Yay, Zoe and Irene have grown up!! We overheard them argue this morning, “Zoe, you can have the bigger bit of the sweetie.” “No, Irene, you can have the bigger bit of the sweetie.” Irene scolds us when we go to Zoe’s favourite restaurants when she’s out playing with her friends. I guess they’ve become allies against parents who give them money for cafe dinners while they dash off to parties etc. Summer busyness!
Archives for 2010
Donald Hall in “Life Work” on tricking writing our of oneself
Donald Hall, how he tricks so much work out of himself.
“At any moment, when a poem does not occupy me wholly, when I feel impatient, or discouraged, or tired, I drop it quickly; after a while—one hour, three hours—I feel the poetry-juices drying out. Instantly, I stop; I put the poems away until the following morning.
Wakes up at 4.15. Four hours done by 10a.m. Been up for 5.5 hours. “Over the last four hours, I have done my day’s work. I cannot fake it in the afternoon; if I push too hard, I become impatient and do bad work. Gets into bed between 8.30 and 9, reads until his eyes refuse to stay open.”
Omnibus Review by Anita Mathias of Rushdie, Ishiguro, Lahiri, and Manil Suri
Anita Mathias
Omnibus Review
Commonweal Magazine.
Salman Rushdie’s dazzling, densely textured maximilist novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Picador USA, $16, 575 pp.) tracks the brilliant rock stars, Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara, a contemporary Orpheus and Eurydice, through three great cities, Bombay, London, and, inevitably, New York; and through the familiar story of fame, desperately pursued, turning out to be less delicious than imagined, leading to paranoid, reclusive misery. Though Rushdie’s characters are often mere embodiments of an idea–Vina, like the painter Aurora in The Moor’s Last Sigh (Pantheon), incarnates the destructive concept of the artist as sacred monster, sacrificing morality, decency, and love for art–I found myself moved by the dumb, stoic suffering of Ormus Cama, an immensely gifted musician who wanted nothing more than calm married love, but loved the wrong woman for that life.The Ground offers vintage Rushdie: his erudition and humor; his magpie allusiveness and multicultural jokes; the lyricism, playfulness, and sheer plenitude of his style; and his trademark ricocheting between the sublime and the silly, popular culture and high art, all incarnated in the voice of the narrator, Rai, ostensible friend of Ormus, and Vina’s secret lover. “An everything novel,” Rushdie calls The Ground. Finally, in an uncharacteristic and Shakespearean peaceful conclusion, after the mythic figures of Vina and Ormus vanish–Vina dies in an earthquake, and Ormus is shot dead by Vina’s ghost in a tiresome flash of magical realism I wish Rushdie would abandon–the lesser artists, the photographer, Rai, and the popular singer Mira Celano, settle down to a life of mutual accommodation and domestic happiness.
The Death of Vishnu (W.W. Norton, $24.95, 256 pp.), a first novel by Manil Suri, a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, presents five rambunctious families in an apartment building in Bombay, squabbling over the expenses of the dying (in the cosmos of the novel, reincarnating) janitor, Vishnu. Suri gives us a dead-on and hilarious portrayal of the melodramatic quarrels of the materialistic Asranis and Pathaks, and the simmering pettiness and viciousness engendered by a claustrophobically close society. In a conscious imitation of the progress of the soul in Hindu theology, the higher floors of the apartment building house the more evolved. These include Muslim Mr. Jalal, who desperately seeks the common truth underlying all religions (and, in a chilling scene, is lynched by a Hindu mob when his son elopes with the Asranis’ daughter), and the widower, Vinod Taneja, who has loosened all cords of desire. Though the dying Vishnu’s hallucinatory memories of love and the Hindu myths feel tacked-on and obtrusive, the book is a sprightly, realistic, funny portrait of lower-middle class Indian life and its pretensions.
The polished, elegant surfaces of Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning volume of nine short stories, An Interpreter of Maladies (Houghton Mifflin, $12, 198 pp.) belie the howling emptiness at their depths. In her carefully observed, minimalist tales, Indian immigrants discover the nightmarish price of the American dream of lots of stuff. Strangers in a strange land, imperfectly understanding, imperfectly understood, missing their community-oriented society, they wrestle with unfamiliar New World problems–loneliness, depression, and isolation which destabilize the marriages that, in at least five stories, agonizingly disintegrate. In a savage story, “A Temporary Matter,” a suffering couple, Shoba and Shukumar, tell each other erstwhile secrets, and we watch them steadily, viciously destroy each other as they face the death of their love and marriage. “Mr. Pirzada” and “Mrs. Sen” present Indian faculty couples, alienated and adrift in a foreign world. More restfully, the final story, “The Third and Final Continent,” details the not uncommon odyssey of the restless Indian (like Lahiri’s and my own and, it’s rumored, Rushdie’s) from India through England to America; and the advent of love within the confines of an arranged marriage.
An Artist of the Floating World (Vintage International, $12, 206 pp.), a slender, perfect novel by the British-Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro, explores the stream of consciousness of a self-deceived man in postwar Japan (reminiscent of Stevens, the butler in Ishiguro’s better-known, poignant The Remains of the Day). In fascinating sections, Masuji Ono, an artist dedicated to depicting the ukiyoe, “the floating world” of “the nightless city” of the pleasure district, pours himself into his art, painting fifteen-hour days as a student, and later as a sensei, a master. Later, exposed to Japan’s poverty, he asks the age-old question of the moral artistic spirit: Isn’t making art unconscionable in a world of pain? Consequently, he betrays his gift, and supports the Imperial Japanese armies. After Hiroshima, he faces a Japan craving amnesia, with the militarist faction shunned, and an epidemic of public harakiri, honor suicides. In imagistic dreamy sections, Ono reflects on his life, unable to face the tragedy of betraying his gifts, his promise, his joy for chimerical ideals, yet finding hope in the buoyancy of the young in the new Japan. Part of the novel’s pleasure lies in decoding Ono’s classic unreliable narrative, and the Japanese facade of invincible politeness. Ishiguro is a stunning writer with absolutely perfect pitch. His flawless novel, suffused with sadness and beauty, has the delicacy and restraint of the ukiyoe prints of the moon, cherry blossoms, migrating birds, and dreamy geishas with their admirers, sipping away all sorrow.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
Donald Hall in "Life Work" on tricking writing out of oneself
Donald Hall, how he tricks so much work out of himself.
“At any moment, when a poem does not occupy me wholly, when I feel impatient, or discouraged, or tired, I drop it quickly; after a while—one hour, three hours—I feel the poetry-juices drying out. Instantly, I stop; I put the poems away until the following morning.
Wakes up at 4.15. Four hours done by 10a.m. Been up for 5.5 hours. “Over the last four hours, I have done my day’s work. I cannot fake it in the afternoon; if I push too hard, I become impatient and do bad work. Gets into bed between 8.30 and 9, reads until his eyes refuse to stay open.”
Christians like Trees. Who bear fruit as they learn to trust
Christians like Trees. Rooted in trust and faith
Blessed is the man
who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked
or stand in the way of sinners
or sit in the seat of mockers.
But his delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither.
Whatever he does prospers.
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither.
Whatever he does prospers.
Don’t you love this image of stability and permanance–a tree planted by streams of water, yielding its fruit in season, with leaves which do not wither, prospering in whatever it does?
To be like a tree, with deep roots, not moved and shaken by the winds of chance, adversity or even good fortune.
There is the opposite image in Jeremiah.
Jer 17:5 This is what the Lord says:“Cursed is the one who trusts in man,mwho depends on flesh for his strengthand whose heart turns away from the Lord.n
Jer 17:6 He will be like a bush in the wastelands;he will not see prosperity when it comes.He will dwell in the parched placeso of the desert,in a saltp land where no one lives.
Jer 17:7 “But blessedq is the man who trustsr in the Lord,whose confidence is in him.
Jer 17:8 He will be like a tree planted by the waterthat sends out its roots by the stream.sIt does not fear when heat comes;its leaves are always green.It has no worries in a year of droughttand never fails to bear fruit.”
Jer 17:6 He will be like a bush in the wastelands;he will not see prosperity when it comes.He will dwell in the parched placeso of the desert,in a saltp land where no one lives.
Jer 17:7 “But blessedq is the man who trustsr in the Lord,whose confidence is in him.
Jer 17:8 He will be like a tree planted by the waterthat sends out its roots by the stream.sIt does not fear when heat comes;its leaves are always green.It has no worries in a year of droughttand never fails to bear fruit.”
It’s interesting to see how seriously God takes trusting in oneself rather than trusting in him. The one who trusts in flesh, himself, or in other people, is actually cursed, according to this passage. “He will not see prosperity when it comes.”
How many people do you know who are prosperous, but do not see prosperity, either through over-spending, through bad luck, or through fear, or miserliness?
But the one who trusts his dreams to God does not fear in a year of drought, its leaves are always green, he always bears fruit.
Trusting in God, of course, implies leaving our dearest dreams in his hands. He may say yes, bless and fructify them. Or, he may have other dreams for us.
Francine Prose on the pleasures of writing non-fiction vs. fiction
Art, a staff to help us bear the ills of life.
I am looking forward to spending the day at the Ashmolean tomorrow.
Watching Kenneth Clark’s Civilization has rekindled my interest in art.
Art is a staff to help man bear the ills of life. It sweetens life. Since man can only concentrate on one thought at a time, it temporarily drives grief from your mind, leading to a temporary forgetting of grief. Like spirituality, it is a life-enricher and life-enhancer, the sugar and MSG of the mind.
In my opinion, Art is one of the greatest sweeteners, among the sweetest things, in our human experience!! Along with friendship.
And here endeth my rhapsody!!
A very relaxing Friday evening writer's party
Watched Zoe in Noel Coward’s manic Hay Fever, then went to a writer’s party (smuggling the girls, who were not invited, into a corner of the beautiful North Oxford garden.) Our host, the designer for the current Doctor Who, being filmed near Cardiff, had designed his garden using clever tricks of perspective to make it appear larger. He showed the girls interesting architectural elements salvaged from skips which he’s using in this Dr. Who.
Had some really good, congenial literary conversations which does not always happen at these parties.
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