sliding (in several minds)

Sliding Rock, November 2011

 Recite to me please all the letters you are not able to read.
Spell "fling yourself skyward."

Spell "fever."
                   from 'Speech', Kazim Ali, The Far Mosque, Alice James Books, 2005.

*

There are preoccupations, some of them pleasant, others not. I won't apologise for my continued half-presence here; instead I will hope that it signals good things elsewhere.

'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.

post HLF 2012

HLF 2012 is over. I wasn't there for the closing, but it was a packed three days for me (mainly because of the recordings I had to do).

Gulzar/Sukrita Paul Kumar, Adil Jussawalla and Suniti Namjoshi were outstanding. Kiran Nagarkar's was a hurried session, unfortunately, being on the first day when schedules went out of whack. I enjoyed listening to all the poets I heard, but the star of the younger poets was Kazim Ali. Wish I'd had at least one conversation with him.

I'm going to take a couple of days off to process and mull over conversations. After that there will be work and domestic things to catch up on, so it's unlikely that there will be posts. I don't have any photos, unfortunately, because I was saving space and battery time for audio recordings.


Do look out for a Call for Submissions soon, though.

Also promise to respond to comments soon!

TFA winners

Anjum Hasan, Vivek Narayanan and I were the judges for the English entries in this year's (I think I mean last year's) TFA Creative Writing Awards.

The results are up here. Congratulations to Ramneek Singh and Joshua Muyiwa. I'm happy to finally put names to the entries.

There were Special Mentions, but they're not on the blog; if any of you were at the awards ceremony, can you fill me on on who those were?

Placeholder

The first mind-change of the year. Take note, all of you!I love that I can spend a half hour on a post and then decide it would be better left unsaid.

Oh well.

As a placeholder and to mark the passage of a post, I give you a miniaturised disturbance. This was taken a couple of days after Thane passed through Pondicherry. You don't want to see the trees or the streets. I promise you.

New Year Irresolutions

1. Speak! I tell my memory.

The intention is to learn one - just one - poem a month. It's a laughably modest target, I know, but when Bill Murray said one baby step at a time I took him seriously all those years ago.

There's an inbuilt danger that I may cheat, of course, and use this as a chance to refresh memory rather than tax it afresh; I might pretend I never knew some poems and learn them as if for the first time. Philisophically, I think that's a worthy enough experiment, but in this year of the apocalypse, I think I ought to prepare for the day when I might be known only by the poems I remember.

It's arbitrary, but I also feel I ought not to learn poems that are: too short - by which I mean less than 14 lines; my own poems, though god knows, it would be nice to remember what I wrote and what I designated as the 'final version'; only in English.

2. Something for the hands

Not that I'm terribly dextrous or anything, but I've been noticing that I rarely do anything anymore with my hands. I don't take photographs, I don't draw, I don't do that much cooking. Nothing is made, fashioned, refined or altered and that's just wrong.

There's a half-finished cloth doll I began for my son some years ago, that I should get out and keep propped up on my table to act as my whipmaster-mascot for the year.

I think of the 99 year old lady I met in Chennai this time. We've been sending 'kind wishes' to each other via my grandmother for the last couple of years and this time I had to visit her. She had made these tiny, delicate, melt-in-the-mouth rava laddus (god! I never thought, in my most bizzare dreams, that I would say that) that existed in a state between roundness and disintegration. How she managed to make them, store them and serve them without destroying them deserves a post all to itself. It was miraculous, not only because of how hard it is to make a half-decent laddu, but because of how she did it at her age.

(This doesn't mean that I am going to make laddus. Breathe easy, all of you.)

3. Talk more

By which I mean, I should talk to one other person who is not family, at least once a day. And no, mails don't count.

I have realised that my phone is almost permanently on silent; that I rarely return calls I've missed and that I don't talk to anyone unless I'm compelled to. I've forgotten how to make small talk, hang out, exercise the full range of my actual, vocal abilities. No wonder I haven't written anything I can use in the last six months.

*

So this is the year when I make blindingly obvious resolutions that I hope I can keep.

Now: what poem should I learn first?

Hyd Lit Fest 2012 Schedule

And we're back!

There's lots of stuff to blog about, but it will have to wait until after the Hyd Lit Fest, which begins on Monday, 16th and ends on Wednesday, 18th Jan.

All events at the Taramati Baradari. Everything is free and open to all. Do come, register and listen to lots of wonderful people.

There's a schedule up on the HLF site, but some sessions have been moved around or have been cancelled for various reasons. Here's the latest - and hopefully final - schedule.

Please note: I'm in conversation with Adil Jussawalla on the 17th of Jan from 11am to noon.

Hope to see some of you there!

Mon 16 Jan	Venue 1	Venue 2	Venue 3
10 - 11	Inaugural Pavan K Varma, Gulzar
11- 12	Romancing Hyderabad Bilkeez Latif, Aminuddin Khan, Narendra Luther (Moderator)	Salaam Hyderabad Vamsee Juluri, Harimohan Paruvu, Krishna Sastry, Meena Alexander (Moderator)	Celebrating Creativity - Contests for College students Sujatha Gopal, Student Coordinators
12 - 1	In Conversation Kiran Nagarkar with Hemant Divate & Sachin Ketkar	Readings (English) Hoshang Merchant, Robert Bohm, Nabina Das, Mohan Ramanan (Chair)	- do -

  1 – 2 LUNCH

2 - 3	In Conversation Urs Widmer and Christopher Kloeble with Charanjeet Kaur & Amita Desai	Translating Bharat Sachidananda Mohanty, Hemang Desai, N Gopi, UN Singh (Moderator), Jeelani Bano	Celebrating Creativity - Contests for College students
3 - 4	Past Continuous Amish Tripathi, Indu Sundaresan, Jaishree Misra T Vijay Kumar (Moderator)	Readings (Poetry) Mamta Sagar (Chair), Arathi HN, Sridala Swami, Arjun Choudhury,	- do -

4 – 4.30 TEA

4.30 – 5	Muse India Awards – Adil Jussawalla, to give away the Awards. UN Singh, Sachidananda Mohanty, GSP Rao
5 – 6	Guftagu with Gulzar Sukrita Paul Kumar
6.30 – 7.00  - Launch of Pavan Varma’s book ‘When Loss is Gain’ 7.00 – 8.30  - Cultural Event – German Music Band - Triotonos
Tue 17 Jan		Venue 1		Venue 2	Venue 3
10 - 11		In Conversation Saeed Mirza with Indraganti Mohan Krishna & T Vijay Kumar		Readings (Poetry) Angshuman Kar (Chair), Mandakranta Sen, Anindita Sengupta, Santosh Alex	Gulzar’s interaction with Students
11 - 12		In Conversation Adil Jussawalla with Sridala Swami		Readings (Poetry) Hemant Divate (Chair), Sachin Ketkar, Anitha Thampi, UN Singh	- do -
12 - 1		The Agony & Ecstasy of India Mark Tully & Pavan K Varma

1 – 2 LUNCH

2 - 3	Translating Classics, Cultures Constance Borde, Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Gillian Wright, Madhu Benoit (Moderator)	Readings (Telugu Poetry) Chennaiah V (Doraveti), Raja Hussain, Sailaja Mithra, N Gopi (Chair)	Celebrating Creativity  – Contests for College  Students Sujatha Gopal, Student Coordinators
3 - 4	Development and its Discontents Rahul Pandita, C  Rammanohar Reddy, G Haragopal (Moderator)	Readings (Telugu Fiction) Abburi Chhaya Devi, Khadeer Babu, Saleem, Atreya Sarma U C Mrunalini (Chair)	German Movie                 (120 mts)

4 – 4.30 TEA

4.30 – 5		Book Launch – Sagarika Chakraborty
5 – 6		S Rayaprol Prize Function – Meena Alexander, Aparna Rayaprol, Aditi Rao, Sachidananda Mohanty

6.00 – 6.30 6.30 – 7.30 7.30 – 8.30	Book Launch – Vidya Rao’s books Vidya Rao (Hindustani Vocal) Ananda Shankar (Dance)
Wed 18 Jan	Venue 1	Venue 2	Venue 3
10 - 11	In Conversation Suniti Namjoshi with C Vijayasree		Spl Programs for School Students – Cheryl Rao, Vandna Mathur
11- 12	Art of the Matter Alekhya Punjala, Vidya Rao, Pritham Chakravarthy, M Nagabhushana Sarma (Moderator)	Adopting / Adapting to India Gillian Wright, Mark Tully, Robert Bohm, Meitim Connolly Jean-Manuel Duhaut (Moderator)	- do -
12 - 1	Readings (English) Navkirat Sodhi, Kazim Ali, Prageeta Sharma, Meena Alexander (Chair)	Readings (Fiction-English) K Srilata Rao, Swati Chawla, Sagarika Chakraborty, Sudha Balagopal (Chair)	- do -

1 – 2 LUNCH

2 - 3	“’Death, be not proud’: Tributes to Vaclav Havel, Indira Goswami and Arun Kolatkar” Readings by The Little Theatre. Shankar Melkote and team	Readings (Urdu nazms) Ashraf Rafi, Hasan Farrukh, Mushaf Iqbal Tausifi (Chair), Masood Jafri
3 - 4	Readings (English Poetry) – Charanjeet Kaur (Chair), M K Ajay , Amrita Nair, Semeen Ali, Sushmita Sadhu	Readings (Hindi Poetry) Rishabha Deo Sharma (Ch), Ahilya Misra, Shashi Narayan Swadeen, Kishori Lal Vyas

                     4 – 4.30 TEA

4.30 – 5.30	Urdu-Hindi Mushaira Muztar Majaaz, Sardar Saleem, Jagjeevan Asthana, Tasneem Johar, Elizabeth Kurian Mona, Syed Khalid (Chair), Narendra Rai
5.30 – 6	Valedictory GSP Rao, T Vijay Kumar, Amita Desai

Goodbye 2011!

That's it for the year, folks!

Be good.

Ron Silliman on Anthologies and year-end lists

Ron Silliman has a great post about the futility of trying to make top [insert number] lists, and anthologies speak for the diversity and complexity of poetry written in English today.

It is interesting to ask what community is represented by the poet who proposes him- or herself as the representative of some transcendent value (the way Jack Gilbert cast himself as the doomed spokesperson of beauty & inner nobility), but mostly it is very sad. The isolato in American literature is little more than a tribune for the most imperial and corporate of impulses, even when – as in Melville, as in Olson, as in Gilbert – he is conflicted & brilliant. If you are responsible to no one, you are in the exact same position that capital and profit play in the world economy. 

What might be noble in such attempts at outsider independence – a resistance to being used by others for purposes that one might find repellant – nonetheless reminds me of the flaw at the heart of Timothy Leary’s old slogan: Tune in, turn on, drop out. There simply is no “out.” It’s as identifiable a location in the game of life as any other. We are all of us on this planet together. You can choose which side you are on, but there is no “nobody’s side” to pick. That one already belongs to Mr. Murdoch, the Koch brothers & their buds. 

But even “represents a community” does not mean that we sing with the same voice, or to the same tune even. The problem with the Dove anthology is that of any “best of” collection. It is not that I’m in the book while Rae Armantrout is not, strange as that may seem, or Paula Gunn Allen instead of Judy Grahn or Sherman Alexie instead of Simon Ortiz, and it is certainly not that Dove actually included 175 poets. It is that she did not include at least 175 others for whom one can make at least as strong a case for representation. The Penguin anthology fails to represent America because the reality is far more complex than one book can articulate. 

It's interesting to think about this at this moment, not because I'm making lists as the year is about to end. It's interesting for me, because I plan to send out a manuscript some time soon, and I'm asking myself all kinds of questions about reputation and visibility and distribution.(Like I only have to make my choice for people to fall all over themselves to want to publish me. Ha!) I have no doubt that when (if) someone at a publishing house reads my manuscript, they'll be asking themselves questions that somewhat echo mine.

And that's when I realise how much I lucked out the last time round and how much the process is not going to be about poetry at all.

Spaniard Tilts at Bureaucratic Windmills

Actually, don't Get. Me. Started.

It's worse than sitting in a hospital waiting to see a doctor. At least there you can arrive at 8.45 for a 10.30 appointment and expect to get a decent breakfast and a place to sit indoors.

At the passport office, a whole day in the Inquiries queue earns you an appointment to see the RPO (other variations include DPO and PRO; one of the letters stands for Passport and the other for Officer. The third is irrlelevant) on a given date, with the (misleading and false) assurance that you don't need to wait in line; you just need to turn up at the given time and see the man in charge.

Right.

Anyone with a bit of sense interprets this as 'Be there as soon as you wake up'.

I have turned up at the passport office five mornings since November, at approximately 7.15 am. I stand in the Apoointments Only line, and if I'm lucky I'm number 6 or 7. More often, I'm 11 or 15. We stand in the sun, sit on bits of paper or move in and out of this line until 9 am, when a bunch of cops come out and organise the line in the usual way - with a red lathi. Fights break out in the other, longer line, where people have been waiting since last night. Agents work the line, picked out the susceptible and sometimes get caught. Money changes hands, often not even discreetly.

Remember: all this is only to make inquiries and show up for appointments; this passport office no longer takes applications, so these queues are not even in order to submit forms. They are for people who want to know why their passports haven't turned up after three, six, twelve months or longer.

Ten am sees us inside, with little chits of paper that decides in what order we see the RPO/PRO/DPO. These are meaningless, because there's another line of people that the cops call VIPs: they have letters from IPS/IAS/MLA type people.

If your serial number is 11, say, you can reasonably expect to wait until 2 pm to see the man, and you can almost certainly expect to be told that your file cannot be found. This is what has been happening to me for the last three appointments. I wait in line from 7.15 am only to be told, some six or seven hours later that I need to come back another day when they will have my file.

This, dear readers, is how Spaniard gets homicidal. Spaniard is A Knight with Very Little Patience. Oh, wait. I'm mixing books up, aren't I?

This is also why I have no energy and want to curl up in bed with a trashy book and oranges and chocolate. Escapism has a function if this is what short-term reality looks like.

(Anyone wanting to send me trashy books, oranges, chocolate, sympathy and valid passports, please get in touch).

So how's your end-of-the-year treating you?