A Rosebud for Posterity

 

 Although a man of few words, you loved language. Even after all these years, when I see you in my mind’s eye you are always with a book or the newspaper in one hand with a pencil poised in the other. You would be so still when reading that if I didn’t see your foot shake occasionally, I would think you were the Buddha himself meditating. Sometimes I would pick up a book that you read and simply go through all your highlights and notes because I was lazy, and it also felt like prying into your thoughts. 

When I was thirteen you invited me into the magical world of The Hindu crosswords, a daily ritual for you. You showed me how to spot anagrams, when to look for hidden words and when to read a word backwards. Soon I was learning all the masonic codes - AB for the able-bodied men at sea, BA for the bachelor. You will have the first shot before you leave for work at 7:15 a.m. after which I had the paper until I had to leave for school at 8:30 a.m. We both would spend the day spinning some of these clues in our minds, you working with the paper at your office, me coming home for lunch to get a second chance to look at the clues again. I will be on tenterhooks awaiting your return from work especially on those days when I would have almost finished the puzzle. My greatest pride was when you agreed with my answer and would allow me to write with a pen on top of the pencil - firming up the answer - set in stone now. 

Work took me to other cities and countries far from home. There was always one constant in my rapidly changing life. You will be at the train station or the airport when I come home for the holidays. I could spot you anywhere, waiting patiently even if the train was delayed by a couple of hours as they often were back then. I knew you would always be there, and the crossword would be there with you. During the pre-internet days we wrote letters as I traveled around the world and saw those sights that you introduced me to, through your books. Our crossword solving became a long-distance sport. Me, on the other side of the world working on the online Hindu a day later than you did and writing out solutions on email.

I was totally unprepared when cancer came calling on you. But you took it in your stride. I would come every few months and stay with you during your chemo. We would still do our crosswords together. Just when they declared you were cancer-free and things were looking up you suffered a relapse. We knew you were heading to a point of no-return. You bore the pain gracefully and asked to be put in a hospice. As the days went by there was only one-way communication between us as you could no longer talk, and you needed a pen and a diary next to you to communicate with the rest of us. You made me promise to not make these frequent long-distance trips every time you took a turn for the worst. Instead, you asked me to make peace, say goodbye and just await the final call - and you specified that it had to be from my brother and he had to confirm that you were indeed gone - and then come to India.

When the inevitable call finally came and I got home, your absence was stark when I noticed the pile of The Hindu with unsolved crosswords. I came home to your writings from the last month of your life - simple instructions to us on what to do with the money, moments of lightness when you saw or heard something funny, asking the nurse at the hospice for the cricket score and your handwritten final letter to me. You were always known for your penmanship, but the last few pages of your diary do not resemble your writing one bit. They reveal the pain you were in and the energy you needed to muster to trace even a single letter. 

And a single letter was your final cryptic clue for me -  a series of repeated scratches that appear shaped like the alphabet “P” - the first letter of my name. I wasn’t at your bedside to solve it. Remember you made me promise that I would come only after you were gone. Were you calling for me? Apparently not, as that was the first thing that crossed everyone’s mind and you shook your head vigorously to indicate it was not. People, Pain, Positive, Paati … they all called out every word that started with P in both tongues that came to their minds. I heard you gave a sigh and gave up your breath reconciling to the fact that your last clue will never be solved. 

 

“Can any word explain a man’s life?” Citizen Kane, a movie we watched together many, many years ago, asked us. I never dreamt that you would leave behind a rosebud for me, a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle as the movie called it. It’s been twenty years and I have not picked up The Hindu since. The P still haunts me sometimes. During the pandemic my daughter walked in on me staring at The Guardian Quiptic.  “I never knew you did crosswords”, she exclaimed. “Your mom used to be so good at it” said my husband proudly. “Can you show me how?” I paused. Could “P” be posterity after all? “A naughty child is an imp,” I began with a smile.

Why Ulysses?

Why read Ulysses? 

Most people do it to signal to others that they are smart. However, Joyce didn't intend his book to be read only by elite academic types. He was very open to ideas and engaged with anyone and everyone from the window cleaner to the waiter at his favorite Parisian haunts. He did want to keep the professors busy but he truly believed that this book would speak to everyone. 

The second type of people to read the book are those motivated by the transgressive nature of the work - against religion, against "decency" and "morality." Anne Enright talks about why her mother didn't want her to read it at the age of 14 - it was full of "scatology" from picking noses to making water to the unholy noises our bodies make. Not to mention the sex (mostly implied). Molly's soliloquy at the end can be read as the work of a protofeminist on women's sexual liberation or as the work of a misogynist. But these are debates held in universities where Joycean professors have mystified the work to the extent that no average person wants to read it out of the fear they will never be able to understand it.

In the last post I said it was totally worth reading Ulysses. In this one I plan to elaborate why. But before I get into that here is a quick primer

Background:

Recount the main events of The Odyssey - which at its crux is about the warrior Odysseus reuniting with his son Telemachus and his faithful wife Penelope after 20 years. He fought in Troy for 10 years and when Troy fell he starts on his return to Ithaca which takes him another 10 years. It takes that long because he is held captive by Calypso, has to deal with one-eyed Cyclops, Lestrygonians, Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, gets blown off course by Aeolus and has numerous other (mis) adventures.

Joyce took the Odyssey and made a few tweaks. Replace:

• 10 years with 1 day - June 16th 1904 - the day Joyce walked out with his future wife Nora who to put it nicely brought love into his life - the day that is celebrated all over the world as Bloomsday
  
• Greece with 1904 Dublin
• Odysseus with Leopold Bloom, a 38 year old middle-aged Jewish ad agent who is very ordinary
  
• Telemachus with Stephen Dedalus a 23 year old struggling writer who is looking for a father figure in his life (think of him as a younger Joyce)
  
• Penelope with Molly Bloom the 34 year old singer and wife of Leopold Bloom who is going to commit adultery at 4pm on June 16th

Now take the traditional novel form and dismantle it completely. Throw in a bunch of references to Shakespeare, Dante, Mozart and Verdi, Catholicism, Irish Nationalism, Colonialism etc. Use stream of consciousness to narrate the inner thoughts of the lead characters, eliminate punctuation, get rid of chapter titles, write each chapter in a new form, throw in parodies and don't hesitate to include references to scat and sex liberally - what do you have - the most modern and timeless epic written for modern times. A book that broke every barrier and liberated all writers. A book that inspired everyone from Hemingway to Scott Fitzgerald all the way to every modern Irish writer.  A book that remains so gosh darn difficult to read while at the same time has some of the most beautiful sentences in the English language and is capable of making you laugh, feel disgusted, angry but also warms your heart and teaches you a number of life lessons along the way. 

When I finished the book and tried to think of what it meant to me I realized that it moved me because it celebrates the everyday life of the average human being who is not a hero in any sense of the word and whose world is filled with ordinary events. As I near my 50 I realize I have lived an ordinary life and have achieved nothing extraordinary but have mostly tried to do my best with the cards I have which is just about what almost everyone else (except for the heroes amongst us) is trying to do too. So the book is for the bourgeois, the average people and how we deal with life. Along the way there are invaluable lessons - lessons on grief - what it means to lose a parent, a child - the effect of loss of a child on relationship, friendships, infidelity, what it means to be an outsider, a citizen, what does civic engagement look like, how do you talk to people who are unlike you, how to repair relationships, how can you be non-violent in a violent world and what it means to make and enjoy art.

Bloom has numerous problems of his own - he is an outsider whose loyalty to Ireland is constantly questioned, people are mocking him behind his back as he is a cuckold, he is not the most educated man one could meet and had never been to university. He is dealing with his father's suicide, the death of his son and the effect that had on his marital relationship. His daughter has recently moved out of his house to make her own way in the world. He has to satisfy unhappy bosses and deal with people he has loaned money to. He is weird and has a number of weird fetishes and also harbors illusions about his own talent. But despite all this he is engaged with the world - he hasn't rejected it. He still has time to check in on a friend struggling to give birth after a hard 3-day labor, worry about the financial well-being of a family that lost its main breadwinner and contribute to a fund to support that family, come up with half-baked ways to improve Dublin's transportation system, its hospitals and even its brothels. He talks to people who hate his guts because that is what we do to stay engaged in our communities. And he picks up young Stephen and shows him a way to engage with his life not with great philosophy but by just being there and offering a cup of cocoa. Stephen is angry at everyone - his so called friends, the headmaster at the school he teaches, at Ireland for not recognizing an artist like him, at the two masters who rule Ireland - England and Rome. But anger and rejection are not enough and that perhaps is the biggest lesson to take from Ulysses. 

When we think of climate change, extreme polarization, racism, sexism or our personal/ professional disappointments it is very easy to become paralyzed. Joyce's earlier work Dubliners captured this paralysis beautifully. But as Joyce matured and wrote Ulysses under terrible physical pain, mental stress and financial and legal troubles he is calling on us to affirm life - the life around us today, right now, with all its imperfections. Is it any surprise that the book ends with a resounding Yes!

Sailed Into Ithaca - After 20 years!

 Today marks a day of a personal achievement for me. I finally finished James Joyce's Ulysses! My third attempt in 20 years. Just like Odysseus I set out on this path about 20 years back just because everyone who was anyone said this was a must-read. In my first attempt I didn't get past Proteus. When Stephen waxed on about "Ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality"I decided that those who claim to have read the book belonged in a "paradise of pretenders" and I wasn't going to be one of them. The unfortunate aspect of giving up this early was that I didn't even encounter Bloom - the Ulysses of the book. Second time around I picked it up because I read Joseph Campbell's Mythic Worlds, Modern Words and he showed me how much there was to mine in Joyce's work. So I picked it up again and this time was going to read along with Frank Delaney and his "re:Joyce" podcast. Unfortunately he passed away in the middle of it and I gave up but I went further along than I ever imagined with Delaney as my guide.

I thought I would pick it up again in 2022, the 100th anniversary of the publication of the book but didn't get around to it.  I have always wanted to visit Ireland but had decided long back that I would do it only after I read Ulysses. I love Irish writing and have read many from the who's who of Irish literature - Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, J.G. Farrell, John Banville, Colm Toibin, Anne Enright, Edna O'Brien, Roddy Doyle, Flann O'Brien, Seamus Heaney, Joseph O'Connor all the way to Sally Rooney. But the crown jewel was still missing. Although I have read Joyce's Dubliners there was a Ulysses shaped hole in my bookshelf. Suddenly I realized I was a year away from turning 50 and it made me think - if not now then when?

So I decided to give it a go hoping that third time will be the charm. I remembered Joseph Campbell saying that The Odyssey was a feminine book, while The Iliad was a masculine one. The reason it took 10 years for Odysseus to get back to Penelope in Ithaca was that he had to purify himself of all the bloodshed and violence and get ready to meet the eternal feminine. The 10 years was prep work for him. Well, I believe the last 10 years was prep for me to read Ulysses too without realizing it. Here are 5 ways in which the world prepared me for Ulysses:

1. I am now middle-aged and therefore closer to Bloom's than to Stephen's age and have had more experience with life in general
   
2.  Maybe because of #1, I have spent a lot of free time reading Shakespeare and listening to opera by Mozart and Verdi and these helped me catch quite a few references in the book.
3. Coincidentally my daughter had to read Emily Wilson's The Odyssey for her 9th grade English and it was an amazing refresher for me. 
4. I have been meditating for a year or so and it gave me an insight into how random thoughts arise in our brain. Joyce's stream of consciousness technique is similar to watching my thoughts during meditation and once I understood that, the reading became so much easier.
   
5. I told myself that I don't have to get all the references and insights in this reading and it was OK to not understand/ even skip the occasional, obscure passage in the book (the book could have used a great editor)
   

 Of course even Odysseus couldn't have done it without his guide Athena and I needed other guides to help me along. Here are the resources that helped me in my journey.

1. Kevin Birmingham's The Most Dangerous Book - although this has nothing to do with the plot of Ulysses this is a dramatic tale of how the book got published in the US and the Court battles the book faced because of its "obscenity." This is a terrific book to read to understand a bit about Joyce and all the brave women who helped publish this book by taking on the US Post Office and Censorship regimes. This is a gripping page-turner of a book and will make you want to read Ulysses.
2. Patrick Hastings' The Guide to Ulysses is a terrific resource for first-time readers as it gives you a chapter by chapter summary and key highlights to look out for. Hastings has been teaching Ulysses to high school Seniors so he knows a thing or two about how to help someone read this tough book.
3. Harry Blamires' The New Bloomsday Book is the one must-have guide to get through the text
4. Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated is for those who want to get every single reference in the book. It is the most exhaustive guide out there and pairs well with the Modern Library version of "Ulysses"
5. Quick refreshers on Joyce's Dubliners, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Homer's Odyssey are very helpful too
   

One does not need any of these guides to get through the book, but I personally felt the top 3 made my reading more pleasurable. I know I am going to be re-reading this book a few more times at least and some day I hope to be in Dublin for Bloomsday to celebrate the heroic aspects of the mundane, everyday, ordinary life.

I guess some of you might wonder - was it worth it?

yes i said yes (sorry I couldn't resist)

March 21st, 2023

Reading Women

It just occurred to me that March is Women's History Month and coincidentally I have been reading a lot of women writers. In fact this year it looks like my reading pile was filled mostly by women. Of course I am still working through Ulysses (have the final two chapters to go) and it has been very rewarding, but will come to that later when I am actually done. For now I wanted to share my thoughts on 4 books by 4 women writers.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton: After The Luminaries which made Catton the youngest Booker winner, the expectations for Birnam Wood were very high. Luminaries is one of my all-time favorite books in the last 15 years, so I have been waiting for Birnam Wood from the time the book was first announced many, many years back. I read this one in two days. It is an action and ideas packed novel and is a commentary on contemporary conflicts. At the heart of the novel is a cash-strapped guerilla gardening group called Birnam Wood whose path crosses with a billionaire setting up a survival bunker in New Zealand. The eco-idealists are led by Mira who is a modern Austen's heroine Emma-like character and the tech billionaire Lemoine is a Mission Impossible-villain + Peter Thiel type. Can eco-idealists and techno-capitalists forge a happy union for the betterment of the planet? Well, the title of the book is from Shakespeare's Macbeth and you know how that ends! But it is how the whole thing unravels that makes it a gripping thriller. Catton shows how even the most well-intentioned ideals can be ruined by petty fights, poor communication, and power struggles. The key message seems to be 1) We are all Macbeths 2) We are all complicit 3) We need to communicate better instead of just virtue signalling and blaming each other if we want to bring about changes to how the techno-capitalists treat the planet. 

My thoughts: I loved the writing and the plot. The dark comedy had the right tone to it. However, I felt disappointed in the end. We are all in collective despair and understand that we are complicit and the novel captures that beautifully while managing to be a great page-turner, but there are no deeper insights here. It seems to suggest that all the mix-ups could have been avoided if the misguided idealists just communicated better - seems too simplistic to me. The Luminaries is a novel that has many layers which lends itself to re-re-reading. Birnam Wood while a gripping thriller and a page-turner lacks those layers that I have come to expect from Catton.

Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf: Andrea Wulf's previous work The Invention of Nature brought Alexander Humboldt to life and it was an amazing read that totally deserved the Royal Society's Prize for Science writing.  During the pandemic I read a biography of Wordsworth by Jonathan Bate and I learned how instrumental the German intellectuals from Jena were to the English Romantics. So when I heard that Wulf's book was going to be about the "Jena Set" I was very eager to read it. The Jena Set comprises of  Schiller, Schlegels (3 of them including Caroline), Schelling, Fichte and Novalis with a cameo appearance by the Humboldt brothers and Hegel at the very end. Goethe was the older, wiser mentor who connected all these young philosophers and worked hard to preserve unity among them. Jena is a small University town in the middle of Germany which saw an explosion of new philosophical ideas between 1794 to 1806 that led to the invention of the self. The rebels were mainly the women - especially Caroline Schlegel (later married to Schelling) who had a fiery intellect and can be credited with making Shakespeare cool again! They came up with a new way of communal thinking called "symphilosophising" and brought to the forefront the "I" - not in a selfish way but in a way of communing with nature. As Wulf says "At the heart of the Magnificent Rebels is the tension between the breath-taking possibilites of free will and the pitfalls of selfishness." Germany (not the country but referring to the region as a whole) was very fragmented in those days where there were many regional rulers and therefore rules which meant that a number of different ideas could develop without the fear of an outright ban across all regions. Germany also had more universities per capita unlike in England which had two main ones. All this led to Jena becoming a birthplace for many interesting ideas that are still relevant. 

My take: This book was a good read just not as great as her book on Humboldt. After a point it became a book about who slept with whom and who had an open marriage and who had kids out of wedlock - I guess it contributed to the chief characters becoming rebels, but I wanted to learn more about the philosophy. Goethe is my favorite character and I would love for Wulf to do a book just about him. 

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich: Louise Erdrich's previous works especially The Plague of Doves, The Roundhouse, The Painted Drum are all some of my favorite novels. The most recent one I read was The Nightwatchman which was also wonderful. The Sentence unfortunately did not work for me. The main character Tookie works in a bookstore not unlike Erdrich herself and so there are a lot of references to other books which I loved! The novel is highly contemporary and incorporates the pandemic, George Floyd, and the 2020 elections. Maybe because these things are so immediate and am still processing these incidents it probably felt a bit odd to read about it in an Erdrich novel. The writing was also not very lyrical to me. I appreciated the appendix of the book which lists all of "Tookie's" favorite books. I will use that list to discover more writers for sure.

A Tip for the Hangman by Alison Epstein: This is not a book I would have read on my own, but I participate in the Folger Shakespeare Library's online book club and this was their selection for last month. This was a great read for anyone interested in Tudor times and the life of Kit Marlowe. Was Marlowe a spy for Walsingham? Was he killed in a barroom brawl or was he assassinated by his political enemies? Epstein uses this as her background to give us a colorful portrait of Marlowe's life with Shakespeare playing a small cameo. Overall a good book but not as good as the choices for previous book clubs (Booth by Karen Joy Fowler or Shadowplay by Joseph O'Connor) or the one I am reading now for next month's book club - Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. 

So that's 4 of my reads for these past two months from 4 very talented writers who happen to be women. 3 of them were known to me and these are writers whose books I will pick up irrespective of their reviews. The fourth writer is very talented and I will keep an eye out for her other books. Now it's time for me to get back to Ulysses as he is returning to Ithaca finally.

Portable Magic - The Joys of Bookhood

Emma Smith's Portable Magic has been on my reading list for months and I finally got hold of it this past week. I have listened to her podcast on Shakespeare many times and so I was eagerly awaiting this book and it didn't disappoint. Just like her lectures she raises thought-provoking questions about books for the reader to ponder over. The subtitle for this wonderful book says "A History of Books and their Readers" and that in a nutshell is what the book is about. It borrows the title from Stephen King's famous statement "Books are a uniquely portable magic" and as Emma Smith elaborates it is not just the content but the form that makes books unique - a form that has remained practically unchanged for millennia. In the introduction she says that her goal is to help her readers appreciate "book giss, the bookhood of (y)our own life and library" and I can certainly say it did for me! The book is a collection of essays and they are full of interesting facts and anecdotes.

Smith opens her essays with Gutenberg as it seems like a very good place to start but she is quick to point out that, "seen from a global perspective the question about Gutenberg seems less, "How did you do it?" and more "What took you so long?"." Chinese and Korean print pioneers preceded Gutenberg by many centuries but the Gutenberg myth is firmly enshrined in our minds and is said to mark a turning point for book culture at least in the western world. It was interesting to note it wasn't the Bibles but his anti-Turkish material following the wars with the Ottomans that opened the floodgates and drove the demand for print technology across Europe.

Another war a few centuries later provided a boost for popular books. During the Second World War American infantrymen were given books to take along with them into the battlefield to read in the trenches. This created a new format called the American Services Edition which served as a forerunner for the modern paperback - cheap editions of non didactic, non controversial books. Apparently without this edition, The Great Gatsby would have never become the classic it is today. Following the end of the war, books became a tool of Cold War, Anti-Communist propaganda - to spread western values of freedom and democracy in Germany and France. 

ASE The Great Gatsby

Books have always been part of a “strategic self-presentation” and while this was true for countries it is also true for us as individuals. Smith talks about the pandemic trend of using bookcases as zoom backgrounds to signal erudition. She has an interesting piece about “shelfies” and uses three women as examples. Unfortunately she didn’t have any images in her book but here are the three images and they say a lot about the person and how they wanted to be perceived by the world. In the painting of Lady Anne Clifford we see her with books at different stages of her life and every book is painted in detail and is not simply a filler. 

The Great Picture by Lady Anne Clifford

In Boucher’s painting of Madame Pompadour we see how the mistress of Louis XV is portraying herself as an intelligent woman, a true reader with an impressive collection of books and then we have the photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading perhaps the most difficult modern book ever. What is she trying to communicate? Is she like those celebrities who have had their zoom backgrounds curated by professionals or is she truly reading Molly’s soliloquy? Maybe what you infer says something about you rather than her.

Boucher's Madame Pompadour

Monroe reading Ulysses

Another fascinating essay was about books as diasporic objects and what happens when objects are removed from their place of origin and should they be repatriated. From Bacon’s Essaies that drowned along with the Titanic to the Kennicott Bible that traveled along with expelled Jews from Spain to Bibles carried by modern migrants documented by Tom Kiefer’s magnificent photographs, books seem to be quintessential diasporic objects with portability being a primary factor for that. One of the key innovations towards portability was the development of the codex which was a huge improvement over scrolls and codex made the Bible truly portable. She describes the conflict surrounding the Codex Sinaiticus (331 CE) which was taken from its monastery by a German scholar and ended up with Stalin who sold it to the British Library to raise funds for his 5 year plan. Does the Codex need to be repatriated? A successful case of repatriation happened when Denmark returned the Poetic Edda Saga to Iceland. 

Tom Kiefer El Sueno Americano

There are a number of other interesting essays that focus on how books are anthropomorphized and even a section on anthropodermic binding which is the practice of using human skin for binding (??!!). She also discusses book burnings and how they are associated with the Nazis and the May 1933 burnings. However, book burnings did not start or end with the Nazis. People have always been burning books in their private homes or in public as in the case of Cardinal Wolsey burning Luther’s books during the reign of Henry VIII. Following WWII the US issued a ban on a number of books including Mein Kampf and found itself in a tricky position. On the one hand the Nazis were portrayed as anti-freedom, book-burning fascists and on the other the Allied countries were banning books that didn't align with their values. We see this in modern America where a vocal minority is calling for banning books that don't align with their cultural values. What shocked me was also the publishing industry’s habit of pulping returned books. Unsold books all meet the same fate and apparently the British M6 highway’s noise absorbent layer is made from 2.5 Million copies of Mills and Boons novels!

The section on Empire Writes Back deals with colonialism and its impact on non-English cultures. Specifically she discusses Puritan New England and the zeal of John Eliot who arrived in the 1650s to spread the gospel among the Alongonquin tribes. Working with a native who was a first-language convert he created the first Wopanaak Bible. These Bibles were used to establish praying towns in New England which led to the elimination of Algonquin cultures. One such Bible owned by a native man named Ponampam shows how he straddled his indigenous culture with that of the settlers. These Bibles are now used by the Wampanoag linguists to aid their language reclamation project.

Finally Emma Smith asks us to consider what a book is and why we have an attachment to this object. As I type up this blogpost I look around my own room and see books everywhere. Some of them I have read multiple times and some have not been opened at all and haunt me in my nightmares! I love the kindle and find it convenient when on travel and to read in bed but I still long for the physical book especially if it is beautifully illustrated or if the subject matter is too complicated. I lost nearly all of my late father’s books during a move but managed to salvage his copy of A History of Modern Times which he received as an award during his B.A. - one of the very few objects of his that I own, but have never read.

 I recently calculated that at my current rate of reading 30-40 books per year I probably can only read about 1000 books in the next 30 years which is not much given the number of books that get published every year. It was fitting that I read Emma Smith’s ode to books while making my way through Joyce’s Ulysses, a book that is challenging and rewarding at the same time and reminding me of the pleasures of bookhood!