Friday Links: NBA Playoffs Edition

“She choreographed our advance out of the west, / camouflaged in North Face jackets // and New Balance sneakers. Papa hushed” – Jaswinder Bolina, “House Hunters”

It’s NBA Playoffs time, which means WNBA tipped off this week. Here’s a preview from Maitreyi Anantharaman at Defector if you like. Try to go to a game if the league is in your city! Inexpensive tickets, probably good seats, and really good basketball. Hopefully the Sports Guys Who Need The “WNBA Is Good Basketball” Qualifier demographic is diminishing, especially as the Caitlin Clark era starts.

I also read some kickass books this week! Like, master-level books! Let’s books first.

What I’ve Been Reading This Week:

One re-read, and one my first time revisiting an author after loving one book. The passage of time is silly that way. You read someone’s first book your sophomore year of college, love it, then look up and 16 years have gone by without picking up any of their other books. Or sometimes you read a book, declare it near-flawless and aspirational, try to graft your own projects onto its structure, fantasize about an HBO miniseries, then look up and 13 years have gone by and you’re like “wait, was it really that good? 23-year-olds are stupid, after all.” I’m thrilled to report that not only did these writers not disappoint me, I liked them both even more this time around. I’m talking, of course, about English As A Second Language by Jaswinder Bolina and Shalimar The Clown by Salman Rushdie.

English As A Second Language by Jaswinder Bolina: sometimes you read a poet and you are reminded that you can always write better. You can always go up a level. Art isn’t even a competition like that, but reading Jaswinder is like playing your first game in the pros. Jaswinder’s writing has a density to it, each line packed with image and detail and metaphor and screw twists. Narrative weaves in and out of each lyric so that you feel like something’s going on, but you’re not being spoon-fed everything outright. A big something going on in this book is righteous fury at USian decadency and the stunning, scary ignorance of the Trump era. That sentence might imply a sort of snobbishness or #Resist Lib cringe, but that’s not what I mean. It’s more in the vein of Baldwin saying to be Black in America is to be in state of rage almost all the time. A Jaswinder poem kinda feels like a David Roth column. Go read this book!

Shalimar The Clown by Salman Rushdie: how to start. I have some unwieldy notes here, but this book deserves some attention. It’s my absolute favorite Rushdie novel, and I’ve read “Booker of Bookers” Midnight’s Children twice. TL;DR version of what I’m about to say is this: the front blurb says this novel is a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel by way of Pulp Fiction-era Tarantino, and it is every bit as awesome as that sounds. I should also say up front that I like Rushdie’s personal-as-political-style writing, though I admit it’s a highwire act that’s not for everyone. Hell, it’s often not for me when a lot of other writers do it, but IDK, I read Rushdie twice in college courses I really enjoyed, so I don’t mind when Rushdie does it.

A quick plot breakdown, because the structure of this book is such that spoilers don’t matter: what we have are essentially five interconnected novellas, telling the story of India and Pakistan’s violent fighting over Kashmir in the 1960s metaphorically through an interpersonal drama. In the first section, we meet India, a 20-something documentary filmmaker in Los Angeles, and her father, Max, a French WWII Resistance hero and former American ambassador to India who had to resign from public life in disgrace because India’s mother was not Max’s wife, but a Kashmiri mistress. At the end of the section, Max’s driver slits his throat so deeply his head almost falls off. Smash cut to Kashmir, years ago, in a village famous for its acting/dancing troupes and excellent cooks. A young, inter-religious couple—Boonyi Kaul, a Hindu, and Noman “Shalimar the Clown” Noman, a Muslim—get married, and their village celebrates their union despite cultural differences. It’s the sort of tolerance and coexistence that Kashmir prides itself on, while India and Pakistan are still marred in post-Partition fighting. The fighting closes in on Kashmir, and Boonyi has ambition beyond merely being a dancer in a village, leading her to run off with Max to Delhi, where he gets her pregnant. This causes him to have to resign, Max’s spurned (WWII hero herself) wife conspires to steal the baby, Boonyi goes home to find herself ostracized and Shalimar possessed by an all-consuming, vengeful rage. Boonyi goes into hiding in the mountains, Shalimar swears an oath not to kill her while either of their fathers are alive—which frees him up to go train as an assassin in resistance groups (well, they start out as resistance groups. I think when you start suicide bombing, you cross over into a different category). The 1965 war leaves its scars across Kashmir and most everyone dead, except Shalimar. By the final section, we’re back in 1990s Los Angeles, India is learning her own history, is learning about her birth mother for the first time, is learning about Kashmir for the first time, is learning she was meant to be named “Kashmira,” which she immediately adopts—all during a Silence of the Lambs-style cat-and-mouse game with Shalimar.

All of this to say: we have a classic Salman Rushdie “personal is political, people standing in for countries/religions/bigger ideas, magical realism” novel, but distilled into this tight, time-jumping thriller.

Who knows what people mean when they say “universal themes?” I sure don’t, but here’s some from this novel: The personal is political. You reap what you sow. Peace and multiculturalism can be difficult to maintain. Ambition can kill you. Humans are bad at appreciating natural beauty when they have it. Violent freaks will always want to kill peaceful artists. Who is entitled to revenge? Is revenge justice? When does the revenge cycle stop? The world does not stop but cruelly continues.

Shalimar the clown reminds me of talking about Ukrainian anarchists with Smags at band practice years ago, reminds me of that weirdo fascist and his bulldog-looking lackey in Andor, features tons of metaphor rooted in mythology, features a loving depiction of the multicultural paradise that was the Kashmiri valley, features the sorts of in-command-of-their-sexuality women you’d find in a Tarantino movie or Rihanna music video—it’s as layered as My Chemical Romance guitar tracks and real fun to get swept up in. It is violent, it does deal with traumatic real-world events, there is plenty in here that is horrifying and awful. But I read this book as, well, not triumphant, but kind of as a testament to the power of art and storytelling and memory. The last scene has haunted me—maybe haunted is the wrong word, lived in my soul—since I first read this book, and was no less exhilarating to come across again. It makes me feel sentimental for Kashmir, a land I know next to nothing about besides what I’ve read here. It’s hard to explain, but this book kinda does everything a novel is supposed to do.

LINKS!

Something to listen to while you browse? Here’s my third-favorite guitarist covering the third-best song of Everybody Beat Up Drake 2024. See if this isn’t in your head for the rest of the weekend.

• The first round is underrated for how exciting it is. The teams who get bounced enter the offseason disappointed and full of questions. But we forget so quickly how good some of these series are. Tyrese Maxey had an awesome season and a 46-point Game 5 against a Tom Thibodeau-coached Knicks defense. Even if Coby White should’ve won MIP over him, Tyrese is worth celebrating.

  If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Don’t trust any ambassadors from the empire. They only bring ruin, and you got a lot of tables.

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  Chris

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