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The Hairless In A Saloon

Discussion in 'Cheeniya's Senile Ramblings' started by Cheeniya, Mar 17, 2017.

  1. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    I deleted it even before you wrote to me and I have also responded to your feedback.
    Sri
     
  2. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    @jayasala42

    Dear jayasala
    That was a nice feed bock. Thank you.
    During my childhood days, I had gone with my dad to the Chinese dentists in George Town. There were many of them then and only one or two remain now. They were experts in painless extraction and people went to them to extract their teeth and fix gold ones in their place. If you had seen 'Thillana Moganambal', you cannot forget Manorama in her glittering golden teeth! After reading your feed back, I gougled for the most expensive saloons or hair dressers in Chennai and found countless ones with such stylish names as ' L’orange Unisex Salon And Spa'
    Quite a few of their male customers are bald I am told.
    Sri
     
  3. Iravati

    Iravati Platinum IL'ite

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    I see what you are trying to do here. You are building Cheeniya's own Malgudi with your fabled recounts of Triplicane. An eye for an eye. A sweet for a sweet. That sets the stage for this eyeless (and hairless) saga. Next ...

    I've harboured many such literary bugbears that terrorize me with the vengeance of "Freddy" Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street. I am haunted by these novels that I have been meaning to finish for years now. But if someone asks me, "How far have you read", I quake in my boots to narrate the story. One such monumental work of fiction that intimidates me is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. The multi-storied novel is the Burj Khalifa of a reading that confounds the floor I am on as all the door-plates read the same. All men are incarnates of Arcadio or Aureliano. There is never been more conscientious author than Márquez in conserving his carbon footprint by recycling the names of his characters. His unrelenting economy of names throws me off unable to discern who-is-who in that epic novel. Yes, I have my own "Will write a review next week" excuses.

    I am suspicious of this admission of your comparable baldness. For a long time I thought King Charles the Bald, grandson of Charlemagne, was as bald as a coot for having earned the aversive nickname. Then I read somewhere that he was hairier and furrier than a highland cow. The "Bald" in his title is a chafing and trailed reference to a missing crown. He was not made a king, so he was bald from lack of kingdom to govern and not lack of hair to groom. Now, I suspect your baldness is a play on lack of grim in your exuberant and humorous writing.

    Great works have "working titles", "marketing titles" and finally "release titles". You seem to have collapsed such anxiety into an instant of penny drop, inspired by Huxley, who borrowed from Milton. From Milton to Huxley to Cheeniya such "-less" state is misleading for you guys seem to have compensated that deficit in the moreish and scrunched-up writing in your works. I think your deliberate ploy to go by "Hairless In A Saloon" is to infuriate those metric and prosody fanatics who would have conformingly proposed "Hairless In A Plaza" to rhyme with "Eyeless in a Gaza". I like your "saloon" more because it is defiant with a ring of snipping and shaving of hairy lexical pedantry.

    I would love to pierce apart and comment on each and every strand of your lovely snippet but I know it would elongate my feedback to that of Lady's Godiva's hair which saved her modesty, on the contrary, I will embarrass myself and drain away and enfeeble Samson of his whatever leftover vigour from his head shave with my never-ending tease. Welcome back! (Hugs)
     
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  4. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    @PushpavalliSrinivasan

    Dear PS
    That's a very apt quote from Poyyamozhi Pulavar on the subject we are discussing here. Thank you!
    We are all in our second childhood now. You say you are reading new nursery rhymes but I am yet to master the old ones. Except for 'Twinkle, twinkle little star' and 'Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool?' my knowledge of nursery rhymes is pretty limited!
    Sri
     
  5. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    Dear..er.. whatever, I mean whoever!

    It has been long, long ago, so long ago, nobody can say how long ago that we interacted. I always look forward to your feed back to my Ramblings though it terribly exposes my ignorance of all your facts, figures and vocabulary! But I do need such exercises for my gray cells! At least that’s what my ‘headshrinker’ has strongly suggested to me.

    More than a decade and a half back, a friend of mine presented me a copy of Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow on my 60th birthday. What was his idea, I am clueless even now and I don’t want to misread his intention. But I must thank him for one thing. It hastened my hair loss and gave me yet another topic to ramble about. But then different folks are foxed by different authors. I know a guy who was foxed even by a simple and elegant novel like The Man Eater of Malgudi by RK Narayan! All the names that you have mentioned made me pass my fingers pensively through my bald head!

    I smiled smugly to myself hearing you mention about King Charles the Bald. I am happy that someone could suspect the claim of my baldness. It inflates my ego. ‘What an image of himself Cheeniya has in IL!’, I tell myself. At the same time, I would hate to forego this well groomed baldness to speculations!

    Believe me, I too thought of Hairless in a Plaza but then I wanted to avoid everyone asking me ‘What Plaza? Where is it? Why a Plaza? Why not other places?’ and so on. So I safely chose Saloon in order that I can avoid a plethora of questions and move on with my story! I don’t do anything without a reason you see.

    A good FB my friend! It made me put on my thinking cap before answering! And thanks for the ‘Welcome back’ hug!
    Sri
     
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  6. Iravati

    Iravati Platinum IL'ite

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    Well, what can I say ? Cats have nine lives but we are not interested in discrete lives. Less known fact is that in each reincarnation, they also demand multitude of names as our Eliot cites.

    The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
    It isn't just one of your holiday games;
    You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
    When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
    First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
    Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James, Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey--
    All of them sensible everyday names.
    There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
    Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
    Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter--
    But all of them sensible everyday names.
    But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,


    —T. S. Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

    I like your whatever-whoever moniker. It preempts your entanglement with the troop of whimsy avatars I intend to launch and confound you.

    Your head-shavers and headshrinkers are funny fellas! Such exposure and attendant embarrassment is mutual. There's facts and then figures and then vocabulary, but then there is also this style — the glowing style you tap into, which, in spite of the hunger of an alchemist plodding frantically to replicate your gold-standard writing, evades me. Nevertheless my headshrinker counsels that if I fail to derive the formula for Cheeniya's hearty writing atleast I should be on the sidelines and hold a candle to immerse in some of that magical glow.

    Aye, “plaza” foreshadows macabre storyline couched in urban vernacular. Say, “Murder in the plaza”, “Killing in the plaza”, “Mayhem in the plaza”, such intense dramas are invariably set in the plazas. No one says “Murder in the saloon”, it is too banal. I like “saloon” with the stark humility not to bamboozle the readers into the anxiety of a gruesome setting like the barber chopping of the ears of a customer. A saloon vindicates the writer from such promises with a humble wording.

    Er, what thinking cap? no tippet or top hat worked for me, it took me weeks to muster the courage to write back to you. Sorry for the delay. Will catch up with your other blogs soon.
     
    Last edited: Mar 29, 2017
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  7. maalti

    maalti Gold IL'ite

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    Dear Cheeniya Sir, very very hilarious post. Couldn't control laughing for some time. Thank you
     
  8. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    @Iravati

    Dear Iravati
    First things first. Iravathi was the Principal of Queen Mary's College, Madras in the late 1950's. She had an 'h' between the t and i. She took our Intercollegiate classes and she loved me like a son. I loved her like a father if you know what I mean! Like the celestial elephant, she was all powerful and feared by the other Principals in the City, men included.

    Now T.S.Eliot! How much I love him! He can never be dead for me! There was a time at the height of my craze for him that I too wanted to become a poet. But fortunately for the world, it turned out to be a still-born desire. You know what I write now. There is no name for it and so I call it 'Rambling' to make it as close to the reality as possible. Despite my love of Eliot, I am not a cat lover. Cats make me uneasy with their mini tiger mannerisms. My daughter has a St.Bernard by name Floyd. I don't like his way of putting his front legs on my shoulder to show his affectionate welcome but the guy is innocent and has no claims of immortality like cats. But I am told that their nine lives have come down to 5 thanks to the ever increasing canine population. Going back to Eliot, he once wrote in his poem about the end of the world. 'Not with a bang but a whimper'! How I wish I could write like him!
    Sri
     
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  9. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    @maalti
    Dear maalti
    Thank you for your kind word of appreciation. I strongly believe that the funny incidents of life are worth sharing. Not the sob stories!
    Sri
     
  10. Iravati

    Iravati Platinum IL'ite

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    I did contemplate whether to add an 'h' in the moniker.
    Whilst reading this poem of Scherezade Siobhan few days ago, I came across

    A bathroom as white as the elephant it cradles. I,
    Airavata – heaven’s milk-toothed cloud,


    It confounded me! I thought Airavata, dubbed as Iravat, the son of Iravati, son of Arjuna, they are all the same. Then I had an impulse to amend my moniker to “Airavati”. I realized on further reading that Airavata (son of Iravati) is different from Iravat (son of Arjuna). I was perplexed with the cross-connection: Why is Arjuna's son named with an "I" and Iravati's son with an "A". My knowledge of Indian mythology is patchy and not to confound myself further “Iravati” prevailed out of that confusion. Moreover, “Airavati” has an airy feel to it in English transliteration.

    This line from poetic literature has been widely adapted by the scientific community to illustrate the end of the universe. Will the universe end with a bang (Big Bounce) or a whimper (Big Freeze). Even Eliot could not have predicted the far-reaching popularity of this veiled line until a scientific idea was forged from his rhythmic musing.

    Ezra Pound would have interjected , “Go back to your Triplicane and leave Eliot for me to take care of.”
     
    Last edited: Apr 3, 2017

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