Don't Gollup Your Food, Harold

"Don't gollup your food, Harold".

The line popped into my head, unbidden, as it were.

I knew where it was from, but not exactly where.

It's a line from one of PG Wodehouse's Mr Mulliner short stories. And I knew I had to track it down. I knew the background. There's a timid Mulliner who loves a girl. There's a beefy guy who loves her and doesn't want Mulliner to marry her. As things come to a head, Mulliner heads home, where he finds two burglars, Ernest and Harold, helping themselves to his dinner. Ernest and Harold are pretty massive individuals, and are doing justice to Mulliners table and liquor when Harold asks the fateful question

Apart from the whole faux-Shakespearean shtick about the first and second burglar, this section just cracks me up

The result is that the burglars start fighting, knock each other out. Mulliner (this one turns out to be Osbert) calls the police who drag out the two battered and unconscious thugs just as beefy Bashford Braddock lands up, wearing hob-nailed boots to punish Osbert Mulliner for having the temerity to marry Mabel Petherick-Soames by giving him a stomping. Seeing the police, and assuming that Osbert was responsible for the the burglars' condition, Braddock wilts away.

Jeeves and Wooster and Blandings get most of the love, but I'm beginning to think that the Mulliner stories were easily their equal - if not better.

They certainly had some fantastic openings.
Here's Buried Treasure:

The situation in Germany had come up for discussion in the bar parlour of the Angler’s Rest, and it was generally agreed that Hitler was standing at the crossroads and would soon be compelled to do something definite. His present policy, said a Whisky and Splash, was mere shilly-shallying. “He’ll have to let it grow or shave it off,” said the Whisky and Splash. “He can’t go on sitting on the fence like this. Either a man has a moustache, or he has not. There can be no middle course.”

Or the well known - and succint opening to The Story of Webster

‘Cats are not dogs!’

The lines that follow are quite good, too...

There is only one place where you can hear good things like that thrown off quite casually in the general run of conversation, and that is the bar-parlour of the Angler’s Rest. It was there, as we sat grouped about the fire, that a thoughtful Pint of Bitter had made the statement just recorded.
Although the talk up to this point had been dealing with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, we readily adjusted our minds to cope with the new topic. Regular attendance at the nightly sessions over which Mr Mulliner presides with such unfailing dignity and geniality tends to produce mental nimbleness. In our little circle I have known an argument on the Final Destination of the Soul to change inside forty seconds into one concerning the best method of preserving the juiciness of bacon fat.

There's poetry too. Remember Good Gnus? From Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court?

A brief suspense, and then at last
The waiting's o'er, the vigil past;
A careful aim. A spurt of flame.
It's done. You've pulled the trigger,
And one more gnu, so fair and frail,
Has handed in its dinner-pail;
(The females all are rather small,
The males are somewhat bigger

And the clubs. Apart from the joy of finding out why the 'Gentleman's gentlemen's" club is called "The Junior Ganymede" (Hans Gruber would have called it the benefits of a classical education), there's the Junior Lipstick, for debutantes, the Senior Test tubes, for brilliant chemists, the Senior Bloodstain, for detectives, and so on...

Most Wodehouse fans love the Buck-U-Uppo stories. And the Story of Webster and its follow-up, Cats will be Cats, but there is so much treasure - not just buried - in these stories.  The sheer ridiculous absurdity - the loopiness  - guarantees grins, giggles, and snorts of laughter.

Look at  Lancelot Mulliner's emotions when he sees Angela, the daughter of Lord Biddlecombe. "His heart leaped like a young gherkin in the boiling vat" (Lancelot is the nephew of a pickle-manufacturing millionaire). And read "Darkling, a Threnody" and wonder who inspired it.

Or take the discussion that opens "Came the Dawn", where a Stout and Mild says "Yes, gentlemen, Shakespeare was right. There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will". And then it turns out what prompted this statement was that his dog had won a prize for short-haired tortoiseshells at a cat show. Which then segues beautifully, a few sentences later, into this line, "No Mulliner has ever won a prize at a cat show. No Mulliner, indeed, to the best of my knowledge, has even been entered for such a competition".

I could talk about the Order of the Crimson Edelweiss, carrying with it the right to yodel in front of the Vice President. Or the entirety of The Smile that Wins, featuring, among other things, the Bramah Yamah Gold Mines flotation. (I can imagine plum with his Encyclopedia Brittanica, looking up the list of Hindu gods and goddesses, and discovering that the name of the creator god rhymes -atleast on paper - with the god of death).

Ultimately, when I think of the Mulliner short stories, they're like the memory of these boiled sweet cough lozenges of my childhood. Sweet, could be savoured or cruched up, and left you breathing a whole lot better when you had them - and the taste lingered...

Kannadasan

Margazhi

If you aren't a Tam, you can't even pronounce it right.

It's a Tamil month, one that loosely corresponds to the period from the middle of December to the middle of January.

But if you arent a Tam, you dont know Margazhi - It's the Madrasi's season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, the season of woodsmoke at dawn when the temples play ML Vasanthakumari singing Andal's Thiruppavai, the season of kolams and carnatic music, when Tamil Nadu's scorching temperatures dip into the twenties.

It is ... beautiful.

மாதங்களில் அவள் மார்கழி, மலர்களிலே அவள் மல்லிகை

Among the months, she's Margazhi. Among flowers, she's the jasmine.

There's this song, a love song, a movie song, where this guy sings about the woman he loves. As lyrics go, the lines are simple, but so loaded with meaning that it makes your heart swell.

The song was written by a tubby womanizing drunkard - who also happened to be one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.

Hyperbole? Maybe. But if you aren't a Tam, you wouldn't know. You wouldn't be able to evaluate the distance between ஆசையே அலைபோலே நாமெல்லாம் அதன்மேலே    and ஜகமே மந்திரம் சுகமே தந்திரம் சிவசம்போ.

So this guy, this Muthiah, wrote songs for movies. He wrote novels. He was a member of the Dravida movement, an atheist. He wrote propaganda verse.

There's a story of a man. A powerful man, beloved by millions. He was a movie star, a matinee idol, and a politician who'd become the chief minister of a state that loved him. But as Chief Minister, he found that he had to take unpopular decisions, tough decisions. So he would steel himself by listening to a song from one of his movies, taking strength from the lines "வாழ்ந்தவர் கோடி மறைந்தவர் கோடி மக்களின் மனதில் நிற்பவர் யார்" (crores of people have lived, crores have died - but who remain in memory), written by this Muthiah, a guy he quarreled with all the fucking time.

If you think this is all quite trite, you're probably justified.

But I'd like to to draw your attention to a film called Raaja Paarvai, one which starred Kamalahasan - not fucking Kamal Hassan - and a song called Azhage, azhagu.
Now, Raja Paarvai is a lovely film, where Kamalahasan plays a blind guy who is in love with Madhavi - and he asks Madhavi to draw a self portrait based on how he sees her in his mind - with eyes like stars, ears like question marks, fingers like "thenkuzhal", and so on...
The result, as drawn by Madhavi, is grotesque, but its also an illustration of the impossibility of translation.

How would you translate, for example, செந்தமிழ் தேன்மொழியால், நிலாவென சிரிக்கும் மலர்கொடியால் (yes, I know that its the hard la, not the soft la there, but translations online are fucked up). That "her voice is as sweet as pure honeyed tamil, that her smile is like moonlight on a flower?" Whatever you try, its not going to be the same.

So, autobiographical note alert, my grandfather was into films. He made money financing them, and the stories of his banging starlets are legendary in our family. As a reaction, my father grew up in rebellion. Where Thatha was hedonistic, he was puritanical. Where my grandfather enjoyed movie music, my \father swore by the Carnatic greats. But I remember this, back in 1981, when appa looked up from the Hindu that he was reading and said, to no one in particular, "What a waste. He died. What a waste of a life".

Kannadasan. Kaviarasu Kannadasan wasn't a Padma Shree or a Padma Bhushan or a Padma anything,.  But he could writeabout vegetables, about beans and bitter gourd, and make it it into one of the most heartfelt love songs ever.  He could write a song glorifying Allah, where every third line ended with "Om" - not because he was taking the piss on Muslims, but because it was about God, whatever you chose to call him or her.  He could write Deva Mainthan Pokindran, a st6aple of every Christmas and Easter Oliyum Oliyum, where Kamal was Jesus, and he could write Yaarum Varuvar, Yaarum Thozhuvar, Naagoor Aandavan Sannidhiyil.

He was, to put it mildly, awesome.

I've always loved hacks. And Kannadasan was the ultimate hack.
But in his commercialism, he transcended commerce.
He transcended politics and propaganda.




 
So if you had one song to sum up Kannadasan's life, which would you choose?
This one?

or this

or this

or this, the only song he wrote for Mullum Malarum,

or this

or the ultimate Tam stoner anthem

You can't.

And that's my point.

Thoughts on the Dylan Nobel

I was in my sisters place, attending to appa and trying to keep amma from fretting when Bull sent me a text. “Just heard that Bob Dylan won the Nobel for literature. For once someone whose works I am rather acquainted with”. At first I thought it was just one of those hoaxes that sweep the internet from time to time, but this time, with everybody from the Guardian to the NYT weighing in, it obviously wasn’t.

There was a time when I had what was arguably the best room in college. 296, Ram Bhavan was the last room in the “new wing facing sky”, overlooking the Birla Museum and its mucky pond where fat koi fish, mottled silver and orange swam in its murky depths. In front of me were the lawns, the grass trimmed and the hedges manicured. And from the balcony seat, you could see the most spectacular sunsets over the arid hardpan that lay beyond the campus walls.

One evening, there was a storm. Have you seen it rain in the desert? It’s spectacular. It went on for a long while, shading dusk into night, and angry streaks of lightning would shatter the darkness.  I sat there in my armchair, in the dim yellow of a 60 watt corridor lightbulb, while Desolation Row played in my room. I was wrapped in the warm cocoon of a bottle of phens. I had my packet of Charms cigarettes, and I had a brilliant light-and-dark show. And in that setting, I’d see the parade of grotesqueries in the song. Cinderella, her hands in her back pockets “Bette Davis style”, Ophelia, an old maid at 27, sepia tinted postcards of hanged men, a hand painting passports brown. Einstein in green rags, playing a violin. A leather cup on a back alley quack’s desk, where a nurse snaps on rubber gloves before she shuffles a pack of dog-eared cards, all saying the same thing.  A song that was both a heap of broken images, as well as scraps of moving pictures of broken people. Even now, if I close my eyes and think back, I can see them all, like something seen through a grimy window, a group of famous marionettes going through the same set of motions for eternity.

There must have been a lot of division about awarding Dylan the Nobel – I’m pretty certain I saw a lot of headlines about how it was deserved or undeserved, often running side by side. I didn’t read any of them. Also since I quit Facebook, I don’t know what my friends are saying – or which clips of which songs were posted.

My own feelings are mixed. There’s the world of Nobel Laureates. And there’s the world of Bob Dylan. Separate worlds until now. The former, at least to me, was essentially a conservative institution, with the standards and choices of a group of Harold Bloom clones. Dylan – the quintessential Dylan, the Dylan of those 640 days between Another Side of Bob Dylan to Blonde on Blonde - was the opposite of that world. But that’s a thought that doesn’t stand up to closer examination. What was revolutionary for the US in the 60s – or in India in the 80s is dated and archaic to a world that’s grown up with touchstones like Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur. For someone who was born in the 1990s, how is Dylan different from Paul Anka or Jim Reeves or any one of those dinosaurs of “Western music”?

For some of us, the answer is, well, obviously, if you’ve listened to Dylan, the difference is obvious. But listening to Dylan isn’t the same for the iTunes playlist era. Of course you can line up Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume X on your iPhone and listen to everything from Like a Rolling Stone to When the Deal Goes Down or the latest thing from Dylan does Sinatra, but that’s hardly the same thing as that segue from Ballad in Plain D to It Ain’t Me, Babe in Another Side of Bob Dylan or that amazing B-side of Bringing it All Back Home (Mr Tambourine Man, Gates of Eden, It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) and It's All Over Now, Baby Blue). And when you listen to it when you still are struggling to figure out who the fuck you are and what the fuck you’re doing in this fucked up world, it leaves an impression.

A large part of listening to old music is nostalgia, of course. With songs of love and songs of youth, it’s pretty much a guaranteed return trip. But not so with Dylan. A large part of it is the timelessness of it. It’s alright ma remains as scathing a commentary in 2016 as it did in 1964. When the ship comes in may have been written as a response to a snooty hotel clerk, but works so well as a prayer of hope and defeat of adversity as well as “Fuck you, naysayers” comment.

If that two year period was the kind of thing that any artiste would kill for, just remember that Blood on the Tracks came almost a decade later. And if later albums weren’t always great, remember that Shot of Love had Every Grain of Sand, Oh Mercy had Shooting Star, Time out of Mind had Not Dark Yet, Love and Theft had Mississippi and – well - all of Love and Theft.

So now, I’ve seen enough people (internet commenters, so take that as you will) diss Dylan. “Can’t sing”. “Overrated”. “Sexist/Misogynist”. “White male”. And yes. He sang for Miss Universe contests and shilled for Victoria’s Secret underwear. But he also came out on stage to accept his Grammy, twitching and fidgeting, and said “My dad, he was a very simple man and he didn’t leave me a lot. But what he told me was….” (A very long pause as Dylan looks at the award, the way a tramp may examine something shiny found in the garbage, wondering how much he could hock it for).. “He said son…”. Pause again. “He said so many things”. And he followed it up with a raging Masters of War, while the first Gulf War (the “good” Gulf war) raged on in Iraq and Kuwait. He’d make speeches about the plight of American farmers during Live Aid, completely pissing off  Bob Geldof. 

He just didn’t give a shit.

Then, there’s Ballad of a Thin Man.  It’s a song I hate. It may have been written about a specific person in a specific set of circumstances, but I’ve always felt it was about me, that I was Mr Jones – that something was happening around me, but I didn’t know what, despite my wide reading, that despite trying so hard, I still didn’t understand.

And when a song can make you feel uncomfortable in your own skin, it means that the songs words have power.  

And isn’t literature all about words with power?