My Mother's Books

It is possible my grandfather, a boy from a village who barely finished his education, was the first in our family to fall in love with reading. So maybe I read because he did. But my literary tastes themselves I owe to my mother. My mother had a well-stocked bookshelf and the books on it were the first adult books I read. I still own many of her books and they are both a memory of my mother (undoubtedly the most influential person in my life) and my own experience of reading them. And because she had been a literature student - or perhaps despite it - she had a fairly eclectic collection which spanned everything from the classic canon to pulp fiction as the following list shows.

The Classics: My mother had, as I said, a Bachelors in Literature. In fact at the time she got married, she had been offered a teaching job at her college and in the ordinary course of life would have taught there and perhaps retired as a respectable lecturer. Instead her gypsy existence as an Army wife found her eventually in Delhi where she often supplemented her meager collection of collegial books with books bought from the pavements for Rs.2-5, often these were classics. This was all she could afford though she would often take us for a bookstore browse and on occasion buy us a Blyton. As a child, I thus leafed through the books of Austen, Dickens, Eliot and the like for the illustrations and my first and only attempt at writing a play was at age 13 from my mother’s copy of The Pickwick Papers (which I still possess). These books I always associate with my first memories of my mother as a person. I was 6; my mother was very young, running a house and trying desperately to write and be something other than wife and mother. Which she did all her life with varying degrees of success.

French Authors: When I first started reading Maugham, my mother gave me a quick rundown on the author – gay, the semi-autobiographical nature of Of Human Bondage, he was briefly a doctor, he was influenced by Guy de Maupassant. The last bit had resulted in the spare prose normally found in French novels. It was a style my mother greatly admired and she had a few translated French books including Maupassant. There were charming novellas by Colette and the works of Francoise Sagan who my mother quite admired. Both Colette and Sagan wrote about French ingénues, but my mother also read darker French fiction. Like many young people of her day, she was influenced by existentialism and the writings of Sartre. And then there was Jean Genet, perhaps a forgotten author now, whose Lady of the Flowers my mother much admired. Its themes made it a prohibited novel when I was young and by the time I was an adult I had graduated to the fashionable authors of my day like Kundera and Marquez and never got around to reading Jenet. Existentialism itself seems a little pickled and distant these days. But one’s inclination for the French novel remains.

The Modernists: My mother was of a generation where the Modernists, roughly I would say the authors who wrote between the two great wars, were studied. We didn’t have very many books at home because they were expensive but my mother would often discuss Forster, Woolf, DH Lawrence and the like. This early introduction led to a bit of a love affair with the modernists, no other fiction is closer to my heart. Among my most treasured possessions is two small hard bound books my mother won as a prize. Apart from its sentimental value, these two volumes of short stories have pretty much every author who wrote between the wars and in the 1950s. Amis, Murdoch and the like are missing but there is Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Stella Gibbons, Waugh, Greene, Elizabeth Bowen and much much more. I have read and re-read these stories very many times and yet they always give me great pleasure and on each reading I have a particular favourite. It also introduced me to a lot of authors who have by now fallen into obscurity but still remain part of a particular sensibility that I quite like.

Pulp Fiction: Very briefly, in my late teens I belonged to a lending library and read every single piece of trash produced at that time. Then it abruptly stopped and here I depart from my mother. For like most of her family, my mother was more postmodern than I can ever be in her cheerful, casual mixing of the vulgar and the classic. We always had a huge number of Chase, Erle Stanley Gardner and Agatha Christie books passing through the house. There were the airport novels like those of Arthur Hailey or Sidney Sheldon. Suddenly my mother would fall into a M&B phase and books with titles like Obsession, Temptation and the like would be strewn around the house, I recall Charlotte Lamb being a particular favourite. Somehow my brother and I never read these though I did give airport novels and of course Christie a spin. Still they remain a part of the map of books we inherited from our mother, albeit like obscure islands on the margins.

Feminist Literature: When I was sixteen my mother gave me two books to read which are seminal works of Feminism. The first was The Second Sex, a book my mother often said had saved her life, and the second was Greer’s provocatively titled The Female Eunuch. Even at that age I understood that de Beauvoir's was the superior book, much more complex and ambitious in its undertaking than Greer’s book could ever be. I have since read it almost every single year of my life and still have the copy my mother gave me that I duly covered in lavender paper and plastic for preservation. Subsequently I read Millett and Freidan, the latter by way of a then fond boyfriend. My mother herself had made the difficult journey of being lost and unsure, marked by a sense of being different, even mad to a better understanding of herself through feminism. But the nature of her upbringing in an orthodox milieu with a limited vision of life had at many times in her life left her conflicted. These dualities in fact so marked her life that when I was seriously in love and contemplating matrimony, she was simultaneously sad that I hadn’t sought an arranged marriage and that I hadn’t spurned matrimony altogether. In contrast, I was brought up free and relatively uncomplicated. I have often stumbled and fallen hard and fast but each time I have picked myself up because my mother gave me the greatest gift of all, a belief in myself and my individual destiny undefined by a relationship. If feminism saved my mother’s life, it has underpinned mine. Yet my life is not what my mother would have wished for me. But I think she would also be happy to see that somehow, armed with what she has given me, I have stumbled on, albeit imperfectly, untouched by the conflicts that undermined her life. That is to say my mother gave me wings and I have rarely been hesitant to use them (even if some of the attempts were misguided!).

In the Mood for Blues

Towards the end of a long week and after a fair few wordy posts this month, a bit of a frivolous and pictorial post in praise of blues.  Being a person who tends towards the earthier end of the spectrum (think browns, mossy greens, mustards and rusts), my sudden appreciation for blue has taken me slightly by surprise.  The other day, for e.g., I spotted a duck egg coat of a particularly handsome sobriety that I instantly coveted. So far the appreciation remains firmly on the side of indigo, midnight blue and smoky blues. I think I will give the brighter blue of skies a miss.  I turned of course to etsy for this compilation given how easy it is to colour search, the collection is a bit biased towards my recent textile+dyeing obsessions.



Blue Wool







Stone Bracelet



Indigo Dyed Dress



Cloth Cuff





Wools



Earrings



Some Folk for Sunday

I haven't been anywhere Portland but I hear it's the coolest city on the planet at the moment. This is all hearsay but it seems to be some kind of hipster haven full of creatives  who make music, have a DIY culture, are green and gainfully employed in selling coffee to each other. The latter bit has even reached the concentrated capitalism that is Sydney's city centre where every other greasy spoon cafe and Thai hole in the wall appears to be closing to make way for tastefully decorated places selling organic coffee and small sweets. Anyhow while drinking coffee at one such place I heard Portland band The Decemberists and they grew on me. A lot of their songs have a sort of mythical quality to them and are richly poetic, so right up my alley.  This one, We Both Go Down Together, for e.g is like an updated and quirky version of the kind of songs in which star-crossed lovers plunged to their deaths and works both ways (you may need to click watch on you tube - there are likely some embedding problems). 

As it happens, my knowledge of any kind of music, bar old Hindi songs, is rather poor. I wouldn't be able to name the Decemberists influences. I have never heard the rock, punk staples of my college life, e.g. Pink Floyd and the like. I don't know any new best-selling acts. I have rarely been to concerts. Though I do tend to be drawn towards folk influenced music and have a passing acquaintance with Dylan and Baez. It so happens that folk influenced music is having its day in the sun, albeit it is dappled sunlight and not the blazing summer sun under which Lady Gaga stands.  So I can say with some confidence that I finally have at least a nodding acquaintance with the sounds of the day. So here is another song I have been listening to, this is by Laura Marling whose age belies her gifts. This song was apparently influenced by letters sent from a wife during WWII.

In Bed with Six DVDs

Last week the Sydney spring flu hit and I ended up staying at home for a couple of days.  A day watching bad telly wasn’t very appealing so I took myself off to the local DVD store and somehow got conned by the pleasant person behind the counter into a “look its so cheap” 6 DVD deal.  Apart from the fact that selecting 6 movies is a drag, let me just say that watching 6 movies over 3 days is not easy and I can only imagine the endurance of the fabled viewers of yore who went to the theatre and saw two shows in a row. Indeed I have known women who have gone into the theatre at 12 pm only to emerge at 9 pm! It’s not a feat I plan to repeat but here for what it is worth, in no particular order, are my thumbnail sketches of the movies.

An Education:  A precocious schoolgirl nearly forsakes a proper scholastic education for an education of another kind i.e. a 60s schoolgirl falls for the charms of a much older conman in this bittersweet tale.  It is a charming film, nicely acted by most of the cast and quite watchable. But not the kind of movie you want to watch all over again once the end credits roll.

(500) Days of Summer: Possibly the most hyped hipster romance of late but it lives up to all those glowing reviews.  Boy falls madly in love with girl who likes him well enough but – surprisingly – is not too keen on the ring on the finger. Surprising given the dire world of recent rom-coms keeps suggesting otherwise. The beginning credits have a pleasant f..k you to the girl who presumably inspired this story, that kind of sets the tone.  Sort of a go watch film if you are young but if you are past 40, a nice enough snapshot of modern love in the Western world.

A Single Man: I should have liked this. It is based on a story written by Christopher Isherwood.  It appeared to be on the nature of love and grief. Even those who didn’t like it praised its look and the recreation of a 60s American campus.  Instead it was incredibly dull. Even the much vaunted look was meticulous but lifeless.  It drowned in its tastefulness, in its desire to be a serious film.  Colin Firth’s performance was much praised but really playing repressed Englishmen must be second nature to him. As must playing boozy, conflicted American women for Julianne Moore.  Exactly the kind of movie you are forced to pick up on the 6 DVD deal and then regret the 2$ you spent on it.

Revolutionary Road: I didn’t expect to like it and I didn’t. It had its moments but it’s about time movies about the hollowness of the American dream and the neuroticism induced by a confinement to the suburbs are retired. At the least a moratorium for the next 10 years might help.

Caramel:  Four women in a salon learn some life lessons and find love. In Beirut.  The forgettable, harmless chick flick variety were it not for its Beirut setting.

Becoming Jane: The last movie I picked up in a desperate attempt to make it to 6. Not as bad as I had feared.  Provided you forget this is about the life of Jane Austen or even about a novelist of any sort. Really they might as well have given history’s most famous spinster a man at the end and it would have made no difference. Plus confusingly, the guy who seemed the template for the bad boys of Austen’s fiction like Wickham and Frank Churchill, inexplicably became the great love of her life. And the guy who was repressed and silently hot, a proto Darcy to speak, remained the thwarted suitor.  Like I said, this is not Austen but a fanciful construction of the author for our times.  Just go along for the ride - but watch out for the many bumps.

Beau Travail*

Tender Co Denim

Clothes for men often tend to be boring. There is the suit but let’s not forget that it’s easy to make jokes about suits, it is after all shorthand for the salaried worker tied to the office and a palette of grey, grey and more grey. Sure there are all kinds of suits and perhaps some men dream of being kitted out in a bespoke one from Saville Row or whatever it is that is considered the epitome of tailoring. Still, even the exquisitely tailored suit is like an exceedingly rich Kanchipuram saree. You admire the workmanship, you understand the underlying science of structure and weave but it is also so good an indicator of dull, stultifying status that once worn it is immediately uninteresting. That is the garment itself is a thing of beauty but on a person it moves beyond this and is both exquisite yet supremely dead.

The choices for men wanting to do things a little differently are limited. Most creatives end up in a uniform of their own; the tee and jeans and casual footwear. But each of these items is of course an equally good indicator of conspicuous consumerism. In fact at no time in history has a man so literally spelled out his state of mind as on the contemporary T-shirt. Irony prevails and its not too hard to see that this is the uniform for any number of professionals in the media and tech industries. There is a certain charm to its slackness and it has a good deal of indie cred but it’s not a garment for grownups. You do see 40 year olds in it but something is lost in translation.

Here and there you might see a man who is the new hipster in more relaxed linen and a scarf but it’s a rare sighting, regrettable because it’s a far more elegant and grown-up look than the guy aiming to look like an Apple employee.

Of course there are a whole lot of men who fall into unnameable categories and don't particularly care about clothes. Take scientists who wear the cheapest jeans around and the T-shirt from the last conference attended (Big Bang Theory’s clothing department has it all wrong). And there are people who do a lot of physical or menial work and require workwear, which is often a polyester uniform with a fluorescent vest often added on. It is unfortunate that polyester has become the fabric for the masses. It is convenient but can never achieve the purity and beauty of workwear of yore. I might be romanticising here a bit but the rough cottons, hemps and flaxes that were used even in the last century have a sense of being of the earth, a sense of honesty. They may be roughly made, patched and used throughout a lifetime but they are imbued with the Japanese sense of wabi-sabi, a worn beauty that is enhanced with incessant use. As an example, my teenage counterpart to the boyfriend shirt was a much used dad shirt and I still remember my disappointment when my father’s uniform was no longer an open weave OG (olive green) of natural fibre but made of polyester. Likewise my great grandfather had a couple of veshtis that he hand washed and maintained impeccably; though they were clean and white they were never, even remotely, the over treated brilliant white cotton of today which is loud in its whiteness. But times have changed and so the ordinary, workaday world belongs to polyester and the like.

Somewhere on the margins of men’s fashion, things can be a bit more interesting. Interpretations of workwear is an ongoing theme – I had blogged on this last year. The rustic workwear of yore is now an affectation and has little to do with adapatibility to the nature of work, nevertheless to my mind it is far more aesthetic than anything that I have discussed before. Though tailored, there is an ease to the garments, this no doubt stems from its workwear inspiration-there is not the straitjacketing , the fitting that office work implies. Plus the natural fibres suggest breathability, the natural dyes impart a more soothing look. My recent copy of Selvedge (which inspired this post) features clothing by Tender Co., though inspired by British workwear there seems to be a degree of Japanese inspiration too. It is of course contemporary featuring as it does a lot of denim and yes, the printed T-shirt. Plus it ties in with the recent handmade movement which is smaller, more intimate, more organic and also makes visible the process by which clothes are made. It is also more expensive of course. Like khadi or pure cotton, workwear has lost its roots and is now meant for the urban aesthete. Yet it has not lost its innate beauty.

Can you work in a namoto?

While many workwear inspired pieces are formal and classic, occasionally you will also find something much more on the edges like lastwear. To quote them: “We make strange, wonderful and durable clothing and accessories. We weave stories, fight corporate colonialism and believe that sustainability is the new grand narrative.” This with their steampunk and gothic inspirations puts it in the realm of the political and anarchic - albeit in line with 21st century norms, it is more through clothes than incendiary pamphlets. The picture with this paragraph has its roots in workwear, inspired as it is by the hakama, supposedly as adapted by the shipbuilders of Empire. It is a voluminous trouser kind of garment with deep side pockets. So workwear and Japan again. Not a look for the workaday life of today but interesting in its origins.

The philosophy of workwear is that it be comfortable, durable and one not think too much about it. Much of the workwear inspired clothes today are a result of conscious thought on what one chooses to wear. and how they represent our selves The argument may be made that it is for pretentious tossers searching for authenticity, that polyester is a more honest and accurate reflection of our work world. Still, once in a while you look at a piece and it is truly sublime and intimately connected to history. And you see a sudden transcendental beauty to it you will not find elsewhere.

*French for good work, beauiful work and the like.

Fam-Com in the time of Family

On my visit to Chennai I picked up a couple of Tamil movies for my grandfather. Most of the films were from the 50s and early 60s and I had heard of them through my mother. My grandfather had seen all the films but he was more than happy to give them a second spin. We first watched பாமா விஜயம் (Bama Vijayam) late into the night; though a bit dated in its sentiments it was a competent enough film with a few laughs along the way.

The next morning we fell to discussing Tamil films of the mid 50s (about which my grandfather of course knew a fair bit) and came to the general consensus that as a rule they were superior to their better known Hindi counterparts. Part of this is because of a theatrical tradition in Tamil Nadu, பாமா விஜயம் for e.g. boasts a few actors who had been trained in a theatrical tradition and knew how to deliver lines with confidence, my grandfather in fact knew the theatre troupes that the actors belonged to. As an e.g. Nagesh is sort of the Johnny Walker of the South but with a much expanded acting range. And while the nature of acting has changed and the actor of the 50s is far too mannered for our times, the training and conventions they follow are all too visible. The other giveaways are the scripts, which are a lot tighter and internally consistent than the average Hindi film of the same era. Additionally they place a great deal of emphasis on the beauty, ambiguity and vagaries of language. Admittedly, some of this is lost on me but it is not hard to see that the films are for an audience appreciative of both language and its manipulation. Bar the songs, this is rarely to be found in a 1950s Hindi film.

Like many other Tamil movies of the time, பாமா விஜயம் is a family drama or perhaps more correctly a family comedy (the fam-com!). Perhaps I am wrong but it seems a genre native to South India, as sturdy and long lasting in its conventions as the romantic comedy. It almost seems to come to life in the 50s as a genre, many earlier Tamil films that I have seen appear to be historicals and mythologicals. Many of the films deal with a multi-generational family set-up with defined roles for all members. No matter what course the film follows, all require the rehabilitation of the paterfamilias role and a return to family order. Both the strain of family bonds and their ultimate cohesiveness are explored though the catalyst is often a familiar outsider like a faithful family retainer. In one way or the other the genre still lives on, in particular in the many serials that choke TV channels, indicating that at least the ideal of family life in India has remained relatively unchanged.

The discussion on Tamil cinema seemed to energise my grandfather and we both left the table in the happy haze that lingers after an interesting discussion. On my return to Sydney, he watched a few more and we talked about them over the phone. I meant to go back and talk a little more of the movies he had seen and the theatre groups that existed in Tamil Nadu. That is not to be.

In the last years of his life my grandfather wrote incessantly to me, perhaps he didn’t want his thoughts to be forgotten. Those discussions are now stilled. There is an element of sadness in that but there is also much in a person’s life that is unsaid. My grandfather lived long but even a long life has its silences and is ultimately rendered ephemeral. What my grandfather thought is now fragmented - lodged here and there in a few of us but also scattered to the winds. And so it is and should be.