The Spaniard In The Works

Posting the Light: Dispatches from Hamburg

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:21:00 +0000

So this is where I've been and what I've been doing.

If you're in Hyderabad, please come.

That's on the 12th of November, from 5pm to 6pm at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Road No. 10, Banjara Hills.

The exhibition will be on until the 18th. So if you're in town and can't make it to the opening, drop by on any other day.

(There will be more posts but only after the exhibition has opened.)

Back!

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:43:00 +0000

Did ya'll miss me?

Updates from tomorrow. Now I need to sleep.

Aditi Machado wins the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:07:00 +0000

Via email from Aparna Rayaprol:

The Srinivas Rayaprol Literary Trust

&

Department of English, University of Hyderabad

Invite you to the presentation of the inaugural

Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize

to

ADITI MACHADO

Presentation by: Padmabhushan
Prof. Shiv K. Kumar
Chief Guest:
Sudeep Sen, poet and editor, Atlas

Poetry Reading:
Aditi Machado
RSVP:
9490317318/rayaproltrust@gmail.com
to

Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 5.00 pm

Saptaparni, Road No. 8, Banjara Hills

Congrats Aditi!

Pratilipi in October

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 02:46:00 +0000

The new issue of Pratilipi is up and no, this is not a pointer to anything I've contributed!

Look out for the six essays by Keki Daruwalla, K. Sachidanandan, Priya Sarukkai-Chhabria, Arshia Sattar, Noor Zaheer and Giriraj Kiradoo (also co-editor of Pratilipi).

Also two of Vivek Narayanan's poems (about which* more when I return**.)

__

* And that's a promise, Vivek.

** This is also the time to say that there will be no more posts until mid-November. I'm travelling until then. I'm on mail, of course, but the Spaniard will be asleep.

Pessoa

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 01:28:00 +0000

In the last year I have carried The Book of Disquiet with me everywhere. If it means I must carry a bag large enough to accommodate it, I find one that fits the purpose. Only in the last few weeks, Pessoa stands in the bookshelf with the glass front that once belonged to my grandfather (who kept in it a flat, small round of Vicks that he would take out and sniff. To me, the smell was magical and meant possibilities). The cover - with one man shot, his back arched and his hands flung up in the air, and another caught mid-stride, his day's purpose re-shaped - looks out at me every time I pass.

It would be a crude formulation to say that I have learnt immense amounts from Pessoa but it is a crudity that is given shape by my inability to put any of that 'learning' into practice in the last year. I dip into the book when I want to know what the day holds for me; to find the words for things long known; to confirm my objective self-pity. I consult it as I would an oracle.

So here's Pessoa in Poetry this month, translated by Richard Zenith:

In me every thought, however much I’d like to preserve it intact, turns sooner or later into reverie. If I wish to set forth reasons or launch a train of argument, what comes out of me are sentences initially expressive of the thought itself, then phrases subsidiary to those initial sentences, and finally shadows and derivatives of those subsidiary phrases. I begin to meditate on the existence of God and soon find myself speaking of faraway parks, feudal processions, rivers that pass almost soundlessly beneath the windows of my contemplation . . . And I find myself speaking about them because I find myself seeing them, feeling them, and there’s a brief moment when my face is grazed by a real breeze rising from the surface of the dreamed river through metaphors, through the stylistic feudalism of my central self-abandon.

See?

Facebook-style Update

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 06:05:00 +0000

Space Bar is ready to throw a tantrum. Who wants to join her?

potpourri post

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:57:00 +0000

I'm tempted to put a picture of a spinning top or something here and leave (it at that). But I won't, because a) it doesn't do to repeat oneself and b) it's not that I don't have things to blog about; just not enough time to lay them all out post by post.

So I'm going to do what Ludwig usually does.

1. Last things first: Some people are calling this a Lit Spat. I think that's a bit of a misnomer. If Bal had a larger point to make it is so large as to be invisible.

2. This is much better. Seriously.

These days, the debate over how to write about reading is a cold affair: a de-militarized zone. I avoid the terms literature and criticism here, and perhaps even debate is too hifalutin a word to describe what has amounted to a decades-long pissing match between creative writers and critics. The current steely silence is evidence only of empty bladders; the combatants have become preoccupied with internal skirmishes.

( the editors of the Quarterly Conversation respond to the essay). [via 3qd]

3. My recent hang-outs include: The Green Light Dhaba, The Plastic Graduate, The Last Resort (what is it with the kids? Why was I not like that?). Also a German blog that I just like to read, even if I can't understand a damn thing. And Sarah Jane.

4. By now everyone knows about Steve McCurry's blog, right? I think I landed up at Tom Pietrasik's blog from there. (while we're on the subject of photographs, go see Sydney chez BM).

5. There's something I'm forgetting, but not sure what. Will return to update, maybe, but mostly this should keep everyone occupied until I return (which is likely to be mid-November or thereabouts).

6. Oh, ya - I remembered. Don't forget to check out Mint's new Free Verse page every Saturday. Can't remember the last time a newspaper published poetry. So far there's Anjum Hasan (better read the poem here, since it's terribly formatted on livemint and not fixed yet), Chandrahas Choudhury, Aseem Kaul and Vivek Narayanan. Yay for Mint and a special thanks to Chandrahas, who has pushed hard for this.

RIP Meenakshi Mukherjee

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:26:00 +0000

It's still hard to believe. Meenakshi Mukherjee died this afternoon, on her way to the release of her new book in Delhi.

More later, when I can string my thoughts together.

The first ~~obit here.~~ [that was, apparently a beta page. Here's the link now]
*

9.15 pm: I'm still trying to say something useful but it all seems like a gross breach of privacy or is just too incoherent. I think I'm going to leave it at an announcement.

Launch of Arzee the Dwarf in Hyderabad

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:50:00 +0000

Chandrahas Choudhury's first novel, Arzee the Dwarf is being launched in Hyderabad on Saturday, 19th September.

I will be in conversation with Chandrahas and he will read from the book.

That's:

Saturday September 19, 5.30 pm
Crossword Bookstore,
City Center, 1st Floor, Shop No. 101-108,
Junction of Road No. 1 & 10,
Banjara Hills, Hyderabad - 500 034.

Note: Those who got mails from me about Chandrahas' talk at the University of Hyderabad, please remember it has now been cancelled.

Revolution 09.09.09

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:51:00 +0000

Forget everything else about this day - you know what makes it memorable?

The release of The Beatles' Mono Box Set. It makes me apple green with envy, to think of all the people who can (and will) order it off Amazon (let's not talk 'afford' here, okay? I can give up plenty to be able to 'afford' this. I'm fanatical like that).

So now you know what's #3 on my wishlist.

'a purveyor of picong'

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:07:00 +0000

That's Michael Hofmann, comparing Frederick Siegel with Naipaul:

From the beginning, Seidel was always a bogeyman, a Bürgerschreck, an épateur—a carnivore if not a cannibal in the blandly vegan compound of contemporary poetry. He is a purveyor of picong, a Trinidadian term, “from the French piquant, meaning sharp or cutting, where the boundary between good and bad taste is deliberately blurred, and the listener is sent reeling.” (This, as good a description of Seidel as inadvertence or serendipity can come up with, is from The World Is What It Is, Patrick French’s outstanding new biography of V.S. Naipaul, and what a lot the authors of Ooga-Booga and A Bend in the River have in common: both of them Insider Outsiders, traveling compulsively on all five continents; sharing an unspeakably deep attraction to a sort of eighteenth-century squirearchy that may or may not be England; a fascination with Africa, with Joseph Conrad, with Islam; both are students of the remorseless spread of global capital and culture, the Gulf Stream of development and the countervailing El Niño of terror; both are equally at ease in fiction and non-fiction, and in a blurring of both; and last and far from least, both exhibit, and are proud of, an insouciant erotomania. Surely Seidel, never a professional poet, never a reviewer, reciter, promoter, or teacher of poetry, could put his name to Naipaul’s boast: “I have never had to work for hire; I made a vow at an early age never to work, never to become involved with people in that way. That has given me a freedom from people, from entanglements, from rivalries, from competition. I have no enemies, no rivals, no masters; I fear no one.” Both are barbed, solitary, aloof, alarming figures, becoming, if anything, less mellow with age, and more like their intrinsic fossil selves, jagged and serviceable, “sharp / And meek,” Seidel says somewhere—he does love his noses—“like the eyesight of the deaf.” Thomas Mann’s term Greisen-Avantgardismus—meaning something like “the experimental progressivism occasionally found in the very old”—suggests itself. We as readers are uneasily privileged to witness their bold, inflammatory, defamatory gestures—gestures we know there will never be time or second thought or pusillanimousness to take back.)

My Pratham books and Mindfields!

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:02:00 +0000

Five years after writing them, (and taking any mention of them off the back of the second edition of my book), my three books for children are finally out! These Pratham books have been so long in the making because they've been simultaneously translated into several languages, and I'm not sure how easily they'll be available in bookstores, but here's their website.

One book, The Flyaway Cradle, is for children between the ages of three and six. The other two - Cheenu's Gift and Phani's Funny Chappals - for early learners (7-10 year olds; these books are for first time learners and for children who are not used to reading books for fun because they don't have the resources for that kind of reading).

*

In other news, I've got my copy of the latest issue of Mindfields as well, to which I've contributed an article on K.

Quite apart from the fact that I've contributed to it, if you have kids or are generally interested in alternative education, consider this a plug for the magazine.

*

So it has been that sort of a day. As you can see.

and i'm saying it.

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:15:00 +0000

nothing.

just pushing posts down, marking time, taking space.

wondering what it would be like to grow up thinking the beatles' music was a big puzzle which can only be made sense of by watching taymor.

and waiting. (for nothing in particular. not even with anticipation.)

just.

YA Loot

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 02:06:00 +0000

[because Aishwarya asked]

The Puffins first:

1. The 22 Letters. Clive King.
2. Fell Farm Campers. Marjorie Lloyd.
3. The Old Powder Line. Richard Parker.
4. Up the Pier. Helen Cresswell.
5. Pageants of Despair. Dennis Hamley.
6. Heartsease. Peter Dickinson.
7. The Extraordinary Adventures of The Mouse and his Child. Russel Hoban.
8. Flambards in Summer. K.M.Peyton (I used to love the Flambards books when I was in school).

Other YA books:

1. The Bridge to Terabithia. Katherine Paterson. (probably the only recent book in the loot).
2. A Northern Childhood: The Balaclava Story and other stories. George Layton.
3. The Nine Lives of Island MacKenzie. Ursula Moray Williams.
4. Legends of the Round Table. Adapted by Barbara Ker Wilson. (under 'W').
5. Grimm's Fairy Tales. Illustrated by Jiri Trnka.

Still more books:

1. Adam and Eve. Willie Rushton.
2. The Shaw Alphabet Edition of Androcles and the Lion. GBS. [it's a pain to read. What was the man thinking?!]

Wishlist: Item #2

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 04:51:00 +0000

I can't decide whether I am an extremely content person or an extremely discontent one. It's been two years since my first and only Wishlist post. This must mean that I have wanted nothing urgently enough since (Tony Leung doesn't count) or that most things are so terrible y shouldn't actually exist at all.

Wishlist item 2, of course, is a necessity and an urgent one at that. I need bookshelves.

Recent acquisitions include:

1. Large number of Puffins dating from 1968-72. Lovely books they are, too. One Farjeon from way back when. More YA books from decades ago. These are cast offs I was happy to house.

2. More castoffs, this time books I'd once given away coming home to roost (I'd offered to donate them to some library but now they're sitting on my floor).

3. Loot from Amit's reading. Hachette gifted me reprints of Buchan, Haggard, Sapper, Wallace, Grey - all very exciting. Also Alex Rutherford.

This is not counting the books I take out and am too intimidated to put back. Every time I take out a book, the shelves seem to sigh with relief and wiggle around in the extra space. So the taken-out ones stay on the floor, or by my table, or on the bed.

I need more bookshelves! Basic, one-book-deep, many shelves high ones.

My Friend Sancho in Hyderabad

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:44:00 +0000

Amit Varma's book, My Friend Sancho releases tomorrow in the city, at the Vikrampuri branch of OdysseyBookstores, Karkhana Secunderabad, at 6pm.

I will be chatting with him, very likely until the cows come home. At which point, Amit will be irresistibly drawn away from book events, talking lizards and high tea.

In the interests of keeping km from breaking out into hives, I am not posting the cover (with lizard) here.

That's:

Saturday, 29th August, 2009

6pm.

Odyssey Bookstores, Vikrampuri, Karkhana, Secunderabad.

RSVP: +91-40-2789 0561.

Hosts: Hachette India and Odyssey.

See you there!

Independent documentary vs. Video art: Girish Shahane on Amar Kanwar

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:57:00 +0000

A strange thing happened to Amar Kanwar around the year 2001. He had already established himself in alternative film circles, when a gentleman named Okwui Enwezor came to Delhi looking for artists. Enwezor, a thirty-something Nigerian who had made the United States his home, had been appointed the artistic director of the most important art exhibition in the world, Kassel's Documenta. He brought a distinctly political, postcolonial perspective to bear on his curatorial choices, and cast his net beyond artists who showed in galleries. He picked Amar Kanwar along with the Raqs Media Collective, leaving people in the art world befuddled. Documenta 11 part-financed Kanwar’s A Night of Prophecy, a film about poets in conflict zones, which was screened through the exhibition’s run in Kassel in 2002.

Kanwar had become a name to be reckoned with in two different worlds with two very different systems of financing. A typical independent documentary is funded by an NGO. The director, who doubles as producer, makes a certain amount up front, with further money coming through DVD sales and telecast rights. To make 5 lakh rupees, a director would have to sell 500 DVDs priced at 1000 rupees each, quite a tall order. The art world, on the other hand, depends on scarcity rather than volume. A video artist will make an edition of, say, ten prints of a video, to be sold for maybe 5 lakh rupees a pop. After the gallery commission, just two sales will provide the video artist the same amount of money that 500 DVDs got the documentary film maker.
It is no wonder that, during the art boom, many experimental film makers reinvented themselves as video artists. The boundaries between the two are blurry enough for the transition to be made without too many eyebrows being raised.

More.

Tony Lopez

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 02:26:00 +0000

I've just begun Tony Lopez's Data Shadow which I got a couple of years ago. Somehow, it slipped into some mysterious invisible zone on my bookshelf and I found it last night while looking for something else (a valuable stone*, if you want to know. I used the stone as a bookmark but have forgotten which book and now I can't find it. No doubt it will turn up).

I usually have no trouble skipping to elsewhere in a book of poetry; I come back to intended structures later. With this book, though, I intend to begin at the beginning - a Preface that is dense and requires time - and go on until I reach an end.**

But for the moment, here's a part of his poem, 'About Cambridge':

Tony Lopez

About Cambridge

About Cambridge they were never wrong
the old masters: for where they mostly lived
and wore their blazers out, happened to be
just beyond the cakeshop
where someone is always eating
opening a window or just cruising dully along
the great body of salty water
which is what one calls the protégé
one of those heavenly bodies that everyday
go by steering the fellowship through rapids
committees and quality audit
to a party taped on U-matic for ARDENT productions
a royal mirror of royalty
beyond the neatly-fenced perimeter
the folding tables and ice-buckets of summer
that is always happening elsewhere
as we poor shadows light up again
and move on

***

The rest of it here.

***

*What stone? This one:

**Data Shadow is the end, in a sense; it's the second half of an earlier collection - False Memory.

Biblio

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:26:00 +0000

The July-August issue of Biblio is a Poetry and Plays special.

Go read. [Registration required].

When the rain comes

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 06:27:00 +0000

Sequence 1: Samurai Warrior

Sequence 2: Backpacker

five out of seven: The 2nd Shakti Bhatt Award shortlist

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:11:00 +0000

Anuradha Roy: An Atlas of Impossible Longing

Chandrahas Choudhury: Arzee the Dwarf
Mimlu Sen: Baulsphere
Mridula Koshy: If It Is Sweet
Palash Krishna Mehrotra: Eunuch Park
Parismita Singh: Hotel at the End of the World
Preeta Samarasan: Evening is the Whole Day.

One graphic novel and one non-fiction (memoir? I don't know) makes this a year for fiction. I suppose this was inevitable; the selector's job is not to be representational. On the other hand, it depresses me a little: either not enough people are writing in different genres, or if they are those books are not their first ones or just not good enough.

At any rate, if the other books are anything like Chandrahas Choudhury's, Mridula Koshy's or Preeta Samarasan's, I'm happy.

Via a Facebook mail and Nilanjana.

triage

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 01:13:00 +0000

A wonderful post from (p) (b):

The woman shook her head and moved one of the cans to one side. The attendant laboriously voided that purchase, and punched in new numbers. The recalculated total was $15.23. The woman shook her head again. It was clear she had only $15, not a penny more, and she thought for a moment, and then took one of the small loaves out of her pile. My thoughts were slow in catching up with me; perhaps I should have offered her the quarter.

Her new total was $14.56. I could see, as I have seen so many times before at this supermarket, but especially so this year, that there was a budget that had to be stretched, a modest one. The task was to come as close to that exact amount with as many items as possible. I imagined she was buying for a household.

So, we learn patience with each other. We let as much time as is needed go into counting money, estimating added tax, smoothing out rumpled food stamps, watching intently as the eyes decide between spaghetti and air-freshener, between canned peas and frozen spinach, the anxiety of an enforced triage. In the same torpor of hardship are the customers and the shop attendants. In the absence of money, time itself slows down.

I could use some of that patience just now.

After yesterday's rain, our water pipe appears to have broken. I'm hoping it's the water pipe and not the sewage. If it is the sewage, I think I will count my blessings, because we had closed the water inlet and the chances of all the water getting contaminated is minimal.

But since I suppose we can't take chances, we will have a dramatic and eventful weekend ahead.

Patience.

Breaking Boundaries

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 11:01:00 +0000

The Goethe Zentrum is conducting a series of workshops all this week in schools, on the general theme of Breaking Boundaries. In the evenings, however, there will be films that are open to all (and free as well).

For four evenings, from Tuesday to Friday, I will be screening films at the Goethe Zentrum. The films will - broadly speaking - be about music, culture, identity and crossings.

- August 18^th: Buena Vista Social Club (105 min, 1999); Dir. Wim Wenders.

- August 19^th: Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (90 min, 2005); Dir. Fatih Akin.

- August 20^th: Jahaji Music (112min, 2007); Dir. Surabhi Sharma.

- August 21^st: Had Anhad (Bound and Unbound) (100min, 2008) Dir. Shabnam Virmani.

Time: 5.30 pm

Place: Goethe Zentrum, 1st floor, Heritage Complex, Hill Fort Road, Hyderabad.

If you're in Hyderabad, do come.

(Much drama has happened in the acquiring of these films but that is another story and shall be told another time.)

Signature

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:05:00 +0000

Anybody who knows me irl knows I sign off with footprints (on the page).

Today being Janmashtami, we couldn't resist the op to festoon our floors with footprints.

Here's how:

Spaniard Takes A Vow

noreply@blogger.com (Space Bar) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 02:58:00 +0000

Because I promised a tadpole this post

I watched half a million people on Facebook do this 50 questions quiz - which includes prize gems such as When Did You Wake Up and What Time Did You Complete This Quiz (as if everyone just wakes up and starts doing FB quizzes; and as if this is supposed to say something about you*).

Though I tried to keep my lip curled, it began to hurt and then I decided to just get it over with. Somewhere in some ledger, you will find it under the head of Oh, What The Heck!

I don't know when I began to get snarky, but no doubt all the people I tagged will be able to tell you ( I still retained some sense and tagged only those who had already tagged me).

But this qs. #40 is what I'm talking about. It asked:

Do anything spontaneous lately?

I admit I had to think hard and this made me even more bad-tempered because it soon became clear that a) I hadn't done anything spontaneous, not really and b) the only example I could dredge up sucked so badly that it was time I took a vow.

It turned out that the last 'spontaneous' thing I'd done was to think I'd surprise my son by picking him up from school, but since he didn't know I was coming, he sat in the bus as usual (while I was chatting with someone) and left without me.

So much for kids making you want to be young again.

And before anyone says anything, of course it's the kid's fault. The alternative would be to admit that there's no point in doing anything spontaneous. And that wouldn't do at all, would it?

*

This pointless (and not entirely spontaneous) post is also to say that this blog will largely specialise in announcements for a while now.

Coming up: announcements about more workshops. Why they're called that I don't know, but whatever.

*Come to think of it, if they did it would say a lot about them.