June 14, 2016
by Neelima
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1.After Muhammed Ali’s death, publishers rushing Ali books
2. Lithub launches Rotten Tomatoes for books
3. X-rays reveal 1,300-year-old writings inside later bookbindings
4. Fifty Shades is most embarrassing book for Mumsnet users
5. Akhil Sharma wins world’s richest award for single novel
June 13, 2016
by Neelima
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There was a nice spread of books at the BYOB Party in May.
Akshay talked about Rushdie’s magical realism in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. To enjoy Rushdie’s writing, a minimal understanding of political and social realities is a must. He uses magical realism to present controversial ideas. “There was a wave of magical realism in India in the 80s and 90s,” Abhaya said. “Rushdie was for magical realism the way Chetan Bhagat was for the campus novel. He started a trend and he was by far the most successful.”
Haroun and the Sea of Stories is about a professional storyteller called Rashid who lives in the saddest of cities. There are a great many stories and diverse characters. For lovers of this genre, the book is a treat.
Vishal found Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate riveting. It’s a book written entirely in verse- 690 sonnets, in fact, with the rhyming scheme a-b-a-b-c-c-d-d-e-f-f-e-g-g. The story revolves around John, a Silicon Valley exec; Janet, an artist and musician; Ed, a character confused by religion; and Phil, a scientist. The story deals with love, homosexuality, anti-nuclear protests, and don’t forget personal ads- one of which Vishal read out.
Vishal gifted the book to a friend who was leaving to San Francisco. In fact, the book resonates more with those who live in that part of the world. Jaya found the verses a little hard to digest and an idea popped up about whether a prose version of the book would make the book more appealing to those who could not read the entire book in verse.
Books in verse are not new. The epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayan, the Illiad and Odyssey and many others were all originally in verse. Reading the poetry version is always better than reading the prosaic version, some readers opined. Metaphorical meanings will be lost otherwise. Another book by Vikram Seth that reflects his expertise poetry is An Equal Music, not to mention the Table of contents in verse form in A Suitable Boy.
More books in Part 2.
June 10, 2016
by InstaScribe
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June 9, 2016
by Neelima
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In the essay Some Things are Worth forgetting by Rebecca Onion, a book called In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies by journalist David Rieff is discussed. What the author of the essay tries to understand by interviewing Rieff is whether history should be remembered or not. There is this idea that history should not be forgotten, sacralized in a way. If you forget, it is a profound injustice to those who suffered and if you learn from human brutality, humanity may benefit and become compassionate as a result. Rieff thinks otherwise:
The mass murder of the Jews of Europe in the 1940s did not prevent the near genocide in East Pakistan, or the country that became Bangladesh, in 1971. It didn’t prevent the Khmer Rouge from killing a million people in Cambodia; it didn’t prevent the Rwandan genocide in 1994. As far as I can see, we don’t learn much of anything from the past. And if people say that we do, I have frankly one answer for them: Syria.
Which makes you wonder. Is learning from the past just wishful thinking? Are you condemned to repeat what history has instilled? Rieff thinks that memory is a convoluted thing and if memory is to be taken seriously what humanity should indulge in is Nietzche’s version of active forgetting.
Perhaps societies should emphasize the present and not the past. And for that, a certain amount of forgetting can be a very good thing.
June 8, 2016
by InstaScribe
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June 7, 2016
by Neelima
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June 3, 2016
by InstaScribe
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June 2, 2016
by Neelima
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I’ve always wondered about the annual birthday celebration, so popular once in Bollywood; not even one movie would stay clear of the joy-filled birthday. Birthdays have always been happy occasions. The one birthday celebration that shocked me out of it was a play by Harold Pinter titled The Birthday Party about a birthday party made ugly by absurdity. Stephen Burt has written an interesting article called Happy Birthday to Whom about the role the poet has in the birthday lyric.
Birthdays have been celebrated for around wo millennia, and it’s not surprising that it is the poet who has chronicled this special day. The poet is famed for celebrating the birthdays of his leader or friends, but when it comes to his own birthday he descends into a deep melancholy.
Birthday parties, and (therefore) poems and songs that honor birthdays, go back pretty far. The biblical King Herod threw himself a birthday party (Mark 6:21); in classical antiquity, the birth dates of rulers, the incarnations of gods, and the births of friends’ children (see Virgil’s famous Fourth Eclogue or Callimachus’s Iambi, no. 12) all occasioned poems. Some Renaissance poets—especially Ben Jonson, a master of occasional verse—wrote for friends’ and patrons’ birthdays frequently: Jonson’s stanzas to William Sydney (or Sidney, born 1585) honor his coming of legal age: “the number of glad years / Are justly summed that make you man.”
Birthday presents and birthday books all came into vogue in the late nineteenth century. It was in the Romantic period that birthday poetry really took off, with poets like Lord Byron and Robert Burns. The trend continue well into the twentieth century with Edaward Thomas, Dylan Thomas and Frank O’Hara. Whenever the poet has written about the day of his or her birth, there has been a tone of defeat.
A poem for somebody else’s day may serve as a present, a vehicle for gratitude, a means of interaction, but it’s hard to be both happy and introspective if the birth is your own.
Do you think that birthdays and the now defunct birthday card replaced by WhatsApp congratulations are worth writing poetry about? Does a hand written poem seem to you like a good enough gift? Or is the poet right in being mournful about the passing of yet another year?
June 1, 2016
by InstaScribe
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May 31, 2016
by Neelima
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