I am patting myself on the back; I had my questions when I taught my colleague’s core texts in the western tradition class last semester. It was a last minute arrangement.  I didn’t know how our students would respond to a non-Christian teaching them the Bible. I got this email from a student today; I can’t stop smiling, you know!

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Dr. Devi,

I would like to know when is the best time to pick up (if there is a time at all!) my exam. I am sure you don’t need the extra clutter in your office and I would really like to re-live some of the conclusions I came to while writing it. The class was extraordinarily enlightening and I hope to carry it throughout the rest of my life. It was easily one of the most important classes I have ever taken.

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Thanks, Matthew. You did very well in the class.

It is always a sign of an useful class when you want to re-live the final exam. What a great book, isn’t it? I really enjoyed teaching it as well.

 

There was just this one brief moment as I walked into Raub this morning for my class when I felt that I had stepped through the portals into another world. I think it was seeing all the students walking so purposefully from class to class; my own state of mind had been different–I had not transitioned completely from the home state of mind.  And yet we are all in the same place and time. School started today for the spring semester, and as usual there was no parking in any of the faculty parking lots (students tell me that they already budget money each semester for parking tickets–students feel quite fine with parking in the faculty decal spots– I just shake my head at their green student decals parked in row after row under the proud legend Faculty Parking Lot; so much for all these distinctions! Faculty! Student! Bah Humbug!– as a result of which faculty end up parking away in the distance in what are known informally as the “loser lots.”) I parked in prime loser lot today. Good exercise walking that distance in the slush and the snow. Lots of familiar faces and some unfamiliar faces in the classes. Because I taught an overload in the fall, I only have three classes and an independent study this spring. Students were happy to be back, they said; the vacation got a bit too long, apparently. Well, giddy up then; we start our readings in earnest on wednesday. I whetted their interest by telling them the frame story of Thousand and One Nights. Scheherazade the storyteller.  It feels like a good semester; overall, a calm day.

Usual redistricting problems in Texas; amazing really, year after year, and nobody cares! Absolutely amazing!

And Rebecca, you must be sad today because Etta James passed away. Here is the Guardian obituaryfor you. What a sad life; sort of like Amy Winehouse’s. I don’t know her music at all, except this song she sang with Chuck Berry--I am a Chuck Berry fan. She is not really a rock singer; too strident tone for that. Here is my favorite Chuck Berry-Keith Richards video.  Don’t you just love YouTube? Nation, please sign all the anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA petitions–it is terrible if they shut down the internet. Rest in peace, Etta James!

ps. Article about gawking tourism in India. I had a similar distressing experience when I was in San Francisco some years ago. The group of people that I was with insisted on walking through Castro Street to, you know, look at the “homosexuals.” It was incredible; I just wanted to run away, and after a while, that is indeed what I did–I said I had to call home and went back to the hotel. Or folks in Dallas who say let us go to Harry Hines Boulevard in the evening and look at the prostitutes. Who is next? People who wear orange shirts?

 

Michael Dregni. Gypsy Jazz: In Search of Django Reinhardt and the Soul of Gypsy Swing. London: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 333. $27. 95 (Hardcover)

Michael Dregni’s Gypsy Jazz is the type of book that those of us who consider research a true labor of love would want to write. Meticulously researched and documented, this book tells the story of the origins of jazz manouche, jazz gitan, jazz tsigane — the many names by which the genre is known — or “gypsy jazz,” as it is known among the English-speaking public, as it originated in Paris in the 1930s and 1940s with the great manouche guitarist Django Reinhardt, and his accompanists in Le Quintette du Hot Club de France. Since nothing comes from nothing, what this means is that Dregni has, down to the last detail, traced the evolution of this “French jazz” — a novel concept since jazz is essentially the most American of all musical forms — all other forms appear elsewhere in the world, except jazz — through its own identifiably French traditions as well as its considerable debts, borrowings, and influences from across the ocean,  from American jazz: the novelty numbers of the 20s big bands, American horn men, Louis Armstrong’s coronet solos, and the bop of Charlie Parker all played on guitar–not a jazz instrument at the time–jazz was for piano or horns in the 30s and 40s–and violin, the gypsy’s own instrument, ironically played in Django’s quintette by the gadjo –Romani for non-gypsy– Stephane Grappelli. String jazz was a novel concept, if there ever was one, and it took a long time and the efforts of many people–both gypsy and gadjo alike–to give this beautiful music its own unique niche in the world of popular music. Dregni’s book is an encyclopedic tribute to these men. I could not put the book down once I started reading it, and my life has been enriched because of it. I would put the book down only to search on YouTube for some of the musicians that the book references: Tchan Tchou Vidal, Moreno Winterstein, Dallas Baumgartner, “Baro” Ferret, Patotte Bousquet, John Adomono et al. Amazingly enough, YouTube has many of these musicians and their recordings. What a treat.

When I first heard Django Reinhardt’s music–it was Swing 42–a simple throwaway tune that Django and Grappelli composed at the end of one of their sessions in 1942–it reminded me of Hindustani classical music. The cascading run of arpeggios from Django’s fretting and picking fingers with their up and down lines sounded exactly like the string-equivalent of the articulated taans of a Hindustani classical composition in drut teen taal to my ears. Of course, not all of Django’s compositions feature such towering and cascading gyres of notes–compare Nuages or Artillerie Lourde with Minor Swing — and Dregni walks us through the evolution of the many structures of Django’s own gypsy jazz–he changed his style greatly over the years– as well as that of gypsy jazz in general from its fast-tempo bals musette beginnings.

Regni’s book is divided broadly into two topical sections with the first eight chapters dealing primarily with Django’s story, and the remaining eight chapters focusing on other gypsy contemporaries of Django such as the Ferret and Malha clans, Django’s son by his first wife and the Baumgartner-Reinhardt clan, the resurgence of Django’s music in Paris with Bireli Lagrene, the Rosenbergs, Schmitt and Debarre, gypsy jazz coming to America with Danny Fender et al, the group Syntax and gypsy jazz rap, and finishes with a gorgeous chapter on learning to play Minor Swing with David Reinhardt, Django’s grandson. What is beautiful about these chapters is that Dregni has traveled to every out-of -the-way gypsy campine and dingy boites du nuit–boxes of night–French slang for dingy bars–and met all these gypsy musicians. If they are alive, Dregni has met them and talked with them; this book is a priceless repository of gypsy memory of the last one hundred years or perhaps more. There is something incredibly tender about an American vintage guitar writer from Minneapolis traveling to France and Belgium to document the words of gypsies, almost the same kind of tenderness that made Django burst into tears upon hearing Louis Armstrong for the first time. Dregni recounts the story. Django had burned his hand badly in a fire in 1928 when the artificial flowers that his first wife had made caught on fire burning his caravan down and deforming his left hand into a claw.  Django was in the hospital for nearly two years during which time his first wife left him and though no one believed Django would ever play guitar again, his brother Nin-Nin had brought him his guitar. Regni writes:

In Django’s hospital bed lay the guitar Nin-Nin brought him. Now, within the ward, he tried to play again. His left hand was but a claw; the hand’s back, a scarred knot. The tendons and nerves of his two little fingers were damaged, leaving the digits paralyzed. He could still move his index and middle fingers though, and so during the eighteen long months of his convalescence, he forced them into motion, limbering the muscles, retraining them to his command. Limited in the number of fingers he could use to fret the guitar, he now had to rethink his approach to the fretboard. Instead of playing scales horizontally across the fretboard as was the norm, he sought fingerings running vertically down the frets as they were simpler to play with just two fingers. He fashioned new chord forms with a bare minimum of notes–often just triads made with his two fingers and his thumb reaching around the neck to the bass string. He then slid his hand up and down the neck, employing these chord forms to speak a fluent vocabulary. (50)

Two good things happened to Django when he left the hospital in 1930. One, Naguine, the woman he had left to marry his first wife, and who would soon become his second wife was waiting for him outside the hospital with a bouquet of tulips, saying simply “Tiens! These ones are real. They won’t start a fire.” And two, Django was invited to the apartment of a bohemian artist Emile Savitry in Toulon where he listened to new 78s from America–Duke Ellington and his Cotton Club orchestra, string jazz of Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang, and Louis Armstrong.

Now, listening to Armstrong’s joyous trumpet, Django was transformed. He put his head in his hands, unashamedly starting to cry. “Ach moune! Ach moune!” he repeated over and over again–a Romanes expression of stupefaction and admiration, meaning, coincidentally, “My brother! My brother!” (51)

Dregni’s style, as evidenced above is impressively and unselfconsciously erudite and informal at the same time, which makes this book the perfect example of useful and enduring scholarship. In the first three chapters, Dregni introduces us to two critical geographical times and places– le marche aux puces, the flea markets, at the Porte de Clingancourt in Saint-Ouen, where the Romani people or the “gypsies” set up their encampments in turn of the century Paris, and Pigalle, the red-light district of Paris, which catered to tourists, gangsters, addicts, prostitutes, pimps, dancers, and musicians, where Django made his living as a guitarist in his early days before the quintette and the recordings. (Sort of like Louis Armstrong’s life, isn’t it?). The first gypsies arrived in Paris in the 15th century, though their presence in Europe can be traced as far back as the 2 AD when these first “gypsies” were forcibly conscripted from India to fight in battles against invading Muslim forces. These early gypsy ancestors continued westward through Byzantium, Egypt, North Africa, Russia, Eastern Europe, and western Europe forging their own language, culture, and identity through the course of their travels. One thing remained consistent though wherever their journey took them: every continent and every country treated them as social outcasts, relegating them to the wastelands and outlands of their cities and villages, shunning them as a vile and hated group of people. The gypsy holocaust known as “porajmos” in Romani during the second world war killed nearly 1. 5 million gypsies in Europe but this goes mostly unremarked in any discussion of the Nazi holocaust, for instance. Dregni quotes Flaubert’s astute observations about the gypsies in France: “They excite the hatred of the bourgeois even though inoffensive as sheep . . .that hatred is linked to something deep and complex; it is found in all orderly people. It is the hatred that they feel for the bedouin, the heretic, the philosopher, the solitary, the poet, and there is fear in that hatred” (24).  Django — his name in Romani means “I awake” ( a cognate of the Sanskrit “jaag” meaning “to wake”; “manouche” is a cognate of the Sanskrit “manushya,” which means “human-man”) was born on January 23rd, 1910  in one such gypsy caravan parked alongside a frozen pond outside the village of Liberchies in Belgium (Happy Birthday, Django!). Tony Gatlif’s very interesting film Latcho Drom (1993) is a good documentary about the migration of the gypsies from India westwards, if you are interested in this early history.

In these early chapters, Dregni lays a thorough foundation for not only the cultural evolution of the gypsy clans in France, such as the Reinhardts, Ferrets, and Malhas, but also the foundation of gypsy music in the bals musette–the working-class dance halls for the Parisian poor and the immigrants, the prostitutes and their clients in the shambles of the city of light–who were entertained by gypsy musicians who played the three signature instruments the bals needed: bagpipes, accordion and the banjo, all precursors to the feeling and texture of what was soon to become jazz manouche. These are entrancing chapters to read. We hear of the opportune meeting of time, place, people, and instruments. Among these early tributaries of what will eventually come together as gypsy jazz we learn of Gusti Malha’s valses manouche, and Poulette Castro’s multi-instrumental string valses featuring guitars, banjos, and mandolins interplaying the melody chords in ascending and descending lines; Dregni traces the prototype of Django’s own string jazz to a 1931 release of valse Poulette. We read of Django’s early banjo and violin apprenticeships in the underworld bals, and Dregni blends anecdotes personally recounted to him by some of these old gypsy master musicians now living in renown amongst those who know gypsy jazz, and in obscurity to the rest of the world, along with excerpts from other published works on Django, most notably by the Parisian jazz afficionado Charles Delaunay, one of the founders of the Hot Club of France in the 1930s along with Pierre Noury, Jacques Bureau, and Hugues Panassie. Here is Dregni describing Django’s discovery of African-American jazz in a Pigalle nightclub through the recordings of the Billy Arnold Novelty Jazz Band:

From listening to Arnold and hearing recordings of early jazz, Django was absorbing and assimilating American jazz, striving to master the harmonies they played, their scales and arpeggios, their phrasing, the bent notes and smears, and most of all, that sense of rhythmic movement inspired from black dance that infused the music, the swagger known as swing. He no longer wanted to sound like a Gypsy or play Gypsy music; throughout the rest of his life, he rarely ever recorded Romani tunes. From the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, through the fleeting sound of jazz bands on a Pigalle stage and the more enduring magic of records played in his caravan in Paris’s La Zone, he sought now to play his guitar like an African American hornman. (47)

I absolutely loved the chapters describing and detailing Django’s work with Delaunay and the quintette, his partnership with Stephane Grappelli, and the host of musicians who played with Django over the years in the quintette, Django’s fear of dinosaurs (ha!), his attempts to learn how to read and write, and always returning to the inexhaustible fountain of music that sprang from his mind in breathtaking melodies and improvisation after improvisation. Dregni’s account of Django’s music and gypsy swing after the Nazi occupation of France is engrossing and reads like a novel in places. Condemned as “American” and “enemy” music, the SS officials had forbidden the public performance of jazz and especially gypsy swing, whereas this was the music that the common German soldiers wanted to hear in the bars and the dance-halls in the after-hours after the shelling and the bombings and the shuttling of Jews and Gypsies to the concentration-camps. Django’s music survived tenuously just outside of the gas chambers because the Nazis wanted entertainment. Regni recounts real or apocryphal anecdotes of other beleaguered gypsy musicians who claimed to be “Django” to Nazi officials just  to escape the concentration camps. These are priceless stories.

Dregni’s considerable research acumen shines forth in the chapter detailing the Gypsy pilgrimage site of Les Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer in Camargue by the sea, and the shrine of the Romani patron saint, Sarah-la-Kali. It was delightful to read Dregni’s wonderful discussion of the historic connections between Sarah-la-Kali (literally Sarah-the-dark) and the Hindu goddess Kali or Durga, and the similarities between the Catholic Romani ritual of the washing of the idol of Sarah-la-Kali in the waters of the Mediterranean, and the Hindu ritual of the washing and floating of the idol of goddess Kali in the river Ganga at the end of our own Durga puja in India. “In the stories of the many Hindu vedas, Kali could transform herself into numerous emanations of her personalities and powers. It should thus come as little surprise that over the centuries and the many miles of the Romani’s travel, she may also have become Sainte Sarah” (137).  A perfect example of a syncretic Catholic-Hindu religious faith, which was once again reflected in Dregni’s description of Django’s death and funeral on May 16, 1953 in Samois-sur-Seine where Django had bought a small cottage for his family to retire. When Delaunay found him there and attempted to lure Django to play in a concert, Django lazily waved him off, lifting up his mattress to display the bed of banknotes upon which he slept, saying, “There’s money here. I don’t need any more” (105). (I know people like this in India.)  It was here in Samois that Django composed one of his last pieces, the brief and brilliant “Anouman.” Dregni quotes Naguine’s observations about Django in Samois:

In Samois, he was no longer the Django of old. He was un autre homme–another man, a new man. He was now a poet. He had the time to look at the beauty of the world around him. In the evening, he might remain at the edge of the river until three in the morning. He watched the river, the movement of the trees, the concert made by the water, and he told me that there he saw the true music, he heard it all, he was crazy for it. He said to me, “Here is the true music!” (106).

In the old days, Dregni tells us, the manouche used to bury their dead by placing them inside their caravan and setting it ablaze with all their worldly goods, a throwback to the Hindu tradition of cremation by fire in a funeral pyre. We still cremate our dead the same way in India, in a funeral pyre. So too with Django, but with this modern update: Naguine and Negros, Django’s mother, buried Django in the Samois cemetery, and then “amassed Django’s last possessions–his meager wardrobe of clothes, his proud collection of fishing rods and tackle, his tape recorder and a batch of last tapes of compositions and new music recorded in Samois. Naguine piled Django’s things in a pyre, placed his guitar on top, struck a match, and set it on fire” (107).  Dregni’s description of Django’s Nuages played in hymn form at the church of Les Saintes -Marie-de-la-Mer is both wacky and profound at the same time. This chapter describing the pilgrimage and gypsy music festival at Les Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer that takes place every year from May 24-25 is a real highpoint of this book. I hope to make it to this annual Gypsy pilgrimage-cum-music festival someday.

Ultimately, like Gatlif’s documentary, Dregni’s book is really a book about the Romani people. The sheer human-character density of this book is staggering, and for that alone, Dregni’s book deserves to be on the top shelf of any ethnomusicography collection. The persistence, curiosity, patience, discipline, thoroughness and genuine warmth that envelops this book speak to Dregni’s deep understanding of a people, without “othering” them, their history, their present, and their invaluable merit as full human beings and as artists.  Django’s music, gypsy jazz, cannot help but be the sweet and joyful music that it is–the music you would dance to with your child or your partner–probably because it comes from a people who have fortunately or consciously chosen to remain uncontaminated by power throughout history. Dregni describes how while Paris has an estimated one hundred streets named for public figures from mathematicians to writers, artists, generals, politicians, and even clowns, there is not a single landmark in Paris today to commemorate Django, except one small relic. In a locked glass case in the music museum Musee de la Musique sits one of Django’s last Selmer Modele jazz guitars that Naguine donated to the Conservatory. Apparently it is pretty scratched up; Django carried his guitars covered in newspaper. When a British journalist sanctimoniously chastised Django for his “dirty and disheveled” guitar with “its pretty varnish long gone, a makeshift pile of matchbox covers under the bridge to keep the strings from buzzing on the frets,”  Django apparently replied: “C’est la guerre” – “it is the war” (128).  I will stop by to see this guitar on my way to Les-Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer.

The 2012 Women’s Studies speaker series will commence with a campus visit and reading by author Lori Ostlund on February 9 at the Hamblin Hall of Flags at 7pm. The reading is free and open to public.

Lori Ostlund’s first collection of short stories, The Bigness of the World received the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and was a Lambda finalist.Ostlund’s stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, New England Review, the Georgia Review, Hobart, Prairie Schooner, and the Kenyon Review, among other publications. She is the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference fellowship. She lives in San Francisco, though she is currently spending two years as the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Ostlund is currently completing work on her novel tentatively titled After the Parade, and a second story collection.

Originally from Minnesota, Ostlund has lived and traveled extensively across the world, and many of her stories reflect the complex symmetries and surprises of the domestic as well as the traveler’s perspectives, and that of the home and the world.

Lori Ostlund’s visit is co-sponsored by Women’s Studies, the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, the President’s Commission on LGBTQ, International Studies, the Office of Social Equity, the Office of Human and Cultural Diversity, and the English Department. For further information, contact Dr. Gayatri Devi at x2284 or gdevi@lhup.edu.

Author website: http://loriostlund.com/

Audrey Niffenegger. Her Fearful Symmetry. Scribner, 2009, pp. 406.

Both homicide detectives and spiritual people know that nothing lies buried for long: corpses get discovered, dead souls and ghosts are dealt with and sent to heaven, hell or limbo, as their respective cases might be. Audrey Niffenegger’s second novel Her Fearful Symmetry is part a subtle psychological crime novel and part conventional ghost story, and draws from conventions of both genres in unique and interesting ways. In particular, the crime–the murder–is committed by a ghost, a perverse haunting wherein a ghost that refuses to accept that she is dead kills another woman to inhabit her body so she can live with her former lover. The murdered woman is her own niece to whom her former lover feels attracted. There is no police work involved in solving this crime. The lover who does not mind the lustrousness of death–he is writing a doctoral dissertation on the Highgate Cemetery in the city of London and feels quite comfortable with death–is repelled by this crime upon discovery, bides his time and then leaves the old lover in the new woman’s body trying to make a family with him. In other words, the premise of this novel is as old as life itself. You cannot escape death; if once you cross over and make attempts to come back, your monstrous return will become subject to the “fearful symmetry” of nature or god or law–whatever you choose to call this supernatural power–of life and death. You cannot switch spirits; one spirit for one body, that is the rule. The title is an allusion to Blake’s poem “The Tiger,” who is evoked in the eulogy made for the young dead woman by her twin sister.  “When I die I am going to be that tiger,” the young woman had remarked as a child upon seeing a tiger.  Thus this young woman becomes the forceful hand of nature in this novel. Like Blake, Niffenegger is a visual artist and print-maker interested in conceptualizing the mythos of life, death and afterlife. Thus the setting of this novel is distributed around the Highgate Cemetery in the city of London, and a block of apartments close to the cemetery–unusual apertures for us to witness the life-and-death struggles of characters who cling to life and the city, while afterlife and eternity await them in the marvelously ornate mausoleums right next door. This is an ironic book at heart. The cemetery is after all a place of symmetry.

Life and death are not the only symmetries explored in this novel. The plot involves two sets of twins, one set of “mirror twins,” Julia and Valentina Poole,  and one set of “identical twins,” Edie and Elspeth Noblin, who not only serve as doppelgangers of each other’s identity, but also whose life stories imitate and intersect each other’s in a naturalistically deterministic and ultimately tragic way. The novel opens with Elspeth’s death in London at 44 years of cancer, and the grief of Robert Fanshaw, her much younger lover who tries to cope with Elspeth’s demise. The narrative events are set in motion with Elspeth leaving her sizable fortune, her apartment and all her significant wealth to her nieces Julia and Valentina, her twin sister Edie’s children who live with their parents in America. The twins essentially will never have to work again in their lives thanks to this inheritance. Elspeth’s will has a strange clause that the twins should live in her apartment at Vautravers for a year after which they can do with it as they please. The will also strangely stipulates that neither her sister Edie nor husband Jack are to set foot in the apartment. Edie and Elspeth’s falling-out and its secret reasons make up part of the mystery of obsessive relationships explored in the novel, the relationship between twins, in general, and these twins in particular. Julia and Valentina, both twenty-one are understandably thrilled to be free from their parents and move to London and live on their own. Even though both sets of twins share many aspects of character and appearance, Niffenegger makes them unique as well, just as all human beings are individualistic in their own ways. Julia is outgoing, Valentina is the shy one–she is called “the mouse.” Edie, their mother is a cipher of a woman, and Elspeth is ambitious, scheming and rather unempathetic of others. Robert, her lover, for instance, at times thinks of himself as “her creature.” Obsessiveness itself acquires its doppelganger element in the novel in the character of Martin, who is a diagnosed with OCD at the beginning of the novel, and whose good-natured wife Marijke eventually leaves him unable to stand the countings, the incessant hand-washing and bleaching, the scrubbing of floors, the papered windows and floors, the strange rituals to enter and leave rooms, and his refusal to accept medical treatment for his condition. This novel has one of the best descriptions of the illness of OCD behaviors.  Julia, Valentina, Martin and Robert all live in the Vautravers apartment building, and the novel’s emphasis on symmetry is extended to the friendship Julia strikes up with Martin, the gradual way in which she helps Martin to fight his OCD behaviors, eventually making him confident enough to leave the apartment itself and go to Marijke, and the tragic attraction between Valentina and Robert. It is also mirrored in the decisions of both Martin and Robert to leave their sickness and obsessions behind and become free at the end. Martin takes the huge step to control his OCD ticks and go to Marijke, and Robert leaves his old lover Elspeth masquerading inside the murdered Valentina’s body.  Natural law endures.

The bulk of the earlier sections of this novel is devoted to the leisurely exposition of the twins’ exploration of London, which Niffenegger deftly uses to lay bare the growing distance between them, the necessary tension that follows the inevitable separation of their distinct identities as Julia and Valentina and not “the twins.” I enjoyed these sections tremendously; Niffenegger captures the world of young, intelligent twenty-year old women beautifully in these chapters. Right away, we sense that children who grow up with solid attention from their families seek to recreate the same intensity in all their future relationships, which can either become a blessing or a curse, depending on how and where they process this need. Valentina’s and Robert’s tentative attraction towards each other suggests some of this cerebral contentment.

While Niffenegger who has worked as a guide at the Highgate cemetery is adept at entrancing descriptions of the graves and the cemetery, she takes a conventional approach, successfully I might add, in describing the haunting of Elspeth’s apartment, or I should say, a la the English, “flat.” Julia, Valentina and Robert communicate with Elspeth via ouija boards, seances, and automatic writing, and Elspeth, before she takes over Valentina’s body, appears as puff of air, white smoke, hazy shade etc.  I want to avoid spoilers, so I will not give away the story of Valentina’s murder, but this killing is also treated within the conventions of ghost narratives. I believe this adoption of the ease of convention is intentional on Niffenegger’s part: ghosts are representational devices anyway, and Niffenegger’s real attempt here is to investigate the nature of death through the character of a ghost. Is death freedom? Is life better than death? Why are we afraid of death that we wish to cling to life through hook or crook? I loved Niffenegger’s description of Valentina’s spirit:

Now the vast throng of crows rose out of Highgate Cemetery in unison, and the ghosts with them, their dark dresses and winding sheets flapping wing-like in the sky. They flew over Waterlow Park, circled around to fly across the Heath, and on and on, until they came to the Thames and began to follow the river eastwards, past the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge, past the Embankment, London Bridge, the Tower, and on and on. Valentina held tightly to her crow. The kitten purred in her ear. I’m so happy, she thought with surprise. The sun passed through the ghosts undimmed, and the shadows of the crows darkened the river. (399)

The epigraph to the novel are the first few lines from the Beatles’ song “She said She said” from their 1966 album Revolver: “She said, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead. I know what it is to be sad.’  And she’s making me feel like I’ve never been born.” In a way, the monstrous manipulation of death and life embodied by the character of Elspeth, a sort of living-dead, is in stark contrast to the contended death of Valentina and the hard-earned freedom of all the other characters–Julia and Theo, Martin and Marijke, and Robert. Her Fearful Symmetry is a well-paced, engrossing and thoughtful novel, vividly contemporary in its character and setting, but harking back to the atmospheric gothic novels of an older time, just like the crows that circle above the Highgate cemetery.

Moog. Dir. Hans Fjellestad (USA). 2004. (available on Netflix streaming)

Are you enjoying this winter break before the universities open for the spring semester? I am. My daughter’s school has opened and between the time she leaves for school in the morning till she gets home in the evening, I am completely “pigging out” (as my old client V used to say from my social worker days) on reading all the books I got last year as gifts, and watching all the movies I have wanted to watch. I have many book reviews to post here before the spring semester starts: Audrey Niffenegger’s novel Her Fearful Symmetry, Michael Dregni’s book Gypsy Jazz, Cristina Eisenberg’s Wolf Tooth, Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies, Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine about the US Supreme Court, David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day, Carolyn Burke’s biography of Edith Piaf, No Regrets, Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle, Jo Nesbo’s The Redbreast (when I look at this list: you have gifted me so many books, Nic! Thanks so much!)–so many wonderful books. A very productive break.

But this is a review of the film-maker Hans Fjellestad’s film Moog, a wonderful tribute to Dr. Robert Moog (pronounced like “vogue” or “rogue” with a diphthong /ou/, and not long “oo” /u/ sound), the inventor of the electronic synthesizer. Though I have not listened to them anytime recently, I used to love the music of Kraftwerk, which was very popular in India, when I was a kid. There was this one movie theater in Trivandrum that actually had a thick red velvet curtain in front of the screen. When the auditorium lights went out this curtain would slowly start to lift from the ground up in a wave-like fashion. It was totally magical to us when we were kids even though it was predictable and we had seen it many times before.  Sort of David Lynch-like; you half expect a spooky little man with painted eyes to smoke his pipe and make an enigmatic gesture when the curtain is fully drawn. The curtain would lift off the floor to the beat of this electronic music–sometimes it was Kraftwerk, sometimes something else. (I wonder who those old projectionists were and where they got this music in Trivandrum?)  In a way it was completely appropriate that electronic music lifted the screen to reveal the movie to us; it was all energy. I became really fond of synthesizer and electronic music seriously because of some of the great movies from the seventies and the eighties that had film scores and soundtracks composed by electronic music composers and groups such as Tangerine Dream who did the scores for some great movies from this period– Sorcerer, Risky Business, Shy People, and Walter Carlos (later Wendy Carlos) and Rachel Elkind who did the score for Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange.  To me, electronic music, and particularly the Moog synthesizer vividly expressed the strange dream-like narrative landscapes of these formally and thematically unique movies.  So I started watching Moog already favorably disposed to the topic and to the man who invented the synthesizer, and I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed this documentary tribute to a charismatic and original inventor, who not only was a good engineer who crossed over into the music industry and became a figurehead for keyboardists such as Rick Wakeman of Yes and Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but also an interesting thinker mulling over what is really the only question worth mulling over: what is the nature of reality? What is matter? What is energy? Are they really interchangeable?

First, let me say what this documentary is NOT about; that way, you won’t be disappointed when it doesn’t deliver all these things, if you happen to go looking for them. It is not a history of electronic music, it is not a history of the invention and evolution of the Moog synthesizer, it is not a biography of Robert Moog. What it is is this: Moog speaks to us informally about his interest in creating completely new sounds, new timbres, work with pitches, acoustics, and tones, and that this was a “real idea” within his mind and how he was able to translate that into electrical signals, and ultimately into circuit boards, and then into instrument panels. Moog recalls how a few traditional musicians who played instruments made from wood or steel asked him”Moog don’t you feel guilty for what you have done to music?” Moog says that he just could not understand that kind of response at all. He had experimented with theremins and had built many theremin kits for hobbyists and the fact that you could create musical notes without touching an instrument simply by moving your hands over two antennas to control pitch and volume fascinated him because of what it told him about sound, about music, and about instrument as an interface between the player and the music.  Do you have to touch something in order to transfer/ translate what is in your mind? Does the music come from the instrument or from the mind of the player? How important is the instrument to music? The synthesizer keyboard is not an “instrument” in the naturalistic sense of the term, the way the guitar is an instrument or a drum is an instrument. The fortuitous element of this story is that there were musicians who were asking the same questions and wanted this to happen, and who welcomed this new way to make music; the Moog synthesizer was a vast improvement over any other kind of electronic music device in the 70s and the 80s.

The documentary follows Moog as he visits several of his musical “followers”– Wakeman, Emerson, DJ Spooky, Herb Deutsch, Bernie Worrell–where they discuss how the synthesizer aided their own musical expression and creativity. Wakeman talks about the strange circumstances in which he came to possess a MiniMoog– a very funny story really–and how suddenly the keyboardist actually had something to do during a live performance on par with the guitarist et al. Deutsch, with whom Moog had collaborated in the seventies to design the synthesizer brings up the contrast between “imitative” synthesizer sounds and new timbres and tones unique to the synthesizer. This discussion is elaborated very beautifully by DJ Spooky who connects the hip-hop splicing and “found sounds” with this imitative vs new sounds debate simply by varying pitch that the synthesizer is able to do. You could very well be the inventor of the bass drum sound on the keyboard, DJ Spooky tells Moog. Interesting, don’t you think?

Moog died one year after the making of this documentary. I am glad Fjellestad made this movie; Moog appears to have been thinking of the nature of creativity and its relation to the universe at the time of the making of this film. The documentary seamlessly weaves in this aspect of Moog’s personality with his industry work with musicians and designers. It would have been fascinating to discover Moog’s later thoughts on these questions. Not many documentaries leave us wanting to know the answers to such interesting questions.

Dr. S. Sreedevi.  Pema Katha Parayunnu. Kochi: Balasahiti Prakashan, 2011, pp. 108, 65/- rupees.

My brother Appu and I listened to all the stories our mother tells children in this collection partly when we were growing up, and partly when she would tell these stories to our children, particularly my oldest niece who was inseparable from my mother when she was a baby in India and before she moved to live in Texas where my brother works. “Pema” does not strictly translate to grandmother; there is no neat one-to-one Malayalam-to-English translation for the lexical-cultural signification of the word.  Pema is a child’s diminutive in Malayalam for ‘peramma” or “elder aunt.” My cousin Teju who is a big man now with his own little children used to call my mother Pema when he was a baby.  Teju’s father, Kochumon, to whom this collection is dedicated was my mother’s youngest brother who passed away recently. So after Teju, for a whole generation of children in our family, my mother became Pema–elder aunt, elder mother, and eventually grandmother.

While she was harried and hurried with a hundred things to do in our house, amma/ pema was relatively free with her time when she visited her brothers and sisters or my father’s family, and all the children in all these houses used to crowd around her and turn her into their playmate. She loved children; children loved her. I always think of the children’s song “Mary had a little lamb” when I think of amma and the children:

“Why does the lamb love Mary so?

Love Mary so? Love Mary so?

Why does the lamb love Mary so”?

The eager children cried.

“Why, Mary loves the lamb, you know,

loves the lamb, you know, loves the lamb, you know

Why, Mary loves the lamb, you know

The teacher did reply.”

She would spend hours walking around the yard with the children, playing imaginary games with them, and telling them stories, some that she made up on the spot, and others from books and movies, and still others from her own childhood. She was incredibly well-read and had an original understanding of everything she read. Her conversations with us were filled with all kinds of memorable and witty allusions and quotes from the latest film song to classical poetry that were deftly, seamlessly and always appropriately blended in for the most accurate rhetorical or interpretive effect.  For all of us kids, my mother’s childhood stories of the times she spent with her brothers and sisters at the Mankompil house in Kottayam were the passage to a magical world, or so it seemed to us in amma’s recreation and retelling of these stories. My favorite one was where her older brother, my uncle invited her to play “goat” with him when they were seven or eight years old.  My mother was thrilled; what a game, she thought, playing “goat.” Turned out that she was the goat; he tied her to a tree, and gave her some water, and jackfruit leaves to eat. That is how you play “goat.” You are the goat.

The stories in this collection thus bear the characteristic literary imprint of amma’s personal interactions with children and all of us, and even more, her unique relationship with stories and story-tellers before her time from all over the world. Amma has mixed many old stories from her own childhood and adulthood with folk stories and fables from Kerala, a handful of folk tales and fables from the west, one from China, and even one from Disney. Disney’s Lambert the Lion was one of our favorite stories when we were growing up, and both Teju and my niece Ketaki used to love that as well. We used to ask amma to tell us this story often and her version accurately captured the unforgettable granularity of detail that used to be the hallmark of the old Disney shows.  Because that is what children want when they listen to a story–details, details, details– and amma knew how to give us the most colorful, vivid and imaginative details.  The way the wolf sharpened his teeth with that rusty old blade, how the jealous goats persuaded Lambert’s mother to leave Lambert outside in the moonlight — “the moonlight will take away his dirty yellow color and make him milky white!” how Lambert convinced the Alsatians that they should continue to take care of the goats when Lambert had cold or fever — “I will open my mouth wide and bare my teeth to show that I am roaring but you do the barking, okay?” etc etc.   I was delighted to find Lambert the Lion in this collection; it is one of the sweetest examples of amma’s great versatility as a story-teller.

The story of the good-natured Kamala and the selfish Vimala made me long to be back in India in my house sweeping the yard or helping amma in the kitchen or listening to one of the many women who used to turn up in our house with incredibly interesting stories and past histories. I used to love sitting with the vegetable woman, the egg woman, the fish woman or the woman who washed our clothes, or the woman who helped us in the kitchen, and listen to them share details of their daily lives with us.  They were mostly poor and worked from morning till night for a pittance in many different houses selling whatever vegetables or egg or fish they had.  When they came to our house they would rest and tell us what was happening in their families, to their husbands and children. These women loved my mother with a devotion that was almost tangible.  Money, clothes, food, schoolbooks–amma gave them at least some of whatever they needed when they came to us with their litany of woes; life had handed many of them very rough deals, and they spent their entire lives trying to make ends meet. When Appu or I fell ill they would go to their church or mosque or temple and pray for us. If amma tried to give them money for the candle or the church, they would always decline, saying “no amma, no money for praying for your children.”  These good women and their kindness make an appearance in several of these stories.  Several of these stories are really about kindness and remembering who you are, really. I was very happy to find one of my favorite stories here–”Yachakande petti” (The Beggar’s Box). Once upon a time there was a king who used to mix amongst his subjects anonymously in disguise checking upon the state of the kingdom. One day he found a very smart and perspicuous beggar. Quite taken by the beggar, the king made the beggar into his minister. Back at his court, the king noticed that the minister-beggar always engaged in deep meditation and prayer in front of a box; he would open this box, peer deeply and raptly into this box, then close the box, close his eyes and pray. Meanwhile, the other ministers who were jealous of the beggar who became a minister–what does that say about the office of the minister, eh? — conspired and told the king that the beggar-minister was engaging in black magic. The king decided to confront the minister and ask him what was in the box. I will tell you, your majesty, the beggar-minister said. He opened the box. The king looked inside and found the beggar’s old clothes neatly folded inside. Everyday I look at my beggar’s clothes, your majesty, the minister said, so I never forget how I became the minister. That is all; it keeps me truthful and simple in the eyes of god. The king was very pleased and made him the chief minister. End of story.  Do you look into your beggar’s box, grandma asks us at the end of the story. We all have a beggar’s box. Remember to look into it everyday.

The western folk tales in this collection include several stories of the bonds between the human and the natural worlds, often how nature comes to the aid of certain humans who have been tricked unkindly and unfairly by other humans.  We loved these stories when we were kids and amma has translated these folk tales and fables from around the world into characters and locales as familiar to us as our own backyard, in the process giving these “airy nothings a local habitation and a name.”  We loved hearing of humans turned into birds (“Seven Ravens), talking tigers (“Seven brothers and a Sister”), the dubious friendship between monkeys and crocodiles–in the Jataka tale the crocodile’s wife wants to eat the monkey’s heart –monkey-heart soup, what crocodiles like best!– birds transformed into handsome princes (Princess September), birds that helped an old man outwit Death by chirping the right answers to Death’s tricky questions (“Come again next spring”), exacting and tricky dwarfs and the girl who could spin hay into gold (Rumpelstiltskin), or Joshua and his invisible dragon etc.  I loved the way amma describes the terrible way in which the brothers insult the kindly tiger in “Seven brothers and a sister.”:

“What nonsense! Ammalu is not some Mowgli from the forest. Why do we need a tiger at her wedding?” They guffawed again and again like movie villains.”

Normally, this is where we would each stop amma telling the story, and start practicing our own terrible movie-villain laugh. (I still laugh like this sometime for my daughter’s benefit — “bwahahahahaa!!!!!” It never fails to make an effect. Especially if you put a blanket over your head while you roar.)

Amma has translated these perennial stories of sibling relations, the relation between freedom and creativity, fair and unfair conduct, and fear of death that pervades all cultures with an ease and cultural relevance that will makes these stories and their innermost kernal of meaning intimately familiar to our young children. Likewise are the”exemplary stories” from her own childhood and adulthood that she tells here — and I use the term in its original sense — “exemplum” as in short narrative anecdotes used to illustrate a moral or ethical point — there are many outstanding exempla in Medieval and Renaissance literatures — these exemplary stories are also told with an immediacy and topical familiarity that will make us think of these stories and remember them long after we have read them. I loved the story “Chavukara,” in which she recounts an exchange she once had with my grandmother–my father’s mother. Apparently, one day my grandmother was going through her clothes which she used to keep in a big wooden trunk and drew amma’s attention to certain brown and yellow spots on the otherwise spotless white linens of a Hindu widow.  When you think of it, it really is mysterious where these dark stains come from. “Look,” grandmother said, “these clothes are filled with chavukara, deathstains.” Deathstains? Amma asked her. Yes, grandmother continued, don’t you know that these dead spirits also desire clothes? Sometimes they come here and push their faces into these linens, smell them, and handle them. That is when they leave these spots behind, to let us know that they have visited. When you see this chavukara, remember that they are not gone; they are all here. They are around us,” ammumma concluded.  For amma, as she explains in the story “Deathstain,” these inexplicable brown spots on the white linens and ammumma’s explanation of their origins became a trope to understand our own fantasies about afterlife, how we imagine a single plank bridge that stretches in both directions between life and death, how these neat distinctions we make between the living and the dead are ultimately immaterial when the fortunate amongst us perceive that such borders are porous by nature, through which the spirits move back and forth. You cannot create Being any more than you can kill it. These are beautiful, thoughtful stories.

These are wisdom stories. Wisdom comes with making the right choice, and really there is only one choice that is life-sustaining. In the midst of hatred, ugliness, anger and enmity we can choose friendship, kindness, goodness, and purity.  Amma retells a story that Sant Tukaram used to say about the “haves” and the “have-nots.” In the midst of great hunger, great poverty, and great distress all of us have the freedom to feel the distress of our body and minds and act on that. All of us also have the freedom to turn inward and eat all the food we want.  It is completely our choice which one we claim as our reality. It is in this sense that the poet said that god and the imagination are one and the same. These stories teach you no less. Thank you, mother dear, sweet, sweet stories!

—-

p.s. I got some nice comments on the review which is really just self-expression, not for publication. Here they are: the first one is from my aunt Savitri–my mother’s older sister, and the second one from my friend and teacher Michael Beard, and the third from my brother.

————-

1.

“Gayu,

Just read your extended appreciation of Pema  katha parayunnu.

Have copied you on the response I  have sent to Appu.

You will take the Golden Tales of Truth (?)   with you when you go.

If I could have   found it I would have sent her a CD but  it is out of  print and I have ordered  a cassette tape…

I used to tell Sreedevi stories too when she was a kid.

There was one which had for heroine a young girl named  Merrythought and Sreedevi loved to hear it again and again.

I had read it somewhere…

Wonder if she  remembers any of it!

A blessing indeed from the powers that be I believe.

Comparisons are ‘odorous’  as we know but I have always adored and treasured Sreedevi.

Now that there is a  huge chasm in my life,

Sreedevi has   rightly climbed into that  space.

affly,

Valliamma”

——–

2.

"Dear Gayatri,
      I love the idea of a daughter writing about her mother in
literary terms.  You make me wonder whether we can play the role
she played, with you, with Anika.  Anyway it gives us a role model.
      The lamb song reminds me of Blake, of course ("Little lamb
who made thee")."

(snip)
---------------
3.
"Great write up."
--------------------

My brother is a talker, as you can tell.
Thanks you, my ideal readers! G.

This year, D got christmas presents for two of her current interests: american popular music and horse riding. She got a lovely wool blanket with the picture of a horse on it, a riding jacket for the winter months when we go back to Elaine’s in spring, and a horse charm bracelet. She also got two PS3 games called SingStar and RockSmith. Singstar is a competitive game where you and another player (or you the single player) sing along to the musicians and their official music videos, and the game judges your performance based on timing, how you hit and maintain the notes, and pitch, and at the end of the game give you a score. The game has different titles based on your score: rising star, stage sensation, superstar, headliner etc. While you are singing the game also comments on your performance with comments color-coded for your microphone such as “cool,” “good,” “awful” etc. There are three levels based on timing, sustaining the notes, and pitch — easy, medium and hard.  When two players play you follow the pitch bars on screen that are color-coded for your microphone.

K and D inaugurated the games on christmas day. Since it was christmas, they picked songs that were religiously inspired. They first sang with REM’s Losing my religion (D was stage sensation and K was superstar), then they sang Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil (D was stage sensation and K was rising star), then Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black (very hard song to sing — D still made stage sensation, K passed on this one; I was watching D sing this song –this is an incredibly dark song sung by a very angry woman filled with foul expletives and D was completely oblivious to the words and simply following the pitch bars on screen and the lyrics! Lyrics are really superfluous in music most of the time, unless you are Bob Dylan), then Dire Straits’ Walk of Life (one of my favorite songs–I never knew that the music video is about baseball–makes sense when you think of it), Bob Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind ( D was stage sensation and K was superstar), then some group called Warrant with a putrid song Cherry Pie.  There should be a warrant out for them for ruining people’s eardrums with trash, no doubt. K and D skipped it after the first listen.

Then D found three songs that we have now heard her sing at least a hundred times. I don’t know any of these singers–I hardly listen to contemporary music anymore–I would like to but I am teaching or working on my classes most of the time — anyway they are all apparently very famous.  K. T. Tunstall’s Black Horse and Cherry Tree– a modern song written conspicuously like an old myth, Corinne Bailey Rae’s Three Little Birds–reminded me of Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds –I played that for D when I heard this one, and Mika’s Grace Kelly, whose music video is very disturbing. It is always so suspicious when you take pre-pubescent girls and make them the central character of your song which contain adult themes. This whole “child-mama-daddy” register of popular adult songs just freaks me out.  Deep-down it is psychologically perverse. I don’t think it matters to anyone, except for a few folks such as me. So now we have heard these songs a hundred times, it sounds like. D has moved on from the “medium” to the “hard” level in all three songs.

Then K and D played on Rocksmith, where you actually plug in your own electric guitar into the PS3 as an input device and pick from their big catalog of songs and play on your guitar–they play the song and the chords and the game tells you which string to play and how. The game also teaches you how to tune your guitar, and has again has three levels–beginner, proficient or medium, and advanced or hard. Anyway K and D started with the Rolling Stones and I can’t get no Satisfaction and D could actually hit the chords pretty okay. Then they moved to a very interesting song–reminded me of the Rolling Stones — some group called Black Keys and a song called Next Girl. Very interesting song–very interesting tunings to gather from what they were showing on screen. Very interesting song.

My favorite nativity painting. See how the light source in the painting is the newborn baby Christ, the prayerful expressions on the faces of the shepherds, Mary and Joseph. What a beautiful painting and what a great painter! “Lead, Kindly Light!”