India Top Readers

Breaking news: India fills reader row
- Tome first, TV later
AMIT ROY


London, June 15: A survey of global reading habits has come up with an
amazing result — India has come out on top.
Researchers from the National Opinion Poll contacted 30,000 people in 30
countries and compared how much time they spent watching television as
against reading.
The West is starting to realise that India has become an intellectual
powerhouse churning out hundreds of thousands of graduates, especially in
the sciences — and this survey seems to confirm that somehow Indians and
books go together.
India came top of the global reading chart with 10.7 hours per week per
head — 4.2 hours higher than the global average.
In Britain, there is concern, as there is throughout the western world, that
television is encouraging a generation of couch potatoes, brought up on
American programming. Britons, for example, spend more time in front of the
television and less time reading than other Europeans, the survey shows.
The average person in the UK watches 18 hours of TV each week, which is
worse than France, Spain, Germany and Italy. By contrast, Britons spend just
5.3 hours per week reading, which is less than their European counterparts.
At 18 hours per week Britons watch 1.4 hours more TV per week than the
global average.
US trends are similar to the UK, with Americans spending 19 hours watching
TV each week and only 5.7 hours reading.
In France, people watch an average 17.3 hours per week compared with Spain
at 15.9, Germany at 15.2 and Italy at 14.9.
The NOP researchers asked people aged 13 and above in each country how long
they spent per week watching TV, listening to the radio, reading and using a
computer for non-work activities. Only people in Brazil, Taiwan, Japan and
Korea read less than those in the UK.
In Italy, people spend an average 5.6 hours per week reading compared with
5.7 per week in Germany, 5.8 in Spain and 6.9 in France.
The research was carried out by market research group NOP World as part of
its annual study of consumer attitudes, values and behaviours. NOP World
spokesman Nick Chiarelli said increased non-work computer use was cutting
the amount of time which people around the world spent doing other things.
From the Indian perspective, Britain has been associated with books,
scholarships and a land to which generations of Indians have proceeded for
higher scholarships.
But things are changing or have already changed in the UK — for the worse.
Chiarelli said: “From a UK perspective, it is perhaps not surprising that we
rank so high in terms of television. Watching TV has always been a popular
leisure pastime in this country — but it is quite concerning how far we lag
behind many other countries in terms of how much we read.”
Chiarelli explained to The Telegraph: “There is a point of context. We are
trying to represent urban, upscale India. We don’t interview rural
populations or subsistence level populations, of which there will be quite a
lot in India. Our view is that India stacks up very well, there is striving
for self-improvement in India and reading is one way of doing that.”
Chiarelli added that there had been substantial resources put into education
in India. “And this is payback time.” As far as TV watching was concerned,
“India comes fourth from bottom. The global average is 22 hours”.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050616/asp/nation/story_4873597.asp

The Right's Wrong Books

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-chait3jun03,1,3615170.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage

JONATHAN CHAIT
The Right's Wrong Books

June 3, 2005

I try very, very hard not to think of the conservative movement as a gaggle of thick-skulled fanatics. To help me along in this process, I seek out well-reasoned commentary from conservative intellectuals such as Tod Lindberg of the Washington Times and Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review. But my efforts at ideological toleration inevitably get spoiled when something comes along like Human Events magazine's list of the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries."

Human Events is a conservative weekly that Ronald Reagan was known to favor, and which the Wall Street Journal called a "bible of the right." It compiled its list by polling a panel of conservative academics (such as Robert George of Princeton University) and Washington think-tank types (such as Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute). As such, it offers a fair window into the dementia of contemporary conservative thinking.

One amusing thing about the list is its seeming inability to distinguish between seminal works of social science and totalitarian manifestos. Marx, Hitler and Chairman Mao sit alongside pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. You'll be comforted to know that Mao, with 38 points and a No. 3 ranking, edged out Kinsey, with 37 points. "The Feminine Mystique," meanwhile, checks in at No. 7, with 30 points, just behind "Das Kapital," which totaled 31 points.

Harmful books that got honorable mentions but couldn't crack the top 10 include John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty," Sigmund Freud's "Introduction to Psychoanalysis" and Charles Darwin's "The Descent of Man." Oh yes, and Lenin's "What Is to Be Done." (If you don't see the link between arguing for individual rights, exploring scientific mysteries and constructing a brutally repressive Bolshevik terror state, then clearly you're not thinking like a conservative.)

Interestingly, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a czarist forgery that incited countless massacres and inspires anti-Semites around the world to this day, failed to rate a mention. On the other hand, "Unsafe at Any Speed" and "Silent Spring," which led to such horrors as seat belts and the Clean Water Act, did. (Given that "Unsafe at Any Speed" launched the career of Ralph Nader, who went on to put George W. Bush in the White House, I wonder if conservatives might one day deem it one of the most helpful books of the last two centuries.)

Possibly even more amusing are the explanations for each book's inclusion. They read like 10th-grade book reports from some right-wing, bizarro world high school. John Maynard Keynes' seminal "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" argued that during recessions governments should cut interest rates, reduce taxes and increase spending, and during expansions do the opposite. It makes the list because, Human Events explains, "FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion debt." (But didn't Keynesian policies help win World War II and then produce 25 years of phenomenal prosperity? And wasn't that debt less than a trillion dollars before Reagan took office?)

The squib on "The Feminine Mystique" begins with a fairly anodyne summary of Betty Freidan's pioneering feminist tract. Rather than explain what's so dangerous about allowing women the choice of having a career, though, Human Events proceeds to quote a review that "Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist." Not just a Stalinist, but a Marxist to boot!

Personally, I fail to see how Friedan's communist past - she was 42 when she published "The Feminine Mystique" - would discredit her insights about the repressive nature of a world in which women were discriminated against or barred outright from most professions and much of public life. Especially because the conservative movement was itself heavily salted with ex-communists. But then, my mind has already been poisoned by Dewey, Mill and other liberal relativists.

More on the Davinci Code

Truth and falsity in The Da Vinci Code
Bernard Hamilton
08 June 2005






The Da Vinci Code is a theological thriller, which makes it an unlikely bestseller in what is often said to be a secular age. Like that other bestseller, The Lord of the Rings, this book is almost completely lacking in love interest, or, indeed, in sex of any kind. A rite of hieros gamos, sacred marriage, which took place some years in the past, is briefly and almost clinically described; and the hero and heroine indulge in only one, very seemly, embrace on page 587.

But bestseller it is, indeed, one of the best-selling books ever. Before considering what makes it so popular, it may be helpful to give a résumé of the plot. Jacques Saunière, a curator in the Louvre, is murdered in the gallery, but has time before he dies to leave a number of cryptic clues to the secret he guards and which is the cause of his death. Robert Langdon, professor of religious symbology at Harvard, with the help of the curator’s granddaughter, Sophie, who is a trained cryptographer, sets out to unravel this mystery. Saunière turns out to have been the Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, a society dedicated to guarding a secret tradition: that Jesus Christ was a mortal man, not the Son of God, that he married Mary Magdalene, who bore him a child, and that their descendants were still alive. The investigators assume that the Catholic Church knows that this secret knowledge represents the true version of the Christian faith and would feel threatened by the possibility that the Priory might make their knowledge public. Robert and Sophie suppose that the Vatican, and more specifically Opus Dei, is responsible for the murders of Saunière and of three other members of the Priory who have been killed (offstage). In the end this suspicion proves to be wrong, although it is true that a member of Opus Dei had been manipulated by the villain into carrying out the killings.

The secrets of the Priory of Sion turn out not have been very well kept after all, for both Robert Langdon, and an English scholar, Sir Leigh Teabing, on whose expertise he calls, have already worked out precisely what those secrets are, even though they are not members of the Priory, and the clues left by Saunière for the most part confirm what they already know. Teabing is described as “a former British Royal Historian”, which I take to mean that he has been a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. They explain the mystery to Sophie, an exposition which takes up chapters 55, 56 and 58 of the book. Stated briefly, they disclose that Jesus was a mortal man, but a great religious teacher. “Understandably his life was recorded by thousands of followers . . . . More than eighty Gospels were considered for the New Testament.” He married Mary Magdalene: “Jesus was the original feminist”, says Teabing. “He intended for the future of his Church to be in the hands of Mary Magdalene.” The Church, which its founder intended should propagate devotion to the sacred feminine, was subverted by Constantine the Great. Wishing to make Christianity the religion of his Empire, and needing to sell this idea to his many pagan subjects, he decided to synthesize reverence for Jesus of Nazareth with the cult of Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, to which he subscribed himself. He therefore put pressure on the Church Council of Nicaea in 325 ad to define the Divinity of Christ and, in support of this, the imperial Church then adopted the four canonical Gospels as the authoritative accounts of Christ’s life. Mary Magdalene was no longer remembered as the wife of Jesus but as “the woman in the city who was a sinner”. The other seventy-six Gospels and their teachings were declared heretical, and the Church became recognizably the male-dominated Catholic Church, with strong misogynistic tendencies, which exists today.

The Da Vinci Code is a novel and it might seem pedantic to point out that the account of Church history given by some of the characters is misleading. But Dan Brown has prefaced his book with this statement:

"Fact: The Priory of Sion – a European secret society founded in 1099 – is a real organization. In 1975 Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Sandro Botticelli, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci.
The Vatican prelature known as Opus Dei is a deeply devout Catholic sect that has been the topic of recent controversy due to reports of brainwashing, coercion and a dangerous practice known as “corporal mortification”. [The address of its New York headquarters is then given.]
All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate."

In Teabing and Langdon’s account, however, the information which they give about Jesus’ original teaching and the way it was radically changed by Constantine the Great is seriously flawed. Brown’s characters assume that the pre-Constantinian Church was a single community, that all its members shared the same beliefs, and that dissenting groups only sprang up when Constantine forced that Church to change its teachings and some members refused to do so. In fact, there were as many different Christian sects in the centuries before Constantine as there are today. The largest of them called itself the Great Church, or the Catholic, that is universal, Church, and that was the one which Constantine favoured and ultimately joined. Its members certainly believed in the divinity of Christ long before Constantine’s day and were, indeed, persecuted by the Roman authorities for doing so. The fullest surviving account of the baptismal rite for adults in that Church is found in The Apostolic Tradition, written by St Hippolytus of Rome in c220 ad a hundred years before the Council of Nicaea. Among the questions which candidates were asked by the officiating minister was this: “Dost thou believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, who was crucified in the days of Pontius Pilate, and died, and rose the third day living from the dead and ascended into the heavens?”. The Council of Nicaea, convened by Constantine the Great in 325, was not concerned with establishing whether Jesus was divine, because there was no disagreement about that among the members of the Great Church, but with debating whether the divinity of Jesus the Son of God differed from that of God the Father (they decided that it did not). Moreover, although the full canon of the New Testament was not finally agreed until later in the fourth century, the Great Church had accepted the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as the sole authentic accounts of Jesus’ life in the course of the second century.

Teabing is correct in asserting that there were other Gospels available in the early Christian centuries. He claims that these have now become accessible once more through the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi codices. The Dead Sea Scrolls are an irrelevance, because they have no Christian content, but the Nag Hammadi collection of texts contains a large range of apocryphal Christian writings (that is, books which have not been included in the canonical New Testament). Although most of these were already known before the Nag Hammadi documents were discovered in 1946, those codices in many cases provide fuller and better versions of the texts. Broadly, the texts fall into two groups: those which set out to fill in gaps in the New Testament narrative (eg, accounts of the childhood of Jesus, or of the later activities of the Apostles), and those which claim to represent the true teachings of Jesus, which the Great Church has misrepresented. The latter group are normally referred to as Gnostic writings because the authors claim a special knowledge (gnosis) of Jesus’ teaching which the Great Church lacks. These writings, like the four canonical Gospels, do not date from the time of Jesus, as Teabing implies, but were all written down much later. Teabing cites passages from two of them in support of his views about Jesus’ true teaching – the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary (ie, Mary Magdalene), of which only a fragment survives. Both quotations are accurate, but they do not support the inferences which Teabing (and the Priory of Sion) wish to draw from them. The Gnostic Churches, which considered that these writings represented Jesus’ authentic teaching, did indeed claim that he had given a more prominent place to women among his followers than the tradition of the Great Church was prepared to admit, and that Mary Magdalene was the recipient of at least one special revelation from Jesus after he had returned to his Father.

Gnostic Christianity existed in a wide variety of forms, but all Gnostics shared a common world-view: that the phenomenal universe had come into being as the result of a cosmic accident, which had trapped spiritual souls in physical bodies and cut those souls off from participation in the Pleroma, the fullness of the Godhead. The Gnostic symbol for the human condition was “gold in the mud”: gold was the soul, and mud the human body. All Gnostics also agreed that Jesus, far from being an ordinary human being, was a divine messenger, sent from the Pleroma to give men the knowledge (gnosis) of their true spiritual condition and how to overcome it. The Gnostic Gospels give no support to the view that Christ was simply a human teacher who preached the importance of the sacred feminine. (There are many other instances of wrong information about Christian doctrine and early Church history in The Da Vinci Code and the interested reader should consult Bart D. Ehrman’s Truth and Fiction in “The Da Vinci Code”, 2004.)

There is no evidence in the Gnostic Gospels, any more than there is in the canonical Gospels, to support the view that Jesus fathered a child. The idea that Jesus was descended from the royal house of David is, of course, found in the New Testament, but the belief that he and Mary Magdalene produced a royal bloodline would seem to derive from Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982). Leigh Teabing (whose name is a partly anagrammatized amalgam of two of the authors of The Holy Blood) admits his indebtedness to this source: “To my taste, the authors made some dubious leaps of faith in their analysis, but their fundamental premise is sound, and to their credit they finally brought the idea of Christ’s bloodline into the mainstream”. This book was much hyped, by the BBC among others, when it first appeared, though its sales never approached those of The Da Vinci Code. The authors adduced no evidence about the bloodline of Christ which would satisfy standard historical criteria.

Teabing and Langdon in The Da Vinci Code have to offer to Sophie, and to the reader, an explanation about how the royal bloodline of Jesus and knowledge of it has been transmitted to the present day. Their account is reminiscent of one of the exam questions in 1066 and All That: “Fill in two of the following: Blank, Blank, Simon de Montfort”. After the Crucifixion, the widowed Mary Magdalene fled to France, where she gave birth to Jesus’ daughter, whom she called Sarah. This is simply an adaptation of the medieval legend of how Mary, with her sister Martha, her brother Lazarus and their servant Sarah came to Provence. St Sarah is still venerated by the Gypsies of Provence. Each year they attend a festival of re-enactment, organized by the Catholic clergy, at the place where the saints are said to have landed, during which they ride into the sea and carry a statue of St Sarah ashore. Teabing then moves on several hundred years and relates how a descendant of Sarah married a Merovingian King of France, so that for a time the royal bloodline occupied a position of earthly power. The Merovingians were overthrown in 751 by Pepin, the father of Charlemagne, and Teabing skims over another 450 years to reach 1099, when the First Crusade captured Jerusalem and Godfrey of Bouillon became ruler of the Holy City. Teabing claims that he was a descendant of the Merovingian Kings, and therefore of Jesus, though in fact, Godfrey was, through his mother, a descendant of Charlemagne whose father overthrew the Merovingians.

Godfrey of Bouillon, we are told, founded the Priory of Sion in 1099 to preserve the secret knowledge that had hitherto been preserved in his family as an oral tradition. Some thirty years later the Order of Knights Templar was founded and it is implied that they were subordinate to the Priory of Sion. They made their headquarters on the Temple Mount, and conducted excavations on the site of Solomon’s temple where they found four enormous trunkloads of documents, dating from before the time of Constantine the Great. These authenticated the Priory of Sion’s version of the life and teachings of Jesus, and were shipped back to their headquarters in Europe. In 1291, the Crusader Kingdom was lost to the Saracens, and the Priory of Sion and the Knights Templar withdrew to the West. There, in 1307, the Templars were arrested and put on trial on the orders of Philip IV of France, with the connivance of Pope Clement V, and their Order was suppressed in 1312. The Priory of Sion was, however, able to take charge of the vital trunkloads of documents which the Templars held and also to protect the sacred bloodline. The Priory still exists and a list of its Grand Masters is given on page 431 of the book. Yet although the Priory is dedicated to honouring the cult of the sacred feminine and although women may become Grand Masters, apparently no woman has done so since the death of Iolande de Bar in 1483. All her successors have been men, most of them very well known: Sandro
Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau among them.

This account of the historical transmission of the secret teaching is not very satisfactory. The narrative of the first 1,000 years offers little detail and no proof. The evidence adduced from the crusading period is at first sight more circumstantial. Certainly the Order of Knights Templar was founded in 1128 and had its headquarters on the Temple Mount in the al-Aqsa Mosque, but they were not in any way connected with the Priory of Sion. The Order of the Temple was, from its inception, directly subject to the pope. It was suppressed in 1312 as the result of pressure brought to bear on Pope Clement V by King Philip IV of France. Its members were charged with heresy, sodomy and the worship of an idol called Baphomet. Few scholars think that these charges had any substance, and it is generally supposed that the chief offence of the Order was that it had great wealth and no real function after the loss of the Holy Land. Although some contemporaries believed that the Templars were guilty as charged, nobody supposed that they had been suppressed because they had secret knowledge which conflicted with the Church’s teaching. (The documents of the trial have been critically examined by Malcolm Barber in The Trial of the Templars.) It was not until the eighteenth century, when the newly founded Masonic Orders began to claim that the Templars were one link in the chain which united them to Solomon’s Temple, that conspiracy theories about the trial of the Templars began to appear. Masonic groups saw in the Church’s suppression of the Templars an early example of its hostility to their enlightened beliefs, while conservative Catholics, such as Joseph von Hammer Purgstall, in his Mysterium Baphometi Revelatum (The Mystery of Baphomet Revealed) of 1818, denounced the Templars as a group of Ophite Gnostics who had sought to undermine the true Christian faith. The view of the Templars’ role in preserving the secret teachings of Jesus and his bloodline described in The Da Vinci Code has no support in medieval sources, but is a modern variation of these nineteenth-century conspiracy theories about the Order.

There had been a Priory of Sion in the Crusader Kingdom. When the First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099 they found the church of Our Lady of Sion in ruins. At some point before 1112 it was rebuilt and a community of Austin Canons was endowed to serve it. The church stood on what was thought to be the site of the house in which Jesus had celebrated the Last Supper, and the Cenaculum, the chapel of the Upper Room, built by the crusaders in c1180 to commemorate this, may still be seen there. After the loss of the Holy Land in 1291, the Austin Canons of Mount Sion retired to their estates in Europe, and their headquarters were at Orléans until 1619, when the Priory was suppressed and Louis XIII transferred their property to the Jesuits. The modern Priory of Sion is an esoteric society which has no connection with the Austin Canons of Crusader Jerusalem. Although documents detailing its earlier history have been deposited in French archives, these also appear to be modern. Certainly none of them has been examined and authenticated by professional historians. The claims made by the Priory about historical continuity with the crusader Priory of Sion, and the list of famous Grand Masters, remain uncorroborated.

In The Da Vinci Code the Catholic Church is cast as the implacable enemy of the Priory of Sion and its secret teaching down the ages. Not merely did the papacy ruthlessly suppress the Knights Templar, it also showed its hatred
of the sacred feminine by persecuting witches, but “those deemed ‘witches’ by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics [and] nature lovers”, so Robert Langdon claims. They are all said to be victims of the papal Inquisition, but that is patently untrue, for Protestants persecuted witches with as much zeal and as little discrimination as Catholics did. (There was no papal Inquisition at work in Salem in 1692.) This passage is typical of Brown’s approach to Church history. There is a notable absence of any reference to Protestantism in the book. As Protestants share with Catholics a belief in the divinity of Christ and the authenticity of the canonical Gospels their reaction to the secret of the Priory of Sion would be as hostile as that of the Vatican – though this is a possibility which Brown seems anxious not to explore. When talking about the Catholic Church in the present day, the hostility of Brown’s characters is directed chiefly at its conservative wing and particularly at Opus Dei, which is treated as a sinister organization, though one which admittedly performs many good works. Brown’s approach to it resembles that of Alexandre Dumas to the Jesuit Order in his historical novels.

Although some readers may identify with the anti-Catholic prejudices of Langdon and Teabing, I suspect that this has had little to do with the book’s popularity. The Da Vinci Code belongs to the genre of occult mystery novels, which range from Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni to the works of H. P. Lovecraft and Dennis Wheatley. The only difference is that Dan Brown is dealing with a “white” mystery – the secret teachings of Jesus. Such works, always popular, appeal to the Gnostic which is lurking in many of us, the desire to be part of an elite with privileged information. The narrator in Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco speculates about this attitude: “hadn’t Agliè spoken of the yearning for mystery which stirred in the age of the Antonines? Yet someone had just arrived and declared himself the Son of God . . . made flesh, to redeem the sins of the world. Was that a run-of-the-mill mystery? And he promised salvation to all: you had only to love your neighbour. Was that a trivial secret? . . . And yet [those who yearned for mystery] turned deaf ears. Is that all there is to it? How trite”. There are two other reasons why this book might attract a large readership. First, it is constructed as a series of interconnected puzzles. The solution to one set confronts the investigators with another. Readers are not asked to solve the clues, but if reasonably well educated they will get satisfaction from understanding them: Leonardo’s diagram of Vitruvian man, the epicene figure of St John in his “Last Supper”, the significance of the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, the male and female quantities of poetic scansion. A reader who does not know about some of these points will almost certainly have friends who do, or, if not, will be able to surf the internet for answers. On one level the book is a kind of intellectual game, and will appeal to the many people who enjoy quizzes.
The second reason is very different. Although it starts as a thriller, the book develops into a Grail Quest. The Holy Grail has been a potent force in the Western imagination ever since Chrétien de Troyes wrote his Perceval in c1181. While the young hero is sitting at dinner in the castle of the Fisher King, a procession enters, led by a page carrying a lance from which blood drips, followed by two squires with golden candlesticks, followed by a maiden, holding aloft a Grail, made of gold, studded with jewels and giving out “so brilliant a light that the candles lost their brightness”. Although Perceval later learns from a hermit that the Grail contained a eucharistic host with which the Fisher King’s father was fed, Chrétien died leaving the story unfinished, so we never learn what precisely the Grail was. This uncertainty is compounded by the fact that Wolfram von Eschenbach, writing a generation later, claimed that Chrétien had falsified the Grail story, but that he had learned the true version from Guiot the Provençal. Wolfram’s Grail is a stone, brought from the Earthly Paradise, the spiritual powers of which are renewed every Good Friday when a heavenly dove lays a eucharistic Host upon it. Thus although in many later versions the Grail is treated as the chalice of the Last Supper, the descriptions given in the two earliest sources and the divergences between them has left space for alternative interpretations.

In The Da Vinci Code we are told that the chalice of the Grail signifies the womb, and in particular the womb of St Mary Magdalene which transmitted the royal bloodline of Jesus, son of David. In that sense the Holy Grail (or San Greal) would signify a person, someone who carried in themselves the royal blood (or Sang réal). The statistical probabilities are that if Jesus really had had a daughter who had issue, thousands of people would be able to claim descent from her 2,000 years later, but the elitist Priory of Sion seems to envisage that there will only be one descendant. The Grail in The Da Vinci Code is said also to be the tomb of St Mary Magdalene, in or beside which the Priory had deposited for safe keeping the four trunks of documents brought back by the Templars from the Holy Land, which proved the authenticity of her cult. The second half of the book is a Grail Quest in which Langdon and Sophie hunt for the shrine. It is surprising, though, that the professor of religious symbology at Harvard did not know that the same legend which reports that Mary Magdalene ended her days in France also says that she is buried in the basilica of Vézelay near Auxerre, where, indeed, her shrine may still be seen.

There is no obvious attempt to model The Da Vinci Code on a medieval Grail romance; nevertheless, there are certain parallels. The Grail quest is an individual adventure in search of spiritual fulfilment, and those who undertake it encounter a series of seemingly irrelevant obstacles and difficulties. Not the least of these is the fact that the Grail castle is very difficult to find. Langdon and Sophie experience the same problem. The final clues which they solve lead them to the Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh, but in the best medieval quest tradition they discover that although it had once been there, the Grail is there no longer. They come then to realize that: “You do not find the Grail. The Grail finds you”. At the very end of the book Langdon believes that he does experience the Grail in the form in which he understands it: “For a moment he thought he heard a woman’s voice . . . the wisdom of the ages . . . whispering up from the chasms of the earth”. The phrase is more reminiscent of Rider Haggard’s She than of
The High Quest of the Holy Grail, but that may be part of Dan Brown’s appeal.

During the Middle Ages people could see the chalice of the Last Supper in the cathedral of Genoa, where it had been deposited by crusaders from the Holy Land. Similarly the Holy Blood, which according to some versions of the legend the Holy Grail was said to contain, was preserved in reliquaries at Bruges and at
Westminster Abbey; while the eucharistic Host, present in the Grail in other versions, was to be found on every Catholic altar when Mass was said. But the Grail itself could not be found in one place, having an independent life in the Western religious imagination which the Church authorities could never fully control, and of all the symbols from Christian tradition it is perhaps the one which can most easily be transposed into a post-Christian context. According to recent religious surveys, some 70 per cent of the population of Britain claims to value spirituality but to have no religious affiliation. Although such people would probably be unimpressed by the religious ideas of the Priory of Sion, they might well find the Grail quest symbolism congenial.





http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.aspx?story_id=2111067

Why Men Just Can't read Women

http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/06/01/ftlit01.xml&sSheet=/arts/2005/06/02/ixartright.html

Why men just can't read women
(Filed: 01/06/2005)

Even Orange Prize finalists rarely attract male readers. Sinclair McKay explains

Now, chaps, quiet at the back, here's a quick test. Which of these names or book titles rings a bell of familiarity? Joolz Denby's Billie Morgan? Or Maile Meloy's Liars and Saints? Hush now, please, ladies, no clues. Of course, the fact is that these books are on the shortlist for next Tuesday's Orange Prize for Fiction, which this year is celebrating its 10th anniversary. However, if you are a man, the chances are that you are not going to go near any of them.


His and hers: men prefer boys' books
The truth is that men will not, on the whole, read books written by women - even Orange Prize winners. On the face of it, the notion is an annoying generalisation. But a new report compiled by academics Lisa Jardine and Anne Watkins of Queen Mary's College London appears to prove that very thing.

Alarmingly, their survey covered about 100 writers, academics and critics - ie, people who have a vested interest in not looking like the idiot who has failed to read the great novel.

"Men clearly now know that there are some great books by women - such as Andrea Levy's Small Island - that they really ought to have read and ought to consider great writing," the report said. "They may even have bought, or been given the books, and start reading them. But they probably won't finish them."

Can this be true? What about the most celebrated of recent novels by women, Monica Ali's Booker shortlisted Brick Lane? According to Professor Jardine, this is a book that men will pretend to have read. But, very often, they haven't.

At least in this case, we chaps have pretended. There are a great many other instances in which we wouldn't even go that far. A S Byatt's Possession? Nup. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale? Hardly. Hands up any man who has read a word of Carol Shields. No? Andrea Levy, then. Still no takers?

To be fair, publishers don't make it easy for us. Those wispy, pastel-shaded covers are not encouraging. Strolling up to the counter with a copy of The Lovely Bones would be the equivalent of buying a great big pink girl's blouse. In the case of Sophie Kinsella and her doubtless side-splitting series of Shopaholic novels, fluffiness is obviously a deliberate marketing move - much in the way that women are turned away at the door of any work by Sven Hassel (Nazi lettering, soldiers in tin helmets, guns firing).

But this does not wholly explain the gender divide. The reluctance of men to touch women's fiction stretches back rather further. Jean Rhys? No, thanks. Virginia Woolf? Now look, we all enjoy a joke.... Well how about Ivy Compton Burnett? Elizabeth Gaskell?

Very often, the snub is not deliberate. It's just that other novels seem to clamour for male attention rather more loudly. Like Flashman. Or any thriller involving Opus Dei. Or Robert Ludlum barnstormers with titles such as The Syndrome Factor. J K Rowling would appear to be the exception. But would boys and men have been so willing to read the Harry Potter books had the name Joanna appeared on the covers?

So why is this? A deep-seated reluctance to grapple with emotional depth and complexity? An aversion to careful nuance and subtle shadings of characterisation? Or simply the feeling that E Annie Proulx's work would be much improved by the occasional description of a flashing red LED countdown on a thermonuclear bomb?

This is a social as much as a literary question. If the best fiction is about searingly truthful exploration of the inner recesses of the human heart, then it is obvious that your average chap is going to go nowhere near it. We get enough of that at home.

Kingsley Amis once said of the Orange Prize: "If I were a woman, I would not want to win this prize. One can hardly take the winner seriously." Much too harsh. If anything, the reverse is true. And it is possibly this level of seriousness, more than anything, that proves the off-putting factor to us gadfly males.

It is not that we are disdainful of Rose Tremain or Zadie Smith. It is just the feeling that you are not going to have much of a laugh in the company of their narrators. Now where did I put my copy of Where Eagles Dare?

A Linguistic Problem

http://bookcoolie.blogspot.com/2005/06/guest-in-house-of-english.html

A Guest in the House of English

Book Coolie presents for you a short essay by Tsipi Keller, novelist and translator, on the issue of writing in English away from her mother tongue of Hebrew. Tsipi is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, of CAPS and NYFA awards in fiction, and is the author, most recently, of Jackpot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2004)






Writing in a language not your own


Not your own. You never own it, you don’t feel you own it, even if your vocabulary is rich, your syntax and spelling correct. There’s always a hesitancy – imperceptible to others, but there all the same – in your hand when you write, and, even worse, in your voice, when you speak, for, in addition to correct usage you also worry about your accent: “Will I be understood? I open my mouth and they know I’m a foreigner. Do they resent foreigners here?”

So yes, I’m a guest in the House of English, but, for the most part, a welcomed guest, free to roam as she pleases, especially when she writes and doesn’t have to answer to anyone. It was hard at first, thirty years ago, when I arrived in NYC. I knew English from school, from reading, from the movies and from pop music. But, by the time I arrived in NYC, I had become adept at adopting languages. I had adopted Hebrew when my parents and I emigrated from Prague to Israel (Yiddish had been my mother’s tongue), and later French, when I went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. I came to NY as a tourist, stayed on, and have been living English and in English for thirty years, the longest I’ve ever spent in any language. It feels natural to me to write in English, but still, the hesitancy I mentioned earlier is there, too. I don’t think it’ll ever leave me. I will always look at native speakers with wonder and a tinge of envy.

To address the practical aspects: Dictionaries have been and still are a great companion to me. Reading and absorbing and listening to how people express themselves. These are obvious and necessary to any writer, native speaker and foreigner as one. What sets me apart, I think, is that, as a kind of “outsider” I pay more attention to terms that native speakers don’t think twice about. For instance, I’ve asked friends why in baseball the term “bullpen” is applied to where the pitchers wait. Are they bulls? No one – and all of them baseball fans – could provide an answer. “Speakeasy” also gives me a tickle. A writer who has more than one language in her arsenal also gets to borrow idiosyncrasies from the other language. At times she does this consciously and deliberately, at times she’s unaware she is doing it. She may choose to mangle idioms, she may mangle idioms unawares.

Bruce Benderson, who reviewed my latest novel, Jackpot, for the Brooklyn Rail, had this to say about the subject:


Tsipi Keller used to write in Hebrew and now writes in English, an adaptation as powerful as the manufacturing of a new personality. During my life I’ve known only two other novelists who succeeded in making such a fundamental switch. It requires a profound rewiring of the brain that can be as insightful as it can be alienating. Keller’s new novel, Jackpot, has the characteristics of something created by a linguistic survivor. In simple, precise yet enticing prose, it tells the story of a conflict between social convention and raw, dangerous appetite. Like a speaker of two languages, it exists on two levels: one appropriate and familiar, the other foreign and disturbing. Such a structure mirrors the immigrant experience. On the surface it is decorous, appropriate, and earnest; on another, muffled plane, all is anguish and confusion.


This is how Benderson begins his review of the book, and when I first read it, this paragraph gave me a jolt. It instantly felt true, although I myself wasn’t aware of these two linguistic and narrative levels. Simply put, this is sharp and brilliant insight. Benderson develops this theme throughout the review, which you can read in full by clicking here and scrolling down.


I’ll conclude with a poem I’ve translated from the Hebrew. It’s by Dan Pagis, one of Israel’s greatest poets. When I was growing up, and when Pagis, in all likelihood, wrote this poem – it was never published in his lifetime, it was found in his archives and published posthumously in the collection, Last Poems – there were those who tried to keep Hebrew “pure.” There was a very real distinction between “literary” Hebrew, and “street” Hebrew. As a writer, you were not allowed to mix the two. I tried it – my first novel was written in Hebrew – and no one would publish it. These days, thankfully, this distinction is ignored by most writers, and “street” Hebrew has its place in literature, if still shunned in some circles.

A LINGUISTIC PROBLEM

The maiden we call Hebrew
is the youngest born in a very good family.
Her problem, though: she messes around.
Every day it's another story.
You can't rely on her,
her word carries no weight.
She's not even pretty:
she's got acne, large feet,
is loud and stubborn as a mule.
And what's worse:
she won't give in to those
who want to stifle her unruly voice
and bury her, respectfully,
in the ancestral tomb.

Hot Indian Spellers

Hot Spell:
Why Do Indians Excel in Bees?
Poring over a Random House dictionary in the middle of
the night.

BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Friday, June 10, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

When an Indian-American 13-year-old won the Scripps
National Spelling Bee last week--the fifth time in
seven years in which a child from that ethnic group
has won this stirringly absurd contest--my first
reaction, naturally, was to ask why such a striking
pattern of success has emerged. (Indians are 0.66% of
the U.S. population.)

My second reaction was to suggest to my wife (just as
gobsmacked as I by this year's bee, in which winner,
runner-up and third place all had their origins in the
Indian subcontinent) that Indians must have vast space
in their brains for memorizing spellings, since very
little of their cerebral room is taken up by social
subtleties or a sense of humor.

My third reaction, since we'd just seen a charming
documentary called "Mad Hot Ballroom"--in which a team
of Dominican schoolkids from the Bronx had vanquished
all comers in a citywide ballroom-dancing
competition--was to say that, just as the Dominican
children in the movie had clearly "got rhythm," the
Indian kids at the bee had just as clearly "got
spelling."

Of course, any suggestion that any ethnic group has
"got" anything--other than a mother tongue and a
native cuisine--is open in this country to vociferous
attack. So I shall look for other explanations for why
young Anurag Kashyap, this year's winner,
was--yawn--yet another Indian kid who can spell
"appoggiatura" on television before a national
audience without breaking into a sweat.

As scientists will confirm, there are reasons why
empirically observable patterns occur: In the case of
the little Indian-American spelling champs, an
arguable one is that this ethnic group has pushier
parents than any other tribe, all very eager--no, make
that desperate--for their kids to succeed at school,
or at anything that looks remotely like school.

This attitude draws on a particular Indian cultural
trait, bequeathed to broader Indian society by the
Brahminical upper stratum: Success at letters is the
sweetest sort of success, the achievement nonpareil.

For millennia, India was a land where the poorest
scholar was held in higher esteem than the richest
businessman. This approach to life proved disastrous
for modern India. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's
first prime minister and a Brahmin to his manicured
fingertips, had such contempt for business (and for
profits) that his economic policies condemned his
people to two generations of stagnation.

But Nehru would have approved of spelling bees. Indian
pedagogy relies heavily on rote memorization--the
result of a fusion of Victorian teaching methods
imposed by the British and ancient Hindu practice, in
which the guru (or teacher) imparted his learning to
pupils via an oral tradition. (The Victorians, for
their part, regarded correct spelling almost as a
moral virtue, and certainly as a caste "signifier," to
use a clumsy anthropological term.)

So the act of sitting down for months with dictionary
on lap, chanting aloud the spellings of abstruse words
and then committing them to memory probably taps into
an atavistic stream coursing through the veins of
Indian bee-children. A friend tells the story of how,
in his childhood, he'd had an Indian boy home for a
sleep-over. He awoke in the middle of the night to
find his guest poring over the host family's Random
House dictionary. "I own an Oxford dictionary," the
boy had said, by way of bizarre, nocturnal
explanation. "This American dictionary is so
different!"

If all that sounds too much like saying that there's a
"geek gene" at work here, let us consider another
explanation for the Indian spellers.

There are certain cultures--particularly Asian
ones--that produce child prodigies. Relentless
parents, goading their children to success at the
youngest possible age, are but one explanation. These
are all cultures in which, traditionally, children
have begun work early, in which childhood as we know
it in the West is an alien idea. Indian kids are
potty-trained by two. In America, that would be
regarded as precocious. Pressure is brought to bear
much later on purely American children than on those
kids whose parents persist in old-world child-rearing
ways long after they immigrate to America.

And here, perhaps, is the last piece in the
Indian-American spelling-bee jigsaw. Educationally,
Indian-Americans are the cream of the crop of a fifth
of humanity, thanks to U.S. immigration laws, which,
for decades, let in only doctors and engineers and
mathematicians. So these children are the kids of
parents who themselves competed--probably at a
ferocious level--to get into the best Indian schools,
and then to get here.

So there you have it, neatly explained. Master
Kashyap--singular fellow!--is a product of a complex
set of processes. Only a part of his success, I'm
pleased to report, is attributable to matters
deoxyribonucleic.

Mr. Varadarajan is features editor of The Wall Street
Journal.

http://opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006801

Lit 50 Chicago 2005

Lit 50 2005
Who really books in Chicago

The power is back on. After dishing on the liveliest literati last year, we return to check up on the movers and shakers in Chicago's book world. For years, Oprah reigned supreme as the city's bookselling heavyweight, metaphorically speaking, only to take a break and then return to the classics--Faulkner anyone? While this was happening, an heiress to a pill-pushing fortune turned the world of words on its head when she made Chicago's venerable little Poetry magazine the Valhalla of verse by giving it a god's fortune. So there you have the beauty and mystery of Chicago's book world: Oprah and Poetry.

1. John Barr
You wouldn't expect a former Wall Street investment banker to be the ringleader in the new golden age of poetry, but when the ring's at the top of a 100-million-dollar pile, you might want it to be. Not long after pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly made Poetry the best-endowed literary organization in the land, Barr took the reigns. As president of the Poetry Foundation, Barr has already laid out a number of ambitious ventures to advance poetry's cause, including several new poetry prizes, such as the $25,000 Mark Twain Poetry Award for humorous work and the $50,000 Neglected Masters Award. Barr has also implemented the American Life in Poetry project, which provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems, headed by poet laureate Ted Kooser, and that's just the beginning. As their mission reads, "In the long term, the Foundation aspires to alter the perception that poetry is a marginal art, and to make it directly relevant to the American public." Now that would be poetic justice.

2. Oprah Winfrey
Sure, we all know how the mighty O once propelled previously little-knowns like Wally Lamb and Jacquelyn Mitchard into the sales stratosphere with her book-club anointments. And sure, she's technically a woman of letters herself now, with a successful magazine bearing her name. But when she turned away from a certain trademarked sentimentality in choosing new authors in favor of classics like Tolstoy and Steinbeck, we said just wait and see. Well, last week she assigned a summer schedule of Faulkner--not one, but three novels in all--to a nation of soccer moms. The result? Faulkner's new box set shot to Amazon's #2 slot, just behind Harry Potter futures. Vintage Books shipped a half million copies and printed 100,000 more--"sales have been amazing," says Vintage's Russell Perreault. When the mayor of Oxford, Mississippi fretted to the New York Times about a surge of resulting condo sales in his town, well, let's just say we see, we see. And we're watching, too, the sales figures for "The Sound and the Fury (Cliffs Notes)."

3. Studs Terkel
Our treasure. 93 years and counting, he's Chicago incarnate. But no fade to glory here; he's still working. The master of the oral history, he remains as prolific as ever. He had a hit in 2003 with "Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times," and has a new work heading our way this September, called "And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey," featuring interviews with Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Louie Armstrong and more.

4. Mary Dempsey
Chicago Public Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey is the unstoppable driving force behind keeping our civic literary resources alive. Dempsey has kept "One Book, One Chicago" running strong, this year putting the vintage Western "The Ox-Bow Incident" into the hands of a city of readers. But she's not just perpetuating past treasures: A free wireless network was unveiled in the city's libraries last winter, allowing residents access to all of the city's digital resources.

5. Scott Turow
A thinking-person's genre writer, the practicing attorney has several best-selling legal thrillers under his belt, including "Presumed Innocent" and "The Burden of Proof," plus some nonfiction, like 2003's "Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty." Come fall, Turow's back to making things up, with "Ordinary Heroes," about a man piecing together his father's experiences in WWII.

6. Jeffrey Eugenides
The rumor mill whispered "Eugenides is coming" and Chicago rejoiced at its truth. The Gross Pointe, Michigan-born author relocated his family from its home in Germany sometime last year, bringing one of our times' most engaging literary minds with it. He broke the literary bubble with his gothic dream "The Virgin Suicides" in the early nineties, which led to his follow-up, the Pulitzer Prize-winning epic "Middlesex," in 2003. Eugenides told Newcity last year that he's "working on his new novel"--and since it took him nearly ten years between "Virgin" and "Middlesex," we may have to wait a bit. We think it will be worth it.

7. J.M. Coetzee
The elusive South Africa-born writer--who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003--gives us much to look forward to later this year: the instructor at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought has "Slow Man," his highly anticipated new novel, hitting shelves in October, plus the "essential edition" of his 1999 work, "Disgrace," due at the end of the summer.

8. Chris Ware
Chicago continues to be fertile soil for the growing field of "indie comics," but no one has yet to reach the influential heights of the Jimmy Corrigan man, who recently released his early nineties work in "Quimby the Mouse" and edited McSweeney's #13. "Walt and Skeezix: Book One," for which Ware shares credit with Frank King, is an ode to King's classic comic strip "Gasoline Alley" and is due this month from Drawn and Quarterly.

9. Mark Strand
The instructor at the University of Chicago in the Committee on Social Thought won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry with 1999's "Blizzard of One," and last year took home the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, for which he pocketed a cool hundred grand. Next, the former Poet Laureate edits W.W. Norton & Company's "One Hundred Greatest Poems of the Twentieth Century," out this June.

10. Elizabeth Taylor
Although this wordy woman may have one of the most frustrating Google names ever, there's nothing wrong with her part in Chicago's literary scene. She continues to run the show as literary editor, as well as Sunday magazine editor, for the Chicago Tribune. Taylor received much praise for "American Pharaoh," a biography of the first Daley machine co-written with Adam Cohen a few years back, and she still glows from the Trib's purchase of Printers Row Book Fair.

11. Steven Levitt
Who knew? The University of Chicago's highly regarded young economics professor won over the masses with the deliriously entertaining and informative "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything," which he co-authored. Spots on "The Daily Show" and "The O'Reilly Factor" soon led to the coveted number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction.

12. Roger Ebert
February's "Great Movies II" gave the thumbman a forum to riff on such classics as "Annie Hall," "Mean Streets" and "Rules of the Game" and proved his opinion on vintage films just as relevant --and, possibly, influential--as his opinion on new releases. With "Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2006" assuredly waiting in the wings, the critic--who, as of this year, is no longer the only to win a Pulitzer (thanks to Joe Morgenstern)--has hardly any reason to keep his thumb down.

13. Ira Glass
The "This American Life" host--one of few radio personalities recognizable by voice andface--helped turn David Sedaris into a cultural icon, as well as giving a major career boost to "Assassination Vacation" author and voice from "The Incredibles" Sarah Vowell. Beyond that, his show epitomizes a certain literary style of radio, and consistently features the work of many of the nation's top young writers.

14. Audrey Niffenegger
Who was hurt more by the Bradifer split than Niffenegger? Pitt and Aniston snapped up the film rights to "The Time Traveler's Wife" with daunting immediacy and the desire to star, but, well, shit happens. But, the Columbia College prof took a sabbatical last fall to complete her second novel, "Her Fearful Symmetry," a London-based mystery, plus an Edward Gorey-like illustrated novel, "The Three Incestuous Sisters," due in September.

15. Christian Wiman
The editor of the prestigious Poetry magazine, who won the 1998 Nicholas Roerich Prize for his first book of poetry, "The Long Home" and who also wrote the 2004 book of criticism "Ambition and Survival: Essays on Poetry," returned last month with "Hard Night" on Copper Canyon Press, his highly anticipated sophomore collection of poems that might even surpass his first.

16. Bill Zehme
This prolific Roscoe Village scribe has captured the essence of some of showbiz's greatest, such as Frank Sinatra and Andy Kaufman, however nothing will be able to stack up against his upcoming book, "Carson the Magnificent," out from Random House this November. Nailing the last interview with one of America's greatest icons, who also happens to be your idol, is not a bad way to top an impressive writing career.

17. Peter Kuntz
This year marks the Chicago Humanities Festival's 16th annual celebration, and its first without co-founder and president Eileen Mackevich, who was apparently forced out by board chair and co-founder Richard Franke earlier this year. (Now that's power.) Since 1990, CHF has brought a vast collection of prominent authors, poets, scholars, artists and performers together in this appropriately dubbed "Festival of Ideas" each fall. While currently between presidents, 2005's CHF is under the direction of acting president Kuntz, who's keeping things on track, it seems, based on the quality and success of this Friday's pre-festival sold-out reading by Umberto Eco, who will present his new novel, "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana."

18. Linda Dimaggio
Linda Dimaggio took over for Matthew Coyne as District Manager of Borders in 2005 and stepped into the top local job at the city's most aggressively expanding bookseller. Out of 450 U.S. locations, eight Borders are in Chicago proper alone. And they keep expanding: With their 2003 openings in Lincoln Park, Hyde Park and Uptown, they've got the city covered, making misery for chief competitor Barnes & Noble and the beloved independents alike.

19. Donna Shear
Under the direction of Donna Shear, Northwestern University Press is continuing to release a wide array of books this year. This, Shear's third year as director of the press, also happens to be the first year of its Chicago regional series, which includes Timuel Black's "Bridges of Memory" and Chicago alderman Leon Despres' "Challenging the Daley Machine." But Shear says the highlight of the year has been the release of Richard Christiansen's "A Theater of Our Own: A History and a Memoir of 1,001 Nights in Chicago," which she says places Northwestern in the forefront of theater and performance publication. Adding to that will be a Victory Gardens anthology, "Victory Garden Theatre Presents" in the fall.

20. Aleksandar Hemon
The "Nowhere Man" and "The Question of Bruno" author--who's also published works in Esquire, Granta, Ploughshares and, of course, the New Yorker--holds a teaching position in the M.A. program for creative writing at Northwestern University and makes a city proud that he--Bosnian-born and one of America's most celebrated "new" voices--calls Chicago home.

21. Garry Wills
"Prolific" and "intellectual" don't often cohabitate, but the adjunct professor and cultural historian at Northwestern--and another local who has claimed a Pulitzer--has penned more than twenty separate books, spinning histories of Reagan, Kennedy, Nixon and George Washington, as well as his recent "Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power" and "Why I Am A Catholic," which continued his musings on religion in America.

22. Bob Bryant
Barbara's Bookstore has become a dominant force in independent bookselling in Chicago, with the recent opening of their expansive facility near UIC and the 2003 debut of their successful outpost in Marshall Field's on State Street. Their move to UIC, which preceded them landing the celebrated book-signing for Bill Clinton's memoirs last summer, was bittersweet for general manager Bryant and his staff, since it accompanied the closing of the Wells Street flagship in the face of new neighboring competition. But Barbara's, a presence in Chicago since 1963, has found its spots to thrive, with stores now open in New York's LaGuardia Airport as well as in Boston and Philadelphia.

23. Kenneth Clarke
Under the direction of executive director Clark, the Poetry Center continually strives to bring new audiences to poetry by bringing poets to the audiences. In the past year, the Poetry Center's archives have made their way into the University of Chicago's library. Thanks to the acquisition, the Poetry Center's pieces will be on display as part of a fall exhibit titled "From Poetry to Verse: The Making of Modern Poetry," which will run from September 16 though January 7.

24. Brad Jonas
Powell's offers the biggest, as well as some of the best and most organized selections of used titles at their three locations in the city. Co-owner Brad Jonas has developed a new monthly reading series in connection with the Art Institute at their location in Lakeview. Jonas also co-created CIROBE, the Chicago International Remainder and Overstock Exposition, one of the largest buying and selling expositions for bargain books, which will be held October 28-30 at the Hilton Chicago.

25. Stuart Dybek
Toiling heretofore in relative obscurity, "The Coast of Chicago" author's 1990 book was chosen last year for the "One Book, One Chicago" program and was awarded the adult fiction prize from the Society of Midland Authors for last year's "I Sailed with Magellan."

26. Alex Kotlowitz
Last summer's "Never a City So Real" collection of essays and travelogues hit home, as he is, in every sense of the word, truly a Chicago guy, even if he grew up in New York City. Last week, Kotlowitz's "An Unobstructed View," a collection of vignettes taken from true Chicago tales, opened on the stage at Pegasus Players.

27. Milt Rosenberg
Rosenberg's "Extension 720" radio show on WGN, now in its thirties, spans a wide range of topics such as sports, psychology, the English language and astrophysics. The professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, called the "nation's leading author interviewer" by Talkers Magazine, has matched wits with Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and Bill Murray over the years.

28. Haki Madhubuti
The poet, publisher and founder of Third World Press serves as an essential figure in the literary and African community. Along with publishing the work of Gwendolyn Brooks, Madhubuti also supplies us with the work of Sterling Plumpp and Kelly Norman Ellis.

29. Joe Meno
The Chicago punk remains humble after the cult-classic success of last year's "Hairstyles of the Damned," which became publisher Akashic Books all-time bestseller, keeping his pen busy with a column for Punk Planet magazine and as coeditor of its skateboard publication, Bail. The Columbia creative writing professor and Nelson Algren Award-winner will undoubtedly rock readers again with his latest effort on oddballs, "Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir," out this November.

30. Elizabeth Crane
The still-hot author, who won the 2003 Chicago Public Library 21st Century Award for her debut, "When the Messenger Is Hot," returned this spring to positive reviews for her introduction of Charlotte Anne Byers, Crane's new heroine and savior of her sophomore collection of short stories, "All this Heavenly Glory."

31. Elizabeth Berg
Best-selling author Elizabeth Berg has been at the forefront of the literary scene since her 1993 debut novel, "Durable Goods," won the American Library Association's Best Book of the Year designation. In 2000, her novel "Open House" was included in the much sought after Oprah Book Club. Berg's latest, "The Year of Pleasures," was published by Random House in April.

32. Alex Ross
Alex Ross is a superhero. He's not a comic character, but a creator. DC Comics' Alex Ross, known by many as the "Norman Rockwell of comics," pioneered the technique of painting rather than drawing comics, and in the process, has become one of the best-known creators in the field, even producing the poster for the Academy Awards a couple years back.

33. Andrew Greeley
Whether it's his Honorary Senior Fellowship at the University of Ireland in Dublin, his time as a sociology prof at the University of Arizona, his work as a research associate at the University of Chicago or his columns for the Chicago Sun Times' Southtown, this is one busy holy man. With over thirty novels under his robe, this Catholic priest's latest work (a reprise of his 1978 classic) "The Making of the Pope 2005" from Little, Brown & Co, is due out this fall.

34. Mark Suchomel
Book giants Barnes & Noble recognized the IPG as one of their twelve best trading partners in terms of data providing in 2005, which is a fabulous feat for an independent press distributor. Publishers Weekly named president Mark Suchomel as one of the "Eleven for the Millennium," as an individual advancing publishing in the 2000s.

35. Ivan R. Dee
A model for successful and thoughtful publishing on a modest scale, Ivan R. Dee and his well-regarded small press are known for nonfiction titles that are not only relevant and interesting, but widely read. With a growing calendar of releases in the next year, Dee shows no signs of letting up, even as its founder recently celebrated his seventieth birthday.

36. Joseph Epstein
A true Chicagoan, author Joseph Epstein has stayed close to home in his career, which has included contributing to The New Yorker, New Republic, and New York Review of Books. The former professor in the English Department at Northwestern University managed to teach and publish pieces simultaneously, such as his best-selling book, "Snobbery: The American Version," which might even serve as a resource for his Evanston students.

37. Jim DeRogatis
The Sun-Times music man ruffles endless feathers with his criticism of all things rock, and whether he loves your band (see: Fall Out Boy), or is flat out disturbed (see: Ryan Adams), DeRo's always a fun read. In last year's "Kill Your Idols," DeRo elicited the help of music writers from across the country to destroy the rock world's most beloved albums, and come February 2006, he's back with "Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma's Fabulous Flaming Lips."

38. Sara Paretsky
Chicago's own Nancy Drew is about to crack the case again, sending her infamous private eye V.I. Warshawski back to the South Side scene in "Fire Sale," out later this month from Putnam Adult. This Cartier Diamond Dagger Lifetime Achievement award-winner has been taking a stab at the crime world for more than twenty years now and will undoubtedly steal a spot on the bestsellers list once again with the twelfth installment, rumored to be the best of the series.

39. Curt and Linda Matthews
The Chicago Review Press oversees four successful imprints that cover everything from music history (A Capella) to African American nonfiction (Lawrence Hill Books). Curt and Linda Matthews created this platform for independent and overlooked subjects and authors in 1973. Linda is the publisher with a staff of eight who work in conjunction with their even more successful Independent Publisher's Group distribution arm.

40. Randy Albers
The Chair of Columbia College's Fiction Writing Department has never wavered in his commitment to Chicago's literary community. This becomes increasingly evident when examining his role in the 9th annual Story Week Festival of Writers. Aside from conceiving the original vision for this cultural series, Albers consulted on its author lineup, (including heavyweights such as Dave Eggers and Sandra Cisneros) and helped orchestrate Ray Bradbury Day. Not bad for someone who's supposed to be on sabbatical.

41. Victoria Lautman
The self-proclaimed "paid blabbermouth" has something of a hit on her hands with the "Writers on Record" series held at the Lookingglass Theatre, where she prints an interview in Chicago magazine, then converses live on WFMT with the likes of Augusten Burroughs, Jonathan Safran Foer and this week's guest, Pulitzer-winner Michael Cunningham.

42. Eric Kirsammer
Kirsammer's two children--Quimby's and Chicago Comics--continue to stock the city with underground lit, as Quimby's remains the premier book stop in Wicker Park, while rivaling Barbara's for the city's best author readings, and Chicago Comics continues to be the Midwest Mecca for the drawn word.

43. Ted C. Fishman
Fishman's "China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World," a detailed analysis of China's thirty-year rise to economic power, hit the shelves in a timely fashion, landing the author television appearances on Charlie Rose, Lou Dobbs and excerpts in the New York Times Magazine and Inc. magazine.

44. Dan Sinker
The founder and editor-in-chief of the punk-rock manual for life Punk Planet saw his Akashic Books imprint, Punk Planet Books, skyrocket with the smash success in terms of sales and critical response to its debut title, local author Joe Meno's latest, "Hairstyles of the Damned."

45. Jessa Crispin
Crispin's Bookslut web site and daily blog always gets its two cents in, and maybe more, given the continuously growing prominence of the Internet as a medium, and blogging as a trend. She also recently launched saucymag.com, a web log focused wholly on cuisine, which she says she started because "basically I just realized that whenever I had any money, which is not very often, it's books and food that I would spend it all on."

46. Jack Cella
The University of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstore has the largest selection of books published by university and academic presses. And general manager Jack Cella has been with the Hyde Park institution for more than thirty years, overseeing its two operations in Hyde Park (it also runs 57th Street Books) and a North Side outpost in the Newberry Library.

47. Ann Christopherson and Linda Bubon
Andersonville's Women and Children First Bookstore has been promoting female writers since its inception in 1979. Co-owned by Christopherson, former president of the American Booksellers Association, Women and Children First is one of the largest feminist bookstores in the country with a massive inventory of more than 30,000 books by and about women, children's books and a plethora of gay and lesbian fiction and nonfiction.

48. Sam Weller
The Columbia College instructor, former correspondent for Publishers Weekly (and former Newcity staff writer), headed the Harold Washington Literary Prize Committee this year. But his colossal accomplishment was the culmination of his collaboration with his longtime idol, Ray Bradbury, in the publication of the authorized biography entitled "The Bradbury Chronicles."

49. Keith Michael Fiels
The executive director of the American Library Association, the oldest (founded in 1876) and largest library association in the world, oversees its 64,000-plus membership list as the organization strives for the "improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship." The ALA also provides a substantial list of publications, from its own American Libraries to CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries to Bill Ott's Booklist. Plus, it's open to anyone interested in librarianship--granted you pay your yearly dues.

50. Barb Slotten
Slotten, the manager of events at the Tribune, oversees the Printers Row Book Fair, the city's biggest summer literary event and book sponsorship vehicle. All eyes will be on this weekend's edition, the first to be run since the departure of Emily Cook, the last carryover from the fair's independent days.

The Lit 50 was written by Tom Lynch, with additional contributions by Trish Bendix, Jamie Murnane, Jenny Seay and Trish Smith
(2005-06-09)












Copyright Newcity Communications, Inc.



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Immigrant

The immigrant experience

Cannes is a marketplace. The red carpet is there just to attract attention
to certain films. So there is no negativeness about the fact that India did
not have a single film in the participative category of the festival,” UTV
Motion Pictures boss Ronnie Screwvala states matter-of-factly.
UTV took three films to Cannes — Blue Umbrella, Rang De Basanti and Viruddh.
“None fitted the competitive category. So it didn’t make sense for us to
enter the competition,” he shrugs. “More goes on at the festival outside
that circuit.”
The European festivals, according to Screwvala, are opening up to marketing
activities. “The American Film Market has always been more active. Last year
we did a deal with Miramax International there.” The result is a cluster of
Miramax films being distributed in India by UTV, like the Bruce
Willis-starrer Sin City knocking at release door.
The importance of Indians being showcased at Cannes is manifold. “Faces like
Aishwarya Rai become pictures that people carry back as their impression of
our films and our country. This helps to market not just our productions but
also tourism and other service industries.”
The global market, he points out, is growing at a never-before pace. “The
market abroad is just as big as the domestic market. All these years, we
have been misinformed about its size by overseas distributors, who gave such
projections for their own benefit.”
Supporting his claim, he points out how the value of tickets is seven times
that in Indian theatres. “Most countries do not have entertainment tax.
True, the marketing cost is higher, the exhibitors strike a harder bargain;
yet the returns are much more.”
Other than producing and distributing movies in India, UTV is going for
international co-productions. The Namesake is the first in the line.
Screwvala had come to Calcutta to ensure a smooth take-off for the shooting
of his $ 9.6 million co-production.
“I had been in touch with Mira (Nair). Then we met at Wellington Club in
Mumbai last November. She wanted me to distribute the film, I offered to
produce it. Mira wanted to roll in February-March as she wanted to catch the
New York winter. By February the paperwork was done. By June 8, they were
through with the US schedule,” he smiles.
The Namesake, in the UTV chief’s words, is “a truly Hollywood film”. “The
Indian revenue that would be generated is only two per cent of our global
expectations.” The film is unique in having global distribution from Day One
of production rather than going in search of a buyer afterwards to the
festivals.
Would a film with Indian characters sell like mainstream Hollywood films?
“My Big Fat Greek Wedding was a Greek story. It did business worth
half-a-billion dollars. Nicole Kidman is an Australian, Russell Crowe is
from New Zealand, Antonio Banderas is Spanish. They are all Hollywood stars.
The Namesake is a story of immigrant Americans. The Ganguli experience is
what even migrant Italians or Germans would identify with.”
It is the treatment of a film that makes it Indian or international, not the
story or the characters in it, Screwvala feels. “Mira knows the American
sensibility.”
He is all for designing movies that appeal to the target audience. “Swades
did far better abroad than in India as it was aimed at the migrant mindset
at the crossroads, rather than the family back home. It would be silly to
take D abroad. The gangster concept is well-known abroad. If they have to
see a gangster movie, they’d rather see Godfather. A Hindi film that we
release outside India as well would have to be quintessentially Indian —
with strong cultural roots — that would appeal to the south Asians.”
The Namesake is the second UTV film to be shot in Calcutta. (UTV is
distributing Parineeta). “I have heard about the trouble Vinod had,” he
said, commenting on Parineeta producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s tiff with the
local industry hands. But Screwvala is not concerned. “Such problems get
resolved.”
But, he categorically states that there should be flexibility when one is
working for a film. “It cannot be a strictly eight-hour shift. The film
industry involves a lot of passion. If a shot is good and things are
rolling, one has to continue without looking at the watch,” the producer
muses.
SUDESHNA BANERJEE
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050608/asp/calcutta/story_4820504.asp

What Lies Beneath

What lies beneath
A series of books on the lives of stage and screen actresses of Bengal looks beyond the dazzle of the arclights to reveal their true selves. Dola Mitra reports

her story: Binodini and (below) some of the books brought out by Thema



It was the mid-1960s. Editors of a bi-annual magazine called Ekkhon had ferreted out a piece of writing from the dusty shelves of oblivion and serialised it for their summer and autumn issues, drawing immense public attention. Among those who read it with a great deal of interest was scholar and theatre critic Samik Bandyopadhyay. But by the time he had put it down, something had begun to disturb him. There were unexplained details; he had questions, to which there seemed to be no available answers. But he was forced to put them aside because there was little that he could do to find out — at least at that time.

That piece of writing was Aamar Katha — the personal narrative of Binodini Dasi, Bengali theatre’s first and perhaps most versatile leading lady. It was a landmark of sorts — the first autobiography of a Bengali theatre actress. But reading what was ostensibly Binodini’s honest and open account of her own life, Bandyopadhyay could nevertheless sense whispers of unsaid things between the lines. “An autobiography can only say so much,” Bandyopadhyay points out, “It never really speaks the complete truth.”

So, after a wait of many long years, Bandyopadhyay is now attempting to complete the picture — of Binodini and others like her — with the help of their miscellaneous written work. His publishing company Thema is bringing out a series on individual stage and screen actresses of Bengal, creating a collage of whole personalities by stringing together bits and pieces of their thoughts scattered in their diaries or in the letters they wrote, the poems they scribbled, and the stories or the film scripts they penned.

“When writing an autobiography, the author is obviously guarded to a certain extent,” explains Bandyopadhyay. “Also, formal autobiographical protocol doesn’t really permit self-proclaiming styles. But a personality can reveal itself through other written work.”

So we get a glimpse into the mind of Karuna Bandyopadhyay — the first actress in the series — that goes beyond her public and perhaps most well-known image as Pather Panchali’s Sarbojoya. Interestingly, in one of her essays, Ja Haray Na, she herself questions this tendency to pigeonhole. “Many say Pather Panchali is Ray’s greatest film. I don’t agree… That is like saying there is only one beautiful strain that the flutist can produce.”

And we are pleasantly surprised to discover that an ostensibly serious actress like Binota Roy, who with her memorable performance in the 1944 film Udayer Pathey, carved out a permanent niche for herself in the world of Bengali cinema, had a charming sense of humour. In her story Andhar Deyul, Roy, who was brought back to the silver screen by Mrinal Sen in 1972 with Kolkata 71, enumerates, tongue-in-cheek, various kinds of “good addictions”.

Shova Sen’s Onra, Amra, Era plays a sort of double role in the series. By writing about actresses and their relationships with her, she reveals the predilections of her own mind, as well as little-known facets of the personalities of many of her contemporaries.

A snippet of conversation she had with veteran actress, Sarayu Bala, is an example. “It is shameful for us that in your presence, other, perhaps less deserving actresses, receive recognition for contribution to theatre,” Sen said. After a brief pause, Sarayu Bala replied, “Can anything be sadder than that?” Could any autobiography of Sarayu Bala’s communicate her displeasure so poignantly? Perhaps not.

No doubt, there were many such omissions in Aamar Katha, as well as her second memoir, Aamar Abhinetri Jibon, either because of “autobiographical protocol” or simply because of Binodini’s sense of humility or modesty. Binodini repeatedly refers to herself as a “fallen woman” (potita nari) and sinner (papiyoshi). And while her style is formal and language dignified, the tone is almost confessional. But just beneath the surface of these almost self-denigrating words, Bandyopadhyay has perceived a deep sense of what can best be described by the Bengali word abhimaan — a bitter-sweet feeling of hurt caused by a loved one.

But it is her other written work, her letters, her poems, etc, through which Binodini speaks volumes about herself and which provide more than a passing glimpse into her personality. But never in her memoirs does Binodini talk about her abhimaan — which reveals her tacit need to be understood and valued.

Perhaps the most significant inspiration for the series came from Bandyopadhyay attempting to understand some things left unexplained by Binodini in her fairly large body of written work. Binodini had requested her mentor and teacher Girish Chandra Ghosh to write the introduction to her first memoir, Aamar Katha. He had done so. But Binodini rejected it, asking him to rewrite it and it was not published along with the first edition of Aamar Katha. But before the second edition came out, Ghosh died, without having written another introduction. Sad and guilty, Binodini made it the introduction to the second edition of Aamar Katha. What surprised Bandyopadhyay after reading Ghosh’s introduction was that it was a positive and supportive one, full of praise for his favourite pupil. And what baffled him was why she had rejected it in the first place.

Of course, Bandyopadhyay speculates: In Aamar Katha Binodini writes about the infamous Star Theatre “betrayal”. She writes frankly about being coaxed by Ghosh and others into living with a wealthy gentleman who was to finance the construction of Star, with the promise that the theatre would be named after her. But on the opening night, Binodini discovered that it was not to be. Bandyopadhyay’s guess is that Binodini expected Ghosh to mention the episode in the introduction and vindicate her name. “There is no other contemporary corroborative evidence of the ‘betrayal’ episode,” Bandyopadhyay explains, “and Binodini may have wanted some affirmation”. But Binodini — like Pygmalion’s Eliza Dolittle — never really gets much credit from her patrons and mentors.

Yet in the literature of that period, there is some reference to the magnitude of Binodini’s contribution - and not just to acting. The poem, Amrito-Modira, by Amrito Lal Bose, throws light on Binodini’s role in helping Ghosh and others to interpret characters. It spells out how Binodini spontaneously enacted scenes during play-reading sessions in her house. He writes, “Kokhono chhadeytey boshey ekaki biroley/mala tuli dei ‘Julie’ Romeo-r gawley (Often she sits on a terrace alone/and as Juliet, garlands her Romeo).”

It is such surrounding material, but mostly their own written work composed during unguarded moments, that reveal their true selves. This is the premise on which Thema’s series is based. Bandyopadhyay also points out that perhaps more than any other group or profession, it is important to try and trace the true voice of actresses. That’s because by virtue of their profession, their own voices often get submerged in the voices of the many characters they portray.

At the moment, Bandyopadhyay is in the process of compiling the fifth book in the series on Ketaki Dutta’s written work. Deviating slightly from the ‘written-work only’ mode, Bandyopadhyay has conducted 10 formal interviews which will be included in the book. But otherwise, the process of collection, especially of unpublished work, has often led him to the doorsteps of family, friends and relatives who dug up rare manuscripts and letters from old chests and trunks.

Bandyopadhyay does not know which leading lady will feature in the series next. But one thing is certain — the series will continue to stitch together snatches of written or spoken conversation to delve into the inner voices of these women. And if one listens carefully, one may solve the mystery of those stifled whispers.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050605/asp/look/story_4822245.asp

Eye on Calcutta

The Calcutta chromosomes
Eye on Calcutta

Renu Roy

A creative artist concerned about roots and identity cannot escape the frame of reference that the city continues to be
It cannot be entirely an accident that two of our greatest living writers of the English language were born in this city. Amitav Ghosh in 1956, and Amit Chaudhuri in 1962. The dates are important because they clearly indicate that the cultural context I am referring to is firmly post-colonial, yet probably it does refer to the Raj, in a deeper and more significant way.
Calcutta was, after all, the first city to be built from scratch by the British outside Britain. It also hosted their first university overseas, their first medical college, and even their first civilian engineering college, that is outside the army. That the English language, and its literature, has a history of connections with our city is only natural, and historically inevitable.
How else do you encounter the plaque on Free School Street that tells you that William Makepeace Thackeray lived here once? How else do you account for the fact that our Park Street cemetery bears an epitaph written by the English poet Walter Savage Landor, in memory of the woman he loved? Rose Aylmer belongs as much to Calcutta as to English poetry. However much you may wish to shake them off, the ghosts of the Raj continue to haunt us to degree that we have almost got used to it. some of us, I know, would feel downright neglected and lonely without those colonial visitations.



Our city has certainly shared more than its fair share of glory and greatness through its literary citizens, so much so that the history of Bengali literature cannot be written without Calcutta in view. But the English language too has a rightful claim to its own piece of turf on the east bank of the Hooghly. This becomes all the more apparent when we remember that the first great Bangla poet to emerge in our city wrote first in English. If any one had changed the course of the history of Bengali literature it was Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, especially in his monumental and modern rewriting of the Ramayana narrative from the point of view of Ravana.
It is interesting to remember that Michael’s first published poetical work was in English. Entitled The Captive Lady it told the romantic Rajput tale of the love and valour of Pritviraj Chauhan. Michael’s departure from the English language and his return to his mother tongue has of course, achieved the status of one of the great legends of cultural nationalism, but the poet’s original choice cannot be forgotten. It certainly indicates how deeply English had been part of our city and its culture.
Michael was not an exception. The other Dattas must also be remembered. The Datta sisters — Aru and Toru — also wrote verse in English and won accolades from discerning readers even in the England of their days. In their painfully short lives, truncated cruelly by death, they left behind an immense possibility for Indian writers of English verse. And all this was at a time when the literati refused to accept English as an Indian language. Its acceptance, in fact, has come much after Independence, when colonialism has long ceased to cast its shadow on our cultural context.

Unfortunately, verse in English never won kudos for Calcutta after the 19th century. Despite the countless volumes published by the Writer’s Workshop, and the painstaking efforts of P Lal, Calcutta has not been able to produce a poet of the stature of a Nissim Ezekiel or even a Dom Moraes.

But prose it has continued to produce in plenty. One may challenge the Calcuttan-ness of an Amitav Ghosh or Amit Chaudhuri, who were born here, or Jhumpa Lahiri, who returned to her parental roots to be married here, or even an Upamanyu Chatterjee, but the fact is that if you are a Bengali, either first generation or second, culturally you will always have an umbilical connection to Calcutta. It is not for nothing that Amit Chaudhuri returned to come and live here. There is something about roots. And sometimes it is so deep, and so complex that it is difficult to explain rationally. The Calcutta chromosomes survive in devious ways. A very patriotic Bengali friend of mine put it rather ironically, when he said that the best Bangla novel this year has been written in English. He was referring to Amitav Ghosh’s latest book – The Hungry Tide.

The English language chromosomes seem to have survived through a significantly long period of time, from their first appearance in the 19th century right into the 21st. It might seem a little dated now, but the novels of Bhabani Bhattacharya in mid-20th century had their own quaintness and subtle impact that may have lost its edge today, but certainly not their validity, as a statement of the times in which they came to be written. I am sure that I am leaving out many names, perhaps too many, of writers in the English language who have been linked to our city and have made their contribution. But I am neither a historian, nor a critic, but a lover of both literature and our city.

Again and again, the spirit of our city surfaces in the most unexpected and startling ways, especially in literature. How else do you explain the emergence in Calcutta of the semi-successful writer Jayojit, the protagonist of Amit Chaudhuri’s A New World, who returns from the American Mid-West with a broken marriage and a young son in tow, to revel in the “tranquility of watery lentil daal in a chinaware bowl and paabda fish in mustard”. How else do you account for the beginning of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, where a pregnant and perpetually hungry, Bengali woman desperately tries to rustle up some jhaal muri in her New York apartment? And if jhaal muri isn’t all about Calcutta, what else is?
Whether you are a second generation Non-Resident Bengali like Jhumpa Lahiri, or brought up in Mumbai like Amit Chaudhuri, if you are a creative artist who is concerned about roots and identity, it is impossible that you will be able to escape the frame of reference that Calcutta continues to provide to all those who are historically linked to it. This certainly is not only about being a Bengali, because the same predilections seem to haunt the visual imagery of a Wasim Kapur, or the Hindi writing of a Mannu Bhandari or Alka Saraogi.
The acceptance of English as an Indian language; the recognition of its Indian practitioners throughout the English-speaking world; and the resonances of this body of writing with what I choose to call The Calcutta Experience; all are post-colonial and post-Partition.
We are therefore confronted here not with a nostalgic connection between the city and the English language spawned by the Raj, but with a comparatively new experience translating itself through new artistic expression. We are being presented here with a wider, larger vista than contemporary Bangla literature, which is still caught up in its own middle-class vortex, but which is inextricably entangled with our city. The Calcutta Chromosomes seem to be growing everyday, in unpredictable directions, and one feels confident that evolution will see its emergence into a considerable cultural context, to which we will all be proud to belong.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050604/asp/calcutta/story_4824660.asp

What Was Once New in Indian PUblishing

http://www.hindu.com/lr/2005/06/05/stories/2005060500220400.htm

Opinion
That was once new in Indian writing

How do we distinguish the merely gimmicky from the really new? asks AMITAVA KUMAR






PHOTO: REUTERS

Irreverent tongue: Salman Rushdie.

EXTREMELY Loud and Incredibly Close is a new novel written by a young, under-30 American author with more-than-a-million-dollar advance. The story revolves around the grief of a nine-year-old narrator, a New Yorker, who has lost his father in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The author's name is Jonathan Safran Foer.

This novel has been described as "gimmicky" and "an overstuffed fortune cookie" because, apart from several blank pages and dramatic fonts, it also contains such unconventional devices as flip-book of video-stills arranged in reverse order so that a human being can be seen jumping up toward the top of the smoking twin towers.

The New York Times Book Review described Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as maddening enough to drive the mature reader to the bar for a stiff drink. Such judgments notwithstanding, the book continues to remain on the newspaper's bestseller list.

Impatient with the new?


My own views on that novel are similar, but I am still left with a set of questions: How is newness to come into the world? In India, didn't all those who found fault with the innovations of, say, Salman Rushdie, or Arundhati Roy, or Raj Kamal Jha — didn't those readers and critics show similar impatience with what was new by finding it gimmicky or overwrought or incoherent? How were the detractors able to separate what is merely show-offish and self-indulgent from that which is unanticipated and truly brilliant?

To find some answers I want to go back to the beginning. Let us return to the first novels written by writers who inaugurate what we call, inadequately and clumsily, but not wrongly, Indian writing in English. Those literary forebears of ours were trying, in their own way, to do something new. What was it?

I have just finished reading, for the first time, R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends. This was Narayan's first novel. When he had completed it, Narayan would mail it to a publisher in England and then wait for rejection — the whole process usually took about six weeks. In August 1931, Narayan finally handed the manuscript to his friend Purna, who was leaving for Oxford. Purna had been advised by the aspiring novelist "to weight the manuscript with a stone and drown it in the Thames".

But fate intervened. One day Narayan received a cable from Oxford. It had been sent by Purna. It read: "Novel taken. Graham Greene responsible."

This drama of rejection — and chance acceptance — is important for several reasons. In the 1930s, when publishers and readers in the West were familiar only with fictions of the Raj, Narayan had taken the unusual step of writing about a school-boy in an imaginary South Indian town. Swami and Friends is an exploration of the intimate but ordinary, even humdrum, world of a middle-class childhood. History does make an appearance in these pages — we read of the nationalist movement, for instance — but it does so more like a paper-boat passing in a gutter filled with rainwater. It would have required a great deal of courage on Narayan's part, or at least a mix of naiveté and confidence, to create a world so unfamiliar to those who were going to appraise his manuscript. That, I think, is newness.

Another Indian writer who debuted the same year was Mulk Raj Anand, but unlike Narayan, Anand was engaged in a more active dialogue with the West. Anand wanted to be accepted by the friends he had courted in Bloomsbury; at the same time, he wanted his independence and strove to find it in his art.

At the heart of his novel Untouchable is the drama of a young man's desire not only to escape the oppressive caste system but to also become a sahib. Anand's protagonist, Bakha, wants to wear trousers, breeches, coat, puttees and boots. He smokes cigarettes rather than the hookah. Bakha also wants to be educated: "he had felt a burning desire, while he was in the British barracks, to speak the tish-mish, tish-mish which the Tommies spoke." It is significant that in the very act of telling us that Bhakha wanted to be a sahib, Anand is able to Indianise the Englishman. The language of the sahib no longer remains English — it is recognisable only as "tish-mish, tish-mish".

Back in the 1980s, this is exactly the feeling that was aroused by Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Twenty years later, it might be argued, we are looking for more than a mixed language. Newness at this stage will come not only from an irreverent tongue, which is now a cliché, but a more accurate engagement with our complex realities, many of which have global dimensions.

The burden of explanation


In Untouchable, Anand's prose always bore the burden of explanation, as if he was trying to act as a guide to the English. On the other hand, by the end of the novel, the Englishman had lost his allure for Bakha. Ten years before the publication of Anand's novel, E.M. Forster had published his remarkable novel A Passage to India. Anand looked up to Forster because "this particular Englishman had leaned on the side of India". Later, Forster was to provide an admiring foreword to Untouchable. Anand must also have opened himself to the novel. And yet, in his own writing he attempted something entirely different; he undertook the task of critiquing caste-oppression in his own society.

Like U.R. Anantha Murthy in Birmingham three decades later, with Bergman's "Seventh Seal" and his teacher Malcolm Bradbury as his inspirations for his searing indictment of Brahmin hypocrisy, Anand used his conversations with writers like Forster and Virginia Woolf to write against untouchablity.

What was true then is also true now. In the case of current Indian writers working in English, what is new is also the result of the conversations ongoing with writers all over the world, older writers like Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee, and Alice Munro, but also younger ones like David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and, why not, even Jonathan Safran Foer.

Amitava Kumar is the author of several books, including Husband of a Fanatic published by Penguin India.