Caravan: Rashid Jahan

Aamer Hussain documents an extensive article on the work of literary mentor and Urdu writer Rashid Jahan at Delhi-based Caravan magazine. This is a fascinating read, especially for a neophyte such as myself, who knows nada about Urdu literature. Also, curious to contemplate how this happens across many literary cultures, where work and the role an early voice played are buried and forgotten about. Click the paragraph to read the entire article.

1952. ISMAT CHUGHTAI HAD BEEN, for nearly a decade, the leading short story writer and novelist in the world of Urdu literature. But across the border in Pakistan, Qurratulain Hyder’s reputation as the disaffected chronicler of the generation lost to the tribulations of Partition was rapidly rising and would soon challenge Chughtai’s supremacy. In Lahore, Hijab Imtiaz Ali was turning to psychoanalytically inspired fictions about alcoholism and the Electra complex. Several other young, female Urdu short story writers, of a generation nurtured on the literature of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, were coming to maturity: Khadija Mastur, Hajra Masroor, Mumtaz Shirin, Shaista Ikramullah, Amina Nazli. And Rashid Jahan—doctor, political activist, Chughtai’s literary mentor and the forerunner of this entire wave of writers—died of cancer in a Russian hospital in July of that year, some weeks before her forty-seventh birthday, almost forgotten by the literary world she had stormed two decades before. Yet she had freed the tongues and the pens of several generations that followed; her impact would be surpassed only three decades later, by Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed, the feminist poets of the 1960s who replaced the forensic idiom of Rashid’s work with a lyrical celebration of women’s bodies. 

Hack My Hearing

Hack My Hearing

In this programme, Frank asks what the future holds for people like him, part of a tech-savvy generation who want to hack their hearing aids to tune in to invisible data in the world around them.

Could these designers and hackers create the next supersense?

To listen to the radio piece click here

Live with the rolling tarps

Here is a LIVE weather report. Behind the rainy system, which was deceptively warm looking but when I took my trotters to run the track proved icy rain and unkind on my spectacles, hid a North Westerly Wind storm. It has just arrived in the past 30 mins at is gusting at 63 KM p hr.

It just body checked my window with what sounded like a hefty bump off the arse of a wrestling owl colliding with it. There followed another gust which sounded TARP esque.

I am tentatively predicting the next windy sounds will be redolent of sheet metal being shook.

On va voir.

Meanwhile over on the East Coast a big thunk of a snowstorm is landing. Of course our 63 k phr have shook things right up. All sympathy momentarily dissolved and distracted. An Orange alert declared in Connemara, (Ireland obv) but my weather spy reported the roof of the house ready to lift off I quote “Orange alert my eye”. We are united in weatherly affront.

Bonne nuit.

Radio rain

Oh God this perishing rain. The sound of it through the curtains makes one feel like you are having your hair washed in a too small sink, with one of those dubious plastic plugs onto the taps pink shower attachment and the water is constantly douching your protesting ears and running down the back of your neck.

Good morning World — that’s my radio rain frustration moment passed. Now I must step and give this weather system something of a chance to express itself visually.

The second day of 2014 has deadlines, reading and no toast on the menu.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to one and all! Bonne Année et Bonne Santé ! e2014 commenced with fog, rolling fog or mildly undulating fog.

I wish you health, humour and happiness during 2014.

I ended 2013 with my family here in Vancouver, eating, watching comedies ensemble (and then subsequently one of the worst films ever written, set in Paris) drinking and scrambling to learn muscle names up and down the anterior and the posterior views of the body.

Contrasts

Two contrasting offerings: the first for the sound of her voice here’s an interview with Sheila Watson from 1975.
http://www.thecapilanoreview.ca/ (scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll also find Crawford Killian interview)
I can’t tell if it’s the tape quality as well as Watson’s voice, along with the pauses, hesitancy or simply the sound of Watson’s voice alone that’s appealing. I wasn’t so struck necessarily by what she said. I just found something particular in the quality of her speaking voice. Also, the gentle quality of the two voices questioning her, how they are sat back from the recording device. Voices these days when recorded have an equality which does not give the same listening inference that’s suggested here. The image of ashtrays on the table between them also springs visually to mind. Diluted orange squash in beakers with garish patterns — ok I shall cease with my 1970’s teleportation. I love the moment where she says “I don’t write, I haven’t written anything since 1957 … and then carries on about how much revision she does leading to her remark “I have an untidy mind ..” and latterly “stream of consciousness is a technique I abhor” On Joyce: “He does it. I wouldn’t”

Secondly in somewhat sharp and technological contrast, here is Mckenzie Wark on Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie — read it until the end, the second half is very engaging.

Click here for entire piece: 

“Bodies are not such coherent things, then. They are fabricated in meshes of images, tech, laws, and so on. “We are not a body without organs, but rather an array of heterogeneous organs unable to be gathered under the same skin.” Pharma-porno gender is not just an ideology or an image or a performance. It gets under the skin. It’s a political technology, “and the state draws its pleasure from the production and control of our porngore subjectivity.”
But its capital and tech rather than the state that most interests Préciado. “These artifacts (us) can’t exist in a pure state, but only within our enclosed sexual techno-systems. In our role as sexual subjects, we’re inhabiting biocapitalist amusement parks. We are men and women of the laboratory, effects of a kind of politico-scientific bio-Platonism.” She usefully extends what is basically a Foucauldian way of thinking onto new terrain, where commodification and power meet.”

Kay McCarthy

It is with great sadness that I acknowledge the recent passing of Kay McCarthy of Dublin 9. (RIP) One of the most wonderful human beings I have known. Luckily I can still very much hear her voice and see her standing in the kitchen. Usually she was moving the teapot towards a cup or offering me something to eat or sitting at the table where we’d all catch up. And then there was the laughter, lots of laughter and warnings about the draft that might come in the back door when Gerry would open it to take the dogs out for a walk. Kay loved the three dogs, but was especially fond of Tolly, who was a small barrel of short legged dog with a ruffle of fluff all over her. The dog was named for the River Tolka where she was fished out of and saved before the McCarthys’ adopted her.

I hope I always hear Kay’s voice. She was the best a person could be loving, caring and unfailingly warm at the sight of you. “Isn’t that great?” was a phrase she often used in conversation and meant it. We loved you Kay and we miss you. Hard to imagine this planet without you. Oíche mhaith.

Ernie in the Manager.

I mislaid the Baby Jesus. I hid him in a safe place until he was due to make his entrance into the manager in the Crib. Then I couldn’t locate him, so Ernie had to step in as the understudy. He looks aglow. Click on the image to see Ernie in Widescreen. I don’t know why this photo insists on being so small in this interface.

4 degrees above

Christmas Day was a pissy rain day when I observed the weather in the lamp light, which is where I like to do my wondering. The forecast today was for four degrees above and it was less pissy thankfully. I was curious to note that the weather forecast was identical today in Tofino, right down to the high and the low and the action. I don’t know why I assumed it might be different, but I practice the cutting edge science of weather wondering  rather than the science of meteorology.

I love Christmas because it’s an excellent time to work! I manage pots of things during these two days and I don’t mean the cooking variety. I mean the reading and writing variety. And this year the theme was exercise. The gym was open yesterday and I took myself to it. It was packed. I continue my physiology studies. Now I conduct them while on the strange up and down, elastic band, mountain machine — the name of which I have never figure out. The problem is I am short and the reading material sits above my head so I have to perform an acrobatic reading feat. I have to balance the book and my hands on two poles that are not intended for that purpose.

When I rang the Motherland today they reported a storm underway. A storm that had been blowing for days. The wind speeds were up to 150KM per hr. We collectively diagnosed it as a Tropical Storm type wind event, except of course rural Ireland is far from Tropical. Met Eireann issued a red alert or Status Red (here are the details just to share a bit of variety on the weather watching).

Wind Warning for Wexford, Galway, Mayo, Clare, Cork, Kerry and Waterford

Update
Becoming very stormy this evening with gale force southeast winds veering southwest early tonight and further veering westerly tomorrow. Severe and damaging gusts of 120 to 140km/hr expected and 150km/hr gusts in exposed coastal areas.
Very high seas also with significant danger of coastal flooding also.
Winds moderating Friday afternoon and evening.

**

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, we can see again where penguins are streaks ahead of us. Power cuts do not piss off penguins.

**

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas or two days off with your family or friends. I hope you had the benefit of good health, warm Brussel sprouts and some comedy to wash it down. At this time of the year and because I pass the hospital often, I think of everyone in there and those working hard to give them pain relief, resolution and comfort. The ones who’ll come out and those who may not. The families and friends who climb the stairs in to visit them regardless. I salute you all. As Mr Strummer says “Without people you are nothing.” VGH also has my favourite Christmas lights in the world.

Two treats

Abysmal rainy day here and terror ice storm in Toronto and further east. I feel for all those people with no heat and no kettle in those shivering temperatures.

Thus a treat (those sans power can join this treat once the lights come back on) Here’s a trailer for a film based on Robert Walser’s short story The Walk. It is made from from found footage and directed by Siobhan Davies & David Hinton.

Click here to watch

Also, a friend sent me this yesterday. An essay on the problems of reading by Moyra Davey. Davey’s show Ornament and Reproach is currently up at the Belkin Satellite gallery.