Parody: Hindi film reviews

[I've never quite gotten the parody thing right, but that's no excuse not to try. The following is a parody of this review of Lucky--No Time For Love.]

Set against the romantic and majestic backdrop of Uzbekistan, Love Someone--Kyon Nahin? is a tale of love that brings together two extremely good-looking people with mediocre acting ability. It is a story of passion in a time of terrorism!

Jill (Sunita Hosakta) is the quintessential dreamer - soft, beautiful and gentle. Her one big belief is that if you search from the bottom of your heart, you will find not just the rainbow, but also the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. One fine morning Jill is riding to school, praying that she clears her test, scheduled on that date. But her journey to school becomes her desperate journey of survival.

Jill never reaches school. She meets a stranger (Rajiv Bandu), who for some reason speaks fluent Hindi, and who's smart, wicked, charming.

It's common knowledge that a love story works if and only if it's high on emotional quotient. And the moments linger in your memory. Love Someone walks into your heart gradually!

The film starts off well, but the story comes to a screeching halt the moment Sunita and Rajiv find themselves trapped in the basement of a drug-dealer's mansion. The conversations between Sunita and Rajiv at this juncture are dull and boring, which is a glaring flaw from the writing point of view. The grip is clearly missing!

But the pace picks up gradually, over the course of four hours. And it gets all the more engrossing when the nuclear bomb/terrorism plot is introduced. From thereon, right till the finale, Love Someone goes higher and higher on the graph.

The film wears a Hollywoodish look all through, which matches Sunita's outfits. But from the writing point of view, Salil Besharam looks more like a buffoon than an intelligence officer. Also, you often wonder how Arjun reaches the right place at the right time - there're no explanations offered!

On the whole, Love Someone--Kyon Nahin? works for the aforesaid four reasons (fresh pairing, soul-stirring music, vibrant action and breath-taking locales). And with terrific promotion undertaken by T-Series, besides no major opposition for the next two weeks as well as commencement of summer vacations, Love Someone--Kyon Nahin? may just manage to find some love with audiences. Kyon Nahin?

Read the original review. I do not lie.

Trivial Bollywood Post

I just wanted people to know that Aishwariya Rai and Vivek Oberoi are still together, after all.

This is important to know.

On Saul Bellow's Nobel Lecture

The American writer Saul Bellow has passed away.

I haven't read enough of Saul Bellow to comment on his oeuvre or his legacy. But one way of honoring him while continuing to tangle with him critically might be to point readers to his Nobel Lecture, from 1976.

Amongst the various 'noble' sentiments he offers in the lecture, Bellow makes a pretty specific point about the function of character in contemporary writing. He tangles with Alain Robbe-Grillet's claim that the novel of bourgeois individualism is "obsolete" because in the latter half of the 20th century individuals are less important than ideas, systems, processes. Here is his quote from Robbe-Grillet's essay On Several Obsolete Notions:

"Fifty years of disease, the death notice signed many times over by the serious essayists," says Robbe-Grillet, "yet nothing has managed to knock it ["character"] off the pedestal on which the 19th century had placed it. It is a mummy now, but one still enthroned with the same phony majesty, among the values revered by traditional criticism."

Bellow's lecture defends complex human character as the subject of literature, whose death is rather prematurely announced by Robbe-Grillet and others, beginning in the 1960s.

And art and literature - what of them? Well, there is a violent uproar but we are not absolutely dominated by it. We are still able to think, to discriminate, and to feel. The purer, subtler, higher activities have not succumbed to fury or to nonsense. Not yet. Books continue to be written and read. It may be more difficult to reach the whirling mind of a modern reader but it is possible to cut through the noise and reach the quiet zone. In the quiet zone we may find that he is devoutly waiting for us. When complications increase, the desire for essentials increases too. The unending cycle of crises that began with the First World War has formed a kind of person, one who has lived through terrible, strange things, and in whom there is an observable shrinkage of prejudices, a casting off of disappointing ideologies, an ability to live with many kinds of madness, an immense desire for certain durable human goods - truth, for instance, or freedom, or wisdom. I don't think I am exaggerating; there is plenty of evidence for this.

Take away the damage done by war and the noise of ideology, and the reader is still there.

But why do many contemporary writers fail to hold the place of importance they once did for readers? Bellow feels that literature has become in some sense marginal to the center of human activity, and goes to Hegel:

But for a long time art has not been connected, as it was in the past, with the main enterprise. The historian Edgar Wind tells us in Art and Anarchy that Hegel long ago observed that art no longer engaged the central energies of man. These energies were now engaged by science - a "relentless spirit of rational inquiry." Art had moved to the margins. There it formed "a wide and splendidly varied horizon." In an age of science people still painted and wrote poetry but, said Hegel, however splendid the gods looked in modern works of art and whatever dignity and perfection we might find "in the images of God the Father and the Virgin Mary" it was of no use: we no longer bent our knees. It is a long time since the knees were bent in piety. Ingenuity, daring exploration, freshness of invention replaced the art of "direct relevance." The most significant achievement of this pure art, in Hegel's view, was that, freed from its former responsibilities, it was no longer "serious." Instead it raised the soul through the "serenity of form above any painful involvement in the limitations of reality." I don't know who would make such a claim today for an art that raises the soul above painful involvements with reality. Nor am I sure that at this moment, it is the spirit of rational inquiry in pure science that engages the central energies of man. The center seems (temporarily perhaps) to be filled up with the crises I have been describing.

So Bellow isn't sure if "science" rules the roost after all. The prospect of centrality is still available to writers if they are inspired enough to enter it. As he says at the end of the essay, "If writers do not come again into the center it will not be because the center is pre-empted. It is not. They are free to enter. If they so wish."

There are two things that I find interesting about this. One is, in his resistance to Robbe-Grillet, Bellow sounds an awful lot like people today who (like Terry Eagleton, say) complain about the drift of both contemporary literature and the criticism that is associated with it. It's not just an old debate, it's a very old debate.

The other is in this business about centers and margins, and the purpose of art. For Bellow, the time when art inspired the bending of knees was also the time when it had a ritualistic function -- when it was the image of Jesus and the Virgin Mary that inspired one, not the precision of the craftsmanship or the verisimilitude of the image. Arguably, in a secular culture art and literature can never be quite as powerful as in the kind of pre-modern society Bellow is thinking of, where the thing that "high" art represents is never in fact merely physically present.

Perhaps Bellow's idea of the "center" is just a euphemism for writing really, really well. Or maybe it's more serious: but what might it mean to make a work of art that accesses the central nerves of human development at the present moment? More concretely, if it were a novel, what kind of novel would it be? Would it look like Saul Bellow's own work?

"My Brother Nikhil," and AIDS in India

The Times' Somini Sengupta has a report on a film that has come out in India, called My Brother, Nikhil, which features a 'hip' young gay man dealing with AIDS and HIV. It's set in the late 1980s/early 1990s, when AIDS was not being discussed in India at all.

The film easily passed the censor board, and thus far there has been no controversy about it whatsoever. I gather that there is no explicit sexuality in it.

Reading the (glowing) Rediff review, one gets the distinct sense that the film will be over-the-top and melodramatic in that Bollywood way. The article is a little ambiguous on this point, but it sounds like part of the plot is "the sad plight of India's patient zero."

Oh well. I'll still go see it if/when it comes out.

This comes on a day when Sepia Mutiny has a post on a BBC report on a study that Indians carrying HIV seem to develop full-blown AIDS at a higher rate than people in other parts of the world. The researchers have attributed the to genetics: "protective genes are rare while harmful genes are common." It's an interesting claim; I'm skeptical, but willing to be convinced.

Still, the statistics are sobering: at least 5 million Indians are infected with HIV.

John Ruskin and Particularism

I listened to the BBC 4 In Our Time discussion of John Ruskin on the way to work this morning, and was struck by a couple of things. (Here is the (main page; the discussants are Dinah Birch, Professor of English at Liverpool University; Keith Hanley, Professor of English Literature and Director of the Ruskin Programme at Lancaster University; and Stefan Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the University of Cambridge).

One thing that struck me was the extent to which Ruskin's political investments overlap with those of succeeding generations. For those who haven't heard of him, Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and William Morris are the dominant voices in the "Pre-Raphaelite" movement in Victorian literature and the arts. [See George Landow's page on Ruskin for more details; and here is a site on Pre-Raphaelite painting] Philosophically, the Pre-Raphaelites were interested in a kind of neo-Feudalism that verged on Fourier-style socialism. Following Ruskin's Modern Painters books, they celebrated Gothic architecture and hierarchical authority. Ruskin apparently described himself as "the sternest kind of Tory," but he was nothing like the other Tories of his era.

In the sense that his work was critical of Victorian industrialization and Capitalism, Ruskin's work had a big influence on many Marxist and progressive thinkers. Also of particular note is his big influence on Gandhi, whose anti-industrial pose owes quite a bit to the ideas of Ruskin and Carlyle (the latter is mentioned with particular enthusiasm in Gandhi's Autobiography).

But the three British Victorianists who are the discussants on this BBC show suggest that, with the seeming current irrelevance of anti-Industrialism protests (except perhaps amongst radical environmentalists), it's unlikely that the political economy side of Ruskin will continue to be compelling for current and future readers. The broad philosophical motive behind Ruskin's political thought is now no longer especially exciting to engage. We are no longer interested in the moral obligation to return to nature, live with the land, or (in the Indian idiom), spin, sew, and embroider our own clothes.

What does remain thrilling in Ruskin's writing is, if anything, the writing itself. As one of the discussants says towards the end of the discussion, Ruskin was not all philosophical abstractions, by no means just an "-ism" thinker as the earlier comments in this post might suggest. If you read Modern Painters (and I confess I've only read a few select sections), you find passage after passage dwelling on the particular visual textures of the English countryside, both natural and man-made. Here's one particularly beautiful paragraph I culled from this website:

For instance, I cannot find words to express the intense pleasure I have always in first finding myself, after some prolonged stay in England, at the foot of the old tower of Calais church. The large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it; the record of its years written so visibly, yet without sign of weakness or decay; its stern wasteness and gloom, eaten away by the Channel winds, and overgrown with the bitter sea grasses; its slates and tiles all shaken and rent, and yet not falling; its desert of brickwork full of bolts, and holes, and ugly fissures, and yet strong, like a bare brown rock; its carelessness of what any one thinks or feels about it, putting forth no claim, having no beauty or desirableness, pride, nor grace; yet neither asking for pity; not, as ruins are, useless and piteous, feebly or fondly garrulous of better days; but usefill still, going through its own daily work, - as some old fisherman beaten grey by storm, yet drawing his daily nets: so it stands, with no complaint about its past youth, in blanched and meagre massiveness and serviceableness, gathering human souls together underneath it; the sound of its bells for prayer still rolling through its rents; and the grey peak of it seen far across the sea, principal of the three that rise above the waste of surfy sand and hillocked shore, - the lighthouse for life, and the belfry for labour, and this for patience and praise.

The idea behind Ruskin's celebration of the decaying church at Calais is roughly congruent with that of Romanticism broadly construed -- the beauty produced by the evidence of the forces of nature, the inextricable (there's that word again) link between human artifice and the inevitable effects of time and age. But more than anything, what I walk away from a passage like that with is the desire to go see the Church he's talking about. (I can't imagine it could still be there.)

That said, if one reads just a little further, one finds that the sweep of comparative architecture, and moral/philosophical investments return in short order to the fore-front:

I cannot tell the half of the strange pleasures and thoughts that come about me at the sight of that old tower; for, in some sort, it is the epitome of all that makes the Continent of Europe interesting, as opposed to new countries; and, above all, it completely expresses that agedness in the midst of active life which binds the old and the new into harmony. We, in England, have our new street, our new inn, our green shaven lawn, and our piece of ruin emergent from it, - a mere specimen of the Middle Ages put on a bit of velvet carpet to be shown, which, but for its size, might as well be on a museum shelf at once, under cover. But, on the Continent, the links are unbroken between the past and present, and, in such use as they can serve for, the grey-headed wrecks are suffered to stay with men; while, in unbroken line, the generations of spared buildings are seen succeeding each in its place. And thus in its largeness, in its permitted evidence of slow decline, in its poverty, in its absence of all pretence, of all show and care for outside aspect, that Calais tower has an infinite of symbolism in it, all the more striking because usually seen in contrast with English scenes expressive of feelings the exact reverse of these.

For Ruskin, the English have a penchant for marking off the past in a museumy way, while Continentals (Ruskin had traveled extensively in France, Germany, and Italy), live with the distant past in a much more mundane, functional, and integrated way. Ruskin never met a generalization he didn't like: he reads the distinction as symbolic of a broad moral divide between English and Continental thinking.

The challenge is to bracket Ruskin's penchant for "symbolism," and read against the grain of his philosophy by reading in the grain of his finely descriptive language. Perhaps if we look closely at the rhythms of his prose (especially in the first passage I quoted), we might continue to find new and vital ways to read Ruskin.

Penguin India to Publish in Vernacular Languages

Via Literary Saloon: Penguin India is going to start publishing books in Indian languages. The representative for Penguin quoted in the article says the Indian book market has the potential to grow dramatically.

I'm hoping they're right: the more books, the merrier.

Qurratulain Hyder, in The Hindu

Via Soniah Kamal at Desilit, I followed a link to a review of a newly translated Qurratulain Hyder novel called My Temples, Too. It was first published in 1949. The reviewer in The Hindu does something a little odd in this review, namely quote herself. Here is an exemplary opening paragraph:

It is in this context that My Temples, Too (Mere Bhi Sanamkhane, 1949) is an important literary event. Hyder, described as the grand dame of Urdu literature, has been credited with refining the form of the novel in a poetry-obsessed Urdu and has been compared to literary icon Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the epic historical sweep of her magnum opus Aag Ka Dariya [Rivers of Fire] (published 1959, translated as River of Fire in 1999 by Kali for Women). Born in Aligarh in UP in 1927, Hyder came from a family of intellectuals and was educated at Lucknow's Isabella Thoburn University, going on to a stint in London as a young sari-clad reporter for Fleet Street, before emigrating to Pakistan to join her family. She returned to India in 1962 and now lives and works in Noida, Delhi. Her novels and short stories are arresting for their complex examination of the cultural inextricability of the Hindu and Muslim cultures in terms of literature, poetry and music, and the forces of history like Colonisation, Independence and Partition as well as and sociological movements like abolition of Zamindari [serfdom], and their conflicts with the flow of individual lives. Here, Hyder differs in her themes from feminist writers like Ismat Chugtai in that the feminist impulse is but one separate strand that is subsumed in the broader sweep of history, and also from the progressive writers group of Manto, Bedi, Bhisham Sahni and Chugtai in her refusal to stay leftist and her nostalgia for the aristocratic zamindari life.

Except for the syntactical error in one sentence ("as well as and sociological"), this is a decent opening paragraph -- at once informative and rhetorically punchy. Hyder is contrasted both to the earlier, Romantic school in Urdu poetry, and to the more narrowly focused feminism of Ismat Chughtai. It's a nice way to position what she does, and seems pretty accurate (though I haven't read enough of Chughtai's works to say for sure whether the assessment of Chughtai's feminism is fair).

But what's sort of surreal is the way the reviewer (Sonya Dutta Choudhry) reprises her own language in the opening paragraph in the final paragraph, putting the repeated phrase in quotation marks:

My Temples, Too is a powerful story, told in an idiom that is distinctively Hyder's, in its syncretic fusion of an innately Indian "centuries of Hindu-Muslim cultural inextricability" style, which simultaneously takes cognizance of western thought and ideas.

To quote myself from above, "The reviewer in The Hindu does something a little odd in this review, namely quote herself," when she refers to "centuries of Hindu-Muslim cultural inextricability," twice.

Desi Weekend: Indian bloggers; BOB NYC

First, I went and met Indian desi bloggers at the Bay Leaf Restaurant in New York.

It's interesting that no one has blogged about it (though Kerim has posted a Flickr photo set), though I can kind of understand it: sometimes it's better to keep real life socialization separate from what one talks about on one's blog.

Also, some friends were involved with the production of Best of the Best NYC, so we spent Saturday evening watching an intercollegiate dance competition in Tribeca. I've been to these before, and sometimes found them a little tedious to watch. Bhangra Blowout, for instance, is a drag to go to (overblown, if you will), unless you're actually a college student yourself, or you have family involved in the production.

[I was also distressed to find out that someone was killed at the after-party at this year's event, though I think it's basically random.]

BOBNYC was more fun than those shows, mainly because of the inclusion of Garba/Raas teams as well as "fusion" teams. There can be such thing as too much Punjabi culture, and the inclusion of Gujurati dance as well as Bolly/Holly/hip hop hybridity makes things more interesting. All of the dances were quite good. I was impressed by the growing importance of live singing amongst the Punjabi groups; it suggests the genre might be moving towards "Boliyan." It's hyper-authentic: so authentic, you'll never see it in Punjab.

And I'd never seen this much Raas before -- truly impressive. The Raas groups emphasize delicacy, complexity, and nuance. This is in contrast to the Punjabi groups, which are all about enthusiasm.

I also enjoyed Josh, the "special act," from Montreal. I've yet to hear music from them that really knocks my socks off (it's a little simple for my tastes), but they have great stage presence. Judging by the crowd reaction, there might be some potential there.

Terry Eagleton's After Theory

We recently had a seminar at Lehigh to discuss Terry Eagleton's After Theory. I think the plan was to have a soul-searching discussion about the role of Theory in Our Scholarly Endeavor, its possibilities but also its limitations. Something like that. Perhaps, if someone was feeling grouchy, there might have been a "culture wars" type of showdown. Or, on a better day, perhaps people who ordindarily hold rather polarized views would have reached some kind of new understanding of what their nemeses are up to, and we would all have benefited from having talked it out.

But all this might have happened only if the substantial argument of Eagleton's book had anything to do with its title. It does not. It is only "after theory" in the sense that Bjork's second solo album was called Post, that is to say, it is after a book that came before, which was called Literary Theory. (Bjork's first solo album was called Debut, in case you were wondering.) Though Eagleton comes out rather strongly against Theory-with-a-captial-T at moments, he is not against theorizing, but is rather forcefully arguing a theory of his own: an ethical, Aristotelian kind of socialism.

Admittedly, the first half of the book does have something to do with the culture wars and the theory wars. There are many good zingers, and some not so good. My favorite right now is:

"'Act locally, think globally' has become a familiar leftist slogan; but we live in a world where the political right acts globally and the postmodern left thinks locally.

To which my reaction is: ouch. Or maybe just, mini-ouch.

Eagleton is very hard on the postmodern left in the first half of the book, only unlike conservative-leaning critics of postmodernism he continues to share their basic view of the world. Thus he is annoyed by the cultural turn in feminist theory, but doggedly supportive of feminism as a philosophical and political principle. And he has a similar ambivalence for many other sub-fields and thematic interests, including post-colonial theory. The latter was once directly associated with Marxism and a militantly anti-colonial world-view, but it now seems to Eagleton to have turned into another form of identity politics studies, fetishizing "difference" in such a way as to make it essentially cooperative with Capitalism. Many of his arguments here will be familiar to people who've read other books critical of theory: the postmodernist take on Enlightenment rationality is foolish; the attack on "essentialism" is misdirected; the whole enterprise is remarkably pliable to the interests of corporate culture, and so on.

The second half of Eagleton's book goes in an entirely different, and for me, unexpected direction. That is to say, it is a vision of socialism underpinned by a concept of ethics that is sometimes Aristotelian and sometimes Liberation Theology. Gone are the little rants about Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, whom he at one point accuses of the "heresy of fideism": "Your life is based on certain beliefs which are immune to rational scrutiny." In the place of the zingers come long disquisitions on the true meaning of the Pauline position on Mosaic Law (Adam Kotsko, are you out there?), Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and passages like this one:

It is because of the body, not in the first place because of Enlightenment abstraction, that we can speak of morality as universal. The material body is what we share is what we share most significantly with the whole of the rest of our species, extended both in time and space. Of course it is true that our needs, desires, and sufferings are always culturally specific. But our material bodies are such that they are, indeed must be, in principle capable of feeling compasion for any others of their kind. It is on this cpacity for fellow-feeling that moral values are founded; and this is based in turn on our material dependency on each other. Angels, if they existed, would not be moral beings in anything like our sense. (155-156)

I must confess that I find much of this language compelling.

What ties the academic/culture wars part of the book together with the latter chapters on issues of truth, morality, ethics, fundamentalism and evil, is a pervading sense that capitalism is to blame. It is Capitalism that fetishizes difference, hybridity, plasticity, and the bad kind of Individualism. It is Capitalism that separates compassionate human beings from their natural tendency to express compassion and selfless action. Liberals may have good hearts, but their philosophy has no ethical core comparable to that articulated by Aristotle or Kant. Postmodernists have shaken things up in a way that Eagleton appreciates; he is amused, rather than chagrined, at the sudden preponderance of people seriously studying such weighty stuff as Mel Gibson's Mad Max movies. But ultimately their thinking is driven by the logic of Capital, and their books, sitting pretty in the "Cultural Studies" section at Barnes & Noble, have their concerns dictated by marketing rather than true, human ethics.

I must confess that I don't share Eagleton's politics, or at least, don't lean as far that way as I might -- I've felt too much disillusionment with India's experiments with state socialism to be very enthusiastic at this point in the game. And I must say that this is a confusing, bizarrely organized book on the whole (one of my colleagues referred to it as "undisciplined," which seems apt). But there is nevertheless, a reaching here towards some thing to which I am sympathetic, namely clarity. Eagleton might be right when he argues that the distractions offered by today's media environment weaken the possibility of ideological clarity one way or another. Without that kind of clarity, truly original thinking in the humanities becomes extremely rare.

The Valve!

Announcing The Valve, a literary studies group blog. It's John Holbo's brainchild, so he's put up the first post (of course, it's "Holbonically long").

I'm looking forward to this -- it should be fun, but it might also be a path to using blogging as a space for serious conversation about literary studies. Currently most of that happens at conferences, and in journals, but both of those venues have certain problems and limitations.

We'll see whether a literary studies group blog will be able to do things that the many excellent "book blogs" and "academic blogs" maintained by individuals currently cannot do. I tend to think it can, though a lot of wrinkles will have to be ironed out first.

Post-pop stars: Moby and Fukuyama

Kelefa Sanneh is one erudite music critic. At times, he reminds me of the indomitable Armond White, the shining star of the otherwise-uninteresting New York Press. (See, for instance, White's recent review of the CGI movie Robots; he finds a way to compare the film to Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle).

Sanneh isn't quite as out there as White sometimes is with the obscure and brilliant cultural allusions. Still, this one seems especially clever:

How did "Play" make Moby a star in the first place? As most articles about "Play" mentioned, Moby marketed his album by licensing the tracks to commercials and soundtracks; relying on the power of corporate synergy, he had made an end run around the pop establishment.

His wasn't just a success story, then, it was a new kind of success story. Even better (according to the strange rules that governed 1999), it was a success story involving the words "geek" and "synergy." Suddenly, regular pop stars seemed old-fashioned: a bunch of oversized personalities, jockeying for space on radio stations that broadcast their songs using an antiquated system of frequency modulation. By contrast, Moby was a scientist, a musical technician who listened to everything and distilled what he heard into some state-of-the-art pop essence.

"I want to have the broadest possible sonic palette to draw on when I'm composing music," he told Gerald Marzorati of The New York Times Magazine, adding that he'd been listening to "pop records, dance records, classical records." And you could tell he felt a bit sorry for those sad 20th-century types who confined themselves to a single genre. He was a pop star for a world too sophisticated to believe in pop stars - a post-pop-star, perhaps.

"The end of history will be a very sad time," the political theorist Francis Fukuyama wrote in 1989, anticipating, after a fashion, Moby's world. Mr. Fukuyama imagined a future defined by "economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands." The appeal of Moby was that he would give us a way to enjoy this future; he would satisfy our "sophisticated consumer demands" through superior engineering.

It's true -- every single track on Moby's Play was used in a commercial somewhere.

More on Paul Wolfowitz and the World Bank

So it looks like Paul Wolfowitz is going to get the job after all. It just goes to show that, while it's easy to see that the Bush administration is ethically challenged, Europeans shouldn't be confused with saints. European support here is clearly the result of some backroom wheeling and dealing.

Still, does anyone believe this career neo-conservative has a personal interest in helping poor countries develop economically?

On the other hand, who knows? Sometimes neophytes are surprisingly good at what they do. And it's not as if there is any direct contradiction between the philosophy of the World Bank and the free market/privatization ideology that is for American neocons a kind of religion.

The Reviewers' Revenge: Sometimes the Internet is Like That

In the Times.

Sometimes the Internet is like that. The traditional objects of
culture - books, movies, art - are becoming ever more distant. In their place
are reviews of reviews, museums of museums and many, many lists.

Here's my opinion of this writer's opinion about Lit-bloggers who review the reviews: I disagree! To be more exact: 1) lit bloggers do more than list favorite books, authors, easy chairs, coffee mugs, and the like. While making lists is certainly my favorite thing to do, it is not the only thing I do.

Ron Hogan, who writes a literary blog called Beatrice.com, recently began a second blog, Beatrix: A Book Review Review. He's not the only one reviewing reviewers. The blogs Bookdwarf, Conversational Reading, The Elegant Variation, Golden Rule Jones, The Reading Experience and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind - all gloss, grade or review other people's book reviews. Most book-review reviews are summary, to say the least. Their main purpose, it seems, is to get noticed and linked to by more popular blogs.

In short, Boxer argues, book bloggers have no original ideas of their own. I would challenge this, but unfortunately I can't find a link or a quote to make my case for me.

[More seriously, see Scott Esposito.]

India: Employment Guarantee Act (NPR)

NPR has been good on India lately.

The latest: India is considering an act that would guarantee one person in every poor household employment 100 days out of every year. They call in everyone's favorite free-market enthusiast, Gurcharan Das, to pour cold water on the idea as "socialist interventionism, doomed to fail."

SACW has a draft of the act.

The idea of doing this does sound a little questionable to me in some respects; there are too many ways for it to turn into yet another government scheme hampered, as so many Indian government schemes are, by too much bureaucracy and too little efficacy. But then: something like 400 million Indians continue to live in poverty. The trickle-down effect promised by liberalization advocates isn't working the way it should. Among the very poor, way too many people are unemployed. Moreover, the rural poor are moving to cities in India at alarming, even dangerous, rates. This might help slow that a little.

Though India is certainly not in the midst of a Great Depression (more like: the Great Endless Insufficient Progress), if this were well-managed, it might have an effect along the lines of that great American institution, the WPA, of generating lots of jobs, and some really impressive , lasting public-works projects along the way.

'A bit more ear please!': Headscarves in France

A new BBC2 documentary: Crooked Timber:

But the image that one was left with was of the hapless headteacher stopping the Muslims one by one at the school gate, singling them out, insisting on minor adjustments to their dress (“A bit more ear please!”). Utterly, utterly humiliating for all concerned. And the women themselves, now convinced that they would never be accepted in France. One had ambitions to be a nurse, but the government has now extended the law to medical service. Petty inspection, endless argument about the tiniest details of the garb worn by “those people”: humiliating and counterproductive.

I have a hard time understanding why the French aren't getting it about this law. I'm half-tempted to go to Paris this summer and do my own inspections -- situationist parodies of the routine described above on the Paris Metro.