Celebrating a 100 years of....Talkies?

I hesitate to interrupt the beautiful silence here, but since I have had Thoughts after a long time and about cinema after an even longer time, I thought I should get let them out in case of system overload.

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Indian cinema celebrated its centenary on 3rd May this year. What it marked was the centenary of the release of Dadasaheb Phalke's Raja Harischandra, which is as good a place as any to mark a beginning. Naturally, there have been special issues and programmes and things and they have been the usual mixed bag of celebration, nostalgia and some good writing.

In the middle of all this, there is Bombay Talkies. 

It is a compendium of four unlinked short films by four different directors and you can google anything you want to know about it. This post is about the state of my mind after watching it last night.

(There were aunties who came inlate - while the title song was on - and congratulated themselves for being on time. 'That is a matter of opinion,' I muttered under my breath but the auntie next to me was busy talking on her phone. During the interval, one of the said, 'How do they allow this kind of thing? Do you want to leave? We can leave if you want. It's up to you.' The phone aunty got up and left. The other one followed and tread on my toes while doing so.)

First off, general puzzlement: I know the Hindi film industry likes to pretend it's the only one around, even while they help themselves to story-and-plotlines from Telugu, Tamil and Korean films; but surely Bombay Talkies could have found directors who were not only mainstream/semi-mainstream Hindi film makers?

Also, Talkies. Someone needs to work on their titling skills, because as code it's inaccurate if somewhat efficient. Harischandra was silent and the studios were still some time in the future.

Thus my general discontent about the nature of this celebration on film: narrow, short-sighted and - for a celebration - minimally aware of its own history.

But the films themselves were fairly enjoyable, if uneven.

I was thinking about what the filmmakers were saying about Cinema-with-a-capital-C beyond the stories themselves, as they must have been because otherwise why bother to string four diploma-length films together, right?

So, in order of appearance:

Karan Johar: Karan Johar is such an insider that he doesn't even need to think about what cinema is. Because - isn't it obvious? - what he does is cinema and why is even a question? We celebrate a 100 years by making more of the kind of film that brought us upto this point.

If there's anything larger he's saying about cinema it is, possibly, that film music is cinema's umbilical cord and tells a kind of truth that transcends all the lies we tell ourselves and let our stories tell us.

(Yeah...that's farfetched. No it isn't. Yes it is. N- Whatever.)

That said, though he's no Wong Kar-Wai, his film had a few genuinely heart-stopping moments. Pity he let the last five minutes of his film slip away from him.

Dibakar Banerjee: There are big stories in small things. That's DB's definition of cinema. Or at least, his definition has sympathies with Ray's vision because he chose to film a Satyajit Ray story.

Zoya Akhtar: Tell 'em what they wanna hear. Hers is the least interesting and most cynically

blasé of the lot. 

Like Johar's film, hers is the work of an insider who is attempting to view the world of cinema through the eyes of an outsider or a misfit. But when you think of all the misfits and outsiders and deadbeats who made even mainstream Hindi cinema (never mind all the other kinds of cinema in whatever language) the memorable thing is is, it made me feel slightly ill to hear that what we need to do to make it is follow our dreams, nurture them in secret (and pray to Katrina Kaif dolls).

Anurag Kashyap: Cinema is misdirection and (a satisfying and necessary) illusion. Of the four, it is perhaps Kashyap who put any kind of thought at all into why he was a part of this exercise and for me that raised his film above the others.

It was clear that while KJ and ZA are one kind of filmmaker, DB and AK are another. These last two, being outsiders to the industry but who are beginning to slide their way in, are less concerned about the truth-telling and lie-nurturing nature of cinema. They don't care if cinema is about truth or lies; what they care about is, that whatever it is, it has the capacity to nourish small and real lives like any great art. 

And that is why we obssess about the movies even today, a 100 years on. Even when we download them carelessly onto our computers, and experience them as a solitary pleasure instead of communal festivity, cinema can attach us in precisely the same way it did a hundred years ago. And at least half of Bombay Talkies celebrates this.

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Oh wait. I'm not done. I feel I must congratulate the Censor Board for this piece of cleverness.

[Apologies about picture quality. Bad phone camera and bad light.]

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Wait. I'm still not done. 

I want sympathy and alcohol because I watched Star Trek Into Darkness. In IMAX 3D. The sight of Benedict Cumberbatch weeping in rage and sorrow over one half of an IMAX screen (in 3D!) still gives me nightmares. And I still have a half-crush on the man (at least, on his voice). 

Basically, JJ Abrams has watched [Spoiler Alert!] The Wrath of Khan and has scavenged dialogues wholesale over both his films in the reboot. That's not entirely a problem; what is, is that despite its cheesey sets and costumes, the earlier film was the better one. 

**Spoiler Alert**

Plus the racefail of having Cumberbatch play [the even more namefail] Khan Noonien Singh. (Seriously, Hollywood. Get your act together.) 

And he's So. Deadly. Serious. Gah!

The best part of the film for me was when Kirk is so frustrated with Spock that he expresses a desire, to Uhura, to yank Spock's bangs (not at all innuendously). 'I know he's your boyfriend,' Kirk says, 'but.' Uhura says she knows how Kirk feels. And then Kirk has this priceless dialogue:

"Wait. You guys are fighting??! Oh my God! I can't even imagine what that's like!"

To me that, and the scene with Kirk, Spock and Uhura in a pod, going to meet the Klingons, was worth the price of the ticket.

On Gustave Dudamel

Via Supriya Nair, this wonderful essay:

ON AUGUST 23rd 2007, the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper not known for its hyperbolic tendencies, ran a breathless headline wondering: "Was this the greatest Prom of all time?" Footage from the concert in question, showing Dudamel and the Bolívars performing "Mambo!" from Leonard Bernstein’s "West Side Story", has since been viewed nearly half a million times on YouTube. The teenaged players, to the stunned delight of a 5,000-strong audience at the Royal Albert Hall in London, ditch their dinner jackets for tracksuit tops in the colours of the Venezuelan flag, jump to their feet, fool about with their instruments and generally give the impression that playing in a symphony orchestra is the greatest gig imaginable.

Among those who received a link to that video was Jamie Bernstein, daughter of Leonard. "I clicked on it thinking, 'oh, this is one of those Facebook things' and just fell into my screen," she says when we meet in New York. "I thought, 'who are these people, where is this energy coming from?' I never thought I would again have those chills in a concert that I used to get watching my Dad conduct. And then I thought, 'where is my Dad to see it all, because this is everything he ever meant.'

"He would have gone down there, to Venezuela, in a shot. He would have crushed every rib in Gustavo’s body with the hug, and he would have been in awe of Maestro Abreu. He would have been beside himself with excitement." Soon after viewing the viral clip, Jamie herself headed down to Caracas—"because I started finding out about El Sistema and I thought, 'this is way too good to be true'."

As always, posted here for sharing & storage purposes.

W.H.Auden: 'This Lunar Beauty'

Because yesterday's full, spring moon, buttery disc that it was. Also, because this is a poem that should be read aloud and I've been looking at poems for too long now. Delighted also, at it's slow increase, so lunar. Time is inches, yes; but also lines.

This Lunar Beauty
W.H.Auden

This lunar beauty
Has no history
Is complete and early;
If beauty later
Bear any feature
It had a lover
And is another.

This like a dream
Keeps other time
And daytime is
The loss of this;
For time is inches
And the heart's changes
Where ghost has haunted
Lost and wanted.

But this was never
A ghost's endeavour
Nor finished this,
Was ghost at ease;
And till it pass
Love shall not near
The sweetness here
Nor sorrow take
His endless look.

Review: Wild Girls Wicked Words

This short review appeared in Mint last week. I've had massive power outages and connectivity problems, so haven't posted this until now.

I really should write or keep the longer versions of reviews to put on the blog. I had a lot more to say about this book, but I edited it down and didn't keep the longer review.

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Wild Girls Wicked Words: Poems of Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi & Sukirtharani

Edited & Translated by Lakshmi Holmström

Kalachuvadu Publications [Sangam House]. Rs. 295. Pp: 230

Every year, around 8 March the world sketches a tribute to women. Each year the gestures seem more hollow and meaningless, a gimmick to sell anything from facials and makeovers to health-checks and insurance. At least since the Delhi rape, it has become clear that far from achieving equality, women in India face even more challenges than the popular narrative would have us believe.

A whole decade ago in Tamil Nadu, there was widespread outrage in literary circles at the publication of Kutti Revathi’s book of poems, Mulaigal (Breasts). Around the same time, other women poets, Malathi Maithri, Salma and Sukirtharani were also publishing poems that spoke about the bodies and desires of women and about wanting a space to call their own. Whatever pious noises about violence against women we are hearing now, things were different in 2003. Back then, these women received death threats and, as Lakshmi Holmström recounts in the introduction to this volume, one film lyricist even said they “should be lined up on Mount Road in Chennai, doused with kerosene oil and burnt alive.”

Ah, that trusty debating strategy used by men in times of social upheaval: kerosene (See also: acid).

That these women continued to write undeterred by threats says much more for their individual courage and perseverance than it does for society as a whole. In the decade since, each of these four women have published more collections of poems and have continued to write about whatever they wanted to, regardless of the compulsions of their private or public lives.

Wild Girls Wicked Words, translated and edited by Holmström, ironically references the indignation of the literary establishment in Tamil Nadu. It is a bilingual collection of selected poems that, while still being appetisers, are substantial enough to give the reader an idea of the kind of poetry these women write, with biographical notes to provide context.

The poems are about the things you might expect – the bodies of women, the relationship of women with their lovers, their children; and about landscape, so intimately tied to the idea of poetry in Tamil literature since the earliest Sangam poetry. But the originality of the ideas and images and tonal variety give these poems depth and edge, making one pause often to absorb and re-read a line.

The first poem, ‘She who threads the skies’ by Malathi Maithri, begins thus: “As the sky fills/the empty shell/after a bird has hatched,/ so desire fills everything.”

These women are unafraid both of desire and of declaring it. “I watched over them in amazement”, Kutti Revathi says simply in her poem ‘Breasts’. In another poem about meeting her lover, she invokes one of Sangam poetry’s most famous lines: “red earth and pouring rain”.

Indeed, for all the contemporary cadences of their poetry, these poets are often in dialogue with the tradition of Tamil poetry; sometimes, as in Malathi’s or Sukirtharani’s poems, they are sardonic; but these poets see themselves as writers who are intimately tied to both place and language. Unsurprisingly, therefore, a portion of the poems in this collection are about Sri Lanka and more specifically about the civil war. These poems are poignant and anguished but are never mere harangues.

Sukirtharani’s poetry is perhaps the most stark and angry of the four, standing as it does at the intersection of Dalit and feminist writing. In her poem ‘Translating her’, she says:

They ask me what the song means/ prying, eager, as if checking out/ the sex of a newly born./ I translate her poverty/  the hunger she eats,/  the hunger she expels

Salma’s experiences as a Muslim, a woman writing in secret and wanting to explore both solitude and selfhood (thanimai/thanmai) are better known via her novel The Hour Past Midnight, which takes its title from the poem ‘A midnight tale’, collected here. Images of confinement act as counterpoint to the imagined peace of a simple solitude. But sitting at the edges of domesticity is a chilling truth:

In this universe/ there may be many creatures/ alone with their prey/ living amicably together/ leading pleasant lives. (‘An evening, another evening’)

‘Language must be redeemed from the grave of its own inadequacy’, declared Malathi Maithri in 2001. This collection demonstrates that this is being done, both with passion and craft.

Vasudha Nagaraj talk on the Justice Verma Committee Report

Though the Justice Verma Committee Report [pdf] (which, last I heard, the Ministry of Home Affairs had taken off their website) came out in January this year - just under a month after the Delhi rape - the thing everyone is watching is the wilfully obstuse Ordinance that the GoI might pass any day now.

Regardless, what the Committee did was remarkable.

So, for this month's talk in the Goethe Zentrum's monthly Lecture Series, they've invited AP High Court advocate, and activist Vasudha Nagaraj to tease out the implications of the Report as well as talk about the govt. Ordinance on Sexual Assault.

Date & Time: Wednesday 13 March. 6.30pm.
Location: Goethe Zentrum, Journalist Colony, Road No. 3, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad.

It's going to be a bit strange, but I'll be reading some of my poems before the talk.

Do come if you can.

Every single leaf

One new neighbour has just cut down a peltophorum because it ruins the view of her shiny new house with the weird landscaping and All! Glass! exterior. Another tree nearby has had branches cut off to make way for a pole that will have their personal transformer perched on it.

At other times we have heard other neighbours complain that:

1) The trees shed too many leaves and their servants (yes) complain about having to keep sweeping.

2) The trees cut off all the sun. Apparently this is a bad thing.

3) There's no place to park because of trees on the pavement.

I'm actually surprised that they don't cut down trees during Diwali, because, you know, rockets.

Meanwhile, spring continues. The Tabibuia have flamed their yellow and are shedding. The figs have come and gone. The pungamaram's tender green is everywhere. The badam has finished with the red and has settled into summer's bright green. The rain trees still drop long seed pods that always, always, embed themselves into the softening tar on the road which, given the state of it, is an improvement.

Soon, even the leaves that so annoy our neighbours will cease to fall, though every cut branch and trunk will continue to put out shoots.

Clearly this last is something our neighbours will not stand for. Hence this:

Completely besides the point that this tree was outside a GHMC park and it wasn't for any of the people around here to burn it down.

I don't want to move. I'm wondering how I can persuade my neighbours that the desert - any desert - is the best place for them. 

Review: Sita's Ascent

Last week's Sunday Guardian has my review of Vayu Naidu's Sita's Ascent.

Suddenly there's a lot of Ramayana- related writing going around. There was Zubaan's anthology of speculative fiction about the Ramayana called Breaking the Bow. (I'm sad to say I've only read one story from it but will get around to it eventually). I'd been meaning to get Arshia Sattar's translation of the Valmiki Ramayana for some time now and used my mother's birthday recently to get it and her book of essays as well. Most recently - like, this morning - I finished Samhita Arni's The Missing Queen.

I feel I shouldn't mix up a straight review post with my thoughts on Arni's book, which were decidedly mixed; but I guess, I hope, I'll get around to it. Eventually. (Why does this sound like something I've said before? Oh wait.)

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In her endnote to Sita’s Ascent, storyteller and performer Vayu Naidu explains that one of her aims in writing the novella was to explore the ‘function of memory as a metaphor for ‘re-membering’ a dismembered story because it is told to us infrequently and in parts’.

As anyone growing up with stories from the epics knows, every telling is a new one – not just a remembering and a reclaiming, but a re-visioning. In Sita’s Ascent memory is the primary hallucinogen, unlocking the past in a dream-like manner.

The story begins with the pregnant Sita being delivered to Valmiki’s ashram by Lakshmana. She thinks she’s on a visit, and though Lakshmana knows better, he chooses silence. In the shock of abandonment, Sita begins to fail until Valmiki pulls her out. Sita begins to live in the ashram and Lava and Kusa are born and grow up, the older people pass on the baton of remembering as if they were runners in a relay race.

Naidu has clearly immersed herself not just in stories from the Ramayana but also in the critical texts about the epic, and in ways of writing about epics. It is easy to see in the structure of the book – each chapter given over to one character – the form of the older Yuganta by Iravati Karve. In the sourcing of stories, Naidu cites Paula Richman’s Many Ramayanas, especially Velcheru Narayana Rao’s essay on the Telugu songs about the Ramayana sung by women in Andhra Pradesh. Naidu writes as one who is fully aware of the multiplicity of narratives and perspectives.

And yet, oddly, the multiplicity of perspectives does not always produce a variety of psychological responses in the narrators. Sita’s love, her well-managed anger and infinite capacity to endure comes across less as steadfastness and more as passive acquiescence. Surpanakka’s anger is entirely avoided because what she recounts is Sita’s swayamvara and Ravana’s failure at it. In Naidu’s narrative, she is Ravana’s sister first and always; never the desirable and desiring woman punished for her outspokenness. If there is some kind of push-back, it comes from Urmila, who rebels by disguising herself and escaping from the palace to live with Sita in the ashram.

The question I find myself asking is, can a retelling of the Ramayana in the 21^st century entirely ignore feminist critiques of the epic? There are, after all, demonstrable ways to write against the grain of the central and indisputably patriarchal narrative: just to take the example of one writer, Volga’s story ‘Liberated’ (‘Vimukta’ in Telugu) reinterprets Urmila’s years of supposed sleep as one intense, solitary meditation out of which she emerges liberated and strong; in another story, ‘Reunion’ (‘Samagamam’ in Telugu) Surpanakha and Sita meet in the forest and find deep empathy for each other.

Given how vividly these characters recall the past, it is surprising how little they examine the reasons for the actions of the people involved. The one exception is Lakshmana. In an incident drawn from the Velcheru Narayana Rao essay, Naidu has Lakshmana fall into an ecstasy of laughter when he sees the goddess Nidra approach him in court. As he laughs, Lakshmana watches and calibrates everyone’s reaction to him – each person imagines Lakshmana is laughing at him and begins to examine his conscience.

Not just this incident, but the guilt Lakshmana feels in having precipitated the entire war by attacking Surpanakka, his self-pitying and horrific justifications – ‘I had been provoked’ – then and later, when he draws the lakshman rekha around Sita – ‘I had never seen her eyes flash fire and her mouth utter such filth. Did she say that to provoke me? – are chilling, but give us psychological depth where we have grown used to archetypes.

A part of the problem lies in the choice of medium. I can see how the impressionistic narrative structure would work as performance and storytelling. As a novella, though, the tone is sometimes disconcertingly casual and colloquial, sometimes mystical and mostly slanted towards the now-tired tropes of the bhakti tradition.

Which is why the actual event of Sita’s ‘ascent’, her final refusal to undergo another test of chastity/purity/loyalty is elided over entirely in this book: when Lava and Kusa finish recounting the Ramayana to the man they do not yet know is their father, Naidu considers the story resolved – ‘The leaves shivered and there was a stream of light where she stood. There was no pain or need for reconciliation. Sita had ascended time cycles.’

If that isn’t a cop-out I don’t know what is.

In another recent retelling of another epic, Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean, the narrator is the river goddess Ganga who is surrounded by a sceptical, disruptive, bawdy audience. To them she says early in the narrative: ‘Much is made of unflagging optimism – that blind, bouncy state which understands neither cause nor effect.’

I wish any one of the narrators in Naidu’s book had a grain of this kind of self-awareness. It would have raised the book from a tolerable and not unreadable tale to one worth returning to, as any epic worth its salt should be.

Bhanu Kapil defines things on Urban Dictionary

You know Urban Dictionary? The place where you go to keep abreast of current slang, innuendo and acronyms (since nearly everything needs fewer vowels, bb).

I didn't know you could make definitions there that would make you want to buy mugs & t-shirts that said Architecture - 5 or Humanimal (I would buy the heck out of that t-shirt).

It appears you can, and someone did. Bhanu Kapil has done something to Urban Dictionary that I hope it will never recover from.

Here's a sample:

Narrative

The inability to conceive of a happy ending.

Sometimes I think that the whole reason I met him was to discover that his wife was studying Counseling Psychology, if indeed that is the name of something a person might actually learn, with the great-grand-niece of Frida Kahlo. In the narrative of desire, perhaps what matters is not intimacy but it's counterpart: a new thought. In this sense, the lover is a necessary force, but rarely it's limit. I said: "Maybe this is the reason we met." Thinking of the yellow table, the third eye, the monkey in her arms. Dominant. I begged for an introduction, forgetting for a moment who I was. To him. For her. A cunt. Do cunts get to meet Frida Kahlo? In the flesh? Greeley, Colorado is where the slaughterhouses are. I'd like to visit that university town.

I've always thought - from what little I've read on her blog and on Almost Island, that Kapil is someone I need to read more of. Maybe some day I will manage it. Until then these sudden instance of brilliance must do.

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Re the entry True Love: I am wondering what a list of lovers' occupations would look like. I already know it will be boring and unpoetic and undeserving of a definition on Urban Dictionary. Perhaps there's an Obscure Sorrow that defines the sadness of never having a lover who was an actor is a miracle play.

A bag full of cats

When I was pregnant, there were a battery of tests that my doc recommended, among them for a series of potential diseases that might damage the foetus. So, I obediently got them done. One of these tests came back positive: Toxoplasma Gondii. I consulted my trusty What to Expect and was horrified to discover that the thing sounded hugely dangerous. I was traumatised.

The doc recommended I re-do the test and the next one turned out negative ( though why disregard the first and accept the second? Would there be any way of finding out until it was too late?) and all manner of things were well after all.

So this Toxo thing seems like a special parasite, one that was (almost) mine. Naturally, all related reading are of interest. This piece suggests that this parasite - usually considered harmless in healthy adults and reasonably-sized children - actually can cause all kinds of changes in the brain.

She began tagging the parasite with fluorescent markers and tracking its progress in the rats’ bodies. Given the surgically precise way the microbe alters behavior, Webster anticipated that it would end up in localized regions of the brain. But the results defied expectations. “We were quite surprised to find the cysts—the parasite’s dormant form—all over the brain in what otherwise appeared to be a happy, healthy rat,” she says. Nonetheless, the cysts were most abundant in a part of the brain that deals with pleasure (in human terms, we’re talking sex, drugs, and rock and roll) and in another area that’s involved in fear and anxiety (post-traumatic stress disorder affects this region of the brain). Perhaps, she thought, T. gondii uses a scattershot approach, disseminating cysts far and wide, enabling a few of them to zero in on the right targets.

To gain more clarity on the matter, she sought the aid of the parasitologist Glenn McConkey, whose team at the University of Leeds was probing the protozoan’s genome for signs of what it might be doing. The approach brought to light a striking talent of the parasite: it has two genes that allow it to crank up production of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the host brain. “We never cease to be amazed by the sophistication of these parasites,” Webster says. 

The whole thing here.

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Someone on Twitter said that this explains Naipaul. I give you that observation without comment.

KGAF Loot

With many qualifications, I adore Bombay. This time, the qualifications just removed themselves: I stayed in town, had one reading and one and a half days to myself to do what I wanted. What I did was wander round, watch people, meet friends, browse the Dilli Haat-ness of Kala Ghoda during the festival. I sat facing the sea, I sat under trees, moved with the shade, began and finished Brat Farrar. Paid homage to Mondegar and Leopold.

And bought lots of books. 15 of them. The first two, I bought on my way to my reading, just a little bit away from the David Sassoon Library. I didn't dare to leave them there because the session was going to be chock full of poets, and what if it occurred to even one of them to check out the place and pick precisely these books up?

Books 1 & 2: Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poets from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond* [ed. Tina Chang, Natthalie Handal and Ravi Shankar]. And Anne Sexton: The Complete Poems**.

Next to the guy who had these books, there was another who had mostly art magazines and law books. But he also had a whole lot of other stuff and two things that I saw and coveted. I promised myself I would return the next day for them. What was to be a minor rescue mission turned out to be a major evacuation.

Here's what I got:

The abridged Don Quixote is, of course, for the kid; as is Goopy, Archy's Life of Mehitabel and the Leslie Charteris. The le Carre and the Mary Stewart are replacement copies and the Allingham is so! beautifully! preserved! Also, Rumer Godden. Only finding a copy each of Flowers for Mrs. Harris or Cider with Rosie would have made my joy more complete.

But the books I'm really pleased about finding are the Ali A. Mazrui, Book 1 [see above] and the Raymond Carver.

Especially the Carver, for all sorts of reasons. The title and the title poem (Where Water Comes Together With Other Water). The joy of finding a collection which contains an individual poem that has moved you. The wanting to know whether Carver's poems were edited as hard as his stories and if so by whom.

Oh, and because I love donkeys, (if you didn't know this about me already, welcome to the blog and make yourself comfortable) and I can never find donkey things the way other people find owls, elephants and tortoises, I was ecstatic because this time I lucked out!

So the kid gets Don Quixote and I get Donkey Hottie.

Okay, fine. It's a pack mule. But I'll take what I can get.  

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But I'm not done.

A couple of days before I left for Kala Ghoda, I was in a sad-but-foul mood about something I can't even remember now. I complained about it and asked for hugs or books and my friend offered to send me something.

I came back from Bombay to find she'd sent me Anuja Chauhan's Those Pricey Thakur Girls. Needless to say, I swallowed it in one sitting last night and my crush on Chauhan just grows and grows. It is full of late-'80s Delhi wonder and though I never thought I'd hear myself say this, it made me so nostalgic for my late-teens! All the Depauls and Wengers and Bercos and every cheesy song and landmark and Delhi thing (including Interact, for heaven's sake) was there and I loved it.

At the risk of sounding like GRRM fan, I want the next book from her, like, later this year or something.

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*I wonder whose copy landed up on the pavement so soon after the book came out. Reviewer? Or *gasp* Contributor?

**I picked this one chiefly for an over-wrought, handwritten letter from a son to his mother on the flyleaf. Either she was heartless or dead and the book landed up on the pavement. Either way, it's fascinating.