A Jamaican Writer, Vandana Shiva, Mao-Kruschev, and more

First, a thought: the global media made a very big deal last week about the bombings in London, which killed 55 people. And it was appropriate, as it was a terrible thing to have happened in a city many reporters as well as readers know and love.

But it's worth considering that 71 people died on Saturday in a suicide bombing in Iraq, when a man strapped to explosives decided to detonate them. He decided to do it while standing beneath a fuel truck in the midst of heavy traffic, in an urban area: everything burned.

It's understandable that it's a smaller story than London; 8000 Iraqi civilians were killed by Insurgents in the past 10 months, and the western media has long since given up on talking about it. Same for the politicians, who see this as bad publicity: as far as I know, neither George Bush nor Tony Blair have bothered to make a statement about this most recent attack. Still, the victims of this Iraq bombing -- all civilians, as far as I can tell -- deserve a moment of sympathy.

* * * *

That said, here are three links:

1. Book Coolie has a guest essay by Jamaican poet and novelist Geoffrey Philp, on the author's relationship to standard English and patois. It's well worth a read -- an impressive step forward for Coolie's blog.

2. Via CultureCat, a link to an article by eco-feminist Vandana Shiva. Here is a sample:

If I grow my own food, and do not sell it, then this does not contribute to GDP, and so does not contribute towards ‘growth’. People are therefore perceived as poor if they eat the food they have grown rather than commercially produced and distributed processed junk foods sold by global agri-business. They are seen as poor if they live in self-built housing made form ecologically adapted natural materials like bamboo and mud rather than in cement houses. They are seen as poor if they wear garments manufactured from handmade natural fibres rather than synthetics. Yet sustenance living, which the rich West perceives as poverty, does not necessarily imply a low physical quality of life.

I don't know. I see what she's saying, but lately I find this type of anti-development argument really irritating. Poor people are generally well aware of their poverty; it's not just Jeffrey Sachs' invention.

Also, I would rather support efforts to achieve Jeffrey Sachs' "achievable" solutions than worry endlessly about who caused the damage to begin with, as Vandana Shiva does in this piece. Righteous anger about colonialism got people like Robert Mugabe and Kwame Nkrumah into positions of power. It did not help them govern justly or competently once they were there.

(Intriguingly, according to this blogger, in his new book The End Of Poverty Sachs actually argues that sweatshops can be a good thing in developing nations! I've yet to read the book, so maybe I will comment more on this later.)

3. There's a new biography of Mao Tse-Tung that talks about a secret pact between the USSR and China in 1962. China would support Kruschev's plan to deploy missiles in Cuba if the USSR would support Mao's invasion of India.

Both events (the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1962 India-China war) took place within five days of each other. The book is called Mao: The Unknown Story, and the author is Jung Chang.

I hope this tidbit is going in the next Dan Brown novel too...

Crossing the Nuclear Threshold: India/US

According to Somini Sengupta at the NYT, perhaps the biggest issue on the table next week with the PM's visit to the US will be nuclear energy technology. I don't expect Manmohan Singh to come away from Washington with much... but I'm always willing to be pleasantly surprised.

According to Sengupta, India is currently on George Bush's good side:

Relations between the countries warmed considerably after Sept. 11, 2001, with joint warfare exercises and Washington's offer of fighter planes for the Indian Air Force. A defense pact signed in June promised joint weapons production and multinational peacekeeping operations.

The United States is India's largest trading partner, and Washington has welcomed India's new patent law restricting production of low-cost Indian-made generic drugs and an "open skies" agreement intended to draw American airline companies to a booming Indian market.

In a telling snapshot of Indian perceptions, a survey commissioned by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in June found that Indians were singular in the world for having a positive view of United States policy.

Ah the drug patents and the airlines again. The drug patents reforms infuriated the Left a couple of months ago, but now it might come in handy in terms of confidence-building with the business-minded White House. I've also heard reference to that bit about Indians being more sympathetic to the Iraq war than everyone else in the world, but I still don't understand it. (And I am, frankly, a little skeptical.)

Then again, with the current climate in Washington, it seems hard to imagine how it would be politically feasible to talk about nuclear technology given the missing WMD scandal that's erupted since the Iraq war, and the ongoing WMD suspicions associated with Iran's nuclear energy program.

Is it possible to help a country like India with nuclear energy technology -- so as to facilitate the building of much-needed power plants -- without getting into technology that might be used for weapons? What is the overlap exactly? (And if there is no overlap, why does everyone think Iran is building nuclear weapons when they say they are simply working on power plants?)

The Ideology of Sarkar

"Sarkar" means "government," so it's no surprise that the trailers to Ram Gopal Varma's latest gangster film (along with the image above) allude directly to politics. With taglines like "There is no good and evil, only power," and "When the system fails, a power will rise..." Varma is marketing a gangster film that seems to be channeling Nietzsche.

He also wants to remind you that he's perfectly aware of the fact that he's ripping off The Godfather, so he takes the rather unusual measure of announcing it at the opening of the film with another on-screen quote: "This is my tribute to The Godfather" (as if Varma has done anything but that since Satya!). Still, this film is unusual because it is explicitly a double-adaptation, blending two mythic backgrounds into one image of absolute power. "Sarkar" is played, of course, by Amitabh Bachchan, here even more impassive and bloated than he is in the other fifteen films in which we've already seen him this year.

Sarkar is really not a very great film (last year's Indian gangster movies were better, especially Maqbool, an adaptation of Macbeth, and Ab Tak Chappan), though Varma's double-adaptation plays interesting games with its sources, including the career of the real life political figure it is (loosely) about, Bal Thackeray, as well as of course the Corleone family in The Godfather.

The Fantasy of Absolute Power in an era of confusing democracy

First of all, why is Puzo's idea of Vito Corleone so attractive? Corleone is a civilized gangster, to whom loyalty must nevertheless be absolute. He is a family man, with strong, almost indissoluble, blood ties -- but who makes exceptions to add in people who are either not family or not Sicilian (i.e., Tom Hagen, "Consiglieri"). The Godfather is, in short, an iconic patriarch, whose absolute honor, loyalty, and authority is the hallmark of his effectiveness as a leader. He's a superman, a savior, and the paragon of capitalism: Jesus Christ in a tux, stepping out of a stretch limo.

People fantasize about such figures when more modern modes of doing business or politics seem to be leading nowhere, when the vagaries of the political process lead to a disputatious and demoralized public.

In the 1970s and early 80s, this was undeniably the case in both India and the United States. It's no accident that The Godfather was released as a film in 1972, after 8 years of indecisive leadership over the war Vietnam and the direction of American democracy. With Vito Corleone and his war-veteran son Michael (though it was an earlier war, the parallel is not an accident), there is no protracted war for control of the mafia -- no pathetic "peace with dignity." Everything is decided via a show of overwhelming force, which requires that the Son, Michael, murder all enemies at once, including his own brother.

A similar failure of governance opened the way to the emergence of the Shiv Sena in Bombay, led by Bal Thackeray. With Bal Thackeray, there were no pieties about reform, inter-ethnic harmony, or Nehruvian secularism. There were just decisions: caps on non-Marathis in city government, restrictions on non-Marathis getting government contracts, Marathi as the official language, the renaming of everything, and so on and so on. The big difference between Thackeray's political power and a gangster's power -- a distinction Varma ignores in the film -- is that Thackeray's power was always strongly supported by millions of working class and lower-middle class Marathis.

Thackeray's populism was also tied to the event for which his actions cannot be forgiven or simply 'understood' as doing what a political Boss Has To Do to stay on top in Bombay. I'm referring of course to Thackeray's well-documented role in fomenting the riots of 1992. Varma's attempt at making a slick gangster movie has no space for this aspect of Thackeray's evil, and in fact reverses it by throwing in a plot involving a Muslim terrorist smuggling in bombs from Dubai (who is in league, improbably, with an evil, cigarette-smoking "Swami" who is out to get Sarkar). It is a truly perverse rendition of reality to take a man involved in the deaths of thousands of innocent people and turn him into a vigilante fighter of terrorism, as Varma does in Sarkar.

Fortunately, Bal Thackeray is on his last legs, and his political machine is faltering. His son Uddhav is no Michael Corleone -- more like Puzo's "Fredo" (soon to be exiled to Vegas) Without Bal Thackeray's charismatic presence, it's questionable whether the Shiv Sena will continue to be a force in Mumbai in the next political cycle.

(Incidentally, there is an interesting controversy about the Dubai terrorism plot in the film, which has led the film to be banned in the UAE. See this)

* * *
Anti-feminism
The other defining event playing into the myth of The Godfather was the rise of feminism, which good Godfathers naturally dismiss with a gesture ("we don't discuss business in front of the women"). Threatening the code of masculine power, in The Godfather Puzo has Vito's son Michael go off to college, where he marries a WASP girlfriend ("Kay") with modern ideas. Michael is sympathetic to feminism and modernity, and frustrated with his family's backwardness, though he eventually dismisses all of it too at the end of the story (brilliantly filmed by Coppola: Michael closes the door on a bewildered and terrified Kay, to discuss Family Business with his father's henchmen).

Some of that anti-feminism is also at play in Sarkar, though here the 'outside' influence is America. Katrina Kaif (with markedly 'Anglo' features; see my post on Parineeta) plays the NRI girlfriend who simply doesn't understand the ways of the Family. What Varma does with this is pretty formulaic: the hero rejecting the 'modern girl' in favor of the 'traditional Indian wife' (here played by Kajol's sister Tanisha!) is a universal theme in Bollywood films.

* * *
Character actors
Ram Gopal Varma has always good at finding memorable character actors -- people like Rajpal Yadav (the bumbling anti-hero in Mein Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon, and a ubiquitous 'comic relief' presence otherwise), as well as many idiosynratic gangsters. Here we have "Silver Mani," a stuttering Tamilian (an odd choice for an ally for Sarkar, considering the Shiv Sena's notorious anti-South Indian rhetoric in the 1970s). Also quite memorable in Sarkar is the glowering "Chander," whose role as Sarkar's enforcer is similar to the "Luca Brasi" character in The Godfather. Tough as steel.

Also great is the 'evil Swami' character, complete with huge glasses, crazy hair, and the afore-mentioned cigarette. Where does he get these guys?

* * *
The Bachchan factor
Amitabh Bachchan is incredibly boring to watch. Varma spends endless hours with close-ups on his star, which go absolutely nowhere. Actors like Brando and Pacino use this blank space and fill it with power -- a hint of menace, the snarl of contempt -- but Bachchan simply seems to be staring off into space, looking vaguely constipated. Fast-forward, yaar. Please fast-forward.

Abhishek is a little better. As with Yuva, he has an interesting darkness about him that differentiates him from the current generation of bland male stars (i.e., the ultra-bland Saif Ali Khan). That darkness is emblematized by his beard, which has generally been considered taboo for lead actors in Bollywood. Bearded, snarling Abhishek was interesting in Yuva, where he had a pronounced vulnerability that had to do with class resentment and insecurity. But this is a smaller role and a lesser film, and that edgy potential isn't doing much here. It won't be long before Abhishek is cast in thousands upon thousands of crap roles like his father (and probably the beard will not last long).

Ah well. There is still hope is for the character actors -- the 'sideys' -- of whom I can never get enough. (Rewind!) Ramu-bhai, please give us more cigarette smoking swamis with sinister smiles. I've had enough of these tired Bollywood stars.

(Ok, wishful thinking. I'm sure I'll be back at the Indian multiplex in North Bergen in a week or two...)

UPDATE: Thanks to Aswin for the link to the Frontline article by Uma Dasgupta about Ram Gopal Varma's gangster trilogy.

Since posting, I also came across (via Feedster) an interesting article by Sudhish Kamath (from an article published in The Hindu, I believe), comparing The Godfather to Sarkar, with additional reference to Mani Ratnam's Tamil adaptation, Nayakan. Pretty good reading.

PM Manmohan Singh's address at Oxford

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave an address at his alma mater Oxford last week. Here's the most interesting quote, I think:

The economics we learnt at Oxford in the 1950s was also marked by optimism about the economic prospects for the post-War and post-colonial world. But in the 1960s and 1970s, much of the focus of development economics shifted to concerns about the limits to growth. There was considerable doubt about the benefits of international trade for developing countries. I must confess that when I returned home to India, I was struck by the deep distrust of the world displayed by many of my countrymen. We were overwhelmed by the legacy of our immediate past. Not just by the perceived negative consequences of British imperial rule, but also by the sense that we were left out in the cold by the Cold War.

There is no doubt that our grievances against the British Empire had a sound basis. As the painstaking statistical work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison has shown, India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6% in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3% at that time, to as low as 3.8% in 1952. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th Century, "the brightest jewel in the British Crown" was the poorest country in the world in terms of per capita income. However, what is significant about the Indo-British relationship is the fact that despite the economic impact of colonial rule, the relationship between individual Indians and Britons, even at the time of our Independence, was relaxed and, I may even say, benign.

This was best exemplified by the exchange that Mahatma Gandhi had here at Oxford in 1931 when he met members of the Raleigh Club and the Indian Majlis. The Mahatma was in England then for the Round Table Conference and during its recess, he spent two weekends at the home of A.D. Lindsay, the Master of Balliol. At this meeting, the Mahatma was asked: "How far would you cut India off from the Empire?" His reply was precise - "From the Empire, entirely; from the British nation not at all, if I want India to gain and not to grieve." He added, "The British Empire is an Empire only because of India. The Emperorship must go and I should love to be an equal partner with Britain, sharing her joys and sorrows. But it must be a partnership on equal terms." This remarkable statement by the Mahatma has defined the basis of our relationship with Britain.

Yes, that is a surprisingly generous thing for Gandhi to have said in 1931. I also liked the point about India's mistrust of the outside world, and was a little shocked by the stats about the country's economic shrinkage between 1700 and 1950 (perhaps more accurate to describe it as 'non-growth').

Word has it that Manmohan Singh will be addressing the U.S. Congress early next week (he is currently heading to Washington to meet with President Bush).

Go, blue.

Through the Water (More Long Island photos)

I swear, I haven't done any Photoshop wackiness to this picture, just improved contrast. That's how the rocks looked through the water (I was standing on a pier).



People fishing at Cedar Beach, Long Island.

Theory's Empire: postcolonial theory

My post on Theory's Empire is now up at the Valve. It's kind of a draft of something that might turn into something else (publishable in a legit journal? maybe).

I'm responding to four challenges to postcolonial theory, from Erin O'Connor, Meera Nanda, Arif Dirlik, and Priya Joshi. O'Connor and Nanda are criticizing the field from 'outside.' Dirlik started outside the field (and still may consider himself opposed to it on principle, though he is now widely read by 'postcolonialists,' and is even anthologized. And Joshi is definitely within the field, though her book In Another Country challenges several of the big generalizations (or formulas) about books, publishing, and colonialism that are often bandied about in the jargon of postcolonial theory.

Ban all E.M. Forster puns immediately

I finally got around to reading Suketu Mehta's column on outsourcing. See the discussion following Abhi's post at Sepia Mutiny a couple of days ago for some good comments on the column; all I have to say right now is, can someone please tell the editors of American media outfits to think of titles for India-related stories that do not entail A Passage to India?

There are other works of literature whose titles might make eye-catching 'ledes.' For instance, this column might have been better titled:

Midnight's Outsourcing [literally midnight, because of the time zone difference...]
The Silicon in the Crown
Outsourcing an Elephant
Train to Bangalore

Others?

In case you were wondering about the fashions in India

I've been busy with writing this week, but I thought it might be worth taking a minute to make sure everyone knows what the fashions are like in India this year.

The report says that Bollywood has bigger draw on customers than any other medium. Each film is a brand in itself and with every new movie there is a fresh new brand of fashion and lifestyle products.

But film critic A C Tuli says "only those designs which can be worn daily by the masses become a fashion statement. Rest do not."

Tuli says in last decade or so, most of the new heroines are shown wearing skinny tops, skirts, gowns etc. They fail to become popular as they cannot be worn daily and by the middle class."

Agrees Ritu Sethi, a boutique owner, "we are getting lot of orders for Parineeta's blouses and Babli's fitted pathani shirts with contrast collars and cuffs." Also in demand are colourful kurtis teamed with baggy, equally colourful pyjamas and cloth bags for women and fitted sleveless shirts and denims.

"Bunty and Babli has defined hip street style this season," says Sethi.

The trend of Bollywood inspiring fashion is not new, Saystuli. In the early 50s, clothing materials were named after Suraiya and Madhubala.

Nargis, the lady in white brought to fore, white sarees -both embroidered and bordered. Raj Kapoor's trousers with folded up holes and scarf in the neck remained popular for a long time. In fact, those who did not adopt this trend were called backward.

"Dev Anand popularised full sleeves top collared shirts and puffy hair, Sadhna's fringe, leg-hugging pyjamis and no side split kurtis were a rage with college girls in 60s, even though they were very uncomfortable to wear," he says.

In 70s, as the heroes shifted from trousers to bellbottoms, so did the young crowd in cities. Rajesh Khanna's guru shirts (collarless) were popular with young men. However, he says most of these fashions last only a season or till another new hit comes.

I miss the guru shirts, man. And the Dev Anand puffy hair (though arguably we have a new bad hair guru with us; his name is Shah Rukh Khan). But what is a "no side split kurti"? And how on earth did white saris (i.e., widow wear) ever become a fashion statement? Clearly I am no fashionista. (Fashionisto?)

Incidentally, here is the trademark Rani Mukherji outfit in Bunty aur Babli referred to in the article. And here is the kind of blouse from Parineeta that (I think) they are referring to.

Ok, bas/basta -- back to literary theory.

EXTRA! Anti-Blogging Polemic Stimulates Academic Blogging

Irritation is a stimulant.

A small sampling of responses:

Tim Burke
Professor B
Chuck Tryon
GZombie
Little Professor
Matt Kirschenbaum
Acephalous
Profgrrrl
Daniel Drezner
Planned Obsolescence
One Man's Opinion
Collin

Me? Nothing too exciting to add. As many other people have pointed out (see especially Tim Burke and Dan Drezner), some of the dangers of blogging that Ivan Tribble refers to are real ones, especially for graduate students or junior people (like me) who don't have much of a formal publication record.

But the potential advantages are real too. Without the platform of this blog, I don't think I would have been part of an NPR interview, or getting calls from Boston Globe Reporters -- both happened in the past month. I even recently got a call from the BBC Asian Network, though I had to turn them down; they wanted to do the interview in Punjabi. (I wish my Punjabi were good enough for radio. Sadly, not the case.)

I agree with many of the people linked above who have argued, contra Tribble, that academics really need to stop being afraid of expressing or hearing unorthodox and unpolished opinions. Intellectual exchange works better if it's warm. Limiting our written expression to journal publications is equivalent to a kind of intellectual cryo-freeze. Tribble is telling us to keep our brains under wraps until we're ready to show them to the world in the best possible light.

But does anyone believe in cryogenics? When you finally thaw that brain, it's highly doubtful you'll get all the components working properly. That's why so much of academic life -- as the anecdotes in Tribble's article suggest -- is dominated by the crude sensibilities of the medulla, not the spirit of rigor and reasoning that might be more characteristic of the cerebral cortex.

Sound Beach

Sound Beach, Long Island

Homage to London: Songs and Poems

London, the center of the universe. I was looking over Daniel Davies' (aka "dsquared") post with the lyrics to Noel Coward's "London Pride," and I thought I would run through some London songs and poems that have been in my head, from the Clash and the Mekons... to Blake and Whitman.

Songs

New York has "New York, New York," but London is lacking its iconic song. The Clash's apocalyptic "London Calling" comes close, but it is a fair bit harder to sing along with than the Sinatra. Indeed, does anyone even know all the lyrics to "London Calling"? And more importantly: does anyone know what the lyrics are all about? (the lyrics are here, if you want to review)

Then of course, there's the late great Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London," to which I offer an honorable "Aoouuuuu" of praise. One might also mention the garage-punky Misfits' "London Dungeon," which, like most Misfits songs, sounds a little like the Ramones, and a little like a dozen other old punk bands. Rancid's "Tropical London" is better, but I think Rancid needs to stop trying to live in the gutter punk England of 1977. (Embrace the 1990s and Berkeley, lads.) Finally, The Faint's "Southern Belles of London Sing" is quite catchy, but also feels dated. Neo-electro... so 2002.

Let's stick with Warren Zevon, shall we?

The funniest London song I know is Adam Kay and Suman Biswas's "London Underground," which is a kind of comedic cover of "Going Underground," the classic song by the Jam (lyrics). They're making fun of all the discomforts of riding the Tube, which isn't exactly appropriate the day after a horrific act of terrorism. It's a little naughty, and I shouldn't provide a link. Still, if you don't mind a few four-letter words and a lot of irreverence, the song is guaranteed to raise your spirits.

There are also some pretty insufferable London songs, like Heather Nova's "London Rain," ELO's "Last Train to London" (a bad disco song), and 3 Doors Down's "Landing in London" (not a big fan of 3 Doors Down). But let's not dwell on these too much...

Immigrants have happily claimed London. When I did a search in my computer's Itunes for "London," I came up with three songs about London in Punjabi, Apache Indian's "London tu Nachdi," Jazzy B's "London Patola," and Amar Arshi's "London." The best of the three might be the triumphant "London Patola," which you'll find in the Immortal Bhangra 3 compilation. Bhangra songs claim London as if it's a suburb of Jalandhar.

As with New York, in London people don't speak very much of "London" as a whole -- it's all about the neighborhoods. With New York, the neighborhood emphasis sometimes seems a little contrived and/or vestigial, especially in the fixed mathematical grid of Manhattan (Chelsea? how about West 23rd St.?). In London, which is a total sprawl, you need the neighborhoods. Hence, M.I.A., currently the trendiest Cockney-Lankan on the planet, describes herself in the following terms: "got brown skin/ I'm an east Londoner/ raised by refugees..." When north central London is essentially a very large outdoor mall, there isn't much cachet in calling yourself a simple Londoner if you want to be an underground rapper. East London is where it's at.

But hands down, my favorite London song -- of any period, and any genre -- is the Mekons' "City of London." It's late Mekons (Journey to the end of the Night), so not many people picked it up. Tragic, but not a huge surprise; after all, how many people still follow a band once they reach their 38th record? Still, Sally Timms breathes new life into the band, and is particularly good here.

Here are the first two verses of "City of London":

I had no idea where I was going
How I lived or what I did here
the yawning gulf between
Hangs like a rope from a wooden beam
Breathing life into these stone-cold lips
Putting gas in this battered old stretch limousine
City of London

Above this unquiet grave
I smell the smell of decay
And stumble through the streets of grey
It never rains but it sometimes does
Please, sir, can I have some more?
How long can you carry on?
Till the empire's built and die empire's gone
City of London (full lyrics here)

It's a song, I think, about the overwhelming weight of the past. It starts with the ghostly verses above, and eventually builds in energy, becoming less spectral and more hopeful and alive to the present as it goes. The song has a cathartic quality to it, though it doesn't necessarily end on a 'happy' note ("10 square miles of hurt"). Satisfying both to one's art-music sensibilities, but also user-friendly and melodic ("catchy").

Poetry

The Mekons' allusions to Dickens and Celine (Journey to the End of the Night is the title of a novel by Celine) might offer a convenient segue into a brief discussion of London in literature. There are innumerable novels and tracts dealing with London -- too many to even know where to begin. So perhaps let's limit it just to poetry for now...

Oddly, I'm not coming up with a great quantity of great London poems this morning. The most famous would probably have to be Blake's "London" from the "Songs of Experience" section of Songs of Innocence and Experience. (There is also a happier reference to London in Blake's "Songs of Innocence," in the poem "Holy Thursday.")

But the lines that seem most appropriate to the aftermath of this kind of event might be Whitman's, from the "Salut au Monde!" section of Leaves of Grass:

I see the cities of the earth, and make myself a
part of them,
I am a real Londoner, Parisian, Viennese,
I am a habitan of St. Petersburgh, Berlin, Constantinople,
I am of Adelaide, Sidney, Melbourne,
I am of Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh, Limerick,

I am of Madrid, Cadiz, Barcelona, Oporto, Lyons,
Brussels, Berne, Frankfort, Stuttgart, Turin,
Florence,
I belong in Moscow, Cracow, Warsaw -- or north-
ward in Christiana or Stockholm -- or in
some street in Iceland,
I descend upon all those cities, and rise from them
again.

* * * * * * *
You can see some other references to "London" in English-language poetry a the Electronic Text Center at the ever-evolving UVA site here.

Cheers to you, London.

Images of London

Flickr photos tagged with 'bomb'

London Metblogs

UK Blogs aggregator

'Life, friends, is boring': A little on John Berryman

I picked up Adam Kirsch’s The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets after reading Michiko Kakutani’s review of it in the Times, and thus far I’ve been happy I did. I’ve read several chapters, but the one that I’ve found most interesting is on John Berryman. (The other poets Kirsch discusses are Lowell, Bishop, Jarrell, Schwarts, and Plath.)

Kirsch’s approach to Berryman begins with literary biography, and ends with a hefty section of close reading, focused mainly on the 77 Dream Songs. The strength of Kirsch’s 'generalist' approach is the way it inspires one to go out and read the writer named, if one hasn’t already (this is one of the overlooked functions of good criticism). I’d actually never read Berryman, and now I have—-all to the good.

The weakness might be in Kirsch’s need to make a neat picture out of Berryman’s progress, which follows an only slightly tweaked ‘anxiety of influence’ shape. Here the dominant literary model is Yeats, whose impersonal grandiloquence Berryman had to eschew in order to find his own voice. I still haven’t read the early, Yeatsian Berryman, and I don’t contest Kirsch’s general claim that the 77 Dream Songs (1965) represent a breakthrough for Berryman personally, and perhaps for American poetry as a whole. But what complicates the idea of the Dream Songs as Berryman’s discovery of poetic Voice is the radical heterogeneity of the styles and personae to be found in the poems themselves. This doesn’t seem like Berryman’s (or anyone’s) authentic voice, so much as a good mix of voices, tones, and topics. There are poems about Ike, about the taxman, about doing lectures in India, and even one about the MLA (people have apparently been making fun of it for a long, long time). There is plenty of wry wit and satire alongside the more serious, ‘confessional’ verses that gesture at the poet’s father’s suicide.

It’s not that Kirsch is wrong; nearly everything he says in general about The Dream Songs is verifiable. But what he doesn’t say—what doesn’t fit his narrative—is how incredibly messy and uneven the book really is.

I’ll leave off on extended analysis, and instead simply offer Dream Song #14:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatedly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

Get it? The speaking ‘I’ in the poem ("Henry," who populates all these poems—a close proxy for Berryman himself) is himself the ‘wag,’ as in, the moving tail of the dog, and the happy wit who laughs at everything and everyone. The Dog has escaped, transcending us. We are the Left Behind, with the mocking ghost of its moving tail.

I also like "literature bores me, especially great literature." It’s a nice way of disavowing literary ambition. It certainly helps to inoculate Berryman against the charge of hubris. But dosn’t he also, with such a self-consciously ‘light’ topic, literally end up not achieving it (greatness)? If this is American confessionalism, it aint a whole heckofalot.

Incidentally, you can hear Paul Muldoon reading this poem of Berryman’s here. Click on "Paul Muldoon."

[Cross-posted at The Valve]

A brazen attack, and flooded plains

6 terrorists attacked a part of the disputed temple complex at Ayodhya, where 13 years ago the Babri Masjid was demolished. They were going after the makeshift Hindu temple on the site, and were killed without causing much damage. One bystander, a woman, was killed in the crossfire.

It's taken over the Indian papers today, but unless there are bad follow-up riots or protests, it might be just another dumb, desperate, and pointless Lashkar-e-Taiba event.

The bigger, 'real' concern of the moment might be the flooding in Gujurat. The livelihood of millions of people is affected. It elicits less interest, because it lacks dramatic symbolism or the element of surprise (there is flooding virtually every year somewhere in India).

The Opening and Closing of The War of the Worlds (the novel)

(Note: Spoiler alert; don't read this post if you haven't read the novel, and are planning to go see this movie)

Steven Spielberg only uses two direct quotes from H.G. Wells' novel, one from the opening and one from the closing. I was surprised to see that he kept the story in the movie pretty much consistent with that of the novel; it suggests that the scientific paradigm dominant in H.G. Wells' day (the novel was first published in 1898) is still pretty much intact, at least with regards to biology.

Here the opening paragraph of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds:

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

And here is the paragraph quoted from the end of the novel:

For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things--taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many--those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance--our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.

Judging from Spielberg's approach to the ending of the movie, evolution and antibodies are still generally interesting biological concepts.

Then again, I overheard a number of people walking out of the theater confused about what exactly killed the aliens -- so maybe many people still don't really get the idea of resistance to bacteria. And quite a number of other people seem to think the ending to the film "sucks." So maybe Wells' concepts are either so obvious that they're no longer interesting... or people still don't get the basic concepts of biology.

The full text of The War of the Worlds is available as an etext at Project Gutenberg here.