Another panel on blogging

Both Chuck Tryon and Tim Burke have recently been asked to be on panels on blogging at their home institutions. Today was my turn. The organizer, a colleague of mine in the English department, asked me to talk about why I blog for 8-10 minutes as part of a series for Lehigh Lab.

8-10 minutes! How about 8 to 10 hours?

For lack of a better organizational system, I used (attributively) Tim's 5 points, since they are pretty similar to my own:

1) Because I want to introduce some unexpected influences and ideas into my intellectual and academic work. I want to unsettle the overly domesticated, often hermetic thinking that comes with academic specialization. I want to introduce a “mutational vector” into my scholarly and intellectual work.
2) Because I want a place to publish small writings, odd writings, leftover writings, lazy speculations, half-formed hypotheses. I want a place to publish all the things that I think have some value but not enough to constitute legitimate scholarship. I want a chance to branch into new areas of specialization at a reduced level of intensity and seriousness.
3) Because I want to find out how much of my scholarly work is usefully translatable into a wider public conversation. A lot of my writings on Iraq, for example, are really a public working-out of more scholarly writing I’m doing in my current monograph, a translation of my academic engagement with the historiography of imperialism.
4) Because I want to model for myself and others how we should all behave within an idealized democratic public sphere. I want to figure out how to behave responsibly but also generatively, how to rise to the better angels of my communicative nature.
5) Because I’m a compulsive loudmouth.

The most interesting questions in the Q&A revolved around the problem of how information is organized in the blogosphere. How are things verified? If blogging really blurs the line between professional journalism and idiosyncratic opinion (or, closer to home: between formal scholarship and half-digested chatter), doesn't that pose problems of legitimation?

In an anarcho-libertarian world-view, it's no problem at all if the flow of information and opinion is completely democratized: who cares whether people get their news from Daily Kos or the Times?

But in the real world, it's not so simple. The "reality-based community" needs some sources of legitimation. In my response to the questions, I was perhaps a little too flippant in dismissing the established order. No one knows whether the cacophony of the blogosphere is really going to lead to a paradigm shift in the World Information Order. But for now I actually feel pretty strongly that we need a conceptual and practical division between what one would call professional journalism (and analogously to academia, formal scholarship), and the informal space of blogs. It is necessary for the same reason as it is necessary to know absolutely whether 1 million people died or not during India's Partition. Every community must have norms and standards, as well as a shared version of the general sweep of history. Without it, conversations don't work.

I probably should have said something to that effect. But it sounded much cooler to say "screw the Times..."

* * * *

And below are some things I said (amplifying Tim's five points, or personalizing them). They are pulled from a few pages of notes I culled together before the panel. I've taken out introductory material that I thought would be highly redundant to readers. Sorry if the resulting points are a little discontinuous:

1. New ways of thinking, new sources. I'm a little disaffected by the patterns of thought that characterize scholarly work in my general field (literature) as well as within my sub-fields (postcolonial studies, British modernism). It seems like quite a number of major paradigm shifts –- the ideas that people were especially passionate about –- were hashed out 15 to 30 years ago. There are quite a number of very smart people who are saying versions of something that was already said, pretty well, by other scholars. Where are new ideas going to come from? Sometimes I get new ideas from really excellent conference talks or public lectures; sometimes I get it from journals. But more often the experience resembles something out of a Scott McLemee essay.

Blogging, in contrast, offers access to worlds considerably beyond one's own. Potentially, it can pose a new model for internet-assisted learning, and a new way of modeling ideas and information in the humanities.

2. International readers. About 40 percent of the readers of my blog are reading me from outside the U.S. I have made contacts with bloggers and readers in places like Germany and Denmark, and quite a number in the UK. I've also got -- no surprise here -– some readers in India, most of whom find me through Indian bloggers based in India who link to me. (Journalists Dilip D'Souza, Jai Arjun, and Amit Varma are particularly culpable for the growth of my Indian readership). I also got nominated for an award or two -- “Best India Blog,” and so on. I didn't win, but the attention probably didn't hurt. And did I mention the readers in Japan, Australia, Singapore (ok, just John Holbo there)?

Amongst this international readership there are academics, to be sure. But I'm not entirely sure what it means. Most of the people who are reading this are people I'll never meet, and who will likely have little or no actual impact on my career or my personal life. What is really at stake for me either personally or professionally in blogging? I'm not 100% sure.

3. Brevity is the soul of blogging. Long historical disquisitions generally get skimmed or skipped. Few readers will stick with you for more than 500 words (how many of you are still left, even here?), and most will start skimming after 250. Some tricky nuances or complex evaluations might get sidelined, but the overriding principle is, can you make yourself understood by everyone, and hold their interest? Can you be smart without being pompous?

Trying to meet all those demands leads to a level of discourse somewhere between formal writing and verbal conversation. Many of the skills one uses to get and hold student interest in the classroom also apply to blogging, except in blogging you should always expect that someone who knows as much or more than you do on a given subject is reading what you write. People reading you are quicker to challenge you than people who are talking to you face to face.

4. Blogging is Conversational. Most blog posts work on the principle of the integration of information dissemination, your own critique, and your readers' responses to your critique. Blogging is thus inherently conversational (much more so than either the traditional media or traditional academic scholarship), which means it relies on a pretty highly developed system of etiquette.

The particulars of that system are quite complex. For one thing, if you quote someone else, you have to be quite clear about it, because on the internet, it's pretty easy to figure out whether something might be plagiarism. Also, if you put someone down, expect them to hear about it pretty quickly (even if the person in question doesn't read blogs). Published writers are habitually googling themselves; they'll find what you said. If you say something harsh about the new novel of a well-respected writer, expect to get a nasty note from that person at 2 in the morning (this has happened to me!). One learns what to do and not to do, mainly through trial and error. And one helps other people learn the ropes.
Sociologists have begun to study this system of etiquette (Henry Farrell and Daniel Drezner have been publishing papers on it, which I responded to here, some time ago).

5. Collective process. The conversational quality of blogs means that many key problems are worked out in what might be called a collective process. It's ironic, because most bloggers are also intensely individualistic when it comes to their tastes and social configuration. Quite a number of academic bloggers are a bit alienated at their home colleges and universities.

How can blogging be at once driven by an individualist ethos, and such an intensely collective/reciprocal universe, where you depend -- completely -- on other people linking to you? That's another one I'm still thinking about.

Getting Down in Addis Ababa

The New York Times has a story on the mixed reaction of local Ethiopians to the influx of foreign Rastafarians on the occasion of Bob Marley's 60th birthday (can you believe he would just be 60?).

Rastafarianism originated in Jamaica in the 1930s. As most readers probably know, Rastafarians worship Ethiopia's King/Emperor Haile Selassie (known as Ras Tafari before he became Emperor). Selassie seems to have been singled out in this way because Ethiopia was Africa's only un-colonized state, and was led by a ruler who (with help) managed to defeat European armies. Selassie was emperor between 1930-1936, and then for a very long period, 1941-1974. He was a controversial leader, to say the least. And he didn't understand the thousands of Jamaicans who had turned him into a figure of reverence. He was a little freaked when he first visited Jamaica, and saw thousands of followers waiting there for him: "There is a problem in Jamaica.... Please, help these people. They are misunderstanding, they do not understand our culture.... They need a church to be established and you are chosen to go."

I like Bob Marley's music, and I respect the Rastafarians. A religion is a religion, after all; it's power is measured in what it does for its followers, and it doesn't need to justify itself to anyone. There are supposedly a million Rastafarians worldwide.

That said, I find this whole spectacle kind of crazy. Here are thousands of followers, some from places like Japan, coming into a poor country, whose ruler's deification became, in some sense, obsolete when the rest of Africa became independent around 1960 (and he was never all that great a leader to begin with). They've come to the place that is theologically defined for them as the "promised land," though only a few hundred of them have ever actually tried to live there (this is a promised land that is desperately short of resources). Meanwhile, the local Ethiopians, many of whom are devout Protestant Christians, are complaining about the pot-smoking foreigners, and walking through the crowd with flyers for their Church.

It's a little like something out of a book by Caryl Phillips (especially The Atlantic Sound), or a V.S. Naipaul travelogue.

* * *
Somewhat unrelatedly, Ethiopia has its own amazing music fusion scene, which was especially active in the 1970s (though it may be still going on, for all I know). You can hear some really interesting jazz/fusion music on a series of CDs called Ethiopiques. One can hear a (very short) sample of the sound here. If anyone can find longer samples or streams of Ethiopian jazz on the web, let me know.

There's something about this music that I find really compelling. It's at once swinging and experimental. It's at once distinctively African, and cosmopolitan and progressive...

Boing Boing

I got a mention in Boing Boing. It's kind of buried, but hey, it's Boing Boing.

Punk rock Boing Boing readers might want to check out my post on Fugazi.

Ward Churchill on CNN

Ward Churchill, talking to Paula Zahn on CNN (Windows Media). It came into my box via Blogdigger.

Warning: it's a trainwreck!

Normally, I hate the Cable News Interview With A Controversial Subject -- the kind of interview where the journalist wields the word "sir" with such a level of ferocity that its victims ought to consider sueing for libel. I almost always side with the person getting yelled at, generally a hapless leftist whose view is being distorted or manipulated by the opportunistic "journalist" with an agenda to stick to, and no qualms about beating down interviewees until they say uncle. There is also often a severe cognitive dissonance between the interviewer and the interviewee, especially if the latter is a soft-spoken academic. For instance, I remember being horrified at the way Michael Hardt was often completely misunderstood in his appearances on TV after the publication of Empire four years ago.

But in this case it's impossible not to be sympathetic to Paula Zahn. Churchill just seems unable to answer any questions directly, or to face what he's saying honestly. He makes some outrageous reversals, and seems completely affectless and immovable throughout -- completely robotic. The effect isn't so much "wouldya take a look at this moonbat?" (Bill O'Reilly's trademark) or "I hope you bleed to death on a rock" (Chris Matthews). With Zahn, it's more a kind of awe that this guy really seems to mean what he says.

But I did lose sympathy with Zahn towards the end -- when she started talking about whether Churchill is going to get fired or not. That's the kind of thing O'Reilly gets off on. But for normal human beings, it's in poor taste.

Rituparno Ghosh's Raincoat: The Impersonation of Middle-Class Life

After he won some broad recognition for Chokher Bali last year, Rituparno Ghosh is India's hottest art film director. Raincoat is his first film shot in Hindi.

Chokher Bali, based on Rabindranath Tagore's novel, was "important," but sometimes maddening to watch; one walked away more confused than anything else about the point. What is either Tagore or Ghosh trying to say about the fate of widows in traditional Hindu culture? (I admit I was more positive on the film when I first saw it a couple of months ago.)

Rituparno has also done quite a number of films in Bengali, the most well-known being perhaps Bariwali, from 1999. I have to admit I haven't seen them.

Given Ghosh's status as an art-director, and as a maker of Small Films With Dark Themes, it was shocking to see that Raincoat turned into a bit of a commercial success in India last month, momentarily edging out some big commercial blockbusters. No doubt it has more to do with Aishwariya Rai's and Ajay Devgan's names than Ghosh's, but it's still something -- Indian audiences are pretty allergic to depressing art films.

Viewers looking for more of Aishwariya in a blouseless 'traditional' sari will be disappointed; here, she's playing against type as a depressed housewife. On the other hand, both she and Devgan are forced by the minimalist scenario to demonstrate an ability to act. And they do; both put in strong performances.

The success of Raincoat is shocking, since this is also a deeply depressing film, one of the most unforgiving I can remember. The strength of it -- its watchability -- is perhaps in the film's central gimmick, which I won't give away, except to say that what we see is the impersonation of middle-class Indian life. If audiences are seeing it as poignant, it's because Ghosh points to the elusiveness of the dream of various post-liberalization middle-class status symbols (which are all enumerated in the film in a bizarre, almost ritualistic way: cell-phone, car, air-conditioning, international air travel...).

But did I like the film? Yes, but.

Worthwhile reviews:

Planet Bollywood is pretty ecstatic.

Now Running is a bit more measured; the reviewer makes some good criticisms.

Outlook India didn't like it, but then, who reads film reviews in Outlook?

Mini-Review of Rishi Rich, The Best

Rishi Rich, The Best deserves a mini-review because it is really a mini-album. It's marked for Indian release (Nupur, 2004); I found it in New Jersey.

Rishi Rich has been a madly prolific producer of desi-ish pop music in England since the late 1990s. He's most famous for his work with pop stars like Jay Sean and Craig David, as well as his studio-commissioned Bhangra remix of Britney Spears', "Me Against the Music." He also did some Punjabi 2-step music with people like Jassi Sidhu (B21) and Bally Jagpal, which has more or less been forgotten -- too bad. Rishi Rich's sensibility is really R&B more than Bhangra; there is very little by way of traditional Dhol or Tumbi in most of his music. (When it is there, as in the Britney Spears "Desi Kultcha" remix, it doesn't always add much.) I should add that Rich has also had some cross-over success in India, with tracks for movies like Hum Tum (he did the catchy, R&B title track, "U 'n' I Hum Tum"). And more Bollywood is on the way...

Rich really is a very talented R&B producer, but I've yet to hear something of his that really blew me away, in the vein of Timbaland and Aaliyah's "If your girl only knew." This Best Of CD is the Indian version of the album Rich released in England in 2002 (Simply Rich), but it's lacking some of the best songs from that release for some reason (especially "Nahin Jeena"). It's not terribly inspiring overall, and I'll just mention a couple of tracks that I hadn't heard before.

The highlight here is probably "Mainu Kaleyan Wekh Ke," which is, surprisingly, a Punjabi song in a rocksteady ska format. It takes me back to the old ska-bhangra experiments from the early 1990s, with groups like Cultural FX and the Sahotas on Multitone Records. This track is marred by vocals that aren't quite what one would want, but the kitschy euphoria of ska and the Bhangra's teasing and joi de vivre, work well together. I wish there were more of it!

Another surprise track is a 2-step anthem entirely in English, called "No One There," with the singer Veronica (who also sings on "U 'n' I Hum Tum"). It's just a catchy pop/2-step track in the vein of Daniel Bedingfield, Craig David, and about 1000 others. Rich aggressively cuts and splices the R&B style vocals (simple definition: 2-step is essentially R&B in double-time).

The result is an interesting textural tension. On the bottom is the "smooth" (legato) texture of 2-step/R&B. On top are rough edges and angular, staccato melodic recombinations designed by the producer.

Link: the BBC bio of Rishi Rich

Tim Burke on Ward Churchill. And, irresponsible postcolonialism

Tim Burke makes some interesting points about Ward Churchill, who was in the news last week after his inexcusable and stupid statements about the 9/11 victims ("little Eichmanns") came to light before a scheduled talk at Hamilton College. Tim Burke argues that Churchill has made quite a career out of that way of thinking. Moreover, a fair number of our left-leaning colleagues subscribe to the mode of thinking that led Churchill to say what he said, even if nearly no one would actually follow that mode of thinking (i.e., "identity politics") to its extreme conclusions. Here's Burke:

I stress very strongly, not the left at large or overall. It’s a very small tradition of anticolonial, pseudo-nationalist radicalism that eclectically and often incoherently grabs what it needs from Marxism, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, and even conservative thought now and again (though often in unacknowledged ways).

It is also a tradition that is completely unable to face its own contradictions. Churchill’s much-cited remarks on 9/11 are an indication, for example, of the underlying moral incoherence of his writing (and writing like his). The principles that are used to value some lives (Iraqi babies dying under sanctions) and not others (people in the World Trade Center) have no underlying ethical or moral foundation: they’re purely historicist and instrumental. The original sin of modernity is seen as the expansion of the West; it is perceived as a kind of singularity that utterly destroyed or erased historical experience to that point. The only moral vector, the only capacity to act immorally or to commit evil, descends from that original sin. If you’re associated by social structure with that expansion, you are bad. If you are a victim of it, you are good.

This perspective on history and contemporary global politics is incapable of explaining its own existence. How is it possible to value life in a world produced by the expansion of the West, even the lives of the victims of colonialism? What are the sources, in a purely historicist account of ethics, of a belief in the sanctity of human cultures, or a belief that it is wrong to colonize or practice what Churchill would call genocide? Churchill, like others who write within his intellectual tradition, has no way to explain the genesis of his own political and ethical position. He can in fragmented ways claim an authenticity rooted in Native American traditions—but if it is possible today in the here and now to construct and disseminate a whole ethical practice founded in those traditions, then his claim of genocidal eradication by the West is clearly is false. If on the other hand, the West contains within it the seeds of its own critique, then the expansion of the West is itself a much more complicated phenomena than it would appear to be in Churchill’s writing.

Sorry for the very long quote, but the four paragraphs hang together.

Much of what is wrong in Churchill is also present -- and also wrong -- in the more radical exponents of postcolonial theory. There is a kind of forgetting of the origins of terms which make the critique possible, and a disregard for the fact that the "West contains within it the seeds of its own critique" (I think Burke is echoing Edward Said's essay on Conrad here, in Culture And Imperialism). Tim's point is that a system of values that is universal, or nearly so -- is both necessary and inevitable (in theory, they would say it's "always already" involved).

One of the things I've been trying to think about, both in my book on secularism (sadly, still languishing without a publisher!), as well as in what will perhaps be my next project, is the possibility of thinking about a historical (rather than "theoretical") critique of colonialism, with something like a liberal, humanist lens.

It's really not that easy to do. If you believe that colonial modernity was indeed a kind of original sin, there is precious little to stop you from justifying resistance to it using what I would call immoral means (i.e., terrorism). A certain way of reading Foucault also leads one to this place...

If you disagree, you are left in an uncomfortable position somewhat akin to the Zamindar (landowner) Nikhil, in Tagore's The Home and the World. You accept the potential benefits of colonization (incidentally, this might apply to the current situation in Iraq), while also aspiring to end colonialism as a political and military strategy of the dominant powers.

But in wanting both things at once you also run the risk -- again, like Nikhil -- of undermining the basis of your own authority. You have your humanism, but to a great extent you lose your politics.

[Still thinking about these issues... criticism welcomed...]

Word usage in the President's SOTU

Word usage in this year's SOTU, according to a DailyKos commenter.

must - 29
security - 29
make - 23
year - 22
freedom - 19
social - 18
people - 18
country - 18
american - 17
nation - 16
terror - 16
new - 16
congress - 15
worker - 15
america - 15
world - 14
govern - 14
because - 14
benefit - 14
every - 13
retire - 13
system - 13
account - 13
iraq - 13
help - 13
time - 12
economy - 11
reform - 11
work - 11
peace - 11
women - 11
tax - 10
great - 10
terrorist - 10
responsible - 10

nothin':

abu ghraib - 0
torture - 0
gay - 0
abortion - 0
private - 0
privatize - 0
Guantanano - 0
Chalabi - 0
crisis - 0
Sudan-0
tsunami-0
mandate-0
poverty-0

Somebody also caught him with a split-infinitive: "judges have a duty to faithfully interpret the law, not legislate from the bench."

To which another commentor responds: "It is always good to faithfully split an infinitive although this is not exactly a place where no one has boldly gone before."

Even Reason is a bit critical of Ayn Rand

It's the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand's birth.

Yeah, well. With the exception of Daniel Drezner, Libertarians don't make much sense to me. To put it simply, I think we need the authority of the state. It protects minorities, takes charge of social welfare, and regulates business practices. In India, rampant statism did lead to corruption ("License Raj") and also a stagnant environment for business as well as the world of arts and ideas. But it also created the framework for a democratic, generally peaceful, modern society. To the extent that the Indian government is inefficient, that is true because the government is actually too weak (as in under-funded), rather than too strong.

I can understand why many Indians (especially those involved in the high tech industry) want to see less government involvement and regulation. But if the goal is to follow the model of the western democracies, then one can't ignore the fact that those societies are all welfare states with high income tax rates (and high enforcement of those taxes), as well as massive government bureaucracies. The skyline of New York City was built on Unionized Labor, property tax, and building codes and inspections. Capitalism too, but carefully regulated capitalism. It's capitalism checked by the concepts of social contracts, constitutional law, and civil rights.

Thus, I can't get excited about Ayn Rand's centenary, the way many Indian bloggers are (see AnarCapLib). Yazad links to a number of paeans to Rand that have come out in the past couple of days. Certainly, Rand's life story is intriguing -- she lived through the Bolshevik revolution personally, before she came to the U.S.

But I have to say that I prefer the NYT's critical version of Rand to the Cato Institute's.

And I'm pleasantly surprised that even an editor for the Libertarian magazine Reason has some critical things to say about Rand's legacy on today's Day to Day.

A few photos from a mini-holiday: Vieques

A few photos from last weekend, mostly from Vieques and the El Yunque rainforest. And here are the rest of my Flickr photos (I'm enjoying the cool tags, blog-friendliness, and searchability).

I meant to write about the experience, but I've been having trouble putting ideas together. So here's a quick list of happy memories:

1) Tropical sun on the skin. You need it periodically. It's like dropping butter onto a hot pan, perfect chemical joy. Heat isn't enough, nor is the ocean; what you need is the direct contact with sun itself.

2) You do strange things on vacation, which you would never do at home. Like asking for favors from strangers when you planned something rather poorly, or the taxi doesn't show up. Or: eating improbable food (i.e., coconut bread stuffed with cheese and guava).

3) Being in a Spanish-speaking place is exhilarating and frustrating, especially if you only had two years of education in the language in junior high school. The basic grammar is there, but the vocabulary is pathetic. Luckily, many words overlap with English, and my accent is good owing to the similarity of Spanish's "t" "d" and "r" sounds to Hindi. Overall, it's just about enough to get basic directions and maybe order food from a roadside stand. But it's sorely lacking when you're trying to explain the difference between Sikhism and Islam to a Jibara peasant-type, who speaks no English. The only headway I could make was "Indiano."

My favorite word from this past weekend was disfrutar: enjoy the fruits of your disfruta. Also, in Puerto Rico especially, I like hearing Reggaeton everywhere; it seems like Reggaeton has completely taken over street music in San Juan. Hip hop is declining.

4) Snorkeling off of Vieques. Strange fish. A puffer?

5) Moss in the rain forest.

6) Scrabble in a cabana by the beach. Geeky, yes. But why not?

7) Taking the $2 ferry and listening to the local men singing Puerto Rican romantic ballads.

8) A break from all the usual crap.

UPDATE: I didn't take this photo, but we did pass this spot outside of Camp Garcia. The military is gone, but protest signs from two years ago are still up.

How Comment Spam Works

One hears a lot about the comment spam problem, especially for people who are on Moveable Type (pre-MT 3.0) and WordPress. I haven't heard about whether it's a problem with Blogger as well, or with third-party comment applications like HaloScan. If not, I presume it soon will be, for anyone with open comments.

This article in the UK Register (which I came across through Kaush, who has been forced to close down comments on his blog) explains what Comment Spammers are trying to do (improve search engine rankings), and how they do it: PHP scripts and Open Proxies (meaning, unprotected servers on the internet). The Open Proxies allow them to mask their IP addresses to get around blocks, and they say they don't use hijacked PCs to spread spam the way email spammers do. It was also interesting to me to learn why blog spammers turned to this technique -- the old 'link farms' became obsolete after Google's search algorithm learned to spot "nepotistic" linking (the "Florida Update," as it is called for some mysterious reason).

Many of the blogs I read now have "captcha" tests, to make sure that human beings are posting comments, not spammers. But even captcha tests, according to this interview, can be solved (something about Unix's curl command...). Yikes.

When I grow up, I want to be a Feuilletonist

John Holbo's latest complex (theoretical!) playful polemic against literary Theory is pretty formidable. I'm not quite sure I get how it all comes together, but I enjoyed learning about the plague of "feuilletonists" in 19th century print culture, the Glass Bead Game, and some beautiful quotes about unbelievable triviality, like this one:

The members of the audience at these lectures remained purely passive, and although some relationship between audience and content, some previous knowledge, preparation, and receptivity were tacitly assumed in most cases nothing of the sort was present. There were entertaining, impassioned, or witty lectures ... in all of them a number of fashionable phrases were shaken up like dice in a cup and everyone was delighted if he dimly recognized one or two catchwords. People heard lectures on writers whose works they had never read and never meant to, sometimes accompanied by pictures projected on a screen. At these lectures, as in the feature articles in the newspapers, they struggled through a deluge of isolated cultural facts and fragments of knowledge robbed of all meaning.

Holbo also makes a throwaway comment a little before dropping the above gem, which I take to be a metaphor for his take on the current culture of Literary Theory:

What follows sounds very much like one of those NYT MLA-bashing pieces. (But also like a description of the blogosphere, no? And much that is printed in the NY Times.)

MLA-bashing, yes. The blogosphere, quite likely. But what stopped me here was the extension of the feuilletonist franchise all the way to the NYT, which I read in quite a different way from the way I read the others.

Now, the NYT has its problems, but I'm troubled by an argument that frames the failings of literary theory, the blog world, and the mainstream print-media via the same metaphor. Holbo seems to say that we're all essentially playing the same game -- throwing around a bit of fluff, and calling it intelligence -- albeit at different registers.

I would argue that these spheres are structurally pretty different. Theory's problem, if it has just one problem, has something more to do with its strange vacuum-like quality; we spend a great deal of time worrying over the epigrammatic phrases found in a half-dozen books. Theory at its worst sucks language into a vortex of paranoid reasoning ("paranoid" in Eve Sedgwick's sense). The problems of the established and the 'informal' electronic media (blogs) are somewhat the opposite -- one sees a flood of low-level chatter, summarial generalizations, speculations, "information," and semi-rigorous argument. Theory is vertical and so forbiddingly structured that everyone in it is a kind of imposter. The print-media, in contrast, is (again, only at its worst) utterly structureless, a kind of protoplasmic soup.

Aren't there alternatives? Literary theory, for instance, could be a little less "high," a little less steep -- lower case "t." And as for the newspaper, I think there already is a fair amount of serious journalism out there (think: Sy Hersh vs. Tom Friedman). Perhaps it's just a matter of knowing how to filter out the bad kind of feuilletonist chatter...

The "Absentees" Who Were Still Present

We're all used to hearing about Palestinian terrorist bombings and Israeli military incursions. In contrast, this type of action -- a land-grab -- doesn't kill anyone; it doesn't even affect a great many people. All that is destroyed is goodwill, if there is any left.

Israel has ordered an urgent review of the seizure of thousands of acres of land from Palestinian farmers, who were cut off from their ancient olive groves by the separation barrier built in the West Bank.

Menachem Mazuz, Israel’s Attorney-General, admitted yesterday that the policy of seizing land in east Jerusalem from so-called "absentees" had been approved secretly by Cabinet ministers last summer without his consent. The review was made public in a letter from Mr Mazuz to a lawyer representing some of the farmers”.

Hundreds of farmers in Bethlehem have been unable to tend their olive groves and citrus orchards because of the electric fence that cuts through their land. In November they were told that the land had been seized for the expansion of Jewish settlements.

"How are we absent?" Jonny Atik, a 55-year-old farmer, asked as he surveyed his eight acres of inaccessible fields just metres away yesterday.

Book Coolie, Hobson-Jobson, and Daljit Nagra

A friend of mine (a virtual friend, I guess) from England has recently started his own blog, which he's calling Book Coolie.

It's kind of odd that the Indian book blog world is so densely populated with "Babus," "Sepoys," and "Coolies"! I am seriously considering starting an anonymous blog with a similar title to keep up with the exploding Hobson-Jobson blog scene. Maybe "The Madd Hatterr"? (A reference to the late, great G.V. Desani... This site has some quotes from Desani's All About H. Hatterr).

I haven't read all of Book Coolie's posts yet, but I wanted to pass along one of his links, about the Brit-Asian poet Daljit Nagra, whose "Look We Have Coming to Dover" alludes to Matthew Arnold's famous poem Dover Beach. Nagra's "Dover" recently won a British poetry award for best single poem.

The climax of Arnold's poem is:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

In Nagra's hands, it is:

Imagine my love and I,
and our sundry others, blared in the cash
of our beeswax'd cars, our crash clothes,
free, as we sip from an unparasol'd table
babbling our lingoes, flecked by the chalk of Britannia.

Tom Wolfe goes geopolitical

Tom Wolfe, most recently in the news for "award-winning" (ahem!) I Am Charlotte Simmons, compares George W. Bush's inaugural address to Teddy Roosevelt, who put forth his own corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to Congress a century ago. (In the Times)

The language in the two addresses is surprisingly similar. But most interesting are the snippets of American history Wolfe pulls out, including this bit:

Theodore Roosevelt's corollary to President James Monroe's famous doctrine of 1823 proclaimed that not only did America have the right, à la Monroe, to block European attempts to re-colonize any of the Western Hemisphere, it also had the right to take over and shape up any nation in the hemisphere guilty of "chronic wrongdoing" or uncivilized behavior that left it "impotent," powerless to defend itself against aggressors from the Other Hemisphere, meaning mainly England, France, Spain, Germany and Italy.

The immediate problem was that the Dominican Republic had just reneged on millions in European loans so flagrantly that an Italian warship had turned up just off the harbor of Santo Domingo. Roosevelt sent the Navy down to frighten off the Italians and all other snarling Europeans. Then the United States took over the Dominican customs operations and debt management and by and by the whole country, eventually sending in the military to run the place. We didn't hesitate to occupy Haiti and Nicaragua, either.

From 1823 to 1904, to 2005. Of course, the Monroe Doctrine, in its specific geographic sense, ceased to be a meaningful term after the invention of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (hemispheres ceased to matter). But Wolfe cites historians who've argued that the doctrine remained alive after all through the 1950s, 70s, and 80s, as the U.S. sponsored paramilitary interventions throughout Latin America to choke the spread of anything that smelled like Communism: everything from the Bay of Pigs, to the Iran-Contra affair, to the assasination of Che Guevara.

Wolfe suggests Bush's mission in Iraq resembles yet another extension of the life of a classic bit of American political philosophy, which has now gone global. But is he right? Isn't this really something quite new, dressed up perhaps in the familiar garb of Liberty, Democracy, and the "Shining City on the Hill"?

I see an assertion of political and military dominance for its own sake, not a defensive geopolitical strategy in a world of competing colonial military powers. The U.S. no longer has competition where war is concerned...