Sketchbook: Archive

“WHY art thou silent? Is thy love a plant
Of such weak fibre that the treacherous air
Of absence withers what was once so fair?
Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant?

Yet have my thoughts for thee been vigilant,
Bound to thy service with unceasing care—
The mind’s least generous wish a mendicant
For nought but what thy happiness could spare.

Speak!—though this soft warm heart, once free to hold
A thousand tender pleasures, thine and mine,
Be left more desolate, more dreary cold

Than a forsaken bird’s-nest fill’d with snow
’Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine—
Speak, that my torturing doubts their end may know!” —William Wordsworth “To a Distant Friend”

Feb 2, 2012

“The only language of loss left in the world is Arabic.
These words were said to me in a language not Arabic.” —Agha Shahid Ali “Ghazal”

Feb 2, 2012

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” —

Virginia Wolf “A Room of Her Own”

Jan 25, 20121 note

“The Congress incumbent had been going around the bastis, handing out hundred-rupee notes and rum and whole sheep to the citizens. Good fresh mutton is the basis of many a political career, I came to know. It made sense. A poor man fills his stomach, he takes pleasure in his dinner, he lubricates himself with two free pegs, maybe three, not too many because he has other plans. He rides his wife, in the morning they both go to the voting booth happy, in that uplifted haze their bodies feel light, and they forget all about how the khadi-wearing bhenchod politician has done nothing for them for years, how he has robbed and stolen and maybe murdered. All of that is gone, vanished, and the happy couple cast their votes, and the servant of the people is in once again, ready to serve them out of roti, kapda and makaan. Hungry, naked and without shelter, the have no memory after meat. So you feed sheep to sheep to herd them in the right direction, toward the slaughterhouse gate. Quite simple.” —Vikram Chandra “Sacred Games”

Dec 26, 2011

“I’ve never let my school interfere with my education.” —Mark Twain

Dec 7, 2011

“But why did I go to all the trouble? It is because of what some of the older girls explained to me: to survive, you must look good or talk even better. The plain ones and the silent ones, it seems their paperwork is never in order. You say, they get repatriated. We say, sent home early. Like your country is a children’s party – something too wonderful to last forever. But the pretty ones and the talkative ones, we are allowed to stay. In this way your country becomes lively and more beautiful.” —

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

Nov 24, 2011

“

Being but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
For fear of waking the rooks,
For fear of coming
Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.

If we were children we might climb,
Catch the rooks sleeping, and break no twig,
And, after the soft ascent,
Thrust out our heads above the branches
To wonder at the unfailing stars.

Out of confusion, as the way is,
And the wonder, that man knows,
Out of the chaos would come bliss.

That, then, is loveliness, we said,
Children in wonder watching the stars,
Is the aim and the end.

Being but men, we walked into the trees.

” —Dylan Thomas “Being But Men”

Nov 16, 20111 note

“Inanition “Covers not getting enough food; or in very stressed infants, even if they get enough food and they are forced to digest it, they just don’t derive any nourishment from it. It’s a peculiar condition, well recognized in neglected and abused infants and children.” Young children “have to receive emotional support and feel safe; and when they don’t, you tend to see this phenomena of wasting away. We call that inanition, for want of a better term.” — Bennett Ex Rel. Irvine v. Philadelphia 499 F.3d 281 (3rd Cir. 2007)

Nov 6, 2011

“

Based on the recommendation of the Child Protection Team, the juvenile court dismissed the child protection case and returned Joshua to the custody of his father. A month later, emergency room personnel called the DSS caseworker handling Joshua’s case to report that he had once again been treated for suspicious injuries. The caseworker concluded that there was no basis for action. For the next six months, the caseworker made monthly visits to the DeShaney home, during which she observed a number of suspicious injuries on [p193] Joshua’s head; she also noticed that he had not been enrolled in school, and that the girlfriend had not moved out. The caseworker dutifully recorded these incidents in her files, along with her continuing suspicions that someone in the DeShaney household was physically abusing Joshua, but she did nothing more. In November, 1983, the emergency room notified DSS that Joshua had been treated once again for injuries that they believed to be caused by child abuse. On the caseworker’s next two visits to the DeShaney home, she was told that Joshua was too ill to see her. Still DSS took no action.

In March, 1984, Randy DeShaney beat 4-year-old Joshua so severely that he fell into a life-threatening coma. Emergency brain surgery revealed a series of hemorrhages caused by traumatic injuries to the head inflicted over a long period of time. Joshua did not die, but he suffered brain damage so severe that he is expected to spend the rest of his life confined to an institution for the profoundly retarded. Randy DeShaney was subsequently tried and convicted of child abuse.

” —
DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services

Nov 6, 2011

“

In 2001, Boston police officers received a tip that a Kmart employee, Thomas Wright, was engaging in suspicious activity. The informant reported that Wright repeatedly received phone calls at work, after each of which he would be picked up in front of the store by a blue sedan, and would return to the store a short time later. The police set up surveillance in the Kmart parking lot and witnessed this precise sequence of events. When Wright got out of the car upon his return, one of the officers detained and searched him, finding four clear white plastic bags containing a substance resembling cocaine. The officer then signaled other officers on the scene to arrest the two men in the car-one of whom was petitioner Luis Melendez-Diaz. The officers placed all three men in a police cruiser.

During the short drive to the police station, the officers observed their passengers fidgeting and making furtive movements in the back of the car. After depositing the men at the station, they searched the police cruiser and found a plastic bag containing 19 smaller plastic bags hidden in the partition between the front and back seats. They submitted the seized evidence to a state laboratory required by law to conduct chemical analysis upon police request.

” —

MELENDEZ-DIAZ v. MASSACHUSETTS 129 S.Ct. 2527 (2009)

Oct 30, 2011

“Variations of the self-imposed delay-of-gratification situation in preschool were compared to determine when individual differences in this situation may predict aspects of cognitive and self-regulatory competence and coping in adolescence. Preschool children from a university community participated in experiments that varied features of the self-imposed delay situation. Experimental analyses of the cognitive-attentional processes that affect waiting in this situation helped identify conditions in which delay behavior would be most likely to reflect relevant cognitive and attentional competencies. As hypothesized, in those conditions, coherent patterns of statistically significant correlations were found between seconds of delay time in such conditions in preschool and cognitive and academic competence and ability to cope with frustration and stress in adolescence.” —

“Predicting Adolescent Cognitive and Self-Regulatory Competencies from Preschool Delay of Gratification: Identifying Diagnostic Conditions.” Shoda, Yuichi; Mischel, Walter; Peake, Philip K. (1990).

Oct 6, 2011

“Now suppose, however, that the investigation reveals that the vaunted eyewitness, on whose observations the case likely will turn, was on parole from convictions for welfare fraud, perjury, and filing a false accident report at the time of the collision. In the absence of Rule 806, plaintiff’s counsel could wisely forego calling the eyewitness as a trial witness and simply call the hearer of the excited utterance, perhaps a highly-decorated police officer or a nun.” —Impeaching the Hearsay Declarant. David Sonensheim.

Sep 24, 2011

“The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.” —Grace Paley “The Paris Review”

Aug 31, 2011

“In Birmingham, Alabama, I taught “self-esteem” in the Department of Family Services waiting room, where four or five hundred people showed up at seven in the morning and waited for hours—sometimes six, seven hours—for their appointments to get food stamps, or to sign up for welfare, or to meet with their caseworker about the children who had been removed from their homes and placed in foster care. My main activity was to get them to play self-esteem bingo. I handed out blank cards, and people were supposed to write adjectives that described them in the spaces. I provided a sample list: “beautiful,” “smart,” “funny.” I’d call out the words and when someone said, “Bingo,” I’d read their card aloud and say, “Now does she have a good self-esteem or a bad self-esteem?” and whoever didn’t completely hate me by that time would chirp, “Good self-esteem!” And I’d give the winner a tiny cheap notebook and say, “Here’s a place for you to write your hopes and dreams.” —Deb Olin Unferth The Paris Review

Aug 30, 2011

“What is the history, you might ask, behind “curry”? “Whenever Indian food is mentioned,” writes Shashi Tharoor, “the non-Indian says with a knowing nod, ‘Ah yes, curry.’ Unfortunately though, there is no such dish.” Tharoor goes on to say that curry, essentially, is “any dish with a gravy” and, of curse, there are countless dishes like that in every major style of Indian cuisine. In a sense, then the non-Indian’s use of the word “curry” is catachrestic “the OED defines catachresis thus: “Improper use of words, application of a term to a thing which it does not properly denote, abuse or pervasion of trope or metaphor.” In the writings of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the ideas of a catachresis as a metaphor without an adequate literal reference becomes a model for all metaphors, all names. For Spivak, this concept allows her to essay descriptions of subjects and processes that occupy as yet unnamable spaces. My own aim, in linking “curry” with “catachresis,” is to ask a slightly different question. If the word “curry” doesn’t have a stable referent or a fixed origin, how can its changing use by postcolonials be seen as a sign of resistance?” — Passport Photos Amitava Kumar

Aug 28, 2011

“I had no shoes. He told me, Remember, when there is war, the first thing is shoes, and second is eating. Because if you have shoes, then you can run and steal. But you must have shoes. Yes, I told him, well you are right, but there is not war any more. And he told me, Guerra es siempre. There is always war.” —Primo Levi Paris Review

Aug 4, 2011

“One of his [Sanjay Gandhi] particular concerns was the rapid rise of India’s population, which had almost doubled since independence. Notoriously, men were sterilized by a team led by one of Sanjay’s friends, the jewelry designer Rukshsana Sultana. The population controllers paraded through the streets of Delhi, drumming up recruits. In numerous cases the operation was done without consent, although the usual reward was a tin of cooking oil, a transistor radio or RS120. “All our vasectomies,” Sultana told the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, “were done in a lovely air-conditioned cellar. I and my workers had to sweat it out on the street.” Across India, several million men were sterilized.” —Patrick French, India: A Portrait

Jul 26, 2011

“Although he never made the point explicitly, I believe Nehru’s attitude was conditioned by the trauma he experienced during partition as he toured riot-torn regions and refugee camps, sometimes intervening at personal risk to stop looting and mayhem. He was not averse to clouting miscreants and ordering crowds to be peaceful in a way that would be hard to picture in an unruly country today, in this era of suicide bombinhs and sequestered leaders. Mohammed Yunus, a Pathan politician from Peshawar in the north-west and the youngest of forty-two children, remembered going to Jamia Millia Islamia university with Nehru when they heard the news of a riot. “We drove to the scene, and they were very surprised to see him. We could see there had just been great violence. Pandit Nehru climbed up on to a wall and addressed the crowd. He said, ‘I want to be the prime minister of a country where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians can live in harmony. Did we get our freedom so that you could kill each others?’ He was very brave. The riot stopped.” —Patrick French, India: A Portrait

Jul 26, 2011

“Based on his tests, Dr. Beroes concluded that the Doritos were dangerous and defective because
they broke into smaller triangular chips that were too sharp, too thick, and too hard for safe passage in the esophagus. He also opined within a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that Frito-Lay failed to warn of the dangers of eating Doritos; that it failed to conduct the appropriate safety studies; that it failed to produce and sell Doritos with uniform compressive strength and hardness; that Doritos were not fit for safe consumption; that Doritos were negligently designed and manufactured; and that their uneven and dangerous characteristics caused Mr. Grady’s esophageal tear and resulting injuries.” —Grady v. Frito-Lay, 2003

Jul 10, 2011

Sketchbook

February 2012

14 posts

January 2012

1 post

December 2011

2 posts

November 2011

4 posts

October 2011

3 posts

September 2011

1 post

August 2011

4 posts

July 2011

5 posts