Would You Pay $1.58 million for this painting?


(Photo of painter and reproduction of Mahishasura from Rediff)

A bidder at Christie's New York recently did so, according to the Calcutta Telegraph. At $1,584,000, it is the highest price ever paid for a work by an Indian painter. According to the Mumbai Newsline edition of Express India, the painting, by Mumbai-based Tyeb Mehta, was purchased by an NRI in New York. It may be just the bad reproduction, but I don't find the painting terribly exciting. Here is the story behind it, according to Rediff:

Mumbai-based 80-year-old [Tyeb] Mehta's Mahishasura is said to be a work in karmic origami depicting the Hindu tale Goddess Durga slaying the demon Mahishasura. But Mehta has depicted Mahishasura a sympathetic figure embracing the goddess symbolising the demon's transformation after uniting with the divine.

I'm not quite sure I see it in the painting. But ok. A little more from Rediff on Tyeb Mehta:

Mehta is part of the Progressive Artists Group which draws inspiration from European masters but interprets Indian themes. He is said to be a very meticulous artist and is not as prolific as Indian master M F Husain.


There is a full profile of Mehta here. The same page includes an older version Mahishasura by Mehta.

There are higher quality reproductions of Mehta paintings here and here.

Suketu Mehta Interview in CJR; Indian Literary Non-Fiction

There's an interview with Suketu Mehta in the Columbia Journalism Review. (The interviewer, Carl Bromley, was kind enough to send me the link.)

Mehta is, as many readers are undoubtedly aware, the author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which I've talked about a bunch of times on this blog. Highlights of the interview include Mehta's discussion of the value of doing interviews with a laptop, rather than a tape recorder, as well as his discussion of what drew him to all these Bombay tough guys to begin with.

Here's the bit about laptops, and keeping his interviewees on point:

So initially they’d be much more hesitant than if I had put a tape recorder in front of them. But then I noticed this subliminal thing started happening where as they spoke, I was literally typing. My fingers were dancing, and they would look at me and pick up these cues from when I’m typing or not. Now, in India the problem isn’t getting people to talk, it’s getting them to shut up or to stick to the topic. And I didn’t have to tell them to stick to the topic, but you know I’d be nodding and typing and when they wandered off into a tangent I’d still be nodding, but my fingers weren’t dancing. And so they would, without my ever having to say anything to them, come back to the topic that I was interested in, which would get me typing.

The idea that the sound (or lack thereof) of his fingers on the keyboard as a kind of cue to his interviewees is really interesting.

The other snippet that caught my eye was the following paragraph, about Mehta's attraction to "tough boys" like the Shiv Sena characters, gangsters, and "special task force" police he talked to:

Why was I attracted to these tough boys? And it’s because in school I was a weedy kid, and I always looked up to the tough boys. The short and the smart sat at the front of the class. We had these two student benches and in the back were the people who had failed the grade and were taking it again or the really tall kids and we called them the LLBs — the Lords of the Last Bench. And I always looked up to these guys. These were the ones who were good at cricket, could get the girls. And here they were — they were grown up, and they were my protectors.

Ah, school days. I knew there had to be something back there...

Bollywood fans might be interested to hear Mehta's response to Vidhu Vinod Chopra's outraged response to Mehta's portrayal of him in Maximum City (this interview is Mehta's first public statement on that tempest-in-a-teapot). And there is a bit more about the dance bar girl Mehta calls "Mona Lisa" in the book. But read the rest of the interview to see for yourself.

* * *
More generally, I'm hoping that the success of this book will trigger more creative nonfiction about contemporary Indian life.

It reminds me of what might have been the best point made in William Dalrymple's controversial piece on Indian literature in the Guardian last month, which is the glaring absence of serious books of history and literary non-fiction in the Indian literary scene:

The other odd absence from the English-language literary scene in India has been the startling lack of any biography, narrative history or indeed any serious literary non-fiction of any description. Earlier this year, Suketu Mehta published what is without doubt the best travel book published by an Indian author in recent years: Maximum City, his remarkable study of Bombay. But Mehta's achievement only highlights the absence of any real competition, for with the notable exceptions of Naipaul and Pankaj Mishra, and one book each by Seth and Ghosh, there are no other Indian travel writers.

The situation with history is even more dire. Although brilliant young Indian historians such as Sanjay Subramaniam produce many excellent specialist essays and learned academic studies, it is still impossible, for example, to go into a bookshop in Delhi and buy an up-to-date and accessible biography of any of India's pre-colonial rulers, even of the most obvious ones such as Akbar or Shah Jehan, the builder of the Taj Mahal. Why is it that much the most popular biography of Mrs Gandhi was by Katherine Frank, an American living in England, and the most authoritative study of Hindu nationalism by a Frenchman, Christophe Jaffrelot? Why are there no Indian authors writing this sort of thing better than us firangi interlopers?

This seems true to me. Can anyone think of other Indian travel writers? (Who write about different parts of India, that is?)

Dalrymple made many other interesting points in that article, some of which were criticized by people like Pankaj Mishra, Vandana Singh (at Kitabkhana), and Samit Basu.

[See an earlier post of mine about Suketu Mehta's Maximum City here]

Don't Panic



I know, I know. Everyone is freaking out about Rita. Taking precautions is obviously necessary, but panic leads people to make irrational decisions. And in our current fragile economic state, panic (fueled by a full week of pre-storm suspense) might have really bad, far-reaching effects on the national -- and even international -- economy.

I'm not saying any of the current evacuations are panicky. No, evacuation is smart. Panic, however, is reflected in the plunging stock market. Or what I fear I will find tomorrow when I go to fill up gas.

Scientifically speaking, I gather that there's a decent chance the storm may weaken considerably before landfall. A couple of models I've seen suggest the storm is likely to drop to Category 2 or 3 status, because of the shallow water, changing wind conditions, and the fact that storms simply don't hold together at Category 5 intensity for very long.

Still bad, but hopefully not a situation where the entire city of Galveston is wiped off the map (as one 'worst-case scenario' has predicted). I'm no meteorologist, of course; if anyone who knows more about these things than I wants to 'school' me on this, I would welcome it.

Let's cross our fingers, shall we? And maybe turn off the TV: watching that angry red donut on its savage westward dance can be addictive. But it fuels the panic.

Anoushka Shankar on NPR

Anoushka Shankar is interviewed on NPR. Shankar, as you may know, is Ravi Shankar's daughter, and already a well-seasoned Sitarist at the age of 24.

She has a new CD out (her fourth solo effort), called Rise.

The interview is decent. There is one (obligatory perhaps) reference to "magic carpets," but otherwise interviewer Susan Stamberg asks good, intelligent questions. Listening, I was mildly surprised to discover that Anoushka has an American accent; hadn't realized she spent her formative years in Encinitas, California.

Some audio samples are available at the NPR page linked to above. Check out "Prayer in Passing"; I believe Anoushka is playing the piano as well as the sitar on that track.

Abraham Verghese, M.D.

Abraham Verghese has a short piece in the New York Times Magazine on his experience working with evacuees from Katrina who had been sent to San Antonio.

I've been a fan of Verghese's since I read his memoir My Own Country: A Doctor's Story some years ago. In the early 1980s, Verghese, an immigrant doctor from India (via east Africa), cared for AIDS patients in rural Tennessee -- when most people thought AIDS was some kind of gay cancer, and when no one in Tennessee thought the disease could be present in their state (it was, of course). In addition to caring for people with AIDS, Verghese took it upon himself to educate the public about the dangers of the disease, which included visiting gay bars (in the daytime) to hold seminars on the transmission of AIDS... It adds up to some pretty surreal scenes.

I have great respect for what doctors do (there are a number of doctors in my family), and I have particular respect for Verghese's sense of compassion, which is in evidence again in this piece.

Here is the the part of the current article that caught my eye:

He told me that for two nights after the floods, he had perched on a ledge so narrow that his legs dangled in the water. At one point, he said, he saw Air Force One fly over, and his hopes soared. "I waited, I waited," he said, but no help came. Finally a boat got him to a packed bridge. There, again, he waited. He shook his head in disbelief, smiling though. "Doc, they treat refugees in other countries better than they treated us."

"I'm so sorry," I said. "So sorry."

He looked at me long and hard, cocking his head as if weighing my words, which sounded so weak, so inadequate. He rose, holding out his hand, his posture firm as he shouldered his garbage bag. "Thank you, Doc. I needed to hear that. All they got to say is sorry. All they got to say is sorry."

I was still troubled by him when I left, even though he seemed the hardiest of all. This encounter between two Americans, between doctor and patient, had been carried to all the fullness that was permitted, and yet it was incomplete, as if he had, as a result of this experience, set in place some new barriers that neither I nor anyone else would ever cross.

The unstated irony in this encounter between an exhausted, frustrated patient and his doctor is the reference to "refugees in other countries." Verghese has to be aware that what the patient is thinking is "countries like the one you come from." But the patient had the discretion not to say it, and Verghese found the right words to respond.

At the end, Verghese describes the event as an "encounter between two Americans," which in some sense adds to the irony -- though there's no question that Verghese is absolutely sincere when he affirms his status as an American.

* * * *

Bit of trivia: Mira Nair directed a made-for-TV film version of My Own Country back in 1998, starring Naveen Andrews as the young Dr. Verghese.

An Indian Rock Connoisseur

Uma's post on Global Voices led me to the blog-archive of a music critic named Jaideep Varma.

Varma wrote for an Indian magazine called Gentleman (which, despite its name, was not that kind of magazine), which folded in 2001. He's now putting up his archive of music writing in blog format, indexed through here.

He is passionate about the great rock and folk acts of the 1960s, and writes glowing long-form essays on the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young. I particularly liked the Leonard Cohen piece, but then I particularly like Leonard Cohen.

And here, he's quite critical of Hindi film music and of the Indi-pop scene, which for him lacks that crucial element of individual, personal expression. The piece linked to was written in 2001, but I think Indian popular music is still pretty much where it was five years ago. Here's Jaideep Varma:

This kind of singer-songwriter has never existed in our popular culture. Mainly because film music is the popular music in our country. Indian cinema has produced many wonderful songs with excellent melodies, but all within a very limited format. Ultimately, a film song has to fill a situation in the film. And today, popular Indian cinema, with its accent on ‘timepass’, cannot produce songs of depth and passion. The format in which they exist simply won’t permit it. Even the older songs ultimately suffer from the same sentimentality and melodrama that the films themselves were steeped in.

This is the voice of someone who is utterly convinced about what he's trying to say, but that doesn't necessarily make him right. (Read the rest of the piece; he surveys virtually the entire Indi-pop music scene.) It's quite possible to say that Varma is guilty of Euro-centrism (or rock-centrism) in his perspective on music.

Varma loves British and American singer-songwriters for their individualism and sincerity, but is it not possible that that individualism is itself a kind of pose? And isn't it also possible that sincerity may be overrated, that the craft in the better work of a Bollywood composer like A.R. Rahman, may have real value -- even devoid of the individual touch?

The ability to appreciate different musical sensibilities on their own terms is often called "aesthetic relativism," generally by people who don't like it. But it may be just as correct to call it "eclecticism." Whatever we call it, it is a capacity that Jaideep Varma, for his considerable talents as a music critic, may not have.

Re-Introducing All About H. Hatterr

I sold G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr to my students as "the Indian Finnegans Wake." When I said it, I was thinking of the last time I tried to read Desani's novel, early in graduate school. It was a frustrating experience, and more a failure than a success really. Hence, the comparison to the Wake.

It's odd, because I'm not finding Desani's book even remotely as obscure now. In fact, it's pretty smooth going, and really quite funny.

Here are the fundae of Desani's life: born and raised in India, moved to England, where he wrote and published All About H. Hatterr in 1948. It was widely reviewed and even sold a few copies, but Desani never wrote another novel (he did revise and add to the text several times). Between 1950 and 1970 he got seriously interested in various forms of Hindu and Buddhist mysticism, and spent time at Ashrams in India, as well as meditation centers in Burma and Japan. Meanwhile, he was writing occasional columns for The Illustrated Weekly of India (a magazine that Khushwant Singh would later edit). Desani finally ended up in Texas, where he taught in the English department at UT-Austin (alongside Zulfikar Ghose) until the late 1990s. He passed away in 2001.

(A more detailed bio of Desani can be found at the University of Texas here)

Salman Rushdie has written in a couple of places about his debt to G.V. Desani's Hatterr. In the controversial preface to the Mirrorwork anthology of Indian writing (1997), Rushdie placed Desani at roughly the same rank of importance as R.K. Narayan (the two writers have little else in common). Here is Rushdie:

The writer I have placed alongside Narayan, G.V. Desani, has fallen so far from favour that the extraordinary All About H. Hatterr is presently out of print everywhere, even in India. Milan Kundera once said that all modern literature descends from either Richardson's Clarissa or Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and if Narayan is India's Richardson then Desani is his Shandean other. Hatterr's dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose is the first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language. His central figure, 'fifty-fity of the species,' the half-breed as unabashed anti-hero, leaps and capers behind many of the texts in this book. Hard to imagine I. Allan Sealy's Trotter-Nama without Desani. My own writing, too, learned a trick or two from him. (xviii)

Yes, it's true, don't even try to buy a copy of this novel from Amazon. (I did, a couple of months ago. One of the associated used-book sellers emailed me after a week with an apology: "Actually, we haven't had that in stock for two years. Sorry, we'll give you your money back." I still don't own a copy; I'm teaching it from photocopies.)

One of the reasons many people are afraid of this novel is its reputation for slang-ridden obscurity. Actually, it's not that obscure -- certainly not as difficult as Ulysses (and not even on the same astral plane as Finnegans Wake). Moreover, the obscurity is generally literary, not linguistic. In the first 100 or so pages of the novel, I counted a total of ten Hindi words in the text. And most of those are 'Hobson-Jobson' words like topi (hat), which would have been readily familiar to readers in 1948. Novels like Manju Kapur's Difficult Daughters are considerably more dense with Hindustani (or Punjabi) words, and still seem passable enough to western readers.

Anthony Burgess, in his preface to the 1969 edition of the novel, is also careful to disavow the métèque label that dogged late colonial African writers like Amos Tutuola. F.W. Bateson coined Métèque as a way of referring to writers for whom English was a second or third language, who don't respect (or don't know) 'the finer rules of English idiom and grammar'.

It's not that such writing can't produce interesting effects. But successful forays into slang or, even further, dialect English, are rarely interesting to fluent English speakers unless they are carefully controlled -- by a writer who is quite confident (and of course competent) in the language. The writer may have a memory of learning English, but he or she cannot still be learning English at the time of the writing of the novel. Conrad, Nabokov, and even the contemporary writer Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated) knew exactly what they were doing. So did Desani.

The mad English of All About H. Hatterr is a thoroughly self-conscious and finely controlled performance, as Burgess points out elsewhere in the same preface:

But it is the language that makes the book, a sort of creative chaos that grumbles at the restraining banks. It is what may be termed Whole Language, in which philosophical terms, the colloquialisms of Calcutta and London, Shakespeareian archaisms, bazaar whinings, quack spiels, references to the Hindu pantheon, the jargon of Indian litigation, and shrill babu irritability seethe together. It is not pure English; it is, like the English of Shakespeare, Joyce and Kipling, gloriously impure.

Though Desani doesn't have very much common with Joyce at the level of style, it seems appropriate to read Hatterr as a species of modernist experimentation.

For one thing, Desani shares Joyce's interest in tweaking the English canon a bit irreverently. Desani's canon is, however, a bit more fringey, having at its center the eighteenth-century classic, Tristram Shandy (full text at Gutenberg). There also seems to be the picaresque spirit of Apuleius here; some episodes read a little like they might have come out of The Golden Ass (full text at Gutenberg). Third is Lewis Carroll, whose "Mad Hatter" is alluded to in "Hatterr" (it's an amusing exercise to speculate on where the extra 'r' comes from). There are, in fact, dozens of sources in play -- my sharp graduate students spotted references to Everyman and Piers Plowman in the first chapter -- but the most prevalent literary reference point by far is Shakespeare. Some of Desani's Shakespearisms are simple comic misquotations, but others are considerably sustained (if still comically misapplied). One episode that stands out is the opening of "Chapter 1" (which, given the small avalanche of prolegomena, is by no means the real beginning of the book). It is a kind of remix of Hamlet. Hatterr, however, is playing the guard:

'All's well, friend Master Keeper o' Literary Conscience!
'The name is H. Hatterr, how d' you do?
'What of that?
'Well, thereby hangs a tale...
'List!'

'List!' is what the ghost in Hamlet says ("listen!"). Here, however, I think Desani is playing around; "List!" also seems to mean "enumerate!" -- as in, explain yourself, damnit! The odd dialogue (I've quoted only a small part of it) is a kind of framing device for the novel that follows (in which, among other things, Hatterr will explain the origins and significance of his name, and, not coincidentally, offer many lists).

Though all of this playing around seems quite modernist in shape, early in the novel Desani self-consciously disavows any connection to the Bloomsbury scene (already for the most part dead and, er, buried by 1948). In the "All About..." section (signed and dated by the author, G.V. Desani), an autobiographical chapter that details the ostensibly 'real' experiences of the author in his quest to get the manuscript of All About H. Hatterr published, he details one encounter with a Miss Betty Bloomsbohemia, to whom he addresses the following:

As for the arbitrary choice of words and constructions you mentioned. Not intended by me to invite analysis. They are there because, I think, they are natural to H. Hatterr. But, Madam! Whoever asked a cultivated mind such as yours to submit your intellectual acumen or emotions to this H. Hatterr mind? Suppose you quote me as saying, the book's simple laughing matter? Jot this down, too. I never was involved in the struggle for newer forms of expression, Neo-morality, or any such thing! What do you take me for? A busybody?

In short, Desani is saying, I'm really not trying to do anything fancy with all this Hatterr-speak. And why waste your intellectual acumen with my crazy little book? And no, I'm no modernist, not like you: nothing so pompous ambitious.

In the midst of this evasive self-acquittal is a seeming grammatical slip: "this book's simple laughing matter." There is apparently a missing indefinite article there ("a simple laughing matter"). It's possibly an Indianism (intentionally inserted), but the missing "a" makes meaning-making little bit slippery. Most obvious reading is self-deprecation... But perhaps Desani is also playing with the idiom "laughing matter"; it is the "matter" that is "laughing" (at the reader? at Miss Betty Bloomsbohemia?). If this were Joyce, there would also be a joke here about "mater" (Latin: mother), and maybe two or three others. It's not Joyce, but there still might be two or three jokes here, not on mothers, but on naming: the book's "simple laughing" Hatterr, who is mad as a hatter, never matter the mater.

* * * *
Not only is this book out of print, it's been widely overlooked by scholars of Anglo-Indian literature as well as 20th century literature more broadly. The most ambitious essay I know of is Srinivas Aravamudan's "Postcolonial Affiliations: Ulysses and All About H. Hatterr," in the anthology Transcultural Joyce. It is a witty, learned essay, but it is almost all about... Joyce (surprisingly thin on Desani).

The most helpful essay on Hatterr that I know of is M.K. Naik's oddly titled: "The Method in the Madness: All About "All About H. Hatterr" About H. Hatterr." (That's the exact title.) It's from Naik's 1987 survey Studies in Indian Literature, which is likely to be widely available at decent American university libraries. Naik's essay is especially helpful as a basic, straightforward account of the book: this is what happens, and here is what Desani is trying to do.

I might take a stab at my own essay on Desani at some point soon (hell, given the length of this blog post, I'm already half-way there). But my dream would be to do a new, fully annotated edition of the text, in the vein of The Annotated Lolita or Ulysses Annotated. I somehow doubt it would fly -- hard to imagine the market for an annotated edition of a book that no one knows about!

There is a decently long excerpt from the novel here.

Somewhere, Beyond the Sea... Bobby Darin

[Am I seriously doing a post on Bobby Darin? Yes: why limit myself only to cheesy Indian music? If I can comment on "Bunty aur Babli," can I not comment on "Splish Splash, I was taking a bath"?]

Last night, we watched the Kevin Spacey film Beyond the Sea, a biopic of the 1960s pop singer Bobby Darin. As biopics go, it was pretty bad. (Hint: If you're looking for a wonderful American musical, watch the Cole Porter biopic De-Lovely instead. Or last year's Ray, or even Down With Love.). Still, I'm a fan of Darin's music, and fortunately there is quite a lot of it in Beyond the Sea. It's also commendable that Kevin Spacey sings Darrin's tunes himself; he doesn't sound quite like Bobby Darin, but he does have a good voice, and really knows how to dance. In the end, I would recommend this film as a rental to people who like this kind of music. Just be prepared to fast-forward the stilted dialogue to the musical numbers. (Sort of like... Salaam Namaste)

It's often said that the musical genre is dead in Hollywood. But it's not strictly true; today's Hollywood musicals are generally "art films." Even Chicago was pretty much an art film; it only became commercially viable because of its "Oscar contention" reputation. One key difference is, of course, that in films like Chicago and here in the considerably less impressive Beyond the Sea, the actors are mainly doing their own singing.

Many Bollywood fans are embarrassed by the continued popularity of the musical, and point to the emergence of non-musical Hindi films as a sign that Indian audiences and filmmakers are maturing. I think that's a red herring. I say, keep the music; it's one of the things that really makes Bollywood distinctive. Real maturity will come to the industry once Bollywood films are shot in sync-sound, with actors start singing their own numbers.

On to Bobby Darin.

Darin's singing style wasn't especially original; he became a pop star imitating Elvis Presley, and matured as an artist imitating Frank Sinatra. After he moved away from cheesy rock songs like "Splish Splash," Darin's first jazz/big band hit was the jazz standard "Mack the Knife," a Rat Pack favorite. He just about nails it; in my view, the only version of "Mack the Knife" that's better than Darin's is Louis Armstrong's. (Eartha Kitt, I seem to recall, has a pretty brilliant version as well.)

Darin wasn't just a studio puppet. He wrote hundreds of songs, including some of his own biggest hits. He also helped start Wayne Newton's career, with "Danke Schoen" (the song that everyone remembers from Ferris Bueller's Day Off).

No point recounting the details of Darin's life here (a detailed, if worshipful, bio can be found here). Darin married Sandra Dee, aka "Gidget." They had a kid, but it was not a happy marriage. Between Darin's ego, his heart problems, his wife's anorexia, and their general struggle to stay relevant through the 1960s, there couldn't have been a whole lot of joy there. Kevin Spacey's film glosses over their divorce, and doesn't mention the fact that Darin remarried the year he died. It also doesn't say anything about the women Darin dated before he met Sandra Dee. The film also pays lots and lots of attention to Darin's toupee, which is, well, obvious, but does it need to be addressed in every scene?

Darin was an Italian from the south Bronx -- his real last name was Cassotto. Beyond the Sea suggests he got the idea for his stage-name when he saw a neon sign above Chinese restaurant: "Mandarin House." The lights for the letters "m" "a" "n" were out, leaving just "Darin." I don't know how true that is.

In the later 1960s, when his singing and film careers had essentially fizzled, Darin became an outspoken progressive, and publicly supported Bobby Kennedy in 1968. After Kennedy was assasinated, Darin wrote a protest folk song called "A Simple Song For Peace." It's a little insipid, but aren't all protest songs insipid? (The one exception to the rule might be John Lennon's "Imagine," and even that gets pretty unbearable after a little while.)

Bobby Darin died of complications from open heart surgery in 1973. He was just 37 -- younger than Shah Rukh Khan, Brad Pitt, or Keanu Reeves at the present moment

Recommendations. I like Bobby Darin's jazz ballads and swing songs more than his late 1950s rock songs. Favorites include: the afore-mentioned "Mack the Knife," "Beyond The Sea," "Call Me Irresponsible," "Hello, Young Lovers," "I'm Beginning To See The Light," "I Got Rhythm," and "More Than The Greatest Love."

In terms of films, the only good Bobby Darin film I've ever seen is the racially-charged film Pressure Point. Darrin plays a racist psychopath, and Sidney Poitier is his shrink. The film has a nicely edgy, paranoid feel to it, and incorporates an almost Hitchockian amount of Freudian psychobabble into the story.

And there you have it -- a post on Bobby Darin.

Anniversaries: Lolita and Leaves of Grass

150 years ago: Walt Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass was published.

Radio Open Source has a special on it, which you can download and listen to as an MP3 here. The quality of the interview is sometimes a bit spotty, but John Hollander and Robert Pinsky are both well worth listening to. While he doesn't always manage the flow of questions perfectly, host Christopher Lyden gives them a bit more room to do their thing than one usually expects from a radio show.

Hollander is especially compelling on Whitman's penchant for lists (a species of anaphora, he reminds us), and mentions Robert Belknap's The List (a book which was just released last year) for its take on lists in nineteenth century American literature: Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, and Whitman.

Hollander also reads a section of Song of Myself, followed by a little snippet of analysis:

The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane
whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their
Thanksgiving dinner.
The pilot siezes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong
arm,
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon
are ready,
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
The deacons are ordain'd with cross'd hands at the altar,
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big
wheel (link)

Hollander talks about the musicality of the section, emphasizing the first two lines: "These together are equal partners on the same musical footing in this marvelous metaphoric exploration of what solo and concerted playing and singing in music are, that he explores throughout his poetry."

My version: Whitman is challenging us to follow the patterns in his seemingly random array of phenomena. There is a steady alternation between singular and plural images (and singular and plural sounds). And while the aural dimension is remarkable for its rhythm, the visual component in these lines can't be ignored. These lines, in short, contain an array of shapes and sounds that seem to play off one another, from the anthropomorphic "tongue" of the carpenter's plane, to the myriad images of hunters at the ready, and of course the suggestion of a Thanksgiving Turkey at the end of a long journey.

One other thing. Hollander also mentions "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking", which seems intensely musical as well, now that I think about it:

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands, and the fields beyond, where the child, leaving his bed, wander’d alone, bare-headed, barefoot,
Down from the shower’d halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows, twining and twisting as if they were alive,
Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories, sad brother—from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon, late-risen, and swollen as if with tears,
From those beginning notes of sickness and love, there in the transparent mist,
From the thousand responses of my heart, never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous’d words,
From the word stronger and more delicious than any,

From such, as now they start, the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
Borne hither—ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man—yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them—but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing. (link)

Notice how the emphasis moves from the other sources of song (here, especially birds), to the poet's own voice.

More on Walt Whitman at Wikipedia.



50 years ago: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was first published (in France).

The novel came out in the U.S. three years later, and both Nabokov and his employer at the time (Cornell University) were quite concerned that the publication of the book would lead to scandals and perhaps censorship.

But the censorship that was feared never materialized. The book was well-reviewed (though some key critics panned it), and commercially successful. Within four years, Lolita was a Stanley Kubrick movie (admittedly not one of Kubrick's best). Nabokov made so much money off of it that he retired from his faculty position at Cornell, and later moved to Switzerland.

NPR has a two-part story on Lolita, featuring the great literary critic M.H. Abrams (who was a contemporary of Nabokov's at Cornell).

Another surprising appearance in the NPR series on Lolita is Azar Nafisi (in part 2). What she has to say perhaps isn't that memorable, though perhaps it's notable that she's become a go-to person for Nabokov studies so quickly. (I have no objection, of course. See my earlier post on Nafisi here)

The more interesting of the two parts in the series might be part I, which focuses on how Nabokov wrote the book -- long summer road trips with his wife Vera. They were ostensibly studying butterflies (Nabokov was also a serious lepidopterist), but often Nabokov would sit out in the hotel parking lot and work on pieces of the novel on a stack of notecards. Also notable is that he used to ride around on buses in the afternoon, noting down the chatter of schoolgirls. (Sounds a little shady, but how else is a middle-aged Russian expatriate in upstate New York going to have any sense at all of how a 13 year old American girl actually talks?)

The New York Times also has a story on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Lolita, which covers some of this same ground, but with a helpful survey of the critical reception of the novel. Graham Greene supported it, while Edmund Wilson, Rebecca West, and Orville Prescott panned it.

Wikipedia on Vladimir Nabokov

The Busy Prime Minister

Indian PM Manmohan Singh has been busy globetrotting this week.

On Monday he was in France, where he met with Jacques Chirac and discussed the transfer of civilian nuclear technology, and Singh and Chirac issued a joint statement. Singh missed out on meeting with the Indian expatriate community there, for lack of time apparently.

No word on whether the Hijab-turban ban was discussed.

In New York, Singh has met with American CEOs, George Bush, and Pervez Musharraf.

Singh has promised to bring down tariffs, to encourage Foreign Direct Investment in the sphere of infrastructure.

The Deccan Herald has reported that Bush was trying to pressure Singh to accept the U.S. line on Iran's nuclear program, but I find the whole premise of the article a bit shaky. Why would Bush care about India on this front, when it is not on the Security Council?

The dinner with Musharraf was probably the most important thing Singh has done this week. From Express India, it seems like the meeting went quite well, though beyond the predictable joint statement (not to "allow terrorism to impede the peace process"), I'm not sure what's really come out of it. Still, all these top-level meetings (three this year alone) have to be good signs for long-term India-Pakistan peace (assuming that 'Mush' stays in power, that is).

In this self-consciously tabloid account of the meeting from the Hindustan Times, there is the suspicion that something is being talked about that isn't getting made public yet. Meanwhile, the Times of India has a highly idiosyncratic account of the meeting as a "deadlock wrapped in a logjam." It is, as most Times of India articles tend to be, pure speculation, and anyway, unlikely: if these guys really can't work with each other, why meet every three months?

(Still, I'm waiting for the big announcement. Aren't you? Hm, maybe the TOI has a point.)

Finally, Manmohan Singh also spoke in support of the newly-created United Nations Democracy Fund, which is going to non-coercively help countries around the world build democratic institutions. Seems nice, though I must say this new fund smells a little like the Bush Administration's usual "democracy talk."

A busy week, isn't it? And I haven't even talked about everything else associated with the UN General Assembly, a huge, event of global significance that has (perhaps unsurprisingly) received little media coverage here in the U.S. this week. The big news at the UN seems to be the organization's failure to push through necessary reforms. Ouch.

Funny Professors

There's a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about eccentric professors. From the first paragraph it seems like it's going to be a lot of fun:

Ask anybody what adjective goes best with the word "professor," and the answer will almost certainly be "absent-minded," or possibly "nutty." Popular culture is full of addlebrained academics, whether they be villainous madmen like Professor Morbius in Forbidden Planet or Sherlock Holmes's archenemy Professor Moriarty; crazy cranks like Professor Emmett Brown in Back to the Future, or well-meaning but harebrained eccentrics like Professor Brainard in The Absent-Minded Professor, Professor Branestawm in Norman Hunter's children's television series, Professor Pat Pending in the Hanna Barbera cartoon Wacky Races, or Professor Dumbledore of Harry Potter fame.

She forgot Flubber, and the two Eddie Murphy Nutty Professor movies.

Unfortunately, the fun doesn't last. The article is really a kind of meditation on the status of mental illness in academia, with special attention to issues like Asperger's Syndrome and the prevalence of anti-social behaviors amongst academics.

It's well worth reading and discussing of course. But I wanted to focus on the fun part this morning: the stereotype of the nutty professor. I'm really bored with the old hollywood cliché of the earnest, bearded prof (i.e., Robin Williams in that unbearable piece of faux-Indie sap, Good Will Hunting). I think we professors really ought to market our comedic powers more aggressively. I've often wondered why, on sites like "Rate Your Professor," there is no question about whether the professor is funny. Funny is important! Humor is almost as good as knowing what you're talking about (in some cases, it can even be a helpful substitute).

Hollywood (and Bollywood) can help us win this fight. One of the best funny professors ever on TV was "The Professor," from Gilligan's Island. (Incidentally, I was shocked to discover just now from IMDB that Gilligan's Island was only on the air between 1964 and 1967. Watching this show as a kid in the 1970s-80s, I suppose I thought I was watching its original run.)

The Professor on Gilligan's Island is the endless comedic foil in the show -- its laughably tweedy heart and soul. And he's the source of such comedic gems as:

Professor Roy Hinkley: Well, that glue is permanent! There's nothing on the island to dissolve it. Why do you know what it would take? It would take a polyester derivative of an organic hydroxide molecule.
Thurston Howell III: Watch your language! You're in the presence of a lady!

Ouch. Ok, maybe not that funny after all. Still, I've often wondered if I should start wearing tweed sportscoats to class, just to weird my students out (and keep them awake). I might also start carrying an old-fashioned tobacco pipe (which will remain unlit of course).

What about funny female professors? I can't think of any from TV or the movies (I know plenty in real life). For that matter, there aren't even that many women-as-professor roles back there. One recent film that comes to mind is the rather steamy crime drama In The Cut, where Meg Ryan plays an English professor. Not a great film, and definitely not funny.

The diabolical Dr. No from the old James Bond movie of the same title, and Star Trek's Dr. Spock also play "professors" in their respective contexts, though they aren't necessarily intentionally comedic. Still, Star Trek often worked Spock for laughs (think of the friction between Spock and Scotty), and Dr. No is funny because it seems so campy and absurd now (one can only watch it through the lens of Austin Powers).

Bollywood has its own professors -- IMDB turns up old films like Khiladi or, even further back, Kora Kagaz. I admit I haven't seen either of them. More recently, perhaps, one thinks of the faculty of the medical school in Munnabhai M.B.B.S..

Can anyone think of other amusing "professor" characters, from either the Bollywood or Hollywood canons? (Or, if you must, from literature)

Mostly Literary Links (also headache science and desi melodrama)

It's fall, and the new books are ripe on the tree, ready for harvesting.

--Vikram Seth's new novel Two Lives is coming out soon, and there is a roundup of reviews at Kitabkhana. It looks like a big, sprawling "20th century" novel (though not as big as A Suitable Boy). A few plot details here:

Two Lives begins with an autobiographical section, explaining how he came to know his uncle, Shanti, a small, one-armed Indian dentist living in Hendon, northwest London, and his aunt Henny Caro, a tall and elegant German-Jewish refugee. Seth lived with this improbable couple from 1969 when he came to study in England. He knew little of their lives until after Henny’s sudden death 20 years later.

In the hands of a lesser writer, the family story would have been little more than interesting. Seth, with his beautifully simple prose, creates a truly unforgettable double portrait. He zooms in on tiny details, then broadens his focus to include Nazi Germany, India and Israel, with all the great events of the 20th century


--Laila Lalami (aka Moorish Girl) has a review of Abdulrazak Gurnah's Desertion in the Nation. I've had this book on the shelf for two months; now (ok not quite now, but soon) I'm actually going to read it. (Via The Reading Experience)

Oh, and the novel is set in colonial Africa, but it has a desi component, if that matters to you. Here is part of the plot, summarized by Lailami:

Desertion opens in 1899, when Hassanali, a middle-aged shopkeeper of mixed Indian and African descent, leaves his house to open the local mosque for the dawn prayer and stumbles on a fallen European, a man so exhausted that he only manages to groan when asked to identify himself. The stranger turns out to be Martin Pearce, an Arabic-speaking British historian who took part in a hunting trip but found the slaughter of animals so unbearable that he left off with his Somali guides, who later abandoned him in the wilderness. He's thirsty, hungry and barely conscious when Hassanali takes him home to his wife and sister to care for him. Before Pearce is restored to full health, however, in comes a British government official, Frederick Turner, to whisk him away lest the natives do him any harm. Later, when Pearce finds out about the mistreatment of his native hosts, he goes back and apologizes, and it is then that he meets Hassanali's older sister, the formidable Rehana, with whom he falls in love.


--After trouncing Rushdie's Shalimar last week, New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani praises Zadie Smith's new novel On Beauty with relish.

--Sunil Laxman is starting a series of short, crisp posts on science. The first installment is up, and it's quite interesting: mostly on genetics, but also a couple of interesting bits on smoking and the neuroscience of pain relief.

--It was only a matter of time before the Indian media eventually discovered a desi melodrama in the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina. A copy of the Sikh scriptures, the Guru Granth Sahib, was rescued from a submerged Gurdwara in East New Orleans.

A Sikh Film Festival in Long Island

There's going to be a film festival at Hofstra University in a couple of weeks, on Sikh cinema, the Spinning Wheel Film Festival. Interesting -- I didn't know there was such a thing as Sikh cinema! Here are some of the films they're screening:

Legend of Malerkotla: A Tale from the Punjab
Directed by Iqbal Malhotra

Sewa: From Paris to Tapovan (scroll down)
Reema Anand

Ranjit Singh
Directed by T.Sher Singh

Sahibzadey
Directed by Sukhwinder Singh

Kaya Taran
Directed by Shashi Kumar

Khamosh Pani
Directed by Sabiha Sumar

The last film on the list above, Khamosh Pani (Silent Water) is a recent partition film. Also, I'd heard tell of this religious/devotional film Sahibzadey, which is done entirely in CGI (computer animation). The rest of the titles are new to me, though I did know about T. Sher Singh, a widely respected journalist in Ontario (Guelph, to be exact).

There do appear to be some propagandistic films in the mix on the full program, but also some films that might appeal to a general audience (especially Kaya Taran and Khamosh Pani). It's also worth noting that the choice of films and filmmakers is secular (non-Sikhs have made several of the films), and pretty closely controlled (no cheesy Bollywood flicks).

Literary Magazines, Blogs, and the Value of Rumination

Both Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber and John Holbo at the Valve have posts on the long A.O. Scott article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine on the new generation of U.S. literary magazines.

In one sense at least, the popularity of The Believer and the newer n+1 flies in the face of all the recent hype about the Internet and literary blogging. These are magazines with relatively modest websites, and which put only a small fraction of their content online. And they are succeeding:

At a time when older forms of media are supposedly being swallowed up by newer ones, the impulse to start the kind of magazine Partisan Review was in the late 1930's or The Paris Review was in the 50's might look contrarian, even reactionary. If you are an overeducated (or at least a semi-overeducated) youngish person with a sleep disorder and a surfeit of opinions, the thing to do, after all, is to start a blog. There are no printing costs, no mailing lists, and the medium offers instant membership in a welcoming herd of independent minds who will put you in their links columns if you put them in yours. Blogs embody and perpetuate a discourse based on speed, topicality, cleverness and contention -- all qualities very much ascendant in American media culture these days. To start a little magazine, then -- to commit yourself to making an immutable, finite set of perfect-bound pages that will appear, typos and all, every month or two, or six, or whenever, even if you are also, and of necessity, maintaining an affiliated Web site, to say nothing of holding down a day job or sweating over a dissertation - is, at least in part, to lodge a protest against the tyranny of timeliness. It is to opt for slowness, for rumination, for patience and for length. It is to defend the possibility of seriousness against the glibness and superficiality of the age - and also, of course, against other magazines.

A.O. Scott is dead-on here, in his estimation of what causes otherwise normal, healthy people to start blogs, as well as in his description of what literary/intellectual blogs do and how they work.

And the idea of the print-only, elitist (by definition) Little Magazine is undoubtedly a powerful counter-point to the all-over-the-place instablogging of everything by everyone that has erupted in the past two years. The point about slowness and the rejection of topicality in particular is a good one:

"The vast majority of magazines in the United States tell you exactly the same thing at the same time," Vendela Vida said not long ago by telephone from San Francisco, where she lives and where The Believer is published (though two of its editors, Park and Julavits, live most of the time in New York). "We'd all apparently entered into this agreement that every month we'd be interested in the same thing" - the upcoming movies, novels, recordings and television shows.

But, of course, in spite of an elaborate machinery devoted to synchronizing and standardizing cultural consumption - of which magazines are an important part - most people's habits remain blessedly out of synch. We buy battered paperbacks at yard sales, stumble across movies on cable late at night and hear strange music on our friends' mix tapes (an experience apotheosized by Rick Moody's article about a Christian indie-rock group, the Danielson Famile, in the recent music issue). Part of The Believer's mission is to capture this aesthetic of mixing and matching, swapping and rediscovering. The message of a given issue seems to be, Hey, look at all this neat stuff - or, as Julavits puts it, "Isn't this amazing?" Philosophers and musicians, the M.L.A., the W.N.B.A., the U.L.A. (that's Underground Literary Alliance), Tintin and a strange 19th-century Southern novel called "The Story of Don Miff" all receive generous, thoughtful scrutiny, for their own sakes and for their interconnections.

"There has to be an element that reflects how we live and how we read," Vida told me. "We don't just run out and buy the new novel or start thinking about Darwinism just because George Bush happened to say something about it." And so The Believer's content is often as pointedly untimely as its approach is digressive.

Another word for this is "long tail": the vast repository of cultural references, obscure ideas, and lost artifacts out there in the world. There ought to be a space for thinking and writing about such things at length, and the issues of The Believer I've seen do just that.

That said, some blogs also reject the impetus to topicality (not so much this blog, lately). Having lots of readers can be addictive, and one usually gets them through timeliness and topicality (among other things). But the nice thing about not having a boss, an editor, or any financial motive whatsoever is that you can just ignore it entirely if you wish to. You don't have to blog about Hurricane Katrina if you don't feel you have anything interesting to say about it.

Incidentally, Marco Roth, one of the editors of n+1 steps into the comments at The Valve, and suggests that the print magazine vs. blog divide need not be completely hard and fast. But his idea of what blogs might be good for is much narrower than the gospel many blogging idealists espouse.

No Canadian Sharia, After All

It's funny how quickly things turn around. The Toronto Globe and Mail reports that the Ontario government has ruled out Sharia-based family law courts for Muslims in Ontario. (Thanks, Jay)

The decision raises a 'fairness' issue, of course, and the McGuinty government's response is to do away with the family law courts for other religions as well. That change hasn't taken place yet, though it is expected to occur this fall.

No complaints here.

(See my post from Fridy)