Ethics for Reviewers

...And, even after the two men had grown apart, [C.S Lewis] happily fulfilled a promise to the publisher of The Lord of the Rings to "do all in my power to secure for Tolkien's great book the recognition it deserves." That included providing a back-cover blurb, two (unsigned) rave reviews in newspapers, and urgent recommendations to all of his correspondents and friends.

- Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia.

Not trying to criticise Lewis or Tolkien here (it is generally obvious when I am criticising either of them), just a wide eyed comment at how different things were "in the old days". A reviewer who wrote unsigned rave reviews of their friends' (or former friends') books now would presumably receive plenty of criticism.

Cognitive Dissonance

(Click for the whole comic - Hark! A Vagrant is genius)

It seems someone has discovered a fragment of a manuscript by Claire Clairmont - Mary Shelley's stepsister who had an affair with Byron and possibly one with P.B Shelley as well. In the manuscript, she calls them both "monsters", and depicts them as pretty amoral where relationships were concerned (see linked article for quotes). Byron sounds particularly vile by her account.

I am rather irrationally a Byron fangirl. I think he's underrated as a poet, had by far the most interesting life of the Romantics, and as ineffectual as he may have been in the event, I've always liked that he would have gone to war for Greece (did the Greeks welcome his help though? I've never seen evidence either way). Plus he was nice looking.

But I've never been under any delusions about his private life. Nothing I've ever read about him has even appeared to hint that he was anything other than an asshole to his women (I know less about any romantic relationships with men). Likewise Shelley, who I'm not as fond of, has always been presented to me as rather a tool, though occasionally a stupendous poet.

So I'm a little baffled at that Observer column I've linked to above. What "moral reputation" does this demolish? Why do the commentators on the piece seem so genuinely surprised? Have I been living in a parallel universe all these years where everyone knows these things? [I recently read an article by a book reviewer who expressed surprise that Tolkien and Lewis had been friends. This did remind me that what I consider "common knowledge" is frequently only common in certain circles. But surely Byron and Shelley are pretty mainstream?]

I'm also fascinated by how invested Dalya Alberge and all the people she quotes seem to be in discrediting Clairmont - both article and comments have "bitches, man" all over them. Alberge describes Clairmont as "an embittered old woman" ("embittered" is hardly surprising, and I suspect "old" is standing in here for undesirable). Professor Kelvin Everest and Sir Michael Holroyd both hurriedly remind you-the-reader that Claire threw herself at Byron. I'm not sure whether we're expected to read this as meaning that she asked for it, or that she was desperate and therefore ought to be grateful to him for his attentions to her.

But my favourite thing about that article so far is this comment from someone who wants to remind us that Byron was really, really hot, omg and remained hot even after he was dead. Also, political correctness! is destroying the reputation! of really hot poets!
And that's terrible.

The Perplexity of Hariya Hercules

I'm a bit disappointed by Penguin's decision to publish Robert A Hueckstedt's translation of Manohar Shyam Joshi's Hariya Hercules Ki Hairani without any sort of introduction or context. In a way it's nice that they're treating it as they would any other book, without making strange zoo animals of books translated from Indian languages. Still, it is a translation, and I'd like to know more about it than the cover and flaps tell me. I should not have to resort to Wikipedia for information as basic as the original Hindi title.

However, that it exists at all is an excellent thing and Penguin are to be congratulated for this. I had no idea what it was when I bought it a few weeks ago; I vaguely recognised the author's name and thought the title was funny (though the Hindi title is arguably funnier).

The book starts off as the comic tale of Hariya, a dutiful son. The last of his father's five sons his primary occupation is looking after his father, a task which includes (this is an immensely scatological book) helping him to defaecate with the help of rubber gloves. Hariya tolerates his father's constant abuse of him without comment, does not seem to mind being considered an idiot, and is not perplexed at all. Until, due to a strange set of coincidences and possible mishearings he comes to believe that he (and everyone else) has a double in a place called Goomalling in Australia, that Tibetan monks are somehow mixed up in it all, and that his family is cursed because his father stole something from said monks.

So when his father dies, leaving behind a trunk full of treasure, Hariya decides it is his duty to return this to those from whom it was stolen. Fighting off neighbours who think he's insane, a nephew with vested interests, and various others, he embarks upon an epic quest to find the monks to whom the contents of the trunk belong. In this journey he is accompanied by a rather unreliable female family member who had years ago starred in a number of pornographic photographs with Hariya's father.

It's all very silly.

It's also very clever and very postmodern, and absolutely hilarious. Hueckstedt's translation is a good one - while I haven't read the original (and I'm thinking I will soon) the tone is just right, he's captured the elaborate, idiomatic style in a way that seems authentic to me, at least. Marvellous book, and I plan to read T'ta Professor (the other translation of a Manohar Shyam Joshi book that Penguin have published recently) soon.

Quoteage

From this interview with Chabon:

In a more equivocal way (one of his chapters on this is called "Hypocritical Theory"), he finds himself worrying about the exploitation of fart-and-snot humour by profit-minded grown-ups. "Tropes and jokes that adults never would have gone near, and would have disdained to traffic in not that long ago," he says, "are now actively employed to snare children's attention, and ultimately their income." What bothers him isn't the jokes and tropes themselves but "the co-opting of kids' consciousness": naughty playground rhymes should be an adult-free zone.

Practically Marzipan: In which I am revealed to be a fraud TamBrahm...

...rejecting a symbol of our culture almost as central, as relevant, as thayir sadam.
In my defence, I cannot help it. Also, I had a traumatic childhood.

[A version of this was published in today's New Indian Express]

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One of the few real problems I have with my cultural heritage is my extended family's love affair with jasmine. We love the stuff. Everyone wears it in their hair at every opportunity, and when a cousin is so insensitive as to cut her hair short the major protests that arise involve the difficulty of properly attaching mallipoo in the future. There are crushed, dead flowers on people's pillows in the morning, and sometimes more fall out when hair is being brushed. I think I might like them if they weren't so omnipresent. Even in Delhi, where most people walk around flowerless, three huge jasmine plants grow on the terrace and provide a constant, if not huge, supply to those who want them. Sometimes they are picked and then put in the fridge to keep fresh, and this is almost the worst of all because the smell permeates everything. It is, I suppose, possible to think of jasmine as a pleasant smell in most circumstances. When the items that smell of jasmine include your slice of left-over pizza and your bottled water, this is no longer the case.

As a result, my dislike of the smell of jasmine has grown intense. It's a pity, because I do like looking at flowers in other people's hair (while they're fresh and alive, at least). And while I don't mind picking up other people's dead flowers, I find myself coughing and choking at anything that smells intensely of jasmine. A couple of years ago an unfortunate set of circumstances led to some jasmine perfume being spilled on a book I was reading. Unable to read the book for several days as I could barely breathe near it, I finally resorted to desperate measures and stuck the book in the microwave, hoping to toast the scent out. I can find no reasonable scientific explanation for the fact that it actually did alleviate the smell.

While one flower smell effectively cuts me off from a huge chunk of my heritage, two others provide strange links to it. Roses have a definite claim to being part of Our Culture, as evinced by the quantities of rose attar used by our ancestors. The smell is slightly spicy, deep and not particularly sweet. It is as complex as (and far more pleasant than) most perfumes. I've never encountered actual roses that smelled quite like that, and if I did I'd by them in an instance.

The other flower I refer to connects me to a chunk of my heritage that is rather more humble. It's the smell of violets. I do not think I have ever seen a violet flower actually growing and alive, and all I really know of them is that they're kind of purple and kind of shy. I have certainly never smelled one, as far as I know. But they can be sugared and put on cakes, too. I'm not sure how big their role is in the confectionery industry as a whole, and whether they are a common ingredient in many sweets. All I know is that when I was washing my hands with violet-scented soap a few years ago I breathed in and felt like I had come home – I was a five year old in a sweet shop again. I do not remember actually loving or even noticing this smell when I was a child, but now it means any number of things to me. Perhaps one day jasmine will do the same.

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Oh look, I am only one of a generation of Degenerate Youth. Who knew?

More F words

Earlier today Adam Roberts mentioned on twitter that he was at a primary school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. He said that the school had chosen to change some of the lyrics in the Potiphar song - instead of inviting Joseph to "come and lie with me, love", Potiphar's wife now desired him to "come and have some tea, love".

My own primary school changed the line to "come and BE with me love", but did this merely by crossing out the word "lie" and substituting "be" on the sheets of lyrics. Amazingly, we caught on, but beyond a few giggles and some puzzlement there was nothing.

However, a year or so later I was in a choir doing Oliver! and whoever was in charge decided to modify the song "I'd do anything". In the song (skip this bit if you know anything at all about musicals) the Artful Dodger is claiming that he would, in fact, do anything for Nancy, and she is giving him lists of specific tasks to see if this is the case. So at one point, she asks him if he would "Even fight my Bill?" to which he replies "What, fisticuffs?"

Unfortunately, whichever adult it was who decided this sort of thing thought that "fisticuffs" was not a word s/he wanted a bunch of kids to sing. I don't know whether it was considered to be too difficult a word, whether the implication of violence was the problem (surely not) - but we were condemned to sing that line as "what? ... *empty space, filled up by some la la laing*" for no discernable reason.

Result: for many years I thought that "fisticuffs" was a dirty word and have never been quite able to rid myself of the association.


Fisticuffs. Giggle.

YfL5: Saussure and Klingon

What do you do when you want to talk about Tolkien and Trekkies? Make a silly, cod-academic reference to Saussure. Obviously.

An edited version was published in Monday's EdEx, etc.

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Klingon: An alien life form from the Star Trek books, television series and movies, origially the enemies of the Federation. Also the Klingon language, tlhIngan Hol, a constructed language invented by Mark Okrand especially for the Star Trek movies of the 1980s and Star Trek: The Next Generation TV series. (Urban Dictionary)


There is a moment, in one of the Star Trek movies (The Undiscovered Country) where a Klingon is supposedly quoting from Shakespeare's Hamlet as it is written in his own language. He remarks to the (mostly human) crew of the Starship Enterprise that Shakespeare is far better “in the original Klingon”. It is only relatively recently that I learnt that there does exist a Klingon Hamlet. It is delightful - not only did the people behind the series go to the trouble to create a whole new language for this alien race, but other people joined in to translate Shakespeare into this wholly made-up language, all for their own amusement. Knowing Klingon serves no useful purpose, in the sense that language usually does, in helping people to communicate. But it's the sort of thing that people clearly enjoy knowing.

Another constructed fictional language that I'm very fond of is Quenya, one of the languages of the Elves in J.R.R Tolkien's Middle-earth books. Language lies at the heart of Tolkien's universe; the many languages that the people he created speak were developed alongside the world itself. Tolkien was a language geek, apparently inventing his first language at age thirteen. He seems to have been fascinated by how things fit together, how grammar works; the general structure of language. And Middle-Earth is obviously the richer for it.

Of course, that is not all that language is. The Swiss linguist Saussure in the earlier part of the twentieth century drew a distinction between two concepts in language, “langue” and “parole”. By Langue he referred to the system of rules by which a language is goverened; Parole indicated the relatively flexible ways in which language was used and meaning created within those set boundaries. Of course this demarcation is somewhat reductive, but I think that fictional languages spoken by fictional people will only ever work at the level of Langue. Parole requires that people be present, actively using the language. If every Star Trek fan, or every Tolkien fan in the world were to display the levels of obsession required to learn a technically pointless language (quite a number of fans of both sorts have obviously done this and I think it's rather wonderful) and to communicate with each other by this means, we might have the beginnings of something pretty fantastic. It'll never happen.

And that is why, ultimately, I have no interest in learning either language. I'm delighted that both exist, but what really charms me about languages will always be the Parole aspect of things. I require that language be changeable and frequently ungrammatical and full of swearing and obsolete words and slang. The Elves would probably never come up with a rich tradition of Quenya slang, and that is genuinely unfortunate (I suspect the Klingons would manage slang quite well).

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I seem to have gotten into the habit of praising profanity every week. I must consider this further.

I'm a believer

A couple of weeks ago I was in my car and someone came and tapped on my window and left me this card. I was pleased by it and showed it to people then took it home and promptly lost it. Today I found it again, and I'm feeling much more secure about my life and the world generally.



The back of the card reads as follows:

Person Got Cheated In Love Once Come And Meet 100% Solution only in 10 Hours , As You Wish, Will Be As

!!! MY PROMISE!!!
Expert In Super Nature Knowledge As:

• Love Marriage
• Job Business
• Marriage Problems
• Child Birth Problems
• Various Magic
• Serious Problems
• Relief Speciality
• Get Love of Your Choice

• 
  

How do I know Guru Sultan Bangali is not a fraud? Besides the fact that he has given me !!!HIS PROMISE!!!, of course. It turns out that he is able to be in multiple places at once - under a different name he has been operating his business in Gurgaon. Only a person of great spiritual fortitude could survive a daily commute from Kalkaji to Gurgaon. Plus, he has business cards, not cheap pink leaflets.

I have great faith in the guru. Trust him with your Serious Problems, and as you wish will be as.

Yellow Blue Tibia Bullets Doux

Everything I thought about Yellow Blue Tibia was jumbled up in my head so I made bullet points. And then it was still chaotic. So I made a stupid pun for a title (much as Roberts seems to have done!) and here is what I think. I think.

• Long before I read the book I'd been told that it involved Stalin collecting a group of science fiction writers and ordering them to create fictional aliens that he could unite the Soviet Union against (I don't think this is a spoiler, every review has mentioned this). A few people were a bit dismissive of Stalin as Adrian Veidt, but I thought it'd be rather awesome. As it happened, that section of the book was a relatively small part of the actual plot. Still really good though.
• I suspect a good chunk of this plot was in there for how cool it would be. I have no complaints with this as a method of writing.
• I particularly love the writing in the earlier sections of the book - it's so fantastically overblown. There is, for example, this wonderful moment where the writers are seriously discussing the politics of these hypothetical aliens - according to the party line, only communists could be efficient enough to invent interplanetary travel. And do they really want to fight communists?
• I spent a lot of time trying to decide whether I wanted to think of this as history or alt-history and still haven't come to any conclusions.
  
• The book feels translated (I am not in a position to comment on whether it feels like it's translated from Russian, but it certainly has the feel of some translations from various Indian languages that I've read). It's quite an achievement, and really impressed me.
• How much fun did Roberts have writing this book? I've read a few negative reviews of Yellow Blue Tibia, and I acknowledge the rightness of much of what they said, but the sheer joy in this book was infectious as far as I was concerned, and it made most criticisms I had seem insignificant.
• But if he'd written this book about my country and used, say, the Bhopal Gas tragedy, I don't know if this whole being swept away by joy could have worked so well.
• ... I don't think he would have written this about India. Russia* and Britain have a very different sort of historical relationship than India and Britain - whether that should put India off limits in certain ways (and equally, whether it shouldn't do the same with Russia are bigger questions that I'm honestly not sure what I think about.
  
• Catherynne Valente's post about this book makes most of the criticisms I could not avoid (and there are some that I did not see, but I defer to her superior knowledge of Russian culture). I think a couple of things she says might be mitigated by the fact that this book has been written as if it were a translation: like the "x"s in the Russian alphabet thing, which I read as using "x" not as a letter, but in its capacity within English as an unknown quantity. I can readily imagine a translator substituting the symbol that performed a similar function. "Konsty", though? Seriously?
• The fatphobia thing. It seemed very clear to me when I read it. It's clear from Roberts' comments on Valente's post that he wasn't going for that at all and is thinking seriously about the charge. I do think that when writing in a style as frequently OTT as this one, that letting in things like fatphobia may be even easier than usual unless you're actively on guard.
  
• On the whole: I loved it, I dogeared it, I called people up so I could quote from it, I'm glad it exists.

*I should add that a significant part of the action actually takes place in Ukraine.

YfL4: Expletive

Can you say the word fuck in a newspaper?

An edited version (with most of the objectionable bits asterisked out) appeared in yesterday's EdEx.


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Expletive: an exclamation or swearword; an oath or a sound expressing an emotional reaction rather than any particular meaning.


Watching a programme about Oscar nominees last week, I was surprised to hear that a Quentin Tarantino film called “Inglourious *silence*” had been nominated for a number of awards. It took me a few moments to work out that the film in question was the director’s Inglourious Basterds (misspellings deliberate).
Lots of people don’t like swearing, in films or on TV. There are plenty of possible reasons for this. Perhaps they simply think swear words are crude and ugly. Perhaps they are afraid that children will hear them and use them or, worse, ask what they mean. In the case of the word fuck, which generally forms a part or the whole of the offending statement, people might even complain that adds to the unfair negative connotations around something as amazing as sex.
Literature and film must deal with the consequences of this disapproval. Films with swearing in them are frequently rated for older audiences (and the DVDs eventually released with the cryptic “contains language” warning on the back, in case the audience expected a silent film or a mime). They will also inevitably have to submit to constantly having words "bleeped" or “blanked” out – the offensive word is replaced either with a beeping noise or with silence. I’m sure Tarantino expected it.
An obvious way to avoid this problem would be to create works of art in which no one ever swears. Which would be fine if you made a film about your grandparents, but perhaps less authentic if you made one about murdering drug smugglers.
So what do you do if you want to depict swearing but don’t want your movie filled with silences and beeps? The answer: substitute other words and make sure your audience knows what you’re substituting them for. Neither I nor anyone I knew in school was ever fooled by a string of teachers who used “sugar” as a substitute for another word beginning with a “sh-” sound.
The internet provides any number of alternative f-words, should you choose to use them. My favourite so far has been “frak”, which originated on Battlestar Galactica when it was first aired in the 1970s. From 2004 to 2009 a revamped version of the original series was aired, and in this the meaning of “frak” became a lot more detailed. “Frell”, a similar word from Farscape, was not nearly as recognizable.
Alternatively, there’s the route that writers like Terry Pratchett and Larry Niven have taken in their books where they embrace the censoring of swear words and throw it right back. In Pratchett’s The Truth, one character’s dialogues are interspersed with the word “- ing”. It looks reasonably normal until other characters begin to ask why this man keeps saying “ing”. Likewise, in Niven’s Known Space stories “bleep” itself has become an insult.
It seems silly to go to all this trouble to mask words when everyone knows what they are intended to signify in any case. But I’m willing to put up with it – contrary to what a number of English teachers in school told me, language is made richer by a good dose of profanity.

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Practically Marzipan: The corruption of the swayamvar

This week's column was swayamvar-based, since Rahul Dulhaniya Le Jayega had just ended (sadly before I'd ever seen an entire episode). Being sadly unoriginal, I stole a lot from this post I wrote a couple of years ago.


[An edited version was published in yesterday's New Indian Express]

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Of the many things I admire about our rich and ancient culture (its excellence at building things, its fondness for good stories, its invention of the gol gappa) my favourite may just be the swayamvar. Let's face it, our ancestors, in common with most ancestors the world over, have had a pretty dismal showing where women's rights are concerned. Yet the swayamvar allowed women at least a nominal choice in who they would marry; an important decision in a world where (judging by the epics) your husband might be banished to the forest at any moment and you would have to tolerate living with him in the close confines of a hut.

In these degenerate times the men have it far too easy. All a man has to do is get a good engineering degree, it seems; no one cares whether he is the best archer in the room anymore. Whether or not being the best archer in the room is likely to be a useful skill is, of course, debatable (if a forest exile is on the cards then it might well be), but at least it allowed for the power equation to be temporarily reversed. This is not the case with the modern arranged marriage, where the female's less-than-wheatish complexion is as likely to work against her as the groom's PhD in English literature is to him.

Which is why I have watched with guarded hope the resurgence of the swayamvar in recent times. In the summer of 2008 a number of news sources reported that a “young tribal girl” (most of them don't seem to have bothered with her name) had chosen her groom through a swayamvar in which her father had asked the hopeful young men philosophical questions. Then there was last year's TV show Rakhi Ka Swayamvar, which, though dreadful in almost every imaginable way, did at least show us a number of (presumably) eligible men competing for the attention of a woman who their families would almost certainly disapprove of. Like the traditional Swayamvar these shows tested men on skills completely unrelated to normal life: does one want a husband who can answer philosophical questions and dance, or one who can negotiate Delhi traffic?

Unfortunately, all good things are made impure by our sinful and unregenerate world. The Americans (who I am frequently informed are the source of unregenerate behaviour) took our idea of the swayamvar and perverted it, creating a situation in which multiple women competed for one man. Programmes like Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire and The Bachelor were so influential as to make Indian producers forget their culture and create the monstrosity Rahul Dulhaniya Le Jayega which ended last week. It is a national shame.

Should I, at some point in the future, hold a swayamvar myself, I'd like to test prospective grooms on skills that would be useful to me. I would shut a contender into a room filled with books and empty bookcases and see what shelving system he used. I would quiz him on the home delivery numbers of restaurants I like. I would ask him to buy me shoes and test his ability to chop onions. If one must have a husband, he might as well be useful.


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Yesterday I gave my boyfriend a book-shelving problem to solve. He failed miserably at it, suggesting that I sort my books by size rather than genre or author. I am rethinking this whole swayamvar thing.

I think Wilbur Sargunaraj has the best idea.

Women ka rally

(Enclicken to embiggen)

YfL3: Txtspk

This week I was old and grumpy. Also, I'd like it to be known that the bizarre grammar of the last line of the print edition was my own fault entirely.
An edited version of this appeared in yesterday's EdEx.


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Txtspk: A form of speech used mostly in the communication of text messages via mobile phone or sometimes Email or online chat. (UrbanDictionary.com)


I am not a pedant. I like to think of myself as a reasonably liberal-minded person where language is concerned. As fond of the English language as I am, it's hard to be a purist about a language of which James Nicoll has said “We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary”. Standardised spelling is a comparatively recent development in the history of the language, and I'm only really fussy about grammar when the lack of it obscures meaning. No one need worry about confusing “who” with “whom” or “will” with “shall” in my presence, and I will even be tactful enough not to point out that you should have said “Arun and I” instead of “Arun and me”.

In addition, I have even embraced the language of Lolcat. For those of you unfortunate enough to have missed out on this phenomenon, I refer to an internet trend of adding funny captions to pictures of cats (see http://www.icanhascheezburger.com for examples). These captions have evolved their own grammar and patterns of spelling and I am quite prepared, delighted even, to go along with them.

Yet if there is one thing guaranteed to make me sound like the curmudgeonliest of language purists, it is txtspk.

I realise that txtspk is born of necessity. No one wants to have to send multiple SMSes unnecessarily, and it's only natural that people should try to cut down on the number of characters they use in a word. I have no real quibble with abbreviations like “l8r” or “b4”. I think they look unattractive, but they get the job done – that is how “later” and “before” sound. I'm less tolerant towards the type of txtspk that consists of removing all the vowels. Disemvowelling your words may help you to send longer messages, but since the person who received them is left with the daunting task of trying to work out what you're trying to say, it could hardly be called efficient.

But the specific form of txtspk that sets my teeth on edge? Substituting “d” for “th”. L8r and B4 both reflect the way the words are pronounced, but I've never heard someone ask “what is dis?” or “who did dat?”, much less “where is da coffee?”. Unfortunately, when someone I know sends me such a message I find myself wondering if they do actually talk that way. And then I imagine them doing so, and I'm never quite able to get that out of my head. I'm sure there are accents that allow for this particular substitution of consonants, and I'm sure they sound charming. But with the average urban Indian accent to talk of dis, dat and de oder? No.

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Miéville in India links

As most of the people who read this blog already know, China Miéville was in India last week (I think he's here for most of this as well) as part of the British Council's LitSutra programme. I've been enjoying the Litsutra blog over the last couple of days - it turns out that the people organizing this thing are also pretty good writers. Krish Raghav has a piece up on the Mint books blog about the Delhi event with Samit Basu. There was also an event at JNU the next day - unfortunately the people at JNU seemed to think they'd be getting a reading from Kraken and an interactive session, while the author had been told he was supposed to be giving them an academic paper. It all resolved itself quite happily; the reading was excellent (though some of us had heard it the night before) and the discussion of SF that followed was reasonably academic - I may refer back to it soon when I read Adam Roberts' Yellow Blue Tibia.

For me, though, the highlights of the whole thing were discovering that Miéville had read this blog (he recognised said nice things, I stood and looked horrified and wondered if I'd ever written anything here that I'd be embarrassed to say to his face) and, possibly more significantly, confirming for myself that he really was a Samuel Beckett person. For various reasons this was very important.

Incidentally, judging by the chapter I heard read out twice, Kraken is going to be brilliant.

In which the Chief Justice asks us not to judge

The Chief Justice of India, K.G Balakrishnan, has been quoted in a number of papers today warning people against being "overtly paternalistic" with regard to a rape victim's personal autonomy...when it comes to her choosing to marry her rapist.


A couple of things:

One, he's absolutely right about respecting the victim's decisions. People do what they can to cope, and it's not always the most progressive or universally useful action. One sees a lot of this when complete outsiders hint that someone is not doing her duty by reporting a rape, whatever it will cost her.

Two, and this is where I say but. But does Justice Balakrishnan live in a different world from me? (Answer: yes). Because while I'm sure there are plenty of people disapproving of and passing judgment upon rape victims who choose to marry their rapists, should such women exist, I'm aware of many, many more stories where it hasn't been a choice. Rape victims in this country are still treated with a great deal of disapproval for bringing the rape up in the first place, and not choosing to take this easy way of ending the scandal quietly is likely to bring upon them even more pressure. The choice between marrying one's rapist and being cut off from all of ones support systems is meaningless, and I see no reason to "respect" such a choice or the people who forced it.

Three, would the number of victims marrying rapists be lessened if said rapists were found guilty by the courts and put in jail? I suspect it would.


(Oh and here is some further weirdness from the Supreme Court. Via Nanopolitan)

February Reading (II)

And this is the non-romance list. In addition to this lot, I started Paul Murray's Skippy Dies at the end of the month. I am progressing slowly, mainly because I am enjoying it so much. I have dogeared or postitnoted every other page as having something enjoyable I wish to share.



The non-romance bit.


Alexander McCall Smith – The Comfort of Saturdays and The Lost Art of Gratitude: I love the Isabel Dalhousie books. They are the ultimate comfort read- they make me generally peaceful and in favour of humanity. These two most recent books in the series involve medical fraud, tightrope walkers, bratty composers and a greater role for Brother Fox, but really, I'm just reading them for Isabel.


Francisco X. Stork – Marcelo in the Real World: I love this book. There are plenty of wonderful reviews on the internet that will give you some idea of why. You should read those.


Naomi Novik – Temeraire: I raced through this one. It was surprisingly addictive. It's set in an alt-universe nineteenth century England with dragons. Will Laurence accidentally comes into possession of a dragon and has to give up his job and fiancée for his new duties. Luckily he discovers in an implausibly short period of time that he doesn't mind this too much. The love between man and dragon is strong (and worryingly slashy, which would be fine if one of the protagonists were not a giant lizard). I really liked Temeraire, but it is too frequently obvious that it has been written by an American woman in the twenty-first century; sentence constructions like “wished he wouldn't have done that” pop up occasionally and are a bit jarring. Still, it is set during one of my favourite periods in English history, it mostly gets the tone right, and it has dragons. I am definitely reading the rest of this series.


N.K Jemisin – The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms: Reviewed here, so I will not discuss it in this post. Except to say that it is a fine book and deserves your love.



Appupen (George Mathen) – Moonward: Lightning hits a tree, life originates and evolves, and eventually a god, Mahanana is born. Agriculture, cities and capitalism follow. Moonward is a set of loosely interwoven stories about life in Halahala under the increasingly dystopic rule of Mahanana, with the first and last stories dealing with people trying to look moonwards. With very little text all the focus is on the artwork, which does not disappoint. Appupen's black-and-white artwork is incredibly diverse stylistically, beautiful, and manages to be funny, angry and depressing all at once. The occasional full-page pieces are especially impressive – particularly the illustration for the rat-fable and a piece that depicts a line of people carrying crosses on their backs. There are also the depressed mechanical birds which I (I do not know how the author would feel about this) wanted to pet. As is usual with Blaft books this one is beautifully produced as well. Definitely a keeper – I'm not sure I'll be reading it at one go again for a while, but definitely in bits and pieces.




Terry Pratchett – The Unadulterated Cat: Adorable and (as far as I can tell) true. I remain a dog person, though.



Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games: This was an almost accidental reread - I was looking up a quote from the book and got sucked in so that I ended up reading the whole thing. Not that I'm complaining. I loved the book when I first read it last year, and this reread has reminded me that I am still to read Catching Fire, the next book in the series. (Mockingjay, the final book, will be published later this year.)


Hirsh Sawhney (ed) – Delhi Noir: Reviewing elsewhere, so that'll probably be put up at some point soon. There are some excellent stories in this collection, though, and it's worth a read.


I forgot, while listing the romance novels I'd read that I'd also reread Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy. I will make up for this by posting an extract.

“I wish you will keep still!” she said severely, patting his arm with a soft cloth. “See, it is scarcely bleeding now! I will dust it with basilicum powder, and bind it up for you, and you may be comfortable again.”

“I am not in the least comfortable and shall very likely be in a high fever presently. Why did you do it, Sophy?”

“Well,” she said, quite seriously, “Mr. Wychbold said that Charles would either call you out for this escapade, or knock you down, and I don’t at all wish anything of that nature to befall you.”

This effectually put a period to his amusement. Grasping her wrist with his sound hand, he exclaimed, “Is this true? By God, I have a very good mind to box your ears! Do you imagine that I am afraid of Charles Rivenhall?”

“No, I daresay you are not, but only conceive how shocking it would be if Charles perhaps killed you, all through my fault!”

“Nonsense!” he said angrily. “As if either of us were crazy enough to let it come to that, which, I assure you, we are not—”

“No, I feel you are right, but also I think Mr. Wychbold was right in thinking that Charles would—what does he call it?—plant you a facer?”

“Very likely, but although I may be no match for Rivenhall, I might still give quite a tolerable account of myself!”

She began to wind a length of lint round his forearm. “It could not answer,” she said. “If you were to floor Charles, Cecy would not like it above half; and if you imagine, my dear Charlbury, that a black eye and a bleeding nose will help your cause with her, you must be a great gaby!”

“I thought,” he said sarcastically, “that she was to be made to pity me?”

“Exactly so! And that is the circumstance which decided me to shoot you!” said Sophy triumphantly.

February Reading (I)

Since I read so many romance novels in February I've divided this past month's reading into two posts, romance and non-romance. This would be the romance one.


Stephanie Laurens - The Bastion Club series [The Lady Chosen, A Gentleman's Honour, A Lady of his Own, A Fine Passion, To Distraction, Beyond Seduction, The Edge of Desire]: I said last month that despite Laurens' many flaws I was probably still going to read the Bastion Club books. And I did read most of them. While buying The Edge of Desire (this version) I gained some useful insights about cover art that I considered contributing to this conversation - unfortunately about four paragraphs in I realised I'd begun to argue for SFF covers featuring Fabio and I deleted the whole thing. I found these a bit tedious; romance novels tend to rest on the interestingness of the hero and Laurens for some reason likes to stress that all her heroes (whether because they belong to the same family or because they are in the same profession) are the same. In this lot, ex-spies try to find brides, get involved in solving crimes that affect these brides, and ultimately realise that each crime has to do with this one Last Traitor who is still floating around England and whose identity is revealed in Mastered By Love, the last book in the series. I haven't read that one and I don't really care that much. Still, I will continue to read Laurens when I come across her.


Gaelen Foley – The Knight Miscellany [ The Duke, Lord of Fire, Lord of Ice, Lady of Desire, Devil Takes a Bride, One Night of Sin, His Wicked Kiss]: This series is loosely based on the Duke (and Duchess) of Oxford and their “Harleian Miscellany”. Apparently the Duchess had a number of flings on the side and the Duke gave the resulting children the protection of his name. This series actually sounded really great. The idea of a group of titled aristocrats in Regency England who were all widely known to be illegitimate raises the possibility of all kinds of interesting situations. The Duchess herself is fascinating; she writes treatises on the rights of women and smuggles the French nobility into England (apparently the historical Duchess was also a feminist, and pretty amazing). I'd love a book on her, but Foley has said somewhere (in one of the afterwords I think) that she's never going to write it. It's a pity, with all these awesome ideas, that the books themselves should turn out to be so unimpressive.

The connected series, the Spice Trilogy (involving Knight cousins) is set partly in India, though why it must therefore be called the Spice Trilogy is uncertain. I have only read the first, Her Only Desire, which features a feisty English girl who is opposed to the East India Company (which as far as I could tell was the source of her income) and within the first ten pages of the book had rescued a native woman from Sati. The book then went on to have her bewildered at how the natives refused to take to her liberated ideas and went on obeying their own traditions, however foolish. It could have been an attempt to show idiot Westerners trying to barge in and change everything according to their standards, but it didn't turn out that way for me. The book then went on to encompass two incoherent plots involving a scheming Indian queen and the hero's ex-wife's suspicious death. Not good.



Julia Quinn – The Lost Duke of Wyndham/Mr. Cavendish, I Presume: Thomas Cavendish is the Duke of Wyndham, is engaged to a woman he barely knows, and lives with his horrible grandmother and her companion. Jack Audley is a highwayman who holds up said grandmother and companion and soon finds himself kidnapped because of his striking resemblance to Thomas' uncle. It turns out (whether he likes it or not) that Jack is the real duke and Thomas is merely Mr. Cavendish. The two books run parallel, with the first telling of Jack and Grace's relationship, and the second of Thomas and Amelia's. The comments over at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books would suggest that for most people the first book they read of the two is the one they prefer: for me this was simply not true. The Lost Duke of Wyndham bored me – Grace is colourless, and I thought that Jack's dyslexia and guilt over a cousin's death in the army were really not shown to be that serious. Plus, I find myself disapproving of highwaymen in a very conservative manner. Mr Cavendish, I Presume, on the other hand, was really good. I like Thomas and Amelia, they have problems and personalities and Thomas' identity crisis and Amelia's trying to get over the damage Thomas had already done to their relationship both worked for me.


Loretta Chase – Viscount Vagabond and The Devil's Delilah (both rereads): A few weeks ago, Sarah Rees Brennan mentioned The Devil's Delilah on Justine Larbalestier's blog and reminded me that I had not read one of the Greatest Romances Ever in a few months. So I reread it, along with Viscount Vagabond, which features some of the same characters. There are geeks and books and some absolutely delicious quotes that I should put up at some point since they deserve a post of their own. This sort of thing:

“Your upper classes, sir, have but two fears in this world: appearing foolish and being murdered by a revolutionary mob. Naturally they believe it is all one thing. It is very difficult for the British gentleman to develop and retain more than one idea in his lifetime.”

And what Sarah said too.



Jane Feather – The Bachelor List, The Bride Hunt, The Wedding Game: This was quite a strange series. These three Victorian romances feature sisters who run an underground feminist magazine in London. I found myself far more interested in the feminism and publishing than the romances, which weren't all that interesting. My intolerance for chauvinism in romantic heroes is probably unfair in a series like this one, but it did get in the way of my enjoying the things. The feminism was pleasing though, and I liked the Pankhurst cameos.


Victoria Alexander - Love With the Proper Husband and The Pursuit of Marriage: These appear to be part of a series involving devious matchmaking parents conning their kids into love and marriage. Love With the Proper Husband wasn't great. The Pursuit of Marriage involved a huge stuffed camel. Guess which one I preferred?

Reading matter

Just a heads up - my friend Nandini, who is awesome and incredibly smart, has this new monthly column at Popmatters. The first one is here. You should read it, and all her columns to follow; I'm expecting them to be rather good.

In which I express shocking opinions and defend a C.S Lewis book

SF Signal recently had a Mind Meld on the topic "Which SF/F/H book do you love that everyone else hates? Which SF/F/H book do you hate that everyone else loves?" that was rather interesting and made me think a bit about what mine would be. These are the best conclusions I could come to:

1. It's certainly not "hate" and I generally wish the man well, but I have so far been completely underwhelmed by the Guy Gavriel Kay books I've read. I started with Tigana and expected great things of it since most people I knew loved it, but found myself frequently bored by it. It did eventually hook me towards the end, but not enough to make me wish to read it again. Then a couple of years ago I read the Fionavar Tapestry and felt active dislike. I don't get it. I'm told The Lions of Al-Rassan might be more to my taste, but I'm wary.

2. I have made it clear in the past that I am not a C.S Lewis fan. Sure, the man may have seduced me a little with the Narnia books when I was eight and uncritical and craving all the fantasy lit I could find. And sure, I think Till We Have Faces is a genuinely fine book (and one which deserves a far better author) - Lewis still manages to rank among the few authors (Orson Scott Card is another) whose obnoxiousness cuts through their work for me. He doesn't like me; I don't like him.

However. I've never actually met anyone who liked Lewis' Space Trilogy (give me a shout out in the comments so we know we're not alone) but it definitely has its moments. The bit with the Sorn in Out of the Silent Planet (I squeed when the Sorn appeared in Alan Moore's second League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book). The paranoid, underground bits in Perelandra, which I rediscovered recently since a bit was quoted in The Book of Imaginary Beings. But mostly, That Hideous Strength. There is so much wrong with this book - it is probably Lewis' most disturbing with regard to his opinions on women. But it is so gloriously, ludicruously weird. There is a sinister Orwellian agency (called N.I.C.E). There is the Dark Side of the Moon. There is a giant disembodied head. Merlin comes back from the grave and random Tolkien references are made. There is a giant, amiable bear. With all this going on, Lewis' terror of women in the university fades into insignificance.

YfL2: Turnip

I have been very silly. The writers of Blackadder, could they but see this, might possibly arrange for me to be assassinated.

(An edited version appeared today in the New Indian Express education supplement. I'm educational, internet.)


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Turnip: (noun) A round root with white or cream flesh which is eaten as a vegetable and also has edible leaves.



Recently a school in California banned a book, removing all copies from its shelves. This would not be particularly unusual (most schools choose not to stock certain books) except that the book in question was hardly something most people would consider racy. It was the Merriam-Webster Collegiate dictionary. Apparently a child had discovered the definition of “oral sex” in this dictionary, and the revelation that a book full of word definitions could potentially tell children what particular words mean was enough. Following widespread mockery the school reinstated the dictionary (though students now need written permission to consult it).

But could the revelation that students might look up certain words and phrases in the dictionary really be that much of a revelation to the school authorities? In an episode of Blackadder, Blackadder (played by Rowan Atkinson) and his turnip-obsessed sidekick Baldrick (Tony Robinson) meet Dr. Samuel Johnson, the compiler of the first English dictionary. The following exchange takes place:



Dr. Johnson: Sir! I hope you're not using the first English dictionary to look up rude words!

Blackadder: I wouldn't be too hopeful -- that's what all the other ones will be used for.

Baldrick: Sir, can I look up `turnip'?

Blackadder: `Turnip' isn't a rude word, Baldrick.

Baldrick: It is if you sit on one.



While it's notable that Blackadder, the scriptwriters and the audience all take for granted that most dictionaries are going to be used to look up rude words at some point, what is far more interesting is Baldrick's contribution to the conversation. Of the three, Baldrick evinces the most sophisticated understanding of language. He realises that meaning is to a great extent dependent on context. The dictionary definition of a turnip is functional, but in the right circumstances a turnip can be an object of desire (as it seems to be for Baldrick himself), a lifesaver (if one were starving), or the source of a great deal of pain or the reason for much cursing, if one were to sit on it. Dr. Johnson's contribution to the English language is to give it rules; words can only mean what the dictionary says they can mean. Baldrick immediately undermines this attempt at regulation by demonstrating that it is completely inadequate.


Of the two sides, I'm inclined towards Baldrick's, and not just because everything one hears of Dr. Johnson makes him sound like one of the most insufferable men who ever lived. But then again, without setting some rules for the language it would be complete chaos.

If Baldrick is right about language, perhaps that school in California was right to ban the dictionary. After all, in the right context every word is potentially dangerous. But when language is that unstable, maybe we need dictionaries, with their illusion of creating some sort of order. Otherwise we'd all just run away screaming and nothing would ever get said.

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Practically Marzipan: Books on a plane

I am amazed I managed to get through this without screaming about getting these motherfucking books off this motherfucking plane.

Anyway. An edited version of this appeared in the New Indian Express yesterday.



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Recently I read of a rumour (hopefully proved false by now) that passengers on flights bound for the US would not be allowed to carry anything on their laps during the last hour of the journey in order to prevent terrorism. Among the dangerous items banned from passengers’ laps were books.

Packing books for a journey is a complex and involved process. For one thing, there’s the time factor to be considered. How long is your trip, and how much time will you, realistically, have to read? If you’re like me, you will vastly over-estimate this and carry twice as many books as are actually required, but it’s good to have a figure to base things on.

There’s also the question of packing relevant reading. Until relatively recently, when I went on holiday I would try to carry books about the place I was visiting – historical fiction or crime thrillers or anything that would be familiar with the geography of the place. It took a few years for me to realize that this didn’t always work. Some places simply that interesting, and even when they are you still risk an informational overload that could leave you craving a bad romance novel. The situation is made worse for me because I’m actually a terrible packer, and far too prone to wanting to carry everything I might need – I have a pair of formal shoes that have traveled halfway across the world with me on the pretext that I might need them. They have never been worn. With books, my instinct is to fill my bags with related and unrelated literature, thus (in theory, at least) preparing myself for every eventuality.

At this point constraints of space and weight come into play. I know through long experience exactly how many trade paperbacks can be stuffed into a regular backpack – subtract four if the backpack also contains a laptop. Whether it is wise or healthy to carry a big bag of books on ones back is of course another matter entirely. But the alternative is to put the books in one’s checked-in baggage and airlines are unfairly harsh about those of us who wise to transport mini-libraries around with us. (I could, perhaps, just about avoid having to deal with airline baggage allowances if it wasn’t for the fact that I buy books compulsively when in other cities).

Once on a plane, the books you’ve carried with you become tremendously important. You don’t want to carry anything that will make you cry - I made two businessmen seated next to me quite uncomfortable once when I carried a particularly weepy book on a flight. Equally, you don’t want something that will make you laugh too much or cause the stewards to think you require medical assistance (P.G Wodehouse is not a valid excuse for disrupting a flight). And it must be absorbing enough to keep you absorbed, since if you glance away from the page you run the risk of being sucked into conversation with the guy next to you, who wishes to tell you all about his son in England who is well settled and unmarried and possessed of every virtue. Do not look away from the page. If books are a weapon in this case, they’re a defensive one.

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The book that made me cry and so disturbed those unfortunate men was Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses, which I wrote about here. I think my most inspired choice of themed books was on a few days' trip to Turkey, when I carried Umberto Eco's Baudolino, Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, and Teresa Tomlinson's The Moon Riders (also a tear jerker, though).