It comes from writing for the Times, and the Times’ very large, very strange audience. That has made me especially sensitive to how, as a poetry critic, a lot of the things you say not only aren’t understood but aren’t understood almost in the way that you wouldn’t understand a Martian talking.

Even readers who are excellent readers — better readers than I am, for all I know — just don’t know what you’re talking about. And then another part of your audience knows everything that you’re talking about and is mightily contemptuous of any attempt to talk to the other, larger portion of your audience, so you end up in this sort of hopeless position. Don’t get me wrong, I’m always happy to write for the Times. But I wanted to see what would happen if you tried to talk to all of the audiences at the same time.

And

Poetry obviously comes in different shapes and sizes and forms and genres. There are people who write novels in verse right now, involving characters. Still, whats seen as being the main part of poetry by most readers today is the traditional lyric poem about an emotion. Yet even lyric poetry isnt personal in an uncomplicated way. Its personal in an extremely complicated way, actually. For example, Paul Muldoon has several poems involving sisters that he doesnt actually have.What Im hoping to do in that chapter is to help readers to see that when poetry is personal, its not just in the sense that the poet is saying, “I have some feelings, and here they are.” Its that the poet is very carefully balancing different identities in order to give us this very distinctive “personal” feeling. Thats what we value in poetry.

It saddens me to say that I speak from experience when I say that sometimes I would see these “mistakes” and turn into the Benevolent EnglishSpeaking Despot. Benevolent EnglishSpeaking Despot royally points out the mistake even though nobody asked. This is often done with a very Jesus on the cross air, like ‘forgive them father, they know not that their English is all rong but don’t afraid babay, I fix everything because I am awesome’. The Benevolent EnglishSpeaking Despot then writes out in nice, big letters the right way (AFTER taking picture of the ohsoprecious English to post on blog or generally show everyone because it’s so lololo and also proof that we hast been among the great unwashed and its unwashed English).

I suspect a lot of people are not aware of what they’re doing when they’re doing this. I’ve been there too.

*

City of Water has been reviewed in Asian Cha. I’m very pleased because Asian Cha is a nice place to be and because I’ve been very lazy about sending the book to people and this is one time I actually made the effort.

*

Uncle Pai died. Amar Chitra Katha comics were really my first insight into so many things–apsaras, talking animals, the perfect body, Buddha, god in general. And love. Don’t forget love.

*

]]> http://aninditasengupta.com/2011/03/close-to-heart/feed/ 2 http://aninditasengupta.com/2011/02/fonts-flowers/ http://aninditasengupta.com/2011/02/fonts-flowers/#comments Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:56:14 +0000 Anindita http://aninditasengupta.com/?p=2562 On handwriting and fonts, Nell Boechenstein at The Millions:

Pens are often considered a fetish item of neurotics with disposable income, but a Mont Blanc sensibility is not my point. Despite being reliably cash-poor, writer-types are often as particular about their pens as they are about their fonts. (When Helvetica—the trend, the font, the film, the MoMA exhibition—was the rage, Slate published a piece asking writersabout their favorite fonts and those queried had cultivated preferences at the ready; Courier, mostly, since those writers who may not fetishize the pen fetishize the typewriter instead.)

Confession: my handwriting sucks (at least I think so and I’m hoping someone will convince me otherwise) and I hate writing by hand. This leads to intense fear that I’m not really a writer because real writers, you know, they love pens.

I do love fonts. But even here, I’m commitment-shy so I like to change from time to time. I like serif fonts like Times New Roman or Book Antiqua while writing and Arial (10 pt) while editing. I switch back to a serif font for the final draft. For blog posts, I love Georgia which is convenient since that’s the default WordPress font.

Gosh, how nerdy is this post? But yeah, just to finish, I’ve been through my Courier phase and exactly for the reason that it looks like typewriter font.

On the subject of nerdiness, I recently discovered I have become more short-sighted and I found a strand of white in my hair. I also recently had a birthday. How is someone to cope with such profusion? No really, it has been all upheaval and discovery in the last few months. What is helping now is flower season. Look at the gorgeousity here. My street has some Golden Trumpet and some jasmine. They’re lovely. It’s been raining a little and in the early morning and the evenings when the air is cool, the world seems soft.

It’s interesting that this tuesday’s poem at Tuesday Poem (link in sidebar) is ‘Olduvai Gorge Thorn Tree’ by Sarah Lindsay:

He kept dreaming of a tree, dreaming

of a tree, dreaming of a tree

and its sound like a hush,

and it seemed he could open

his mouth when he woke and make the others

know something they didn’t already know…

The New Yorker review of The Social Network says that the movie “suggests we now treat one another as packets of information”. Or attributes. A human being summed up easily. I was struck rather hard by this at the recent Hyderabad Literary Festival where people introduced themselves to each other, quickly adding, ‘we’re facebook friends’. I had one person claiming familiarity with me based on ‘I know her. I know her. From Facebook.’ In Sridala Swami’s post on privacy, she points how Facebook’s “position on privacy is, if you have nothing to hide, you should have nothing to fear from having your data in the public domain”.

But the need for privacy is not necessarily the same as the need for secrecy. Privacy is also about safety. People share selectively based on comfort levels, perceived trustworthiness. It’s not always about having something to hide. It’s about not wanting the neighbourhood stalker to know your door number. It may be possible to unearth it but you hardly want to make it easy. As the movie shows, Facebook started off as an exclusive club. People had to know you. Or at least be part of the same educational institution, a supposed guarantee. What it has morphed into is something far less controlled. You get a friend request. In today’s network-happy world, you usually accept if the person is remotely in the same career, industry or interest area. I know that people interested in writing tend to accept friend requests from others who seem to be part of the field in any way.

Bam. Suddenly your friend list is nearly a thousand people and you’re using the page to let people know about book releases, events and  so on. Except that you also have family pictures, and you also use it to keep in touch with friends who live elsewhere. Boundaries blur. It may not be like strangers knowing your intimate secrets but it is like strangers leafing through your family albums,  checking out who your close friends are, sizing up your relationships with mom, boss, boyfriend. Of course, it’s stupid to think you know someone because you know them on Facebook. It’s a curious half-light. When you meet the same person socially, they’re unlikely to respond to your polite ‘how are you’ with a line from Rumi or Neruda hinting love trouble. Facebook ‘fraandship’ does not a friendship make. But try telling that to people who tend toward familiarity.

One can always set limits, prune the friend list, control what one publishes or use the privacy settings. Except a self-publishing, narcissistic tool is also addictive. Some people check Facebook as often as they check email. At various times, in various moods, in various states of sobriety. Enough personal revelation seeps through. It seems like a lot of work to set up customized lists for each feature. A friend told me she recently removed all her photographs — it seemed safer and simpler.

What finally got me was the noise.

I’ve de-activated my account. For the moment. It’s curiously difficult, like an itch. Every now and then, I want to sign back in and they make it so easy. All I need to do is sign in once for my account to be reactivated. In other words, the Facebook page is perennially waiting. It glows blue.  It’s there when nobody else is.

__

ps: I’ve quit FB but I am on Twitter, and now on Tumblr. So I may have exchanged one kind of noise for another. I’m also available on mail.  :-)

Ninasam’s annual shibeera (camp) brings together academics, activists, actors, dancers, directors, enthusiasts, journalists, performers, photographers, poets, readers, singers, smokers, writers and watchers for a week of cultural adda. This time, there were two plays by the Ninasam repertory group — Kuvempu’s Shudra Tapaswi and Shakespeare’s Othello. There was Carnatic music by TM Krishna (sublime!). There were lectures by Sundar Sarrukai, Rajni Bakshi, Shiv Vishwanathan and N. Manu Chakravarthy. There were poetry, fiction and play readings in Kannada, Marathi and English. There was other stuff but I don’t want to bore you with lists. What I’m saying is there was lots of gorgeousity.

I did a reading of my work. I was more nervous about this than I am about most readings. Firstly, it was the post-lunch session. Yes, bring on the sympathy. Secondly, there were many Bhasha writers/readers at this gathering. I was expecting questions about mother tongue, cultural roots, the whole continuum of belonging and unbelonging about which I feel tormented sometimes and terribly bored at other times.

It was wonderful. Yes, there were some expected questions. But there were also some unexpected ones, especially later, and some wonderful responses from people I respect a great deal. But most interesting was this encounter with a Kannada poet —-

Our first meeting was after dinner the night before my reading. We were standing outside the canteen, near the washbasins. It was cold and rainy. Water dripping into my ears, muddy feet, poetry talk.

‘People who write in English can’t be authentic because they don’t think in English,’ he said.

‘I think in English.’

‘Yes, but you can’t feel in English.’ He drawled out the feel, like feeel. He looked at me compassionately because I am handicapped in this way.

‘Erm, yeah, I need a smoke.’

It took me a day before I could pass him without wanting to make faces. (Reader, I did not actually make faces. It might have seemed immature.)

After my reading, he waylaid me on two separate occasions, told me what he found problematic about my work–and some of it was exactly what has been appreciated in other places. It’s always freeing, even if unsettling, to encounter totally different poetics. It forces you to pick and choose elements from different cultures, to continually think about what would work best for a particular poem instead of following the easy formulae of rules. For example, I’ve been thinking about the whole ‘show, don’t tell’ principle quite a bit and his aesthetic preferences for exploratory statements as opposed to ‘photography’ made me think about this some more.

With all the intense communicating and socialising and sharing, I started feeling breathless every once in a while.  There is a small tailoring workshop on the grounds, a room with some women on sewing machines, a bench outside and in front, a grove stretching out. I sometimes went and sat there, under the trees, to think or write.  I exchanged smiles with the women but somehow, felt reluctant to break the silent companionship in which we sat — them inside, me outside — working at something. It seemed important to let that place be just for ‘doing’, and not for talking.

Here are some lovely pictures of the festival by Prateek Mukund. Oh, and anyone can attend the annual shibeera. You just need to write to Ninasam around the time it happens.

*

After the intensity of Ninasam, there was the intensity of illness. I was sick for about three weeks. The upside is that antibiotics affect the poetry well, mostly because I get so drugged that I can’t see straight. This, I find, is an useful state for poetry. As are hangovers.

It makes me think of this interview with Iain McGilchrist, a writer and psychologist who has written a “a fascinating analysis of, and a clear warning about, our increasingly divided brains (Poetryfoundation.org).” From the interview:

The right hemisphere is not just better at understanding metaphor in the strictest sense, but at making unusual connections, and therefore at any non-literal use of language. I don’t think we need to get hung up on that: metonymy is also going to be a right-hemisphere function—indeed my thesis is that poetry is nothing if not a recruitment of the right hemisphere.

I’m interested in this because I feel like I get through life as two different people (left-person and right-person) — one who is obsessed with process, systems, lists and order and the other who shirks all of these alarmingly. The first fills in excel sheets with plans, routines, menus worked out for the entire month. The other refuses to even look at the excel sheet on certain days. It’s not hard to predict which would be better at poetry. The trick is getting the right one to come out at the right time. It’s not nice when I’m at a social event and find myself drifting blankly while someone speaks to me, or open my mouth to say something and realise I’m speaking strange.  And on that note, read what George Szirtes says on conversation.

Also interesting is what McGilchrist says about the logic, order and patterning required in poetry. Rhyme, rhythm, metre.

And I could not agree less that having a clear metrical pattern and rhyme scheme is limiting, or tends to suggest the left hemisphere’s attitude to language. They are the condition of all music and dance, the right hemisphere’s domain, and when we decide to dispense with them, we take a knowing risk.

Hmm.

*

I’ve been making a(nother) attempt to learn Kannada. I decided I had gone about it all wrong in the past — all those conversational classes which told me how to buy vegetables at the market just bored me to death. I realised the only way I can get interested in a language is through its writing. So I’ve learned the script. I can now read signage of all sorts and spend a lot of time reading out shop signs to A.

More ambitiously, I’m also trying to read Girish Karnad’s ‘Yayati’. Since I can spend a total of one hour a week or something on this, I’ll probably be done with it by next year. But hey, remember the tortoise?

In the spirit of slow but sure, I love this site called Padakali which gives you one new word every day.

*

The point of all this is that I don’t mind them so much in the open, as they are at the little pool behind the State Central library at Cubbon Park.

]]> http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/09/flanerie-2-pigeons-at-the-library/feed/ 3 http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/08/write-like-a-man/ http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/08/write-like-a-man/#comments Wed, 11 Aug 2010 05:58:48 +0000 Anindita http://aninditasengupta.com/?p=2426 …is what I do. According to two different web programmes that supposedly deduce your gender from the way you write. I submitted a blog post and the results were quite unabashedly male. I’ve been thinking about this because I have to review Interior Decoration which is an anthology of poetry by Indian women. It makes one think about the femaleness of writing and so on.

In other news, I’ve been adopted by cats. To be more exact, two cats (a male and a female) came into the house one morning, and sneaked into a cupboard. She went into labour and two hours later, Dobby was slapped by a white paw when he went sniffing to see what the odd smell was.  He went hysterical. So did I.

A, who is an expert on cats unlike the two of us, was summoned. He found one grey-white Tommy in there and promptly escorted him out. We came back into the room. Dobby went sniffing again. Another white paw emerged, and then a fully-formed, much-bristling mother cat. There was a litter of three in there, behind my lovely collection of bags.

We could hardly put the babies out in the cold and rain so we realised we’d have to court danger for a while (sworn enemies under one roof and all that). We bundled mother and children into an old suitcase and made place for them upstairs in the TV room. There was one tiny incident which ended with Dobby getting his face swiped. He was taken off to the vet for Tetanus shots and thought he was being punished for guarding the house from enemies.  All morning, he lay around the house looking bewildered at what life had tossed him.

Now that door stays closed, we guard their separation like hawks (or parents or zoo keepers), and we have stopped watching movies. The universe makes choices for you.

After six weeks, when they have stopped nursing, we will put some or all up for adoption. I say some because I’m harbouring tiny hopes of keeping one of them if I can persuade the grown-up dog and the child cat to be friends. The adults don’t have much of a chance since they started off so badly.  But isn’t she cute?

Meanwhile I’m trying to stay loving but detached and write my second collection. Like a man, I’m told.

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?

*

*

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.

]]> http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/05/some-news/feed/ 2 http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/04/leaving-comfort-zones-duck/ http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/04/leaving-comfort-zones-duck/#comments Fri, 02 Apr 2010 23:05:47 +0000 Anindita http://aninditasengupta.com/?p=2268

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

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.

]]> http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/03/2247/feed/ 3 http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/03/poem-up/ http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/03/poem-up/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:17:32 +0000 Anindita http://aninditasengupta.com/?p=2241 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.

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.