Entries from July 2007 ↓

Nadia tagged me and I have a virus and a fever and, let’s face it, I enjoy talking about myself.

• each player lists 8 facts about themselves
• the rules of the game appear before the facts do
• the player ends by tagging 8 people, which means listing their names and then going to their blogs to tell them that they’ve been tagged, then going back and commenting on their lists.

1. I taught myself to raise both eyebrows individually and roll my tongue, although it must be said I have a very short tongue, so i really just sort of make a U out of it.
2. I have seen everything containing Stephen Fry that is available on YouTube, often more than once.
3. I have fascinating hallucinations if I get a fever of 103 or higher. Really stellar stuff, good for literature later in life.
4. I read at about 2 to 2.5 minutes a page. I taught myself to read at that pace, since my original was about 3 minutes a page. I have to read every word, otherwise I don’t really enjoy my book. I can’t speed read for the life of me, and I think it’s bollocks to try because what fun is that? I likes the words.
5. Alan Davies, from QI, needs to marry me.
6. I don’t like calling myself a feminist because I don’t think of feminism as a religion, ideology or way of being. I think it’s a tool that you use when you need to. More generally, I’m not fond of labels and I don’t like to wave flags.
7. I have trouble uni-tasking. I get very antsy and need to do something else. But I’m quite a lazy person.
8. I wish I knew how to punch people out and I didn’t throw like a girl.

I’m going to tag people who don’t give a damn and won’t do it anyway because, heck, why not.

Joel, Uzair, Natalia, Mariam (who never looks at my blog anymore!), Urmila, Annabell, docsRock and Maheen.

I have a short media-watch piece on SAJA Forum that’s just been put up. You can find it here if you like. More shameless self-promotion, this.

I’m such a bleedin’ feminist.

Screenshot from today’s BBCUrdu.com. BBC’s South Asia section doesn’t have any of these news pieces. Here’s a very functional, uninteresting translation.

• 52 die in 3 suicide attacks – in Hangu, Kohat and Hub
• The family of Maulana Abdul Aziz [killed in the Lal Masjid operation] released on parole.
• Protective measures: danger of suicide attacks, police station gates closed
• Lal Masjid [Red Mosque] will be repainted a different colour
• Inquiries continue into the Islamabad [suicide] bomb [at a rally for the chief justice]

What counts as a civil war? Collective action of one self-declared cohesive body over another? Or is that something that comes later, when we write the histories?

Hell. Hand basket. All that.

I haven’t been interested in writing poetry for a while now. When I feel like writing, I get anxious and feverish, not because of what I might write but because of what I know I won’t be writing. The phase-out that comes while you’re writing isn’t there lately. And I’m trying not to be pushed.

2007 seems not to be my year for writing. Not in the first 6 months of it anyway. I haven’t written very much that I’m thrilled about. All of it is … mediocre? Just kind of there. Nothing that fizzes.

I guess that means it’s time of collect and make sense of. Because also there isn’t much impetus to write poetry. Nothing is moving me particularly. I mean, political events are but I vent that stuff in class or, at most, here in this blog in prose. I won’t be writing an Ode to Lal Masjid any time soon. And love is getting boring, which will happen if your love life is on rince-repeat.

I’ve written some things. But I have no idea of their quality or originality, except the sneaking suspicion that they’re not so good. That a computer programmed to “kyla-style” might not have done better.

Addendum: I read this title for a blog piece just now and suddenly felt that inner writerly lurch. Man, that’s what I want to write. That’s where I live. Damn!

Goodbye Mother Theresa

I hope the kids settle down

I must head for the Chinas

Pray to God I don’t drown

…like this one are quite good. I don’t know what makes it a novel, really. But it’s a lovely read.