Autumn civilizes us
Summer's bare arms are sheathed
and the ritual of the cooling air sends us inside
to make schoolwork with sober chalkmarks
And I might say, drily,
"Autumn's softening light adds texture and shadow
to the still-yellow day."
Now analyze the poem.
But my students' eyes are elsehwere, on Autumn,
with its open space and windows
and living, biting insects
all still with us when we talk
And supposedly the famous leaves will don unsober brights
all too soon. But that bomb of color comes too late for Autumn,
verging on the foreshadowed winter.
(Screw the Fall! I'd rather not watch)
I prefer the daylight today, and the twittering, still-green trees,
and you, of course, and the texture of your sweater:
another Autumn, holding in the still-warm air.
Another fledgling attempt at verse. Do forgive the self-indulgence...
Anyway, an earlier instance (a more summery poem) can be found here.
Critiques are always welcomed.
Barbara Ehrenreich Goes Corporate
Barbara Ehrenreich's new book is called Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, and it is the white-collar sequel to her bestselling Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
Where in Nickle and Dimed Ehrenreich spends some months working minimum-wage jobs while also attempting to live on the salaries from those jobs, here her goal is to pose as a white-collar worker in "transition," trying to reenter a changed workplace after taking time off for family reasons. Ehrenreich changes her name back to her maiden name (to avoid recognition), and fakes her resumé to some extent (she gets friends to act as reference verifiers). Most of the chapters of Bait and Switch detail her various attempts to find a real job generally situated in the field of Public Relations or Communications.
The specific trigger for her interest was the spike of white-collar unemployment following the recession of 2001, which disproportionately affected people at middle and higher income brackets. But that's just one event: the general context of Ehrenreich's inquiry is the insecure employment climate that has emerged in corporate America since the 1990s:
This world of endless cycles of layoffs threatens to become permanent, partly for the reason that, as Ehrenreich rightly points out, reducing payroll costs is always a quick way for a company to boost its profits.
Ehrenreich details her experiences attending "networking events," and also meeting a series of career coaches, as well as people who might best be described as "employment gurus" (charismatic figures who preach an empowerment message oriented to helping unemployed people feel more employable). She is insightful and often funny on the fallacies of the various employment aids she tries, and I was particularly struck by her take on professional networking:
As an academic, I don't have any experience at all with the mid-career transition scenario Ehrenreich is exploring in her book, but I've had my share of demoralizing experiences networking in the academic context. She seems to nail it exactly.
Whether or not you agree with her specific politics, Ehrenreich is certainly a compelling writer, and I liked Bait and Switch, for its analysis of the current corporate climate as well as for the eye-opening exposure of the vast world of career guidance services, resumé-building, and "networking" (all of which are useless, and moreoever seem to be uncannily similar on old-fashioned pyramid schemes in structure).
Still, I'm not sure if the new book will be as influential as Nickle and Dimed, mainly because the world here is so much blander and contained. The stories in Nickle and Dimed were often shocking (especially for a sheltered/privileged academic like myself), but the white-collar version is devoid of interesting characters or gripping situations. "Downward mobility" may be a real phenomenon, but its victims are doing their very best to hide it behind a deadeningly predictable shtick comprised of the following buzzwords: qualifications, objectives, experience, contacts, vision, confidence, and [baseless] optimism.
On the other hand, Bait and Switch might be helpful reading for people who find themselves in roughly the situation Ehrenreich inhabited while doing research for this book (how not to apply for a job that you don't really want anyways). In contrast, Nickle and Dimed, for all its rhetorical power, is not really oriented to the working-class folks whose economic struggles it documents.
Where in Nickle and Dimed Ehrenreich spends some months working minimum-wage jobs while also attempting to live on the salaries from those jobs, here her goal is to pose as a white-collar worker in "transition," trying to reenter a changed workplace after taking time off for family reasons. Ehrenreich changes her name back to her maiden name (to avoid recognition), and fakes her resumé to some extent (she gets friends to act as reference verifiers). Most of the chapters of Bait and Switch detail her various attempts to find a real job generally situated in the field of Public Relations or Communications.
The specific trigger for her interest was the spike of white-collar unemployment following the recession of 2001, which disproportionately affected people at middle and higher income brackets. But that's just one event: the general context of Ehrenreich's inquiry is the insecure employment climate that has emerged in corporate America since the 1990s:
Today, white-collar job insecurity is no longer a function of the business cycle--rising as the stock market falls and declining again when the numbers improve. Nor is it confined to a few volatile sectors like telecommunications or technology, or a few regions of the country like the rust belt of Silicon Valley. The economy may be looking up, the company may be raking in cash, and still the layoffs continue, like a perverse form of natural selection, weeding out the talented and successful as well as the mediocre. Since the midnineties, this perpetual winnowing process has been institutionalized under various euphemisms such as "downsizing," right-sizing," "smart-sizing," "restructuring," and "de-layering" -- to which we can now add the outsourcing of white-collar functions to cheaper labor markets overseas.
This world of endless cycles of layoffs threatens to become permanent, partly for the reason that, as Ehrenreich rightly points out, reducing payroll costs is always a quick way for a company to boost its profits.
Ehrenreich details her experiences attending "networking events," and also meeting a series of career coaches, as well as people who might best be described as "employment gurus" (charismatic figures who preach an empowerment message oriented to helping unemployed people feel more employable). She is insightful and often funny on the fallacies of the various employment aids she tries, and I was particularly struck by her take on professional networking:
[Networking] feels 'fake' because we know it involves the deflection of our natural human sociability to an ulterior end. Normally we meet strangers in the expectation that they may truly be strange, and are drawn to the multilayered mystery that each human presents. But in networking, as in prostitution, there is no time for fascination. The networker is always, so to speak, looking over the shoulder of the person she engages in conversation, toward whatever concrete advantage can be gleaned from the interaction-- a tip or a precious contact. This instrumentalism undermines the possibility of a group identity, say, as white-collar victims of corporate upheaval. No matter how crowded the room, the networker prowls alone, scavenging to meet his or her individual needs.
As an academic, I don't have any experience at all with the mid-career transition scenario Ehrenreich is exploring in her book, but I've had my share of demoralizing experiences networking in the academic context. She seems to nail it exactly.
Whether or not you agree with her specific politics, Ehrenreich is certainly a compelling writer, and I liked Bait and Switch, for its analysis of the current corporate climate as well as for the eye-opening exposure of the vast world of career guidance services, resumé-building, and "networking" (all of which are useless, and moreoever seem to be uncannily similar on old-fashioned pyramid schemes in structure).
Still, I'm not sure if the new book will be as influential as Nickle and Dimed, mainly because the world here is so much blander and contained. The stories in Nickle and Dimed were often shocking (especially for a sheltered/privileged academic like myself), but the white-collar version is devoid of interesting characters or gripping situations. "Downward mobility" may be a real phenomenon, but its victims are doing their very best to hide it behind a deadeningly predictable shtick comprised of the following buzzwords: qualifications, objectives, experience, contacts, vision, confidence, and [baseless] optimism.
On the other hand, Bait and Switch might be helpful reading for people who find themselves in roughly the situation Ehrenreich inhabited while doing research for this book (how not to apply for a job that you don't really want anyways). In contrast, Nickle and Dimed, for all its rhetorical power, is not really oriented to the working-class folks whose economic struggles it documents.
In Praise of "Balderdash" (And other words for "nonsense")
The eskimos have a million words -- something like that -- for "snow." We, down in the melted world of "hot air," "hot water," and HOTlanta, have a million words for nonsense. And we need every single one, to truly and precisely describe all the different genres of the useless stuff people say.
The words for nonsense have been in my head lately partly because I've been teaching All About H. Hatterr, and Desani seems to use them all -- often with reference to the speeches of various fake Holy Men who show up in the novel.
So today I thought I would briefly celebrate colorful words for "nonsense," with a mini-tour.
Let's start with the thesaurus.reference.com entry for "nonsense":
Let's have a closer look at some of the words in bold, shall we? We might also add words like "hocus-pocus" and "blarney," neither of which mean "nonsense," strictly speaking. They are words that describe specific kinds of rhetorical sleights-of-hand -- flattering or deceiving -- and as such they are part of Desani's universe of nonsense. Also, if we were interested in blogging, we might also add "snark," which is a new species: snotty, arch, derision.
Mumbo-Jumbo: Interesting how a number of words meaning 'nonsense' have an ethnic or non-English etymology. Mumbo-jumbo comes from West African religion, where it is the name of a God. Presumably it came into English through the slave trade. The African-American novelist Ishmael Reed played with this word in his postmodern novel Mumbo-Jumbo.
In contemporary usage, it seems to be more or less synonymous with "hocus pocus," and is often used to describe the seeming fakery of religious or quasi-religious rituals:
Out of cultural sensitivity, one wonders if all this appropriation of "mumbo jumbo" might actually be offensive to some west Africans. I tend to think not, since the God Mumbo-Jumbo is apparently "a god, hobgoblin or boogie man." One doesn't worship these types of Gods, one fears them. (Still, I wouldn't mind knowing where exactly in West Africa Mumbo-Jumbo comes from, and what he means or meant to people there.)
Palaver: Another word with a West African origin, this word meaning straight nonsense comes from a pidgin used by traders centuries ago. It probably comes from the Portugues word "palavra" (or the Spanish: "palabra"). As it was picked up by English sailors, it became derogatory: palaver. Here's the OED:
Hocus-Pocus: Probably derived from the Latin "Hoc est corpus," which sounds like it might be part of the Latin mass. The OED suggests that this etymology is not hard and fast:
Whether or not the etymology is set in stone, people have used "hocus pocus" as a figure for the specifically ecclesiastical brand of "nonsense." (In that sense, it's remarkable how close "mumbo-jumbo" and "hocus-pocus" are to one another.)
Balderdash: Interestingly, "balderdash" started as a word for a frothy liquid before it gained its present-day meaning:
"Florid inflated tautologic ornamental baldersash": Wow, you can always count on Carlyle to throw down! (But why isn't he using commas correctly?)
Rigmarole: Early in All About H. Hatterr, Desani describes his own book as "rigmarole English," which has a nice, self-deprecating ring to it. The word usually refers to the nonsense associated with rambling, incoherent statements:
The OED's etymology of rigmarole is quite interesting. Apparently, it is derived from "Ragman's Roll," the latter being a medieval/Renaissance game of chance. Unfortunately, I can't quite understand the game after reading their definition of "Ragman's Roll":
So... it's a roll of paper with strings attached? And you pull on the strings at random? And something happens? I'm having trouble visualizing. (Anybody know what "Ragman's Roll" might look like? Or what the point of it might have been?)
Blarney: Literally means "smoothly flattering talk." But here is the rest of the OED definition:
Flattering nonsense is still nonsense. It is the kind of nonsense a 'guru' speaks to his 'chelas' to entice them to give him their money and attention. And it is what you see in book blurbs and letters of recommendation that praise our friends to the stars. Blarney, pure blarney. (I wonder if the prevalence of Blarney in the world bothers the folks who actually live there; it's not their fault, is it?)
Gobbledygook: More official verbiage. The OED speculates that it probably comes from the sound a Turkey makes: "gobble gobble."
Poppycock: It sounds obscene, but really it isn't. The ever-proper Virginia Woolf, as I recall, used this word all the time. Which is odd, because the OED says that the word is originally American slang (and they don't give an etymology):
I like the idea of describing the Congress of the United States as a "pack of poppycock gabblers." I also hope I one day have occasion to describe someone as a "dangerous, raving, psychotic, stupid, vicious, sickening writer of poppycock." My current worst insult is simply "troll," and that is basically a weak cliché.
Soft Soap: Means flattery (a synonym for "blarney"). Apparently "soft soap" has some vulgar connotation, though I can't quite figure out what that would be (maybe I'm too timid, or maybe I just don't want to go there). Here's the OED:
"Soft soap" is a word Jon Stewart should use, when he's criticizing the media for its softball treatment of political figures. You can't keep on using baseball metaphors forever. Sometimes you have to go with soap.
Hogwash: You might think this word derives from water associated with the washing of hogs, but you would be wrong. According to the OED, it's the wash from a kitchen that is given to hogs. It's fitting, if you think about it. (Human-derived waste, consumed by hogs)
Hooey: Another American slang word for nonsense. (Americans have a special talent, both for dishing the stuff and describing it!) Here are some sample usages:
So there's my list -- hope it was amusing for you to read.
Can you think of other colorful words for nonsense? (Feel free to throw out words from South Asian languages, or any other languages that you know. I wanted to do my own entry on "bakwaas," but thought that might be confusing...)
The words for nonsense have been in my head lately partly because I've been teaching All About H. Hatterr, and Desani seems to use them all -- often with reference to the speeches of various fake Holy Men who show up in the novel.
So today I thought I would briefly celebrate colorful words for "nonsense," with a mini-tour.
Let's start with the thesaurus.reference.com entry for "nonsense":
absurdity, babble, balderdash, baloney, bananas, blather, bombast, BS, bull, bunk, claptrap, craziness, drivel, fatuity, flightiness, folly, foolishness, fun, gab, gas, gibberish, giddiness, gobbledygook, hogwash, hooey, hot air, imprudence, inanity, irrationality, jazz, jest, jive, joke, ludicrousness, madness, mumbo jumbo, palaver, poppycock, prattle, pretense, ranting, rashness, rot, rubbish, scrawl, scribble, senselessness, silliness, soft soap, stupidity, thoughtlessness, trash, tripe, twaddle
Let's have a closer look at some of the words in bold, shall we? We might also add words like "hocus-pocus" and "blarney," neither of which mean "nonsense," strictly speaking. They are words that describe specific kinds of rhetorical sleights-of-hand -- flattering or deceiving -- and as such they are part of Desani's universe of nonsense. Also, if we were interested in blogging, we might also add "snark," which is a new species: snotty, arch, derision.
Mumbo-Jumbo: Interesting how a number of words meaning 'nonsense' have an ethnic or non-English etymology. Mumbo-jumbo comes from West African religion, where it is the name of a God. Presumably it came into English through the slave trade. The African-American novelist Ishmael Reed played with this word in his postmodern novel Mumbo-Jumbo.
In contemporary usage, it seems to be more or less synonymous with "hocus pocus," and is often used to describe the seeming fakery of religious or quasi-religious rituals:
Mumbo-Jumbo: 2. Obscure or meaningless language or ritual; jargon intended to impress or mystify; nonsense.
1870 L. M. ALCOTT Let. 29 June in E. D. Cheney L. M. Alcott (1889) ix. 238 We..went to vespers in the old church, where we saw a good deal of mumbo-jumbo by red, purple, and yellow priests. 1930 V. SACKVILLE-WEST Edwardians vii. 328 Sebastian..swore loudly that nothing would induce him to take part in the mumbo-jumbo of the imminent Coronation. 1952 A. GRIMBLE Pattern of Islands viii. 165 The moon was above all constraint of sorcery's mumbo-jumbo. 1964 E. BAKER Fine Madness x. 97 Never mind the technical mumbo-jumbo. All we want is a simple yes or no.
Out of cultural sensitivity, one wonders if all this appropriation of "mumbo jumbo" might actually be offensive to some west Africans. I tend to think not, since the God Mumbo-Jumbo is apparently "a god, hobgoblin or boogie man." One doesn't worship these types of Gods, one fears them. (Still, I wouldn't mind knowing where exactly in West Africa Mumbo-Jumbo comes from, and what he means or meant to people there.)
Palaver: Another word with a West African origin, this word meaning straight nonsense comes from a pidgin used by traders centuries ago. It probably comes from the Portugues word "palavra" (or the Spanish: "palabra"). As it was picked up by English sailors, it became derogatory: palaver. Here's the OED:
This word appears to have been used by Portuguese traders on the west coast of Africa for conversing with the local inhabitants (cf. quot. 1735 at sense 4), to have been picked up there by English sailors (cf. quot. 1771 at sense 4), and to have passed from nautical slang into colloquial use. Cf. FETISH n.]
Hocus-Pocus: Probably derived from the Latin "Hoc est corpus," which sounds like it might be part of the Latin mass. The OED suggests that this etymology is not hard and fast:
Used as a formula of conjuring or magical incantation. (Sometimes with allusion to an assumed derivation from hoc est corpus)
1632 RANDOLPH Jealous Lov. I. x, Hocus-pocus, here you shall have me, and there you shall have me! 1656 HOBBES Lib. Necess. & Chance (1841) 384 This term of insufficient cause..is not intelligible, but a word devised like hocus pocus, to juggle a difficulty out of sight. 1772 FLETCHER Logica Genev. 201 The hocus pocus of a popish priest cannot turn bread into flesh.
Whether or not the etymology is set in stone, people have used "hocus pocus" as a figure for the specifically ecclesiastical brand of "nonsense." (In that sense, it's remarkable how close "mumbo-jumbo" and "hocus-pocus" are to one another.)
Balderdash: Interestingly, "balderdash" started as a word for a frothy liquid before it gained its present-day meaning:
Balderdash. 3. A senseless jumble of words; nonsense, trash, spoken or written.
1674 MARVELL Reh. Transp. II. 243 Did ever Divine rattle out such prophane Balderdash! 1721 AMHERST Terræ Fil. 257 Trap's second-brew'd balderdash runs thus: Pyrrhus tells you, etc. 1812 Edin. Rev. XX. 419 The balderdash which men must talk at popular meetings. 1849 MACAULAY Hist. Eng. I. 351, I am almost ashamed to quote such nauseous balderdash. 1854 THACKERAY Newcomes I. 10 To defile the ears of young boys with this wicked balderdash. 1865 CARLYLE Fredk. Gt. II. VII. v. 287 No end of florid inflated tautologic ornamental balderdash.
"Florid inflated tautologic ornamental baldersash": Wow, you can always count on Carlyle to throw down! (But why isn't he using commas correctly?)
Rigmarole: Early in All About H. Hatterr, Desani describes his own book as "rigmarole English," which has a nice, self-deprecating ring to it. The word usually refers to the nonsense associated with rambling, incoherent statements:
Rigmarole: A succession of incoherent statements; an unconnected or rambling discourse; a long-winded harangue of little meaning or importance.
1736 PEGGE Kenticisms, Rigmarole, a long story; a ‘tale of a tub’. 1757 FOOTE Author II, You are always running on with your riggmon~rowles. 1766 MRS. DELANY Life & Corr. Ser. II. I. 77 How I have run on! Burn this rig-me-role instantly, I entreat your ladyship. 1779 F. BURNEY Diary 20 Oct., That's better than a long rigmarole about nothing. 1814 SCOTT in Lockhart (1839) IV. 274 She repeated a sort of rigmarole which I suppose she had ready for such occasions. 1859 MEREDITH R. Feverel xi, You never heard such a rigmarole. 1883 Times 2 Nov. 2/3 A long rigmarole was told how the journalist's hat had fallen into the Seine.
The OED's etymology of rigmarole is quite interesting. Apparently, it is derived from "Ragman's Roll," the latter being a medieval/Renaissance game of chance. Unfortunately, I can't quite understand the game after reading their definition of "Ragman's Roll":
Ragman's Roll: 3. A game of chance, app. played with a written roll having strings attached to the various items contained in it, one of which the player selected or ‘drew’ at random.
In one form the game was a mere amusement, the items in the roll being verses descriptive of personal character: see Wright Anecd. Lit. (1844) 76-82 and Hazlitt E. Pop. Poetry (1864) I. 68. But that of quot. 1377 was probably a method of gambling, forbidden under penalty of a fine.
1377 Durham Halmote Rolls (Surtees) 140 De Thoma Breuster et Ricardo de Holm quia ludaverunt ad ragement contra p{oe}nam in diversis Halmotis positam 20s. condonatur usque 2s. 1390 GOWER Conf. III. 355 Venus, which stant..In noncertein, but as men drawe Of Rageman upon the chance.
So... it's a roll of paper with strings attached? And you pull on the strings at random? And something happens? I'm having trouble visualizing. (Anybody know what "Ragman's Roll" might look like? Or what the point of it might have been?)
Blarney: Literally means "smoothly flattering talk." But here is the rest of the OED definition:
Blarney: Name of a village near Cork. In the castle there is an inscribed stone in a position difficult of access. The popular saying is that any one who kisses this ‘Blarney stone’ will ever after have 'a cajoling tongue and the art of flattery or of telling lies with unblushing effrontery.'
Flattering nonsense is still nonsense. It is the kind of nonsense a 'guru' speaks to his 'chelas' to entice them to give him their money and attention. And it is what you see in book blurbs and letters of recommendation that praise our friends to the stars. Blarney, pure blarney. (I wonder if the prevalence of Blarney in the world bothers the folks who actually live there; it's not their fault, is it?)
Gobbledygook: More official verbiage. The OED speculates that it probably comes from the sound a Turkey makes: "gobble gobble."
Poppycock: It sounds obscene, but really it isn't. The ever-proper Virginia Woolf, as I recall, used this word all the time. Which is odd, because the OED says that the word is originally American slang (and they don't give an etymology):
1865 C. F. BROWNE A. Ward: his Travels I. iii. 35 You won't be able to find such another pack of poppycock gabblers as the present Congress of the United States. 1884 Pall Mall G. 17 July 4/1 All what you see about me bein' drunk was poppycock. 1892 Nation (N.Y.) 24 Nov. 386/1 Their wails were all what the boys call ‘poppycock’. 1924 M. KENNEDY Constant Nymph iii. 54 Sometimes, you know, you talk..poppycock. 1935 Punch 9 Jan. 30/1, I am not going to..ruin the perfect cadences of my English prose by pointing out to you in courteous and dignified language that your objections are all poppycock and my eye. 1955 Times 24 June 4/5 The peculiar capacity for pumping generals into jobs for which they were never suited continued the poppycock started by the Labour Government. 1973 Nation Rev. (Melbourne) 31 Aug. 1443/6 He was..a ‘dangerous, raving, psychotic, stupid, vicious, sickening writer of poppycock’.
I like the idea of describing the Congress of the United States as a "pack of poppycock gabblers." I also hope I one day have occasion to describe someone as a "dangerous, raving, psychotic, stupid, vicious, sickening writer of poppycock." My current worst insult is simply "troll," and that is basically a weak cliché.
Soft Soap: Means flattery (a synonym for "blarney"). Apparently "soft soap" has some vulgar connotation, though I can't quite figure out what that would be (maybe I'm too timid, or maybe I just don't want to go there). Here's the OED:
Soft soap: 2. slang. Flattery; blarney; ‘soft sawder’. Also attrib. orig.
U.S. 1830 Reg. Deb. Congress U.S. 12 Apr. 774, I will not use the vulgar phrase, and say he has been pouring soft soap down the backs of the New York delegation. 1842 People's Organ (St. Louis) 15 Apr. 2/2 The magnificent bombshell, rammed full of pride, aristocracy,..soft-soap, curiosity, folly, display, nonsense, man-worship and small-talk, was touched off. 1848 BARTLETT Dict. Amer. 320 Soft soap, flattery; blarney. A vulgar phrase, though much used. 1861 HUGHES Tom Brown at Oxford xxxiii, He and I are great chums, and a little soft soap will go a long way with him. 1901 DELANNOY £19,000, xxxix, ‘You're the most sensible woman I've ever met.’ ‘None of your soft-soap, now!’
"Soft soap" is a word Jon Stewart should use, when he's criticizing the media for its softball treatment of political figures. You can't keep on using baseball metaphors forever. Sometimes you have to go with soap.
Hogwash: You might think this word derives from water associated with the washing of hogs, but you would be wrong. According to the OED, it's the wash from a kitchen that is given to hogs. It's fitting, if you think about it. (Human-derived waste, consumed by hogs)
Hooey: Another American slang word for nonsense. (Americans have a special talent, both for dishing the stuff and describing it!) Here are some sample usages:
1924 P. MARKS Plastic Age 100 My prof's full of hooey. He doesn't know a C theme from an A one. 1931 1932 WODEHOUSE Hot Water xiii. 223 Well, of all the hooey! 1934 Discovery Jan. 4/2 The United States of America, whose capacity for new words passes all belief, is responsible for hooey. 1935 Punch 10 Apr. 400/1 You have been misled, Hubert. I see it all. Somebody has been telling you the old, old story... Hooey, Hubert. Boloney. 1935 L. MACNEICE Poems 21 Ireland is hooey, Ireland is A gallery of fake tapestries. 1948 V. PALMER Golconda xxv. 210 All this political hooey..doesn't affect me. 1966 AUDEN About House 21 Lip-smacking Imps of mawk and hooey Write with us what they will.
So there's my list -- hope it was amusing for you to read.
Can you think of other colorful words for nonsense? (Feel free to throw out words from South Asian languages, or any other languages that you know. I wanted to do my own entry on "bakwaas," but thought that might be confusing...)
Happy Birthday Google; Everybody Hates Chris
Google turns seven today. Wow, only seven?
I am almost unbelievably dependent on Google. Virtually every post I write on this blog rests upon Google searches. Google also bought Blogger some time ago, so even the fundamental technology I use to write depends on them. I also use their other services, including Google Maps and Gmail, all the time. If you could implant a Google search machine as a chip in your arm, I would probably go out and have it done -- text ads and all -- because it would be damn convenient.
As part of its anniversary celebration, Google Video is streaming the first episode of Everybody Hates Chris, for free for the next four days.
I'm not sure how Chris Rock is supposed to fit the Google birthday, but anyway, Everybody Hates Chris a good show: both funny and serious at the same time -- "black comedy" in more ways than one. Though Chris Rock is only in the show as a voice-over (the show is about his life in Brooklyn as a boy), it somehow feels a lot like the adult version of Chris Rock -- angry, but often brilliantly insightful about the foibles of life on both sides of Ocean Parkway.
I am almost unbelievably dependent on Google. Virtually every post I write on this blog rests upon Google searches. Google also bought Blogger some time ago, so even the fundamental technology I use to write depends on them. I also use their other services, including Google Maps and Gmail, all the time. If you could implant a Google search machine as a chip in your arm, I would probably go out and have it done -- text ads and all -- because it would be damn convenient.
As part of its anniversary celebration, Google Video is streaming the first episode of Everybody Hates Chris, for free for the next four days.
I'm not sure how Chris Rock is supposed to fit the Google birthday, but anyway, Everybody Hates Chris a good show: both funny and serious at the same time -- "black comedy" in more ways than one. Though Chris Rock is only in the show as a voice-over (the show is about his life in Brooklyn as a boy), it somehow feels a lot like the adult version of Chris Rock -- angry, but often brilliantly insightful about the foibles of life on both sides of Ocean Parkway.
Book Candy: Vikas Swarup, Q&A
I recently read Vikas Swarup's Q & A, which was just released in the U.S. this past summer (it was released in India a bit earlier). The novel has generally been pretty well-reviewed, and seems to be selling well, if the Amazon ranking tells us anything.
Swarup's novel has an ingenious (bordering on gimmicky) frame. It's a picaresque Bombay novel about a poor teenager who wins a fantastic sum at a television game-show (the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?). It's such a fantastic sum that he's immediately arrested on suspicion of cheating; the novel unfolds as he explains how he came upon the answer to each trivia question through a life experience that was precisely salient to the particular trivia question he was asked.
The best passages from the novel are full of details and observations from everyday life. One example might be the following passage about riding trains:
I like how Swarup starts with a generalization about the experience of traveling by train, and ends with details that are unique to Ram's particular problems (and hopes, including a girl in a blue salwar kameez in his cabin in the train). Unfortunately, there aren't many passages in this vein (and even this paragraph isn't great).
Q&A is strong on energy and its funny, moving stories; I really enjoyed the Australian diplomat episode and the unlicensed Taj Mahal tour-operator chapter near the end of the novel. But the novel also has some episodes that border on the incredible, including a somewhat distasteful sequence with a closeted gay Bollywood actor and a truly far-fetched episode involving voodoo. All in all, it's more like "book candy" than literature; goes down easy, but will be quickly forgotten.
I wish Swarup the best of luck -- I have a feeling this book will succeed in the U.S. -- but I can't strongly recommend Q&A.
Other reviews:
Ron Charles at the Washington Post generally gives Swarup the benefit of the doubt, while making some gentle criticisms: "There are enough horrors here to drain a million liberals' bleeding hearts, but Ram never suggests the solution will come from a different political arrangement, more equitable distribution of wealth or social revolution." True, but the absence of a political critique was the least of my concerns in this novel.
Patrix also reviews it, and gives it a lukewarm, "lazy Sunday afternoon" approval.
Lisa Yanaky, at the improbably titled Book Brothel, gives Q&A a 9/10 rating. She ends her review with this: "[Swarup] doesn't have the same writing prowess as authors like Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy, but he still captures all of the things I love about Indian literature."
As half-concessions go, Yanaky's is straightforward enough. But it makes me wonder: what are American readers of Indian literature looking for?
Swarup's novel has an ingenious (bordering on gimmicky) frame. It's a picaresque Bombay novel about a poor teenager who wins a fantastic sum at a television game-show (the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?). It's such a fantastic sum that he's immediately arrested on suspicion of cheating; the novel unfolds as he explains how he came upon the answer to each trivia question through a life experience that was precisely salient to the particular trivia question he was asked.
The best passages from the novel are full of details and observations from everyday life. One example might be the following passage about riding trains:
Train journeys are about possibilities. They denote a change in state. When you arrive, you are no longer the same person who departed. You can make new friends en route, or find old enemies; you may get diarrhea contaminated water. And, dare I say it, you might even discover love. As I sat in lower berth number three of coach S6 of train 2926A, with fifty thousand rupees tucked inside my underwear, the tantalizing possibility that tickled my senses and thrilled my heart was that I might, just might, be about to fall in love with a beautiful traveler in a blue salwar kameez.
I like how Swarup starts with a generalization about the experience of traveling by train, and ends with details that are unique to Ram's particular problems (and hopes, including a girl in a blue salwar kameez in his cabin in the train). Unfortunately, there aren't many passages in this vein (and even this paragraph isn't great).
Q&A is strong on energy and its funny, moving stories; I really enjoyed the Australian diplomat episode and the unlicensed Taj Mahal tour-operator chapter near the end of the novel. But the novel also has some episodes that border on the incredible, including a somewhat distasteful sequence with a closeted gay Bollywood actor and a truly far-fetched episode involving voodoo. All in all, it's more like "book candy" than literature; goes down easy, but will be quickly forgotten.
I wish Swarup the best of luck -- I have a feeling this book will succeed in the U.S. -- but I can't strongly recommend Q&A.
Other reviews:
Ron Charles at the Washington Post generally gives Swarup the benefit of the doubt, while making some gentle criticisms: "There are enough horrors here to drain a million liberals' bleeding hearts, but Ram never suggests the solution will come from a different political arrangement, more equitable distribution of wealth or social revolution." True, but the absence of a political critique was the least of my concerns in this novel.
Patrix also reviews it, and gives it a lukewarm, "lazy Sunday afternoon" approval.
Lisa Yanaky, at the improbably titled Book Brothel, gives Q&A a 9/10 rating. She ends her review with this: "[Swarup] doesn't have the same writing prowess as authors like Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy, but he still captures all of the things I love about Indian literature."
As half-concessions go, Yanaky's is straightforward enough. But it makes me wonder: what are American readers of Indian literature looking for?
False Promises and Quackery (What else is new?)
President Abdul Kalam is promising an HIV/AIDS vaccine in India in the next three years:
I hate empty promises like this one. If it were really possible to guarantee that, why aren't any researchers in the field saying so? As far as I know, there is no effective HIV/AIDS vaccine. Any vaccines that are being tested are being tested because it isn't known whether they work. It's really counterproductive to presume that a trial in progress is going to have a positive result.
In general, I'm not so terribly excited about Abdul Kalam. He may have been a good rocket scientist and engineer in his day, but a lot of what he comes up with these days regarding the status of science and technology in India is pretty nutty. When do we get a new Indian President?
Secondly, I'm really not thrilled about the idea that Indian medical schools are going to be incorporating homeopathic medicine into the M.B.B.S. curriculum in the next few years.
I know lots of people subscribe to things like Ayurveda, but it always makes me cringe when people talk about treating cancer with random concoctions, scented candles, and prayer. If folks want to do Ayurveda, fine. There is something to the placebo effect (if you actually believe it). But when the doctors themselves don't know the difference, their patients are really in trouble.
Fortunately, many in the medical community in India are criticizing the proposal.
Anti-HIV/AIDS vaccine will be available in the country within the next three years and its clinical trial is on, President A P J Abdul Kalam said on Friday. "Hopefully in three years, it will be available in the market," he told a conclave on 'HIV/AIDS: A uniformed intervention', organised by Assam Rifles Wives Welfare Association.
I hate empty promises like this one. If it were really possible to guarantee that, why aren't any researchers in the field saying so? As far as I know, there is no effective HIV/AIDS vaccine. Any vaccines that are being tested are being tested because it isn't known whether they work. It's really counterproductive to presume that a trial in progress is going to have a positive result.
In general, I'm not so terribly excited about Abdul Kalam. He may have been a good rocket scientist and engineer in his day, but a lot of what he comes up with these days regarding the status of science and technology in India is pretty nutty. When do we get a new Indian President?
Secondly, I'm really not thrilled about the idea that Indian medical schools are going to be incorporating homeopathic medicine into the M.B.B.S. curriculum in the next few years.
I know lots of people subscribe to things like Ayurveda, but it always makes me cringe when people talk about treating cancer with random concoctions, scented candles, and prayer. If folks want to do Ayurveda, fine. There is something to the placebo effect (if you actually believe it). But when the doctors themselves don't know the difference, their patients are really in trouble.
Fortunately, many in the medical community in India are criticizing the proposal.
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:
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:
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:
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]
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:
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.
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 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.
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:
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:
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:
'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:
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 sopompous 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.
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
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.
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:
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:
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
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
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