Today's New York Times has an excellent article on an upcoming reterospective of GBS's work at the New York Public Library (a beautiful beautiful place that one should spend a day or two in when visiting New York City).

While I can't exactly remember what of GBS I may have consumed, given that I haven't been much of a reader of plays (sometimes I think, these days, I have become more of a watcher/ gossip hound/ groupie of literary world/ business vs. the serious consumer/ orgy-ist of literary products that I was when I was say 18 or 19 years old, and that is definately a bad thing! A. H, I need your help quick! ), I surely think GBS ain't as great as Shakespeare (an echo from that Harold Bloom's Bard-alotary tome, the one who 'invented human') inspite of this:

...He was impatient with the man who he conceded was the greatest English playwright after himself. "The truth is," he wrote, "the world was to Shakespeare a great 'stage of fools' on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living." Shakespeare's pessimism, he concluded disapprovingly, "is only his wounded humanity."...

Other tarty tidbits:

... The American, described the play (Mrs. Warren's Profession) as "illuminated gangrene." ...

.. Shaw regarded the sexual vitality of women - nature's vehicles, after all, for passing on the life force - with a mix of adoration and terror that made them monumental. ...(yes yes like that greek myth - I forget which exactly - women are capable of immensely larger sexual pleasure)

Meanwhile, Uncle Pankaj Mishra takes down Uncle Salman Rushdie's Shalimar a peg or two, in another of his too delicately intellectual, James-ian sounding reviews (I think he had already kicked Rushdie before for infecting 'Indian Writing in English' with the disease of Rushdieitis, with its maniacal neo-magic realistic prose) at NYRB. And having had Uncle Rushdie read from a draft of this novel (the episode of Shalimar and Booyni doing it in paradisical Kashmir read like bad bad Bollywood kitsch: think of quasi-sex, i.e., shaking bushes or bees sucking from flowers in the middle of a syrupy love song), when he lectured here a year ago, I think I surely don't want to walk the tight rope with Shalimar any time soon.

Meanwhile Uncle Vikram Seth came out with his latest book, this time a memoir, called 'Two Lives'. And just because I like Seth (I owe him a huge debt for showing me, a bumbling Indian kid, what can be done using English via the mad novel in verse, 'The Golden Gate'), I think I will try to look this book up sometime soon.

Also this book, Persian Fire, sounded interesting. An interesting historical novel would be to write a story of the Persian- Greek wars from the view point of a Persian, perhaps someone who is the witness to Alexander's sacking of the Xerxes's capital.

Also if testify doesn't come from holding one's balls while making an oath, where does it come from then? I must, must find $1000, and get me the O.E.D quick!

I usually make the Buoy logos by "borrowing", i.e., stealing photographs etc from elsewhere but for a change a photograph that I thought would make a great logo the moment I saw it, taken by my friend Sgt. Joao Bambuman in the Brazilian outback. Go look at his Brazil photographs and then go visit him if you can!

Moooo...