Two weeks off (going to Ladakh); Also, celebrating 10,000 hits

My 10K Run -- and it only took 4 months!

In the next day or two I will cross 10,000 hits on Sitemeter. It's pretty cool, though I'm not exactly popping out the champagne (if I ever reach 1 million, maybe then).

I'm happy because I've been averaging 140 hits a day for the past few weeks. But unlike blogs that actually have 140 unique readers per day, there are probably only between 20 and 40 actual regular readers of this blog -- most people come to this site through Google. My biggest 'hits' have been, oddly enough, "Manmohan Singh" and "George Orwell Fahrenheit 9/11". Why would Google rank my site highly on these? I'm still not sure, though I have a theory that referring to the topic in the title of the post (in Blogger it becomes the title of the file) and posting quickly helped. Other popular posts have been "Wendy Doniger," "Operation Bluestar," "Meera Nanda," and "V.S. Naipaul, Farrukh Dhondy, and William Dalrymple." I've personally been happy with my posts on stuff like: Postcolonial FAQ, Fugazi, Brazilian Dance Music, and the film Yuva. But almost no one comes to my site looking for those things -- too bad.

I want to say thank you to the people who've commented on this site, who have put me on blogrolls, and who have linked to me on occasion. Here's a short list (I may be forgetting some people. If so, forgive me):

Brey
Sharleen Mondal
The Weblog
Anjali Taneja/ To the Teeth
Kumar (the friendly Kashmiri Kumar, now in the midwest somewhere)
Scott McLemee
Shashwati Talukdar
P. Kerim Friedman/ Keywords
Chuck Tryon
Not Really Indian
Tyler Curtain/ Bentkid
Timothy Burke
Michael Bérubé
Dan Green
Greg Perry
Sutton Stokes
Apostropher
Erin O'Connor
Ophelia Benson/Butterflies & Wheels
Joanne Jacobs
The blog formerly known as Jivha
Little Professor / Miriam Burstein
Kitabkhana
Bala Subra/ Lost In Media
All About George
Yves Etheart
Mikaela Reid

Oh, and thanks also to all the people who have sent supportive emails in response to this blog. You know who you are.

On Vacation

We're going to India for a couple of weeks. The highlight will undoubtedly be Ladakh (more links here, here, here). It's in eastern Jammu & Kashmir, and one of the major centers of Tibetan Buddhism outside of Tibet and Ithaca, New York (little joke there). I'm looking forward to it mainly because it will be completely and totally different from the (lately) drab eastern seaboard of the U.S.A.

But Delhi and Bombay are also always fun: books are cheap, music is plentiful, food is fantastic, and I have a new camera to play with.

Cheers, everyone.

On High Tech workers returning to India

In the New York Times, Amy Waldman's latest is on high-tech workers returning to gated communities, uninterrupted power, and various California-type amenities in Bangalore.

It generally rings true, though statistically I think it's still a pretty small phenomenon. And despite the attendant oddities (some of which are explored in the article), I think it's definitely a net gainer for the Indian economy and India's cultural integration into the rest of the world.

Best Bakery Retrial in India; problems in the Criminal Justice system

The "Best Bakery" case is being retried outside of Gujurat. The Christian Science Monitor has a good story on it. You should read the whole thing, but the following stood out to me:

The first trial, held in May 2003 in the state of Gujarat, where the massacre took place, ended in the acquittal of all 21 of the accused rioters after the victims changed their testimony. The Indian Supreme Court last April ordered a retrial out of state, calling state officials "modern-day Neros" for ignoring the complaints of witnesses that they had been politically harassed and pressured to change their testimony by police and state officials.

The opportunity for another trial in this cornerstone case is seen here as an important chance to resolve a major irritant in Hindu- Muslim relations and a chance to chip away at the pervasive problem of witness tampering in the Indian justice system."This case has been a kind of systematic failure of the Indian legal system," says Teesta Setalwad, a human rights activist who led the effort to get the case a second hearing. "This has been a symbol, hopefully, to revive the criminal justice system in India."

In a country where prosecutors win violent criminal cases only 4 percent of the time, some dramatic reforms are required, Ms. Setalwad says. "In India, we have failed (in providing justice.) Trials take 10 years to finish. Witnesses turn hostile and change their testimony. The whole system needs to change."

Earlier, I was mocked for coming up with some odd ideas for getting better results from the Indian criminal justice system (I had suggested the central government use helicopters to videotape communal incidents that police are incapable or unwilling to stop). And maybe the idea was a little silly.

But with statistics like that (4 percent conviction rate on violent crimes, 10 years to complete a trial), I think even really radical solutions deserve a hearing.

Apostrophic Alignment Index

This is what I hoped would happen.

It would be great to start a cultural index Wiki. But I have no idea how Wiki works, or how to start one. 

(Maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself)

Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle (a "Review")

Harold and Kumar: the funniest movie I've seen all year, completely mad. There's transgressive genius in the conceit of a Hindu on an epic quest for hamburgers and a Korean (Christian) in search of "Buddha" (i.e., high quality marijuana). And let's not forget the parallel quest of their neighbors -- Jews in search of the perfect hot dog. None of this is particularly remarked upon in the film, and in fact I got the sense that everyone in the audience in Orange last night completely missed it.

Side note: I predict more damage to the Bush presidency from a certain T-shirt Kal Penn wears in one scene than from anything Michael Moore comes up with in F9/11. 

Kal Penn is hilarious. Apparently he was in a crap movie called Malibu's Most Wanted, last year (I'm still not going to see it). And in real life he's a vegetarian -- so no White Castle. But it's a good ensemble overall: John Chu, Neal Patrick Harris (i.e., of Doogie Howser, and now of Cabaret), and Chris Meloni are great. 

I would recommend this as long as a little gross-out humor doesn't freak you out (for the record, the scatological "gags" are less numerous than the brilliant plays on ethnicity). And it's not a cerebral date movie (go see Before Sunset for that), or an "impress your colleagues with your exquisite taste and refinement" type of affair. Indeed, if anything, it's more of a "don't admit to anyone that you laughed so hard there were tears in your eyes" type of affair.

Palimpsest

Palimpsest:

Originally the term for a parchment on which several inscriptions had been made after earlier ones had been erased. The characteristic of the palimpsest is that, despite such erasures, there are always traces of previous inscriptions that have been 'overwritten.' Hence the term has become particularly valuable for suggesting the ways in which the traces of earlier 'inscriptions' remain as a continual feature of the 'text' of culture, giving it its particular density and character. Any cultural experience is itself an accretion of many layers, and the term is valuable because it illustrates the ways in which pre-colonial culture as well as the experience of colonization are continuing aspects of a post-colonial society's developing cultural identity. (from Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts)

Questions:
1. Does it make sense?
2. Is it useful? (Is there a simpler word you would use to describe this?)
3. Think of examples?

ASCI: Amardeep Singh Cultural Index

Some of you may have tried the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index test a few weeks ago. I myself abstained, basically because the very first question stumped me ("Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly?"), and a third of the references that followed were essentially foreign to me.

That's not to say that I'm a Philistine... Actually, I'm pretty much a snob, but of a slightly different kind. My tastes: hip hop, indie rock, electronic music, eccentric films, assorted eclectic weirdness. As I've gotten older I've also dabbled in jazz, lots and lots of Indian music (which I'm keeping off the list -- maybe there should be a separate, 'desi' taste list), and the odd classical number. But my heart and soul is still rock and roll.

I'm trying to sustain some logic in the contrasts: Originators versus appropriators, "sell-outs" versus die-hard independents, slightly goofy versus slightly serious, alienated versus exotic... I also stole a few from Terry Teachout that I liked.

In every case, you can pick "DC" (Don't care) or "NHOI" (Never Heard Of It)
And I'm not sure it matters whether you "concur" or not with me. If you really must have a mathematical formula, try this:

number of "A answers - number of "B" answers = ASCI score

For every DC, subtract three points. For every NHOI add three points. If you want. What does the final number mean? It's a secret.

Final note: obviously, given a choice between a legendary band like Bad Brains and a more recent, (briefly) radio-friendly band like Living Colour, most serious people will pick the original as "better." But don't tell me who is more respectable. Rather, tell me whom you would rather put in your CD player when you're driving around town. Honestly.

1. (It's 11pm) The internet or Jon Stewart?
2. Pavement or Wilco?
(Too lame? Try: Clinic or the Doves?)
3. Sonic Youth or Unwound?
4. (It's 1991) Fugazi or Nirvana?
5. Bikini Kill or Sleater-Kinney?
6. Bad Brains or Living Colour?
7. Fatboy Slim or Moby?
(Too lame? Do this one: Mouse on Mars or Aphex Twin?)
8. Le Tigre or Peaches?
9. Grandmaster Flash or Run DMC?
10. The Nation of Ulysses or The Make-Up?
11. Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve) or Alan Moore (The Watchmen)?
12. Mos Def or Talib Kweli?
13. Public Enemy or Dead Prez?
14. Nas or Jay-Z?
15. Bands with "mouse" in the title or bands with "cat" in the title?
16. The Cable Guy or The Matrix?
17. Repo Man or Slacker?
18. Juliette Binoche or Audrey Tatou?
19. Dude, Where's My Car? or Friday?
20. Afrika Bambaataa or Kraftwerk?
21. Adult or Fischerspooner?
(You can also substitute Ladytron for Adult)
22. Andy Warhol or Keith Haring?
23. Actual graffiti or Jean-Michel Basquiat?
24. Andre the Giant or Hulk Hogan?
25. "Vogue" era Madonna or Marilyn Monroe?
26. The Sopranos or The Simpsons?
27. Mac or PC?
28. Jill Scott or Alicia Keys?
29. Aimee Mann or Liz Phair?
30. Deep house or drum n bass?
31. Ambient or trip-hop?
32. (Want to dance) A live band or a great DJ?
33. Vegetarian or meat?
34. Juice or soda?
35. On a date: Sushi, yes or no?
36. On your own: Taco Bell, no or yes?
37. Organic vegetables or regular veggies?
38. Backpack or sling?
39. Dead Kennedys or Bad Religion?
40. A little sublime (not the band, the real thing) or a lot of beautiful?
41. Reggae or ska?
42. CDs or MP3s?
43. Atmosphere or Aesop Rock?
44. 1969 or 1979?
45. 1981 or 1991?
46. The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin?
47. Tolkein or Rowling?
(Too lame? Try: Le Guin or L'Engle?)
48. In New York: Brooklyn or the Lower East Side?
49. In the Bay Area: San Francisco or Berkeley?
50. On a mountain or on a beach? 

Obviously there's more that could reasonably be added. If people have ones they want to add (or if you want to make your own, 'specialty' sub-list), feel free to go ahead, in the comments, in an email to me, or on your own blog. Also, feel free to tell me if anything on the list absolutely sucks. I'm thinking of this as a kind of group project, rather than my own thingie. If other people join in, we can change the name to something else...

In particular, I would be grateful if people could put up more authors -- more literature. My tastes in literature are so obscure that it might throw off the whole list (I've read every author on Terry's Index).

The Nameless: Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake

[My recent computer problems -- fried laptop -- led me to pull out some archive CDs. On one I came across an essay I wrote in November that I thought I'd lost. Since I doubt that many magazines will still be interested in it, I thought I would put it on the blog today.]

A Novel of Names for a Community Without a Name
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
(Originally written in November, 2003)

I was captivated by this novel in large part because of the uncanny sense of identification I felt with Lahiri’s protagonist, Gogol Ganguli. I also think it raises a number of interesting issues regarding names: misnaming, renaming, and the epistemological problem of namelessness.

The Nameless: ABCD, South Asian American... This is a novel that represents – perhaps definitively – the experiences of a very specific community. But which community? Unfortunately, the community to which I refer has no name that is not clunkily sociological or somehow pejorative. Sociologically, they are second-generation South Asian immigrants, or South Asian Americans. By people within, and recently from, South Asia, they are called, pejoratively, ABCD’s (American Born Confused Desis). And while in recent years “ABCD” has lost its edge of mockery, and gained a measure of academic respect, it is still inadequately descriptive – something of a joke even if conference papers and a series of low-budget films have disseminated the title.

Against “ABCD,” critics like Vijay Prashad have attempted to simplify and unify categories by legitimizing the flexible name Desi. Many diasporic South Asians use this word as a community marker, irrespective of when they immigrated or if they even are immigrants. So a person on an H-1 visa is as much a desi as a person whose parents came to the US in the 1960s, and who speaks no South Asian language effectively. In parts of New Jersey and California these communities are blended, but elsewhere (especially on college campuses) there are sharp divides between different kinds of desis. Amongst the various communities that recognize the term, desi may work, but it remains a name like a Punjabi or Bengali pet-name, a name used around the house rather than recognized by a broader public. In this case, there is a chance that the term will reach a critical mass, but it is not yet broadly available. I find it hard to imagine the word rolling off the tongue of someone like Charlie Rose (who recently interviewed Lahiri at length on PBS).

Overdetermination: the Osama Diaspora. On the streets of America’s cities and towns, the problem is not the lack of a name, but rather, especially in the wake of 9/11, too many names –- and nearly all of them insulting. Before 9/11, the standard pejorative for an Indian man was merely “Apu,” a name that now seems completely benign in relation to what has followed. On the streets of south Philadelphia and Brooklyn, it is routine for people on the street (often minorities themselves) to colloquially throw out Muslim names (always Muslim names) as a kind of casual insult – “watch where you’re going, Abdul.” Sometimes politically conscious African Americans (the same folks who routinely greet me with ‘A salaam a laikum’) will use other names –- I was recently sort of pleased to be addressed by a street bookseller as “Habib” (Arabic: beloved, friend). Though there will be exceptions, it begins to seem likely that “Abdul” and “Mohammed” will come to fill the same slot as the old white ethnic slurs – “Mick” for an Irishman, or “Guido” for an Italian. For Sikh men of course, the misnaming is much more aggressive: “Osama” and “Bin Laden” are the most common mis-names one hears. One South Philly man (a caucasian), in a moment of inspired racist efficiency, recently referred to me simply as “Bin,” thus saving himself the expenditure of five syllables he no doubt did not have to spare.

A History of Naming Conundrums: Peoples of color. In the sense that there is no ‘good’ name, but rather a thousand pejoratives and ingroup pet-names, the experience of Desis/ABCDs/South Asian Americans/Osamas does echo that of African Americans, who have used and discarded a series of public names: “colored,” “Negro,” “black,” “African American,” the too-diluted-to-be-useful “people of color,” and the hybrid derogatory/pet-name “nigger/nigga.” The points of comparison are interesting and potentially very compelling, but beyond the scope of this particular review. To the extent that the experience of African American naming and self-naming has been difficult, however, it seems to me that the struggle to name the diasporic community, and of naming within the community, will be a long and difficult road.

“Gogol.” The great conceit of Lahiri’s novel is that her Gogol, the ambassador of a community without a name, is himself misnamed. His parents legally give him as a first name the last name of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol in the Massachusetts hospital where he is born. It is chosen with the understanding that it is merely a formality, and will in time become just a pet-name, because at the moment the grandmother’s letter, with the ritually-selected Hindu name on it, was lost somewhere in the mail from Calcutta. “Gogol,” the name of his father’s favorite writer, goes on the birth certificate, and it stays with him in his early school years. His parents give him a proper name, Nikhil, but it doesn’t really stick. As he goes to college, Gogol wants to redefine himself on terms that he feels are his own rather than those that come from his parents’ Bengali immigrant culture. In an amazing act of self-definition, which loses nothing by the fact that it is in fact a common event, he abandons the name Gogol, and tries to become someone else. In this review I won’t say anything further about what happens with Gogol’s attempt to rename (or find, identify) himself.

“Jhumpa,” according to Deep. Lahiri’s own experience as a writer echoes Gogol’s. In her recent Charlie Rose interview, Lahiri revealed (no surprise to anyone who knows Bengali names), that “Jhumpa” is her pet name rather than her good name. Growing up in America, however, she has chosen it as her official, public name. The gesture annoys some members of Lahiri’s family, who must find the public use of a private, family name to be inappropriate. But it is a gesture that allows Lahiri to continue to claim the version of herself she knows best, and that she wants others to know. Asserting the name “Jhumpa” is at once a misnaming and a refusal to be misnamed –- it is a powerful hybridizing speech act addressed to both her familial-ethnic community and to her American (actually global) readership. [And “Jhumpa” is a gesture, I must confess, that has got me thinking: I know my family would be horrified if I ever decided to identify myself in print as “Deep” (pet name) rather than as “Amardeep” (proper name)?]

Eponymous Nikolai. A word about the other Gogol. If a namesake is the person who is named after someone else, who is the person named? Answer: the eponym. As I mentioned earlier, the eponym of Lahiri’s protagonist is one of the many beloved madmen of Russian literature, Nikolai Gogol. Lahiri uses the nominal link between her protagonist and the writer Gogol seriously, but without allowing the Russian philosophical mood to weigh down her story. There are a number of interesting and provocative parallels to Gogol’s “The Overcoat” in The Namesake – especially regarding the odd status of names and naming in Gogol’s story. Gogol’s protagonist has a surreal name himself – Akaky Akakyevich (the latter means, son of Akaky), which suggests a kind of parthenogenetic birth, without history or family. Gogol refuses to name the office where Akaky works (“In the department of … but it is better not to name the department.”). In that the story toys with anonymity, with the prospect of namelessness, it is a perfect reference point for Lahiri’s story about the strangeness of the Indian immigrant experience in the United States.

Really, the child of immigrants begins in a kind of nowhere place. She is firmly of America, but is not quite an American, in part because she is not recognized as such by others. The child may have privileges -- access to education, significant mobility – but she still has to first discover and then adapt to American values and life-concepts, which are firmly resisted at home. She can buy herself the appropriate overcoat, but it will not be cheap, and it can always be stolen. Overcoats can be purchased, but it is difficult to change the fact that the city remains cold.

Catachresis. The critic Gayatri Spivak has revived the Greek term “catechresis,” in a number of recent essays (see The Critique of Postcolonial Reason). It is actually a rather simple and straightforward concept: when you misname something because there is no name for it, that is catachresis. “American Indian” is an example of catechresis – there was no singular ethnicity to describe all the different civilizations of the western hemisphere before European discovery and conquest. Lahiri’s The Namesake is a novel of catachresis, at once an American immigrant story and an intriguing contribution to a growing postcolonial canon. As my example of “American Indian” shows, misnaming is global, and it doesn’t start with American school teachers who find it difficult to pronounce difficult Indian names like “Siddharada” (who inevitably gets renamed “Sid”) or “Jaswinder” (who inevitably becomes “Jesse”).

Though it was quite a different thing, misnaming and renaming is a process that began much earlier -- at the moment of the colonial encounter. Remember that it is Anglicization that originally creates Gogol’s last name – Gangopadhyay became Ganguli. It goes further: “India” (like Calcutta and Delhi) is itself is an Anglicization of “al-Hind,” the Persian name for the area around the Indus River. (And Lahiri, in her novel, plays with the fact that the Ganguli family lives on Amherst Street in Calcutta – while the American Ganguli’s live in a college town in Massachusetts.) What was India before it was misnamed? The confusion of the community-without-a-name is merely the latest extension of a permanent historical crisis in naming.

Soon everyone will have one.

[Source: Associated Press]

New book of Eqbal Ahmad essays; Bangladesh 1971

In the Daily Times of Pakistan, there's a descriptive review of a book of essays by Eqbal Ahmad, called Between Past and Future.

Ahmad, a life-long dissident both in South Asia and in the United States, led a remarkably full and varied life. Born in Bihar in 1934, during the Partition his family migrated to Pakistan. He came to the U.S in the early 1950s, and eventually did a Ph.D. at Princeton in Middle East Studies. Then he went to Algeria to support the FLN (Frantz Fanon was a colleague). Then he returned to the U.S., where he soon found himself caught up in anti-Vietnam war activism (he was charged alongside the Berrigan brothers with conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger; the charges were later dropped). Then he finally slowed down: between 1982 and 1997 he taught at Hampshire College, where he developed a reputation as a clear-headed radical political thinker. He returned to Pakistan in 1997, and died in 1999. (A more detailed biography of Ahmad can be found here)

The highlight of the review is the account of Ahmad's criticism of the actions of the Pakistani government against East Pakistan (soon to become Bangladesh) in 1971:

In his article “Letter to a Pakistani Diplomat” that first appeared in the New York Review of Books, Eqbal responded to protests by officials against his highly critical statement to the New York Times that followed the army action in East Pakistan on March 25, 1971. First, he wrote, he had no natural sympathy either for the Bangladesh movement or Shiekh Mujibur Rahman who impressed him as being a limited man. Second, he pointed out that he himself was originally from Bihar and most of his people had migrated to East Pakistan and many were killed in the period preceding the military’s intervention. But, he said, the only viable course for West Pakistanis was to insist on the immediate termination of martial law, convening of the duly elected National Assembly and a commitment that the majority decision of that assembly shall be binding on all. Eqbal spelt out the principles underlying his position in these words: “I know that I shall be condemned for my position. For someone who is facing a serious trial in America, it is not easy to confront one’s own government. Yet it is not possible for me to oppose American crimes in Southeast Asia or Indian occupation of Kashmir while accepting the crimes my government is committing against the people of East Pakistan. Although I mourn the death of Biharis by Bengali vigilantes, and condemn the irresponsibilities of the Awami League, I am not willing to equate their actions with that of the government and the criminal acts of an organised professional army.” It would be useful to keep in mind that many similarly refuse to accept such an equation when it comes to the Israeli army and the Palestinians or the Kashmiris’ struggle against the Indian army. But few amongst us paid heed to what Eqbal wrote in those fateful days about what was happening in East Pakistan, soon to become Bangladesh.

Ahmad was right about Bangladesh in 1971; he was also right about Algeria and Vietnam. What else was he right about? I'll have to pick up the book to see.

Stanley Crouch excerpt, with sincere editorial suggestions

I was a little restrained in commenting on Crouch/Peck last week because I hadn't actually read any of Stanley Crouch's fictional prose.

But today, through Ed Rants (see his parody of the Crouch/Peck encounter), I came across an excerpt from Crouch's novel Don't the Moon Look Lonesome. It's a novel that begins, at least, with an account of an interracial romance in trouble:

This contrast, which they used to joke about, meant too much right now. That put a gash in her spirit. They were no longer so damn superior to the dank rhetoric of racial talk. The two had been together for five years. The first four were so good they presently seemed like no more than an elaborate fantasy, a tale she told to herself about an idiotically wonderful life she had never lived. Over the last ten or twelve months, the supreme closeness of their love was suffering. Their home, as if from nowhere, was invaded by emotional disorder. It might linger, it might not. She hated most the mystery of wondering just how long that divisive prickliness would dominate his mood, then infect hers. If she had to experience the sudden spread of this interior cactus, Carla preferred the times when it disappeared almost immediately and Maxwell became himself again, not a perfect guy by any means, but her man. Then, sure, there was reaffirmation in his tone of voice, in his touch, in the way his eyes put themselves on her, as if she were now clear to him again, not a blue-eyed fog he could almost see through, knowing no warmth, no substance. At first, it always felt like a gleaming gift to know that her soul and flesh had risen from beneath a dehumanizing abstraction and had returned to their rightful place. Way inside, however, her heart eventually felt like a rubber band that had been pulled and pulled until it could not go back to its original size. Some hard, hard bitterness went with that.

The word for this is: truly and seriously overwrought.

My shortened, simplified version:

Carla considered their five years together during the flight. Over the past few years, their intimacy had suffered, and Carla now wondered if the relationship would survive at all. Maxwell had become prone to a fearful moodiness that, as now, seemed to begin and end inexplicably. As the airplane finally approached Houston, she worried that the gap of racial difference that lay between them--always such a liability when they traveled together--had hardened in his mind.

Does my revision convey anything less than Crouch's original prose? Do all of Crouch's metaphors about rubber bands, interior cactuses, and blue-eyed fogs really add anything? And I haven't said anything about some of the grossly misogynist writing that comes later in the same chapter (which I won't quote).

End of Jivha?

Say it isn't so...

I never even got the guy's email address. If anybody knows it, please forward it to me -- I want to plead with him to keep his archives online (right now you can still access them if you go through a permalink, but not from the main page).

I think his posts on Indian secularism were especially great. Scholars of the subject will find that it is a gold mine of observations on the news of the past year.

Beyond that, Jivha had a masterful ability to decode hypocrisy, posturing, and spin in the Indian media. He was an important voice, and will be missed.

Goodbye Ambience, Hello Music: Vishal Vaid and Karsh Kale

Saturday night we went to see Vishal Vaid (see this thoughtful interview at MyBindi) at Joe's Pub in New York City. It was pretty great -- he and his band have found what I think is just the right way to blend the traditional bhajan/ghazal style of music with a few modern, 'fusion' elements. I'm not sure if Vaid is planning to put out a solo CD; I think he probably should.

Vaid sang on a number of tracks on Karsh Kale's 2001 CD Realize, which is one of the better examples in the chill-out drum n bass genre. The attraction on that CD was the sophisticated production and the Asian underground "vibe." While I've always enjoyed listening to Realize, but I've never loved it -- it's mostly music I listen to in the background. (Talvin Singh's Ha, in contrast, is something I can listen to intensely.)

I'm glad to see Vaid going in a new direction here, aiming for a return to a style of music approaching conventional light-classical style of bhajan/ghazal singing. The electronics are completely out. When Karsh Kale did come into the performance for the last two songs, he was playing live drums. There's more emphasis on song structure, and on the content of the songs themselves. The poetry of forbidden love and the meditations on life and death -- the truly priceless heritage of the Indo-Islamic literary tradition -- come to the foreground. Say goodbye to ambience, and hello to a (dynamic and evolving concept of) the real thing.

Though Vaid's music is as a whole much closer to the traditional ghazal style, there are still many things Vaid is doing that deviate from what you hear in Jagjit Singh, for instance. I'm not an expert (to say the least) on this, but to my ear he is using a much wider vocal range, and considerably more emphasis on improvisation. Vaid works the tension between the formal austerity of the ghazal and the wild expressivism of the Qawwali aria.

Apparently, he is doing it from a perspective of personal investment and scholarship, as this interviewer found:

In addition to providing vocals for the electronically-oriented Realize band of which Karsh Kale is the driving force, Vishal also does more traditional ghazal mehfils, with Karsh accompanying him on the tabla, and he’s acquainted with the work of great Urdu and Punjabi poets such as Bullhe Shah, Ghalib, Qateel Shifai, and their ilk. More than this, he seems to have his finger on the pulse of the newer Urdu poetry developing in the wake of the very political poetic period that seems to have died down a bit with the passing away or decreasing activity of the great Socialist poets such as Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Sahir Ludhianwi, and Habib Jalib. Vishal also writes ghazals himself, though I didn’t have the presence of mine to ask whether the short bait that he iterates in “Liberation” is his own:

dawâ milî na masîhâ milâ
kashtî ko na kinâra milâ

We found no medicine and no messiah,
Our boat found no shore. (from the MyBindi interview)

Vaid takes the classical tradition seriously, and perhaps modernizes it in a controlled way. Others (in recent years) have tended to approach the tradition as more of a mining operation.

Counterpoint: I really enjoyed Vaid's original songs and his style of singing, but several of the people in my party thought that Rahis Khan's astonishing tabla playing was really the standout aspect of the evening. My cousin from Delhi found Vaid's occasional use of integrated English translation to be a little irritating. I didn't mind so much because I don't have any training in Hindustani classical music, and therefore don't have much investment in its "authenticity." Also, the translations open the music up to a much larger audience in the U.S. as well as elsewhere than might otherwise be possible. Having watched the rise and fall of many a world music "sensation" (Bob Marley, King Sunny Ade, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Fela Kuti, Bally Sagoo, Cheb i Sabbah, etc.), it seems to me that an effort at translation can make a very big difference. (See my earlier piece on the Brazilian dance music fad for more on the importance of translation.)

Vaid also does some vocals on Karsh Kale's new CD Liberation. I haven't heard it yet, so I'm not sure whether what I saw on Saturday is a trend that Kale is also following. Maybe when I get the CD I will write a follow-up.

[This post was slightly modified]

DJ notes

On Friday, I attempted to entertain 125 people for a few hours. It was fun, but the dancing was a bit weak. So here are a few quick notes, to the guests as well as to myself.

Notes to wedding guests:

1. You are required to burn off your dinner with at least half an hour of vigorous dancing. I will play "It's the Time to Disco," "Koi Kahe Kehta Rahe," and "Mundian to Bach Ke" as often as you want, up to five times. I will even play Gloria Gaynor's "I will survive," Sister Sledge's "Good Times," Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," the Bee Gees's "Stayin Alive," and any Abba that you may require. It's a wedding: I will play whatever you want. (Except Audioslave -- sorry, friend.)

Important: sitting around outside the wedding hall, sipping champagne, and enjoying the sea breeze is not an acceptable alternative. Come back inside and sweat it up a little; the water is free.

2. Please don't approach a DJ playing music to an empty dance floor, and congratulate him on the great music he is playing. Get on the dance floor and dance, mofo!

3. For the older folks likely to complain about the volume of the music (it wasn't even that loud): bring earplugs. Or go check out the sea breeze. Please.

4. Kids: I will play Jay-Z's "Dirt off your shoulder," because it has a good beat and a positive message (even with the "N" word). However, I will not play "99 Problems," or any song with the word "bitch" in it. Please don't ask me to. I will also prefer not to play Usher's "Yeah," because it actually kind of sucks. How about Christina Milian or Nina Skye instead?

And why don't you like the Black Eyed Peas's "Hey Mama"? I know they're a little too radio-friendly, but come on, it's a good beat. (What's wrong with kids these days?)

5. Guests at a culturally mixed wedding are required to come three hours early to socialize and develop an appropriate comfort level with people of the other party/ ethnic group. Activities could include the joint building of sandcastles, the drafting of sub-committee proposals, debates over the aesthetic quality of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, as well as the general personal curiosity and/or erotic tension essential in any environment where substantial dancing is likely to occur.

/bureaucratese

Notes to self:

1. Avoid spilling champagne on your laptop while using it to play music. (ARGH) Especially avoid doing it three weeks after the warranty expired.

2. Avoid the song "Fanaa" from Yuva. Other people aren't that excited about it. (Luckily you knew enough to avoid "Dol Dol" from the same film.)

3. Avoid Outkast's "Hey Ya" at the end of the night, when only 15 people are on the dance floor. Too much, man.

4. Hire 50 migratory drunken Punjabi wedding guests for all future wedding engagements. Without them, no party is truly complete. (Also without them, your own limitations as a DJ become somewhat of a liability...)

Freethinkers vs. Secularists: Susan Jacoby

Overall, I think Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers is a marvelous book. Her research helps me with the project I'm working on, and it's quite well written.
 
At the very least, I think it will lead to a renewal of general interest in Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll. Jacoby draws a vivid picture of each, and finds some particularly compelling quotes from their respective works. I already cited one of the great quotes from Ingersoll, in my 'pre-review' of the book last week. The kernel: "Secularism teaches us to be just here and now." 
 
Thomas Paine
 
Paine is extraordinary -- he nailed several major veins of acceptable discrimination, and devoted (sacrificed, really) his life to ending them. To begin with, he spoke out against the disabilities against English Jews when he was still living in England (here he was almost 100 years ahead of his time). Then, after moving to Philadelphia in 1774 on Ben Franklin's suggestion, he helped to found the first U.S. anti-slavery organization, and wrote fiery editorials denouncing the hypocrisy of the pro-independence American settlers. As Jacoby puts it: 

Paine regarded it as particularly ironic that Americans should complain with increasing vociferousness of injustices done them by Britain while the colonists themselves enslaved other men. Six weeks after the article was published, the first antislavery society in America was established in Philadelphia, with Paine as a founding member. Certain that American independence would lead as inevitably to the abolition of slavery as to a revolution in religion, the English immigrant soon became one of the most ardent and articulate advocates of rebellion against England.

He went back to England for a visit that ended up turning into something more. He wrote The Rights of Man as a response to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke condemned the French Revolution; Paine, in contrast, extolled its possibilities. England was hostile to the French revolution at the time, as it had dangerous implications for the local aristocracy. Paine was forced to flee to France; he was "tried and convicted of sedition in absentia, barred from ever returning to the country of his birth, and burned in effigy." In France, he soon fell afoul of the violence of the Jacobins. He was thrown in prison by the Jacobins, and spent nine months in a French prison before James Monroe got him released (1793-4). Sick with a suppurating ulcer, he then lived, rather meekly, in James Monroe's house.

In 1802, Jefferson invited him to come back to the U.S. But because of Paine's extremely aggressive 1794 book The Age of Reason, Paine found himself in the hot-seat yet again. Here Paine moved from attacking the injustices of Britain's treatments of its religious minorities, the foul American institution of slavery, and the terroristic violence of Jacobin France, to attack religion itself. This is Jacoby's quote from Paine:

Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God were not open to every man alike. Each of these churches show certain books, which they call revelations, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses; face to face; the Christians say their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.

The fire here reminds me of Voltaire.
 
The Absence of "God" in the U.S. Constitution
 
Many people (especially colleagues in Europe) seem to think that America is somehow less secular than European countries, because America is a more religious culture than the northern European societies are.
 
But it's not really true. Politically, the United States is every bit as secularized as Europe, and in some cases (in education especially), the Jeffersonian idea of a "wall of separation between Church and State" has led the country to a form of secularism that is much more rigorous than that practiced in England, Germany, or the Netherlands. Thanks in large part to the revolutionary vision of Thomas Jefferson, America's constitution is framed entirely in the world of human rights and human obligations; it has no references to God.
 
Even the references to "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God, "our Creator" and "Divine Providence" in the Declaration of Independence, point to an essentially Deist entity, where God is acknowledged as a creator but not as an active presence. Even in the Declaration, the onus is on human beings to make laws and voice protest using their own judgment as a guide. (And Jacoby argues that the phrase "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God" points more to Isaac Newton -- the laws of Nature being those of science -- than it does to the Bible.)
 
Which isn't to say that this country is perfect on matters of tolerance of dissent, or treatment of minorities. Despite the federal requirement for disestablishment, states have been sometimes painfully slow to remove a fabric of laws that essentially reflect a Christian worldview. Jacoby argues that standing controversies like abortion, the death penalty, and the censorship of film and literature are as much about religion and secularism as the more obviously religiously-inflected issues like prayer in schools, "Under God," and federal funding for "faith-based" organizations.
 
Where the book's argument begins to show its seams is in the role of the freethinkers in achieving the real secularization of American society through the juridical resolution of the above issues (generally, to the favor of a secularist perspective). Jacoby argues that "freethinking" and secularism are essentially one and the same (this appositeness is even suggested in her title: Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism). But her actual historical research, especially in the 20th century, shows that the phenomenon of Paine, Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Grimke sisters, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, etc., were in actuality a relatively small component of the long struggle to achieve and sustain American secularism.
 
Jacoby laments that the current movements to ensure the maintenance of secularism as well as continued secularization, through cases like Michael Newdow's, are generally supported by people who refuse to criticize religion per se (the ACLU figures particularly strongly in many of the major Supreme Court decisions after World War II). But I think the critique of organized religion isn't necessary, and potentially does more harm than good in the sense that it writes off the many people of faith who are supportive of strong secularism in the United States.
 
I have much more to say about this book -- Jacoby has some great bits on Antonin Scalia (she nails him), American feminism, John F. Kennedy, and the Civil Rights movement. But I'm toying with the idea of writing a proper book review for a magazine somewhere (anyone got a suggestion?) so perhaps I should save some things for later.

Speaking of James Wood and Dale Peck...

...There's a review of their respective new books in Salon by Laura Miller. Miller finds a similarity in their tastes, even as she notes that Peck gets no respect while Wood is almost universally respected.

It answers the point that reader Kumar raised in his comment to my take on Wood's "Broken Estate," which is whether Wood considers himself to be a believer or not (it's only relevant because Wood dwells at length on the personal faith of the writers he works with). It seems to be confirmed that Wood is not of faith, but the Salon writer sees his criticism as nevertheless religious:

By now, it's become commonplace to state that Wood, who was raised as an evangelical Anglican, has replaced his lost faith with his belief in literature. For an apostate, he is one God-haunted guy; religion is still the stick by which Wood measures all of human experience, which may be one reason why jokes make him nervous. He calls satire the "comedy of correction" because it judges its characters by the unyielding standards of a deity, specifically the scornfully laughing Yahweh of the Old Testament.

Although Wood doesn't go so far as to draw the obvious parallel, note that the compassionate "comedy of forgiveness" requires that the writer surrender his status as lofty creator and enter his characters, his creations, to the degree that his words, thoughts and being effectively merge with theirs. He becomes them. Remind you of anyone? Yet for all the New Testament overtones of this model, Wood labels it "secular comedy." Satire, he writes, is "religious comedy," because it doles out "punishment for those who deserve it" as opposed to "secular comedy," which offers "forgiveness to those who don't." In Wood's secular comedy, characters are "free to contradict themselves without being corrected by the author, are free to make mistakes without fearing authorial judgment."

There's nothing especially secular about any of this, if by secularism you mean something more positive and humanist than the mere absence of religion. Are these characters truly free, or are they merely unsupervised? The signal quality of Wood's comedy of forgiveness isn't liberation but relief -- at the departure of a prosecutorial God/author whose chill shadow still makes Wood shiver.

Though not technically religious, Wood thinks about literature religiously, and this, as much as his obvious intelligence and erudition, endears him to literary people, particularly authors, even when they disagree with him. It's not hard to see why. If literature is a religion, then what does that make novelists? For the chosen few, something akin to gods. Of course, hardly any contemporary writers are permitted to enter Wood's kingdom of heaven (only Monica Ali, in this collection), but many would rather see themselves as taking a long shot at divinity than as laboring in a quaint niche at the margins of a pop-mad society.

I think I agree with this perception, though I should really check out the new book to be sure.

Strip-searched or merely frisked? George Fernandes and U.S. Customs

Was the former Defense Minister strip-searched or not?

It was widely reported in the Indian media a few days ago that he was strip-searched while passing through JFK on his way to a conference in Latin America. The story surfaced after being recounted in a new book by formder deputy US Secretary of State Strobe Talbott (it's called Engaging India).

[And yes, this is the same George Fernandes implicated in the Tehelka scandal.]

Now, via Jivha, I find that Indian Express reports Fernandes saying he wasn't strip-searched so much as frisked. People who've traveled through airports in the U.S. recently will recognize the drill: remove coat, shoes, arms in the air, etc. Perhaps Fernandes is, er, covering up his actual treatment? Or (more likely), he simply miscommunicated (or exaggerated) what happened to him in his earlier conversation with Talbott.

If so, this is no longer a scandal, and I am no longer outraged.

Blogging Survey

XX has a link to a blogging survey being organized by students at UCI.

If you keep a blog, fill it out!

Throwdown: Crouch vs. Peck

Blogs (well, a few of them) are abuzz with critic Stanley Crouch's unprovoked slap of critic Dale Peck.

Crouch apparently has a history of this sort of thing. According to Salon, he got fired from the Village Voice for a similar kind of dust-up in the late 1980s:

It's true that Crouch's blustery style and pugilistic spirit can sometimes get a little out of control. In another bit of Crouchian legend, he got fired after throwing down some street fighter justice on a Village Voice colleague who disagreed with his dislike of gangsta rap music -- a brief but intense dust-up that led to the police being called and Crouch getting the ax. Crouch later described this as the best thing that could have happened to him, careerwise: "I want them to know that just because I write, doesn't mean I can't also fight," he said.

And Crouch has made a crude homophobic slur against Peck before:

"Dale Peck," he says, "is a troubled queen, and the only person who cares about him being a troubled queen is himself."

No sympathies for Crouch here -- even if he was trashed by Peck earlier.

You would think that Crouch would be able to take his lumps -- after all, his reputation as a critic is based on his pull-no-punches take on African-American intelligentsia. I'm sure that more than one left-learning black critic, writer (Toni Morrison), or filmmaker (Spike Lee) has probably wanted to slap Crouch over the years, but they're refrained. If you can dish it, you have to be able to take it.

Speaking for myself, I can't really take it, so I try not to dish it.

[Here is Sven Birkerts criticizing Peck's "Hatchet Job" technique in Bookforum, if you haven't already read it.]

A fake hate crime, and a real one

A fake hate crime in France (via Sharleen).

And a real one, in Queens.

[Update: The story in Newsday has a photo of the victim, Rajinder Singh, after the assault.]

More on English professors

Read this piece by Sharleen Mondal. It's excellent.

It's in response to this long article in this month's The Believer by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. There's too much in the essay to summarize it simply. I guess the best description of his take on attending an MLA convention is open-minded but skeptical. I've only read about half of it so far (have to get back to Susan Jacoby!), but I approve of everything I've seen so far.

I'm also grateful because Sharleen turns directs me to Charlie Bertsch, a 'punk rock' English prof. at Arizona.

Musical oddities and little treasures (and a U2 parody)

I'm preparing to DJ the wedding of two friends this weekend. Mostly that means, lining up the 'Greatest Hits of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and today!' (pronounced in your best radio voice). It's stressful to line up just the right songs. In this case (it will be a culturally mixed crowd widely variable by age), it might even be impossible. Some will want Abba, others will want the latest Bollywood numbers (as in, Rishi Rich's "U&I" from Hum Tum).

As a way of procrastinating the real work of delineating a tasteful, 'memorable experience,' I've found myself flipping through my collection and enjoying oddities, all of which are utterly unusable:

1. Orlandivo, Onda Anda O meu Amor, from Soul Samba 70s. Somewhere between samba and the Isley Brothers ("Between the Sheets")

2. Ozzy and 'Madonna,' "Crazy Train," white label mix. A hard house beat, sampled guitars from Ozzy Osbourne, and a woman singing bowdlerized Ozzy lyrics (throwing in random riffs to the effect of "show me that your love is for real," etc.). This is supposedly Madonna's voice, and it sometimes even sort of sounds like her. But it's not Madonna.

3. Britney Spears, Madonna, and Rishi Rich, "Me Against the Music (Bhangra mix)." Yes, an authorized remix of Britney Spears with Dhol. It makes the whole thing a little noisy, but it might be playable to a certain crowd under certain conditions.

4. Henry Rollins, "I Hate U2." This is Rollins, doing live stand-up comedy in Dublin. In this bit he's trashing one of Ireland's (many) sacred cows. The parts about U2 are hilarious. The parts where he talks about what he thinks about when he's working out are less so.

[I know U2 is pretty widely liked and respected by most 20-30 somethings out there. Rollins, as a veteran rock n roll guy, has his own beef. And I shouldn't be glib; I have a long history with this band (The Joshua Tree was the first LP I ever bought). But look at these lines:

"I have spoke[n] with the jungle angels
I have held hands with the devil
It was warm in the night
I was cold as a stone"

Bono loves the juxtaposition of opposites. He also likes to keep it very, very simple. But can't we do better than angels, devils, warm, and cold? The meanings cancel each other out, leaving only a goopy, indeterminate emotion as a residue.

To illustrate, here are my U2 parody lyrics:

You were on the inside, but now you're out
This world seemed hard before it all went soft
I asked for too much, but now I got nothing,
You were right, baby, you were right
You got to cut to black
before you see the white light

Does it sound U2 ish? ]

5. Yo Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin, "Ave Maria." My man is on the cello. And Señor McFerrin shows he can sing much more than trite reggae-pop. Si, Señor.

6. Grupo Batuque, "Tabla Samba," off the Indica Brazilia CD. Everyone goes, "What is this?"

7. Ursula 1000, "Ram Balram" off the Bombay 2: Electric Vindaloo CD. It might make you laugh, but it's still funky.

8. Jack White, songs from the Cold Mountain soundtrack. Jack White of the White Stripes did a bunch of 'old-timey' style songs for Anthony Minghella. They're nice, in kind of an "O brother, how on earth did you get this gig?" kind of way.

9. Nelly Furtado, "Party's Over (Reprise Mix)" off the Ultra Chilled 2 CD. Listen for all the goofy noises she makes!

Harold and Kumar -- hunting Hamburgers in New Jersey

Dude, am I the only one who is excited about Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle?

See some reviews of the film here.

Unfortunately, I will be in India on July 30, when the film is scheduled to release. So I will miss the first 10 days of the era of HKGTWC.

I'm curious to know how they will retitle this for Indian release. Bend it Like Beckham became Football, Shootball, Hai Rabba! (this is true).
Maybe this will become Burger Chahta Hai?

Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers; Robert Ingersoll, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln

[Broadband is down at home; posting will be limited as I'm on the internet at a noisy library terminal]

Secularism teaches us to be good here and now. I know nothing better than goodness. Secularism teaches us to be just here and now. It is impossible to be juster than just. . . . Secularism has no 'castles in Spain.' It has no glorified fog. It depends upon realities, upon demonstrations; and its end and aim is to make this world better every day--to do away with poverty and crime, and to cover the world with happy and contented homes. (Robert Ingersoll, American secularist; quoted in Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers)

I'm finally reading Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers, a book that was scheduled to come out in March, but which for some reason I didn't find in the bookstore until yesterday. I'm only about a third of the way through it, but so far I'm enjoying it, and learning a lot. The arguments about secularism aren't always convincing on every point, but the research she's done is great -- it fills in many gaps in my (admittedly paltry) knowledge of these chapters in American history. So far, I've read great chapters on the revolutionary period, Thomas Paine (who was more radical in his beliefs and in the manner of his life than I'd ever imagined), as well as Abraham Lincoln.

One of the most important benefits of Jacoby's argument about the Revolutionary period is the way she links the Evangelical Protestants (many of them southerners) with the elite freethinkers who were responsible for many of the signature features of the U.S. constitution -- Thomas Jefferson, James Madison. The evangelicals wanted to keep religious "tests" as well as any references to God out of the Constitution to protect their freedom to organize as well as proselytize. Baptists and Congregationalists were, therefore, key players in ensuring disestablishment, first in Virginia, and then nationally. Jacoby talks about this briefly in her Beliefnet interview:

A secular government was developed to protect the rights of religious minorities. Most Americans don't know that God is not mentioned in the Constitution. It was a coalition of religious Evangelicals and freethinkers or deists who joined together to get this ratified. And why did the Evangelicals want this then? Because they were a minority and they deeply feared government interference with religion. This Constitution basically placed the Episcopal Church, the established religion in the South before the Revolution, on a level playing field with all of the Evangelical Protestant denominations that were sprouting up. The effect of this was to enable them to proselytize for their own religion in ways that if there had been a union of established church and state they never would have been able to do. Ironically, it's the separation of church and state that has probably enabled religion to flourish throughout the 20th century in this country in ways that it doesn't in other developed nations.

Here are some reviews of the Jacoby, and my reactions to them:

1. Scott McLemee, in a generally positive review, 'grumbles' about Jacoby's over-use of the term "religiously correct" to describe versions of American history that try to simplify the broiling chaos of America's religious and irreligious sects in the interest of unifying American culture under the banner of Protestant Christianity.

2.. Richard Wrightman Fox's review in Slate points out a possible flaw that stems from Jacoby's own research, and that is visible between the lines of her history. And that is that so many of the primary figures in her story are of arguable importance -- they were always a little less than fully respectable, even if they were able to command large audiences.

As a history, Freethinkers does not look critically enough at the notion of "influence." Jacoby's favorite freethinker Robert Ingersoll, an Illinois lawyer and politician, evolved after the Civil War into a well-known "agnostic" lecturer and writer. But to call him "the preeminent orator of his generation" suggests a cultural centrality that he did not command. Infamous as much as famous, he entertained a mass audience without being widely followed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the greatest feminist thinker of the mid-19th century. But her stature stemmed from her general appeal for women's rights, not her dismissal of the churches or her challenge to divorce laws. Most contemporaries regarded her anticlericalism and her free-divorce advocacy as anachronistic survivals from an antebellum era strangely infatuated with "individual sovereignty." Tom Paine's influence took a steep dive as early as 1794, when his Age of Reason assailed Christianity as a laughable "mystery" religion. True, he remained a hero to many 19th-century American anticlerical rationalists. But every social and political viewpoint, secular or religious, gained adherents in a century that saw the population explode from 5 million to 75 million. Paine's relative influence declined dramatically even if the number of his admirers grew.

3. Alan Wolfe, in his New Republic review (not available online), talks about some interesting aspects of the debate that don't appear too much in Jacoby's book, including especially the notorious Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who in the late 1950s and 60s championed the effort to remove prayer from public schools. One of Wolfe's complaints about Jacoby is that in privileging non-believers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she neglects the important role played by pro-religious advocates in the women's rights movement in the 19th century:

One religious dissenter celebrated by Jacoby who did achieve significant historical fame is Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leader of the first wave of American feminism. Stanton spent a major portion of her late years writing The Woman's Bible, an attack on Christianity for its malecenteredness, and she also gave frequent speeches arguing that organized religion was hostile to women. In this regard, she stood in sharp contrast to Susan B. Anthony, who concluded, not without reason, that it would be good to have on the side of female suffrage all those myriad women willing to join a Christian temperance organization. By Jacoby's lights, we ought to be celebrating Anthony and forgetting Stanton--but, as even Jacoby concludes, Stanton is hardly treated as a non-person by contemporary feminists. And so Jacoby, to protect her thesis, shifts her ground. Yes, Stanton is well known, but "the essential role of agnostics in the women's rights movement has never been acknowledged."

The phrasing in this paragraph is a little shifty -- I don't think it's quite true that Jacoby shifts her ground; I think Wolfe is actually mischaracterizing her position.

4. Christopher Hitchens, in his Washington Post review, seems to really enjoy the book. His complaint is that Jacoby doesn't consider the importance of non-believing conservatives:

If the book has a fault, it is the near-axiomatic identification of the secular cause with the liberal one. Susan Jacoby has what might be called ACLU politics. To read her, you would not know that two of the most prominent intellectual gurus of American conservatism -- Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss -- were both determined nonbelievers. H.L. Mencken, who if not exactly a conservative was certainly not a liberal, had vast contempt for religion but is cited only briefly here for his role in the Scopes trial in Tennessee.

There's probably some truth in this, though it seems a little self-serving on Hitchens' part to mention it.

5. Michael Kazin's review, in the New York Times, is a little disappointing. He ends the review with a couple of paragraphs that don't quite make sense:

On the other hand, freethinkers in the United States are unlikely to talk many people into abandoning their belief in an afterlife and their reverence for Scripture. In 1892 Ingersoll gave a lovely eulogy for his friend Walt Whitman, whom, he said, ''accepted and absorbed all theories, all creeds, all religions, and believed in none.'' But this is a difficult stance to take, and few Americans have ever taken it.

Religious diversity untrammeled by government is a hard-won and signal achievement of our society, thanks to the efforts of James Madison and other enlightened minds. It would be unreasonable to suppose that a rigorous humanism could replace this kind of freedom, which remains rare in a world of warring faiths.

But Jacoby isn't arguing that reason should replace freedom... Nowhere does she say that secularism requires that people give up the freedom to religious expression and belief.

[Expect more on Jacoby from me in the next few days]

India-related resources at the Complete Review

Dan Green from The Reading Experience linked to a site he is associated with called The Complete Review in a recent post.

It has a wealth of resources, including a number of thorough reviews of books by Indian authors (including Upamanyu Chatterjee, Githa Hariharan, and Qurratulain Hyder -- people whose work I enjoy, but who are not widely known outside of India).

Also recommended is this useful analysis of the James Laine book on Sivaji, as well as the subsequent harassment of him and anyone even remotely associated (culminating with the Sambhaji Brigade's attack on the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute a a few months ago).

Personal Law in India: Triple Talaq, Mehr, and why it doesn't matter anyways

I was briefly excited to see some movement regarding Triple Talaq (where men can instantly divorce their wives) from the Indian Muslim Personal Law Board. But, as Soma Wadhwa writes in this week's Outlook, what the MPLB has ended up with is pretty disappointing. Moreover, many other substantial issues relating to women's rights in the Muslim community are simply not being addressed by the overwhelmingly male board (1 woman, 41 men).

Muslim women's advocates have other issues they want addressed (such as the right of Muslim women to divorce men), and are clear-headed on what it will take to get there:

This was a far cry from the original promise of a draft model nikahnama, a promise now deferred to the board's November meet in Kozhikode. Women's groups and activists in the community who have been lobbying tirelessly for a ban on triple talaq for years now are obviously disappointed. "The board has little concern for women and their rights," regrets Hasina Khan of Awaz-e-Niswan, a Mumbai-based support group for Muslim women. "ngos and civil society have very little dialogue with them, and there are very few women on the board anyway." Agrees Nazneen Barkath, president of the Madurai-based All India Progressive Muslim Conference, "It is, of course, necessary to get rid of the un-Islamic practice of triple talaq, but the long-term battle must be for women's participation in the affairs of the jamaat (community). Unless Muslim women get a due share in the administration of mosques, women's issues will only be decided by men." A fact that Lucknow-based Naseem Iqtidar Ali, the lone woman in AIMPLB's 41-member-strong executive committee, knows through experience. Her demand that Muslim women be granted the right to divorce their husbands (tafviz-e-talaq) was ignored outright at the Kanpur meeting. "The board just has to make it mandatory that a clause giving wives the right to divorce is inserted in all nikahnamas. Today, talaq can be so unfair to women," she says.

Much of the debate amongst Personal Law Board members relates to what is the best interpretation of Sharia. The problem is that Sharia was composed entirely by human interpretations of the Quran; it is not strictly what the Quran says, and in some cases there are arguably deviations. Moreover, in India in particular, there is a long history of Muslim personal law as adjudicated by British lawyers in colonial India:

While the orthodoxy's strongest argument against abolishing the practice of triple talaq in one sitting has always been that it is based on the Shariat or the Divine Laws, liberals push for a more contemporary understanding of the genesis of these Divine Laws. The original message in the Quran was in its intent and design both radical and humanitarian. The corpus of rules articulated centuries after the death of Prophet Mohammad by the Muslim establishment in the light of the dominant patriarchal ethos of the emerging society were incorporated as the Shariat. Liberals point out that rules characterised by the ulemas as Sharia, even though entirely the creation of a human agency, became vested with the sanctity of being either revealed or divine. Plus, in India, the Anglo-Mohammedan law evolved by the colonial courts in their effort to apply the laws of the Quran (in cases where the parties were Muslims) also began to be construed as a part of the Shariat. These laws, the handiwork of those who were not even nominally Muslims, were justified through the legal fiction that the courts were not interpreting the Shariat but merely applying it.

Muslim personal law as it now stands owes much more to Anglo-Mohammedan law than it does to official Sharia (much less the Quran, only 'real' source of authority in Islam).

The triple talaq issue has been hotly controversial since the Shah Bano decision in 1986. There, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of an elderly woman who had been divorced by her husband with a triple talaq. Shah Bano had demanded maintenance (alimony), which her ex-husband had refused. There is actually a provision for this in the sharia. According to Madhu Kishwar, in her essay "Pro-Women or Anti-Muslim? The Shah Bano Controversy" (from Religion at the Service of Nationalism and Other Essays), at the time of the ruling the Supreme Court had already ruled on two earlier Muslim divorce cases in favor of the women plaintiffs. In one case, Justice Krishna Iyer had cited a practice called mehr as justifying his decision to grant maintenance. Kishwar defines mehr as follows:

Mehr, translated as "dower," is somewhat similar to the marriage settlement that used to be prevalent in some European countries whereby the husband settled an estate on the wife as a security for her. The amount of mehr is of two kinds--prompt and deferred. Prompt mehr is that which the husband must give the wife any time she demands it. Deferred mehr is that which the wife agrees not to demand until the marriage is dissolved by death or divorce. The latter form is more prevalent in India.

There is a further wrinkle, which has to do with another form of maintenance. Shah Bhano's ex-husband, Mohammed Ahmed Khan, had actually paid her a lump-sum amount for the divorce, during the iddat, the three-month period following the official talaq. (During that three month period, the husband is supposed to "keep the wife in his houseand maintain her at his own standard of living."). Shah Bano's lawyers had argued for another, ongoing payment, the mataa, which is described in the Quran: "And for divorced women let there be a fair provision (mataa). This is an obligation on those who are mindful of God" (2.241).

Of course, though all the intricacies of sharia are quite fascinating, it's really besides the point, because neither Sharia nor the Quran should decide the legal arrangements of modern nation-states. Constitutions need to be decided democratically in order to serve the interests of all citizens.

In the case of sharia, the interest may be pragmatic as well as principled: it seems to me that the sharia, with its sometimes contradictory concepts of mehr, iddat, and mataa, is simply too arcane to be credible. We shouldn't be discussing fine points of Quranic language, we should be discussing equity and justice.

The MPLB has refused time and again to make substantive changes in Muslim personal law. One can see why they are so reluctant -- for the past twenty years and more, the Muslim community in India has been under constant rhetorical (and sometimes real) attack by the majority. In such a climate, the Board has refused to change its stance as a matter of showing some backbone.

But now, with the setbacks for the Hindu right in the recent elections, the MPLB has plenty of room to move -- there are no new Rath Yatras on the horizon, no riots, no impending wars, and no terrorist hysteria. The fact that they still won't make any meaningful changes in the Personal Law shows that something is deeply wrong with the system.

Race, Baseball, Boston, Bonds

My sympathy for Boston's "curse of the Bambino" dropped a bit after reading this piece on Alternet about Barry Bonds's recent comment that he would never play for the Red Sox because of the city's racism. It turns out that Boston was the last team in Major League Baseball to integrate, and when it did, it did so only half-heartedly:

The Boston Red Sox were the last team in major league baseball to integrate. They waited so long to sign African-Americans, that the hockey team, the Bruins, actually beat them to it. The Sox removed their color line in 1959 twelve years after Jackie Robinson broke through with the Brooklyn Dodgers. They begrudgingly brought marginal infielder Pumpsie Green up from the minors. But it didn't have to be Pumpsie.

In April 1945 the Red Sox held a private tryout at Fenway Park for Robinson himself. With only management in the stands, someone yelled "Get those niggers off the field," and the door was shut. In 1949, the Red Sox laughed off the chance to sign Bonds's godfather, the legendary Willie Mays, who would go on to hit more career home runs than all but one man before him and awe crowds with his speed and defense. As Juan Williams reports, "One of the team's scouts decided that it wasn't worth waiting through a stretch of rainy weather to scout the black player." That decision killed the possibility that Mays and Ted Williams might have played in the same outfield.

In the 1950s, as teams immeasurably strengthened themselves by signing players like Mays, Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks, Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella, Elston Howard, and others, the Red Sox stood pat with an all white hand. (The next time you hear a Boston fan complain about "The Curse of the Bambino", correct them that their "Curse of the Racism" has had a much more adverse effect.)

All I can say is: Go Yankees.

Literature Still Rules

There is a debate on Critical Mass about what it is that goes on in literature departments.

It's part of a long (endless, really) debate about the "decline" of literature in global culture. The latest log on the fire is the recent NEA study (covered by McLemee in the Chronicle) showing that Americans are reading fewer books, and considerably less literature.

I think the terms of the lament are sometimes a little confused. Some people see the problem as rampaging political correctness in English departments. Even when literature is taught, these critics allege, it is taught "in the wrong way."

Others (more realististically) see the overwhelming spread of the commercial mass media as to blame. Still, even this argument has some holes in it. TV, the movies, and popular music have been around for a long time. And while their spread has probably had some negative impact on the bottom line of booksellers since 1950 (the beginning of the TV era), the market for fiction continues to be relatively healthy, if not exactly robust.

The internet may actually facilitate the invention and popularization of new kinds of writing. "Hypertext" has turned out to be a bit of a bust, but things like fan-fiction have taken off, mainly through the internet. Moreover, there are a number of people out there who are using blogs to express themselves creatively. Clearly, there's more to come.

There's also the interesting (and I think, growing) synergy between the popular cinema and the world of fiction. In the comments on Critical Mass, I posted this:

[To say that literature is changing is not] the same as saying it's dying, or even that it's declining significantly. Literature is changing, as it must, but I think it's still very vital. I'm also optimistic that imaginative writing in some form (perhaps not always in books) will always be there. For example, note the number of commercially successful movies that are based on books -- that is synergy, and it reflects well on the continuing centrality of literature to our culture. Popular books like Harry Potter are not just glorified screenplays; they are more than that. That they become successful movies reflects well on their authors as well as a culture that recognizes a good story when it sees it.

This might seem like an unusual position for an English professor to take. But I stand by it. Admittedly, many Hollywood blockbusters come from imaginative sources that are not exactly literary. But science fiction and fantasy writers -- Phillip K. Dick and J.K. Rowling supreme among them -- are extremely competitive in the marketplace of stories and images that are considered new, provocative, and yes, commercially viable.

Expect the good ideas and good stories to continue to be mined by the Weinsteins and co. Also, expect people to keep trying to come up with good stories to sell. Ideally, people would write just to tell a good story, and sometimes books (like Cold Mountain and The English Patient) lose something as books once the movies come out. Moreover, capitalism is not always kind to writers that try to do something that isn't flashy enough to be commercial (though you never know -- look at Susan Orlean). But that's the system we have. Literature has a place in it, and I think that will continue to be the case. People should look less at the NEA's statistics and more at the dynamic nature of the market...

About how English departments might respond to these cultural changes (especially the internet), I offered this suggestion:

Interestingly, the creative writing classes in my department are always overflowing -- even if people are apparently reading fewer books on the whole, there sure are many young people want to try their hand at writing them! [Perhaps it represents a cultural shift to a Do-it-yourself mentality?] Thus, one proposal I have for reinvigorating excitement about literary study is to expand the teaching of writing, but NOT in order to produce more interpretive/theoretical papers. Rather, I think English depts. should expand their teaching of creative writing, imaginative non-fiction, and journalism.

In other words, if the overwhelming presence of the internet means people spend less time reading books, it nevertheless seems to mean that ordinary people spend more time than ever before writing. Some just write emails. Others only write goofy blogs. But throughout, what matters is that millions and millions of people are writing, writing, writing, every day and all the time. English departments, if they do their job right, can make that side of contemporary life more rewarding for the writers (not to mention easier to stomach -- for the readers!).

Some background info. on Indian communalism: RSS, VHP, BJP, etc.

I've been looking at some reference books to try and improve my factual understanding of the history of communal politics between 1880 and 1919. One helpful book is India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation, by Robert L. Hargrave, Jr. and Stanley A. Kochanek (HBJ, 2000).

Creation of the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS:

The emergence of Hindu consciousness and identity is rooted in the late 19th century. Its origins can be traced to the Hindu revivalism of the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement founded in 1875, and the 'extremism' of the Congress leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The growth of Hindu nationalism, in contrast, is a product of the early 20th century. Politically, the concept of Hindu nationalism (or communalism as it was then called) was first articulated by the Hindu Mahasabha, a movement that was founded in 1914 at Hardwar by Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya in reaction to the creation of the Muslim League in 1906. In its early years the organization was obscured by the Congress party with which most of its members were associated. The Lucknow Pact of 1916 and the ascendency of the Moderates within the Congress alienated many of the Hindu extremists, however, and under the leadership of V.D. Savarkar, an admirer of Tilak and, like him, a Chitpavan Brahmin from Maharashtra, the Mahasabha parted with the Congress in a call to 'Hinduize all politics and militarize Hinduism.' (source: Hargrove and Kochanek)

I didn't know that the members of the Mahasabha were in the Congress early on. It's also interesting to hear that they came into existence initially as a reaction to the forming of the Muslim League.

The RSS was briefly banned after the assasination of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948 (Godse was associated with the RSS). It was also banned during 1975-1977, when Indira Gandhi had assumed dictatorial powers. It was banned yet again for a short while after the razing of the Babri Masjid in December 1992.

Organizations like the BJP and the VHP were actually formed rather recently:

Over the past 50 years, the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) has emerged as an increasingly powerful force in India and has become the head of what is now known as the Sangh Parivar, or family of Hindu nationalist organizations, with a spread across all sectors of Hindu society. These organizations include the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, founded in 1948 and now the largest student organization in India; the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), founded in 1955 and today the largest trade union in the country; the Jana Sangh (1951) and its successor, the BJP, representing the political arm of the RSS; the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), founded in 1964, and its thuggish offshoot the Bajrang Dal (1984), which represent the more explicitly religious wing; and the newly formed Swadeshi Jagaran Manch, founded in 1991 to protect Indian economic self-reliance from the threat of foreign capital.

The last is interesting -- I hadn't heard of the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (they have a website -- note the iconic use of Gandhi's image!). It seems confusing, since the BJP government was pro-foreign investment and privatization. On the other hand, the nativist slant communalism makes "self-reliance" an obvious ideological endpoint. I'm curious to find out more about how the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch is thought of by the mainstream Hindu nationalist groups.

Finally, the RSS today. It is important to note that they are not just thugs. Indeed, I suspect that much of their mass-support comes from their social programs, which build credibility in local communities:

From 1977, the RSS undertook a major effort to expand membership, and it met with resounding success. It is estimated that there are today more than 2.5 million members who attend meetings of the shakha, or unit, every day of the year. Here, for about one hour at either dawn or dusk, RSS volunteers uniformed in khaki shorts engage in an intensive program of ideological discussion, physical exercise, and military discipline. There are some 40,000 shakhas throughout India, each having 50-100 active members with a neighborhood base. RSS support is predominantly urban and lower middle class. From its traditional geographic core in North India, the movement has spread into the Northeast and into South India. It has also begun to make inroads into the countryside and has won support among Dalits (untouchables) and tribals. The RSS places increasing emphasis on social work and has been active in flood relief and in literacy campaigns.

I don't know if the number given (2.5 million) is still accurate. Does anyone know if that has changed in recent years? Has the support for the RSS changed following the BJP defeat? (Probably not, I'm guessing)

Also, does anyone disagree with Hargrave and Kochanek's factual data or interpretations? They give extensive footnotes, but I'm curious to know if people have other interpretations of the history.

The real issues in James Wood's novel, The Book Against God

James Wood is best known as a book critic. Here is a recent LRB piece that caused a bit of a stir amongst literary bloggers a couple of months ago; and here is a review of a book on the history of the King James Bible from the New Yorker last year. The Book Against God is Wood's first novel. A collection of reviews of the book, most of them lukewarm or positive, can be found here.

The plot: a graduate student in Philosophy at University College London, desultorily writing a dissertation, steadily reveals himself to be a believer in God despite strenuously (and sometimes embarrassingly) imposing his atheism on friends, girlfiend, and family. Actually he is not writing the diss. at all, but instead composing a collection of quotes and arguments pointing at the absence of God in the world, a "Book Against God." In fact, however, Wood wants to show that Tom Bunting's attachment to his father (a Vicar at the church of a small northern English town) carries within it the seeds of a kind of belief.

I can see why the novel was dismissed by some critics -- it has flaws. But I still enjoyed it for its many arguments and insights.

McLemee has some good insights on the book. He explains the thinness of Wood's protagonist (Thomas Bunting) as necessary:

But he is ultimately the victim of the author's still greater ironies. The themes of God and godlessness in the novel may echo passages in Wood's essays, but Bunting's anti-theological speculation lacks the element of self-possession that helps to make the critic's work so intellectually graceful. Bunting's ideas do not grapple with the world so much as evade the moment of having to face it for real, just as his lies, unpaid bills and trial separation from his wife all postpone the inevitable.

He is, then, a kind of scapegoat. Like the "invisible man" in Ralph Ellison's novel--or his closest relative, the narrator of Kenneth Burke's novel Towards a Better Life--Bunting carries the burden of painful experience that he does not yet quite understand how to shape into something meaningful. Or, to choose an example that may be more exact, he has the same problem that Saul Bellow's Herzog does: that of having just a few too many philosophical arguments available to patch over the holes in his life.

I have to admit I haven't read the Bellow or the Burke (and it's even been a long time since I looked at Ellison), so I can't say whether I would agree with these comparisons in a substantive way. But the key word here is "scapegoat" -- Tom Bunting is a scapegoat for the unresolved (and unresolvable) issues the novelist wants to raise.

What are these issues? Well, Wood is struggling with what might be called the phenomenology of belief and disbelief. In plain English: how can you really know when you believe in God? Or: how can you definitively know that you don't believe? The possibility of a middle-ground seems dangerous and intellectually soft (Nietzsche, for instance, would have none of it). Here's a representative discussion between Tom Bunting and his father:

'One of the great Renaissance essayists [Montaigne],' Father continued. 'Posssibly Christian, but more likely an agnostic and sceptic, and sensibly hiding his heresy from the authorities. But, then “Que sais-je?”' he finished, self-mockingly.

'I've always disliked that idea, of covert blasphemy,' I said, perhaps a bit hotly,' like concealing a gun. It seems untruthful, dishonest.' I said this, despite my own multiple dissimulations and deceits. I wasn't at all sure why I was saying it, except to resist my father. I didn't even believe what I was saying. My own 'heresy,' after all, was covert for most of my adolescence. It was still essentially covert when I was with my parents.

'Oh, I don't know,' said Peter, in a sweet, singing tone. 'After all, belief and unbelief are not absolutes, and not absolute opposites. What if they are rather close to each other, I mean belief shadowed by unbelief and vice versa . . . so that one is not exactly sure where one begins and another ends? Then, 'lying' about belief is not like concealing a gun, is not really like lying at all, but more like telling your wife that you slept well when in fact you spent the night racked by insomnia.'

There is a double-irony here. Not only has Tom Bunting been concealing his putative atheism from his family, he has also, we begin to see, been concealing from himself the fact that he is essentially a kind of unconscious believer.

Of more general interest is the question about writers from the early modern period who stop just short of leaving out all references to God in their thinking. Montaigne is one example; Descartes and Locke might be others. Even Kant, one feels, could be as happy arguing against the existence of God as for it (if, for instance, he were writing 100 years later). Are these writers simply unbelievers who mask their lack of faith with salutory references to religion demanded by publishers and censors? Or is it possible that the major figures of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were at once modern and Christian? Are they members of that "middle ground" of belief advocated by Tom Bunting's father (in the passage above)?

From his essays, I get the feeling that Wood prefers to read the professions of belief from the moderns as essentially sincere. He draws the line at the "soft" Establishment writers of the nineteenth-century, especially Arnold and Renan, whose professions are so watered-down as to be essentially unsupportable. In "The Broken Estate," that tradition is extended to twentieth-century theologians like Paul Johnson, for whom Wood has little patience:

No, the great 'strength' of Christianity is not that it offers medicines, but that it is true. Health comes from this. [Paul] Johnson's ecclessiastical cynicism – where “strength” means only “strength for the church”--suspends what is most powerful about Christianity: its claim to be true. Instead, like Arnold and Renan, he offers the milder language of success: does it work for you? He secularizes religion and demonizes secularism. In doing so, he makes Christianity vulnerable where it should be strongest. If Christianity can be defended as merely a set of advantages, then it can be attacked as merely a set of disadvantages by rival advantages, most of them secular. If Christianity is only a therapy service, a matter of comfort and consolation, then why not something more powerful than its withered ardor? (Drugs, love, literature, etc.).

Here Wood points at something that I (as someone in favor of political secularism) can grab onto-–the idea that soft religion can also be soft (or "demonized") secularism. Preserving Christian morality without preserving Christianity continues the coercion of religious dogma without the justification of religious faith. Wood would rather have real "medicine" or no medicine at all.

But here is where I part with Wood: the urgent issue in politics today is not one of real or false religion, so much as it is how to guarantee that societies around the world can continue to protect religious freedoms. Along those lines, what would be more challenging is a protagonist who is a real atheist, poised against a rising tide of (possibly fake) religious fervor in his society. (The believer who invents an atheist protagonist could possibly do a better job than the atheists -- like Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi -- who repeatedly conjure improbable "fanatics")

The "rigorous" Christianity of Wood's essays does not help us respond to the arguments and actions of religious extremists. Arnold begins to look better: Wood overlooks the possibility that Arnold's softened, inclusive Establishment in fact might have enabled the public presence of religion to become symbolic in a useful way (the same way that Monarchy is useful), even as modern nation-states transition to secularist politics.

[A final, unrelated thought: One thing no one has mentioned is, the novel is full of classical music. If you decide to pick it up after all, prepare to get a little tutorial in Pollini, Edward Elgar, Schnabel, Rachmaninoff, Richter, Rubinstein, Kempf, Michelangeli, Brendel, Bartok, Glazunov, Schumann's the Kinderszenen, and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition!]