New Yorker Mornings

Today, this moving essay by Peter Schjeldahl. It is attentive and demands that you read it with the same, if not similar attention it was written with. Here are some bits that made me giggle.

1) When I started writing criticism, in 1965, in almost pristine ignorance, I discovered that I was the world’s leading expert in one thing: my experience. Most of what I know in a scholarly way about art I learned on deadlines, to sound as if I knew what I was talking about—as, little by little, I did. Educating yourself in public is painful, but the lessons stick.

2) One drunken night, a superb painter let me take a brush to a canvas that she said she was abandoning. I tried to continue a simple black stroke that she had started. The contrast between the controlled pressure of her touch and my flaccid smear shocked me, physically. It was like shaking hands with a small person who flips you across a room.

3) My problem was not a lack of connection with the collective unconscious. I was a fucking poet. My problem was getting out of bed in the morning.

4) Writing consumes writers. No end of ones better than I am have said as much. The passion hurts relationships. I think off and on about people I love, but I think about writing all the time.

5) Writing is hard, or everyone would do it.

6) I met Susan Sontag once, at a party. She came up and praised something that I had written. Thrilled, I began chattering about I don’t remember what. Sontag froze. She retreated, taking backward steps before turning away. It dawned on me that receiving her blessing was supposed to have been enough: a solemn initiation. I had presumed on it.

7) I had a rage of ambition and an acrid dissatisfaction that, along with a love of the world, were bound to come out somehow. The self-centered motives have waned. It’s harder to pitch into writing with less to prove or avenge. To start a critical essay, I must prod myself until the old mesmerized flow resumes.

8) When I finish something and it seems good, I’m dazed. It must have been fun to write. I wish I’d been there. If you can’t put a mental frame around, and relish, the accidental aspect of a street or a person, or really of anything, you will respond to art only sluggishly.

9) Family and friends are being wonderful to me in my sickness. I’ve toiled all my life, in vain, to like myself. Now the task has been outsourced. I can’t go around telling everybody they’re idiots.

10) “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” per Samuel Johnson.

11) Life doesn’t go on. It goes nowhere except away. Death goes on. Going on is what death does for a living. The secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead.

12) One night in the early seventies, I perched on a tenement-roof edge despite my fear of heights, legs dangling, and ordered myself to let go. It was amid a love disaster. I truly thought I’d jump. But something inside me laughed derisively. Who was I kidding? Humiliated, I went downstairs. Some, in a crisis, must lack the laugh or muffle it for long enough.

13) Memory is a liar. It’s a heap of dog-eared, smudged, incessantly revised fictions. The stories make cumulative lies—or, give us a break, conjectures—of our lives. This is O.K. because it had darn well better be.

14) Reality was droning on as usual, with impartial sunlight streaming through a nearby window and picking out swirls of dust motes. A thing about dying is that you can’t consult anyone who has done it. No rehearsals. No mulligans.

15) Brooke has Texas grit: respecting everyone and taking no shit from anybody, least of all her spouse. When she’s mad, it’s scary, tapping a rage that once fuelled her escape from an awful family. There’s no recourse but to duck and wait for it to pass, which it does. The sun began to shine on my life when I gave up arguing with Brooke. She is also very funny and brings out the fun in others, her spouse not excluded.

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UNSTILL

Mind is crisscrossing. It’s a web connecting too many things and I came here to slow down.

I woke at 4:30 am feeling very happy because it had been raining and the sounds from the open window made me smile first thing in the morning. I lay in bed for a few more minutes, prolonging joy, wondering if I was only teasing myself with the promise of an early morning or if I was actually going to wake up and get one.

4:45 – I got up, went outside. It was dark and the rain had washed the streets and trees. Smiled more. Came back to bed and started reading. I am still with Patchett. Last two essays in The Story of a Happy Marriage. I am loving it. Went to the kitchen, made hot water, sat in bed sipping it, reading. It was still raining.

5:30 – Day broke. Went outside properly and smiled. Came back, changed into my walking clothes (oversized blue sweats and black yoga pants), took phone, earphones, Patchett and went for a walk. I listened to the soundtrack from Vita and Virginia as I walked. The music was composed by Isobel Waller-Bridge, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s sister. Fuck them both. So talented.

Many fruits were fallen pachak on the road. 3 mangoes, 2 purple berries, 3 red berries, one half-eaten banana, and half a jackfruit. Took a few pictures. After 15 mins of being consumed by V&V, I walked to the park, went inside an enclosure, sat on a bench and read. An old man came to do various exercises. We left each other alone. I read for 30 mins and came back home.

I took coffee with Patchett again and spoke to the parents for a while. Came back to bed to chill and read a bunch of essays that made me think think think. Grateful for these mornings. Was distracted by Hamzy’s Korean food-eating videos again but only mildly.

1. You Really Need to Quit Twitter
2. Is Google Making Us Stupid?
3. Habit by William James

Ignoring the doomsday headlines is not difficult because I recognize that we are already anyway doomed. The irony of being led to all these essays through twitter is somewhat charming.

Bookmarking these for later:

• Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, Janet Malcolm
• The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm
• Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf 

Must return to Vita and Virginia.

Remembering to Read

This morning, on the way to SLV to pick up breakfast – a security guard, in his 70s, sitting on a plastic chair outside an ATM with a pen and a Kannada newspaper, solving crossword. A little ahead, another oldish man with a shovel, uprooting a small plant by the compound of his house. He was wearing a white baniyan and panche.

Pretend it’s a city: have a list of books and films I must run to. Days are happier when I remember to remember that there is a woman named Fran Lebowitz who lives the way she wants to, reads, smokes, eats, walks, and goes back to live in her apartment alone– and no man no woman no child no parent can ever tell her anything. I am most curious about her love life, her sex life. But she’s given me so much that the other stuff, though I want to know everything about her — can never compete with how she makes it possible for me to believe that I can live however I want to, that I am young to not have to work hard to feel alive. That anything I’ll ever need is already with me, that I can move to NYC and live there forever (bring money, she says but – lol)

I spent all of this week crying. I cried in lifts and restrooms, at home, and at work, while riding. I don’t want to be that way ever again. I like to believe that I am not myself when I am not reading women. The months I spent in lockdown reading Toni Morrison, Marieke Lucas, Makenna Goodman, Sheila Heti, and Dawn Powell were the best days of my life. Nothing can ever come close to the intimacy I share with a woman whose work I’ve just begun to discover and rediscover. My problem is that I give too much attention to my life. I must remember everyday what Toni Morrison said: “I write because otherwise I would be stuck with life” and what Fran Lebowitz said, “Reading is better than life”

Reading is real, supremely more real than anything else I’ve ever known. More real than even perhaps, writing.

Reading Walking December

On my way home from the walk today, I saw a tree with leaves that reminded me of the giant leaves we plucked in Belgaum to serve food while playing kitchen-kitchen with the neighbor girls. Their food looked much tastier and healthier. And they even thought of things like pappads to make from white leaves, and beeda from green leaves with red veins. The leaf I recognized was used to serve other leaf-food in.

Finished reading Makenna Goodman’s The Shame which I think I read at a good time in my life, guilty only occasionally about my snail-slow pace. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as anti-baby literature but I think I am accumulating it smilingly 🙂

Work is mad but I am only realizing it because classes are over and the non teaching part of academic life is dancing on my head. I am a happier person when I teach and what’s nice is that I am barely aware of it. Woke up at 3:30 one morning this week and read till 7:00. Best morning. It took revenge a couple of days later but what joy to be with yourself that early in the morning with cool, blue silence.

This quote by Hannah Arendt returned me to reading with a fever. Made me think WTF am I doing when I am not reading?

The mere reading of a book requires some degree of isolation, of being protected against the presence of others.

Hannah Arendt

Very grateful to have found twitter in my late 20s. There is so little I want to undo and unsay in my 30s. Also – problematic, toxic, traumatic, overrated, ew, contradictory, cringe, binge, thirst, political political monkey monkey underpants. No thank you.

I read in the park these days. Read Maile Maloy this morning. Felt cheerful. The weather is perfect to read outdoors.

I have money plants growing out of wine and chai point bottles in my room now. The two avocado pits I planted earlier this year are growing tall on the terrace. I smile everytime I see them. I am using the same water bottle I did three years ago before which I had a red bottle of same build.

Birthday month was strange. I spent a lot of time inside my head and felt very distant from me. Made myself miserable and blamed it on the world. When I had enough, I took myself out and read like mad. Realized it’s the only thing I must keep doing to stop from going further in.

Looking forward to Alexander Chee and another round of Toni Morrison. Watched Rebecca, loved it. Watched a lot of TV and loved it more. I seem to have grown warmer to the idea that if I am wearing great clothes, nothing can undo me. Fashion is an answer, and sometimes a solution.

Through all the miserable points in my life from school, college, and work – I wish I had paid more attention to what I was wearing. May have even helped me own myself a little bit. N got me the bestest birthday gift. I was asking for self-respect, she got me a vibrator.

I thereby conclude that an orgasm is the best kind of self-respect.

Stupid

Oh how stupid I’ve been. Life itself is a distraction. It distracts me from living. So much of what I do is a response. To be better, to be good, to make it count. What kind of a soulless way to live is that? So far I’ve felt most alive when I don’t respond to anything, especially time. I’ve felt alive when I am learning, when I’m watering plants and listening to short stories, when I am discovering someone’s reading life, when I feel the itch to write & succumb to it wholeheartedly, full-bodily, beautifully – when I am hardly aware of time.

This beautiful blog reminded me that I am not really living. Why do I even bother doing anything that is not living? For now, this means giving myself permission to be swallowed by books and being unwilling to part with time to do anything else. Gahhh

Franny & Toni

Spent all of last week scrounging through everything Fran Lebowitz wrote and spoke. Read Beloved and came to discover Toni Morrison as a lot closer to me than I’d anticipated. My body is filled with her words and I’m letting them sleep inside as long as I can hold them there. But the better discovery was the close friendship between Fran and Toni. I am feeling an envy that is both happy and relieved. I’m excited to learn the things they said about each other.

Watching Fran is one kind of thrill. Reading Toni and realizing that my best writing years are yet to happen is another kind. Fran arrived in New York, much like Didion did. To write. To learn to write. Fran was barely 17. I want to go too. Discovering these women has made my resolve to see New York stronger. And so much that I don’t give a fuck about wanting to be special. I want to be as hopeful and as plain and as ordinary as those women were before they became famous. I want to see the city and feel the echo of their words in my eyes.

Stitcher is a gift. Here are some fab interviews that I loved by Etgar Keret, Claudia Rankine and Fran Lebowitz.

Keret narrates a funny incident involving his mother who, proud that her son had become a famous writer, made sure to ‘split’ her vegetable shopping just so she could return to the green grocer and say ‘you know my son’s story was published in the New Yorker’ while buying carrots – and then again — ‘you know he teaches in this great American University’ while buying cucumbers.

He says some really interesting things about fiction, something that I am getting more and more terrified of writing.

Claudia Rankine takes me back to my time at Seattle, and that evening we watched ‘Citizen’ performed powerfully on stage. So powerful that for the rest of the evening, I saw nothing but guilt and fear in the eyes of that one severely racist colleague.

I’m itching to write about it even as I gaze lovingly at the other three writing deadlines. Even so, I read this Paris Review Interview of Fran last night and went to bed happy and songful. She’s making me return to reading furiously. She says in an interview “If you want to learn how to write, and your parents are willing to pay obnoxious money to put you through a writing school, take that money, buy lots of books and read. It’s the only way to learn how to write”

In this interview, she says “But really, I read in order not to be in life. Reading is better than life. Without reading, you’re stuck with life”

Gahhhhh.

R for Reading

My memory of watching Appa read is soaked in the sound of his laughter. I cannot separate the two. He’d have a ಬೀchi (Beechi) book open on his stomach, his back straight, his fingers firm on the spine. When he began laughing, the room had to hold its breath. His belly moving, his body shaking, puffs of air escaping his mouth, he’d explain why he was laughing. There was always a man named Thimma & something ridiculous always happened to him in very Vadivelu-like situations. 

Amma & I’d wait for him to finish & demand more explanation until he gave in & revealed that he was actually laughing because it reminded him of something from his hostel days. About the time when a boy terrified of ghosts refused to pass by the graveyard after they were returning from a late night horror film, and how one of them pointed at a tree and started howling only to watch the boy scream, run & fall, scream, get up, run & fall all the way back to the hostel.

I learnt a lot about pace from watching him read. It never happened that immediately after laughing at a funny bit, he returned with more laughter. There was always time for reflection after a laughing fit, almost as if the book had to use strength to calm him down, rest his bouncing belly, make him pause. Then he’d say mchh & close his eyes for a bit.

Schools can be creatures of Brahmanical impositions. Sanskrit was shoved down throats under the garb of ‘scoring subject’, Kannada was made alien because fears of halegannada (old Kannada) were thrown around, English was desirable, English songs even more so, boy bands were cool even if they had difficult names (Enrique was/is Henry K). 

I pushed myself to mug big words in the dictionary, never quite knowing when to use them. At home, I grew ashamed of all the Kannada books & hid them behind English books with thick, impressive spines, not knowing whom they had to be hidden from. It is not ironic that I teach English for a living today but have returned to Kannada with a fervor – a kind of Sairat. Reading Siddalingaiah helped this return. Watching Big boss Kannada confirmed this. Now when I write in Kannada sometimes, I am pleased that my hand remembers it very well.

I was born into castes that whipped Kannada & Konkani together to produce a gadbad of joys that English will never understand. And yet, a man living all the way in Latin America, in fucking Aracataca who wrote in Spanish, somehow made it to a tattoo on my arm.

Last week, Appa learnt that our thread-wearing neighbour had procured enough newspapers to sell. He went & asked for Deccan Herald with great interest, bought it & also a copy of Kannada Prabha. At home, he threw the DH in a corner & read KP. He did the same thing the next day, & the next. I smiled & felt rescued. Somehow by showing & hiding, we have found our own ways to survive, read, and be taken seriously.