Archives for January, 2006

We begin with Larkin and his contribution to this thing called The Movement (England, 1960s). And when you begin The Movement, you have to begin with T.S. Eliot, of Waste Land fame.
So the adjunct professor goes. Continue reading this entry »

The AMS recently started a new venture: Trashbooks. These are notebooks consisting of pages that have already been used on one side. So basically, they take all the discarded photocopies from places like the Publishing and Copy Centre and bind them all together, and voila: instant activist notebooks. Continue reading this entry »

I watch.
Am later (tired) unable to sleep.

She sits, in the midst of that noncommittal (it is – isn’t it – noncommittal?) bustle alone. In the very centre of that complacent mingling, she wraps herself in loneliness, clasps her mantle of solitude to her body tightly, like a coat against slanderous winter winds, arms crossed tightly, defensively, across the chest. And like a floor length coat with only three buttons, this seemingly self-contained silence billows out from her waist downwards awkwardly; like a coat, not like the skirt of an 18th century English dress. Continue reading this entry »

It is astounding, when you stop to think of it (and please do, it’ll be worth your while), how many beautiful people there are in the world. Walking down the street becomes dangerous: the potential of falling in love (head over knees) every second becomes comical. Continue reading this entry »

After English class ended today, I decided to head to Common Ground, thinking I’d complete my Tom Jones readings on a comfy sofa. When I got there, I noticed that a couple of my friends were already there and I proceeded to the waste the next hour in pointless chit chat.
I’m not going to regale you with a list of the no-so-witty comments we amused our sorry selves with, but there was one thing that I still can’t get over. Continue reading this entry »

From my Ethnobotany readings:

Columbus turned to plants to prove that he had reached the Indies. He mistook the small inedible nut (nogal de pais) as the coconut described by Marco Polo. Any vaguely aromatic plant became evidence of the Spice Islands. His ship’s surgeon dug up the roots of the common kitchen rhubarb (Rheum raponticum) and concluded that he had found a limitless supply of the valuable carthatic drug Rheum officinale, a native of China.

- Davis, Wade A. 1997. Ethnobotany: An Old Practice, A New Discipline. In Ethnobotany Evolution of a Discipline. Dioscorides Press, Oregon. pp 40 – 51.

One of the minor characters in Tom Jones (by Henry Fielding) is a Dr. Bilfil, who is introduced as:

a gentleman who had the misfortune of losing the advantage of great talents by the obstinacy of a father, who would breed him to a profession he disliked. In obedience to this obstinacy the doctor had in his youth been obliged to study physic, or rather to say he studied it; for in reality books of this kind were almost the only ones with which he was unacquainted; and unfortunately for him, the doctor was master of almost every other science but that by which he was to get his bread; the consequence of which was, that the doctor at the age of forty had no bread to eat.

It is worth noting that Blifil dies eleven pages later.

On a final note, please excuse the long pauses between posts: in between bouts of living, I need to sleep and such, you know.

Of the many men whom I am, whom we are,
I cannot settle on a single one.
They are lost to me under the cover of clothing
They have departed for another city.

When everything seems to be set
to show me off as a man of intelligence,
the fool I keep concealed on my person
takes over my talk and occupies my mouth.

On other occasions, I am dozing in the midst
of people of some distinction,
and when I summon my courageous self,
a coward completely unknown to me
swaddles my poor skeleton
in a thousand tiny reservations.

When a stately home bursts into flames,
instead of the fireman I summon,
an arsonist bursts on the scene,
and he is I. There is nothing I can do.
What must I do to distinguish myself?
How can I put myself together?

All the books I read
lionize dazzling hero figures,
brimming with self-assurance.
I die with envy of them;
and, in films where bullets fly on the wind,
I am left in envy of the cowboys,
left admiring even the horses.

But when I call upon my DASHING BEING,
out comes the same OLD LAZY SELF,
and so I never know just WHO I AM,
nor how many I am, nor WHO WE WILL BE BEING.
I would like to be able to touch a bell
and call up my real self, the truly me,
because if I really need my proper self,
I must not allow myself to disappear.

While I am writing, I am far away;
and when I come back, I have already left.
I should like to see if the same thing happens
to other people as it does to me,
to see if as many people are as I am,
and if they seem the same way to themselves.
When this problem has been thoroughly explored,
I am going to school myself so well in things
that, when I try to explain my problems,
I shall speak, not of self, but of geography.

- Pablo Neruda

Shabana Mir has written an intensely beautiful poem on domestic violence (I am afraid of my voyeurism, that I can believe that beauty can be extracted from witnessing other people’s tragedies). This one poem has touched me more viscerally than any other piece of writing on this topic that I can remember, fiction or otherwise. What resonated most for me were two lines spoken by the aunts "dripping venom"

Who has not been black and blue?
What surkhab ke par does she have?

Continue reading this entry »

So today I attended one of those big community shindigs, where everyone knows everyone else and the food is never-ending. Early on, conversation turned towards university and what I was studying. I, not thinking it through, said I was studying Life Sciences and English.

"Oh, so you’re not going to do medicine?"
I think it’s been pretty well established on this site that I have no desire to attend medical school, but hearing that made something in me stand on edge. The underlying assumption is that medicine is the be all and end all – an assumption strengthened, ironically enough, by parents of children who cannot get into medical school. And I wouldn’t mind being the be all and end all.

Continue reading this entry »