A Genre with No Name

(June 26 to January 4? I have no bad excuses and no good reasons. OFW.)

I am eagerly reading Love and Longing in Bombay by (sigh) Vikram Chandra, whose writing grabbed my brain, heart, and ear when I read Sacred Games. What I had initially thought was a novel turned out to be an 800-page commitment that I loved reading until about page 350, when I fell into a swirling, breathless, synapse-popping adoration of every word, phrase, and character.

But Love and Longing in Bombay is called a collection of five stories and it is not a group of stories, at least not any more than The Women of Brewster Place or The Men of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor, Sylvia Watanabe's Talking to the Dead, and other books that are of a genre that may have begun with Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. There are others that I am having trouble remembering. The Temple of My Familiar, my favorite work by my favorite writer, Alice Walker, may fall into this genre, although it has been a long time since I last read it, and my memory--- well, let's just say I do much better in the memory department than I have a right to, and I will leave miracles well enough alone.

All of these writings are the offspring of novels and short stories; their sections may be read separately, but when combined, they are greater than the sum of their proverbial parts. It may be that the characters interact in many tales and/or the themes collide and/or there is a frame that unites seemingly dissimilar narratives.

There are enough of these writings to merit their own name. So what do we call them?

• "Portmanteau" comes to mind, but it carries too strong a whiff of Lewis Carroll whimsy, and I don't know that the French would approve or that they deserve the credit.
  
  
• "Nova," a back-formation blend of "novel" and "novella"? Nah, the plural would be "novae," which is too unwieldy, and goodness knows, smacks of the villain elitism. [How did it become a social sin to be articulate? Don't we want world leaders to be both educated and thoughtful? I'll leave that rant for another time.]
  
  
• "Helix"? It works as an apt metaphor; the amino acids accomplish together what they can not do alone and form something totally different in the meantime. It is derived from a Greek word descended from the Latin word that means "to roll, wrap," according to our friends at webster.com. In DNA, a helix takes on a third dimension that "spiral" does not, and the depth of the interactions among connected narratives is what makes this my favorite genre. But, the plural is "helices" or "helixes," and the term may require more explanation than it's worth.
  
  
• My mind initially tossed up "masala" before another part of my brain shot it down, ground the idea under its heel, and kicked the mushy scraps into the gutter. The word comes from the Hindi-Urdu term for "materials, ingredients, spices" and, from the phrase garam masala, a blend of "hot spices," [Thanks again, Webster-ji.] is often used to refer to the mixture of genres in Hindi movies, which can have major strands of romance, religious tolerance, political activism, and thrillers without sweating from the effort. "Masala" is used too often for my tastes, if you will pardon the pun. At least it has not become as cloyingly ubiquitous as "awesome," one of my least favorite verbal tics in English. Of course, someone who uses "great," "cool," and (yes, dear Dog, yes,) "neat" as often as I do should not complain.
  
  
• Hmmm. "Tenement tales"? I liked it for a moment, as it refers to many inhabitants and their separateness and connectedness within one structure, but the connotations are not pretty. It does get points for alliteration, but there is the air of an urban setting that is not always accurate.
  
  
• "Condo stories" has the opposite class connotations, and "condo knitting," a style of faux knitted lace in which rows are knit alternately with one small needle and one very large needle, really frightens me, and I don't scare easily. I couldn't find any pictures that convey the horror well enough. Maybe there are sorts that do not bring about fiber nightmares.
  
  
• In addition to the DNA image, there is a woven-ness in this genre with no name that could be fuel for naming, if I knew anything about weaving. "Shuttle," "warp," "weft," nope: in order they smack of sci-fi, sci-fi and/or twisted ugly shit, and a word that will need to be explained every time.
  
  
• "Herringbone" just caught in my throat, and I am "acking" like Bill the Cat.
  

Any ideas?

To get back to where I started, one of the things I am enjoying about reading Love and Longing in Bombay is that some of the characters from Sacred Games show up in a prequel tale. (Celie and Shug Avery from The Color Purple turned up in The Temple of My Familiar, and I think I cried.) The character Sartaj Singh may in some way be based on the real-life police officer Vijay Salaskar who was killed during the attack on Mumbai in late November. Salaskar was interviewed for Maximum City: Bombay, Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta and may have been part of Chandra's research, as the two traveled together at times; see here for my blog entry about reading this.)

I have been feeling a rereading of Sacred Games coming on since I finished it. I had read about 100 pages and set it aside, then I was given a copy [Thanks, Mom!] and I read it after photocopying the 18-page glossary and using it while reading so as to not wreck my concentration or the binding of the book. I liked the novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain well enough---it is also made up of interconnected tales, but the frame story is overt enough to call it a novel--- but Sacred Games and Love and Longing in Bombay make me want to read everything Chandra has ever written.

But first, I have to read more introductory paragraphs to research papers. This example is from the writing of a 16- or 17-year-old student with no diagnosed learning disabilities; I have modified it slightly in order to protect the indefensible. I gave students guidelines about what an introductory paragraph should be, such as no first- or second-person referents and the inclusion of the thesis statement therein, but it is not evident from his writing.

My project is on the life of otter's. I'm going write on the haBitat, what they eat, How they Breed, even how they catch there food. I want to learn all about this fantastic animal.

Thesis: I am writing on how otter's live, Breed, eat. This will Be a fun project.

"Sweet Jesus, child," I thought. "It won't be fun for me. I wasn't planning to teach fourth graders how to write high school research papers. Do you believe in euthanasia?"

---Anne

P.S. I tried adding links to titles as I wrote, but the different colors and my constant parenthetical injections made the page look as if I hadn't taken my ADD meds today, but I did, even if I have used blogging today as one of the most blatant excuses to avoid grading papers. So, here are links to the books written about above. Please don't tell me I "referenced" them; I'll cry.

Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor
The Men of Brewster Place [the independent bookstore search engine wants to sell only as audio cassettes, for some damned reason] by Gloria Naylor
Talking to the Dead by Sylvia Watanabe
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker
Maximum City: Bombay, Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta
Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra

Waiting in the Wings I

Happy Birthday, Sarah!

Neither of my readers will be surprised to discover that I have had two posts mostly written but had not finished them nor put them here. I'll spare you the excuses. Here's the first, which includes an update.

The Yearbook Time Warp and Madhuri Dixit

I don’t pretend to understand the psychological processes at work, but when I look at a photograph that was taken of people who were born before about 1950, they almost always appear to be older than I am now, even if they were 18 at the time. The student pictures in a 1945 high school yearbook are of people who look older to me than my own 47-year-old face. Maybe it’s the hairstyles or eyeglasses, which I mentally transpose onto the members of the class of ’45 whom I see in the grocery store. Maybe it’s the style of photography.

Every now and then, though, I look at a person and make the same error. I usually forget that Anil Kapoor is only a year older than I am; in my mind he is another half-generation out. Maybe his staid character in Bewafaa fooled me into thinking he was older. Madhuri Dixit, whom I adore, is another such case. I first saw her in Devdas, and perhaps the first image of her looked as if it were from an old movie. Maybe it's because she appears neither underfed nor plastic surgeried and made-up beyond recognition, so I assumed she was from a time that saw beauty differently. (She is a gorgeous woman and doesn’t seem to work at it, which always impresses me. I get the feeling that she hops out the shower looking stunning.) But I kept being surprised that she was Shahrukh Khan’s (secondary) love interest, because she had registered in my brain as being one generation older than his character.

Shahrukh Khan was born almost exactly five years after I was, and Madhuri Dixit is another year-and-a-half younger. I don’t really have a good excuse.


Bad hair years

OK, so I’m usually clever enough to get out of my own way, but several weeks ago, in a local Bollywood palace, I saw a DVD entitled Dard-e-Disco: Best of Shahrukh Khan, and promptly lost my mind. Maybe it as the striped AND polka-dotted shirt coupled with sideburns. Maybe it was the blurb “BEST VISION WHICH U NEVER SEEN BEFORE” running around the box. Maybe it was the picture of a bare-chested, kneeling SRK with his hair blowing back. (Sorry, I can't bring myself to search the 28,203 pictures of SRK that Yahoo! images has listed to find that particular image. Try this or this or this instead. sigh!) Whatever was to blame, the mental maelstrom was so powerful that it temporarily washed away my aversion to bootlegged DVDs and my conviction that if I want Bollywood to be an honest business, I need to deal with it honestly, and I didn’t even check to see if it was a legitimate release.

Readers, I bought it.

It includes 65 song sequences, only two of which are from movies I had not seen (Shakti and Koyla). I have been watching in bits and pieces, and on the day I started this post, I saw “Dekha Tujhe To” from Koyla. In it, SRK and Madhuri Dixit dance around a mountain top, but it is difficult to actually see them. Look at the video, and see what distracted me.

I am trying to determine which are buried under more padding: Shahrukh Khan’s shoulders or Madhuri Dixit’s breasts. Late 80s style at its worst. Don’t ask me about the mullet, or I may cry.

I’ve seen Koyla since, and I liked it, for the most part. But I made the mistake of discovering that the movie was not made in the 80s, as I had assumed; its release date is said to be 1997. Too early for retro kitsch, too late for irony, no historical markers necessary---so what the hell were they thinking? I was almost embarrassed in one scene when all of Madhuri was lying down except for her breasts, which formed oddities never before created by biology nor architecture. (And I thought of the scene in Shashi Tharoor's Great Indian Novel in which our hero sneaks a peek at the breasts of his favorite Bollyood diva only to discover what he had seen was obviously padding. What kind of movie and sexual naivete could have kept him from knowing?)

I have an ally at the local Bollywood palace who has been suggesting late 1970s Amitabh Bachchan movies, and seeing his lean self in drag-on-the-ground bell-bottoms makes it clear why some people refer to him as Daddy Long-Legs. He must have a 48" inseam. Whether he's moralizing or clowning around, he's great fun, too! Badly choreographed (dishoom, dishoom!) fight scenes and the fact that he can't dance notwithstanding, I am liking these older movies.

So, now that I'm learning a little Bollywood history, maybe I can figure out how to count and estimate people's ages. Or figure out how old I am. A case could be made that that is the core problem.

What I'm Reading Now

From the realm of "better late than never" comes this latelatelate second post. I have loads of excuses; please don't make me bore you by reciting them.

I'm about 450 pages through the 500ish page book Maximum City: Bombay, Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta. It's taken me through the worlds of real estate, organized crime, disorganized police, quasi-sex workers, Bollywood, and how they all intersect. It's all a bit crazy-making, but the man's writing is fantastic, except for a couple of brief stereotypical references to gay men and lesbians and good-sized people. The editor could have helped with avoiding a touch of the formulaic that entered into later chapters, but I am learning about Bombay, the writing is thought-provoking in most of the right places, and he has made me laugh aloud a few times. The library fines won't be much fun to pay, but better the library than the power company.

This book will work as great background for Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, a mammoth book which I started and abandoned after running up colossal library fines. I have found out that Mehta and Chandra are friends, and were in Bombay/Mumbai at the same time, sometimes interviewing the same people at the same time. Little bitty island city.

Next up? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, of which I've read about 130 pages and then stalled out on because I am not mentally prepared to say goodbye to these folks. I sometimes slow down at the end of a good book if I'm not willing to leave the alternate world I've lived in, and this is several hundred pages and years of alternate world to bid adieu.

And, of course, there's King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan [sigh] and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema waiting to be read.

And friends to hang out with, and a kind, handsome man to ponder, and a dog who would like to go to the dog park rumored to be in Durham, and work to do, and movies to watch, and knitting to be done at places other than at boring meetings at work and at stoplights, and...