The Perils of Eat, Pray, Love · 9 February 2009
I left a university library book in Budapest’s Hotel Andrassy a number of years ago, and lost another one last fall somewhere between Colorado Springs and Boulder. And I’ll probably risk university property and my own sketchy rep with the circ desk again next month—seems less a hazard than trusting whatever informal book exchange I’ll find in Mecca to keep me satisfied. I can just see it: lying in a hot, tiny-windowed room with indigestion, the power out, and nothing but 8 musty copies of Eat, Pray, Love. That plus a match: good for creating some light, but I'll travel with an LED anyway.
Ok. So it is awkward to own many books and I and am fanatical about packing light (Papa owl, the erstwhile backpacking guide: “take care of the ounces and the pounds will take care of themselves”). But given the probability of quiet non-electrified nights over there, and the fact that I can only do so much pranayam and metta meditation (careful, you might get appointed as a subject for that… you’ll know if I mist up when I see you later), I should probably put in a short order this week to Powells.com.
So I have no idea. I’m thinking 5-7 titles. Does anyone love any of these or think they’re meh? Or have other suggestions?
Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis (need at least one below-the-belt writer)
Ovid, need to decide which
I am That or One Taste (same diff.; or maybe just get both and squash head between the two?)
The Snow Leopard
Meetings with Remarkable Men or something else by Gur or Ous?
Some U.G.? (probably… but no idea what and shouldn't a few lines be enough? hilarious even have to read more than one book, or one sentence, on nondualism)
Krishna Dutta’s biography of Tagore
The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals
Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis, or Stone Junction by Jim Dodge (must have something like this)
Shankara and Indian Philosophy (SUNY Religious Studies Series) by Isayeva, or Feuerstein’s Yoga Morality: Ancient Teachings at a Time of Global Crisis
The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace by Norman Sjoman or History of Modern Yoga by Elizabeth de Michelis
Martin Buber’s edited volume, Ecstatic Confessions
Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, or Midnight’s Children
The Cambridge Concise History of Modern India by the Metcalfs (annoying as hell but CONCISE!), or Modern South Asia by Sugata Bose (good on political economy)
Something more beautiful… or just re-read Buber?
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: beta state
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Can I suggest Narayan’s The Guide and R.P Jhabwala’s Out of India.
Both paperback and lightweight, and while fiction, both open doors for many a philosophical debate of the kind that Owls might like.
Also, from someone who always packs too much, you may find that you will hardly have time to read, what with the practice, and talking/meeting the people, exploring the place. I find that I never read more than about 20% of the material I bring with me. Then again, I mostly travel for work and anthropologist’s work never ends. The only time I read all 7 books I brought with me was on my yoga holiday in Greece, but then again, I was alone (and was given a nickname ‘la solitaria’ by an old Greco/spanish couple I used to meet at a taverna) and there was very little else to do between the classes but lie on the beach and read.
Whatever you take with you to read, I am sure it will serve as a brain food that will result in fab posts here.
Posted by: Fatou · Feb 9, 10:29 PM · #
Water Music, T.C. Boyle.
Great vacation book. So so much fun.
Posted by: joy · Feb 10, 02:05 AM · #
I say stick with the Existential Jew. Fatou is right; you won’t have that much time to read anyway.
Posted by: RE · Feb 10, 06:28 AM · #
Snow Leopard. If can suggest a book off the list… You have probably already read it, but if not: The Man Without Qualities. It’s a biggy, so you only need to bring volume I. Then again, I’m way too european in my tastes, so this one might be a dud in Inde.
Posted by: knl · Feb 10, 07:26 AM · #
I’m legally obligated to recommend that you bring some Rushdie and Theroux.
Posted by: cody · Feb 10, 08:08 AM · #
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles
Posted by: karen · Feb 10, 08:52 AM · #
Me again. I also think a slim volume of some Whitman might be in order.
Posted by: RE · Feb 10, 10:00 AM · #
I thought I’d share this: not having heard of Buber before this post, I was surprised to see one of his books on the ‘on sale’ shelf of the main bookstore in my town. Might buy it tomorrow, I had to catch a bus today ;-) Could be the 20% of my prescribed travel reading when I whizz off again next week
Posted by: Fatou · Feb 10, 10:12 AM · #
So here’s my tuppence-ha’penny worth
Sankara and Heidegger Being, Truth, Freedom by John Grimes (under 200 pages nice cover)
Oh and the Ovid, my vote of course is the Metamorphoses here’s a link to a version on google books page 95 has his Narcissus and Echo
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KEj8qFPT65sC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Metamorphoses&lr=&as_brr=0#PPA95,M1
Martin Buber….. cool!
Posted by: grimmly · Feb 10, 11:11 AM · #
I am sending you Cosmicomics anyway, and my copy of The Road. They balance each other out! :)
You cannot go wrong with Murakami.
May I suggest Proust’s Swann’s Way, the beauty of his language is exquisite.
Posted by: Gregor · Feb 10, 12:01 PM · #
Oh, nice!!!
Thanks warmly everyone and keep them coming if you’ve got them. Would enjoy a reading list of people’s favorite ideas for running-off-to-Mysore reading.
(I wonder how many months I’d have to spend there to get through the list….?)
back to work, xoxoxovo
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 10, 12:02 PM · #
Have you read E, P, L or are you still holding out against it, on principle? I haven’t read it and I tried a few times to think that I would but I’m just not interested.
I second Karen’s nomination for Murakami. I don’t really know how the Mysore experience is supposed to be but I suspect I might be tempted to cart along Moby Dick and Don Quixote if I were planning to go.
Posted by: Carl · Feb 10, 12:29 PM · #
My feeling, based on perusing the first few chapters, is that…
EPL is the perfect expression of what can go wrong with an over-educated, adventurous, American white woman like me. It is self-involved, self-pitying, drama-manufacturing, spiritually depraved, economically exploitative, culturally imperialistic, tritely schematic, self-congratulatory and whiny and worst of all: poorly written. I would burn it a hundred times over. I would assign it to a sociology class in the same week as Rudyard Kipling. I would write the anti-EPL if I could. More.
But I mean, I could be wrong about this. I did only read a couple of chapters…. I understand that some people I respect actually liked the book.
Ok, my lunch hour is over. More later on these many ideas you have given me…
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 10, 12:55 PM · #
Oooh, The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles!
And LOL!, Carl, for the Moby Dick suggestion!
Posted by: karen · Feb 10, 05:27 PM · #
Apu Trilogy, to watch on your laptop on the plane.
Posted by: R · Feb 10, 06:15 PM · #
Ok, so far:
Jhabwala, Out of India
Naryan, The Guide
Boyle, Water Music (_Tortilla Curtain_ is brilliant)
Buber
Musil, Man Without Qualities
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Grimes, Sankara and Heidegger (wow)
Whitman (I always despised him but might be more ok now with the transcendentalism thing)
Murakami, Wind-Up Bird Chronicles (half-read)
Calvino, Cosmicomics :-)
McCarthy, The Road
McCarthy, The Road
McCarthy, The Road (etc…)
Proust, Swann’s Way (read it in Managua, oddly)
Mellville, Moby Dick (OMG)
Cervantes, Don Quixote (one of my favorites)
Bowles, Sheltering Sky (saving it for Morocco?)
Ray, Apu Trilogoy (uhhhhhh….)
KNL, I’ve been holding off on MWQ for a long time…. Fatou, yes, read Buber. He’s one of those minds, like Spinoza and I don’t know who else, that inspires a tenderness. Sleepy here. Night.
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 10, 09:16 PM · #
DQ is my one of my favorite books too. I guess if I were going to be marooned under a mosquito net, my two authors would be Cervantes and Mark Twain.
I’ve been so overcome while reading Twain that I’ve had to bite the pages. ;)
Oh yes, and you’ll love Water Music. It was Tortilla Curtain that led me there but WM is an entirely different kind of book. I would have to call it ‘rousing’. So filthy and wonderful. ;)
Posted by: joy · Feb 11, 12:23 AM · #
Five to pack and please your pop’s spatial sensibilities, if not his literary tastes:
Pratima Bowes, Consciousness and Freedom
C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
Yukio Mishima, The Sound of Waves
J-K Huysmans, A Rebors
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Feb 11, 02:18 AM · #
That’s ‘Rebours’. Dear me.
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Feb 11, 02:27 AM · #
Why would you “hold off” on MWQ? Hold off no longer!
Posted by: knl · Feb 11, 04:25 AM · #
I second the Hadrian, great book…. Huysmans is wonderful but it would be a little ironic to take it as a travel book no?
Posted by: Grimmly · Feb 11, 04:40 AM · #
Oh geez, not The Road!
But I guess you might as well read it and get it over with. The book’s sole virtue is that it has no chapter breaks so there’s a strong impulse to read it straight through. And then you can drop it off at a coffee house and get on with your life.
Posted by: Carl · Feb 11, 09:31 AM · #
Man, none of the above.
Something palate cleansing. Or something for plane time, and not much else. Books can provide as much cloud cover as booze and drugs. They’re almost as bad as cameras. And it’s kind of nice to let the right book come to you, although I’m hoping there’s something besides EPL. Or the Gideon Bible.
Posted by: Yancy · Feb 11, 01:08 PM · #
Collections of Nothing by William Davies King.
Posted by: Susan · Feb 11, 05:52 PM · #
Did I tell you I know Elizabeth De Michellis? (I’m sure I misspelled her name though). My friend Mark used to work for her.
Posted by: V · Feb 12, 01:38 AM · #
Yes, you told me! Her book looks pretty good.
Yancy, your advice speaks to a younger (0v0), who I still trust. Thanks for that. I’ll watch out for cloud cover.
Memoirs of Hadrian does look beautiful. I love this whole list.
BTW, I just got email #5 asking if I’m really going to Mysore. So funny! Yes, of course! I’m looking at a couple of major life decisions right now, and want to see them from a distance. At some point in my life I do want to go pay my respects to this practice and simmer in its original stomping/posing grounds; and I think I’ll feel a new freedom going forward after I have done that.
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 12, 12:09 PM · #
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 12, 01:10 PM · #
OMG. Somebody was a little too hyper on her lunch hour and wrote completely random commentary on her own blog. The dangers of a fast keyboard. I just did a self-edit rather than get in to some controversy that’s none of my business.
P.S. Speaking of random commentary…, I just got my email and it includes a gift certificate from a really wonderful client. A certificate for… a deluxe colon cleanse at a clinic in Beverly Hills.
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 12, 08:51 PM · #
whhhhhhha ha hah a hahahahah! A colon cleanse??
Man alive!
Posted by: joy · Feb 13, 12:02 AM · #
I managed to catch it and liked it.
Posted by: V · Feb 13, 01:12 AM · #
Colon cleanse as a gift? Is that an LA thing?
Posted by: karen · Feb 13, 07:19 AM · #
I’m curious about what might make a colon cleanse “deluxe,” rather than merely standard, but I will hopefully forget about that very quickly and not Google it.
Posted by: Carl · Feb 13, 09:54 AM · #
The Elephanta Suite (Theroux) presents an interesting cross-cultural view of India with very subtle yogic themes and Shalimar the Clown (Rushdie) is just wonderful and Kashmiri.
Posted by: cody · Feb 13, 10:09 AM · #
I also managed to catch it, and I also liked it.
Posted by: patrick · Feb 13, 10:59 AM · #
Well, I wanna see it! ;)
Posted by: joy · Feb 13, 11:48 AM · #
I was just yammering about the relationship of going to Mysore and teaching mysore. You all are quick!
It’s funny I’ve never read Theroux at all, but I’d like to. Someone else recommended The White Tiger, the “perfect antidote to lyrical India.”
New development today: small chance I will have to cancel the trip. Long story. Let’s hope there’s nothing to it.
Meanwhile… Happy Valentine’s Day! Directly from my heart to yours, here is an irrigated colon.
The certificate itself is actually very ornate and fancy.
I think this kind of gifting qualifies as only in Beverly Hills kind of behavior. “For the person who has everything”?
But… I’m becoming intrigued…
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 13, 12:45 PM · #
hi (0v0)
i’m writing from a borrowed laptop, which has IE, so i can’t read beyond a certain number of comments. i’m amazed i can write this. now i realize you’re going to Yogamecca. that’s wonderful. i hope you enjoy it tremendously.
in China i could access blogger blogs, but not wordpress ones, so i won’t be able to visit Karen’s, V’s, Sonya and others. bummer.
i look forward to reading your perspectives on your Yogamecca experience.
hugs
Arturo
Posted by: arturo · Feb 14, 06:41 AM · #
Well Grimm, you might be right. Let’s hope our downward-facing Des Esseintes doesn’t settle for the ersatz experience. Again.
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Feb 16, 08:12 AM · #
If all this is just my rhetorical construction to which I run away… what does that make you?
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 16, 07:10 PM · #
P.S. I guess I have to read the damn book some time…. Might explain some things, including Rosebud.
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 16, 07:11 PM · #
Tta, Red snapper. Read it and then look over the intial post in this thread. If that doesn’t break a grin across your beak, nothing will.
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Feb 17, 02:02 AM · #