Teaching the God of Small Things

character map

While snapping this picture on her gifted-and-talented phone, my student accidentally cut off Margaret Kochamma (and dead Joe) on the far left side of this whiteboard picture, and I wonder if that signifies something about the students' current inability to process post-colonial conditions of shattered intimacies, but here you have it: the character map we developed after reading the first three chapters of the novel for today's class. In my South Asian Literature course I allotted only four class sessions in which to discuss this fractured, poetic 320-page postcolonial novel. Today, in a brief lecture I provided what I thought might be necessary background information about the colonization of places along the Malabar coast, the state of Kerala and its Communism, land reforms, Syrian Christianity, the caste system (although they've already studied Cracking India and Untouchable, so they're pretty well-up on that), in addition to biographical information about Arundhati Roy. I am probably the last person to find out that the novel is loosely based on Roy's life, and that of her mother Mary Roy.

We began to have a rich discussion of the significance of the History House and the allusions to Heart of Darkness in chapter 2--one student pointed out that the 7-year-old perspective dominating the narration conflates Chacko's philosophizing about History as a big ghosty house they inhabit with an actual house that holds a haunting history of its own--the British guy that went mad, like Kurtz. Students appeared surprised when I explained that Kari Saipu, or the "Black Sahib," seems to have had pedophilic tendencies, and that this has implications for how postcolonial Indian history is imagined in this book (Kari Saipu makes me think, in fact, very much of early scenes of Hari Kunzru's Impressionist as well as what happens to Estha later, and then of the Kite Runner which we'll be watching rather than reading. Why all the pedophilia, Edward Said?). I suppose I'll keep blogging about this, since it's one place to keep my thoughts linear in a case where the novel is anything but.

Bolly Log

I've been watching Bollywood movies on Netflix for the past couple of weeks. I cannot get through a single movie in a night, but that's neither here nor there. I've got a lot to catch up on; it's been a while. Here's what I logged this winter break (and still counting):

• Chennai Express: 2013 with Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone (both from Om Shanti Om which I loved). Very silly. Stereotypes of South Indians abound. Also a long and bloody fight scene.

• Dostana: 2008  Abhishek Bachchan and John Abraham pretend to be gay to rent an apartment. Lots of John Abraham's awesome physique. Bad music. I was going to be offended about the gay stereotypes but the KISS and then the ambiguous ending made up for that.

• I, Me, aur Main: Briefly, I got on a John Abraham kick. Wouldn't you?

• Dil To Pagal Hai: 1997 with Shah Rukh Khan in his bad hair days. I think I should probably have seen this sooner. I already knew all the songs (which I love--old school playback singers). But Netflix had this on a timer, and the timer went off before I could finish the story!
• Lakshya: Totally my favorite film so far, a war drama based on the 1999 Kargil conflict (when Pakistan-backed armed forces infringed on the Line of Control in the Indian-controlled state of Jammu-Kashmir). Why did I love this? Soldier Hrithik Roshan of the two thumbs can dance and he shows it off in Main Aisa Kyon Huun. Also features Amitabh Bachchan and Om Puri in Experienced Soldier roles.
• Bunty aur Babli: Rani Mukerji and the Bachchans. I love the Bachchans. A few things I appreciate about this movie: the subversively DIY Hindu-ish wedding ceremony with innovative vows and explicit references to consummation. Rani's and Abhishek's constant costume changes. Amitabh in a Guy Noir role. The (to me, at least) amusing fantasy that a woman can give birth to a newborn the size of a healthy 3-month old in ten minutes, flee the police mob, and jump on a train. This review finds it an adorable Bonnie-and-Clyde send-up featuring "girl power" messages. Well, kind of.

On Breaking Down Gender Stereotypes

Once again, I will not be supporting the GoldieBlox company, in spite of its stated goal to "break down gender stereotypes." In what one online friend referred to as a "jerkmove," GoldieBlox is threatening to sue the Beastie Boys to preempt a copyright infringement case over the use of the rap group's "Girls" song in a commercial. The Beastie Boys have published an open letter in the NYT.

I am so annoyed by this pseudo-feminist company that I can't even repost the original GoldieBlox commercial, even though it offers what I find to be a clever parody of the Beastie Boys song because I think the toy is a stupid gimmick. It features a conventionally pretty, able-bodied girl with long blonde hair. Sometimes she has an African American sidekick who is also as pretty as a Barbie. The toy does nothing to "break down gender stereotypes" other than give these characters pastel colored tools.

Just a quick little OMG

I did my first tweet ever for #AcWriMo.

My kid is breaking the first of her 2-year molars (bottom left, and she's 2 1/2). We were thinking she was just "being TWO" but no, she's just "being TWO in pain." There is a difference. I have to believe that.

Working on Marie Corelli always makes me happy. Because you're reading along and then you come to something like this:

... never in all the passing pageant and phantasmagoria of history did a greater generation of civilised hypocrites cumber the face of the globe than cumber it to-day,—never was the earth so oppressed with the weight of polite lying,—never were there such crowds of civil masqueraders, cultured tricksters, and social humbugs, who, though admirable as tricksters and humbugs, are wholly contemptible as men and women. Truth is at a discount,—and if one should utter it, the reproachful faces of one's so-called “friends” show how shocked they are at meeting with anything honest. We are drifting our days away in a condition of false luxury,—of over-ripe civilisation,—which has bred in us that apathetic inertia which is always a premonitory symptom of fatal disease.  (Modern Marriage Market)

I think she just nailed what folks now refer to as "first world problems." More wine please now.

Teaching Barthes, Foucault, and Gubar this week in my Lit Theory class.
Full of misery about 2/3 of my Composition class.
Waiting for good news from two major submissions last summer. Was supposed to hear "in October." And now it's November 2. Does anyone else watch the calendar like I do, in regards to these sorts of things?? Yes. They do.

Is it possible that there is too much Halloween candy in the house?
And there's this:

Good Morning Goon

This morning, I'm in the kitchen putting lunches together for me and the kid, and I hear her yell from her crib, "MAMA! I WANT A BOOK!" Of all the books on the floor of her room, this is the one she wanted:

I love this kid. 28 months old, and already a dedicated reader with a taste for parody.

Baking Bread is as Hard as I Thought It Would Be

In a charmingly clear essay called "The Intentional Fallacy," which I am preparing to teach to my Literary Theory class this week, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley wrote,

Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. ... Poetry is a feat of style by which a complex of meaning is handled all at once. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and 'bugs' from machinery.

I read this, and then I went to a bread-baking class, and the combination of Wimsatt & Beardsley and yeast was this poem. I have not written a poem in a long while, and I've never made bread from scratch.

How does one judge a loaf of bread?

Not as early as monks, but not as late as students
A morning more humid indoors than out
Seven or eight maybe, imperfections
In a church kitchen.
Unseen hands had heated the milk
Counted the yeast
Distributed spoons.
A wheelchair, a walker, one eye blind and one wandering,
All of us kneading for the sake of our souls
Unequal to our uneven ovens
With no leader, weak lighting, glass loaf pans, cold tea
A rising, then, a falling:
Mine, puckered, but still nourishing.
What is the standard by which we disown or accept the self?

From LJ Notices to Correspondents, December 2, 1854

Q. R. H.—Courtship is an indispensable preliminary to marriage. Sebastopol has to be taken by a regular siege. It is the same with that citadel—a woman’s heart. You must approach it in due form, and fire the big guns of big promises.

Here, the London Journal editor responds to a correspondent's query presumably about whether a period of courtship is necessary, with a timely reference to the Siege of Sebastopol that was, well, ongoing (September 1854 - September 1855), because the Russians did not wish to give up the Crimea. To translate: the peaceful-looking Victorian lady, pictured there in Charles Green's 1878 watercolor (titled appropriately "Courtship"), represents the Imperial Russian Army under attack by enormous British cannons, like this one:

by William Simpson

Sounds very romantic.