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It is a massive Self that is responsible for these myriad injustices, tyrannies, exploitations which plague us all, which prevent us from pursuing a life of intellectual, moral, or spiritual purity without implicit and inescapable hypocracy–we are (I am) ultimately responsible, we are (I am) ultimately powerless.  I speak of an inclusive Self comprised of all of us who live silently or loudly within an organization of bodies complicit in its own oppressions.  This is the ego of all our egos.  It is very different from the ultimate Oversoul/Brahmin which binds us to All and then to One through our divine spirits: that Thing which is free from karma.  No, this Self is the amalgamation of all our karmas, and thereby binds itself to that Brahmin by binding all of us to materiality via injustice and despair, preventing us from even imagining a collective enlightenment.   This is the shared Self of the Polity, the self-loathing ego of humanity, at once a national, corporate, and global being comprised of all us Masters and all us Slaves.  The cruelty is that we are ultimately powerless over this Self (what can I do against all this ocean of injustice and dispair) and yet ultimately and inescapably responsible for it, for it is ourselves, not Other; its crimes are our crimes.

To be able to speak concretely, let me reference one pathology of this Self among many many that I could choose, brought to mind by this article on Rampant Racism in the Criminal Justice System on Counterpunch today.  This is nothing new, but must be constantly revisited and reminded, because this is a massive and brutal injustice being perpetrated IN OUR NAME, as citizens, whether law abiding or not.  And yet, I can do almost nothing except point to it.  Understand it.  It is our history and our legacy:

Professor Michelle Alexander concludes that it is no coincidence that the  criminal justice system ramped up its processing of African Americans just as  the Jim Crow laws enforced since the age of slavery ended.  Her book, The New  Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness sees these facts as  evidence of the new way the US has decided to control African Americans – a  racialized system of social control.   The stigma of criminality functions in  much the same way as Jim Crow – creating legal boundaries between them and us,  allowing legal discrimination against them, removing the right to vote from  millions, and essentially warehousing a disposable population of unwanted  people.  She calls it a new caste system.

Or, say this issue doesn’t bother you like it does me: choose another: coorporate control of our environment, human trafficking, war war war, poverty and inequity, and so on and on.  What of Afghanistan?  How can we ignore the documents leaked today of misery, coversion, incompetence, and collusion?  And yet, how can we act on them? we cannot.

How is a civilized individual supposed to pursue self betterment, artistic creation, spirituality and purity, when s/he recognizes his/her attachment to this political Self?  Must we intentionally and powerfully continue to cleave ourselves into Individuals and simply ignore the incredibly strong ties that bind us together–the bindings of economy, culture, government, labor? Oh, Guruji, please explain and enlighten: my mind is clouded by confusions!

Yesterday, I was thinking about the elements.  Without being didactic, today the word refers to the possible atomic configurations represented on the periodic table, which includes elements that are unfamiliar or nonexistent in nature, but possible in a laboratory.  Once, of course, the word referred to Earth Air Fire Water.  According to the atomic notion of elements, these are not elements at all but are rather composed of the elements (or the combustion thereof).

But the traditional notion of elements still seems to have relevance overlooked by science–this shift of theory of elements seems different to me than other scientific advances where an erroneous notion of reality was replaced by a more accurate one, like the Ptolemaic cosmos or creationism.  Because ecologists, geographers, and geologists will still tell you that the four fundamental forces that shape and comprise the natural world can be grouped into Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.  The ancients recognized that there were different types of “earth”; they didn’t think that the one word described the most fundamental component that could be discovered, but they did recognize that “earth” was material that had a distinct set of properties.  It seems that in this case science has wrested a word away from traditional knowledge, which is a natural and laudable development as our language becomes more specific and useful to scientific advancement.  But we must not forget to restore Earth, Air, Fire, and Water to their rightful places of respect.

Rather than elements, Earth Air Fire and Water are natural presences and forces; they are at once energy levels (temperature) and aspects; they are forces of transformation and change.  They are not the most basic components of physical existence (elements), but they are the dominant aspects of natural existence.  Each carries its own uses and associations, its own energies–water can cool, fire can cook, earth can build. I also think that each one carries a subtle set of associations that we respond to as humans, a relationship of deep signification built over the evolution of our species, ingrained deeply in our collective unconscious.  If you have a camp fire or a bonfire and manage to pull yourself away from staring into the flames for a moment to watch your friends around the fire, you’ll see the obvious and powerful pull that the element has on the core of their beings.  When I am in the presence of water, my mind is set at ease.  Yesterday, me and two of my friends sat by a creek to meditate.  I sat on a rock down by the water, he sat on a boulder high above me, and he sat on a sun-drenched rock directly in the sun.  I am a water sign, he is an air sign, and he is a fire sign.

I think it’s important to reclaim the category of natural elements because I would like us, as a western culture, to be able to open up dialogues between traditional sciences and our potent and inspiring scientific advances.  Many traditional systems of medicine are built around these four natural forces.  Astrology depends on them.  A dialogue like that would go no-where if it amounted to a squabble over the definition of the word “element,” but it would be fruitful if Western science could become more sensitive to subtle and natural energies and if traditional knowledge could become more rigorous and able to justify itself.

In looking for my keys (aargh, where are my keys?) I pulled out my small pile of scraps and fragments that my typewriter has generated over the last few weeks.  This blog was originally conceived as a public notebook, and this post is in line with that: these fragments are totally raw, unedited, personal; they are a blend of fiction and reality; sometimes I was writing the emotional state of a fictional character in my mind, and yet I cannot hide the truth that I have been focused on vocational anxiety, and what little writing I’ve managed to eeke out of that unproductive emotion can only wallow in it pitifully.

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THE PLATFORM OF THE SATISFACTIONIST PARTY INTERNATIONAL (DRAFT)

What is is all that is, and so it must satiate.

Since what is is all that is, any economy predicated on growth and dependent upon expansion for its health is inherently a lie.

We have been lied to by expansionist policy: humans are enveloped in finity.  We cannot escape our own skin.  And yet, we must eat.

The past has put too much energy and investment into expansion: we will turn the movement inwards, to provide sustenance for our own bellies first.

Therefore, all capital relegated into abstraction by history must be liquefied into usable material.  What is, must be made available to consumption; what was always only hypothetical must be rendered as a lie.

i e, all capital must be liquedated.

Capital that exists as human potential must be either liberated or more fully utilized.  Labor is not the only human potential.

All assets owend by previously incorporated national entities must be liquefied and fed back to the bodies politic, including all back stores of grain, inks, papers, oils, and other commodities.

In the case that assets owned by a particular national entity are human in nature, i e of an emotional or creative value, or expressed in terms of potential instilled by a process of over- and elite- education, these assets must be brought under liquified scientific scruitiny and re-administered to the intellecutal elite who will re-create value to be fed back to the Taxpayer in aspirational morale.

And so on, ad nauseum.

–

The mind has become obscured.  It can no longer differentiate passion from desire, dharma from vocation.  I am controlled, manhandled by the anxieties of desire.  I am not my situation: my days run through me as a river in the desert; I waste myself unwisely, expend myself in diversions, offer myself to those who are unworthy.  I spend energy trying to ignore myself.  I cannot sustain creation and balance.  I ebb and flow rapidly, I find myself unpredictable and unreliable; I surrender myself to myself; I bow before the ferment; I am too ready to accept faliure as fate.

Again I will try; today again I will remake myself.  I will become…

–

What truths can economies manufacture?

What productivity does anxiety wreck?

Why am I so determined to obey?  Why do I so virulently seek my own powerlessness?  What am I doing to my lungs, my body, my voice?  Oh, great risi,  advise me, I know not my dharma.  AM I to function, to languish, or to revolt?  I am comfortable with any of these, my path is not yet formed.  I get no directions from community or environs.  Individualism has taken me too far off any recognizable road.  I have something to offer any who is not myself, but I do not know who or what.  Like a child lost in a forest, I watch capitalism but cannot participate; like a child in a forest, I can walk through streets lined with mighty buildings and cannot enter any; what I call my home is a temporary shelter, a camp.  Will I reach home in this life?  Is this my desire?  Is desire what ought to guide me?  I am mighty.  This, I have never doubted.  But the nature of my expression, the manifestation of inner power in the form of a life’s work, I do not know.  I have long believed that when I am old, it will become clear what my life’s work has been.  I have never thought that I would know beforehand. I thought perhaps that it would only be a soft touch that was required from myself to enter the chute of karmic works, to begin to truly create, to feel desiring products to spin daily out from my fingertips.  Effort is worthwhile, and yet I am lazy: I have been lazy; I must soon reposition myself, delve into some rich atmosphere of intention, intention that most valuable of treasures, which brings significance to every action.

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drive, drive that beast along.  That unyielding desire, drive it to wealth justified by art that does not lie; the forum that is a lie.  White space is expensive in this land, white walls do not come easy.  Through riches and on to death.  Through fame and on to failure.  Through love and on to war, we drive, holding drinks and passing out printed cards, we try to thrive through mimosas and martinis, barely balancing on the edge of sobriety, we drive, through convention centers of hungry eyes, through failure we drive.

Jai Jai Navia

Zed

I’ve been working on the section of my book about British colonialism in India. (if you don’t know what book I’m talking about, scroll down a few posts to the intro)

First of all, it’s interesting working on this project now in this place.  On the one hand, India feels far away in my life; on the other hand, when I write about it, it still feels like the thing I ought to be writing about; my topic.

This chapter demands that I look again at the Raj.  It’s hard not to be more interested in the historiography of the Raj than the actual history; how scholars and historians approach the period, which ended quite recently and which had a tremendous impact on the modern world in both the east and the west, and is in no way simple.  For example, I’ve been reading what Wendy Doniger says about the period in her big book “The Hindus: an Alternative History”. This is a truly brilliant and very useful book; I really appreciate what Donager has done in bringing both cohesion and complexity to my understanding of Indian history.  The whole book, I notice, is about the synthesis that history has created in India, about how every time there’s a new power structure in India, it gets incorporated with its ideas alongside the old; the Arayans incorporated themselves alongside and within the Indus Valley Civilization, the Brahmins built on the Vedas of the Arayans to create a ceremonial power structure and a new generation of holy texts; new sects and offshoots of the religion (buddhists, jains, shaivites, tantrics) created new forms of synthesis, until the Mughals came and again, there was a tremendous amount of exchange and synthesis under the Sultinates and the Mughals, who genuinely valued Hindu culture and who drew parallels and points of exchange between the two religions.  This is Doniger’s attitude until she gets to the British.  They brutally and arrogantly imposed themselves upon India.  This is the inescapable truth; they were guilty of racism, hubris, violence, economic and human slavery and exploitation.  But why do modern scholars like Doniger not feel the impulse to continue the narrative of synthesis into the colonial period?  Because it strikes too close to home; they’ll come off sounding like apologists for colonialism and orientalism, which is the tradition we all inhabit as Westerners writing about India.  It’s too politically risky for us as writers and scholars.

But nothing is monolithic.  There were Englishmen with a genuine and deep respect for Indian culture, and there were things that the British did in India that, over time, proved themselves to be positive and useful .  The British literally shaped Indian society; they dictated where and what the cities would be, built the rail lines to run between them, and brought the English language to India, which has proved to be the foundation (for better or worse) of the contemporary Indian economy.

This is the situation I’ve placed myself in, because I am arguing for the inclusion of English in the literature and culture of India.  Which is an easy position to take, since English is such a big part of the linguistic milieu of contemporary India, and because the large number of English speakers in India is the bedrock of the new Indian economy.  But while arguing for this, I need to not be dismissive of the horror of the history that brought the English language to India.  Professor Lal was, in truth, a beneficiary of colonialism–it gave him the incredible education which he continued to gain the level of scholarship and wisdom that he has attained.  But is he sensitive enough to the damage that the British did?  Am I?

I better stop writing about writing this and write it.

The mighty signifier Drugs names a narrative that births a calculated and urgent economy of fear and desire subsumed into raw desperation and dilapidation, an economy sanctioned by a bumbling civil system that we all propagate and support, a system that seems not to know what to do with the population that it created in America to exploit, and so continues to mindlessly and automatically oppress.  That mighty signifier Drugs deemphasizes and confuses the substances that it claims to signify: chemicals which interact physiologically with a Human, creating distinct physical states that should be understood medically.  Along with that material signified, Drugs points to a narrative and archetype that has been re-created in the American psyche: the violent and violating minority who profits unfairly off despair (this discourse never bothers to probe that despair, lest it be traced back to the dominant economy), the menacing cancer that preys on youth.  The violence that is packed tightly within the word is supposed to be somehow ontologically connected to the substance itself, rather than the regime that has been created by fear of that very violence.  Whether or not I like it, the significance of the word Drugs is heavily laden by a regime of anti-produductive forces that war at once from within and without marginalized American communities—a regime enacted through the legal system and justified by its own narrative.

Cocaine, for example, ruins lives.  It does so because it contains the chemical power to destroy bodies.  However, it cannot be overlooked that the most common side-effect of cocaine—seen as a social force—is chronic prison sentences.  Prison is not the prescribed treatment for any physical ailment, including addiction or withdrawal therefrom, including also poverty, malnourishment, hopelessness, abuse, or trauma.  Indeed, in the absence of prison education and rehabilitation programs, it is hard to see just what prison is prescribed to treat, as a body or as a body politic.

More likely than any salubrious effect desired, the carceral regime that is enabled by this narrative is enacted upon bodies because those bodies are Criminal, were born Criminal.  The American system was created to be exclusive and continues to be: others have said it before me, so I will boil it down to the essence: the Other is essential for the Self to be.  This is true economically: America was blatantly built on slavery.  Perhaps our economy today has less dependence on bondage labor than it once did, perhaps not,

especially if the regime of low wages and high debt is recognized for the calculated malevolent beast that it is.  Those who seek a way to opt out of that system that keeps labor desperate and cheap must be dealt with somehow.  And yet, we must get our drugs from someone.

On Friday I went to a short-film festival of socially relevant films held at an NGO here.  The films were uneven, but the message of each was very clear: the first one told a typical story of women traffiking in India, a tragic and massive industry, there was a very blunt one about discrimination against Muslims in America, one about transgenderd people in India and the struggles they face (for this one I would have appriciated some audience dialogue that didn’t happen; it was clearly too graphic and uncomfortable for many members of the Bengali audience.  People were laughing, some walked out.  Homosexuality is not so much discriminated against here as…hidden).

It did strike me that the name of the event was “Black and White,” which seemed to me to be a clear reference to American racism, because the discriminations and injustices that were addressed by the films were all pretty brown-on-brown.  This was never explicitly discussed or explained, but I’ve noticed an interest in India about the various American oppressions and injustices.  On multiple occasions here I have been asked about the massacre and displacement of American Indians–for a while I speculated that this was because of the name “Indian” but I don’t think that’s it. 

There’s no inherent concept of sarcasm or irony in Indian culture, there’s no system of meaning things other than what is said.  So I think that Indians are bewildered and facinated by the hypocracies of America; we claim to be founded upon equality and freedom when we are founded upon slavery. India is explicitly founded upon slavery and inequality, the caste system.  Educated Bengalis seem to need to constantly remind themselves that what America says and what America means are two very different things.  Indian politicians spout hate and they mean hate, but American politicans spout liberation democracy and equality and mean imperialism.  In order to resist this imperialism, they must first navagate the trecherous waters of hypocracy and doublethink.

That was obviously very oversimplified and myopic.  Indian politicans totally lie all the time, for example.

And then on Saturday I went to a gathering where young poets (ten to twentyfour) read their poetry.  It was really wonderful to hear all the voices of Bengal; there was a lot of cliche, of course, but there were a few exceptional poems.  Sadly, the event was on the roof of a tall building during a rain storm, so I couldn’t stay long–I was too cold.

Though I haven’t been so regular about keeping up the blog, if you are tuned in now I promise a lot of good media coming down the tube; the much promised picture post will happen whenever I plug my laptop into the internet. And I’ve got a chunk of fiction coming down the pipeline.  So bear with me.

Blogging’s been flagging recently.  Because I’ve regained daily humanity; I’ve stopped traveling in India and I’ve begun to live in Lake Gardens, Kolkata.  Which is as good as life can be.  I feel part of a community like never before-after a whirlwind week of introductions, I know all my neighbors, am a familiar face to a few vegitable sellers at the market, not to mention a really cool and expanding  circle of expats.  I have some sort of schedule and routine.   I usually wake up early, at 6.30 or 7.  Three days so far I’ve gone running around the lake.  I’m beginning a morning yoga class on Monday.  I have to be back by 7.45 so that a shirtless guy in a seethrough lungi can toss a packet of milk into my hands as soon as I open the door for him.  Futz about until Rohit gets here–he’s the guy who sits aimlessly in my apartment all day during working hours; he’s the employee of my landlord.  For a few days I floated the theory that while he wasn’t my servant, he might end up doing some things for me, but that’s not the case at all.  He pretty much tells me what to do in a vaguely maternal but monosyllabic way–wash dish tub, etc.,  I have a strong suspicion, though, that he does sweep the floors.  As soon as possible, I leave and go down to my desk on the varandah of the Lal house (next door to my apartment building).  Since I don’t have a laptop, I’m pretty much aimlessly reading Writer’s Workshop books during the day, browsing the collection.  And working on my Bangla, which the guys who work in WW (running the warehouse and bookstore), help me with.  They’re hilarious people, each with very strong personalities, and very friendly, and speak very little English.  I’m pretty much learing Bengali for their sake.  I get bored and mosquito bitten pretty quickly, so at two I go visit the printer, who is overseeing my laptop repair.  Etc. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the dramatic Fall of America, been following the news closely, and simultaneously educating myself about the political situation here, imagining what path India’s rise will take.  I have been reading about the Naxalite movement here–Maoist rebels that control a huge swath of India’s agricultural interior.  The book that  you should read, that I’m reading, is Red Sun by Sundeep Chakravarti.There is, literally, a violent revolution amassing within India.  Because of the dramatic inequity of India’s development, not just in terms of economic numbers, but also culturally.  Urban India, Middle-Class India, are on a totally different planet from the vast majority of India’s landmass, full of people who are finding the aeons-old struggle to survive harder and harder.  I genuinely expect that the Maoists will come to power in India in the post-America(n power) epoch.  Of course, this is unlikely to slow the economic rise or alleviate the inequity.  If anything, it’ll make everyone poorer.  I imagine that a  CPI(M) India would look something like today’s china–somehow using Communist ideas to fuel and sustain a massive capitalism founded on mass labor, free of any morality, but probably more corrupt.  Remeber that I’m writing about things that I don’t understand, am not a part of,etc.

I’ve been lagging on the blog because I’ve been writing a lot of fiction on my typewriter, and am actually feeling blissfully predigital and imaginative.  When I get my laptop back, that’ll change.  I’ll do my big picture posting, first of all.

I’m still typing on my child’s laptop, so pls forgive typos and potential insane formatting.

The Durga Pooja continues unabated thru this night, when the idols will get dunked, and I’ll be thre for that I hope; also my first glimpse of the Hoogely, which is sort of hidden in this city.  This is a long festival, and to be honest over the last few days, I’ve lost some of my steam for it, because it’s still so hot and seeing pandals requiers walking in expanding circles for long distances.  My cell phone stopped working, so I’m in a bit of enforced isolation.  So this week is truly a sacrafice to Maha Kal, mother time, which will end tonight when she leaves this earth (literally, my empty time will end just then,  because I think my friends will be there at the ghat, and then tomorrow I’ll move into my new apt andhopefully gain some proof of existance(address) for the cell phone company and life will begin again, renewed.)

I’ve been scribbling some in my notebook, looking through, not as much as I thought I had, but a bit.  W/o a computer, sadly, nothing creative and cohearent can be born.

“prutoham Zet was a Zephaier International representative. It was in this capacity that he survived the Meltdown and it was inthis caapcity that he had come so far to the Outside.  Which, hequickly discovered, had ceased to be outside anything , and was stilll reeling with cibfusion abou thow to behave on the Inside.  Nobody in New York could affort the inpu tcosts of the Machine anymore.’ well, you see whee I’m going. Tireed of hunt and packing this keyboard.

Well, today I’m going to make another effort to see the city.  I’ll go up north somewhere and look for some pandals to photograph for the future amazing blog photo post

edit. That was written this morning, and I got off my ass.  I had a great meander through North Kolkata in my tourist shorts (I packed as many shorts as I  did pants, and only when I got here remembered that no one wears shorts here.)  I found in N Kolkata east of the main road (chowranghee/whatver its called up N) the quiet alleys of old India.  It reminded me of Varanasi. I also saw what must have been the central ginger and garlic distribution point for the city.  And some truly amazing pandals for festival.  I can’t wait to have capacity to post them.  Then, through really truly random wandering West, I came to Nimtola, which is the buring ghat.  My first glimpse of the Hoogley river was at nimtola today, believe it or not.  Dark, right?  Then the oft-guidebook-cited Flower market, and then to Babughat, where I saw some early in the day Durga dumpings.  Devided to bail and come back before rain and crowds.  It’s crazy ou tther enow.  I think I needed my inertia over the last few days, and only started writing about on the blog when it had ceased to be plesent an I had to go back to India.  Sorry for the negativity, is what I’m saying.

Jai Mata Di

I  want to revisit the issue of Tata motors now that I’m here.  It looks more certain that the company is going to pull its factory out of West Bengal.   The issue hasn’t cleared up for me at all.

At base, this conflict is representative of a massive fissure in the reality of India.  The India of renowned economic might is all smooth marble, slicked hair, alchohol, etc., and is completely beyond anything that any pesant or laborer would recognize.  The humanity of the countryside, the labor of subsistance whichhas sheparded India  through thousands of years.

‘Development’ always proceeds by displacement, which is more or less violent.  And this is utterly value neutral; the desire that drives us ‘forward’ cannnnot be stopped for anything.  Of course America was built  on the backs  of slaves and the blood of Natives.   Could it have been otherwise?

If India looks tto her gods and ancient stories for guidance on this, she won’t find the message of tolerance you might expect.  When the Pandavas, the good guys of the Mahabarata, were sent into exile for fourteen years, they wandered through the forest looking for a place to live.  When they came upon a village, Arjun-the hero-and Krishna (yes, THE Krishna) slaughtered every man, woman, and child in the village.  They only  left alive a single snake.  That snake lived to kill Arjun’s grandson,  and so the cycle continues.  I asked Prof. Lal why Arjun and Krishna committted such atrocities, when we are supposed to revere them as ideal men.  He said that they needed somewhere to live in exile.  Within the great dance of Shiva, there are an infinity of smaller destructions, and all we can do is hope that we are the destroyers and not the destroyed.

This is not to come down on the side of Tata and the government, not to justify their actions.  The whole thing was terribly handled.  Tata didn’t need to build their factory on prime farmland, especially given the world food crisis.  There was a sight literally 600 yards away, across the highway, that no one would have disputed if they built their factory there.

To be clear: the failure of this factory really spells the end of new industrial investment in this region. Common knowledge among the coorporate world is that W. Bengal is too enmired in politics and corruption to do business in, and this proves that wisdom correct.  This is why Calcutta looks like Calcuttta and Delhi and Bombay look  like Delhi and Bombay.

And as America collapses, I think it’s right for India to ask whether rapid industrialization is a sustainable way of thriving.  And this project especially is quesionable: the project was to build a car that cost 1 lakh ruppees, about 3000 dollars, the cheapest car ever.  Do India’s streets really need that many more cars?  Emphatic NO. These streets are trecherous and conjested.  And understand about honking in this country: Indian drivers constantly HONK, simply to announce their presence.  I don’t think that TATA left the horn off of their car.

Mamata, the opposition leader who has caused all this controvercy, is the leader of the *RightWing* opposition to the Marxist state government, which would do Anything to keep Tata in W. Bengal.   She’s counting on the disaffection of the peasents to rally up support for a massive right-wing coup in this state.  We’ll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, I’m still doing fine.  I started reorganizing The Book Nook today.

This promises to be a random and disorganized post.

So I’m getting into some sort of routine with the Writer’s Workshop, already, but I have a feeling that it’ll change soon.  The idea is that I’m going through all their books, and making a spreadsheet that has all of the information about each book, plus an excerpt (I’m starting with poetry, so usually the first poem), plus the table of contents (which is the laborious part for these Poetry books).  I’m happy doing this, and sometimes I run across an interesting thing.  There’s one book of poems about the ancient history of India–about the Aryans, etc.,–from 1988 that I want, and every day I ask to buy it, and every day they tell me I can’t have it because it’s a rare book and it’s the last copy.  I’m doing this all sitting crosslegged on the cement floor of “The Book Nook,” which is about as nook-ey as it sounds (”I did it all for the nookey!” (i’m deleriously tired right now)).  The Book Nook is the only place in existance one can buy a Writer’s Workshop book in person, it’s hidden down an alley in Lake Gardens, which is really a residential neighborhood, and no one ever comes to buy a book, and if they did, they wouldn’t sell it to them, because they’re all rare books.  But they still pay a guy (one of four guys I work with, none of whom speak English), to sit there in case someone does. 

OK, but the problem is that the Book Nook is hideously disorganized, which is what happens when you pay guys who speak no English to tend an English-language bookstore (with all due respect to them).  It seems like books through 1992 are organized by genre–I’ve been working my way through the Poetry section, and haven’t come up with anything past 1991.  But I haven’t seen much from before 1982 either (WW has been going since 1958).  The rest, at least from 92 onward, are stuck in random pockets organized (proportedly) by year.  The problem is a total lack of bookshelf space; before I can launch the massive reorganization I have in mind, we need to get more bookshelf space, which is impossible given the physical constraints of the nook (which is sort of a free standing shed).  I kind of want to take all the books out, bulldoze the thing, and start afresh.  I have yet to talk to Prof. Lal about the full extent of the problem, so I don’t know what’s going to go down.

The eventual goal is to get them set up to be able to sell over the internet, on like alibris.com. 

So that’s work.  Other things are progressing slowly.  I’m hoping that this weekend I make some friends and find that vibrant youth/literary/culture of the city.  Oh!  I got a cell phone.  I’m actually going to post that in a second post right now so it’ll be easier to find.

I keep getting these spam comments for moderation.  Have any of you tried to post a comment?  Is that still not working?