The little post I did on Craigslist on Monday evening got me a quick cameo on Radio Open Source (download the MP3 here; I'm at 34:00). Thanks ROS for having me on again, and Craigslist -- do I get a job now?
Incidentally, I had another encounter with radio mini-fame back in June, as a small part of Chris Lydon's interview with Amitav Ghosh.
Craigslist as a Metaphor For America
Radio Open Source is doing a bit of an anti-State of the Union address show tomorrow night, to coincide with President Bush's annual meaningless (and utterly skippable) applause-fest. They're calling it Blogs of the Union, or BOTU for short.
As more and more of the country moves online, the most popular websites seem a little like mirrors for society as a whole. Ebay, Craigslist, and, in a sense, Google itself, provide an image of the interests, passions, and problems of millions of people, as we coexist in a seemingly endless array of confined socio-cultural bubbles. Most people just look to their relevant catgories, but it's never been easier to see how the other 300 million live than it is right now.
Of the websites I mentioned, I believe it's Craigslist, with its bewildering main page array of activities, jobs, real estate, stuff for sale, and personals, that makes the best metaphor for America's current state of disunion. On Craigslist, you see it all right in front of you, in its amazing, almost unthinkable diversity. 10 million people a month are using it, for 3 billion page loads. And while it's still a relatively modest minority of Americans who are involved (there are still of course large chunks of society who are not online), it gets a little closer to representativeness every year.
You have dog-clubs and tennis-clubs; sperm donors wanted, and sperm donors offering. You see want ads for potential spouses and some for fiddlers (and some that are both at once). People are looking for Scrabble partners, and people are looking for anonymous sex. There are two million dollar summer homes for sale, along with college kids looking for cheap-as-dirt summer sublets.
And here's my favorite find of the evening, an Indian guy who wants someone to teach him to speak with an American accent, for which he will barter (yes, barter) his skills:
I hope someone takes him up on his offer -- and I think the teacher should be bold enough to request that he offer all five services in the course of a single evening: computer repair, massage, cooked dinner, housecleaning, and good friend/hangout buddy. If there is any cure to allthe world's my important problems (i.e., loneliness, unhealthy food, general aches and pains, and computer woes), it is represented by this remarkable list of offerings.
It's not beside the point that the guy is offering to barter all of these skills to an anonymous stranger. Indeed, nothing could be more 'Craigslisty' than that. While much of what is on tap at the site involves the exchange of money, what's amazing is that so much of Craigslist is driven by people who trust complete strangers with intimate aspects of their lives, on matters that have nothing to do with money whatsoever. If I didn't know better, I would say that it suggests we still have some kind of civil society in place...
But let's not get carried away by our romantic ideals. They don't really apply to Craigslist, where it's all in the particularities -- there's no end to them, and virtually any generalization about them is going to fail.
As more and more of the country moves online, the most popular websites seem a little like mirrors for society as a whole. Ebay, Craigslist, and, in a sense, Google itself, provide an image of the interests, passions, and problems of millions of people, as we coexist in a seemingly endless array of confined socio-cultural bubbles. Most people just look to their relevant catgories, but it's never been easier to see how the other 300 million live than it is right now.
Of the websites I mentioned, I believe it's Craigslist, with its bewildering main page array of activities, jobs, real estate, stuff for sale, and personals, that makes the best metaphor for America's current state of disunion. On Craigslist, you see it all right in front of you, in its amazing, almost unthinkable diversity. 10 million people a month are using it, for 3 billion page loads. And while it's still a relatively modest minority of Americans who are involved (there are still of course large chunks of society who are not online), it gets a little closer to representativeness every year.
You have dog-clubs and tennis-clubs; sperm donors wanted, and sperm donors offering. You see want ads for potential spouses and some for fiddlers (and some that are both at once). People are looking for Scrabble partners, and people are looking for anonymous sex. There are two million dollar summer homes for sale, along with college kids looking for cheap-as-dirt summer sublets.
And here's my favorite find of the evening, an Indian guy who wants someone to teach him to speak with an American accent, for which he will barter (yes, barter) his skills:
I would like to speak English like an American does. I have had my education in British English and brought up in India. As I am working in Philly, I guess my conversation/communication skills is 80% okay with others. But sometimes people find it hard to understand my accent. Would you be interested to teach me the common words, phrases, sentences, lingos, etc ?
I stay near Art museum and any weekday (after 6 PM) is okay with me. Let me know what do you want in return. I don't have any specific thing to offer but here is a list if you are interested:
1. I can fix your computer, software, hardware problem (including Laptop)
2. Give you a Massage (I am a certified therapist for head massage)
3. Prepare food, specially nice indian curries etc
4. May be help you to clean the house or some other work
5. May be a good friend, hangout buddy
I hope someone takes him up on his offer -- and I think the teacher should be bold enough to request that he offer all five services in the course of a single evening: computer repair, massage, cooked dinner, housecleaning, and good friend/hangout buddy. If there is any cure to all
It's not beside the point that the guy is offering to barter all of these skills to an anonymous stranger. Indeed, nothing could be more 'Craigslisty' than that. While much of what is on tap at the site involves the exchange of money, what's amazing is that so much of Craigslist is driven by people who trust complete strangers with intimate aspects of their lives, on matters that have nothing to do with money whatsoever. If I didn't know better, I would say that it suggests we still have some kind of civil society in place...
But let's not get carried away by our romantic ideals. They don't really apply to Craigslist, where it's all in the particularities -- there's no end to them, and virtually any generalization about them is going to fail.
Movies Seen Recently, Music I'm Listening To
We did go out and see Capote and Brokeback Mountain over the past few weeks, and while I wasn't enthralled by either film, I prefer Capote over Brokeback. I enjoyed Ang Lee's film -- I thought it was elegant and spare -- but also on the verge of sweepy and hollow. Maybe I remained generally unmoved by the film because it is an image of an era ('the closet') that has passed? Or perhaps because it's simply a romance that never quite gets to full boil. Whatever the case, I thought Brokeback Mountain managed to be impressive without being particularly moving or inspiring.
(The one image that has stayed in my mind is the brief moment of violence that appears at the end of the film, involving Jake Gyllenhal's character... you know the scene I'm thinking of... terrifying)
Capote at least gets into the murky waters of the writer's (inevitable?) exploitation of his subject. I tend to side against Truman Capote: I would rather be a bad writer and a good person, than a good writer who denatures (or destroys) his subject to get the Story. There is a lot to debate here: was Capote really all that great? And: can't he be accused of helping to start the era of the mass-media's sensationalizing of violent crime? Or maybe: he was a great writer and a terrible human being? Or: aren't all great writers pretty much that way?
* * *
And here are some older films I've been watching over the past few weeks:
Side Streets (1998; IMDB). Shashi Kapoor plays a really strange role in this small art movie about working-class ethnic New York. Kapoor plays a huge (in more than one sense) movie star whose brother is an NYC taxi driver married to Shabana Azmi. That alone seems rather unrealistic -- one finds it hard to accept that a huge Bollywood star might have a siblings who drive taxis in New York -- but the rest of the film is gritty and believable. There are also parallel plots involving Russian drug dealers, abject fashion designers, and an Afro-Caribbean couple who bicker at length about permission to drive a car. But the real reason to see the film is the scene at the end, where Shashi Kapoor goes nuts and pulls a Charles Bukowski in a posh hotel room.
Ash Wednesday (2002; IMDB). Another New York indie film, this one directed by Edward "cheekbones" Burns of The Brothers McMullen. Ed Burns is a little like John Cassavetes back in the day -- a commercial actor who makes low-budget independent films with the cash he gets from the forgettable films he does in Hollywood. And while Burns's films lack the searing emotional upheaval of Cassavetes flicks like Opening Night or Faces, there is something interesting going on here. The plot of Ash Wednesday is pretty gripping, though the acting by the Irish gangsters of Hell's Kitchen is at times quite weak. The Catholic themes of sacrifice, rebirth, and redemption are strangely appropriate for a gangster film, and are all at play in the film's climactic scenes.
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939; IMDB). There is nothing to criticize in this film: snappy 1930s dialogue, great plot, and total relevance to politics today (you can substitute Jack Abramoff for the bad guy in the film without any difficulty whatsoever). It also has the distinction of being the only world-class film I've ever seen that portrays a Senate filibuster as a scene of climactic, world-changing action.
Fiddler on the Roof (1971; IMDB). Yeah, I know it's a banal Broadway myth of the Russian Jewish shtetl, but the songs in this movie are just too much fun. And Topol's big lines have great camp value; I'm especially keen on the moments where he shouts "Tradition!" in an accusing way at God, only to wave off after a moment (eh, ok, so much for tradition). I only hope I'm half this entertaining and melodramatic when I'm fifty. Watching this again also reignited my interest in the Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem, whose works I'm somewhat curious to read.
The First Time (1969; IMDB). This movie was made in 1969, but it feels like 1954. Wow, is it dated -- it has a script that seems to have been written by a rather sleazy fifteen year old boy. Just truly awful dialogue; I don't know how I watched it all the way through. Maybe it had something to do with Jacqueline Bisset? That would probably be a good guess.
Home Delivery (2005). We watched about half of this recent Bollywood film before falling asleep. It felt like a collage of bits from a TV sitcom crudely stitched together to try and form a film. Yawn -- and that, needless to say, pretty much sums up my attitude to most Bollywood flicks that have been coming out lately (except perhaps Bluffmaster and 15 Park Avenue, both of which I want to see).
* * * * *
I've been listening to Matisyahu's Live at Stubb's, The Decemberists' Castaways and Cutouts and Picareseque, and the Bluffmaster CD soundtrack. Both the Decemberists and Bluffmaster rock, though in very different ways.
I'm still trying to decide about Matisyahu, who takes an Orthodox/Hasidic messianic vision and channels it into the lyrical and melodic conventions of roots rock reggae and dub. At times it feels a little like a gimmick, but some of the songs really do click quite nicely. There is some real poetry here, though there is also, on some of the longer "jams," a little smelly Phish. We'll see what they do with the studio album...
The Decemberists have been doing their thing for a few years, but I only just got their new CD a month ago. These are, I think, the best-written lyrics I've come across in recent years. Magnificent -- deserving of a separate post (coming soon, hopefully).
And on the lighter side of things, Bluffmaster is the ultimate Bollywood/Hip Hop fusion, complete with spadefuls of swagger. And with cool baritone vocals on some of the best tracks, Abhishek Bachchan is coming to fill in his father's shoes more and more... I don't know if "Sabse Bada Rupaiyya" is going to be as immortal as "Rang Barse," but at least it's got a nice beat and you can dance to it.
(The one image that has stayed in my mind is the brief moment of violence that appears at the end of the film, involving Jake Gyllenhal's character... you know the scene I'm thinking of... terrifying)
Capote at least gets into the murky waters of the writer's (inevitable?) exploitation of his subject. I tend to side against Truman Capote: I would rather be a bad writer and a good person, than a good writer who denatures (or destroys) his subject to get the Story. There is a lot to debate here: was Capote really all that great? And: can't he be accused of helping to start the era of the mass-media's sensationalizing of violent crime? Or maybe: he was a great writer and a terrible human being? Or: aren't all great writers pretty much that way?
* * *
And here are some older films I've been watching over the past few weeks:
Side Streets (1998; IMDB). Shashi Kapoor plays a really strange role in this small art movie about working-class ethnic New York. Kapoor plays a huge (in more than one sense) movie star whose brother is an NYC taxi driver married to Shabana Azmi. That alone seems rather unrealistic -- one finds it hard to accept that a huge Bollywood star might have a siblings who drive taxis in New York -- but the rest of the film is gritty and believable. There are also parallel plots involving Russian drug dealers, abject fashion designers, and an Afro-Caribbean couple who bicker at length about permission to drive a car. But the real reason to see the film is the scene at the end, where Shashi Kapoor goes nuts and pulls a Charles Bukowski in a posh hotel room.
Ash Wednesday (2002; IMDB). Another New York indie film, this one directed by Edward "cheekbones" Burns of The Brothers McMullen. Ed Burns is a little like John Cassavetes back in the day -- a commercial actor who makes low-budget independent films with the cash he gets from the forgettable films he does in Hollywood. And while Burns's films lack the searing emotional upheaval of Cassavetes flicks like Opening Night or Faces, there is something interesting going on here. The plot of Ash Wednesday is pretty gripping, though the acting by the Irish gangsters of Hell's Kitchen is at times quite weak. The Catholic themes of sacrifice, rebirth, and redemption are strangely appropriate for a gangster film, and are all at play in the film's climactic scenes.
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939; IMDB). There is nothing to criticize in this film: snappy 1930s dialogue, great plot, and total relevance to politics today (you can substitute Jack Abramoff for the bad guy in the film without any difficulty whatsoever). It also has the distinction of being the only world-class film I've ever seen that portrays a Senate filibuster as a scene of climactic, world-changing action.
Fiddler on the Roof (1971; IMDB). Yeah, I know it's a banal Broadway myth of the Russian Jewish shtetl, but the songs in this movie are just too much fun. And Topol's big lines have great camp value; I'm especially keen on the moments where he shouts "Tradition!" in an accusing way at God, only to wave off after a moment (eh, ok, so much for tradition). I only hope I'm half this entertaining and melodramatic when I'm fifty. Watching this again also reignited my interest in the Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem, whose works I'm somewhat curious to read.
The First Time (1969; IMDB). This movie was made in 1969, but it feels like 1954. Wow, is it dated -- it has a script that seems to have been written by a rather sleazy fifteen year old boy. Just truly awful dialogue; I don't know how I watched it all the way through. Maybe it had something to do with Jacqueline Bisset? That would probably be a good guess.
Home Delivery (2005). We watched about half of this recent Bollywood film before falling asleep. It felt like a collage of bits from a TV sitcom crudely stitched together to try and form a film. Yawn -- and that, needless to say, pretty much sums up my attitude to most Bollywood flicks that have been coming out lately (except perhaps Bluffmaster and 15 Park Avenue, both of which I want to see).
* * * * *
I've been listening to Matisyahu's Live at Stubb's, The Decemberists' Castaways and Cutouts and Picareseque, and the Bluffmaster CD soundtrack. Both the Decemberists and Bluffmaster rock, though in very different ways.
I'm still trying to decide about Matisyahu, who takes an Orthodox/Hasidic messianic vision and channels it into the lyrical and melodic conventions of roots rock reggae and dub. At times it feels a little like a gimmick, but some of the songs really do click quite nicely. There is some real poetry here, though there is also, on some of the longer "jams," a little smelly Phish. We'll see what they do with the studio album...
The Decemberists have been doing their thing for a few years, but I only just got their new CD a month ago. These are, I think, the best-written lyrics I've come across in recent years. Magnificent -- deserving of a separate post (coming soon, hopefully).
And on the lighter side of things, Bluffmaster is the ultimate Bollywood/Hip Hop fusion, complete with spadefuls of swagger. And with cool baritone vocals on some of the best tracks, Abhishek Bachchan is coming to fill in his father's shoes more and more... I don't know if "Sabse Bada Rupaiyya" is going to be as immortal as "Rang Barse," but at least it's got a nice beat and you can dance to it.
Hindutva In American Schools: Links
Some excellent posts by bloggers on the recent controversy in California over attempts by Hindu groups to have their version of Indian history incorporated into school textbooks (see the Christian Science Monitor). While the California school board initially approved changes earmarked for them by the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation, after a concerted effort by academics the changes have been reversed. See, academic expertise does matter for something.
--The great science-blogger Pharyngula, now from his new site:
(As far as I'm concerned, the fundamentalist Christian ideas are equally strange, but that's a small quibble!)
--Butterflies and Wheels, an equally steadfast advocate of secularist thinking.
--Our new blog-friend, the Accidental Blogger
--And here's Archana.
Suffice it to say, I find the prospect of the incursion of Hindutva ideology into the American school system pretty surreal.
UPDATE: This is just a links post. See my more detailed response to the California controversy here.
--The great science-blogger Pharyngula, now from his new site:
Yeah, these aren't fundamentalist Christians, but Hindu nationalists with very strange ideas—still, it's the same old religious nonsense.
(As far as I'm concerned, the fundamentalist Christian ideas are equally strange, but that's a small quibble!)
--Butterflies and Wheels, an equally steadfast advocate of secularist thinking.
--Our new blog-friend, the Accidental Blogger
--And here's Archana.
Suffice it to say, I find the prospect of the incursion of Hindutva ideology into the American school system pretty surreal.
UPDATE: This is just a links post. See my more detailed response to the California controversy here.
Tyeb Mehta -- overhyped? (try Prosenjit Roy)
I posted on Tyeb Mehta a few months ago, after it came out that a painting of his had sold for $1.58 million at Christie's in New York.
Somini Sengupta has a thorough profile of Mehta in the Times this week, which is pretty well worth reading for the insight it gives on what Mehta is after with his myth-based gestural paintings. (Also helpful is Sonia Faleiro's nice profile of him, which appeared in Tehelka in June.)
And I came across a recent first-person testimonial by Mehta in the Times of India, where he talks about his active (if non-devout) relationship to his Shia Islamic heritage.
I know much more about Mehta after reading these pieces -- and he seems like a fascinating person -- but I'm still on the fence as to whether I actually like his paintings or not. The images just seem somehow flat to me (have a look at the Times' slideshow and tell me what you think...)
While the shapes Mehta produces are dramatic, they seem more like drawings than paintings: they are flat and descriptive even when the images involve violence, suffering, or mutilation. (Sengupta mentions the traumatic effect of communal violence on Mehta's thinking...) The monstrous, misshapen bodies in his paintings ought to provoke visceral horror, but that's not what happens for this blogger at least.
Contrast his work to that of another contemporary painter, Prosenjit Roy. Roy has some paintings on Jalsaghar, and more on his own homepage. Alongside whimsical paintings like "The Sleepy Scratch" is the more serious "Artist on a mend," a painting about depression which, I would argue, has a painterly joke in it all the same:
(Do you get the joke? Hint: It's on you.)
But Roy's most ambitious painting might be The Order of Things, which he hasn't posted in full color -- perhaps to protect it from Internet leechers (**blogger coughs nervously**). It looks like a surrealist take on the philosophical arguments of Michel Foucault...
Somini Sengupta has a thorough profile of Mehta in the Times this week, which is pretty well worth reading for the insight it gives on what Mehta is after with his myth-based gestural paintings. (Also helpful is Sonia Faleiro's nice profile of him, which appeared in Tehelka in June.)
And I came across a recent first-person testimonial by Mehta in the Times of India, where he talks about his active (if non-devout) relationship to his Shia Islamic heritage.
I know much more about Mehta after reading these pieces -- and he seems like a fascinating person -- but I'm still on the fence as to whether I actually like his paintings or not. The images just seem somehow flat to me (have a look at the Times' slideshow and tell me what you think...)
While the shapes Mehta produces are dramatic, they seem more like drawings than paintings: they are flat and descriptive even when the images involve violence, suffering, or mutilation. (Sengupta mentions the traumatic effect of communal violence on Mehta's thinking...) The monstrous, misshapen bodies in his paintings ought to provoke visceral horror, but that's not what happens for this blogger at least.
Contrast his work to that of another contemporary painter, Prosenjit Roy. Roy has some paintings on Jalsaghar, and more on his own homepage. Alongside whimsical paintings like "The Sleepy Scratch" is the more serious "Artist on a mend," a painting about depression which, I would argue, has a painterly joke in it all the same:
(Do you get the joke? Hint: It's on you.)
But Roy's most ambitious painting might be The Order of Things, which he hasn't posted in full color -- perhaps to protect it from Internet leechers (**blogger coughs nervously**). It looks like a surrealist take on the philosophical arguments of Michel Foucault...
Bengaluru
There is a great -- really great -- piece by Ruchir Joshi on India's addiction to renaming in the Calcutta Telegraph. As many readers will be aware by now, Bangalore will be changing its name to Bengaluru.
Hm, I think I know the word he's thinking of in Hindi, though not Bangla.
Along the way, Joshi makes some great points about how place-names function in India, across a wide spectrum of languages:
(First thought: "Sex Pyaar"? Too good.)
Second thought: Yes, exactly, exactly. And there are other good points; go read the whole thing.
Incidentally, if you haven't already, you should check out Sepia Mutiny's parody of the name change here, though commenter Raghu offers a defense of "Bengaluru" that is also worth considering as a counter-point:
Something about the name brought out the schoolboy in all three of us and the holiday was rife with jokes. Was the name-change proposed by a local Bong? If not, why on earth would IT-rich, culturally proud, ’Digas [Kannadigas] want ‘Bengal’ included in the name of their capital city? The second half, ‘luru’, with a couple of letters added or changed, led to all sorts of dormitory-humour, wisecracks unreproducable in a family newspaper such as this, except it suffices to say that the tweaked ‘luru’ could play one way in the Hindi we all spoke, and another in the Bangla with which we were all familiar.
On the flight back, a slightly more serious vein of thought asserted itself. I remember clearly how angry I became when Bombay was officially renamed Mumbai a decade ago, and again, when the same thing happened soon after to Madras and then, finally, to Calcutta. Usually this anger remains contained to a note I add when writing for newspapers and magazines unfamiliar with my preferences, a note which requests everyone to kindly leave alone the city names I use, such as Calcutta, Bombay or Madras. But now, with the imminent adding of Bangalore to this list, the whole issue rekindles itself for me and it’s about far more than just names.
Hm, I think I know the word he's thinking of in Hindi, though not Bangla.
Along the way, Joshi makes some great points about how place-names function in India, across a wide spectrum of languages:
While I am all for changing ‘Road’, ‘Street’ and ‘Avenue’ to Sarani, Marg and Vithi, happy with the exchange of Lansdowne for Sarat Bose and chortlingly happy with the kicking out of Harrington in favour of Ho Chi Minh and the cancelling of Camac to install Shakespeare, (or even ‘Sex Pyaar’ as one signboard notably proclaimed), to my mind the same principle does not apply to city names.
This is because, a city, like a country, is a much larger, a much more complex construct than a lane or a plaza. There is a reason why most people reading this column probably did not pause to think twice about my use of 'India' and 'Indian' in the previous paragraph but one: 'India', much more than 'Hindustan', 'Bharat', or 'Bharatam', is the name that is now truly representative of the country we live in; it is the one agreed name that diverse people from all over the country use regularly and without quarrel, and, since the spread of cricket and television, it is a name that is now freely used across city, small town and even village; also, not unimportantly, now that we see ourselves as deeply connected to the world, it is the name by which the international community knows us and recognizes us.
Similarly, what a ‘Calcutta’ or a ‘Bombay’ signifies is a typically subtle Indian way of eating your cake and having it too. What the old names say, which Mumbai and Kolkata don’t, is: ‘yes, we come from a colonial history, but also, yes, we have overcome that colonial past and are confident enough to keep whatever is useful from that past, whether it be the English language, our railway network, or, indeed, the names of two of our most famous cities. Just as the name India provides a nomenclatural umbrella to awesome diversity, so do the names of these urban leviathans provide each a name-shelter under which all who have contributed to that living city can live and continue to work.’
(First thought: "Sex Pyaar"? Too good.)
Second thought: Yes, exactly, exactly. And there are other good points; go read the whole thing.
Incidentally, if you haven't already, you should check out Sepia Mutiny's parody of the name change here, though commenter Raghu offers a defense of "Bengaluru" that is also worth considering as a counter-point:
Those of us who are objecting probably also need to examine why we're so distressed about the change. After all, law does not change names, it just changes spelling. Theres a sentiment that stirs beneath our rational, political arguments about the adequacy of the status quo and the dangers of linguistic nationalism and tubthumping - its our anxiety at the fact that our precarious culture, not fully Western but certainly not fully Kannadiga, just got pushed onto its back foot. Taking the names entirely on their own accoustic merits, Bengaluru is so soft and mellifluous, but Bangalore shakes off those drooping vowels and is crisper, more anglicized - it sounds like the city we want it to become for our comfort - and that's our linguistic chauvinism.
"Abandoning the Duty of the Painted Bench" (Pamuk charges dropped)
Reuters reports that charges against Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk have been dropped. He was originally accused of insulting "Turkishness" when he referred to the genocide of the Armenians in the 1910s, in an interview with a European reporter.
Under Turkey's Article 301, many writers have been charged and imprisoned over the years for criticizing the government, Turkishness, or the memory of Kemal Ataturk (though there is actually a separate law for that). And besides Pamuk, there are a number of active cases that should still concern us. Amnesty has a long list:
Over at Verbal Privilege, Elizabeth echoes Amnesty, in worrying about all of the active cases, not just Pamuk's:
Under Turkey's Article 301, many writers have been charged and imprisoned over the years for criticizing the government, Turkishness, or the memory of Kemal Ataturk (though there is actually a separate law for that). And besides Pamuk, there are a number of active cases that should still concern us. Amnesty has a long list:
Hrant Dink is a journalist and the editor of the Armenian-language weekly newspaper Agos, which is published in Istanbul. On 7 October 2005, Hrant Dink was given a six-month suspended prison sentence by the Sisli Court of First Instance No. 2 in Istanbul for “denigrating Turkishness” in an article he wrote on Armenian identity. According to the prosecutor in the case, Hrant Dink had written his article with the intention of denigrating Turkish national identity.
Sehmus Ulek is the Vice-President of the Turkish human rights NGO Mazlum Der. On 28 April 2005 the Sanlıurfa Court of First Instance No. 3 started hearing a case against him and Hrant Dink, under Article 159 of the old TPC (now Article 301) for speeches they made during a conference organized by Mazlum Der’s Urfa branch on 14 December 2002 entitled “Global Security, Terror and Human Rights, Multi-culturalism, Minorities and Human Rights”. Sehmus Ulek referred in his speech to the nation-building project of the Turkish Republic as it had affected, in particular, the southeastern area of the country; Hrant Dink discussed his own relationship to official conceptions of Turkish identity. The next hearing of the case will take place on 9 February 2006.
A trial began in May 2005 at the Beyoglu Court of First Instance No. 2 in Istanbul against publisher Ragip Zarakolu for his publication of a Turkish translation of a book by Dora Sakayan entitled Experiences of an Armenian Doctor: Garabet Hacheryan's Izmir Journal (Bir Ermeni Doktorun Yasadıkları: Garabet Haceryan'ın İzmir Guncesi; Istanbul: Belge 2005). Ragip Zarakolu had been charged under Article 159 of the TPC for “denigrating Turkishness and the security forces”, and then under Article 301 after the new TPC came into effect.
Fatih Tas is a 26-year-old student of Communications and Journalism at Istanbul University and the owner of Aram publishing house. He is currently being tried under Article 301 because he published a Turkish translation of a book by the American academic John Tirman, entitled Savas Ganimetleri: Amerikan Silah Ticaretinin Insan Bedeli (Istanbul: Aram, 2005) (The Spoils of War: the Human Cost of America’s Arms Trade), that reportedly includes a map depicting a large section of Turkey as traditionally Kurdish and alleges that the Turkish military perpetrated a number of human rights abuses in the south-east of the country during the 1980s and 1990s.
Murat Pabuc was a lieutenant in the Turkish army who retired on grounds of disability. Whilst still serving, he witnessed the massive earthquake that hit Turkey in August 1999, as well as the institutional corruption that he alleges followed it. He became disillusioned with his military duties, seeing soldiers as being alienated from ordinary people, and began to refuse orders. He eventually began undergoing psychiatric treatment. In June 2005 he published his book Boyalı Bank Nobetini Terk Etmek; the literal translation of this title is "Abandoning the Duty of the Painted Bench." It alludes to a Turkish anecdote which portrays a pastiche of a soldier following orders unquestioningly. He believes that this was the only way for him to express what he had experienced in the army. As a result he is facing a trial for “public denigration of the military” under Article 301.
Birol Duru is a journalist. On 17 November 2005 he was charged with "denigrating the security forces" under Article 301 because he published on the Dicle news agency a press release from the Human Rights Association (IHD) Bingol branch which stated that the security forces were burning forests in Bingol and Tunceli. The president of IHD’s Bingol branch, Rıdvan Kızgın, is also charged under other legislation for the contents of the press release. Rıdvan Kızgın has had over 47 cases opened against him since 2001, and Amnesty International is currently running a web action
for him as part of its ongoing campaigning work on human rights defenders in Turkey and Eurasia. Birol Duru is due to be sentenced on 8 December 2005.(link)
Over at Verbal Privilege, Elizabeth echoes Amnesty, in worrying about all of the active cases, not just Pamuk's:
That said, I'm still worried about the many ongoing cases against other writers, journalists, publishers, and activists that do not receive a fraction of the attention Pamuk's case got. The cases of people like Hrant Dink, Ragip Zarakolu, and Ferhat Tunç are a more crucial barometer of freedom of expression in Turkey--we'll see what happens to persectued writers and artists who do not enjoy the benefit of an international outcry.
Buffalo DNA: Two New Bloggers
I want to welcome Amitava Kumar to blogistan. Amitava is one of the sharpest and most opinionated Indian cultural critics around, and I have no doubt he'll be a very formidable blogger.
A good start is his recent slam of a billboard advertisement used by the newspaper Daily News and Analysis:
Go to his blog to see the picture in question. Incidentally, the post also attacks the content of the paper in question, singling out a very bad recent book review of a novel also related to Bihar, Siddharth Chowdhury's Patna Roughcut.
Wow, inspired ranting. My timid gloss on this might be something like: Amitava doesn't like the ad because it takes a very smug potshot at political corruption in Bihar. Even granted that corruption and government waste might well be a problem, it isn't going to be solved by cheap shots from the snide, metropolitan, soi-disant cognoscenti.
* * *
While I'm promoting new blogs, let me encourage people to take a peek at Ruchira Paul's Accidental Blogger. Ruchira is a strong champion for liberal politics, both in the U.S. and in India. A recent post on "Anthropomorphism and Empathy" stood out to me, as did this brief post on the female foeticide problem I was talking about earlier this week.
She's also done interesting some literature-oriented posts. (Do more lit posts, Ruchira!)
A good start is his recent slam of a billboard advertisement used by the newspaper Daily News and Analysis:
Will someone suggest a caption for this photograph? I saw this billboard near a highway in Bombay and understood that it was an ad for a newspaper called DNA. I would describe it as the pavement-level version of a Rushdie novel–self-satisfied metropolitan fiction for consumption by the metropolitans. It is not the buffalo who has decided to carry a reminder on its body that it must work for Bihar; instead, it is some clueless cosmopolitan who is announcing his never-to-be-really-actualized intentions about–what exactly?–social activism. If this individual has recovered from his new year’s hangover by now I’d like him to consider why the geography of a land and its peoples is reducible to a buffalo’s hide. Perhaps I am over-reacting but this is because the rag in question has dung in its DNA.
Go to his blog to see the picture in question. Incidentally, the post also attacks the content of the paper in question, singling out a very bad recent book review of a novel also related to Bihar, Siddharth Chowdhury's Patna Roughcut.
Wow, inspired ranting. My timid gloss on this might be something like: Amitava doesn't like the ad because it takes a very smug potshot at political corruption in Bihar. Even granted that corruption and government waste might well be a problem, it isn't going to be solved by cheap shots from the snide, metropolitan, soi-disant cognoscenti.
* * *
While I'm promoting new blogs, let me encourage people to take a peek at Ruchira Paul's Accidental Blogger. Ruchira is a strong champion for liberal politics, both in the U.S. and in India. A recent post on "Anthropomorphism and Empathy" stood out to me, as did this brief post on the female foeticide problem I was talking about earlier this week.
She's also done interesting some literature-oriented posts. (Do more lit posts, Ruchira!)
'Hindu Protestantism': Nirad Chaudhuri on Hindu Reformers
I'm teaching a short excerpt of Nirad Chaudhuri's Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951). It's about 30 pages in Amitava Kumar's Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate, mainly concerning Chaudhuri's early understandings of England, the English language, and Englishness as a child in Bengal.
One part that caught my eye is his characterization of the Hindu reform movements, which would include the Brahmo Samaj as well as what he calls the 'orthodox counterblast' (I believe Chaudhuri's own family tended towards the latter). In truth, the two movements were not so far apart from one another, and many members of the latter community began as dissenting Brahmo Samaj members.
Here is Chaudhuri (hope you enjoy the long quote):
This is interesting in lots of ways, one of which being of course the question it raises about where Nirad Chaudhuri sees himself (as I mentioned, I believe Chaudhuri's own parents would have counted themselves among the reformers he's criticizing above).
The other major point I draw out ot this is a reminder to anyone who advocates strong forms of cultural or religious purity, that everything is always already mixed, contaminated, and hybridized. That hybridity is particularly intense in the Indian context for historical reasons: both the Brahmo Samaj and the "orthodox counterblast" are heavily dependent on ideas derived from the Protestant missionaries in their midst. Their sectarian disputes, one could even say, mimicked the sectarian disputes between Protestant sects (Unitarians, Methodists, etc.).
Needless to say, the caution about false purity could well be applied to all religious communities.
One part that caught my eye is his characterization of the Hindu reform movements, which would include the Brahmo Samaj as well as what he calls the 'orthodox counterblast' (I believe Chaudhuri's own family tended towards the latter). In truth, the two movements were not so far apart from one another, and many members of the latter community began as dissenting Brahmo Samaj members.
Here is Chaudhuri (hope you enjoy the long quote):
My father and mother believed in a form of Hinduism whose basis was furnished by a special interpretation of the Hindu religion. According to this interpretation the history of Hinduism could be divided into three stages: a first age of pure faith, in essence monotheistic, with its foundations in the Vedas and the Upanishads; secondly, a phase of eclipse during the predominance of Buddhism; and thirdly, the later phase of gross and corrupt polytheism. The adherents of this school further held that all the grosser polytheistic accretions with which popular Hindusim was disfigured had crept in at the time of the revial of Hinduism after the decline of Buddhism in the seventh and eighth centuries of the Christian era, and that they were due primarily to the influence of Mahayana or polytheistic northern Buddhism and Tantric cults. This degnerate form of Hinduism was given the name of Puranic Hinduism in order to distinguish it from the ealier and purer Upanishadic form of Hinuism. The reformers claimed that they were trying only to restore the original purity of the Hindu religion.
The very simplicity of the interpretation should serve to put historical students on their guard against it. But the reformers implicitly believed in it, and since they believed in, their belief gave shape to and coloured their attitude to the other religious movements of the world; they failed to detect the true filiation of their theory, to see that that was only an echo and duplication of the theory of the Protestant Reformation. Although their claim to be restoring the pure faith of the Upanishads by ridding it of Puranic excrescences was certainly inspired by an unconscious absorption of the idea of the Protestants that they were reviving the pure faith of the Scriptures, the Apostles, and the early Fathers, the Hindu reformers looked upon Protestantism as the product of a parallel religious movement and were deeply sympathetic to it.
This is interesting in lots of ways, one of which being of course the question it raises about where Nirad Chaudhuri sees himself (as I mentioned, I believe Chaudhuri's own parents would have counted themselves among the reformers he's criticizing above).
The other major point I draw out ot this is a reminder to anyone who advocates strong forms of cultural or religious purity, that everything is always already mixed, contaminated, and hybridized. That hybridity is particularly intense in the Indian context for historical reasons: both the Brahmo Samaj and the "orthodox counterblast" are heavily dependent on ideas derived from the Protestant missionaries in their midst. Their sectarian disputes, one could even say, mimicked the sectarian disputes between Protestant sects (Unitarians, Methodists, etc.).
Needless to say, the caution about false purity could well be applied to all religious communities.
Claim: Female Foeticide Correlates with Wealth, Education
Via Quizman, an article in the Christian Science Monitor about India's female foeticide problem (also discussed by Uma, Neha Viswanathan, and Abhi, among many others).
Here is the CSM:
I don't see hard and fast evidence in this statement or elsewhere CSM article for the claim, but several sources in the article suggest a correlation between wealth and education, and higher incidences of female foeticide. It makes some sense: wealthier families can afford the multiple ultrasounds and the abortion procedure. And the strongest evidence for the claim comes from the fact that birth ratios tend to be the most skewed in relatively prosperous agricultural states like Haryana and Punjab.
It doesn't account for everything, of course -- boy/girl birth ratios in relatively prosperous states in South India are at or near normal levels (according to this map based on recent census information). So there definitely are some cultural factors at work, but it's not as simple as "Punjabis are more patriarchal."
Incidentally, the Indian Medical Association, though it has condemned female foeticide, is questioning Lancet's claim that 10,000,000 female foetuses have been aborted via sex-selection in the past 20 years, of which 5 million abortions are said to have taken place after the procedure was banned in 1994.
According to the BBC article, the IMA claims that since 2001 a crackdown on ultrasound equipment has led to a dramatic drop in female foeticide. But it will be another five years (the next census) before we have any reliable data on that, so there's almost no point in even discussing it at present. (Or not: are there other sources for sex-ratio statistics that might be used to sort this out?)
Here is the CSM:
The practice is common among all religious groups - Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Muslims, and Christians - but appears to be most common among educated women, a fact that befuddles public health officials and women's rights activists alike.
"More educated women have more access to technology, they are more privileged, and most educated families have the least number of children," says Sabu George, a researcher with the Center for Women's Development Studies in New Delhi, who did not participate in the study. "This is not just India. Everywhere in the world, smaller families come at the expense of girls."
I don't see hard and fast evidence in this statement or elsewhere CSM article for the claim, but several sources in the article suggest a correlation between wealth and education, and higher incidences of female foeticide. It makes some sense: wealthier families can afford the multiple ultrasounds and the abortion procedure. And the strongest evidence for the claim comes from the fact that birth ratios tend to be the most skewed in relatively prosperous agricultural states like Haryana and Punjab.
It doesn't account for everything, of course -- boy/girl birth ratios in relatively prosperous states in South India are at or near normal levels (according to this map based on recent census information). So there definitely are some cultural factors at work, but it's not as simple as "Punjabis are more patriarchal."
Incidentally, the Indian Medical Association, though it has condemned female foeticide, is questioning Lancet's claim that 10,000,000 female foetuses have been aborted via sex-selection in the past 20 years, of which 5 million abortions are said to have taken place after the procedure was banned in 1994.
According to the BBC article, the IMA claims that since 2001 a crackdown on ultrasound equipment has led to a dramatic drop in female foeticide. But it will be another five years (the next census) before we have any reliable data on that, so there's almost no point in even discussing it at present. (Or not: are there other sources for sex-ratio statistics that might be used to sort this out?)
Desi Lit Links from the Literary Saloon; and a Short Rant Critique of Arundhati Roy
Literary Saloon has a number of posts relating to Indian literature up right now:
--Another James Laine book on Sivaji has been banned in Maharashtra. Apparently the offense this time is Laine's claim that Chhatrapati Sivaji was an "Oedipal rebel," which basically means he fought with his father. A pretty laughable reason to ban it, but then, there are never good reasons to ban books. (Stop the Maharashtra government before they ban again!)
--Neha Sharma has something in Asian Age, on the status of Hindi literature. Unfortunately, the link is already dead (though Lit Saloon has a couple of paragraphs quoted).
--The same Lit Saloon post also links to this story about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's presiding over the re-release of two books by Premchand. Interesting to hear the PM's thoughts on some works of literature...
--And Arundhati Roy has turned down a Sahitya Akademi award for best writing in English, for The Algebra of Infinite Justice.
Whoa. A shrill -- and dated -- tirade is the best piece of writing to have come out in English by an Indian citizen last year? And didn't she publish that essay four and a half years ago (and the accompanying book three years ago)? That she's turning them down serves them right; they could do a lot better.
I'm critical of the Indian and American governments for many things, but I'm so over Arundhati Roy. (Read the original essay from September 2001 at the Guardian.) Over the course of the essay, Roy says many things that are true, and that I agree with -- she certainly sees clearly where George W. Bush is going with "Operation Enduring Freedom," and presciently predicts the failure of a "war on terror" that, since the invasion of Iraq, has gone completely astray.
But Roy also makes some very paranoid generalizations in that essay, which I believe are unsupportable. Here is one of the worst:
She might have a point that the wrong of 9/11 is no worse than, for instance, the wrongs the U.S. has at times committed in the name of freedom or justice, or which have followed indirectly from its actions (as in, 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians since the beginning of the most recent war -- a war which didn't need to happen in the first place).
But I don't see the point in claiming that the two types of violence are "interchangeable," or that Osama Bin Laden is America's "family secret" and also its "doppleganger." No, he's not: they are separate evils, and merging them is sloppy thinking. And I don't see the point in bringing in multinational corporations -- their function is quite different from that of the U.S. military, even if some function as auxiliaries for military projects. But McDonald's and Microsoft are not the same as Halliburton, and the mere fact that all three have well-paid corporate executives does not make make them all evil.
I'm not that far from Roy on some issues of substance (at least in this particular essay; I do think many of her positions on other issues are absurd [see her comments last year on cell-phones in India, for instance]). But I'd rather describe things plainly, as they are, and without the breathless ramification of rhetoric that she seems to relish so much.
--Another James Laine book on Sivaji has been banned in Maharashtra. Apparently the offense this time is Laine's claim that Chhatrapati Sivaji was an "Oedipal rebel," which basically means he fought with his father. A pretty laughable reason to ban it, but then, there are never good reasons to ban books. (Stop the Maharashtra government before they ban again!)
--Neha Sharma has something in Asian Age, on the status of Hindi literature. Unfortunately, the link is already dead (though Lit Saloon has a couple of paragraphs quoted).
--The same Lit Saloon post also links to this story about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's presiding over the re-release of two books by Premchand. Interesting to hear the PM's thoughts on some works of literature...
--And Arundhati Roy has turned down a Sahitya Akademi award for best writing in English, for The Algebra of Infinite Justice.
Whoa. A shrill -- and dated -- tirade is the best piece of writing to have come out in English by an Indian citizen last year? And didn't she publish that essay four and a half years ago (and the accompanying book three years ago)? That she's turning them down serves them right; they could do a lot better.
I'm critical of the Indian and American governments for many things, but I'm so over Arundhati Roy. (Read the original essay from September 2001 at the Guardian.) Over the course of the essay, Roy says many things that are true, and that I agree with -- she certainly sees clearly where George W. Bush is going with "Operation Enduring Freedom," and presciently predicts the failure of a "war on terror" that, since the invasion of Iraq, has gone completely astray.
But Roy also makes some very paranoid generalizations in that essay, which I believe are unsupportable. Here is one of the worst:
But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. He is the American president's dark doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum dominance", its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. (link)
She might have a point that the wrong of 9/11 is no worse than, for instance, the wrongs the U.S. has at times committed in the name of freedom or justice, or which have followed indirectly from its actions (as in, 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians since the beginning of the most recent war -- a war which didn't need to happen in the first place).
But I don't see the point in claiming that the two types of violence are "interchangeable," or that Osama Bin Laden is America's "family secret" and also its "doppleganger." No, he's not: they are separate evils, and merging them is sloppy thinking. And I don't see the point in bringing in multinational corporations -- their function is quite different from that of the U.S. military, even if some function as auxiliaries for military projects. But McDonald's and Microsoft are not the same as Halliburton, and the mere fact that all three have well-paid corporate executives does not make make them all evil.
I'm not that far from Roy on some issues of substance (at least in this particular essay; I do think many of her positions on other issues are absurd [see her comments last year on cell-phones in India, for instance]). But I'd rather describe things plainly, as they are, and without the breathless ramification of rhetoric that she seems to relish so much.
Semantic Tagging Vs. Search (Del.icio.us and CiteULike)
Over on the sidebar, you'll see three links, two of which are new:
"Clips blog" speaks for itself: just raw links to things that seem interesting in my RSS feeds. (Suffice it so say, that after a brief dalliance with Google Reader, I'm still using Bloglines.)
Del.icio.us is a service that many readers will likely be familiar with, though probably not everyone. It's also a kind of 'clippings' mechanism, though the idea is you store your favorites with tagged (keyword) references. Some people (Kerim) even use it as a way of housing an extended blogroll.
It might seem redundant to have semantic tagging when you can basically find anything you can think of with simple searches in Google or Yahoo. But del.icio.us seems to be most surprising when you're trying to find things that relate to what you're interested in, but that you wouldn't necessarily know to search for. The people who seem to have adopted it first are techies -- many software people seem to use del.icio.us to keep track of links to "helpful hints to debugging in DOT.NET" or "quick Linux hacks" (see Popular). But there's no reason why people interested in literature, art, and politics, can't also be using the service to connect to each other, and to find out about things via keywords.
Incidentally, the process of posting to del.icio.us becomes pretty easy with their handy Firefox extension. Once you've installed the extension, it just takes one click to add a post.
I'm still not 100% sure whether del.icio.us tags will really be a big-time revolution -- "the next phase of the internet" -- or simply a service that appeals to hard-core users (bloggers and the like). Del.icio.us is certainly growing fast, and especially so since they were acquired by Yahoo!, but their interface isn't exactly fun.
The title of this post might be somewhat misleading, since obviously I'm not suggesting that semantic tagging services like del.icio.us or Flickr are somehow going to make conventional search engines obsolete. At most, the two forms of accessing resources on the web will be complementary to each other. But there is an additional level of interactivity involved with tagging -- you leave a trail across the net (if you want to), which either you yourself or someone else could possibly make use of later.
Finally, a word on CiteULike. This is an academic-oriented service, that allows you to bookmark articles you've read online, including those that are behind university subscription databases -- such as Project Muse, JSTOR, EBSCOhost, etc.
I've just started playing around with CiteULike, and I'm not quite sure yet whether I'll be using it regularly. It might be a useful tool to get into a better discipline with regards to actually reading journal articles (instead of just doing searches when I'm working on an article or a book chapter). Like Del.icio.us, CiteULike allows you to share links to articles and view other people's articles, making it potentially easier to keep up with other people who might be doing research that relates to yours. And the "notes" function allows you to read people's thoughts on the articles they're reading. As with Del.icio.us, this service will only be of great value as a relational index if a large number of people in a given field are actually using the service regularly.
Again, I get the feeling that people in the sciences are using this extensively, while humanities folks have barely touched it.
Any thoughts on these services? And what do you think about Tagging vs. Search? Are there other tagging services you would recommend?
Clips blog @ Bloglines
My Del.icio.us
My CiteULike
"Clips blog" speaks for itself: just raw links to things that seem interesting in my RSS feeds. (Suffice it so say, that after a brief dalliance with Google Reader, I'm still using Bloglines.)
Del.icio.us is a service that many readers will likely be familiar with, though probably not everyone. It's also a kind of 'clippings' mechanism, though the idea is you store your favorites with tagged (keyword) references. Some people (Kerim) even use it as a way of housing an extended blogroll.
It might seem redundant to have semantic tagging when you can basically find anything you can think of with simple searches in Google or Yahoo. But del.icio.us seems to be most surprising when you're trying to find things that relate to what you're interested in, but that you wouldn't necessarily know to search for. The people who seem to have adopted it first are techies -- many software people seem to use del.icio.us to keep track of links to "helpful hints to debugging in DOT.NET" or "quick Linux hacks" (see Popular). But there's no reason why people interested in literature, art, and politics, can't also be using the service to connect to each other, and to find out about things via keywords.
Incidentally, the process of posting to del.icio.us becomes pretty easy with their handy Firefox extension. Once you've installed the extension, it just takes one click to add a post.
I'm still not 100% sure whether del.icio.us tags will really be a big-time revolution -- "the next phase of the internet" -- or simply a service that appeals to hard-core users (bloggers and the like). Del.icio.us is certainly growing fast, and especially so since they were acquired by Yahoo!, but their interface isn't exactly fun.
The title of this post might be somewhat misleading, since obviously I'm not suggesting that semantic tagging services like del.icio.us or Flickr are somehow going to make conventional search engines obsolete. At most, the two forms of accessing resources on the web will be complementary to each other. But there is an additional level of interactivity involved with tagging -- you leave a trail across the net (if you want to), which either you yourself or someone else could possibly make use of later.
Finally, a word on CiteULike. This is an academic-oriented service, that allows you to bookmark articles you've read online, including those that are behind university subscription databases -- such as Project Muse, JSTOR, EBSCOhost, etc.
I've just started playing around with CiteULike, and I'm not quite sure yet whether I'll be using it regularly. It might be a useful tool to get into a better discipline with regards to actually reading journal articles (instead of just doing searches when I'm working on an article or a book chapter). Like Del.icio.us, CiteULike allows you to share links to articles and view other people's articles, making it potentially easier to keep up with other people who might be doing research that relates to yours. And the "notes" function allows you to read people's thoughts on the articles they're reading. As with Del.icio.us, this service will only be of great value as a relational index if a large number of people in a given field are actually using the service regularly.
Again, I get the feeling that people in the sciences are using this extensively, while humanities folks have barely touched it.
Any thoughts on these services? And what do you think about Tagging vs. Search? Are there other tagging services you would recommend?
Had John Updike Been African...
Teju Cole is the current (and temporary) pseudonym of a rather nomadic blogger, who will be posting about his travels in Nigeria for a few weeks. One of his comments about getting access to good material caught my eye:
More than a little truth in this, I think. (Crap, maybe I should get out of Pennsylvania too...)
A Hint: If this interests you, you should read more of Teju Cole soon, before the blog disappears.
One morning as I walk down our street to where the Isheri Road goes under the Lagos-Sagamu Expressway Bridge, I witness a collision between two cars. The drivers both kill their engines in the middle of the road, jump out of their vehicles, and start beating each other up. Fists connecting with faces, right there in front of me. This is Lagos.
Well, this is wonderful, I think. Life hangs out here. The pungent details are all around me. Here's the material that can really hit a reader between the eyes. A gossip-lover's paradise.
One week later, I see another fight, at the very same spot. All the touts in the vicinity join in this one. Pandemonium, but a completely normal kind of pandemonium, that fizzles out after about ten minutes. End of brawl. Everyone goes back to their normal business. I suddenly feel sorry for all those who, as writers, have to ply their trade from some sleepy American suburb, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes. Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I'm sure of it. His material killed him. Shillington, Pennsylvania simply didn’t measure up to his extravagant gifts. And sadder yet are those who don't even have a fraction of Updike's talent, and yet have to hoe the same arid patch for stories. I could cry of boredom just thinking about it.
More than a little truth in this, I think. (Crap, maybe I should get out of Pennsylvania too...)
A Hint: If this interests you, you should read more of Teju Cole soon, before the blog disappears.
"Incendiary Circumstances": Reviews and Links
Amitav Ghosh's new book of essays, Incendiary Circumstances, is out. It has gotten a number of reviews:
It's worth noting that a number of the essays in the new book can be found online for free:
Tsunami 1, Tsunami 2, and Tsunami 3.
"The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi" is on Ghosh's own website here.
A version of "No Greater Sorrow" is here.
"The Ghat of the Only World: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn" is at The Nation.
And there may be others, but I don't want to discourage people from buying the book!
Time Magazine (via Abhi @ Sepia Mutiny)
LA Times (via Indian Writing)
San Francisco Chronicle (via Indian Writing)
Washington Post
It's worth noting that a number of the essays in the new book can be found online for free:
Tsunami 1, Tsunami 2, and Tsunami 3.
"The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi" is on Ghosh's own website here.
A version of "No Greater Sorrow" is here.
"The Ghat of the Only World: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn" is at The Nation.
And there may be others, but I don't want to discourage people from buying the book!
Sonia Faleiro's Book/Podcast, and a Better Kind of Interview w/Vikram Chandra
Sonia Faleiro's book The Girl is out on Viking India. Sonia does a podcast of an excerpt on her blog, which is pretty damn cool.
Sonia also recently interviewed Vikram Chandra for Tehelka, and did not mention his big advance. (I groaned about this tendency in the Indian media last week)
Sonia also recently interviewed Vikram Chandra for Tehelka, and did not mention his big advance. (I groaned about this tendency in the Indian media last week)
Margaret Cho! Goes to India
Margaret Cho! She's so outrageous, so much more melodramatic than life, that even simply stating her name deserves an exclamation point: Cho!
(Other people in the exclamation-required category include Odetta! and Rekha!. Feel free to suggest further additions...)
Via Clancy, I caught links to Cho's (!) recent adventures in India. Some clichés, but also some very energetic and entertaining stream-of-consciousness writing:
My first instinct is to remind her to breathe. But then, she's right, it is odd: why do the speakers go on the outside of the Tata trucks?
Also amusing was this:
Chi! (Note: That is a joke in Hindi)
(Other people in the exclamation-required category include Odetta! and Rekha!. Feel free to suggest further additions...)
Via Clancy, I caught links to Cho's (!) recent adventures in India. Some clichés, but also some very energetic and entertaining stream-of-consciousness writing:
Yet with the way that there are no real lanes, and the sheer variety of the vehicles on the road (tuk-tuks belching out black clouds of diesel smoke to camouflage themselves and everyone else, scooters balancing entire families, possibly three generations on two wheels, bulbous, gas guzzling Ambassadors filled with white tourists arriving from the airport, filled with dread and regret, wanting to turn back immediately, donkey carts pulled by old, old donkeys and driven by even older men, bicycles loaded down with sugar cane and roti and babies, then the undisputed kings of the highways, the enormous Tata lorries, painted in hallucinatory colors, swirling orange and purple monstrosities, blaring some kind of insanely happy Indian pop music, as the speakers sit outside the vehicles, to keep the drivers awake, so I was told, making me think that they are called Tata because that is the last thing you see coming at you, a cheerful goodbye - “Ta-Ta!” before you are crushed underneath their fearsome wheels, cows, just wandering freely, eating garbage in the way of oncoming traffic, dogs and pigs weaving in and out of it all, along with pedestrians who bravely cross because this is all absolutely normal to them) I can’t believe I didn’t see more carnage on the street, that the asphalt didn’t glow red with blood. (link)
My first instinct is to remind her to breathe. But then, she's right, it is odd: why do the speakers go on the outside of the Tata trucks?
Also amusing was this:
I called down at our hotel in Delhi one too many times for toilet paper. “We just sent you two rolls already! What are you doing with it? You Americans try to wipe wipe wipe all your problems away. You cannot do that here!” (link)
Chi! (Note: That is a joke in Hindi)
Texture Words and Data-Mining: Two Examples (Woolf and Sassoon)
The following post is written for inclusion in The Valve's discussion of Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, and Trees.
It's a pleasant coincidence that Matt Kirschenbaum posted an introduction to Nora, the data-mining literary studies collaborative project he is involved with, just as I've been working on my own post on a proposed project to use search and semantic tagging (del.icio.us and other XML-based services) to study the representation of texture in literary texts. In his post, Matt asks:
The following is my own proposal for a very specific kind of linguistic data that could be gathered from searchable digital texts.
1. Texture
Some years ago I started a project on "texture words" for a seminar on Victorian literature, which I took with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and which Eve in turn had designed on the inspiration of her student Renu Bora. Bora's essay "Outing Texture" (published in the Duke Press anthology Novel Gazing) had worked out some interesting links between materialism (as in, Marxist historicism) and the sensory/sexual experience of Victorian material culture (as in, the world of fabric, fetish-objects, and touchable commodities).
Bora's essay has some very inspired moments -- as well as some potentially confusing "theory" -- but the most important thing he does for my purposes is define the concept of texture that I work with. Texture is:
My own interest is in the way texure is figured in literary language. From the 9 or 10 novels we read that term, I made lists of key texture words and organized them semantically, using my own rough (and admittedly idiosyncratic) classificatory scheme:
I call these and other words that look and sound like them "texture words." They have various functions in literary texts, which vary by genre and period, and any absolute generalization about them is likely to fail. (It's a big language.)
Instead of function, I tend to think about texture words in terms of value, which is various. First and foremost, texture words can describe physical textures in the world -- a building reduced to "rubble," or a "shiver" from cold. But texture words also provide a second-order value to writers, as a way of figuring perceptions or ideas that exist almost entirely in the mind: a "glimmer" of understanding, a "ripple" of pleasure. Texture can materialize a mode of being that might be difficult to represent. In the hands of sloppy writers, they can be a shortcut, or a way of remaining vague about what is meant. But in the hands of masters -- say, George Eliot or Henry James -- texture is an essential tool in navigating the ambiguity and confusion that intelligent human subjects (the protagonists of novels) generally inhabit.
It was 1997, so naturally I made a kind of web project out of this, some of which worked and some of which was probably a little silly. One component of the project that I still find useful is a starter raw material archive, associating the words above with particular passages in the novels in question: A-L, and M-Z. The archives could well be extended with reference to other works by the same authors, as well as thousands of other works of poetry and fiction that use these types of words to convey a sense of visual (and haptic) texture in literature. Ideally, the expanded version would be a collaboratively produced database, with chronological information as well as direct links to OED entries for each of the words. The material could be extracted and compiled relatively easily from thousands of digital texts that are already accessible through sites such as Project Gutenberg.
Ideally we would also have some of the cutting-edge niceties -- chief among them collaborative tools such as comments and a Wiki-like framework that allows any interested party to contribute. I'm especially optimistic about the possibilities of semantic tagging, which distributes the potential labor involved in organizing the data, and makes it useable for multiple purposes. For instance, I may be interested in "texture," while another scholar might be interested in "homoeroticism" or "railroads." Ideally, a fully tagged digital literary would make it relatively straightforward to find and produce linguistic data such as I am interested in with texture, but also provide bridges between different kinds of thematic inquiries.
* * * *
2. Working With Texture in a Brief Interpretive Reading (Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out)
(Check out The Voyage Out Gutenberg etext.)
What has stayed with me from my earlier project is a small obsessive attention to words that signify texture: I prick up my ears when novelists and poets use words like "glimmer" or "shimmer," and compare notes with the way George Eliot or Henry James used it. For instance, Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out (which I read for the first time only last year) seems heavily dependent on these texture words, which Woolf uses to convey both physical textures as well as the infinitely varied landscape of human emotion. So you have passages like the following:
The ship steadily encroaches on land, and the features of the shore gradually differentiate themselves from one another. Flatness turns to texture with proximity. And then the reversal: once the sense of space (the "great bay") is stable, an even closer kind of texture emerges, as the boats from shore "swarm" around the ship and there is the "thump" of feet on deck. This is Woolf doing an experience of texture that most people will be familiar with, though most of the time the experience of a changing scale of visual differentiation happens in a matter of seconds (in the air), so there is generally less time to contemplate than was available to people at sea.
But Woolf uses some of the same words in passages dealing with her characters' emotional lives as well, such as Rachel's traumatic first kiss at the hands of Richard Dalloway (a married older man). Forgive -- or enjoy, as appropriate -- the purplish prose:
Notice the way Woolf uses the word "scattered" at the end of this passage, to convey a sense that the intensity of the moment of the kiss has in effect dissipated, even as she marks a transformation: life now holds "infinite possibilities" for Rachel (though what those possibilities are remains unspecified). Both of these passages use images of visual texture, though in the second passage the visual textures are reflections of Rachel's feelings. But it's more than that: as one gets further into the novel it becomes apparent that Rachel experiences the world almost entirely through texture. In Lacanian jargon, we could say that she is a creature of Imaginary textures, while the Symbolic world of meanings and focused interpretations remains beyond her reach. She sees textures instead of the things themselves.
* * * *
3. Working With Texture Using a Quasi-Quantitative Method: Siegfried Sassoon's War Poems
(Check out Sassoon's War Poems at Gutenberg)
I'm teaching Pat Barker's Regeneration this spring, so I've been going through Siegfried Sassoon's poems to see what's there. And while it now appears to me that Sassoon isn’t perhaps the greatest of the war poets, he does have a distinctive voice and some very powerful poems (and he played a key role in nurturing the best of the war/anti-war poets of World War I, Wilfred Owen). However, his style is perhaps a little too recognizable: he tends to repeat themes and images a little too frequently. He also sometimes uses mixed metaphors in ways that might be deemed predictable (“flickering horror”; “blurred confusion”).
But Sassoon’s poems become interesting even as flawed, symptomatic artifacts of the war. The dense sound associations and intricate patterns Sassoon creates in his first two collections, The Huntsman and Other Poems and The Counter-Attack And Other Poems (recollected at War Poems in 1918) collectively provide a good example of the phenomenon of linguistic texture I was referring to above.
There are a few sound clusters that dominate the war poems in these books, and even simply enumerating them gives a powerful demonstration of Sassoon’s frame of mind: doom/gloom/glum/glimmer; grunt/gruff/mutter/thud; stumbling/ crumpling/ shuddering/ smothering/ smouldering/ hammering/ muttering/ muffling/ rumbling/ blundering; rotten/ sodden/ trodden; strangled; bleeding; choked/ crouched; creep.
There is an overwhelming tone of darkness, blindness, and paralysis in most of the poems, some of which were written while Sassoon was in "recovery" at Craiglockhart near the end of the war (of course, he was never really sick). There are of course poems that don’t fit the pattern, of which most are satirical political commentary on pro-war Englishmen, while a couple deal with natural imagery (in the model of Sassoon's earlier, genteel style). Of course, even these exceptions do contain texture words: “The Fathers” has the phrase "I watched them toddle through the door," while "Base Details" has "toddle safely home and die." "Toddle" is a texture word in a rather unusual sense: a walking texture, connoting a particularly soft movement of the legs. It sounds (and works) a fair bit like "waddle," except it strongly suggests infant-like movement. This is how Sassoon insults his rhetorical enemies -- the chicken hawks of World War I.
Sassoon’s texture words are generally found in his trench poems, of which an exemplary case might be "Prelude: The Troops," which also has the virtue of being short. Below, I've posed all of the texture words in the poem in bold:
This isn't the most 'textury' of Sassoon's poems -- it drifts away from the grimy, gloomy, muddy textures of the trenches in the first stanza to a more dramatic, funereal tone in the third, passing through a soft pastoral interlude in stanza two. For now, let's just focus on the dense cluster of texture words in that first stanza: "dim," "thinning," "gloom," "shudder," "drizzle," "sodden," "dull," "sunken," "haggard," and "grope."
Instead of reading for meaning (not terribly exciting in this poem), let's look at it, provisionally, as data. First, note how many of the words sound similar. Indeed, the words that sound similar actually seem to mean somewhat similar things -- "sodden" and "haggard." It's also interesting that so many of these words are trochees, in which there is a doubled consonant at the syllabic break: "shud/der," "driz/zle." This seems to be quite prevalent in texture words (see my list in the first part of this post), though I'm not sure that very much can be made out of it without some serious training in linguistics.
Beyond this, it's actually fairly shocking how prevalent this relatively short list of texture words is in Sassoon's two books of war poems: he uses "dim" nine times; "gloom," fourteen"; "shudder," six"; "drizzling," three; "sodden," six. ("Blind," which doesn't appear in "Prelude: The Troops," appears fourteen times in War Poems as well, which suggests that Sassoon might well have titled the collected War Poems "Blind Gloom," after the two words that seem to be most prevalent.)
In a longer essay I would enumerate the role played by twenty or thirty other texture words and phrases, including words that might not initially seem to be in the realm of texture, but which are drawn into association with Sassoon's texture words via meter and morphology (such as "suffer" and "blossom"). For now, let it simply suffice to say that texture words for blindness, incoherence (the "thud" of bombs, the "muttering" of soldiers), suffering, and decay are the most prominent citizens in Sassoon's war lexicon. Feel free to check it for yourself here).
(Incidentally, some passages in Sassoon’s famous pseudonymous Sherston memoirs have a similar approach to texture. Here's just one sentence from near the end of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man to give you a flavor of Sassoon's prose: "Their jargoning voices mingled with the rumble and throb of the train as it journeyed—so safely and sedately—through the environing gloom.")
* * * * *
4. Conclusions: Interpretive readings and Quantitative research
I wanted to give two different kinds of reading to show that there might be more than one way of playing with texture. There's a great deal that can be done with it using a more or less conventional interpretive model (close-reading), where the focus is on thematics such as materiality or space, and texture words might simply be understood as triggers. But there are also quantitative, intertextual possibilities here, for which searchability is a minimal feature, and a tagged database may be of considerable help. And there is no reason why the two types of research can't be complementary of each other (which pretty much sums up my feelings on the question of whether Franco Moretti is trying to convert everyone to statistical analysis -- he isn't).
Texture words are in all kinds of writing, not just in canonical writers like Woolf or almost-canonical writers like Sassoon. These words are often used inexpertly or ineptly by second-rate writers; indeed, the very obviousness of texture words in Sassoon's poetry or Woolf's first novel could be taken as signs of inexpert fashioning. (Woolf significantly refines her prose style over time.)
A more systematic, specifically quantitative type of study of not just a few authors but a statistically significant, Atlas-sized chunk of them, might reveal interesting patterns in the ways texture words are used, as well as how their use changes over time. Relatedly, I would be curious to know whether there are variations in the use of texture words that are linked to aspects of social identity, such as gender, sexuality, or race. Is there a texture gap by gender? Do gay writers use more texture words? (one thinks of Hopkins' "Pied Beauty": "Glory be to God for dappled things") Are there particular textures that are more prevalent amongst writers from specific social groups? African American textures? Postcolonial textures? There is not one but several projects here, which could benefit from the "data-mining" approach that Matt Kirschenbaum has described, and which I also initiated in crude form with my earlier "texture words" project.
It's a pleasant coincidence that Matt Kirschenbaum posted an introduction to Nora, the data-mining literary studies collaborative project he is involved with, just as I've been working on my own post on a proposed project to use search and semantic tagging (del.icio.us and other XML-based services) to study the representation of texture in literary texts. In his post, Matt asks:
Literary scholars, however--here the force of Moretti’s arguments make themselves felt--traditionally do not contend with very large amounts of data in their research. A significant component of our work is therefore basic research in the most literal sense: what kinds of questions do we seek to answer in literary studies and how can data mining help, or--more interestingly--what new kinds of questions can data mining provoke?
The following is my own proposal for a very specific kind of linguistic data that could be gathered from searchable digital texts.
1. Texture
Some years ago I started a project on "texture words" for a seminar on Victorian literature, which I took with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and which Eve in turn had designed on the inspiration of her student Renu Bora. Bora's essay "Outing Texture" (published in the Duke Press anthology Novel Gazing) had worked out some interesting links between materialism (as in, Marxist historicism) and the sensory/sexual experience of Victorian material culture (as in, the world of fabric, fetish-objects, and touchable commodities).
Bora's essay has some very inspired moments -- as well as some potentially confusing "theory" -- but the most important thing he does for my purposes is define the concept of texture that I work with. Texture is:
the surface resonance or quality of an object or material. That is, its qualities if touched, brushed, stroked, or mapped, would yield certain properties and sensation that can usually be anticipated by looking. Technically speaking, all materials have texture, though colloquially we often say that only rough things (or friends) do. Smoothness is both a type of texture and texture's other (Bora, 99)
My own interest is in the way texure is figured in literary language. From the 9 or 10 novels we read that term, I made lists of key texture words and organized them semantically, using my own rough (and admittedly idiosyncratic) classificatory scheme:
Light reflection: Glint, glimmer, gleam, gloom, shimmer, shine
Desiring-affect: dapple, dimple, ripple, shudder, quiver
Desiring-dissolution: linger, finger, mingle, lingual
Desire (frisson): quiver, quaver, waver, shiver, shudder, flutter, flatter, [blush]
Flow: throb, gush, burst, crush, burst, blow, suck, kiss
-Ubble: bubble, blubber, rubber, rubble, rumble, rub, trouble
-Utter: mutter, stutter, stammer, utter, stumble, grumble, putter, patter, prattle, hubbub
Gloomy: dull, sullen, mull, lull, glum, gloom, sallow, wallow
Pfudd: mud, thud, blood, glug
Naked teeth: bitter, barren, rid, rotten, grim, winter, wither, shrivel, suffer
I call these and other words that look and sound like them "texture words." They have various functions in literary texts, which vary by genre and period, and any absolute generalization about them is likely to fail. (It's a big language.)
Instead of function, I tend to think about texture words in terms of value, which is various. First and foremost, texture words can describe physical textures in the world -- a building reduced to "rubble," or a "shiver" from cold. But texture words also provide a second-order value to writers, as a way of figuring perceptions or ideas that exist almost entirely in the mind: a "glimmer" of understanding, a "ripple" of pleasure. Texture can materialize a mode of being that might be difficult to represent. In the hands of sloppy writers, they can be a shortcut, or a way of remaining vague about what is meant. But in the hands of masters -- say, George Eliot or Henry James -- texture is an essential tool in navigating the ambiguity and confusion that intelligent human subjects (the protagonists of novels) generally inhabit.
It was 1997, so naturally I made a kind of web project out of this, some of which worked and some of which was probably a little silly. One component of the project that I still find useful is a starter raw material archive, associating the words above with particular passages in the novels in question: A-L, and M-Z. The archives could well be extended with reference to other works by the same authors, as well as thousands of other works of poetry and fiction that use these types of words to convey a sense of visual (and haptic) texture in literature. Ideally, the expanded version would be a collaboratively produced database, with chronological information as well as direct links to OED entries for each of the words. The material could be extracted and compiled relatively easily from thousands of digital texts that are already accessible through sites such as Project Gutenberg.
Ideally we would also have some of the cutting-edge niceties -- chief among them collaborative tools such as comments and a Wiki-like framework that allows any interested party to contribute. I'm especially optimistic about the possibilities of semantic tagging, which distributes the potential labor involved in organizing the data, and makes it useable for multiple purposes. For instance, I may be interested in "texture," while another scholar might be interested in "homoeroticism" or "railroads." Ideally, a fully tagged digital literary would make it relatively straightforward to find and produce linguistic data such as I am interested in with texture, but also provide bridges between different kinds of thematic inquiries.
* * * *
2. Working With Texture in a Brief Interpretive Reading (Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out)
(Check out The Voyage Out Gutenberg etext.)
What has stayed with me from my earlier project is a small obsessive attention to words that signify texture: I prick up my ears when novelists and poets use words like "glimmer" or "shimmer," and compare notes with the way George Eliot or Henry James used it. For instance, Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out (which I read for the first time only last year) seems heavily dependent on these texture words, which Woolf uses to convey both physical textures as well as the infinitely varied landscape of human emotion. So you have passages like the following:
On and on she went, by day and by night, following her path, until one
morning broke and showed the land. Losing its shadow-like appearance it became first cleft and mountainous, next coloured grey and purple, next scattered with white blocks which gradually separated themselves, and then, as the progress of the ship acted upon the view like a field-glass of increasing power, became streets of houses. By nine o'clock the _Euphrosyne_ had taken up her position in the middle of a great bay; she dropped her anchor; immediately, as if she were a recumbent giant requiring examination, small boats came swarming about her. She rang with cries; men jumped on to her; her deck was thumped by feet. The lonely little island was invaded from all quarters at once, and after four weeks of silence it was bewildering to hear human speech.
The ship steadily encroaches on land, and the features of the shore gradually differentiate themselves from one another. Flatness turns to texture with proximity. And then the reversal: once the sense of space (the "great bay") is stable, an even closer kind of texture emerges, as the boats from shore "swarm" around the ship and there is the "thump" of feet on deck. This is Woolf doing an experience of texture that most people will be familiar with, though most of the time the experience of a changing scale of visual differentiation happens in a matter of seconds (in the air), so there is generally less time to contemplate than was available to people at sea.
But Woolf uses some of the same words in passages dealing with her characters' emotional lives as well, such as Rachel's traumatic first kiss at the hands of Richard Dalloway (a married older man). Forgive -- or enjoy, as appropriate -- the purplish prose:
Richard took her in his arms and kissed her. Holding her tight, he kissed her passionately, so that she felt the hardness of his body and the roughness of his cheek printed upon hers. She fell back in her chair, with tremendous beats of the heart, each of which sent black waves across her eyes. He clasped his forehead in his hands.
"You tempt me," he said. The tone of his voice was terrifying. He seemed choked in fright. They were both trembling. Rachel stood up and went. Her head was cold, her knees shaking, and the physical pain of the emotion was so great that she could only keep herself moving above the great leaps of her heart. She leant upon the rail of the ship, and gradually ceased to feel, for a chill of body and mind crept over her. Far out between the waves little black and white sea-birds were riding. Rising and falling with smooth and graceful movements in the hollows of the waves they seemed singularly detached and unconcerned.
"You're peaceful," she said. She became peaceful too, at the same time possessed with a strange exultation. Life seemed to hold infinite possibilities she had never guessed at. She leant upon the rail and looked over the troubled grey waters, where the sunlight was fitfully scattered upon the crests of the waves, until she was cold and absolutely calm again.
Notice the way Woolf uses the word "scattered" at the end of this passage, to convey a sense that the intensity of the moment of the kiss has in effect dissipated, even as she marks a transformation: life now holds "infinite possibilities" for Rachel (though what those possibilities are remains unspecified). Both of these passages use images of visual texture, though in the second passage the visual textures are reflections of Rachel's feelings. But it's more than that: as one gets further into the novel it becomes apparent that Rachel experiences the world almost entirely through texture. In Lacanian jargon, we could say that she is a creature of Imaginary textures, while the Symbolic world of meanings and focused interpretations remains beyond her reach. She sees textures instead of the things themselves.
* * * *
3. Working With Texture Using a Quasi-Quantitative Method: Siegfried Sassoon's War Poems
(Check out Sassoon's War Poems at Gutenberg)
I'm teaching Pat Barker's Regeneration this spring, so I've been going through Siegfried Sassoon's poems to see what's there. And while it now appears to me that Sassoon isn’t perhaps the greatest of the war poets, he does have a distinctive voice and some very powerful poems (and he played a key role in nurturing the best of the war/anti-war poets of World War I, Wilfred Owen). However, his style is perhaps a little too recognizable: he tends to repeat themes and images a little too frequently. He also sometimes uses mixed metaphors in ways that might be deemed predictable (“flickering horror”; “blurred confusion”).
But Sassoon’s poems become interesting even as flawed, symptomatic artifacts of the war. The dense sound associations and intricate patterns Sassoon creates in his first two collections, The Huntsman and Other Poems and The Counter-Attack And Other Poems (recollected at War Poems in 1918) collectively provide a good example of the phenomenon of linguistic texture I was referring to above.
There are a few sound clusters that dominate the war poems in these books, and even simply enumerating them gives a powerful demonstration of Sassoon’s frame of mind: doom/gloom/glum/glimmer; grunt/gruff/mutter/thud; stumbling/ crumpling/ shuddering/ smothering/ smouldering/ hammering/ muttering/ muffling/ rumbling/ blundering; rotten/ sodden/ trodden; strangled; bleeding; choked/ crouched; creep.
There is an overwhelming tone of darkness, blindness, and paralysis in most of the poems, some of which were written while Sassoon was in "recovery" at Craiglockhart near the end of the war (of course, he was never really sick). There are of course poems that don’t fit the pattern, of which most are satirical political commentary on pro-war Englishmen, while a couple deal with natural imagery (in the model of Sassoon's earlier, genteel style). Of course, even these exceptions do contain texture words: “The Fathers” has the phrase "I watched them toddle through the door," while "Base Details" has "toddle safely home and die." "Toddle" is a texture word in a rather unusual sense: a walking texture, connoting a particularly soft movement of the legs. It sounds (and works) a fair bit like "waddle," except it strongly suggests infant-like movement. This is how Sassoon insults his rhetorical enemies -- the chicken hawks of World War I.
Sassoon’s texture words are generally found in his trench poems, of which an exemplary case might be "Prelude: The Troops," which also has the virtue of being short. Below, I've posed all of the texture words in the poem in bold:
PRELUDE: THE TROOPS
Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom
Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals
Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots
And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky
Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down
The stale despair of night, must now renew
Their desolation in the truce of dawn,
Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace.
Yet these, who cling to life with stubborn hands,
Can grin through storms of death and find a gap
In the clawed, cruel tangles of his defence.
They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy
Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all
Is ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky
That hastens over them where they endure
Sad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,
And foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.
O my brave brown companions, when your souls
Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead,
Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,
Death will stand grieving in that field of war
Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.
And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;
The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.
This isn't the most 'textury' of Sassoon's poems -- it drifts away from the grimy, gloomy, muddy textures of the trenches in the first stanza to a more dramatic, funereal tone in the third, passing through a soft pastoral interlude in stanza two. For now, let's just focus on the dense cluster of texture words in that first stanza: "dim," "thinning," "gloom," "shudder," "drizzle," "sodden," "dull," "sunken," "haggard," and "grope."
Instead of reading for meaning (not terribly exciting in this poem), let's look at it, provisionally, as data. First, note how many of the words sound similar. Indeed, the words that sound similar actually seem to mean somewhat similar things -- "sodden" and "haggard." It's also interesting that so many of these words are trochees, in which there is a doubled consonant at the syllabic break: "shud/der," "driz/zle." This seems to be quite prevalent in texture words (see my list in the first part of this post), though I'm not sure that very much can be made out of it without some serious training in linguistics.
Beyond this, it's actually fairly shocking how prevalent this relatively short list of texture words is in Sassoon's two books of war poems: he uses "dim" nine times; "gloom," fourteen"; "shudder," six"; "drizzling," three; "sodden," six. ("Blind," which doesn't appear in "Prelude: The Troops," appears fourteen times in War Poems as well, which suggests that Sassoon might well have titled the collected War Poems "Blind Gloom," after the two words that seem to be most prevalent.)
In a longer essay I would enumerate the role played by twenty or thirty other texture words and phrases, including words that might not initially seem to be in the realm of texture, but which are drawn into association with Sassoon's texture words via meter and morphology (such as "suffer" and "blossom"). For now, let it simply suffice to say that texture words for blindness, incoherence (the "thud" of bombs, the "muttering" of soldiers), suffering, and decay are the most prominent citizens in Sassoon's war lexicon. Feel free to check it for yourself here).
(Incidentally, some passages in Sassoon’s famous pseudonymous Sherston memoirs have a similar approach to texture. Here's just one sentence from near the end of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man to give you a flavor of Sassoon's prose: "Their jargoning voices mingled with the rumble and throb of the train as it journeyed—so safely and sedately—through the environing gloom.")
* * * * *
4. Conclusions: Interpretive readings and Quantitative research
I wanted to give two different kinds of reading to show that there might be more than one way of playing with texture. There's a great deal that can be done with it using a more or less conventional interpretive model (close-reading), where the focus is on thematics such as materiality or space, and texture words might simply be understood as triggers. But there are also quantitative, intertextual possibilities here, for which searchability is a minimal feature, and a tagged database may be of considerable help. And there is no reason why the two types of research can't be complementary of each other (which pretty much sums up my feelings on the question of whether Franco Moretti is trying to convert everyone to statistical analysis -- he isn't).
Texture words are in all kinds of writing, not just in canonical writers like Woolf or almost-canonical writers like Sassoon. These words are often used inexpertly or ineptly by second-rate writers; indeed, the very obviousness of texture words in Sassoon's poetry or Woolf's first novel could be taken as signs of inexpert fashioning. (Woolf significantly refines her prose style over time.)
A more systematic, specifically quantitative type of study of not just a few authors but a statistically significant, Atlas-sized chunk of them, might reveal interesting patterns in the ways texture words are used, as well as how their use changes over time. Relatedly, I would be curious to know whether there are variations in the use of texture words that are linked to aspects of social identity, such as gender, sexuality, or race. Is there a texture gap by gender? Do gay writers use more texture words? (one thinks of Hopkins' "Pied Beauty": "Glory be to God for dappled things") Are there particular textures that are more prevalent amongst writers from specific social groups? African American textures? Postcolonial textures? There is not one but several projects here, which could benefit from the "data-mining" approach that Matt Kirschenbaum has described, and which I also initiated in crude form with my earlier "texture words" project.
Latest Flickr Plugin Gizmo: Retrievr
Check out Retrievr (via Matthew Kirschenbaum). It allows you to find images in Flickr's archives by drawing in a little box. You can play with black and white (and find B/W photos), or add in color to search color photos.
I tried doing my best version of George W. Bush:
I didn't get the President, but I did get this endearing floppy-eared creature.
Then I tried a heart:
And I got this result, which is pretty good.
According to the "About" page, the plugin isn't designed to recognize faces or objects, just shapes. So the result is equally good (or bad) if you use obviously abstract shapes:
That leads you to this. Not bad, eh.
Enjoy.
I tried doing my best version of George W. Bush:
I didn't get the President, but I did get this endearing floppy-eared creature.
Then I tried a heart:
And I got this result, which is pretty good.
According to the "About" page, the plugin isn't designed to recognize faces or objects, just shapes. So the result is equally good (or bad) if you use obviously abstract shapes:
That leads you to this. Not bad, eh.
Enjoy.
India-Oriented Works at Project Gutenberg: Bankim and Beyond
The Project Gutenberg folks are steadily amassing quite a collection of books that have fallen out of copyright. And while it's not quite a fully-functional virtual library yet, many of the materials they have up might be of value to scholars, especially of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Many of the newer books that have been going up are formatted in HTML, which makes them very readable, especially if one is reading online. A few even have scanned illustrations, which is even nicer. I hope this trend continues.
The next step for them, I would think, is tagging. To compile the below, I did title and subject searches (under the advanced search option) for "India," "Bengal," and so on. But it might also be helpful to have contributors pre-group the materials they're adding as they add them. As it is, one has to dig.
I also might appreciate a ratings system, as well as reader feedback (comments).
* * * *
The big news this week, for me at least, is the addition of Miriam S. Knight's translation of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's The Poison Tree. It's a nice, HTML version of Bankim's novel, with some graphical niceties, and embedded chapter links -- much nicer than the standard text file. And Bankim's story about wifely devotion is intriguing -- elements of the supernatural, as well as the rural/urban divide in Bengali life.
There are many other India-oriented texts that have been made available, most of them in the past 5 years. Below is a short list of some that I've come across, with books that look especially interesting or important near the top:
Annie Besant, The Case for India (1917). Besant has been an important figure in some recent scholarship on theosophy (especially Gauri Viswanathan's Outside the Fold). She's also a typically eccentric example of a westerner who made India her home. These are lectures given in 1917, describing the rise of the independence movement; nicely formatted in HTML.
S. Mukherji's Indian Ghost Stories. I read a couple of these stories (first published in English in 1914). While not thrilling, they do seem worth checking out as an example of early Indo-Anglian fiction in the horror genre. The second story involves an atrocity committed during the Indian Mutiny (others might also follow this vein).
Maud Diver, Far To Seek: A Romance of England and India (1920). Judging from a quick look at her prose, Diver clearly has literary aspirations; this is more than a "I went to India, and it was hot, and I had an adventure" type book (i.e., in the vein of O. Douglas below). One of the main characters, Lilamani Sinclair, is a mixed-race Anglo-Indian. Nice HTML edition.
Edward Washburn Hopkins' The Religions of India (1896)
Talbot Mundy, Hira Singh: When India Came to Fight in Flanders (1918). This is apparently a fictional narrative written in the voice of a Sikh soldier in Europe during World War I. Quite unusual, actually. Also see two other India-related novels by Talbot Mundy, King of the Khyber Rifles and The Winds of the World.
O. Douglas Olivia in India (1912). "O. Douglas" was the pen-name of a woman writer, who did a series of "Olivia" novels in the 1900s and 1910s.
George Robert Aberigh-Mackay, Twenty-One Days in India, and Other Stories
Mrs. Meer Hassan Ali, Observations on the Mussulmans of India (1832!). This an account of Indo-Islamic life written by a British woman who married a Lucknavi Muslim, who had spent some years in England (read the interesting preface). This looks like a very detailed and finely written ethnography of Shia Islam as it was practiced in India two hundred years ago.
John Biddulph, The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago (1907).
Commissioner Booth-Tucker, "Darkest India" (1891). A Christian reformist essay, modeled after Booth's Darkest England.
Sir Valentine Chirol, Indian Unrest. By the same author, India, Old and New
William Eleroy Curtis, Modern India (1905). A series of short chapters, which were originally pieces published in the Chicago Tribune. Nice HTML edition with scanned photographs of India in 1904 and 1905.
Caroline Augusta Frazer, Atma, A Romance (1891). This novel involves the Sikhs, and begins with an account of the fall of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's empire in the 1840s.
S. B. Banerjea, Tales of Bengal (can't find a date). These short stories look really interesting...
Sarojini Naidu, The Golden Threshold (1896). These "spiritual" poems are heavily influenced by the European symbolist movement, though knowing this doesn't make them any more exciting to read.
Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy (1922)
Edward Ellis, The Jungle Fugitive: A Tale of Life and Adventure in India
Edwin Arnold's Translation of the Bhagavad Gita
Sakuntala, Kalidasa
The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry
Akbar, Emperor of India
India's Love Lyrics
John Morrison, New Ideas in India in the Nineteenth Century
Fernao Nunes A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India
Lewis Wallace, The Prince of India (and volume 2)
Herbert Strang, In Clive's Command: The Story of the Fight for India
Frederick Sleigh Roberts, Forty-One Years in India: From Subaltern to Commander-In-Chief
Oliver Optic, Across India (1895)
* * * *
Oh, and did I mention their holdings of Rudyard Kipling, Rabindranath Tagore, or Mohandas Gandhi? I thought everyone already knew about those. Not to mention Kisari Mohan Ganguli's translations of the Mahabharata, or Hindu Literature (which includes translated poems by Toru Dutt, selections from the Ramayana, as well as the rare Sanskrit text called Hitopadesa).
Many of the newer books that have been going up are formatted in HTML, which makes them very readable, especially if one is reading online. A few even have scanned illustrations, which is even nicer. I hope this trend continues.
The next step for them, I would think, is tagging. To compile the below, I did title and subject searches (under the advanced search option) for "India," "Bengal," and so on. But it might also be helpful to have contributors pre-group the materials they're adding as they add them. As it is, one has to dig.
I also might appreciate a ratings system, as well as reader feedback (comments).
* * * *
The big news this week, for me at least, is the addition of Miriam S. Knight's translation of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's The Poison Tree. It's a nice, HTML version of Bankim's novel, with some graphical niceties, and embedded chapter links -- much nicer than the standard text file. And Bankim's story about wifely devotion is intriguing -- elements of the supernatural, as well as the rural/urban divide in Bengali life.
There are many other India-oriented texts that have been made available, most of them in the past 5 years. Below is a short list of some that I've come across, with books that look especially interesting or important near the top:
Annie Besant, The Case for India (1917). Besant has been an important figure in some recent scholarship on theosophy (especially Gauri Viswanathan's Outside the Fold). She's also a typically eccentric example of a westerner who made India her home. These are lectures given in 1917, describing the rise of the independence movement; nicely formatted in HTML.
S. Mukherji's Indian Ghost Stories. I read a couple of these stories (first published in English in 1914). While not thrilling, they do seem worth checking out as an example of early Indo-Anglian fiction in the horror genre. The second story involves an atrocity committed during the Indian Mutiny (others might also follow this vein).
Maud Diver, Far To Seek: A Romance of England and India (1920). Judging from a quick look at her prose, Diver clearly has literary aspirations; this is more than a "I went to India, and it was hot, and I had an adventure" type book (i.e., in the vein of O. Douglas below). One of the main characters, Lilamani Sinclair, is a mixed-race Anglo-Indian. Nice HTML edition.
Edward Washburn Hopkins' The Religions of India (1896)
Talbot Mundy, Hira Singh: When India Came to Fight in Flanders (1918). This is apparently a fictional narrative written in the voice of a Sikh soldier in Europe during World War I. Quite unusual, actually. Also see two other India-related novels by Talbot Mundy, King of the Khyber Rifles and The Winds of the World.
O. Douglas Olivia in India (1912). "O. Douglas" was the pen-name of a woman writer, who did a series of "Olivia" novels in the 1900s and 1910s.
George Robert Aberigh-Mackay, Twenty-One Days in India, and Other Stories
Mrs. Meer Hassan Ali, Observations on the Mussulmans of India (1832!). This an account of Indo-Islamic life written by a British woman who married a Lucknavi Muslim, who had spent some years in England (read the interesting preface). This looks like a very detailed and finely written ethnography of Shia Islam as it was practiced in India two hundred years ago.
John Biddulph, The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago (1907).
Commissioner Booth-Tucker, "Darkest India" (1891). A Christian reformist essay, modeled after Booth's Darkest England.
Sir Valentine Chirol, Indian Unrest. By the same author, India, Old and New
William Eleroy Curtis, Modern India (1905). A series of short chapters, which were originally pieces published in the Chicago Tribune. Nice HTML edition with scanned photographs of India in 1904 and 1905.
Caroline Augusta Frazer, Atma, A Romance (1891). This novel involves the Sikhs, and begins with an account of the fall of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's empire in the 1840s.
S. B. Banerjea, Tales of Bengal (can't find a date). These short stories look really interesting...
Sarojini Naidu, The Golden Threshold (1896). These "spiritual" poems are heavily influenced by the European symbolist movement, though knowing this doesn't make them any more exciting to read.
Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy (1922)
Edward Ellis, The Jungle Fugitive: A Tale of Life and Adventure in India
Edwin Arnold's Translation of the Bhagavad Gita
Sakuntala, Kalidasa
The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry
Akbar, Emperor of India
India's Love Lyrics
John Morrison, New Ideas in India in the Nineteenth Century
Fernao Nunes A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India
Lewis Wallace, The Prince of India (and volume 2)
Herbert Strang, In Clive's Command: The Story of the Fight for India
Frederick Sleigh Roberts, Forty-One Years in India: From Subaltern to Commander-In-Chief
Oliver Optic, Across India (1895)
* * * *
Oh, and did I mention their holdings of Rudyard Kipling, Rabindranath Tagore, or Mohandas Gandhi? I thought everyone already knew about those. Not to mention Kisari Mohan Ganguli's translations of the Mahabharata, or Hindu Literature (which includes translated poems by Toru Dutt, selections from the Ramayana, as well as the rare Sanskrit text called Hitopadesa).
Follow-up from Jonathan Wonham
Jonathan Wonham, whose post on Roger Caillois and the Mexican jumping bean inspired two posts from me last week (here and here), has posted a strong follow-up on Connaissances that I would recommend. Among the many interesting points in the post are Jonathan's comments on the distinction between (scientific) analogies and (poetic) metaphors:
Yes, but is the desire to avoid association with aestheticism enough to support a strong distinction between analogy and metaphor? Isn't the distinction to some extent semantic?
(There are many other points in Jonathan's post, including a very intelligent reading of Caillois's "Siliceous Concretions" poem as well as some disagreements with some of the arguments I've made. Read his whole post).
So actually, I think most scientists would be suspicious of metaphors, especially those based on anthropomorphising 'feelings'. What they are often up for, however, is analogies. A good analogy is often used for explaining a complex phenomenon in terms of a simpler one. A good example in the domain of fluid flow is the use of the flow of traffic into a city as an analogy for the movement of a turbulent flow. I've only been able to find one reference to this analogy on the internet and it is buried somewhere here.
In this analogy, the cars on the road stand in for grains of sediment in the turbulent flow because the behaviour of the cars is much easier to examine than the grains of sediment. The scientist looks to see what happens to the speed of the cars as they approach the city, slowing down or speeding up as the traffic reaches various bottlenecks and then makes the analogy with the particles in the flow, suggesting that these will also slow down or speed up as the flow encounters similar 'bottlenecks' or constricting gullies on the sea floor.
Why do scientists prefer to call these comparisons analogies rather than metaphors? It is because, as made clear here, metaphor is a rather wide term which:
is not always used for practical description and understanding; sometimes it is used for purely aesthetic reasons.
Yes, but is the desire to avoid association with aestheticism enough to support a strong distinction between analogy and metaphor? Isn't the distinction to some extent semantic?
(There are many other points in Jonathan's post, including a very intelligent reading of Caillois's "Siliceous Concretions" poem as well as some disagreements with some of the arguments I've made. Read his whole post).
Afghan War Rugs (and, North Carolina still exists)
Chapel Hill, NC:
Flier kiosks are a common sight in college towns. But at this particular time (i.e., before the semester has started), none of the kiosks in Chapel Hill seemed to have any actual flyers, just remnants of things from earlier. The result is a somewhat disconcerting collage.
But on to our real subject:
Would you buy a rug with the design above?
On a lark, we went into a place in Carrboro that sells Persian rugs. The salesman there was very enthusiastic, and showed us all kinds of rugs made in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Pakistan. Most of them had familiar, Persian designs, but some rugs from Afghanistan were radically different. According to him, the women who weave ones such as the above were asked by the merchants to simply portray whatever would best represent their experience -- and the result is tanks (and personal carriers), helicopters, and automatic rifles (AK-47 and AK-74). These 'war rugs' are apparently not of very high value for the general consumer, as people don't want to put them on the floor in their houses.
I was drawn to them, even though I felt, even then, that the designs were ugly. But I would feel queasy about actually buying and displaying such a rug in my apartment: it's hard to imagine how such an expression of suffering and rage could ever be transformed into a decorative element for a comfortable (and, needless to say, gun-free) American home. So maybe one could justify buying a 'war rug' as a work of art, but not as an actual, functional rug?
I don't think so. There is a company (warrug.com) that sells these rugs exclusively (indeed, many of the designs are similar to the ones we saw in Carrboro). I find the language on the site advertising the rugs a little troubling. It's also notable that designs such as the above are often copied and produced elsewhere in the region: all for the export market (see especially this page of this site for more on that). At the very least, this additional information casts doubt on the romanticized account of the war rugs we got from the salesman: this is not the authentic voice of Afghan women's protest, but a sizeable industry oriented to a particular niche of western consumers.
There is, however, an earlier generation of war rugs that were produced during the Soviet invasion itself, according to Graham Gower's Afghan War Rugs site. Many of these were 'protest' rugs, which were sold to raise money for the Mujahideen. Some of them tell pictographic stories of particular battles against the Soviets, or record the exploits of Ahmed Shah Massoud. These do seem somewhat more interesting to me than the generic 'weapons' war rugs, though the pictographic battle rugs are clearly relics of a very particular historical conflict.
Far and away the most informative site on war rugs is the cluster of articles by Jon O'Callaghan of New Hampshire, who analyzes the rugs he sells quite closely. You can learn about different kinds of wool in the rugs, different knots used by weavers in Herat (Afghanistan) and Mashad (Iran), as well as considerable detail on the types of weapons represented -- often with high graphical accuracy -- in the various types of war rugs. O'Callaghan's site is poorly organized, but if you click around you will find out lots of interesting things about war rugs.
The more I learn about war rugs, the more I dislike them. Our sales-guy in Carrboro also showed us traditional rugs from Hereke, as well as the abstract Gabbeh style from Southern Iran. Since I'm not sure I'll ever be able to afford a vintage Hereke rug, if I do ever buy a Persian or Turkish rug, it will probably be a Gabbeh:
* * * *
Incidentally while on this quick jaunt in NC, we also went to the Duke Gardens, which is worthwhile even in winter: go to Flickr to see some other rug pictures, as well as shots from the gardens in winter.
Flier kiosks are a common sight in college towns. But at this particular time (i.e., before the semester has started), none of the kiosks in Chapel Hill seemed to have any actual flyers, just remnants of things from earlier. The result is a somewhat disconcerting collage.
But on to our real subject:
Would you buy a rug with the design above?
On a lark, we went into a place in Carrboro that sells Persian rugs. The salesman there was very enthusiastic, and showed us all kinds of rugs made in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Pakistan. Most of them had familiar, Persian designs, but some rugs from Afghanistan were radically different. According to him, the women who weave ones such as the above were asked by the merchants to simply portray whatever would best represent their experience -- and the result is tanks (and personal carriers), helicopters, and automatic rifles (AK-47 and AK-74). These 'war rugs' are apparently not of very high value for the general consumer, as people don't want to put them on the floor in their houses.
I was drawn to them, even though I felt, even then, that the designs were ugly. But I would feel queasy about actually buying and displaying such a rug in my apartment: it's hard to imagine how such an expression of suffering and rage could ever be transformed into a decorative element for a comfortable (and, needless to say, gun-free) American home. So maybe one could justify buying a 'war rug' as a work of art, but not as an actual, functional rug?
I don't think so. There is a company (warrug.com) that sells these rugs exclusively (indeed, many of the designs are similar to the ones we saw in Carrboro). I find the language on the site advertising the rugs a little troubling. It's also notable that designs such as the above are often copied and produced elsewhere in the region: all for the export market (see especially this page of this site for more on that). At the very least, this additional information casts doubt on the romanticized account of the war rugs we got from the salesman: this is not the authentic voice of Afghan women's protest, but a sizeable industry oriented to a particular niche of western consumers.
There is, however, an earlier generation of war rugs that were produced during the Soviet invasion itself, according to Graham Gower's Afghan War Rugs site. Many of these were 'protest' rugs, which were sold to raise money for the Mujahideen. Some of them tell pictographic stories of particular battles against the Soviets, or record the exploits of Ahmed Shah Massoud. These do seem somewhat more interesting to me than the generic 'weapons' war rugs, though the pictographic battle rugs are clearly relics of a very particular historical conflict.
Far and away the most informative site on war rugs is the cluster of articles by Jon O'Callaghan of New Hampshire, who analyzes the rugs he sells quite closely. You can learn about different kinds of wool in the rugs, different knots used by weavers in Herat (Afghanistan) and Mashad (Iran), as well as considerable detail on the types of weapons represented -- often with high graphical accuracy -- in the various types of war rugs. O'Callaghan's site is poorly organized, but if you click around you will find out lots of interesting things about war rugs.
The more I learn about war rugs, the more I dislike them. Our sales-guy in Carrboro also showed us traditional rugs from Hereke, as well as the abstract Gabbeh style from Southern Iran. Since I'm not sure I'll ever be able to afford a vintage Hereke rug, if I do ever buy a Persian or Turkish rug, it will probably be a Gabbeh:
* * * *
Incidentally while on this quick jaunt in NC, we also went to the Duke Gardens, which is worthwhile even in winter: go to Flickr to see some other rug pictures, as well as shots from the gardens in winter.
More on Anthropomorphism and Poetry
There was an interesting objection to my post yesterday at the Valve, along the lines of "do you really think that scientific and poetic thinking can be complementary?" Poetry -- most poetry -- keeps its subject under a certain amount of intentional ambiguity, while the aim of scientific experiment (cutting open the jumping bean) must always be to demystify.
Though I can't fully answer Rich's objection, it made me think of Ted Hughes' short poem, "The Jaguar," which is available here. I'll just quote a few lines here:
It’s possible to read Hughes’ poem as demystifying the "caged" jaguar, challenging our human-centric understanding: the jaguar doesn’t know what a cage is, and will never know. Hughes is getting us to see the world as (he presumes) the jaguar sees it, and as such is testing the limits of cognition. The poem can be read as complementary to the aims of science, in that it aims to get us to understand the jaguar's "being" as it really is, and not as simply a grumpy human-like thinking being that is gawked at by children, behind bars, in a zoo. To think of the animal as angry at its status, or bored, is to think metaphorically.
On the other hand, maybe not. Though the poem demystifies, when Hughes uses words like "freedom" and "anger" he also retains some level of anthropomorphism, and through anthropomorphism, metaphor. He probably couldn't successfully take us into the being of the jaguar in writing, or via any representation at all (the only way to really do that would be to become the jaguar).
What I was after in my previous post is the idea that scientists are as dependent on metaphor (especially the metaphor of anthropomorphism) as we are. They are, of course, not dependent on it when they are actively performing experiments; that is something else, and it doesn’t make sense to see it as connected to poetry at all. But the rest of the time, it seems to me that the attempt to comprehend and theorize requires metaphors.
If we grant that science depends on metaphors, it might also be possible to think of poems as doing something complementary to science: it might be possible to say from a linguistics point of view that a certain kind of poetry might perform conceptual tests on our understanding of what objects are in and through language. I think Hughes' poem attempts something like that, and succeeds in a very limited way.
* * * *
As an example of a discussion of anthropomorphism within science itself, here are some comments by a computer science professor at UT-Austin:
I thought this was interesting because Prof. Dijkstra makes it a point to describe the amoebae without any anthropomorphism at all in the first paragraph, and it’s purely abstract -— like looking at wallpaper. Then one of the other scientists in the room creates a human plot... and suddenly, it’s possible to “understand” it.
Whether or not I'm on the mark about the relationship between science and poetry, it's somewhat gratifying to see that scientists are interested in the problem of anthropomorphism as well.
Though I can't fully answer Rich's objection, it made me think of Ted Hughes' short poem, "The Jaguar," which is available here. I'll just quote a few lines here:
But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, memerized,
As a child at a dream, at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes
On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom -
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear -
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him
More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.
It’s possible to read Hughes’ poem as demystifying the "caged" jaguar, challenging our human-centric understanding: the jaguar doesn’t know what a cage is, and will never know. Hughes is getting us to see the world as (he presumes) the jaguar sees it, and as such is testing the limits of cognition. The poem can be read as complementary to the aims of science, in that it aims to get us to understand the jaguar's "being" as it really is, and not as simply a grumpy human-like thinking being that is gawked at by children, behind bars, in a zoo. To think of the animal as angry at its status, or bored, is to think metaphorically.
On the other hand, maybe not. Though the poem demystifies, when Hughes uses words like "freedom" and "anger" he also retains some level of anthropomorphism, and through anthropomorphism, metaphor. He probably couldn't successfully take us into the being of the jaguar in writing, or via any representation at all (the only way to really do that would be to become the jaguar).
What I was after in my previous post is the idea that scientists are as dependent on metaphor (especially the metaphor of anthropomorphism) as we are. They are, of course, not dependent on it when they are actively performing experiments; that is something else, and it doesn’t make sense to see it as connected to poetry at all. But the rest of the time, it seems to me that the attempt to comprehend and theorize requires metaphors.
If we grant that science depends on metaphors, it might also be possible to think of poems as doing something complementary to science: it might be possible to say from a linguistics point of view that a certain kind of poetry might perform conceptual tests on our understanding of what objects are in and through language. I think Hughes' poem attempts something like that, and succeeds in a very limited way.
* * * *
As an example of a discussion of anthropomorphism within science itself, here are some comments by a computer science professor at UT-Austin:
Let me first relate my experience that drove home how pervasive anthropomorphism is. It took place at one of the monthly meetings of the science section of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, where we were shown a motion picture made through a microscope. Thanks to phase contrast microscopy . . . it is now possible to see through the microscope undied cultures of living cells, and that was what they had done while making this motion picture. It showed us - somewhat accelerated - the life of a culture of amoebae. For quite a while we looked at something we had never seen: I can only describe it as identifiable bubbles with irregular changing contours, slowly moving without any pattern through a two-dimensional aquarium. To all intents and purposes it could have been some sort of dynamic wallpaper. It was, in fact, rather boring, looking at those aimlessly moving grey blots, until one of the amoeba in the centre of the screen began to divide. We saw it constrict, we saw in succession all the images familiar from our high-school biology, we saw the centres of the two halves move in opposite directions until they were only connected by a thin thread as they began to pull more frantically at either end of the leash that still connected them. Finally the connection broke and the two swam away from each other at the maximum speed young amoebae can muster.
The fascinating and somewhat frightening observation, however, was that at the moment of the rupture one hundred otherwise respectable scientists gave all a sigh of relief: “at last they had succeeded in freeing themselves from each other." None of us had been able to resist, as the division process went on, the temptation to discern two individuals with which we could identify and of which we felt - more in our bones that in our brains, but that is beside the point - how much they “wanted” to get loose. A whole pattern of human desires had been projected on those blots! Crazy, of course, but such is the pervasive and insidious habit of anthropomorphic thought.
I thought this was interesting because Prof. Dijkstra makes it a point to describe the amoebae without any anthropomorphism at all in the first paragraph, and it’s purely abstract -— like looking at wallpaper. Then one of the other scientists in the room creates a human plot... and suddenly, it’s possible to “understand” it.
Whether or not I'm on the mark about the relationship between science and poetry, it's somewhat gratifying to see that scientists are interested in the problem of anthropomorphism as well.
What To Do With a Mexican Jumping Bean: Science and Poetry
Jonathan Wonham has a wonderful post on Connaissances about a debate between two famous French writers, Roger Caillois and André Breton.
The debate is over what to do with a Mexican Jumping Bean. For those who don't know, these are beans found in northwestern Mexico, which make little jerking, rolling movements, seemingly of their own accord (see a Flash video). They are apparently pretty easy to get at shops in the southwestern part of the U.S. Here is Jonathan's account of the debate between the two writers:
Jonathan agrees with Caillois (so do I) that thorough knowledge of natural phenomena need not be the death of poetry. For one thing, as Jonathan points out, even cutting open the bean to find out what is inside wouldn't actually resolve the question of what makes the beans jump by itself. The larvae, freed from the limiting shell of the bean, would likely die -- it certainly wouldn't jump. Moreover, it wouldn't explain at all how the Jumping Bean Moth evolved into a dependant (parasitical) relationship with this particular species of plant, so as to feed on its seeds, metamorphose, and eventually hatch out of the hollowed shell of the same seed. As Jonathan puts it:
In effect, scientific reasoning is no less dependent on acts of the imagination -- and metaphor -- than poetry. Especially with his comments on evolution, Jonathan is here echoing Caillois' arguments in a 1935 essay called "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," where Caillois explores a series of odd natural resemblances that are the result of evolutionary accidents (such as a particular species of South American butterfly that resembles an owl, or the praying mantis). Caillois uses the word "mimicry" to describe this mode of resemblance, but of course it isn't really that at all (the animal has no knowledge of the other animal or natural phenomenon it resembles, nor has it intended to resemble anything).
Incidentally, Jonathan Wonham's post is inspired by Donna Roberts' review of Caillois' The Edge of Surrealism (PDF), which also discusses Caillois' relationship with the writer and analyst Georges Bataille, who was also both a scientist (or at least a philosopher) and a poet. Of the three writers Caillois seems to be the most grounded -- the most methodical, rigorous thinker. And yet, in at least one sample of his work that Jonathan Wonham himself has translated on his blog, one gets a sense of a powerful literary imagination. Here is Wonham's translation of a prose poem by Caillois called "Siliceous Concretions", which describes, in a somewhat clinical way, the beauty in a rock formation in the Ile-de-France. Here I'll only quote a few lines:
Notice the intriguing anthropomorphizing of the rocks under the water. Obviously Caillois knows as he writes that the objects he's looking at are neither "lazy" nor "evasive" in any proper sense, nor does water "flee." These verbs are all metaphors, which do not deny the truth of science, though they do perhaps move laterally away from its mode of perception. (Read the whole prose-poem here).
There is a danger of launching from here into large generalizations about scientific thinking vs. poetic thinking. At most, I would say that any strong opposition between the two is questionable: even as a more scientific kind of poet, Caillois remained a poet. But do you know of other examples of the interplay between science and literature? Scientists who were creative writers, or people who are primarily writers who've responded directly to scientific ideas or knowledge?
* * * * *
Also see Jonathan Wonham's interview with Ivy Alvarez, discussing science and poetry, here.
And if the only thing that interests you in this post is the Mexican Jumping Bean, see more on that at How Stuff Works, and Wayne's Word.
Update: As with so many things, I find that Scott McLemee has already been there, done that (free link at the Chronicle of Higher Ed).
The debate is over what to do with a Mexican Jumping Bean. For those who don't know, these are beans found in northwestern Mexico, which make little jerking, rolling movements, seemingly of their own accord (see a Flash video). They are apparently pretty easy to get at shops in the southwestern part of the U.S. Here is Jonathan's account of the debate between the two writers:
The incident with André Breton and the Surrealists concerned a Mexican jumping bean and resulted, according to Caillois, in a rift developing between himself and the Surrealists. The question is: given the mystery of Mexican jumping beans, is the more fruitful posture to break them open and dispel the enigma (Caillois' preference) or to respect the enigma and harness whatever imaginative possibilities it appeared to invite (Breton's position)?
I think this question perfectly exemplifies the difficulties I alluded to earlier of the possible oppositional character of science and poetry. In the context above, Caillois places himself as the man of Science, intent on cutting to the core of the problem and finding out what is going on inside the bean. Breton on the other hand is the mystic, the hermit who will watch the bean jumping for hours, formulating in his head an infinite number of ways to explain why the bean is jumping. Is there a tormented soul trapped inside it? Did a woman rub it between her lips and cause it to become excited? Has it become wet with the urine of a wombat and developed paroxysms? All of these questions rapidly come to mind, stimulating the poetic instinct.
Jonathan agrees with Caillois (so do I) that thorough knowledge of natural phenomena need not be the death of poetry. For one thing, as Jonathan points out, even cutting open the bean to find out what is inside wouldn't actually resolve the question of what makes the beans jump by itself. The larvae, freed from the limiting shell of the bean, would likely die -- it certainly wouldn't jump. Moreover, it wouldn't explain at all how the Jumping Bean Moth evolved into a dependant (parasitical) relationship with this particular species of plant, so as to feed on its seeds, metamorphose, and eventually hatch out of the hollowed shell of the same seed. As Jonathan puts it:
Cutting the bean in half like a true scientist reveals that there is something inside making it jump, but poses a new question: why? Why does the larva throw itself around like that? This is very often the way with science. Tearing back the veil of one mystery reveals another, a Russian doll of conundrums, one inside the next, each more mysterious than the one before, deep mysteries, mysteries of time, of evolution. Like the question of how the ear evolved with tiny bones inside it. Or of how eyes developed as orbs of transparent jelly.
In effect, scientific reasoning is no less dependent on acts of the imagination -- and metaphor -- than poetry. Especially with his comments on evolution, Jonathan is here echoing Caillois' arguments in a 1935 essay called "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," where Caillois explores a series of odd natural resemblances that are the result of evolutionary accidents (such as a particular species of South American butterfly that resembles an owl, or the praying mantis). Caillois uses the word "mimicry" to describe this mode of resemblance, but of course it isn't really that at all (the animal has no knowledge of the other animal or natural phenomenon it resembles, nor has it intended to resemble anything).
Incidentally, Jonathan Wonham's post is inspired by Donna Roberts' review of Caillois' The Edge of Surrealism (PDF), which also discusses Caillois' relationship with the writer and analyst Georges Bataille, who was also both a scientist (or at least a philosopher) and a poet. Of the three writers Caillois seems to be the most grounded -- the most methodical, rigorous thinker. And yet, in at least one sample of his work that Jonathan Wonham himself has translated on his blog, one gets a sense of a powerful literary imagination. Here is Wonham's translation of a prose poem by Caillois called "Siliceous Concretions", which describes, in a somewhat clinical way, the beauty in a rock formation in the Ile-de-France. Here I'll only quote a few lines:
Other volumes, more powerfully curved, hold up an efficient shield to invisible pressure. These are the ones which are slow to thin or fold themselves, the opposite of lazy they are fashioned by a long evasiveness.
An underground current filters through the sand to slowly form these great tears of stone fixed in a flight which is forever headlong, forever immobile. For it is the water which flees.
Notice the intriguing anthropomorphizing of the rocks under the water. Obviously Caillois knows as he writes that the objects he's looking at are neither "lazy" nor "evasive" in any proper sense, nor does water "flee." These verbs are all metaphors, which do not deny the truth of science, though they do perhaps move laterally away from its mode of perception. (Read the whole prose-poem here).
There is a danger of launching from here into large generalizations about scientific thinking vs. poetic thinking. At most, I would say that any strong opposition between the two is questionable: even as a more scientific kind of poet, Caillois remained a poet. But do you know of other examples of the interplay between science and literature? Scientists who were creative writers, or people who are primarily writers who've responded directly to scientific ideas or knowledge?
* * * * *
Also see Jonathan Wonham's interview with Ivy Alvarez, discussing science and poetry, here.
And if the only thing that interests you in this post is the Mexican Jumping Bean, see more on that at How Stuff Works, and Wayne's Word.
Update: As with so many things, I find that Scott McLemee has already been there, done that (free link at the Chronicle of Higher Ed).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)