PCless: Day 3

[muckefuck]

monshu came home last night to find the walls of the office painted Ass Brown instead of the sophisticated shade of green we'd picked out. When he asked the painter about this, he confessed to having written the number of the paint chip down wrong. No harm done--he'll repaint the room at his expense--except for the time lost.

I really wish I could tell you all that being without our computer for a couple days has enriched our lives, that instead of composing detailed replies to anonymous Internet posters and watching Buzzcocks, I'm spending my evenings in deep meaningful conversations with monshu and reading the great works of modern fiction. All it really means is that I'm watching television in the evenings, a habit I'd pretty much broken myself of once the t.v. was banished to the basement.

Last night, we ended up watching a longish chunk of the Omen. I thought it would be just the movie to help lull monshu to sleep because it seems to have been directed by someone who thought Donner's version was too fast-paced and engrossing. I really can't imagine who this movie is for. Those brought up after the original will be turned off by the dearth of mayhem and paucity of gruesome deaths, and those brought up with it won't find a single twist to hold their interest. Although it's not a shot-for-shot remake à la Van Sant's Psycho, every scene is a monument of faithfulness. Eventually, I switched over to Jeepers Creepers, which is just the shlocky shocker for anyone who's ever longed to see the boho guy from the Mac commercials get horribly mutilated.

So, yes, Döblin is on hold while I wrap of Kiran Desai's The inheritance of loss. It's a solid good read that mercifully avoids most of the usual pitfalls of Desi lit. I'm not sure if I'll jump right into Vikram Chandra's Sacred games or pick up something else (Rushdie's Shalimar? Note a theme emerging) for a while, since much as I'm interested in the further adventures of Sartaj Singh, I'm not sure how ready I am for a 900-page novel at this point.

Comments

[caprinus.livejournal.com]

The sophisticated shade of green -- cousin of the superintelligent shade of blue, Hooloovoo?

Anyway, I'm wondering about the way you write titles. Do you follow a certain style-guide/professional habit?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Professional habit. According to AACR2, it's not necessary to capitalise all significant words in titles. So for books only, I follow normal capitalisation conventions (e.g. Love and longing in Bombay, The brothers Karamazov, etc.).

[caprinus.livejournal.com]

LOL, I almost wrote in my comment "are you a librarian?" -- but memory insisted "no" (based on what I am not sure), and I was curious to see where else one picks up this particular habit. My internal bet was that you went to school in France. But your familiarity with AACR2 indicates a library background, so perhaps the initial guess was right and its rejection based on insufficient data.

(I suppose technically I am not a librarian either, as in I don't have my MLIS, but I am a cataloguer at a library).

[wiped.livejournal.com]

i just woke up from a nap in which i dreamed that i met you in a bookstore, and you used the word "mexicute" which i vowed to incorporate into my vocabulary. just FYI.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid to ask what that word even means!

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

What are the usual pitfalls of Desi lit? I've never read any ...

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure it's fair to single out South Asians here, since it's not like I haven't seen the same sort of offering from immigrants of other backgrounds. But I literally picked Desai's work out of a pile of books which were all semi-autobiographical Bildungsromane, the first novels of young bourgeois 1.5 and 2nd-generation immigrants from the Subcontinent. Yes, one of the storylines in Inheritance of loss concerns a young man from Kalimpong struggling in Harlem to fulfill his father's dreams, but differs both in being from a working-class perspective for a change and in its denouement. As I complained to monshu, "Write what you know, okay, but don't bore us!"

For this reason, I'm going to be interested in seeing how Rohinton Mistry's family novel shapes up. So far, only one of the short stories I've read from him is plainly autobiographical; most of them took place in the same Parsee apartment complex back in India so I got a variety of perspectives instead of the same tired "middle-class kid torn between two cultures" stuff you see everywhere.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

bah. I was torn between two cultures being part kraut in England, and now I'm a pre-stressed migrant in the US, while I'm doing my best to get my kids infected with a Brazilian cultural background. I'm hoping that if I expose them to enough different cultures, and let them know that it's OK that they have different some experiences from their friends then they won't be able to form clear national identities and we can get past all this bullshit.

OTOH, they'll probably rebel and turn into pseudo Texan nativists, or something. gah.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

some different, obviously. I've been writing, bear with me.