19 Followers
19 Following
msarki

M Sarki

Besides being a poet with four collections published, M Sarki is a painter, film maker, and photographer. He likes fine coffee and long walks. 

M Sarki has written, directed, and produced six short films titled Gnoman's Bois de Rose, Biscuits and Striola , The Tools of Migrant Hunters, My Father's Kitchen, GL, and Cropped Out 2010. More details to follow. Also the author of the feature film screenplay, Alphonso Bow.

Currently reading

L'Appart: The Delights and Disasters of Making My Paris Home
David Lebovitz
We Learn Nothing: Essays
Tim Kreider
Elmet: LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017
Fiona Mozley
Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived: Short Stories
Lily Tuck
The Double Life of Liliane
Lily Tuck
At Home with the Armadillo
Gary P. Nunn
American Witness: The Art and Life of Robert Frank
RJ Smith
Autumn
Karl Ove Knausgård, Ingvild Burkey, Vanessa Baird
Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd (Reading Edition)
Nick Mason
American Witness: The Art and Life of Robert Frank
J.R. Smith
U and I: A True Story - Nicholson Baker Nicholson Baker has an almost neurotic obsession with not wanting to sound like another writer and not to enter into manuscript words or phrases another writer has previously used. He is frightful of himself slipping into his work a metaphor or turn of phrase that he unconsciously may have lifted from another writer's output he may have read many years ago but still resting latent in his memory just waiting to reveal itself, and himself, a writer lesser than he is or wants to be in the eyes of literary others. Nicholson Baker really cares too much what his readers think of him. In contrast, I do not. But the reason for this is I am not trying to be anybody but me. I have no pretensions that anybody but you and a few others are even interested in what I have to say. I am not concerned whether or not I keep you in my fold as a constant and reliable reader. That does not mean I don't want you in my corner, it means simply that I will not be mediated by what I might possibly lose in readership or reputation. It is highly likely that every word I have used in this paragraph has already been used by a better writer, but that won't prevent me from saying what I need to say. Even if my unconscious at work is sending me information that has been retranslated or rearranged from what I have previously read, I am busily typing away and getting these so-called original thoughts of mine down on the page you are scanning now perhaps for errors, omissions, or a nifty plagiarism or two.

I have read very little of John Updike and this book U and I does nothing to make me want to read him either. It is possible I should never have read this book at all as I have no interest in anything Updike has written no matter the size of his fame and popularity. I read this book by Nicholson Baker for his audacity, or because of his presumed premise for audacity. There is nothing in my mental capacities to compare with Baker's personal recall or his memory for what he has read. There have rarely been incidents or affairs that connect for me with something I have read. For example, there is nothing in my memory for any of my already-read literature to remotely resemble my granite-like memory for where I was when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I can barely remember anything verbatim a week after I have finished reading it. I have never been able to memorize more than a couple of poems. Songs I have loved still lack the lyrics they had when the tune made me dance in the first place. Yet, I am still an accomplished poet who has a pretty unique way with words.

The most notable observation in my reading of Nicholson Baker is that he definitely has a wide range of authors from which to quote some memory of, or at least some history of who the artist was or was purported to be. Unlike myself, Baker is quite educated and has lived in New York City for some time, enough to have learned what is important and perhaps what is not. I am tempted to claim Baker is a little high brow, but I have no proof of this. He just looks like he came from good stock. In comparison I have been operating from my bootstraps and basically been working on the fly for most of my life, primarily living in the woods or wishing I were still there even though I was calling Louisville my home and from it getting a decent living.

I am not at all insulted or aghast by Baker's quest for fame or for wishing it in his attempts to be a literary cream rising. My only frame of reference for recognizable essay-writers is my experience reading David Foster Wallace, Roberto Bolano, Geoff Dyer, Lee Klein, Jonathan Lethem, Ander Monson, John Berger, Hunter Thompson, and John Jeremiah Sullivan. I am sure there are others I have forgotten to list. But I have never been interested in John Updike. Personality is everything for me, and Nicholson Baker alludes to its importance as well when he himself is picking his authors and yours. In other words, Baker thinks you ought to like him if you read him, and is worried to some degree that what he has to say, and the way he might say it, could turn some readers off, so he is very careful. But not careful enough because I don't like him as much as I did when I first started reading this book.

While listing the four vocabulary words his father gave him when Baker initially began compiling a journal of them, or when he first began to want to compile a list of vocabulary words, the last word of the first four his father gave him was acerbic which was recalled to his mind while in the midst of relating a story regarding Marcel Proust, Wallace Stevens, Samuel Beckett, John Updike, and his alimonied ex-wife. The story made me remember a morning last week as I was composing a poem and struggling over which word best fit what I was trying to say. The two words fighting for this loftiest of positions were willfully and willingly. I felt the correct word was willfully but there was some discussion with my wife over whether it was actually a word or not. I wanted it to be a word. It felt like a word to me. What I was attempting to say in my poem needed a willful act instead of a willing act. There was a huge difference to me and I decided to go with the word willfully. Turns out it is a word and I was not only right I was accurate in what I wanted to say. I found his story about his word discovery with his father rather interesting and in ways helpful in keeping my own spirits intact for pressing on always for the next right word, which may be wrong, in fact, for others.

I do not like the way Baker refers supposedly to the woman he loves as his "now-wife". I find the term rather disabusing to the ideal of love and respect for another person. The term sounds almost bitter in some respects, and certainly a little whiny if you were to ask me for the truth and my opinion. The Baker term "now-wife" leaves me wondering if this is perhaps his first or third, if he is thinking about trading her in for another, or if he knows it will not last, this love and devotion so obviously fleeting and so out of control. Baker's claim of heterosexuality in concurrence with his hero Updike and near-hero Nabokov in light of his once-homophobic tendencies leaves me with some sickening in my taste for reading more from this fucking idiot. But idiot he is not, genius perhaps, wannabe for sure, and supremely smarter than yours truly. But there are times this Baker poseur grates on me. He is at moments seemingly out of the blue and extremely irritating and unnecessary. But I intend always to read on and complete my assignment until I have nothing left to say. And I suppose the same goes for Nicholson Baker.