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M.T. Karthik

~ works, thoughts, events of 1977 – 2017

M.T. Karthik

Monthly Archives: January 2017

Reading and Writing

30 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by mtk in beliefs, thoughts

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

blog, Karthik, m.t., mtk, reading, writing

Reading

I am reading Ismail Kadare’s The Accident, and it’s pretty great. Taking me a little longer to finish, because his riddling, nested, suspenseful style requires more effort. I wonder what it’s like in Albanian?

I’ll post a review when I’m done, but one note on a line that made me laugh aloud.

The Accident begins with and concerns a car accident in Tirana, Albania, that results in the deaths of two people about whom little is known but much becomes suspected. Agencies from neighboring countries are – perhaps paranoically – worried these seemingly accidental deaths are part of a larger plot and they come to Albania to investigate. Then amidst the descriptions of each of the interested parties’ procedures, Kadare segues thus:

“As usual, the Albanian intelligence officers took a long time to reach a position which the others had already abandoned.”

which caused me to erupt in my first lol of this finely crafted novel.

The Accident, I. Kadare, Onufri Publishing, Tirana, 2008.

Writing

I haven’t been blogging or writing in a journal in some time and I think it has had an effect on my mind and my behavior which is suspect for its simplicity and uninspired plodding lately.

The fact of the political circumstance I am now living in is no small part of this situation.

I am a brown-skinned, South Asian immigrant to the United States who has been a naturalized U.S. citizen for 36 years. I am routinely subject to racism and discrimination because of my appearance and name.

Before I open my mouth and speak, no one around me knows I have lived in the U.S. since I was two, have attended all public elementary, middle and high schools and the largest public university in this state – that I am as or more local than anyone in the room. This is a racist and bigoted place.

The two-faced behavior which is taught, encouraged and rewarded by the masters – the ones who seek to maintain their pre-eminence – as equally seeks to contain liberated thought and free will, which are discouraged and ultimately punished, through disconnection and isolation. They hope to drive out those who would not agree.

And now the Slum Lord is the Driver Outer in Chief .

Ultimately the way immigrants like myself behave – the things we say, do and write – are not judged in and of themselves as expressions of a free mind, but rather against an “Americanism” that is shifting, biased, calculated and profoundly racist. Freedom to speak out is curtailed through this and other subtle means.

As Octavio Paz wrote decades ago,

“the North American does not tell lies, but he substitutes social truth for the real truth which is always disagreeable.”

– O. Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950

… this has grown into a fantastic parallel history in which the North American social truth denies – via the mechanism of retelling the story – the genocide and slavery of its historical real truth, denies and marches on with pipelines and religious intolerance and banning people and ideas.

Sitting here, being me, it is thus, hard to write. I know I’m marginalized. Though less than most because I have worked at some of the biggest publication and broadcast entities in this country. I’m both educated to and have experience of how it works – after years in New York, LA, Silicon Valley.

I also know I need specific and intelligent support to write what I want to write, a supremely competent agent, lawyer and contract with a publisher with power. Sticking it here free for the world without support is just stupid and pointless.

So yeah, back to writing reviews then. I will finish the Kadare and have a full review of The Accident next week.

For decades, in bars at this time of year I have raised a glass and told people,

“It is said that most suicides happen on a Monday and that most suicides take place in the month of January. Therefore if you can get through the last Monday in January, you’ve increased your odds already.”

 

– M.T. Karthik, date unknown, some time in mid-1990’s, in San Francisco

 

Today being that last Monday in January,

I wish you all happy travels to the great beyond

and to the rest of you,

congratulations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MTK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Found the Female Loggerhead Shrike

28 Saturday Jan 2017

Posted by mtk in birds, fauna

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antonio, female, Karthik, loggerhead, m.t., mtk, point, recharge, rocky, RPRZ, San, shrike, States, texas, United, zone

Field Report Early Spring Sounds and Pools

25 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by mtk in fauna, flora, landscape

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antonio, field, Karthik, m.t., mtk, point, recharge, rocky, RPRZ, San, stream, texas, zone

Loggerhead Shrike, Lanius ludovicianus

24 Tuesday Jan 2017

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antonio, bird, first, Karthik, lanius, loggerhead, ludovicianus, m.t., mtk, passerine, point, recharge, rocky, RPRZ, San, shrike, spring, texas, zone

The first bird of the spring has arrived and it’s one I haven’t seen before: the loggerhead shrike, Lanius ludovicianus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mtk

The Ten Point and Six Point Bucks at Dusk

23 Monday Jan 2017

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antonio, bucks, deer, field, Karthik, m.t., mtk, point, pt, recharge, rocky, RPRZ, San, six, tailed, ten, texas, urban, white, wildlife, zone

mtk

It’s Vulture Season

23 Monday Jan 2017

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atratus, black, coragyps, helotes, Karthik, m.t., mtk, texas, vulture

and the Coragyps atratus are everywhere. I saw a huge committee of them and a kettle of them atop and around USAA! (the plural for vultures in flight is a “kettle” and at rest is a “committee” and when feeding a “wake”)

I saw this fella out in Helotes

dscn9254
dscn9257
dscn9258

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mtk

 

 

 

Weather System Crosses Over the Field feat. Rainbow

16 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by mtk in landscape, RPRZ, sky, weather

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antonio, clouds, deer, field, Karthik, m.t., meteorology, mtk, photography, point, rain, rainbow, recharge, rocky, San, stream, system, tailed, texas, white, zone

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mtk

 

The Ten Point Buck Bows to Me 3x

16 Monday Jan 2017

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antonio, bows, buck, deer, field, Karthik, m.t., mtk, point, recharge, rocky, RPRZ, San, stream, tailed, ten, texas, three, times, white, zone

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mtk

 

Sets of Two Year Eight Month Twenty Eight Day Increments by Salman Rushdie

12 Thursday Jan 2017

Posted by mtk in Book Review, reviews

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days, discussion, eight, Karthik, m.t., months, mtk, review, rushdie, salman, twenty-eight, two, years

The idea of a fairy tale written by an atheist emerged from my reading of this 2015 novel.

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight NightsTwo Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My history with Salman Rushdie is unknown to him I’m sure, but beyond reading as much of his work as I can over the years, it also includes at least one performance piece in San Francisco in the 1990’s and at least one letter I actually sent him through his agent when I was working in New York and dated a woman who worked for his publisher in the early aughts. Pretty sure he never got it though.

After the fatwa was placed on his head, the performance piece was that -as a young writer living in SF and helping give birth to the non-profit resource Media Alliance – I had a button which read “I am Salman Rushdie” and wore it out and about while he was in hiding as an act of solidarity.

The button was particularly more effective on me than my peers – mostly white and black Americans – because I’m Indian and so perhaps could have appeared to be him to someone ignorant of his age.

And stupid enough to think he’d be wearing a button declaring himself who he was in public.

I have written about Rushdie before in the context of Haruki Murakami, and indeed I attributed Murakami with influencing Rushdie toward popularity in this. However, now I think more than by any peers, Rushdie has been influenced most by the United States and particularly his new chosen home of New York City.

It reminds me of John Lennon in that way, another Brit liberated and enthused by the teeming creative humanity of New York.

I think creative immigrants falling in love with the US can be compared and contrasted with others for whom it is the same, but never to me – for mine has been a continual, slow falling out of love with the place.

I wouldn’t speak for Rushdie with regard to his beliefs of course, but his facile use of language to allow characters to wrestle over the aspects of God or the legitimacy of the same exhibits an intellectual courage I, as an atheist, admire profoundly. And upon finishing this book it struck me:

If an atheist writes a fairy tale and it comes out seeming very much like the fantastic stories of all our religions, what does that mean?

I am reminded of Anatole France in this regard. By the end of Penguin Island is it really something else? I mean, is that us as humans staying in touch with our it? Two Years Eight Months Twenty-Eight Days has that quality in the form of its frame story – as if told from the distant future. (these guys also immediately brought to my mind the tall blue aliens of the far distant future in Spielberg’s, A.I., – my imagination is so dense with shit).

This book has all Rushdie’s expertise of craft – voluminous, tumbling wondrous language and ideas of fantasy worlds and people and non-people. It’s a tumult of musical and thunderous sentences, some of which run on for pages.

His mastery of the third person remains impressive because aspects seem omniscient – even Godly – while others are so human or somewhere in between, yet he never allows the authority of any hierarchy to intercede in the power of the narrative. The story demands to be itself despite all religions or deities or men or women who may exist within it. Even the ‘We’ in the frame story admonish themselves for editorializing.

But it is more pop now. And at times the veil between author and subject slips.

I am sure, after having lived there myself and knowing something of its temperament, being an international celebrity in New York comes with demands for new language. Rushdie’s now includes a clear love for the city and its cultural community. It is the basis for his exuberance.

In Two Years Eight Months and Twenty Eight Days, Rushdie imports his beloved Thousand Nights and a Night to Manhattan and Queens and the Staten Island Ferry and proceeds to weave and reweave it into contemporary New York City and beyond.

Using simple abbreviations for countries abroad drawn in loose terms now – a secondhand where”A,P and I,” are Afghanistan, Pakistan and India or in which ancient sites of the Bible or Koran are described tangentially through the mechanism of the stories within stories that make up this telling, there’s still a clear association for Rushdie now with neoliberal, Obama-and DeBlasio-leaning New York as much as with Harry P., Das Racist and metropolitan culture.

And because his works are contemporary in skein if not in the whole of the yarn, fantastic stories and language emerge which create – perhaps utopically – a secular and liberated future beyond religion that is ultimately modeled after the best interpretation of New York City’s teeming admixture of humanities.

But something is missing – not teeth, there’s plenty of teeth in just one of his terrifying djinni to suffice – and the spin on Goya’s Saturn was epic. But I mean … there is a comfortableness in Rushdie here that makes this work, ultimately, light. A fairy tale. And reading it as such, I loved it. But felt it doesn’t turn the corner on cultural critique. It resides where you expect it might, entertaining and at times thrilling anyone who appreciates flights of fancy.

View all my reviews

mtk

Upon Reading The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

12 Thursday Jan 2017

Posted by mtk in Book Review, reviews

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book, colson, critique, doubleday, Karthik, m.t., mtk, railroad, review, the, underground, whitehead

My thoughts on The Underground Railroad, my first introduction to Colson Whitehead.

The Underground RailroadThe Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I followed the success of this book with interest, remembering that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man won the National Book Award for fiction in 1950 and The Color Purple by Alice Walker did in 1983, both works I respected, but that since, African-American writers have been absent as victors. It is impossible not to think of the farce of the Oscars and other cultural awards when 34 years go between the appearance of anyone black on a list such as this.

Here is a historical fiction on the implementation of pre-Civil War slavery at the peak of the slavers repression of the slaves – the era when a few men of conscience were freeing slaves and encouraging states to outlaw the practice. Running away was working.

It is thus set at the time when repression was at its most savage; when slaving whites were afraid of uprisings and cracked back with an orgy of violence to send the message of their superiority.

Whitehead has a crisp tone and a direct manner, writing in the third yet exhibiting effortless shift of vantage, moving between the runaway slaves Cora and Caesar and the tumbling, ever-pressing posse of those who would catch and sell or kill them – led by the relentless Mr. Ridgeway – as well as a cast of characters that surround and support or seek to destroy the railroad.

In Whitehead’s telling the railroad is real and mechanical and underground, belching and speeding through darkness shielded from the stars and thus to who-knows-where with intense purpose or driven by the hand of a wild-eyed refugee pumping a pushcart through the narrowing and darkening hole to the point of exhaustion to escape her pursuers.

The book is brutal because the era is brutal and the telling is matter-of-fact about events that are a stain upon our national character – eugenics experiments alongside the horrifying comfort of those who laughed and skipped and played as they lynched, raped, burnt to a crisp and whipped to death. It is all here laid bare, written without sentimentality. I understand the book took Whitehead a decade and a half to write and the work is apparent as the narrative careens forward, northward, zigs toward unknown locales, zags to known others.

In some ways Whitehead’s craft in this book reminds me of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West. I am not sure how I mean that except to say writing on matters that are so difficult to describe for their savagery requires a deft hand, an honest heart and a razor-sharp mind.

This is fine work – a worthy National Book Award winner – and I agree with those who believe all Americans should read it.

View all my reviews

mtk

Talk, Talk by T.C. Boyle

11 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by mtk in Book Review, reviews

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Tags

boyle, communication, corraghessan, deaf, hearing, Karthik, m.t., mtk, novel, review, t., t.c., talk

A deaf woman’s perspective written by a hearing man, this post is about discovering a T.C. Boyle novel from 2005 I hadn’t read called Talk, Talk, one of the most amazing feats of fiction I’ve read in some time.

I’m a big fan of Boyle but can’t keep up with his production, which is fast and furious. (I still haven’t read his current novel, The Terranauts).

In Talk, Talk, Boyle uses both language of the hearing and of those without to describe with startling precision the perspective of his main characters, a deaf woman and her hearing boyfriend. It is a complex landscape of communication that includes layers of perspective – people watching them sign to each other or the subtle differences in their own use or avoidance of sign or spoken language.

Boyle’s precision in describing the complicated dialogues taking place between the characters amazed me. He seamlessly enters the realm of the non-spoken we all share, e-mails and texts, where there is no distinction between the hearing and those who cannot. In fact, he empowers his characters with a beautiful countering of language for language.

The novel is essentially a road novel in which the driving force is an act of identity theft in which the perpetrator is a serially irresponsible and hateful user of others and the victim the aforementioned main characters.

From the police station encounter at the opening to the final showdown between the thief and his victim, the narrative isn’t that complex. It travels a good distance – from coast to coast – but it isn’t about the road. Somehow the landscape of the mindsets of the characters becomes more interesting than the plot. Their way of rationalizing and communicating is fascinating and sends this tale tumbling and careening down the road.

Subtle modes of communicating are revealed by Boyle’s process of how we talk to one another in extreme circumstances. When the final showdown between the thief and the woman finally occurs, after so much suspenseful haranguing and violent confrontation it ends with a pretty simple gesture – a shove.

I found out T.C. Boyle is on Twitter @tcboyle and is really active and generous about chatting about his work. He wrote to me when I complimented him about the novel, that the novel was about language itself.

Boyle writes so much of such high quality, it seems almost effortless and I asked him how he manages to be so productive and yet active on Twitter and giving talks and being social, something I find very difficult and he replied pointedly that writing is the thing he does, every day. He is active at the process.

It was a great reminder from a guy who when asked what suggestions he had for a young writer just starting out once replied, ‘come from a wealthy family.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mtk

Fresh Roadkill

06 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by mtk in fauna

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antonio, deer, fresh, roadkill, San, tail, tailed, texas, white

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mtk

Violent Event in the Woods

06 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by mtk in flora, landscape

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event, fall, fallen, Karthik, m.t., mtk, o.p., park, schnabel, tree, trees, violent, woods

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ardea herodias, the Great Blue Heron Visits

06 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by mtk in birds, fauna

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antonio, ardea, Blue, field, great, herodias, heron, Karthik, m.t., mtk, point, recharge, rocky, RPRZ, San, stream, texas, zone

The first great blue heron, Ardea herodias, I’ve ever seen at the field and stream visited this past December, 2016.

It never let me get close enough to get good footage, but its immense blue wings are clearly visible.

the footage from the first visit is even worse, but it was exciting to see this guy.

M.T. Karthik

This blog archives early work of M.T. Karthik, who took every photograph and shot all the video here unless otherwise credited.

Performances and installations are posted by date of execution.

Writing appears in whatever form it was originally or, as in the case of poems or journal entries, retyped faithfully from print.

all of it is © M.T. Karthik

a minute of rain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYLHNRS8ik4

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