book... reactions

waiting to hear from a restaurant on whether on i can do a review of them or not.
perfect blogging time.

so i checked out three books from the public library to last me on my week-long trip visiting my parents in NC - two of them the middle and conclusion to the terry goodkind trilogy, wizard's first rule, and another called the jane austen book club, which was a staff recommendation that i spotted at the library, and picked up because i've read all of austen's books anyway. but it would have helped if i had read them more recently, coz the only chapters in which i could really see the author's art were the ones dealing with persuasion and pride and prejudice. anyway, at home i found two boxes i have been searching for for ages, of my old books, mostly from my english major, but some others as well. picked out ender's game, because i had already finished the three library books by my third or fourth night there.

so, this is what i figured out:
throughout my reading of all the books, i kept recalling something a fiction workshop professor told us on the first day of class (back in 2004) - that when you are writing fiction, the best approach is to let your characters carry the story. develop them, let them carry the plot along - don't start with a plot idea, or a theme, or anything like that. while i did write a story from a theme not long after this that won some recognition, i still think the character thing is a good idea, because of course what really carries you through a good novel is when you care about the characters in some way.
so, is that what makes a "good" book? i don't know... i know that i couldn't put stone of tears or blood of the fold down, except toward the end of the second one because the plot started to feel contrived and way too complicated. it may not have been the best writing in the world, and not everything about the characters truly drew me in, but the storytelling was excellent. and what made me check the books out in the first place was my desire to find out what else happened to richard and kahlan after the first book, and what did it mean for darken rahl to have only been an "agent," etc etc. cared about the characters, cared about the world they lived in.
the austen book took me longer to read. there's a different taste to these contemporary fiction books... not quite the feast that fantasy books used to be for me. i can tell from reading it that fowler is a "good" writer, and it is a "good" book - well-crafted, clever, literary in more than one sense because of the austen echoes. but honestly, some of the characters in the book club just slipped in my mind and then out again... allegra stood out, because she was gay and then betrayed by her partner in a writing group sort of way; sylvia, because she was allegra's mother; grigg, because he was the only guy in the group and the youngest child in a family with three older sisters... and see, i can barely remember any of the others. somebody named bernadette. prudie. don't recall anything much about them.
if i write "literature," if i want to get published, is this the sort of stuff i have to write?

orson scott card was so, so, so very different. i thought i had read ender's game before, but i didn't recall the ending this time around - maybe i had started it and never finished. i felt so much for little ender that i went back and reread the ending a few times (since i still had a couple of days left in NC). i thought about it, and figured that (similar to another thing the fiction workshop guy told us) the best of any genre of literature tells you something true about the human condition. and this is what i learned from ender's game: that we destroy that which we don't understand; that love can be healing, but only if we open our hearts to it.
i couldn't help comparing ender wiggin to frodo baggins. frodo saved the shire - but not for himself; he had to leave for the havens in the end. ender saved earth, but in the end he couldn't return there either. but frodo's departure at the grey havens was basically a sort of death, whereas ender - by traveling to the new colony, and then traveling with his sister in search of a home for the hive queen - had a sort of almost-immortality, as he aged in space travel and not in earth years. and it was his sister's love that made this possible. did frodo simply close himself off to the possibility of healing? why do we just accept that he was no longer whole ("i am wounded... it will never really heal...") and could not remain in the shire even for those who loved him?

another interesting thought that popped up... there is much talk in the goodkind trilogy about how wizards use people in order to help humanity... i guess because they have great vision and can fit their "usees" into the puzzle they are trying to piece together. so, zedd uses richard, adie, etc; richard uses the mud people, du chaillu, the sisters of light, his mord-sith guards, etc. and in ender's game, everybody uses ender - colonel graff, anderson, and even valentine is used by graff in order to use ender, the ultimate goal being to train the universe's best military genius to defeat the "buggers."
but in the end, valentine also uses ender, volunteering him without his permission to be governor of the first human colony on an older bugger world - but mostly to make sure that he ends up going the same place she does, because she loves him. and she tells him this, when he chafes for a moment:

"Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you. I didn't come here because I wanted to be a colonist... I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore."

i wonder about this. did gandalf use frodo, too? he told him once, even the very wise cannot see all ends. it's important to LOTR that there is a Power, a providence sort of thing, that transcends the power of the wizards and of sauron himself. ("bilbo was MEANT to find the ring"). but maybe gandalf saw more than others could, and knew frodo was the only one with the hardiness (and tookishness) to carry out the deed. he knew gollum had a role to play, and they certainly all used gollum toward the noble end of destroying the Ring.

is this what determinism means? that we are all used by God? and that it is our greatest honor to be used so, the best we can do to fill the role He lays out for us? i get the feeling card's idea is more of a, well, secular idea... not like tolkien's thoughts. but one can always stretch the idea so.

speaking of tolkien, we watched donnie darko last night. much more interesting than i thought it would be. but hubby was disgusted that drew barrymore produced it, and thought the whole "cellar door" (that is the tolkien reference, for anyone who wants to look it up) thing was stupid. i can sort of see it, though...

so it turns out i'll be doing a review of the restaurant, after all, but not till tomorrow morning (that's when i'll go meet them). it's the third pizza place i'm doing in two months... i expressed that concern to my editor, but he said, "well, people eat a lot of pizza." true, true!

book review?

well, not really.
spent some memorable hours this weekend in new york with one of my dearest college friends and her absolutely edible one year old son - it was so exciting to see some of the things that musa will be doing in just a few months! keith vikram - half scottish, half south indian - is already cruising, tentatively, and even doing things on command - he'll even breathe in and out like a little yogi in imitation of his momma, and can pick out the "eight" shape from his foam floor mat on demand. he says "mm-BAAA!!" to mean a number of things, and even though he isn't recognizably identifying anything or anyone with words it's so amazing to see how much he understands of words he hears.

anyway, so my dear friend, who shares the edinburgh connection with me (she studied there in 96-97 as an undergrad, i was there in 97-98 for grad school while she was in her senior year back home, and then she went back in 98-99 for the same grad program i had done) gave me a gift of two alexander mccall smith books. not the no. 1 ladies' detective agency series, for which he is apparently most well-known, but two light-hearted fiction books on life in edinburgh. just finished 44 Scotland Street, will continue with Espresso Tales, probably tonight.
so this isn't really a review, because i read through it too quickly to assess it with confidence. so i'm really just reacting when i say reading 44 scotland street was like savoring a... napoleon, maybe? something crispy and light and delicious, maybe frosted or at least cream-filled, with some layers to it, some depth of flavoUr, a delicate sweetness, a lingering pleasant aftertaste.
there was enough of edinburgh familiar to me to be delightful, a sense of both the old, ordered beauty and almost-pretentiousness of the place (it would be sacrilege for me to say actual pretentiousness), but enough of what i did not know to make me see that there is a sense of the city i will never get... basically the part of it that is, well, white, and goes out to bars with casual acquaintances and whatnot. which is a lot of it, i know. but i was too busy pretending with my good friend there to be the Fundamentalist Lassies of Bonnie Scotland (this was before fundamentalist became such a bad word in both muslim and non-muslim circles that even i couldn't play with it anymore). so i got to know the side of edinburgh that could get a free piece of burfi in bismillah grocers, that scoffed at the edinburgh uni MSA and its problems, that actually volunteered to give tours to visitors when the new masjid finally opened even though i was supposed to be finishing up my dissertation (don't worry, i finished it in the end anyway).
still, mccall smith was a very fun read... very fun... ya allah, was i really an english major, or was that all a dream??
it's funny, the things that struck deeper chords in the book rang from the characters themselves... well, that's not funny, really, that's the way it should be, isn't it. but even though pushy irene and her precocious son bertie are a bit exaggerated for comic effect, i recognize their situation so well... and i like that some of the characters have moral conflicts over something like a little lie. halfway through the book i came to expect that any character in the middle of an act of deceit or furtiveness would be immediately caught out, and that was kind of fun too... those are the kinds of scenes in movies i can't bear watching. something about moral suspense is just difficult for me. it would be so much easier if everyone just didn't do things they weren't supposed to do.

alright well, time for maghrib, and musa is well into the books on the bottom of the bookshelf now... currently eating a humprhey carpenter book instead of the squash i pureed so beautifully for him just an hour or so ago...

i wrote, therefore i was

okay so i wrote something! a scene, that's all. a little sketch. it felt so good. took it to the writer's group, got a couple of suggestions. since i never write anything and i barely ever blog (at least compared to koonj) i'm gonna post it here. it's not forever long, i don't think. well, i'll see what it looks like.

meanwhile, i have a question for all da mommaz out there: why is it that once you have changed a poopy diaper, no matter if you wash the baby, change the clothes, lotion him up, wash your hands, and everything, two hours later you are still getting whiffs of poop? it just doesn't go away! i don't understand it! there's no poop in his diaper or anywhere on him or me but i still smell it! aaah!!

okay here's my scene. she is a synesthete, by the way, that was my crazy idea. and for those who actually read this blog, i used my dad's childhood story which i wrote about a month or two back...

Mariam drooped her head slowly, slowly to the crook of her elbow, letting the sharp edge of her straight-cut hair slice gently into the scratched desk. She imagined she could hear the whisper-thin sound, each strand cutting into the soft, old wood with her miniscule movements. If she moved slowly enough, imperceptibly enough, Ustad Maqbool might not notice at all –
“Mariam!”
The teacher’s voice barked out, prickly as the stubble shadowing his flabby double chin.
As always, she tasted rain in her mouth, sweet and pungent all at once, when he said her name. She jerked upright, pulling her arms off the desk. If only she could make her body stay stiff – push a board or a rod, maybe Ustad Maqbool’s punitive yardstick, through her spine and just keep it up straight, tape her eyes open, and drift away like that… Ustad Maqbool never asked the girls any questions, anyway, just wanted to make sure they were always listening and attentive.
Mariam began to listen again. This was math class, the most boring of all. At least in Urdu class she could focus on the words, roll them around her tongue in whispers, and when they read Iqbal it was a feast, even if she didn’t understand all the words.
Tundi baad-e-mukhalif se na ghabra, ai auqab
Ye to chalti hai tujhe oonchay orhanay ke liye
[i had a translation here for my writing group but i took it out because i think i'll ask someone for a real translation (volunteer anyone?)... i dunno if i even got the urdu right, feel free to correct that too]
Falcon– that tasted like wood, but living wood, a young tree in spring rich with sap and slow water. But flying, that was gritty, dirty, earthy, like wet sand gloppy with the residue of snails and slugs and insects. And fear tasted somehow sweet, with an unhealthy tang, like an overripe banana.
She tried to keep listening. “Saath,” seven, plus “paanch,” five. But the numbers were just numbers, flat, not even stale, nothing, sounds with no savor. How could she concentrate on something she could see or hear, but not taste at all? Her mouth felt dry. At the end of class she could get some water.
She kept her back straight, but her head drooped again, this time forward, with her chin falling to her collar. Staring resolutely at the patterns of scratches on her desk, she tried to keep her eyes open while thinking of things to keep her awake.
A sunlit pool – a pond at the edge of the village. Walking there with her big brother, past the new photographer’s house, with the grand studio and all the wonderful painted backdrops, pictures of valleys or fields or lavish palaces, where she and her brother and sisters had sat so very still while the old man fiddled with the great camera under his brown, dirty curtain. They slowed as they walked, wanting to see if he was home, taking portraits, but the dusty doorway was closed, the windows still.
At the pond, Mariam and Burhan – the two youngest of eight – reached into a little drawstring cloth bag and rolled into their fingers the little balls of oiled aata Amma had given them from making her morning parathas. Mariam snatched the tiniest balls first – she thought the fish would like those better – and tossed them one by one gently into the water, watching anxiously for any tiny bubbles that might mean a fish had popped up to swallow one. Spring sunlight glinted off the surface, making it difficult to see.
If she were a fish, she could pop up like that to see the sunlight whenever she wanted, then wiggle back down with a flourish of her tail into the cooling water when it got too hot. She imagined as deliciously as she could – her squirmy, scaly body, with the energy to flick and dart through the water even more easily than a bird could fly through the air. Mariam loved this vision – she would picture herself as the fish and say the words to herself: water was like a green plant; fish was sweet and creamy, like rasmalai milk; sunlight was like sucking the plain clean cotton of a new dress.
“Mariam! This is the last time!”
And again, rain washed out her sunlit daydream.

writing, writers, once written

i am sitting in the living room trying to put something very fast together for my writer's group meeting tonight. we all decided (the five of us) that we would try each submitting something for each meeting, no matter how small - one has written a 99-word piece, for example.
but of course, i can't think of anything! well, there is something i have wanted to write for a while, about how becoming a mother has changed my relationship with my own mother (for the better alhamdulillah), but that will take too long for something i ought to email everyone within the next hour so they can at least read it before 7 p.m. so i might just write some sort of small sketch.
ya allah - ya haqq! as irving would say :) - this used to be my fire! if someone - a professor, a friend - told me i had to write something and i could write anything i wanted - a blank page was like a gift, the mouth of a sunlit secret forest path, a turn around a corner that opened into a valley of sublime beauty, a world where anything, anything, anything could happen! how narrowly age constricts our dreams... (but it's not age, i know that, i know that).

last night i left musa with my mother-in-law for an hour and a half (and he was fine, alhamdulillah, even ate cereal and squash and had JUST fallen asleep when i got back) and went to a book reading by myself. such an alien thing to do - felt so alien to be driving at night without any little face to look for every couple of minutes in the rearview mirror, without worrying that i'm turning or braking or accelerating too hard for my wee passenger - felt so alien to be sitting in a small independent bookstore full of adults, listening to adults speak (so articulate! so poetic!) about literature and culture and american perception of the Other after september 11 and about the tribulations of trying to get published. in the car i felt so alone, not in a lonely way, just so strange to be alone, and i remembered vividly the first time i realized i wasn't alone after i found out i was pregnant, driving to work one morning.
anyway. i went to hear african-(american?) writers chris abani and doreen baingana read from their books becoming abigail and tropical fish. i went because i was in a class with doreen back in 2001 or so, a creative nonfiction workshop, and thought she was an amazing writer, and it's so cool that she was published - and random house just recently put her book out as paperback. bought it, will read it. but both were amazing writers, although whenever i interact with other writers i almost always end up wondering why people write SO much about sex and why it is so artsy and literary to do so. but, it was well done, nongratuitous, etc, so, whatever. just, tell me now, will i never make it as a writer if i don't have some sort of sex scenes in my novels? urgh.
but, God. the writers. they were funny, witty, smart people. it's like a different world. now i'm here in my pajamas and glasses. i wish i could remember what they said. especially for my writer's group tonight.

so i need to write something, now, fast. for inspiration i went to my oooooold angelfire web page, no i'm not linking it here, where i once planned to have a whole section devoted to literature, blah blah blah. this was long before blogs, by the way. i have a few poems there, stuff i wrote either in college or right after so everything's at least six or seven years old and up to 12 years old. haven't written any poems since the first year of my marriage. but, what the heck. here's one i wrote some random time, i think probably seven years ago, around the time my brother got married - no, it was after, so six to seven years ago. because it was after a late evening trip i took with him and my bhabhi to the beach at wilmington - i remember, clearly, the exhilaration of praying maghrib with my sister-in-law out loud on the beach, and then tripping in the sand as we walked after nightfall. but that's not what i wrote about... the poem doesn't mean anything, it's not like koonj's poems.
musa has managed to pull a book out of the bookshelf and yank off its cover. which he is now gleefully eating. stephen king's "on writing". ain't it strange? i never bought this book - it came in the mail to me a couple of years ago through amazon.com, but i have absolutely no idea at all who sent it to me. not a clue. but it's a great book. so thank you whoever it was. here's the poem...



at the feet of the sleeping continent,
two darknesses merged in silence:
sleepless ocean/wakeful sky,
mirroring restless obscurities.

moonless blackness starred with grace,
watching tossing seas of pearled unconscious
reach loving arms to treacherous sands
and withdraw, falling short every time...

near and far are vague and dark --
unseen earth, and water melds with heaven
on the horizon -- but here, at the shore,
the broken reach of the sea
crashes luminous and jewelled at my feet.

feeding musa

first jarred baby food, actually - organic carrots (since there might be some truth to the whole nitrate thing). it's just as well... i did make him my own carrots before, but this jarred one is sweeter.
anyway, i was going to write about all my feeding tricks, but i have to go clean him off now, he's getting antsy and needs a diaper change, too...