A dose or two of "Goodness Gracious Me" always helps!

So I ventured into New York to attend a concert of Brahms's Sonatas as planned; this week's concert seemed to have been more popular than the last week's because when I got there roughly at the same hour I only got one of the farthest seats in the town hall. Which was well because, as I discovered half way through, I wasn't in the mood of chamber music anyway, at least chamber music performed in a big ass concert hall.

Before the concert began, meanwhile, I snuck into the Virgin Megastore on that biggest tourist trap on the planet, Times Square, and polished off a third more of Moshin Hamid's soliloquy as a novel, "The Reluctant Fundamentalist". It reads well, i.e., it is quick, and has managed to hold my ever shrinking attention when I began in last Sunday at the very same store, primarily because Mr. Hamid once held the exact job I have begun at at the turn of this year, and this novel paints, at least that is how I view it, a pretty accurate psychological portrait of an outsider sojourning through the tunnels (instead of halls) of world Capital (blame this usage on my browsing of a biography of Stalin later in the evening). However, the protagonist's soliloquy as a explanation of his slow disillusionment with the "American Way of Life", which subsequently leads to his return to an imaginary Islamic past (he himself claims that he came from a cultured Pakistani upper class family, which was not all that religious) is not, as my bibliophilic friend C put it, all that compelling or convincing. That said, if I am in the vicinity of Times Square next Sunday for a double concert of Bach's "Well Tempered Clavier", I will finish the rest of this book.

After abandoning the Brahms concert, I followed my nose to the desi strip on Lexington Ave to eat a dosa or two at Saravaanas, thanks to Elizabeth's post (whose prose style I "totally" envy btw) that put me on the scent of an excellent, excellent dosa - one of the better ones I ate in North America. Hunger satiated, and topped off with a dose of chicory laced Madras coffee, I headed over to the Strand to see if Jay Griffiths's "Wild" had arrived there yet. It didn't but I did find a copy of her earlier book "A Sideways Look At Time". I also added a cheap copy of Amartya Sen's "Argumentative Indian", and Stephen Trimble's anthology "Words From the Land: Encounters With Natural History Writing" to the Griffiths book. The latter book is foundational in my reading life; I discovered it in a rarely trafficked section of the Georgia Tech library in the summer of 2001, and it opened up whole worlds of writers to me, starting with one of my most favorite writers now, Wendell Berry, and extending all the way to Annie Dillard, John McPhee, Edward Abbey, Peter Matthiessen etc. After debating for a while if I should buy Richard Feynman's (one of my heroes) collected letters, and resisting the lure of crowding my garret further with paper that would likely sit unread, I headed out to the tunnels across the Hudson.

When I landed, I was greeted by a crescent moon, and a breeze flowing through the new foliage of the oak trees in the neighborhood park one has to walk through to get to my slum lair.