Reading and Wandering and Cooking

So, I've just been reading some of David Foster Wallace's Oblivion Stories and he has this weird style of long, tortuously drawn out sentences that probably in the ones that I read at least lasted on average a good page or so, with minimal punctuation and wide oscillations through time and across subplots and random tangents and which (the style) has gotten rather steeped in my mind and it's not like it is bad, per se, although I don't profess to have the linguistic skill to pull it off myself and but so I'm sorry if that makes its way into my writing because really DFW can only barely pull it off himself and presumably from many perspectives does not quite manage to.

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I've been reading some other things, though. Since I got here, I've read Razor's Edge, which proved to be a quite nice book with some interesting themes and nice characters. And The Truth by Terry Pratchett which did the usual job of entertainment quite well. And then I started Derida's Of Gramatology, and am currently only halfway through the translator's preface.

I was trying to bond in some way with another student on this abroad trip who studies comparative literature at Brown and I needed another book to read so I asked him for recommendations, hoping to get a conversation started and hopefully get him to recommend one of the hundreds of ebooks I have but have not quite yet read. He was kind of reluctant, though! And thought I was being kind of presumptive about having one of the books he'd recommend, which, yeah, but I do have an excellent selection of books. And he reads apparently a lot of Spanish literature in Spanish (I do have some Garcia Marquez and Borges and even a handful of Neruda, but he declined any recommendations there) and a lot of critical theory that I wouldn't have and the best I could get out of him is an admission that he had been interested in Derrida's deconstructivism. So, I am stuck with Of Gramatology, in a vain attempt to win his respect. Also, though: it has some pretty cool parallelisms with Indian philosophies from millennia ago, which is why I had it in the first place. He totally has the nondualism of Shankara's advaita vedanta! And some weird other ideas that match up. The preface is delving into Nietzsche and Hegel and Heidegger and Derrida and those ideas that I can catch are pretty interesting (these have an unfortunate tendency to be few and far between).

And then I was sitting in a beautiful green park, with the Baha'i lotus temple off to the side looking very sci-fi, reading Of Gramatology, listening to The Litmus Test while 5 cricket matches went on just down the hill and behind me a man was pissing against the wall of a building. It was a super weird collection of experiences that just did not go together at all!

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The lotus temple was a pretty beautiful place. It was absolutely full of tourists, although most of them seemed to be Indian. Outside on the street there was the usual collection of fried-food wallahs and a little kid was really determined to sell me a wire-and-bead sculpture of a rickshaw. Inside the complex (a rather sprawling and exquisitely tended yet sparse garden) every other person was taking a selfie. But! There were also random dogs wandering around, which I really appreciated. I mean,they are everywhere, but it is nice that they were there, too. And! In addition to the building being stunning and unlike any other that I've seen, the inside actually managed to feel rather spiritual.

Before entering, the large group of tourists I was with were told, first in Hindi and then in English, that there was to be a) no photography and b) no noise, but that we could stay as long as we liked and were encouraged to say prayers in the manner of any of the world's various religious traditions. This last bit was quite nice, because for each of the other temples I've visited and presumably for most that I will visit, it feels terribly intrusive. I am but a tourist looking at shiny things while people are mostly attempting to make some kind of personal communion with some kind of personal deity. In contrast, at the lotus temple I was content to just sit and think for a while, and felt that I was using the building to its intended purpose.

I found a seat somewhat near to the center of the lotus, which formed a very tall dome and as such had incredible acoustics. The ghostly murmur of hundreds of people trying to be silent and the occasional wail of a child formed a chorus that deserves the word sonorous or mellifluous more than anything else that I've heard. Or maybe: haunting. I wanted to record it, but I don't think that would have been smiled upon. And the contrast between the selfie'd tourists and the meditative people inside (although they were in fact the same people) was astounding or amazing or some such other adjective that I haven't quite overused yet. It was a good place.

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I saw my first monkey the other day. But, I was running late for school and so was unable to capture photographic proof. I swear, though: there was one.

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I also started to learn how to cook this week! I'll be taking a weekly class and have to put together a recipe book, which I guess I'll be posting here because: why not? This week we made pakora (basically just deep frying vegetables and things) and aloo ka paratha, which is kind of a potato pancake. It is just me and one other student, and Kuldeep the cook, who speaks negligible English, and Fatimaji who is the homestay coordinator and super nice, for translation. Also: 4 kittens! Their mother stashed them in a cupboard in the corner of the kitchen and every once in a while will herd them back into it, but as soon as her back is turned they'll start scampering about and hide behind the oven and bat shyly at my probably confusingly hirsute toes? I'll try and drag my attention away from them long enough to figure out how to make a half-decent chapati, though. And maybe some other stuff! It looks to be a very enjoyable class.