Kolkata

Welcome back after the Easter break.

The story under discussion is by Amit Chaudhuri: biographical information can be found at the British Council website here.

The setting of the story is Kolkata, to be specific, the Ballygunge neighbourhood of that city. Lots of nice people make their lovely photos available for everyone to look at: there are some good ones here.

In the story, Bishu meets his brother at Esplanade.

They walk past K.C. Das, the sweet manufacturer,

towards the Governor’s Building

and the All India Studios,

finally going to Dacres Lane for a bite to eat:

Dontcha just love being able to see all the places that you’re reading about?

Time

Changing the clock, moving into November has made me a little sombre and philosophical perhaps. Anyway the general theme this week was time, which leads me on to the idea of how we use time wisely, waste time, kill time, bide our time (wait). Here are the two poems: one’s strength lies in its starkness, its economy, and the haunting final image of the priest and doctor running over the fields. The remaining picture is of them still running, they never arrive. The other is a magnificent musical celebration of the carpe diem motif, used, as so often it was, for the purpose of seduction.

Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Philip Larkin

To his Coy Mistress

by Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv’d virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp’d power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Book review: Freedom by Jonathen Franzen

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Epic.
Since I apparently live under a rock, I last heard the name Franzen when I read The Corrections. I didn’t realise that there were weird amounts of media buzz going on about his requesting that work to be withdrawn as an Oprah Winfrey Book Club choice. Since Oprah has the ability to send book sales skywards, this was seen as smacking a gift horse in the mouth. However Mr Franzen felt he didn’t want her logo on his work, and was fearful that it would put off male readers. Now I can understand that. And, frankly, I don’t care if he comes across to some folks as arrogant, whingey, self-obsessed or what. He can write.
Basically it’s the two guys who are friends and one girl triangle, nothing new there, indeed he trots it out for those who maybe don’t know Natasha, Pierre and Andrei from War and Peace, and funnily enough it’s exactly the plot line of Diderot’s Le Fils Naturel, which I’ve just read. But he caught up my heart. He did it again; even the characters you hate, you still like. There’s that ambivalence, that multi-facetted light refraction. And at its heart there is a real question, how to live in this imperfect world, how to make the best choice (best for whom?), how to deal with all that freedom. “..the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.” (p.381) Mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made, they’re unavoidable, or at least some of them are. In the end we need to be a little forgiving. It’s a family story that covers three decades of recent American history, but that makes it sound as bland as tapioca pudding. No, this is a satisfying, substantial meal.

Spot the difference

Before and after Ken Livingstone’s campaign.

The article we read in Meerbusch about the remarkable change to Trafalgar Square is available here. I dunno, although I’m not a great fan of pigeons, it looks a bit dead to me, without them.
But then maybe you just need to fill it with other forms of life. T-Mobile managed to do just that with one of their legendary “Life is for sharing” adverts, a great sing-along in Trafalgar Square that you can see here. And while you’re there, check out the Welcome Back video, another brilliant T-Mobile idea for Heathrow Airport. Can’t we have that every day?

Money, money, money

Talking about money is always interesting. But tricky too, as it is a sensitive subject. Naturally (why naturally?) most people see their pay slip as confidential, not something to leave lying around the house for anyone and everyone to see. But if there is not more openness about pay levels, more transparency, how will that 20% pay gap between men and women ever close? Is confidentiality over pay a huge conspiracy by men to protect their prerogative?
If you are very quick, then you can still listen to the BBC Radio 4 programme that inspired the lessons this week:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00tq0qp/Can_Pay_Will_Pay_Episode_1
And if you miss that (I’m afraid it’s only available until the 23rd) you can still see the article that people took home with them that gave background information about what constitutes a large salary, where the median wage is, and how many people have to pay 50% tax in the UK.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8151355.stm

Book review: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

In an exuberant adventure ride down the Mississipi, Huck faces the big issues of integrity and loyalty and the instinct to listen to your own ‘good heart’ rather than the distorted values of civilisation. The civilised world really does not come off well: feuding, cheating, callow stupidity and revenge reign supreme in the ‘sivilised’ towns along the banks and the raft is the only place of safety. I loved the exact rendition of various speech patterns, I loved the ironic tone, and I absolutely hated it when Tom Sawyer appeared on the scene in the last section. I know that Twain was attacking Romantic notions, showing how foolish and dangerous they could be, but his daft ideas with baking a rope ladder in a pie and smuggling all sorts of unnecessary equipment into Jim’s cell just irritated me beyond measure. Then I read the excellent introduction by Peter Coveney and was gratified to discover that I am not alone in finding that final chapter less than successful. “From the moment of Huck’s arrival at the (Phelps’s) farm the moral heart of the novel leaks away in all those contrived adventures of Tom Sawyer to ‘free’ (…) Jim.” Apart from the ending though, I loved it.

New words

Yesterday’s lesson started with a short podcast taken from BBC Six Minute English and looking at words that have entered the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED is the authoritative historical dictionary of the English language; if you would like to get an idea of how thorough a job it does of tracing the development of words, then you can see an example at the OED word of the day.
The OED was originally published in 1928 (work started in 1879!) in ten volumes and the version available for purchase now is in twenty volumes. As one might imagine, overhauling such a massive piece of scholarship is a huge undertaking and not undertaken lightly. From the OED website:

The Oxford English Dictionary was originally published in fascicles between 1884 and 1928. A one-volume supplement was published in 1933, and four further supplementary volumes were published between 1972 and 1986. In 1989, a complete Second Edition was published, consisting of the original OED amalgamated with the supplementary volumes, and together with 5,000 completely new entries. In 1993 and 1997, three volumes of Additions to the Second Edition were published. (For more details, see the history of the Dictionary.)

The OED is now, for the first time, being completely revised, with the aim of producing an updated Third Edition.

The BBC Learning English Six Minute homepage will give you a list of the words, plus definitions. I got the feeling yesterday that some people didn’t see this vocabulary as being particularly relevant or useful to them, social networking being only for young folk. Well, you might be interested to hear about Phyllis Greene, who started blogging at the age of 90. There’s a film of this feisty lady here and I would recommend her blog too!

Canada and the Queen

First and foremost: here is the link to the editorial from the Globe and Mail that we read in class this morning, in case you were unlucky enough to miss the start of term.

There were, of course, lots of queries.
First the question of the attitude of French Canadians to monarchy. As one might assume, the francophone population is less enamoured of the idea than the rest of the state. I found a leader article at a French Canadian newspaper, La Presse, that looks at the same poll that Ms McLaren mentions: whereas across Canada 44% would welcome a referendum on the subject of the constitutional position of the monarchy, in Quebec that figure reaches almost 60%. The journalist at La Presse sees a gulf between general opinion and politicians: none of the main parties has taken up republicanism as a declared policy. And the problem is down less to apathy than to the fact that the task would be daunting: any major constitutional change requires not just a simple majority of popular support, but unanimity in Senate and the 10 Provinces.

Second came the question of the cost of monarchy. Now this does rather depend on who you ask. There are those who refuse to even use the epithet ‘The Royal Family’, and rail loudly about Charles Windsor taking a bigger cut of taxpayers’ hard-earned money than even the most avaricious banker (here), but in the hope that The Guardian, although in favour of a democratic move towards a republic, will be less partisan, I refer you to this article. Yes, they are a bit of a luxury. I’m sure a President doesn’t cost as much.

Also to do with cost was the question whether Canada has to contribute to the Civil List. Well, not directly, but naturally Canada pays for the whole administrative rat’s tail that follows from having a constitutional monarch who is based on the other side of the Atlantic. Since she’s not there to do all the ceremonial stuff a Queen has to do, there’s a governor general as her representative at federal level and an array of lieutenant generals at the provincial level. There seems to be a certain amount of criticism of the wastefulness of such a dual system. There’s an interesting article here, along with comments from readers.

For the really keen, Wikipedia provides more information than you probably need, or want, on the Governor General of Canada and on Monarchy of Canada.

Happy browsing!

Book review: Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want it by Maile Meloy

This wonderful title is a quote from a poem by A.R.Ammons, and is an apt description of the quandary encapsulated in each of these stories. Often enough the wanting it both ways is the classic case of the husband hoping to keep both wife and lover, or hoping for the chance to juggle the two – funny how it’s rarely a woman trying to keep all the plates spinning. But this is not the only kind of wishful thinking, there is also the child who regrets the departure of her mother’s glamorous lover and his appealing son, or the very funny rivalry between two brothers who would dearly love to do without the other as ego booster and audience to and judge of their success. My favourite was the first in the collection, a broken, isolated young man of mixed Cheyenne Indian background, fizzing with loneliness drives to the nearest town and just follows people into a building, as if he were a stray dog. He finds himself in an adult education class taught by a young and attractive lawyer. Mesmerised by her, he returns each week, and attempts a restrained courtship of this unapproachable creature who lives six hundred miles away, a telling indication of how much separates them, even though her mother works in a school cafeteria and her sister works in a hospital laundry and “selling shoes is the nicest job a girl from my family is supposed to get.” And that restraint is a key to Meloy’s narrative style; there are no verbal fireworks, but a calm and unexcited expression of emotion, a style that is more rather than less effective at conveying that surge of empathy.

Book review: The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard

The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard has a most wonderful knack of precise, deft characterisation: the narrator describes her sister-in-law as “an emphatic little woman. When I first knew her she could look delicious even so, an infuriated kitten.”, which succeeds in giving us a picture of the sister-in-law and an idea of Jenny, the narrator, too. And although Jenny is the voice we hear, we are nevertheless made privy to how others see her: the time she spent in Naples she was a young woman of twenty something, and the men tend to picture her as an ingenue, an innocent abroad, whereas the dry, scathing analysis of verbal games that she gives us certainly gives the lie to her naivete.

There’s a marvellous sense of place in this novel too, Naples plays as much a role as any of the people, is always present: “In our office, in those days, I was always aware of the city, like someone compelled at a dinner table to be attentive to a boring neighbour while listening all the time for the voice of a loved one at the other end of the room.”

The action of this novel is predominantly inner rather than outer, it sucks you in not through plot but through the supple expressive language.  Just what I love. And it’s short, which goes some way to explain how I finished it even before it made it onto the ‘What I’m reading’ sidebar. I picked it up after doing my chores yesterday and didn’t put it down again, with a sigh, until it was over. Ah well, back to work next week,  so I’ll enjoy being able to do that while it lasts!