food!

C and I made dinner yesterday, to wit, the following: watermelon, basil, mint, watercress and feta cheese salad, followed by cava beans, spinach and pasta salad, followed by roast nectarines with a vanilla bean sauce, with of course, copious amounts of zinfandel (and when that ran out), pinot grigio and shandies. The menu tonight, spinach and red onion salad with maple-dijon vinaigrette, roast salmon with fig and onion jam, and sour cream and cinnamon cake.

Gardening

On the return from Quebec City, we drove through the rolling hills of Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire (where we stopped off at a true-blue diner), and back into Cambridge. Opened the post to see that my package of Jo Malone samples had arrived and now, having sprayed White Jasmine, Amber & Lavender, Orange Blossom, Nectarine and Honey, and French Lime Blossom on me, I am happily content, smelling like an English Garden, writing my very last paper.

Vive La Quebec

Am in Vieux Quebec City now. Who had a clue that this existed in North America, this old town, that looks like it was plucked out of fairy-tale Berlin, Prague and Paris, where everything is in French (as the proud Quebecois and their independence movement will attest to), and where above all, the food is in French. Although it has been busy with work, being holed up in cafes in Montreal and Quebec on cobblestoned streets with horse carriages passing by, with endless chocolat chaud, cafe au lait and croissants, with rain pattering off the grey stones, with the sun bursting out of clouds, ricocheting off an ancient chateau, and every arrowing spire in the city, with tiny art galleries and Catholic churches around every corner, with Nina Simone singing in every cafe, it feels like I have walked into an alternate universe, and the past and the future both seem very far away.

negating my ass

I am valiantly trying to write my hardest paper yet: a paper for which I receive no credit, which topic I have to conjure out of thin air, which will be read by one of the few people whose intellectual opinion I consider relevant, and which is daunting because it is about literature, which I have enjoyed as a reader, but never as a critical theorist (and thank god for that).

For example, consider the sentence below:
"What Hegel established is, then, that violence is a necessary moment in the history of the recognition of human freedom. This history initiates a contradictory outcome: it asserts freedom through the negation of freedom. However slavery, generates the conditions of its own emancipation so that the process moves toward the mutual cancellation of servitude and domination. It is a negation of the negation: The negation that instituted bondage is negated in its turn."

I have read this paragraph 3 times and I still don't understand it. ARRGHHGHGHGHGH.

2 more papers before the conferral of a degree- so close and yet so far.

An Application For Credit For PostColonial Literature

The course is a rigorous examination of political and social identity as seen through the prism of personal experience, and taught by the leading postcolonial theorist in the world. We examine the works of Frantz Fanon for example, a Algerian revolutionary who wrote the discourse on Algerian independence and use him to understand the role of violence in transitioning societies such as India, South Africa and Sri Lanka. We examine the results of Empire, as seen through the works of Conrad and Bronte and analyze how they create a dependent society which, when given freedom, fractures into internecine strife due to an inability to self-govern. We examine black history, through the works of Jean Rhys and Toni Morrison, and analyze what happens post-independence for oppressed communities, and the struggle to rebuild themselves, their society and their identity. These are broad topics and we examine how they interlock, create cleavages and result in how identity is formed, and how personal identity translates into a political consciousness.As to how they are relevant to an MPP degree, I find here at Harvard that many think of policy as a series of economic and theoretic prescriptions. Understanding how individuals and communities are shaped by policy is, I believe, integral to crafting humane and sustainable policies. Coming from Sri Lanka, a country to which I intend to return, and which has been shaped by war and by a colonial experience, I find it essential to take ONE course here at Harvard, which allows me to explore all these themes above and reflect on how they may shape a country.

Cry, beloved country

The City

You said: "I'll go to another city, go to another shore
find another city better than this one
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead

How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them
totally."
You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighbourhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things
elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Constantine P. Cavafy, translated by Edmund Keeley & Phillip Sherrard

A Bus Named Desire

What a night! North Carolina called for Barack, and Indiana with only a sliver of a margin of victory for Hillary. It has been the most astonishing of campaigns, and of primaries to date. While at many moments I have been numbed by the sheer drudgery of it all, at many other moments too I have been excited and thrilled by the prospects of change in government, of youth turning out in droves, of contests between a black man and a white woman, and most possibly of all, of hope. I started the campaign a fervent Hillary supporter, but the dial has now swung to Obama, especially after his speech on race. If he could grow up in this country, run in politics, and still give a speech like that- then that's it. And Hillary with her ridiculous proposals on a gas tax holiday, and her attempts at populism amongst working-class white voters is just alienating now. I relished the prospect of a fight for the nomination, but now I join the clamouring for her to step down, for the party to rally around Obama, for the national mood to turn towards the general election. And to many friends who have literally taken the semester off school in all but name, campaigning in rural North Carolina, in Pittsburgh, in New Hampshire, running call shops out of their garages and mobilizing the campaign; a massive congratulations for the ardour, the commitment and the belief in public service.

xobni

So I have just downloaded this app called Xobni, for those of you who are Outlook users and have clunky interfaces, (read the NY Times article on it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/technology/05xobni.html?em&ex=1210305600&en=ec7ba19942188f37&ei=5087%0A)

It tells me that my number 1 ranked most frequently emailed person is my co-chair of the Conference. The total tally? 1739 emails sent over six months over 1244 different conversations.

And you ask me why I needed a Blackberry.

let a thousand flowers bloom

Took the afternoon off with C, and we hiked through Boston, including the never-before-ventured-into Jamaica Plain. C's plan was to go to the arboretum, (a place like a topiary, aviary but focused of course on trees), and set on sprawling acreage in JP, at the heart of beautiful parkland. So in no short order, the following specimens were noted and surreptiously smelt, ; rosehips that were not yet in bloom, wisteria, seven different specimens of lilacs, elms, sassafras (which apparently goes into root beer until they discovered it could give you cancer), some japanese cherry trees, willows, violets, grape hyacinths, and of course tulips which are everywhere in bloom. C, the budding horticulturist, could identify at sight all of the above, whereas I of course, vainly ran to the copper tags and feigned knowledge.

my girl

"We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience"- The English Patient

The reading by Michael Ondaatje under the quiet cavernous New York Public Library and the discussion that followed represented a four year break in the time that I had seen him. There was an astonishing passage, hallucinatory according to one reviewer, of a boy on a horse riding through an eclipse. Though I have only read the book Divisadero once, the reading of it was like opening a wound again, the scar the memory of it.

There are many flaws with Ondaatje's style of writing, which I am not oblivious to; the inability to pitch dialogue, the inadequacy of the political and moral vision, which is found in the best of Naipaul, the perfection of every character; that is to say, a lack of mundane, annoying characteristics (no one is a habitual nose-picker in his novels) which epicizes the characters. All of that is true. But there is an unbearable compassion in his writing, a true recognition of pain, loss and betrayal, a haunting that is there in every story, and is left like the memory of lingering smoke in every reader. For the sheer humanity and understanding in his novels, for his homage to the complexity of how the past links up with the future, and the present, there is no one quite like him. And all of that is leaving aside his much feted language; quiet sentences precede quiet sentences of clarity and beauty, until in the middle of a paragraph, at the end of a sentence, there is a sudden starburst of beauty that verges on pain; because the revelation on the page is so true, so unexpected, and now, having read it, changes life so imperceptibly.

And with all of that, I am plunging into Divisadero again.

the postcolonial wretched

"Each age has its peculiar opacities and its urgent missions. The parts we play in the design and direction of historical transformations are shadowed by the contingency of events and the quality of our characters. Sometimes we break the mold; at others, our will is broken. What enables us to aspire to the fraught and fervent desire for freedom is the belief that human beings are capable of imagining what Fanon once described as a "time [that] must no longer e that of the moment or the next harvest but rather of the rest of the world",
Homi Bhabha, in his introduction to the Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon