Godawful poem#1

Extinct

The last angry scream
was heard in circa three zero one six,
said the Committee For Conservation
of Emotional Diversity.
Plundered by Prozac,
anger management
and breathing skills,
It died at the turn of the century.
In its place, it spawned
a new religion of deep inhalers
whose bodies were temples,
who ate low-fat meals.
Its demise was recorded
in the Extinct Emotion Registry,
created by a concerned few
in circa two zero seventy
to preserve all that was
lost or deleted,
when megachips decoded
genomic anomalies,
faulty circuitry,
marginal incongruities,
and scrambled
the infinite capacity
that humans had for error.

Godawful poem #2

Adrienne Rich

Diving into the wreck is a strange and beautiful poem by Adrienne Rich I also love Margaret Atwood's thoughts about the poem: "The wreck she is diving into, in the very strong title poem, is the wreck of obsolete myths, particularly myths about men and women. She is journeying to something that is already in the past, in order to discover for herself the reality behind the myth, "the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth." What she finds is part treasure and part corpse, and she also finds that she herself is part of it, a "half-destroyed instrument." As explorer she is detached; she carries a knife to cut her way in, cut structures apart; a camera to record; and the book of myths itself, a book which has hitherto had no place for explorers like herself. This quest--the quest for something beyond myths, for the truths about men and women, about the "I" and the "You," the He and the She, or more generally (in the references to wars and persecutions of various kinds) about the powerless and the powerful--is presented throughout the book through a sharp, clear style and through metaphors which become their own myths. At their most successful the poems move like dreams, simultaneously revealing and alluding, disguising and concealing. The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through."

The crooked timber of self-interest

Anthony Lane reviews the book 'Portrait of a Lady' and talks about why it is such a great American novel. Henry James wrote about "the crooked timber of self-interest in the most altruistic of intentions..." and Lane asks, "Are we all so mercenary, cutting and trimming people, whether unwittingly or by design, to fit the pattern of our own desires? Such are the politics of personhood." I loved the language of the review and the fact that it mirrored the struggle between self-sufficiency and its limits. Here's another sentence that I liked.."and so the book traffics back and forth, with sublime indecision, between the need to stand firm, in Emersonian majesty, and the yearning to break one's pose and join the more crowded landscape of mankind."

Great article on the blame game

From Psychology Today

"In 1967, Watzlavik, Beavin, and Jackson published The Pragmatics of Human Communication, which identified several axioms (i.e., commonly accepted principles) of interpersonal communication and how it works. One axiom, "The Punctuation of the Sequence of Events" (p. 54), provides insight into why the blame game is so common in interpersonal communication.

In reality, relational communication events are continuous; they are ongoing, with no clear-cut beginning or ending. In other words, in the context of close relationships, communication events are continuous transactions, as they are tied to the past, present, and future of the relationship. As participants (or observers), however, there is a tendency to divide communication transactions into sequences of stimuli and response, or cause and effect - to impose our own punctuation on the communication transaction."

From the Granta 'Money' issue

"In fact the trouble I was having with ethics was that I'd never thought about them before -- in any sense. I had opinions on almost every subject, could argue any position and believed in almost nothing. I grew up, not necessarily with the belief, but with the feeling powerfully impressed on me, that life was a question of surviving, of making it through, not getting caught." - Richard Rayner (Rich, Rich, Rich)

The 'Marginal Cost' Mistake

Prof Clayton Christensen in HBR

"Weʼre taught in finance and economics that in evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs, and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues that each alternative entails. We learn in our course that
this doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities theyʼll need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, that approach
would be fine. But if the futureʼs different—and it almost always is—then itʼs the wrong thing to do.
This theory addresses the third question I discuss with my students—how to live a life of integrity (stay out of jail).
Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives when we choose between right and wrong. Av oice in our head says, “Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldnʼt do this. But in this particular extenuating
circumstance, just this once, itʼs OK.” The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low.
It suckers you in, and you donʼt ever look at where that path ultimately is headed and at the full costs that the choice entails.
Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.”

Catalogue of rejected thoughts

"It seems to me that the writers we love most are those who manage to capture something we ourselves have thought and rejected, for being forbidden, dangerous, elusive, something that if we made room for it would undo something else we want to keep, so we force it away—literature as a catalogue of rejected thoughts. For the way they can hold onto what the rest of us would put away as dangerous, they become heroes, the ones who emerge with the one thing we hoped to keep secret, but know we need. When I say to you James Salter is one of my heroes, that is what I mean."

--From an essay by Alexander Chee

From "In Treatment"- my favourite show at the moment

Just watched episode 16 of Season 3 where Adele beguiles Paul with her analysis of his situation. The scriptwriting in this series is so complex and nuanced that it takes my breath away.

Adele: "The first day I met you, you insisted that you and Gina had it all figured out, that your need to save people started with your mother's illness.."

Paul: "..and does that seem far fetched to you?"

Adele: "It doesn't. But I think caring for your mother was also a way of saving yourself. It was miserable, yes.. but it was also safe and familiar and it kept you from having to find any real connections elsewhere, from risking yourself in the outside world..
And it also had the convenience of allowing you to blame it all on your father.
And it's really not so different to what you do to this day, is it? You cloister yourself in your apartment or your burrow-like office, you convince yourself you're sick, you'll accept a growing paralysis rather than taking a risk and finding where or towards whom your real passion lies.
And is it any wonder you haven't found what drives you yet?
You're 57 years old. And at some point you're going to have to move past the stories you've assigned to your life. These steadfast explanations you've settled on years ago. You have to look at yourself again. For real answers, you have to take that risk."

This is so true for all of us at any age...maybe particularly our mid-thirties and forties. We need to move beyond the stories we have assigned to ourselves and our lives and take at least a few risks all over again.

Found online in a comment thread....

"To be whole, let yourself break.
To be straight, let yourself bend.
To be full, let yourself be empty.
To be new, let yourself wear out.
To have everything, give everything up."

Godawful Poem#2

Thanks to Peter and his 'Godawful Poetry Fortnight' , I'm here again with my sickly second offering.


I wandered lonely as a status update
I surfed, I liked, I borrowed.
In Twitter, I found a rowdy crowd,
In blogs I drowned my sorrow.

Before I knew what hit my soul,
I surfed, I read, I borrowed.
RSS feeds told me all I need,
Now I can’t tell today from tomorrow.

So oft upon my couch I lie,
I surf, I chat, drink Bordeaux.
I melt into my glowing screen,
The real world turns to shadows.

Our digital selves are quite complete,
We post, we like, we follow.
We haven’t met and yet we’re friends,
You should know by now I'm shallow.

Terribly bad, truly awful poem

It's Godawful Poetry Fortnight and this below is my contribution!

Inventing places

I read The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh and wanted to preserve this bit: " I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination; that her practical, bustling London was no less invented than mine, neither more not less true, only very far apart. It was not her fault that she could not understand, for as Tridib often said of her, the inventions she lived in moved with her, so that although she had lived in many places, she had never travelled at all"

On writing - Elizabeth Lowry in Granta 103

From an excerpt in my favourite literary magazine:

"There’s a sense in which writing is simply scar tissue, the attempt to create a meaningful self out of a compromised one, and in my case this damage was caused by the constant move from country to country, which made for radical instability. J.M. Coetzee once characterized South African literature in the era of apartheid as ‘a less than fully human literature, unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power’."

Super Duper Blockbuster Thriller

"Super Duper Blockbuster Crime Thriller" -- these screaming superlatives usually advertise Tamil crime fiction stacked in tea stalls in Chennai. They may have well led to the formation of Blaft - an independent publishing firm in Chennai, started up by a mathematician and a fashion designer who thought it would be good to translate the books and find out what the hell they were about.

I met them both at ScRipt, a mini-feature of the Singapore Writers Festival -- providing a platform where emerging writers from South Asia could promote their work in Singapore.

I went for a few sessions and they were great but the Blaft session stood out with its bizarre posters and tales straight out of some Coen Brothers' film.

The Blafties translate pulp fiction in Indian languages to English as well as publish original fiction in English. They veer towards experimental fiction and what Rakesh Khanna (one of Blaft's founders) calls 'Irrealism.'

"Maybe its like surrealism, I don't know," he said. Kaveri Lalchand, who also makes clothes and acts in theatre and does all sorts of other things, talked about convincing Surender Mohan Pathak, a prolific Hindi crime fiction author, to let Blaft translate his work into English.

Rakesh and Kaveri tracked Pathak down to his house in Old Delhi and the man whose books have sold over 150,000 copies (each-see comment below!) in Hindi was understandably amused by their proposed print run of 5,000 copies. Still, they persisted and so their catalogue of books and translations keeps growing in direct proportion to their tenacity.

It's wonderful to see current, surreal or irreal work out of India exploiting the immense diversity of Indian languages. It was also just fun to hang out with people who are so passionate about what they do and do it alongside other full-time jobs.

We were never warned about heartbreak

This is a line from Julian Barnes' brilliant new short story -- Complicity-- published in the October 19th issue of the New Yorker. My favourite bit is below but the whole story is here.

"I used the word “complicity” a bit ago. I like the word. To me, it indicates an unspoken understanding between two people, a kind of pre-sense, if you like. The first hint that you may be suited, before the nervous trudgery of finding out whether you “share the same interests,” or have the same metabolism, or are sexually compatible, or both want children, or however it is that we argue consciously about our unconscious decisions. Later, looking back, we will fetishize and celebrate the first date, the first kiss, the first holiday together, but what really counts is what happened before this public story: that moment, more of pulse than of thought, which goes, Yes, perhaps her, and Yes, perhaps him."

The politics of Singlish

Given that this week is dedicated to the Singapore Writers Festival, I read some poetry by Arthur Yap-- one of Singapore's foremost poets. I first encountered his work at the National Library when I moved to Singapore five years ago. I was looking for local poetry and literature, and his collection of poems -- The Space of City Trees-- struck a chord.

I'm happy to post one of his poem here. It deals with the dilemmas inherent in the forging of postcolonial identities. There is also a great essay that analyses this poem and others like it in QRLS -- the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore.

The Correctness of Flavour -- By Arthur Yap

waiting for the lime sherbert to arrive,
mother turned around to her vacuous child:
boy, you heard what i said earlier?
nowadays, they emphasise english.

boy rolled his squinty eyes to the ceiling.
waitress returned, flustered, and started
on her own emphases:
lime sherbert today don't have.
mango got. strawberry also don't have.

mother, upset and acutely strident:
today DOESN'T have.
today DOES NOT have

Singapore Writers Festival

The Singapore Writers Festival started yesterday and is on till November 1. Workshops and conversations are happening all week at The Arts House -- one of my favourite buildings in Singapore. This is a multidisciplinary literary festival, featuring some 120 writers from 22 countries and over 170 programmes.

Today I saw O Thiam Chin, a young Singaporean author, talk about his book of short stories, 'Never Been Better' -- published by MPH.

"I don't always go for the big dramatic moments. I'm much more interested in the small and subtle moments of realisation that people have," he said.

When asked why he had not thought of looking for international publishers for his book, Thiam Chin said that he had chosen to be a small fish swimming in a small pond. "I'm not sure I was up to international standards. I wanted to look for local publishers first as my stories also had a local flavour," he said. He spoke of his dreams of getting published in The New Yorker some day.

It was a nice little session -- and I was glad to have attended it. I plan to walk around and attend free sessions over the next few days. And of course, I'll record impressions and conversations that stay with me and post them here.

Here's a picture I like -- of Thiam Chin autographing his book.

Our band gets a review

It's always fun to perform. It's even better to get a review !

Where synthetic biology may lead us...

Michael Specter is probably one of my favourite science writers. He has written a fascinating piece on synthetic biology in this week's issue of the New Yorker. It's fairly futuristic and it seems like this will be a field to watch. I quote from the article below -- a taste of things to come!

"No scientific achievement has promised so much, and none has come with greater risks or clearer possibilities for deliberate abuse. The benefits of new technologies—from genetically engineered food to the wonders of pharmaceuticals—often have been oversold. If the tools of synthetic biology succeed, though, they could turn specialized molecules into tiny, self-contained factories, creating cheap drugs, clean fuels, and new organisms to siphon carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."

It is not knowledge we lack

I've been in the grip of Sven Lindqvist's book on European barbarism. It's called 'Exterminate All The Brutes' and is a terrible, wrenching account of imperialism and racism through the centuries. He ends the book with this paragraph that I think is broadly applicable to life.

"You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions."