STK: Shaun Kadlec's Fulbright Journal
Journal: July 1st, 2003
Hello, all!
Greetings from Colombo. I'm writing from Barista, Colombo's hottest new coffee shop, in the middle of filming for their new television commercial. The crew is buzzing and fussing, setting up lights, taking them down, framing shots and running after actors who are too beautiful for their own good and who keep rushing outside to take calls on their lavender cell phones. Colombo is never shy about its contrasts. I just came from a 35 cent rice and curry lunch at a small diner near the place where I'm staying. Another fussing, buzzing, less traditionally beautiful crew was doing roadwork in front of the diner. Being shaken by a mean steam roller and a couple of jackhammers, the diner felt like it was about to crack down the middle and collapse.
My excuse for spending the afternoon at Barista is that I had to drop by the Indian High Commission to pick up an application for a visa for my trip to India in July - and the Commission is next door to Barista.
This update is going to be broken up into sections. That way you can read the parts that sound interesting to you and I don't have to put in the extra effort it takes to generate a seamless text with pleasurable transitions and logical progressions and all of that nonsense. As I near the end of my stay in Sri Lanka, I find that I have less and less time and tolerance for formal niceties. So why all of the explanation? Right. Down to business.
An Audience with Arthur C. Clarke
I paid a visit to Sir Arthur C. Clarke a month or so ago. The introduction was made through a friend I made at the India Fulbright conference in February. This friend has a friend who's tight with Sir Arthur. After a few emails back and forth , Mr. Clarke invited me over to chat while a film crew was setting up to record an interview and proved that he's a truly charming gentleman. He lives in a home/office compound that is sandwiched between the Iraqi Embassy and a prominent girls' school. He has all of the insulating comforts you would expect: high walls with electrical wire running across the top, enormous staff (15 or more including domestic and office help), Mercedes with driver, posh but regionally appropriate furnishings. His office is hung with photos of him with an assortment of personalities like Patrick Stewart and that guy who played Darth Vader. His desk is in front of a bookshelf that he has devoted entirely to his own publications. But hey, if I had enough published works to fill a bookshelf, I guess I wouldn't be too shy about showing off a little. One whole shelf was taken up by all of the editions and translations into most major languages of 2001.
We chatted about this and that, that and this: about our impressions of and mutual fondnesses for Sri Lanka, about his acquaintance with Tolkein at Oxford, his correspondence with C.S. Lewis (soon to be published), his newest novel (which he claims will be his last), entitled The Last Theorem. He introduced me to his eleven-year-old Chihuahua, Pepsi, who slept throughout our chat and to whom he spoke in an adorable I'm-talking-to-my-dog-oh-yes-I-am voice. Everyone has their special dog voice. He had just watched the film Wild Wild West with Will Smith, and he laughed and laughed about the enormous mechanical spider that the Bad Guy pilots during the film's climax. Thought it made excellent science fiction.
I have the feeling that meeting Sir Arthur is the single, most easily-measurable stamp of success that I could possibly affix to my Fulbright experience. You don't know how many people asked me before I left - half-jokingly, no doubt - if I was planning to meet the grandfather of science fiction while I was in Sri Lanka. It will be good material for cocktail party chatter. Oh, America. Such a beast sometimes.
Yogic Arts and Sciences
My birthday gift to myself this year was to go on a weekend yoga retreat at a beach in the south near Unawatuna. What an excellent choice that turned out to be! The teacher is an Australian wonder named Paddy. The best yoga teacher I've ever encountered. A master of postures (judging from the positions she can get into, I suspect she defected from Cirque du Soliel), and also endowed with best combo of Nurturer/Dictator qualities I've seen in ages. I've improved quite a lot during the last month. And it goes without saying that my general sense of well-being has improved. One of Paddy's star students is a Thailand-ordained, Austrian monk named Pajalo. He has special monk shorts and tank tops made from the same dark red fabric that his robes are made of. Very smart.
Tango for Six Murderesses
I just saw Chicago at the Majestic Cinema in Colombo. What delicious, opulent indulgence. It made me want to fosse-fosse-fosse my way to Bombay and become a back-up dancer for Shah Rukh Kahn. Not that Chicago is particularly Bollywood-ish on the surface - no more than any other over-produced film musical But it taps into the same universal urge to revel in the Highly Constructed and to be Fabulous and to shake it till it won't' shake no more. It is TOO MUCH. Too much sin and song and dance with far too little clothing. A wonderful contrast to
Travel Itinerary
July 7: Colombo, Sri Lanka to New Delhi, India, with Jon Sampson. We'll be seeing some of the sites in and around Delhi, will probably make trips to Agra (Taj Mahal) and Jaipur (Pink City in the Rajasthani Desert). Then we're heading north through the Indian Himalayas in Uttaranchal and Himachal Pradesh into Ladakh, ending up in the city of Leh. It's actually quite far from the sensitive Kashmiri border areas, and there have been no violent incidents there in ages-and I don't think there's ever been an incident involving tourists.
August 6: Jon leaves India for the U.S. via Colombo, and I will spend about a week in either a meditation or yoga retreat center. Having spend nearly a year in South Asia (and the final month in some of the most intense parts of India), I think I will need some down time before heading back to the West.
August 19: New Delhi to London. I'll be meeting up with John Shorb and Brian Dever for a countryside holiday. We're hoping to spend a little time on the English countryside, to make it up to Scotland, and of course to spend a few days in London itself.
September 1: London to Los Angeles. I'd love to strike out across the U.S. to visit all of y'all scattered Americans, but I will have used all of the funds I have available for travel in India and England. What to do? Have to take the chance to travel in South Asia and Europe when you can get it. I'll be staying with Ma and Pa in Frazier Park while I look for a job and decide where I'll be moving. Also planning to study for and take the GRE. While I'm stationed in Frazier, I might even spend a little time lazing around and doing nothing.
Editing
Editing is an office job. When I first realized this, I became quite bitter. Aren't people on fellowships supposed to be "in the field" having adventures and getting dirty and speaking obscure languages and collecting paradigm-shifting data? They aren't supposed to be nine-to-fiving in an office, spending whole days behind a computer and on the phone, soliciting manuscripts from the elite, revising web pages, copy editing, writing press releases? I've gotten over many of the negative feelings (or have at least made my peace with them). It's been a fascinating experience full of ups and downs and gradual realizations. Not something I necessarily want to pursue as a career or hobby in the future. And man oh man am I ever glad I've figured this out now, because editing is one of those jobs that liberal artsy literary folk are supposed to want to do. I'm glad to know it's not for me.
The Desperate Fight Against Absurdity in Maalabe
A few weeks ago I was visiting Manju, Thushara and Rukman, three Sri Lankan friends who live in Maalabe, an outer suburb of Colombo. Though it's much smaller, it reminds me of places like, say, Culver City near Los Angeles or Edina south of Minneapolis or Goleta near Santa Barbara: not a whole lot going on, not a lot to distinguish them from other suburbs, not particularly wealthy or impoverished, certainly not exceptionally beautiful. While I was out in Maalabe town running errands with Manju, I realized that I should probably email Jon to make sure he didn't have any last minute questions before his nearing departure for Sri Lanka (he came June 3). The guys don't have a phone line in their house, so I couldn't dial up with my laptop. I looked around Maalabe, asked around, and couldn't find a single internet café. There was one shop with an online computer and a sign in the window advertising internet access, but the proprietor and a giggling, young, female assistant claimed to have "some little bit of work to do," which would tie up the computer indefinitely. So I hopped in a bus and went to a much larger suburb, Battaramulla, and went through the same process (minus the giggling assistant) with very similar results. I returned to Rukman's a few hours later, clothes drenched in sweat, never having reached Jon - and I realized that yes, the work I'm doing on this egalitarian, free-and-available-to-all-with-internet-access arts journal is utterly irrelevant to most Sri Lankans. If large suburbs near Sri Lanka's largest city don't have accessible internet cafes, you can bet that small towns and villages off the tourist routes REALLY don't have them - and that many of the ones that are out there are too expensive for most villagers to afford. I often feel like I should abandon this project and go teach in a village school where the impact of my efforts might be more easily measured, where my effort might directly fulfill a real need.
It is some small consolation to know that more people will have access to moju online than would have access to a print journal. During my search for internet access in Maalabe and Battaramulla, I also didn't see any bookshops that would carry arts journals. And yes, I DO know that what I'm doing with moju is not utterly irrelevant. Positive work needs to be done on all socioeconomic levels. But you have to be realistic about the impact of what you're doing. You have to know whom you're excluding and why, whom you're alienating and whom you aren't representing. Knowing who you're reaching is the easy part.
Lecture Tour to Vavunia and Jaffna
Jon, my friend Manju and I made a fantastic trip to two predominantly Tamil cities in the North of Sri Lanka. We were hosted in each place by their Universities, and I gave talks on contemporary American poetry at each location. It was an intense and deeply, even profoundly educational trip, and though I would love to tell you all about it, I'll never get this update on the site if I keep writing. So, I'll put it in the next one, which should include my departure and arrival in India. I feel as though I'm being swept down a very strong river these days. But a good river.
Hoping all is well in your corner of the world,
Shaun