Condi's fashion statement, in the Washington Post.
The message: I won't stop at Secretary of State.
Congrats to Dilip D'Souza
Via Locana, I learn that Dilip D'Souza, blogger and journalist extraordinaire, has won the Outlook-Picador Prize for a non-fiction book. The award is given for his book Ride Across the River.
I'm going over to Indiaclub.com to see if I might be able to get Dilip's book in the U.S.
Ride Across the River was adjudged the winner of the fourth Outlook/Picador India Non-Fiction Competition at a function today. Mr D'Souza read out excerpts from his prize-winning entry that would be published in the forthcoming of Outlook dated March 14 that would be available on the website on March 5.
Mr D'Souza had also participated in the second Outlook-Picador Non Fiction Contest in 2001, and his essay, Kashmir Here, Kashmir There had then been declared the first runner-up.
The other runners-up this year were:
Geralyn Pinto for Re-Routing and
Tishani Doshi for Excerpts From the Journal of a Delusional Widow
These, along with the other two short-listed entries would be published on the website during the week March 7 - March 14. These are:
Ankush Saikia's Spotting Veron and
Samanth Subramanian's In Search of the Razor’s Edge
Outlook and Picador India thank all the participants of the fourth Outlook/Picador India Non-Fiction Competition. We were overwhelmed by your enthusiasm and by the number of entries we received.
The jury comprised:
Vinod Mehta, Editor-in-Chief, Outlook
Sandipan Deb, Managing Editor, Outlook
I. Allan Sealy, Author
Ajit Vikram Singh, Bookseller
Sam Humphreys, Editor, Picador
I'm going over to Indiaclub.com to see if I might be able to get Dilip's book in the U.S.
The Strange Case of "Kurban Said"
Who the heck is Kurban Said?
Friday is my non-teaching day, so I went down to Montclair to check out what I think is the nearest used bookstore to my current apartment. It's called the Montclair Book Center, and it turns out it's pretty good -- three floors, two storefronts, new and used books, and surprisingly well organized.
Among other things, I came across two novels by a writer I'd never heard of, Kurban Said. Reading through Paul Theroux's afterword to Ali and Nino, I saw this:
Ok, wow. Now that's a backstory! Elsewhere, Theroux makes it clear that he believes Nussimbaum is most probably the single author of the novel: "Mr. Reiss convincingly showed that Essad Bey -- that is, Lev Nussimbaum -- was the author of Ali and Nino. The novel is so informative and self-consciously Asiatic that you know it could only have been written by a brilliant outsider observing the society from a distance, and you guess, an exile."
So the revelation might not be that dramatic. Lev Nussimbaum would likely have had many of the same life-experiences (albeit scaled down) as Kurban Said, the person he purported to be. And it probably wasn't at all unusual for Azerbaijani Jews to convert to Islam in the early 1900s.
But wait. There is in fact a second afterward in the recent Anchor edition of Ali and Nino that in some ways contradicts the first. This one is by someone named Heinz Barazon:
But wait, which version is correct -- Heinz Barazon's, or Paul Theroux's? Is "Kurban Said" simply the pen name for Lev Nussimbaum/Essad Bey, or is it a pseudonym that represents the work of two people? Barazon's phrasing suggests he believes that Ehrenfels is the primary author of the book.
Theroux's support for Nussimbaum is based on research done by Tom Reiss, who wrote an article in The New Yorker in 1999, and recently published a substantial book called The Orientalist: Solving The Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life. Serendipitously, according to Amazon, it just came out a couple of weeks ago.
A quick Google search reveals an excerpt from The Orientalist here (I highly recommend you read the whole thing). Reiss had in fact encountered the Heinz Barazon quoted above, an Austrian lawyer entrusted with managing Baroness Ehrenfels' estate, who originally (at least) strongly argued that the author of Ali and Nino was the Baroness only:
I wouldn't be so impressed either: the Nazis probably wouldn't have allowed the publication of anything by anyone Jewish in 1937. The fact that only her name was on the books might have been an agreement worked out between the Baroness and Nussimbaum/Bey that enabled the work to be published at all. One question I still have is, how did Reiss (or someone) convince Barazon to soften his stance enough that he would later write an afterward to Ali and Nino allowing for uncertainty as to the authorship of the novel?
Another question might be: if Nussimbaum had a successful career as an author in Berlin in the 1920s and 30s as Essad Bey, and if he wrote this novel, why not publish under that name? Why Kurban Said? The new name makes the co-authorship thesis make a bit more sense.
But there's more. To solve the puzzle of Kurban Said, Reiss goes to Baku in Azerbaijan. Oddly -- and amazingly -- the Azerbaijanis have their own ideas about who wrote Ali and Nino:
Man, this just doesn't stop.
This morning I read thirty pages of Ali and Nino, which is fittingly a romance between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl. Also appropriately, the opening chapters are obsessed with a question of definition, though not of the identity of the protagonist but of Azerbaijan itself. Is it European or Oriental? As the character Professor Senin puts it to his students in the opening pages of the novel itself: "Some scholars look on the area south of the Caucasian mountains as belonging to Asia, while others, in view of Transcaucasia's cultural evolution, believe that this country should be considered part of Europe. It can therefore be said, my children, that it is partly your responsibility as to whether our town should belong to progressive Europe or reactionary Asia."
The uncertainty about the identity of Trans-Caucasia seems to mirror perfectly the uncertainty that now circles around "Kurban Said."
Friday is my non-teaching day, so I went down to Montclair to check out what I think is the nearest used bookstore to my current apartment. It's called the Montclair Book Center, and it turns out it's pretty good -- three floors, two storefronts, new and used books, and surprisingly well organized.
Among other things, I came across two novels by a writer I'd never heard of, Kurban Said. Reading through Paul Theroux's afterword to Ali and Nino, I saw this:
But how had this Central Asian come to write his book in German and publish it in Berlin? Was he an exile, and if so, was this a pen name? It turns out that it was indeed a pen name, possibly shared by two people, one an Austrian baroness, Elfriede Ehrenfels, and the other an emigre Jew from Azerbaijan, Lev Nussimbaum, who had converted to Islam and taken the name Essad Bey and lived in Berlin and Vienna.
Ok, wow. Now that's a backstory! Elsewhere, Theroux makes it clear that he believes Nussimbaum is most probably the single author of the novel: "Mr. Reiss convincingly showed that Essad Bey -- that is, Lev Nussimbaum -- was the author of Ali and Nino. The novel is so informative and self-consciously Asiatic that you know it could only have been written by a brilliant outsider observing the society from a distance, and you guess, an exile."
So the revelation might not be that dramatic. Lev Nussimbaum would likely have had many of the same life-experiences (albeit scaled down) as Kurban Said, the person he purported to be. And it probably wasn't at all unusual for Azerbaijani Jews to convert to Islam in the early 1900s.
But wait. There is in fact a second afterward in the recent Anchor edition of Ali and Nino that in some ways contradicts the first. This one is by someone named Heinz Barazon:
It was impossible for decades to identify the author behind the pseudonym, but it now seems clear that "Kurban Said" is a pseudonym for two different people-- a woman, the baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, and a man Lev Nussimbaum. . . . Lev Nussimbaum--who possibly had the original idea for the novel--was Jewish, born in Baku [in Azerbaijan] in 1905. Nussimbaum's father took Lev and perhaps a German governess to Berlin during the tumult of the Russian Revolution. Nussimbaum completed his studies there, became a journalist and later wrote books about Mohammed, Nikolas II, Lenin, Reza Shah Pahlevi and regional geo-political issues. These books were published in London and New York under the name Essad Bey, the name he had taken in his youth when he converted to Islam. After Hitler seized power, Nussimbaum fled Berlin for still-independent Austria where an intense friendship with Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, her family, and her circle, developed. Ali and Nino is almost certainly result of this relationship. Which sections of the novel are the work of which author remains an unsolved mystery.
But wait, which version is correct -- Heinz Barazon's, or Paul Theroux's? Is "Kurban Said" simply the pen name for Lev Nussimbaum/Essad Bey, or is it a pseudonym that represents the work of two people? Barazon's phrasing suggests he believes that Ehrenfels is the primary author of the book.
Theroux's support for Nussimbaum is based on research done by Tom Reiss, who wrote an article in The New Yorker in 1999, and recently published a substantial book called The Orientalist: Solving The Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life. Serendipitously, according to Amazon, it just came out a couple of weeks ago.
A quick Google search reveals an excerpt from The Orientalist here (I highly recommend you read the whole thing). Reiss had in fact encountered the Heinz Barazon quoted above, an Austrian lawyer entrusted with managing Baroness Ehrenfels' estate, who originally (at least) strongly argued that the author of Ali and Nino was the Baroness only:
Barazon came directly to the point: the novel Ali and Nino was written by the Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels von Bodmershof, the second wife of Leela's father, Baron Omar-Rolf von Ehrenfels, and when Baroness Elfriede died, in the early 1980s, having outlived her husband, all rights to the work had passed down to Leela.
Barazon produced a thick file of documents that backed up this story: publishing contracts, legal papers, and author lists from the late thirties, stamped with Nazi eagles and swastikas. Under the entry for "Said, Kurban" in the author's section of the 1935—39 Deutscher Gesamtkatalog–the Third Reich's equivalent of Books in Print–it said, in no uncertain terms, "pseudonym for Ehrenfels, v. Bodmershof, Elfriede, Baroness." The Nazi documents seemed to tell a clear story–that Baroness Elfriede had been Kurban Said–but it was one that I believed to be untrue.
I wouldn't be so impressed either: the Nazis probably wouldn't have allowed the publication of anything by anyone Jewish in 1937. The fact that only her name was on the books might have been an agreement worked out between the Baroness and Nussimbaum/Bey that enabled the work to be published at all. One question I still have is, how did Reiss (or someone) convince Barazon to soften his stance enough that he would later write an afterward to Ali and Nino allowing for uncertainty as to the authorship of the novel?
Another question might be: if Nussimbaum had a successful career as an author in Berlin in the 1920s and 30s as Essad Bey, and if he wrote this novel, why not publish under that name? Why Kurban Said? The new name makes the co-authorship thesis make a bit more sense.
But there's more. To solve the puzzle of Kurban Said, Reiss goes to Baku in Azerbaijan. Oddly -- and amazingly -- the Azerbaijanis have their own ideas about who wrote Ali and Nino:
Educated Azeris I met seemed to consider it their national novel, telling me that they could show me the street, square, or schoolhouse where almost every scene had taken place. There was a resurgence of interest in the late 1990s in this small romantic novel from the late 1930s, though nobody seemed exactly sure why. I paid a call on an Iranian film producer who occupied a lavishly refurbished suite in a collapsing old mansion, and who explained to me his plans to make a movie of the book. (When the money didn't come through, he instead produced the Baku location scenes for a James Bond movie.) Another day I visited the National Literary Society, a Stalin-era building, where the chairman filled me in on the simmering dispute in Azeri academic and government circles over the novel's authorship. Kurban Said's identity had long been a subject of speculation, he explained, but fortunately, the issue had now been resolved: Kurban Said was the pseudonym for Josef Vezir, an Azeri author whose sons, the Veziroffs, had been very active in making sure his memory was preserved, and that he receive credit for Azerbaijan's national novel.
But when I got a copy of some short stories and novellas by Vezir, I was surprised that anyone could give this theory credence. Vezir was clearly an ardent Azeri nationalist whose novellas openly stated that ethnic and cultural mixing was a bad idea and a betrayal of the motherland. In Ali and Nino, Kurban Said offers nothing less than a passionate endorsement of ethnic, cultural, and religious mixing. The warmest passages in the novel describe the cosmopolitan Caucasus on the eve of the revolution–when a hundred races and all the major religious groups fought together only in battles of poetry in the marketplace–and the message seems to be that the separation of peoples is hideous and genocidal.
Man, this just doesn't stop.
This morning I read thirty pages of Ali and Nino, which is fittingly a romance between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl. Also appropriately, the opening chapters are obsessed with a question of definition, though not of the identity of the protagonist but of Azerbaijan itself. Is it European or Oriental? As the character Professor Senin puts it to his students in the opening pages of the novel itself: "Some scholars look on the area south of the Caucasian mountains as belonging to Asia, while others, in view of Transcaucasia's cultural evolution, believe that this country should be considered part of Europe. It can therefore be said, my children, that it is partly your responsibility as to whether our town should belong to progressive Europe or reactionary Asia."
The uncertainty about the identity of Trans-Caucasia seems to mirror perfectly the uncertainty that now circles around "Kurban Said."
"Discover the Network"
Michael Berube has been having a bit of a duel with David Horowitz over Horowitz's goofy (but evil) "Discover the Network" website.
This site seriously presents the below diagram (see the full diagram here) as constituting a "network" of "leftists" that needs to be investigated and scourged by the patriotic efforts of conservative American websurfers.
I think Berube's instinctual response to stuff like this this -- to smirk -- is the correct one. If this is the best David Horowitz can do...
This site seriously presents the below diagram (see the full diagram here) as constituting a "network" of "leftists" that needs to be investigated and scourged by the patriotic efforts of conservative American websurfers.
I think Berube's instinctual response to stuff like this this -- to smirk -- is the correct one. If this is the best David Horowitz can do...
"Our Godless Constitution," and the Treaty with Tripoli
Brooke Allen, at the Nation, has an essay on the Godlessness of the U.S. Constitution and the founding fathers. It's essentially a remix of Susan Jacoby's book Freethinkers, and about half a dozen recent op-ed type essays she's published along the same line.
As Ralph Luker points out, the paydirt in the piece is really Allen's citation of the U.S.'s 1797 "Treaty of Peace and Friendship" with Tripoli:
I agree with Luker that such phrasing -- which was unanimously ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1797 -- would be inconceivable today.
As Ralph Luker points out, the paydirt in the piece is really Allen's citation of the U.S.'s 1797 "Treaty of Peace and Friendship" with Tripoli:
As the Government of the United States...is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion--as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen [Muslims] --and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan [Mohammedan] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
I agree with Luker that such phrasing -- which was unanimously ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1797 -- would be inconceivable today.
Secularism returns to Bollywood: Mahesh Bhatt
Retired director Mahesh Bhatt has some reflections on secularism in Bollywood cinema on Sabrang. He lauds the 'golden years' of Hindi cinema -- the 1950s and 60s. This was when poet-lyricists like Sahir Ludhianvi and Kaifi Azmi wrote some of the most memorable classic popular songs in Indian history -- in rich, flowering Urdu.
Bhatt also believes that Bollywood went through a 'dark' phase in the 1990s, with a trend towards anti-Muslim cinema. The main example he gives is Gadar, though one can can easily think of some others: Sarfarosh, Fiza, Mission Kashmir. (My colleague Amit S. Rai has an essay on these films of late 1990s "cinepatriotism" at Shobak.)
Bhatt feels that moment may be over, and he cites the popularity of last year's colorized version of the classic Dilip Kumar film Mughal e-Azam as proof. I might also add Main Hoon Na, which tried to make Nehruvian secularism seem hip again.
Let's hope he's right.
Bhatt also believes that Bollywood went through a 'dark' phase in the 1990s, with a trend towards anti-Muslim cinema. The main example he gives is Gadar, though one can can easily think of some others: Sarfarosh, Fiza, Mission Kashmir. (My colleague Amit S. Rai has an essay on these films of late 1990s "cinepatriotism" at Shobak.)
Bhatt feels that moment may be over, and he cites the popularity of last year's colorized version of the classic Dilip Kumar film Mughal e-Azam as proof. I might also add Main Hoon Na, which tried to make Nehruvian secularism seem hip again.
Let's hope he's right.
A little more on Bombay slum demolition
A detailed timeline of recent events regarding the demolishing of slums in greater Bombay. The blog is called Bombay's Demolition Drive, and it is dedicated to this subject (though, like Communalism Watch, it isn't very bloggy -- more of an archive).
Also on slum demolition: see the excerpts Dilip D'Souza provides from a book on the humanitarian issues behind Bombay's slum problem. It was written 20 years ago, but sounds like it could be written today; nothing has changed.
Unrelated: Speaking of Communalism Watch, this post defending Bihar's CM Laloo Prasad Yadav is interesting. Actually (again) it's not a post, but a cut-and-pasted article from Indian Express. I might accept the argument that Yadav has suppressed communalism in the state, but his record has still been so abysmal in so many other areas that I'm not sure it matters.
Also on slum demolition: see the excerpts Dilip D'Souza provides from a book on the humanitarian issues behind Bombay's slum problem. It was written 20 years ago, but sounds like it could be written today; nothing has changed.
Unrelated: Speaking of Communalism Watch, this post defending Bihar's CM Laloo Prasad Yadav is interesting. Actually (again) it's not a post, but a cut-and-pasted article from Indian Express. I might accept the argument that Yadav has suppressed communalism in the state, but his record has still been so abysmal in so many other areas that I'm not sure it matters.
Language politics in Taiwan
Kerim Friedman has put his anthropology dissertation online. 70% of the Taiwanese speak languages other than Mandarin, especially Hoklo and Hakka. But Mandarin is nevertheless the official, 'hegemonic' language of Taiwan -- the majority languages are, for various political and cultural reasons, declining.
Looks like great work!
Looks like great work!
Tsunami reveals ancient city
BBC reports that the Tsunami caused the coastline in Tamil Nadu, India to recede in places, revealing the remains of an ancient city. Archeologists knew there was something there, but the statues that have emerged are a surprise.
Teaching Journal: Katherine Mansfield
I'm teaching a class on 20th century British women writers this spring. It's a modified version of my standard "British modernism" course. I wanted to try teaching people like Irish Murdoch, Doris Lessing, A.S. Byatt, and Monica Ali, writers I often can't quite make room for. Thus far it's been a lot of Virginia Woolf, and a brief but exciting bit of Katherine Mansfield.
I initially just scheduled one day for Katherine Mansfield, on the strength of Hermione Lee's comments on the friendship between Mansfield and Virginia Woolf in her recent, definitive biography of Woolf. Following Lee's reading of the relationship between Mansfield and Woolf, I planned to put Mansfield in as a contemporary with a vision of the modern experience parallel to Woolf's (similar themes), but with a radically different approach to telling stories (different form).
But it worked out quite differently. For one thing, my students reacted really energetically to the three Mansfield stories I assigned, so I decided to add four more stories and extended the discussion by a day. In the first class, the discussion of both class relations and the symbolic importance of death in "The Garden-Party" seemed to have a nice spark to it. And in the second session, the polymorphous (bisexual? queer?) eros that one finds in "Bliss" also seemed to generate quite a bit of interest.
[Note: read a helpful bio of Katherine Mansfield here. And most of Mansfield's major short stories are available online via Project Gutenberg, or at sites like Arthur's Classic Novels. You could go read one right now, if you felt like it.]
Woolf and Mansfield are especially close in their shared vision of the ephemerality (or collapse?) of the big concepts that form the bedrock of 19th century literary individualism –- the distinction of the self from others, the ability to know and understand that self, and the ability to respond to crises rationally and intentionally. But where Woolf wrote monumental philosophical novels about the dissolution of the self, Mansfield makes the point in small, impressionistic passages in short stories whose themes seem trifling in comparison to Woolf’s. And yet the point is no less real, and no less admirably expressed.
After reading about a dozen of Mansfield's stories, it now seems to me that Mansfield’s differences from Woolf are actually both thematic and formal. Mansfield has a capacity for directness that is at least disarming, and at its most extreme rather shocking ("Bliss"; "The Garden-Party"; "Marriage a la Mode"; "The Man With No Temperament").
Mansfield’s adult characters are philosophical but not social radicals. In Mansfield's world adulthood seems to always be a story of failure, expressed in the stories via the exposure of a series of little weaknesses that actually have big ramifications. An example is Isabel’s failure, in "Marriage a la Mode," to immediately respond to her husband’s threatened divorce. Another example is Laura’s failure, in "The Garden Party," to insist on the cancellation of the Garden Party when a man in her immediate neighborhood has just met with a fatal accident. And it's there again in "Bliss," in Bertha Young's complete mis-appraisal of her erotic/spiritual connection to Miss Fulton.
These may seem like small imperfections -- "character flaws," they could be called -– but I think they suggest a generalized condition, not just a problem with some lost individuals. Mansfield’s protagonists embody Virginia Woolf’s famous motto in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" that something in "human character" changed in the 1910s, but that change is not so much a new capacity for self-reflexive and self-conscious thinking (Woolf's argument) as it is a complete, radical evacuation of interiority. (Mansfield might protest if she were reading this; on the surface, she appears to be passionately invested in discovering her characters' interior lives. But as much as there are many moments of small "revelations," self-knowledge never seems to lead anywhere concrete in Mansfield. It's as if the self that knows itself is essentially paralyzed.)
So I'm newly interested in Mansfield, and satisfied with my recent experience teaching her stories. And maybe I'll write something bigger on her once I've made my way through the remainder of her stories. I also probably need to take a crack at her letters and diaries.
But: is she Woolf's philosophical equal? Is she as good a writer? Maybe, maybe not. Check out the final lines of "The Garden Party," and decide for yourself. The protagonist Laura has gone to pay her condolences to a working-class family where a man has died. She's naive, deeply uncomfortable to be out of her social element, and also feeling a little guilty that her posh little lunch went on as scheduled, even when someone in the neighborhood had just died:
I initially just scheduled one day for Katherine Mansfield, on the strength of Hermione Lee's comments on the friendship between Mansfield and Virginia Woolf in her recent, definitive biography of Woolf. Following Lee's reading of the relationship between Mansfield and Woolf, I planned to put Mansfield in as a contemporary with a vision of the modern experience parallel to Woolf's (similar themes), but with a radically different approach to telling stories (different form).
But it worked out quite differently. For one thing, my students reacted really energetically to the three Mansfield stories I assigned, so I decided to add four more stories and extended the discussion by a day. In the first class, the discussion of both class relations and the symbolic importance of death in "The Garden-Party" seemed to have a nice spark to it. And in the second session, the polymorphous (bisexual? queer?) eros that one finds in "Bliss" also seemed to generate quite a bit of interest.
[Note: read a helpful bio of Katherine Mansfield here. And most of Mansfield's major short stories are available online via Project Gutenberg, or at sites like Arthur's Classic Novels. You could go read one right now, if you felt like it.]
Woolf and Mansfield are especially close in their shared vision of the ephemerality (or collapse?) of the big concepts that form the bedrock of 19th century literary individualism –- the distinction of the self from others, the ability to know and understand that self, and the ability to respond to crises rationally and intentionally. But where Woolf wrote monumental philosophical novels about the dissolution of the self, Mansfield makes the point in small, impressionistic passages in short stories whose themes seem trifling in comparison to Woolf’s. And yet the point is no less real, and no less admirably expressed.
After reading about a dozen of Mansfield's stories, it now seems to me that Mansfield’s differences from Woolf are actually both thematic and formal. Mansfield has a capacity for directness that is at least disarming, and at its most extreme rather shocking ("Bliss"; "The Garden-Party"; "Marriage a la Mode"; "The Man With No Temperament").
Mansfield’s adult characters are philosophical but not social radicals. In Mansfield's world adulthood seems to always be a story of failure, expressed in the stories via the exposure of a series of little weaknesses that actually have big ramifications. An example is Isabel’s failure, in "Marriage a la Mode," to immediately respond to her husband’s threatened divorce. Another example is Laura’s failure, in "The Garden Party," to insist on the cancellation of the Garden Party when a man in her immediate neighborhood has just met with a fatal accident. And it's there again in "Bliss," in Bertha Young's complete mis-appraisal of her erotic/spiritual connection to Miss Fulton.
These may seem like small imperfections -- "character flaws," they could be called -– but I think they suggest a generalized condition, not just a problem with some lost individuals. Mansfield’s protagonists embody Virginia Woolf’s famous motto in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" that something in "human character" changed in the 1910s, but that change is not so much a new capacity for self-reflexive and self-conscious thinking (Woolf's argument) as it is a complete, radical evacuation of interiority. (Mansfield might protest if she were reading this; on the surface, she appears to be passionately invested in discovering her characters' interior lives. But as much as there are many moments of small "revelations," self-knowledge never seems to lead anywhere concrete in Mansfield. It's as if the self that knows itself is essentially paralyzed.)
So I'm newly interested in Mansfield, and satisfied with my recent experience teaching her stories. And maybe I'll write something bigger on her once I've made my way through the remainder of her stories. I also probably need to take a crack at her letters and diaries.
But: is she Woolf's philosophical equal? Is she as good a writer? Maybe, maybe not. Check out the final lines of "The Garden Party," and decide for yourself. The protagonist Laura has gone to pay her condolences to a working-class family where a man has died. She's naive, deeply uncomfortable to be out of her social element, and also feeling a little guilty that her posh little lunch went on as scheduled, even when someone in the neighborhood had just died:
"You'd like a look at 'im, wouldn't you?" said Em's sister, and she brushed past Laura over to the bed. "Don't be afraid, my lass,"--and now her voice
sounded fond and sly, and fondly she drew down the sheet--"'e looks a picture. There's nothing to show. Come along, my dear."
Laura came.
There lay a young man, fast asleep--sleeping so soundly, so deeply, that he was far, far away from them both. Oh, so remote, so peaceful. He was dreaming. Never wake him up again. His head was sunk in the pillow, his eyes were closed; they were blind under the closed eyelids. He was given up to his dream. What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing, this marvel had come to the lane. Happy...happy...All is well, said that sleeping face. This is just as it should be. I am content.
But all the same you had to cry, and she couldn't go out of the room without saying something to him. Laura gave a loud childish sob.
"Forgive my hat," she said.
And this time she didn't wait for Em's sister. She found her way out of the door, down the path, past all those dark people. At the corner of the lane she met Laurie [her brother].
He stepped out of the shadow. "Is that you, Laura?"
"Yes."
"Mother was getting anxious. Was it all right?"
"Yes, quite. Oh, Laurie!" She took his arm, she pressed up against him.
"I say, you're not crying, are you?" asked her brother.
Laura shook her head. She was.
Laurie put his arm round her shoulder. "Don't cry," he said in his warm, loving voice. "Was it awful?"
"No," sobbed Laura. "It was simply marvellous. But Laurie--" She stopped, she looked at her brother. "Isn't life," she stammered, "isn't life--" But what life was she couldn't explain. No matter. He quite understood.
"Isn't it, darling?" said Laurie.
1000 people per acre? Bombay slum rehabilitation plan
Sonia Gandhi is forcing the Chief Minister of Maharashtra to rehabilitate 800,000 illegal shanties destroyed by the state government.
The state of Maharashtra has tried to find any number of excuses to avoid doing the needful. The money issue is understandable. What is harder for me to comprehend is the population density they are talking about implementing in the hypothetically legalized and rebuilt slum-city. Take the following chart on Indian Express:
The money doesn't add up quite right in dollars. Does the state of Maharashtra have $5 billion at its disposal?
But more than that, I'm a little shocked by how tightly packed these shanty-towns are going to be. Let's conservatively estimate that each shanty counted of the 800,000 that were destroyed housed 2 people (the real number is probably closer to 5). If they are talking about putting everyone -- nearly 2 million people -- on just 2000 acres, they are talking about 1000 people per acre! This might be possible if they were building 10 story apartments, but that's clearly not what they're intending.
Then again, thought the article suggests the space available is 2000 acres, the chart does say 2000 hectares. If we consider that there are 2.5 acres in a hectare, it does look a little less crazy. Slums are, as a rule, extremely densely populated in Indian metros (and especially Bombay).
And one should also keep in mind that greater Bombay overall has a population density of 16,000 per square mile (according to this site at Macalester College). That sounds extremely dense -- and it is -- but it works out to only 25 people per acre (640 acres in a square mile).
No matter how you do the math, the plan for rehabilitation that seems so onerous is still one that envisions a shocking, even impossible, level of population density.
The state of Maharashtra has tried to find any number of excuses to avoid doing the needful. The money issue is understandable. What is harder for me to comprehend is the population density they are talking about implementing in the hypothetically legalized and rebuilt slum-city. Take the following chart on Indian Express:
Rehabilitation needs of Mumbai slums built between 1995 and 2000:
8 LAKH [800,000] total shanties
2,000 HECTARES land required
Rs 24,700 CRORE [comes out to $5 billion, I think]
(land: Rs 700 crore; construction: Rs 20,000 crore; infrastructure cost: Rs 400 crore)
The money doesn't add up quite right in dollars. Does the state of Maharashtra have $5 billion at its disposal?
But more than that, I'm a little shocked by how tightly packed these shanty-towns are going to be. Let's conservatively estimate that each shanty counted of the 800,000 that were destroyed housed 2 people (the real number is probably closer to 5). If they are talking about putting everyone -- nearly 2 million people -- on just 2000 acres, they are talking about 1000 people per acre! This might be possible if they were building 10 story apartments, but that's clearly not what they're intending.
Then again, thought the article suggests the space available is 2000 acres, the chart does say 2000 hectares. If we consider that there are 2.5 acres in a hectare, it does look a little less crazy. Slums are, as a rule, extremely densely populated in Indian metros (and especially Bombay).
And one should also keep in mind that greater Bombay overall has a population density of 16,000 per square mile (according to this site at Macalester College). That sounds extremely dense -- and it is -- but it works out to only 25 people per acre (640 acres in a square mile).
No matter how you do the math, the plan for rehabilitation that seems so onerous is still one that envisions a shocking, even impossible, level of population density.
Pamuk to be charged for speaking the truth
[I'm starting to catch up on my blog reading!]
Literary Saloon reports: In a case of life imitating fiction, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk is being charged with insulting Turkey. He told a German interviewer that "30,00 Kurds and 1 million Armenians had been killed" by the Turkish military in the past.
It sort of fits the content of Pamuk's stories. I'm looking forward to his next novel, which I would suggest could be titled "The Trial."
Literary Saloon reports: In a case of life imitating fiction, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk is being charged with insulting Turkey. He told a German interviewer that "30,00 Kurds and 1 million Armenians had been killed" by the Turkish military in the past.
It sort of fits the content of Pamuk's stories. I'm looking forward to his next novel, which I would suggest could be titled "The Trial."
Secularism discredited in the Islamic world?
An article in the Chronicle, summarizing recent debates in Islamic political theory and theology. There seem to be two alternatives to secularism being floated. One is essentially Islamism democratized -- Ijtihad -- and is associated with a scholar named Muqtedar Khan:
Among other subscribers to roughly this approach was none other than Mohammed Iqbal, the Indo/Pakistani poet.
The other philosophy making the rounds is represented by Khaled Abou El Fadl.
It seems like El Fadl is advocating something along the lines of a moral historicism. You study history in order to have a more accurate and rigorous model for jurisprudence, but you do it with an "overriding moral goal such as justice," presumably derived from the present day.
But doesn't the presumption of a moral goal lend itself just as well to a thoroughly secularist approach to jurisprudence? If we know what justice is, we should be able to write laws without recourse to religion.
In the Indian context I've sometimes argued in favor of a radical implementation of a Uniform Civil Code, which would remove all traces of theology (Hindu or Islamic) from personal laws that affect things like marriage, divorce, custody rights, head of household status, inheritance, and property rights.
As much as it now seems that such an approach to secularism is discredited in the Islamic world because of the totalitarianism of people like Ataturk, as well as the failures in Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, I don't see the intellectual justification for the approaches suggested by Khan or El Fadl.
Today's proponents of ijtihad take a far more expansive view. "There will be no Islamic democracy unless jurists permit the democratization of interpretation," wrote M.A. Muqtedar Khan, a professor of political science at Adrian College, in a 2003 essay. In Mr. Khan's view, political elites in the Muslim world have for centuries restricted the development of democracy and political accountability by hiding behind religious principles that they proclaim to be fixed in stone. Mr. Khan argues, in effect, for an end run around the entire traditional apparatus of Muslim jurisprudence. Believers should instead, he suggests, look directly to the Koran and to the practices of Muhammad and his companions, and use their own efforts at interpretation to build ethical communities.
Among other subscribers to roughly this approach was none other than Mohammed Iqbal, the Indo/Pakistani poet.
The other philosophy making the rounds is represented by Khaled Abou El Fadl.
Not all Muslim liberals, however, find the ijtihad model attractive. A very different strategy for working toward democracy and pluralism is put forward by Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles. In Mr. Abou El Fadl's view, liberal Muslim scholars should revive, not dismiss, some of the longstanding threads of Islamic jurisprudence, looking carefully at historical cases in which Muslims have successfully built pluralist and relatively democratic societies.
Although Mr. Abou El Fadl's methodology is more elitist than Mr. Khan's vision of ijtihad for all, he also maintains that it will ultimately be more liberal. He wrote in a 2003 essay that basing government around consultation and shura, as Mr. Khan and his allies suggest, could lead to majoritarian tyranny. "Even if shura is transformed into an instrument of participatory representation," he wrote, "it must itself be limited by a scheme of private and individual rights that serve an overriding moral goal such as justice."
Mr. Abou El Fadl adds in an interview that he finds Mr. Khan's framework extremely ill-disciplined. "Instead of making the effort to study Arabic and study the texts," he says, "Muqtedar Khan is simply throwing around terms like ijtihad and mufti and fatwa. ... This kind of thing is why there's such a vacuum of authority. This is why we have people like bin Laden going around claiming to be Islamic."
It seems like El Fadl is advocating something along the lines of a moral historicism. You study history in order to have a more accurate and rigorous model for jurisprudence, but you do it with an "overriding moral goal such as justice," presumably derived from the present day.
But doesn't the presumption of a moral goal lend itself just as well to a thoroughly secularist approach to jurisprudence? If we know what justice is, we should be able to write laws without recourse to religion.
In the Indian context I've sometimes argued in favor of a radical implementation of a Uniform Civil Code, which would remove all traces of theology (Hindu or Islamic) from personal laws that affect things like marriage, divorce, custody rights, head of household status, inheritance, and property rights.
As much as it now seems that such an approach to secularism is discredited in the Islamic world because of the totalitarianism of people like Ataturk, as well as the failures in Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, I don't see the intellectual justification for the approaches suggested by Khan or El Fadl.
Tigerstyle
We went to see Tigerstyle in New York last night. It was pretty great -- these guys are probably the best underground Bhangra/hip hop remix producers out there right now. You can listen to some samples here (try "Punjabi Lean Back").
There's also a good interview with the duo here.
It started snowing. We spent the night in the city at my brother's, and went to see The Gates this morning before heading home. I didn't bring a camera, so I'll just plagiarize someone else's Flickr stream for The Gates in the snow. (Slice is a little grumpy about the whole thing. Maybe he got up too early in the morning...?)
There's also a good interview with the duo here.
It started snowing. We spent the night in the city at my brother's, and went to see The Gates this morning before heading home. I didn't bring a camera, so I'll just plagiarize someone else's Flickr stream for The Gates in the snow. (Slice is a little grumpy about the whole thing. Maybe he got up too early in the morning...?)
Blogging in the doldrums; dissing Kisna
My blogging mojo is weak right now... All sorts of factors may be to blame, but more than anything else it's hard to blog when my daily rhythm is in transition (moving, packing, adjusting, commuting, etc.).
Blogging is one of those things that really requires windows of time and energy. To write even semi-seriously takes an hour or more a day of commitment, and I just haven't had it as much as I would like lately. Maybe things will get back to normal soon; I don't know.
* * * *
We saw Kisna, and I can agree with reader Mihir that it's in fact quite skippable. Or fast-forwardable?
Or to put it quite plainly -- it sucks.
That said, I didn't mind Antonia Bernath's bad Hindi accent. I think it's remarkable how much Hindi they actually got her to say; in the past, the English characters in Hindi films had all their lines dubbed into Hindi, when they had lines at all. And speaking as someone who speaks Hindi both badly, and with a bit of a 'gora' accent myself, I would posit that it's a bit of a step forward, which Indian viewers probably ought to enjoy. In an era of globalization, we want to hear non-Indians speaking Hindi with an accent -- it's a sign that the language (and the culture) is in demand. One so rarely heard it in India in the past, largely because foreign visitors almost never felt it would be worth their while to invest serious time and energy learning the language. "They speak English in India, don't they? Why should I bother?"
Kisna as crappy as it is, is a small sign that that may be changing.
On the interracial romance. In this film, Bernath's "Katherine" and Vivek Oberoi's "Kisna" do push the threshold past the interracial flirtation we saw in Lagaan. Ghai clearly loves putting the camera on Bernath's face -- she's definitely the lead -- while Gowarikar, in Lagaan , stacked the decks in favor of Gracy Singh. But even though he put Bernath in songs, desi outfits, and provides copious measures of smouldering looks and melodramatic dialogue, Ghai does the theatrical equivalent of sitting on himself with the conclusion of the film. Instead of having them run off into the sunset as the plot demands, Ghai has his Oberoi mumble some twaddle about "jeevan satya," and demur, marrying his racially-correct village fiance for duty rather than love.
Why not have Katherine stay in India, and marry Kisna? In real life, I know of a few instances where something like this in fact did happen.
But maybe I'm asking too much. I continue to doubt that we'll ever see a mainstream bollywood movie where a heroine romances and marries a westerner. I simply think it would be impossible for audiences to accept. (And just in case anyone is confused, Bride and Prejudice is really an American production; that's where the money came from...)
Blogging is one of those things that really requires windows of time and energy. To write even semi-seriously takes an hour or more a day of commitment, and I just haven't had it as much as I would like lately. Maybe things will get back to normal soon; I don't know.
* * * *
We saw Kisna, and I can agree with reader Mihir that it's in fact quite skippable. Or fast-forwardable?
Or to put it quite plainly -- it sucks.
That said, I didn't mind Antonia Bernath's bad Hindi accent. I think it's remarkable how much Hindi they actually got her to say; in the past, the English characters in Hindi films had all their lines dubbed into Hindi, when they had lines at all. And speaking as someone who speaks Hindi both badly, and with a bit of a 'gora' accent myself, I would posit that it's a bit of a step forward, which Indian viewers probably ought to enjoy. In an era of globalization, we want to hear non-Indians speaking Hindi with an accent -- it's a sign that the language (and the culture) is in demand. One so rarely heard it in India in the past, largely because foreign visitors almost never felt it would be worth their while to invest serious time and energy learning the language. "They speak English in India, don't they? Why should I bother?"
Kisna as crappy as it is, is a small sign that that may be changing.
On the interracial romance. In this film, Bernath's "Katherine" and Vivek Oberoi's "Kisna" do push the threshold past the interracial flirtation we saw in Lagaan. Ghai clearly loves putting the camera on Bernath's face -- she's definitely the lead -- while Gowarikar, in Lagaan , stacked the decks in favor of Gracy Singh. But even though he put Bernath in songs, desi outfits, and provides copious measures of smouldering looks and melodramatic dialogue, Ghai does the theatrical equivalent of sitting on himself with the conclusion of the film. Instead of having them run off into the sunset as the plot demands, Ghai has his Oberoi mumble some twaddle about "jeevan satya," and demur, marrying his racially-correct village fiance for duty rather than love.
Why not have Katherine stay in India, and marry Kisna? In real life, I know of a few instances where something like this in fact did happen.
But maybe I'm asking too much. I continue to doubt that we'll ever see a mainstream bollywood movie where a heroine romances and marries a westerner. I simply think it would be impossible for audiences to accept. (And just in case anyone is confused, Bride and Prejudice is really an American production; that's where the money came from...)
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