondering what to say, when she looked into my eyes and spoke softly, “Shalu, I want to be your mother.”

I was touched by the way she phrased it.

I can’t begin to describe the emotions I felt, but instinctively I blurted out, “Why didn’t Papa tell me?”

She touched my hand and said, “He felt shy, embarrassed. You know how he is. He wanted me to tell you. And leave the decision to you.” She paused, and said; “I know it’s difficult for you. I promise we’ll do what you want. But try to understand. Your Papa feels very lonely.”

“And you?” I asked.

“I am lonely too,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes.

Suddenly she started to cry into her handkerchief, “I’m sorry,” she said, got up, and went into her room.

I sat confused.

She had been so calm and composed. And suddenly she broke down.

Had I said something wrong?

Maybe I was too young to understand. All I wanted was that Papa should be happy, everyone should be happy; even she should be happy.

Ms. Bhattacharya came out of the room. She had washed up, done up her face and looked so beautiful, so vulnerable, that I instantly felt like hugging her.

Something inside told me that she would make Papa very happy. And me too!

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that sometimes you wait for a moment and when it comes you don’t know what to do with it.”

 “I like you,” I said. “I know you’ll make Papa happy. Only I wish Papa had told me. Shall I call you mummy?”

She smiled, “Come on Shalini. Be my friend. Call me Priya.”

“Okay,” I held out my hand, “Priya, let’s be friends. And you call me Shalu.”

“Shalu, actually even I wanted your Papa to tell you,” she said.

“He must’ve been embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed?”

“To tell me that he’s fallen in love at his age.”

“He’s only 43.”

“And you, Priya?”

“28. Oh come on, I shouldn’t be telling you my age.”

“You look 25,” I said.

She blushed. The baby cried. She went inside.

I went into my room and lay on the bed. What a day! I just couldn’t wait to tell Victor all this. He’d die laughing. Maybe I should marry him. We are so happy together. If Papa can marry Priya, why can’t I marry Victor?

They – 43 and 28 – Adult Love!

We – 15 and 30 – Puppy Love?

It’s not fair, isn’t it?

I drifted into sleep.

When I woke up, Papa was sitting beside me on the bed.

“It’s past one,” he said. “Let’s go for lunch.”

“Why didn’t you tell me, Papa?” I asked.

His cheeks, his ears became red. He avoided my eyes.

“I guessed it the moment I saw you two at the station,” I said.

“You’ve really grown up, Shalu,” Papa said. “I’m so happy you have accepted her and your little brother.”

“Brother?” I said dumbstruck, and slowly comprehension dawned on me. I closed my eyes. All sorts of thoughts entered my brains. And suddenly everything was clear. “Oh yes. My little brother.”

Lunch passed off in a trance and soon we were on our way to Mussoorie. I’d wanted to go alone by bus, but Papa wouldn’t hear of it. He had work at the site office near Mussoorie and Priya wanted to see my school. She hadn’t been to Mussoorie before.

It was almost five when Papa got off at the site office and we were cruising on the Mall on the way to my school. Priya was looking out of the window as if searching for something. Suddenly she asked the driver to stop.

“I have to get something. Please look after the baby for a moment,” she said.

I took the baby in my lap and saw her enter Hackman’s, the biggest departmental store in Mussoorie.

She returned fast. “A small gift for you, Shalu” she said giving me a gift-wrapped packet and an envelope containing a greeting card.

I opened the envelope. It was a ‘Thank-you’ card.

She had written a message on the inside of the card:  “…To my darling daughter and friend, Shalini…”

I kept on starting at the beautiful handwriting, unable to read further.

Instantly, I recognized the same unique familiar lovely cursive handwriting, so feminine, so delicate.

Tremors started reverberating in my stomach, like a roller coaster. My pulse was racing. The car negotiated the steep road past Picture Palace up the winding slopes of Landour.

“Priya, look,” I said pointing out of the car window, “that’s the oldest building in Mussoorie. It’s called Mullingar. Isn’t it just like the Cellular Jail?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You’ve seen Cellular Jail?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. “Many times.”

“You’ve been to Port Blair?” I persisted.

“Yes. I’ve lived there. It’s a lovely place,” she said.

“How lucky,” I said. “I’ve only seen pictures of Cellular Jail.”

Silence. Pregnant silence.

Then I spoke, looking at her child seated on her lap, “Baby. He’s so cute. How old is he?”

“Six months,” she said.

“You haven’t named him?

“Oh yes,” she said, “we call him Baby, his real name is Vivek.”

“Vivek?”

“Yes. Vivek ,” she said “It’s a nice name, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I answered.

I patted the driver on the shoulder and said, “Seedha Le Chalo. Jaldi. Drive fast. To Landour Hospital.”

“Hospital?” Priya asked flabbergasted.

“I want you to meet someone,” I said.

The car stopped outside the hospital. “Come,” I said, and Priya holding her baby in her arms followed me towards the door of Victor’s room.

I opened the door and said, “Come Piyu. Go right in. Your Victor is waiting for you, for both of you.”

I didn’t wait to see the expression on her face.

I quickly turned and ran to the car and shouted to the driver, “Driver – jaldi karo. Be quick. Take me to the site office. Fast.”

As the car descended down the steep slopes of Landour, past Char-Dukan, towards Picture Palace at the end of the Mall, I took out Anton Chekhov’s book from my purse.

I’ll have plenty of time to read it now.

Maybe I’ll keep it as a souvenir to remember Victor.

I opened the book, read on the first page: “To my darling Victor…Love. Piyu.”

I took out my cell-phone and sent an SMS to Victor: “Happy Reunion!”

Then I turned the page and began reading Anton Chekhov’s enthralling short story ‘The Darling.’

As I write this I am feeling good.

Yes, I am feeling good.

Don’t ask me why.

Happiness goes when you speak of it.

VIKRAM KARVE  

Copyright © Vikram Karve 2009

Vikram Karve has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

http://vikramkarve.sulekha.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/karve

Appetite for a Stroll

http://books.sulekha.com/book/appetite-for-a-stroll/default.htm

vikramkarve@sify.com

I'm a huge fan of airplane bottles.

Now this to me is the epitome of Whiskey Tango when it comes to enjoying a Kenny Chesney concert in Philly. I uncovered these gems when I was rifling through my phone the other day and thought I would share them. They both were actually guzzling tall daiquiris like their stomachs were on fire. The one cat we’ll call “No Shirt Mcquack”(Above) was snoring to beat the band, and the woman “Bag lady Magee”(Below) was in my best guess, chasing rabbits in her dreams.

The scent of the two of them reminded me of college and what the kitchen floor at 10 Cedar Street in Orono would smell like after having 75 people drink their throats off all night in a 5 bedroom house. I mean hey we all get after it before concerts, but for $100/ticket I’m not going to nap through the undercard to get to Kenny. We had a ball with these people and if I’m not mistaken, I think Brawn might officially be on their christmas card list.

Tall Daiquiris make me drowsy

SHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEEEE!!!!
-GRIZZ