To imagine a different and better world

As a huge fan of short stories, I always look forward to the fiction in my favorite magazine.

Imagined worlds they are.  

As a kid, I read Enid Blyton's books, and I had to imagine pretty much everything that I read there.  Bacon, for one, about which I had no idea, and the kids in those books were always having bacon with breakfast.  After breakfast, they wandered about by the stream.  Imagine that!

Nonfiction essays, too, require imagination on my part.  Even now.  To read an essay like the one that masterfully describes the story of globalization via Chinese merchants selling sexy lingerie to Egyptian women wrapped up in niqabs, in a remote small town by the Nile, requires imagination on multiple dimensions.

Reading is, thus, more than mere reading:

When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed.

There is no denying the fact that Enid Blyton's stories changed me. They informed me that there were people and cultures that were far removed from where I existed.  The local stories too, whether by Sujatha or Kalki or Jayakanthan, changed me.  So did the serious and gossipy reporting in Blitz, Illustrated Weekly, or India Today.  Words and sentences were like magical spells.

The power to imagine is also the power to create.  

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I'm going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things. They daydreamed, they pondered, they made things that didn't quite work, they described things that didn't yet exist to people who laughed at them..

Whether a fictional world, or the real world with problems of real people, reading them developed in me a sense of empathy.  Empathy then leads to wondering how the world can become a better place for you and me, which is why I rant--to make a case for doing things differently.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.
You're also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it's this:
THE WORLD DOESN'T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS. THINGS CAN BE DIFFERENT.

Sometimes, I think that there are only two kinds of people on this planet--those who willingly read, and those who would way prefer not to read unless they were compelled to.  I have always believed that the world will be a better place if more people read on their own.  I am always shocked at how much even those who used to read quite a bit are so distracted by social media that they now do not spend some of their down-time reading.

    

Imagine if more of us read!

Book those meetings!

Working from home for many means plenty of video meetings.  "Zoom" has taken on a new meaning in our vocabulary.

Not everybody is comfortable with this new way of interacting.  Some are relaxed and easy, while many others are seemingly not.  A few make sure that the background is professional and presentable, and then there are others.

So, of course, there are ratings for that too.

For now, these are in a lighter vein, but I won't be surprised if the rating system becomes a part of everything else in life that we seem to be rating all the time.

A shelf with books is one of the favorite backgrounds--it tells the viewer that the person is a reader and is informed and, therefore, knows what they are talking about.  Is it any surprise that book publishers provide background images of their books?  Like this one from Random House:

Have that in your background and impress the heck out of the viewer!  Who cares if you have not read the books as long as you know how to talk about them ;)

Couldn't books be a part of the home decor as much as paintings and tchotchkes are?

Yes, they can, say the Japanese, who even have a word for it: Tsundoku.

And you thought only Germans have a word for everything!

Tsundoku means buying books that you do not read but pile up at home.

"The phrase 'tsundoku sensei' appears in text from 1879 according to the writer Mori Senzo," Prof Gerstle explained. "Which is likely to be satirical, about a teacher who has lots of books but doesn't read them."
While this might sound like tsundoku is being used as an insult, Prof Gerstle said the word does not carry any stigma in Japan.

You just happen to have a lot of unread literature.  That's all.  There are far worse things that one can do about which we need to worry a lot ;)

But what if some of the unread books have $20 bills tucked away in between the pages?  You will never know unless you read the books, right?

Do you know anyone who has read Ulysses from cover to cover?

Let's see if this cartoon tickles you ... at least half as much as how funny it was to me:

Source

Maybe the book was James Joyce's Ulysses! ;)

Every time I read an essay in which the author makes references to Joyce and Ulysses it is only to make a point that it is insanely difficult to go past even a few pages of that book.

Like this writer from a few years ago, who spoke the truth, during his graduate schooling, to his Joyce scholar professor: "If I had to choose between rereading Ulysses or Tarzan of the Apes, I'd go for Tarzan."

Yet, when we list our summer reading lists, even the wish lists, it is not the likes of Tarzan that we think of but the heavy ones like Ulysses.  What's up?  I like this take:

Of course, we tackle more elaborate books in summer because we have more time on our hands, with the season’s longer days, the time off from work, and the promise of leisure in the air. But there’s also a psychological effect at work. From our childhood days, the coming of summer and the end of the school year meant the end of our “required” reading: no more homework, no more chapter assignments, no more mandatory synopses of The Scarlet Letter or historical summaries of “Everyday Life in Dickens’ London.” Come the solstice, many of us experienced something that will never disappear: the exhilaration of setting our own literary agenda—a private summer syllabus devoid of grades and fueled by love alone.

For once, it is not about the grades.  Not because it is a required reading. It is love.

But the reality is that I rarely ever run into people anymore who want to talk about the books that they are reading or plan to read.  It is almost as if a vast majority does not read books anymore.  Neither here nor in the old country.  Maybe there really never was a book-reading culture and it was only a few who read?

This coronavirus summer that preempts travel should, logically speaking, give me plenty of time to read serious books and blog about them.  Even Ulysses!

But, life is illogical, for the most part ;)  I don't have a list of books for this summer.

This Tarzan will, however, continue to read, think, and blog.

Reading the future ...

During the morning drive, I turned the radio on.  It was not about tRump.  Phew!

Source

What an interesting segment it was!  So interesting that I couldn't wait to return home and place an order for the book.  I added another book to the order.  The two books will reach my doorstep in a week, and just in time for the winter break.

I wonder, however, for how long books will continue to be printed.  Consider music, for instance.  It is mostly streamed.  When was the last time you bought music as a tangible CD or vinyl?  They don't even sell cassette tapes anymore, right?

Even now, quite a few purchase the e-version of books instead of the bound paper.  For how long will books continue to be printed on paper?

An even more troubling question is this: Will books be around?

Book maybe dead by 2039, the futuristic commentary argues.

How long did it take for vinyl to be replaced by tapes.  And then tapes by CDs.  How long did CDs continue to sell?

It is absolutely fascinating that printed books have survived this long.  Why 2039 for that commentary?

In 1439, an eccentric German goldsmith cast the Latin alphabet in lead, smeared the letters with oil-based ink and squashed them beneath a wine press. Johannes Gutenberg hadn’t invented the ink, the paper, the press or the alphabet, but by combining their powers, he built the first printing press and printed the first mass-produced book: a 1,200-page Bible printed on vellum and bound in pigskin.

The rest was history.

Soon, even books will become history in the coming "post-book world"?  Of course, rumors of books ending have been spread for a while.  "Until now. Or more accurately, until 2031, when the Verse arrived, and humanity discovered a new way to tell its stories."

As troubling as the commentary is, it seems entirely plausible.  If video killed the radio star, virtual reality (VR) killed the book authors:

By the mid-’20s, V.R. was sleeker and cheaper, but still posed no danger to Cinemark or Barnes & Noble (both of which declared bankruptcy in 2036). But the rise of cheap neural threads led to the first generation of V.R. implants, and in 2031 Google’s Daydreamer, Netflix’s ReelLife and Microsoft’s much-mocked Awegment were joined by Amazon’s Universal Experience, popularly known as the Verse.

What a clever piece of writing there, right?  Can't you already see those brand names?

The author makes an important point that it was never about the books per se.

"The stories." That's what the books were about.

And stories existed long before 1439. Stories are shape-shifters, infinite and immortal: They’ve been painted on the walls of Chauvet Cave and pressed into clay tablets; sung by griots in the streets of Old Mali and cut into the Peruvian desert; danced and drummed and whispered, spun like spider-silk across the Atlantic and painted on the undersides of overpasses. In the context of human history, the book was nothing but a format, a brief technological quirk in the history of human storytelling, younger than theater but older than soap operas.

Read the entire commentary. Maybe you will welcome that future.

As for me, 2039 neatly coincides with another landmark, and I hope to live with books as we know them!

The fucked up Chinese "model"

Even occasional visitors to this blog know all too well that I am not a fan of the Chinese model.  I don't care for money if that means humans and the natural environment will be damned by decisions made by a few who are more equal than others.  Btw, in China's case these few are all men. 

I continue to be shocked that, for instance, China openly runs a prison complex to brainwash and torture Uighurs, and the world couldn't care as long as the products that they import from China are inexpensive.

More recently, the news that tRump offered a deal to Xi that he would not say anything about the Hong Kong protests should not shock me given that we are talking about tRump and China--yet, I am shocked that this is the state of the world.

One relatively unknown American with a wee-bit of a prominence said something about the protests in Hong Kong, and from across the ocean came China's thundering response to fuck off.

Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, posted a tweet supporting protesters in Hong Kong, upsetting the Chinese Basketball Association led by the Hall of Famer Yao Ming.

Or, as tRump and his toadies like to tell ball players--"shut up and dribble."

In addition to Chinese sponsors such as the shoe company Li Ning and the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank Card Center, which both announced that they were pausing their partnerships with the Rockets, team officials faced an immediate backlash from the Chinese Basketball Association and the Chinese consulate in Houston. The basketball association announcement Sunday that it was suspending cooperation with the Rockets was particularly jarring, since the federation president is the Hall of Fame center Yao Ming, who starred from the Rockets from 2002 to 2011.

It is always shocking to me that when it comes to a choice between money and morals, the business folks and politicians always tend to run away from morals into the welcoming slimy arms of money!

China has one hell of a choke hold on its people.  How awful that there are supporters of the China model all over the world!

China is also the most successful in controlling the internet in its territory.  But that is not any standalone thing; it is a part of the complete control the government has:

But their stranglehold on society is also the result of their largely successful push in the past decade to ban nearly all bookstores, books, authors and academics that do not adhere to the Communist Party’s line. Even before the current Hong Kong protests, there was a crackdown on Hong Kong publishers. In the fall of 2015, associates of the Causeway Bay Books store disappeared, later discovered to have been detained on the mainland, accused of trafficking in “illegal” books critiquing leading members of the Communist Party. In 2017, the Communist Party formally took control of all print media, including books.

Fucking authoritarians!!!

These authoritarian bastards are particularly focused on books and print.  Why?

Regimes are expending so much energy attacking books because their supposed limitations have begun to look like strengths: With online surveillance, digital reading carries with it great risks and semi-permanent footprints; a physical book, however, cannot monitor what you are reading and when, cannot track which words you mark or highlight, does not secretly scan your face, and cannot know when you are sharing it with others.

They want to know what you read, when you read, and with whom you share what you read.  "The ghostly absence of books, and the freethinking they seed, is the nightmare."

And, yes, shut up and dribble the damn ball!

Source

Know yourself ... and your audience too

My neighbor flattered me yesterday with a question.  "Why don't you write for the New York Times?"

I never let these questions get to my head.  Because, I have a good idea of my mediocrity.  I am not at the level at which those big boys and girls play ball.  But, it is always a treat when somebody says such wonderful things.

The other thing that sometimes I am told is this: "You should write a book."

A long time ago, I read a rather sarcastic essay, which said that there is a book within every one of us, and it is best if that book stayed inside us ;)

Is there a point in writing a book that nobody would ever read?

Of course, academics do that all the time.  They proudly display their tomes in order to impress the gullible students and the universities faculty committees.  But, rare is an academic book ever read by anybody, even within academia!

In an essay that was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, back in 2001, I quoted from Chekov's play, Uncle Vanya, in which the uncle finally lets loose at a retired professor:

"All our thoughts and feelings pertained to you alone. Our days were spent talking of you and your work, we were proud of you, we uttered your name with reverence, our nights were wasted reading books and magazines for which I now have the deepest contempt! ... But now my eyes have been opened! I see everything! You write about art, but you understand nothing of art! All your works, which I used to love, are not worth a copper kopeck. You've swindled us!"

I then added:

Would people be disillusioned if they knew that only a few of professors' publications are ever read by more than a handful of other scholars? Would people be disappointed in higher education if they realized that most academics' publications would not sell even for a penny? Would people agree with Uncle Vanya that professors who write but are rarely read and cited are swindlers? Could it be that people already grasp the truth, and that their knowledge is one cause of the decline in the prestige our society accords to faculty members? If I did not teach at a university, would I agree with Uncle Vanya?

I don't care much for book-writing, academic or otherwise.

How about building on many of the ideas that I blog about here and writing books?  I don't think so.

You can tell a story to anyone who’s willing to listen. But writing a book that people will pay money for or take a trip to the library to read, requires an awareness few storytellers have. It is not performance, not a one-person show. It’s a relationship with the reader, who’s often got one foot out the door.

Which is why even in this blog I keep the posts short--I am fully aware that the reader is ready to move on, especially in this FOMO world.

If you want to write a book, do it. It’s wonderful and horrible and fulfilling and soul-crushing all at the same time. But do it because you want to, not because someone suggested it one time. Be mindful of what it fully entails before you start, so you have reasonable expectations and set reasonable goals. You don’t have to write with the aim to get published, and you don’t have to publish with a traditional publisher.

In the past, I have collected posts from this blog, re-formatted them as vignettes, and printed them. All for one reader: My father.  He keeps them in his safe, and refers to them by "volume numbers."  That's priceless!

Nero to succeed Marcus Aurelius!

I know I have been harsh on Barack Obama the President.  As President, Obama always came across to me as a souped up combination of Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush.  He seemed to lack the inner drive to go out there and strike deals.  Sometimes,  I even think that this personality trait of his has also contributed to Democrats getting cleaned out not only from the White House and Congress, but--and more importantly--at the state level in the legislatures and governors offices all over the country.

As a person, Obama has been a model human being at the White House.  Like how Carter was, and continues to be after his presidency.  Kids all over the world can--and should--look up to the likes of Obama and Carter and tell themselves, "I want to grow up to be like them."

I am equally proud of the remarkable level of intelligence that Obama has always demonstrated.  An intelligence that is not abrasive nor audacious, but humble.  Kids all over the world can--and should--look up to him and tell themselves, "I want to grow up to be smart like him."

A reader, as much as he is a writer and an orator:

During his eight years in the White House — in a noisy era of information overload, extreme partisanship and knee-jerk reactions — books were a sustaining source of ideas and inspiration, and gave him a renewed appreciation for the complexities and ambiguities of the human condition.

Yes, the complexities and ambiguities of the human condition.

What a contrast to the incoming president who has not for a nanosecond demonstrated anything about "the complexities and ambiguities"; in fact, he has taken to a whole new level the previous Republican president who made it clear that he did not do nuances and that he viewed the world as us-versus-them.

For Obama:

reading gave him the ability to occasionally “slow down and get perspective” and “the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes.”

To get into somebody else's shoes is what empathy is all about.

Not even the incoming president's fanatical bootlickers will think of their Dear Leader as capable of empathy!

Obama reads widely, including fiction:

He points out, for instance, that the fiction of Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri speaks “to a very particular contemporary immigration experience,” but at the same time tell stories about “longing for this better place but also feeling displaced” — a theme central to much of American literature, and not unlike books by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow that are “steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you’re giving up.”

In contrast, can you imagine the demagogue having anything substantive to say about Diaz or Lahiri?!  As one reader phrased it in his comments to the NY Times piece:

Like Blunder Woman Sarah Palin, Trumpty Drumpty always struggles to name a single book he's ever read.

Oh, I owe to another commenter at the NY Times the title for this post.

Rewards-r-us

Could that really be the case?  Could my eyes be deceiving me?

I got closer. It really was what I thought I saw.

It was a thirtyish guy, with a neatly trimmed beard, reading a hardcover book while seated on the bench by the river, with his bicycle leaning against the bench.

A sight to behold!

"That is a rare sighting" I said.

He looked up, perhaps wondering what bird has such a strange accent.

"You are reading a book!!!" I hoped he got the multiple exclamations in my voice.  These are the situations when we really need Victor Borge's punctuation guide.  But then, we cannot be haphazard with exclamation points ;)

He smiled.  "Yeah, everybody has tablets."

"Oh, they may" I replied as I walked up to him.  "But, they are playing Pokemon, not reading."

"I think you are right" he said.

I wished him a good day and continued with my walk.

We live in strange times.  It could get even stranger.  We even have a presidential candidate, whose first name might as well be Adolf, who boasts that he does not read books.

As I have often lamented, reading books is seemingly rarely ever done anymore in the old country.  Movies and cricket, and now Facebook and WhatsApp, seem to have taken over people's down times.

A couple of years ago, when discussing market mechanisms and incentives, I briefed students about the "experiment" to reward students with a dollar for every book a student read.  They were almost unanimously against it.  The students argued that kids should not think that they would do something only if there is a reward.  "If this class were not required for your graduation, then you won't be here, right? Doesn't that mean you, too, are doing it only for the reward?" I asked them, and hastily chuckled to lighten it up.  

A recent gift that I gave was a book.  In the book, I inserted a twenty-dollar bill as well.  That was more than four months ago.  I suppose a few years down the road that book might even be dropped off at some used bookstore.  And then somebody else buys that for a quarter.  This new owner of the book keeps reading and all of a sudden a twenty-dollar bill falls out.  I would like to be there when that happens ;)

Reading books is how I got to be here.  Life itself has been a wonderful reward.  I am sure the bearded bicyclist has been collecting his rewards as well.

A life of rebellion ...against quiet desperation?

When I was young, we never seemed to have enough money for me to buy books.  Throughout my life in the old country, my parents, like most ones of their generation, had budgetary worries and with the household budget and accounting done in the presence of us kids, well, I knew well it was a luxury for me to buy books.

Thus, I relied on the local library, which more than fit my needs of those days.  Heck, that library even had Fahrenheit 451, and The Prophet, which are evidence enough that it was not a bad library by any means.  When we moved to the big city of Madras, I then made wonderful use of the libraries at the American and British consulates.

Attending graduate school at a university with more libraries than I could have imagined, with more books than I could have ever dreamt of, meant that I now had even less of an incentive to purchase books.

But, every once in a while, I do buy books.  And am always ready to loan them to anybody who is interested.  (There are a few books that are ultra-special to me and the fear of losing them means I shall never loan them!!!)  A student had borrowed my copy of Mario Vargas Llosa's Letters to a Young Novelist.  And it came back to me yesterday, which gave me an opportunity to scan through the book and re-read a few of my favorite sentences and paragraphs there.

Perhaps you wonder why I purchased that book when I have no plans ever of writing a novel.  Non-fiction essay writing shares in plenty with writing novels.  For that matter, the existential drive to be an academic has a lot in common with the angst that drives fiction writers.  Consider the following sentences that Llosa writes:

At peace with themselves!  Which is why I went through all those career changes--ditching electrical engineering, quitting professional planning--even though those, especially engineering, would have made me worry less about my financial well-being.  As I blogged a while ago, I don't want that life most people lead, which Thoreau noted:

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them

So, "what is the origin of this early inclination" to choose this vocation?  Why this nagging feeling that without pursuing this vocation we won't be true to ourselves?  Llosa provides an answer that sums it up really well for me: "The answer, I think, is rebellion."  A rebellion "against authority, the establishment, or sanctioned beliefs."  Yes, to rebel, even if seems like I have no cause!

This existence means that I never truly take a holiday from my work.  Why would I, when this is all I want to do?  Llosa writes regarding the literary vocation:

The literary vocation is not a hobby, a sport, a pleasant leisure-time activity.  It is an all-encompassing, all-excluding occupation, an urgent priority, a freely chosen servitude that turns its victims (its lucky victims) into slaves.

I live that kind of a life so much so that one of my biggest problem is that most teachers do not view themselves the same way.  Instead, they view their vocation as one that pays them so that they can do whatever else that really interests them.

Llosa also consoles me about my failures--having failed at getting promoted to the rank of full professor, not being recognized by my peers, ... when he writes about "confusing literary ambition with a hunger for glory and for the financial gains that literature affords certain writers"

This academic life of reading, thinking, writing, learning, and teaching, is, indeed, the best thing that ever happened to me.  Here's to hoping that it will continue for a while more.

Just burn the damn books. Who needs them anyway!

Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books that I like to discuss with students.  In my initial years of teaching it seemed like quite a few students were aware of the book.  Now, it is increasingly rare for a student to know what I am referring to.  And it worries me all the more that we are getting closer and closer to the society that Ray Bradbury described in that profound story.

Back in the day, it was relatively easy to know which books would make me think more about life, and which ones would merely entertain me. I loved those potboilers, too.  But, perhaps it is because I am getting old that I worry that everywhere I turn it is nothing but potboilers that are read, if at all books are being read. 

Reading this New Yorker essay by George Packer on a rainy and cold winter day does not help either.  Maybe I should not have thought about reading and, instead, as in Fahrenheit 451, I should have simply been watching television.  After all, it is reading that makes one agitated and depressed, right?

Packer's essay is all about Amazon, which Jeff Bezos started as an online bookseller. One might think that Amazon did wonders to book selling and reading, by making available a gazillion titles at the click of a mouse button and at low prices, and with the Kindle reader that gets a reader the book within minutes of buying it online.  One would think that such a democratization, where the middlemen are axed out and one could even self-publish books, would be nothing but a win for the consumer. Right, George?

Bezos is right: gatekeepers are inherently élitist, and some of them have been weakened, in no small part, because of their complacency and short-term thinking. But gatekeepers are also barriers against the complete commercialization of ideas, allowing new talent the time to develop and learn to tell difficult truths. When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good? 

In the old model, publishers, editors, and consumers too, cared about what was being printed and read. An army of people, so to speak, celebrated the good quality ones, and people like me then knew that Fahrenheit 451 was a must-read. Now, Amazon has been nuking those elitist gatekeepers.  "Will Amazon care whether a book is any good" as long as the widget it sells brings in the dollars and cents?

Several editors, agents, and authors told me that the money for serious fiction and nonfiction has eroded dramatically in recent years; advances on mid-list titles—books that are expected to sell modestly but whose quality gives them a strong chance of enduring—have declined by a quarter. These are the kinds of book that particularly benefit from the attention of editors and marketers, and that attract gifted people to publishing, despite the pitiful salaries. Without sufficient advances, many writers will not be able to undertake long, difficult, risky projects. Those who do so anyway will have to expend a lot of effort mastering the art of blowing their own horn. “Writing is being outsourced, because the only people who can afford to write books make money elsewhere—academics, rich people, celebrities,” Colin Robinson, a veteran publisher, said. “The real talent, the people who are writers because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t going to be able to afford to do it.”

I have had a love-hate relationship with Amazon, as I do with most corporations, for a number of reasons, including the worry that its model might really push us into the dark world where nobody reads books and even if they do, well, Fifty Shades of Grey is no Fahrenheit 451.

Unlike the old elitist gatekeepers of this literary world,

A former Amazon employee who worked in the Kindle division said that few of his colleagues in Seattle had a real interest in books: “You never heard people say, ‘Hey, what are you reading?’ 

Maybe it is that I am fast becoming an old curmudgeon. But, I like to believe that I am worried about all these not because I am getting old but because these are issues we--as a people--are not thinking through.

And so the big question is not just whether Amazon is bad for the book industry; it’s whether Amazon is bad for books.

Do us all a favor: get yourself a paper-copy of Fahrenheit 451 and read it. Now.

Source

How many books should one read to gain wisdom?

Of a couple of faculty colleagues with whom I was friends, at least for a while, one, who retired a few years ago, loved engaging me in arguments and debates, especially when we were in agreement, which was almost all the time.

Once, when we were discussing and walking, she asked me, for the gazillionth time, how old I was.  And she  stopped walking when I told her. (Stalker ladies, I ain't telling you how old I am!)  And then, she gave me what I thought was one of the best compliments that I have ever received--she thought I was way wise for my age.

We often construct images of people we interact with, based on whatever little we know.  She, too, had thus estimated my age at a good decade-plus more than what I was based on what she knew about me and my way of thinking.

In developing such an image, she had also imagined that I read a great number of books, all the time.  I corrected that, too.  The reality is that I rarely ever read full-length books anymore.

She was initially convinced that I was playing the fool. Why play one when I am one, right?

The scientist that she was, she then quizzed me a lot over the next few conversations and finally convinced herself that I really don't read a great deal of books.

I then let her in on what I thought was an open secret: that most modern books in the humanities and the social sciences aren't entirely new thoughts developed by the authors.  Instead, the gist of their arguments in the full-length books can often be found in much shorter, and easier to read, essays they would have authored in publications--academic or general.  That condensed form works very well for me.

As a follow-up, when it was her birthday time, I gifted her this book:

I hadn't read that book either, which amused her to to a great deal!

But, her prodding made me inquire about my own approach to understanding the world.

The only satisfying explanation is this: the constant reading of articles and news reports is reinforced by that old Hindu philosophical approach that understanding the world is a lot more intuitive than analytical.

Recently, when another friend asked me whether I had read a certain book--fiction, in this case--I told her that I find contemporary full-length fiction to be unappealing.  When I am in the mood for it, I go back to the classics.  I re-read any one of the books I have read in the past.  When I read Fathers and Sons a second time after nearly twenty-five years, the insights I gained from it were phenomenal.  Or, the time I re-read Catch 22 or Fahrenheit 451.

Which is why when I came across the following Vladimir Nabokov quote, I immediately resonated with it:

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

But then, how do we know we have read enough books and that our time might be better spent re-reading them?  That answer is intuitive, my dear reader ;)

Keep in mind that "knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers."  I am furiously at work to get past the "wise guy" wisecrack to a real one, though, I am increasingly convinced that even now I could easily open up an ashram here and babble a few things and earn a lot more money.  As I recently joked with a friend, the answers to all questions are right at my blog already ;)

After I re-read the sentences up until here, (see, I already put Nabokov to use!) I wonder what the point is!

Will end it with this:

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, and effort which no one can spare us.- Marcel Proust 

Ray Bradbury dies at 91. His writings will live on--unless we burn 'em!

Heard on NPR that Ray Bradbury died. 

In his memory, and as thanks to him, am re-posting the following old one from my own blog:

ht

Based on Ray Bradbury's warning, I imagine that books engage in self-immolation when Jersey Shore is on!

What sells at the Chennai Book Fair? Ahem, ...

Back home, I am a huge fan of C-Span's BookTV.  I have spent one too many hours at home watching and listening to authors talk about their books.  I have even spent the mornings of the first Sundays of many months watching the extended three-hour sessions with writers.

A couple of years ago, when I was in Chennai for a few days, I was starved for intellectual activity.  I scanned the paper every single day for any interesting and non-religious talks.  It was so disappointing and frustrating not to have anything to attend.

Then, one day I spotted a book-review, I think, that excited me.  The book was a compilation of selected Tamil poems--from the Sangam period to modern times--that had been translated into English.

One of the authors was a faculty member at IIT Madras.  I emailed her inquiring whether there would be any book-reading like how it is done in the US.

She replied almost right away.  "Thank you so much. We are having a launch for The Rapids on August 21st at 6 (Landmark, Apex Plaza). Please do come if you are around." 

I was excited. But, disappointed too--the event was to be held a couple of days after I was to leave for the US!  An O Henry irony in real life :(

Largely because of that experience, I went to the book fair with zero expectations.  Furthermore, as with all things in India, I have come to learn not to question anything, and not to expect anything.  I just have to take it the way it comes.  India is simply incomprehensible anymore.

At the book fair, it seemed like four kinds of books dominated over everything else: religious/spiritual books, various exams- and competencies-related texts, left of center books, and books from local newspaper/magazine publishers.

The left-of-center books, with Marxist language, looked and felt so old.  Looking at copies of Mao's dictates in Tamil was quite surreal.

The libertarian streak in me scanned for anything that might challenge the role of government.  I did not see anything along those lines.

Oh well!

Of the Tamil books I spotted, if it were 30 years ago, I would have purchased the complete collections of short stories by Pudhumaipithan. I leafed through the table copy, but that was it.  There was once a time and a place for that in my life.  That moment has passed.

After I put that down, a thirty-something woman picked it up and started scanning it.  I was glad.

And then at another booth, she again picked up a book that I put down.  Now, I was not glad.  When I saw her again at a third booth, well, I skipped a couple of booths and continued on without any worries.  Maybe America has made me paranoid about such things!

As I later told mom, the best thing about the book fair's content was this: the two main preoccupations of the people here were missing at the fair.  And the two that were, thankfully, missing?  Cricket and movies.

So, if you are in Chennai and, if not for any other reason but to get a place where nobody bugs you about cricket or movies, at least for a couple of hours, head to the book fair :)

While you are there, pick up tee shirts at a booth that sells wonderfully attractive ones that are unique--they have creatively designed Tamil phrases on them.  They look great.  Want to check them out before you go?

Book fairs: 26 years ago in Calcutta versus now in Chennai

Twenty-six years ago, when I was gainfully employed and living in Calcutta as a freshly minted engineer, I went to the book fair there.  (I think it was during that time, and not during my second work-related stay there, which was for a week much later that year.)

1986 feels so old now.  The world was very different then, and the book fair reflected that old world.  One of the booksellers was the USSR's Mir Publishers.  Thanks to the Soviet government underwriting the costs of publication, and the propaganda goals, the books at Mir's booth were bloody inexpensive.

I picked up a bunch from them--those were the only books that I bought at the fair.  I think it was then that I purchased Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov," which is one of the few books that I thought were ever worth retaining and are safely at home in Eugene.  I have not re-read them after the initial reading, but that doesn't matter.

And, of course, I bought a copy of "The Communist Manifesto."  After all, those were the last days of my own commie leanings. Yes, this copy, too, is safe in Eugene :)

Anyway, true to the stereotype, Calcutta's population showed up in huge numbers at the fair.  I had plenty of rasagollas and pani puri and then I walked back to the tiny room I had.  (I wonder where the fair was held then for me to have walked back!)

It is now 2012.  A vastly different world, and an equally vastly different me.  As I figured out what I wanted to do in life, I shed my pink colors, well before the wall tumbled down.  Having made myself at home in the arch enemy of the old Soviets, I spent hours in the US, in front of CNN on television, watching the wall come down, and then the USSR disintegrate.


Now, I am more of an outsider and observer when in India.

It is the book fair in Chennai, which is no longer Madras.  Calcutta, too, has undergone a name change.  The USSR is, of course, long gone and, therefore, there was no booth of Mir's at the Chennai fair.

Unlike the old me 26 years ago, I was not in search of anything too literary and philosophical.  Not because I have lost interest in them; they are very much alive.  But, I was not planning on picking up anything that serious in the Tamil language. 

However, there was one publication for which I was on the alert: a collection of Madan's "Ananda Vikatan" cartoons from the old days.

Sure enough, there was a Ananda Vikatan booth.

I zoomed into the humor section, and there they were: collections of Madan's cartoons, in three volumes.  I picked them up, paid, and exited.

What a contrast over the 26 years: the old me at the book fair was excited with Dostoevsky and the current me is thrilled with Madan's cartoons at a book fair!

Why write books? Another form of orgasm?

I remember reading a few years ago (age is catching up--can't recall where I read this!) the author noting that there is a book within every person and most of us need to know how to make sure the book stays there and never comes out.  Yet, people write books and most of them are awful.

The NY Times' Bill Keller writes (ht):

Writers write them for reasons that usually have a little to do with money and not as much to do with masochism as you might think. There is real satisfaction in a story deeply told, a case richly argued, a puzzle meticulously untangled. (Note the tense. When people say they love writing, they usually mean they love having written.) And it is still a credential, a trophy, a pathway to “Charlie Rose” and “Morning Joe,” to conferences and panels that Build Your Brand, to speaking fees and writing assignments.

Writing books for self-satisfaction seems more like a polite way of how I refer to most of the book writing that is done within the ivory towers: onanism of the intellectual and literary types!  May produce satisfaction and alter oxytocin levels in the person, but that is all.

Speaking of books written by academics, it would be lovely if professors who list books in their vitas also identified in their annual reports how many copies of the book were sold to buyers other than university libraries.  Most academic journal articles are rarely ever read, and I would hypothesize that most academic books are bought only by university libraries, and then the books gather dust on the shelves.

Full disclosure: I have never written a book, and have no plans to write one--at least for now :) 
I have pretty much stopped reading books by academics too.  Most books are nothing but fluff, and if there is a nugget of wisdom in them, well, it would have been published as a journal article a few years prior to the publication of the book itself.  A 15-page essay almost always contains everything that we would want to know from that 300-page book, and I way prefer the 15-pager.  But then most academic journal articles are also crap--nothing but intellectual onanism.

Now, a collection of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons is a book you ought to own :)

The success that Gandhi had in India

The real magic of the Mahatma was not a trick of popular charisma, but in fact a deft ability to recruit, manage, and inspire a team of talented individuals who worked tirelessly in his service. Gandhi himself was one of the few people to recognize how this phenomenon worked. “With each day I realize more and more that my mahatmaship, which is a mere adornment, depends on others. I have shone with the glory borrowed from my innumerable co-workers,” he wrote in 1928 in Navajivan.
Recognizing this fact does not diminish the rare and valuable qualities Gandhi himself possessed. Rather, it acknowledges that great work is the product of collaborative processes, and that many hands working together toward a common purpose can achieve monumental results. In Gandhi’s case, it was the relationship between a visionary leader and the team supporting him—and their collective use of the right resources, such as the books in Mahadev Desai’s library—that paved the way for extraordinary and lasting accomplishments.

An excerpt from a wonderful essay, after reading which I am all the more blown away with how effortlessly Gandhi was able to get so many talented, eager, and committed people to sign on to his ideas.  One heck of a personality he must have had.  Gandhi died barely 60 years ago, but the events of his life time now seem quite a few centuries old.  At the speeds at which we seem to move now, it is all the more real when I think about Einstein's comment that future generations will find it impossible to believe that such a real life person in flesh and blood actually existed on this planet.

What do book geeks do during March Madness?

Over to Salon:

Bracket-mad readers are currently participating in the DABWAHA (Dear Author Bitchery Writing Award for Hellagood Authors) tournament for romance novels, the BSCreview (BookSpot Central) competition for science fiction and fantasy books, and a match dedicated to selecting the world's favorite fictional detective.

The grandaddy of them all, however, is the Tournament of Books,mounted by the Morning News Web site and now in its sixth year. Unlike DABWAHA, ToB doesn't offer prizes to readers who make the most accurate predictions, and unlike all the other contests, it doesn't rely on polling readers to determine the winning books. Instead, a single guest judge selects the victor in each bracket, while the tournament's overseers, Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner, serve up commentary garnished with the occasional dab of sportscaster lingo ("quintuple toe loop"?). There's even an official statistician who crunches such questionably significant numbers as (I think I have this right) the ratio of an entry's length to its likeliness to ascend to the next round.

:>)

The physical book in a digital world .... melts away ....

Jason Epstein reviews, in the NY Review of Books, the inevitability of digitization, and concludes:

My rooms are piled from floor to ceiling with books so that I have to think twice about where to put another one. If by some unimaginable accident all these books were to melt into air leaving my shelves bare with only a memorial list of digital files left behind I would want to melt as well for books are my life. I mention this so that you will know the prejudice with which I celebrate the inevitability of digitization as an unimaginably powerful, but infinitely fragile, enhancement of the worldwide literacy on which we all—readers and nonreaders—depend.

Epstein's description of books melting away triggers in my mind images of the firemen from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and the machine/dog that is used to sniff out and track down the protagonist, Guy Montag. 

It is not the digitization that worries me at all--after all, without the binary digits, this blogging itself won't be possible!

It is Bradbury's bottom-line in the shockingly accurate prediction of how anti-intellectual we will become, surrounded by television screens and disconnected from society ..... that is worrisome.  Every time a huge gazillion inch high definition television set is purchased, it further pushes us into a hedonistic life.  A hedonistic life where nothing else matters.

Now, in an existential framework within which I mostly approach life, well, I am absolutely ok with whatever people want to make of their lives--I suppose my worry stems from the high probability that the hedonism is not a result of informed decision-making.  And it is not based on being well-informed because, hey, that HD TV means no reading or thinking.  After all, as Bradbury notes in Fahrenheit 451, thinking makes people depressed :)

Google, education, and knowledge

The fantastic availability of information, and made easy thanks to Google, has made many of us sit back and wonder if all these are good or bad news. Like that old Chinese parable. You wonder which one? Email me for that :-)

A couple of months ago, this essay in the Atlantic asked whether Google was making us stupid. At the same time, we have a whole bunch of people complaining that high school and college graduates seem to be uninformed and incompetent. And, comedians like Jay Leno routinely joke about the prevailing dumbness in society. I suspect that we are only beginning the next iteration of discussions. Why do I say this is the "next iteration?" According to Brian Cathcart, this is nothing but a reformulation of a situation from 2400 years ago:

... the story of the Egyptian god Thoth. I looked it up, and it was told by Plato. It goes like this: Thoth has invented writing and proudly offers it as a gift to the king of Egypt, declaring it “an elixir of memory and wisdom”. But the king is horrified, and tells him: “This invention will induce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, because they will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written…rather than, from within, their own unaided powers to call things to mind. So it’s not a remedy for memory, but for reminding, that you have discovered. And as for wisdom, you are equipping your pupils with only a semblance of it, not with truth.”

That was written 2,400 years ago, and Lloyd pointed out that similar arguments about inevitable damage to human thinking and memory attended the arrival of printing in the 15th century AD. We seem to have survived both shocks with our capacity for general knowledge intact, indeed enhanced. That puts modern concerns into perspective.

But, yes, as much as I am a HUGE fan of the web, Google, and many other widgets out there, I wonder whether we are outsourcing away too much of what we ought to be doing ourselves.

What does Cathcart say?

There will always be dimwits, and their feats of stupidity will always make news. Equally, there will always be teachers and parents who shake their heads at the supposed ignorance of the young. We need to be careful before we construct trends from such things. But the internet is different, and it lifts the discussion onto a different plane. We are bound to tap into it for general knowledge, and the young will do it first. Schools are surely right to encourage them. The story of Thoth tells us that the curmudgeonly response—“This invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it”—is a waste of breath.

Admitting to not reading "great" books

I grew up way more interested in short stories than in lengthy tomes. Not that I did not read lengthy tomes. I learnt a lot about life and humanity from short stories by, say, O Henry or Maugham, and later on from the stories in the New Yorker or the Atlantic. Which is why this piece from the Telegraph is neat: