A July 4th poem by John Berryman

This is a poem by John Berryman, from his groundbreaking collection Dream Songs, first published in 1965:

Of 1826

I am the little man who smokes & smokes.
I am the girl who does know better but.
I am the king of the pool.
I am so wise I had my mouth sewn shut.
I am a government official & a goddamned fool.
I am a lady who takes jokes.

I am the enemy of the mind.
I am the auto salesman and love you.
I am a teenager cancer, with a plan.
I am the blackt-out man.
I am the woman powerful as a zoo.
I am two eyes screwed to my set, whose blind--

It is the Fourth of July.
Collect: while the dying man,
forgone by you creator, who forgives,
is gasping 'Thomas Jefferson still lives'
in vain, in vain, in vain.
I am Henry Pussy-cat! My whiskers fly.

Just one quick note: "Henry" and "Henry Puzzy-cat" are variations on the poetic persona in the Dream Songs -- a cynical, lechy, middle aged white man, similar (one gathers) to Berryman himself.

Here I like the first two stanzas. They're mostly the poetic equivalent of one-liner jokes, but as well done as it gets in that vein. The third stanza is more puzzling to me.

Incidentally, notice the rhyme scheme. Many (but apparently not all) of the Dream Songs have one or another scheme. The emphasis on form is what separates Berryman from many of his less-disciplined contemporaries. Thematically he has much in common with people like Ferlinghetti or Ginsberg.

Luther Vandross

R&B singer Luther Vandross is dead.

Political Composition, Blogging, and a little about Iraq

I've been following the Rhetoric Carnival a bit through Clancy, and thinking about my own approach to teaching writing. I don't teach composition that often -- generally once a year -- but I always struggle when it comes to deciding how to do it. I haven't thought much about my method since leaving graduate school, partly because everyone assumes literature professors must know how best to teach comp. But it's not really a correct assumption; in my view, we could all benefit from continuing to think about how and what we teach.

They are discussing an article by Richard Fulkerson in the journal College Composition and Communication that doesn't appear online (CCC stopped updating their website in 2003, and have also discontinued their JSTOR archive). I haven't read the full article yet, so my ability to comment is somewhat limited.

The main debate is between 'expressivists,' who believe composition should aim to teach students how to write their personal thoughts and ideas, and the 'procedural rhetoric' people, who prefer a more traditional, 'objective' approach. One of the primary names associated with the expressivist school is Maxine Hairston, though there are many others who articulate their own variations of the idea (a good bibliography of much of this criticism is at the bottom of this article).

Intellectually, I prefer the more objective -- one might even say conservative -- approach these days. I want to help my students get prepared for future careers, not simply help them find their own voices. Most college freshman need a great deal of direction with regard to the fundamentals of sentence structure and the forms of argument. On the other hand, if you don't give students opportunities to develop their skills with content that seems relevant to themselves, you are in a world of really bored students, and a dead class. So I'm a little torn (and I haven't even decided how I'm going to approach the class I'm teaching this coming fall... ulp).

There's some other issues here. One of them is the growing digitalization of writing, partly through the Internet, but also in most professional contexts. People increasingly communicate by email, and even send each other formal documents that way. In the old days, those documents were printed out, and the print forms were the ones that were read. But now people read more and more on the computer itself; the experience has become pretty naturalized.

The internet in itself doesn't mean much; if you have to convince the boss to adopt your proposal, you still have to use every persuasive tool at your disposal to do it. The forms and functions of public writing have not changed at all. The changes in the way people write have probably been more secondary, stylistic changes. One of these might be the growing informality of what is considered public rhetorical style. At first, the change was mainly visible in the blogosphere, where the conventions of argument are somewhat different (even in the 'serious,' Crooked Timbery blogosphere) from the conventional print-media. But more and more, the conventions of writing acceptable in blogging are coming to influence conventional journalism. Along these lines, I was struck by a paragraph in George Packer's recent essay on the parent of a soldier who was killed in Iraq:

It was the first blogged war, and the characteristic features of the form--instant response, ad-hominem attack, remoteness from life, the echo chamber of friends and enemies--helped define the tone of the debate about Iraq. One of the leading bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, responded to the news of Saddam's capture, in December 2003, by writing, 'It was a day of joy. Nothing remains to be said right now. Joy.' He had just handed out eleven mock awards to leftists who expressed insufficient happiness or open unhappiness at the news. . . . Sullivan's joy was, in fact vindictive and narcissistic glee. (He has since had second thoughts about the Administration's conduct of the war.) Similarly, as the insurgency sent Iraq into tumult most antiwar pundits and politicians, in spite of the enormous stakes and the awful alternatives, showed no interest in helping Iraq become a stable democracy. When Iraqis risked their lives to vote, Arianna Huffington dismissed the elections as a 'Kodak moment.' It was Bush's war, and, if it failed, it would be Bush's failure.

Packer's characterization of blogging as having acclerated the polarization of political debate in the U.S. seems right to me, especially regarding the Iraq war specifically. Blogging is no longer a subcultural activity. It is mainstream, and it is changing not just the way people argue about politics and war, but the way people argue in public, tout court. Perhaps that's something we should be talking about in comp. classes as well -- though I'm not exactly sure how I would take it on.

(Incidentally, Packer mentions a rather shady involvement in the pro-war campaign by Christopher Hitchens in the article. Hitchens -- always the pugilist -- came back with this piece in Slate. Naturally, in his critique of Packer, he doesn't mention the fact that Packer criticized him in the New Yorker article that he (Hitchens) is now attacking in Slate. Ugh.)

A Quote from Dan Kennedy, on the Writing Life

Recently I got some review books from Basic Books. (Yay, free stuff.) One of them is Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, a collection of essays by mostly-young, relatively unknown writers on writing. Flipping through, I came across a diary entry from Dan Kennedy (one of those McSweeney's dudes) that I liked:

April 11, 2004

I don't believe in writer's bloc--I'm not working up to a big analysis of why one can go for so long without writing. I don't go in for that whole think of like (Spinal Tap accent in place) 'Look man . . . it's impossible to [insert any for mof creative work] write now. I can't do it, and I don't know when . . . [dramatic pause] or if . . . I'll be able to do it again, man.' I mean it ain't backbreaking work, writing. And there's no sense in making a precious and larger-than-life practice of it. I think that things like music, writing, filmmaking are all blue-collar jobs, and I think that it just gets worse and worse the more people try to position themselves or their craft as anything more lofty than what basically amounts to a job in the service of others. One of my all-time favorite quotes about the creative process of writing comes from Neal Pollack: 'I don't see writing as some sort of holy act. When the phone rings, I answer it.' Having said all of that, it has taken me a month to sit back down in front of this page. Maybe you can't control when inspiration will strike, but there is something to be said for the discipline of showing up so that when it comes around you'll be there waiting.

BharateeyaOO.o

A Hindi version of the open source "OpenOffice.org" suite is now available (see this announcement). It is called BharateeyaOO.o, and it can be downloaded from hi.openoffice.org.

Cheers to the Open Source community for making it happen.

(Now, if only they would hurry up and release OpenOffice 2.0...)

Norman Mailer's Race-baiting

This is what Norman Mailer said in Rolling Stone about Michiko Kakutani:

Kakutani is a one-woman kamikaze. She disdains white male authors, and I'm her number-one favorite target. One of her cheap tricks is to bring out your review two weeks in advance of publication. She trashes it just to hurt sales and embarrass the author . . . But the Times' editors can't fire her. They're terrified of her. With discrimination rules and such, well, she's a threefer: Asiatic, feminist and, ah, what's the third? Well, let's just call her a twofer. They get two for one. She is a token. And, deep down, she probably knows it." (link)

What a ball of slime. This is about as sinister and twisted as it gets -- classic race-baiting. I'm surprised he didn't also throw in some slurs about sushi, cheap cars, or schoolgirl uniforms. At least he witheld the obligatory "go back to where you came from" comment.

If you want better reviews, Mr. Mailer, write better books. And if you don't like what the reviewer writes, find fault with her judgment, not her ethnic background.

Ah well, I didn't think very highly of Norman Mailer to begin with.

Literary and Arts Linkage

Ok, enough with the music for now. Here are some literary and arts links:

1. Mark Bauerlein has posted his own introduction to the Theory's Empire anthology at Butterflies and Wheels. His contention is that Literary Theory has declined as it has become institutionalized, but most recent theory anthologies don't register that any change has occurred. But if theory has declined, why a collection of essays called Theory's Empire?

2. It's not often that Michiko Kakutani writes reviews of works of literary criticism, but here's her favorable Sunday review of Adam Kirsh's The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets. The six poets Kirsh writes about are Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath. The key sentence in the review, which looks like it might be Kirsh's thesis, is as follows:

In fact it is one of Mr. Kirsch's central arguments that the "discipline, seriousness and technical sophistication" that these poets acquired during their Modernist apprenticeships enabled them to produce poems about newly intimate subjects that possessed the rigor and shapeliness of lasting art - poems that stand in sharp contrast to the outpourings of earnest but flabby "confessional" verse produced from the 1960's on, in the wake of Robert Lowell's epochal book "Life Studies."

Unfortunately, poets today do not have anything as strong as high modernism to bounce off of.

3. On Monday night I went with my friend Julian to see short films by William Kentridge at the Bandshell in Central Park. I didn't love the films, which were overly psychoanalytic and symbolic for my tastes, but I thought the technique was interesting. In contrast to normal stop-motion animation, where each frame gets a separate drawing, what Kentridge does is use the same basic drawing, erasing parts where movement is occurring. The result is a unique visual effect (you see erasure marks) produced using a very simple, even primitive, method. Here is a link.

4. The Net Art movement (whose center is Rhizome.org), has a show up at the New Museum in New York, with a pretty favorable review in the Times. I may try and go at some point; I had some friends in graduate school who were involved with the Rhizome community, and it seems like it's grown by leaps and bounds since then.

5. Robert Alter reviews Umberto Eco's new novel at Slate. It seems to be a novel about the tension between one's 'personal' childhood memory and what might be called one's 'cultural' memory. The novel seems to have a bit of a Ulysses connection:

This notion that a vast jumble of texts, high and low, might be constitutive of the self owes a good deal to a novel that has meant much to Eco—Joyce's Ulysses. Yambo's discoveries in the boxes in the attic are reminiscent of the wonderful catalogue of miscellaneous objects in Leopold Bloom's drawer in the Ithaca section of Joyce's novel. The mind as a patchwork of disparate texts is very much evident both in Stephen (high culture) and in Bloom (popular culture). Yambo, like Bloom/Ulysses, is a man trying to get back home, and the last section of the novel is appropriately entitled, in Greek, The Nostos, the term for Odysseus' return to Ithaca. In the literally hallucinatory concluding pages of the book, Eco actually borrows Joyce's term "psychopomp."

My "jumble of texts" would include my dad's LPs (from Talat Mahmood to Captain and Tenille), my toys, (especially the Transformers), innumerable Sci-fi children's novels, and breakdancing (not doing it -- watching other kids).

6. It's been ten years since the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa was excecuted by the old Nigerian government for his activism on behalf of the Ogoni people, against Shell Oil's exploitation of their land. Here is an article about how the decennial of his death is being celebrated in Nigeria (via the Literary Saloon).

I've read Saro-Wiwa's novel Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English ('Sozaboy' means soldier-boy), and I would recommend it to people interested in the chaotic experience of contemporary Nigerian life.

7. Reviews of Orhan Pamuk's memoir of Istanbul at The Comnplete Review (they argue that the book is trying to do too much), and Jabberwock, who finds the writing less than gripping at times.

I've been reading Istanbul too; I might have my own review at some point.

Last Week's Quiz, explained

Thanks to everyone who tried my little quiz last week. The following long post is where I explain both the questions and the answers -- to the baffled as well as the cognoscenti.

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Question 1: “Flight IC 408” was a breakthrough hit in the Asian Underground/drum n bass club scene in the late 1990s. At which Indian airport are you most likely to hear the announcement sampled in the song?

London
Delhi
Calcutta
Birmingham

There are two reasons the answer is Delhi. First, it has to be in India because of the way the announcement is being made “Passengers are requested to proceed to the aircraft.” This is only said in Indian airports. The accent is also a bit of a giveaway, but I suppose there are enough immigrants from South Asia in England that it's not decisive. Secondly, it's “Flight IC 408 to Calcutta,” so it can't be Calcutta.

I heard very similar announcements being made at the domestic airport at Delhi the last time I was there (on my way from Bombay to Lei, Ladakh). My guess is, the story of the song for State of Bengal is something like this: you're a Bengali on your way from England to Calcutta, and you just heard the announcement. Though you'd already been in India for a few hours, it's the announcement that sets the chain of memories and emotions moving for you -– you're in India! A curious kind of hyper-nostalgic, jet-lagged euphoria ensues.

(Well, in the song at least. It's equally possible, after being in transit for 24 hours -- and awake for 36 -- that all you want to hear is the chorus from the My Chemical Romance song: "So long and good night/ so long and good night" ...)

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Question 2. Panjabi MC's “Mundian to Bach Ke” used a sample from a popular 1980s TV show called “Knight Rider.” But a very similar sounding hip hop song was released by the rapper Busta Rhymes in 1997:

Hit em high
Do my thing
Turn it up/fire it up
It's a party

Basically, this is just nitpick trivia. But it's interesting that both Timbaland and Busta Rhymes did hip hop Knight Rider tracks before Panjabi MC came up with his. This isn't to take anything away from the brilliance of the PMC track, which is still the benchmark Bhangra/hip hop number (though if you're not tired of it by now there must be something wrong with you). Even the most original hip hop artists routinely borrow, copy, and steal from others. Most of the time it doesn't lead to anything -- but every so often the reworking of known elements produces something greater than the sum of its parts.

Another interesting bit of trivia: it's a playful song directed to young women ("muthiar") making their first appearance on the social scene -- hence, "Mundian to bach ke"/Beware of the Boys. It was odd, then, that when Jay-Z used Panjabi MC's version of "Knight Rider" two years ago, the great 'Hova' used it as a venue to make a political statement about the Iraq War.

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Question 3. Aside from producing thumping Brit-Asian hip hop tracks like “Nachna Tere Naal” and “Hum Tum,” Rishi Rich has been a pioneer in which British dance phenomenon?

Drum n bass
2 step
Jungle
Goa NRG

By the late 1990s, the British Jungle/drum n bass scene was beginning to decline. On a trip there in 2000 I asked one Brit-Asian dude I knew about it, and he said, "well, there's only so many ways you can vary the bassline before it all starts to sound the same." At the time I disagreed, but it wasn't long before my I too got bored of my LTJ Bukem and Metalheadz CDs.

The next big fad, variously referred to as 2Step, UK Garage, or Speed Garage -- started in the late 90s, and seemed to be huge in England in 2000. The myth is that 2Step was invented when club Djs started playing American R&B records at double time (140-160 RPM), and went from there. (The Wikipedia entry for 2Step tells a different story.) Big British 2Step stars are Artful Dodger, Craig David, So Solid Crew, and MJ Cole.

Along with virtually every other British pop fad, this one too had its own Asian/Punjabi underground version. Before he started doing tracks with the current wave of Brit-Asian R&B (especially the potent Jay Sean in English / Juggy D in Punjabi thing), Rishi Rich rapped on a number of Asian 2-step CDs, including some of the early Pure Garage CDs, and Garage Vybes (produced by Khiza). The work is pretty good. There are also a couple of 2-step type tracks on Rishi Rich's 2004 solo CD, Rishi Rich: The Best (released in India only).

In my occasional experiences DJing Indian music in clubs, parties, and the odd wedding, I've noticed that people over here don't really get into the 2Step sound. Maybe it's too smooth and 'cool' for the desi dance floor? Or maybe it's just an American thing: despite its catchy, poppy sound, 2Step never really became a mainstream phenomenon here. (The exceptions are Daniel Bedingfield's hit "Gotta Get Through This," and NSYNC's "Pop," both of which used 2Step beats.) Lately, Americans seem to like it rough -- hence the popularity of "crunk" (not to be confused with Krumping) and Reggaeton.

And what's 'in' in terms of Desi music now? I don't claim to know. One speculation I have is that the 2Step sound is morphing into a broader "Asian R&B" sound, which includes Rishi Rich, but also Jay Sean and Raghav, as well as newer people like Dakota. It's a mix of English lyrics and Hindi or Punjabi lyrics, kept simple to be accessible to second and third generationers who don't know much of the 'bhasha.' It is also likely to appeal to non-Indians, who don't know the language at all -- hence the British chart success of Jay Sean and Raghav. Along these lines, one of the best commercial-ish CDs I've picked up thus far this year is called Essential Asian R&B, on the Outcaste label. (The evolution of Outcaste might be a good mirror for the story I'm telling about the ins and outs of musical fashion. Compare the compilations they're putting out now to what they were doing 5-7 years ago...)

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Question 4. Who killed Bhangra?

State of Bengal
Asian Dub Foundation
Tabla Beat Science
TJ Rehmi

There is a track called “Who Killed Bhangra” by TJ Rehmi. You can find it on the Qilaash compilation and the Indestructible Asian Beats comilation, maybe others. As an attempt at fusing drum n bass and Bhangra it's admittedly only partially successful. But it is interesting to me because of the way it refers to the tension between the Drum n Bass (Asian Underground) scene and the Bhangra scene, both in North America and the UK.

For awhile, it seemed like Asian Underground would replace Bhangra. In the late 1990s Asian Underground was getting a lot of mainstream interest and critical approval, though it always seemed to be just on the edge of commercial viability or mainstream success. The Asian “Underground” seemed, ironically, to be a ticket out of the underground for Brit-Asian artists. Talvin Singh won big prizes for his CD OK, which was, at best, not such a great album (just... ok), though it did exemplify a particular enthusiasm for globalization that seemed to be in the air in the late 1990s.

But after around 2000, Asian Underground stopped being so hip, and many of the artists from the late 1990s fell off the radar, or tried some other things. Talvin Singh, for instance, did a classical CD called Vira with Rakesh Chaurasia (son of Hariprasad) on flute.

Meanwhile, Bhangra didn't die. Throughout the boom and bust of "Asian Underground" the Bhangra scene remained quite active, if a bit underground/gray market in England and North America. Bhangra also began to take on a new centrality in India itself, with the emergence of a national market for 'Punjabi pop' in the late 1990s.

Artists like Harbhajan Mann, Manmohan Waris, Sukshinder Shinda, Punjabi Hit Squad, Punjabi Outlawz, RDB, Kam Dillon, Jazzy B, and A.S. Kang have been doing Punjabi tracks with hip-hop influenced producers in England (and increasingly, in Punjab itself), and have kept things moving forward. Many of them are great, charismatic performers (though none have quite the comedic elan of the superstar Daler Mehndi). They also continue to sing in Punjabi -- keeping it real. Koi shak?

Bobby Friction and Nihal solve the problem of the Bhangra/Asian Underground split by putting it all together on their weekly radio show on BBC1. You hear a mix of hip hop/Bhangra (DJ Sanj, Punjabi Hit Squad), Asian Underground (Dhol Foundation, HardKaur), as well as the newer "R&B" sound.

So -- no one killed Bhangra.

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Question 5 Black Star Liner: “Supafly and __________”

Bindi
Desi
Bengali/Bangali
Stoned

Black Star Liner is strongly associated with the Asian Underground movement. But most of their (well, his) tracks have more of a dub/reggae sensibility than drum n bass. It's basically stoner music. "Supafly and Bindi" the title of one of my favorite tracks off the CD Bengali Bantam Youth Experience.

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Question 6. That sound you hear at the beginning of Panjabi MC's “Dhol Jageero Da” is:

'Busting a cap'
'Sparking a philly'
Malt liquor being spilled on the ground in honor of fallen comrades
'Knocking da boots'

All four of these are hip hop cliches. I'm not going to define them because several are definitely not 'PG' allusions (figure it out yourself! or just, act like you know). Anyway, I definitely hear the opening of this song -– one of the biggest Bhangra club/wedding hits of the past three years –- as 'sparking a philly'

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Question 7. The bar next to the Sikh Gurdwara in Southall, UK is called:

Jalandhar Blues
GT Road Bar
Southall Panjabi Pub
Glassy Junction

Ok, this is a travel/tourism question, not so much a music question. But along with East London and Birmingham, Southall is one of the main centers of Desi music and style in the UK, so it's probably fair. It's an interesting pub to check out, though I would discourage you from going there after visiting the Gurdwara! (Or if you do, just have coke, ok?)

Incidentally, the anthropologist Brian Axel has a memorable chapter on the goings on at this pub during the Khalistan years (1984-1995 or so) in his book The Nation's Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh "Diaspora". Here's an interesting paragraph:

Consider glassy. The word has multiple significances and is a pun. As the manager put it: 'Many, many years ago when lots of Asians came to England. . . they all wanted to go for a drink, and they would say to their mates: Let's go for a gilassy.' In British English, glassy is an adjective used to refer, for instance, to a kind of look, glassy eyed, that implies drunkenness or childlike incredulity. . . .Glass also refers to a quantity of beer and the beer's container, particularly a half pint. . . . In colloquial Punjabi, the word gilassy, and English loanword, signifies a specific history of translation and transfiguration, transposing categories of Sikh and English practices of consumption.

Axel gives the same treatment to "Junction": the pub is also near the Southall train station, and sits on the site of the former "Railway Tavern." But I'll stop there (I might get into Axel's book at some point in a future post.)

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Question 8. Bally Sagoo started a record label called

Multitone
Ishq
Nachural
Soho1

Though Bally Sagoo hasn't put out many really decent records in the past few years, he continues to flood the market with product. I hope it's selling, because otherwise it must be awfully tiring to release so much crap.

However, on his personal label, he's put out work by other artists, who seem like they might have some promise if they can find their own voices and develop artistically. Gunjan has promise as a singer, and so does Kenz (a producer). But so far I haven't been blown away by anything they've done.

(Gunjan has some good tracks on the recent CD by Thievery Corporation, The Cosmic Game, including a catchy lounge remake of "Satyam Shivam Sundaram." See a link to a video of her doing the track at Sepia Mutiny)

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All in all, the 32 people who finished the quiz got surprisingly low scores.

2	100
3	88
4	63
5	50
3	38
7	25
4	13
4	0

I haven't calculated a mean or a standard deviation, but a quick glance tells us all we need to know: more than 50% of the people who completed the quiz got less than 50% of the answers right. That's not counting all the people who may have started the quiz and given up after two questions, realizing they were out of their league. (I have no way of counting those people, and Quizyourfriends.com does not give hitcounts)

The two people who got 100% scores are cyber-personalities I'm not familiar with: "Raghav" and "Bono."

So this was, if I may say so myself, a damn hard quiz.

Religious Hatred Law in the UK -- Update

In the UK, NPR cites a growing 'backlash' against the proposed law banning speech that expresses "religious hatred."

Besides Salman Rushdie, Michael Palin of Monty Python (think of the parody of Christianity in The Life of Brian) and Rowan Atkinson of "Mr. Bean" have come out against the bill, as potentially restricting legitimate artistic expression that criticizes religious groups. Even after the Labour party made the language in the bill stronger to try and avoid confusion over what exactly is being banned, there is still evidently some confusion. The Labour Party says it's banning hate speech that targets "individuals," not "ideas," but this is a little vague. The kinds of statements that usually constitute religious hate speech targets groups by definition (the group element is what makes it hate speech!), and the line between religious groups and their religious ideas can be thin.

The pros and cons of this law were also discussed at Crooked Timber a number of times last December (start here).

The potential for abuse is very high, so I'm skeptical about whether this law is a good idea. But it looks like the Labour Party is sticking with it in the current party platform.

Vijay Iyer piece in the Boston Globe

There's a little quote from me in a piece on Vijay Iyer in today's Boston Globe. The author of the piece is Siddhartha Mitter, who writes a lot of music related stuff for them on a freelance basis. He has a blog, called Ill Hindu, where you can see some other stories he's done recently.

Mitter is a real jazz head. I know enough to be able to say that the piano work on Iyer's recent CD, Reimagining, sounds a little like Thelonious Monk, but that's about as far as my jazz knowledge goes. Mitter can tie it into the M-Base movement at Berkeley, and also names Andrew Hill, Randy Weston, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Cecil Taylor as other influences on Iyer.

The piece on Iyer is in reference to a show Iyer will be doing in Boston this week. (He was actually in New York last week at the Jazz Standard; sadly, I couldn't go on any of the three nights -- but JusJus blogged it).

Anyway, here are some more thoughts from me on Vijay Iyer:

In terms of fusion, what jazz musicians like Vijay Iyer are doing is something quite different from anything else we're seeing in the cultural landscape right now. The kinds of musical fusion we're accustomed to seeing are generally pretty simple. A producer takes a hip hop song, and adds in a sample from a Hindi film song, or Punjabi Bhangra. The remix is a pretty simple formula, and it's pretty much subject to the language and structure of hip hop. It doesn't make the music 'bad' -- I still listen ot Bhangrafied hip hop all the time -- but it does limit the range of expression in some ways.

In contrast, the inflections from the Indian classical tradition in Iyer's work is very subtle; it's entirely possible to listen to the music without knowing about it. Jazz is also a highly inclusive art form, in which a musician like Iyer can casually put in a shade of, say, South Indian Carnatic rhythms, in the midst of a track reworking of John Lennon's "Imagine." And as an improvised form, Jazz puts fewer strong demands on the overall shape of the music, which makes it a very fertile place to blend multiple cultural strands. No one rule or concept rules the roost.

With the success of people like Vijay Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa, I think we'll start to see a new interest in jazz music in the Indian American community. We're already seeing it to some extent, as Vijay Iyer and his various ensembles tend to draw a fair numer of South Asians at their shows on the east coast. These are people who might ordinarily not go anywhere near places like the Jazz Standard in New
York.

That said, it's a mistake to think of Iyer as somehow doing "Indian jazz," just because of his background. For me, jazz isn't about a racial or ethnic background so much as it is a musical language and a state of mind. What Vijay Iyer is playing in his solo work (like the recent CD Reimagining) will appeal to pretty much anyone who likes Thelonious Monk; I gather from the positive reviews of Reimagining in mainstream jazz magazines like Downbeat and the Village Voice that audiences and critics are seeing it that way too.

This is kind of a response to the "Identity Jazz" comment that bugged me in a review in the Village Voice I had mentioned a couple of weeks ago. At the time I hadn't actually heard Iyer's new CD, so I didn't go after the Voice reviewer's use of the phrase. Then I actually bought the CD ($9.90 off Itunes -- I've been listening to it a lot), and I realized that in fact the phrase simply doesn't apply at all to what Iyer is doing here. Reimagining is not "Indian Jazz" or "Identity Jazz"; it's just jazz.

I'm not 100% confident about my own claim in the first paragraph, that jazz is somehow a less determinative musical form than hip hop. I can think of some hip hop heads who might venture to disagree. (First and foremost would be the 1980s rap group Stetsasonic; they wrote "Talkin' all that jazz" as a repudiation of conservative-leaning jazz musicians who said that rap was "not music" when it first emerged...)

More generally, I have to admit that it's a pretty difficult claim to substantiate, though I don't think it would be impossible. Any thoughts?

Essay on Orhan Pamuk

Since you're annoyed at how this blog looks all of a sudden, why not go read an essay I posted at The Valve this morning? The essay is here. If the atmosphere over there is intimidating, feel free to comment here if you've read the novel and have some thoughts.

* * * * *
Imagine a “provocative” Broadway play about the U.S. use of torture in detention centers like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

In this imaginary play, a volunteer is requested from the audience, someone who preferably identifies himself as a “devout Muslim.” The volunteer is brought on stage and subjected to stage torture, as a way of shocking the audience, but also of using the horror produced by a direct representation of the real thing as an argument against the very thing it shows.

But imagine that the regular actors are all tied up in the basement one night, and in their stead are diabolical CIA agents who have become obsessed with this particular play, and seen it night after night, memorizing it entirely. When the agent-actors get their volunteer, they don't stage torture him, they really do it. There is blood, screams, and a look of utterly convincing terror on the man's face. It's disturbing, certainly, but few, if any audience members imagine that it could possibly be anything other than the most powerful realism (“Maybe the man in the audience was a plant,” says one woman). At the end, there is an overwhelming standing ovation; the audience is truly “moved,” and more angry at the government than ever. But of course, as they watched the torture they were completely involved in the action, enjoying it utterly. The applause is for the quality and intensity of the performance, not so much the ostensible politics of the play.

The audience is roused, but what does it learn from watching this display? Hard to say. Possibly, nothing it wouldn't have also known from watching an excellent fake version of the same thing. Or maybe it doesn't matter. What might be more interesting is the theory of theater that drove the diabolical CIA agents to do what they did. Their goal, of course, was not to discourage a practice by showing it directly (which may or may not work, because of the addictive quality of the spectacle of violence), but to actually use the theater to cause harm to someone they did not like.

A meditation on these lines is at play in Orhan Pamuk's Snow, except I've played with some things in Pamuk's story (about the 'headscarf' controversy, which is tearing apart Turkish politics), to fit the American context.

In Pamuk's Snow, two mindbending works of 'theater' are performed during the course of events that constitute the novel's 'present'. The first is described as a piece of moldy nationalist propaganda, “My Fatherland or my Scarf,” in which religious fanatics plot a conspiracy and are gunned down by the noble protectors of Turkish state. Only, in the mad version of it that is actually performed in the novel, when the police (who are real police, acting under orders from a mad actor who has become a state official) gun down the fanatics they do not go after the actors on the stage, but the audience itself. They specifically target boys from the local religious high school in the audience, who are enthusiastically voicing their disapproval of the secularist play. The police rifles are loaded; a small secularist massacre ensues, which comes to be known as the Coup throughout the second half of the book.

There are a number of possible angles on Pamuk's approach to what might be called Absolute Theater (i.e., theater which does the very thing it seems to be only representing). One thread has to do with genre and authority. The protagonist of the novel is a modernist, atheist poet named Ka, who is visiting the small town of Kars to investigate the recent spell of suicides by young Muslim girls, who were protesting the state ban on headscarfs in public settings, such as public schools. After a dry spell of many years, Ka is suddenly overtaken by poetic inspiration at numerous moments in the novel. Poems come to him like spells of nausea – from something or somewhere outside of himself (something perhaps divine). But the poems are nevertheless utterly private and personal, and are never cited or interpreted in the novel. What do they do? Echoing Auden, we could say that the poems don't seem to make anything happen.

There is also a first-person narrator in Pamuk's novel, named “Orhan,” who is following the trail of Ka's experiences in the town of Kars. Through “Orhan,” there is some interest in the novel in thinking about what the form of the novel. In contrast to both drama and poetry, novels (in Pamuk's novel) are given both historical and anthropological authority – they have the power to describe the totality of a people or an event. Even if fictional, a novel is, in some sense, the most straightforwardly and widely 'true' of the three genres. One of Ka's interlocutors, a young man named Fazil, seems all too aware of this when he asks “Orhan” to insert a disclaimer in the novel he knows the latter is writing:

'I did think of something, but you may not like it. . . If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I'd like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.'
'But no one believes in that way what he read in a novel,' I said.
'Oh yes, they do,' he cried. 'If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I've just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.' (425-426)

On the one hand, it is a mark of Fazil's provincial simplicity – his stupidity – not to be able to comprehend the basic function of representation in art. He is a young man who was, earlier in the book at least, associated with the Islamists in the town, and perhaps his naivete about the truth-value of “fiction” is tied to the trouble the very religious have with accepting any “representation” that deviates from the sacred, or that derives from any individual's self-ascribed authority. On the other hand, with that naivete comes an unmistakable respect for the work of art as a work in language that has power.

The secularists in this novel are harried people, losing the battle against Islam in the countryside. The fantasy of a secularist play that becomes Absolute, and of a literary work that becomes Real, is in some sense a fantasy that the naïve view of Art (i.e., Art is never fictional) might in fact be true after all. It is a way of thinking about representation where “literature” (which is by definition secular) embraces a kind of representationalist fundamentalism as the only effective way of communicating in a society in which representation is forbidden.

The problem of efficacy not just a problem for artists living in environments consumed by religious fundamentalism. Indeed, it might just be a quintessentially modern/modernist problem, depending on how it's framed. Aren't genres like Installation Art and Reality TV also attempting to bridge Reality (which normally has all the authority), and Art (which normally has none)? There might even be something a little Nietzschean about it. (Perhaps one could insert a helpful quote from The Birth of Tragedy here.)

2. Paul De Man on Hegel

Nietzsche isn't mentioned in Pamuk's novel, though there are some references to the “play to end all plays” that smell a little like Nietzsche. And Pamuk wisely refrains from offering any straightforward theory of theater or aesthetics in the discourse of the novel itself. There is, however, an intriguing reference to Hegel, which might be a starting point for a different kind of discussion:

“It was Hegel who first noticed that history and theater are made of the same materials,' said Sunay. 'Remember: just as in the theater, history chooses those who play the leading roles. And just as actors put their courage to the test onstage, so too do the chosen few on the stage of history.' (199)

Sunay, the speaker here, is the mad actor/state official who orders the actors in “My Fatherland or my scarf” to be replaced by real police, carrying loaded weapons, who shoot down the religious fundamentalists in the audience.

Reading this, I started poking around with Hegel's theories of theater and aesthetics, but mostly came up with dead-ends. (The quote here might be a little bit helpful, but not terribly so.)

I did read two essays by Paul De Man on Hegel's Aesthetics, with mixed results. “Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics” in Blindness and Insight turns out to be an essay which essentially argues that Hegel's two strongest statements in the Lectures on Aesthetics, namely, “The beautiful is the sensory manifestation of the idea,” and “Art is for us a thing of the past” are in fact versions of the same thing. De Man finds a way to interpret the word “past” as a kind of reference to memory and memorization: Erinnerung and Gedachtnis. De Man has a very complicated argument, to show, in effect that for Hegel, art is about memorization, and therefore perhaps, the past. Here is the summary statement:

We can now assert that the two statements 'art is for us a thing of the past' and 'the beautiful is the sensory manifestation of the idea' are in fact one and the same. To the extent that the paradigm for art is thought rather than perception, the sign rather than the symbol, writing rather than painting or music, it will also be memorization rather than recollection. As such, it belongs indeed to a past which, in Proust's words, could never be recaptured, retrouve. Art is 'of the past' in a radical sense, in that, like memorization, it leaves the interiorization of experience forever behind. It is of the past to the extent that it materially inscribes, and thus forever forgets, its ideal content. The reconciliation of the two main thesis of the Aesthetics occurs at the expense of the aesthetic as a stable philosophical category. What the Aesthetics calls the beautiful turns out to be, also, something very remote from what we associate with the suggestiveness of symbolic form.

The last few sentences are hard for me to quite parse, even though I've read this essay of De Man's twice. What is clear is that De Man argues that Hegel's “past” can be read “radically” (as memory), so that Hegel's theory of aesthetics might be read as not actually opposed to Art. But even after performing the rescue operation, he still isn't happy with the (new) theory of aesthetics he sees in Hegel. This turns out not to be an essay that recuperates Hegel after all; rather, De Man finds yet another way of saying either we don't understand Hegel, or he doesn't make any sense. (It's hard for me to imagine that De Man, when he had finished writing this essay, was quite satisfied with where he landed up.)

That said, interesting stuff happens along the way, particularly as the essay touches upon the distinction between Classical art and Romanticism, which are so important in De Man's other essays. And the follow-up essay to this one (“Hegel on the Sublime”) is quite interesting as well. Did you know that for Hegel, there is no distinction between the sublime and the beautiful (“The sublime for Hegel is the absolutely beautiful.”) ?

The most salient passage in the second essay for our purposes is De Man's reading of Hegel's appropriation of the “Hebraic” turn to iconoclasm as offering the first textual interpretation of the sublime. For Hegel, the sublime (or the absolutely beautiful) really only happens in language. As De Man puts it:

Hebraic poetry is sublime because it is iconoclastic; it rejects art as plastic or architectural representation, be it as temple or statue. 'Since it is impossible to conceive of an image of the divine that would in any degree be adequate, there is no place for the plastic arts in the sublime sacred art of the Jews. Only the poetry of a representation that manifests itself by means of the word will be acceptable.' In its explicit separation from anything that could be perceived or imagined, the word indeed appears here as the inscription which, according to the Encyclopedia, is the first and only phenomenal manifestation of the idea. Monuments and statues made of stone and metal are only pre-aesthetic. They are sensory appearances, all right, but not, or not yet, appearances of the idea. The idea appears only as written inscription. (11)

The best example of the sublime written inscription turns out to be the Fiat Lux, which, De Man points out, was also mentioned as an instance of the sublime in language by Longinus himself. And De Man's passage on this (which I won't quote here) is a beautifully argued introduction to speech act theory that bypasses Derrida – he makes the point about the performative in language without the confusing (and obscuring) “play” of “Structure, Sign and Play.”

3. Pamuk's deconstruction

We've gotten considerably away from Pamuk, though all the roads can be made to lead home again if it is wished. It might go something like this:

The fantasy of a theater that becomes absolute is a fantasy of claiming (or restoring) the divine performative. Absolute theater is "sublime" for Hegel, though one can legitimately ask whether it has anything to do with art or aesthetics. (However, judging from De Man's own rigorously achieved dead-end in "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics, it may just be that Hegel's theory of aesthetics itself doesn't have much to do with art.)

In Pamuk's novel, this fantasy is one experienced, or performed, by secular writers, but it is itself a species of absolutism that is a mirror image of the very form of absolutism it claims to be opposing.

Bear with me

I'm trying to sort out the template...

Blogger seems to have changed something... Then I changed some things... Now it's sort of a mess.

The Monsoon and the Stock Market

It seems to happen every year -- the stock market peaks as the monsoon breaks in Bombay. I visualize happy stock traders dancing at the BSE, while barefoot children dance on the pavement outside.

Bombay is lucky. In the rest of India, it's damn hot. 122 degrees! (Sorry if that scares you, Ms. World -- it should be a bit cooler by the time you get there...)

Wimbledon is on. Indian tennis star Sania Mirza won in the first round yesterday. Go Sania! Now that you are possibly the biggest sports star in India, it's time for you to actually win some matches!

And in Gurgaon, outside of Delhi, they are planning to build the biggest shopping mall in the world, despite the fact that revenues and traffic are down at the other malls around Delhi. Hard to get excited about that, but there it is.

All this (well, except the heat wave in the north) makes me want to go to India. Unfortunately, our trip is probably going to be postponed until December.

Asian Underground/Desi Hip Hop Music Quiz

A couple of days ago, in the MTV Desi thread at Sepia Mutiny I came up with a little quiz, of Desi Hip Hop trivia. It was here, and it was probably a bit too easy.

So here's another one, at QuizYourFriends.com. It's focused mostly on the 'Asian Underground'/drum n bass genre, with some questions oriented towards hip hop. It's designed to be answered without looking things up on Google, so no cheating!

Trivia is totally useless of course. But interesting as a kind of cultural litmus test. We're beginning to see the appearance of commercial Hindi film trivia quiz games, like the Filmigame, where I would be pretty hopeless.

If you have the time and energy, you can write your own quiz on whatever subject you know the best, from Madhubala flicks to Carnatic music to ghazals to indie rock. If you do, please post the link in the comments below.

Tennis at Twilight

Tennis at Twilight
A Poem

At 8:15, it still feels like daytime
The ball is where it is, fluorescent green,
though my arm's sore from typing all day
and I think about dinner.
I have dreams of winning, swiftly and publicly.

At 8:30, I swallow a mosquito,
wasting the fading daylight with coughing
and little flailing comments, about tennis in a swamp.
My wrist is unsure, and the sound of children on swings
distracts -- the ball drops again and again into the net.

At 8:45, the light begins to bend
The ball is at times in two places
It is too small, a shadow, it disappears over the fence.
Even as we play with full focus, the expression is imprecise:
As the light goes, it takes away our realism.

At 9:00, it is nighttime, and we are playing alone.
There is a big moon, almost full, behind your head
It gives enough light for poetry, but not for tennis.
We still play -- hard, by instinct, but chasing no ball.
We cannot see ourselves at work in the darkness, glistening.

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Suggestions? Feedback? Likes, dislikes?
Please be a bit gentle. This is the first time I'm putting up a poem...