WhirledView

Professor P. Lal: He da Man

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

        That is Fullness
               This is Fullness
                      From Fullness comes Fullness
                             Take Fullness from Fullness
                                    What remains is Fullness
                                           Om  Shantih  Shantih  Shantih
                                                        The Paramahamsa Upanisad

This has been hard to write, not only because I am sad, but because sloppy thinking and writing won’t do for  P. Lal.

I planned to visit him, in Kolkata, this coming January or February.  For months I’ve been looking forward to another session of wide-ranging, exhilarating conversation, some heavy literary and philosophical stuff, perhaps, but also the elation of minds meeting in surprising ways, all to be heightened (I hoped) by cups of Darjeeling  and squares of cloud-light shondesh from the kitchen of Shyamasree, his wife, whose family had been intimately connected with the Shanti Niketan of  Rabindranath Tagore. 

That wordfest won’t happen now.  P. Lal died on November 3, 2010.

Purushottama Lal (aka Profsky) was, oddly enough, the only mentor this American writer ever had.  He hounded me relentlessly until I let him publish my first collection of poetry.  The Deadmen and Other Poems appeared in 2002 with the Writers Workshop imprint, gold-embossed, handloom-bound, in a rainbow of colors.  Three books have followed that one.  Would any of my poetry gone public without P. Lal’s hectoring?  I don’t know.  But this is the way publishing began for me, and I am grateful.

We met face to face, a qualification whose importance will emerge shortly, while I was Branch Public Affairs Officer at the American Consulate in Calcutta/Kolkata in 1998.  He had committed himself to translating (or transcreating, as he immodestly put it) the Mahabharata of Vyasa and, tranche by tranche, he was reading his beautifully—indeed lovingly Englished lines to a small collection of enthusiasts who gathered at 11:00 am on Sunday mornings. Having taken a graduate course in Sanskrit literature at the University of Chicago, I’d nibbled at some tone-deaf Victorian and 20th century translations, so I was eager to know if a readable version might finally be in the works.  Off I went, one Sunday, and established myself, as discreetly as I could for the only non-Indian in the room, as far toward the rear as empty seats permitted.

Thus I found a refuge from the pain that went along with the State Department’s gleeful absorption of the U.S. Information Agency.  U.S.I.A.’s Indian employees were being squeezed mercilessly. Collegial operations were being replaced by rigid hierarchies.  Rapid response was giving way to bureaucratic sclerosis.  My efforts to influence the process were fruitless.  But Profsky knew nothing of this.  I left it all behind on Sunday mornings. 

Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence – A Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel, The Museum of Innocence, tells the tale of an attractive and wealthy thirty year old man’s obsession with an eighteen year old shop girl who was also his distant cousin. The story is set in 1970s Istanbul, a different and far poorer city than today. In this book, Pamuk sprints, then almost painstakingly strolls, through the separate but interconnected lives of the westernized elite, the idiosyncratic Turkish film world and that of a lower-middle class family all set against an outside world of the country's ongoing political turbulence and economic stress.

Political murders were commonplace during those years, nightly killings transpired on the city’s streets between left and right and Pamuk hints that perhaps Turkish security forces themselves played murky roles in the carnage. The military coup of 1980 ended the escalating urban violence and ushered in a more stable era. But Pamuk leaves an important question unanswered: whether and by how much the Turkish “dark state” was involved itself in underwriting the unrest. A question that still echoes today.

1970s Istanbul

Istanbul of the late 1970s was a difficult place to reside or even visit. I well remember visiting friends there in January 1979: the petrol lines were long. The Turkish lira was nonconvertible and inflation was high. Imports were almost non-existent but the markets were filled with fresh produce from the countryside and fish from the seas and the Bosphorus - even in winter. Internal migration was rampant and the city’s public services were overwhelmed by the influx of peasants from Anatolia - but Islamists did not figure prominently in Pamuk’s world of the time.

Pat Sharpe Is Reading Her Poems This Sunday: Come, If You Can

Patricia Lee Sharpe will be one of the featured readers at the New Mexico Women Authors’ Book Festival this weekend.  She will be reading from her three volumes of poetry on Sunday, October 3, at 1:30 pm.  The Festival is being held at the New Mexico History Museum in downtown Santa Fe.  Poems from The Deadmen, her first book, which was published by Writers’ Workshop in Kolkata will be included, as well as selections from Indus Suite and Coming and Going Love, her latest, which was published this summer.  WhirledView readers will not be surprised to learn that her poems grapple with the hard issues of our times, although the human heart is not by any means neglected.

A Gift for Pakistan and the Women of Pakistan

Finishing Line Press has just published my collection of poems Indus Suite, which is now available at www.finishinglinepress.com and  www.amazon.com.  Regrettably (except for an extract serving as a blurb on the back cover) there was no room for the introduction that Pakistani poet  Fahmida Riaz so kindly and generously wrote when this collection was first coming together.  Here is that "Forward," word for word.  PLS

 The Indus Suite poems were written in Pakistan.  They are interwoven in the years of Patricia Sharpe=s sojourn in Karachi and my friendship with this amazing woman, who was then an official at the American Consulate in Karachi. [We'd first met twenty years before, when I was a Fulbright Professor teaching American Literature at Punjab University in Lahore. PLS] 

How did I become her friend, when I have never had even a nodding acquaintance with anyone belonging to the diplomatic community?  Neither before nor after her.  (This unconscious striving to keep a respectful distance must be mutual!)  And yet I went to her so often, sought her company so frequently while she was here that I was sometimes the first reader or listener of these poems.

I read them or listened to them in silence and wonderment.  There is something inexplicable about them.  Something that defies all notions of keeping one=s distance, remaining aloof, or minding one=s own business. 

I have marveled at them because these poems could have been writtten by a Pakistani.  A sane Pakistani who loved this land and grieved for it.  They could be written by me.

Did I write them, too?  I can see lines from my own poems echoing in hers.  Of course, Patricia never read them.  They are all in Urdu, which she could not read.  Nor did I even read them out to her.  Translating them into English would have been a bother.

But when I read in ACover Up@

You who dare

to hide my handiwork

in windowless rooms,

in coffin-like cells,

and call yourselves

protectors--O

you brain dead

jailors of body and soul,

who

gave

you

this brief

to suffocate daughters and wives

                  for the crime of being female......

I marvel at her passionate involvement and think of my own poem AChadar aur Chardivari@ (AChadar and Four Walls@)

Sire, what shall I do with this black chadar.

Why do you bestow it upon me,

                            your Grace?

Mexican Maid

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

You didn’t make her beautiful, God,
you didn’t get her educated,
or shower riches,
but female is female
in the dark.
You designed her
for making bébés.
You gave her the urge
for sex
and motherhood,
precious motherhood, you said,
the goal of a woman’s life,
the reward for piety.
Be patient!  Be good!

And you made her counterpart,
the guy from nowhere
going nowhere,
angry,
lusty,
machissimo,
doesn’t care if no! means yes! yes!
or no! no! no!  he needs it, he wants it,
and look how she’s dressed, how she walks,
where she is, she’s asking for it,
and he’s no sissy
in rubbers,
besides the priest says
every fuck should be open to love.
Meaning bébé -making,
which happens.
The bébé.
Not the love.

She looks at her fatherless daughter,
her fatherless son,
and gives the one in the making
back to God.
It’s a sin, she tells me.
A sin. 

THE MOTHS OF WINTER '08-'09

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I could
and should
have predicted this.
Denial
was easier.
Then winter came.
I reached
into a stack of sweaters
for a favorite, a mossy green cashmere,
unfolded it, laid it out, made to put it on and saw
the worm,
munching away,
as if it hadn’t already consumed
yarn enough
to give it cramps
and pause.
I saw
so many holes
the most dedicated expert weaver
couldn’t make this very pricey sweater
I liked so much
whole again.

The stack
also contained
a plum merino,
a dove gray alpaca,
an itchily ordinary pink wool turtleneck,
the first two equally gnawed at,
the latter hardly touched.
Moth larvae have good taste.
How comforting!

Disaster unblocks memory.
There had indeed been
a nondescript tan moth
fluttering boldly around one day,
its wings going so fast it had the look
of a bit of fuzz.
I tried to catch it.  It got away. 
I shrugged. 
Maybe it wasn’t a moth.
Most probably it was nothing at all
to worry about. 

Precedent established, I shrugged off
the next one, too, or almost,
in another room, where—I can’t believe
I didn’t focus on this—I’d stashed some modest
Orientals, rolled up, out of the way,
in a dark closet corner,
toward which,
come to think of it,
that second moth was headed
when I made one careless futile attempt
to smash it
between my palms.  

The rugs didn’t have holes
so much as squiggly
little channels
in the nap. 
How nice!  Sculpted carpets. 
And very chic, in a way.
Orientals need
a touch of  history,
which I’ll embroider a bit,
as carpet sellers usually do,
and be rid of them.

Meanwhile, the house stinks
of the mothballs I deluded myself into not
needing, a double dose, to be extra
sure, as if I could ever
make up
for the loss.

Life in the Age of Bush

by Cheryl Rofer

Newsweek started it, according to Kevin Drum. And Jamie has added his tuppence. The San Diego Union-Tribune has contributed its view (via Bouphonia, which is more worth reading).

As Kevin puts it, “Newsweek asked its cultural critics to pick the ‘one work in their field that they believe exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.’" I’m going to do something that I tend to criticize in others, like the Union-Tribune: way overinterpret some literature that probably doesn’t deserve it. But what the heck.

I’ll put forward a genre that I believe exemplifies some aspects of life in the age of Bush: action novels about the Templars and other religion-related mysteries that originated in the high middle ages. Since that’s one of my favorite periods of history, I’ve particularly noticed this trend. I haven’t read all of them by a long shot, but I was in the middle of one of them when the challenge surfaced, The Templar Legacy, by Steve Berry.

Zen and a Couple of Books

by Cheryl Rofer

I’ve been a great fan of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance since the very beginning. So when I saw an advertisement for Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Mark Richardson, I rushed out to my local independent bookseller to buy it. They were out; I guess there are a lot more like me in Santa Fe. But they soon got a new batch, and I gobbled it up in two days.

It’s almost always a mistake to write sequels, so I didn’t expect much, and I wasn’t disappointed. Richardson has achieved a sentimentalism that appealed even to me with his mimicry of Pirsig’s tone and style, but as it went on with nothing like the original content, the mimicry cloyed. Pirsig’s odd passive constructions, which reflect the confusion as to the identity of the narrator, mean nothing when used by a motorcycle guy who is running from something we never learn, whose trials and enlightenment, if that is what he achieved, pale next to Pirsig’s heroic journey.