[lbo-talk] Arundhati Roy

// ravi ravi at platosbeard.org
Sun Jun 5 09:51:52 PDT 2011


On Jun 5, 2011, at 12:37 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Jun 5, 2011, at 12:26 AM, // ravi wrote:
>
>> I really, badly, want to like Arundhati Roy.
>
> Why?
>

Because she is [ultimately] on my side. I am big tent (the rare humble gesture of a keyboard warrior :-)) - Krugman, Bono, Roy, even Rachel Maddow and Obama fans… I love them all! :-)

On Jun 5, 2011, at 2:40 AM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
>
> To be fair, the tone of the article cannot be blamed on Roy. The journalist has to take some blame for praising Roy's "tasteful" (Jesus!!!) apt.
>

True, but at the same time, the journalist serves here as an unintentional but faithful mirror. The adoring stuff she (the journalist) writes is I think the sort of image that Roy sees of herself. And you can see that in Roy’s quoted answers, the almost childlike self-centered analysis. Not to mention the bad analogies:


> "It's as though you had this churning," she says, slowly. "You had a feudal and very unequal society. In this churning, this thin milk separates into a thick layer of cream, and a lot of water that can be just slop. The thick layer of middle class that has been created becomes a great market.

And the Nixonesque “I am not a crook” stuff:


> I was in a forest, which I love being in, and it was real. It wasn't some tourism, or some holiday. All the things that interest me were together there.

Back to your response:


> Otherwise, I hear books and mangos. So what?

Yeah, I get annoyed by this sort of thing more than I should — “Let’s eat mangoes”, “mangoes in the moonlight”, etc. But at the same time, while it is the journalist who juxtaposes a month slumming with the Maoists followed by mangoes served by the household help in an upscale apartment, it’s not just a matter of the juxtaposition (or tone), no? It points to Roy’s fundamental incoherence. IMHO.


> I don't like Roy much either. But my dislike has nothing to do with the fact that she writes about the dams and about the Maoists.

This I agree with entirely.

On Jun 5, 2011, at 10:16 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> When Marianne Moore edited the Dial, her policy was to publish long reviews of good books, short reviews of fair books, and no review of bad books. You don't like her? Why are you posting on her then?

Catharsis!

—ravi



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list