The Writing Life Too

The sky is gloomy as a graveyard this morning. July has been ushered in with a blaze of heat, so last night as I was heading out to my book group, was grateful to see clouds moving in. The temperatures are supposed to be in the high 60s today and I cannot express how relieved I am that the latest heat wave is over.

I hope you all had a lovely Fourth— I’ve heard that the winner of the Nathan’s Famous International July Fourth Hotdog Eating Contest was Joey Chestnut, the defending champion. He won by eating 68 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes, 3 1/2 more than Takeru Kobayashi of Japan, his arch-rival. It was a new world record. Do you ever wonder how people first become interested in these eating contests? I mean, Coney Island seems the perfect venue (and there 40,000 people gathered to watch the contest), but Chesnut is described as a “professional eater” so does a disposition toward this occupation begin in childhood? I wonder too did the dogs come with mustard and ketchup?

By the way, our book club read The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga a novel I highly recommend, especially if you’re interested in a glimpse of the changing values and economy of India. It won the Man Booker prize and is a confession by the narrator, anti-hero Balram Halwai, the son of a rickshaw driver. The format is a series of letters to the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao because he wants to introduce the entrepreneurial spirit of the new India to the premier.

According to the author: “The narrator is lying in his small room in Bangalore in the middle of the night, talking out aloud about the story of his life. It's a story he can never tell anyone-because it involves murder-in real life; now he tells it when no one is around. Like all Indians, who are obsessed (a colonial legacy, probably) with the outsider's gaze, he is stimulated to think about his country and society by the imminent arrival of a foreigner, and an important one. So he talks about himself and his country in the solitude of his room.”

The tale he spins of his rise from tea house employee to business owner is woven with barbed wit, irony, and insight into the realities of poverty. In fact, it’s about the opposite of the sentimental, romanticized version of poverty that captivated Westerners in Slumdog Millionaire. Instead the story depicts how a rise out of poverty is possible in modern India by means of patronage and corruption. And it has the most unusual use of ‘beak’ that I have ever read—trying to figure out how to use it in my writing……