This and That

• I have not written a post in three months. Was it time that passed?

• Loved William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault. It is a book that got me reading fiction again. I was finding it difficult to read fiction in the past year or so because I was finding it difficult to ponder or wonder (ponder was lack of concentration I guess but wonder was because I'd exhausted it watching G do new things each day.) Trevor's sentences work so well at concealing themselves that you are well in the middle of a pang in your stomach or an urgency to see how a life would turn out before you realize that the sentences worked together to get you there. Brilliantly minimal. If you haven't read William Trevor yet, here is a good bibliography to choose from

• I am reading Netherland - library copy, like it so far. This leaves Blind Assassin and White Tiger on the planned fiction list. Why White Tiger? Why not?

• A friend had gifted me Animal Farm (can be read online) some years ago and I just tucked it away in the bookshelf saving it for a day when I needed to read something fictional, short, from start to finish. That day arrived a month or so ago. G's favourite rhyme then was Old MacDonald had a Farm and I was singing it (off-key, oh so off-key!) to him several times a day and I think Animal Farm couldn't help but be chosen if one were making animal sounds all day. Wonderful book and whenever I made oink sounds after that I thought not of Squealer but of Napolean. And subsequently only the Animal Farm animals made their appearance in the rhyme when I sang it!

• G is learning words rapidly. A few a day. Yesterday's best was beetroot.

• I am quite due to do the writing as catharsis. These blobs of words have been sitting in my head morphing and vanishing. I cannot even bring myself to write in my journal which is the best place for them - spill out, sort out. It is about a friend I lost in September.

• Been enjoying the works of Renoir. How much of a person lies behind their art.

Reading Lists

The problem with language is it both reveals and conceals. When one says here is my reading list, you can interpret the statement in so many ways - I'm reading only this, I'm reading them in the order I've listed them, I'm reading them all, I'm reading about them (this is a scary phenomenon because I expend a lot of energy with the background reading), I would love to read these books, etc. The interpretation may depend on what kind of a reader you are. In my case I usually assume that people who put up reading lists are parallely reading all or most of the books in that list. I also assume that it is likely that they are reading other things that they aren't listing (which is why a blogger like dovegreyreader scares me with her lists - check out her sidebar(s) and you'll know why.)

When a timeframe is not mentioned what stops one from thinking that the list has been going on forever? Something like all the books I've ever read, am reading, will ever read or want to? Oh no I did not want to go down the Babel path. Retrace: Close this para. Start another with new train of thought.

I was lying in bed last night next to a sleeping G who every now and then would put out an arm and manage to tug off the earphones of my iPod. Then, oh so carefully, I'd extricate the coveted accessory and press resume to continue listening to the World Book Club podcast with Lionel Shriver. The book being discussed was, of course, We Need to Talk About Kevin. I made a mental note to add said book to my reading list and this action led me to think about the various books I'd read and/or abandoned this year and somewhere in the consideration of The Gift or perhaps Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger, I slept. It may have been a dream or a crossthought but I also thought of Chenthil's post on books, which he called long, which I call woefully short, where he had tantalisingly set up his story of how he took to reading and then abruptly put a fullstop to it. I felt like turning the page to see if someone had torn off the rest (Chenthil: part two please!) The mashup of my pre-sleep pondering led to one good idea though - that of creating another list, this time for the year 2010 and focusing on Language.

For instance this Year 2010 list - and no cliched ten books in '10 - will necessarily include Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, which I shall cheat and read this year and buy myself some time (yes the absurd is always around the corner.) I guess Bill Bryson, Noam Chomsky, Anne Fadiman, ...gosh there are plenty...So if you have any wonderful titles to recommend, I'd be grateful.

PS: I like the play on the title but I recommend you read it as reading 'lists'

PS2: the problem with language is it both expands and limits expression

Osho: Gathering the data

Hey everyone: this is a quick post to ask a question. I did it a while ago on Twitter and am doing it here too. This 'a question' is going to be chopped into chunks. Many thanks for your time.

Have you read Osho?

a) If yes, do you think the label 'sex guru' holds good?

c) What would you say about the nature of his work?

d) Like? Dislike? Why?

I am going somewhere with these questions. I will have a post up once I have sufficient replies from friends.

Year of Lists - Progress Report

Quick note to see where I stand on the nine books to read target at the half-year mark:

1. Words in Air: Got book via mail today. Started reading immediately. Love it already. Plan to read off and on throughout rest of the year
2. Negotiating with the Dead: One of the first books I read this year. Had lots of fun with it. Definite reread later this year or next
3. White Heat: Because of 1, am reconsidering this one. I do not want to be confusing correspondences. Likely to move book to next year's list (assuming there's one)
4. Netherland: Have not made any procurement plans yet for said book. But do intend to read it this year
5. The Blind Assassin: Work in progress. Been that way for a few months now. Likely to finish this year
6. Harvesting the Heart: Err...what was I thinking when I added this one to the list. Strike it out
7. Ticknor: You know I haven't seen this book in India at all. Must make plans to acquire or must push to next year
8. Christine Falls: Done done done. Yay
9. The White Tiger: Have copy. Will read when I run out of excuses to not read it

I have shown YES on four, NO on three, MAYBE on three. Not bad.

Maid Up

Three related bits have been working in my head today. And before I sat down to type about them I caught a whiff of another bit, also related, from the background anchor noise on television. The three and half items are related by one word, one entity - maid. In the language of roundabout, it becomes the gender neutral domestic help.

Yesterday my mother alerted me to the TOI headline: Minimum wage mooted for domestic help in state. We did the math, we traced some history and carried on a conversation dominated by this news snippet. On the one hand I was very uneasy at the image of a harassing employer with which I must be slotted merely because I employ and on the other I was thinking of how a government wage minimum might help my maid who works in three houses and is always on the move to get work done. The thing about domestic help is that it is more a relationship than an employment. And that is where the domain gets murky.

Oh to be rid of servants, for all the emotions they breed - trust, suspicion, benevolence, gratitude, philanthropy - are necessarily bad, reads a diary entry of Viriginia Woolf in 1930. She seemed to have been perpetually in trouble over domestic help. That aside, her observation is pretty accurate. And that is why I offer the word relationship instead of employment because the latter implies a certain set of expectations and duties and hours all for a certain salary and additional benefits. The former, however, is vague, confusing; in the long run the boundary lines get invisible and control keeps moving from one end to the other. Both play their cards, usually emotional blackmail, and figure out ways to move on. How can one quantify a relationship?

When one tries to quantify, expect professionalism or even be professional, the relationship will be a super disaster. And, honestly, all the emotional tossing around is tiring even though it ensures steady state on shaky legs. You will love your maid one day, you will hate her the next. Fact. Replace 'maid' with 'friend', 'lover', 'husband' and the like and the statement will still sit pretty. Human nature.

Does being human also involve taking advantage of the weaker? You bet. The half story that the television anchor was dissecting is the presently hot Shin*y Ah*ja r*pe case. The wife came out to strongly support her husband. The question remains: who was the weaker?

A few weeks ago my cousin who was discussing her maid woes with me remarked that she did not know how to handle her maid. How do you know when to put your foot down and when to turn a blind eye? I wish there were seven steps to domestic governance that you could offer a copy of when such questions are asked. Sadly, no one knows the answer. It is as elusive as trying to figure out how to make marriages stick, how to be patient with your kids, how to be happy forever. There is no answer; rather, the answer keeps changing.

Will minimum wage help? Certainly. The question is who will be the beneficiary of such a rule.

George Orwell and First Lines

Take a look at these:

The clock struck half past two

(Keep the Aspidistra Flying)

As the alarm clock on the chest of drawers exploded like a horrid little bomb of bell metal Dorothy, wrenched from the depths of some complex, troubling dream, awoke with a start and lay on her back looking into the darkness in extreme exhaustion.

(A Clergyman's Daughter)

U Po Kyin, Sub-divisional Magistrate of Kyauktada, in Upper Burma, was sitting in his veranda. It was only half past eight, but the month was April, and there was a closeness in the air, a threat of the long, stifling midday hours.

(Burmese Days)

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth. 

I remember the morning well. At about a quarter to eight I'd nipped out of bed and got into the bathroom just in time to shut the kids out. It was a beastly January morning, with a dirty yellowish-grey sky

(Coming up for Air)

The rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out on to the pavement to address a lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and her grey hair was streaming down. 

(Down and Out in Paris and London)

Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side, he lurched across the yard, kicked off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs. Jones was already snoring. 

(Animal Farm)

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. 

(1984)

It is so unbelievable to note that Orwell establishes the time so definitively at the very beginning of each novel.

The Wheels on the Bus go...

...round and round. In our case we've been getting rounder and rounder while little G has been getting longer and longer. Since claiming responsibility for letting my interests slip away is a difficult admission to make, I shall save myself some guilt and stick to pronoun we for a while.

We have been identifying rhymes, picking out favourites already and clapping away when such ones play. We smile a lot and we sing along in our squeaky bad-even-in-the-shower voice (one of us can only babble still.) We love books and don't you make the mistake of thinking that we just stick to baby board books that have big fat pictures on them that invite you to point and smile and say gaaaaaaaaar and go clap clap clap. Ha, instead we love big fat books that make the adult go ga ga ga and those are the books that from the shelf come one by one and toss behind when we're done done done. baby perfect flourish. Out they come and out they stay until activity-weary mom puts them back in vain. Out they come again. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Harry Potter have been subject to particularly harsh treatment since we've stacked them in the lowest shelf. 

We love Margaret Atwood (an excellent collection of links on Atwood at Luminarium) and we have made up our minds that we shall read everything published. Our personal Atwoodian collection has been growing and so has our generous unasked for recommendation to friends. Negotiating with the Dead is brilliant, witty and cunning. Walk into the sentence trap and nod and nod while wondering what you are agreeing to. We have also reread Waltzing Again, a book that we so devoured last December, and loved it better if that were possible. We have been going around with a pink highlighter and furiously marking lines! The Blind Assassin is partly read and sitting there because we find non-fiction easier to assimilate than fiction. The kind of thinking that reading good fiction involves is very challenging to us at the moment. 

We must also admit to discovering Penelope Fitzgerald (So I Have Thought of You, the letters collection is such a warm book) and resolving to become acquainted with her works. First up is the Edward Burne-Jones biography and then possibly The Bookshop or The Blue Flower. 

Now that we are three paragraphs into avoiding guilt and feeling puffed up (must avoid ballooning descriptions to keep guilt at bay) at the effort and looking at the clock and thinking that the last sentence must be typed soon or sleeping G will morph to crying G, it is time to switch to trusty, lanky, self-critical I:

I realized, on a quick look back at recent reading practice, that I  have started to gravitate towards biographies. A few days ago I picked up Andrew Lycett's Conan Doyle, a book whose existence I had been completely unaware of upto that moment. Someone from that foggy slushpile of memory had remarked that biographies were written for mature (read OLD) people. That remark of all the discarded remarks found its way to light at a perfectly inopportune hour. 

After some consideration I am pleased to declare that I still have something called the reading habit and while I cannot quantify it because each day is so fuzzy and intangible, I do note that books get read and get replaced by new ones, magazines also get read over a month (before the next one arrives), online articles are skimmed, starred and read on lucky afternoons, newspapers get missed in the bargain and much to her chagrin, dear L does not have a clue about what is happening to General Election 2009. Yes, I intend to vote thank you very much. Jaago Re! And yes, IPL Season 2 is the only soap opera I watch. 

One of the nice little retrievals I've done is listen to A R Rahman's 1947 Earth. I used to play it a lot when it was first released. Then it got lost in myriad new things and I remembered the album when someone asked me about Rahman and the Oscar. Was it a popular album? I don't know. But the music grows on you. I do know that. The other Rahman albums I plan to unearth are En Swaasa Kaatre, Pudhiya Mugam and Indira (especially for Thoda Thoda Malardhadhenna, a past favourite.)

Let me leave you with a few Atwoodian quotes from Waltzing Again:

"Complication" is a matter of how you perceive yourself in an unequal power relationship

good writing of any kind by anyone is surprising, intricate, strong, sinuous

I think everyone should go out and get themselves a set of colored pencils and play with them. They will have fun

Under pressure, you can't depend on human nature to remain the way you think it ought to be. Under pressure people do strange things.

By my age and stage, you're going to know a couple of things. And if you don't know these things, where have you been all your life? Number one: some people aren't going to like you. This may come as a big shock. But it is true of every human being. There's some people who aren't going to like you. And there's some people who aren't going to like what you do, no matter what it is. So why not enjoy yourself and have fun?

There is a great risk of my typing in a large portion of the book if I go on picking out the pinked beauties, so take my word for it and read the book. Bye-bye.