These are some lines from a novel of ‘variations’, Milan Kundera’s ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’. What follows these lines, occasionally, is my inchoate humming, going a little beyond the last note of the variation preceding it.

One of life’s great secrets: women don’t look for handsome men; they look for men with handsome women.

The truth: he’d taken an ugly mistress because he didn’t dare go after beautiful women. Zdena was as high as he rated himself them. A weak will and utter poverty – these were the secrets he had hoped to hide.

He had to absolutely prove to himself that it was love that bound him to her, not weakness or poverty. And only a larger-than-life kind of passion could justify an affair with so ugly a girl.

Yes, and why not? Can’t a weak man feel true love for an ugly woman?

Be wary of those perilous first days! If you serve the other party breakfast in bed, you will be obliged to continue same in perpetuity or face charges of animosity and treason!

He was well aware that of the two or three thousand time he had made love (how many times had he made love in his life?) only two or three were really essential and unforgettable. The rest were mere echoes, imitations, repetitions, or reminiscences.

Whereas the Devil’s laughter pointed up the meaningless of things, the angel’s shot rejoiced in how rationally organized, well conceived, beautiful, good, and sensible everything on earth was.

There are two kinds of laughter, and we lack the words to distinguish them.

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory.

$ Most old world folk/communal dances, and tribal dances are hinged on circle dancing. The most magnificat: Masai lion hunt dance. As is that children’s play rhyme ‘Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses’.

She loved him too much to admit that what she thought of as unforgettable could ever be forgotten.

His tenderness was like a machine for churning out terms of endearment.

My talk with the taxi driver ($who wanted to write a novel too) gave me sudden insight into the nature of a writer’s concerns. The reason we write books is that our kids don’t give a damn. We turn to an anonymous world because our wife stops up her ears when we talk to her.

In this sense the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is the result of the passion, not the passion itself.

Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where three things happen:

a) a high enough degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities; b) an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual; c) a radical absence of significant change in the internal development of the nation.

In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surround himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.

$ The wondrous technology of cyberia has already ushered in this era of graphomania. We know this disease by another name: blogerrhea. And this ‘page’, kind reader, is the evidence.

The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in a different universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it’s too late.

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of deafness and lack of understanding

Litost is a state of torment caused by a sudden insight into one’s own miserable self. And one of the standard remedies for personal misery is love.

The absolute quality of love is actually a desire for absolute identification. We want the woman we love to swim as slowly as we do; we want her to have no past to look back on happily. But as soon as the illusion of absolute identity fall apart (the girl looks back happily on her past or picks up speed), love turns into a permanent source of great torment we call litost.

Litost works like a two stroke motor. First comes a feeling of torment, then the desire for revenge. The goal of revenge is to make one’s partner as miserable as oneself. The man cannot swim, but the woman cries when slapped. It makes them feel equal and keeps their love alive.

From time immemorial men have been divided into two large categories: idolizers – also know as poets – and misogynists – or, rather gyophobes. Idolizers or poets worship the traditional feminine values like feelings, house and home, motherhood, fertility, divine flashes of hysteria, and the divine force of nature in us; misogynists or gynophobes experience mild terror at the thought of them. The idolizer worships womankind in a woman; the gynophobe prefers the woman to womankind. And keep one thing is mind: a woman can be happy only with a misogynist… The idolizer or poet may give a woman drama, passion, tears and worries; he will never give her contentment.

$ Who am I? An idolizer or a gynophobe or the worst of both?

Idolizers or poets have always been prime booty for hysterics. Hysterics know that idolizers will never slap them. Idolizers are helpless when faced with a woman because they’ve never left their mother’s shadows. They see an envoy from their mothers in every woman and immediately give in. Their mothers’ skirts hang over them like the firmament.

He once read Pascal’s pensee about subtle minds and geometrical minds, and since then he had divided all mankind into those who are subtle and those who are not.

A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, and an exquisite mediocrity of the soul – those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or fashion magazines – the ones all women try to imitate these days – how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they are just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They are not born of human bodies; they hatch readymade from computers. Let me tell you friend, your small town butcher’s wife is the perfect woman for a poet.

$ Perfect articulation of one reason why I refused to put up posters or collages of various film actresses or fashion queens on my walls even in my heavily women deprived, nearly all male college life, in spite of that being quite common, a badge of identification and taste.

Not enough ass. The terrible litost that comes from not getting enough ass.

Time is Kafka’s novel (The Trial) is the time of a humanity that has lost all continuity with humanity, of a humanity that no longer knows anything or remembers anything, that lives in nameless cities with nameless streets or streets that had names different from the one’s they had yesterday, because a name means continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name.

And all the time it was the same street; they just kept changing it’s name, trying to lobotomize it.

$ One reason why I refuse to call Bombay, Mumbai or Madras, Chennai.

She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman’s genitals was through her sadness.

Love is a constant interrogation. In fact I don’t know of a better definition of love than that.

We will never remember anything by sitting in one place waiting for the memories to come back to us of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the world. We must travel if we want to find them and flush them from their hiding places.

Her sexuality had been occupied by love (I say “occupied” because sex is not love, it is merely the territory love marks out for itself) and therefore had a dramatic and serious component to it.

No, the reason is that mankind is moving more and more in the direction of infancy, and childhood is the image of the future.

$ Refer to Robert Bly’s brilliant treatise on this subject: “Sibling Society”

They think that pressing together is the be-all and end-all of love’s joys. They are aroused, their hearts are pounding, but they don’t know what it means to make love.

At the beginning of man’s erotic life, Jan said to himself, there is arousal without climax; at the end climax without arousal.

Human life – and herein lies the secret – takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a faction of an inch.

The woman who runs away to defend her honor. The woman who gives herself, the man who takes. The woman who veils herself, the man who tears off her clothes. Time honored images, every one of them and all a part of us.

But what if our desire for the female body is dependent on them? If we go ahead and root them ($time honored images above) out of ourselves, will a man still be able to make love to a woman?

• From the talk with Philip Roth +

Sterne and Diderot understood the novel as a great game.

$ Julio Cortzar took this literally in his novel ‘Hopscotch’

A novel is a long piece of synthetic prose based on play with invented characters. These are the only limits… The synthetic power of the novel is capable of combining everything into a unified whole like the voice of polyphonic music. The unity of a book need not stem from a plot, but can be provided by a theme.

$ Nice distinction between plot and theme

One the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In course of time this gulag grows even bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.

$ MK was speaking of the paradise of Soviet totalitarianism. Don’t we now have the alternative (and competing) paradises & gulags of democracy (That mad Cuban poet, Reinaldo Arenas, in his autobiography ‘Before The Night Falls’, wrote that the only difference between socialism and capitalism was that where as in socialism one has to smile as one gets it, in capitalism one can fucking scream!) and those of messianic theocracies?

And yet certain erotic passages of George Bataille have made a lasting impression on me. Perhaps it is because they are not lyrical but philosophic… The erotic scene is the focus where all the themes of the story converge and where its deepest secrets are located.

When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is a wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seem to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than understand, to answer rather than ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

$ Amen!

• Request in a bottle: Will somebody gift me a pen scanner, so that I can directly cull stuff from books, instead of first annotating them with a green pen and then typing them in. I am a two-finger typist and this takes me too long. This piece for example took me 2 + hours! +

MK had this mystical way with the insides of people didn't he. Almost courageous. But strangely, when I read MK, for the first time, I didn't quite feel that alone. Because the darkness of jealousy, self-pity, self-wrath, humour, and other such strange grey paths didn't seem to be mine alone. But to you, I recommend Ignorance. Somehow, placed your self-imposed exile between a few pages of that book, however briefly.

Peace N