Literary Safari

Here are a couple of articles/pieces I’m psyched to read this week:

In this week’s New Yorker: “Google’s Moon Shot: The quest for the universal library.”

In the Feb/Mar Bookforum: “On the Record: What Writers Talk About When They’re Talking About Writing” 

Not so new … but I just found it: Dave Eggers on “Short Short Stories” in The Guardian Unlimited.

Whenever I visit India, I admire the colorful and intricate art on the back of three-wheeler auto rickshaws that populate the streets of Pune. They bring back memories of my school days – how I used to crowd into a tight space alongside a dozen other girls with plaits and pigtails in blue and white school uniform pinafores. Our lunch boxes and thermoses used to hang off the sides and we’d clutch each other as the driver hurtled the vehicle over speed bumps and puddles of mud. (Sort of like this amazing flickr photo.)

While I was on my daily rickshaw ride, I never thought about things such as how long or hard the driver had to work to generate his daily income, what would happen if he got into an accident, or was unable to work. I never considered his family – perhaps even his daughter – who might have been my age, but was unable to go to school or ride a rickshaw to get from one destination to another. What was life like for her?

I was a very different type of rickshaw girl than Naima, the girl in Mitali Perkins’s most recent middle-grade novel Rickshaw Girl.

Naima is around 12/13 years old and lives in rural Bangladesh. She is the best alpana painter in her village and wants to use her artistic talent to help earn money for her family. One of Naima’s frustrations is that unlike her best friend Saleem, she can’t help her father drive his rickshaw because she’s a girl. Not only that, but she can’t work outside the house and her family can no longer afford to pay her school fees. One day, while talking to Saleem …

“You help your father,” she burst out. “Why can’t I help mine?”

Saleem shrugged. “You’re a girl. Girls stay home and help their mothers. Boys earn money and work with their fathers. That’s just the way it is.”

“But why? It’s not like that everywhere, Saleem. When I passed the tea stall this morning and peeked in at the television, I saw a Bangladeshi lady on the screen who was a doctor …”

Soon after this conversation, Naima has an epiphany: She is going to dress up as a boy and drive her father’s rickshaw–and help earn more money. Her plan doesn’t go as expected and she soon finds herself to blame for an accident that damages her father’s expensive, beautifully-decorated rickshaw. Instead of giving up, Naima comes up with an ambitious plan to repair and restore her father’s vehicle. In the process, she learns a few things about herself and about the opportunities that await her in her community. (So does her family.) {Warning: plot spoiler ahead} … Naima meets a woman who runs a rickshaw repair business (with the help of a loan from a women’s bank) and who offers to hire her.

Sure, there are other stories out there with gutsy girl protagonists in traditional societies. This one is different though – it is a timely and moving illustration of the grassroots changes that are occuring in rural environments around the world through microfinance institutions such as the Grameen Bank. Without sounding like propaganda or a case study, it provides a glimpse into how organizations like the Grameen Bank are beginning to make a difference in the lives of girls and women in Bangladesh.
We all need a little optimism, especially when it comes to stories about children in other cultures. Rickshaw Girl was a refreshing read. It was a good feeling to hold a book in my hand that highlighted change instead of just focusing on child labor, low literacy, and lack of opportunity (all topics that we hear enough about). It’s a timely novel, given the Nobel Peace Prize that was recently awarded to Muhammad Yunnus’s and Grameen Bank for “their efforts to create economic and social development from below.” With simple and spirited illustrations by Jamie Hogan, this book could be touching, memorable conduit for a literary study on the issues that face youth in developing countries and the hope that microfinance and other grassroots institutions are bringing to their lives.

More on rickhsaws and microfinance:

Gallery of Bangladeshi rickshaw art at Sepia Mutiny.
“Millions for Millions,” an article on two approaches to microfinance in The New Yorker.
Discussion Guide by Mitali Perkins.

I started taking dance lessons this week. They are on Tuesday nights at a little church up the block from our apartment in Northern Manhattan. The instructor is Russian, in his late 40s/early 50s, trained in the Fred Astaire system. His name is Oleg.

“Where do you teach?” I asked him, while we waited for class to start.

“I teach in a studio in Man-hattan,” he said.

“Ah,” I replied.

A few minutes later, my husband asked Oleg, “So, where do you live?”

“I leeave over in Man-hattan,” he replied again.

“Ah,” my husband said, lapsing into silence. We exchanged an amused look, both of us thinking and wondering whether we should tell him that we live in Manhattan too. We opted to remain silent.

A split second later, the older Russian lady exclaimed, “Well, this is Manhattan too!”

Oleg looked at her and just shrugged. He didn’t seem convinced.

I wanted to laugh.

I guess it’s quiet up here. Come out of the subway and you can actually hear birds chirp. There’s a tree outside our apartment building that is home to dozens of sparrows. And, on summer mornings and evenings, you can barely hear yourself think.

I suppose that Washington Heights – or Hudson Heights – if you want to use the real estate term – is city and suburb living rolled into one. You have the all-important A train, a few decent restaurants, and the experience of being able to walk in a five-block radius and experience three different cultures – Russian, Dominican, and what I like to call ‘Gentrian.’ You also have an immense park, a museum, quiet, and more space.

Since we moved up here, I’ve gotten pretty used to people asking me if I live in the Bronx. When first-timers come to visit, they say things like, “Where is New York City?” or … “How far away is Manhattan?” … even though they’ve clearly crossed the George Washington Bridge and paid a $6 toll!

When my uncle from Jackson Heights came to visit a few months ago, he said, “Oh, this is just like Queens.”

My first response was, “No, it’s not.” I felt the need to defend my 212 area code, and tell him all the reasons why this was Manhattan.

But then I remembered something my dad told me a long time ago: “Don’t bother trying to change people’s minds and perspectives and convince them of something just to boost your image in their minds. If they want to think you don’t know something, let them. You don’t have to prove yourself to anybody. That just means you’re trying to prove yourself to your own self.”

Papa was like that. He was a silent doer. If he want to a party and found himself in a group of people who held a strong opinion about something (say real estate) and he had a piece of information that might change their mind, he gauged the situation. Were these people who really wanted to know? Would they want to hear something that would make them feel less erudite? If no, he kept silent. He even applied that rule in instances where he realized that an individual had an impression of him that was mistaken.

I like that philosophy. Why do I sometimes feel the need to try and convince someone that I live in Manhattan. To feel like I’m more sophisticated or worldly? To enable them to view me through a certain lens?

Ehh. It’s not really necessary, is it? Papa would say no.

Still, every now and then, I do want to make a list of all the things I love about my neighborhood. So, for the record they are:

The Cloisters
Fort Tryon Park
The Little Red Lighthouse
Frank’s Gourmet Market
The Cornerstone
The Pumpkin House

Regardless of the borough, many of them are worth a visit – or a hike or drive – depending on where one is coming from!

This from The Guardian:

They are billing it as the thinking person’s American Idol, a search for the next big superstar but with literary, as opposed to pop celebrity, pretensions. Touchstone, an imprint of the publishers Simon & Schuster, yesterday launched First Chapters, a competition designed to find writing talent through the internet. It is inviting unpublished authors to submit the first three chapters of a manuscript to the scrutiny of the voting public. The winner’s book will be published and distributed by Touchstone and the author will enjoy a $5,000 (£2,575) cash prize.

Of course, I immediately logged on to gather.com for more details about this “First Chapters” contest. Since I don’t work for any of the ineligible sponsoring companies:

(“Gather Inc. (“Sponsor”), American Public Media Group, Minnesota Public Radio, Southern California Public Radio, The Hearst Corporation, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Simon & Schuster and their respective parent companies, subsidiaries, affiliates, promotion, advertising, design, web design, web hosting, publicity, production and print production agencies) …

… I guess I qualify to enter.

This is at least the second Gather.com writing contest in the past six months, the last being Amazon Shorts. So we know that public journalism (with new possibilities such as You Witness News) and voting-based celebrityhood are official trends. What’s the buzz word for this new trend going to be? Participatory literary agency?

I just got back from a screening of Mira Nair’s The Namesake, a film whose release I’ve been anticipating for over a year now. [Watch a preview here, at the official site.]

Just when I thought I’d seen a good movie last week with Freedom Writers, here came an emotionally charged film that just blew me away.

The basic plotline of The Namesake is quite familiar by now: It’s the story of the Ganguli family–Ashima (Tabu), Ashoke (Irfan Khan), and Gogol (Kal Penn)–and their complex navigation and journeys over 25 years through the infinitely complex societies and cultures of India and America, both fraught with contradictions and heartbreaking beauty and choices.

Gogol is named after the Russian author Nikolai Gogol, and his story is the heart of the book – and of the movie. And yet, Nair deftly builds and constructs the other characters into the film, and creates a canvas where the passage of time is smooth and profound.

The story itself is moving; there’s no two ways about it. But it was the small details that tugged at me and that I’ve brought home to ponder upon: the image of Ashima mixing a cup of American chivda for herself – Rice Krispies, chili powder, and peanuts; of Gogol shaving his head after his father passes away; of Ashok looking at his son’s basement bedroom while holding a wrapped package in his hand …

The cast is phenomenal, songs by Susheela Raman were apt (including “The Same Song” [listen] in the final credits), and the transition between the worlds of New York, Nyack, Manhattan brownstones, Victorian beach homes, Calcutta, and Cleveland were seamless.

When I came out of the theatre, I didn’t want to talk to anyone and it was an effort to stop myself from sobbing. I had to ask myself: what is it about this film that has moved me so profoundly? The answer is one that I’m just beginning to unravel, but it begins with identification – my identification with so many of the characters in the movie … with Gogol, of course – a child who grows up between worlds and has to make choices and define himself, make friends with his differences and learn to jump between thali dinners and cocktail parties. A child whose name comes with the territory of mockery, misunderstanding, and exotification. I saw myself in him, and I’m sure many many more Indian-Americans will. Then, in Ashoke and Ashima I saw pieces of myself, of my future, of my past, and of my parents – of their choices, of my transition, my family’s transition to life in America … the sacrifices and the gifts …

There’s so much there. It’s going to take me a few days to digest. Maybe I’ll just come back to this. …

I don’t know whether I truly believe this — I have to admit that it has been a couple of years since I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s book — but I almost feel as though this is one of the instances where the movie outshone the book for me. But perhaps my comparison between film and book wouldn’t stand up, so here’s what I plan to do – I plan to reread the book between now and March 9, then watch the movie again.

Really, that’s just an excuse to go back and see it once more, with my husband. And, no matter what, I know that this film is going to go on the list of movies that my children will watch with me when they are teenagers. That’s for sure.

I’m reading Orhan Pamuk’s 2006 Nobel Lecture in the 1/1/07 issue of The New Yorker. Delivered in Turkish on Dec. 7 at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Babamin bavalu (My Father’s Suitcase) is a multi-layered personal essay about Pamuk’s relationship with his father, his writing, and his books. (I wish I understood Turkish so I could watch it too.)

From the moment it arrived in my mailbox and I flipped open The New Yorker to this essay in the “Lives and Letters” section, the first sentence caught my eye:

“Two years before my father died, he gave me a small suitcase filled with his manuscripts and notebooks.”

It reminded me of my father’s notebooks, journals, and lists that I have kept aside since he passed away five years ago. I’m still waiting for the right time to know what to do with them.

So I did what I do with the reading material that tugs at my heart–I stashed it away for the perfect moment. (Sort of like I’ve been stashing away my dad’s words.)
Now why would you put off reading something you’re dying to read? It has something to do with my being a creature of delayed gratification, I think. When I pick up a work that I know is going to mean something to me and change me, I want (a) to be alone (b) to have nothing else that needs my attention … It’s like opening a gift. The longer you wait to open it, the more your fingers tremble when you unwrap the packaging.

So, the “perfect” moment came this morning when I was riding the subway downtown. I am glad I waited. This piece is really the most perfect way I could begin my 2007 literary journey.

Yesterday, I was asked a big question by my managing editor: Why do you read? My off-the-cuff answer to her was: I read to lose myself and find myself, all at once. There aren’t many other activities that give me that feeling. Maybe writing? I read because I know I’ll find answers to those unasked questions — and because for those few hours, I can be someone else and swim in the ocean of stunning imagery and language that makes me hold my breath.

That’s how I felt while reading My Father’s Suitcase. It took my breath away. Orhan’s father reminds me of my own- an avid reader, a man who loved words, but who never considered himself a writer. And yet, he has left behind so many words.

I’m still reading the piece, but for now I must share this lovely passage from the essay:

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes, he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do. But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete—after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. More…

Sigh. That’s why I read. To find words like these. And, that’s why I must make time to write-so that I can continue to find that joy he speaks of.

I’m not really one to make a laundry list of New Year’s resolutions, but this feature in US News and World Report caught my eye, and I want to share it with everyone I know: “50 Ways to Improve Your Life in 2007.”

I can be a skimmer of advice columns, but this was so much more than that. The sections such as family, health, community, planet, home, and mind in this package were informative and practical, both very good things!

I’ll try to work on some of them:

Your Health:
Work Out Harder
Eat at Home
Take Care of Your Contacts
Your Mind:
Go Tech Free Once a Week
Study the Sky
Your Community:
Donate Books to Schools
Help Rebuild New Orleans

Some others to add to that list:
Study Spanish
Learn to Ride a Bike
Play with my to-be-born nephew
Find out about those mini med-school courses
Eat a Friday night dinner at The Natural Gourmet School
Go on more artist dates
Write more morning pages
Blog more (but of course)

I’d better end before I overextend myself Happy New Year!