Self Currently Reading: Will Self

Self is vastly interested in anything to do with India, as that will be her first destination of 2012, in January.  A former student invited her to visit, and since self feels a writer’s first duty is to experience new experiences, she accepted the invitation.

Several days ago, self began reading Will Self’s highly entertaining Psychogeography.  Self must admit, she didn’t know much about the book, and expected it to be one long account of how he walked from London (cheating a bit for a plane ride across the Atlantic) to New York.

He describes one part of the walk from JFK to Manhattan as “just so fucking dull.” BWAH HA HAAA!!!

It turns out that particular walk is only one of many.  On p. 83, self begins reading the essay, “The Holy City.” It begins:

I arrived in Varanasi by minibus, a stubby little eight-seater which clumped and bumped along the straight and rutted roads of Uttar Pradesh from the Nepalese border.

He hearkens back to an earlier trip, during which he “linked up with a Canadian Buddhist — the very worst kind.  He propped me on the handles of his Supercomet bike and pedalled us both down to the bathing ghats.  Downriver I could see smoke rising from the death barbecue:  long pig griddling for breakfast.”

Will Self (Self knows this post is three times as confusing as her usual, because why did that man have to choose the same last name as SELF?) finishes up with:

All this happened twenty years ago and I’d like to say that it seems like yesterday, but it doesn’t:  it seems like twenty years ago.  Now I’m an older, less adventurous and less stoned man.

This is very amusing.  Brother-in-law Richard informed self that one of Dear Departed Sister’s best friends was from the same province self will be visiting in January:  Bihar.

“It’s the poorest province in India,” brother-in-law told self yesterday.

“But I’ll be travelling with Her Royal Highness of Bihar,” self counters.

“They still practice purdah,” brother-in-law maintains.

This gives self pause, for about half a day.  Then she figures:  if the price of travelling with Her Royal Highness is wearing a big white cloth over her head, so be it!  Self has had to endure much worse things:  such as being stuck on a Negros Navigation ship from Manila to Bacolod, with the only available toilet down the hall, and loathsome.

Besides, self will be traveling in private car.  With the princess’ two younger sisters. That should provide enough material for at least 50 pages of vivid writing.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Lorrie Moore’s 9/11, in the 12 September 2011 New Yorker (Moore Discusses “the Fictional Normal”)

Like many people, I watched 9/11 on television from a thousand miles away.  Also like many people, I found myself asking, among the dozens of terrified questions that crossed my mind, Do I know anyone who works in the World Trade Center?  I was pretty sure that I didn’t.  And I was about to relax ever so slightly and guiltily, when I suddenly remembered —  wait a minute —  that my brother worked there.  Or had.  He’d been there during the first bombing, in 1993, and I wasn’t certain whether the state administrative office he worked for was still situated there.

It turned out that his office had moved just across the street.  My brother was in the W. T. C. subway station when the first tower was hit and, after the second one was hit and the adjacent buildings were evacuated, my brother, covered in ash, and unreachable by anyone, walked eight hours home to Queens.  The next day?  He returned to work and sat there at his desk for two hours, waiting for others to show up —  until at last it became clear that not a single other person was going to.  And so he left.  The cough he already possessed became permanently worse.

*     *     *     *

The world is resilient . . .  no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them.  A veneer of civilization descends quickly . . .

Could the above possibly have anything to do with what Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, calls “the banality of evil”?  For instance, the way in which the Nazi guards kept such detailed daily records of movements of prisoners here and there, the idea of creating a bureaucracy of pain, the playing of classical music after mass murder, etc.?  Were these the Nazis’ attempt to create for themselves a “fictional normal”?  (Self, what are you on about now?  Why does a phrase like “the fictional normal” suddenly cause you to make a transcendent leap to the “banality of evil”?)

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Colum McCann’s “Dessert,” in The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, 12 September 2011

The Colum McCann essay, dear blog readers, is what self can only describe as epic.  Here’s the first half:

The sky would always be this shade of blue.  The towers had come down the day before.  Third Avenue on the Upper East Side was a flutter of missing faces, the posters taped to the mailboxes, plastered on windows, flapping against the light poles:  “Looking for Derek Sword”; “Have You Seen This Person?”; “Matt Heard:  Worked for Morgan Stanley.”  The streets were quieter than usual.  The ash fell, as ash will.

Everything felt honed down to the necessary, except for one woman who sat alone at an outdoor table in a restaurant on Seventy-fourth Street.  She had just ordered a piece of chocolate cake.  It arrived in front of her, and the waiter spun away.  A slice of two-layer cake.  Dark chocolate.  A nipple of cream dolloped on top.  A sprinkling of dark powder.  The woman was elegant, fiftyish, beautiful.  She touched the edge of the plate, brought it toward her.

At any other time, it would have been just a piece of cake, a collision of cocoa and flour and eggs.  But so much of what the city was about had just been levelled —  not just the towers but a sense of the city itself, the desire, the greed, the appetite, the unrelenting pursuit of the present.  The woman unrolled a fork from a paper napkin, held it at her mouth, tapping the tines against her teeth.  She ran the fork, then, through the powder, addressing the cake, scribbling her intent.

Our job is to be epic and tiny, both.

Ah, Colum, that is exactly what self feels writing is:  “to be epic and tiny, both.”  She will hold that piece of advice in her heart forever.

Stay tuned.

Worship in the Philippines

Self bumped into Charles Tan at the Manila International Book Festival today.  Also, Ambeth Ocampo, very busily engaged in signing copies of his books while being deluged by worshipful citizens.  Also saw:  Nadine Sarreal, Gwen Galvez, and Karina Bolasco.  These women give credence to one of Dearest Mum’s sayings:  “In the Philippines, women don’t grow old.  Only the karabaw do.”

If self really cared about her appearance, she would move to the Philippines (which is terribly impractical; if not impossible)

In the meantime, self is engaged in reading a book called:  Horacio de la Costa, S. J.:  Selected Essays on the Filipino and His Problems Today , edited by Roberto M. Paterno and published in 2002.  Fr. de la Costa, who taught at the Ateneo, was a great Filipino historian and writer.  In one of the essays, called “The Role of Religious Women in Asia Today,”  self gleans this fascinating nugget of information:

“When the Spaniards first came to Maynila, they found the women worshipping a wooden image in a pandan grove in what is now the district of Ermita.  It was the image of a woman, and the Spaniards very naturally presumed that it was an image of the Virgin Mary, brought by some wandering Franciscan missionary around the time of Marco Polo.  They dressed it up in velvet and cloth of gold and put a crown on its head and called it Nuestro Señora de Guia.  But some time ago an architect got permission to cut a small piece from the base of the image and test it; and he found that it was molave, which suggests that it was carved in the Philippines and was not brought here from Europe.”

Fascinating, isn’t it, dear blog readers?

Stay tuned.

Quote of the Day: Rosario Ferré

The quote of the day is by Rosario Ferré, an important feminist writer, and one of self’s long-time favorites.  It’s from her essay, “The Writer’s Kitchen,” in Feminist Studies, Volume 12, no. 2 (Summer 1986):

How To Let Yourself Fall From the Frying Pan Into the Fire

Throughout time, women narrators have written for many reasons:  Emily Bronté wrote to confirm the revolutionary nature of passion; Virginia Woolf wrote to exorcise her terror of madness and death; Joan Didion writes to discover what and how she thinks; Clarisse Lispector discovered in her writing a reason to love and be loved.  In my case, writing is simultaneously a constructive and a destructive urge, a possibility for growth and change.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.