five things

I'm too busy--and on tenterhooks over several major unresolved questions--to finish anything substantive now. But in the meantime you should read these:

1. My contrapuntal friend has started blogging again, alhamdulillah. See his post on the desire to provincialize Bengal, born of:

getting a little fed up of books by eminent Indian social scientists that invariably turn to Bengal for their empirical meat. After 4 and something years in graduate school, I have this vision of a Bengal teeming with social scientists discussing Marx, Dostoyevsky, or genealogies of modernity at coffee shops or second hand book stores on streets named after writers, while all around them bhadralok and bhadramahila scurry to and fro on their bourgeois itineraries, with idle subalterns watching stealthily from between cracks in buildings. None of this has been vindicated by trips to Kolkata....

There's also this nice review of a show of avant-garde European prints at the British Library ("the fascinating thing about brick kilns is that they are made of the very things that they make. As are libraries.")

2. Beth at Cassandra Pages has spent the last several months writing with great patience and beauty and humor about her father-in-law, who hails from a part of Syria I know and love, and whose life is drawing to a close half a world away, at the age of almost a century. I refuse to excerpt any of this: take an hour or so sometime and read it all slowly, with the care it deserves. It has been a long time since I watched a book unfold online with such pleasure--the last one, I have recently learned, will become paper-and-ink, and I hope 'The Fig and the Orchid' will follow.

3. Sashi is posting more poems, which he should send to magazines, but in the meantime they are here on the internets for us all to enjoy. This one I like a great deal; and also this. In a recent epigraph he also introduced me to a this quote from a poet we both love, Jack Gilbert--a fragment from a Paris Review interview: "We're the only things - leaving religion out of it - we're the only things that know spring is coming." Let it come soon, please.

4. Psyche, riffing off another blog, considers 'the books that got away' (I am in the process of trying to keep two or three from doing the same). I've known a number of books that got away, but the one that puzzles me the most is Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter. I've read some pages of it over and over, started anew several times, remember the early paean to the oyster dance in a New Orleans whorehouse with a startling vividness, have devoured other novels of his cover-to-cover five times--and yet I've never actually finished the book. Perhaps because last time I was reading it, I wound up in the hospital, and it still carries the tang of illness, or perhaps just because the wily, jazzy narrative is as slippery as that oyster. I'll catch it someday.

5. Manish of Ultrabrown has somehow managed to see and review Fatih Akın's new film, Auf der Anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven)--and calls it "a masterpiece--one of the finest diaspora flicks I've ever seen." I am desperate with envy, having waited long & impatiently for the New York premiere in May. As some of you may remember, Akın's last feature film Gegen die Wand is not only one of my all-time favorite films, but was the subject of the very first post on this blog. I also love his documentary about Istanbul's musics, İstanbul Hatırası/Crossing the Bridge, and enjoyed Im Juli (In July), an early outing into romantic comedy. He's a young director, only in his mid-thirties: here's hoping for a very long career, and more stories of the borders crossed and uncrossed in the migrations that link Germany and Turkey. I have every hope that The Edge of Heaven will be, as Manish says, "just mind-blowingly good." And I am also keen to encounter the soundtrack--those from Akın's earlier films are on heavy rotation on my ipod--as well as to see whether the wondrous İdil Üner makes another cameo in this film, as she has in both of his prior features.

Oh, and that post includes a review of The Band's Visit, a rather charming Israeli film I have been meaning to write about since Anand & I saw it back in December. Later this week, perhaps.