Voh bhooli dastaan . . . .

Three months ago, I wrote about Radiant Reader(s), the texts that I read in English Literature classes from Class III to about Class VI or VII, exactly and approximately. And the response I got was from a couple of Indians. Upon seeing that, I thought, hmmm, here is something else that some Pakistanis and Indians share, and which might bring us to a civil conversation.

I remember bits and pieces within some of the Radiant Readers. I remember the colors in some kind of order, red, blue, green, orange (or was orange before green? akh!). Khair, as I said in the previous piece, if anyone can  remind me what The Ungrateful Larch was about, I will appreciate you forever!

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As some of you already may have brilliantly deducted, I am a child of the sixties and seventies. One day, while at the library, I was thinking about the old Penguin hardcovers from that time, and earlier. I turned to the internet in hopes of finding something that approximated the ones I had, or borrowed, but the usually helpful web was not so much this time around.

Owning a Penguin hardcover was something of a beauty, and a rarity as they were not inexpensive. I had five of them myself. At the front was the title, and the author's name, with interesting artwork, and at the back, a long list of titles available through Penguin Classics. Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility cover had a light brown background, with a sketch of a man and a woman in a buggy (Willoughby and Marianne), and a woman with a white bonnet and parasol. Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, had this aqua green background with plump babies underwater, perhaps some inhabitants (and bubbles?). Almost always you could connect the art of the cover with the content of the novel.

I wish I had held on to some of my books, but a lot gets lost while moving, and much is left behind when moving from one country to another, as we did in 1979.

Geoff Dyer, in the NYT:

There is a widespread nostalgic fondness for the first Penguins, with their bands of color that made every book look the same within whichever category of writing — green for crime, purple for . . . something else? The same is true of the early Modern Classics featuring drawings, but for someone of my age — born 1958, buying and reading from the mid-1970s — these editions were the stuff of used-book stores. They all looked pretty much the same: old, dreary and therefore oxymoronically unmodern. Whereas the 1970s livery with titles and authors’ names in sharply discreet Helvetica was the pristine look of modernity — sometimes modernism — itself.

You can read the entire article, here.

Dawn in Paris

The previous day, I enjoyed watching a documentary on PBS - Paris The Luminous Years:  Towards The Making Of The Modern. It originally aired almost a year ago but I had not seen it before, and watching just a few minutes, I was drawn in to the lives of the artists and writers who called Paris their home. I loved re-visiting Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company. And seeing the works of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Derain, Braque, and many others.

I learned of the modernist movement through Romance Language literatures (French and Spanish) at first, but later mainly through British literature. It remains one of my favorite periods because of the break with the past not only in terms of writing, but art in all its forms, whether it was the stream of consciousness of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, or the effects of industrialization in the novels of D.H. Lawrence and his depiction of relationships. Or the cubism of Picasso and Braque.

This documentary mainly focuses on Paris, and its importance in shaping the direction in which modernism was moving. Also other than Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein who were incredibly influential in the span of time of the "luminous years" (1905-1930), most of the artists discussed in this film are male. We learn of the relationships between artists, between artists and their champions. Would Ulysses, shocking for its time, have been published had it not been for Sylvia Beach? It was during these years that Americans as different as Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes and Josephine Baker also arrived in Paris.

It also explains the roles that cafes played in the life of these artists, and of Paris altogether. I found it eye-opening to learn that public gatherings were interdit in Paris during a certain period of time and it was in the cafes where artists arranged to have their work exhibited, or meetings were fixed. Hubbubs of artistic and political discussions and ferment, I do not know that that has changed in Paris all that much where cafes are concerned.

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What also came to mind while watching the documentary was the book I chose as my project for my Feminist Criticism class: Writing For Their Lives: The Modernist Women 1910-1940. Djuna Barnes is not mentioned in the documentary, but she was also in Paris in those luminous years and had met and interviewed James Joyce. She also became a friend of Gertrude Stein. Writing For Their Lives analyzes the works of women writers such as H.D, Bryher, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore among others and how they fit into the avant-garde modernist movement. Many of these women also befriended one another, supported one another, were lovers and inspirations to one another. These are not writers that one sees often in the canon; it was great to see how these women were no less ground-breaking than their male counterparts like Joyce. I have yet to read Women of the Left Bank, but I can say that Writing For Their Lives is also an important work in examining Modernism.

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I have yet to see Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, and its back to the future theme by going back to the Lost Generation. As I watched Paris The Luminous Years, and the reactions to the "new" (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Ulysses), I thought about the time we are living in today. A time in which supposedly modernism is dead, and that which followed. Is what replaced it any better? I cannot say for certain, but what I do hope is that there is still something we can learn from the modernists. Think of how often we still quote some of them, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, from lectures to characters in television series. I hope we never reject some of the artists, thinkers, writers completely as we continue into the future.