Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

Until the last week of last month, I was all set to play with a steelband. Wherever Carnival was, I knew it wasn't in the costumed bands I played with for all those years that were now playing with me, and the whole country.

And then, out of the blue, Minshall announced he was bringing a band. And my head hurts and I hope it isn't Bird Flu, but my heart is soaring. The debt this country owes Minshall is as nothing compared with mine. When I thought it had all been lost, he would never bring a band again, I would never get the chance to make the real, true, spiritual connection with the best thing we ever made, our own Carnival, at the very end of the rope, at last, at last, thank God, after 30 years of involvement in Trinidad Carnival, I'm going to play a real mas, thanks be to Minsh!

-- From B.C. Pires's essay "Making Minsh-meat of Carnival", in the February Trinidad and Tobago Review, published today (but sadly not online).

(Also in this new TTR: my review of Rupert Roopnaraine's book Primacy of the Eye: The Art of Stanley Greaves; a shorter version appears in the February Caribbean Review of Books, and perhaps this week I'll get around to posting it online.)