Indian Writing

IBN’s Rajeev Masand to Abhishek Bachchan, about (yawn-shudder-and-yawn) KANK:

Your character portrays an ideal man and perhaps an ideal husband. He is one who loves his wife unconditionally, is betrayed by her and later forgives her and embraces her as a friend.

****

And here’s Abhishek on SRK:

I am not presumptuous or precarious enough to think of myself as equal to Shah Rukh yesterday, today or tomorrow.

Other words that begin with P: procrastinate, perverse, persimmons, penguin, pink.

Methinks AB Jr is clearly the pineapple of politeness.

Ryszard Kapuscinski interviewed by Bill Buford. An old interview, but very worthwhile.

You know, sometimes, in describing what I do, I resort to the Latin phrase silva rerum: the forest of things. That’s my subject: the forest of things, as I’ve seen it, living and travelling in it. To capture the world, you have to penetrate it as completely as possible.

Buford:—But using story to make sense of this forest of things, to give it shape and coherence? For your writing certainly relies on narrative.

Kapuscinski: Yes, story is the beginning. It is half of the achievement. But it is not complete until you, as the writer, become part of it. As a writer, you have experienced this event on your own skin, and it is your experience, this feeling along the surface of your skin, that gives your story its coherence: it is what is at the centre of the forest of things.

…

Why am I a writer? Why have I risked my life so many times, come so close to dying? Is it to report the weirdness? To earn my salary? Mine is not a vocation, it’s a mission. I wouldn’t subject myself to these dangers if I didn’t feel that there was something overwhelmingly important—about history, about ourselves—that I felt compelled to get across. This is more than journalism.

This is one of the reasons why I love blogs. You read about people whose lives are so different from yours. And still they’re similar in all kinds of gimme-a-break ways.

This is a nice post. And this:

Later on, my last job of the night, I took a middle-aged heavyset guy to Glendale, Queens. The entire ride there we talked about the rising price of gas and he explained to me in complicated detail the mechanics of our economy and how gas prices were going to exceed people’s need for the stuff and eventually prices would go down, etc, etc.

After a while, he asked if I was a student. I get asked this one a lot since I look a lot younger than my 30 years. I said no. Then he asked, “Well do you do something else besides driving the cab?” I’ve learned over the past few years that people really like it if you’re doing something else. They don’t like to hear that you’re just a cab driver, they want you to be working towards something.

I’ve started to tell people different things, but a lot of times I just give some vague, weird, embarrassed answer like, “I guess I’m trying to be a writer these days,” or something like that. Sometimes I’ll even tell them about the blog, but most often not…

(via The Sheila Variations)

How glorious to return to the internet with one of the best things I’ve read lately - Martha Nussbaum’s devastating review of Harvey C. Mansfield’s book Manliness. Many thanks, Elizabeth, for the email!!

To Nussbaum,

it seems appalling that Mansfield has spent decades teaching great philosophical texts to undergraduates who cannot easily tell a careful reading from a careless one, or low standards from high ones — especially when the teacher keeps portraying himself as the bold defender of standards. Undergraduates typically take a while to learn to analyze the arguments in Plato logically and to care about things like validity, ambiguity, and contradiction. Many of them, then, will not notice how riddled with logical error and verbal ambiguity their teacher’s pronouncements are. That is the sort of thing that they are in class to learn. But surely other, older people know. How did someone whose every paragraph is a stake in Socrates’s heart come to be an exemplar of philosophical seriousness?

Almost.

Nussbaum takes on the John Wayne nursery-school of thought to point out what feminism is about:

What feminists have sought above all is a society in which there are no sex-based hierarchies, in which the sheer luck of being born a female does not slot one into an inferior category for the purposes of basic political and social functioning.

Elizabeth links to Mansfield’s letter in reply, such as it is.

She also links to another classic - Said’s 2001 evisceration of Samuel Huntington.

And via the incomparable Arts and Letters Daily, I offer you yet another - Nussbaum on Judith Butler.

Enjoy!