Wednesday, May 24, 2006

A drama of dentures and sisterly love

I could swear that my eyesight started to go the moment I hit 40, just like mama said. Like clockwork. I suppose I can always blame it on the computer age: all of that staring and typing can't be good for the head or the hands. Either way, there's no stopping the effects of time or gravity. Both always win; sometimes, to tragicomic effect. Last Sunday my dear aunt Anya was having a bad day. A very bad day. She was vomiting for a better part of three hours, and was overall queasy. She lives across the street from Beverly Hospital in Montebello. When she felt too spent to make another trip to the bathroom, she called my mom. "Knarik" she whispered, "sorry to bother you, but can you please take me to the hospital?" "Knarik, I have to tell you something, I know you're going to think it's funny." Mama has a fairly wicked sense of humor, but couldn't imagine what would be amusing at this juncture. "While I was barfing my dentures fell out, and I accidentally flushed them down the toilet." Of course, I can only imagine my mom's laughter. She has an infectiously evil cackle that makes you laugh, too. So she chuckled with her toothless sister on the phone. "I'm coming." They got to the hospital and waited in the ER together. She was quickly seen at the triage point. They took her blood pressure, all was normal. My mom asked the nurse in her heavy Russian accent "Can you please check mine, too?" 185. Whew. She was nervous. It always shoots up when she's nervous. The doctors ran some tests and discovered nothing out of the ordinary. Anya was released and they drove back home at around 1 am. Later, when my mom was in my den retelling the story, my saintly sister-in-law interjected and said "Oh, you know the dentures are probably stuck down there. All you have to do is pull the toilet off..." We called Anya..."You know, it's possible to..." She would have none of it. "No," Anya said, "they're long gone." She couldn't bear the thought of putting the wayward dentures back into her mouth after all that. So she'd be waiting for the new set--a good five weeks of toothless misery. Uncharacteristically, she wouldn't be talking much. But she could always call Mama on the phone and mumble. Dentures lost to gravity. But in the end, lots of sisterly love.

Friday, May 05, 2006

How Kaavya got screwed, got despondent, and got a chance to be on Oprah

It's hard to feel pity and sympathy for poor little Kaavya, on whose shoulders seemingly rest, squarely and oppressively, the heavy 'Burden of the Past.' The photo with the smug mug of an Ivy leaguer looks down on us mere mortals who have a snowball's chance in hell (or thereabouts) of securing a book deal and 500K advance. But alas, little Kaavya enjoyed the fruits of her exploits, erm, employ, all too briefly! The rise and fall of Kaavya Viswanathan, the young Indian-American Ivy league novelist cum plaigarist, proves to be great e-mail fodder, still. A cousin of mine mused on the origins and notions of plaigarism, arguing that copyright laws were brought into being in order to protect authors from economic harm. Does copying the same words in different syntax constitute 'economic harm'? Or is the copying of the plot itself the deal? In any case, appropriating the intellectual birthchild of another without credit where credit is due is just plain fraud. But isn't it just the case that a story told from the 'multicultural' angle is all just a bit old and, pardon my snore, boring? Do we really want to read another bildungsroman of young immigrant offspring straddling two (or more) worlds? Is the lack of freshness the real culprit? or is it the now-hardily-proven lack of originality? "Write what you know" a writer told me once, "write from your gut, your experience, and it will always be true." True yes, but interesting is another matter altogether. In 1970, with The burden of the past and the English poet, W. Jackson Bate argued that the writers of the 1660s to mid 1800s comprised the first generations to acknowledge and 'feel' the burden of the weighty literary past. He eloquently expounded what we already knew: it's all been said and done before. And most likely, better. Ms. Kaavya said that she had so 'internalized' her favorite writers that she unintentionally and unconsciously regurgitated not only the plot, but piecemeal passages (having apparently read them over and over and over again). The Harvard Independent is having a grand old time matching passages, image for image, sentence for sentence, for our reading pleasure. I suppose 'internalizing' is to become the new publishing buzzword (viz., the editor to the writer, sternly: Are you certain you haven't internalized Pynchon with this one?). A friend of mine, giggling in his office at work e-mailed me admonishing, "I think we seriously need to check through our e-mails. Surely she's picked up some of our stuff, too!" I'm sure there's more KaavyaGate to come. Perhaps a little scolding session on Oprah's couch? Bring it on!