bittersweetpangs
Bittersweet
A personal journal
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Thoughts from William Dalrymple's 2009 review of 'In Other Rooms, Other Wonders'
Agree with William Dalrymple here, Amitav Ghosh's writing (with some exceptions) tends to lack "authenticity of observation and dialogue rooted from long experience living among the people he is writing about" (Pankaj Mishra's words).
Aravind Adiga seems to have no authenticity or lived experience at all, neither does Kiran Desai, and both are almost unreadable. They write about people and worlds that appear -- to me! -- wholly imagined, synthetic, unengaging, unresonant, unreal.
Vikram Seth doesn't belong to the unauthentic, 'slickly diasporic group', even if he does live in England. Arundhati Roy obviously does not. Mohsin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif do not.
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Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way that you feel
Joni Mitchell
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from an earlier life
The idea that no one can separate those destined to be together is an ancient and powerful one. The doctrine of karma, whereby actions in a former life shape the present life, is often misunderstood as causing fatalism. In fact, the doctrine is a dynamic one, since actions in the present life shape the next life. Karma and rebirth are thus invitations not to passivity but to action. Fidelity to an attachment, even if thwarted in this life, may result in its consummation in the next.
At the personal level, the theory of rebirth functions to reassure individuals that their socially illicit feelings are justifiable. Hindu texts repeatedly insist that love is a force that cannot be contested.
In the 11 th-century Sanskrit Kathasaritsagara, Pulindaka feels immense affection for. another man, Vasudatta, the moment he sees him and therefore tries to sacrifice his life for him. They live together (Vasudatta marries, Pulindaka does not) and when Vasudatta dies, both his wife and Pulindaka commit suicide to be with him. The text explains the two men’s feelings thus: ‘Vakti janamaantarapritim manah snihyadakaaranam (Affection [that arises] in the heart without a cause speaks of love [persisting] from a former birth).
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...the overarching cultural importance of these notions of the spirit retaining its attachments but not its gender through lifetimes. That these Indic notions help legitimize relationships that might otherwise be seen as illegitimate appears not just in these modern weddings but in some pre-modern texts, where parents and other authorities come around to approving young people’s socially inappropriate desire to marry.
One such story is that of a prince who falls in love at first sight with a beautiful and brave Chandala girl, and wants to marry her. The prince’s parents are perplexed when they see him pining away. His father, king Palaka, decides that the girl thinks that ‘without doubt she was the beloved of my son in a former birth, and this is proved by his falling in love with her at first sight’. King Palaka tells his wife, ‘The minds of the good tell them by inclination or aversion what to do and what to avoid’.
This explanation calls into question the nature of ‘reality’. The king’s argument is based on the idea that attributes that appear real like caste, class and gender may not be ‘real’ because they change from one lifetime to another.
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-extract from a book by Ruth Vanita
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it's just so very easy to make perfectly horrible mistakes
“That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
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Be it through a veil, tell the truth. And other writing advice
ZADIE SMITH:
"Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/20/10-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-two
Here are some more rules
ROSE TREMAIN:
1 Forget the boring old dictum "write about what you know". Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.
2 Nevertheless, remember that in the particularity of your own life lies the seedcorn that will feed your imaginative work. So don't throw it all away on autobiography.
SARAH WATERS:
1 Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.
3 Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I've got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.
4 Writing fiction is not "self-expression" or "therapy". Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. ...
HILARY MANTEL
7 Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world. People don't notice their everyday surroundings and daily routine, so when writers describe them it can sound as if they're trying too hard to instruct the reader.
8 Description must work for its place. It can't be simply ornamental. It usually works best if it has a human element; it is more effective if it comes from an implied viewpoint, rather than from the eye of God. If description is coloured by the viewpoint of the character who is doing the noticing, it becomes, in effect, part of character definition and part of the action.
MICHAEL MORPUGO:
2 Ted Hughes gave me this advice and it works wonders: record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys.
WILL SELF:
1 Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . .2 The edit.
3 Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
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tumhari yaad
tumhaari yaad ke jab zakhm bharne lagte hain
kisi bahaane tumhe yaad karne lagte hain
When wounds of your memory begin to heal
I find some pretext to think of you again
तुम्हारी याद के जब ज़ख्म भरने लगते हैं
किसी बहाने तुम्हे याद करने लगते हैं
- tumhari yaad, Faiz Ahmad Faiz
instagram
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prosperity and peace are good things
Stephen Pinker
"Countries that have minimized problems like crime and war are in fact pretty happy—the Danes and Kiwis and Austrians don’t seem to miss the blood-pumping thrill of conquest and martial sacrifice. I don’t think the dystopia of ennui in a peaceful affluent liberal democracy that Fukuyama worried about should be high on our list of problems. We should all have such ennui."
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"This too shall pass" is misunderstood. Our worst troubles may not go away. What will go is something else.
this too will pass
Hanif Kureishi: "It was as though we had been possessed, and when the fever had gone, we could only speculate what it had all been about."
https://open.substack.com/pub/hanifkureishi/p/massive-thrusting
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if only this were a nightmare from which one could awake
"Two months later, and I still want to go back to that morning of ____, wake up again, and exhale because the whole thing was just a bad dream. Still can’t digest the breadth and depth of this whole disaster."
- someone on Twitter, who deleted the tweet immediately
It's all such a nightmare. If only it were actually a nightmare.
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on traffic and obesity
Adding car lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity
.-Lewis Mumford
(Quintumble Quote, 7-Dec-2023)
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a light from the shadows shall spring
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings, #1
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unexpected destiny
So true. We often meet our destiny on the road we take to avoid it.
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the breath of those times
if we strain hard, he says, it is still possible to “feel the breath of those times – even if lightly – upon our skin”
words of Prof BN Goswamy, applicable in many senses
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"Everywhere peace, everywhere serenity and a marvellous freedom from the tumult of the world.”
so said St Aelred, 12th century abbot of Rievaulx monastery in Norfolk
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this too will pass
Hanif Kureishi: "It was as though we had been possessed, and when the fever had gone, we could only speculate what it had all been about."
https://open.substack.com/pub/hanifkureishi/p/massive-thrusting
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