I must admit my first reaction of Ms Lisa Chester’s missive was “that sounds like a posting by a porn star!”. This must be because of how it read in my haste: “Lisalips”. So I would suggest that Ms Chester(is there also a pun here or is it her real name?) consider renaming her “edgy” column with something that refers to the content of what she wants to write/talk about.

The content of her excerpts on dating however made me remember this ambitious site: www.solvedating.com . Perhaps Ms Chester can float an Atlanta Dating Market, something similar to the botched Pentagon’s futures market on their buddies, oops baddies and get rich with an IPO.

Her wisdom re clothing (or the lack of) is more measured. Also what would be of more interest to me would be to read her “writing’ vs say her “journalism”. But nevertheless each to her or his own cannons or keeping with the season, turkeys I say!

Sashi

I'm so busy and in such a bad mood these days that I practically stopped reading messages at CATL. I still read e-mails, though.

Your reaction to the "lisalips" posting is very appropriate. Just as I read your e-mail, I checked out her message and found that almost every phrase of it makes me laugh. I think, what she has succeeded in with her message was to partly dissipate my bad mood :-)

Did you know that "lisalips" is a writer, publicist, and trendsetter (what's the latter, by the way?), being trend-forecasting (what's that??) and setting to focus on relationships, fashion, and what's hot?

She has many interests and occupations for a promising career. Check out the link at the bottom of www.fromlisaslips.exposurinc.com.
I think, in some twenty years she'll prove an excellent columnist or even editor to one of those popular glitzy magazines that you can find in Kroger in a checkout line.

Hmmm ... I just found out that she had withdrawn her posting (# 3657) from the CATL list. Do you know why? :-)

• Art

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:) oh boy I am glad that my 2 bits helped clear some air and offered you some amusement. I also noticed that along with her posting, my posting was "un-posted" as well. I am deciding if I should take umbrage at such ghastly censorship!

Usually I ignore such "riff raff" that seem to float on the board under the guise/license of "writing", including all types of vomiting/sneezing/farting etc.

What is simply unreadable I ignore. Ms Lips's posting however smacked too much of self promotion and I just had to write my 2 bits even though I had read it at an ungodly hour last night.

As for 'trendsetter', 'edgy', 'trend-forecasting' etc, they are just another set of meaningless adjectives. It might be instructive to create a literary hoax in this context panning Ms. Lips. Maybe that will be my next project. :-)

Also I should point out to Alan Sokal's hoax here: www.physics.nyu.edu

you will enjoy it!

Hope Sir Booby fares well and you will be able to wrap up his saga in a few days!

• Sashi

-- You know, Sashi, when I came to US I could not understand what all these Greek fraternities were about. It first I thought that its members studied works of Greek philosophers or dramatists, or at least learned Greek language. But I could not understand why Greek?

Soon I learned that the members of the fraternities are ordinary undergraduate American "guys" who typically do nothing but watch/play sports, eat chips, drink beer, flirt, party etc etc, in short, they have nothing to do with Aristotle!

But why calling them Greek fraternities then? Partly I was explained and partly I understood myself: in America if you call something by a new fashionable name, at least by a name, you can sweep a lot of things "under this name", talk vaguely about it and earn money (basically promising that something is going to work but what it really is and what it really does is unclear).

Such things happen everywhere in science, for example. People studied atoms and molecules for decades, but now it is "trendy" to call these objects "nano-objects". Angstroms are more and more called 0.1 nm :-)

This small re-naming opens up extensive possibilities of obtaining new grants and publishing articles in such journals as "Nature". The same thing is happening with the prefix "bio".

"Alpha Kappa Sigma", "Gamma Theta Omega". "nanocluster", "nanotechnology", "biopolymers", "biomachines" ...

Maybe the analogy is indirect but I think one can also add to this list the new concepts of "edgy", "trend-forecasting", "trend-setting" etc.

• Art

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The next book acquisitions of mine shall be Borges’s “Fictions” and “Non Fictions”. Borges’s mythology (for every writer in the process of writing creates his own myths and mythology) has been called labyrinthine. And the few short stories that I have read of him have indeed this maze like structure to them. I suppose this comes from his voracious reading and retelling of all that he had read.

A few nights ago I came upon Borges in an anthology of Latin American short stories, rather I went looking for him. The story was called “The Other Death” and dealt with two versions of a death of what was presumably the same person. In the first thread the chap dies a natural death after he had become a recluse. The reason behind his reclusive ness is revealed to be because of cowardice shown during a skirmish and the shame that resulted. In the second thread however the chap is killed honorably on the battle field as he behaved in a valorous fashion.

So Borges sets the death of this person as the labyrinth that all past essentially devolves into and how memory fluctuates. He writes “to modify the past is not to modify a single fact; it is to annul the consequences of that fact, which tend to be infinite.” It seems to be that Borges was hinting at the fact that when we become the storytellers, which all human conversations to a certain extent are, we tend to lie, we tend to twist the facts, even if a little bit.

In an interview of Borges, I read “when I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.” These books for me would be R.K.Narayan’s Malgudi, which still could be conjured up in the 80’s (pre multiple TV channel, pre “liberalized”, pre infotainment) India and then, because then USSR wanted third world minds to slant towards it and thus heavily discounted, the great Russians; Chekhov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Yes we did read Browning, Keats and Wordsworth who occupied the last few middling pages of our school English textbooks. However my memory of those poems is quite dim.

Also in a conversation with Ai, she commented that I should lift up this intellectual portcullis (“teach, learn or get the f**k out!”) of mine and let all the “riff raff” in. This when I said I need to experience life more widely to be able to fashion literature. I think my doubts in a way mirror what Cotezee wrote in his memoir “Youth”, wondering about how he could produce literature if he is stuck behind a desk at IBM London, fiddling with programming and now sucking on the marrow of life.

Perhaps there is some truth in what Ai said. However the problem, as I have observed in the past, is that even if I lift the portcullis, my mental castle either (here I am guessing) is too forbidding or is quite un-Disney like for their liking! For example I tried to be friends with a doctor at V, I allowed her entry. However she almost resented the amount of stuff I knew and in the fact that I like to stick my nose into every smelly hole! And I grew tired of listening to her monologues on dietary habits, her calorie intake, her exercise schedule, her “Buddhism” (yes sir Buddhism a la chewing gum) etc.

This means that I am cranky and need to pack up for the day as I brace for the turkey massacre!