Chaosbogey

you should know me better than that

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:43:00 +0530

Last night Joni and I talked for six hours straight about boys and books. At some point, somewhere in the eighty simultaneous conversations we were having, we mentioned the relationship words we hate most. Mine was ‘boundaries’ and she knows me better than to ask why. Hers was ‘friendzoned’. I know her equally well, but I have less tact. “Why!” I blurted “I do it all the time.” This earned me a scathing look. Joni is skilled at scathing looks. One feels somewhat like a mouse mocking a hungry eagle. “Do you even know what friendzoning is in the world of people who aren’t Nandini?”

I was forced to admit that perhaps I didn’t. I was then educated. Friendzoning is a verb that men use when women refuse their advances and diplomatically suggest they be friends instead. It further implies that every such woman is needy enough to keep the guy and his hankering penis around for validation. It is a word, basically, that encapsulates male entitlement and shifts the burden of heterosexual desire without altering the balance of courtship rituals.

It figures I never grasped the term. Men rarely ask me out. When they do, I reflexively turn them down. Then I avoid them. The only time I dated someone who took the lead I fell so deeply in love that I never recovered from it, and giving up my agency again terrifies me. I feel powerless when I am, as it were, pursued. I might be farcically feminine, but I need to chase* almost as much as I hate that particular metaphor. I like my fangs. The logical question is, rather: have I been friendzoned?

*As in I only know I want something when I do something stupid in order to get it. It also means, being awkward and timid and prickly and physically aloof, that I have resigned myself to a life lived mostly alone. (I have only two emotions, careful fear and dead devotion? Now you know why weepymen bands speak to me.)

Turns out, though, that only men can get friendzoned. I’m used to the many ridiculous double standards involved in being a woman, but this one baffles me. Obviously it is flattering to be pursued. Obviously there are people pathetic enough to give false hope to others because they have nothing else to feed their pride. Obviously it hurts when that happens, and it hurts worse to feel a fool than to be rejected. If this has happened to you, as it has to me, perhaps you are generous enough to continue wanting someone who can’t distinguish between attention and interest. Once I stopped being in pain, I felt only amusement and an affectionate pity. But then I am not a nice person.

Equally obviously, because you want a person doesn’t mean they have to want you, and it easy to mistake kindness or civility for encouragement, especially in our hyper textual era. And for every person who takes advantage of vulnerability there is another wise enough to draw clear lines (told you I hate the word boundaries) that protect everyone involved. There is, besides, already a word for people of the first kind: parasites. If you need a verb: they exploit.

WHY THE FUCK DO WE NEED ANOTHER WORD? One that excludes women? Are we no longer allowed to experience obvious things? And why implicate the beautiful word ‘friend’? It’s not a consoling insult! It seems to me as obvious as anything else that, given time, (some) unwanted lovers might make excellent friends. In the world of people who aren’t me this might seem like an irrelevant thing to get flustered by, but words have more power than any other single force I know. To see a word so sacred being abused so sorely irks me. And this neologism - this cocktail of entitlement and exclusion - lit the long fuse of my temper. Very few people have ever met me truly furious, and all of them will tell you this: flee.

All this to say that I will no longer be talking about love on bogey. I was content dripping words all over the place when I thought of Love Feminism Treatise as a critical essay. That has changed. Samuel Delaney says that talented writing evokes the universal by way of the detail. This is no less true for being a mite trite, and there is no genre for which it is more true than personal essays (even more than fiction, I’d wager). I am finally ready, if not to make a claim at talent then to make an attempt towards it, and for all my bloggy gossip, I have never written a personal essay. (Apart from Res Ipsa Loquitor, which was more rant than essay anyway) I intend to try.

I have been listening to this album ever since they started...

Sun, 19 May 2013 05:16:00 +0530

I have been listening to this album ever since they started streaming the preview. It’s been, what, four days? five? a week? I am living, basically, in a troubled fugue and I can’t find a single non-contradictory thing to say about it. I’m not sure I even like it. The only coherent thing I know is that, unlike everyone else, I haven’t been listening to Random Access Memories and am no longer fit for cocktail conversation. I got about a third in and then I wanted to throw things at dancey happy people. So well.

Anyway. I’ve given up on figuring this one out and given in to $40 dollar tix so I can listen to it live and perplex myself ever further. Seriously, was there ever a band less suited to mega-arena mania? I held out this long, but what can I say. There’s a science to walking through windows.

Spring Reading.

Wed, 15 May 2013 02:29:00 +0530

Novels.

G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen. Word from the wise: If you ever think to read your way through an awards long-short-any list, don’t. Not unless someone is paying you and/or offering to introduce you to Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver and Hilary Mantel over a champagne dinner. And then prepare to be bored out of your skull. I’m usually lucky in what I read, in that I am tolerant person and I know my taste well enough to predict if I will actively hate something. So when I decided to read the Orange long list to get some sense of female fiction today (whattay dreadful phrase) I figured there would be some painful stuff on it, but I could get to it after I had committed myself by reading all the books I was excited by. So I went through the list, excised all the fake-minaret stuff, and made my selection. I also decided that I wouldn’t read any of the famous folks until the end and allow for some momentum that way (which excluded, as it turned out, almost the entire shortlist, which came out a few weeks after I began reading).

The first to arrive was The Red Book by Deborah Kogan, an updated version of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, which I read earlier in the year and quite enjoyed and I thought this new book couldn’t be any worse than Girls. I was wrong. It was awful. It was turgid. It was banal. It was so bad my brain hurts when I think about it, or about Shutterbabe, which Kogan wrote about her years sleeping her way across three continents and being, purely incidentally, a war photographer. Then I started The Light Between Oceans and Mateship With Birds, and while they weren’t terrible, I got bored. I couldn’t finish, a chronic problem I have with books that don’t work for me. Next I borrowed out The Innocents, yet another book by someone who thinks the point of The Age of Innocence is the plot. THEN came Alif the Unseen, which I really, really liked, because (atleast) I couldn’t stop reading it. It’s genre! It has plot! And the quotidian East! It ends, alas, extremely flat and has no real people to speak of, but it was, by far, the best thing I read on the long list until I began The Marlowe Papers, which is my pick for the unknown-person Orange award. I haven’t yet read Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette? - the only overlapping between my list and the shortlist - but I have a hard time imagining a mom novel can beat a verse novel about Kit Marlowe’s undead existence. Alif, meanwhile, is an earnest, ambitious book that has all the techonerds I know going Booyah! I think it needs to grow a sense of humor, a deeper mythology, and a more astute politics. And it needs to read Rae Armantrout a few times.

Stella Gibbons, Nightingale Wood. This is the best novel. It is a retelling of Cinderella with Gibbons’ inimitable wit and sly lyricism and while I don’t like it more than Cold Comfort Farm I like it as much? It has the same pulverizing of character: her keen, shrapnel analysis of human behavior, only rescued from brutality by her obvious affection for her people, flawed and silly though they may be. Gibbons was, in some ways, a war novelist - many of her books are about people preparing for or recovering from war - and it tinges even this, the most frivolous of her novels. Besides, who doesn’t know that love is the most martial of maladies? Nightingale Wood suits my romantic temperament, my cool laughing brain, and my fleet beating feet all at once. Here, anyway, is evidence:

The tune swayed on, pulling the dancers irresistibly like the moon dragging the tides of spring. People glanced at one another and laughed, and waded into the ocean of music as the moonlit bathers had gone out into the silver-green sea. Round and round, white crinolines swaying like the bells of flowers, cloaks swinging gallantly from young shoulders. The music swelled and fell as the waves of warm, moon-swayed water rolled round and round, and the dancers dreamed that life was beautiful, in a world toppling with monster guns and violent death.

I have taken this waltz in my heart all this long winter etc.

Teju Cole, Open City: If you know me, you know exactly where I stopped reading. But I am walker in New York City and it was nice, while it lasted, to read someone else meandering pointlessly through Manhattan borough.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale. I work in a bookstore called Bluestockings. We have feminist book clubs. Me being me and new being new, I thought I should participate. I didn’t like this book in 2003, when I first read it. A decade later I continue to dislike it.

Non Fiction.

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place. Is this book amazing or is it amazing? It’s so beautifully enraged, so wonderfully controlled, so neatly constructed, that I read it three times in three days and the only cogent thing I can say about it is !Jawdrop!

Katie Roiphe, Uncommon Arrangements. Yes, yes, I know. But this book is lovely. Honest. Did you know that a person with the excellent name of Ottoline Morrell not only existed but was notoriously beautiful and Bertrand Russell’s mistress and had the coolest country mansion like ever? I didn’t, and I thoroughly enjoyed the many litsoap titbits in this book and best of all was I could disguise my callow joy as “research” for Love Feminism Treatise. But I will write more responsibly about this once I, you know, read it again.

Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. The first non fiction I ever read, I’m pretty sure, was Ex Libris at the age of thirteen? Fourteen? It was how I discovered, anyway, that such a beast as an essay existed. Back then I was going to be a novel writing quantum physicist, so much as I loved that book, I didn’t seek her out. More fool me. In Spirit.. Fadiman takes incomprehensible world of medicine and makes of it the thriller it must be for its practitioners. That she does it while writing a cultural history, a family drama, and the tale of a superhuman migration taught me the true potential, perhaps for the first time, of non fiction. Could I write this book? Probably not. But damned if I won’t die trying.

Rsyzard Kapuściński, The Emperor. Almost everyone thinks this is greatest Kapuściński of all time. I prefer Another Day in the Life, or even Shadow of the Sun, but I adore him to pieces and will worshipfully read most things he wrote. I am aware this isn’t a popular opinion and even I have my limits (looking at you, Travels with Herodotus) but let it be said that I have given him a spirited defense in the positivist prison that is American journalism. And let it also be said that my sex life has duly suffered. (kidding; my sex life is non existent even without the oppression of subversive opinions)

William Finnegan, Crossing the Line. If, by the time I am 29, I haven’t witnessed a student uprising in an apartheid state, I will consider myself a failed human being. Or something. I had much conflict with this book, a white boy’s coming of age as a surfer and teacher in black South Africa. I explained my reservations in tedious detail in class and can’t be bothered to repeat them, but I will concede Finnegan is a fine writer and everyone should learn how to catch a great wave and I really am extremely lazy. And also that I speed-skimmed the book and should reread it (as I will) before I get to have a respectable opinion.

Short Stories

(I chose one per writer based on which I remembered most vividly as I wrote this.)

Edith Wharon, “A Cup of Cold Water.” I’ve told anyone who will listen, and most who won’t, that Wharton’s real genius is in the short stories. This one, which is about walking and alienation and the reckless night that changes your entire life, suited me admirably the morning on which I inhaled it. I had to read it again before I wrote this, because I knew it had clauses like this one - her ideas had the brilliant bloom and audacious irrelevance of those tropical orchids which strike root in air - and I wanted to point them out to you all.

Edwidge Danticat, “New York Day Women.” There is a bit somewhere in this short story that goes She has to be careful with her heart, this day woman. I will carry that with me for a long time. It’s so true and so untenable. Also, well, my mother is coming and I am preparing.

Susan Minot, Lust and Other Stories. Is it my fault or the writer’s that I can’t tell one story in this collection apart from the next? I started reading Minot because I asked around about Serious Writers tackling Romance and got, well, her. I do not recommend her.

Lorrie Moore, “You’re Ugly, Too.”There was something clever I wanted to say here, according to my notes, about the relationship between author and protagonist and I’ve forgotten it cos I read this on like March 1. All I remember are several excellent jokes and the phrase “Professional Women and the Demographics of Grief”. Right after that- this I looked up- comes a line of clumsy verse: If there were a lake the moonlight would dance across it in conniptions. Paging Stella Gibbons.

Mavis Gallant, “Thieves and Rascals.” Teenagers, everyone knows, are disconnected from their parents. It motivates half the pop culture out there. But it takes Mavis Gallant and her citrus irony to show us that parents can’t grasp their kids either. Or each other. And that memory is a thing often best left repressed and life is sustained through a series of small hypocrisies* and that family is fragile in and beyond all the obvious ways. This was the most unsettling thing I’ve read in months, and it explains why I go so spare and so slow on the Gallant.

*an epiphany I kinda wish I had last week instead of languishing in my notes from early April. I have every failing except the useful ones.

Katherine Mansfield, “Marriage a la Mode.” I started reading the collected Mansfield after finishing her chapter in Uncommon Arrangements. I began with this one and it is devastating. Partly I read it trying to figure out who the characters were based on and partly I was propelled by the precise lucidity of her prose and partly I was amazed at how much stuff she conveys in so little time. I think there’s something to be said about Lorrie Moore being a later Mavis Gallant being a later Katherine Mansfield being a later Edith Wharton and I fully intend to say it once I’m better acquainted with all. For now, though: I can’t believe it took me 26 years to fall headlong for the short story format. It is perfection.

Essays

I read a lot of essays in the past two months, but most of them were for school and school is out and I am reluctant to think about them. I read a million Didion essays for different classes (her Joan Baez profile is quite awesome, must admit). I read Ellen Willis’ essay about radical feminism about a dozen times for the finals essay of my ethnography class. Many of the other essays I read were by another professor, Lawrence Weschler, who writes very eccentric things, and you should read “Shapinsky’s Karma” if you’re fascinated by bizarre dudes from Bangalore who wander about evangelizing unknown American artists. (and really who isn’t) He writes a lot about art and so forth, and it was (I thought) a really good class for opening one’s mind about the weird world we inhabit. I am making my way through his work, and maybe in a few months I will do a Ren post on here. We read dozens of poems and everyone from Joseph Mitchell to Grace Paley and I left each class energized and wanting to conquer All the Books and craving whiskey.

The only essays I read outside work were some essays from the New York anthology while I waited for an interview (far as I remember: Pete Hamill’s “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class”, which was great; Vanessa Grigoriadis’ “Everybody Sucks”, which told me many things about Gawker that I could easily have lived without knowing but am glad I didn’t, and Jay McInerney’s “The Death of the Idea of the UES” which seems to think Carnegie Hill = UES)

I also read many essays about telly, for an essay I am writing about soaps. I find soaps, and the social-moral nexus they chart, intensely compelling. So I read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay about Reality Television and about Michael Jackson, both from Pulphead; DFW’s “E Pluribus Pluram” (does the man ever say anything without saying it twenty times?!) from A Supposedly Fun Thing.. , Daniel Mendelsohn’s Mad Men essay from Waiting for Barbarians and the essay that began it all, Renata Adler’s “Afternoon Television” from Canaries in the Mineshaft. My problems with Adler’s syntax are evident from the very first sentence — You have to tolerate extremes of hatred and loneliness to follow, Monday through Friday every week, through a still unterminated period of weeks, the story of an educated man so bitter that he kills himself solely to frame another man for murder. Now there’s a sentence that requires work and one that is, depending on how you look at it, either fucking brilliant or fucking frustrating and I change my mind each time I read it. After that sensational start, however, her essay gets mired in the impossibility of describing Days of Our Lives, which, like any soap, has stayed on the air for decades by fabricating a steadily more implausible plot. If someone as closely analytical as Adler can be baffled, I began to wonder, how much of a mess would I make? So I have set out to find out and will probably reread all these essays many times before I’m done. Additions gratefully solicited.

Meanwhile, these months in poetry have mostly been Merwin, Wislawa Szymborska, Anne Sexton, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Jennings, Rae Armantrout and Nikki Giovanni. Oh, and Dom Moraes. If there is some sense in that list, I leave it for you to discern. See you next month, when I will probably be telling you about perennials. Much of my reading is snippety things I never quite finish, and I’m not sure how to capture them in these posts? So they get their own.

angrygirlcomics: in Chinese mythology, the Dragon Kings ruled...

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:21:37 +0530

angrygirlcomics:

in Chinese mythology, the Dragon Kings ruled the four seas and often had fearsome half-human half-dragon forms. throughout the land in shadowy groves and clandestine coves lurked fox spirits, beautiful, cunning creatures who often took the form of seductive young women. while the Dragon Kings often were frightening in appearance, their children were quite lovely and could take fully human forms.

I wanted to draw a fairy tale story with a fox spirit and a dragon prince.

Sonnet

Mon, 13 May 2013 06:58:34 +0530

Where it begins will remain a question
for the time being at least which is to
say for this lifetime and there is no
other life that can be this one again
and where it goes after that only one
at a time is ever about to know
though we have it by heart as one and though
we remind each other on occasion

How often may the clarinet rehearse
alone the one solo before the one
time that is heard after all the others
telling the one thing that they all tell of
it is the sole performance of a life
come back I say to it over the waters

— WS Merwin

always with me it begins and ends a delusion.

If love was the habit of some borrowed room, I might escape my...

Wed, 08 May 2013 02:51:12 +0530

If love was the habit of some borrowed room, I might escape my fate. or perhaps be less enraged by it. but I go write my book and stand my time.

Each time I go to the Met I am transfixed by this painting....

Thu, 02 May 2013 09:57:17 +0530

Each time I go to the Met I am transfixed by this painting. I’m not a Picasso person (though I adore Cezanne, so I guess there’s no real escaping him) but this painting can, and has, drawn me from straight across the gallery. I went once with a poet, who told me that I looked like her (!), that we both had that “forthright, quizzical, seductive” gaze. It meant the more coming from a flamboyantly gay man, but I dismissed it then cos too many people have said strange things about my cross-eyed glance for my comfort. And I never know what to do with compliments, so few and far between.

But at least I know what the cover of my first novel will be.

The Real Face of Love

Thu, 02 May 2013 06:38:00 +0530

Thursday: haunting moon leers, as you walk ten blocks through Times Square, weeping over “It was Rape” and carrying a box of unsold books.

Friday: Deadline. Life disappears.

Saturday: New Dress, Drunk Dial.

Sunday: Curled up in bed, reading Uncommon Arrangements then Six Years After then Girls of Slender Means, then then then

Monday: Squirmy Strange

Tuesday: The dismissal of something that took half a night to draft in less time than most would take to read it.

Wednesday: Buying bras, the lady appraises you with one swift glance - “you are not the type to attract men”- and hands over the one least like lingerie and exactly like the training bras girls wear before they own boobs.

So this is what it’s like then. No wonder I hated it the first time. It’s unpleasant to think of oneself as a footnote in someone else’s life.

Every Fool

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:38:00 +0530

It has been an unsettling weekend, and it closed with a farewell dinner for Deep, who is leaving in early May. “You are the most perceptive person I’ve ever met” he said to me this evening, but before I could gloat he continued “with an utterly reckless heart. It’s like your brain and your mind don’t even connect. Seriously, din, you’re a profound moron.” I said similarly encouraging things to him.

In honor, then, of this, a pome:

Any fool can get into an ocean
But it takes a Goddess
To get out of one.
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the
    water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That’s when the fun starts
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.

— Jack Spicer.

was almost this.

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:27:44 +0530

was almost this.

mizbingley: IS THIS MY DREAM COMING TRUE AND THE BISEXUAL...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 08:42:56 +0530

mizbingley:

IS THIS MY DREAM COMING TRUE AND THE BISEXUAL NUN-FUCKING SWORD WIELDING OPERA SINGER JULIE D’AUBIGNY BEING IMMORTALIZED IN A FILM BY NATALIE DORMER

This afternoon I had a fascinating conversation with a feminist...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:48:26 +0530

This afternoon I had a fascinating conversation with a feminist far younger than me (ok, by like six years) and she insisted that the most enduring success and symbol of patriarchy is that the only thing that stops men from hitting on women is the magic phrase “I have a boyfriend”. If, that is, there is anything that stops them. Then I saw that exact sentiment repeated on twitter so clearly this is a cultural epiphany. Obvious things often are.

It’s not an anxiety I’m familiar with, but that’s cos I’m oblivious to people flirting with me when I’m not flirting with them. One of the small luxuries of not being attractive, I imagine. If they were handing out advanced degrees in being the one providing unwanted attention, otoh, I would be valedictorian. In the throes of the Feelings, I often behave quite badly. I convince myself that the sheer intensity (and insanity!) of it will infect the other person. I don’t “hit” on people — I don’t fucking know how or I would — but neither do I suffer in patient silence.

It’s not the casual entitlement of the lonely dude at the bar, but something far worse: the total, unrelenting imposition of one soul upon another. I do this rarely - emotion exhausts me and I dislike enduring it - but I do it thoroughly.

Glad I have patriarchy to blame, then.

ps: happy happy Ella!

Northern April

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:56:00 +0530

For a late April, so young upon us:

O mind, beset by music never for a moment quiet, –
The wind at the flue, the wind strumming the shutter;
The soft, antiphonal speech of the doubled brook, never for a moment quiet;

The rush of the rain against the glass, his voice in the eaves-gutter!
Where shall I lay you to sleep, and the robins be quiet? Lay you to sleep – and the frogs be silent in the marsh
Crashes the sleet from the bough and the bough sighs upward, never for a moment quiet.
April is upon us, pitiless and young and harsh.

O April, full of blood, full of breath, have pity upon us!
Pale, where the winter like a stone has been lifted away, we emerge like yellow grass.
Be for a moment quiet, buffet us not, have pity upon us,
Till the green comes back into the vein, till the giddiness pass

—- Edna St Vincent Millay

… and for a turn I take again and again and again:

Viennese Waltz

We are so tired, and perhaps tomorrow
will never come; be fugitive awhile
from tears, and let the dancing drink your sorrow
as it has drunk the colour of your smile.

Your face is like a mournful pearl, my darling;
Go, set a rose of rouge upon its white,
and stop your ears against the tiger-snarling
where lightning stripes the thunder of the night.

Now falling, falling, feather after feather,
the music spreads a softness on the ground;
now for an instant we are held together
hidden within a swinging mist of sound.

Forget these frustrate and unhappy lovers;
forget that he is sad and she is pale;
Come, let us dream the little death that hovers
pensive as heaven in a cloudy veil.

—- Elizabeth Jennings.

ha. I just read the phrase “moon-kissed waters” and...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 07:27:01 +0530

ha. I just read the phrase “moon-kissed waters” and was all like I am SO over the moon and clearly the internet disapproves. #shock

gypsymoonsister:

The Whimsical Art of Alexander Jansson

nevver: Making everything a mystery

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 02:03:27 +0530

nevver:

Making everything a mystery

millionsmillions: In 1862, Fyodor Dostoevsky met Charles...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 06:09:00 +0530

millionsmillions:

In 1862, Fyodor Dostoevsky met Charles Dickens… Or did he? In a thoroughly researched piece for the Times Literary Supplement, Eric Naiman tells the thrilling story of how one – or two? or several? – hoaxers managed to dupe biographers, New York Times reviewers, London Review of Books editors as well as readers of numerous scholarly publications. Long story short: be wary of ostentatious “nipple” references.

Via guns, a baisakhi song. I celebrate so many new years...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 06:07:00 +0530

Via guns, a baisakhi song. I celebrate so many new years it’s as if my year’s always starting, but the ones I love best are Diwali (though no one in my family is actually Gujarati) and Ram Navmi (which is next Saturday, and only a new year in that it was the din I first ate Real Food. This year it will be the first time in 26 years I don’t eat mum’s kheer on it, more’s the pity. One year, when we were fighting, mum drove clear across the city to make sure my day didn’t go unsweetened, sigh.) Anyway. Half of me wishes you a Happy Pongal.

Once, not so long ago, I would also have said things to you in Bengali, but that time, it has passed.

I have come to realise the Internet is No Good for me. Like this...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 23:20:18 +0530

I have come to realise the Internet is No Good for me. Like this song, to which I also come late in life, this is proof that I’m really rather dim. Thusly, hiatus: I’m off the networks for now (though my passwords remain my own) and I’m not reading stuff online if I can help it (this is less likely).

I expect to be back in June, maybe July, if I have the will to sustain the off again internet (this is entirely unlikely, but it is good to have hope)

I will, however, continue to publish my monthly reading and occasionally a song and poem and similar. Tumbogey, basically, will continue its sputtering existence. Meanwhile, here is The Moon in Its Flight.

Not Reading, March 2013.

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 04:06:27 +0530

I read one book in March. Say it again for emphasis. ONE. There were also a few essays and a short story or two, but the only thing requiring significant attention I finished was Teju Cole’s Open City. Which I began in February and had to read for class besides. Is there such a thing as readers’ block? There should be, cos I have it. I’m in the middle of so many books I’ve lost count, but can’t summon the stamina to commit to any.

I have excuses, of course: March was a month in which I had, unusually, a life. I went to New Orleans and Washington DC. I wrote the first drafts of two mostly but not entirely crappy short stories. I went to a lot of gigs, I made a new friend, I searched for apartments and (thusly) I ventured into Brooklyn. But really the reason I didn’t read was the reason I haven’t been reading. Words feel like a chore, and I never learned to read without pleasure, because I never had to. For years I thought people telling wannabes that you can’t write if you don’t read were stating the fucking obvious and I still do and it is terrifying but there it is. Can this stop now please?

Life apart, I still have what anyone with a real job considers an obscene amount of time. So what do I do with it? Mostly I watch telly, which is proving irksome lately, and I have started watching soaps. I have started watching, more specifically, Bold and the Beautiful again, which first I watched because Certain Highbrow People couldn’t get enough of Brooke Logan in her lingerie. Well, anyway. Now I watch it (I tell myself) cos I have a kernel of an idea for (yet another) television essay. It all started when I read Renata Adler’s soaps essay and realized how fucking hard it is to write intelligently about melodrama and now obviously I must try it for myself. Then I read DFW and all was undone and that is a story for next month, which will have a supersized reading post you lot can be suitably impressed by.

This month I am talking about walking.

My first happy memory from childhood happens relatively late. I must have been about eight. I was a happy child — so happy, in fact, that I didn’t know what “happy” meant cos I had never experienced true sadness. The first time I felt sorrow I was eight, and the next time I was happy I was sitting in a tree with a friend and I knew I was happy. We had spent the hour before that exploring the IIM campus and playing a game called pirates. There were many rules to the game, all of which I’ve forgotten, except the one where we each got to bring one imaginary friend so we could more accurately depict an Enid Blyton novel. My point, for I have one,is that my first memory of friendship involves a great deal of rambling and clambering and being generally acrobatic. We spent years of our lives playing pirates, and well into adulthood our favorite way to meet is to spend entire nights meandering.

That’s why I became, and remain, a walker. Walking soothes me. It’s why, unlike most walkers I know, I don’t consider it a fundamentally solitary activity. Most of my wandering occurs in the uncongenial hours*, and I prefer walking alone to most company, is true, but once you’ve experienced perfect synchronicity with someone who indulges your silences you never stop looking, or hoping. Deep and I have, over the years, ruined our friendship a hundred times. But we always solve it by walking.

*Yeah, bad habit, and while it is probably obvious to you lot, it was only recently I figured out that this was foolhardy — that the universe doesn’t, in fact, balance anyone’s life ledger.

My first walk in New York was on a wicked bad ankle some weeks into September. In the last two years I have broken my right ankle twice, sprained it thrice, and twisted it more times than I want to count. In the last seven I have also pulled every ligament that exists on my right knee. I have, basically, a fucked right leg. So while that walk was less than thirty blocks, it was torment. I was still nursing my last sprain, I was scared of falling, and I forgot to exercise my ankle before I set out. It was horrible, but it was wonderful. You know how they say pain heals? That walk up to Harlem was the best thing I did for my limbs in three years.

Pain also trains. I now walk with a more measured tread. I take many rest-and-stretch breaks. I’ve tried to slow down my life over the last few years, and succeeded with everything except the speed at which I read. Anyone who walks habitually knows that one’s brain usually matches one’s stride, and I try (and usually fail) to stretch my thoughts to the point of recursion. I walk to think and to find rhythm: searching for vacant spaces, for serenity, for those brief gaps when my mind is allowed a peek into my subconscious. I’ve always been a hunter of quiet, especially in public, and the best quietude occurs in crowds: roads, museums, subways, zoos. I find the hushed calm of libraries, for instance, exhausting. All those thoughts everyone’s constantly suppressing!

Reasons shape spaces. Walking might the best way to find a city, but I rarely walk as exploration. I do so occasionally, of course, one afternoon in January I found myself starting at Bryant Park and ending up, mysteriously, in Cobble Hill. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the thrill of the known blurring into the unknown, but that I am badly suited to flâneuring. Getting lost is inevitable with someone who hates straight lines and is as directionally dyslexic as me, so I prefer to choose destinations and retain some illusion of control. ‘Sides when you mostly walk alone in the dark, it is comforting to think you know where the fuck you’re going.

Walking has other uses as well. I’ve been cultivating a bubble- a chunk of mobile silence, if you will- trying, almost, to make myself vanish. If you stay still, I notice, people pretend you aren’t there, which is a useful skill to have a writer. I tested this theory recently at one of those dull wine-and-cheese things after book launches. I plonked myself at the heart of the room, displayed my biggest notebook, and busily took notes (which means I drew stick animals and wrote down the lyrics to Fool on the Hill). My bubble didn’t quite work, but it almost did: people avoided me at first, and I got not a few strange looks, but soon enough I was invisible. Soon enough I blended into the furniture and people conducted their mundane conversations all around me. Sensitive or secretive people didn’t, of course — I myself would walk a long circle around someone clutching a giant jade notebook — but it’s amazing how tiny a minority of humanity we neurotics are.

How, you are probably wondering, does walking help with my little bubble? It doesn’t, not really, but standing about randomly staring at things and talking to yourself and being the only brown girl in Harlem at dawn does help you escape self-consciousness.

Protip: the first step to people not noticing you is not noticing yourself.

Right. I should stop already with this post, but it would be amiss of me not to point out that with arts reporting evanescence is mostly a liability. Good cultural reporting requires radical presence, the kind of charisma that makes people eager to talk to you about their things and reassures them that you will authoritatively represent them to the world. I am trying not to be only an arts reporter, and I am not charismatic, but faking it till I am making it is my next personality project. Wish luck.

since I've been loving you.

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 12:39:00 +0530

Tonight someone I didn’t know I was dating broke up with me. Ok, that’s disingenuous. We went out and did things, more than once, but I’m unclear at what stage one is sufficiently “together” to require a formal process of “breaking up”. This is truly a peculiar country etc. I had never called him my boyfriend, either to myself or anyone else. My friends- the few that I have in this city- don’t know his name. I forgot to reply to texts, I ignored calls, I never made a date more than a few hours in advance. He is a patient, gracious man, and when he told me, as he dumped me, that I was never ‘present’, it was impossible to argue against. He knew, as I should have, that he deserved to be treated better.

I suppose it is fitting that this - my utter failure at romance- happened within a fortnight of my next Big Essay formulating itself around the question of feminism and love. I am, as you can imagine, far more excited by the essay than I was by him, and while I don’t ‘blame’ feminism for my priorities (they’re just fine, thank you) I do think there’s a profound disconnect between the women of my generation and the simple fact of loving. ‘Love’ is not a word we like to use without irony. We are embarrassed by love, to collapse a complex series of emotions into one word.

It is embarrassing to us to admit it, to crave it, to cherish it — embarrassing, even, to feel love.

I loved- in the full, lush, operatic sense of the word- exactly once in my life, and it ended horribly, and it’s not an experience I am keen to repeat. I discovered, in the many years since, how to make do: that it is possible, and even preferable, to substitute yearning with friendship and desire with respect. That was what I did over the last few months, only the not-boyfriend’s more sensitive than I generally think men are capable of being. He saw what I didn’t want to see: that I can no longer pretend at passion. It’s one thing to vent a little longing with a little fun, to try forget a stupidly aching heart with the help of someone who is both beautiful and kind. It is another to break someone’s heart just because you can’t stop breaking your own. I sailed dangerously close to the latter, and I’m grateful he values his dignity more than I value mine.

The only thing I learned about love in 26 years is that no one chooses the people they fall most deeply in love with. It is possible to talk human beings into almost anything, but it remains impossible to talk us into — or out of — love. The only choice lies in practical action, and it is an important choice, but that chasm between what one feels and what one does is a gap that all the women I know are unwilling to think about. And I wonder why.

Perhaps the thing I admire most about not-boyfriend is his graceful exit. Most people would’ve tapered me off. Everyone knows the routine: dismiss a person enough, they disappear. Ignore them and repulse them, etc. It is a routine I have become intimately familiar with as a stranger in a new city, as someone who inevitably needs people more than they need me. He chose, instead, honesty, even when I clung to banalities. “We should stay friends!” I said at the end, as one does. “I like you a lot” he replied, “but I don’t want to be your friend.” That was when I knew this boy was more an adult than me.