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I had to post a report on Oct 1 (I’m early) for the Arnold Committee, so I thought I’d post it here.  Unless you’re unfamiliar with what my project is here, I’d actually prefer you to scroll down and check out yesterday’s post.

This is a bit of an awkward time to give a first report; I have only been working on my project for a week, and this week and next I won’t be working much at all.  This week there are two holidays, and next week is the biggest religious festival of the year, the Durga Puja, and so I will use that time to celebrate the Mother Goddess along with the rest of the city.  For this reason, I’d like to offer to file another report at the beginning of November.

The experience of adjusting to a strange place alone is a difficult but important experience of growth.  I feel that I’ve learned a lifetime’s worth of knowledge about this city and about myself in this last week alone.  I have dedicated myself to the Writer’s Workshop and Professor Lal, who runs the entire operation singlehandedly.  He is truly a wise soul, and he has offered me not only a new philosophical worldview, but also (perhaps less importantly, but more relevant to my project), a very welcome benevolent approach to publishing.  The Writer’s Workshop is not about producing best-sellers, it is about encouraging new writers and creating a national literary community.  The Workshop is incredibly prolific; it publishes about 100 new titles a year, divided into the genres of Poetry, Fiction, Reference, Translation, and then a few art books, a few children’s books, and a few books in Indian languages.  Each book remains the intellectual property of the author–a fact which I, as an American publisher, regard as a tremendous act of charity, and which P. Lal regards as a burden off his shoulders.  The standard contract dictates that 350 copies of each book will be printed.  Of those 350, 10% are given to the author as his or her royalty, the author is expected to purchase 100 copies him/herself at printing cost, and the rest are stored at The Writer’s Workshop waiting to be sold either in the totally inconspicuous Book Nook in front of the Lal household (the entire operation is run from the Lal household), or by mail.  The Writer’s Workshop has no distributor, and no Writer’s Workshop books are featured in any bookstores.

This week, I completely re-organized and alphabetized the Book Nook, which was a pretty massive project.  I have now at least touched each of the 3,500+ titles of the Writer’s Workshop.  Next, I will carefully catalogue each title, type in an excerpt, and log this information online.  In this way, I will help the WW sell more of its books online, hopefully helping to empty their overflowing warehouse and providing more access to this incredible body of literature.  Beginning the project in this way will allow me to engage and familiarize myself with the entire body of Writer’s Workshop books; it will take me at least a few months.  After this, I will assume a more editorial function in the Workshop.  Throughout my time here, I am constantly thinking of ways to connect this small publishing operation with the independent operations I know of in America; thanks to your flexibility in allowing me to spend time in New York over the summer, I now have close connections with editors at a myriad of independent publishing houses, all of whom would eagerly read any books I send them.  I already have some ideas in this regard.  I feel that my presence here is truly opening a cultural connection that would not otherwise be formed, and so I thank the Arnold Committee for providing me the opportunity to be here.

“There is no coming-to-be.  There is no ceasing-to-be.  There is only being, and no not-being.  I am being, incessant, eternal, infernal.  I am a being, with boundaries, doomed to take up space, doomed to take up time.  Fully enabled to eat.  Constantly lucid, and prone to misuse.

And, finally, alone.  Until I leave this world, I will be encased in skin and skull.  Incapable of being-another, which could perhaps cure this incurable loneliness.  I fear I have never felt empathy.

I am a being passing time, I, at the beginning of a long time, perhaps and probably a long time alone, which is what I claimed to have wanted, passing time until time begins to seem short.  I constantly crave the future.

I move through geography freely.  I inhabit places discontinuous.  I live disjunction.  Everything everywhere is the same.  I am the same everywhere, and everywhere I am, people see Other, or another, a being not Native, except being Native.  ”

Which was written over the course of last night: we are all prone to moments of loneliness, but this does not mean I am lonely. 

I stood on Park Street, alone and white, eating greasy egg-vegetable rolls I had deemed were safe.  Alienation ran deep.  I watched couples stroll by, Park street of high fashon and youth, and I thought, if anyone hailed me, even to obviously scam me, I would probably respond.  I thought, if any solitary white walks by me, I would hail them.  I didn’t know what to say, and that’s why it had to be a white, so I could pretend some false commonality.  At least I could presume English. 

Of course I kept to myself, and the city continued, oblivious.

I finished one roll, and held the hot other in my hot hand and walked slowly behind a slow couple chatting in english, prolonging the night with each other. 

I found a second spot to sit and eat my next roll.  My mind replayed the first.  I reconciled myself to walking home quietly and darkly.

As I walked toward the metro station, not a block away from where I had been, I saw a white man, alone in the crowd, standing awkwardly balancing a backpack hunched over a fried greasy egg roll, staring forlornely into the river of passing humanity.

I did not stop.”

All from the Escha Upanishad (not sure of spelling). P. Lal’s lectures are truly enlightening.

All the world is swaddling.  The swaddling of the Divine.  Undress it. 

All work is bondage.

Heaven is punishment for good deeds.

Slayers of the self go to sunless worlds.  Killers of Atman are

Plunged into darkness are the worshippers of ignorance.

Plunged into darker darkness are those who delight in knowledge.

Ignorance will not do, but knowledge is not enough.

Plunged into dark darkness are worshippers of non being.

Plunged into darker darkness are worshippers of being.

The womb of the sun is covered in a golden disk.  Remove it.

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.

I know that’s an awkward number of digits for you. Try putting a +033 in front of it to get the India country code. Really, the best and cheapest way of talking to me is by calling me on Skype. As soon as I pull myself together, I’ll set up skype to forward calls to this cell phone, and then calling me will be free for you. If ever I manage to plug my laptop in to the Internet.

My cell phone, which cost Rs 1600 (um, 40$), has FM radio on it. Can your Iphone do that? Though I can’t seem to imagine a situation when I’d hold my phone to my ear and listen to bollywood music. Maybe to look popular.

I just wrote an update about my project, so scroll down.

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?

Alright!  THe page finally loaded!

First things first: this is what I read over morning tea: STORY.  I’d love to hear your comments on that.  The thought had crossed my mind when I was in America, but it seemed, i donno, wrong.

I’m “getting adjusted” to being here, I tell myself .  That seems to involve a lot of sitting around, reading, making halfhearted stabs at my Bengali book (I need a tutor).  Maybe I’m waiting for life here to get adjusted to me: I’m totally ready to go out, get my own apartment, work eight hours a day for Professor Lal, have bengali and music tutoring, etc., but I need people and contacts to make that happen.  I still haven’t really met the people I’m most counting on to help me with that.  I have to remember that it’s only been 3 days, a long three days, but not long enough to expect much of anything.

Since my last post, I’ve been mostly engaged in meeting Professor P Lal. I went to his Mahabarata lecture at the Birla Mandir yesterday, which is positively the largest temple I’ve ever seen.  His lecture was really enlightened and inspiring.  He talked about the four stages of Om, which mirror the four states of being: ‘a’ is the waking state, when you open your mouth to communicate–it is a state of dialogue, debate, conflict, suffering.  Realizing this, you narrow your mouth to make the O sound, and this is the meditating, thinking, dreaming internal state.  The ‘M’ is the dreamless sleep state, and the state of transcendence, the mystical state.  And then, most important of all, there is the page on which Om is written, the silence in which it is said.  I’ll let you chew on that.

This morning I visited Lal’s house, where he runs the Writer’s Workshop.  WW is an inspiring model of sustainable idealism, cultural production, communitarian economics.  He publishes new authors who could never be noticed by big publishers.  He prints 350 copies of each book; his printer charges Rs 16 for printing and hand-binding (including Sarree silk) each copy.  It is so cheap partly because he’s lucky enough to be in India, and partly because the (Muslim) family that binds his books believes fervently in the mission of the Writer’s Workshop.  The author retains all rights, is paid royalties in the form of copies of the book, and is required to buy 100 copies her/himself.  Other than that and a very inconspicuous stand outside his house, there is absolutely no system of distribution.  You want his books, you ask him.  He doesn’t really care either way whether they are sold or not–they are so cheap to distribute.  He doesn’t want any part in the marketplace of profit and loss, and simply doesn’t have the infrastructure to produce bestsellers.  And it’s been going on for fifty years, and it’s gained attention.  On Oct. 3, the Governor of Bengal will come to a gala to celebrate the bicentennial of the Writer’s Workshop.  There was this article: LINK.  And, gladly, he feels that my presence is a tribute to his life’s work, which it is. I saw his warehouse where he’s got a huge huge amount of books.

My next goal is to find a meaningful role within his Writer’s Workshop.  Though the thing has been going fine without me, he’s pretty sure I’ll have plenty to do, but I’m not sure what that is.  I also don’t have the language to communicate with the people who work for.  I need a bengali tutor as soon as possible.

Hopefully, I’ll have some real writing and some pictures (when I take some) to share sooner rather than later.

A slow accumulation of arrivals in Kolkata.  First the late-night race through empty streets to a dark and mothbally room, then meeting the servant who fed me breakfast, then meeting my hosts the Rays, a kind elderly couple, then meeting the streets of Kolkata–I went out, lost myself, found myself, returned, now waiting to go hear P. Lal’s mahabarata lecture and meet him.  I just walked here, I’m in an internet cafe, and I’m literally dripping sweat.  A silly amount of sweat.  I’m still dreaming about truly arriving in Kolkata–it seems a wonderful place where I’d like to live for a year.

So I was just told that you had to be logged in to post a comment, and I think I just changed that so anyone could comment.  So please please do!  And if it doesn’t work, shoot me an email.

1. Mini Doughnut Machine: just put in dough, it shapes, fries, and tops up to 15 mini doughnuts per minute.

2. lawn aerating sandals: just strap these babies on and walk over your lawn; instant holes in your yard!  And if it’s good for grass, think how good it’ll be for your driveway!  For your bedroom!

3 (ooh, I forgot.  These things just go in one end and out the other.)  Ah!  A backpack with a solar panel on it!  So you can recharge your cell phone on the go!  How did I ever live without it?

I’m in frankfurt, making the best of a pricey 60 minutes of internet.

I went to the airport today. Just for a visit, I guess.

Checked in at the desk, surrendered my backpack (22.6 kg, an easy .4 kg below the weight limit). She gave me a boarding pass, a document that I’ve always put so much faith in–as if it somehow gave me the authority to ride an aeroplane. Had a nice seltzer with the parents on the Pour Le France balcony, after which said a heartfelt goodbye at security. Waited in the security line, dutifully undressed myself. Took a nap by the gate next to a fantastic cast of germans and americans, wondered about the Stock Market. When the boarding swarm began to form, I peed (a small but deep victory: never before have I made a bathroom run after I had heard boarding be called), then glided on board. They accepted my paperwork gratefully. Found seat 41K, a windowseat next to futuristic looking bathrooms that I was excited to check out. Busted out the pillow and fell back asleep (so I’m trying to trick my body into thinking that night is day so that I won’t have to do it in India, a silly idea). No one sat in the aisle seat next to me, and I was feeling great as only luxury travel can make you feel.

Then right when everyone’s settled in their seat, this blonde Dandy, who was mostly his blonde Fu Man Chu styled facial tufts, sidles up to my row, and avoids eye contact by looking at a rectangled paper, my rejected boarding pass. “41K? Are you Jed Bickman?” assent. “Do you have a copy of your paper ticket?” ” E-ticket, right?” I actually thought that perhaps I had awoken in the dark ages of the 20th century. “No, you were supposed to have a paper ticket. Can I see it?” I had no paper ticket. “Um, you should come with me. Maybe you should bring all your stuff with you.” I shook my head and stood up empty handed. Some conferring which I had no say in. Then the woman, the Power in the situation, told me to go get my stuff. I haistily tore my bag out of the overhead, aware of all the terrorist-minded passenger eyes on me.

I bought my ticket on Vayama.com–I guess they had the best price and I was lazy. They were supposed to mail me a paper ticket, but never did (no record of it in their system, no one signed any packages), and didn’t. But they did take care of it–I’m on a flight out tomorrow morning. I have a feeling that one will go according to plan, but I’ll have middle seats the whole way, baby.

See you onna Flip Side.