Derek Walcott's play Pantomime is currently playing in Sydney, & the Morning Herald has a review by Stephen Dunne.

Plug in the box. Write the first chapter. Go to the party. Get in the boat.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Happy Bloomsday!

It's a rich brew which turns out to be a great deal less than the sum of its parts. The Theo story is creepily persuasive, but the rest of the novel's elements don't hang together, partly because the various parallels, unconvincing to begin with, are simply stated rather than argued out through the narrative.

-- From Mike Phillips's review of Lawrence Scott's new novel Night Calypso, in today's UK Guardian.

I knocked on the door. Nothing. I peered through a small window: the place had a deserted, shut-down look. I was about to give up when the door opened. A sleek cat slithered out and started rubbing against my leg. Then a face appeared: a woman with a small diamond in her nose.

"He likes you," she said with some surprise, but with a smile. "He doesn't usually like visitors." The cat's approval seemed a good omen.

Nadira Naipaul, the writer's second wife, ushered me into a small, cosily furnished sitting room, telling me that "he" would be down in a few minutes. I noticed a pile of books on a table, with a well-thumbed paperback about deciphering alphabets and codes on top. There was a portrait of a young, or at least youngish, V.S. Naipaul. And a shotgun propped against the wall next to the fireplace.

-- From Andrew Riemer's profile of Sir Vidia in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald.

"A poem," he said, in answer to a question about knowing when a poem is completed, "is really an attempt to write a poem."

-- Teasing words from Derek Walcott, at his reading in Kingston on Sunday--see stories in the Observer and the Gleaner.

The unvarnished truth is that there's no space on the right for John Kerry. Hard-line exiles--for whom Cuba is the only issue--are dedicated Republicans. However, there is an opening on the left. A viable position for Kerry would be to declare himself fiercely anti-Castro and then point out that Bush has no Cuba policy other than the embargo--a 45-year failure that has yet to make any progress toward its stated goals: free elections in Cuba and an end to Castro's reign. Kerry should then champion what the majority of exiles want--unlimited remittances and unrestricted travel--and argue that increased contact with Cuba will lay the groundwork for civil society in the post-Castro years.

-- Ann Louise Bardach suggests how John Kerry could win the Cuban vote & hence Florida, in Slate.

In The General in His Labyrinth, Castro's close friend and drinking buddy, Gabriel García Márquez, writes in the voice of Simon Bolívar, saying: "The man who serves a revolution ploughs the seas." But the great Liberator's last words in the novel are these: "This nation will fall inevitably into the hands of the unruly mob and then will pass into the hands of almost indistinguishable petty tyrants of every colour and race." One suspects that, reading his friend's novel, Fidel must have shivered slightly--even in a very hot climate.

-- From Jay Parini's review of Volker Skierka's new biography of Fidel Castro, in today's UK Guardian.

Does writing poetry pose a health threat? Is there any such thing as the Sylvia Plath effect?

And is the phrase "live fast, die young" more applicable to sensitive young souls describing their torment in verse than to James Dean-style tearaways?

According to James Kaufman, whose research has just been published in an obscure publication called Journal of Death Studies, the answer could be yes to all three questions.

So the scientists have confirmed it....

I do see the resemblance. Brian Lara the frog has turned up in Portsmouth, no doubt sent ahead of the WI cricket team to spy on preparations for their tour of England this summer....

Trying to harness a conversation with Lakshmi Persaud is like trying to catch a butterfly.

The author of Raise the Lanterns High ... flits between talking about her new book, her life and her children, and back again. But what drives her is not arrogance but an infectious enthusiasm.

"If the book is praised, it doesn't go to my head and, if anyone says to me they don't like the book, it does not disturb me. When someone reads the book, their interpretation of it depends on a whole host of things," Lakshmi said.

-- From a short profile of Trinidad-born Persaud in yesterday's Hendon & Finchley Times.

The Will of all Wills was a Warwickshire Will....

And a handsome, cheerful fellow too, they say. Today is his birthday, his 440th by most accounts. Here's a sort of present--a silly little poem:

Present from Stratford

She took a train through the autumn smoke,
a scarf to her lips. She trod in the crowds
& the shrubbery-beds, drank tea, was cold.
She plucked up something from under a tree.

Clacked in a blue box tricked with stars:
a seed, a cone, its broken needles
dry like thorns, unlovely wooden
bud, a brittle rosemary burr.

Not whole as a stone, I thought, not old
as a stone, not perfect under my thumb.
Then, not dead as a stone, I thought.
Something ought to be sleeping inside--

this metaphor's too plain. It nests
on the shelf, a pine-bark egg on its bed
of pins. Sometimes I fetch it to smell.
Sometimes I'd like it inside my mouth.

-- Philip Sander

Lara dislikes the ball and means to drive it away from him. Sobers used to co-opt it. Lara in full cry will bloody a bowler and leave him wishing he were dead. Sobers used to make bowlers fall in love with him.

Every ball bowled to Lara is to him an adventure, a brand new problem or window of delight; and the question you see him asking in that split-second pause is: "By what inventive chord-of-a-stroke shall this one be put away?" When he winds up dead-batting, Lara feels it as a constriction, an interruption of what he's there for. For all his elan, he is at heart a marauder, a taker-apart of a fielding side.

By contrast, every ball to Sobers was part of a preordained scheme of things. He didn't ask, "With what chord shall I destroy this one?" He asked, "Where in the melodic line does this ball fit?" Most times, he found the response which harmony dictated....

Brian Lara lives in and through cricket. But where Sobers was of Barbados and the colonial 50s, Lara is from Trinidad and a product of the '80s. He grew up amid the Me Generation, not the British public school and its traditions. He has no empire either to administer or to resist; he comes from a country with nine synonyms for heckling; and his immediate cricket ancestors are Pace-like-Fire and Licks-like-Peas. Moreover, he is generationally a man of the Americas, an American. And what all these mean is that, unlike Sobers, Lara is a man alone.

Among West Indians, Trinidadians are the existentialists.... Perhaps it has to do with the relative young-ness of the society. Or with its urban demographics, or its bi-ethnic composition.

But you see it in Lara, in the little lunge-and-rock-back, the early sighting but the playing late, the sense that, to him, each ball represents a discontinuous new promise and peril.

-- Wayne Brown, writing in today's J'ca Observer.

Like tens of thousands of other West Indians, I spent yesterday morning in front of the TV, anxiously counting down the runs to the quadruple century. And I'm not even much of a cricket fan. But I'm thrilled Lara's recaptured the record, & hoping that this time it means the beginning of a turnaround for the whole team--& not yet another lost opportunity.

Then I pick up the Express this morning & read this infuriating article:

A world cricketing legend.

That's how Prime Minister Patrick Manning described West Indies captain Brian Lara after he scored 400 runs--the highest Test score in the 127-year history of the game.

Manning issued the statement yesterday saying initially it is difficult to find superlatives to describe a man who has broken two world records in ten years.

Manning later telephoned Lara in Antigua at around 6.40 p.m. extending his personal congratulations. Manning asked Lara what he would like the country to do for him now and assured that the Government was making appropriate preparations for him on his return to the country.

The headline? "Manning to Lara: What do you want?"

I couldn't help thinking that no prime minister has ever asked, say, the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, "What do you want?" I couldn't help thinking how many calypsonians & musicians have died in poverty, & of Carlisle Chang's great mural The Inherent Nobility of Man, demolished in an airport renovation. Which isn't to deny the magnificence of Lara's achievement yesterday. By all means let's throw him a parade, give him another medal, name something else after him. But you can't build a civilisation on just sports heroes & beauty queens, however much we may adore them here in the Caribbean.

Islamic fundamentalism in Southeast Asia is erasing the past and cultures of the peoples of the region, with Christianity and Islamic fundamentalism "at war with each other", the 2001 Nobel Laureate for Literature Sir Vidia S Naipaul said in Bangkok yesterday.

Naipaul, who was speaking after reading from a work on Malaysia at Chulalongkorn University, said some people wanted to stamp out their own past and culture. This destruction of people's pasts is "very brutal", he said.

The outspoken Trinidad-born, Oxford-educated writer is often accused of giving Islamic societies a less-than-glowing appraisal, and he did nothing to change that yesterday, saying countries that converted to Islam--such as Malaysia and Indonesia--had suppressed their pre-Islamic pasts, resulting in their people developing "troubled personalities".

-- Pravit Rojanaphruk reports on Naipaul's visit to Bangkok in today's Thailand Nation.

West Indies collapse because they do not work as hard as any other international team and because they are weak mentally. From the manual labour perspective, anyone could whip them into shape. It's been done before. There is a fair amount of batting talent and the return of Jermaine Lawson and Fidel Edwards should strengthen the bowling.

But how will a PlayStation-generation team be taught to forget everything but the next ball? Isn't there a great party going on in the Red Stripe Mound? Man, we should be there. This team cannot bat through 90 overs because they can barely sit through a feature film. They should be playing chess, not Grand Theft Auto. They should be reading novels, not flicking through magazines.

Certainly they should be taught their own history. If you had a quarter for every member of the team who read CLR James's Beyond a Boundary, you'd find yourself borrowing a coin from the umpire at the toss. A contemporary West Indian batsman actually failed to recognise Sir Everton Weekes's name when Sir Everton attempted to give him a batting tip; the young players probably think the Three Ws was a restaurant.

-- From a scathing commentary by B.C. Pires in yesterday's UK Guardian.

Henry Swanzy, the BBC producer who from 1946 to 1954 edited the landmark Caribbean Voices programme, has died at the age of 88. The Guardian has published an obituary by Philip Nanton & Anne Walmsley.

But cricket's footprint, as the great Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James acknowledged in his seminal work, Beyond a Boundary, has always been larger than the grounds on which it is played. "In the inevitable integration into a national community," he wrote, "one of the most urgent needs, sport, and particularly cricket, has played and will play a great role."

James was referring to the project of Caribbean unity.... The idea Mr. James introduced in his timeless 1963 book was the notion of sport as an instrument of social justice and national identity. In his estimation, the motive force of West Indian cricket was to subvert the colonial project, restaging cricket in its parochial aesthetics as a discourse in anti-colonialism....

Fuelled by the sentiments that Mr. James had identified, West Indian cricket teams became the best in the world at a game that Lord Harris, a governor of Bombay, once argued required the "doggedness of the English temperament" for success. West Indian cricketers rewrote that script--eventually bludgeoning the English into a series of hapless surrenders in the 1980s, battering them with a muscular, exuberant and physically intimidating brand of cricket.

After a brief period of West Indian supremacy, cricket mastery passed to Australia, India, Pakistan and South Africa. These former colonies are producing the best cricket teams not so much because they are fired by an anti-colonialist aesthetic but because they are bolstered by familiar economic forces. Because Rupert Murdoch saw the potential for cricket in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, he trained the cameras of his media empire on the subcontinent. Among the many reasons why an India v. Pakistan cricket match is probably drawing more attention than the siege of an al-Qaeda deputy is that Murdoch's Star TV has turned Asia's cricket players into demigod millionaires.

Duke University academic Kenneth Surin argues that cricket is no longer "a means of national expression" and he points out that West Indian professional cricketers now earn a living touring the world in pursuit of ever-increasing financial rewards. Such globetrotting has levelled the playing field, Prof. Surin says: "Cricketing styles have become homogenized in consequence of this 'internationalization' of the game."

So last week, while India and Pakistan were meeting, the English team was steamrollering the West Indies in Jamaica with a British version of muscular, physical cricket, reversing the recent narrative between the two countries.

If the result in Kingston was parochial, it also contained a universal morality tale of the times.

-- From an op-ed piece on "the geopolitics of cricket" by Ken Wiwa in today's Globe & Mail.

Archimedes held that he could lift the earth if he had a lever long enough, and an extraplanetary fulcrum to rest it on. There are horrors so heavy that they seem untellable. To bear to tell them so that we can bear to read them, a writer must find somewhere outside--peaceful, unmarked--to project them from. Atrocity enters the imagination not as the violating point of the knife but as the fair flesh violated.

That is how the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat has managed over the past 10 years to portray with such terrifying wit and flowered pungency the torment of the Haitian people....

In her other stories and in this collection Danticat often uses the Haitian community in the United States as the horror-spared site for her fulcrum. Despite difficulties, strangeness and uncertainties, these characters are swimmers pulled from the depths. Nitrogen bubbles course agonizingly in their bloodstream, memories rack them; yet there is an uncertain daylight, and it is by this that darkness is called up and told.

-- From Richard Eder's review of The Dew Breaker in this weekend's NY Times Book Review (like most Times online content, after about a week you'll have to pay to read it).

The Scotsman reports today that Derek Walcott has been robbed in Paris:

Mr Walcott, 73, spoke of being left in a Kafka-esque limbo after his partner, Sigrid, had her bag snatched in Paris.

The thief got away with the couple's passports, travel documents, money, and, critically, Mr Walcott's green card, allowing him to travel and work in the United States.

Mr Walcott has returned from Europe to his home in St Lucia in the Caribbean, but was due to travel to Scotland via the US, where he has an apartment in New York and a teaching job in Boston.

He and Sigrid had to show newspaper cuttings about his work to airline officials at the airport before they were allowed to board their plane and leave France.

"Day by day it gets more devastating," he said. "One of the worst things is [the loss of] my green card. My second application took almost a year to come through, and now I have to do it again.

"The most frightening thing is this contemporary thing of identity--unless you have papers, you don't exist. Very Kafkaesque."