'Ideas are what you want to get rid of'

Leonard Cohen, when asked if he learns something from writing songs, if he works out ideas that way:

"I think you work out something. I wouldn't call them ideas. I think ideas are what you want to get rid of. I don't really like songs with ideas. They tend to become slogans. They tend to be on the right side of things: ecology or vegetarianism or antiwar. All these are wonderful ideas but I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart. I never set out to write a didactic song. It's just my experience. All I've got to put in a song is my own experience."

Also this.

Jacket2, dog-earred

Jacket is back now as Jacket2, and much joy it brings.

Just look at this*! If I wasn't scared of fines, I'd totally dog-ear the pristine copy of Ooga-Booga I'm currently reading to see what it would make. Or worse (better) the ancient copy of Looking Glass War whose pages are brittle and yellow and will becomes triangles of half-formed words if I do decide to vandalise the page.

"Yes?

Yes."

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*All the joy comes from having the humble dog-ear raised to a level of art. Me - I'm unapologetic about admitting I used to eat the corners of pages when I was a kid. Not to mark them but because they...were there?

You heard me.

Word of the Day: Vāsanā

वासना

The sense impressions left by events, objects, experiences, on the mind. But also smell (Tamil. Vasanai). So Proustian. A mnemonic.

**

According to the doctrine of vāsanās - memory traces or smells - perception itself is half memory. One remembers because one sees a partial similarity between the object present and an object one has seen before. So one needs remembrancers so that one may remember, recognise - literally re-member or reconstitute the object in front of us - by reconnecting present impressions with past memories of that object.

from 'The Ring of Memory' by A.K.Ramanujan, Uncollected Poems and Prose, Delhi: OUP, 2001. Quoted by Niranjan Mohanty in 'Memory in the Poetry of A.K.Ramanujan: A Study', Kavya Bharti, Madurai: No. 17, 2005.

From The Man Without Qualities

For Swar

From Chapter 21 of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities:

Brought up in a religious and feudal spirit, never exposed to contradiction through having to deal with middle-class people, not unread, but as an aftereffect of the clerical instruction of his sheltered youth prevented for the rest of his life from recognising in a book anything other than agreement with or mistaken divergence from his own principles, he knew the outlook of more up-to-date people only from the controversies in Parliament or in the newspapers. And since he knew enough to recognise the many superficialities there, he was daily confirmed in his prejudice that the true bourgeois world, more deeply understood, was basically nothing other than what he himself conceived it to be.

**

Something very like this is what Swar and I were discussing in Bangalore in early May when we were discussing our dissatisfaction with recent IWE. 

What else do people mean when they use phrases such as You really got into my head there or You put my exact thought into words, and say them when they mean to praise?

**

Of course, my recognition of the truth of the quoted passage only shows that I am equally susceptible to the glow that the confirmation of prejudice gives. When such truth is spoken by someone with talent and precision, it elevates one's own regard for one's intelligence.

The (In)compleat Disconsolate

1: Aram Saroyan:

As one who once considered himself in the vanguard of writing as writing, it is difficult for me to describe my feelings when confronted by a new generation of writers who are dedicated not to an exploration of any particular literary dimension I can identify beyond a snotty tone of voice. I know this isn't something I ever had in mind.

Beyond that, there are a number of other identifiable trends, which I would characterize briefly as: 1) Poems that prove how smart I am; 2) Poems that prove what a master of rhetoric I am; 3) Poems that prove I am a dope addict; and 4) Poems that just generally prove how hard I am to understand in any way...

I am a writer because I desire to communicate with my fellow man and woman and child and writing is one avenue open to me to do this. As I experience more of life, my respect for it grows, and it is impossible for me to regard it, and anyone else in it, as the subject or object of any kind of literary exercise. It is an experience that is bigger and more profound that any telling turn of phrase or immaculate run-on sentence. It is quite simply real. Not brilliant, not arcane, not sarcastic - but alive, and in just being alive more meaning than we could ever hope to fathom. The most we could hope for, I believe, is an honest and sincere accounting of our experiences as members of this miracle of being alive in time.

-- ca. 1974

(via Don Share)

**

2:  Anis Shivani in HuffPo on the Best American Poetry:

What I'd like to focus on is the aesthetic that seems strewn all over this particular anthology: poetry as a mechanical art. Walter Benjamin talked about the lost aura of the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. What we have here is poetry that is so seeped in the mechanics of mechanical reproduction that it seems to be looking beyond its status as a work of art, and reaching toward something of populist gnosis. It is poetry as facsimile, poetry as self-imitation, poetry as garbage in, garbage out. If there's one impulse defining this grab-bag of remainders and leftovers, it's that poetry is a robotic enterprise turned in on itself, self-sufficiently generating new items from within its own production sphere. Poetry is presented as working best when it shows least reliance on looking outside itself to be shocked, surprised, horrified at what it finds. Everything in this anthology is self-contained, sealed off, hermetically profuse.

**

3: Robert Hass on Yu Jian and Xi Chuan and poetry in China:

Over the years I’d attended a few international literary gatherings at which Chinese poets had read their work. In those years, in the 1980s and 1990s, you did not, in the first place, know whether the poets you were hearing were the actual poets, given the People’s Republic’s tight control of its public culture, but you did know that, if they were the actual poets, they were nevertheless writing in some utterly opaque code. Poets from around the world—from Vietnam and the Netherlands and Brazil and Canada, quite different from one another, coming from quite distinct literary traditions—were part of the same conversation. They were trying to invent in language, trying to say what life was like for them, to bear witness to it, to find fresh ways of embodying the experiences of thinking and feeling and living among others. That was what I was suddenly hearing in Beijing—that familiar, exhilarating sound, not so much of poetry, but of the power of the project of poetry. It felt like something very alive and new was stirring in China.

4: Geoffrey Hill, recently anointed Oxford Professor of Poetry, in 'Triumph of Love' (extracts here):

CXLVIII

Obnoxious means, far back within itself,   

easily wounded. But vulnerable, proud   

anger is, I find, a related self

of covetousness. I came late

to seeing that. Actually, I had to be

shown it. What I saw was rough, and still   

pains me. Perhaps it should pain me more.   

Pride is our crux: be angry, but not proud   

where that means vainglorious. Take Leopardi’s   

words or—to be accurate—BV’s English   

cast of them: when he found Tasso’s poor   

scratch of a memorial barely showing

among the cold slabs of defunct pomp. It   

seemed a sad and angry consolation.

So—Croker, MacSikker, O’Shem—I ask you:   

what are poems for? They are to console us

with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.   

Let us commit that to our dust. What

ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad   

and angry consolation. What is   

the poem? What figures? Say,   

a sad and angry consolation. That’s   

beautiful. Once more? A sad and angry   

consolation.

Book release: Anindita Sengupta's City of Water, Friday, 7 May

1.

Toto Funds the Arts
is pleased to invite you
to the launch of Anindita Sengupta’s
first volume of poetry, City of Water, where she will be
in conversation with poet/writer Sridala Swami 

Venue: Crossword Bookstore, ACR Towers, Ground Floor, 32 Residency Road, Bangalore – 1
Date and time: Friday, 7 May 2010 at 6.30 pm

Anindita Sengupta’s poetry has been published in several journals including Eclectica, Nth Position, Yellow Medicine Review, Origami Condom, Pratilipi, Cha: An Asian Journal, Kritya, and Muse India. It has also appeared in the anthologies Mosaic (Unisun, 2008), Not A Muse (Haven Books, 2009), and Poetry with Prakriti (Prakriti Foundation, 2010). In 2008, she received the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing, annually given to two writers under thirty in India. In 2010, she was the Charles Wallace writer-in-residence at University of Kent in England. Sengupta, who lives in Bangalore, is also a freelance writer and journalist and has contributed articles to The Guardian (UK), The Hindu, Outlook Traveler and Bangalore Mirror. 

**

2. Michael Scharf's review of the Bloodaxe Anthology (ed. Jeet Thayil) in the Boston Review. Vivek says there's a companion piece. When it turns up, I will post the link.

**

3. Not very related, but have been wanting to slip this in somewhere. In response to Anindita's post here, Swar Thounaojam says:

“How can one not bear witness to terrible things? Isn’t that self-indulgent?”

When you say ‘witness to terrible things’, what is your focus? empathy for victims? authenticity of the terrible things? for me, these are very dangerous territories for artists especially writers. In the age we live in, multiple and various narratives of violence are beamed straight to our screens – we are too familiar with home as well as foreign violence – the brutal obscenities of our age. The weight of authentic representations/recounts/narratives very easily close down responses because it doesn’t lead to thought; it is just an impotent (though earnest) addition to what we already know and see and hear. Yes, empathy has to be there but that is not enough. That familiar ‘terrible things’ have to be made strange so that we can go beyond uncomplicated empathy and make ourselves think actively. For me, it is not about bearing witness to terrible things; it is about imagining terrible things on my own terms. It is not self-indulgent; it is necessary investigation. Like Howard Barker said – ‘I trust my imagination, I don’t value my opinions.’ He was not being glib when he said that. He was expressing a deeply philosophical stance of an uncompromising writer. Our age needs imagination; opinions are a dime a dozen.

**

4. Looking forward to catching up with a bunch of you in Bangalore! See you (definitely, I hope) on Friday, or else over the weekend.

wound to do

'PRICES SLASHED,' said the gentleman. 'EVERYTHING MUST GO.'

'You're quite right,' said the elephant. 'Everything must, in one way or another, go. One does what one is wound to do. It is expected of me that I walk up and down in front of my house; it is expected of you that you drink tea. and it si expected of this young mouse that he go out into the world with his father and dance in a circle.'

'But I don't want to,' said the mouse child, and he began to cry. It was an odd, little, tinny, rasping, sound, and father and son both rattled with it.

'There, there,' said the father, 'don't cry. Please don't.' Toys all around the shop were listening. 'He'd better stop that,' they said.

It was the clock that spoke next, startling them with his flat brass voice. 'I might remind you of the rules of clockwork,' he said. 'No talking before midnight and after dawn, and no crying on the job.'

                                                                                       From The Mouse and his Child, Russell Hoban.

Remember this?

Next on the list (not that one, but just on my reading one): The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz.*

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*It's taken me all this time, Cat. What can I say?

'nobody can inspire my wallet on a local train. But I can steal a line I hear from a commuter'

So says Sriram Raghavan on Rediff, defending charges that Johnny Gaddar is inspired by Tarantino.

I haven't seen the film yet, but he has a point; there's inspiration and there's 'inspiration' in the way many people making mainstream cinema use it - where it's shorthand for plagiarism. And I'd go watch the film if for no other reason than because he wrote that line in the title.

Via Jai

Opera Jawa

Was reading the September issue of Sight and Sound this afternoon, and saw Tony Rayns' review of Opera Jawa. The film was one of six commissioned by The New Crowned Hope Festival to celebrate the 250th birth anniversary of Mozart last year. (I Don't Want To Sleep Alone and Syndromes and a Century were also commissioned for the same festival.)

Tony Rayns says:

The sets and props in fact deserve a chapter to themselves; created by Indonesia's leading installation artists, they include a butcher's slaughterhouse with carcasses hanging above blood-red candles in the shape of human heads, television sets carved from stone and wispy white muslin dummies hanging by the roadside to represent the dead. No film has looked or sounded like this before.

Tsai Ming-liang Banned Unbanned

Tsai Ming-liang's film, I Don't Want To Sleep Alone, was recently banned by the Malaysian censors because they weren't happy with the way the country had been portrayed or with, I presume, all the sex, which is pretty much inevitable in a Ming-liang film. The 'last month' in the quote below refers to March this year, by the way.

Last month, Tsai and his production company, Homegreen Films (set up by him and his producer Leonard Tee), received a letter from the Malaysian censors informing them that I Don't Want To Sleep Alone had been banned.

Despite Tsai having been careful about how he portrayed the character of his Muslim actor, Norman Atun, and the edits they made specially for the Malaysian release, somehow the censors still took offence with the film.

The censorship board's reasons were that Malaysia was depicted negatively in the film, with beggars and immigrants populating Kuala Lumpur and the hazardous haze (caused by open burning) enveloping the city. They said Malaysians were also portrayed as cold and heartless. It is Visit Malaysia Year 2007 after all, so they felt it wasn't appropriate for the film to be shown.
An appeal was quickly made against the ban and just a couple of days ago, the appeals committee of the censorship board finally said yes to the film's release ... but with a few conditions.
The film will only get a limited release in arthouse cinemas, while five cuts are to be made. The cuts involve scenes where actor Lee Kang-sheng's bare buttocks can be seen, Norman is cleaning Lee as he lies injured and clad only in his underwear, Norman washes his underwear, Lee and actress Chen Shiang-chyi are kissing and where radio reports of open burning can be heard in the background.

Producer Tee said they were happy that the appeal was successful, but worried about the five cuts. He said they would make another appeal against those cuts. Meanwhile, Tsai voiced his concern as well, stating that he could not see how a story about love and compassion could be seen by the censors as something negative. He also said he is still trying to make up his mind whether to accept those conditions put forth by the censors.

Clearly we're not the only ones. I'm not sure whether to cheer, or weep.

Two interview with Tsai Ming-liang: Senses of Cinema, which is a few years old now, and an excerpt from Tony Rayns' interview with the director, which forms a part of the Press Kit for the film (pdf). Incidentally, this film was commissioned for the Weiner Mozart New Crowned Hope Festival, Vienna 2006, along with Syndromes and a Century by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.