{I Like Moving Around}

I just finished the second draft of the short story I was working on. I am not sure where it stands now, I will need some distance from it. Sometimes I wonder, what am I doing with this whole genre-shifting thing. During any given time, I am working between three genres--academic prose, short fiction and poetry. Part of my mind tells me, I would get things done much more quickly only if I stick to one and follow through the end. It is hard for me to stick to one thing. I tend to leap around, I have too many interests. I am not a creature of habit at all.

But at the same time, I am not sure genre-fidelity is such a good idea. Different genres respond to the complex realities of our times in different ways. I find it hard to fit all my concerns, all my interests in one genre or another. If someone asks me, what is my "favorite" genre, I would not necessarily know how to answer. What I do with poetry, cannot be accomplished via short fiction. And what I do in my short stories cannot be done in my academic writing. Now, the challenge is, to follow through the projects, keep on hacking at them, see where they take me after a considerable period of time.

I am getting better at this act of "following through." But it's still often a challenge. So, right now, I am not planning to write any new short stories. Because, I have plenty which are sitting there, after one, two or three drafts. I need to process the feedback they got, revise them and keep on revising them. Now, I am not one of those people who likes to implement something in a mechanical kind of a way. So, if I have a burning desire to write something new, I will write a new one. What I am trying to say here, that is not going to be my priority for a while.

Besides, I am finding it hard to devise new creative prose, even if it's fiction, while I am working on my dissertation. I guess, my mind is too full of prose! That is why, I feel somewhat accomplished-- I have been able to revise this story that I wasn't too sure of after the first draft. In other news, today I took the print-outs of the manuscript 2 and spira-bound it to make it look like a book (finally!). So, I will be able to read through them and see where it stands. One of my closest friends had interesting things to say. Now, I will have to plunge into the process myself.

{été}

I am recognizing how hard often it is to assert myself in circumstances where folks don't really know how to recognize the very essential identity of women involved in intellectual or creative pursuits. Yet, those are the activities that make me me. It has been both un-nerving and comforting to be confirmed during the last one week that I will never be an ideal homemaker. I like to withdraw from the world because the kinds of work that I do need solitude. But that does not mean I am into domesticity. Staying a lot indoors or inside one's homespace does not make one a domesticated person. It becomes especially true for women who write, paint, theorize...in short, are involved in work which requires long hours away from the roles that are socially delineated for women. Emily Dickinson stayed inside the four walls of her home a lot. That does not make her domesticated or even remotely interested in domesticity.

* *

:Writing Updates:

--Submitted to 5 places (4 print, 1 online)

-- Have not been able to do any work with the poetry manuscript because of the overall hullabaloo in life. But in retrospect, that might be good. I believe it is allowing me a wee bit of distance from work just completed.

--Working slowly on the short story for the UCLA workshop. It's due in two weeks!

* *

Finished Nnedi Okorafor's novel Zahrah the Windseeker. Still under its spell, will try to write my thoughts about it once all the quasi-familial stuff recedes into background.

:: Manuscript::

I finished compiling the first draft of the manuscript. So far I have 46 poems spanning 62 pages, divided into three section, one prologue and one epilogue. Most of them, that is, around 35 were written during the NaPoWriMo challenge and the week before that. According to this, these are the most commonly used words in the manuscript:

Word	Frequency
one	83
mother	52
did	46
word	39
without	38
story	37
way	28
never	23
ma	23
know	23
myself	22
once	22
around	22
every	21
time	21
finger	20
hand	19
through	19
ne	17
page	17
little	16
make	16
ever	16
thing	16
old	15

I am still not sure what to think about it, because I have just compiled the whole thing. I haven't yet read the whole manuscript through. Later today or tomorrow I want to print out a copy of it and read it to figure out where it stands. But for now, I am happy that I have a tangible manuscript to work with. I also have some tentative titles. But again, I want to read through the entire manuscript to see if I can find some other catchy lines to do the work of the titling.

Jane Eyre

To celebrate the arrival of summer properly, I saw Jane Eyre yesterday. The latest adaptation. I do have a slight obsession with Victorian women writers and the messed up tomes they wrote. Most of them are bundles of contradictions, but if one wants to understand the complexities of the nineteenth century British capitalism, one doesn't have much option other than to go through them. I had first read Jane Eyre when I was eight or nine, an abridged edition for kids. But it wasn't that abridged. It didn't really exclude the parts which might be considered "inappropriate" for children or anything. It merely simplified the Victorian English. I have gotten back to the text again and again after that, partly because I love it, and partly because it's hard to avoid it if you're a scholar/lover of Caribbean literature.

A large chunk of the film has been told in flashbacks. The opening scene is that of Jane leaving Thornfield. I liked that choice. For me, it's one of the strongest moments of the book, and I would say it's also a coming-of-age moment for Jane: one during which she exercises her feminist agency. She rejects Rochester, rejects what Thornfield stands for. She does not ever deny that she loves Rochester, yet she leaves. A proto-feminist statement that love is not the only place where women can (or need to find) self-expression. But there are other reasons why I think this moment is one of the most significant moments of the novel. As someone who has for the last ten years of her life spent reading literatures on and about slavery, it is hard not to notice the Abolitionist sub-text that runs through that leaving. In leaving Thornfield, Jane walks out of the legacies of slavery, the supremacy of the maritime/plantation bourgeoise. And the time too, is just ripe. The novel was published in 1847. The energy of 1848 is in the air, and slavery has been abolished in British Caribbean in 1838. And of course when Jane comes back, Rochester has lost his eyesight--the total disempowerment-declassment of the plantation aristocracy, and Thornfield itself has been burned to ruins. Jane gets uplifted a little bit in terms of her class, what with her inheritance from the dead uncle and everything, and Rochester goes through a process of being disempowered. So, the class status-quo is restored. Kind of.

The film has done some serious editing of the novel. Understandable. Too little of Grace Poole. Too little of Bertha Mason, not to speak of the fact that she looks distinctly South Asian. I do think the film tries to level out the class and racial sub-texts there. But if one is careful, it can be gleaned from whatever is available. Like, the coachman is black. When Bertha spits at Jane, what comes out is a glob of black phlegm. Blood coagulated into a thick blackness? Once that lands in Jane's white wedding-dress, it makes space for an interesting symbolic blackening of Jane herself. For the white lower middle-class woman from the British empire, to walk out of the confines of imperial femininity, she needs that symbolic blackening. In other words, in order to be a feminist in imperial Britain, white women needed to go through a process of blackening/browning/racialization. I think, that was my favorite scene from the film. Because it's one of the most profoundly politically symptomatic ones. Although, I also think, Jane's childhood scenes were artistically rendered too.

Overall, it was an enjoyable film. Although, if I have to be honest, I think there is something about the best of Victorian novels that resists cinematic narrativization.

Writing Table

Right now, I am in a small university town in Illinois, visiting M. I am sitting in a table right next to a big window drinking coffee. Earlier I was working on typing up some of the poems I wrote during the NaPoWriMo month. After that, I read some poems from Joseph Legaspi's book Imago. I am thinking, if I had a window and a writing-table right next to it, I probably wouldn't have spent so much money and time in the coffee-shops. This desire does make me uncomfortable. Because I recognize in that very desire, a kind of consumer materialism. And I know there are actual costs of that kind of desire. This is specifically the kind of desire that makes people crave more, take paths that will satisfy those cravings rather than stay true to their passion and creativity. In short, it makes them conform. But on the other hand, I also think, is it too much as a writer to ask for a writing-table next to a window? Shouldn't we all live in a world where everyone can have access to a workplace of their choice? Yes, but we don't live in an ideal world. And so long as we don't, I should get the most of this writing table while I am here.

Adelaide Labille

I have been thinking and trying to find out works by women visual artists recently. The painter is Adelaide Labille-Guiard, and the date of this painting is 1785. I love how the teacher stares back at us, an expression of defiance in her face. It is doubly significant that she has painted herself with two students, since most male painters in those days refused to accept female students.

Dal With Cream and Salsa

In the last nine years, I have discovered that being a grad student means learning skills that you wouldn't necessarily think of possessing in normal circumstances. You might not even know that they exist. One such skill is throwing random shit together. Like today, I had some salsa, some whipping cream, half of an onion and some dal sitting in my refrigerator. And what do I do? I threw them together. And the result is, NOT TOO BAD! So, here is the recipe.

Ingredients:

Dal ( I used mushur, or red lentils. Anything else will do too.)

Onion (sliced in rough pieces)

Spices (I used cumin seeds, coriander powder, red chili powder, paprika, turmeric)

Butter

Red Salsa (Store Bought Variety)

Whipping Cream

Preparation:

Boil the lentil seeds and the sliced onions together.

Heat butter in a skillet. Temper it with the spices. Let it sizzle for a while.

Pour the whipping cream. Let the spices mix well with the cream.

Now pour the salsa. Again, let them mix well.

Then, the boiled dal. Let it simmer for a while.

Slurp it with rice or rotis.