Well, I’ve done something odd. I went back and tagged my old India blog posts. I guess I’d intended to let them sidle out of sight, since this blog has continued to change so much. But after the events of this past week, it suddenly seemed disloyal to be hiding my wonderful trip to Mumbai under a basket… So, you will notice links to pix from the trip and the cloud tag now also contains tags from the trip… I can’t imagine Mumbai will be a huge topic going forward, but reading this OP ED in the NYTimes from Sonny Mehta, I suddenly want go back and reclaim the Mumbai I remember. I read Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found in preparation for my trip. It’s an amazing read–all the disparate elements that make up this character that is Mumbai. I even had a bibliography for my trip that at one time was attached to this blog, but has disappeared. And I have to stop looking for it right now because the Third Year Review (TYR) is due tomorrow. I need to (sigh) read it one more time.

I’ve been making connections in my frazzled brain about why Graphic Novels are a natural next step for me. One is my (occassionally hidden or obscured) passion for all things Sci Fi and Heroic. Like all latch-key children of the eighties, I absorbed the cartoon ethic. I would watch anything from Godzilla to She-ra to GI Joe with equal fervor. It was what we did. As I grew older, I hid my love of cartoons until I fell in with computer scientists and anime fanatics in Boston. I saw all of Cowboy Beebop on “Anime” night with Fletch and Kathie and Will, along with several things I’d love to forget. I’ve watched every episode of Farscape, Stargate, Babylon 5, Deep Space 9, Star Trek Voyager, and on and on. I adore almost anything the SciFi channel is willing to serialize, though I generally can’t stand any full-length movies they air. Must be the attention span issue.

I also love mysteries. I didn’t grow up reading comics or graphic novels, I grew up reading Agatha Christie and Trixie Belden. My first job was in editorial at a mass market publisher working with mystery novels. I have a deep appreciation (along with an occasional loathing) for the formulaic. I am a House addict.

I see every animated movie that comes out. Luckily my roommate shares my passion, so I’m not alone with the tots and the parents in the theater. Or even worse, with the teenagers. So, combining my passion for the literary, the formulaic, the mystery, the cartoonish, the weird, the sci fi, the bizarre, and you can see that Graphic Novels have no doubt been standing in my path for some time now.

As an aside…I cannot bear most grown-up movies–I really only like the emotionally disconnected ones. Like Lost in Translation or anything by Wes Anderson—LOVED The Darjeeling Limited. But, thanks to my stepmother, it has become apparent that I am turning thirty-six on the eleventh of this month. So I’ve done this piece of analysis in part to redeem my childish nature, and to justify my love of all things graphic with my well-earned literature degree. (I was really excited about turning thirty-five–I’d even considered having a party.)

In the process of writing the TYR, I have finished Watchmen and read Dark Knight. Loved both of them. Analysis will have to wait until I don’t feel like I should be editing the TYR (which I do…right now…so I have to stop…).

–Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (Victoria Terminus), Mumbai (Bombay) in August 2005

I’m still in the middle of finishing my third year review (though I have started Dark Knight Returns on the sly). However, today’s news has shocked me back three years to the month I spent in Mumbai and traveling through parts of Southern India. I was about to move to Mississippi and start a new life, and thought I’d just do a complete system restart by spending a month in India. I’d always wanted to go to Bombay, primarily because of Salman Rushdie’s novels, and it seemed like the right time to do it. No one else had the time/money/interest to go with me, so I went alone. Alone, except that I blogged it. It was the start of this blog, actually. I’d hidden the category, since this blog had become something else in the meantime, but I’ve pulled it back out today.

I have to get back to editing my review (it’s getting close!). But my thoughts are of fruit juice vendors in Colaba and lazy dogs in the street with the shouts of men hawking their carved Ganeshes in booths outside the Leopold. Even the OMG awful crush of the “Ladies Compartment” on the train from Mumbai to Hyderabad that I caught at the VT. And I will be thinking of the Gateway to India with the (persistent) guides hawking their services alongside the forbidding elegance of the Taj Hotel.

I will be conjuring that Colaba tonight. Maybe it will do some good.

Like the issue of competing standards, that question of values can be answered only in terms of criteria that lie outside of normal science altogether, and it is that recourse to external criteria that most obviously makes paradigm debates revolutionary. –Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p.110

Do you remember reading The Secret Garden? It was one of my favorite books and movies and I loved everything about it. As a fairly willful girl-child in rural Mississippi, I could easily imagine myself ripped from a luxurious life in India, and transported to the damp chill of the English countryside to ramble around in a decrepit manor house. Left to fend for myself, surely I would be triumphant, encouraging health and vigor around me and learning the mysteries of the heath. And although I loathed all forms of yardwork and whined piteously when my mother forced me into the open air, I knew that in the proper environment, the life I was meant to have, I would immediately understand how to judge the wick from the dead and coax gorgeous rose gardens back to life…and win the hearts of everyone in the process, in particular the handsome simple-in-his-wisdom country ruffian.

What I really turned into is a woman who loves a metaphor. And the wick-ness of dead-seeming things is one that I cherish. And tonight I found that a long-dark, petrified piece of my brain still had some life in it….and had indeed been waking up without my noticing it at all.

I’ve been treating this blog like a bottle tree…just a structure on which to hang my shiny, colorful bottle-shaped (let’s go with this metaphor please) triumphs. And lord knows I love a bottle tree. Love a bottle tree. Would love to have a real one in my yard. (There will be some future discussion about bottle trees and nkisi and fetish objects and Southern culture at some point in the future, but I digress.)

I started this blog in July of 2005 as a way to share my solo trek through India with my family and friends (I have been preoccupied with India my entire life…it may have started with The Secret Garden, but Rushdie contributed a great deal). After I got back from India, I did all of those things on that “Most Stressful Things To Do or Have Happen To You In Life” list. I finished grad school, quit my job, sold a house, bought a house, got a divorce, moved from Massachusetts back home to Mississippi to start a new career on the day Katrina hit. Afterwards my NOLA refugee (and yes, I know it’s not the right word) brother, sister-in-law and nine-month-old nephew moved in to my new home in time to greet the 18 wheeler who arrived with my belongings. My gas was in my brother’s name forever because he was the one around during the day to go get it hooked up.

They ended up in Savannah (10 hours instead of 5 hours away), and my brother went to SCAD and became a documentarian. I moved again after a year to a rental house with a roommate, sold the house in Mississippi, and I’ve been hiding out since. I believe I’ve been spinning some sort of cocoon, but I’d forgotten that eventually I was going to emerge.

Tonight I went to the bookstore on campus looking for The Watchmen. Apparently it’s either library-use-only or checked out at every place our Interlibrary Loan folks tried. It’s part of a new project I inadvertently started via Twitter, but it may be the first non-librarian brain-project I’ve had in years. It was hard to find. It wasn’t in the Graphic Novel section, but I knew they had it (I’d called ahead). Like all our patrons, I’m loathe to ask for help, and I had some time to kill. So I started wandering. And I wandered all the way up to the econ / science / technology / neurology / section-ish area on the second floor all the way in the back. And then I started finding books that were in my Amazon shopping cart. First, Everything is Miscellaneous, and then Here Comes Everybody. And right there, on the very same shelves was Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And I realized that part of my brain was waking up again.

And I owe it all to the Mississippi Library Association and Twitter and this strange Graphic Novels project.

So, that’s what this blog is going to be now. I’m going to document this part. Some of it will be about libraries. Some may be about Graphic Novels. Or revolutions. Or “that recourse to external criteria that most obviously makes paradigm debates revolutionary.” And maybe we will see what emerges from the cocoon. And if it’s nothing more than a pair of silk pjs, that will be fine. I’ve been looking for a nice set to go with the embroidered dragon bathrobe Kathi got me in Beijing.

*McCloud, Understanding Comics, p.8

Highway 81 through Virginia is stunning. I recommend it for vacation and travel considerations as an alternative to 95. There was fog the morning I drove through, settling in the valleys of the Appalachias.

I made it to Birmingham with Max in the car before the hurricane stopped us cold on Monday. I had to drive back to Oxford, Alabama to find a Motel 6 that would take us. Their computer system had already been struck by lightening, so everyone was punchy by the time we got there. Joining in the hijinks and mayhem that follow cheating death, I ordered a cheeseless pizza with pepperoni and sausage (no anchovies at Dominos) and dug in with the dog to watch the storm (and for the delivery boy). Max does not love Motel 6 and repeatedly attempted to get back into the car during our trip. Actually, he’s still doing that.

The next day I drove through downed power lines and fallen trees. It was a beautiful day–sunshine and cool. That ozony feeling was in the air–kind of crisp and clean. But everywhere I looked those massive, 100ft, old pine trees had crashed on the side of the road–or on a house or car. As I was driving from Tuscalousa to Columbus a powerline blew beside me with a loud pop and a brilliant blue-white flame. Riding into Louisville, things looked okay. But when I got to my aunt’s street, there were one or two (hard to tell) of those beautiful, massive trees lying across the roadway, on top of a white car. I hear he claims the trees fell on him, but everyone knows he just ran into them.

When I got here, we had power but the water was brown and there was no TV or Internet, etc. The telephone pole with power lines had broken and just hopped forward and remains now leaning precariously into the street–but we still have power and phones (sort of). Everything is back to normal except the TV and the phones doen’t work right, really. I’m glad there’s no TV–everytime I see TV it sucks out a little bit of my soul. People aren’t looting up here, but there has been panic at the gas stations, and now many of them are empty.

My brother, Liberty, and their son Hank (7mos) are here–they live in New Orleans just off Canal up from the French Quarter. They got out when the highways were first opened going the other direction. They’re going to be staying with me at my new house for now. I can’t believe I’ve gotten my hands on that baby so quickly… My stepmother and father have houses in Hattiesburg, where I grew up, and one in Brookhaven, where I lived twice. The house in Hattiesburg has a tree through it, and Brookhaven still doesn’t have any power. Everyone is okay.

We sit around like everyone else, I imagine, wondering what we can do to help. They won’t let anyone down there now. All the roads to the coast are closed. Churches are making “health and hygiene” packets for people. I’ve heard about families taking in refugees. We’ve heard it is the “worst natural disaster in the country’s history” or “our own tsunami” or “what it must have looked like after Hiroshima.” Southerners like to tell a good story, but I’m not sure these are exaggerations. Everyone I meet is affected in some way. Everyone has some kind of family down there, it seems. And Mississippians vacation on the Gulf Coast and visit New Orleans. It’s easy to follow the pictures on the television, tracing the streets we’ve been down, wondering where Beauvoir went. Or the casinos. I hate those casinos choking the coast in Biloxi and Gulfport–but they were a source of jobs and revenue. $500k/day of revenue for MS.

I’m okay and my family is okay. I bought and sold a house. My furniture, I hope, will be here tomorrow. Every day I get up and think about India. Today it was the smell of wood burning (where in Starkville wood was burning, I do not remember). I remembered Hampi and the bazaar in front of the temple. They had cut entire bunches of bananas to sell and the women had little hibachi grills where they would roast the bananas. Or that’s what I think they were roasting–I never had any. They dressed like “gypsies” in colorful clothes (not saris) embroidered with small mirrors.

I really want to write about poverty and mythology in India when things settle a bit. The MS Blog will continue however.

ACP

I’m leaving India tonight at 2:15am. I am very sad to be going. For Bombay, I’ve only begun to begin to know the city. And it’s a great city to know. Really bizarre and rich. I wish I could figure out how to get NDTV and the Times of India in the US. I’m very involved in tracking several news stories right now. Outlawing Dance Hall Girls (not even strippers–they just dance!), Outlawing Plastic Bags (the cause of the monsoon devestation) and the Buildings That Keep Falling Down (3 in the last two days). And for India–I haven’t figured all that out yet. I know I want to come back. And I’ve pretty much planned the trip out.

I understand now (and for the first time) why someone would want to get a tattoo. I feel like something in me changed, and I wish there were an external sign that it had happened. Right now all I have is an allergic rash, weight loss, and a sunburn. Wouldn’t a Ganesh or OM across the forehead be a clearer signal? Alas, with blood-borne diseases and poor hygenic conditions here, it probably won’t happen. But now I understand.

I’ve got to go buy another suitcase for all the stuff I bought. I’m not going to pay more than 700 ru for it (he’s asking 900–I’ve been scoping it out).

I know I have more India stories waiting to bubble up to the top, and I intend to use this format to continue “processing” my trip. Be forewarned.

Now, of course, for those of you interested in the next adventure…to Mississippi!! I’ll be driving cross-(half the) country with my White German Shepherd, Max, starting on Saturday. We’re headed for Columbus, and I start at Mississippi State University on Thursday, the 1st. One week away!

ACP