Anindita Sengupta » Notes

What an exciting week

Anindita — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:26:17 +0000

Yesterday, there was a gas cylinder leak in the house. It should have been simpler to solve than it was. There was illness involved and allergies. Allergies can really fuck up your sensory responses. Somebody in the complex has used strong fertilizer. It smells very similar to gas and I was getting both smells. The cylinder is kept in an alcove in the outer wall of the house. The alcove is gated and locked. Panic causes loss of memory. Keys and combinations require memory. I remember rummaging for hammers and torches. Also, shame and anger for being in trouble, then self-pity, then guilt for the self-pity, and an irrational wish that someone else would deal with it so I could go back to my study and write my article. Immediately after, I thought about this blog post. Then, I thought about doing a backup of my work. Also, how being an adult means knowing how to recognise the many smells of death. Also, how people should use less fertilizer, especially for decorative gardens.

More cheerfully, there’s an interesting BFS film fest at Ashirvad on June 4, 5, 6. It’s a retrospective of films by Anjali Monteiro and KP Jayasankar. There are three short films called Irani Cafe Instructions, Breasts and Agreement around poems by Nissim Ezekiel, Kutti Revathi and Salma respectively. There’s also Our Family, which I’ve watched and love. Details here.

This time’s Toto Funds the Arts reading is of Aditya Sudarshan’s new play. It is tomorrow at 6.30 pm at Crossword on Residency Road. Aditya Sudarshan is a fiction writer based in Delhi. He is the author of a detective novel, A Nice Quiet Holiday (Westland Books, 2009) and several published short stories. He is also a scriptwriter for NDTV’s political comedy show, “The Great Indian Tamasha”. Sensible People, his first play, “is set in a middle-class milieu in Central Delhi. It is the story of two well-respected bureaucratic families that are forced to face up to scandal and re-examine the values they live by.” It will be read by Lakshmi Krishnamurty, Priya Rao, Shashank Purushotham, Deepika Arwind , Swetanshu Bora and Neha Miglani.

I’ve been ill continuously for a while. Which means I want to crawl into a hole and be the opposite of friendly until it all blows over. This is because of self-pity and the belief that misery when wallowed in will feel like a warm, fluffy pillow. It’s also because of vulnerability which is hitting such a high note these days that my ears want to burst.

And blogging seems to me to be an activity that requires a mix of friendliness and honesty (aka vulnerability) and other leafy-green things.

But somebody mentioned that Jeet Thayil said at a workshop that just as carpenters don’t get up in the morning and say, ‘I’m not in the mood to make furniture today’, poets shouldn’t get up and say ‘I’m not in the mood to make poems’. Since this is much hearsay, I hope he really did say that. (Take it as a very loose quote, practically a non-quote. But I like the thought and it wasn’t mine so I must loosely quote.)

Extending that, can writers of any sort wake up on any day and say ‘I’m not in the mood to be vulnerable today’?

There’s an interesting series on at Very Like A Whale about poets and technology. And at Poetry Foundation, is there more to life than poetry, like say, laundry? I love doing laundry. Also, cleaning and re-organising and cooking. But sometimes, these can become reasons for procrastination or avoidance. I suppose the trick is to recognise why you’re doing something at a given moment, and always be aiming to do the right thing at the right time for the right reasons. How exhausting. I thought about this yesterday after the incident. That if I’d been less reluctant to leave my computer, I might have reacted quicker.

I’ve added a Library Thing widget to the sidebar, mostly because I like looking at book covers and this seems like a convenient way to have some around. There’s no real order to the books in there though. I’ve added some recent books but I’ll probably go backwards and add some earlier ones, and then whatever I read next. So it’s not a chronicle really, more like a cloud. Also, I’ve moved all links to poems published in journals to the page titled Poetry. Supernally clever idea, yes?

Some news

Anindita — Thu, 20 May 2010 07:40:57 +0000

Three poems in the latest issue of Mascara Literary Review. And two poems in Hari Batti’s Green Light Dhaba.

I’m in this article in HT Horizons. According to it, my typical day involves reading, reading, and well, not much else. Not sure where they got that idea from but it sounds nice. Kind of a dream life. Also, this article about City of Water appeared in Bangalore Mirror today.

I had written about South African poet Loftus Marais some time back and I’m really thrilled to see him on PIW. It means that translations of some of his poems are now online.

Leaving, comfort zones, duck

Anindita — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 23:05:47 +0000

Last days in Canterbury. The sky holds its light longer each day. These last months have been both rewarding and freeing. I had burrowed into a rut and I’ve been breaking out of it, I think. It’s all the time and the poetry, the solitude, the detachment from currents.

I did a reading of my work at the university last week. I was nervous and exhilarated as usual. Some of my older, and what I think of as ‘less crafted’ poems still seemed to move people the most. This and the second one on this page have never been revised and so in essence, are what I wrote as first drafts. I’m puzzling over what this means (and hoping it doesn’t mean I should just retire). Of course, sometimes poems that work well in a reading are not the same as those that work well on the page. A poet brings certain things to their own reading of a poem that make it more than the words. But I wonder if that’s all it is.

As a reader, I like a lot of poets whose work is polished. But there are others I like whose poems are looser or even flawed. The truth is I’d rather read a poem that I get something out of — feeling or thought — even if it’s imperfect than a lovely construction that left me cold in both ways. Even one sparkling or memorable line, image, thought trumps a series of words that sit in the right place but glisten dully.

On the note of rules, I lurked at a workshopping site for some time last year. The site is pretty strict about what makes good poetry and what does not. Obviously this has its uses, especially for beginners, but it can also lead to neat poems with the intelligence and emotional appeal of frozen meals. More harmful is the fact that they stress a singular way to write poetry. This can become a comfort zone, an old couch you grow fat in. It’s very tempting to stay there. Poetry is hard to pin down and it’s easier (less risky) to follow a set of rules than to figure out what works or doesn’t as one goes along, poem to poem, moment to moment. How messy that is! How uncontrollable. How dangerous. How much like life.

So how much revision is good revision? Somebody said (I forget who) there’s an optimum amount after which you need to stop, save the poem from your own mind or something like that. Where’s that point? I think of it like that dot in a painting by Miro, the one poet Moniza Alvi talks about, ‘Barely distinguishable from other dots, / it’s true, but quite uniquely placed.’

The dot knows where it is. And once you see it, you know where it is. But until then, it’s a a bit elusive.

Here is the poem and here is a video reading of the poem by Moniza Alvi which shows the painting.

I Would Like to Be a Dot in a Painting by Miro

I would like to be a dot in a painting by Miro.

Barely distinguishable from other dots,
it’s true, but quite uniquely placed.
And from my dark centre

I’d survey the beauty of the linescape
and wonder — would it be worthwhile
to roll myself towards the lemon stripe,

Centrally poised, and push my curves
against its edge, to give myself
a little attention?

But it’s fine where I am.
I’ll never make out what’s going on
around me, and that’s the joy of it.

The fact that I’m not a perfect circle
makes me more interesting in this world.
People will stare forever –

Even the most unemotional get excited.
So here I am, on the edge of animation,
a dream, a dance,a fantastic construction,

A child’s adventure.
And nothing in this tawny sky
can get too close, or move too far away.

~ Moniza Alvi

Rambling, Riverside, Etc

Anindita — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:04:47 +0000

I thought this was going to be another ‘linking’ post but it turned into something else. Which is reassuring because it means I’m becoming less lazy as it gets warmer. I’m on the last leg of my stay in Canterbury and feeling a bit reflective. It’s been particularly interesting because it’s my first time living alone. (I moved out of home only when I got married which in any case was relatively early.) There’s a strange and sometimes disquieting freedom to being able to set the rhythms of your own day. In this case, it’s heightened because I have no job, no classes, nobody to answer to. Sometimes the space is overwhelming. Other times, it’s magical.

I spend a lot of time reading or writing in my room. It’s quieter than any place I’ve lived in before. Except on some nights when one of my flatmates decides she must make some noise. On these nights, she sings very loudly, has screaming matches with some unfortunate person on the phone or laughter fests with friends at the doorway. She’s 19 as are my other three flatmates. Apparently, there were some issues with availability of rooms so I ended up in the under-grad area. It’s possible to live very separate lives though, which is a good thing because they’re quite shy around me and (understandably) treat me as if I’m from another planet, to be stepped around gingerly and so on. I remember how I felt about people over 30 when I was 19. So it’s interesting in the ironic ‘your time will come’ kinda way to be on the other side of the fence.

Occasionally, I walk to the centre of campus about 15 minutes away to go to the library or buy something. There’s been the odd social thing and I’ve met some interesting post-grad students. Sometimes I go into Canterbury town and have lunch and walk around. The riverside walk is quite idyllic. There are gardens and little bridges, lost umbrellas, lots of ducks and then suddenly, swans.

I’ve been going to London very often, at least once a week and because I have dear people who invite me over, I’ve spent some weekends there. There’s little one can add to the reams that have been written and said about London but I do love it. A big city has a different sort of energy about it and I haven’t experienced that since I left Bombay where I grew up. So my liking for London is partly nostalgia. But only partly. The rest is just the fantastic coolth of the city.

I also find it exhausting though. I’m always dreadfully tired by the end of the day. Okay, there is a four-hour commute. But it’s more than that, something to do with the high that comes from collective energy and the subsequent anticlimax, perhaps. This is what makes such cities so addictive, I suppose. Each day packs in more of life’s mania, darkness and exuberance, the gambler’s roller-coaster of emotions. Other places can seem desperately ordinary in comparison.

But it’s a huge sign of progress — or age — that I haven’t started mourning the loss of Bombay as a result or wishing I lived in London. I’m sort of seeing the possibilities contained in living the quieter, more ordinary life and it seems like, finally, I’ve grown to like my life in Bangalore enough to not want to change it. It’s taken a long time for it to feel like home. A little more than a decade. And it’s been very hard at times so I feel a bit like celebrating.

Anyway, now for those links. This is one of the nicest International Women’s Day posts I read (and I’m not saying that just because I’m mentioned in it). Jessica Smith on female bloggers (via Rumpus). And this poem in Writers Connect which I found surprising.

And morning has broken and I must sleep.

Poem up

Anindita — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:17:32 +0000

My poem ‘The City of Water’ is now up at Unsplendid, an online journal of received and nonce forms. It’s a sestina. Do read if you’re interested in that kind of thing. That kind of thing being poetry, sestinas, etc.

My computer was down for six days and I suffered. I had to use computers in a common room and write by hand the rest of the time. I survived. But I’m glad it’s over.

I went to see Ron Arad: Restless at the Barbican. Arad is an industrial designer, artist and architect. I don’t know anything about design or architecture really but I found some of it really fascinating / amusing including a strangely-shaped ping pong table which one could actually try out. Some pictures here.

Before that, Patience Agbabi came to read at the university. She was warm, vibrant, very lovely. Her next collection is a retelling of the Canterbury Tales in poetry. Quite a challenge, I’m guessing. She’s blogged a little bit about it here. She’s also Canterbury Laureate for the year and the audience was quite large. The questions were similar to the ones asked back home — do you write for the page or the stage? what kind of research are you doing for this book? Patricia Debney who is a poet and writer herself and a senior lecture here asked about the fact that she often uses form and whether she finds this restricting. Agbabi said that using form makes things more interesting / challenging because it sets parameters that she has to work within, makes it less amorphous.

Somebody read my horoscope and it was full of some troubling stuff. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before and I was all shrugs and smiles about it. But I was surprised at how it played on my mind all the way back in the bus from London to Canterbury. Nothing some wine and sleep couldn’t fix. But still.

I was only reading poetry (and poetry-related essays / criticism) for the first month simply because there’s so much of it available here that I don’t get back home. I started missing prose though so have picked up a novel, Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Wizard of the Crow. It’s quite gripping and very funny in bits. The protagonist is a conman who pretends to be a healer and diviner. I thought this was interesting:

As a novelist, Ngugi says he is very influenced by the “trickster” tradition. “The trickster character appears in tales all over the world,” he explained. “In West Africa it is Anansi the spider. Elsewhere it is Hare or Tortoise.

“The trickster is very interesting because he is always changing. He always questions the stability of a word or a narrative or an event. He is continually inventing and reinventing himself. He challenges the prevailing wisdom of who is strong and who is weak.”

Among other poets, I’ve been reading Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Some of her poems here.

All In All

Anindita — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:32:31 +0000

…I’ve had a good year. According to Facebook, that is. But FB also gives you the option of choosing the status messages you want to display because not all of them will fit into this collage. An interesting exercise in choice. What we want to remember. What we want others to remember about us.

I found myself leaving out a lot of laments about lack of sleep and insomnia; some about being sick (it seems that I announce all my illnesses); messages celebrating or mourning public events like Carol Ann Duffy’s laureateship, Chitre’s death, Bhopal and 26/11; lots and lots of links to books, poems and movies. I tried to make sure the happy news items of the year — my book, my travels, the UV relaunch and the CWIT fellowship to Kent — stayed in. I felt manipulative doing this but remembered that the online persona is frequently manipulative, a careful sorting and choosing of the selves we want to reveal or highlight. Also, like most other FB widgets, this is an exercise in self-indulgence. Tech-savvy nostalgia. If I was sitting on my verandah with a glass of wine and getting soppy about the year, these are the things I’d talk about — the warm stuff, the successes, the interesting and extraordinary.

In a nod to honesty, I left in some messages on insomnia, deadlines and the nitty-gritty of writing. Also, the death of a friend. Because yes, 2009 was about those things as well, and in the daily churn, more about them than about magical mystery tours. Still, all in all, a good year.

Ostrich, Resolution

Anindita — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 10:35:47 +0000

Revisit notions of beauty and ugliness–all notions, actually–plus get my head out of the sand and not plunge it back there again. This is the closest I’m going to come to a new year resolution. Of sorts (, out of sorts). Last year, it was consistency and balance and I’m happy to reminisce that I’ve almost been successful. When I’ve eaten, drunk or slept too much (or too little), slept and woken at odd hours, been workaholic or too-lazy, been extreme in other words, at least I’ve pursued one end consistently for many days. And then the opposite for an equal number of days. Which balances it out in the end, I suppose.

So there it is for 2010: revisiting and clear-eyedness. This ostrich, which is ugly or beautiful depending on how you look at it and does not have its head buried in the sand, is a mascot.

Oh, and I hope y’all noticed how I’ve done some dusting and cleaning around here with categories and links. This look, I think, will stay for a while. I’ve been playing around with it too much and there’s no reason to give up on consistency just because the year’s over.

Happy 2010!

Cheer

Anindita — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:53:07 +0000

So we are continuing with the cheer. Look, I even changed to a Christmassy theme! I thought this was nice, sort of subtle, unlike the ones which had holly all over them. I heart Wordpress more and more for making it so easy to change look. I dabbled in web design a few years back, even made money from it which qualifies it as a previous profession, and I used to enjoy playing around with typeface and colour. I don’t do that anymore so this is my consolation.

Anyway, over the weekend I watched Cheri, Stephen Frears’ film of Colette’s novella Cheri. I have a weakness for lush period movies and this one is certainly both lush and period — 19th C France and the life of the rich and infamous. Lea, an aging courtesan takes Cheri, the decadent and disaffected son of a friend, under her wing and into her bed. The relationship starts off as a transaction of sorts, the age-old exchange of wisdom and youth, and the two are so cynical about love that they don’t imagine it could happen to them. Against all expectations, they stay together for six years. When he goes off to get married in keeping with his mother’s wishes, they realise they love each other.

The movie has lavish sets and costumes. Rupert Friend looks both callous and vulnerable. Michelle Pfeiffer makes up in style what she lacks in substance, and is patently well-cast as the aging beauty. But it’s no Dangerous Liaisons so don’t expect a huge deal. It feels rushed in the beginning and abrupt at the end because they’ve crammed the entire story of the sequel, The Last of Cheri, into a four-line voiced narration. The lovers are unconvincing in bits and there’s something incomplete about the whole venture. Still, if you have an afternoon to spare and and like period movies, it’s a relaxing sort of watch.

I was struck and a little amused by something while watching the movie. Much of it is about the lovers’ suffering. And because they’re rich, they have the means to ‘cope’ rather well. So here is evidence of my flawed heart: I was finding it hard to sympathise with people who can check into luxurious hotels for weeks to get over someone. I had to remind myself of the debilitating nature of heartbreak, its sapping of colour from everyday things, its dulling. Most likely, the brilliant blue of the Atlantic seemed pale to Lea in her post-love blues. It’s unfair to not extend the same level of human compassion to everyone (including the rich) but I think it does happen sometimes.

***

Movies often speed up the pace of books. In one of the essays in Art Objects, Jeanette Winterson talks about how each book has its own pace and good reading means finding the pace of a book and settling into it. Because pace is integral to any text, its deeply unsettling when it’s manipulated too much for adaptation. I think that’s why the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice was one of the more satisfying ones because at least they gave the story enough time. Also Jane Eyre, which I watched twice for its gothic mood and for Timothy Dalton as Rochester.

***

Speaking of hot men, have you seen Captain Kirk make beat poetry of Palin’s speech? Some of my happiest memories of childhood include ‘Captain Curd’ as I inexplicably called him. I was always torn about who I wanted to grow up and marry more: him or Mr Spock. Twenty years and the Star Trek movie later, I’ve decided on Spock but it was real close.

In the spirit of the season

Anindita — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:52:25 +0000

…I’ve changed back to the camels which is cheery (I think) and plan to deal only in happy stuff for a while. Wait, that might mean I have nothing to write about. But we shall take that risk.

Next month I leave for Canterbury where for three months I will be reading, writing, walking about and trying to keep my toes unfrozen. Of course, I’m very excited about all this. Most of all, about the mountains of free time to do nothing but stare at my blank screen and will poetry to come. More seriously, I’m looking forward to traveling England and attending poetry readings and performances in London.

I also seem to have developed an irrational fear of not getting enough spicy-tangy food to eat in those three months. Which would explain why I’ve been hastily eating every kind of chaat, thali, curry, tandoori and biriyani that I can lay my hands on. Maybe I fancy I’m a camel. By the time I get there, I’m going to be a blimp.

Besides eating, I’m looking for a coat and boots to fight the winter there. This means that I have to spend a lot of time trying to get inside shops. Sometimes, I manage this. But often I do not, because of sheer lack of stamina and will power. On Sunday, we drove down Commercial Street and the entire city was doing their Christmas shopping. A sea of people rustling packets with that curiously determined look that shoppers acquire — beady eyes, sweat on the upper lip, steely jaw. We drove down the street in awe. He cursed the shops, the people, the traffic. I slumped in my seat as if I was being led to the torture chamber. Predictably, we didn’t find parking, heaved a sigh of relief and quickly left to get a drink instead.

I decided to go back on a weekday morning, and am now convinced that this is the only way to do it without getting stampeded. People who have to go to offices will have to take the morning off, but what’s half a day’s pay for health, sanity — and who knows — life? Of course, if everyone does this, then Monday mornings will be as bad as weekends. So on second thoughts, strike that suggestion.

Anyway, I did some shopping that I liked. Goobe’s Book Republic on Church Street has expanded their collection and I bought two poetry books: Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf and Margaret Atwood’s Selected Poems II. Quite pleased. For the uninitiated, Goobe is a bookshop and a library so you can rent or buy, or first rent and then buy if you like the book. I think it’s totally cool.

The year end is full of ‘best of’ and Rob Mackenzie’s holding a poll over at Magma Poetry on what was the best poetry collection of 2009. Of course, most (none?) of these books are available here but I like to look at the lists so that when I buy online, it’s easier to choose what to go broke on. The usual votes for Alice Oswald and Don Paterson but another name that cropped up quite often is Orphaned Latitudes by Gerard Rudolf.

Lastly, I’m not very fond of having to choose what I liked best in a year mainly because I tend to like too many different things at the same time but here are the poetry books I bought / got in 2009 roughly in order of acquisition (not all of them were published this year):

Bearings by Karthika Nair
Boki by Nitoo Das
Night River by Keki N. Daruwalla
Nights and Days by James Merill
Isla Negra by Pablo Neruda
Human Dark with Sugar by Brenda O’ Shaughnessy
View From An Escalator by Liesl Jobson
Bantu Ghost by Lesego Rampolokeng
Poems by Mongane Wally Serote
The Poet Lied by Odia Ofeimun
The Boiling Caracas by Odia Ofeimun
Glumlazi by Pravasan Pillay
Romancing the Dead by Gary Cummiskey
Beowulf by Seamus Heaney
Selected Poems II by Margaret Atwood

More Bhopal

Anindita — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:47:20 +0000

Hari Batti’s talking about Bhopal all week at his Green Light Dhaba, a place I’ve wanted to give a shout-out to in any case.

Suketu Mehta’s piece in NY Times. Very well-written and quite unflinching.

Imagine if an Indian chief executive had jumped bail for causing an industrial disaster that killed tens of thousands of Americans. What are the chances he’d be sunning himself in Goa?

Here’s where you can donate money for victims: bhopal.org.

And my piece at Guardian Cif. I don’t know why they removed the link to the site from the bottom where I had put it. Must be some policy thing. But anyway, take a look at the comments section where someone’s taking apart Union Carbide’s PR bullshit.