Eliza’s Haberdashery

If you recall, I once posted a delightful essay on “Coffee“, written by Anne Fadiman. It was the best essay on a favourite subject I had read in a long time and was my first brush with the author. Her essay left a lingering impression (it certainly gave a most entertaining account of coffee’s origins!) and today, my latest Amazon shipment arrived, with her latest collection of essays, “At Large and At Small“ nestled within its box.

Thank you to my e-mail angel, Madam Snarky, for forwarding the full text of JK Rowling’s speech at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Associationto me weeks ago. I read it, and fell in love with it.

It’s one of the few speeches that successfully combines humour…

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention. Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard. You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock.

honesty…

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

and messages that you will remember, on overcoming fear of failure..

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default…Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

..and human compassion, gleaned from her brief stint at Amnesty International..

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before. Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners.

Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life. Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

If I’d been present, I would have wanted the speaker to continue after the last line…

And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom: As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters. I wish you all very good lives.

Excellent.

Even Barack Obama’s speech at Wesleyan University - encouraging graduates to public service - did not move as much as this did.

You know, I cannot remember a word of the speech given at my graduation ceremony (yonks ago, admittedly), or even who delivered it, but if it had been JK Rowling’s speech (and the author herself, I suppose), I really think, some of the words would have stuck.

The speech is reproduced in full below.

(more…)

It was the blurb on the cover that drew me: “Your son says the bullying was unbearable. But his revenge was murder. What would you do?” Sensationalistic, but to a Mom of two boys, it intrigued.

In nineteen minutes, you can order a pizza and get it delivered. You can read a story to a child or have your oil changed. You can walk a mile. You can sew a hem. In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world, or you can just jump off it.

In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge.

It was the first time I picked up a Jodi Picoult novel, and it turned out to be a good introduction to the author. Nineteen Minutes tells the story of Peter Houghton, a 17-year old boy, who one day walked into his high school and shot dead ten people, schoolmates and a teacher. Countless others were injured, including a Homecoming Queen who lost half her face and a jock who got permanently brain-damaged.

The story is not so much the shooting but the events that lead up to the violence. What happened to turn a shy 17-year old into a mass murderer?

Picoult’s narrative weaves in and out of the past - the bullying that took place from the time Peter was five years old and escalated as he grew older, Peter’s dry social life, his parents’ doting on his older brother Joey who unfortunately died when Peter was sixteen and became the family martyr, his teachers’ inability to handle the bullies, Peter’s own inability to retaliate - but also takes us through the present.

Peter imagined what his Mother would say if he came home with a paper that had a big fat A on it - if, for just once in his life, he did something everyone expected of Joey, and not Peter.

Picoult’s greatest strength, in my opinion, is her ability to delve into her characters’ emotional turmoils and it’s especially wrenching to live through the pain of Peter’s parents, his Mom, Lacy, especially, who blame themselves for Peter’s behaviour.

It was simple to say that behind every terrible child there was a terrible parent, but what about the ones who had done the best they could? What about the ones, like Lacy, who had loved unconditionally, protected ferociously, cherished mightily - and still raised a murderer?

What’s more painful, though, is to get into the head and heart of Peter himself - and to read through his transformation from a shy, passive, highly sensitive child to a bitter, confused teen, and finally, to a resigned young adult.

The story’s other characters are no less interesting, particularly Superior Court Judge Alex Cormier whose daughter Josie used to be Peter’s close friend, until she became one of the popular crowd and ditched him. Alex allows us a glimpse into the court circuit while Josie provides a complex counterfoil to Peter’s character. Towards the end of the story, Josie’s role becomes clearer. In irony, Peter’s Mom is a midwife, bringing life to the world, and his Father, Lewis, is an economics professor who specialises in measuring happiness.

One of the tenets of his breakthrough - H = R/E, or happiness equals reality divided by expectation - was based on the universal truth that you always had some expectation for what was to come. In other words, E was always a real number since you could not divide by zero. But recently, he wondered about the truth of that….Lewis had come to believe that you could be conditioned to expect absolutely nothing from one’s life. That way, when you lost your first son, you didn’t grieve. When your second son was jailed for a massacre, you were not shattered. You could divide by zero; it felt like a canyon where your heart used to be.

There’s of course a whole entourage of teenagers populating the book - and Picoult managed to make even the most horrible bully (usually it’s the most popular kid in school, right?) sympathetic.

The story highlights teenage angst and the complexities of negotiating high school politics. I appreciate it most for the questions it raises, though: bullying in general; authority figures who do not stop the victimisation of those in their care; parental responsibilities and how easy it is to overlook a child’s troubles; and how violent tendencies are nurtured when there is no recourse or redress for victims of bullies. 

The thread of compassion and humanity runs strong throughout the book - and it’s difficult to cast any character into a clear-cut bad or good guy role (though the bullies in this tale certainly get my vote for the former). The story offers no neat or happy endings but the issues it highlights will make you remember Peter, Josie and their lives, long after the last word is read.

Last month, I received an invitation from a friend to attend a Mother’s Day celebration organised by an NGO, eHomemakers, a group that promotes working from home, teleworking and the running of SOHO businesses through the use of information and communications technology. 

This ten-year old group also has a programme, Salaam Wanita, which aids women who cannot work outside of their homes to learn skills and start micro-businesses to earn a living, especially through eco-basket weaving. (An aside: I would encourage you to view and buy the baskets - they’re made of recycled magazines and are sturdier than the usual straw. Each is beautifully unique in colour and pattern as well. I’ve bought nearly half a dozen as gifts and while they are priced on the high side, you are helping a good cause.)

The ceremony at a convention centre was sponsored by Nestle, which has been a strong supporter of the group since its inception, and while the affair was a simple one, it was clear that the women (and some men) being feted and recognised were uplifted by the attention. Small grants for businesses were awarded, one of them organised by my friend, and the women who accepted the grants seemed eager to start their projects and become independent breadwinners. Most of them were single parents, one was abandoned by her husband, and many had disabilities or had disabled children and parents to care for. The women cut across ethnic lines with one recipient coming all the way from East Malaysia. What they had in common was their determination to improve their lives and especially, to provide well for their children.

A mother would sacrifice herself for her children.

I sat next to a lady who reminded me of my own Mom. Julia is a single parent who has had amazing success in the corporate world, and who decided to chuck the high-flying corporate life to found a non-profit enterprise, the Truly Loving Company (TLC) which aims to donate a portion of all receipts from the sale of its household products to selected charities. TLC’s products are available in retail outlets and the charities that benefit to date are:Shelter and Rumah Aman, among others. HSBC Trustee is the overseeing body for TLC.

I was impressed with Julia’s drive and sincerity, and am pretty sure she will take TLC places, given her extensive corporate background and dedication. I gave her suggestions that I gave another colleague whose family has started a small retail operation - offer an internet option and home delivery service to expand clientele. For working Moms, time is a precious asset, and hours saved grocery shopping would be a blessing.

At any rate, both eHomemakers and TLC are examples of women who got off their butts to help others, and the results are good for society as a whole. Actually, anyone who gets off their butts to implement the ideas percolating in their heads can achieve amazing results.

I caught the tail end of Oprah some nights ago where she interviewed three individuals who each started a big wave of social help, all on their own. One of them began with food coupons and now operates food pantries all across America while another is a former Microsoft employee who has founded Room to Read which helps build libraries in under-developed locations all around the world. Wow. It all began with an idea, and a burning desire.

If you have both, the time to act is now.

When there’s nothing much to smile about, at work, I turn to:

Dilbert.

A creation of Scott Adams, the history of Dilbert could serve as a sort of inspiration to cubicle inhabitants everywhere. Essentially, Dilbert was created by Scott when he himself was a cubicle-ite, and was an amalgamation of his co-workers. He used Dilbert for his work presentations then was encouraged by the response to try Dilbert for syndication. United Media signed him up and in 1989, Dilbert was launched. Scott still held his day job until 1995, and his work experience (he worked from 1979 to 1995), I believe, is what makes Dilbert and his experiences immediately recognisable to office workers all around the world. So who says all that nastiness you endure at work can’t translate to money, huh?

Dilbert now appears in 2,000 newspapers in 70 countries, and the Dilbert web site, which is fantastic by the way, was the first syndicated comic strip to go online in 1995.

Our Star carries Dilbert in its tech section on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but in black and white. A pity.

At any rate, while you laugh at Dilbert and co (and many times thank the Lord that you do not have a Boss like his), some of his characters and stories will eerily remind you of real life. There is truth in art. And actually, this Dilbert comic strip below is based on a true story:

This guy got fired for posting a Dilbert strip that described managers as “drunken lemurs”; Scott Adams knew about it and created a series of strips around the incident (as above). Not only that, Scott also posted the guy’s resume on his blog, and voila - the guy has now found a new position with one of Adams’s fans. The article quotes Adams as giving this advice though:

“Stick with ‘Garfield.’ No one ever got fired for loving lasagna.”

Heh. I shall continue loving my Daily Dilbert.

Niki Aguirre is just about the second author I “know” before their publications get nominated for a prize. The first author I can claim to know “before she was famous” is local columnist, I Am Muslim author Dina Zaman.

Now, Niki - whom I’ve never met, by the way, but whose beautiful blog, The Virtual Onion, was one of my earliest pitstops when I started this blog of mine - has her debut novel, 29 Ways to Drown, nominated for the longlist of the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

I knew about it late - and only through Eric Forbes’ interview with Niki (and all other longlist nominees).  

Warm congratulations, Niki.

Niki’s (frantically) editing her first novel (good luck!), and had this to say to Eric on the short-story:

My first love is short stories. I love reading them. I love writing them. Until recently—minus a few painful years at university when I dressed in black and fancied myself a poet—that’s all I’ve ever wanted to write. So I’m glad I published my collection first before trying my hand at a novel. I hope to continue writing both.

I’ve only read one book on the longlist: Wena Poon’s Lions in Winter, which I greatly enjoyed. I also went to her book reading a couple of months back and found her to be a very expressive storyteller as well. She read out “Dog Hotpot”, which is just about the most humorous story in the whole collection. My favourite tale, though, is of the Singaporean lady who’s stuck in the American desert. I still remember the story.

These two authors (I promise to read your book, Niki!) - and Dina - inspire the writer in me, and I will be following their writing career with a keen eye.

ps: Sorry about the formatting - the WYSIWYG editor just refuses to respond!

pps: Niki’s a London-based fiction writer, born in the United States to Ecuadorian parents who studied English Literature at the University of Illinois and holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of London. She is the recipient of the Birkbeck Oustanding Achievement Award for Creative Fiction in 2006 and a grant from the Arts Council of England in 2007.

I trust that life has treated you well?

I missed this blog (visiting is not the same as inhabiting); I missed writing (jotting down observations of human reactions and conversations is not the same as personal writing), but I have kept up with my reading.

On my reading table, the most notable non-fiction that has kept me riveted (no mean feat) is Tariq Ramadan’s In the Footsteps of the Prophet. Tracing the life of the Prophet but staying away from pedantic religious fervour, Tariq’s narrative on the Prophet Muhammad’s life and character draws out useful lessons for Muslims on leadership, faith, courage, kinship (with Muslims and non-Muslims), and surrender to God. Rich with references to the Quran and the Hadith, the book is a good reminder that the Muslims had a great and noble leader in the Prophet, who led not by rhetoric, but by example. The Prophet’s humanity is thoughtfully highlighted, and throughout the book, Tariq often emphasizes on the much less publicised aspects of Islam - the compassion, justice and humanity of the religion. It’s a wonderful, enlightening read, and a timely reminder of politics and leadership from the Islamic perspective. This title was purchased from Amazon, and the title was found through their computerised recommendations.

For fiction, I reverted to my reading roots: popular fiction, and scooped up Jeffery Deaver’s More Twisted from the under-refurbishment Times Bookstore in Bangsar Shopping Centre. I loved his tales, once upon a time, and absorbed Lincoln Rhyme a long time before Denzel Washington made him celluloid. More Twisted is the second of a collection of his short stories, all centred on murder, suspense and - of course - endings with a twist. I’m three quarters of the way through the book already, so yes, the drought of popular fiction through these months have made me hungry for stories that entertain. There are weaker stories in the collection (”Afraid”, for one, which however can pass off as a mild precursor to the chilling “Saw” movie-trilogy) but most are - well, thrilling. My favourite is “Born Bad”, of a daughter who turns out differently than what her parents hoped. Or so it seems, at first. Deaver also wove in Sherlock Holmes in one of his tales, set in the late 19th century, “The Westphalian Ring”, a tale of cunning and cerebral one-upmanship. These, and the rest, are all delicious tales, serving mini-shots of adrenalin to keep you turning pages past your bedtime.

I also bought a copy of Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, not fiction but a true-life account of his life, growing up in a small city in America in the 1950s. This copy, I snagged at a stationery store in Subang Jaya’s Taipan, half an hour before closing time, when we had to make an emergency purchase of art supplies for our son. For some reason, the store frontlined this title (a pile of it greets you right as you walk in) and I got it for RM30, not such a bad deal. I am a quarter-way through and appreciating that while we humans may live continents apart, we can still laugh and appreciate one another’s growing up experience. It’s refreshing, at any rate, to know that Bryson’s Mom wasn’t such a great cook (I thought all Moms of that era were!), and seemed to be just as harassed as today’s Moms are, at juggling kids and work and husband. Bryson’s account of fifties America though make me nostalgic for more innocent times, but not the fifties as that time, for Malaysia, was a time of great impending change. While America was in its glory years, our country was negotiating for a new life - for Independence from the British. We’ve come a long way, Malaysia, but there’s still - oh so much we have to learn.

Yesterday, at Popular bookstore in Ikano, when the kids bought their Rotten School and Singapore Ghost Stories titles (Elder is already writing his own ghost stories, so there’s a Tunku Halim and a James Lee in the making, perhaps), I couldn’t resist snagging another fiction title. This time, by author Jodi Picoult: Nineteen Minutes. A tale of a seventeen year old boy, a victim of school bullies, who decides on revenge and shoots dead ten of his schoolmates in a rampage that takes - you guessed it - nineteen minutes. The story is on the why, as his Mother pieces together past events and people who could have driven her son over the edge. I’m still on page 39, and Picoult’s characterisations are compelling me on. There were other dark, complex storylines by the same author at the bookstore, and I suspect I’ll be reading more of Picoult should the rest of the story bear up the first forty pages.

Last night, old friends, let’s call them Senor and Senora Snarky thrust another title into my hands, which they say I MUST read: Khaled Hossaini’s The Kite Runner. Don’t watch the movie, they advised, but read the book. Their siblings have all read the book, and it’s mandatory “family reading”, so how could I say No? This erm - snarky - couple is probably reading aloud passages to their beautiful baby boy, Snarky Junior, as I type this! I haven’t started on the tome (I was secretly hoping I could get off the literary guilt wagon by just watching the movie), but with recommendations such as this, how could I not read the novel?

And now, we come to today, when Chet - who I had not met for some time - texted me this morning to join her at The Atria. Now, one cannot go to The Atria without visiting the Big Bookstore, that cavern of discounted books that will most likely deplete you of your last few Ringgits. It’s particularly dangerous when Big Bookstore has a sale, as it did today.

I spent around RM73 but bought about ten titles for the kids (Animorphs for RM1 each!) that included volumes on Space and Architecture, and - after Chet left - found two titles for myself: Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man, for RM12, and Philip Roth’s Everyman (hardcover edition), for RM19.90. I greatly enjoyed Zadie Smith’s On Beauty - it was rich, and funny without being insensitive - and look forward to this celebrity-inspired tale. I’ve never read Philip Roth but for some inexplicable reason, I’d had this title on my To-Read list for at least a year. The tale is of a 70-year long life that ends up becoming - well, not much at all. Isn’t that the greatest fear in all of us, we everyday people, that we will die not ever becoming a fraction of what we hope to become?

I do have to mention some other titles that caught my eye at the big bookstore: Monica Ali’s The Brick Lane, Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree (if it wasn’t for the price, I would have snapped up this hardback), The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl (I’d read and respected The Dante Club), The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and the seemingly-delicious ”killer Mum” tale, Notting Hell (though this is a bit too light for my current mood). Chet also highlighted a Julia Cameron title, “The Sound of Paper“, but since I failed to finish her Artist’s Way, I left that one alone.

Oh, and I was tempted by Jeremy Paxman’s The English, but the author’s name somehow reminds me of Jeremy Clarkson, and he now reminds me of a friend I sorely miss, a wonderful, exasperating conversationalist who is no longer around, who used to lift my spirits with witty asides (off-the-mark though some may be) and colourful, candid remarks. The friend was one of the few who could make me turn to the dictionary, so you see why I miss the company.

Anyway, there’s no better company than the company of books. The words may plunge you into deep depression but it’s the sort of depression you feel after watching a particularly sad movie; in other words, it’s sadness from a distance. The real world is the one that has the ability to cut you up and make you bleed. Real people (authors and gentle readers aside, of course) are the ones who gleefully mutilate and feast on torn and bleeding wounds. In stories, you find heroes and acts of courage and heroism, people who stand up for what’s right; in real life, it seems to be very hard to find such people.

I still have hope, though, that not all hero-worship is in vain.

For now, I shall return to the stories, where heroism is thankfully still in good supply.