How quickly the morning has passed in the consumption of "media"; this I tell my friend C, is a sign of how chaotic and unsystematic our reading habits are, for we spend far too much time scattering our attention in all directions instead of focusing it, on say, the great books waiting at our elbows (for me this would be Stendhal's "Red & Black"), unread. But then the "post-modern" mind is fickle, unstable, and very demanding of "inputs" vs. say reaching for self knowledge through deep reading.

The pieces snared in this morning's roundup at various literary waystations include a close reading by Monica Ali of "A Painter of Signs" - a novel by "The Great Narayan" (to use the title of a Pankhaj Mishra's essay in NYRB). She begins, by writing:

"In his essay "A Story-Teller's World," Narayan, describing the oral story tradition of the Ramayana and other epics, says: "The tales have such inexhaustible vitality in them that people like to hear them narrated again and again, and no one has ever been known to remark in this country 'Stop! I've heard that one before.' They are heard and read and pondered over again and again, engendering in the listener an ever-deepening understanding of life, death and destiny." We could say the same of his Malgudi tales.

In Malgudi, however, we do not fly with the gods but amble along the dusty lanes, loiter in the fountain in Market Square, watch the bathers at the river in the half-dark dawn. Heroics are of the everyday variety, the printing of a leaflet a momentous event, and there is frequently nothing to do but drink coffee and discuss the affairs of the world or the street. Accustomed as we are these days to the "big" novel, the novel of ideas and of information that soars across continents, spans decades or centuries, dazzles with science, flirts evenhandedly with glamour and gore and expostulates on the causes of war and terror, the world of Malgudi is rather a small one. Here is where the miracle occurs. Because all too often in the big novel, beneath the glitz there is a nullity. The author is free to kill off the characters; they were barely alive in the first place. Malgudi, by contrast, teems with life."

Ali then goes on to examine how Narayan plays with the jutaxpositions between the modern (signified by Daisy, a family planning crusader), and the tradition (embodied by Raman's - the hero's- aunt or "maami") through his genial, and to me grandfatherly, comedy. As Ali points out in this essay, Narayan, even as he appears to write beguilingly simple novels, does battle with some heavy themes. This clearly is in opposition to Naipaul's[1] dismissal of Narayan's fiction as some kind of Hindu quietism in face of worldy questions and problems.

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The Guardian also features a speech by Paul Asters on why we need stories, even though stories (and the process of creating them) are "utterly and magnificently ... useless". He says this on the power of stories:

"Those of us who are parents will have no trouble conjuring up the rapt attention in the eyes of our children when we read to them. Why this intense desire to listen? Fairy tales are often cruel and violent, featuring beheadings, cannibalism, grotesque transformations and evil enchantments. One would think this material would be too frightening for a young child, but what these stories allow the child to experience is precisely an encounter with his own fears and inner torments in a perfectly safe and protected environment. Such is the magic of stories - they might drag us down to the depths of hell, but in the end they are harmless.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next. For years, in every country of the Western world, article after article has been published bemoaning the fact that fewer and fewer people are reading books, that we have entered what some have called the 'post-literate age'. That may well be true, but at the same time, this has not diminished the universal craving for stories."

These lines very much echo the following line of Muriel Rukeyser's, which I often mutter to myself as I go on my walkabouts:

"The universe is made of stories, not atoms."

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In the New Yorker, Alice Quinn has a simaltaneous conversation with two American poets, Philip Levine and Galway Kinnell, both of whose work I like. While I agree with Wendell Berry's prescription (in his book "Standing by Words") that statements on "arse poetica" are best made in the form of an essay rather than in the ever poliferating medium of the interview, given the absence of much real time conversation (of high quality), I take guilty pleasure in reading literary interviews, including this one.

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Having read sections of Sven Birkerts's mournful, but clear eyed, meditations[2] on the business of reading in his book "The Gutenberg Elegies", at various book stores previously, I was glad to buy an old copy of it earlier this week for half a dollar (yes, cheap ass that I am). Birkerts's essay on his evolution as a reader is quite resonant to me, mainly because of the resistance against, and the furtiveness involved in, his early reading. As Jonathan Franzen detailed in a classification of readers elsewhere[3], Birkets and I (with my immodesty) were "social isolates", i.e., oddball children who take their oddballness into a relam of imagination. And because of its imaginary-ness, this world can't be shared with other children, resulting in "social isolates" having the most significant conversations with authors, and characters in the books they are reading.

[1] I find most Naipaul's fiction a pain in the ass to read