A VISIT FROM DAP: GREAT LIBRARY BOOKS

Straight out of Kate Bryant's frontal lobe comes this awesome (and frequently updated) blog, Awful Library Books. This reminds me of the time my brother worked at the Windsor Park branch of the Queens Public Library in middle school and used to bring back books marked 'DISCARD' all the time. They were mostly 50s textbooks and shitty copies of "classics" but there'd sometimes be books I think they found inappropriate to carry anymore. I think this blog is mostly the latter category. WHO ARE THESE ANONYMOUS LIBRARIANS?

Ejemplos:

This book is probably quite different from my own effort, "A Woman's Toe" (Doubleday)


A Passion for Asses

Vans: A shoe for white folks


I can already imagine the nerdy kid finding this book in the library. 2 weeks later his mom is dragging him to church.


CORRECTSTAR


STEP ONE: BE INCREDIBLY BEAUTIFUL, IMPECCABLY WELL-DRESSED WHITE PEOPLE


Also the cover of my book 'Bashing a Dude's Head in with a Wrench'


FINALLY I CAN BURY MYSELF NEXT TO MY CAT IN THE NEIGHBOR'S YARD

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\\\book shit: in hanuman's hands by cheeni rao

in "unaccustomed earth" jhumpa lahiri wrote a story about an alcoholic cornell student (ugh) and the relationship he has with his family. while many claim that the story, only goodness, nails the despair of a family who has to cope with alcoholic relatives it kind of ignores the alcoholic character himself. in fact, anything about him reads like one huge cliche on the hopeless romantic-type drunk. moreover, i read that shit and felt like the alcoholic didn't even have a problem. the kid was soft. i know some alcoholics. that dood was nothing special.

i wonder if lahiri's ever even met a real wilder. this dude was a REAL wilder:

i mean. the cover is a wind-up hanuman toy running around a table full of pills.

shieeeet!

"Of Indian origin, Rao ingeniously draws on Hindu mythology as well as his encounters with racism in America to add two powerful dimensions to an otherwise ordinary autobiographical tale of a troubled kid who falls prey to drugs and crime."

"All this happens because a young Rao, hemmed in by his parents' stern Hindu values and his white American peers' refusal to accept him, predictably bursts. Fleeing the Chicago suburbs for an unnamed liberal arts college in New England, Rao becomes a user and then a dealer of marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, cocaine and heroin." - Sun Times

"Drug use/addiction/dealing is rarely ever due to such a simple answer as a desire to rebel or because our lives are “too perfect.” I address this in the book, but a short answer for you is that involvement in the drug world is often a symptom of deeper problems, whether they be confusion of identity, difficulties assimilating, problems coping with the diverse expectations of their parent’s culture vs american culture, etc. I have known many young Indians who have created one face for family and others for the outside world– understand why, and you are one step closer to understanding why addiction is on the rise in this generation." - the author responding to some idiot on a blog.

THANKS FOR WRITING MY DIASPORA DRUG BOOK, ASSHOLE.

I WILL BUY A COPY SOON AND READ IT.

I'M SORRY FOR YELLING.

do you think he went to bard?

(a little bit of digging reveals it was williams.)

here's a passage i found on the nets:

"So, rather than waste my time going to classes ... I spent most of my time getting high and playing poker. I would walk in on the days of the tests for my premed classes, scribble my answers down as fast as possible, then race out to find something better to do with my time. I was also taking a poetry-writing class, but I'd been writing for a long time before I came to college as a way of dealing with my internal chaos, and so though the poems I created were sorry jumbles of cliche, they at least showed an understanding of basic poetic forms. The instructor was perpetually grumpy, either pissed that getting tenure didn't excuse him from having to teach poetry to a bunch of hacks, or that people only recognized him as the weirdo who had somehow gotten a poem with the last lines 'Put down your flamethrower, honey / you know I always loved you' into the Norton anthology. Since a couple of the students felt it was a class requirement that they talk more than the professor, even if it was only a monologue about the secret meaning of the poem they had scribbled before class, I soon stopped going to that class too."

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More on Slumdog Millionaire and The Namesake and Monsoon Wedding and Maximum City and A.R. Rehman and M.I.A. and 1991 and Diaspora and Stuff

Since posting on Slumdog Millionaire a week ago, and not seeing it as planned, my anticipation has grown 9-fold. Noah from YouWildin had the chance to peep it and he's had great things to say. Roger Epert has been speculating about an Oscar nod for Best Film. I can't wait!


After Monsoon Wedding I thought The Namesake could fill the void I had for a non-Bollywood film that I could appreciate. Something both Western and Indian - something that hits all my identity points. I anxiously waited for it to drop and when it did, it really didn't hit the spot. I mentioned before that one of the main reasons I started fucking with fiction was the need to tell stories of the lower-middle class Indians in Queens in the 1980s and 1990s as I couldn't relate with Lahiri's characters. Sure, parts of me definitely identified with The Namesake's Gogol, but it was the boring parts of me. Though one would assume Jhumpa Lahiri's American Indians would strike a chord with me, those were not the Indians I grew up with - my Indians were similar to Nair's Indians of New Delhi than Lahiri's of Boston. Really, the Indians I grew up with were neither as when our parents left India in the 70s and 80s and brought that fossilized India into the homes we grew up in, India became more Western than Queens as we knew it.
Monsoon Wedding was great because it was an early depiction of post-1991 India. Monsoon's Delhi was modern as it depicted India after it's economy had been liberalized allowing the middle class to expand rapidly and India to come to the world's attention as not just the orientalist national embodiment of spirituality, but something new. This was a globalized India. And while there's no doubt India has changed, it's been a selective change. The poor are still poor. Though Nair didn't overlook this with characters like PK Dubey (who I mention below) that represent the unchanged India, she couldn't take it far enough. It's understandable - the story there was New India, and it hadn't been told thus far. And she made Salaam Bombay! 20 years ago. 20 years before Slumdog Millionaire came out. A sort of in-between of the elite diasporic Indians of Lahiri and Nair's Indian Indians surpisingly came in the form of a Bollywood movie called Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. While I appreciated DDLJ for its plot and songs and such when I was 10, I appreciated it for entirely different reasons when I was 20. Released in 1995, DDLJ completed 600 weeks of continuous play in Mumbai theatres making it the longest running film in the history of Bollywood. I won't get into the plot but what's key is while Monsoon was an art film on new India with one diasporic character in the form of a superficial Australian cousin or something, DDLJ was the first Indian film to humanize the diasporic South Asian. Previously, South Asians from London or New York were reduced to caricatures of chain-smoking, cocaine-snorting, gamblaholics with no respect of Indian women and thus India. In DDLJ, the main character shows that Indian as an identity isn't restricted to those in India thus Raj is more in touch with his culture than Kuljeet who was born and raised in Punjab. Tons of other films with diasporic main characters followed suit. Though not directly addressing the New India of post-1991, DDLJ wouldn't be possible without it. For a Bollywood movie it was on some groundbreaking shit really.
Poorer India has come to attention recently in the form of this year's Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger and Suketu Mehta's Maximum City. Published in 2004, Maximum City is a narrative nonfiction book - part memoir, part travel writing, part sociology - about Bombay. Mehta' grew up in Bombay, settled with his family in Jackon Heights in the late 1970's, and then returned to Mumbai. What set this book apart from all the other critic-lauded writing publishing companies churn out by trendy South Asian writers is the attention it pays to the slums - to real life in a developing nation. Comparisons to the London of Dickens, the Paris of Zola, and the New York of Woody Allen are appropriate. With some further digging I found out it was Maximum City that iced the cake of Simon Beaufroy's scipt and inspired Boyle to create the film. He even carried it with him the entire time he was there. Another reason I'm psyched to see the film is its soundtrack. Previously I mentioned my appreciation for Gang Gang Dance and their appreciation for Bollywood music and how their appreciation caused me to re-appreciate Bollywood music and re-approach some kind of music project sampling it. Both DeGraw and Bougatsos cite AR Rahman as a huge inspiration for Saint Dymphna. I was giddy when I heard Boyle got Rahman to drop the project he was working on to join Slumdog. I was giddier when I found out Rahman collaborated with MIA on a song for the film. Here's what he had to say:

"We met before but never worked before. M.I.A., she’s a real powerhouse. Somebody played me her CD and I thought, Who’s this girl? She came here and knew all my work, had followed my work for ages. I said "Cut the crap," this "my idol" crap. You have to teach me. We started working in India, then we e-mailed the track back and forth. She did the vocals in England. I did the rest in India."

Boyle called her a "gift" to the soundtrack. He used her Paper Planes, and the collabo with Rahman entitled O Saya. It's used early on in the film. I can't tell if I'm more excited about the film or the song. To close, I'll leave you with a few Rahman songs I grew up listening to:

Also from Dil Se:



Also from Bombay, and maybe in Tamil (can't hear it):

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