poverty

Wading through fifty United Nations cases on successful business strategies to reach the poor, from cement factories in Indonesia to pharmaceuticals in Africa, and trying very hard to suppress the faint glimmer of hope that again, letting a thousand flowers bloom might be the only way to muddle along in the process to alleviate, and END poverty. What am I going to do when I can no longer do this stuff either?

irises

Bought deep-purple irises and white stargazer lilies, the scent dense and rich and flooding my tiny room. I do so love flowers, but only very certain kinds. No daisies and gerberas, baby's breath or hyacinths or any of those bright and pretty flowers. Lilies (always stargazer, never calla and never any other colour than the funereal white) above all, bright yellow daffodils, deep red-black roses, irises always and endless lavender, and dying tulips which I think are so much more extravagant than tulips in their prime, in their overblown state, pneumatic, like Dolly Parton now and not before.

Spent last night reading from an old compilation of the New Yorker, Slight Rebellion off Madison (Salinger) and Autobiography by Fitzgerald (F. Scott). Written way back in the sixtie, I still think that Salinger is the standard to which all coming-of-age novels aspire. And my favourite of all of his work (notwithstanding the unread Hapworth 16, 1924 to be dug up from the bowels of Widener before I leave), is definitely For Esme with Love and Squalor.

It is time to look unflinchingly into the future and march forward. First, the taxes.

growing

this is how I feel today: like a grumpy polar bear ready to rumble.

The funniest thing i heard in two days was courtesy of a certain editor of an indian daily who asked me in all seriousness, "Am I a dwarf or am I a child"? I am still pondering this question now. Is there anything left to grow into?

homie is my homie

am feeling thoroughly beaten up and nauseous. I can't quite pinpoint why, but the overload of work to do seems rather monstrous, and procrastination the only way to seriously deal with it.
Hopefully the yoga class today won't turn into some crazed trampolining class with projectile missiles and I can be at peace.

Thanks to JP, I now have tickets to see... drumroll please... MICHAEL ONDAATJE AT THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY!!!!! Thank you thank you.

What else? In class with the homie today, and it came quite unbidden to me, that Christabel Lamotte in Possession must be modelled off Dorothy Sayer's letters, in the use of the witch in the turret and the madwoman in the attic and the words that burn the paper they are written on. And both, highbrow literary detective fiction stories, are not grounded in any sort of reality about love and life; instead they are fantasies, cleverly disguised as stiff-upper-lip romances. I can't quite explain it more than that. I fell in love with these books, of Ash and Christabel, of Peter and Harriet. But the real writing lies with the Virgin in the Garden, and in the letters, and they are bitter, thwarted and full of pain.

Never mind. The weekend was full of alcohol-induced reality, and I am still feeling exhausted by it all. I wish I could go somewhere, to a house by the sea, with the wind on the sand, and great grey gloomy skies, and the call of an albatross, with just my books, endless tea, and gazing through hazy windowpanes.

letters to john cournos

I am waiting in the eaves of Houghton Library, Harvard’s rare manuscript collection, to uncover eleven original letters written by Dorothy Sayers to her Russian lover, John Cournos, with whom she had a brief, intense and bitter love affair in the early 20s, just after the first war. I passed through maximum security procedures before I was allowed to enter the hallowed halls where these letters, now about a hundred years old, are housed. There is one lone scholar here, working laboriously away. We are only allowed pencils and paper, and absolutely nothing else. I feel like a scholar, and the brief honor it entails. What it would mean to be cloistered away, working quietly as though in a dream, living between worlds, and between lives, bridging histories.

The papers arrive, carefully folded into sheaves of tissue. Among them are some original photographs. The Library tells us that the records of those who view its collections are kept for a hundred years. I would like to know who else has requested these, taken it out of the quivering tissue, viewed it wonderingly. Written by quill, on plain white lined paper, now faded except for the ink which has lasted, with the dates carefully cut out.

The first letter begins like this.

“Dear John,
I’ve heard you’re married. I hope you are very very happy, with someone you can really love. I went over the rocks. As you know, I was going there rapidly, but I preferred it shouldn’t be with you, but with somebody I didn’t really care twopence for. I couldn’t have stood a catastrophe with you. It was a worse catastrophe than I intended because I went and had a young son (thank god it wasn’t a daughter) and the man’s affection couldn’t stand that strain and he chucked me and went off with someone else!”

And then later

“.. Now why in the world should you want to meet me? Last time we met, you told me with brutal frankness that you had no use for my conversation. Do you think my misfortunes will have added new lustre to my wit? If I saw you, I should probably cry, and I’ve been crying for about three years now and am heartily weary of the exercise.

And then
“I wanted to have children quite normally and ordinarily. I wanted yours, and as you repeatedly refused, I chucked the whole business. I didn’t want the Beast’s, but having got it, I felt perfectly affectionate to the Beast and would have stuck to him faithfully if he hadn’t so to speak, turned around and stamped on me”.
“I’m sorry you found our last conversation dull. It was rather too desperately exciting for me- the last whack that chucked me over the cliff. ….
“ Final problem: Tea or no tea? It’s going to hurt like hell to see you, because Judah, with all thy faults I love thee still.
So you see the lover has to be companionable, only then again, if he was too nice one would fall in love with him and that would be vile. One can’t be ecstatic about something which involves telling lies to one’s charwoman.
“It’s odd that I get on so much better with you when you aren’t there. I suppose what I had for you was one of those sorts of object hero worships and that was why all the backstairs part of the business was so completely unthinkable.”

A Postscript
“I reopen this on returning from the film of “peter Pan’ to submit to you a very serious difficulty. Supposing one is ever able to give Anthony a home or a parent or two- will it become necessary to his peace of mind to see “Peter Pan”? Will he feel a pariah if he is the only child who has never seen “Peter Pan”? Because I absolutely refuse to take him. I am quite unable to sit through a Barrie play without grinding my teeth. There is a kind of leering unwholesomeness about the Barrie mentality which makes me heave. Has any child ever been heard of that does not like Peter Pan? But- is a child who does not like “Peter Pan” a monster? I should not like to be mother to a monster. Please give me your opinion on this agitating question. “

“You broke you own image in my heart you see. You stood to me for beauty and truth, and you demanded ugliness and barrenness and it seemed now that even in doing so, you were just being. You told me over and over again “I cannot marry anyone”, “I will not be responsible for anybody’s life”, and “I will not be responsible for bringing any lives into the world”, “I do not love you”. My dear, you stripped love down to the barest and most brutal physical contact- it is nothing- any man would do for that. I said to myself: “There is nothing I can give him beyond what the finest harlot in the street could provide. Our life would be one dirty shift after the other, with nothing in it but an agony of emptiness for both of us”.
“To be just, I never meant him to be more than what he wanted to be- an episode. If it had not been for the accident of Anthony, I couldn’t have blamed him for leaving me. He is not a good man, but he never deceived me. I understood from you that you, also, only wanted to be an episode and I didn’t want you to be that. I am sorry if I mistook the things you said, they didn’t seem capable of any other interpretation but as I have been so bitterly punished by God already, need you really dance on the body?”

“It frightens me to be so unhappy. I thought it would get better, but I think every day is worse than the last, and I’m always afraid that they’ll chuck me out of the office because I’m working so badly. And I haven’t even the last resort of doing away with myself because what would poor Anthony do then, poor thing?”

“But then, I still had some hope and some faith and desire for better things. But I swear that if you had offered me love, or even asked for love, you should have had everything. Not easily, because I did not want to commit so bitter a sin, but you never asked me to love you, never said a word to me of anything but bodily desire. ..If you remember, I offered to marry you by English law only, so that you could be free in your own country. “

“I am so terrified of emotion now, and it makes me feel so ill and work so badly that a quite business like beginning would be easiest for me.”

“Well, well, the prizes all go to the women who “play their cards well” but if they can only be won in that way, I would rather lose the game. “

reading

It was widely noted, upon the passing of Arthur C. Clarke that he was a renowned science fiction writer. The Times wrote adulatory articles amongst others, but not a single mention of the pedophilia was to be found in any respectable journal. I have many problems with Clarke as a man, but I also believe, unfortunately, that a distinction should be made between one's private life and one's public life.

Have been submerged in reading, watching, writing, and breathing in the silence. It has expanded my heart right now, like nothing else could. I live in many worlds now, in Old pre-war Britain, amongst the cobblestones of Merton and Magdalen, watching two lovers embrace,
Placetne magistra?
Placet.

And then into Trinidadian Port of Spain, watching a young boy married on the proof of a letter, at 13 to a young girl who lives with a large family, and his quest for his own identity, making signs, that say Trespassers Forbidden and watching his clumsy grabs at significance, watching what Naipaul has said, that in postcolonial societies, empire has denied humans the chance to make a real life, a significant life.

And then most favourite of all, into the early seventies, into northern California, into ranch country and seeing three people who grew up together split up after a single act of violence, watching one boy going into the gambling dens of the time, another fleeing into France to piece together another's life, and always the silence between the words.

All done listening to Tamil music from the 80s, sung by the irrepressible S.P. Balasubramaniam.

If I could preserve this moment, and more, this feeling, I really do believe that this is all I need. And that this may be all that I come to have, at least, that which is in my control.

We'll have the life we knew we would.

Spring!

The housemates are gone, the friend who came to stay is gone, and I spent the last three hours on hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor the old fashioned way after decades of band-aid swiffer use. Then the bathroom, every surface bleached and sanitized, the bathtub scrubbed with heavy-duty cleaner. Every dish in the overflowing sink washed, chucked into the dishwasher and put away; kitchen tops and stoves cleaned after two months of neglect. Then the living room, hoovering every last stray crumb, sweeping stubborn dust swirls from corners and arranging cushions. Corridors, swept, mopped and Pledge-ed. Then my room, the worst for the last. Two loads of laundry. Every book taken off the floor, recovered from under the bed, recovered from cracks between bed and wall, and bed and window, (27 in total), arranged in piles of what-to-return (read-horrendously overdue), what to (ambitiously) read, what I MUST read RIGHT NOW. After I could see the floor again, it was swept, mopped and sanitized. In a burst of overdrive, I even sanitized my chair (leave antibacterial disinfectant on leather for 3 minutes and then wipe off) and my computer screen with special cleaner. Threw away three months worth of paper and met my desk surface again. Took out the trash. Superglue-ed (which I had the foresight to buy at CVS today) a piece of my shoe that was falling off). Put the flowers in new water. Watered the long-suffering Edith (my cactus). And put my aroma therapy burner to work.

And now I am at my desk, a little bewildered at this springcleaning fit, which came and shook me like a rag, and has left me now spent, with of course, the task du jour, my dissertation to hand in a draft before the final, before the morning. Procrastination, your name is woman. To think that just last week, at precisely this time, I was at the picture above, at the Cape of Good Hope.

confusion

Epistemology and Ontology are the most basic levels at which theories can be compared, and I still, at this ripe old age, have no idea what it means. (I get teleology, ontology, and semantics all confused in my head). So I decided to write it down.

a) Epistemology: the branch of philosophy that investigates the possibility, origins, nature and extent of human knowledge.

b) Ontology: a branch of metaphysics that deals with what is being?

c) Teleology: The study of final causes, particularly in relation to design or purpose in nature

kim

When I am here, at the heart of this great college, listening to this lecture from a Parsi intellectual, about Kipling’s Kim, and he highlights a passage, that begins, “And the great fields of the Punjab rolled by”; it should smack of colonialism, written by a defender of Empire, a postulate of the white man’s burden, but here, shadowed as we are by snow, and denuded trees, with only the barest hint of Asia, carried by reminiscent travelers that wash up on our shores, it is a remnant of a future that might not yet come to pass. “I am Kim, I am Kim, I am Kim, and what is Kim?”

A Tale Of God's Will (Requiem for Katrina)

Dear Terence,

I wanted to say thank you again for taking the time out of your busy schedule, coming to Harvard and playing for a bunch of people who don’t know much about jazz, but who know a lot about work in homelessness, education, health, policy and government. We have been receiving emails all day from the proud few who stayed on to listen to your talk, about how that part of the Conference, was enough to make the whole day worthwhile. Did you know we had a team from Japan that flew in to hear you? That was the Japanese guy in the front row who asked you the first question: “How do you make jazz?”.

What you said when you talked to us was true. All you gotta do is to get one person. That’s all you have to do. Well you got more than one person buddy. You got some of the ‘right’ people, if I may say such a thing. There are requests already to know more about the Thelonius Monk Institute, from people who WORK at Harvard Business School and questions about collaboration with the institute, and even questions about Herbie Hancock!! I will pass them on in a more formal fashion, but I just wanted you to know first. (My favourite comment was from someone who said she cried during your performance, and another who said you brought a raw dose of humanity to the conference).

I can only apologize for what must have seemed like something rather unplanned, given that you’re used to high-profile events and, you came to a student run event which was just being held together at the seams. Well, even though it was student-run, it was 40% attended by professionals, and the rest were Harvard students, so at the risk of sounding arrogant, they’re people who’re going to find life a little easier, and will have a strong sense of service especially when they see people like you, playing their heart out, spreading the word about New Orleans, and talking and talking and never giving up, despite how tired or discouraged you may be. So you have made one more small step, in changing the world.

When I first saw you talk with Mitch in New Orleans way back in November, I thought to myself, this is a guy who’s got the Bill Clinton touch! He makes it seem like he’s only speaking to you, but in fact he’s speaking to a whole room. It made you suspect!! It was the first time that I formally heard of you, but then I went back and watched Spike Lee’s stuff, and there you were, at every moment, when the heart needed words that the mind could not express. And then I heard your music and I thought, whatever anyone can fake, there’s no way you can fake that.

I am from Sri Lanka. You may not have heard of it, but in Dec 2006, a tsunami came and washed away 60,000 people. And I was there right afterwards, and I stayed for 2 years, and I saw the things that I saw again this past November in New Orleans, and I was so surprised because I thought, this is the United States! There’s no way that this could happen in the United States? I thought it only happened in countries like mine, where the rich were so rich and everyone else was so poor, and when all their uninsured homes got flooded away, the government let five star hotels buy beachfront properties, instead of giving it to fishermen who’d lived there, right next to the sea, for generations. And no amount of money from abroad was enough to compensate for the failures of the government and the sense of abandonment.


But it happens everywhere. I’m still trying to record it down, to remember it as honestly as it happened. Which brings me to my last point. I have always wanted to be a writer. Whether I will have the courage to pursue the truth of that journey is another story. But listening to your music, which so exactly charted the journey of my heart and soul those two years, I was silent. Because you are a true artist, and I can’t even imagine how difficult it must have been to compose something that you can only see with your eyes closed. I don’t have the words to really say what I want to express, but I found a truth in your music that I rarely find in art. And I can only imagine how exhausting and difficult it must be to relive that every time you perform. So finally, for the dedication and perseverance that you give to your art and your music, I commend you, as someone who dares to hope to follow in your footsteps. What you are able to do with your music, and the commitment to New Orleans that you have which is evident in what you speak, is true example to me, when I get discouraged about my own country, and about my lack of courage to follow my heart.

rajnikant

"Your needs are going to feed her needs until all there's left is a Wilson-shaped chalk outline on the floor"

I have been waiting to use that line on someone since I heard it a week ago and I busted it out today! Yay!

A discussion on Rajnikant yesterday got me thinking. Why was I, self-labelled thinking woman, professing (what was undoubtedly my father's projected) love for Rajnikant in front of a group of very attractive woman. Sometimes I feel like the unloved Southern cousin of dusky skin, and outgrown teeth and frizzy hair next to Northern women with olive skin, dark obsidian hair and a certain je ne sais quoi to them. And then just to make sure the balance is firmly tilted in my favour, I profess adoration for a certain gentleman who has most emphatically lost all his hair (and now has hair implants that lie in a hairsprayed comma over his forehead so he can dramatically flip it back- this gesture btw was during his heydays where every young man in bell bottoms grew out a comma of hair to do the same, including this author's father), is darker than night, was a bus-conductor (one step away from women's tampon dispenser) and is skinnier than a twig, subsisting on a diet entirely composed of alcohol and pattu (cow dung ash).

But! Appearances can be deceptive. For while the rest of the world may have hangups about his appearance, he certainly does not. In fact there's a whole Tamil song devoted to the way he walks (thangamahan from Baasha). There is a whole sub-industry devoted to replicating his khaki autorickshaw driver-policeman-bus conductor shirts. There's his smile, full of bad teeth, that somehow inspires wellbeing. There's above all, his confidence, his energy, his Lutheran stance of : Here I stand, I can do no other in his movies. Truth, justice and the American way! Here's to Rajnikant and many more really bad movies.

barf

Harvard-Wide Graduate Student Speed-Dating Event This event is open to the first 120 graduate students who register and make a payment. Registration opens on Sunday, Feb. 17th at 9 pm. Participants will have the opportunity to speed-date 20 individuals of the opposite sex and the opportunity to mingle with many more. This will be the first of similar events that the HGC would like to host for individuals seeking to meet other graduate students at our University. When: Friday, Feb. 22nd from 6 pm to 8 pm Where: NEWS Restaurant (South Station on Red Line); 150 Kneeland St Boston, MA 02111 RSVP: www.harvardspeeddating.comCost: 10 dollars via paypal Feel free to contact any of the four of us with any questions and/or suggestions. You may also subscribe to our listserv at http://calists.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/hgc_events

Study Questions

Printed at the back of Elimination Dance, a small book of a single poem by (who else) M. Ondaatje, which contains among other things, graphics of regions in Canada where Brian Mulroney has been burned in effigy or pissed on from a great height during a motorcade, are the following study questions. (In both English and French, as per Canada)

Study Questions
1. Does the author's fuck-you tone contribute to the theme of the poem as a whole?
2. Compare Elimination Dance with "The Rape of the Lock'-with special emphasis on the use of zeugma
3. Is the author's use of simple language a conscious attempt to mask his social agenda OR is he an unconscious victim of his own prejudices?
4. Diana Whitehouse-where are you? I knew you when I was 14 years old. I heard our name mentioned over the loudspeaker at Heathrow Airport in 1989. Please contact me c/o Brick Books, Box 38, Station B, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 4V3
5. Does the figure of the mountie in the poem function as a textual censor-sensor?
6. Is the central theme of choice an illustration of rational elitism or animistic determination?


Questionnaire d’étude

1. Est-ce que le ton ‘va-te-faire-foutre’ de l’auteur contribue au thème de ce poème?
2. Ecrivez une dissertation qui compare La Danse eliminatoire à la Boucle de Cheveux dérobée – soulignant l’usage du zeugme.
3. Croyez-vous que l’auteur se rend compte que son langage simple déguise ses perspectives socials où est-il une victim inconsciente de ses propres préjugés?
4. Diane Whitehouse- ou êtes-vous? Je vous connaissais quand j’avais 14 ans. J’ai entendu votre nom sur les haut-parleurs de l’aérogare Heathrow en 1989. Prière de me contacter a/s Brick Books, CP 38, Succursale B, London, Ontario, N6A 4V3, Canada
5. Le Personnage de la Gendarmerie royale dans le texte, agit-il en tant que censeur ou en tant que phénomène sensorial?
6. Croyez-vous que le thème du choix, sujet central du texte, fasse prevue d’un élitisme rationnel ou d’un déterminisme animiste?

Poothathamby's Treason

“The Governor in Jaffna had two Mudaliyars by the name of Don Manuel Anthirasy and Don Lewis Poothathamby. An untoward incident in their families has been the subject of a drama. Anthirasy being taken by the beauty of Poothathamby’s wife sent word to her to pay him a private visit. In reply the lady sent a broomstick and a pair of old slippers which made Anthirasy very indignant. He waited for an Opportunity to revenge this insult. He as Co-Mudaliyar, asked Poothathamby to sign a blank paper which he did in a weak moment. Then Anthirasy wrote out a letter on this blank paper offering help to the Portuguese. Anthirasy was in high favour with the Governor and brought about a trial by night (which was against the rule) and hail Poothathamby was sentenced to death. Before any appeal could be made against the hasty sentence to the authorities in Colombo, poor Poothathamby was put to death. The Governor and Anthirasy however were at length summoned to Colombo. Anthirasy who went by land was killed by an elephant and the Governor who went by sea threw himself overboard”.

Notes on Jaffna, American Ceylon Mission Press, Tellipalai, Ceylon 1923

to jp, with love

As students of policy, we are taught to design optimal policy based on robust statistical analysis, infused with some ideals of basic human rights, equality, perhaps even democracy and social justice now and then. But we are not taught, and few of us seek, to understand the visceral impact of such policies, whether it is of foreign intervention, denial of access to housing, food, water and sanitation, the tolerance of torture and so on and so forth. We are also limited by the affluence of our surroundings, and the paucity of our own imagination, to fully experience the radical life-altering effects, or the difference between life and death, that the policies we may influence come to have. As the feminist agenda voiced nearly half a century ago, and what we have forgotten, is that the personal is the political.

Ultimately this is what the postcolonial novel, with characters engaged in conflicting internal dialogues that are writ large at the level of the nation, does. It gives a voice to those whose voices are long gone. It takes a bottom up view, and not a top-down policy view, and addresses the very real question of morality, the idea that dare not speak its name in the hallowed corridors of policy. In the end it concludes that a true resolution of what is right and wrong cannot arise out of dogmas about imperialism, religion or ethno cultural hegemony, but must arise out of an unflinching examination of the human condition and the dictates of its time. When a novel has survived this interrogation, when its reflection of its historical moment has rung true throughout the ages, then it becomes a classic, worthy of our time and study, to understand more of the great expanding mysteries of the human condition. Without this primordial knowledge, the study of policy becomes a mere exercise in academic futility.

ash wednesday

Today was Ash Wednesday, and was interesting to see those who chose to brand themselves. (Tradition demands, and as usual it is always interesting to see how tradition is followed in former colonies more than in former empires, that Catholics attend mass in the morning, at which ash is marked onto their foreheads, which should remain for a day. So more than a few people, for a secular policy school, walked around with blackened foreheads today.)

The other anecdote which I truly find eccentric, and it is not many that qualify to that aspirational label, in my books is of a corporate finance professor at MIT, whose class a good friend attends. Said professor, by name of Asquith (whose famous theory shows that stocks that are heavily shorted tend to underperform in the long run), conducts lessons from a bed. Due to back problems, the Professor cannot stand or sit for more than 5 minutes at a time, and for the past ten years, has a bed wheeled into the auditorium, from which he lectures, prone, with his head propped up on one hand, and a dutiful assistant scurries about on the blackboard behind him. To intellect, academia, and the ability to do what you want!

Heart of Darkness

Watching the returns come in yesterday was strangely disappointing. I would have had a lot more to say about politics and presidential elections way back in the day, but right now, I think that plus ca change, plus c'est le meme. Roared through Heart of Darkness yesterday and through Chinua Achebe's critical essay on same, labelled: Images of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. There is a lot that could be said about this novel (indeed what hasn't?) and I am not going to add my tuppenceworth right now. But in class this morning, with a wonderful, energetic (sometimes self-congratulatory) postcolonial theorist, I discovered this: that at the Berlin Conference in 1885, when the Congo was divided up between France, Portugal and Belgium, hosted by Bismarck, the major part of Congo, was given to King Leopold, and not to the state of Belgium. It became his own private playground, outside of any supranational power, any civil administration and any constitution. It was raped, pillaged and was a centre of slave trading. Hence the great novel, Heart of Darkness.

I apologize in advance to the readers for the next few weeks will likely be talking about certain books and literature, for this is one chance in a lifetime, for me to recover what another lost youth could have looked like.

bowel movements

Descended into the depths of an ionic/doric column encased faux roman building, otherwise known as Widener Library, to discover an old interview in a now-defunct tattered African journal, with Michael Ondaatje. One hour later, I emerged victorious and slightly dazed, for the quality of the interview, the unguarded responses, was well worth the hour spent in the bowels of Harvard Yard.

I know that (all four) readers of this blog are vividly acquainted with my obsession with Ondaatje, but perhaps not all are acquainted as well with his oeuvres, and so here is a standalone passage, from Anil's Ghost, which might hint to others, of greater works behind.

He was staying at his aunt's house in Boralesgamuwa, and she and her friends were playing bridge on the long porch that surrounded the house. He came towards them carrying a lit candle, shielding the flame. He placed it on a side table a yard or so to the right of them. No one noticed this. He drifted back into the house. A few minutes later Gamini crawled on his belly with his air rifle through the grass, stalking his way from the bottom of the garden towards the house. He was wearing a small camouflage hat of leaves to disguise his presence even further. He could almost hear the four women bidding, having halfhearted conversations.

He estimated they were twenty yards away. He loaded the air rifle and positioned himself like a sniper, elbows down, legs at angles to give him balance and firmness, and fired. Nothing was hit. He reloaded and settled in to aim again. This time he hit the side table. One of the women looked up, cocking her head, but she could see nothing around her. What he wished to do was shoot out the flame of the candle with the pellet, but the next shot flew low, only a few inches above the red porch floor, and hit an ankle. At that instant, simultaneous with the gasp from Mrs. Coomaraswamy, his aunt looked up and saw him with the air rifle hugged against his cheek and shoulder, aiming right at them.

chronoschism

written about Anil's Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje,

This novel is characterized by those abrupt breaks in time, that Ursula Heisse calls , "chronoschisms", ruptures that postmodern novelists, unlike their modernist predecessors, refuse to assimilate to the "unifying time of the individual mind". That is, the politics of Sri Lanka, seem to reflect back postmodern notions of the collapse of grand narratives, the fragility and impermanence of identity, the failure of history to provide us with a coherent account of our origins, and the moral ambiguities of action and character in a world where cause and effect are endlessly complex. That nothing lasts, that granite monuments crumble, seems to drive him to value the briefest fragments of time, to respect the moment of absolute love or generosity, the flash of intuition, the graceful walk of a young woman who will not survive another day. The artist's ability to identify fragments of beauty and nobility, even in times of terror, matches the scientist's ability to identify "permanent truths, the same for Troy as for Colombo," in the mineral traces of a soil sample.

Margaret Scanlan

Whimper anew

The end of the week, to paraphrase Eliot, tapered off, not with a whimper, but with a bang, trekking out to Longwood to meet a f(r)iend from high school, (as C says, what assed-out high school did you go to anyway?! why are your high-school friends everywhere except Singapore!?) in the rain, sleet and snow and just about lost the will to live but managed to see a part of Boston that was urban and inner city, and with its own energy, optimism and problems. Missed the debate on Thursday night, but had a fascinating discussion about housing, mixed-income housing, and mixed-land use, because the problems in rebuilding is that public housing is merely a physical structure which is no doubt essential, but does not by itself solve the problems of education, health, poverty and racial inequality. Instead public housing must be thought of as a site, where other services should also be brought in by government to congregate, and must be cross-incentivized to do sol. Unfortunately it rarely does.

Then watched Juno at 3pm with friends because it was Friday and there was nothing else to do. (I also bumped into Robin Williams the night before at Red House, a charming restaurant with a crackling fireplace where copious amounts of wine was imbibed- he was battered, newly out of rehab, all hairy, but with an irrepressible twinkle in his bright eyes). I finished my case which took 9 hours of bleary-eyed work, far more than ever anticipated. And more importantly; WHO'S YOUR DADDY?!! Because I secured the redoubtable Terence Blanchard, a Grammy Award winning jazz musician to come and play at the conference, from his new Grammy-nominated trumpet album: Tales Of God's Will; A Requiem to Katrina. (http://www.terenceblanchard.com/).

Then Friday night was spent at a 5 hour dinner with M and C, getting drunker and drunker, sillier and sillier, talking about a certain very attractive lieutenant-colonel in the airforce (who does not vote, which sends C into tizzies everytime, sketches apples and trees, separately and is from a family of union members), classes, and our quadrangle of love. And we are getting ever closer to the end, at the end of the first week of class, and talk of graduation and the summer and families meeting families are in the air. In that spirit, here is a poem I have posted before...

God Abandons Antony,

When suddenly, at the midnight hour
an invisible troupe is heard passing
with exquisite music, with shouts
your fortune that fails you now, your works
that have failed, the plans of your life
that have all turned out to be illusions, do not
mourn in vain

As if long prepared, as if courageous,
bid her farewell, the Alexandria that is leaving
Above all, do not be fooled, do not tell
yourself,
it was a dream, that your ears deceived you;
do not stoop to such vain hopes.
As if long prepared, as if courageous,
as it becomes you who have been worthy of
such a city,
approach the window with firm step,
and with emotion, but not
with the entreaties and complaints of the
coward,
as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds,
the exquisite instruments of the mystical
troupe,
and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are
losing.

Constantine. P. Cavafy, 1911