Thursday, April 29, 2010
My Writing Sucks!
Had been reading one of older stories. I am embarrassed. The writing reads like shit. No plot. Characters weak. Total disaster. But I still think there is an underlying interesting theme somewhere. I will try not to pay much attention to all the negative feelings, and just concentrate on the revision. Maybe (maybe) after the 20th revision, it will look like okay. Choleable, as they say in K-town.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
It Hurts Me More Than It Hurts Them
Yesterday I posted my work for the UCLA Extension's Advanced Short Story Workshop.I didn't produce anything new, but did some major revisions of a story I had written exactly a year before. I did get some feedback on it then, but did not know how to process the feedback. Now, going back to it after almost a year, I felt that some parts just needed to be hacked out, some essential parts added, and I also played with the POV. One of the most important things one of my reviewers then told me was that, the teacher-figure in the story looks a stereotypically bad-guy, with almost no subtleties. I felt that a limited third-person POV can't achieve the kind of empathy and subtlety that she was suggesting, so I made some changes. I made the teacher's grand-daughter narrate the tale, a grand-daughter who also happens to be her student. DRR read it last night, and while he liked some parts of it, his major criticism was, it's not very clear why is the narrator feeling compelled to tell the story?
I have to agree. As of now, that's the weakest aspect of the story.
So, here are some of the things I have been thinking today:
1. Make the narrator hate the protagonist. Make the protagonist hate the narrator and make cryptic comments about her grandmother. Rather than making the anger dissolve through the pages, make the protagonist dwell on her anger.And not just anger in the general sense, but anger directed specifically towards her old teacher. That is, make the antagonisms more pronounced, and see what happens. That way, make the people in the story brush up against each others' nasty sides, but it will also probably make the narrative revealing their more humane and contradictory sides. Make the grandma die, make her death the occasion for the story to be told, the narrator feeling compelled to tell the story.
2. Write the story from an omniscient perspective. Make Jhinuk witness Shilpi in the truck carrying her grandma's dead-body, and let her react. That way the narrative can delve into both inside Jhinuk's head, as well as inside Shilpi's head, and if the need be, can also observe Shilpi telling Jhinuk certain things about her grandma, trying to redeem her. So it can also go inside the school-teacher's head too. But here too, the sense of crisis and antagonism and the lingering anger should be retained, just so the story moves forward much more easily and the characters have enough reasons to act the way they do.
Now, the thing is, to try out both of these, and see where they lead me. But it will have to wait for some time, I guess. I am too swamped right now, and I don't think I will be able to get to these changes until the summer holidays are here. On the other hand, it will be nice to get some feedback from the workshop too. See what they have to say!
I have to agree. As of now, that's the weakest aspect of the story.
So, here are some of the things I have been thinking today:
1. Make the narrator hate the protagonist. Make the protagonist hate the narrator and make cryptic comments about her grandmother. Rather than making the anger dissolve through the pages, make the protagonist dwell on her anger.And not just anger in the general sense, but anger directed specifically towards her old teacher. That is, make the antagonisms more pronounced, and see what happens. That way, make the people in the story brush up against each others' nasty sides, but it will also probably make the narrative revealing their more humane and contradictory sides. Make the grandma die, make her death the occasion for the story to be told, the narrator feeling compelled to tell the story.
2. Write the story from an omniscient perspective. Make Jhinuk witness Shilpi in the truck carrying her grandma's dead-body, and let her react. That way the narrative can delve into both inside Jhinuk's head, as well as inside Shilpi's head, and if the need be, can also observe Shilpi telling Jhinuk certain things about her grandma, trying to redeem her. So it can also go inside the school-teacher's head too. But here too, the sense of crisis and antagonism and the lingering anger should be retained, just so the story moves forward much more easily and the characters have enough reasons to act the way they do.
Now, the thing is, to try out both of these, and see where they lead me. But it will have to wait for some time, I guess. I am too swamped right now, and I don't think I will be able to get to these changes until the summer holidays are here. On the other hand, it will be nice to get some feedback from the workshop too. See what they have to say!
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
From Poetry Daily
To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage
for John Olivares Espinoza
You are nothing like my father.
And like my father
you are nothing.
Zambo. Castizo.
Without draft animals
the Mexica used the wheel
only as a toy.
Please keep off the lawn.
Green mirrors are asleep
beneath the grass.
In graduate school a landlord asked,
Here to pick strawberries?
“Y me vine de Hermosillo/
en busca de oro y riqueza.”
Are your hands
always so dirty?
Slip a finger in my mouth.
I’ll devour the grime
under the nail.
Pomegranate, grenade.
Sometimes in order to say a word
it’s necessary
to spit it out. A spic sells seashells
on the seashore. Assonance
is often considered a blemish
by corrido singers.
You walk out with a French horn in your arms
and you’re a butcher
in El Dorado holding
the golden entrails of cattle.
(Note)
Eduardo C. Corral
Witness
Volume XXIII / 2010
for John Olivares Espinoza
You are nothing like my father.
And like my father
you are nothing.
Zambo. Castizo.
Without draft animals
the Mexica used the wheel
only as a toy.
Please keep off the lawn.
Green mirrors are asleep
beneath the grass.
In graduate school a landlord asked,
Here to pick strawberries?
“Y me vine de Hermosillo/
en busca de oro y riqueza.”
Are your hands
always so dirty?
Slip a finger in my mouth.
I’ll devour the grime
under the nail.
Pomegranate, grenade.
Sometimes in order to say a word
it’s necessary
to spit it out. A spic sells seashells
on the seashore. Assonance
is often considered a blemish
by corrido singers.
You walk out with a French horn in your arms
and you’re a butcher
in El Dorado holding
the golden entrails of cattle.
(Note)
Eduardo C. Corral
Witness
Volume XXIII / 2010
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Chapbook
Spring Break! Last week, I had finished the second draft of my first chapter, had turned it in to my dissertation group for discussion and feedback. One of my co-advisors liked it, the group liked the arguments overall. Although, the general feedback is, I will have to do a lot more with the editing and language and footnoting. So, basically, I still need to go back and do a lot of the finalizing stuff. But at least, the argument worked, and I think, I do have a better sense of the direction of my project.
In other news, just finished revising a poem for which I had received some good feedback. My own sense is that, it's almost there. Maybe I will need another edit after a while. A tweaking here, and a tweaking there. But mostly it is done.I also have developed in the course of the last week or so, a better sense of my first collection of poems. Initially, I was more interested in coming up with a full-length book. Undoubtedly, the full-length book would have allowed me with more of a space to deal with both thematic and formal complexities. But, the way a lot of my poems are evolving, I don't think a full-length book will have much space for a lot of the shorter poems I have written in the last three years.So, a chapbook project, I think, will be much more suitable for bringing together the kind of work I have been doing for the last three years. If I have to look into this project with an impartial eye, I will have to say, these poems are not that impressive by themselves.It's not that I think they are totally bad or unreadable, but I wouldn't say, they are earth-shattering or anything. But they have played a very important role in my life, and my growth as a poet/writer, because they have pointed out the areas to me--the areas where I need to work, the kinds of research I need to do in order to keep on writing more meaningful and relevant poems, the formal areas where I need to develop my linguistic skills. In that sense, this chapbook project will play an important role in bringing to fruition a specific phase in my life.
So, for now, I need to write the concluding poem of the collection, bring them all together in a single file, and begin to revise. I am giving myself a year to do all that work. So, hopefully, by the summer of 2011, I will have the manuscript of a chapbook ready. Ready enough to be sent out to publishers! Wish me luck!
In other news, just finished revising a poem for which I had received some good feedback. My own sense is that, it's almost there. Maybe I will need another edit after a while. A tweaking here, and a tweaking there. But mostly it is done.I also have developed in the course of the last week or so, a better sense of my first collection of poems. Initially, I was more interested in coming up with a full-length book. Undoubtedly, the full-length book would have allowed me with more of a space to deal with both thematic and formal complexities. But, the way a lot of my poems are evolving, I don't think a full-length book will have much space for a lot of the shorter poems I have written in the last three years.So, a chapbook project, I think, will be much more suitable for bringing together the kind of work I have been doing for the last three years. If I have to look into this project with an impartial eye, I will have to say, these poems are not that impressive by themselves.It's not that I think they are totally bad or unreadable, but I wouldn't say, they are earth-shattering or anything. But they have played a very important role in my life, and my growth as a poet/writer, because they have pointed out the areas to me--the areas where I need to work, the kinds of research I need to do in order to keep on writing more meaningful and relevant poems, the formal areas where I need to develop my linguistic skills. In that sense, this chapbook project will play an important role in bringing to fruition a specific phase in my life.
So, for now, I need to write the concluding poem of the collection, bring them all together in a single file, and begin to revise. I am giving myself a year to do all that work. So, hopefully, by the summer of 2011, I will have the manuscript of a chapbook ready. Ready enough to be sent out to publishers! Wish me luck!
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Proma Tagore's Poems
Had been reading Proma Tagore's work from Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets. I wanted to read her work primarily because she is another South Asian academic-poet figure, and on top of that, writes about Bengali-ness in interesting ways. For example, one of her poems is called khichuri after noon. Now how can I just bypass a title like that? Similarly, she has a bi-lingual poem called "between tongues" which is literally a list of phrases in Bengali and their translations in English. It is an interesting idea, but there were a couple of places where I stumbled hard. For example, kalpanar daka, she has translated as through a calling of dreams. Now, kalpana is so not dream, it's imagination. So, I keep wondering is it a bengali-american's lack of enough knowledge of the language, or is it more like a stretching of the meaning of the word kalpana. Similarly, chotobelar gantha has been translated as "childhood weaves". I find that too literal, for "gantha" is indeed weaving, but it's also a word which connotes stories or narratives. And here, I would have liked a little bit of more exploration to play with that double-meaning in the English translation. But maybe then, she leaves them in the way they are for only the Bengali readers to get certain things? In any case, I don't think I will venture out to write a bi-lingual poem in that way anytime soon. I will stick to English and Bangla. Separately.
But overall, I do think, her poems do have some strong lines. For example,
"in remembering,
our rage will hold,
our words will refuse to be kept,
and i will not be consoled
tonight."
Or,
"resilience singing out
in all textures of brown:
earth, mud, clay, bark."
I like these lines because there is an effort to engage with colonial/imperial/neo-colonial state of being in here, it moves beyond the de-politicized way of dealing with gender in both American and Bengali mainstream women's poetry. I like the little reference to color, the different shades of brown all explored through concrete objects. It irrevocably brings up race, without being very explicit about it. That is, it does not pronounce the word "race" anywhere. I love the title of her poem "when places leave." There's a sense of mystery in there. And again, a sense of an awareness of the colonial/neo-colonial state. I mean,places vanish. Literally. In so many ways. And then, obviously in the minds of the people. And my home-state is, right now, in the middle of all that. Places are vanishing fast. So are people along with them.
But where I am also thinking a little bit, and feeling somewhat skeptic, is the way I am seeing post-colonial academic jargon very squarely placed in her poems. I want some of that there, though not in the form of those jargons themselves, but rather in forms of ideas, concrete stories, images, and words. In short, I want that theoretical knowledge from post-colonialism and gender studies to be translated into poetic forms and formal techniques of writing. The other thing is, these poems are little too "diasporic" for me. I am not "hybrid" in that sense. I speak and read and write in my native-tongue quite quite fluently. Thank you.
So, there is that obvious problem of not being able to relate to that immigrant anxiety in here.Instead, I would have liked a little bit more delving into concrete history through the images and the stories. Like, the little note she has about the use of the word "khichuri" in her family, especially in women's lingo, could well have been a poem in itself, and in my opinion, a much more interesting one than the one she has now.That footnote has a sense of history, social space, language in the way the poem does not have. Especially, I could have done without a coinage like "hybridized tongue."
My own writing has taken a back-seat now. I mean, I am writing. The second draft of the first chapter of my dissertation. So, I am not seeing much chance of spending much time with my poems and stories until Spring Break.
But overall, I do think, her poems do have some strong lines. For example,
"in remembering,
our rage will hold,
our words will refuse to be kept,
and i will not be consoled
tonight."
Or,
"resilience singing out
in all textures of brown:
earth, mud, clay, bark."
I like these lines because there is an effort to engage with colonial/imperial/neo-colonial state of being in here, it moves beyond the de-politicized way of dealing with gender in both American and Bengali mainstream women's poetry. I like the little reference to color, the different shades of brown all explored through concrete objects. It irrevocably brings up race, without being very explicit about it. That is, it does not pronounce the word "race" anywhere. I love the title of her poem "when places leave." There's a sense of mystery in there. And again, a sense of an awareness of the colonial/neo-colonial state. I mean,places vanish. Literally. In so many ways. And then, obviously in the minds of the people. And my home-state is, right now, in the middle of all that. Places are vanishing fast. So are people along with them.
But where I am also thinking a little bit, and feeling somewhat skeptic, is the way I am seeing post-colonial academic jargon very squarely placed in her poems. I want some of that there, though not in the form of those jargons themselves, but rather in forms of ideas, concrete stories, images, and words. In short, I want that theoretical knowledge from post-colonialism and gender studies to be translated into poetic forms and formal techniques of writing. The other thing is, these poems are little too "diasporic" for me. I am not "hybrid" in that sense. I speak and read and write in my native-tongue quite quite fluently. Thank you.
So, there is that obvious problem of not being able to relate to that immigrant anxiety in here.Instead, I would have liked a little bit more delving into concrete history through the images and the stories. Like, the little note she has about the use of the word "khichuri" in her family, especially in women's lingo, could well have been a poem in itself, and in my opinion, a much more interesting one than the one she has now.That footnote has a sense of history, social space, language in the way the poem does not have. Especially, I could have done without a coinage like "hybridized tongue."
My own writing has taken a back-seat now. I mean, I am writing. The second draft of the first chapter of my dissertation. So, I am not seeing much chance of spending much time with my poems and stories until Spring Break.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Pedagogy I
Was too late to go for my French class today. Wasn't feeling super-good physically and there was also the fact that last night I went out for a dinner after AGES, and ended up staying out till almost 11.15 pm and then chatted with RC until 1.30 am. Besides,I am allowed to wallow in Monday Morning Blues once in a while. So I have been here at home, and graded almost 50% of the student papers.Now this set wasn't that bad. But there are other things that bother me about my students.
1. The extent to which they accept social inequality
2. The extent to which they think "choice" solves it all. Rarely do they try to see that none of our choices are absolute.We all choose from the given options, to begin with. Besides, what we end up choosing are almost always profoundly influenced by what we have internalized through socialization. Therefore, all choices are and can be and should be ideologically de-constructable.I mean, no one should get a blank check by saying, this is my choice. That choice needs to be contextualized and justified. Yes, I will agree to the possibility of disagreement there. But nothing seems more problematic to me than when people leave it at choice and do not probe on the social, historical, ideological factors that made that specific choice possible.
3. My students have no freaking sense of history.
4.They are incapable of thinking of anything beyond the scope of the "personal" and the "individual." In other words, they fail to see how the "personal" is implicated within the social.
To be fair to my students, I don't think they are alone in this. I see this amongst my younger friends and cousins in India, amongst my high-school friends, and heck, even amongst all-term activists and artists who really should know and feel better.So part of it is just, I will have to say, human reluctance to see how we are all structurally implicated even when we think we are so damn free.I will also say, all of us, in varying degrees are reluctant to see how our most personal moments are problematically embedded within centuries of evolving power structures and modes of domination.But then, there are also ways in which the neo-lib regime transforms the incapacity to see the structural into an art-form. Precisely because,a capacity to see the structure might also produce a desire to transform that structure. To change its basic thrusts. And no social hegemony (or even system) wants that.
Yet... yet, human beings rebel! Maybe that's where human beings are thoroughly and profoundly human?
1. The extent to which they accept social inequality
2. The extent to which they think "choice" solves it all. Rarely do they try to see that none of our choices are absolute.We all choose from the given options, to begin with. Besides, what we end up choosing are almost always profoundly influenced by what we have internalized through socialization. Therefore, all choices are and can be and should be ideologically de-constructable.I mean, no one should get a blank check by saying, this is my choice. That choice needs to be contextualized and justified. Yes, I will agree to the possibility of disagreement there. But nothing seems more problematic to me than when people leave it at choice and do not probe on the social, historical, ideological factors that made that specific choice possible.
3. My students have no freaking sense of history.
4.They are incapable of thinking of anything beyond the scope of the "personal" and the "individual." In other words, they fail to see how the "personal" is implicated within the social.
To be fair to my students, I don't think they are alone in this. I see this amongst my younger friends and cousins in India, amongst my high-school friends, and heck, even amongst all-term activists and artists who really should know and feel better.So part of it is just, I will have to say, human reluctance to see how we are all structurally implicated even when we think we are so damn free.I will also say, all of us, in varying degrees are reluctant to see how our most personal moments are problematically embedded within centuries of evolving power structures and modes of domination.But then, there are also ways in which the neo-lib regime transforms the incapacity to see the structural into an art-form. Precisely because,a capacity to see the structure might also produce a desire to transform that structure. To change its basic thrusts. And no social hegemony (or even system) wants that.
Yet... yet, human beings rebel! Maybe that's where human beings are thoroughly and profoundly human?
Saturday, February 20, 2010
I am in bits n pieces here, folks...
There are some weeks when I will get more of my poems and stories done. There are weeks when I will get more of my French done. There are weeks when I will get more of my dissertation done. But rare there are weeks when I get all of them done in equal measure. Last week, for example, I have failed to work on my diss, although I did get some of the readings done. Now, I need to go back to it, and begin to work on it. Meaning, actually WRITE. I have been post-poning that ever since I got up. I know I won't get over this feeling of not-being-productive until and unless I crunch some words into that document. But I am resisting it, resisting it, resisting it. This is gut-wrenching work. But so is writing a poem. So is writing a story. Honestly, I don't take any claims of something coming "naturally" to anyone too seriously. Simply because nothing comes to me naturally. I have to work god-fucking-damn-hard for any halfway decent lines I write. And I don't think I am especially stupid.Anyways....
I have been working steadily towards the story I began last summer, and now I am seeing the end. Although what it will be is a shitty first draft. But whenever I get to work on it, I feel a kind of fulfillment, because this is a project that I had such a hard time with when I began, and even now, it just seems to be driving me crazy. But I am happy that I am working on it, and seeing some light. Finally got some great feedback on my Bindudi story from Valerie. As usual, her suggestions are dot on. So, now, I will have to some time to go back to it, and try out the revisions. Let's see when it finally happens...
Also got some good feedback for my Bildungsroman I poem...looking forward to do the revisions sometime this coming week.
Have been reading a collection of Anton Chekhov's short stories. It is fascinating to see how skilfully he uses the "chance encounter" format to come up with stories which are scathing in terms of representing the multiple forms of social violence, the social hierarchies and the way human beings cope with them. I realized, that Chekhov wrote quite a number of short shorts, "flash fiction" as we call them today. But I didn't have my regular irritation about it. Probably because, nowhere does Chekhov reduce his narrative into sheer triviality, superficiality, even when he writes a very short story. He was writing very short narratives not because he didn't have the adequate social eye, but he was using the short-form simply because sometimes they fitted the material he was dealing with. After all, if one is building up a story around a chance encounter between two long-lost friends, for example, and using that meeting to reveal things about the two characters, there's only so much one can write about it. The question, then, becomes, how does one "read" the society, the culture, the ideologies and the power structures into this brief interaction. Within the seemingly trivial and useless conversations. Chekhov's brilliance lies in the fact that nothing was too trivial for him. Nothing was beyond his sociological eye. Hence, the great stories we have today.
Have also just begun Tarashankar Bandopadhyay's Dhatri Debota.
I have been working steadily towards the story I began last summer, and now I am seeing the end. Although what it will be is a shitty first draft. But whenever I get to work on it, I feel a kind of fulfillment, because this is a project that I had such a hard time with when I began, and even now, it just seems to be driving me crazy. But I am happy that I am working on it, and seeing some light. Finally got some great feedback on my Bindudi story from Valerie. As usual, her suggestions are dot on. So, now, I will have to some time to go back to it, and try out the revisions. Let's see when it finally happens...
Also got some good feedback for my Bildungsroman I poem...looking forward to do the revisions sometime this coming week.
Have been reading a collection of Anton Chekhov's short stories. It is fascinating to see how skilfully he uses the "chance encounter" format to come up with stories which are scathing in terms of representing the multiple forms of social violence, the social hierarchies and the way human beings cope with them. I realized, that Chekhov wrote quite a number of short shorts, "flash fiction" as we call them today. But I didn't have my regular irritation about it. Probably because, nowhere does Chekhov reduce his narrative into sheer triviality, superficiality, even when he writes a very short story. He was writing very short narratives not because he didn't have the adequate social eye, but he was using the short-form simply because sometimes they fitted the material he was dealing with. After all, if one is building up a story around a chance encounter between two long-lost friends, for example, and using that meeting to reveal things about the two characters, there's only so much one can write about it. The question, then, becomes, how does one "read" the society, the culture, the ideologies and the power structures into this brief interaction. Within the seemingly trivial and useless conversations. Chekhov's brilliance lies in the fact that nothing was too trivial for him. Nothing was beyond his sociological eye. Hence, the great stories we have today.
Have also just begun Tarashankar Bandopadhyay's Dhatri Debota.
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