And the medal goes to Anthony Lane for his mammoth and brilliant diary of the Olympic fortnight in the New Yorker (week 1 and week 2). Over 10 pages (or 19, in case it reaches you as a Word document), Lane records how he watched everything from athletics to shot put, does some joyous China-bashing and even sneaks in a cheer or two for Indian joie de vivre (a.k.a anarchic chaos. Favourite bits given below but please, take the time to read the pieces. You will be a gigglier person for it.
"Phelps stepped onto the winner’s podium, flanked by his compatriot Ryan Lochte, who had taken the bronze. (It’s the old Ben Jonson problem: you’re a fine playwright, and at any other time you’d be the best, but by lousy luck you happen to overlap with Shakespeare, who takes gold in every medley in town.)"
Here’s a passage about a desi character in Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Adichie’s rightly celebrated novel about Biafra’s brief secession from Nigeria. Adichie’s language is utilitarian, but the war, affairs and arguments over postcolonial politics are molto bene:
There was Dr. Patel, the Indian man who drank Golden Guinea beer mixed with Coke… Whenever Ugwu brought out the kola nut, Master would say, ‘Doc, you know the kola nut does not understand English,’ before going on to bless [it] in Igbo… Dr. Patel laughed each time… throwing his short legs up as if it were a joke he had never heard before… [He] always took a lobe [of the nut] and put it in his shirt pocket; Ugwu had never seen him eat one…
Odenigbo teased [Olanna] that… both Okeoma and Patel were falling in love with her… Dr. Patel told too many stories of his days at Makerere, where he cast himself as the perfectly chivalrous intellectual…
For a houseboy, Bollywood is an escape from the civil war:
… [Ugwu] would watch the new television. If he was lucky, an Indian film would be on. The large-eyed beauty of the women, the singing, the flowers, the bright colors, and the crying, were what he needed now.
Adichie’s written a novel of some complexity — I’m working my way through — and she did it at just 29. (thanks, Sapna)
Among the many things I’m thankful to Maike Kollenrott for, one is the Moleskine. She was the one who got me my first somewhat overpriced but entirely gorgeous Moleskine notebook and I’ve been a Moleskine junkie ever since. When I got the first one, I thought the best thing about a Moleskine was feeling a kinship with Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and Vincent Van Gogh (at this moment I’ve no hearing in one ear and am growing 300 sunflowers in my Molehill Empire garden so I’m currently feeling serious oneness with Van Gogh) but the real pleasure of a Moleskine lies in going through it when you’ve almost filled it up. Like with my current one which has about ten pages left and began, in October 2007, with me taking notes compulsively at the New Yorker Festival which was fantastic. A little more than a month before this year’s (which I will not be attending; please feel free to extend sympathies) is a good time to flip through the old notebook. The bits below are from a discussion on the theme of monsters between author Martin Amis and Ian Buruma, a New Yorker writer. Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk were talking about homeland just before them but couldn’t get tickets for it (sniff).
Phenylketoneurics?*
Salman Rushdie is less than a foot away from me. I love New York.
Traitoris a facile, micron-thin movie which plays like one of the poorer episodes of 24. Its free association on loaded topics like terrorism, torture, religious discrimination and ethnic profiling are about as deep as a prom queen discussing Darfur. Issues are mentioned once and discarded as if mere incantation wards off boycotts. Under the guise of religious sensitivity, the movie whips up fears of Manchurian Americans, Arabic-speaking sleeper agents behind every gas station, beneath every shock of dark hair. We’re not in Syrianaany more, Toto.
Like The War Within, the movie goes so far in humanizing terrorists, it encourages you to root for them. The terrorists’ operation, the simultaneous bombing of buses in the American heartland, is beset by problems large and small. The filmmakers build our sympathy for them, turning them into a Rebel Alliance wending its way to an unshielded exhaust port. ‘Americans were terrorists to the British — how soon they forget,’ says Saïd Taghmaoui, who bonds with double agent Samir Horn (Don Cheadle) over chess in a Yemeni prison. This is, needless to say, problematic, because terrorists tend to target unarmed civilians.
The probability of movie suckage approaches one as you start adding personnel like Guy Pearce, Neal McDonough or Ashok Amritraj. Traitor has all three: Pearce, an actor who’s more jaw than talent; McDonough, a man with ice-blue eyes; producer Amritraj, who got his start making soft porn. Actors who are too pretty rarely emote well. This is the kind of flick which feels incomplete with the ‘We’re the same, you and I’ cliché.
But Aly Khan is a wonderfully patrician villain, the way he enunciates ‘power’ as ‘pah’ in posh Indian English. Don Cheadle and Archie Panjabi are better than this crap. Panjabi’s wondering eyes, shock of hair, tiny mouth and ability to rock jogging tights jab my girlfriend buttons big-time. And that accent! To me she’ll always be the tomboyish older sister hovering over the yard in East is East. Oh, Archie. Why must you debase your perfectly Karol Bagh-worthy name with cheesy terrorism flicks?
The lovely Elegy is a searing, honest chamber drama based on the May-December romance between a New York public intellectual (Ben Kingsley) and one of his students (Penélope Cruz). The rap is that the novella is better, Philip Roth’sThe Dying Animal. I’ve got it on order — it must be a hell of a book. The movie is as raw as Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy, but its musings wander more widely to age, mortality, loneliness and jealousy.
Kingsley portrays David Kepesh, a recurring character in Roth’s novels, as your mother’s worst nightmare: an overeducated loner who hops from bed to bed and refuses to (re-)marry. Kepesh is so self-centered and afraid of the emotional intermingling of a relationship, he winds up sixthsomething in an isolation of his own making. He’s hewn a comfortable life pontificating about art at Columbia and in the New Yorker. Charlie Rose asks him about his love life, and his wry, rueful answer, delivered in nasal British tones, could be any of Rose’s interviews with Salman Rushdie. (Did the Salman recognize himself in it when he turned up at the premiere?)
The professor seduces student Consuela Castillo (Cruz) over art, pointing out the secret of Velásquez’ Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor) and comparing Cruz’ eyes to the subject of Goya’s La Maja Vestida (The Dressed Beauty). The old rake has been at this game at the close of every semester. He throws a cocktail party after grades are handed in, homes in on a pretty femme with front row looks and back row cleavage, and ‘gives her some culture along the way.’ Preppy, wealthy, Cuban Consuela is game. ‘You’re a very charming man,’ she murmurs, demanding to be courted as a lover, not a prize.
The artist Francisco de Goya painted another famous nude which was referenced in Elegy, another meditation on aging starring Ben Kingsley. Elegy and Kureishi both seem to equate old age with an intense need to sleep with fine young things. Which doesn’t set it apart from the other stages of manhood, really.
[Quick impression of first 70 pages, not a full review.]
The Septembers of Shirazby Dalia Sofer tells the story of Tehran after the fall of the shah. The book’s central family is Jewish Iranian. The father is imprisoned for unspecified crimes against the mullahs, and an Armenian friend is unceremoniously executed.
The tone of the book is exaggeratedly mournful in an arty, lit workshop style; the melancholy plot doesn’t move. After A Case of Exploding Mangoes, I’ve had my fill of books about being thrown in jail by an authoritarian Islamic regime. It takes a Dostoevsky or a Nabokov to render poetic a gulag.
But one of the delights of the book is that it reveals how, as with Arabic and Turkish, so many Farsi words are related to (and precede) those in Hindi:
Farsi
Hindi
English
har
har
every
shahidan zendeand
shahidan zindabad
long live martyrs
shisheye
shisha
glass
The family’s son lives with orthodox Brooklyn Jews to escape the political turmoil back home. And it turns out the reply to ’salaam alekum’ in Yiddish is… alaichem shalom.
Congrats to Vijender Kumar for winning India a boxing bronze, bringing its total to three, its highest ever in a single Olympics. Here’s video of Vijender’s semifinal match. He got completely owned by the Cuban, but ain’t no shame considering Cuba’s a boxing powerhouse.
Before the match, NBC ran a promo about Vijender, Indian field hockey and the country’s dearth of medals.
Zara Gonzalez (she even sounds desi!) drew a Ganesh Obama which removes all political obstacles*. I’m not sure how to take the fact that Ganesh appears to be just another art monster in her pantheon
The clip above was Obama’s ticket mate Sen. Joe Biden, saying something perhaps meant to be friendly but pretty damn stereotypical. One cooks dal, the other (like Hillary) makes cracks about cornershops:
“… you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” Not only was this an offensive line, it didn’t even make any sense: The observation, familiar to anybody who watched a comedian on cable television 15 years ago, is that Indian Americans are the only ones who work in convenience stores, not that they’re the only ones who shop there. The man can’t even keep his condescending clichés straight. [Link]
[Ramesh Ponnuru] So Maybe McCain can win the Indian vote. [Link]
Biden muddies Obama’s change message as he voted for the Iraq war and has been in the Senate 36 years. But he knows his foreign policy, has opposed Dubya’s weak hand in Pakistan and will be an effective attack dog in the VP debate and the campaign. It’s a pleasure to finally, finally see a blue pill nominee with some teeth:
Biden was noted for his one-liners on the campaign trail, saying of then-Republican frontrunner Rudy Giuliani… “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, and a verb and 9/11.” [Link]
The criticism will focus on Biden’s 1987 plagiarism bout, his support of credit card companies (he pushed the bankruptcy bill that Dems now hate), his comments about Obama, his racial obliviousness (the comment about Indian-Americans in 7-Eleven). In a normal year, this stuff would have disqualified him instantly…
Currently the problem with Kahaani Hamaaray Mahaabharat Ki (earlier posts about the show: 1, 2, 3, 4) is that the actors playing the younger versions of the Pandavas and Kauravas are much too old for their roles. The story has reached the point where the Pandavas and Kunti have returned to Hastinapura, and the princes are about to commence their education under Kripa (and later Drona), so you’d think that they would be aged somewhere between 13 (Yudhisthira) and 9 (Sahadeva) – definitely no older. That's probably how it's supposed to be too, given some of the childlike prattle and random fooling around that's happening in the show (Bheema gifts Duryodhana his pet rabbit, would you believe; Duryodhana reciprocates by sneaking food into Bheema’s room). Unfortunately, all the princes are played by muscular hunks with stubbles and impressively developed torsos, and this detracts from the intended cuteness of many scenes.
For example, the slapstick sequence where Bheema beats up cooks and palace guards who have mistaken him for a food-thief (throwing some of them into giant vats so that their dhotis catch fire, etc) was probably conceptualised as an endearing introduction to the gluttonous second Pandava, but it doesn’t play out that way at all. This Bheema is no lovable little kid, he’s a well-built bully, and this is nothing less than a cringe-inducing display of machismo directed at helpless domestic staff. What does he think he's doing, practicing for the Olympic wrestling medal?
R: Basically you can tell us all about how superficial and superfluous chick-lit is.
J: Hold on, are you giving me instructions on what to say?
R: No no, we just want your views on the subject...
J: Well, okay then, we can fix a time.
R: ...so that you can rip the genre apart.
J: Um, you are telling me what to say. What if I want to say instead that a book should be judged as an individual work instead of being lazily lumped with a whole lot of other books that might be of vastly varying quality? That there can be good chick-lit, bad chick-lit and a whole lot of other intermediate types? That the "how" is more important than the "what"? And that the notion of “ripping a genre apart” doesn’t make much sense to me?
R (speaks after long pause, sounds bitterly disappointed): er, oh okay, in that case, bye-bye. (Hangs up)
No room for nuance, people. None at all. This is why we prophets of complexity rarely appear on TV and never get invited anywhere.
(TO Globe) The average sleeper ingests four insects a night. (that explains the night I woke up hacking my guts out. Darn earwigs!). So why not get with the program and eat bugs. Vij did and now crickets are on the menu at his chi-chi resto in Vancouver.
(NYT) At least 3K, mostly Christians, are living in relief camps in Orissa after 10 people were killed and 500-1000 houses were burned down. 9 towns are under curfew with shoot-at-sight orders.
(SAJA) A study in the Journal of the American Medican Association (JAMA) says lead, mercury and arsenic were found in unhealthy levels in some Ayurvedic medicines sold in the U.S.
(Reuters) Nearly 200K ‘national security letters’ were issued in 3 years, nearly all with gag orders. ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer says they violate his ISP client’s 1st Amendment right to dispute an illegitimate investigation.
(Practicalfishkeeping) A 14 year old boy from India claimed a 2 cm-long fish had ‘slipped’ up his urethra into his bladder. The fish was extracted. It was not an Amazonian candiru.
(Fox) Capitalism: the new disease of India. A 14-year-old school boy in eastern India has been arrested on suspicion of murdering a younger student who refused to give him her iPod.
(NYT) Jihadis allegedly from Pakistan attacked an Indian Army post near Jammu and then barricaded themselves in a house, waging a daylong battle and holding a family hostage.
(Blogsome) Hillary Clinton is surely the most artificial politician, with her tight, thin-lipped smile and hideous laughter. Was ‘keep going’ a Harriet Tubman quote, or an entreaty to her loyal cadre?
(Sullivan·C) Bobby Jindal is a neophyte religious fanatic not ready to be president if McCain passed away. And if you’re appealing to Clinton voters uneasy with a black man as president, why pick a person of color?
(TO Star) Dr Abhijit Guha will die unless they find a suitable donor for a bone marrow transplant. Apparently the “community is underrepresented” in the registry. For shame. note: Canada and the US are part of the same registry.
(Dallasnews) Two employees accused Abercrombie & Fitch of demoting them to the back room for not being hot enough or for having blond highlights. Last month a Muslim teen in Oklahoma alleged she was denied a job because of her hijab.
(New Yorker) The author of a smear ‘book’ on Obama calls Muslim ‘ragheads,’ thinks there’s a conspiracy for a North American superstate, is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and calls John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Katie Couric, and John Lennon ‘communists.’
(NYT) The Taliban fired a rocket-propelled grenade into a fuel tanker they’d parked by a Kandahar prison, setting off an explosion that killed the prison guards, destroyed nearby buildings, and opened a breach in the walls as wide as a highway.
(Suntimes) Ebert: Ben Kingsley is good at slimy intellectuals... Philip Roth has exhausted the vein of young babes falling for older intellectuals like, say, Philip Roth. I cannot read one more speech founded on the f-word, I’ve been overserved.
(Daily Show) A desi Hillary Clinton supporter says he’s tired of being called a racist for not supporting Obama, then makes it a point to call him Hussein.
(Yahoo) The new gen in documentaries takes off from Moore’s groundbreaking tho controversial work. The Youngest Candidate profiles 19 yr old Ytit Chauhan running for Council who is accosted on the street and asked to strip to prove he is not a terrorist.
(NYT) Mala Ghisai, 44, and her daughter, Sangeeva Van Elleswijk, 16, of the Netherlands, took a lunch break on the new esplanade in the middle of Times Square. (ht: tamasha)
(NYT) 8 years ago, airport security workers frequently pulled Barack Obama aside for extra screening because of his last name. At the time he struggled to pay for a rental car to the DNC and had little access, watching on outside TVs.
(NYT) Asif Zardari claimed he suffered from dementia, depression and PTSD to get out of a UK corruption case, but now claims he’s fine for the Pakistani election.
(NYT) Pankaj Mishra: 500K Indian soldiers still pursue a few thousand in Kashmir with pitiless intransigence. 4M million Kashmiri Muslims suffer every day the misery and degradation of military occupation, creating new terrorists.
(NYT) In ‘Traitor,’ Don Cheadle does subtle work. Samir’s former girlfriend (Archie Panjabi) is an interesting minor character. Aly Khan plays a terrorist.
(Mypopkorn) Lalu Prasad gives his reason for nuclear deal. Puts Communists to shame as well as folks like L.K. Advani. English version’s there too, but Hindi audio is recommended. Hear him speak Angrezi mixed with Bihari-accented Hindi.
And the medal goes to Anthony Lane for his mammoth and brilliant diary of the Olympic fortnight in the New Yorker (week 1 and week 2). Over 10 pages (or 19, in case it reaches you as a Word document), Lane records how he watched everything from athletics to shot put, does some joyous China-bashing and even sneaks in a cheer or two for Indian joie de vivre (a.k.a anarchic chaos. Favourite bits given below but please, take the time to read the pieces. You will be a gigglier person for it.
Email this
› 
Facebook this
› 
Reddit this
› Link 
The Septembers of Shiraz
