Three Naive Statements About "The Snow Man"

In honor of the snow, end of the semester office hours, and the endless winter of the mind, here are some very brief observations on Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man." These are naive responses, because, well, it's a blog. And of course, the many intimidatingly good close readings of this poem (several of which are excerpted at UIUC) threaten to leave one with nothing of one's own to say. The trick is to write first (naively), then compare notes with the published critics.

The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

1. Verbs: For a poem that is essentially about standing still, there are quite a number of active verbs, suggesting a play between activity and passivity. Through his verbs, Stevens makes the visual and aural perception of nature (which might well be understood as passive) into a highly intentional act. The poem opens with the observer in the snow, taking in the sharp visuals of a snowy winter day. But there is a shift after the semi-colon in the third stanza (the poem’s grammatical and conceptual hinge), first towards the land, and then back to the speaker. The last stanza has two verbs, one associated with sound (“listens in the snow”), and the second with sight (“beholds”), even as it negates (twice) the object on view (“nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”).

2. Nature described: There are parallels running throughout the poem in the descriptions of nature, which are first positive if remote (“crusted with snow”; “shagged with ice”), and then associative and negative (“sound of the wind”; “sound of a few leaves”; “sound of the land”; “same wind”; “same place”). The “sound of…” and “same…” phrases in the third and fourth stanzas are all in some sense echoes or reverberations of events that are never directly described in the poem. They are like pronouns without an antecedent, and they are all versions of one another (the “sound of the land” must logically also be the sound of the wind, since nothing else in nature on a still winter day would make noise).

3. Human mood/being/nothingness: As is relatively common in some of Stevens’ more famous poems, there is a play in “The Snow Man” between a feeling human consciousness (who experiences winter as “misery”), and a purely abstract perceiving entity that is utterly free of any emotional distortion (i.e., that sees "nothing that is not there"). The perceiving self and nature in its bareness and remoteness reflect each other directly: both as stillness and “nothingness.”

There is a grammatical trick of the poem in its double-negatives, and a conceptual trick involving a doubling of the observer (especially in the second half of the poem). One must have a “mind of winter . . . not to think/ of any misery . . . in the sound” of the snow and the nothingness of winter. The poem has so many subordinate clauses that it’s a little unclear whether listener in the last stanza is the same as the observer who first appears in the first. But of course they are – they must be – one and the same “snow man.” (Incidentally, it makes little sense to me to read the "snow man" in the poem as literally a snow man made of three big balls of snow. The snow man is a sentient being cogitating on the snow. I read the title of the poem as a comment on the human imaginative tendency to anthropomorphism, our tendency to populate the nothingness of winter with crude sculptural images of ourselves.)

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Those are the naive statements. As mentioned above, UIUC has excerpts from about a dozen relevant critical takes on "The Snow Man," many of which cover similar ground. Check them out; I was impressed by Anthony Whiting and Kenneth Lincoln. The opening of the Lincoln excerpt is especially sharp and compelling:

"The Snow Man" is one long sentence in five oddly rhymed tercets, crystallized as verse. Like Frost's image of ice melting on a stove, the poem reveals itself as it slides along, warmed dangerously by human touch. The lesson is clear: leave a snow man alone, and it exists for itself, unchanged; touch the snow, and the artifice goes away, as it goes along. An object measures differently in motion than at rest, variously cold and hot: watch it disappear. Instead of the expected iambic opening ("I placed a jar"), the poem begins impersonally, with a tentative trochee, almost spondaic, "One must have a mind of winter." Right away, reverse field, the poem catches us in metric crux ("the trochee's heave," Pound said). A leveling cold serves to brace entry and numb stresses into anapests, even spondaic trochees: "and the boughs / Of the pine-trees crusted with snow."

And it just goes from there, all good.

[Cross-posted at The Valve]

Lehigh in the Snow

Yes, I did too make it into work this morning. I'm glad I did; the first decent snow of the year is always a spectacle.

A larger size version of the above is on Flickr.

Anjali Gupta vs. Indian Air Force

Don't even think about claiming sexual harassment if you're a woman in the Indian Air Force. First, your charges will be dismissed. Then, you'll be put in jail, "for your own protection." And finally, you'll be court-martialled on trivial charges, and convicted by a jury that, to add insult to injury, includes two senior women officers (one of whom is Air Marshal Padmavati Bandyopadhyay, the highest-ranking female officer in the Indian military).

Here's the back-story from Mumbai's Mid-Day:

“She refused to play ball with senior officers who wanted her to ‘co-operate’ with them in various ways including participating in collecting bribes for recruitment of cooks and others. (Apparently the going rate for a cook in the force is Rs two lakh),” he reveals.

Jitender claims Gupta was forever being harassed for illegal favours. “The more she refused to join them at parties in the night, the more she was harassed.

In fact, Anjali had earlier complained to her seniors about the drunken behavior of Sq Ldr Choudhary who was even issued a Form10 by the IAF.

Every time she complained to higher authorities about malpractices in her department, she would be moved to another department. She was moved around 6-7 times in the last one year,” he states.(Mid-Day)

And here's today's news:

An Indian Air Force court martial has recommended that Flying Officer Anjali Gupta be cashiered from service. Gupta and her family contend that she is being framed because she brought charges of sexual harassment against superior officers and because she blew the whistle on corrupt deals.

In armed forces’ parlance, “cashiering” is a more severe punishment than “dismissal”. A cashiered officer is denied the privileges of rank and post-service benefits. The five-member jury’s proposal in the court martial headed by Group Captain Ganesh in Bangalore has to be confirmed by Air Chief Marshal S.P. Tyagi.

The court martial has found Gupta guilty of five of seven charges brought against her. She was charged on five counts of financial embezzlement (amounting to Rs 1,080), insubordination, indiscipline, irregularity and conduct unbecoming of an officer. (Calcutta Telegraph)

Oh no, she embezzled 1080 Rupees! (approx. US $25). And let's see, insubordination (because she says her superior officers were hitting on her?) and indiscipline (because she refused to go along?).

If the Air Force can explain why they found her sexual harassment charges to be false, they really need to do so ASAP. Otherwise, this case case stinks to the high heavens.

Sami Al-Arian: quick thoughts

Sometimes it seems there are an awful lot of "terrorists" but not a lot of convictions. Sami Al-Arian and his co-defendants join the ranks of the acquitted.

The basics of the case are these:

The trial, lasting more than five months, hinged on the question of whether Mr. Arian's years of work in the Tampa area in support of Palestinian independence crossed the threshold from protected free speech and political advocacy to illegal support for terrorists.

Prosecutors, who had been building a case against Mr. Arian for 10 years, relied on some 20,000 hours of taped conversations culled from wiretaps on Mr. Arian and his associates. Officials said he had helped finance and direct terrorist attacks in Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while using his faculty position teaching computer engineering at the University of South Florida as a cover for his terrorist activities.

20,000 hours of conversations -- and not a single guilty verdict! It seems that the guy is not a terrorist.

The Times has also made the text of the indictment available (PDF), and I've been reading through it. The government makes many specific accusations against Al-Arian and his colleagues, but the broadest one is that he was the U.S. head of an organization called Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), which engaged in a conspiracy to support people committing acts of terrorism.

Over the course of the indictment, the government describes its version of what the PIJ was doing between 1991 and 2002. Interestingly, the longest indictment by far is a charge of conspiracy to commit racketeering, not terrorism. This charge mostly reads like committee meeting minutes for what could be any small activist group, punctuated occasionally by references to suicide bombers overseas (notably: no specific references to any direct involvement in a bombing). And Counts 5-44 are "Travel in Interstate or Foreign Commerce or Use of the Mail in Any Facility in Foreign Commerce." The actual "material support for terrorism" indictments are relatively brief, though the government does claim significant evidence in each case.

For the government's case to fall through with this much evidence, there really must be substantial doubt about their basic version of what the PIJ was doing, who it was associated with, and when. Are they making it up?

Read it and see. Perhaps it all is, as Al-Arian's defense lawyer has said, "a work of fiction." But the indictment is specific enough to seem more than plausible to me.

The next question is, will he be deported? Will he try to get his job at the University of South Florida back?

"Whitelists" and "Snail-Mail": Analogical Formations

Didn't William Safire retire? Oh well, I guess not: his latest piece at the New York Times Magazine delves into a class of words referred to by linguists as analogical formations. These are terms, generally involved with technology, that come into being as a logical necessity after a given term in widespread usage demands an opposite term. For example, once the word "blacklist" became a relatively common way of describing a function to stop unwanted emails or software applications, the word "whitelist" was coined to describe senders or applications that are, if you will, pre-approved.

Other examples he gives:

underwhelming
software (the word "hardware" came first)
hotfix
copyleft
blamestorming
multislacking (from "multitasking")
rightsizing (management)
dumbsizing (labor)

I might add "snail-mail" for conventional mail, which only became commonplace after email became the standard method of written communication.

Another rather crude analogical formation is "meatspace," which refers to the flesh-and-blood world, as opposed to "cyberspace." It was coined after "cyberspace" became a widespread term. I should add that while I've never actually heard "meatspace" spoken aloud, Google turns up 326,000 hits for it, so I gather it has started to stick.

Like snow... Or egg?

Any other analogical formations you can think of?

Upcoming Conference: Secularism in South Asian Literature

This year I am co-chairing the South Asian Literary Association's annual conference with Anuradha Dingwaney-Needham, of Oberlin College. The topic is "Secularism in South Asian Literature: Possibilities and Limits." I was invited to co-chair in large part because the topic directly coincides with my research interests. SALA picked the basic topic, and invited the two of us on board. Anuradha and I wrote up a call for papers, selected from among the many proposals that came in, raised funds to support the conference (thank you, Lehigh!), and produced the following schedule.

SALA is the main academic group for the study of South Asian literature in the U.S. It has been around for a decade, and has about 80 members. This year's conference will be held in Washington, DC, in parallel with the annual convention of the Modern Language Association. The tone of the conference tends to be somewhat informal compared to the MLA, and the emphasis is on young scholars. Quite a number of grad students (who might have a hard time getting their papers accepted by MLA) give talks at SALA.

If you're going to be in DC at the end of December and have an interest in attending, contact me via the email address on the sidebar to get some further information. Also contact me if you're interested in becoming a member of SALA more generally (membership is inexpensive, and comes, I believe, with subscrption to the organization's journal, the South Asian Review).

Below is the schedule for the conference. Any comments or questions are welcome; needless to say, I'm pretty proud of the diversity of topics and authors on our schedule!

Monday December 26

Session 1: 5:00-6:30

1A. Secularism and Fiction I

a. Saiyeda Khatun, Johnson and Wales University, “The Humanist Agenda in Shaukat Osman’s Janani.”
b. Rajender Kaur, Rhode Island College, “Beyond ‘Aitch(Indus)es and Em(uslims)’ to I-Thou: Interrogating Secularism in Mariam Karim’s My Little Boat and Gita Hariharan’s In Times of Siege.”
c. Nyla Khan, University of Nebraska at Kearney, “Nationalism vs. Universalism: Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines.”
d. John Hawley, Santa Clara University, “Tariq Ali’s Islam Quintet and the Role of the Secular in Islam.”

IB. Secularism in Bollywood and Contemporary ‘Art’ Cinema

a. Kerry Luck and Bonnie Zare, University of Wyoming, “Secular Isn’t Sexy: The Promotion of Pan-Hinduism in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.”
b. Prabhjot Parmar, University of Western Ontario, “Dharamputra and Gadar: Two Outposts of Secularism in Hindi Cinema.”
c. Blair Orfall, University of Oregon, “Secularism via the Hollywood/Bollywood Adaptation.”
d. Parvinder Mehta, Wayne State University, “Viewing the (Secular) Other: Interstitial Spaces and Liminal Hybridities in Mr. and Mrs. Iyer.”

Tuesday, December 27
9:00-10:30: Session 2

2A. Secularism and Fiction II

a. Cara Cilano, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, “The Fissures of Pakistan: Bangladesh as/and Secularity in Recent Pakistani Fiction.”
b. Kamal Verma, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, “Intersections of Marxism, Humanism, Secularism, and Indian Thought in ‘An Apology for Heroism.’”
c. Brewster E. Fitz, Oklahoma State University, “R.K. Narayan’s ‘The Gateman’s Gift’ and ‘Such Perfection’: Ironic Allegories of the Secular and the Religious in Cultural and Political Institutions.”

2B. Secularism and/from the Position of the Minority

a. Rochelle Almeida, New York University, “Secularism and Contemporary Art: M.F. Husain and his Mother Teresa Series.”
b. Revathi Krishnaswamy, San Jose State University, “Secularism and the Shifting Category of Caste.”
c. Robert McNamara, Loyola University of Chicago, “Racial Minorities and Secular Modernities.”
d. Anushiya Sivanarayanan, Southern Illinois University, “Hindutva and Tamil Literature.”

10:45-12:15 Session 3

3A Gender and Secularism: Alternative Politics

a. Rashmi Bhatnagar, Boise State University, “Meera’s Poetics as an Instance of Secularism in South Asia.”
b. Nandini Dhar, University of Oregon, “The ‘Sacred’ and the ‘Secular’: Gender and Resistance in Rashsundari Devi’s Amar Jiban.”
c. Kellie Holzer, University of Washington, “Producing the Grhalakshmi: Religious Nationalism and Colonial Modernity.”
d. Kanika Batra, Loyola University of Chicago, “Redefining Secularism: A People’s Theatre from New Delhi in Alliance with the Women’s Movement.”

3B. Postcolonial Secularism and Diaspora I

a. Summer Pervez, University of Ottawa, “‘Deleuzian Secularism in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album.”
b. Prathim Anandan, Wolfson College, Oxford University, U.K, “REMIX! Negotiating Assimilation, Identity, Secularism and Otherness the Second Time Around: the Subculture of Desi Music.”
c. Moumin Quazi, Lamar University, “Teaching Diaspora Literature in a Non-Secular Setting.”


1:30-3:00: Session 4

4A Partition Violence and Contemporary Communalism

a. Karni Bhati, Furman University, “Woman, Quam, Nation in Qurratulain Hyder’s Fiction.”
b. Maya Sharma, Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College/CUNY, “Losing a Village to Make a Nation in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers.”
c. Sangeeta Ray, University of Maryland, “Rage, Riots, and Religion: Witnessing Films and Films as Witness.”

4B. Postcolonial Secularism and Diaspora II

a. Hema Chari, California State University, “Believers/Skeptics/Fundamentalists, and the Limits of Secularism.”
b. Bed Giri, Dartmouth College, “Religious Absolutism and Secularist Polemic in Rushdie, Kureishi, and Smith.”
c. Manav Ratti, Linacre College, Oxford University, U.K, “Holy Trinities, Satanic Verses: the Postcolonial, the Postmodern, and the Post-Secular.”

3:30-4:30: Keynote Speaker: Suvir Kaul, Professor of English and South Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania, “The Secular Imagination.”

Incidentally, I posted information on last year's conference here.

Quadrilaterals

Amy Waldman is doing a series of articles in the New York Times on India's rapidly growing superhighway system, the "golden quadrilaterial." The first one alone packs quite a punch; Waldman is a practiced observer of India, and is able to give a balanced and realistic picture.

There are some great touches here, including the (predictable) Indian bureaucrat bemoaning the hurdles to progress posed by "Democracy," the Korean engineer who's taught his Indian cook to make Kimchee, as well as the women hired by the highway project, who carry wet cement on their heads from the mixer to the road. All in all Waldman makes a compelling case that the project is "going to change the face of India," while also acknowledging that it produces as many problems as it solves. (Though in the end, there can be no question that the highway is needed)

In terms of the writing, my favorite bit comes near the end:

The face of West Bengal, home to 28 years of Communist rule and acres of green rice paddies, was already changing. Three satellite townships were being built near the town of Bardwan, which would be only an hour from Calcutta when the new highway was complete. Residents would commute, as they did from suburbs across America.

If the highway was enabling the middle class to migrate out of cities, it was also encouraging the poor to migrate in. Beneath a crosshatch of elevated highways on the edge of Calcutta, thousands of rural Indians had burrowed in, constructing homes, creating businesses. Dung patties dried on the highway's underpinnings. Yellow taxis sat in rows. A whole civilization within, or beneath, a civilization, had hatched.

Dal bubbled over a wood fire in the single room, constructed from wood and jute bags, that eight men shared. Bal Dev Rai, a 40-year-old from the state of Jharkhand, had called the room home for five years. He drove a bicycle handcart, sending money to his wife and daughters, returning to his village at harvest time. For him and his fellow bottom-dwellers, the improved highway meant a nicer roof over their heads.

Read the whole article (and look at the multimedia feature), here.

Update: Part 2 of the series -- on the booming Indian auto industry -- is here. Interesting tidbit: 800,000 personal automobiles were sold in India in 2004, with the number for 2005 expected to cross 1 million. At that rate of growth, and given that Waldman states that there are 23 million autos on the roads currently in India, the number of cars jamming Indian highways and city streets will double in the next 10 years!

Update 2: Part 3 of the series here; Part 4 of the series here.

Streaming Poetry @ The Poetry Archive

The Poetry Archive is fully operational, with a pretty extensive collection of audio files from 80 poets, present and past. (Andrew Motion introduces the project in the Times of London, here.) If you've never heard Yeats or Tennyson reading in their own voices (on wax cylinder recordings), now you can for free. Each of the contemporary poets has some free streaming audio files available, but you can buy CDs of the contemporary people doing more of their poems.

In terms of Indian poets, Sujata Bhatt has three poems available. I'm not a huge fan of Sujata Bhatt's work on the whole, though I do find the following lines from "A Different History" provoking:

Which language
has not been the oppressor's tongue?
Which language
truly meant to murder someone?
And how does it happen
that after the torture
after the soul has been cropped out
of the conqueror's face--
the unborn grandchildren
grow to love that strange language?

I like the drift of these lines, though I find the way it ends a shade too obvious.

I prefer the Brit-Iranian poet Mimi Khalvati. Listen to her "Ghazal" -- very clever!

Or try the Jamaican Jean 'Binta' Breeze. Even within the three poems online she uses different dialects and voices. "Could it be?" is in standard English, while "The Arrival of Brighteye" is in Jamaican Patois. With Breeze's poetry especially, you get something out of hearing her do it that you simply wouldn't get on the page.

[Thanks for the tip, Ed]

Meltdowns in the BJP and Shiv Sena. A Trend?

First, Vajpayee retired. Then L.K. Advani got himself in hot water over his comments on Jinnah, and will probably be out by the end of the year. Before he goes, however, he's made sure to get Uma Bharti out of it, and that seems to have stuck. Bharti, I understand, is going to form her own regional party in Madhya Pradesh. Also look for her to do a Ayodhya-bound "Ram-Roti Yatra."

On the Shiv Sena side, the meltdown is even more extensive. Most recently, Raj Thackeray quit the party, and openly questioned his brother Uddhav's leadership. Before that, it was Narayan Rane. What exactly Raj's defection means, and where he will go is still a matter of some speculation (he will probably not go to the Congress). DNA Mumbai speculates as follows:

No more can Narayan Rane be sure of disgruntled Shiv Sena leaders making a beeline for his camp. The Sena corporators, MPs and MLAs, who had been keen on joining Rane, now have an option - a Raj-sponsored Sena.

The possibility of Raj Thackeray floating a separate organisation may put the brakes on the exodus of disgruntled Sainiks looking for an alternative political platform to Rane's Congress.

A senior official in the Congress said, "The vertical split in the Shiv Sena will upset the horizontal growth of Rane." Majority of the leaders, pushed into a corner by Uddhav, had sought refuge with Raj. Rane wanted to tap such elements, which felt slighted or isolated in the Uddhav sena.

Horizontal? Vertical? Kya, kya? I'm not sure what they're talking about. Anyone have a guess?

All the troubles in the BJP and Shiv Sena parties may suggest the end of an era -- both parties are struggling to find new momentum for their respective agendas. Are they finished? Probably not: we said the same thing about the Congress Party in the spring of 2004, when the NDA government looked unbeatable. There was considerable infighting there too, along with many questions about who could really lead the party into the next era (the Sonia-Manmohan solution deftly solved all the political problems presented by Sonia Gandhi's leadership of the party). Whether or not we will see another Babri Masjid type event, it seems hard for me to imagine that the era of Hindutva is really behind us.

Nothing lasts forever, so it's dangerous to gloat in politics (as in everything else in life). As soon as Congress hits a rough patch (or the Communists finally quit in frustration), will the Sangh Parivar be back at the center? Or are we headed towards a future of even more localized politics, held together by some vaguely centrist, currently nonexistent party?

Eric Doeringer In the Voice: Bootlegging it in Chelsea

The artist Eric Doeringer is in the Village Voice this week after getting busted by the cops for selling his art without a license in Chelsea, something he'd been doing for four years without incident. Doeringer's version of the event is here.

Doeringer sells bootleg paintings, partly as a way of subverting the commodification of the art-object, and partly because it's just a very good idea: art aficionados might well buy a $100 bootleg version of a Damien Hirst painting of colored dots that they like. The bootlegs invoke the original, but they aren't cheap, mass-produced prints of the paintings they copy. You (the middle-class art consumer) get the "aura" of the original work of art without the price-tag. The only flaw is that your art is an Eric Doeringer copy of a Damien Hirst painting -- but it's only a flaw while Doeringer's name is of lesser value than Hirst's.

One might also add that Doeringer's art flagrantly flouts American Intellectual Property law. What Doeringer does is a little like what Negativland did with U2, or what the Phantom Edit Fan Network did with Jar Jar Binks, and what innumerable hip hop remix artists have been doing with sampling years on their laptops. Except, of course, that Doeringer has been able to get away with it thus far: I gather he hasn't had any trouble with the painters whose art he's bootlegged, though I suspect they would be within their rights to claim that he's infringing on their intellectual property when he sells his bootlegs.

I should also mention that I went to high school with Eric Doeringer. He's obviously going to be famous some day, so you might want to buy one of his bootlegs now.

Quirky American Art Films and Terrible Bollywood Comedies

We recently signed up for cable in our new apartment, and as one of the incentives, the cable company threw in a bunch of movie channels, including IFC and Sundance. I'm not exactly sure how long we have them, so I'm watching a fair bit: it's a good way to catch up on foreign and art movies that might seem like dubious rentals at the video store.

The Journey (1997). I'm not sure how I missed this little indie film with Roshan Seth and Saeed Jaffrey the first time around. It's in the intergenerational acculturation mini-genre that also includes classics like Bend it like Beckham as well some lesser-known/ low budget movies (i.e., Chutney Popcorn). Here, an ABCD and his caucasian wife have to come to terms with a father living in India (Roshan Seth) who comes to stay with them in their suburban home in Pittsburgh. What distinguishes this film from movies like ABCD or American Chai is that it isn't a coming-of-age film (i.e., who should I marry? what should I do with my life?). If anything The Journey is a dysfunctional family/can't we all get along drama with lots of intelligent insights on the cultural divide. The greatest strenght of the film is the script, but the major flaw is the weak acting on the part of the U.S. based actors.

A Tout de Suite (2004). After leaving grad school, my intake of European art films really declined, which is too bad, because there are a lot of interesting films being made. A Tout de Suite ("Right Away") is a little bit of a throwback to Godard, but it does some interesting things with multiculturalism and social class in contemporary France. I could have done with a little less of melancholy heroine staring off into space, but the heist/ getaway part of the plot keeps you engaged.

The Last Waltz (1978). This Martin Scorcese film of the last concert of the band known as The Band was re-released in theaters last year, with color correction and audio re-mastering. I never saw the original, but clearly the updated version is a damn good rock band documentary. The songs with Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, and of course Bob Dylan are among the best, but I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing.

The Red Violin (1998). If you get past the cheesy and far-fetched premise, this is actually a beautifully shot art film with nice music. I'm not too surprised that I liked it, because the same director, Francois Girard, also did 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, which, if you haven't seen it, you must (immediately).

The Celluloid Closet (1995). I kept thinking of ethnic minorities in Hollywood as I was watching this breakthrough documentary about gay and lesbian themes in the movies over the weekend. (How did I get away with never having seen it earlier?) Several of the showbiz people interviewed for the film talked about how minority viewers watch films differently from mainstream viewers: we look for representations of ourselves, focusing in sometimes on the bit parts or throwaway moments that others might not notice. For gay viewers, it might be Mrs. Danvers' strange obsession with her former mistress' wardrobe (in Rebecca), or a certain look that William Boyt gives Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur. For South Asians, it's the convenience store owner in Barbershop (or most recently, in Syriana, where according to Manish, South Asian workers in the Persian Gulf play significantly more than a bit part).

One important difference between an ethnic/immigrant audience and other minority groups is that most immigrants have had direct access to other filmic traditions, which weren't as saturated with stereotypical roles and bad accents as the American film industry has been. One isn't as bothered by Sabu as one might be because there is a vast repertoire of more honest images of India available from the same era. Whereas there really aren't positive or "out" representations of gay characters avaiable at all (anywhere?) until the 1990s.

Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005). Forgive the grammatical mistake(s) in the title of the film, and see the happily Quirky art film beneath. Think Todd Solondz (except less nihilistic), and maybe also shades of recent John Waters (Pecker) and Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World). The best part might be the satire of the pretentiousness of the "art world" (which virtually assures that pretentious artist types will love it).

Garam Masala (2005). We saw this at an actual movie theater, and oh, how I wish we'd just seen Harry Potter instead.

For starters, this is about the most flagrantly misogynistic film I've seen this year, in any language. The premise is, Akshay Kumar is engaged to one woman, but decides he needs to have affairs with three other women -- all flight attendants -- at once. Akshay Kumar is sometimes funny as the harried polygamist, but much of the humor in this film is predicated on the audience having no respect for women whatsoever. Why does he want to date three women at once while being engaged to a fourth? What on earth is he looking for? The film seems to suggest that playing this game would be something that every guy would naturally want to do, just to show that he can.

Something similar is afoot in the recent hit comedy, Shaadi No. 1, another "Cheating Mangetar" (fiancé) group comedy (this seems to be almost a mini-genre all of a sudden; I wonder what that's about?). Shaadi No. 1 might be excused because it is, well, pretty shoddy. (Sorry for the bad pun) But clearly the filmmakers and writers put a lot of time and thought into Garam Masala, which aims to go beyond the disposable teen sex-comedy realm of Shaadi No. 1 and last year's trashy Masti. The ugliness of Garam Masala is all the more palpable and offensive because it is, technically, a better film.

* * * * *
Oh, and I just wanted to note: I didn't watch all of these this past weekend! I've been watching the films mentioned above over the past month, in between moving, teaching, house-hunting, etc.

Technical Difficulties, and How They Were Resolved

Recently I've been having some technical difficulties here. For periods of time, I can't post anything, and comments get frozen. (So if you've posted a comment recently only to find that it doesn't show up for two days, thank you for your patience. And sorry for the delay.)

My wife S., a software engineer, just helped me solve it. Interestingly, it is a problem with my university's file server system, not with Blogger. (Blogger, I forgive you and I'm sorry I thought you were buggy)

Here are the details, for the techies in the room (and for myself, as a reference in case I have to deal with the problem again):

First, a description of the problem. When I try to post, Blogger gives me an error that looks like this:

450 Cannot open or remove a file containing a running program archive_11_01_2005.html

The file mentioned by the error is usually an archive file, but sometimes I also get the main "blog.html" file for the front-page of the blog. Clearly, since HTML files aren't exactly executable programs, what must be happening is the archive file is stuck in the middle of some kind of process, and that freeze is affecting all of the other processes Blogger needs to perform to put up a new post or publish a comment.

As I learned from attempting to erase the same file in a DOS FTP client, the file is actually an error generated by the university's server, and is only relayed by Blogger. While this error is happening -- which lately, has been most of the time -- I can't make updates or changes to my blog Template or blogroll (hence my very stagnant blogroll). Also, new posting may or may not work. And comments may or may not work.

Second, Google it. S. did a search for "Cannot open or remove a file containing a running program" at posting.google.com. From the results, it looks like it is an error that is unique to AIX Unix servers -- some kind of file corruption problem. The techies seem to indicate that the only way to solve the problem is to delete the file.

Third, go to Unix. S. taught me a couple of Unix commands I hadn't known. One is the command to see what processes are currently running on your server ("ps -aef lgrep [userid]"). When you run this, you see lots of activity, including recent attempts to post as well as FTP demands that are clearly people attempting to comment over the past couple of days.

Then, you can kill any stuck processes with a simple "kil -9 [process number]" command.

But actually, while it is hella cool to know how do this, it doesn't solve my particular problem. What solved it finally was simply renaming the problem filename ("mv [filename] [new filename]").

As soon as we did that, 11 halted comments from yesterday's appeared instantly, as did the post I had written earlier this morning.

(Incidentally, all of the above will be relevant only to people who are running their blogs off of a university server or other host. It won't be relevant to people with "Blogspot" or "Typepad" blogs.)

Is This India? (Links potpourri)

Ah Thanksgiving break. Perfect to take an hour and catch up on some blog-reading, eh?

First up, Ms. World has posted some reflections on her experience in India. She's visiting some places that are a little off the Bombay-Agra-Delhi tourist map, and taking the train. It's been a mixed experience for her: she's spent time with Uma and Anand, but also had some difficult moments. I'm not terribly surprised she's gotten some nasty looks and catcalls -- traveling through India as a single black woman is pretty brave.

Her most biting (and insightful) comment might be this one:

One scenic and hectic bus ride later, I was in Pushkar, one of the holiest Hindu cities in India. However, I didn't feel very spiritual in Pushkar but more like assaulted by life going on in the streets. Pushkar was a bitch-slap in the face to an urbanite like myself. I thought Bombay/Mumbai was India. But Pushkar is India too and it is the India you may have read about. It is organized chaos, the Brahmin priest who really doesn't seem very priest-like, the cows, the dogs, people trying to get their hustle on, people asking for money. There is so much more to the description but I can't put it into words. Is this India?

I like the phrase "get their hustle on."

And to answer Ms. World, actually there is no one India. All of the stuff you're seeing (including the unpleasant stuff) is part of the picture. But there's sweetness and light there, too. Keep looking.

* * * *
2. Jabberwock attends a wedding.

While Ms. World has been in India, Jai Arjun from Jabberwork has been in England, for a cousin's wedding. His account is alternately hilarious and biting.

Start with hilarious:

The reception is the best part of the week, and not just because it marks the end of all things. The speeches are superb, especially the taking-the-piss one made by three of the groom’s best men, where they spend 20 minutes recalling every embarrassing moment in their friend’s life for the benefit of the large audience. (Placed beforehand in an envelope on every table are old photos from a costume party, Neal dressed in drag: “You aren’t losing a daughter,” one of the best men shouts out to the bride’s father, “you’re gaining one.”)

And then biting:

In times past I had jested with friends that Jayalalithaa’s foster son (and later Lakshmi Mittal’s daughter) would never be at liberty to get divorced, so expensive and elaborate were their weddings. But there’s more truth to that joke than I’d realised. This is the secret to a long and successful married life: wear the bride and groom out so much that they’ll never, ever consider untying the knot.

Hm, ouch.

(Anyway, read the whole post; guaranteed to be entertaining.)

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3. Hooch and Hamlet

Sonia Faleiro published a great, detailed story in Tehelka, based on her visit Chharanagar area of Ahmedabad. I had mentioned this issue a few weeks ago in a post on Shashwati and Kerim's documentary project, Hooch and Hamlet. Happily, my own little post on the project seems to have at least partly inspired Sonia's story on the Chharas.

On a related note, Kerim reports that they've found a well-known producer to work with them as an adviser on the documentary, and that the fund-raising for the film has been going well (though they are still a ways from their goal).

And Dilip D'Souza has written on the Chharas as well.

Reading Dilip's and Sonia's stories, I find myself with a bit of journalism envy: I too want to travel around the world, meet people with interesting stories, and then write about it.

(Then again, talking to college students about literature for a living isn't so bad... No complaints here...)

* * * *
4. Talking Tamil/Tamizh
Tilotamma on Tanglish (Tamil-English); her source is Vish.

And speaking of Tamil/Tamizh, check out Sunil Laxman's post criticizing the absence of strong language/literature programs in Indic languages in India. It was triggered by his encounter with a Chinese student at his university who had had a frustrating experience attempting to learn the Tamil language in order to read classic Tamil literature in the original. The absence of a standardized program of study belies the Tamil revival movement of recent years:

But this made me think of a deeper issue. In Tamil Nadu, the “Tamil” revival movement (and the Dravida movement) dominates the political scene. For over 40 years, the state has been ruled by one Tamil party or the other. They shout hoarse about Tamil being denied it’s classical rights and pride of place. But if someone wants to come in and learn Tamil, there’s hardly any place he or she can go to, and there’s mighty little these so called champions of Tamil have done for Tamil language or culture (except shout hoarse that if girls wear jeans or if girls and boys talk, it’s ruining Tamil culture. Sorry, I couldn’t help that dig). If it is to study Tamil classics, it’s even harder. To the best of my knowledge, there are no dedicated centers for research and study on this area of priceless history. There are no dedicated university departments, or endowed chairs in universities for academics to pursue this research (if there are some, I haven’t found them). The few language departments have no incentive to teach, publish or research this area.

I’ve found this true for almost any major Indic language (Sanskrit’s priceless legacy at least has a few study centers of excellence).

Contrast this to the situation here, far away in the States. Some of them have outstanding programs in Indian languages, and carry out excellent research.

Read the whole post, Tamilians and Tamil-watchers.

* * * *
5. Get Your Flash On
Nina Paley, the mad genius behind Sita Sings the Blues (also an art professor at Parson's), is offering private classes in computer animation -- Flash and Final Cut Pro. If I were still in the New York area, I might sign up.

Travel Writers: India, England, and the U.S.

I'm teaching the following course in the spring. It's an introductory course, geared at people who are not necessarily English majors.

Travel Writers: India, England, and the United States

The philosopher Augustine is reported to have said written that "the world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page." He was right: travel enlarges the world, and exposes us to how other people think and live. Travel also shows us things about ourselves we might not have known, as we are forced, when abroad, to confront our particular prejudices and limited knowledge about the world. This course examines written narratives (mostly non-fiction) by literary travelers of all sorts, with a special focus on India. It features writing by travelers from India traveling in the west, as well as British and American writers who have journeyed to India for work or pleasure. To what extent is travel writing a 'reliable' source of information about a culture? How is it similar or different from anthropology? Is there a method for producing 'good' travel writing? What is it like to travel as a woman? We will also watch a select number of films that focus on the travel theme.

I'm still working out the actual reading list and syllabus, though I think the course will emphasize writers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries over more contemporary writers. The danger of a "Naipaul and after" course is that everyone is likely to be circmspect and self-conscious. What makes the earlier writers interesting from a pedagogical point of view is that they tend to be less self-conscious about things like racism and cultural preconceptions (or misconceptions).

One does tend to do Naipaul in such a course, and talk about things like exoticization and Orientalism. One might also do something like The Satanic Verses, though the book is almost too much to handle in an introductory course like this. And I'll probably end the course with a brief unit on the recent spate of travel writing oriented to India's high-tech boom (Tom Friedman and so on).

I'm pretty sure I'm going to be ordering the anthology edited by Amitava Kumar called Away: The Indian Writer As An Expatriate. But the rest of it is a bit up in the air.

I'll probably do something in the vein of the "Tagore in America" post I did for Sepia Mutiny this past summer. Other writers who will be in the mix include Dean Mahomet, Mohandas Gandhi, Pandita Ramabai (who wrote interesting letters based on her traveled in the U.S.), Katherine Mayo (author of the infamous Mother India), George Orwell, E.M. Forster, Ved Mehta, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. I might also talk about the early Punjabi settlers in California, as well as American missionary work in India.

Any further suggestions? Writers who might be relatively more obscure? Diarists? Journalists? Musicians/artists? I'm especially curious to find South Asian writers who traveled in the west and wrote about it in languages other than English, but really any suggestions or criticisms would be helpful.

My Grandfather

My grandfather, Santokh Singh Narang, passed away. He was my maternal grandfather ("Nanaji"), though we called him Daddyji.

Like many other Punjabi Sikhs, he came over from Pakistan at the time of Partition, settling in Delhi. My mother was born in Delhi, along with three sisters and a brother.

It's a tribute to Daddyji's progressive thinking that he made sure all four of his daughters received first-class educations, at a time when that was far from common for a traditional Punjabi patriarch. It is especially impressive, because he did it on an Indian government salary, which in those days was far from sufficient for raising five children and educating them in English-medium schools.

My mother became a doctor, her brother an engineer, and her three sisters are all teachers. Interestingly, their children -- my cousins in India (and abroad) -- are all successful over-achievers, many of them IIT and IIM-A graduates.

Daddyji worked for the Indian government in the tax department, until he retired in the mid 1980s. The center of the family then moved to Chandigarh when my uncle got a job there (and Daddyji had little stomach for staying in Delhi after 1984).

Daddyji passed away in Chandigarh this past weekend of various health problems; he will be missed.