Updates

I have been neglecting this blog—between the fourth chapter of my dissertation, teaching, writing job applications and keeping up with some other deadlines, I am all blogged out. But I have been forcing myself to spend some time with my writing, even if it's 15 mins every day. I have also enrolled in a short story workshop, just so I can get some writing done. It is not that I am hoping I will achieve some huge feat, but just trying to keep up with some deadlines, getting some feedback for my work, all these little things make me feel that I am still within the process. Meanwhile, I am doing some work on the poetry manuscript. I have a better idea of where it is going. I know what poems I need to write for it once I am done with the dissertation. I am doing lots of thinking about it, drawing up a list of books I need to read.

But I am also learning, as I am writing the dissertation, that any long project, involves lots of painstaking moments. At this point, my mind and body are really ready to jump to the finishing point without going through the hoops. At the same time, I know, this is what the process is all about—taking a few pages everyday, editing them, making notes, writing a page or two, cutting things out, adding new stuff. And it takes time. I am not the same person who started this project. So has the project changed. There are moments when I sit down with it, and think about what I am writing about, I get enormously excited. Away from it, I feel sad, listless. Even more so when I think about the institutional paradigms within which I am working on it.

In the same way, I am slowly coming to accept, I might not be the best person to write in short prose-fiction forms. This week, I met with a new friend of mine, an Iranian-American woman with an MFA. After our conversation, I felt a lot energized about beginning to think about a novel once I am done with the dissertation. So, that's something I am looking forward too.

{...}

Rainmaker poems--

when Austin evenings smell of Kolkata

((Laboring))

I started the day with a nice rejection from PANK--oh well! This Labor Day weekend has been tough. I have moved between intense anger, listlessness, sense of failure, depression and missing someone I really really love. And if I have to be perfectly honest, it's the last thing that has been causing a lot of the other things I listed above. There are other things, too. For example, the anxiety over my dissertation. But nothing fucks me up as a conflict with a childhood friend, someone who should have understood me better than anyone else! But this is also something I have come to realize in the last few days--I am an intensely ideological person. For me, the "personal" is really really "political" and vice versa. I tend to de-code the smallest moments in my life, our lives, and this often creates emotional problems and distances with people I otherwise love and cherish. I know a lot of the things I am extremely critical of wouldn't necessarily bother most others. But this is me, and I also recognize, this propensity of mine has also given me an unique voice, I don't really intend to change myself. I am all willing to try hard to be a better person. I am all willing to modify my rhetoric depending upon the context. But what I am not willing to do is, to enter into too many "compromises."

In other news, I am still working on the fourth chapter of my dissertation. I get very easily tired these days. I cannot write more than a page or a page-and-half. But I do work on it every day. So, I am making progress. Although I am far from being done, it does help me to see that I am adding on to the chapter, I am paving my way towards completion.

In the creative writing front, I have been revising a story I wrote a while back. I got some feedback on it from my workshop, so I am trying to do some revisions. Let's see how it goes!

[Summer Publications]

I haven't updated the publications list here for a while. So, here it goes:

lingerpost

Up The Staircase Quarterly

(Tuesdays Fall 2011)

I recognized today that this semester my Tuesdays are going to be crazy. Normally, I should not expect to get too much of my own work done on Tuesdays. But, it's mostly going to be preparing for my discussion sections, attending the lecture, then office hours, then teaching, and if I still retain my sanity after that, a little bit of grading. But because it was the very first Tuesday of the semester, I did succeed to revise a poem, post it for the workshop forum, write around 300 words for the dissertation. I also managed to submit to two places. Overall, it wasn't a bad day--just an extremely busy one. Now, I am waiting for the rice to cook. It's in the oven. Once that's done, all I need to do is to reheat the dal, have dinner and go to bed. Yes, I am tired.

Reception

I gave a friend of mine a poem called "Just By Sheer Mistake" to read and comment on. The poem has been accepted by a journal ever since, so I cannot post it here. Otherwise, this post would have probably made more sense. Anyways, her comments were totally off-base. She did not understand what I was writing about at all, she had problems in understanding the references to the counter-culture, she misread everything in the poem. Literally. When I first read her feedback, I was confused (and sad),because this is a woman who is extremely extremely sincere. She is a very very nice person, and she wants to understand. So I talked to M, who really did help me a lot to put the whole thing in perspective. According to him, this woman writes primarily about the home-space--there is very little in her poems that problematize domesticity. Yes, there are moments when she wants that cloak of domesticity to be better repaired, but more or less, her poems are about celebrating the familial/domestic space, rather than looking for a space beyond the familial/domestic. On the other hand, my poem was about that very tension--the conflict between the familial and the more public space of artistic exploration. Now, what does it mean when you have a father who found his voice in that public space of artistic exploration too? In other words, the young men and women who in 1960s found their voices in the so-called counter-cultural spaces, are the parents of the kids, who like me, came of age in the 1990s. How does one write about the conflicts with them? In this particular poem, I chose to explore that conflict through the lens of a "benevolent patriarchy". Although nowhere in the poem did I use that term. The poem ended up being an exploration of a space where the "public" and the "familial" intersect with each other, through the presence of the character of the father. I have never really thought how complicated this poem is from the perspective of a reader. In other words, for someone who is not that familiar with lefty/countercultural childhood, there is a lot that I am presuming in this poem. So, after I processed some of my friend's initial reactions, I recognized, my poems are going to be understandable only to a small group of people. At least for now. I don't know if it's good or bad. And I am not going to worry myself thinking about it. But this is what it's going to be for now. If I have to be true to myself, I will have to keep on writing, and just hope there is someone out in the world who would know what I am talking about.

{Saturday Happy}

School has started, I am teaching this year. This semester I am TA-ing for an American Lit. class. This first week wasn't that hectic, but I am sure it will become crazier as it moves along. My days are not that "interesting" right now. I wake up, make myself coffee, try to do some work on the dissertation chapter, read a little, write a little. So, yes, these were the three "happy moments" of this past week:

1. Breakfast Tacos at Cafe Medicci

Yes, I allowed myself two breakfast tacos this Thursday: bean and cheese and migas. They were delicious. But it wasn't just that. They also helped me to pay attention to the class while the professor I am TA-ing for, appreciate it, and then have a meeting with him and my co-workers during which I didn't think about food.

2. My Advisor Likes My Chapter 3

and thinks it's "bold." This did give me some impetus to keep on working on my Chapter 4.

3. Cappuccino and Revising A Poem

Yesterday, I bought myself a cappuccino and worked on revising a poem. I felt such a bliss! I haven't been able to write too many new poems, and I doubt I will, until I get the dissertation done. But I can still revise my old poems! And there was something extremely consoling about sitting in a cafe with a cup of cappuccino and revising my poem. It's like a date with a very close friend, someone who knows me better than anyone else, someone to whom I don't have to explain myself. I just emailed the poem to one of my readers, let's see what he has to say.