Bird Feeder - Showcasing Hunger Rules in Nature?

Easy food at break of day!

Manna for my wretched wings,

wintered out with desperate flying

to find some food and prey.

 

 

A surge, a measured swoop

to grab the rim n hang on to it.

Tentatively balanced,

to feast on every seedly bit.

 

The sparrows wait

the cardinals hover,

as I feed feverishly

till I can hold no longer.  

It is now the cardinal’s turn;

the red one on the ring.

In his hurry, he bangs the rim

and the feeder begins to swing.

 

Paying for his rushed entry,

the cardinal must now wait;

warily watching the tasty treats

until the swinging stays.

 

Crazy Cardinal!

For want of patience,

endures wrathful screeches

and a feeding time reduced.

 

One peck, two peck,

and now he must go.

Without a grudge he takes a bow,

soon alights a humble sparrow.

 

The line is growing, the bounty waning

I fly out to tell my friends…

finches, chickadees, blue jays and all,

still wethering Michigan's snowfall!

 

 

Hunger Games...

the humans play.

We birds know better

to simply share and obey

the Hunger Rules of Nature.

Verdi's 'Otello' at Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center - Spellbinding Musical and Drama.

What could be more enthralling than to watch the 321st Metropolitan Opera performance of GiuseppeVerdi's Otello,  from 'grand tier' box number 18 of the Lincoln Center?  This was an unforgettable experience for two reasons. First of all, I had never watched a Shakespearan Opera, let alone one of Verdi, and then getting to watch it from the center parterre premium seating at Lincoln Center was simply wonderful.

Otello is composer Giuseppe Verdi's Italian opera in four acts based on Shakespeare's play Othello with Jose Cura in the title role, opposite Krassimira Stoyanova as Desdemona and Thomas Hampson as Iago. This opera was one of Verdi's last ones and had its world premier in Milan in the year 1887 and is "often cited as Italian opera’s greatest tragedy, a miraculous union of music and drama. It is a musical masterpiece as profound philosophically as it is thrilling theatrically."

Shakespeare's Othello was one of my lesser liked tragedies of Shakespeare, but watching Otello has made me rethink that.  The intensity of emotion that the music and the singing aroused in me was  was almost unbelievable. Stoyanova in the role of Desdemona was magical; particularly as she sang'Ave Maria', her last piece, an emotional goodnight to Emilia her attendant. That piece, clearly foreboding Desdemona's death, had me in tears that were unstoppable. The orchestra, conducted by Alain Altinoglu, and the singing at that point felt almost as if the duo were plucking at my heartstrings "with every instrument playing as softly as possible, pulsing like the last breaths of a dying being."  I was absolutely overcome by the sheer volume and intensity of emotions I was experiencing.  This was despite the fact that I did not understand a word of the singing since it was in Italian, and I did not dare look at the translation provided on the ticker tape lest I miss something that was happening on stage. The fact that I knew the entire story of Othello to the smallest detail did only but enhance the experience.

There are at least five more performances of Otello scheduled at Lincoln Center in the next few weeks;  this is a must see for anyone who appreciates art and /or music in any form.

   

Anna Karenina - Stoppard and Wright's Adaptation of Tolstoy's Mega Classic Fails to Impress.

Much as I didn't want to watch another cinematic version of Leo Tolstoy's classic novel Anna Karenina, I did.  When the movie was released in 2012, I was intrigued by the fact that the vast landscape the novel rides through was to be captured in a theatre mould.  However, the movie did not make waves after its release, and I soon forgot about it until the Oscars this year where Anna Karenina won the 'Best Costume Design' award. Having seen it this week, my resolve not to see another adaptation of Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina stands resolute, even strengthened.

I was impressed by the fusion of theater and cinema that Joe Wright brought about especially the scene where we along with Anna and the others watch a horse race on stage! However, this embellishment did little to redeem my interest in the movie which transformed Tolstoy's classic saga, his literary opus into a drama about a fobidden love that unfolds in glamorous Russia of the 1830s. Needless to say, Jude Law and Keira Knightly played out their parts well, but made no lasting impressions that would have raised the movie to the classic proportions of its literary counterpart.     

Paul Theroux Captures a Changing-India in "The Elephanta Suite"

For some reason, I received several of Paul Theroux writings as Christmas gifts this year. In the past, I've read short essays and articles of Theroux in magazines and newspapers, but The Elephanta Suite is the first book of his that I read. The Elephanta Suite consists of three novellas, in all of which the protagonists spend some time at the Elephanta Suite in Mumbai.

The title of the book is what made me pick it up over the other Theroux readings waiting on my bookshelf such as The Lower River and The Kingdom by the Sea. The title piqued me because I remembered visiting the Elephanta Caves near Mumbai as a child, and I was intrigued by the fact that Theroux, an American writer, had perhaps used the same as a title to his book of novellas.  Unfortunately, I still haven't been able to come up with a convicing deeper meaning to the title other than the fact that Elephanta Suite is a hotel room that features in all three novellas of the book. Regardless, I'm still pondering over whether Theroux used the creativity, the nurturing, and the destruction artistically portrayed in the Elephanta caves as the underlying theme for the three novellas. Seemingly a little far fetched, but I can see how the concept of Vamadeva, Anugrahamurti, and Bhairava, different avatars of Shiva in those caves, could trigger literary imagination such as Theroux's, who is both a writer of fiction and an acclaimed travel writer as well.

Although the three novellas are looped  together by their setting and their American protagonists, each novella has a distinct flavor and a unique after taste. The first novella The Monkey Hill  has a rich American married couple visiting an Ayurvedic Spa resort near Mumbai in an effort to understand and sort out a tenuous relationship. Theroux in the course of this novella doles out the expected and the surprising to his readers as we follow the two protagonists "in search of kicks and watch with mounting trepidation as their blindness to cultural nuances, their first-world illusions of invulnerability and their reckless sensuality lure them into dark and fatal corners where their traveler’s checks and consulates can’t save them."

The second novella, The Gateway of India is about Dwight, a germophobic young businessman from Boston, seeking new outsourcing deals in Mumbai for his American company.  He is on a second visit to India, a place he says is "dirtier, smellier, more chaotic and unforgiving than anywhere he’d ever been. ‘Hideous’ did not describe it; there were no words for it. It was like an experience of grief, leaving you mute and small.”  In fact, Dwight when we first see him, could well be espousing Kipling's, 'Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet'.

The Elephant God, the last of the three novellas, impressed me the most in that it came together neatly at the end; perhaps, that's how Theroux wanted it to be. In fact, I understood the earlier two novellas better after reading this third novella. This novella deals with the plain-Jane Alice, a graduate of Brown who very soon figures out that the real India is not akin to what she saw in the movies, nor is it like what some native writers had made it appear because 'Where were the big, fruitful families from these novels, where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men?' It is with these unanswered questions in mind that Alice sets out to seek enlightenment at the Sai Baba Ashram near Bangalore. Truly, 'a leap in the dark' for her in Theroux's words because it will leave her 'a different person at the other end'. 

The Elephanta Suite, published in 2007, could have paved the way for writers such as Anand Girdhardas who tried to capture the essence of a changing-India, except that Theroux, in this book,  does it so casually, yet deftly with the elan of a master writer. Unwittingly, Theroux's dragnet of call centers, god-men, child prostitution, and other socio economic realities of changing -India are laid bare to the reader, who is left awed and enlightened 'at the other end'! In the Elephanta Suite Theroux has brilliantly used his mastery as travel writer and fiction writer to illustrate the face of a changing nation as also the changing psyche of its inhabitants. He has definitely stripped the stereotypical romance and exoticism that India has long been associated with, and instead he presents a snapshot of contemporary India that is 'swarming, seductive, anachronistic, and which has a disorienting dynamism' that defies definition even as it demands a deeper delving into the human condition of those Theroux calls the 'accessible poor' and who constitute a significant majority.

Having enjoyed reading Theroux's "The Elephanta Suite', I now plan to read his other books that have been waiting on my book shelf since Christmas.
 

George Orwell's 'Dilemma' Remembered.

"A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl's bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?"

by George Orwell

"A writer's starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.... I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.....The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us."

Orwell's dilemma lives on!

Ang Lee's Movie "Life of PI" Illustrates 'Life Will Defend Itsef, No Matter How Small It Is!'

The failings of the flesh are clearly more powerful than the refrain of religion, or so Ang Lee’s movie “The Life of Pi” appears to suggest.  A story within a story, the movie is definitely a must see, but I felt the movie, despite some brilliant acting by newbie Suraj Sharma playing the young Pi, did not hold up to Martel’s award winning novel, "The Life of Pi.". 

Ang Lee’s captures the drama on the high seas with the elan of a maestro. It’s almost as if the emotional and moral storm that rages within Pi, the protagonist, manifests itself in the angry waves that lash and virtually tear apart the boat that Pi is forced to share with a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded Zebra, and Richard Parker, the Bengal Tiger, in the aftermath of a shipwreck. 

This story within a story could pass off as a simplistic fable for children to watch on a 3D screen; however, it could as well embed itself permanently in the viewer’s mind as a story that defies closure. What did Pi do on that boat, and what was done to him will have to be decided by the viewer. Not a wonder then, Yann Martel, the 2001 Man Booker Prize winning author of the novel "Life of Pi" also leaves it to the readers to decide what they wanted to have happened to Pi on that boat and whether  "Richard Parker is more than just a tiger... Some people could say it’s Pi himself. Some people can, in a sense, say it’s like God -- we're afraid of God, but he brings comfort and he keeps us going, which is what the tiger Richard Parker did."

"This is How You Lose Her" by Junot Diaz Highlights the 'Half-Life of Love' and its 'Foreverness'

I cannot resist a Junot Diaz write up, and those close to me know that; so within the first week of its release, I had  gotten a copy of Junot Diaz’s “This is How You Lose Her”, a collection of short stories with the most predictable Junotesque theme of ‘infidelity’. 

Having lived in and around New Brunswick, the favored setting in most of Diaz’s writing, for more than ten years, I feel a connect to all that Mr. Diaz writes, be it the Rutgers University Campus, the Dominican ‘bodegas’ around it, or the Spanglish which is now the second language of this university town. Additionally, I almost had the privilege of having Mr. Diaz as a keynote speaker at an event I organized, but for the stranglehold of decency imposed by administration who wanted a guarantee from me that Mr. Diaz would use caution with his language during the keynote address. An appalling demand considering his audience  at this event comprised of  16 to 20 year olds whose language was for the most part a spattering of profanities in English, Spanish, and Spanglish! Until this day, I regret not having gotten that chance of meeting and listening to Junot Diaz! 

Dominicans are a very interesting minority in this immigrant friendly university town, and I know for sure that there are several such Yuniors that reside in New Brunswick who have stories similar to what Diaz’s protagonist in all three of his writings shares with us readers.  However, it needs the unself-conscious pen and the creative genius of Mr. Diaz to shamelessly live out these bacchanalian stories of infidelity and machismo in so engrossing a fashion that all moral and social judgments stand suspended! Not saying that Junot Diaz perpetuates the myth of male superiority because Mr. Diaz in one of his interviews admits that Dominican “culture leads us towards dehumanizing women in our imaginations. I and my male friends could not have been as fucked-up in our relationships, or done the things we did in our relationships, if we felt that women were truly human. Because once you empathize that they are indeed human, you become incapable of hurting them.”  Junot Diaz’s successful representation of the Dominican diaspora in New Brunswick is because he has so much been a part of all that he pens. He is in fact ‘Yunior’, at least for the most part, and like Yunior has “lived in three or four worlds … but never saw any value in sealing off (his) background. (He) was critical, but (he) never felt one of the options was to entirely reject it.” Much as he cringes at and decries the sheer shallowness of Dominican males, refers to them as ‘dogs’ and ‘rats’, but Junot is always one among them and understands, even smiles at some of the debauchery that surrounds him. 

Not a prolific writer, Junot Diaz has only a couple of major writings to his credit: Drown, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Monstro, and now, This is How You Lose Her. After each writing, he appears to have become more comfortable with his Spanglish alter ego Yunior and that has made his writing that much more appealing.  I thoroughly enjoyed Junot Diaz’s “This is How You Lose Her.”

Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence - A Novel Art Form?

"..why are you making a museum out of what you’ve already written a whole book about? Don’t you believe in the power of words and in readers’ imagination? Don’t you believe in literature?” - A question almost every reader of Orhan Pamuk's novel The Museum of Innocence' would ask of him? Why did Pamuk feel the need to actually build and create a museum in Istanbul containing all the objects that entwined the story of his novel " The Museum of Innocence", a forbidden romance set in Turkey during the early 70s between the rich aristocrat Kemal and the beautiful but middle class Fusun. Pamuk claims, "the idea of the “Museum of Innocence” was already fully formed in my mind by the late 1990s: to create a novel and a museum."  However, what is intriguing is that like other artists starting on a new piece, Pamuk did not have any fledgling idea/story to tell, and that he was depending on random objects, most of which he had collected in the 90s from fleamarkets in the then seedy locations of Beyoglu and Cihangir, to inspire and propel a storyline for a new novel! That is apparently how the 2008 novel "Museum of Innocence" came to be. I am somewhat reluctantly disappointed by the novel and annoyingly piqued by Mr. Pamuk's explanation for the construction of the museum in Istanbul.  My feeling this way may be attributed to the fact that I have a great deal of respect for the writer Orhan Pamuk, and that I had so thoroughly enjoyed his last novel, 'Snow'.

Having published his novel in 2008, Mr. Pamuk in 2012  inaugurated 'the' "Museum of Innocence" housed in a '19th-century house on a quiet street in the Cukurcuma neighborhood'!  The whole project cost him, about $1.5 million, almost the amount that the Nobel Prize on his earlier writing had gotten him.  Agreed that artists are by nature quirky, but this extension of the novel into a living museum 'of people' is an altruism hard to palate. Perhaps he wished to be the maverick having fashioned a museum almost as a sequel to his novel, but he refutes that saying “ it’s not that I wrote a novel that turned out to be successful and then I thought of a museum. No, I conceived the novel and the museum together.”  Apparently, he 'went shopping first, or .. took, from friends who still conserved them- old furniture, miscellaneous paperwork, insurance papers, various documents, bank statements, and, of course photographs for (his)my museum and.. novel...and wrote my (his) book based on all these things bought and acquired.' That rings true somewhat because in the novel Kemal and Fusun's love story does build upon and is stored within inanimate objects such as cigarette butts, an earring, photographs, an expensive leather bag, a matchbox.,; things that Kemal has either presented to Fusun, or has stolen from Fusun's home. The question then arises is whether Mr. Pamuk's novel is 'art', that which is inspired, or merely a 'contrived' piece of writing that needs selling.

Orhan Pamuk wanted to make a mark, and he did, but whether the mark has made an impact on his readers, or whether it will on generations to come, leaves to be seen.  I'd also be curious to know how many visitors the museum has had so far, and whether some of the visitors were readers of his novel, since the novel has a free admission ticket to the museum.  Also, how much is the admission ticket to this museum, and is the museum a non-profit venture given that it is a 'people's museum'?

Not meaning to undermine an artist's vision, but Orhan Pamuk's museum appears to be an after thought, a last ditch effort to get publicity for his novel. What I forgot to mention was that I had had a copy of the novel since 2009, but after reading the first few chapters of the 87 chapters that the book has, I set it aside to read at a later time.  Were it not for the announcement of Mr. Pamuk inaugurating his one of a kind museum in Istanbul, of the same name as his novel, the Museum of Innocence would have sat on my book shelf for posterity; I would never have gone back to reading Pamuk's novel.

This may be coincidental, but the fact that I had read Anita Desai's "The Artist of Disappearance' just the week before reading Pamuk's novel didn't help.  In fact now I see Pamuk as Anita Desai's 'disappearing artist' since he's now writing novels to 'provide a matter-of-fact account of the two lovers' moving tale', and he is now depending on museums 'to focus more on private and personal stories,..to be better able to bring out our collective humanity'.  Apparently the artist, the writer Orhan has given way to the 'collector' the 'hoarder' as Ms. Desai had suggested in her book! Will art disappear too is the scary corollary....