Scratched beyond recognition
At the margin of today's paper
That lies soulless
On your coffee table -
As we talk unsure, hushed
Our voices sliding into pauses abrupt -
Is perhaps my face
That you so fondly drew
Knowing it's me on the phone for you.
© Dan Husain
April 13, 2005
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
The 'Q' with two tails*
*Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee used the letter 'Q' with two tails to signify their partnership.
The annals of crime fiction have known many partnerships, but none so fruitful or enduring as that of Frederick Dannay and Manfred B Lee. The composite of those two is better known to us as Ellery Queen, and under that name were produced some of the most intelligent and inventive yarns ever. There was considerable ingenuity even in the form: the stories were written by ‘Ellery Queen’, and featured a detective so named who, far from being a professional sleuth, was actually a writer of detective stories! The fortune cookie came full circle.
Arguably, Queen is the first instance of a ‘cerebral’ detective in the American form of the genre (we shall forget Poe’s Dupin here, since he was too improbably bizarre to be real). He is a scholar, within reason; a man remarkably well informed on the arcane and the abstruse, without the epigrammatic airs of Holmes. He’s an acute observer of minutiae. He’s also sufficiently human to have a father, Inspector Richard Queen, a policeman in the New York Crime Branch, and with whom he enjoys a most affectionate and endearing relationship.
We do not know very much about his personal life, except that he is ‘young’, whatever that means. Like Holmes, he is timeless.
The stories themselves are encyclopedic in plot and sweep – as indeed one would expect, given the detective’s unusual abilities. The names are intriguing to say the least: The Roman Hat Mystery, The French Powder Mystery, The Dutch Shoe Mystery, The Greek Coffin Mystery, The Chinese Orange Mystery, The Egyptian Cross Mystery…
It wasn’t long before the partners in this delightful enterprise realised that they had spawned something of an industry; the seal on this fact was finally set by their founding, in 1941, of what is perhaps the most famous magazine in the world devoted to crime writing, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, or EQMM as it is now familiarly abbreviated. In more than six decades of flourishing existence (even after the demise of the original founders) the journal has elevated the genre to levels that even mainstream literature has seldom seen. It was the first magazine to encourage new talent through the ingenious medium of the writing contest and competition, has played host to some of the greatest names in detective fiction, and carried learned critiques on the form by eminent commentators.
It has had a fanatically devoted, and exponentially increasing following among cognoscenti – the kind probably last seen when Sherlock Holmes was the mascot of the Strand Magazine in the last decade of the nineteenth century. And in much the same way, collectors prize its old issues.
This year America celebrates the Ellery Queen centenary.
***
The annals of crime fiction have known many partnerships, but none so fruitful or enduring as that of Frederick Dannay and Manfred B Lee. The composite of those two is better known to us as Ellery Queen, and under that name were produced some of the most intelligent and inventive yarns ever. There was considerable ingenuity even in the form: the stories were written by ‘Ellery Queen’, and featured a detective so named who, far from being a professional sleuth, was actually a writer of detective stories! The fortune cookie came full circle.
Arguably, Queen is the first instance of a ‘cerebral’ detective in the American form of the genre (we shall forget Poe’s Dupin here, since he was too improbably bizarre to be real). He is a scholar, within reason; a man remarkably well informed on the arcane and the abstruse, without the epigrammatic airs of Holmes. He’s an acute observer of minutiae. He’s also sufficiently human to have a father, Inspector Richard Queen, a policeman in the New York Crime Branch, and with whom he enjoys a most affectionate and endearing relationship.
We do not know very much about his personal life, except that he is ‘young’, whatever that means. Like Holmes, he is timeless.
The stories themselves are encyclopedic in plot and sweep – as indeed one would expect, given the detective’s unusual abilities. The names are intriguing to say the least: The Roman Hat Mystery, The French Powder Mystery, The Dutch Shoe Mystery, The Greek Coffin Mystery, The Chinese Orange Mystery, The Egyptian Cross Mystery…
It wasn’t long before the partners in this delightful enterprise realised that they had spawned something of an industry; the seal on this fact was finally set by their founding, in 1941, of what is perhaps the most famous magazine in the world devoted to crime writing, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, or EQMM as it is now familiarly abbreviated. In more than six decades of flourishing existence (even after the demise of the original founders) the journal has elevated the genre to levels that even mainstream literature has seldom seen. It was the first magazine to encourage new talent through the ingenious medium of the writing contest and competition, has played host to some of the greatest names in detective fiction, and carried learned critiques on the form by eminent commentators.
It has had a fanatically devoted, and exponentially increasing following among cognoscenti – the kind probably last seen when Sherlock Holmes was the mascot of the Strand Magazine in the last decade of the nineteenth century. And in much the same way, collectors prize its old issues.
This year America celebrates the Ellery Queen centenary.
***
Topkapi
i searched for comfort in history’s
forgotten backyard, a reckless debris
it was: angry stone and mute granite
cobbling together in an ornate dance,
and the wind like a swirling dervish
swaying with the fury of a woman
scorned. the ottoman walls wailed
over memories of miseries enacted here,
and over pleasures that were played out
by the banks of the nearby bosporus –
a pliable backdrop, if ever there was any,
to this decaying palatial harem
where eunuchs and courtiers conspired
to stretch an empire beyond the marmara.
i was all alone when i witnessed all this
from my zephyr burnished perch, an impossible
privilege in the days of the sultan
and now a mere salutary stop
in a tourist’s itinerary. i was perturbed,
to say the least, at what this meant
and found no comfort in pitying
the significance of this moment
as i saw before my eyes
centuries of conquests collapse
into a parable of the inevitable.
© 2005 Ashish B. Gorde
forgotten backyard, a reckless debris
it was: angry stone and mute granite
cobbling together in an ornate dance,
and the wind like a swirling dervish
swaying with the fury of a woman
scorned. the ottoman walls wailed
over memories of miseries enacted here,
and over pleasures that were played out
by the banks of the nearby bosporus –
a pliable backdrop, if ever there was any,
to this decaying palatial harem
where eunuchs and courtiers conspired
to stretch an empire beyond the marmara.
i was all alone when i witnessed all this
from my zephyr burnished perch, an impossible
privilege in the days of the sultan
and now a mere salutary stop
in a tourist’s itinerary. i was perturbed,
to say the least, at what this meant
and found no comfort in pitying
the significance of this moment
as i saw before my eyes
centuries of conquests collapse
into a parable of the inevitable.
© 2005 Ashish B. Gorde
Sunday, April 10, 2005
Suroor...
Words that trap you
Shackle the very wish
Of yours to break free… from me
Like vignettes
At the margins of your portrait
Entwining, entangling, ensnaring
This biblical velleity
To taste the forbidden
Fruit of your Eden
But the swirling snakes
Of heathen desires
Raise their wispy heads
Of gnomic intent and size
To only find themselves gnarled
At the margins of your portrait
You look up from the poem
Oh…and all that remains are…
Your kohl lined eyes
The purple stained lips
And a crooked shape of once a snake
At the margins of your portrait
©Dan Husain
January 18, 2005
Shackle the very wish
Of yours to break free… from me
Like vignettes
At the margins of your portrait
Entwining, entangling, ensnaring
This biblical velleity
To taste the forbidden
Fruit of your Eden
But the swirling snakes
Of heathen desires
Raise their wispy heads
Of gnomic intent and size
To only find themselves gnarled
At the margins of your portrait
You look up from the poem
Oh…and all that remains are…
Your kohl lined eyes
The purple stained lips
And a crooked shape of once a snake
At the margins of your portrait
©Dan Husain
January 18, 2005
Friday, April 08, 2005
The Pest and the Pedant
Quite without argument literature’s busiest and most officious of busybodies was Thomas Bowdler. A man trained to be a physician or surgeon (I forget which), he gratuitously meddled in things far removed from the ambit of his chosen calling: encroaching on the province (if that) of the clergyman instead of enriching his own, trying to sanitise supposedly impressionable minds and souls.
A full two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death he picked on the poor Bard as a starting point to begin his self-appointed purification mission. Carefully excising, expunging and expurgating words, phrases and passages considered ‘indelicate’ for tender eyes and ears, he produced The Family Shakespeare: an opus to be dipped into by a benignly stern pater familias for the instruction, improvement and edification of his brood. One can imagine the scene: a Sunday evening at home by the fireside, after a properly sensible supper, with six or seven eager faces upturned as the man ponderously drones on.
And mind you, Victoria was not yet enthroned to set her stamp on the age.
Well, history often displays a nice sense of irony, so it wasn’t long before the silly doctor got his come-uppance (but not before he had visited his unwholesome attentions on the Bible, and Gibbon, poor man): his name soon became synonymous with overly sensitive morality and ridiculous censorship. The same tender minds for whom he laboured now laughed at him.
But curiosity impels us to examine what precisely Bowdler found objectionable in England’s greatest son – and not, certainly, out of moral scruple in this day and age.
As far back as the 1930s, Eric Partridge, the famous scholar and writer on English language, trawled through Shakespeare and documented every single word, phrase and passage having sexual or scatological connotations. And the result was his monumentally entertaining Shakespeare’s Bawdy. A sample, perhaps? Here’s something from Venus and Adonis – Venus speaking:
‘Fondling,’ she saith, ‘since I have hemm’d thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom-grass, and high delightful plain,
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from the tempest and the rain:
Then be my deer, since I’m such a park;
No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.’
For sheer exuberance of imagery, that has few equals: the Elizabethans were remarkably free of moral straitjackets.
And if that whets your appetite (pun or none), Partridge’s delightful work is now available in a fine reprint (Routledge Classics): both scholar and prurient alike can rejoice.
***
A full two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death he picked on the poor Bard as a starting point to begin his self-appointed purification mission. Carefully excising, expunging and expurgating words, phrases and passages considered ‘indelicate’ for tender eyes and ears, he produced The Family Shakespeare: an opus to be dipped into by a benignly stern pater familias for the instruction, improvement and edification of his brood. One can imagine the scene: a Sunday evening at home by the fireside, after a properly sensible supper, with six or seven eager faces upturned as the man ponderously drones on.
And mind you, Victoria was not yet enthroned to set her stamp on the age.
Well, history often displays a nice sense of irony, so it wasn’t long before the silly doctor got his come-uppance (but not before he had visited his unwholesome attentions on the Bible, and Gibbon, poor man): his name soon became synonymous with overly sensitive morality and ridiculous censorship. The same tender minds for whom he laboured now laughed at him.
But curiosity impels us to examine what precisely Bowdler found objectionable in England’s greatest son – and not, certainly, out of moral scruple in this day and age.
As far back as the 1930s, Eric Partridge, the famous scholar and writer on English language, trawled through Shakespeare and documented every single word, phrase and passage having sexual or scatological connotations. And the result was his monumentally entertaining Shakespeare’s Bawdy. A sample, perhaps? Here’s something from Venus and Adonis – Venus speaking:
‘Fondling,’ she saith, ‘since I have hemm’d thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom-grass, and high delightful plain,
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from the tempest and the rain:
Then be my deer, since I’m such a park;
No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.’
For sheer exuberance of imagery, that has few equals: the Elizabethans were remarkably free of moral straitjackets.
And if that whets your appetite (pun or none), Partridge’s delightful work is now available in a fine reprint (Routledge Classics): both scholar and prurient alike can rejoice.
***
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Gambit
“I love you.” Pawn to king three
mobilises your infantry.
Black regards, fields a knight,
an early move to protect his right.
Queen to king’s rook four
takes the battle to his door,
sends his knight running
in this contest of cunning.
And while he looks,
you open your rooks,
your sleek bishops
insurance against mishaps.
Daunted, black responds
with a few desultory pawns –
till endgame stares him in the face
to tell him he’s lost the race.
White to play and mate in two:
cold eye and hand move “I hate you.”
***
mobilises your infantry.
Black regards, fields a knight,
an early move to protect his right.
Queen to king’s rook four
takes the battle to his door,
sends his knight running
in this contest of cunning.
And while he looks,
you open your rooks,
your sleek bishops
insurance against mishaps.
Daunted, black responds
with a few desultory pawns –
till endgame stares him in the face
to tell him he’s lost the race.
White to play and mate in two:
cold eye and hand move “I hate you.”
***
Reality Check…
That once looked so bewitching
Filtering dazzling lights -
Casting myriad patterns
On the walls… the ceiling…the couch.
The chandelier has slipped from the peg.
The inverse interrogative icon, inversed.
Posing questions…jagged.
Jagged shards on the floor
Beckon crimson drops from the feet.
Ones that are aching –
To ooze from the heart instead.
Trying to fuse the motley pain
Ones she nurses within…
The drained heart lies in vain, beat.
Filtering dazzling lights -
Casting myriad patterns
On the walls… the ceiling…the couch.
The chandelier has slipped from the peg.
The inverse interrogative icon, inversed.
Posing questions…jagged.
Jagged shards on the floor
Beckon crimson drops from the feet.
Ones that are aching –
To ooze from the heart instead.
Trying to fuse the motley pain
Ones she nurses within…
The drained heart lies in vain, beat.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
Desire...
I walk in there.
And, as if by design
Our eyes meet.
Lock for a fleeting moment
Caressing.
Unlocking in me, languorously
The fabrication of desire.
The cascades of emotions
Tripping on each other
Engulfing me languidly
In the tortuous fire.
Molting the sleet.
Yielding -
Unsettling the intrinsic schema.
I look away.
Perchance, it seems so plain.
But almost in the tripping moment
Am drawn,
To seek that look again.
My native quiescent in disarray.
I can no longer eclipse,
Feign.
I so wish to see you again.
© Preeti Bose
And, as if by design
Our eyes meet.
Lock for a fleeting moment
Caressing.
Unlocking in me, languorously
The fabrication of desire.
The cascades of emotions
Tripping on each other
Engulfing me languidly
In the tortuous fire.
Molting the sleet.
Yielding -
Unsettling the intrinsic schema.
I look away.
Perchance, it seems so plain.
But almost in the tripping moment
Am drawn,
To seek that look again.
My native quiescent in disarray.
I can no longer eclipse,
Feign.
I so wish to see you again.
© Preeti Bose
A Poet's Dilemma
Drunken metaphors
Cavorting to strange rhythms,
Hauling sackfuls
Of allegory and cliché
Pilfered from a Bedouin’s caravan,
Spice-laden, my words,
But their aroma
is lost to a critic's blocked nose.
© Dan Husain
March 30, 2005
Cavorting to strange rhythms,
Hauling sackfuls
Of allegory and cliché
Pilfered from a Bedouin’s caravan,
Spice-laden, my words,
But their aroma
is lost to a critic's blocked nose.
© Dan Husain
March 30, 2005
Saturday, April 02, 2005
HOUSEWARMING
We have a new home, as all of you can see. Unlike those of brick and mortar, which are prey to every kind of whim and caprice that Providence in its infinite wisdom is capable of throwing one’s way, this one was ready in remarkably short order: the architect-contractor executed his commission with the minimum of fuss, and the owners are beaming proudly at the results. Would that all pursuants of the former’s calling were as gratifyingly quick in their labours as the splendid Chugs: ladies and gentlemen, shall we rise in a toast to him, if you please…?
As is the wont of all new houses – and ships – there may be a few oddities here and there, a few leaks beyond the shipwrights and fitters. If any catch your eagle eye just say so, and we’ll see what we can do about them. But you’ll agree that the overall effect is not infelicitous! Sylvia Beach’s famed shop-front graces the masthead, just as we’d wanted it. And the white sets off the writing to advantage.
Chugs, thank you once again for your lovely work!
This is now our home. May it bring joy to all of us!
Shakespeare & Co.
As is the wont of all new houses – and ships – there may be a few oddities here and there, a few leaks beyond the shipwrights and fitters. If any catch your eagle eye just say so, and we’ll see what we can do about them. But you’ll agree that the overall effect is not infelicitous! Sylvia Beach’s famed shop-front graces the masthead, just as we’d wanted it. And the white sets off the writing to advantage.
Chugs, thank you once again for your lovely work!
This is now our home. May it bring joy to all of us!
Shakespeare & Co.
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