The Chasing Iamb

People who have no business walking around jauntily in Germany


   

Anne Fadiman has a new book At Large and At Small. Now I need to wait quietly until the paperback is out.

1. A poem I wrote is in print. I understand how absolutely idiotic my bio sounds.

2. I ate a bite of barbecued rib, one bite of chicken, a tiny prawn and and a whole hot dog. Its been 9 years since I last ate meat or fish.

3. Robert Jordan is dead. I started reading him in 1997. My brother, gaya, gaya's brother, paddy, spellcheck and great hordes of us got hooked and we joked about how he was going to die and leave us in the lurch without finishing the damn series. Now he is dead. I no longer care for his writing and I rarely read fantasy. But I am sad for all of us who read him for a decade...even 30 pages of Elaine bathing and the description of Andor's plumbing system.

 

So shall I have sex or write a poem
The situation’s tense
If I give in to lasciviousness, then my muse and I will be spent
If I throw away my quill to jump under a feather quilt
Then once I’ve come and gone and come, I’ll be wracked with guilt
Aren’t poets supposed to be miserable, lovesick, forlorn
Not happily banging out a meter to the strains of porn
Shouldn’t I simply be masturbating all alone
Then turning my angst and finger cramp into a wretched poem
“Oh, where are you, and who is he, that lingers in the mist
The chariots of Helios still deny your kiss
My soul is turgid, torn tumescent tingling and true
But black satin sheets of wet desire boil a pheromone stew.”
Such oral epics I could produce on the back of restraint
Or of course I could get on my back, and oral till you faint
BUT no instead I’ll alliterate and show off my assonance
Write by flickering candlelight and bid farewell to finance
I’ll eat bread and mouldy cheese and move away to Paris
Catch a fashionable disease and dream about your phallus
Which I’ll compare to a summer’s day as it’s newly shook in June
Resplendent like a daffodil to make a Bath Wife swoon
A satanic mill never stood so tall and yours is a road that
I’d gladly take till your jabberwock finds my bandersnatch
For foreplay on your nipples I will lyrically wax
Till a Nobel Prize for literature becomes my shuddering climax
So shall I have sex or write a poem about having sex
Scheme with rhymes AA, BB or just XY plus XX
Will fame and fortune come my way if I come all alone
Or will my efforts come to nothing, a has been talent free zone
So shall I have sex or write a poem
The situation’s tense
It’s time to throw my leg over, stop straddling the fence
Sex, poem, sex, poem, clamped knees or bed spread
Screw it, screw me, poetic fame comes only when you’re dead.

Penny Ashton

AND THEN THIS!

I am sure you have noticed like I have that great tonnes of new books set in the Middle East have silly names which work through Clash of Civilization juxtapositions. The list of the most irritating so far:

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Kabul Beauty School

Honeymoon in Purdah: An Iranian Journey

I want to add to the list.

Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America And American in Iran (not to be confused with Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America

Salmon Fishing in Yemen (Reviewed here)

When in the diary of the emigre do you get the entry,

"I don't wish I was back home."?

This is the week in which that entry appears.

I don't wish I was back home.

Still obsessed. Still laughing whenever I see Naveen Andrews, almost turned blue from laughing when i saw him ripping in a muscular manner at a pile of coconuts. But he has been replaced in my pinup gallery by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje.His voice. Help.

Just finished reading Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief. Nice book if you are an Omkara fan since Stephen Alter follows Vishal Bhardwaj from conception to release. Stephen Alter is a close observer and has a nice, clear style making the book is highly readable. While he mostly he avoids painful explaining (horseradish breads, to use the classic example) he does bank on defamiliarisation to be interesting. The following bit is a good example of this particular form of irritation.

" On the wall of my hotel room is a picture of Wajid Ali Shah, one of Lucknow's former nawabs, but there are reminders of Bollywood as well. The Lux Soap in the bathroom has a picture of Kareena on the wrapper and in the minibar is a bag of Lay's potato chips with an image of Saif holding a globe in his arms. Switching on the TV, I see ads with Ajay promoting Tata Indicom. A few minutes later Irrfan Khan -- the hero of Maqbool-- is pitching Hutch mobile phones. In the bizarre juxtaposition of advertising and cinema, Othello and Macbeth endorse competing telecom companies. But it is Saif, heir to the throne of Pataudi, a nawab-in-waiting, advertising potato chips with a Latin flavour, that makes it seem entirely surreal."

Anyway this is a good book for the train/plane/interminable auto rides.

 For some irrational reason I keep comparing Alter's mild eye to Suketu Mehta's far more confident perspective. I think Maximum City (which i liked a lot) is best read in random, lovely stretches. The following passage is my favourite. Here is Suketu Mehta's description of a bar dancer meeting one of her regulars outside of the bar for the first time, once she finally gives him the green light. They buy juice from the heroin dealer at Haji Ali. They rent a cage of tiny songbirds and get a taxi, telling its driver to take a walk:

            …and the girl rolls up all the windows of the taxi and opens the door of the cage and all the birds fly out and fill the small dark taxi with their energy and their music. She laughs with delight and asks her man to play a game with her: Catch the birds. They reach out with their hands to grab the birds, who are small and quick, and they have to wave their arms wildly about even to touch them. As the girl and her ardent suitor reach out to catch a bird, they sometimes, accidentally, can’t help touching each other…

                Half an hour or an hour later, the door of the taxi opens and half a dozen or a dozen dead birds are thrown out on the road. If there are any remaining alive, they fly out over the great dark sea, free at last.

When is the book on Madras and its film industry coming out? 

I have always liked Somerset Maugham for being a good, reliable read. I recently found Cakes and Ale in the house and it turned out to be a happy find for my current mood. It's a lovely little satire about  the literary world that included Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole. Something I found particularly funny. For the last week I have been reading EM Forster's Aspects of the Novel. And then I find this passage in Cakes and Ale. "On his advice I read The Craft of Fiction by Mr Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr E M Forster, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr E M Forster; then I read The Structure of the Novel by Mr Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing at all."

Maugham had an interesting life. He was pushed into medicine by his guardians but became a best-selling writer before he turned 25. He was an extremely successful writer. He was well-regarded, his books and plays sold well but he thought of himself as a "B list author." He travelled around the world. He served in World War I as part of a group called the Literary Ambulance Drivers, which included Cummings and Hemingway. He was a Secret Service spy in Russia and wrote about this period in Ashenden which inspired the James Bond series. Unlike many people who are unaffected by exposure to the world at large, he acquired a calm tolerance of human foibles.

His sexual adventures are quite fascinating too. He seems to have been actively bisexual all his life. He tried to leave his property to his young male secretary/companion by trying to adopt him and disinherit his daughter. He had married his wife Syrie when he was nearly 40. They drove each other crazy and he was thrilled when she finally died. Syrie Maugham is now strangely back in fashion as it has been recognised that she was one of the first people to turn interior decoration into an art form. In her own times she was very popular designing homes for millionaires and princes. As many sources will tell you she designed the first all white room. Syrie was the one of the first women of her generation to pursue their violent desire to fulfil themselves.

I include the weather on the authority of the most amazing work on the novel that I have met for many years. It came over the Atlantic to me, nor shall I ever forget it. It was a literary manual entitled Materials and Methods of Fiction. The writer's name shall be concealed. He was a pseudo-scholar and a good one. He classified novels by their dates, their length, their locality, their sex, their point of view, till no more seemed possible. But he still had the weather up his sleeve, and when he brought it out, it had nine heads. He gave an example under each head, for he was anything but slovenly, and we will run through his list. In the first place the weather can be 'decorative', as in Pierre Loti; then 'utilitarian', as in The Mill on the Floss (No Floss, No Mill, No Tullivers); "illustrative" as in The Egoist; 'planned in pre-established harmony' as in Fiona MacLeod; 'in emotional contrast', as in The Master of Ballantrae; 'determinatiive of action', as in a certain Kipling story, where a man proposes to the wrong girl on account of a mud storm; 'a controlling influences', Richard Feverel; 'itself a hero', like Vesuvius in The Last Days of Pompeii; and ninthly, it can be 'non-existent' as in a nursery tale. I liked him flinging in non-existence. It made everything so scientific and trim. But he himself remained a little dissatisfied, and having finished his classification he said yes, of course there was one more thing, and that was genius; it was useless for a novelist to know that there are nine sorts of weather, unless he was genius also. Cheered by this reflection, he classified novels by their tones. There are only two tones, personal and impersonal, and having given examples of each he grew pensive again and said, 'Yes, but you must have genius too, or neither tone will profit.'

This reference to genius is, again, typical of the pseudo-scholar, He loves mentioning genius, because the sound of the word exempts him from discovering its meaning. Literature is written by geniuses. Novelists are geniuses. There we are; now let us classify them. Which he does. Everything he says may be accurate but all is useless because he is moving round books instead of through them, he either has not read them or cannot read them properly. Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they may contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West. The reader must sit down alone and struggle with the writer, and this the pseudo-scholar will not do. He would rather relate a book to the history of its time, to events in the life of its author, to the events it describes, above all to some tendency. As soon as he can use the word 'tendency' his spirits rise, and often those of his audience may sink, they ofetn pull out their pencils at this point and make a note, under the belief that a tendency is portable.

                                                                                                                                            Cambridge, 1927

I am re-reading Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Its a sweet, funny, sad book. Perfect for a quiet day. Meanwhile Melissa Banks is making funny noises in the Guardian at the new study Why Humans Have Sex. Apparently there are 237 reasons!

the memory loss, the fuzzy edges, the canny jogging away from any scary thought, the desperate desire for it to end. I am a Syrian Christian aberration. Intoxication does not improve me.