Spike

Checked my blog stats by chance on a day when there was an inexplicable spike in the number of visitors. Like, over a 1,000, which never happens. It's not like I've posted much, let alone anything controversial or even topical.

The evergreens are those poems and choruses that everyone comes for: Edwin Morgan, Anouilh's Antigone, Marachera, a couple more things. More recently, it becomes evident that board exams are round the corner and people are looking for things on schools. So Shantamma, that post about conversations about schools and Rishi Valley keep getting read.

But otherwise? *shrug* Who knows why anyone still reads this blog? (This is not ingratitude. I'm glad the three or four of you who still check in are around).

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'Spike' also reminds me of reading at the University of Hyderabad with Kazim Ali. I read my ghazal, in the last line of which is the word 'spike'. Kazim, following a train of thought set off my poem, suddenly decided to read a new one he'd written, and which he had to read off his laptop. It had something to do with the word 'spike' but the only thing I remember about it is that was preceded by a story about a sect of mystical men who swear to wear trousers with drop-crotches, to catch any babies they might have.

Yes. I am not dreaming this up. I was not on anything.

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That ghazal I wrote, it was one of the poems I sent in for a couple of German poets to translate. This is the Poets Translating Poets project that the Max Mueller Bhavan has been doing all of 2015. Hyderabad was the penultimate stop, and in January, Jeet Thayil, Jameela Nishat, A. Jayaprabha and I translated poems by German poets Sylvia Geist and Tom Schulz. We each had to translate a minimum of four poems and submit four for the Germans to translate.

I thought it would be fun to give them a ghazal. Sylvia took it on. She said she avoids rhymes and form in her own poetry because it comes too easily *envy* but was thrilled to work on it in translation.

I don't have enough - or indeed, any - German to judge the results. They'll be up on a website eventually, and you lot can do the needful. Instead of talking rhyme words and form, I remember googling images for that office object newspapers and restaurants use, to spike bills and memos and things. 

For some reason, it was particularly important to have the right image in one's head before attempting a translation.

The whole exercise was fun, exhausting, but I'm still wondering if it was useful. As a first pass at something, sure. But as a final translation? I feel process ought to be privileged over product, but what do I know?

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The other thing that's spiked is the temperature. Early Feb and we were already at 36C. Night temperatures are at 22C. Our year is one unending summer punctuated by a few days of deluge and a week or so of mild chill and mist.

My wrists already have mild burns from any encounter with the laptop. This summer - now - I intend to go offline as much as possible, return to pen and ink (okay, not ink; but some reasonable substitute), and try to get accustomed to having nearly no electricity.

We have to be the only people in this city to not have an inverter or a generator. Plan to keep it that way.

Reading promiscuously

I was visiting Rishi Valley over the weekend and was invited to speak at the Junior School assembly about anything I wanted to. I elected to talk about SFF, because I figured this was something that would bring together readers from the ages of 8-14 most happily.

Surprisingly enough, though they've read a lot of what's marketed as YA today, they really haven't read much SFF at all - or what my generation would call science fiction and/or fantasy. Not much Tolkien (the films, yes; the books, not really), no Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury. No Poe (I'm widening the category here to include all kinds of possibilities), no le Guin (not even Earthsea) - I could go on.

(And yet, nearly everyone had read Alice and quite a few had read The Phantom Tollbooth. This made me happy.)

At the end of the talk, the people who'd invited me to speak told me that the problem was that the kids read too much of this stuff and not enough of "real life" fiction.

"Really?" I thought. Because I thought I'd established that the kids had actually read almost nothing of SFF. It turns out that what they meant was that the kids are reading only the Riordans and the George RR Martins and the Amish Tripathis.

I didn't have the time to argue this properly. I was just a little surprised at the attitude, though god knows I shouldn't be any more. I was a little more concerned that my friends seemed to be falling on the side of carefully directed reading.

Me, I'm all for promiscuity in reading. I think children of whatever age should be able to pick any book off any shelf that seems attractive to them at the time without having some adult at their back telling them, 'Oh, this has bad language' or 'You won't understand this until you're older.'

I mean, yes, they may not understand something or may be shocked or delighted by the language; they may even be reading something out of purely prurient interest but what really shocks me is how adults can forget that they were exactly like those kids; and if they think they turned out okay, why would they believe these children won't?

Anyway.

If there's an objection to the category of fiction marketed as YA today, it is that it is too narrow, a mere cul de sac instead of even a street or a neighbourhood, much less the wider world. What these books do (like the adults I am sort of in lapsed dialogue with now) is distrust the intelligence of the children to understand complexity or to experience a world that is unavailable to them except through words.

I remain unconvinced that Stories About Real People will redress this lack in YA fiction. I read a lot of teen fiction, for instance - a 21st century take on the school story - and it's a sub-genre just like Mallory Towers or St. Clare's and no less bound by its own conventions that those books.

I also doubt that those children read only the kind of books the teachers seem to object to, but if that is indeed the case, the solution is surely not to discourage a certain kind of reading but to encourage another kind?

God knows, I read enormous quantities of rubbish growing up. All the Sidney Sheldons and Jeffrey Archers; books whose names I vaguely remember but whose authors I've forgotten (The Thorn Birds? Beyond the Blue Mountains?). Hey - my parents didn't even keep those Rugby Jokes out of reach. I could read absolutely anything I wanted and as far as I can tell they didn't allow themselves an opinion on whether it was 'good for me' or not.

They may not have thought of it that way, but what they encouraged was promiscuity in reading without thought to the moral or the lesson or the nutrient-value of the book in question. I wish schools would be as hands-off with the kids in their charge.

In celebration of which, this post:"May they always come for the unbuttoning and find that they stay past the remaking of the bed."