Nasim Marie Jafry's Blog, page 8

Michael Wolf's 'bastard chairs'

I love this project bastard chairs by German photographer Michael Wolf. I want to sit on them all (I am always looking for somewhere to sit and wish there were more benches, though Edinburgh is not too bad).

Didn't expect to see ME mentioned in Neel Mukherjee's novel

Am enjoying Neel Mukherjee's 2010 novel A Life Apart - a novel within a novel -  and was surprised to come across this observation from the main character Ritwik Ghosh, a student from Calcutta studying English Lit at Oxford in 80s/90s:

 'And then there is the steady rise of illnesses Ritwik's never heard of - glandular fever and ME, chronic fatigue syndrome and RSI. God, these are the very people who take a  dozen jabs before they go to India and carry a whole pharmacy with them...

Sliding down Mt Everest

This is utterly gorgeous footage of the Himalayas. Made me think of both my dad and my stepdad. In the seventies, we visited Murree Hill Station - in the Himalayan foothills -  with my dad's family in Pakistan, after his death. And a couple of years ago, my step dad had taken to telling us that he had climbed Mount Everest in a day and slid all the way down. He was very well travelled, but we are sure this didn't happen. We got used to his false memories and stopped contradicting him, it...

It's hard to be original about grief

It's very hard to be original about grief; it's a time to be got through, that is all. Today, I find it hard to believe that I lost my beloved stepfather two weeks ago. After the phone call, the immediate minutes, hours, days passed in a blur. I veered between wailing and relief for the first week. He was 85 years old and had been spiralling further into severe (vascular) dementia, but we did not know he was so poorly, we thought we had him for a good while longer. He died peacefully in his s...

The pantomime of PACE

More nonsense from the PACE trial/biopsychosocial gang in mid-January. The BMJ and the Lancet and the Telegraph and the Times and the Guardian and the Independent and the BBC and god knows where else reported with varying degrees of ignorance and insult that people with ME were exercise phobic, as insulting a red rag as you can get. And they wonder why people with my illness feel hostile towards such  'research'. It's a fucking pantomime. The BMJ did not at first post my commen...

Carlos Acosta on BBC4

With television so dumbed down and dispiriting, was a joy to come across Carlos Acosta on Boxing Day night. My favourite dance was this piece, 'Derrumbe', about a marriage ending. The female dancer is Pieter Symonds. She is mesmerising. The music is spellbinding too. The whole BBC4 programme is available here for a while.

The Missing Story

A couple of months ago my friends lent me Tagore's selected stories, recommending one in particular, 'Kabuliwallah'. When I looked it up I thought I had the wrong page because the story was not there and after checking several  times, I realised the story was missing, it had been removed. So I read another couple of stories instead and loved 'Exercise-book', a story about a little girl who loves writing so much she will write on any surface she can get her hands on. His stories can be sa...

Autumn: research & lumberjacks & novel reprinted

Watching the 2003 film Monsieur Ibrahim et les Fleurs du Coran the other night, I was reminded of my time in France at L'Université de Caen, in the scene where the son feeds his father cat food and passes it off as pâté. My flatmate and I used to buy jars of pâté, from Carrefour that looked and tasted like cat food. I still remember the red and white chequered lids. I came across my carte de séjour the other day, which gave me a pang, more than just the nostalgia of finding student items from...

'Dans la rue': a few thoughts on Patrick Modiano

Like many, I had not heard of Patrick Modiano when he was announced yesterday as the 2014 winner of the Nobel Literature prize.  He sounds like a lovely man, overwhelmed by the news. I listened to a short interview here in French and this illuminating discussion in English. He was walking in the Jardin du Luxembourg when he got the call he'd won.  I love that he was 'dans la rue' when he heard the news. 'Dans la rue' is one of the first, most simple phrases you learn in  French...

Colm Toibin & Hanif Kureishi & Bach

This is just perfect from Colm Tóibín, a five minute film on writing generally, and specifically on fictionalising family trauma. I agree with him about having to write the loss: using fiction to fix it and 'get it back'. A kind of rearranging, putting things back in place. I strongly feel my own writing of fiction is a response to catastrophe. I also love his comment about being able to go back to a piece of writing ten years later (what I'm currently doing, my progress is a just faster than...