Thursday, May 31, 2007

 

do it again

Marina Lewycka's first book was rejected 36 times before she finally found a publisher at the age of 58. Now A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is a worldwide hit.

That was from this interesting article in the guardian unlimited and should be a good thing to remember by all aspiring (and despairing) authors who are lurking in all kinds of places everywhere except that this same article went on to contradict itself several paragraphs lower by saying this…

After 36 rejections (she has kept all the letters) for her previous work - two completed novels, poetry, short stories, romantic fiction –


So, seems like a short history was not rejected 36 times after all but she had many rejections for her other previous works… Just plain careless journalism I guess . be that as it may, as madam lewycka rightly mentioned writing can be a compulsion (and I pity people who have the writing disease but write badly) but still, I guess you can only get better and better , so you should do it again and again and keep on going on and on and on like ariston …

But here’s an interesting info for me personally. The writer will soon publish the second novel “two caravans’ and this same article says…

Two Caravans has the same characteristic blend of comedy and desperation as her first book. It concerns a group of strawberry pickers drawn from several countries who fetch up in Kent, and traces their lives, loves and battle to survive.

I was in kent once and during university break I too was a strawberry picker one summer picking the best strawberries in the world as big as a small fist with all kinds of old people, pensioners, students and mostly gypsy families…one time I was taking a rest at the edge of the field under a pear tree and I saw this lady came towards me, looked left and right but did not see me , took off her panties squat down , closed her eyes and let out a stream of yellow urine right in front of me …full frontal beaver and all…a nice bonus for the day…

So, quite looking forward to read this book when it comes out . may be she would be describing the same strawberry field who knows? but first need to read a short history of tractors in Ukraine that I bought from the last warehouse sales . It is lying there somewhere in my library …

Friday, May 25, 2007

 

granta

when i was around sixteen or so, i subscribed to TIME magazine. in those days what you need to do was just send the little piece of envelop-free form (postage prepaid) and just ticked 'bill me later'. you just simply get the form from the magazines in the school library. and you start getting your weekly issue till say the fourth issue and a polite mail will arrive telling you that you haven't paid up but please ignore the letter in case you've already paid and needless to say i just ignored the letter. After the tenth issue a decidedly stronger letter would arrive and i would just ignore this too and by the fifteenth issue you start getting a threthening letter that you'll be hauled to court and i would just ignore this too and after the 16th issue or so the magazines stopped coming, but by then I've already received four months worth of free magazines.

I would then get another little form from the school library and this time it would be THE READER's DIGEST. Same thing happened. then i would change to NEWSWEEK and the cycle completed, I'd send another application to TIME and the same thing kept on going.

and i did this for almost two years till near the all important MCE exams (equivalent to SPM now) when I stopped (for fear that god might be angry with my criminal act and would fail me- but seemed that god couldn't care less about me giving the crap to american magazine publishers because not only i passed but i was the only one selected from the whole school to study overseas ON SCHOLARSHIP)...

Perhaps because i was young and stupid i didn't realize the potential danger that i might actually be dragged to court ...but nothing actually happened . i never get any court summons , nobody from any of these magazines visited me.

the thing is, even at that relatively young age i very much preferred TIME to NEWSWEEK and i absolutely detested READER's DIGEST....the contents were interesting enough but i felt suffocated by the treacly writing and i imagined only women read reader's digest and perhaps they go on to reading mills and boons and all those danielle fucking steele and sophie kinsella and all those retarded chic lits in their twenties or older....i may be right too, i don't know...

but the thing i want to really say is this. In those days my favorite sections in TIME was already the book section in the back pages and to this day i still can not break the habbit of reading good magazines from back to front. and when i read a particularly interesting book or movie reviews i would write the titles on little piece of papers and put them in my wallet hoping to look for them in library (in case of books). the only problem was I never get to find any of these books in my school library.

But I kept these little piece of papers for years and sometimes very much later, i'd find what i was looking for and would be very happy. nine times out of ten those lists don't dissapoint. and thus i get to know about all those american authors norman mailer, gore vidal , john cheever, and the rest and read william wharton's strange book 'birdy' and much later saw the movie version with music score from my favorite singer peter gabriel...but on the minus side, up till now i still do not get to see federico fellini's amarcord (which has 100% good tomatoes rating on rottentomatoes) or read Ryszard kapuscinski's "The Emperor: The downfall of an autocrat" about the ethiopian emperor haile selassie.

but there's a form of consolation with regards to ryszard kapuscinski when i get to read the description of the emperor's funeral in one of the GRANTA volumes a while back.and now that it is so easy to download all kinds of stuff from all those computer peer to peer downloading programs i may try to look for amarcord one of these days....

and i will say this,(again). if anybody want to look for good writing there's no better place to go than granta. the first time i discovered granta was about ten years ago from one of those week end boot sale in wye railway yard , kent and my first volume was the issue on "autobiography" (vol 14 Dec 1984) and got it for 10p. Over the years i've slowly build up my collections - wholly from used bookstores and sales all over the globe from National bookstore, makati to that bookstore owned by an irish guy twenty paces or so from tapae gate in chiang mai to the strand new york to one of those bookstores from charing cross road london to thor kar hong's skoob and now, god bless them PAYLESS bookstores around kl...they always have a few around...and out of the ninety or so volumes from the first to the latest I have around seventy volumes and as my habit in my younger days i have here a piece of paper with the numbers of volumes that I've bought and those back issues that i am still looking for. when i find a new one I'll cross out the volume from my list and so on....

but sometimes i forget to bring the list and i couldn't figure out if I've bought this or that volume and to be on the safe side i just buy them only later to find out that I've them already and thus i end up with quite a few duplicate copies...and as i'm accumulating more and more books i keep on getting the same books twice and on rare occasions trice! which only mean several things...i'm an idiot, and i buy but DON'T read... true enough.

so in the case of granta i now try to make a point of reading at least one story or essay from each volume... and just finished reading giles foden "idi amin's banquet" which in fact transformed into an early part of the movie 'the king of scotland' which by pure coincident i saw on the plane to bangkok a week or so ago.....and several days back i just picked a volume at random and read one story at random...it happend to be an essay by Thomas keneally in memory of the the guy who gave him the material to write schindler's list....and this get me interested to watch the steven spielberg's movie and i'll try to find it from one of my favorite pirates one day very soon....

Saturday, May 19, 2007

 

confession of a cheapskate book addict ...

i always wonder, why even if you have more money than you'll ever likely to spend in your life time you'd still be looking for bargains.... i've seen this many times... some of the people i know who earn hundreds of thousands a year will grumble if they have to pay a couple of dollars more for that pirated computer software or games or would not buy things if it's about fifty cents above the price they think it should be. so i don't really feel that terrible saying that yes, i confess... i too am a cheapskate...especially when it comes to buying books. And more specifically, i'll say this. Perhaps more than ninety percents of books in my library - which is threathening to take over my whole living space - are bought from sales of one kind or another or from heavily discounted bargain bins. but this does not mean to say that i buy craps...in fact my collection is decidedly eclectic...even if i say so myself.

at the risk of sounding like a book snob, i confess that i would not pick a sophie fucking kinsella , or danielle asshole steele books or harry bloody potter if they are given to me for FREE!. but here's another thing. call me a cheapskate if you like, I was really looking forward to read gabriel garcia marquez autobiography Living to tell the tale but the price was , shall we say 'above my cut-off point'...so i'll wait...for it to appear in sales, and i've been waiting for it for more than theee years as this book first appeared sometimes in 2003! . and a few monts ago i saw the orhan pamuk non fiction 'istanbul' and as i've read an excerpt of of it sometimes back in GRANTA i was really looking forward to this one too...and standing there oblivious to everybody in the middle of the bookshop aisle i was completely absorbed reading that part of the book about gustave flaubert getting the clap on his journeys to the middle east...randy bugger that he was... and you would think i'd do the decent thing and buy the book... but no, i behaved like a damned cheapskate and decided not to buy it becuase it was a few ringgit shall we say 'above my cut-off point'. so i'll wait... and i justify myself with the lame excuse that i can afford to wait too as i still have thousands of books to read....

and here's another thing...i'm currently reading 'factotum' by bukowski and i bought this , yes, from a discount bin and if it was not for this i would not have bought it as the normal price is yes, shall we say 'above my cut-off point'...and what a good book it was too...i wished i would have discovered bukowski during my early formative years but even now i still find the book very enetrtaining. life of drifters and hobos seem to be a lot more colorful and interesting than most people i know it seems. and incidentally i had to stop reading 'stuart a life backward' another good book about a hobo because of this. and i guess i'll segue through and read his other famous book 'ham on rye' which i also bought yes, from a warehouse sales...and here's another thing... i was reading wikipedia on bukowski and belatedly discovered that he wrote a screenplay to an autobiographical film about himself 'barfly' and there is an excellent documentary on him according to rottentomatoes bukowski:born into this' so, i did what any self respecting cheapskate would do... i download these from internet .... for free.

Monday, May 07, 2007

 

what happened on may 13th 1969 ?

on may 13th 1969 malaysia witnessed the first ugly race riot when the DAP which was then to all purposes a very chauvinistic chinese party won big in the general election in some majority chinese towns and in their euphoria threatened to chase away the malays out of 'their' chinese areas especially in a few parts of KL..and blood was spilt and a few hundred or according to some thousands of innocent people were killed on both sides ....that is how i understand the matter but i like many others don't really know exactly what actually happended that triggered the whole situation as malaysia then and even now is not exactly a land of writers and i've never come across any book interesting enough for me to read about this sad event...and i've never come across anybody who had a first had experience of this event ... until yesterday , when i met this man who was then a fourteen yr old boy living in kl....

his story is this. on thirteenth of may 1969, a cousin of his went for interview for a job in KL and later spent the day wandering around the city and went to a movie at Federal movie theatre in chow kit. What movie was not told to me but apparently the movie goers include both non malays presumably chinese and malays so was certainly not a malay movie as then and now no chinese in their right mind ever go and see a malay movie...

what the movie goers didn't know was that at that time the riot has boiled to a frenzied pitch with bands of chinese parading around town in agressive manner with all manner of small weapons raised high and shouting insults and declaring that they will chase the malays out of town and some people have been killed and a few were hanged on the overpass along jalan tunku ab rahman and a band of chinese came and stationed themselves at the theatre waiting for the film to finish and when the movie goers filed out they sorted out the malays and non malays... they let the chinese go and whacked the malays with parangs. Realizing what happened the place was in chaos in a matter of minutes and the malays panicked and scampered every which way and his cousin managed to find a way out but seeing this the chinese went after him and he was hit with a parang on the arm as he tried to parry the hit to his face but kept running away until he came to DBP building and fell on to the ground and the chinese came over, raised high the parang and as thing sometime happened, he was saved in the nick of time by a a traffic policeman on a bike who happened to pass by and the chinese then scampered away...

that was how i was told anyway and i'd love to hear any first hand experience of this fateful day or comments why the killings happened.... i am no closer to understanding why such thing could possibly ever happened in kl but not in other areas where chinese are also in considerable number. i always have this view... malays are one of the most peaceful people on earth... by thier nature, the malays are very docile people, laidback and yes, inherently 'lazy'...they rather sleep or run away when things get bad in most situations but when they are pressed to the wall their mind short circuited and they can ran amok....in the case of thirteenth may 1969, the chinese rather forgotten this little detail and in the euphoria of winning the majority in KL they became mad and did unforgivable things which short circuited the malay minds and hence the mayhem...

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

 

the pic that got me interested in balthus

well, as i said previously, i' m just discovering balthus... and the painting that started it all is this one that i saw in the art institute of chicago...i must've looked like a pervert to some museum goers probably , as i stood there in front of the picture for may be about ten minutes transfixed and hypnotised by this disturbing prepubescent girl with her legs spread apart so...and here's the thing, by most people yardstick balthus could be considered a pornographer and understandably so ...but the sheer beauty of the painting transcend and elevate it from just for mere voyeuristic sexual titilation although it is a hard battle not to give an average male an involuntary hard on...


but sometimes it's difficult to draw the line between erotica and porn... all great museums are full of voluptous nudes and sometimes in the acts of being raped not only by humans but some randy gods of the old religions.... and take this painting for example...is this art or porn? it's in the muse' d'orsay no less and by the great courbet too (no less) ...i didn't stay in front of this painting for long but kept a fair bit of a distance and watched people's reaction to it...and i noticed most people just hurried past and some japanese girls giggled a bit and took photos with their digital camera just like me...some people pretended not to see but a few came very close to the painting and pretended to study the texture of the paintings and color...oh yeah...



....or what about this enigmatic painting from an unknown artist from "the school of Fontainebleau ca. 1590" hanging in the louvre? (no less) . what is the meaning of this tweaking of nipple by one beautiful female to another equally voluptuous nymphet?

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