I have submitted to the fact that I won't get any writing done before moving on to Miami. This is my last week in Austin, and it's more important for me to pack, to see things are getting done and explore this city where I have lived for eight years a little bit more before I say my formal goodbyes. And that's okay. I might submit some of my poems to a few places before this month runs out. But, honestly, moving from one city to another is huge. And I should forgive myself for not being able to accomplish too much during the month when I am doing so.
i am very slowly reading two books -- The Origin Of the Family, Private Property And the State by Friedrich Engels and Midnight's Children by Salmon Rushdie. The first one, I have read before. When I was doing my undergraduate in Sociology and a student activist in Kolkata. But, there are differences between reading a text as complicated as Origin as a seventeen-eighteen years old college student, and as a middle-aged 35 year old woman. While I am aware that much of the anthropological theory on which Engels based this book is kinds dodgy, I still think, the central essence of this book is still as relevant today as it was during the time when it was written. The fact that family is not a space full of love. The fact that family is ultimately tied to private property and state. The fact that family is essentially a power-laden institution.
The second one I am teaching in fall. So, I want to re-read it again, very slowly, making mental notes about how to approach this text pedagogically to a room full of American undergrads whose introduction to South Asia and India, is, at best sketchy ( in normal circumstances). I am savoring Rushdie's sentences, laughing out loud at his political jokes, and overall enjoying his many-layered allusions. I could not also help thinking, if this novel was workshopped in a typical American writing workshop, what some of the usual reactions would have been:
"Show, don't tell!" (yes, Rushdie "tells" a lot)
"I got lost here!" (yes, because you're not as conversant with Indian political history of the 1940s as Rushdie is)
Sometimes, it's good not to have an MFA.
i am very slowly reading two books -- The Origin Of the Family, Private Property And the State by Friedrich Engels and Midnight's Children by Salmon Rushdie. The first one, I have read before. When I was doing my undergraduate in Sociology and a student activist in Kolkata. But, there are differences between reading a text as complicated as Origin as a seventeen-eighteen years old college student, and as a middle-aged 35 year old woman. While I am aware that much of the anthropological theory on which Engels based this book is kinds dodgy, I still think, the central essence of this book is still as relevant today as it was during the time when it was written. The fact that family is not a space full of love. The fact that family is ultimately tied to private property and state. The fact that family is essentially a power-laden institution.
The second one I am teaching in fall. So, I want to re-read it again, very slowly, making mental notes about how to approach this text pedagogically to a room full of American undergrads whose introduction to South Asia and India, is, at best sketchy ( in normal circumstances). I am savoring Rushdie's sentences, laughing out loud at his political jokes, and overall enjoying his many-layered allusions. I could not also help thinking, if this novel was workshopped in a typical American writing workshop, what some of the usual reactions would have been:
"Show, don't tell!" (yes, Rushdie "tells" a lot)
"I got lost here!" (yes, because you're not as conversant with Indian political history of the 1940s as Rushdie is)
Sometimes, it's good not to have an MFA.
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