A Day In the Life Of...

Reading


Lunch


What I Had For Breakfast: 2 Cups of It

Writing...er, dissertation...and a brand-new poem....

Work

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
---Alice Walker

This is definitely not how I felt when I was younger, but as I am growing older, I feel, being a writer is about doing the writing, true. But it's also a way of being in this world.In that it is more than just writing. I feel like I have to be more critical and more loving at the same time, in order to be the writer I want to be. I am someone who believes in the autonomy of the text, the ability of the text to generate meanings irrespective of the text-maker, but as I am getting into the act of creative writing more and more, and getting introduced to more and more writers, I am beginning to see how biography too is important for the art/text we make.Our contradictions surface invariably in the art we produce. Our art, the texts we produce invite us to explore our contradictions. Whether we choose to do it or not, depends on us. Human beings, as much as they try, do not lead compartmentalized lives after all.

TidBits

Left-overs always taste so much better! Couple of days ago, I made this kosha mangsho with goat meat. I followed this recipe almost verbatim. Koshano is a form of slow-cooking, I guess. But it does some magical things to the meat.

In another week, we will bang right into National Poetry Writing Month. I don't think it will be a good idea for me to try to do the challenge with the dissertation still looming large in the background. Instead, I am taking up the challenge of working on my poems everyday. I don't know if that will amount to writing a new poem, or revising an old one. Sometimes, it takes me three or four days (or more) to get a poem out of my system. I don't want to yank out a poem a day because of April happens to be some kind of poetry month. But it does feel good to see that poetry receives a kind of special attention during this April, and there are events around it.

The dissertation-chapter is moving, although not as fast as I would like it to go. But it's moving!I have a strange, inconsistent relationship to deadlines. In case of the dissertation, the deadline to submit at least once to the writing group during a semester has been very very helpful. It has made me sit down, organize my thoughts, and just to produce something. Even if that "something" happens to be very rough, sketchy, and tentative. I mean, if I have a first draft at least I can go back to it, revise,and make it better. But it's hard to produce that first draft, often times! In case of my creative writing, I prefer to write without deadlines, and then put them up for workshops. Sometimes, I have generated new stuff for a workshop, and have revised the existing stuff extensively. But in general, I do like to produce creative stuff on my own time, and then use the workshop for thinking through the feedback.

A Nice Evening

Last night, RR and I went out for an impromptu “date.” Since we are both very interesting people, our idea of a “date” consists of going to Mozart, shit-talking about the yuppies who have HUGE homes up on the cliff, watching the ducks swim in the green water, trashing the spoilt-brats who knife through the water in their privately-owned yachts, and drinking cappuccino. Oh yes, we also set our timers, and wrote. For the last couple of days, I have been writing my dissertation at home, in the mornings, right after waking up and breakfast coffee. So I worked on doing some drastic revisions on a poem while RR worked on de diss.

Later, we went to Buenos Aires Cafe, did some more people-watching, and ate some really good food. Empanadas as appetizers, some very meaty stuff for entrees, and then a dark chocolate crème brulee for dessert, and talked some more about literature, film, the relationship between craft and ideology. All in all it was a productive evening which helped me get out of the hopelessness of not landing any huge fellowship yet for the next academic year!

I kind of have an idea what I want to write for this chapter of my dissertation, and I am not letting the “I need to read more before I can begin to write” impulse to get the better of me. Instead, once I am done with the writing quota of the day, I try to devote some time to the reading/catching up on the secondary materials. And then, once I am done with the first draft of the chapter, I can go back and do a more thorough finalization of the whole thing. But I need to have the basic work done before anything else. This, often, for me, is the hard work. Because at this stage, I am trying to figure out what my arguments are going to be. So, it's a lot of active brain-storming. But I think best when I write. This is something I have discovered about myself in the last one year, while writing my dissertation.

Writing in an "I" Voice

I have been afraid of writing in first person, unless it's a persona poem. So far I had defined persona poem rather narrowly: I would take characters from existing stories, myths, tales and would try to write in their voice. But I have largely avoided writing in an "I" voice otherwise. Because I was scared that they would be read as confessional and autobiographical. Whatever experience I attribute to the "I" persona of the poem will be attributed to me. I think, there is a strong trend to read any poem written by a woman in "I" voice as autobiographical. But, it's especially true about the poems produced by women of color in this country. The "I" in the poem, most of the times, get read anthropologically, and I have resisted that. Now, I am in a workshop which requires that I "adopt" an "I" persona for the length of the class (ten weeks) and write from the perspective of that persona. It's challenging, precisely because this is something I have avoided so far. We still haven't progressed enough for me to generate detailed comments on the process, but I have signed up for the challenge. Let's see where it takes me!

Left Forum 2011

I discovered, this weekend, after presenting at the Left Forum, that there are different issues at stake in an activist presentation than in an academic one. The responsibilities are different, and much more collective in nature. It becomes even more complicated when one is trying to represent the social movements in diaspora. In other words, solidarity work has its own complexities. There is a huge responsibility of representation, and the political fallouts of that might be much more severe than an academic presentation, where the stakes are measured much more in terms of an individual scholars' responsibility towards the issues he/she studies. Also, after an activist presentation, the audience is much more prone to ask questions like “what can I do to help” and one has to have “positive” answers without being reductionist.

Now, some stuff I heard in Left Forum:

The White Woman in Front of the Elevator: In which panel are you presenting?

Me: Contemporary Leftist Movements in India.

The Woman: Is there one?

Me: There are many.

The Woman: Oh really? Nice. Good for you that you're presenting!

I smile, the elevator comes in, we both stop conversing.

From Gautam Navlakha's presentation:

In India, we have every variety of left. One can choose from many varieties of left movements, see where one fits me. As an Indian, this is something that makes me extremely proud!

This is a rough paraphrase of what he said, and I have to kind of agree:))))

Raspberry Smoothie

Ingredients:

Fresh Raspberries

Milk

Vanilla Yogurt

Brown Sugar

Preparation:

Blend and drink.

Very difficult!

As usual, I don't really know the measurements. I go by my eyes.