literature

I wrote this story for children sometime back, improving on a vaguely-remembered story my grandmother told me, and gave it an end. This is my translation of it in memory of all pilgrimages and boat journeys of childhood: In the distant town of Alappuzha, our Ammini Amma bought a fistful-of-cumin and a fistful-of-mustard from a … Continue reading A Children’s Tale: Fistful-of-Cumin and Fistful-of-Mustard go on a Pilgrimage

With this collection of short stories, Imtiaz Akhtar makes his bold debut. Kafka Sutra is the sort of book that as a teenager, I would have loved to sneak from my mother’s shelf, and that as a mother, I would secretly enjoy letting my daughter or son whisk away.

Awakened by his presence, I was startled but not frightened. Somehow he seemed familiar and non-threatening.  He stood there in the dim light of a single energy-saving bulb from my reading lamp.  I put aside my dog-eared, yellowed copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five. A Children’s Crusade, arose from my chair, and approached him for a closer look.

Sixty days. A year. Five years. A week. A day. An hour. Right now.
That’s the curse of addiction, those needles, inhalants, the entire barbarity of cheap booze shilled by the chosen ones, the money changers, all amortized and bundled debts in trans-capital, sold next to the playground, the trees cut down for billboards pronouncing sexual prowess and football hero-dom with the flick of the Mike’s Hard Cider or a fucking Bud.

Imagine Moscow being taken over by some international corporate cartel. By a monster which has its own factories and office buildings, security services, private prisons, re-education (‘training’) centers, and its obedient mass media outlets. Imagine that it also has detailed databases on almost everyone who really matters in the capital.
Imagine that human lives suddenly don’t matter. People are only expected to produce and consume; they become fully disposable.

For the sake of brevity, the posting is all about pushing back into the amnesic chambers of the North American mind, dendrites rewired to believe the world is a place where only one species – Americas Consumo-Erectus – is allowed to live with life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and me-myself-and-I religion.

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
— Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator

 it is through mimesis, (identification with the mirror image) that one gains a sense of unity, self-containment and mastery over the body. If that was all that there was to it, humanity would be condemned to dwell forever entombed in the hell of mirrors. However, the identification with an Other in the mirror opens out the possibility for symbolic thought.

Jay Dyer
21st Century Wire
Before there was Back to the Future, there was the early phase of science fiction propaganda embodied in Fabian H.G. Wells’ 1895 novella, The Time Machine.  Wells’ work is both entertaining and important for the course of modern literature, yet also calls for an analysis given the prevalence of propaganda functioning at many levels within the novel.