(re)mixed messages
update: amardeep has a nice long overview with links.
Over the weekend I attended a few of the events of the South Asian Women's Creative Collective (SAWCC) annual conference, Mixed Messages. I went to the opening reading on Friday evening, featuring Amitav Ghosh and Vijay Seshadri (Sara Suleri was supposed to take part but couldn't, which I sorely regretted) and a lively panel discussion on new/mixed media (including blogging). I had the pleasure of meeting Amardeep Singh (and his lovely wife), Amitava Kumar, and Anna John of SepiaMutiny, which was all great fun--having been seduced into blogging mainly by people I know in 'real life', it was a curious experience to encounter virtual correspondents in person for the almost-first time (I met Laila Lalami of Moorishgirl at another reading this year, but otherwise the realms have stayed separate).
On Friday, Ghosh started with a reading of one of my favourite essays in Incendiary Circumstances--the little essay remembering Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn in the last years of his life, a loving and gently teasing portrait of a poet whose work I have loved immoderately since that first encounter in a Seattle bookshop back in 2003 or so. Seshadri followed with a reading of a short, tart, funny fragment of memoir, called 'the Nature of the Chemical Bond'--about his chemist father's strange penchant for touring Civil War battlefields, and his family's annual trips from Ohio to New York to visit Kalustyan's and buy a year's worth of essential ingredients unavailable in the Midwest. He also read a few poems, none of which I can seem to find online--my favorite was about telling the story of one's life through its humilations. I should admit that I've read only a little of his work, mostly in anthologies--and of course 'The Disappearances', that poem that gained a talismanic stature in the weeks after 9/11--but I'll certainly be searching it out more actively from now on. The discussion/Q&A that followed touched on a lot of interesting topics: the importance (or not) of form, mixing genres, questions of regional/local/national identity, especially in a diaspora space, the role of writers as activists or public intellectuals, and how that role functions differently in India and the U.S., etc. Ghosh spoke particularly trenchantly about the "false dichotomy" between acting and writing, arguing that the latter can be as powerful (if not moreso) as direct forms of active political engagement. He also characterized his work's roving eye (in a geographical sense) as a sort of attempt to "follow the Indian diaspora," to Egypt, Burma, and beyond. He raised some eyebrows with his characterisation of America as "an empty space," but explained that he experiences it as a sort of neutral zone that allows him to write freely about other places. (One bizarre moment, though: in an otherwise thoughtful digression on the tenacity of South Asian diasporas, he said something like 'take an Indian and put them anywhere, and they'll be fine; if you took an American and dropped them into India they wouldn't last ten minutes.' Perhaps that was just snark, but still, WTF? I lasted plenty longer than that, thankyouverymuch. Downright flourished, as a matter of fact. Though it's hard not to, in Kerala, where everything seems to blossom: even jetlagged wide-eyed white girls). Overall, though, a rewarding evening--and a sadly underattended one (no idea why).
On Sunday, I also managed to slip away from work for a few hours to drop in on the New Media panel, which was lively & inspiring--featuring Anna, the poet Ravi Shankar, who co-edits DrunkenBoat.com, podcaster Yesha Naik, and Rattapallax press publisher Ram Devineni, and moderated by the verbally kinetic and really very funny Amitava Kumar. I believe the panel's going to be podcast at some point, so I won't narrate it in great detail, except to say that I went away all keenly caught up in the mad notion of recruiting a bunch of people who have better things to do (like write their dissertations) and founding a magazine with them. Or making unusual multimedia cinema[*]. Or something. The blog is great fun, but I am itching to kick-off my next quarter-century with a bigger project.
[*actually, this kind of happened the summer after college, when I was working on an organic farm in British Columbia with some lovely crazy people and we decided to make spoofy digital short film about the perils of genetially-modified foods. I played a mutant killer raspberry.]
Over the weekend I attended a few of the events of the South Asian Women's Creative Collective (SAWCC) annual conference, Mixed Messages. I went to the opening reading on Friday evening, featuring Amitav Ghosh and Vijay Seshadri (Sara Suleri was supposed to take part but couldn't, which I sorely regretted) and a lively panel discussion on new/mixed media (including blogging). I had the pleasure of meeting Amardeep Singh (and his lovely wife), Amitava Kumar, and Anna John of SepiaMutiny, which was all great fun--having been seduced into blogging mainly by people I know in 'real life', it was a curious experience to encounter virtual correspondents in person for the almost-first time (I met Laila Lalami of Moorishgirl at another reading this year, but otherwise the realms have stayed separate).
On Friday, Ghosh started with a reading of one of my favourite essays in Incendiary Circumstances--the little essay remembering Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn in the last years of his life, a loving and gently teasing portrait of a poet whose work I have loved immoderately since that first encounter in a Seattle bookshop back in 2003 or so. Seshadri followed with a reading of a short, tart, funny fragment of memoir, called 'the Nature of the Chemical Bond'--about his chemist father's strange penchant for touring Civil War battlefields, and his family's annual trips from Ohio to New York to visit Kalustyan's and buy a year's worth of essential ingredients unavailable in the Midwest. He also read a few poems, none of which I can seem to find online--my favorite was about telling the story of one's life through its humilations. I should admit that I've read only a little of his work, mostly in anthologies--and of course 'The Disappearances', that poem that gained a talismanic stature in the weeks after 9/11--but I'll certainly be searching it out more actively from now on. The discussion/Q&A that followed touched on a lot of interesting topics: the importance (or not) of form, mixing genres, questions of regional/local/national identity, especially in a diaspora space, the role of writers as activists or public intellectuals, and how that role functions differently in India and the U.S., etc. Ghosh spoke particularly trenchantly about the "false dichotomy" between acting and writing, arguing that the latter can be as powerful (if not moreso) as direct forms of active political engagement. He also characterized his work's roving eye (in a geographical sense) as a sort of attempt to "follow the Indian diaspora," to Egypt, Burma, and beyond. He raised some eyebrows with his characterisation of America as "an empty space," but explained that he experiences it as a sort of neutral zone that allows him to write freely about other places. (One bizarre moment, though: in an otherwise thoughtful digression on the tenacity of South Asian diasporas, he said something like 'take an Indian and put them anywhere, and they'll be fine; if you took an American and dropped them into India they wouldn't last ten minutes.' Perhaps that was just snark, but still, WTF? I lasted plenty longer than that, thankyouverymuch. Downright flourished, as a matter of fact. Though it's hard not to, in Kerala, where everything seems to blossom: even jetlagged wide-eyed white girls). Overall, though, a rewarding evening--and a sadly underattended one (no idea why).
On Sunday, I also managed to slip away from work for a few hours to drop in on the New Media panel, which was lively & inspiring--featuring Anna, the poet Ravi Shankar, who co-edits DrunkenBoat.com, podcaster Yesha Naik, and Rattapallax press publisher Ram Devineni, and moderated by the verbally kinetic and really very funny Amitava Kumar. I believe the panel's going to be podcast at some point, so I won't narrate it in great detail, except to say that I went away all keenly caught up in the mad notion of recruiting a bunch of people who have better things to do (like write their dissertations) and founding a magazine with them. Or making unusual multimedia cinema[*]. Or something. The blog is great fun, but I am itching to kick-off my next quarter-century with a bigger project.
[*actually, this kind of happened the summer after college, when I was working on an organic farm in British Columbia with some lovely crazy people and we decided to make spoofy digital short film about the perils of genetially-modified foods. I played a mutant killer raspberry.]
posted by kitabet at 5:57 PM
2 Comments:
in an otherwise thoughtful digression on the tenacity of South Asian diasporas, he said something like 'take an Indian and put them anywhere, and they'll be fine; if you took an American and dropped them into India they wouldn't last ten minutes.' Perhaps that was just snark, but still, WTF? I lasted plenty longer than that, thankyouverymuch. Downright flourished, as a matter of fact. Though it's hard not to, in Kerala, where everything seems to blossom: even jetlagged wide-eyed white girls). Overall, though, a rewarding evening--and a sadly underattended one (no idea why).
That's true, now that I think about it. Not only are there many culturally flexible/open-minded Americans, there are plenty of Indians who reach the U.S. and completely fail to flourish.
And as for under-attendance, it might have something to do with Zakir Hussain and Arundhati Roy in town the same weekend.
"...I went away all keenly caught up in the mad notion of recruiting a bunch of people who have better things to do (like write their dissertations) and founding a magazine with them. Or making unusual multimedia cinema[*]. Or something. The blog is great fun, but I am itching to kick-off my next quarter-century with a bigger project."
One of the things that maybe we should've talked about the "new media" scene is that, given the low monetary investments involved in setting-up a web-magazine or even making a video-film, one should always think one-issue-at-a-time. To put it differently, in coming up with bigger, more engaging projects, like bringing out a magazine, one has less reason now to worry about bringing out six in a row before your costs can be recouped. So, go ahead, do it!
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