But not here -- at the Valve.
I'm too busy with end of semester stuff to be doing the usual blogging right now...
Exhausted too. However,there is the possibility of a little holiday soon. Quite soon, in fact.
The Flop Pile
Indian film reviewers have begun to develop a special kind of reviewers' idiom. As they are responsible for coming up with copy for a large volume of truly atrocious films, they have to continually come up with fresh language with which to hunt their quarry. The kind of meanness that you see about once a season with Hollywood flops is more or less routine at Rediff, where the films are ranked somewhere between "Disaster" (Tango Charlie) and, at the high end "Above Average" (Lucky: No Time For Love). I seem to remember that some films used to actually be "hits" and even "super-hits" in Bollywood, but that era is either over, or Rediff reviewers are so bitter they refuse to certify "hits" out of spite.
The reviewer for a film called C U @ 9 voices her outrage openly: "Did the writer suffer from hallucinations/illusions while writing fragments that he dared call a story?" And after about 200 words of contemptuous sarcasm, she tries to muster up just a little bit of a plot summary:
Well, so much for a plot summary.
And the reviewer for Laila -- A Mystery is so pissed she verges on losing her cool entirely:
Well, that's one way to end a review!
[Here's a previous post on Rediff's Bollywood reporting]
The reviewer for a film called C U @ 9 voices her outrage openly: "Did the writer suffer from hallucinations/illusions while writing fragments that he dared call a story?" And after about 200 words of contemptuous sarcasm, she tries to muster up just a little bit of a plot summary:
But if you insist, here's the jist: Some 'steamy' scenes with Isaiah aka Romeo and Shweta aka Kim, with the latter exposing and doing a shoddy job of it. Blood dripping between frames. A display of all the tools a carpenter would ever use. Predictable sound effects. [. . .]
Blood, blood and more blood.
To top it all, a pathetically inferior attempt at explaining the waste of your three hours.
Well, so much for a plot summary.
And the reviewer for Laila -- A Mystery is so pissed she verges on losing her cool entirely:
As far as the actors in the movie are concerned, I have seen people chopping vegetables come up with more expressions than they did! Apart from dropping her clothes every 3.2 seconds and arching her eyebrows, Payal Rohtagi does nothing. Ditto Chesz Shetty.
Let's not even talk about the actors, Farid Amiri and Rohit Chopra... or the jarring music... or the pathetic editing...
In fact, the movie is really not worth writing about.
Well, that's one way to end a review!
[Here's a previous post on Rediff's Bollywood reporting]
Monday Morning Inter-Meeting Indie Pop
Dave Ambrose on NPR. It's a sign of the times that NPR allowed him use songs from the illegal Fiona Apple album as part of this story. Ambrose acknowledges that he "can't say exactly how" he got his hands on the songs, but that was the only comment on the matter.
So much for respecting intellectual property law! I suppose, if NPR can do it, MP3 blogs should continue on their merry way.
I recently read a Slate.com piece arguing that Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine isn't all that great anyway. I haven't heard it yet, but I can say that I liked the Fiona Apple song he played.
Dave Ambrose has a web radio show called Theory Radio.
So much for respecting intellectual property law! I suppose, if NPR can do it, MP3 blogs should continue on their merry way.
I recently read a Slate.com piece arguing that Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine isn't all that great anyway. I haven't heard it yet, but I can say that I liked the Fiona Apple song he played.
Dave Ambrose has a web radio show called Theory Radio.
Babu's back; New titles out in India
Babu at Kitabkhana is back posting, with a vengeance. Also, she's been outed: "Hurree Babu" is actually someone we had been mentioning in some recent posts for her non-pseudonymous work.
One of Kitabkhana's new features is going to be a monthly "Inbox," a listing of notable books released in India. This month features two new anthologies of Indian writing (neither of which have been released in the U.S.), a new novel by Siddartha Deb (recently reviewed in the Village Voice), as well as yet another book by Pankaj Mishra (India In Mind). Both the Deb novel and the Mishra book are available in the U.S.
Interesting on Mishra -- Amazon says his "Buddha" book was released in December 8, 2004, and India in Mind on January 4, 2005. That's two books out in a single month!
One of Kitabkhana's new features is going to be a monthly "Inbox," a listing of notable books released in India. This month features two new anthologies of Indian writing (neither of which have been released in the U.S.), a new novel by Siddartha Deb (recently reviewed in the Village Voice), as well as yet another book by Pankaj Mishra (India In Mind). Both the Deb novel and the Mishra book are available in the U.S.
Interesting on Mishra -- Amazon says his "Buddha" book was released in December 8, 2004, and India in Mind on January 4, 2005. That's two books out in a single month!
Wh'appen? Short story recommendation
I wanted to point people to my man Harpreet Singh Soorae, a young writer from the UK. His short story, "The Man With No Name," is up at Another Subcontinent for the next month. It has an interesting alternately anxious/relaxed rhythm to it, which I think may be familiar to the other desi slackers out there.
The Interpreter: Watch out for A.O. Scott, and Race Issues
We thoroughly enjoyed The Interpreter as an agreeable Hollywood timepass. It's really nicely shot, and has some brilliant "suspense" scenes (especially the scene on the bus, which I found totally shocking).
This morning I thought I would read what some other people thought of the film, and I was dismayed to see, first of all, A.O. Scott being unremittingly snide:
It's always a little depressing when negative reviews of a film you enjoyed (admittedly a little thoughtlessly) lessen your opinion of the film. But A.O. Scott manages to do just that. Damn.
There are of course quite a number of positive reviews of the film, mostly focusing on Darius Khondji's magnificent cintematography (the New York Daily News: "The city has rarely looked more lovely on film"), and the nice acting by both Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn (Splicedwire: "Kidman and Penn vividly yet gracefully charge their characters with resonant emotional distress.")
And there are many more. But none of the positive reviews manage to take the sting of a single harsh review in The Times. Why do I fetishize the NYT so much?
* * * * *
Secondly, it's interesting that few critics have talked about the unusual race issues in the film. Roger Ebert does have a throw-away "P.S." at the end of his review which is more interesting than the body of the review itself:
Yes, this is something to ponder. A.O. Scott made fun of the way the Nicole Kidman (of all people) is The Interpreter's "embodiment of suffering Africa." I think Scott's tone, there at least, is probably on-target: the film's attitude to race leads one to slight sarcasm, not full-blown outrage. In that it points to the failure of postcolonial African ideals, I think the issue in this film is politics, not so much race. And I'm bored of the kind of response to art which looks for a racist unconscious everywhere. To see The Interpreter as racist for demonizing "Zuwanie" is to overlook the basic historical fact that the violence that has occurred in sub-saharan Africa in the past decade has been committed by black Africans, against other black Africans.
The Interpreter would have been a more serious film if it had addressed the causes of that violence: endemic poverty, the absence of any checks on the power of the dictators, way too many guns, and the world's indifference. One could also ask for a more historically nuanced representation of both Nicole Kidman's character's "white African farmer" background; white African farmers in places like Zimbabwe can hardly be said to be innocent victims.
All of this might make the film more serious, yes, but the sad truth is that any whiff of historical specificity would have surely turned this glamorous (but conscientious) Sean Penn-Nicole Kidman political thriller (with potential-Oscar buzz!) into a "sincere" and "important" film that no one wants to see (the Hotel Rwanda trap).
This morning I thought I would read what some other people thought of the film, and I was dismayed to see, first of all, A.O. Scott being unremittingly snide:
This kind of movie, stuffed with intimations of faraway strife and people in suits talking frantically on cellphones and walkie-talkies, is conventionally described as a political thriller, but "The Interpreter" is as apolitical as it is unthrilling. A handsome-looking blue-chip production with a singularly impressive Oscar pedigree, it disdains anything so crude, or so risky to its commercial prospects, as a point of view.
It's always a little depressing when negative reviews of a film you enjoyed (admittedly a little thoughtlessly) lessen your opinion of the film. But A.O. Scott manages to do just that. Damn.
There are of course quite a number of positive reviews of the film, mostly focusing on Darius Khondji's magnificent cintematography (the New York Daily News: "The city has rarely looked more lovely on film"), and the nice acting by both Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn (Splicedwire: "Kidman and Penn vividly yet gracefully charge their characters with resonant emotional distress.")
And there are many more. But none of the positive reviews manage to take the sting of a single harsh review in The Times. Why do I fetishize the NYT so much?
* * * * *
Secondly, it's interesting that few critics have talked about the unusual race issues in the film. Roger Ebert does have a throw-away "P.S." at the end of his review which is more interesting than the body of the review itself:
I don't want to get Politically Correct, I know there are many white Africans, and I admire Kidman's performance. But I couldn't help wondering why her character had to be white. I imagined someone like Angela Bassett in the role, and wondered how that would have played. If you see the movie, run that through your mind.
Yes, this is something to ponder. A.O. Scott made fun of the way the Nicole Kidman (of all people) is The Interpreter's "embodiment of suffering Africa." I think Scott's tone, there at least, is probably on-target: the film's attitude to race leads one to slight sarcasm, not full-blown outrage. In that it points to the failure of postcolonial African ideals, I think the issue in this film is politics, not so much race. And I'm bored of the kind of response to art which looks for a racist unconscious everywhere. To see The Interpreter as racist for demonizing "Zuwanie" is to overlook the basic historical fact that the violence that has occurred in sub-saharan Africa in the past decade has been committed by black Africans, against other black Africans.
The Interpreter would have been a more serious film if it had addressed the causes of that violence: endemic poverty, the absence of any checks on the power of the dictators, way too many guns, and the world's indifference. One could also ask for a more historically nuanced representation of both Nicole Kidman's character's "white African farmer" background; white African farmers in places like Zimbabwe can hardly be said to be innocent victims.
All of this might make the film more serious, yes, but the sad truth is that any whiff of historical specificity would have surely turned this glamorous (but conscientious) Sean Penn-Nicole Kidman political thriller (with potential-Oscar buzz!) into a "sincere" and "important" film that no one wants to see (the Hotel Rwanda trap).
Composition Without Rhetoric: John Guillory
[Cross-posted at The Valve]
English departments are constantly struggling to justify their existence in an increasingly results-oriented academic hierarchy. What does studying literature prepare you to do? How will it help students get a job? We usually answer it with some version of "critical thinking and persuasion through written arguments," which we hope will hold off the administrators another year. But are the skills one uses to compose a compelling argument about George Eliot relevant at all to the kind of writing that dominates the corporate world? Why does it often seem that one is writing all the time -- email after email after email -- without actually involving oneself with the inner life of the language? In "The Memo and Modernity" (Critical Inquiry 31.1) Guillory draws on everything from Quintilian to Erasmus to The Handbook of Business English, to show the emergence of a massive genre of informational writing that is neither truly scientific nor rhetorical.
Guillory argues that the late nineteenth century saw the rise of the memo -- a genre of bureaucratic writing that is, effectively, anti-rhetorical. It is a kind of writing that exists between two more frequently opposed genres, literary/journalistic and scholarly/scientific:
He makes a compelling argument that the middle term, "informational" writing, is in fact best understood as anti-rhetorical. In doing so, Guillory is directly opposing a dominant theory in composition pedagogy, that all writing is always in some sense rhetorical ("Everything's an Argument").
It's much more complicated than that. The benchmark text for Guillory is JoAnn Yates' Control Through Communication, which works through the emergence of the memo historically, in the 1870s and 1880s. He uses Yates in several ways, but perhaps the key passage is the following one:
The memo is thus a distinctive genre of writing, not merely a subset of rhetorical prose as traditionally understood. It is by definition a professionalized (or bureaucratic) mode of expression. For Guillory, its difference from the classical "business letter," which was highly rhetorical, should not be dismissed:
Guillory is going against the "everything's an argument" philosophy that leads Composition classes to claim a kind of universal importance in American universities. For Guillory, the three genres of writing -- literary, informational, scientific -- are distinct from one another, and should not be confused.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the essay is the second half, where Guillory talks about the "internal contradictions" of information genres. One is the contradiction between concision (brevitas) and verbosity (copia). Modern writing fetishizes the former, and assiduously avoids the latter, to such an extent that most young people have already fully assmilated the logic of business-class brevitas before they even reach the college freshman writing classroom (where brevitas is usually immediately reinforced and amplified). The kind of copia that characterizes literary writing from earlier periods is hard for many students to understand: it seems like waste, or rambling, or showing off. It's not impossible to convince students to appreciate elegance and style, but it takes time and effort (I often wonder how my Victorianist colleagues can get students to get into writers like Ruskin...).
The second contradiction Guillory talks about relates quite directly to the fierce debates we are (always?) having, about clarity (claritas) vs. jargon (which Guillory refers to as "technicity"). This is a huge question for us in literary studies, as we are often aggressively accused of over-reliance on a mystifying professional jargon. Many literary critics respond to these charges (as GZombie has recently done, on his blog, and in comments here and at Crooked Timber) with the argument that literary analysis is a specialized kind of skill, which requires training. Literary critics can and should use their jargon in the same way that our colleagues in the Genetics Department or Computer Science use it. (If he were to respond to this, I imagine that Guillory would argue that literary/journalistic and scientific genres of writing are distinct from one another. The advent of "technicity" in literary studies is therefore fallout from its attempt to fashion itself as science.)
Guillory's article speaks to this question (obliquely), and also, interestingly to the question of how it is that Composition has come to be merged with English, despite the seeming divergence of information-oriented composition pedagogy from the traditionally more rhetorical orientation of literary studies. I'll end with a quote from near the end of Guillory's essay that brings all of this together:
English departments are constantly struggling to justify their existence in an increasingly results-oriented academic hierarchy. What does studying literature prepare you to do? How will it help students get a job? We usually answer it with some version of "critical thinking and persuasion through written arguments," which we hope will hold off the administrators another year. But are the skills one uses to compose a compelling argument about George Eliot relevant at all to the kind of writing that dominates the corporate world? Why does it often seem that one is writing all the time -- email after email after email -- without actually involving oneself with the inner life of the language? In "The Memo and Modernity" (Critical Inquiry 31.1) Guillory draws on everything from Quintilian to Erasmus to The Handbook of Business English, to show the emergence of a massive genre of informational writing that is neither truly scientific nor rhetorical.
Guillory argues that the late nineteenth century saw the rise of the memo -- a genre of bureaucratic writing that is, effectively, anti-rhetorical. It is a kind of writing that exists between two more frequently opposed genres, literary/journalistic and scholarly/scientific:
literary/journalistic----informational----scholarly/scientific
He makes a compelling argument that the middle term, "informational" writing, is in fact best understood as anti-rhetorical. In doing so, Guillory is directly opposing a dominant theory in composition pedagogy, that all writing is always in some sense rhetorical ("Everything's an Argument").
It's much more complicated than that. The benchmark text for Guillory is JoAnn Yates' Control Through Communication, which works through the emergence of the memo historically, in the 1870s and 1880s. He uses Yates in several ways, but perhaps the key passage is the following one:
The Yates thesis, then, is that the memo emerged as a result of a new kind of managerial practice, and not as a development of rhetorical theory. On the contrary, the invention of the memo entailed a deliberate forgetting of rhetoric, an act of oblivion. The memorandum was not an evolution of the business letter but a new genre of writing. The term "memorandum" in this new generic sense began to be used in the later 1870s and early 1880s, although it did not become common until the 1920s, by which time the form of the memo was in widespread use. The idea of the memorandum as a "note to oneself" precisely captures the situation of internal communication within an organization. Hence Yates speaks of the memo as constituting an "organizational" memory. That this mode of remembering, displaced from individual minds to documents, was premised on the forgetting of rhetoric, underscores the little revolution in the history of writing Yates rediscovers.
The memo is thus a distinctive genre of writing, not merely a subset of rhetorical prose as traditionally understood. It is by definition a professionalized (or bureaucratic) mode of expression. For Guillory, its difference from the classical "business letter," which was highly rhetorical, should not be dismissed:
The story of rhetoric's demise has been told often enough to have provoked a revisionist history in which it never died at all, but was rather dispersed, in which the motives of rhetoric were hidden behind even the most scientific language. The revisionist history is credible if rhetoric, as the "art of persuasion," is rediscovered wherever the motive of persuasion exists. The rhetoric that seems to be nowhere is then said to be everywhere. 26 Some very sophisticated reassertions of rhetoric have relied upon this line of argument, for which Nietzsche's will to power is often invoked as a precedent, as the truth rhetoric tells about every speech act. Against this view, I would argue that if rhetoric is the art of persuasion, it makes a difference if the art disappears, leaving us only with persuasion. It must make a difference if information genres are founded on the deliberate suppression of rhetorical techniques. Such writing may fail to transcend the motive of persuasion, but it cannot fail to be different generically from what preceded it.
Guillory is going against the "everything's an argument" philosophy that leads Composition classes to claim a kind of universal importance in American universities. For Guillory, the three genres of writing -- literary, informational, scientific -- are distinct from one another, and should not be confused.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the essay is the second half, where Guillory talks about the "internal contradictions" of information genres. One is the contradiction between concision (brevitas) and verbosity (copia). Modern writing fetishizes the former, and assiduously avoids the latter, to such an extent that most young people have already fully assmilated the logic of business-class brevitas before they even reach the college freshman writing classroom (where brevitas is usually immediately reinforced and amplified). The kind of copia that characterizes literary writing from earlier periods is hard for many students to understand: it seems like waste, or rambling, or showing off. It's not impossible to convince students to appreciate elegance and style, but it takes time and effort (I often wonder how my Victorianist colleagues can get students to get into writers like Ruskin...).
The second contradiction Guillory talks about relates quite directly to the fierce debates we are (always?) having, about clarity (claritas) vs. jargon (which Guillory refers to as "technicity"). This is a huge question for us in literary studies, as we are often aggressively accused of over-reliance on a mystifying professional jargon. Many literary critics respond to these charges (as GZombie has recently done, on his blog, and in comments here and at Crooked Timber) with the argument that literary analysis is a specialized kind of skill, which requires training. Literary critics can and should use their jargon in the same way that our colleagues in the Genetics Department or Computer Science use it. (If he were to respond to this, I imagine that Guillory would argue that literary/journalistic and scientific genres of writing are distinct from one another. The advent of "technicity" in literary studies is therefore fallout from its attempt to fashion itself as science.)
Guillory's article speaks to this question (obliquely), and also, interestingly to the question of how it is that Composition has come to be merged with English, despite the seeming divergence of information-oriented composition pedagogy from the traditionally more rhetorical orientation of literary studies. I'll end with a quote from near the end of Guillory's essay that brings all of this together:
These tensions were interestingly played out in the twentieth century in the teaching of business and professional writing. The first attempts to teach business, professional, technical, and scientific people how to write were by and large undertaken by persons in those fields. The aims of this pedagogy were very close to those expressed by the originators of the memo form: to break with the old rhetoric, and to fashion new genres of writing. Even as late as 1929, Philip McDonald complained in his English and Science about the way in which English was taught in the schools, which he saw as promoting obscurity, pomposity, and ornateness. (89-100) But McDonald means to indict a rhetorical style. His conclusions favored the continued segregation of technical writing from English departments. Yet after the second world war, business and technical writing came under the province of English and composition teachers, who were naturally more disposed to favor the norm of clarity descending from belles lettrist culture than the norm of technicity regnant in the professions. The technical fields put up little resistance to this transfer of teaching authority because they were themselves increasingly troubled by the tension between technicity with clarity.
The reassertion of a literary norm within the field of informational writing seemed to respond to a perceived decline in the communicative effectiveness of writing that paced the explosion of information and media. The tension between clarity, which posits a hypothetical general reader, and technicity, which assumes a specialized addressee, has never been resolved. The failure of modern writing to achieve clarity brings technicity into disrepute; but technicity is an inescapable requisite of modern writing and is not, in itself, incompatible with clarity or communication. An analysis of informational writing that fails to recognize the complex relation between clarity and technicity is unlikely to yield a composition pedagogy adequate to the demands upon writing in modernity. The reassertion of clarity by the literary professoriate, like the reassertion of brevity, forgets the inaugural act of information genres, forgets the forgetting of rhetoric.
If only something that important were on my laptop...
Yikes:
To the person who might be thinking of stealing my laptop: you are in possession of 20 gigabytes of Bhangra and Hindi remix songs. Yes, I know they all sound the same -- what can I say, I have no taste? Oh, and there are about 5 megabytes containing some arcane scribblings on something called Secularism, that is currently of no interest whatsoever to the FBI, the Federal Marshals, or indeed, the congressional or the executive branches of the American government. If you haven't already reformatted the drive, go ahead and do so now.
I have a message for one person in this audience - I'm sorry the rest of you have to sit through this. As you know, my computer was stolen in my last lecture. The thief apparently wanted to betray everybody's trust, and was after the exam.
The thief was smart not to plug the computer into the campus network, but the thief was not smart enough to do three things: he was not smart enough to immediately remove Windows. I installed the same version of Windows on another computer - within fifteen minutes the people in Redmond Washington were very interested to know why it was that the same version of Windows was being signalled to them from two different computers.
The thief also did not inactivate either the wireless card or the transponder that's in that computer. Within about an hour, there was a signal from various places on campus that's allowed us to track exactly where that computer went every time that it was turned on.
I'm not particularly concerned about the computer. But the thief, who thought he was only stealing an exam, is presently - we think - is probably still in possession of three kinds of data, any one of which can send this man, this young boy, actually, to federal prison. Not a good place for a young boy to be.
You are in possession of data from a hundred million dollar trial, sponsored by the NIH, for which I'm a consultant. This involves some of the largest companies on the planet, the NIH investigates these things through the FBI, they have been notified about this problem.
You are in possession of trade secrets from a Fortune 1000 biotech company, the largest one in the country, which I consult for. The Federal Trade Communication is very interested in this. Federal Marshals are the people who handle that.
You are in possession of proprietary data from a pre-public company planning an IPO. The Securities and Exchange Commission is very interested in this and I don't even know what branch of law enforcement they use.
To the person who might be thinking of stealing my laptop: you are in possession of 20 gigabytes of Bhangra and Hindi remix songs. Yes, I know they all sound the same -- what can I say, I have no taste? Oh, and there are about 5 megabytes containing some arcane scribblings on something called Secularism, that is currently of no interest whatsoever to the FBI, the Federal Marshals, or indeed, the congressional or the executive branches of the American government. If you haven't already reformatted the drive, go ahead and do so now.
India Number One -- In HIV
Express India. The claim is based on an estimate by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. South Africa still has the highest solid estimate of HIV positive people (5.3 million to India's 5.1 million), but the range of estimates in India is much wider because of the lack of systematic testing.
France: No Compromise
The expulsion of three Sikh students has been held up in the French courts. (Via The Discrimination and National Security Initiative blog)
On some things, the French do not compromise.
On some things, the French do not compromise.
Good snark goes bad
I'm not enjoying this snarky trashing of Foer's new novel by Harry Siegel as much as I normally might. I agree with the sentiment; I'm not a huge fan of Foer's writing (though he interviews quite well). But I'm beginning to think that clever zingers are easy. It's better in principle just to say nothing at all and talk about what matters than it is to talk trash, as pleasurable as that might sometimes be.
That said, it's sometimes hard to stick to principle.
So far, this is good snark. But Siegel goes a little over the deep end when he brings up the flip-book a second time:
The first paragraph is ok. But the second paragraph above is show-offy, and the third is basically nonsense. Writers are allowed to use tragic events as material for their imaginations. 9/11 is not off limits. Deal with it.
And once Siegel starts to go wrong, he really goes wrong. Near the end of the review is the following bit of bareknuckled crap:
Oh, Harry Siegel, come on. So you were at Ground Zero; are you going to play that card every time a liberal opens his mouth? Adam Gopnik is harmless, and the bit about smoked mozzarella is just a line, an idea -- one person's response to a catastrophe. Save the venom for the real bad guys.
That said, it's sometimes hard to stick to principle.
Much has been made of the flipbook with which Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ends, a series of pictures of a silhouette falling from the towers, rearranged so that as one turns or flips the pages, the figure ascends instead of falling. Some advice to our young author: Don't walk the streets naked and complain that no one takes you seriously, and certainly don't write a book culminating with a flipbook and then complain that your words aren't taken seriously.
So far, this is good snark. But Siegel goes a little over the deep end when he brings up the flip-book a second time:
And then the flipbook, which, like the other illustrations, serves no purpose but to remind us that this is an important book, and what a daring young author this Foer is, offering us authenticity, a favorite word of his. In an interview, he explained that "Jay-Z samples from Annie—one of the least likely combinations imaginable—and it changes music. What if novelists were as willing to borrow?" Yes. Jiggaman and "Hard Knock Life" are surely what the novel needs.
Foer is indeed a sampler, throwing in Sebald (the illustrations and Dresden), Borges (the grandparents divide their apartment into something and nothing), Calvino (a tale about the sixth borough that floated off, ripped off wholesale from Cosmicomics), Auster (in the whole city-of-symbols shtick), Night of the Hunter (the grandfather has Yes and No tattooed on his hands) and damn near every other author, technique, reference and symbol he can lay his hands on, as though referencing were the same as meaning.
And with the same easy spirit in which he pillages other authors' techniques, stripping them of their context and using them merely for show, he snatches 9/11 to invest his conceit with gravitas, thus crossing the line that separates the risible from the villainous. The book's themes—the sense of connection we all feel when the coffee or acid hits and everything is illuminated, the brain-gurble and twitch and self-pity we all know better than to write about—have nothing to do with the attack on the towers, or with Dresden or Hiroshima, which Foer tosses in just to make sure we understand what a big and important book we're dealing with.
The first paragraph is ok. But the second paragraph above is show-offy, and the third is basically nonsense. Writers are allowed to use tragic events as material for their imaginations. 9/11 is not off limits. Deal with it.
And once Siegel starts to go wrong, he really goes wrong. Near the end of the review is the following bit of bareknuckled crap:
All of this brings to mind the infamous post-9/11 issue of The New Yorker, in which author after author reduced the attack to the horizon of their writerliness, epitomized by Adam Gopnick's comparing the smell to smoked mozzarella. I was at Ground Zero, so didn't hear about the issue for weeks or read it for months (or smell mozzarella at all), but I understood both why such words were vile and how writers curled into what they know. They felt that the world had become too large and ill-contained to do anything else.
Oh, Harry Siegel, come on. So you were at Ground Zero; are you going to play that card every time a liberal opens his mouth? Adam Gopnik is harmless, and the bit about smoked mozzarella is just a line, an idea -- one person's response to a catastrophe. Save the venom for the real bad guys.
Iriver vs. Ipod
I was a little down about my IRiver H10.
Shortly after I bought it, my wife received a free IPod Mini from work as a perk (ah, the life of the software engineer), and I was instantly jealous. Though my IRiver does have a color screen so you can look at pictures, as well as a text-viewing mode -- neither of which are to be had with IPod Mini -- it doesn't really have the "gee-whiz" quality of the IPod.
For one thing, the IPod's firmware is much, much better. It's easy to use, fast, fun to play with -- well, you already know, because chances are, you probably have an IPod. Also, ITunes is a nice piece of interface software. In contrast, the firmware my IRiver came with was awkward and buggy. Worst of all, it didn't come with it's own software package, and wasn't especially transparent to Windows Explorer. This meant I was stuck using Windows Media Player 10. (Which I don't particularly like)
Fortunately, IRiver released a major Firmware upgrade, which makes the useability of the device much better. This is the first time I can think of where a company has in effect improved a product dramatically after it's already being used by consumers who bought it.
Now I'm respectable at least. But I'm still jealous of the IPod Mini.
Shortly after I bought it, my wife received a free IPod Mini from work as a perk (ah, the life of the software engineer), and I was instantly jealous. Though my IRiver does have a color screen so you can look at pictures, as well as a text-viewing mode -- neither of which are to be had with IPod Mini -- it doesn't really have the "gee-whiz" quality of the IPod.
For one thing, the IPod's firmware is much, much better. It's easy to use, fast, fun to play with -- well, you already know, because chances are, you probably have an IPod. Also, ITunes is a nice piece of interface software. In contrast, the firmware my IRiver came with was awkward and buggy. Worst of all, it didn't come with it's own software package, and wasn't especially transparent to Windows Explorer. This meant I was stuck using Windows Media Player 10. (Which I don't particularly like)
Fortunately, IRiver released a major Firmware upgrade, which makes the useability of the device much better. This is the first time I can think of where a company has in effect improved a product dramatically after it's already being used by consumers who bought it.
Now I'm respectable at least. But I'm still jealous of the IPod Mini.
Professors under Siege: Githa Hariharan and A.S. Byatt
[Cross-posted at The Valve]
I recently taught, in parallel, two books about relatively unassuming professors whose lives actually become a little bit interesting. One was Githa Hariharan's In Times of Siege, and the other A.S. Byatt's Possession. As novels about academic life, both deal with academic controversies associated with the politicization of academic work in England in the 1970s and 80s, and India in the 1990s, respectively. As both Hariharan and Byatt have taught at universities on and off, they include a fair bit of direct discussion of the issues; both novels have "lectures" alongside straightfoward narration. I have been meditating on whether the self-conscious intellectualism of the novels crosses the line into academicism (Bad Writing). Below, I say some critical things about In Times of Siege, but conclude that Hariharan finds a way of doing it that works. On the other hand, I say some nice things about Possession, but conclude that its theory about history actually doesn't work.
I also do a fair bit of plot-summary of In Times of Siege (bear with me), but not of Possession, which is a much-better known story.
* * * * *
This is Hariharan's fourth novel. Even though she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Thousand Faces of Night, In Times of Siege is the first book of hers to appear on a major U.S. publishing house (Vintage). It's a worthy debut; the novel is at once nicely executed (short and to the point), and clearly distinct from the kinds of novels published by Indian authors in the past decade. Professor Shiv Murthy is a professor of medieval Indian history at a correspondence university in New Delhi. He is also in some sense deeply emotionally stunted by a childhood experience, the sudden disappearance of a father who had been a frustrated Indian freedom-fighter. Shiv finds himself in hot water when the Hindu right picks up on a series of lessons he's written on a 12th century reform figure named Basava (or Basavanna, depending on how you spell it). Basava was a critic of religious orthodoxies in his day, but also a bit of a religious prophet himself. He is credited with starting a sect, the Veerashaivas (Warriors of Shiva), but he is nevertheless held up by some Indian secularists as an early example of a critic of Brahminical authority, religious dogma in general, and all manner of other backwardness in India. To religious Hindus, however, he can be seen as a religious hero.
Shiv's lectures, Hariharan informs us, are a bit slanted towards the progressive, secularist interpretation, and a loud group of critics (the "Itihas Suraksha Manch," or "History Protection Platform") publicly calls for an apology, a revised lesson, and a more "balanced" syllabus. (Ring some bells?) The Chair of the department and the Dean are spooked by the national media attention, and attempt to strong-arm Shiv to revise the lesson and sign the apology. The Chair's complaint against Shiv is a nice parody of bureaucratic absurdity. Here's a short bit from the Department Chair's list of phrases in Shiv's lesson that were deemed objectionable: "One: Backward looking. Two: Contradictory accounts of Basava's life, conflicting narratives. Three: Birth legends fabricated. Four: Called a bigoted revolutionary by temple priests. Also called a dangerous man, a threat to structure, stability, and religion. Five: The comfort of faith was not enough for Basava." I like this list because it shows how the censorious side of Political Correctness, traditionally a hallmark of the left, can just as easily be deployed by the right. The words "backward looking" in a lesson on Medieval Indian history might in fact suggest a sloppy conception of history, but here they are being censored because they are too progressive.
Normally for Shiv, the response to such coercion would be a bit of a no-brainer -- you sign the apology, change the lesson, and keep your job -- but at the time this controversy happens the daugther of an old friend is staying with him, recuperating from a broken leg. Meena is a campus radical from a different (better) university, and her presence in his life completely transforms Shiv's sense of his role as a historian. She eggs him on as he resists the History Protection Movement. Along the way he also fall a little bit in love with her, even though her age is less than his daughter's (Shiv's wife is away for a time in Seattle). In case you were worried about where this is going, Hariharan handles this part of the story with psychological realism and grace; she keeps the potential for sexual scandal from hijacking a story that is at essence about the professor, Shiv Murthy.
The defining problem, in both novels, is more or less same: what does history mean to us? Ideologically, it can be a chain that binds us to the past, forever constraining our visions of the kind of society we might have. History can be conservative: if people were divided along religious, caste, and class lines in the past, so it must always be. But for most young people today it is much easier to be a kind of Intentionally Naive Radical: who cares? It's not just the 12th century that's old news, it's the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. What matters is what's Big News, today, right now, this very moment.
The protagonists of both of these novels live a very different relationship to history. Even if history's riddles aren't completely decipherable to them, its concerns are animating and open to interpretation. Thinking about history is the kind of thing that can help you get over the loss of your father (Hariharan). Or, discovering history can make you fall in love (Byatt). The theory of history in (serious) historical fiction might be generalized as follows: an engagement with the recesses of the past has the potential to utterly transform the present at every level. History, in short, is the very best kind of 'long tail'.
Of course, this is easier to say than it is to do. In working out her novel's theory of history, Hariharan does have a few moments of professorial geekiness. At one point, for instance, she writes:
To my taste, this is all good until the last sentence, which is a bit like a rhetorical question you ask the class near the end of the hour, which falls flat. The question, which might sound weighty and grave to the ears of professors, reeks of academicism to students. (And perhaps readers as well...)
[To be fair, Hariharan's novel has many moments where the crisis in history is dealt with that don't go this route. I won't quote them here; hopefully some of you will trust me when I say that this novel is worth a read for anyone who has ever worried about academic freedom.]
For some, the essayistic drift one often sees in novels about academics might be a problem in and of itself. One is reminded of the old dictum to "show, don't tell." Fortunately or unfortunately, books that have professors for protagonists tend to do a lot of self-conscious telling alongside unconcious showing.
I think academic novels can work, though it depends on how it's done. Despite the passages on Basava and the sacking of the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar (another source of controversy amongst Indian historians and history-writers), Hariharan's novel still feels light, whereas Byatt's Possession has a weighted-down feel. With all the different voices in play, it becomes difficult to sit with it and just read the damn book. Byatt's narration via diaries, letters, and snippets of 'reconstructed' poetry are evidence of a comprehensive, richly textured knowledge of the knowledge Victorian era, but they make Possession seem like a bit of a textbook, rather than a "story."
Of course, one could argue that that's the point of the book: no story worth knowing is ever just one person's story. The emphasis on the individual protagonist and the fixed viewpoint (individuated) narrator who in some sense mirrors the protagonist, is a convention of the modern novel. In passages like the following, Byatt seems to be protesting the trend:
This seems to be a bit of conservative nostalgia for the "old-fashioned" novel where a man and woman fall in love and get married, but the fragmentary structure of the novel in which this quote appears makes it hard to quite believe she means what she says. Byatt's more experimental recent stories seem to make a case for aesthetic seriousness critics attach to the words "postmodern" and "metafiction," while maintaining a more-than-sentimental attachment to the elements of storytelling that postmodernism has, supposedly, rendered passé.
In parallel with the different approaches to the idea of history in their novels are differences in epistemology along modern/postmodern lines. Hariharan's take on Basava leans postmodernist: the final truth about this 12th century figure's relationship to religion will never be definitively known, but the lack of closure can actually be a lesson for the always polarized, ideologically volatile contemporary moment. In contrast, Byatt's English professors recoil against the dicta of the postmodernist era, as they are propelled by a desire to know the Whole Story about the scandalous Victorian romance they are investigating. There is no question in Byatt's novel as to whether there is a Whole Story to be objectively known and explained; there most certainly is. And presumably alongside the "deep human desire" for the Whole Story comes a hunger for a series of other ontologically incorrect terms: Totality, Essence, and Truth.
I recently taught, in parallel, two books about relatively unassuming professors whose lives actually become a little bit interesting. One was Githa Hariharan's In Times of Siege, and the other A.S. Byatt's Possession. As novels about academic life, both deal with academic controversies associated with the politicization of academic work in England in the 1970s and 80s, and India in the 1990s, respectively. As both Hariharan and Byatt have taught at universities on and off, they include a fair bit of direct discussion of the issues; both novels have "lectures" alongside straightfoward narration. I have been meditating on whether the self-conscious intellectualism of the novels crosses the line into academicism (Bad Writing). Below, I say some critical things about In Times of Siege, but conclude that Hariharan finds a way of doing it that works. On the other hand, I say some nice things about Possession, but conclude that its theory about history actually doesn't work.
I also do a fair bit of plot-summary of In Times of Siege (bear with me), but not of Possession, which is a much-better known story.
* * * * *
This is Hariharan's fourth novel. Even though she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Thousand Faces of Night, In Times of Siege is the first book of hers to appear on a major U.S. publishing house (Vintage). It's a worthy debut; the novel is at once nicely executed (short and to the point), and clearly distinct from the kinds of novels published by Indian authors in the past decade. Professor Shiv Murthy is a professor of medieval Indian history at a correspondence university in New Delhi. He is also in some sense deeply emotionally stunted by a childhood experience, the sudden disappearance of a father who had been a frustrated Indian freedom-fighter. Shiv finds himself in hot water when the Hindu right picks up on a series of lessons he's written on a 12th century reform figure named Basava (or Basavanna, depending on how you spell it). Basava was a critic of religious orthodoxies in his day, but also a bit of a religious prophet himself. He is credited with starting a sect, the Veerashaivas (Warriors of Shiva), but he is nevertheless held up by some Indian secularists as an early example of a critic of Brahminical authority, religious dogma in general, and all manner of other backwardness in India. To religious Hindus, however, he can be seen as a religious hero.
Shiv's lectures, Hariharan informs us, are a bit slanted towards the progressive, secularist interpretation, and a loud group of critics (the "Itihas Suraksha Manch," or "History Protection Platform") publicly calls for an apology, a revised lesson, and a more "balanced" syllabus. (Ring some bells?) The Chair of the department and the Dean are spooked by the national media attention, and attempt to strong-arm Shiv to revise the lesson and sign the apology. The Chair's complaint against Shiv is a nice parody of bureaucratic absurdity. Here's a short bit from the Department Chair's list of phrases in Shiv's lesson that were deemed objectionable: "One: Backward looking. Two: Contradictory accounts of Basava's life, conflicting narratives. Three: Birth legends fabricated. Four: Called a bigoted revolutionary by temple priests. Also called a dangerous man, a threat to structure, stability, and religion. Five: The comfort of faith was not enough for Basava." I like this list because it shows how the censorious side of Political Correctness, traditionally a hallmark of the left, can just as easily be deployed by the right. The words "backward looking" in a lesson on Medieval Indian history might in fact suggest a sloppy conception of history, but here they are being censored because they are too progressive.
Normally for Shiv, the response to such coercion would be a bit of a no-brainer -- you sign the apology, change the lesson, and keep your job -- but at the time this controversy happens the daugther of an old friend is staying with him, recuperating from a broken leg. Meena is a campus radical from a different (better) university, and her presence in his life completely transforms Shiv's sense of his role as a historian. She eggs him on as he resists the History Protection Movement. Along the way he also fall a little bit in love with her, even though her age is less than his daughter's (Shiv's wife is away for a time in Seattle). In case you were worried about where this is going, Hariharan handles this part of the story with psychological realism and grace; she keeps the potential for sexual scandal from hijacking a story that is at essence about the professor, Shiv Murthy.
The defining problem, in both novels, is more or less same: what does history mean to us? Ideologically, it can be a chain that binds us to the past, forever constraining our visions of the kind of society we might have. History can be conservative: if people were divided along religious, caste, and class lines in the past, so it must always be. But for most young people today it is much easier to be a kind of Intentionally Naive Radical: who cares? It's not just the 12th century that's old news, it's the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. What matters is what's Big News, today, right now, this very moment.
The protagonists of both of these novels live a very different relationship to history. Even if history's riddles aren't completely decipherable to them, its concerns are animating and open to interpretation. Thinking about history is the kind of thing that can help you get over the loss of your father (Hariharan). Or, discovering history can make you fall in love (Byatt). The theory of history in (serious) historical fiction might be generalized as follows: an engagement with the recesses of the past has the potential to utterly transform the present at every level. History, in short, is the very best kind of 'long tail'.
Of course, this is easier to say than it is to do. In working out her novel's theory of history, Hariharan does have a few moments of professorial geekiness. At one point, for instance, she writes:
Each of us carries within ourselves a history, an encyclopedia of images, a landscape with its distinct patterns of mutilation. A dictionary that speaks the languages of several pasts, that moves across borders, back and forth between different times. Some biographers date Basava's death--or the presumption of death-- as January 1168. But in Shiv's mind, this tentative date creeps forward insidiously. Not to June 7, 1962, when his father disappeared, but to its medieval counterpart, June 7, 1168.
Like Shiv's father, Basava disappeared. He was presumed dead. His end would always be shrouded by mysterious circumstances and speculation. Speculative narratives. Narratives of love or faith or revolution. But is all narrative doomed to be inconclusive?
To my taste, this is all good until the last sentence, which is a bit like a rhetorical question you ask the class near the end of the hour, which falls flat. The question, which might sound weighty and grave to the ears of professors, reeks of academicism to students. (And perhaps readers as well...)
[To be fair, Hariharan's novel has many moments where the crisis in history is dealt with that don't go this route. I won't quote them here; hopefully some of you will trust me when I say that this novel is worth a read for anyone who has ever worried about academic freedom.]
For some, the essayistic drift one often sees in novels about academics might be a problem in and of itself. One is reminded of the old dictum to "show, don't tell." Fortunately or unfortunately, books that have professors for protagonists tend to do a lot of self-conscious telling alongside unconcious showing.
I think academic novels can work, though it depends on how it's done. Despite the passages on Basava and the sacking of the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar (another source of controversy amongst Indian historians and history-writers), Hariharan's novel still feels light, whereas Byatt's Possession has a weighted-down feel. With all the different voices in play, it becomes difficult to sit with it and just read the damn book. Byatt's narration via diaries, letters, and snippets of 'reconstructed' poetry are evidence of a comprehensive, richly textured knowledge of the knowledge Victorian era, but they make Possession seem like a bit of a textbook, rather than a "story."
Of course, one could argue that that's the point of the book: no story worth knowing is ever just one person's story. The emphasis on the individual protagonist and the fixed viewpoint (individuated) narrator who in some sense mirrors the protagonist, is a convention of the modern novel. In passages like the following, Byatt seems to be protesting the trend:
Might there not, he professionally asked himself, be an element of superstitious dread in any self-reflexive, inturned postmodernist mirror-game or plot-coil that recognises that it has got out of hand? That recognises that connections proliferate apparently at random, apparently in response to some ferocious ordering principle, require the aleatory or the multivalent or the "free," but structuring, but controlling, but driving to some--to what?--end. Coherence nad closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable.
This seems to be a bit of conservative nostalgia for the "old-fashioned" novel where a man and woman fall in love and get married, but the fragmentary structure of the novel in which this quote appears makes it hard to quite believe she means what she says. Byatt's more experimental recent stories seem to make a case for aesthetic seriousness critics attach to the words "postmodern" and "metafiction," while maintaining a more-than-sentimental attachment to the elements of storytelling that postmodernism has, supposedly, rendered passé.
In parallel with the different approaches to the idea of history in their novels are differences in epistemology along modern/postmodern lines. Hariharan's take on Basava leans postmodernist: the final truth about this 12th century figure's relationship to religion will never be definitively known, but the lack of closure can actually be a lesson for the always polarized, ideologically volatile contemporary moment. In contrast, Byatt's English professors recoil against the dicta of the postmodernist era, as they are propelled by a desire to know the Whole Story about the scandalous Victorian romance they are investigating. There is no question in Byatt's novel as to whether there is a Whole Story to be objectively known and explained; there most certainly is. And presumably alongside the "deep human desire" for the Whole Story comes a hunger for a series of other ontologically incorrect terms: Totality, Essence, and Truth.
Traffic Jam Chaos
If you're stuck on, say, the Jersey Turnpike, you basically just sit there and listen to NPR show after NPR show. But in India everyone keeps fighting to get through. There are lots of motorcycles, and they cut through every available inch of space. Sometimes it doesn't work out, as in this Dilip D'Souza post:
Ouch.
And another section of the post I liked:
Leaving Dandi, we are in an enormous traffic jam, trying to make our way through the hordes of trucks, buses, vans, jeeps, SUVs, cars and people who are trying to make their way to Dandi for the Congress rally. The heat is fierce, and I don't envy the folks stuck in buses or the back of trucks; though in one, they have broken into song and dance and are having a rip-roaring time.
Just ahead of one place we are stalled interminably, a motorbike tries to move ahead on the edge of the road. As I watch, it slips off the edge and rolls down the slope into a thicket of thorny bushes. Its driver gets up screaming. His arm is broken, the bone visible, the blood already staining his sleeve. The amateur nurse with us takes two plastic water bottles and fashions a splint with them for him.
Ouch.
And another section of the post I liked:
Another truck driver decides he's had enough of this snarl. He tries to swing his truck around to go back. Somehow, he manages to get it perpendicular to the road, but then he is stuck. He can't complete the U-turn, he can't go back. The traffic is that snarled. He keeps pleading with the surrounding vehicles to let him get past, but as they can't move either, it's futile.
A motorbike tries to edge past him; at that very moment, he thinks he sees a gap and he tries to move forward to finish his U. In near-slow motion, I see the motorbike toppling sideways, the truck almost running over it, people yelling at the driver to stop. Luckily he does, in time, and nobody is hurt. But several men around are incensed and rush up to his door and start banging on it and on his windscreen, one with a long stick. (What's a man doing with a stick like that in traffic like this?). He has his hands up helplessly, his passengers jump out and run. I'm afraid the men around him are going to lynch him.
But they relent, perhaps because all of us know what a mess we are in and the kinds of things that sometimes happen in such messes. The driver eventually backs his truck down the slope, out of the traffic, into the bushes, and sits there waiting. For all I know, he's still there.
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