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For The Emigre

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Tuesday, December 22 1908
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The SAS have killed some people in Afghanistan.

The Veneziana pizza was invented in the 1970s by Pizza Express.

In China, there’s a Monastery of Sin.

The first artificial Christmas tree wasn’t a tree at all.

Sir Isaac Newton was the last of the magicians.

The half-cock is a purely defensive stroke.

Greed was the cause of Colombo and indolence was that of Star Fort.

The word ‘robot’ is derived from the Russian for ‘to work’.

Wolves are a bit scarier than reindeers.

The average Dutchman is 6’1″.

Every child finds their father’s sneezes loud.

There are about half a dozen booksellers’ shops in Sydney.

A basic awareness of the humanities could make one a little less offensive.
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—
For The Critic

—
For The Critic

To the researches of the antiquary and scholar Jorge Luis ‘Vintage’ Borges, a few points offer further context on that most peripatetic of birds in this, our present century.
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Learned reports come from South Asia, where the spotted-bill Filipino pelican (phillipensis) is found, with no small irony, only in Cambodia, the Indian peninsular, and in Sri Lanka (or the contemporary Ceylon). Here they are known to congregate by the Beira Lake, ‘an urban oasis’ in the capital city of Colombo, whereat they feed upon raw sewage, single-use plastics, and the flesh of those who commit crimes against the state. Herefrom they derive their green hue, as in former legendary illustrations.

In the Americas, along the Gulf Coast of the northern continent, at La Nouvelle-Orléans, the pelicans play a game named ‘basketball’ by ornithologists, in which they catch a round ball within their bucket-like beaks (the Hebrew word kavas meaning both ‘cup’ and ‘pelican’), attempting to deposit it one to the other, but are not allowed then to transport it thus, which is termed ‘travelling’, as one might think befits the wanderous nature of the species.¹

And within Europe the fabulist Dahl has transmitted at least one account in which a pelican was found to be running a window-cleaning business in collaboration with a giraffe, a monkey, and a small child (the child’s right to employment and/or fitness as regards working with wildlife having thus far not been ascertained). This incident fell out, it is averred, in England, where the pelican is held in certain high regard, not least in aristocratic and heraldic circles – vide ‘Hampshire House’. The Royal Park of St James is particularly noted for their population, and in the age of the automobile it has become necessary for a pelican crossing to be erected, enabling the animal to venture to and from St James’s Palace safely, across the modern thoroughfares.

Though not know to the British (or at any rate witnessed by them) for many centuries, in recent times the sceptre’d isle has hastened to catch up, the venerable Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to take just one example, having of course the pelican as its emblem, also inaugurating as a new ‘tradition’ a college anthem – as accompaniment to their ancient and sacred reverse-pelican-walk – on a theme of Thomas Aquinas: ‘Bye, bye, Mrs Pelicane Pie’. They then partake of a huge banquet.

On Anglican feast days more widely, church choirs sing in honour of the ‘soft, self-wounding pelican’ (Finzi, 1946) ‘whose breast weeps Balm for wounded man’ – this strange image arising, as Borges notes, from St Jerome’s commentary on Psalm 102 (‘I am like unto the pelican in the wilderness’), in turn commented upon by the inquisitorial S Roberto Bellarmino SJ, wherein ‘as the pelican wages constant war on noxious animals, [and] especially on serpents, so the Anchorets constantly do combat with the demons’. That doctor of the church cites Mary Magdalen, Mary of Egypt, Paul the first hermit, Anthony, Hilarion and others in his analogy.

This is susceptible to two conjoined interpretations.

The first is that the pelican connotes the solipsistic tendencies of our age: self-loathing, body-dysmorphia disorder, psychological perturbances, and so on. It may be for this reason that the pelican is still found engraved upon cilices. (Compare also, the ‘pelican daughters’ of King Lear with the earlier, and the more overtly Christological implications in King Leir.)

More charitable interpretations might well be put forward for a bird that – according to one Spanish fable – would rather set itself on fire than lose its fledglings (a gloomy and inverted version of the phoenix myth) – whence the popular legend of the stork (considered the same bird by the ancients) delivering a baby. The unreliable Horapollo (Hieroglyphica), however, speaks of a creature noted for its blindness or imprudence, because they nest needlessly upon the ground and are thus vulnerable to traps:

Though like other birds, it can lay its eggs in the highest places, it does not. But rather it hollows out a place in the ground, and there places its young. When men observe this, they surround  the spot with dry cow-dung to which they set fire. When the pelican sees the smoke, it wishes to put out the fire with its wings, but on the contrary only fans the flames with its motion. When its wings are burned, it is very easily caught by the hunters. For this reason, priests are not supposed to eat of it, since it died solely to save its children. But the other Egyptians eat it, saying that the pelican does not do this because of intelligence, as the vulpanser, but from heedlessness. (transl. Jean Martin)

In the Hieroglyphica, it is the vulture which allows its young to drink its blood. Either legend might well stem from a translation error; but Joseph Hall, in his Meditations, takes Horapollo’s conception of the pelican as a caution against meddling – ‘the flame of discension’ – in church doctrinal matters, to one’s own destruction.

Modern Egyptians, meanwhile, do also sometime eat the pelican, which they call gemmal al bahr, or ‘the camel of the river’. But the meat thereof is coarse and strong and greasy, for which reasons it had been proscribed among the Israelites (Levit. xi. 18). And at this season, our thoughts turn likewise to the tribulations of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott and crew (the Terra Nova expedition, 1911) who subsisted, for as long as they did – according to his own handwritten journals, in the British Library – on a diet of ground pelican and biscuits, this meal named for the ancient belief that the pelican can store a weeks’ supply of food in its beak. More evidence of the nutritional value of this sustenance would have been afforded by their safe return, and welcomed, no doubt, by later generations of polar explorers. Alas, though, they did not survive their great endeavour.

There remain, quite inexplicable, the events surrounding General Guise, who, while ‘marching up to Carthagena’ (c.1754), was apparently fired upon by artillery pieces stuffed with pelicans, from which he scoffed that he would make a pie. A commentary in The Spectator notes politely that the General was perhaps ‘a little cracked’.

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¹ The legal historian Grisham relates a 1992 case in which two Supreme Court Justices, Rosenberg and Jensen, were assassinated on the orders of an oil tycoon wishing to drill on nearby marshland which is home to this endangered species. The Justices in question had a history of environmental rulings.

Well, a decade on, that situation’s only got worse. Karunatilaka and I are now related. Wife’s cousin’s cousins… we are fairly confident.

Betweentimes, Chinaman has gone from strength to strength. It won a raft of prizes (Gratiaen, Commonwealth, DSC South Asia), has been or is being translated into several languages (including Sinhala), and last year a Wisden panel voted it – a quite absurd achievement, this – the greatest novel and second-greatest cricket book of any kind of all time. The umpteenth printing is now out, via Penguin India, in a new ’10^th Anniversary’ special edition: hardly standard practice for even the most successful novels.

Nor has Karunatilaka been resting on his laurels. All jokes aside about the difficult second album/novel (he’d be quite happy with either, I suspect), he has already published one children’s book (Please Don’t Put That in Your Mouth) and written the follow-up; there is open talk of a short-story collection; and there is the somewhat unexpected matter of a forthcoming cookery book – a co-project with his wife.

–

Chats with the Dead is the story of Maali Almeida, a 34-year-old photographer who ‘s good at ‘winning at blackjack, seducing young peasants, and photographing scary places.’ Or rather was – because he’s dead now.

It’s Sri Lanka, 1989, and Maali had been in bed, photographically-speaking, with a lot of the conflicting parties, not to mention their agendas. The JVP, the government, the BBC, a Tamil-rights group; he has been to the frontlines for all of them. To say he was ‘promiscuous’ would strike, well… exactly the right tone. And in a box he keeps of his disturbing/unpublishable outtakes, he even has a photo of his killer – ‘the chances of liberating [which] are as likely as Lanka winning a World Cup.’ He just can’t remember who it was yet: whereby, our detective story. ‘It is funny and unfunny what your brain chooses to retain.’

He had also been in bed, non-photographically-speaking, with, among others, his girlfriend Jaki and his boyfriend DD – a love triangle whose sides don’t meet (based loosely on the life of Richard de Zoysa). These two are also cousins, because, y’know, Colombo.

He now finds himself in some aspect of the afterlife – though quite which he is yet to fathom. It is a busy place (as Nietzsche once put it, the living are only a very small subset of the dead), and by and by he crosses paths with a dead lawyer, a dead bodyguard, two dead lovers… some helpful, others vengeful, a few competing for his soul, and most of them frustratedly trying to chat back with the living. So now he has to learn ‘the rules’, as well as solve the mystery of his murder.

It is the Mahavamsa meets The Matrix… in a Sri Lankan government department.

‘When you fantasized about heaven you thought you’d be greeted by Elvis or Oscar Wilde. Not by a dead doctor. Or a deceased Marxist.’ But by page 16 he’s met both, and is now watching his own corpse being incompetently disposed of by paramilitary goons, at Beira Lake. And while he talks thus, retrospectively, to himself (the whole thing’s in the second person), there swirls around him an all-comers spirit realm of fanged ghouls, minor deities, baby-stealers, charms, seances, sorcery, urban legends, prayers, dreams and talking animals, an inventive theological mix of everything from Kuveni’s curse to the Kotahena Crow Man in his urban underpass.

There exists already a Karunatilaka style, and it is here in spades: dive bars, Colombo culture, books, art and (particularly) music, the things that are – and are not – talked about. His taunting games with names and places. A cheeky drop-in from the boys in Chinaman. A page-long parody of Anil’s Ghost? And then the storyteller’s signs deployed by every shifty author from Herodotus to Ondaatje – ‘All stories are recycled, and all stories are unfair’ – the whole lot strung together with the now-familiar mischievous logic, verbal levity and seamy humour that mark him out as the Sri Lankan counterpart to Marlon James.

As with James, this doesn’t always make for pleasant reading (consider Maali’s job); but then his thoughts on all those easier alternatives might well be coded in the line, ‘Monsoons and full moons make all creatures stupid.’

Chats with the Dead is considerably more direct in its satire than was its predecessor. Besides, the stakes are higher. The abject slavery of many lives; the rank iniquities of much religion; the dreadful suicide rate. And as he picks at these scabs of SL’s less-than-savoury history, Maali’s most unflattering (and generally unchallenged) remarks are reserved for the nature of the post-Independence nation: as a corrupted paradise, on its political class, and on its tendencies to violence. ‘Yakas are made, not born,’ someone admonishes. It’s not conciliatory, nor is it all that optimistic. Karunatilaka – I mean, Maali… – has a savagely critical reading of the self-conscious national lust for a rapacious origin.

Reflecting on the spurious léonine self-image of his countrymen, Maali reflects that ‘If we must have a national creature, if it must be on our flags, in our myths, and painted on our sports teams, why must it be the clichéd lion? If we must have an animal as a national symbol, let it be something original that we can own.’

‘Like many Sri Lankans,’ he goes on, ‘pangolins…’ – but I shan’t spoil it for you. Needless to say, the month or so since Chats‘s launch has seen you-couldn’t-make-it-up links form between the pangolin, Sri Lanka, and the realms of death and afterlife.

Chats is an entirely successful and perfectly mature novel, as good as – albeit much darker and less full of, well… life than – Chinaman. But it’s not perfect. Too many variants of ‘Maali’, ‘malli’, ‘Maal’, ‘Malin’, and so on for the untrained eye/ear; some minor characters who might be given clearer edges (or got rid of/merged); some textual messiness; an anachronism or two; a couple of vague inconsistencies, and one hell of what seemed like a twist (read literally) just pages from the end, but which turned out to be two sentences in need of much more careful separation. A lot, frankly, that ought to have been dealt with by professional wordsmiths at a world-bestriding publishing colossus.

But the bigger problem, I fear, will be one of international ‘accessibility’. In my review of Chinaman I noted that I thought the quite heavy preponderance of little-known Sri Lankan terms and Singlish might have the effect of denting saleability. The international success of that book would suggest that I was wrong – or that assiduous changes were made during the foreign publication process.

The same applies here. Minor matters of vocab or narrowly-regional reference (there is a sharp remark about the vulnerability of shop signs ‘that end in consonants’, e.g.) can of course be edited; but in the case of Chats, the hardwired very-Lankan-ness – the ’80s politics, the social concepts and the mytho-religious lexicon: the meat and bone of the matter (if one can use that term for ghosts) – is perhaps much more pervasive than the first-round local reader might imagine. Sri Lankans may enjoy the novel (doubtless the wrong word) for a certain grim nostalgia quotient; but all but very-interested foreign readers may find that there is rather a lot ‘going on’.

So much for second novels, difficult or otherwise. In literature, as in all else, people are ingrates – so it’s quite likely this will not be greeted with the fanfare that met Chinaman. For better or worse, Chats with the Dead is a novel by a multi-award-winning author, which will be judged on more than its own merits, and/or held to a higher standard.

More locally, the book may yet prove to have landed in a timely fashion. In these increasingly apocalyptic times, let us hope Maali Almeida is wrong when he warns: ‘Do not be afraid of ghosts, it is the living we should fear.’

—
For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Thursday, May 9 1907
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At 45% of the population, white Christians are a shrinking demographic in America.

Hermal eggings are so leek.

No sensitive person would choose to be the historian of the Irish asylums in the first part of the last century.

Spinoza fucks Hegel up the arse.

Carol Drinkwater has just enjoyed a nice glass of Rioja.

WG Grace achieved 83 ducks in his first-class career. One man alone – Shaw (A.) – clean bowled him 20 times, and six times Grace hit his own wickets.

Smak is full of natural goodness.

Poet Laureate Robert Southey was once elected to parliament without his knowledge, while on holiday.

During the Russian Revolution, some people named their daughters ‘Terrora’.

Satire and humour are more common among royalists.

A trifle can do you a lot of harm.

Goldfish pheromones were discovered by accident.

Only in the English language is there the phrase ‘too clever by half’.

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Thursday, July 19 1906
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Jacob Zuma is the only black South African president never to lift the rugby world cup.

At Morrisons, your opinion gets rewarded with a £500 voucher.

Vegetarianism, which is based on false hypotheses and ideas, does not have followers in the Soviet Union.

Property blinds all eyes.

You must be prepared to stabilise if you need to excavate earth.

Apples don’t have daddies.

Only humans know that trees are beautiful.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is appearing at the CENS Workshop on Understanding and Countering Online Falsehoods and Influence Operations.

Necessity, Manitoba, has a population of 1,230 souls.

Almost everyone is happy to accept the cookies.

The lion-keepers at Dublin Zoo have a remarkable record in breeding lion cubs.

Gustav Mahler wrote the Kindertotenlieder before any of his own children died.

Basketball is not an interesting sport.
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—
For the Sunday Times (SL)

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Friday, August 17 1906
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In Germany, young ladies have no sex.

‘Silver Billy’ Beldham was blond, and is said to have fathered 39 children.

Thom Yorke’s left eye is made of arse muscle.

The state of Nevada was very nearly called ‘Humboldt’ instead.

Strong fences make good eel traps.

A fairy can still win a wheelbarrow race.

There is no law against declaiming Chinese poetry.

There is no other word for ‘synonym’.

You are no longer safe online.

Edward Said never taught anything about the Middle East.

Xerxes’ plans all miscarried in ships of the sea.

Britain is on track to experience a cauliflower shortage.

People in rich countries can afford to be stupid.
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