Via Kitabkhana, I caught links to a series Amit Chaudhuri is doing in the Calcutta Telegraph, on Indian writers and their audiences. It's a three part series, of which parts one and two have been published so far.
In part one, Chaudhuri argues that it's a vulgarized version of Said's concept of "orientalism" that drives the common suspicion that some English-language South Asian fiction is written for a western audience. I think there may be some link between the questions about English and the appearance of Said's argument, but it's probably more coincidental than causative.
Part two is more interesting to me, because there Chaudhuri questions whether there can ever be an organic connection between the characters in novels, the writers of those novels, and readers. He points out that many high modernist texts in Europe (he cites Ulysses particularly) definitely heightened the potential gap between the three groups -- Leopold Bloom isn't the sort of person who would read the book in which he is the protagonist. Secondly, Chaudhuri questions whether writing in languages other than English is really free of the problems of connection to the "real" India that one sometimes sees in Anglophone Indian writing.
I think he's right on both counts, though Chaudhuri doesn't take the next logical step, which would link the two gaps he's describing in terms of class. Joyce's invention of a protagonist who is in a sense too much of an ordinary guy to actually read the book that is about him is a way of challenging the expectations of his readers. And class is at play again in the example of Anantha Murthy's story about an urban bourgeois who returns to the village for a visit. Serious novels and short stories, whether in Kannada or English, are almost by definition an urban, bourgeois preoccupation. The divide in both cases is not between two economic class groups, not so much the "real India" vs. some deracinated, westernized, English-speaking fantasy of it.
[I must admit I have had Amit Chaudhuri's Freedom Song on my shelf for a couple of years, but have never had the chance to crack it. Anyone read it? However, I have made good use of his anthology, The Vintage Book of Modern Literature, which I think is probably the finest in its genre -- it's much better than Rushdie's Mirrorwork.]
"Mutiny" Benefit screening
Is anyone going to this thing next week? This documentary has been in the works for more than a decade, and I can't quite understand why they haven't just released the thing already. Perfectionism?
Then again, I've never seen it, and this might be a good opportunity.
Then again, I've never seen it, and this might be a good opportunity.
FUNDRAISER SCREENING - NYC Thurs May 19, 2005
Asian Cinevision, 3rd I-NY, The Singh Foundation, and
Shobak.org present a special fundraiser screening of:
MUTINY: ASIANS STORM BRITISH MUSIC
(2003; 77 min.; color & b/w)
Directed by Vivek Bald; Produced by Claire Shanley & Vivek Bald
Featuring Asian Dub Foundation, State of Bengal, Fun^Da^Mental,
and many others....
Including post-screening discussion
and Q&A with very special guest
SAM ZAMAN aka State of Bengal
and Mutiny director VIVEK BALD
All attendees will also receive a copy
of an exclusive mix CD by DJ SPOOKY
7pm @ The ImaginAsian Theater
239 East 59th Street (btw 2nd & 3rd Ave.)
Subway: 4,5,6 to 59th St,/Lexington;
or F to Lexington Avenue / 63 St.
$20 per ticket - Tickets are available at the ImaginAsian Box Office at 239 E. 59th St. or online at: http://www.theimaginasian.com/nowplaying/index.php?cid=900&date=20050519
Paris Notes
So why Paris, why now? Well, there is a long-ish story there, having to do with in-laws in Bombay, which I will spare you because it ended up being irrelevant to the trip. Suffice it to say, a six day trip to Paris near the end of a grueling academic semester wasn't my choice, but once it was decided I happily went along. And had a lovely time.
Indeed, it's shocking that this was my first trip; from a literary and linguistic perspective I should have gone when I was 19, and studying both the French language and modernist literature in college. I remember being often embarrassed in graduate school that I had travelled so little outside of visiting India (and at that time I hadn't even seen very much of India).
Were we there to make a statement? No. We certainly got some looks, but then I get some looks even here in New Jersey. We did nothing political while we were there, and didn't really talk politics with anyone. We just went around and looked at Paris. That might be political in the very small sense that many of the South Asians one sees in Paris are very recent immigrants, who don't speak any French, and who are primarily in service positions. We are not that.
My favorite thing about Paris had to be the sidewalks, and the ubiquitous outdoor cafes, brasseries, restaurants, and bars. This is a relatively uncommon thing in New York, and even in San Francisco -- where the weather is generally nice but just a little on the nippy side in the evenings. The wide, Georges Haussmann sidewalks are no doubt what enables it all.
* * * * *
Van Gogh
After a slightly groggy first day, we went to Auvers Sur Oise, where Vincent Van Gogh did paintings like this. (Or try these.) It's also the place where he committed suicide, and where both he and his brother Theo are buried.
From reading several of Vincent's letters to Theo from this period, one gets the strong sense that he didn't love Auvers the way he loved Arles (specifically the colors of Arles -- and color was everything to Van Gogh). Still, it seems like the painter was in relatively good spirits at this spot. He did nearly a painting a day while he was there:
The weather was superlative for our visit too, though I must say that all of the beautiful paintings Van Gogh did during his stay in Auvers are somewhat tainted by the fact that, after two months there, he suddenly committed suicide.
Because of that terrible act, going to this site is going into a mystery. On the surface there is all sun and the rustic pleasures of fields, a small town, and quiet. Underneath, for Van Gogh at least, there was something much darker. You can walk by the places where Van Gogh did his paintings: this church, this former corn-field. And you can only imagine, and dread, the emotional and psychological turbulence that once stood where you now stand.
I find Van Gogh's letters to be indispensible to understanding what was happening in his paintings. Both he and Theo were very smart and trusting letter writers.
* * * * *
The Louvre. What to say about the Louvre? A dreary day, but a necessary visit. My favorite Louvre photo is not one I took. It's by a Flickr member named "Funkyj," and it's here.
You nailed it, Funkyj.
* * * * *
Nightlife, and Pochoirtistes
At night, we wandered around Paris. We spent the most time in the area north of Place de la Bastille, along Rue de la Rocquette, and in Le Marais, where we had two very good dinners (one from a cheapo falafel place, one at a fancy-ish restaurant). We also spent an evening in the Latin Quarter, where we watched buskers and then a dixieland jazz trio at a wine bar. It was all very convivial and not too crowded. We never had to make a reservation for dinner, and we never met a rude waiter.
On one stroll through Le Marais, we came across a graffiti artist who was rapidly spray painting rather beautiful figures onto open spaces in a rather narrow lane off Rue Saint Antoine. A small band of groupies stood nearby, taking pictures, and gabbing -- so we decided to tag along.
A man came out of a nearby restaurant and started arguing with the artist about whether he was allowed to do what he was doing. I couldn't make it all out, but when a middle-aged woman among the bystanders told the man, "C'est un artiste!" I pretty much figured it out. The man went back inside the restaurant.
Two minutes later, there were police cars in the lane. The artists disappeared, and the crowd scattered. S. and I just stood there, eating our falafel sandwiches.
I learned the name of the artist the next day, when I was randomly watching the French news in our hotel room, and there was a story on the controversial graffiti artist Jerome Mesnager and the installation project underway at the Section Urbaine. Mesnager is part of a moment that calls itself tha "Paris Pochoirtistes."
There is also a great blog post on this installation here.
Going to the Louvre: 10 Euros ($15 at the current exchange rate). Watching high-concept graffiti artists who are well-known in the Paris arts scene be chased by cops: priceless.
* * * * *
"Let Them Eat Extremely Overpriced Little Sandwiches, and Let Them Stand in Long Lines"
We also went to Versailles. Unlike the Louvre, this was actually fun. We made sure to spend a good 45 minutes in the "Mus&?acute;e de Parlement" that is at Versailles, just to balance the extreme Monarchialist bent of the place. I now know more about the history of the French Republic than I think is strictly necessary.
And we saw Marie Antoinette's actual toilet. Worth the price of admission. (Well, almost -- entry fees are pretty exorbitant.)
The rude irony about Versailles is that some of its most famous residents had their heads chopped off.
* * * * *
Impressionists and Pointillists
Also fun was the Musée d'Orsay, which is an Impressionists' paradise. They had a nice exhibit on post-Impressionism, and I learned a few things I didn't know about the advances in optics underlying Pointillism -- optical mixing, divisionism, and basic color theory.
And I didn't know that Seurat took a decidedly anti-Romantic, scientistic approach to his method (see these lecture notes). I suppose I was sleeping during that day in art history class in college.
It's interesting, because this aspect of optics is exactly what enables our televisions to produce the illusion of color even today. If the Impressionists were reconceiving the meaning of painting in an era of photography, the Pointillists were pre-conceiving painting for the era of television.
* * * * *
Don't mess with young Irish writers who idolize Yeats
I had a pleasant argument about Yeats with the Irish dude working the counter at Shakespeare & Co. He seemed to think of Yeats as a "desperate optimist." I can't bring myself to agree. But then Yeats is rather complicated, isn't he? How to manage the Occultism, the Elitism (and bad politics generally), the brilliant poetry, and the long and tumultuous life? No simple formula contains it all.
It's actually a nice bookstore, in case you were wondering. Best of all: open late. They have prominent displays of Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation on display there, as well as, of course, Ulysses. I was too embarrassed to buy the book on Beach; I'm buying it now on Amazon.
* * * * *
Chatting with artists
On the last day we were in Paris, we stumbled into something called the Grand-Marché d'Art Contemporain, mainly because it was three blocks from our hotel. This is a huge open fair, where artists bring their works to display and sell.
The cool thing is, the artists are actually there, and you can talk to them. Unlike many Parisians, who get annoyed by people (like me) who speak bad French, or who just speak English, the artists seemed quite excited that we took an interest in their work. I told one guy, who was doing a very precise kind of photo-realist painting, that his work resembled Gerhard Richter's, and he was positively beaming.
We fell in love with some of the work we saw, and were even tempted a couple of times to buy something, though buying original art is something one thinks of as a hobby for people who are a) rich, and b) actually grown up. We are far from (a), and still resisting (b).
I think my taste is moving away from the conceptual art that I was into in college, and towards a more technical kind of expressionist painting and sculpture. I find I really like a rather non-ideological kind of beauty in painting. Is that reactionary?
(The previous paragraph sounds pretentious. Forgive me; I'm still a little jet-lagged.)
We made friends with one painter who called herself CAB. And we're still thinking of calling up Katia Neboit-Croze to buy this painting, though the money it costs (not so very much) would be much better spent on other things -- like paying our bills.
* * * * *
Parisian Paneer
Our best meal in Paris was, ironically, at the Indo-Pak restaurant called Le Zaiqa, right across from our hotel near the Gare de Lyon. We were a little tripped out to find something that looked and, yes, smelled of home (meaning, New Jersey, not India) in Paris that for the first four days we studiously avoided going there.
But we were glad we did. They were so happy to have Punjabi-speaking patrons that they treated us very lavishly, giving us free dessert, masala chai, and after-dinner brandy.
The interesting thing was their paneer -- it didn't taste like paneer at all. It was sweeter and much softer. Is it possible they're using some kind of French cheese instead? And is this commmon in the Indian restaurants in Paris? We didn't find out. Whatever the case may be, that was some of the best mattar paneer I've ever had.
* * * * *
French Multiculturalism
On the last night, also, I watched a televised debate about Multiculturalism in France on one of the French news channels.
It's odd, because my French isn't great, but I pretty much understood the whole thing, despite the fact that they were speaking very fast and about something quite technical and complex.
On the pro-multiculturalism side were Tariq Ramadan (of course), an Afro-French novelist and scholar named Calixthe Beyala, and a character named Olivier le Cour Grandmaisoon. On the anti-multicultural, "Republican" (in the French sense) side there were three people, but only one of them seemed to be making really coherent arguments, and that was Alain Finkielkraut, who has written a book called Au Nom de l'Autre: Reflections sur l'anti-semitism qui vient (In the Name of the Other: Reflections on the Anti-Semitism to Come).
Finkielkraut was the main intellectual "conservative" in the debate, which tells you something about the intellectual scene in France, especially given that his earlier book, In the Name of Humanity (tranlated by Judith Friedlander, on Columbia University Press), made arguments with which many on the cultural left might be sympathetic.
Still, Finkielkraut arguments in favor of a kind of assimilationist Republican in this new book and in this debate are fluid and formidable, and at times Ramadan, Beyala, and Grandmaison had to move quickly to counter them. At other times, the guy just wouldn't shut up, and the moderator did rather a poor job of handling him. He talked a lot about human rights, citizenship, the rule of law, and the "foulard" of Islamism.
Here is an interesting summary and analysis (in English) of another of Finkielkraut's books, An Imaginary Jew. Both this article and the synopsis of Finielkraut's In the Name of Humanity suggest a person rather more liberal than the one I saw on television, who was extremely antagonistic to any expression of Arab/Muslim political solidarity in France. Perhaps in recent years he's taken a sharper turn to the right?
On the left, Tariq Ramadan was the clear leader, though he was much more reserved than Finkielkraut on the other side of the table. Beyala was sharp and well-spoken, though slightly off-topic in my view (she kept bringing up the slave trade, which seems irrelevant to race-relations issues in France today). Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison was closer to the mark in his arguments on France's failure to really face up to the damage done during the colonial era in Algeria. I'll be curious to check out his book Coloniser Exterminer if/when it is translated, though I suspect I will find it to be rather strong medicine.
Indeed, it's shocking that this was my first trip; from a literary and linguistic perspective I should have gone when I was 19, and studying both the French language and modernist literature in college. I remember being often embarrassed in graduate school that I had travelled so little outside of visiting India (and at that time I hadn't even seen very much of India).
Were we there to make a statement? No. We certainly got some looks, but then I get some looks even here in New Jersey. We did nothing political while we were there, and didn't really talk politics with anyone. We just went around and looked at Paris. That might be political in the very small sense that many of the South Asians one sees in Paris are very recent immigrants, who don't speak any French, and who are primarily in service positions. We are not that.
My favorite thing about Paris had to be the sidewalks, and the ubiquitous outdoor cafes, brasseries, restaurants, and bars. This is a relatively uncommon thing in New York, and even in San Francisco -- where the weather is generally nice but just a little on the nippy side in the evenings. The wide, Georges Haussmann sidewalks are no doubt what enables it all.
* * * * *
Van Gogh
After a slightly groggy first day, we went to Auvers Sur Oise, where Vincent Van Gogh did paintings like this. (Or try these.) It's also the place where he committed suicide, and where both he and his brother Theo are buried.
From reading several of Vincent's letters to Theo from this period, one gets the strong sense that he didn't love Auvers the way he loved Arles (specifically the colors of Arles -- and color was everything to Van Gogh). Still, it seems like the painter was in relatively good spirits at this spot. He did nearly a painting a day while he was there:
But anyway I am living one day at a time, the weather is so beautiful. And Iam well. I go to bed at nine o'clock, but get up at five most of the time. I hope that it will not be unpleasant to meet oneself again after a long absence. And I also hope that this feeling I have of being more master of my brush than before I went to Arles will last. And M. Gachet [Van Gogh's doctor and host] says that he thinks it most improbable that it will return, and that things are going on quite well.
The weather was superlative for our visit too, though I must say that all of the beautiful paintings Van Gogh did during his stay in Auvers are somewhat tainted by the fact that, after two months there, he suddenly committed suicide.
Because of that terrible act, going to this site is going into a mystery. On the surface there is all sun and the rustic pleasures of fields, a small town, and quiet. Underneath, for Van Gogh at least, there was something much darker. You can walk by the places where Van Gogh did his paintings: this church, this former corn-field. And you can only imagine, and dread, the emotional and psychological turbulence that once stood where you now stand.
I find Van Gogh's letters to be indispensible to understanding what was happening in his paintings. Both he and Theo were very smart and trusting letter writers.
* * * * *
The Louvre. What to say about the Louvre? A dreary day, but a necessary visit. My favorite Louvre photo is not one I took. It's by a Flickr member named "Funkyj," and it's here.
You nailed it, Funkyj.
* * * * *
Nightlife, and Pochoirtistes
At night, we wandered around Paris. We spent the most time in the area north of Place de la Bastille, along Rue de la Rocquette, and in Le Marais, where we had two very good dinners (one from a cheapo falafel place, one at a fancy-ish restaurant). We also spent an evening in the Latin Quarter, where we watched buskers and then a dixieland jazz trio at a wine bar. It was all very convivial and not too crowded. We never had to make a reservation for dinner, and we never met a rude waiter.
On one stroll through Le Marais, we came across a graffiti artist who was rapidly spray painting rather beautiful figures onto open spaces in a rather narrow lane off Rue Saint Antoine. A small band of groupies stood nearby, taking pictures, and gabbing -- so we decided to tag along.
A man came out of a nearby restaurant and started arguing with the artist about whether he was allowed to do what he was doing. I couldn't make it all out, but when a middle-aged woman among the bystanders told the man, "C'est un artiste!" I pretty much figured it out. The man went back inside the restaurant.
Two minutes later, there were police cars in the lane. The artists disappeared, and the crowd scattered. S. and I just stood there, eating our falafel sandwiches.
I learned the name of the artist the next day, when I was randomly watching the French news in our hotel room, and there was a story on the controversial graffiti artist Jerome Mesnager and the installation project underway at the Section Urbaine. Mesnager is part of a moment that calls itself tha "Paris Pochoirtistes."
There is also a great blog post on this installation here.
Going to the Louvre: 10 Euros ($15 at the current exchange rate). Watching high-concept graffiti artists who are well-known in the Paris arts scene be chased by cops: priceless.
* * * * *
"Let Them Eat Extremely Overpriced Little Sandwiches, and Let Them Stand in Long Lines"
We also went to Versailles. Unlike the Louvre, this was actually fun. We made sure to spend a good 45 minutes in the "Mus&?acute;e de Parlement" that is at Versailles, just to balance the extreme Monarchialist bent of the place. I now know more about the history of the French Republic than I think is strictly necessary.
And we saw Marie Antoinette's actual toilet. Worth the price of admission. (Well, almost -- entry fees are pretty exorbitant.)
The rude irony about Versailles is that some of its most famous residents had their heads chopped off.
* * * * *
Impressionists and Pointillists
Also fun was the Musée d'Orsay, which is an Impressionists' paradise. They had a nice exhibit on post-Impressionism, and I learned a few things I didn't know about the advances in optics underlying Pointillism -- optical mixing, divisionism, and basic color theory.
And I didn't know that Seurat took a decidedly anti-Romantic, scientistic approach to his method (see these lecture notes). I suppose I was sleeping during that day in art history class in college.
It's interesting, because this aspect of optics is exactly what enables our televisions to produce the illusion of color even today. If the Impressionists were reconceiving the meaning of painting in an era of photography, the Pointillists were pre-conceiving painting for the era of television.
* * * * *
Don't mess with young Irish writers who idolize Yeats
I had a pleasant argument about Yeats with the Irish dude working the counter at Shakespeare & Co. He seemed to think of Yeats as a "desperate optimist." I can't bring myself to agree. But then Yeats is rather complicated, isn't he? How to manage the Occultism, the Elitism (and bad politics generally), the brilliant poetry, and the long and tumultuous life? No simple formula contains it all.
It's actually a nice bookstore, in case you were wondering. Best of all: open late. They have prominent displays of Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation on display there, as well as, of course, Ulysses. I was too embarrassed to buy the book on Beach; I'm buying it now on Amazon.
* * * * *
Chatting with artists
On the last day we were in Paris, we stumbled into something called the Grand-Marché d'Art Contemporain, mainly because it was three blocks from our hotel. This is a huge open fair, where artists bring their works to display and sell.
The cool thing is, the artists are actually there, and you can talk to them. Unlike many Parisians, who get annoyed by people (like me) who speak bad French, or who just speak English, the artists seemed quite excited that we took an interest in their work. I told one guy, who was doing a very precise kind of photo-realist painting, that his work resembled Gerhard Richter's, and he was positively beaming.
We fell in love with some of the work we saw, and were even tempted a couple of times to buy something, though buying original art is something one thinks of as a hobby for people who are a) rich, and b) actually grown up. We are far from (a), and still resisting (b).
I think my taste is moving away from the conceptual art that I was into in college, and towards a more technical kind of expressionist painting and sculpture. I find I really like a rather non-ideological kind of beauty in painting. Is that reactionary?
(The previous paragraph sounds pretentious. Forgive me; I'm still a little jet-lagged.)
We made friends with one painter who called herself CAB. And we're still thinking of calling up Katia Neboit-Croze to buy this painting, though the money it costs (not so very much) would be much better spent on other things -- like paying our bills.
* * * * *
Parisian Paneer
Our best meal in Paris was, ironically, at the Indo-Pak restaurant called Le Zaiqa, right across from our hotel near the Gare de Lyon. We were a little tripped out to find something that looked and, yes, smelled of home (meaning, New Jersey, not India) in Paris that for the first four days we studiously avoided going there.
But we were glad we did. They were so happy to have Punjabi-speaking patrons that they treated us very lavishly, giving us free dessert, masala chai, and after-dinner brandy.
The interesting thing was their paneer -- it didn't taste like paneer at all. It was sweeter and much softer. Is it possible they're using some kind of French cheese instead? And is this commmon in the Indian restaurants in Paris? We didn't find out. Whatever the case may be, that was some of the best mattar paneer I've ever had.
* * * * *
French Multiculturalism
On the last night, also, I watched a televised debate about Multiculturalism in France on one of the French news channels.
It's odd, because my French isn't great, but I pretty much understood the whole thing, despite the fact that they were speaking very fast and about something quite technical and complex.
On the pro-multiculturalism side were Tariq Ramadan (of course), an Afro-French novelist and scholar named Calixthe Beyala, and a character named Olivier le Cour Grandmaisoon. On the anti-multicultural, "Republican" (in the French sense) side there were three people, but only one of them seemed to be making really coherent arguments, and that was Alain Finkielkraut, who has written a book called Au Nom de l'Autre: Reflections sur l'anti-semitism qui vient (In the Name of the Other: Reflections on the Anti-Semitism to Come).
Finkielkraut was the main intellectual "conservative" in the debate, which tells you something about the intellectual scene in France, especially given that his earlier book, In the Name of Humanity (tranlated by Judith Friedlander, on Columbia University Press), made arguments with which many on the cultural left might be sympathetic.
Still, Finkielkraut arguments in favor of a kind of assimilationist Republican in this new book and in this debate are fluid and formidable, and at times Ramadan, Beyala, and Grandmaison had to move quickly to counter them. At other times, the guy just wouldn't shut up, and the moderator did rather a poor job of handling him. He talked a lot about human rights, citizenship, the rule of law, and the "foulard" of Islamism.
Here is an interesting summary and analysis (in English) of another of Finkielkraut's books, An Imaginary Jew. Both this article and the synopsis of Finielkraut's In the Name of Humanity suggest a person rather more liberal than the one I saw on television, who was extremely antagonistic to any expression of Arab/Muslim political solidarity in France. Perhaps in recent years he's taken a sharper turn to the right?
On the left, Tariq Ramadan was the clear leader, though he was much more reserved than Finkielkraut on the other side of the table. Beyala was sharp and well-spoken, though slightly off-topic in my view (she kept bringing up the slave trade, which seems irrelevant to race-relations issues in France today). Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison was closer to the mark in his arguments on France's failure to really face up to the damage done during the colonial era in Algeria. I'll be curious to check out his book Coloniser Exterminer if/when it is translated, though I suspect I will find it to be rather strong medicine.
Back from Paris
I'm working on a detailed trip narrative -- maybe later today. For now, I'll just leave you with the above photo of the Seine near Notre Dame.
I've been uploading this and other pictures to Flickr. You can see them here. They're a little randomly ordered, though many of them have comments.
I've kept the pictures of S. and me under "Friends and Family." If you wanted to be added as a "friend," email me and I will do so.
Another longish post
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.
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.
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