Читать книгу Accepting My Place - K. B. - Страница 5

I hate to begin with this, but Cymbeline confirmed to me that I am not a person who enjoys theatre. I can’t only blame only my attention span, for I find rewarding gazing into paintings that a typical American teenager would glaze over, or reading dense literary works that would cause any other person of my age to hurl said work at a wall. Yet, whenever I’m in a piece of theatre, whether it is shows as diverse as Spiderman the Musical, RENT, The Book of Mormon, and yes, unfortunately, Cymbeline, I find myself unable to concentrate on the plot, more interested in the inner works of my imagination rather than the ones being projected towards me.

And, what a shame that is, for Cymbeline was clearly an excellent show. I loved the movement between the six cast members as they changed characters without even once breaking character, unless intentional, I loved how they changed lines and outfits to fit the sounds of the 21^st century (Imogen says “I hate you” to Iachimo, and Iachimo looks like he’s wearing a sweater designed for Grease), I loved that Noah Brody and Paul L. Coffey looked like twins (inbreeding on the set, much?) and, dare I say it, I loved the acting, which was good enough to suspend my inner turmoils for a moment and watch with complete belief a grown Posthumus cry on stage.

If history is when memory is annihilated for the sake of creating the collective identity of a peoples, myth is when memory is distorted, bended, and altered to allow a memory to speak for the collective present of a different time period. In that regard, Cymbeline is clearly a myth. It may feed us the lines of Shakespeare’s originals, but re-imagines them, not only creates the laugh for the audience but laughs along. The actors show none of the rigor I associate with the theatre, and I think that is good. Like all myth, Cymbeline re-adapts a memory and puts it in front of the audience in a way that can’t be ignored. For that, I will at the very least give it my utmost respect.

December 11^th, 2011: “A reaction to Ulysses, the greatest book of the 20^th Century…”

This is my fourth time reading Ulysses. The first time I don’t remember, other than I put it down. The second time was in Spanish; horrible life decision. The third time was when I was in Dublin, in which I thought it was well done, but not for me. So, the moral of the story is that, every time I come back to Ulysses, I find myself admiring it more and more, but never in love with the world presented, and this remains my reaction, now to an incredibly strong climax. I had to read Ulysses at this point of my life. I’m in a stage where I’m changing directions in a direction already chosen for me, and it’s been causing me to obsess a little bit with Joyce. What can I say? He finished Dubliners at 22 (it just took him forever to get it published), which makes me feel inferior in every imaginable way, and he wrote work that offered infinite new pathways for language. Joyce, whether he knew it or not, wanted Ulysses to be the last novel ever written, and it shows.

In that regard, I would say that Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written. It uses every technique, from stream-of-consciousness, journal clips, various third persons, even various characters, to construct a day in Dublin in 1904. It’s very easy to see how Ulysses led the world to postmodernism. It was probably the first novel that exhausted every possible way a story could be told, which then led to hundreds of novels that used Ulysses multitude of techniques, but without the search for a truth, a light at the end of the tunnel. It was also a novel that fused myth with the novel, compressing the entire history of the West into both the history of Leopold Bloom, a trend that later became perfected in postmodern literature (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnight’s Children, etc). What is most impressive is how Ulysses represents the ultimate mergence of the self with history. One has the sense that Joyce has taken every moment in his life, fused that with a moment with history, and as a result, made himself part of the very tapestry of Western existence, so that one can’t even read the phrase E. Pluribus Unum without it referencing something else. It is the fact that Joyce has made himself the ultimate memento, the focal point to which all the memories of Western history collide, makes me incredibly envious. I would agree with everyone who has claimed that Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written.

That being said, I don’t think it’s the best novel ever written. First, I honestly don’t believe in original or authentic art, nor in tiers, because then you get into “what’s bad for one person is true for another” argument. The only way, in my opinion, that one can really evaluate art, is as either important, art that has shifted thought in such a strong direction that one can never forget it, as great, art that moves, impassions, and inspires both the world and the individual, in such ways that one feels that one’s very thoughts, emotions, and, dare I say it, soul, has been ripped right in front of you and shown pulsing through the very work you are reading, and then everything else. Works that are that intricate that any person can see themselves in it, and works that change the very way we think, those are both rare, important, and unforgettable (coincidentally, things that are none of the above are commonplace, average, and pretty forgettable, even if they can also be very good). So, while I would say Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written, I wouldn’t put it above and over, say, War and Peace, Moby Dick, The Tale of Genji, or Shakuntala. They all did something that had to be done, weaved a story that had to exist, and for that, we should, to all of them, be eternally grateful.

Nonetheless, I am incredibly jealous of Ulysses. Joyce broke through the cacophony of traumas and memories that made him who he was to create music. He exhausted the entire history of both literature and the West. That being said, I don’t think that Ulysses did everything. Ulysses may have exhausted every trick in the book, but he did so in a way that created a world that ultimately saw the end of language as we had known it (yes, in some ways, I blame the beauty of modernism for the melancholy of postmodernism). Plus, Joyce clearly wanted to give voice to a nation, rather than distort what it means to be of a nation. He may have created a multitude of events, but a central event anchors them down, and at the bottom of that trove is the land of Ireland. Ulysses is an incredibly Irish work. In other words, Ulysses may have done a lot, but it didn’t place the globe in the context of a novel.

Thank you, Ulysses, for coming to me at a time when I had to learn that art has to be personal, that it’s not just enough to tell a story that needs to be told, but to merge oneself with the world in such a way that your very soul becomes the very history that the world looks back upon to know it existed.

December 13^th, 2011: “as new worlds replace old…”

When I was in Spain, Segovia, I saw errant knights fighting each other in the hills while archers hidden in the castle flung arrows their way. Couple with the speech my professor/tour guide Eugenio was giving us, I suddenly felt a desire to compress the history of the world into a novel. I knew that this novel had to exist even before I knew what it was about. I had dreams of clouds ascending, people changing, all the way back in high school, highly abstract thoughts that I later pinned down to the ebbs of the world. On that day, my vision was born, and with it, The Hearkening, the book I am always orbiting, writing towards, but have yet to have pinned down and constructed. I am not ready for the sheer breadth and depth the world needs. It is coming to me slowly, day by day. Maybe once I am ready to write it, I will talk about it less abstractly. Until then, it is best that the work remains plunged into my subconscious, until the pressures of my psyche have compressed it into the pearl fit for the world to see.

In Spain, I also realized how much technology had compressed our world. I saw girls playing endlessly on their smart phones while walking, dressed no differently than the New Yorkers I was used to. As I traveled, I got into conversations about Gabriel Garcia Marquez with a random old Romanian man, or used the power of Futurama or Dr. Zoidberg to bridge the gap between myself and 2 Armenians who barely spoke English. The world is compressing. I always give the example of a future fifth grade classroom, one where people from all over the world (Mali, China, India, New Zealand, if we’d even go by national identities in such a world) are doing the same math homework, speaking some form of a global language, but do not interact in a physical class room, but through the network that is more and more displacing our world. It would be a world where a Malian, Indian, and New Zealander would all practically be in the same space, or in other words, a world where, a Malian with her strong oral traditions, an Indian who clings to his foundational epics, and a New Zealander who loves to read novels, would be on in the same space, the same footing.

Which made me realize, this would be a great opportunity to equalize the world. Which made me realize, the novel isn’t dying because literature is dying, but because literature is re-energizing, rejuvenating, re-flourishing. Why can’t there be a new form that would replace the novel, in the same way the novel replaced the romance? It would be a form that is global, a form that ties print literacy, orality, and other global forms of storytelling together, thanks to the handiness of the Internet and new technology.

Unfortunately, that world can’t exist, yet, because we live in a simulation of globality, where the West tells the rest what’s best. In order to begin to view our world as truly global, at least in literature, we would have to bridge the world of the novel we currently know with the future. It wouldn’t be possible unless there was a novel that truly rewrote history in the face of the world instead of the west, first. I want to create that bridge.

Today, I had a brunch with another grandiose thinker. He wants to construct an entire system of education that is individualized, negotiated entirely through the internet. A person will be introduced to different disciplines, then choose what he or she wants to be educated in, and then will educate himself in that world, at the pace she sees fit. The professor will function as a facilitator, rather than a source of information, but most of the work is individualized, and done through the network. He sees a future where robots will walk aside humans, where humans will have plunged into the depths of technology to the point that we’ll defeat nature; why worry about dying when we can colonize new planets and find new ways to extend life?

We both make fun of ourselves in some ways. Lofty ambitions can’t truly control the future. The world turns, and people impact it, but those impacts create smaller dents than we realize. To think only of the future lofts your goals away from the world inasmuch as it exists. To think only of the present is to shield yourself from the fact that the world is always in transition. Therefore, the only thing one can do is work in the moment, while at the same time reaching for infinity.

December 14^th, 2011: “I concede, Mr. McCarthy…”

I’m currently finishing up Changing my Mind, a collection of essays by one of the few writers in the generation above mine that I respect, Zadie Smith. To sum up the essays: she’s a brilliant literary critic, albeit not nearly as interesting when she begins to delve into the personal essay form. Anywho, the reason why I feel like writing a blog post on her is because one of her essays, “Two Paths for the Novel” has spoken to me in a way it definitely didn’t the first time I read it. Back in 2009, when I was an intern at a literary agency, looking for articles to read with which I could waste time, I chanced upon an essay in the New York Times Book Review, in which Zadie argues that, right now, we have either traditional realism, or experimentalism, neither of which are healthy states of literature, but that the experimental road, or at least the one recently paved by Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, was the best bet for our literary future. At the time, I thought “cool story brah.” Then, a few years later, I flipped to this essay, and I almost didn’t want to read it. I had remembered what I had thought the essay was about, and thought, “Oh, great, another self-indulgent essay arguing for more meaningless language for the sake of language,” which to me is just as pointless as meanderingly boring realist writing that’s pretty much doing what people 200 years already perfected. My aesthetic is the writer who fuses language with story, constructs worlds of great intricacy with sentences that are unique, and if you can’t do both, you might as well back your literary bags and go home. I began Zadie’s essay with this thought in mind, that Zadie was pretty much arguing for the lesser of two evils, but one that was still pretty irrelevant to art. Then, I stumbled upon her conclusion one of her concluding thoughts.

“As you read it, Remainder makes you preternaturally aware of space, as Robbe-Grillet did in Jealousy, Remainder’s obvious progenitor. Like the sportsmen whose processes it describes and admires, Remainder, “fills time up with space” by breaking physical movements, for example, into their component parts, slowing them down; or by examining the layers of a wet, cambered road in Brixton as a series of physical events rather than emotional symbols. It forces us to recognize space as a nonneutral thing – unlike realism, which often ignores the specifities of space. Realism’s obsession is convincing us that time has passed. It fills space with time.

Something has happened here, someone has died. A trauma, a repetition, a death, a commentary. Remainder wants to create zinging, charged spaces, stark, pared down, in the manner of the ancient plays it clearly admires…. But the ancients always end in tragedy… Remainder ends instead in comic declension, deliberately refusing the self-mythologizing grandeur of the tragic. Fact and self persist, in comic misapprehension, circling each other in space (literally, in a hijacked plane). And it’s precisely within Remainder’s newly revealed spaces that the opportunity for multiple allegories arises.” (Smith 95-96)

Ladies and gentleman, with this one page, I am convinced that me and Zadie Smith are indeed of the same world, for she too realizes that, regardless of whether a story has meaning or not, that story has to take place in a space, and whereas literature up until now has used space to annihilate time, it is now time for a literature that uses time to annihilate space (see, she’s even using my own wording!). In other words, I’m interested in a literature that shows representations of time, but without ever referencing a fixed space, because of the constant movement back and forced between space that fragments the notion that we can even exist in one space. Maybe, McCarthy is interested in a similar thing, but in a different way. For me, it’s a geopolitical, physical space. For him, it’s a space that has to be orbited instead of stated, bricks that are used to construct a wall rather than an abstraction, ie brick 1 + brick 2+ brick 3 = wall, rather than “I live next to that wall.” I’ll admit that I had to put down Remainder; it was a book that I couldn’t get into. That being said, I’m always looking for more allies, and I’m pleased that Smith may have inadvertently helped me find one.

December 16^th, 2011: “say you’ll go…”

Today, in an hour, I leave New York, hopefully for good. When I first came here, a year ago, it was a great city. It was exactly what I needed for freshman and sophomore year, a place in which I could reinvent myself and hide from the traumas that made me so passive to myself in Georgia. There was so much to do, everyone and everywhere had a great energy. I clicked with people in a way I didn’t know I could. Then, I went to Madrid, evolved into a different person, and found the States not only boring, but strangely scathing. I realized that the States disturbed me so much (and not in the sense of “pissed me off,” but in the sense of “agitated my very sense of self) is because I kept framing my world as evolution rather than actualization. I am still the Kiran that I was at age 5, even if I’m changed; my traumas will always be mine, and I can’t pretend to kill them off; I have to accept them, using my art to make beauty out of myself and therefore redeem my self.

In other words, I came full circle in this city, and I’m proud of that. No longer do I hate this city because of “what it did to me,” but because it’s super noisy (despite my goal to sleep in until eleven today, I got awoken by my loud neighbors at 8:30), and its competitive edge kills me. I need some place more calm, energetic, but at the same time laidback (MADRID!).

There are many parts of myself I’m leaving behind with this city. First are my friends. I’m pleased to say that every person who went the extra mile to keep in touch with me when I left for a year stayed by my side this year, and for the most part grew to become an even greater part of myself than when I first had left them. I feel like these 5 people have grown with me as I have with them (along with the addition of one new super-friend), and I hope that I can cherish them for a lot longer than my stay in New York.

The second is my brain. I’ve realized that academia and critical thought aren’t my cup of tea, even though I still largely think in that logic. This semester has been me trying to exhaust whatever theory I have left in. I’ll probably keep the skeletons of my thoughts with me, referencing them at future readings and lectures, but keep them out of my artistic modes of thought. Frankly, I’m glad blogging has allowed me to slowly exhaust the millions of thoughts in my head, because I’ve realized I can only create a global novel by just working on every novel I write, piece after piece, in the hopes of finally reaching a novel that has encompassed the entire world’s way of being in one space. I want to create art that can speak centuries after my life has ended. I write for the globe.

The final is myself. I’m learning to become Kiran instead of Kiran 1 or 2 or 3. Time will continue to make me who I am. This is inevitable for all people. I’m different only in that I see redemption in where I’ve failed, beauty in all that I’ve lost. The world is chaos; somewhere, there can be peace in anarchic matter. Me coming to terms with New York was a step forward in finding my peace. Even if I haven’t imploded into myself just yet.

December 17^th, 2011: “a reaction to Don Quixote, the novel of great transitions…”

I don’t know if this is common knowledge, but Don Quixote’s knightly name is The Knight of the Sorrowful Face. It comes when Sancho, after Don Quixote flogs yet another unfortunate soul on the early part of his journey, says, “I was looking at your face for a while in the light of the torch that unlucky man was carrying, and the truth is that your grace has the sorriest-looking face I’ve seen recently” (Cervantes 139).

It is common knowledge that Don Quixote is a hilarious book. In fact, I never thought I’d laugh out loud so much from a book written the early 1600s (Quixote confusing “my mouth sores” with “Methuselah?” Sancho being punished by a royal court by being slapped in the nose? Priceless). At the same time, Don Quixote is one of the most profound books ever written. Even at times the humor reflects back on itself, the sheer insanity of one man who yearns for a time long forgotten, and in doing so, acts as if that time never ended (Yukio Mishima, much?). Even one of the people that Don Quixote meets on his journey finds his situation perplexing. “How is it possible that there are knights errant in the world today or that there are printed histories of true knightly deeds?” he asks (Cervantes 553). And, for the rest of the world, his question is not only correct, but in itself the statement. The time of knights in shining armor are long over in Spain; life has become sadly boring, internal, and, dare I say it, modern. Alonso Quixano, however, doesn’t want to believe that the tales he reads in his romance are no longer a part of his culture; he, taking the name of Don Quixote, decides to go on an epic tale, in the name of a Dulcinea that happens to be a random peasant girl, in the name for an adventure he can never actually complete. In the second half of the book, Quixote’s tales have become legendary, because someone chose to write them down. Now, dukes, travelers, courtesans purposefully play with Quixote and his madness, jesting him into fights they know he’ll never win, toying with his believes for a cheap laugh. It would be wrong to say that Quixote never questions (he is, after all, the Knight of the Sorrowful Face for a reason); instead, it seems that Quixote never stumbles. After a moment of self-doubt, he resuscitates himself, calls upon his squire Sancho and his horse Rocinante, and returns to journey towards the path never traveled, the path that doesn’t actually exist. Near his deathbed, Quixote returns to Quixano, and he questions why he chose to believe in a world that could never be. He dies, believing that he did was for nothing.

Don Quixote is a book that has proved to me that, one can live entirely in one’s time and be a product of said time, referencing events long passed, reacting to deeds a person of another world or history will never understand, and yet still be universal. For, Don Quixote makes it aptly clear that the end of the knightly days is just the soil in which Don Quixote happened to be planted in, and inside the blossoms that somehow never seem to wither away are buds of hope in the face of hopelessness, doubt in a world that will never understand you, the curse of being given a gift that no one will see the beauty in during a lifetime, the lies that humans tell themselves to never deject themselves from their path, be it the search for salvation on Earth or to be salvation themselves, and, yes, the most pressing of all human reactions, the need for laughter in an unpredictable and troublesome world.

December 18^th, 2011; “I’m sad...”

I’m sad that when people ask me what they do, they don’t really care about the answer. They only want a quick blurb so that they can get into deeper conversations. I would rather just enter those deeper conversations.

I get the sense that people don’t want to get to know me. I feel that most people orbit around themselves, never interested in the planet that has come to make them who they are. I not only orbit around, but visit my planet every day. I ask myself why I feel sad, why I have to make infinite chains of interrogation about something that might have very little to do with what I’m actually feeling. When I get to the bottom, I feel lost, often confused, because there was nothing there in the first place.

For some unspoken reason, at the core of every human lies an unparchable well of sadness, the sweat of which seeps into my very skin at the moments when I would least like it to. I wish I were better at hiding my sadness; I wish people couldn’t understand how I feel upon a glance into my eyes.

I’m sad, but sad is different. Most people conceal their sadness by pretending there is nothing to be sad about at all. They enjoy not feeling sad, as they should. Most of them keep their mind on the surface in the first place, nor does their mind wander into self-defensive triggers and unplanted booby traps the moment that they first touch upon how they feel. They didn’t even notice their feelings in the first place.

What do you do when you are not only the one who sets traps for yourself, but has mastered every nuance in your step, every half-foliaged wall you decide to purposefully touch, because you’re the one who wants to hurt yourself, that you’re the one who wants to seep in sadness and explore sadness knowing very well that nothing exists in sadness except sadness?

I guess the only thing to be done is to feel sad.

December 19^th, 2011: “I want to make love to a dancer...”

I want to make love to a dancer. I want to feel as I hold him in my hands the expression of an artist, a man who touches me the way his feet react to a falsetto. I want to feel as if I can own something who has a beauty that transcends time. Not someone, but something. A statue with a pulse. A body lost in a contortion that never unfreezes. A replication of my mind in the body instead of spirit of a human.

What is it about the dancer that makes me love him? Is it his perfect body contrasted with my very mediocre one? Is it his physical beauty that shall always surpass my own? Is it that vain cock of the head that comes with being so beautiful? Or, is it the fact that I not only seek art, but envy it, loathe it, and I want to mash my body up against that which I can never create, but only inspire?

Whatever it is, I’ll give you this much. Dancers are fucking hot.

December 20^th, 2011: “I feel like a stay-at-home mom during a revolution…”

I hate that I’m not published yet. I hate that I’m going to probably have to wait years before I’ll actually be able to speak in public that which my (unfortunate) close friends could probably re-recite to me. I hate that there’s clearly a revolution going on. People at Occupy Wall Street are already on the frontlines; I want to be with them, but in the form of literature. I want to be published now. I want to impact the world now. I want to unload everything which the worlds needs to hear, so that I may rest in peace, but the world will turn in the same frustration I hold for it now.

The good news is that my writing is not solely timely. I don’t think that my work will be dated if published in ten years; the worlds and their depth, their insight, their dissatisfaction, stretch not towards only the 21^st, 22^nd, and 23^rd century, but towards infinity. Fifty years from now, no one will know the difference between what happened in 2011 or 2013 or 2016; they are both years of the early 21^st century; what seems so distilled, so urgent, will be just part of the past, like every other moment of urgency that came before it.

Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still urgent for me. I’m glad to have learned that the act of feeling that my writing is no longer in my private space has calmed me down, but I can’t avoid the fact that my world as we know it, right now, in this very decade. This is the decade in which the world will continue to descend into its never ending stupidity, a culture of video games that make us feel like we’re in video games as we become taken over by the very rich, destroy ourselves for the sake of profit, and the earth is eaten up until what remains are skyscrapers. Or, the earth may re-bloom, use technology to enter the world into a state of global collectivity, where old definitions can die out for more inclusive ones, where we continue to take walks in the park even as we take those same walks in a network. I want the world to turn once again, to begin a new moment of itself, much like the Mayans strangely predicted (global, much?). I feel like I’m an unfortunately big part of this. I refuse to be silenced. I refuse to pretend that I’m like anyone else. I refuse to dim down my voice when my voice is exactly what the world needs right now. And, that makes me impatient, anxious, driven to succeed, and times, a monstropolis of my own.

Where’s a good back massage when you need one?

December 21^st, 2011: “young versus old writers…”

A writer who begins young is like a meteor. (S)he is originally overwhelmed by the sheer inertia of his talents, the sheer power of his skills, and often charges recklessly at that which he doesn’t know. After passing his first planet, he suddenly finds himself in its orbit. He wants to reach the core of this planet, and no matter how much he desires to escape, he can tell that he is falling down. The young writer begins to shed, very quickly, but powerfully, pieces of himself, shards of his skin that, no matter how small or big they may be, impact that globe. Finally, he hits the planet, and he is incinerated into ashes. At the bottom of that impact lies a hole that only he could have made, a hole grander and more compelling than any hole thus made in that planet. Until the next young meteor comes around, and finds herself tumbling towards a world she knows she never chose, but has to dent.

A writer who begins at an older age has written probably for decades before he writes a work of value. He is clearly talented, but he has no armor around his body, no gait to which his work may center upon. Yet, somehow, someday, an event occurs, a moment of such seismic gravity that the older writer finds himself inspired in ways that never were before. Suddenly, the act of writing, which was at once hefty and bothersome, yet necessary, becomes fluid, and the worlds create themselves. In the text may be no words that haven’t been said before, yet in them lie a gloss, a steel, a luminance that shines over the text and makes it seem as if all the words have become new in front of our eyes. The old writer then begins to orbit and collide like a new writer. The initial impact tends to be smaller, yet the rips that the impact made into the earth almost seem in some ways more profound.

With youth comes innovation and freshness. With age comes sagacity and wisdom. These tropes of age have remained fairly constant, and writers are no different in this regard.

December 22^nd, 2011: “masks…”

What is it with artists my generation and their preference to wearing masks? They go by pseudonyms, they never connect with the public unless scripted, they associate themselves with their meat outfits or their sunglasses. In other words, they hate being seen as themselves.

But, I have to ask why? I too understand the need to globalize the self, to take every little thing that makes me rooted in this world and toss it into the wastebasket so that only the way I imagine the world can remain. I, like them, want to say that I can be any and every person in the world, that I can create a mode of looking at the world that comforts the uncomforted and challenges the fixed. At the same time, I recognize that I can’t get away from the fact that I like men, that I’m of South Indian descent, that I’m crazy young, and that I have enough scars on my heart to sink the Titanic. That doesn’t make me any less relatable; on the contrary, it’s how I can not only make people relate to my specifics, but treat them as so distant, so distorted, that they can become universal.

Your art has to, at the end of the day, be your art, and you can try to chase the incredibly intricate and complex visions of the world that tether you to the world as much as you like, but you have to realize that it’s your doubt that becomes another person’s doubt, your longing that makes another person see a part of his ex-lover in your art. It is the moment that I exhaust that which makes me a human, transcend each and every particular to the point that they become the dust on my apartment floor, that I can become universal, that I can enter into every mind that was one never mine but is now only mine, that I can become what a Westerner would call God.

December 23^rd, 2011: “on labels…”

What I find incredibly misguided about the early 21^st century marketplace is the confusion between that which is literature and that which is marketed as literature. Great works have art have always been impossible to define by labels as vague as “science fiction” or “mystery,” but instead in their ability to uniquely channel the sensibility of the human experience in ways that challenge or complicate human existence. Works of the last ten years or so, however, have not even strived to create such intricate worlds. Works that are considered “literary fiction” are recognized as such for their decision to favor character development over plot, whereas “genre fiction” tends to favor plot over character development. Neither are effective tools in gauging literature, but they are effective in creating passive labels that can then be used to efficiently market works by writers to certain audiences. Some people think that it may be the case that, within the early 21^st century, we are seeing a market more open-minded in promoting work that is of multiple genres, that might distort and bend the space of what genre means for the sake of telling a story. That’s all fine and clear, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re in very weak times when it comes to literature.

December 24^th, 2011: “the collective…”

I just realized that we’re moving out of an individual world. Not a subjective world, where the individual is recognized as, well, unique and individuated, but a world in which that interior psychology is recognized and nested among a consciousness that every person is subjective, and that every person has right to their subjectivity; in other words, a world where a multitude sounds greater than an individual, but a multitude that doesn’t summate every individual in that multitude, but instead goes back and forth between every individual in that multitude to touch on every person’s truth rather than a grand truth. This is something that I’ve already discussed, both in relation to my own work (We Are the Poorest (Country) in the world, where there are hundreds of individual narrators, but none that tie together, with the exception of the collective “We’s,” but I don’t think of them as real characters, but allegories for the voice of a collective), and the political exterior (Occupy Wall Street), but what I’ve not realized is how that changes the West’s relationship to subjectivity. Even in modernist/postmodernist works, there is a Sethe, or a Leopold Bloom to grapple onto. It’s only in the extremely postmodern work of people like Barth where the idea of a character or language centered on character is subverted, but not in a way that then leads to a light at the end of the tunnel, but an infinite jest of, well jest. I want to keep both worlds, in that I’m very much a fan of the critiques of language of postmodernism, while at the same time seeing the special snowflake of everyone.

The problem is that the collective drowns me. I see such a beauty in a world where every person has an individuated opinion that can be accessed and then made active thanks to the Internet, and I think that’s going to be one of the touchstones of the global era. I just think of, as we continue to be compressed, as we continue to become closer together to the point that we merge, to the point that the networks that currently relate us begin to unite us, physically, mentally, emotionally, that it will be hard for people who are frustratedly individuals, even in the most collective of societies, to create worlds that are accessible only to themselves, that later become accessible to the rest of the world as they crack the eggs of their interior and reveal their splendidly yellow brim. I’m lucky. The 21^st century still rewards individualism. I just worry for people who have the “Kiran” gene in the 24^th century.

December 25^th, 2011: “random thoughts that both have everything and nothing to do with Christmas…”

I was working on my novel before my parents called me towards the Christmas tree-> I don’t know what to make of my first novel. It’s a work I’m very proud of, but I fear that no one else will like it. I really like that the stories are so mellow and human, but what if no one else gets it? What if they tell me that I’m not writing the true narratives of poor regions, even though I’ve made it clear that these are regions I made up in my head, regions that don’t actually exist in this world, but reflect truth onto ours? And, then, there’s the fact that something feels missing from it. I don’t think the thread that connects my being to language is in it. I think that some of the stories are weaker than others. I think the transitions could be even smoother. Yet, I also feel done, that this novel is over, and I’m ready to begin my next one (in fact, I wish I had begun it even earlier; that voice feels dying to me as well). I feel like I want to wait until someone else at least sees it (no one else has read the novel except myself) before I make changes that might not even be needed. I might be being a tough critic on myself. I just hate that I grow so quickly. I have become even more self-conscious of the fact that I write so prolifically, because people make it into something strange, that art should be created every ten years rather than every ten months. It’s part of the reason why I’ve delayed What Remains of Monstropolis, feeling that I should wait until I at least finish my first novel before starting a new one. But, it’s not about starting a new one versus an old one. It’s about entering into a new door of yourself that you suddenly find unlocked, the moment before that door closes. You end up spending hours thinking about how great it would be to have entered it, and that maybe you can still enter it; the door is closed, but certainly not locked. But, now, there’s so much more effort in getting that door unhinged; you try to push it, but it pushes back. You bet it would have been so much easier had you just done it when you should’ve. So, now I’m about to start this second novel, but it feels closed to me. Yet, I know I have to write it. The problem is that I have too much to say, and I’m dumping it on the page, to unload my anxieties, to feel like I don’t have to have so many worlds, so many characters, so many emotions, stuck in one body. Yet, it makes my work feel undisciplined, that I don’t have the energy to stay with something for a few years and perfect it. But, how do I stay with something when, in three months, not one, but five doors will open, and I have to choose which one to enter, if I even enter one at all?

My parents put a picture of myself in Indian formal wear as the front of my Christmas car -> I feel ugly. I hate the picture. I thought I had gotten over the fact that I hate my facial features, that I hate the way that I look, that I hate things about myself that are out of my control, that I hate there are things that are out of my control, that I can’t choose my race, I can’t choose my skin tone, and I can’t choose the way I look. I can, however, control how I see beauty in myself, and I have learned this last semester to begin the process of saying that I am good-looking, because others who aren’t as biased against my Indian-ness the way I am, others who don’t automatically think ugly the moment they see South Asian features, others who don’t look back in the mirror and think “why do people think of me as good-looking when I’m so average looking?” can somehow see something worth enjoying at my face. What hurts me the most is that I really thought I was over it; I had stopped thinking about my hatred of my Indian-ness this entire semester, and now it is back. There is something deeper here that I have yet to understand.

Sitting with my parents as they open Christmas gifts -> I am hyper self-conscious. I hate always thinking back and forth between infinite chains that only plunge deeper into self-destructive banter. I hate feeling like, the reason why I always forget people’s birthdays or find myself incredibly out of sync when everyone else is in a moment is because I live in my head. Being a person who lives in his imagination, I can’t connect to the outside world. I feel sorry for the people who care for me, that they have to care for someone so unconsciously and unintentionally narcissistic.

December 27^th, 2011: “personal facts about literature I love…”

1. I think Dubliners is Chekhovian realism. I think A Portrait of an Artist of a Young Man is realism becoming modernism. I think Ulysses is modernism defined. I think Joyce transformed with an era.

2. I think realism is an artistic aesthetic highly over-rated. It’s one thing to create representations of humans that are realistic and complex; it’s another to waft in 19^th century writing style (third person, dry, detached narration) as if it is still a part of the 21^st century.

3. I secretly want to marry a Yukio Mishima look-a-like. I have a thing for biracial Asians, and I think that type of detached sado-masochism is kind of sexy.

4. I rejoice when I read Flaubert’s letters to George Sand. There’s a letter in which Sand tells Flaubert to basically calm the fuck down and enjoy life. I’m glad he didn’t. Flaubert is considered one of the greatest writers of the 19^th century. Sand, as Tolstoy succinctly said, was forgotten and replaced by Zola.

5. I have incredibly Western taste. Even my love for Japanese literature and Indian epics could be arguably considered Western. I hope to become global in my taste.

6. I need to stop obsessing over modernism. Like, seriously.

7. I do think Romanticism, however, is incredibly under-rated. Pushkin? Melville? Hullo!

8. I want to write like I’m dipping a feathered pen and starting a pillow book.

December 28^th, 2011: “Argentina?”

Recently, I’ve started working on a love story. When I was in the American embassy in Madrid, trying to get my passport pages re-filled, I ended up making small talk to this woman who was going to the States to marry a boyfriend of hers for thirty years. The catch: they hadn’t seen each other since they had been exiled to other continents because of the Dirty Wars of Argentina. They kept in touch through letters, calls, and now, probably Skype and facebook, but they didn’t need face-to-face to keep their love in tact.

Now that I’ve ended a moment of freckled ecstasy with another human being, and old loved one has returned to my life, almost as a blip of what was once the beauty of the tip of our sea-covered iceberg, I want to write this story. The catch: I’ve never been to Argentina, and I know very little of the Dirty Wars. The good news is that, so far, the story is writing itself very smoothly. It is, after all, a story of how communication may change, but that love will always remain constant. The bad news is that I just feel so unqualified to write something that’s a representation of a place I don’t know (damn you postmodernism for making me self-conscious!!).

So, because I’m going to have to leave Portugal to see my parents during their anniversary (July 7^th), and I’ll have to wait three months because of Schengen rules to enter into the EU again, I was planning to spend that three months living in another country. I was originally thinking South Africa, and largely still am, but now there’s a part of me that wants to go to Argentina. I won’t make any money teaching English (there’s a lot of jobs, but they pay the US equivalent of 3 bucks an hour), the plane tickets are expensive (easily a thousand euros), and by then, the story might not be a world that calls me anymore. I’ll perhaps have moved on to others. I also have Argentinean friends who have promised to read my story and tell me what they think, so they’ll be around to push me in the right direction in terms of facts. At the same time, I feel the need to viscerally feel and emotionally connect with the land, the subconscious of a culture, before I write about it.

In others, I just don’t know!

December 29^th, 2011: “A Reaction to The Brothers Karamazov, but not really…”

I am in the process of slogging through the enlightening, but slightly slow The Brothers Karamazov. I find it very interesting how Fyodor Dostoevsky named the main antagonist, Fyodor Karamazoc, a maniacal patriarch that is then killed by his four sons. I wonder if these four sons represent the act of Fyodor killing himself. He did then die a year later after the book was published.

But, the real reason why I find this book badass is this sentence: “Connoisseurs of beauty could have foretold that this fresh, still youthful, beauty would lose its harmony by the age of thirty, would “spread”; her face would become puffy, and that wrinkles would very appear upon her forehead and around her eyes her complexion would grow coarse and red. She had the beauty of the moment, the fleeting beauty which is so often met with in Russian women”

SOOOO TRUEEEE!!! Although Fyodor didn’t then mention that the Russian men, two hundred years later, still bear a creepy resemblance to the Cavity Creep.

December 31^st, 2011: “It’s already 2012?”

When I was in college, I would get mad when another year passed by. I hated that I was still unpublished, undiscovered, immature, etc. It didn’t help that my New Year’s Resolution for the preceding year would always begin with “I will at least get one of my stories in a magazine by the end of this year.” To this day, those resolutions have gone unpromised; I’m still not published. Yet, when 2010 became 2011, I didn’t care about these silly resolutions. First of all, I was and still am incredibly glad that the work I wanted to publish when I was an 18 year never saw the light of day; it was horrible, and got every rejection it deserved. But, second of all, and more importantly, I realized that it didn’t matter. So many amazing things happened to me in 2010, and it helped me figure out that there’s more to life than chasing my anxieties.

2011 continues that trend. I kind of forgot up until an hour ago that a new year was beginning, because my life has become so much more continuous, so much more of a path traveled rather than a set of goals checklisted, that years ending no longer bother me. I rather follow the calendar of my heart; I celebrate when I finish a work, or meet a great friend, or taste fabulous food, rather than holidays.

Nevertheless, it’d be wrong for me to ignore all the great things that happened this year. I got to travel all over Central and Eastern Europe the earlier half of this year, which filled my “jar of insight” in ways I wouldn’t be able to describe (but, if you’re really that curious about all I learned, read We Are the Poorest (Country) in the World, because that novel couldn’t have existed without those travels). I realized that there’s a part of me that seeks beauty in places that aren’t the one I grew up in, but I also realized there’s a greater part of me that is escaping and hiding. I’ve learned to catch that worm by the tail. I’ve met so many great people, and solidified already existing friendships. Some of them even became something greater.

Looking towards the New Year, for the first time today, I’m in the mood to write my New Years Resolutions, a day in advance. None of them are based in literary stuff, because I’ve realized that the writer in me is just there; it doesn’t matter if my work gets out in 2012 or 3012; it’s worth reading because Kiran says so.

Resolution 1: I want to learn proper ways to channel my energy and release my tension (or, in other words, I want to learn how to calm down), because there’s enough neuroticism in here to electrify a field of cattle.

Resolution 2: I want to learn how to cook without the use of a microwave – my real cooking sucks.

Resolution 3: I want to learn how to take my resolutions and goals lightly; after all, I’m only human, and as a human, I can’t control when the world decides to put giant boulders and colossal sand scorpions against my way.