The more, the less sexier?

I recently read somewhere a Brad Pitt interview where he had said that Jesse James was one of the earlier celebrities in America in the times of Mark Twain. Then celebrities used to be few and far between. He was talking in the context of his latest film, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford". He added that, even in those days (at the cusp of the 19th and the 20th centuries), there were tabloids and a lot of sensationalizing and hype. Remember this is "the apex of celebrity" http://digbig.com/4xrch talking (Brangelina, no less). He ought to know. What he was saying in fact is that now that there has been a celebrity population explosion, being a celebrity does not have the same value it used to have in the times of Twain and the James Brothers. It has been considerably devalued like the rupee or the dollar. Remember, though, that in those days, the population of the US of A was a mere 76,094,000, according to the US Census. http://digbig.com/4xrcj. It quadrupled to 305,397,000 by 2008. http://digbig.com/4xrck. Common sense suggests that the demand for celebrities must have gone up too, what with the population of tabloids and fanzines and fan websites having soared up as well. In other words, there being more worshippers, there is a demand for more icons in every conceivable field: movies, theatre, ballet, television, music, sport, fashion, literature, art, science, you name it. This may sound like specious reasoning, come to think of it. Speaking for myself, celebrity antics leave me cold. But then I am in the minority. When I look at the way celebrity gossip is manufactured and lapped up and celebrity is used to sell products, though, even I have to agree that celebrity is here to stay for a long, long time to come.

Rad humanist, who me?

I just came across a reference to MN Roy’s Radical Humanism in a translated-from-German book on Fearless Nadia. And I remembered my father used to read one of his books bound in maroon cloth at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/4xyxr a little after 1947. Around then, he was also reading a biography of Joseph Stalin. His interests were wide ranging from political theory to Sufi mystics and bhakti poets (Kabir, Tukaram, Dnyaneshwar and the rest). I guess that’s where I must have got my eclectic reading taste from. My reading as a child was fairy tales n English. But I also read a lot of social, historical and sword-and-sorcery stories in Marathi, regurgitating some of the latter in my class magazine. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/05/english-yes-english-grammar-no.html. Later, I switched my loyalty to pulp fiction in Marathi and in English. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2008/03/genre-pulp-fiction-avatar-marathi.html. I also flirted with the self-improvement genre at one point in my life. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/search?q=self-improvement. Literature absorbed me most of my adult life. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/05/never-judge-book-by-its-title-cover-is.html. Now, my interests are more non-fiction: geopolitics, sociology, history (particularly the subaltern stream), cinema. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/search/label/Arundhati%20Roy. As I said earlier, I came across this book on Fearless Nadia, originally titled in German “Zorro’s Blonde Sister” according to a blog post I found here: http://bmukhtiar.blogspot.com/. It is written by Dorothee Wenner, a Berlin-based filmmaker, writer and curator for the Berlin International Film Festival, with incredible insight into Indian socio-political, cultural and film history. I don’t agree with the political and feminist subtext she “reads” into the Nadia repertoire, though. I reckon she goes a bit too overboard there, almost to the point of sounding like a hagiographer. Yet she fills in the background of the Nadia story brilliantly with appropriate vignettes of personalities at various points (MN Roy, Mridula Sarabhai the not-quite-feminist Gandhi, for instance). Here’s what Wenner says about Nadia (aka Mary Evan): “For a blonde, blue-eyed, busty white girl to capture the collective imagination of Indians in the pre-Independence era, was no mean feat! Add to that the stunts she did! She was, along with the Wadias, a pioneer in the Stunt Film Genre in India. I pride myself for being a feminist, but Nadia represented a fearlessness with a dash of sparkling wit, that’s unmatched in any actress of any era.” http://saritharao.blogspot.com/2006/01/true-blue-bolly-interview-with.html. There’s a spiel about JBH Wadia’s desire “to make movies that touted the strength and emancipation of women” on this website. http://memsaabstory.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/fearless-nadia/.

19 Gramercy Park.

233 Khetwadi Main Road http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/07/morgue.html where I grew up – and spent fifty three years of my life – had neither the glamour nor the grandeur nor the opulence nor the august lineage of owners of the 37-room, 18,000 square-foot mansion in New York (19 Gramercy Park) at the southeast corner of 20th Street and Irving Place, directly overlooking Gramercy Park. Here’s where Ben Sonnenberg, also born in 1936 like me, grew up. According to an architectural report at http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GRP/GRP002.htm 19 Gramercy Park was built by a Whig politician in 1845. It was later owned by the Stuyvesant Fish family and, from1945 on, by the legendary “flack” (the father of modern PR and spin doctoring for which, according to his son, he was “scandalously well paid” by Philip Morris, Pan Am, Pepsodent, Texaco and Sperry-Rand among others) Benjamin Sonnenberg. This Russian Jew who came to New York from Brest-Litovsk in 1905 when he was just four turned into the most ardent capitalist. It was he who combined 19 Gramercy Park with the six-story apartment building next door at Number Twenty after evicting the tenants, the pacifist socialist leader and Socialist Party Presidential candidate in 1940, 1944 and 1948, Norman Thomas, among them. (Interestingly, Thomas also happened to be also a Conscientious Objector to the Great War which he thought was an "immoral, senseless struggle among rival imperialisms". His brother shared his views and went to prison for resisting the draft. By contrast, Ben dodged the draft by joining the “Company” as his handler called the CIA.) Both Ben and his father led what can be succinctly described as bizarre, make-believe lives. Ben confesses to hating his father. They spent time with each other taking long walks in the neighbourhood since the time Ben was ten till he was in his thirties. Apart from that, Benjamin joined from time to time the self-exiled Ben who was busy running up his debts and running down his trust fund in Cold War Europe of the fifties. The reasons for Ben’s hatred were never spelt out clearly. Benjamin paid most of Ben’s extravagant bills admonishing him from time to time like any normal father. Benjamin’s only fault seemed to be that he was overbearing and over acquisitive, a Collector, which made Ben “a Collector’s Child”. Both father and son quoted widely from various authors. On various occasions, Ben claimed to be living apposite roles of characters from exotic novels. A weird but fascinating tale of the listless and pointless life Ben led with too much happening to him too soon including the CIA and multiple sclerosis is what Lost Property by Ben Sonnenberg is all about. P.S.: In retrospect, it did remind me of Truman Capote's unfinished novel, Answered Prayers especially because of so many NHRN (Not His/Her Real Name) characters strewn all over it as also a "rootless, intelligent and detached" raconteur like Ben was once described by an ex-CIA operative whose name he promptly forgot after using his swimming pool for an entire summer. Ben wrote his memoirs with uncomparable grace, extreme economy and delicious irony - and sometimes lobbing at you obscure words like "banausic" (= merely mechanical or routine) and "emulously" (= with a desire to emulate or competitively) - and refusing to explain them.

Perils of Amanda, the hyper writer.

I’ve read about Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860-1939), yes. I have not read a single one of her three novels, Irene Iddesleigh, Delina Delaney and Helen Huddleston, though. Her first novel was dubbed by the humourist Barry Pain "the book of the century". For his pains, he got the sobriquet, "clay crab of corruption" from the mistress of aliteration. It’s an irony of sorts that Pain has long been forgotten while Ros is still remembered. She’s even going to be celebrated in her native land, Ireland. Come 26 September, fans will read from Irene Iddesleigh in a Belfast pub. The one who manages to read the longest without laughing will win a copy of a Barbara Cartland novel, a return ticket to Ros’ hometown Larne and a copy of the writer’s ‘how-to’ handbook. Just to give you an idea of the daunting challenge, here’s an excerpt from Irene Iddesleigh: “The living sometimes learn the touchy tricks of the traitor, the tardy and the tempted; the dead have evaded the flighty earthy future and form to swell the retinue of retired rights, the righteous school of the invisible and the rebellious roar of the raging nothing.” Or, this bit from Delina Delaney: “Have you ever visited that portion of Erin's plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?” And, this gem from her poem, ‘Visiting Westminster Abbey’ (from Fumes of Formation – her other book of poetry being Poems of Puncture):

“Holy Moses! Have a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer,
Some of whom are turned to dust,
Every one bids lost to lust;
Royal flesh so tinged with 'blue'
Undergoes the same as you.”

Aldous Huxley insightfully explained the Ros phenomenon as follows: "In Mrs. Ros we see, as we see in the Elizabethan novelists, the result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the artistic. It is remarkable how late in the history of every literature simplicity is invented...”. He contnues: “This is how she tells us that Delina earned money by doing needlework: ‘She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father's slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness’.” Nick Page (In Search of the World's Worst Writer) tells us: "For Amanda, eyes are 'piercing orbs', legs are 'bony supports', people do not blush, they are 'touched by the hot hand of bewilderment'." Have alook at three woodcuts from Irene Iddesleigh here: http://www.oddbooks.co.uk/amanda/irenepics.html.

Literature as gossip.

Truman Capote. The Princess Diana ‘revelations’ reminded me of his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, peopled by Unspoilt (and Spoilt) Monsters. "All literature is gossip," Capote reportedly told Playboy in December 1976. This is part of what I find endearing about him. He was a taleteller to the core in the best and the worst sense of the word – a raconteur as well as a gossipmonger. In fact, the advance publication of excerpts from his work-in-progress got him in trouble with a lot of his high-society friends because they didn’t like him tattling on them. Coming to the Diana prediction of her own impending death in a road accident planned by ‘X’ in a note to her butler Paul Burrell nine months in advance of the event, why did not that worthy say anything for so long? For snippets of Capote’s writing, visit the starkly designed tribute website: http://www.ansoniadesign.com/capote/. At http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2003/s971385.htm, the new spotlight on the Princess Diana mystery is covered.

Thank you for not reading. (With apologies to Dubravka Ugresic.)

Is reading uncool? One Mumbai cabdriver probably thought so without giving the matter much thought, I guess. He lost the opportunity of a lifetime. He had in his hands for a couple of days a diary containing the unlisted telephone numbers of Hrithik Roshan and Salman Khan among others. He could have easily hawked them to fans for thousands of rupees. The VIP whose diary – her ‘lifeline’, a mine of normally unobtainable info – happened to be left behind in that unfortunate cabdriver’s cab one Sunday afternoon was lucky. She got a cabdriver who thought reading was uncool and, as a result, she got her precious treasure trove back. HR and SK were spared the trouble and the expense of changing their unlisted telephone numbers. The cabdriver’s son who delivered the prodigal diary did claim a couple of hundred bucks by way of transportation – and reward for honesty, I suppose. But look at it this way. The cabdriver did read her address on the flyleaf. Else, the diary would never have come home. But obviously that was about the only stuff he bothered to read. No curiosity, no reward, what? My son Ashu who was in Mumbai briefly told me both his daughters, Aditi and Avantika, seem to think reading is uncool. That surprised me no end because both of them write well, far better than many of their peers. (P.S.: In my book, if reading is uncool, so is writing. Evidently, they and I don’t read the same stuff, huh? ) Seems kind of logical, though, since they live in the US of A where the National Endowment for the Arts uncovered “a precipitous downward trend in book reading” – despite the much-hyped Oprah Book Club helping to push millions of books. The NEA senses "an imminent cultural crisis" and predicts: "At the current rate of loss, literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century." Aditi and Avantika head the trendsetters. Let’s hope pretty soon they’re not at a loss for words. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/books/181442_reading09.html. Review summaries of Dubravka Ugresic’s Thank You For Not Reading: http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/ugresicd/thankyou.htm#summaries. (Irony of irony: Aditi and Avantika’s mom, Nandini, got me a copy of Thank You For Not Reading on her last visit to Mumbai a couple of years back. )

STOP PRESS: To read Alchemy, one of the 33 pieces from Dubravka Ugresic’s Thank You for Not Reading: Essays in Literary Trivia, go here: http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no13/Alchemy. Quotable quote: “The transmutation of shit into gold is nevertheless no simple thing, for if it were we would all be rich. You need institutions, galleries, media, a market, publicity, interpreters (those who will explain the meaning of the artistic gesture), promoters, art dealers, critics and, of course, consumers. Even when the shit is well packaged there is no guarantee that the transmutation will succeed.”