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

H and K

Having just watched Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, I can safely concur with the review of an institution as august as the New York Times in saying that this, pardon the oxymoron, is an intelligent stoner raunch comedy. Kal Penn as an actor has never appealed to me: even in comic roles he seems to be constantly overacting with his timing just that little bit off, and as for well serious acting, the Namesake: enough said. John Cho is the real gem in this comedy, and I much prefer this to the Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle.

I have been putting the P-R-O back into procrastinating and need to really plow through some serious work OR ELSE- all will be doom and gloom. In a way, and I am going to regret this the moment I say it, being at a desk 24/7 does mean that one tends to get things done; especially things that one is interested in.

ice cream

long conversations with father, and things are progressing slowly but surely.

I have discovered a new, favourite ice cream: goodbye strawberry cheesecake (Haagen-Dazs), hello caramelized pear and pecan. Needless to say the corporate drones at Haagen Dazs did not come up with this winner by themselves; it was the result of a nationwide competition on flavours, and its out on limited edition.

Now if someone, why not, can make rose and almond ice-cream, and other floral/nutty combinations, my heart is theirs.

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.