__
The paper is over at last. It isn't the best paper I've written or the most inspired, but it will have to do. There is no time, you see. Prufrock still has one arm over my shoulder and he's whispering,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
I guess at the conference, too, people will come and go, talking of Michelangelo. And I will sit by the seaside waiting to hear the mermaids break into song.
This act of writing an academic paper is so terrifically boring. I tried reading about ten theoretical pieces of writing, and I just couldn't take it. It seems so pointless, this endless reading and writing and analyzing when people who are going to listen to you speak are dully practising their lines inside their heads. Deciding when it is that they will give out that short, intellectual cough. When it is that they will look up, raise their eyebrows, shrug their shoulders, and make a sarcastic comment about the foolishness of persons outside the academia. Who go about life thinking a piece of bread is joy (perhaps it is, you sad mutt). And after every paper is presented, someone with distinguished hair will ask a godawful long question and the paper presenter will give a long reply that answers not the question asked but sounds polished enough to make both parties feel good. My, my, do I have a bug in my brain!
Anyway, so I've decided I'm never going to write a paper again because I've grown out of them like I've grown out of amusement parks. I don't want to make a thought-sandwich: you put yours between layers of other people's thoughts and then you put mayonnaise to make it all look good and sell it for the price of your soul (yes, I do think writing a paper comes close to playing Faustus). This post is going to get zero comments or something because I can barely understand what I'm writing. What I want to do is to actually tell you all about my favourite works of literature in a non-paper way. My mum was on her 'Where is your Life going?' mode and she wanted to know why I didn't want to become a professor. That way, I'd have lots of time to manage a career and a non-existent husband plus kids. So then, I started off on how the academia depresses me, how writing papers is a transfer of bullshit, that I don't want to set out to prove what I already know. That am done with justifications. That I did not want to commit the heinous crime of telling trusting students the snivelling significance of mermaids that don't sing to Prufrock. That I may burst into tears in a classroom if I had to stand up and confess that I am no Prince Hamlet myself.
When we were in college, this poet called Ranjit Hoskote came for a writer-in-residence program. Physically, he was about as attractive as a prawn- small and pink. (Dear Ranjit- sure, we can be on first name terms in my personal universe at least- if you are in the habit of Googling for yourself as I am and find this, do not let your heart smite you, read on.) But the minute he opened his mouth, all of us promptly fell in love with him. He had a voice that knew pain, understood vowels, and dug into your skin like the rain. Also, one of the first things he said was, "I'm rather reticent." And we all knew he wasn't a prospective GRE exam writer. Somebody who uses words like 'reticent' in normal conversations is, you ought to agree, tres charmant. We took him out to dinner despite our HoD forbidding us from doing anything of that sort. La di la. How sweet is the forbidden fruit to every rebellious Eve. We went to Red E Food Court in Chetpet (which has now been closed so that that dinner with Ranjit has acquired the beauty of myth) and we sat like dumb bells just giggling foolishly at his pink face. Really, tres charmant. Morning wells like blood in the stag's hollow eye, he said in his mournful voice and we all sat like frogs with open mouths waiting for the flies that never came.
So what am trying to say in this very drunken fashion is- I'm such a sucker for pretty words. Really. Take this bloke Milton. I thought I was engineered to hate him since he was a misogynist and all. Besides, I did not like his name. But we had him on our syllabus for the Epic course and I had to read Paradise Lost. Then, of course, wham, there I was fervently wishing Milton were alive so I could see what his teeth looked like. All those bits about Lucifer's beauty gave me goosebumps, they did. Another bloke I was unexcited about earlier but became all hey-you're-hot later is Shakespeare. I didn't think much of him because well, the only Shakespeare I had read before college was the terrible abridged ones. Then, I read Othello and wept. Othello acts like a downright bitch and kills Desdemona (which does piss me off), but yet, he does it so beautifully that he made me weep. Ever since, I've defined my happiest moments in Othello terms- if it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy. I discovered that there is such a thing as being 'too happy' and that when that moment disappears, your fall downwards is harder, steeper, and that it will ask of you to bleed your heart. It is better not to have Othello moments, though if you haven't had one, you haven't lived recklessly. Or maybe you haven't lived at all.
Then of course, there's Salinger. I am friends only with people who read and like Salinger. Really. Not that he's on my checklist. I don't go around asking everyone I meet, "Do you like me? Do you like Salinger? Can we be friends?" But inevitably, they all do. He has such a roaring sense of humour, something that makes me laugh with a rip in my heart. It's so hard to write about nothing, just an ordinary day, an ordinary life, and to do it thus in a way that several decades later, a crazy girl in India reads it and thinks these are her thoughts, published so prettily, by a man she never met. Holden Caulfield has been psychoanalyzed enough by literary critics- and I'm so glad the book wasn't on our syllabus. I would have hated to point out theme, setting, language in that book. This bit that Holden says about a woman who is weeping at a sad scene in a movie but refusing to take the little kid next to her to the bathroom- it will stay with me forever or something. This definition of kindness. Also, Seymour. The chap who blows his brains off after telling a kid a story about bananafish- I want to sit with him someday and not talk at all.
Another fictional person I'd like to meet is Septimus Smith who also killed himself. He's from Mrs.Dalloway and he thinks the birds sing to him in Greek. Towards the end of the book, he flings himself from a window and there....that's the end...the war, the coming back, the shell shock, the endless measuring of coffee spoons. Like Icarus, Septimus Smith falls to his death. Melted by the sun, undone by the world. Even CR who taught us Literature like it was Math, couldn't strip away the beauty of the Septimus fall.
Oh there are way too many of them for me to write it all down. Also, I'm yammering on because I know I shall never be happy about writing a paper again. The Othello moment for that has come and gone long back. Now, I can only pull out my sword and stand like a late entry for a costume party.
Good night.
The paper is over at last. It isn't the best paper I've written or the most inspired, but it will have to do. There is no time, you see. Prufrock still has one arm over my shoulder and he's whispering,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
I guess at the conference, too, people will come and go, talking of Michelangelo. And I will sit by the seaside waiting to hear the mermaids break into song.
This act of writing an academic paper is so terrifically boring. I tried reading about ten theoretical pieces of writing, and I just couldn't take it. It seems so pointless, this endless reading and writing and analyzing when people who are going to listen to you speak are dully practising their lines inside their heads. Deciding when it is that they will give out that short, intellectual cough. When it is that they will look up, raise their eyebrows, shrug their shoulders, and make a sarcastic comment about the foolishness of persons outside the academia. Who go about life thinking a piece of bread is joy (perhaps it is, you sad mutt). And after every paper is presented, someone with distinguished hair will ask a godawful long question and the paper presenter will give a long reply that answers not the question asked but sounds polished enough to make both parties feel good. My, my, do I have a bug in my brain!
Anyway, so I've decided I'm never going to write a paper again because I've grown out of them like I've grown out of amusement parks. I don't want to make a thought-sandwich: you put yours between layers of other people's thoughts and then you put mayonnaise to make it all look good and sell it for the price of your soul (yes, I do think writing a paper comes close to playing Faustus). This post is going to get zero comments or something because I can barely understand what I'm writing. What I want to do is to actually tell you all about my favourite works of literature in a non-paper way. My mum was on her 'Where is your Life going?' mode and she wanted to know why I didn't want to become a professor. That way, I'd have lots of time to manage a career and a non-existent husband plus kids. So then, I started off on how the academia depresses me, how writing papers is a transfer of bullshit, that I don't want to set out to prove what I already know. That am done with justifications. That I did not want to commit the heinous crime of telling trusting students the snivelling significance of mermaids that don't sing to Prufrock. That I may burst into tears in a classroom if I had to stand up and confess that I am no Prince Hamlet myself.
When we were in college, this poet called Ranjit Hoskote came for a writer-in-residence program. Physically, he was about as attractive as a prawn- small and pink. (Dear Ranjit- sure, we can be on first name terms in my personal universe at least- if you are in the habit of Googling for yourself as I am and find this, do not let your heart smite you, read on.) But the minute he opened his mouth, all of us promptly fell in love with him. He had a voice that knew pain, understood vowels, and dug into your skin like the rain. Also, one of the first things he said was, "I'm rather reticent." And we all knew he wasn't a prospective GRE exam writer. Somebody who uses words like 'reticent' in normal conversations is, you ought to agree, tres charmant. We took him out to dinner despite our HoD forbidding us from doing anything of that sort. La di la. How sweet is the forbidden fruit to every rebellious Eve. We went to Red E Food Court in Chetpet (which has now been closed so that that dinner with Ranjit has acquired the beauty of myth) and we sat like dumb bells just giggling foolishly at his pink face. Really, tres charmant. Morning wells like blood in the stag's hollow eye, he said in his mournful voice and we all sat like frogs with open mouths waiting for the flies that never came.
So what am trying to say in this very drunken fashion is- I'm such a sucker for pretty words. Really. Take this bloke Milton. I thought I was engineered to hate him since he was a misogynist and all. Besides, I did not like his name. But we had him on our syllabus for the Epic course and I had to read Paradise Lost. Then, of course, wham, there I was fervently wishing Milton were alive so I could see what his teeth looked like. All those bits about Lucifer's beauty gave me goosebumps, they did. Another bloke I was unexcited about earlier but became all hey-you're-hot later is Shakespeare. I didn't think much of him because well, the only Shakespeare I had read before college was the terrible abridged ones. Then, I read Othello and wept. Othello acts like a downright bitch and kills Desdemona (which does piss me off), but yet, he does it so beautifully that he made me weep. Ever since, I've defined my happiest moments in Othello terms- if it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy. I discovered that there is such a thing as being 'too happy' and that when that moment disappears, your fall downwards is harder, steeper, and that it will ask of you to bleed your heart. It is better not to have Othello moments, though if you haven't had one, you haven't lived recklessly. Or maybe you haven't lived at all.
Then of course, there's Salinger. I am friends only with people who read and like Salinger. Really. Not that he's on my checklist. I don't go around asking everyone I meet, "Do you like me? Do you like Salinger? Can we be friends?" But inevitably, they all do. He has such a roaring sense of humour, something that makes me laugh with a rip in my heart. It's so hard to write about nothing, just an ordinary day, an ordinary life, and to do it thus in a way that several decades later, a crazy girl in India reads it and thinks these are her thoughts, published so prettily, by a man she never met. Holden Caulfield has been psychoanalyzed enough by literary critics- and I'm so glad the book wasn't on our syllabus. I would have hated to point out theme, setting, language in that book. This bit that Holden says about a woman who is weeping at a sad scene in a movie but refusing to take the little kid next to her to the bathroom- it will stay with me forever or something. This definition of kindness. Also, Seymour. The chap who blows his brains off after telling a kid a story about bananafish- I want to sit with him someday and not talk at all.
Another fictional person I'd like to meet is Septimus Smith who also killed himself. He's from Mrs.Dalloway and he thinks the birds sing to him in Greek. Towards the end of the book, he flings himself from a window and there....that's the end...the war, the coming back, the shell shock, the endless measuring of coffee spoons. Like Icarus, Septimus Smith falls to his death. Melted by the sun, undone by the world. Even CR who taught us Literature like it was Math, couldn't strip away the beauty of the Septimus fall.
Oh there are way too many of them for me to write it all down. Also, I'm yammering on because I know I shall never be happy about writing a paper again. The Othello moment for that has come and gone long back. Now, I can only pull out my sword and stand like a late entry for a costume party.
Good night.
19 comments:
See, no one listens to you at a dull conference like that, but put it in your blog! I'll listen.
Ranjit Hoskote used to write terribly long, but interesting articles regulary for The Hindu's Magazine supplement at one point. I'm glad it wasn't poetry he wrote there, because I don't understand poetry, and wouldn't have been able to appreciate him. I liked his articles, along with P. Sainath's and Shashi Tharoor's(some times).
The only work of Salinger I've read is 'Catcher in the Rye' and I thought it was a piece of bull shit right up there with 'Catch 22'. I think I can't appreciate American humour much. I love British humour though.
@Karthik Sivaramakrishnan- You don't like The Catcher in the Rye AND Catch 22?? You're officially off every potential friendship list :D Really.
Yeah, Hoskote writes art critiques. And yes, am glad he doesn't write poetry for The Hindu though for entirely different reasons.
And that is just as well ;) :p
@Karthik Sivaramakrishnan- Hrmmph
Actually, if you don't mind, could you explain what the 'Hmmmph' means? There is this girl I know who keeps using 'mch' in chat :-| Apparently, its an expression of annoyance. Is 'hmmmph' like that? I also have a question on whether 'ph' is to be read as 'f' or 'p' with emphasis like some northie would say it, but i'll avoid asking that.
@Karthik Sivaramakrishnan- :O You never sleepah?? Some rapid action force or something. You are like an eternal Gtalker character!
It's HRmmph. There's an 'r' there. It's the snort of a disbelieving horse.
Madam, it is 9:15 pm. Only. Yeah, very much like rapid action force. If you give crisis alert now, it'll take 8 hours to mobilise me. And then, I'll transport myself in city transport to the scene of the crisis. So if my roommate is the one in crisis, i'll sleep, get up, take a bus ride, come back and attend to it! :)
Gtalker eh? I don't use gtalk at all. I never know what to talk to people. But I can write. So gchat I sometimes use. Usually when people buzz me on it.
Oh, I missed the crucial 'r'! Snort of a disbelieving horse you say :-? Disbelief like when it sees a unicorn, or disbelief like when someone walks up to the horse and says, "You're an ass!" :)
you read each every one of my wonderful poems if i can kill myself? :P
I do wonder how it will be to learn English from you :P And someone just stole a poem...sad..
gb- where all your mind went off in the beginning. felt like some stream of consciousness novel. shit i can't believe you took hoskote to a food court! hahahaha so typically college student like. i think some nice quiet place would have been more appropriate. you know i didn't want him to analyse my poems, so when it was my day to get deconstructed, i ran back home. hahaha
but but but who first made you read salinger.ME.ME.ME.
that was for very,very cheap kicks.
miturn means mi turn.it was mi turn.
i am also weeping.and winging it.
@Karthik Sivaramakrishnan- You're bored of your PhD, aren't you? You're eating bread in a cold place and you don't know why anymore. You are an alienated human. So shad.
@Vishesh- What are you trying to say, child?
@Anika- You bleddy smirky, Red E wasn't noisy. It was called Food Court but it was restauranty only. Why weren't you there, btw?? I thought you'd come too!!
@N- We had TWO office meetings today and it was joy beyond comparison. What all you missed man, god only knows. Check your webmail kuguly.
Good :) Now stick to this impression. I like this more than the 'padips and all' impression.
@Karthik Sivaramakrishnan- What's your email id? Really.
karthik.sivaramakrishnan@gmail.com
Aunty what I mean to say is
That someone stole a poem I wrote and pasted it on their blog.I told my mommy and God(Google) and waiting to see what happens.
I also think it would suit you to be a teacher,as only they are capable of calling you a "child" when you make fun of them and irritate them :)
So the brownie mam,shall teach English at____?
@ gb - you're asking me now! after some 5 years. (shit, it's been that long!!) red e is red-e, will always be loud to me. anyhoo i didn't turn up for the meal because i would have been doing some superficially important thing. also i didn't like my stuff being disconstructed, i felt a bit weird.
now it's different. hehehe
Now you've become a cynical adult... But then I do agree with you regarding conference presentations.
Thought sandwich? - lovely concept - appealed to my graphic mind.
And GB - I most enjoyed that bit of writing written in a very drunken fashion.
I too recall some of my 'too happy' moments - some have happened while re-reading some blog posts that I cherish.
Child - you do have a way with words.
@Vishesh- I don't mind coming to your school and doing creative writing workshops, actually. It's part of my job :D Do you know some middle school teacher I can fix this up with??
@Anika- Like I-Suck meetings, I suppose ;)
@The Visitor- Thanks, adultji. I feel blessed. I shall soon post my world-weary conference experience.
_
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