--We all need a little break from email. I tend to have small classes -- and I only teach a 2/2 load -- but I still can't quite keep up with all the student emails I get.
--Online colleges are going to find it easier to get aid packages from the U.S. government. I'm not surprised these enterprises are succeeding, but I haven't heard anything yet to suggest that a person could get a serious education through them. What's more interesting is the large number of traditional colleges and universities (including my own) that are branching out into online education. The ability to do online courses through established schools might challenge the way we think about admissions and the structure of post-secondary education. What if small universities and liberal arts colleges decide to band large numbers of online courses together, and form conglomerate entities? Could students be "admitted" merely for the purpose of taking a particular online course, or studying with a particular professor?
--William Safire on "Blargon". Blogging, as all you blogerati undoubtedly already know, generates tons of medium-specific jargon, though much of it is borrowed from terms in journalism ("the jump," the "sidebar," "above the fold"). Many blog-words try and incorporate the word "blog" in some way to indicate their context: "blogorrhea." In some ways, it reminds me of the once-trendy musical genre called Ska, which generated hundreds of bands that incorporated the word "ska" in some way into their names. Here I'm thinking of the legendary Jamaican band called The Skatalites, but also lesser known "third wave" ska bands like "Ska Humbug," "The Skadillacs," "Skaface," "The Skaflaws," "Skali Baba and the Forty Ounce Horns," "Skankin Pickle," "Skarab," "Skarotum," "Skatland Yard," and so on. (Just so you know where I'm getting that list from, it's this FAQ)
--Are blogs taking over the world? No, they aren't. And I'm sick of reading about people who write for Gawker media -- an enterprise which has, I think, passed its peak. Now that she's quit Wonkette Ana Maria Cox is pretty much famous for being the venue that launched Washingtonienne.
--A Catholic high school has forbidden its students from blogging and online social networking, mainly to protect them from sexual predators. High school, it seems, is like being in China (or Pakistan).
Sarah Macdonald's Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure
I recently taught Sarah Macdonald's irreverent travel narrative, Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure in my Travel Writers class. Though I'd been worried about how it would go over, Macdonald's book really seemed to click with my students. Her hip style and irreverence actually woke up some students who had, up to this point, seemed somewhat bored by our discussions of travel, colonialism, and the Indian diaspora.
Though I believe my students learned some things from the book overall, Macdonald does hit some off notes. For instance, take Macdonald's discussion of the eponymous cow, which follows a description of Indian traffic rules:
Most of what she says here (especially about India's street cows being unhealthy) is true, but the smug tone bothers me; how is it different from the old type of colonial travel narrative (i.e., Katherine Mayo) that aims to ridicule the "natives"?
Macdonald gets much more interesting and informative as she moves from being a passively observing traveler making wisecracks to an active participant in India's spiritual marketplace. She samples large-scale events like the the Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, the Our Lady of Health Basilica at Velangani in Tamil Nadu, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Sai Baba Ashram near Bangalore, Mata Amritanandamayi's (aka, the Hugging Amma) Ashram in Kerala, and the Tibetan Buddhist center in Dharamsala. She also explores smaller, more marginal traditions, including Vipassana Buddhist meditation (where you don't talk to anyone at all for ten days), the Parsis of Malabar Hill (who come off as very pompous and somewhat delusional), and the now-fading Bene Israel Jewish community. Though she doesn't at any point visit India's major mosques, she does have a chapter on her experience in Muslim-dominated Kashmir.
In each case, Macdonald tries to make her encounter with a given religious tradition personal -- that is, she considers whether the religion she encounters is something she can connect with, and whether it's something she would want in her life in an ongoing way. She shows a willingness not only to try different things, but to actively immerse herself in various religious practices and belief-systems. It's hard to know how seriously to take it: she dabbles in not just one or two but ten different religious traditions in the course of two years, but Macdonald does structure her book as a kind of personal spiritual journey -- where each of the major religious traditions she encounters gives her something to take home.
Despite the personal element, Macdonald's book remains somewhat ethnographic: there are substantial paragraphs explaining how Jainism works, the basic principles of Zoroastrianism, and so on. And actually, what might be the most interesting ethnographic work she does isn't about Indian religion per se so much as the culture of foreign travelers who go to India for "spiritual tourism." The chapter on the large numbers of young Israelis in the mountains is especially interesting. I noticed this myself when I was in Leh (Ladakh) two years ago: everywhere you go, you see signs for restaurants serving "Israeli" cuisine. There are special Israeli-only hostels, not to mention ubiquitous young people speaking Hebrew. The Israeli kids go to India to party (cheap drugs, no parents), to experiment with things like Tibetan Buddhism, and more than anything else to get a break after their mandatory military service. Some explore alternative/mystical forms of Jewish spirituality (Macdonald goes to a Seder that resembles a rave), while others stay fairly close to conservative and orthodox Judiam. In this vein, Macdonald has a particularly surreal conversation with a Lubavitcher Rabbi (!) who runs a synagogue in Dharamkhot.
Also good is Macdonald's take on the American Sikhs who have a small school in Amritsar (for American Sikh children). There she participates in a Kundalini class, and has a conversation with a teacher named Guru Singh:
No really, tell us what you really think!
In general, I would recommend Macdonald's book despite its occasional off notes. While Holy Cow is unlikely to tell you anything you don't already know (that is, if you know India well), it might be a good present for a curious colleague or friend (or their kids).
Though I believe my students learned some things from the book overall, Macdonald does hit some off notes. For instance, take Macdonald's discussion of the eponymous cow, which follows a description of Indian traffic rules:
I've always thought it hilarious that Indian people chose the most boring, domesticated, compliant and stupid animal on earth to adore, but already I'm seeing cows in a whole different light. These animals clearly know they rule and the like to mess with our heads. The humpbacked bovines step off median strips just as cars are approaching, they stare down drivers daring them to charge, they turn their noses up at passing elephants and camels, and hold huddles at the busiest intersections where they seem to chat away like the bulls of Gary Larson cartoons. It's clear they are enjoying themselves.
But for animals powerful enough to stop traffic and holy enough that they'll never become steak, cows are treated dreadfully. Scrany and sickly, they survive by grazing on garbage that's dumped in plastic bags. The bags collect in their stomachs and strangulate their innards, killing the cows slowly and painfully. Jonathan has already done a story about the urban cowboys of New Delhi who lasso the animals and take them to volunteer vets for operations. Unfortunately the cows are privately owned and once they are restored to health they must be released to eat more plastic.
Most of what she says here (especially about India's street cows being unhealthy) is true, but the smug tone bothers me; how is it different from the old type of colonial travel narrative (i.e., Katherine Mayo) that aims to ridicule the "natives"?
Macdonald gets much more interesting and informative as she moves from being a passively observing traveler making wisecracks to an active participant in India's spiritual marketplace. She samples large-scale events like the the Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, the Our Lady of Health Basilica at Velangani in Tamil Nadu, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Sai Baba Ashram near Bangalore, Mata Amritanandamayi's (aka, the Hugging Amma) Ashram in Kerala, and the Tibetan Buddhist center in Dharamsala. She also explores smaller, more marginal traditions, including Vipassana Buddhist meditation (where you don't talk to anyone at all for ten days), the Parsis of Malabar Hill (who come off as very pompous and somewhat delusional), and the now-fading Bene Israel Jewish community. Though she doesn't at any point visit India's major mosques, she does have a chapter on her experience in Muslim-dominated Kashmir.
In each case, Macdonald tries to make her encounter with a given religious tradition personal -- that is, she considers whether the religion she encounters is something she can connect with, and whether it's something she would want in her life in an ongoing way. She shows a willingness not only to try different things, but to actively immerse herself in various religious practices and belief-systems. It's hard to know how seriously to take it: she dabbles in not just one or two but ten different religious traditions in the course of two years, but Macdonald does structure her book as a kind of personal spiritual journey -- where each of the major religious traditions she encounters gives her something to take home.
Despite the personal element, Macdonald's book remains somewhat ethnographic: there are substantial paragraphs explaining how Jainism works, the basic principles of Zoroastrianism, and so on. And actually, what might be the most interesting ethnographic work she does isn't about Indian religion per se so much as the culture of foreign travelers who go to India for "spiritual tourism." The chapter on the large numbers of young Israelis in the mountains is especially interesting. I noticed this myself when I was in Leh (Ladakh) two years ago: everywhere you go, you see signs for restaurants serving "Israeli" cuisine. There are special Israeli-only hostels, not to mention ubiquitous young people speaking Hebrew. The Israeli kids go to India to party (cheap drugs, no parents), to experiment with things like Tibetan Buddhism, and more than anything else to get a break after their mandatory military service. Some explore alternative/mystical forms of Jewish spirituality (Macdonald goes to a Seder that resembles a rave), while others stay fairly close to conservative and orthodox Judiam. In this vein, Macdonald has a particularly surreal conversation with a Lubavitcher Rabbi (!) who runs a synagogue in Dharamkhot.
Also good is Macdonald's take on the American Sikhs who have a small school in Amritsar (for American Sikh children). There she participates in a Kundalini class, and has a conversation with a teacher named Guru Singh:
For a time my cynicism is suspended and I'm in on the group high. The singalong of self-love has created a New Age ring of confidence in the room. Guru Singh oozes happiness in himself, his faith and his music. He gives me a CD of songs he's made with Seal, called Game of Chants, and shows me references by Jane Fonda and Pierce Brosnan. I tell him Courtney Love said sat nam at the MTV awards and showed me some Kundalini Yoga moves when I interviewed her at Triple J [an Australian television variety show], but I can't resist adding that she then put her cigarette out in my coffee. . . . The song and panting stuff may be kind of fun but I'm skeptical of this form of yoga; mainly because the first Sikh guru was critical of the practice and believed service to others was a better way to God. This new version of Sikhism seems to be a synthesis of age-old knowledge and modern self-loving Americanism--its saccharine self-absorbed smugness is a bit much for me.
No really, tell us what you really think!
In general, I would recommend Macdonald's book despite its occasional off notes. While Holy Cow is unlikely to tell you anything you don't already know (that is, if you know India well), it might be a good present for a curious colleague or friend (or their kids).
My Semi-Serious Oscar Picks (and a film about Indian Jews in Israel)
In the interest of not being too serious, let's talk Oscar.
Did you notice that all five films begin with letters at or before the letter 'M'? I've sometimes felt that films with letters closer to the beginning of the alphabet do slightly better, because they sit closer to the top of movie listings and such. Interestingly, every Best Picture Winner since the year 2000 has also started at or before 'M': Million Dollar Baby, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Lord of the Rings. (In the 1990s, the ratio of A-M and N-Z is 1 to 1)
I'm not really sure who's going to win -- I haven't seen Crash or Munich. But I saw the other three, and I can't see the award going to Good Night, and Good Luck, because it's such a small film (Oscar likes big and sweepy). And Capote is too cold and amoral (Oscar likes a moral, and Capote questions about the viability of the death penalty is arguable). Because I read so many mixed reviews of Crash, my money's on Munich or Brokeback Mountain. While most people are predicting Brokeback Mountain because of all the hype this spring, it's always dangerous to bet against Stephen Spielberg...
It's possible that Best Picture will go to Brokeback Mountain, while the Best Director award will go to Spielberg and Munich.
On Documentaries, I did recently watch Murderball (the film about quadroplegic rugby players), which is a long-shot against March of the Penguins, but a damn good documentary nonetheless. I'm also trying to figure out how Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man wasn't nominated; that is a really brilliant and philosophically challenging film.
I have a gut feeling that Capote will win Best Adapted Screenplay, because it's a movie about a writer on the verge of greatness, and films about writers writing tend to ring the "well-written" bell, if you see what I mean. Capote should also win for Phillip Seymour Hoffmann in the Best Actor. (Best Actress is harder to read, isn't it? Reese Witherspoon was good in Walk the Line, but it was a pretty conventional role. Hard to compare her to more radical roles like Judi Dench in Mrs. Henderson Presents or Felicity Huffman in Transamerica)
I haven't seen any of the Foreign Films this year, though I would encourage the committee in India who chooses which films to select to send to the Academy for pre-nomination to look carefully at the films on this list. Note that none of them look anything like Paheli! I get the feeling that the government committee is a bit cut off from the rest of the world. Something like 15 Park Avenue might have had more of a chance; mostly the official Indian submissions tend to be pretty ridiculous choices.
* * * *
Now to be just a little more serious.
In a couple of weeks, I'm going to be on a panel at Lehigh talking about a recent Israeli film called Turn Left at the End of the World (also see IMDB).
The film is about the interaction between Indian and Moroccan immigrants to Israel in the 1960s. Beginning as early as 1949, Indian Jews were invited to 'return' to Israel, and the immigrants placed by the Israeli government in rural settlements, often based on where they came from in India. Jews from the Bene Israel community in Bombay tended to end up in a desert town called Beersheva (where they struggled), while Cochin Jews tended to go to more agriculturally-friendly places in other parts of the country (where they prospered). There are now about 60,000 Bene Israel Indians in Beersheva, with less than 5000 remaining in Bombay.
I got to watch a preview copy of Turn Left at the End of the World last night, and it is actually a lot of fun; it stars a well-known Indian actor named Parmeet Sethi, as well as some actual Indian Israelis (Liraz Charchi, pictured above, is particularly impressive as Sarah Talkar). Judging from some articles I've been reading, the film's portrayal of the integration of the Bene Israel Jews in Beersheva in the later 1960s is probably a little too upbeat. In real life, the Indian Jewish communities tended to remain somewhat segregated from the mainstream of Israeli society, and the Bene Israel community in particular had to struggle to get official recognition as proper Jews. But that's a quibble; if you see this film playing anywhere, definitely go see it.
Does anyone have any recommendations for further reading on Indian Jews, either in India or Israel?
(Oh, and what are your Oscar picks and why?)
Best Picture: Brokeback Mountain
Capote
Crash
Good Night, and Good Luck
Munich
Did you notice that all five films begin with letters at or before the letter 'M'? I've sometimes felt that films with letters closer to the beginning of the alphabet do slightly better, because they sit closer to the top of movie listings and such. Interestingly, every Best Picture Winner since the year 2000 has also started at or before 'M': Million Dollar Baby, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Lord of the Rings. (In the 1990s, the ratio of A-M and N-Z is 1 to 1)
I'm not really sure who's going to win -- I haven't seen Crash or Munich. But I saw the other three, and I can't see the award going to Good Night, and Good Luck, because it's such a small film (Oscar likes big and sweepy). And Capote is too cold and amoral (Oscar likes a moral, and Capote questions about the viability of the death penalty is arguable). Because I read so many mixed reviews of Crash, my money's on Munich or Brokeback Mountain. While most people are predicting Brokeback Mountain because of all the hype this spring, it's always dangerous to bet against Stephen Spielberg...
It's possible that Best Picture will go to Brokeback Mountain, while the Best Director award will go to Spielberg and Munich.
On Documentaries, I did recently watch Murderball (the film about quadroplegic rugby players), which is a long-shot against March of the Penguins, but a damn good documentary nonetheless. I'm also trying to figure out how Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man wasn't nominated; that is a really brilliant and philosophically challenging film.
I have a gut feeling that Capote will win Best Adapted Screenplay, because it's a movie about a writer on the verge of greatness, and films about writers writing tend to ring the "well-written" bell, if you see what I mean. Capote should also win for Phillip Seymour Hoffmann in the Best Actor. (Best Actress is harder to read, isn't it? Reese Witherspoon was good in Walk the Line, but it was a pretty conventional role. Hard to compare her to more radical roles like Judi Dench in Mrs. Henderson Presents or Felicity Huffman in Transamerica)
I haven't seen any of the Foreign Films this year, though I would encourage the committee in India who chooses which films to select to send to the Academy for pre-nomination to look carefully at the films on this list. Note that none of them look anything like Paheli! I get the feeling that the government committee is a bit cut off from the rest of the world. Something like 15 Park Avenue might have had more of a chance; mostly the official Indian submissions tend to be pretty ridiculous choices.
* * * *
Now to be just a little more serious.
In a couple of weeks, I'm going to be on a panel at Lehigh talking about a recent Israeli film called Turn Left at the End of the World (also see IMDB).
The film is about the interaction between Indian and Moroccan immigrants to Israel in the 1960s. Beginning as early as 1949, Indian Jews were invited to 'return' to Israel, and the immigrants placed by the Israeli government in rural settlements, often based on where they came from in India. Jews from the Bene Israel community in Bombay tended to end up in a desert town called Beersheva (where they struggled), while Cochin Jews tended to go to more agriculturally-friendly places in other parts of the country (where they prospered). There are now about 60,000 Bene Israel Indians in Beersheva, with less than 5000 remaining in Bombay.
I got to watch a preview copy of Turn Left at the End of the World last night, and it is actually a lot of fun; it stars a well-known Indian actor named Parmeet Sethi, as well as some actual Indian Israelis (Liraz Charchi, pictured above, is particularly impressive as Sarah Talkar). Judging from some articles I've been reading, the film's portrayal of the integration of the Bene Israel Jews in Beersheva in the later 1960s is probably a little too upbeat. In real life, the Indian Jewish communities tended to remain somewhat segregated from the mainstream of Israeli society, and the Bene Israel community in particular had to struggle to get official recognition as proper Jews. But that's a quibble; if you see this film playing anywhere, definitely go see it.
Does anyone have any recommendations for further reading on Indian Jews, either in India or Israel?
(Oh, and what are your Oscar picks and why?)
Dubya In India (and the "Fresh Prince" in Bombay)
President Bush just landed in India. Here are some links that stand out to me regarding the visit and the proposed nuclear deal:
1. A poll published in Outlook India shows that Bush's approval rating in India is higher than it is here in the U.S. (So maybe one shouldn't take the 100,000 protestors from Muslim groups and the Left in Delhi as the definitive voice of India.)
2. Bernard Gwertzman of the Council on Foreign Relations, does a Q&A in the New York Times on the nuclear deal, explaining some of the details of the proposed deal, and why there's been difficulty ironing out the kinks.
3. Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, suggests that the nuclear deal the U.S. is negotiating with India isn't legal under the NPT, which the U.S. has signed even if India hasn't. Moreover, quite a number of folks are likely to be bothered by a possible deal, and a number of UN organizations are going to step in to try and block it after signing:
So even if the deal is signed (which is by no means guaranteed), it may not stick. Can it really be that the administration is unaware of the complications? What could their motivations for signing this be if it's unlikely that anyone will start shipping nuclear fuel to India anytime soon?
4. Arundhati Roy singles out Bush's planned visit to Rajghat (the Gandhi memorial park) as something that will cause millions of Indians to "wince." I don't know; I think most Indians are perfectly comfortable with unlikely appropriations of Gandhi's image and legacy (just as civil rights activists in the U.S. have gotten used to Republicans wantonly quoting MLK).
Other than that, Roy's best zinger on Bush's travel plans is about his choice of venue:
Not much of a bite there.
5. Forget Bush-Manmohan and the Nuclear Deal! Will Smith is in Bombay, making prognostications about the merger of Bollywood and Hollywood.
1. A poll published in Outlook India shows that Bush's approval rating in India is higher than it is here in the U.S. (So maybe one shouldn't take the 100,000 protestors from Muslim groups and the Left in Delhi as the definitive voice of India.)
2. Bernard Gwertzman of the Council on Foreign Relations, does a Q&A in the New York Times on the nuclear deal, explaining some of the details of the proposed deal, and why there's been difficulty ironing out the kinks.
3. Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, suggests that the nuclear deal the U.S. is negotiating with India isn't legal under the NPT, which the U.S. has signed even if India hasn't. Moreover, quite a number of folks are likely to be bothered by a possible deal, and a number of UN organizations are going to step in to try and block it after signing:
First, the United States has no authority to grant such an exemption on its own. The NPT is a treaty signed by 187 nations; it is enforced by the International Atomic Energy Agency; and it is, in effect, administered by the five nations that the treaty recognizes as nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France). This point is not a legal nicety. If the United States can cut a separate deal with India, what is to prevent China or Russia from doing the same with Pakistan or Iran? If India demands special treatment on the grounds that it's a stable democracy, what is to keep Japan, Brazil, or Germany from picking up on the precedent?
Second, the India deal would violate not just international agreements but also several U.S. laws regulating the export of nuclear materials.
In other words, an American president who sought to make this deal would, or should, detect a myriad of political actors that might protest or block it—mainly the U.N. Security Council, the Nuclear Suppliers' Group, and the U.S. Congress. Not just as a legal principle but also as a practical consideration, these actors must be notified, cajoled, mollified, or otherwise bargained with if the deal has a chance of coming to life.
The amazing thing is, President Bush just went ahead and made the pledge, without so much as the pretense of consultation—as if all these actors, with their prerogatives over treaties and laws (to say nothing of their concerns for very real dilemmas), didn't exist.
So even if the deal is signed (which is by no means guaranteed), it may not stick. Can it really be that the administration is unaware of the complications? What could their motivations for signing this be if it's unlikely that anyone will start shipping nuclear fuel to India anytime soon?
4. Arundhati Roy singles out Bush's planned visit to Rajghat (the Gandhi memorial park) as something that will cause millions of Indians to "wince." I don't know; I think most Indians are perfectly comfortable with unlikely appropriations of Gandhi's image and legacy (just as civil rights activists in the U.S. have gotten used to Republicans wantonly quoting MLK).
Other than that, Roy's best zinger on Bush's travel plans is about his choice of venue:
Ironic isn't it, that the only safe public space for a man who has recently been so enthusiastic about India's modernity, should be a crumbling medieval fort?
Not much of a bite there.
5. Forget Bush-Manmohan and the Nuclear Deal! Will Smith is in Bombay, making prognostications about the merger of Bollywood and Hollywood.
Octavia Butler, RIP
Octavia Butler died last weekend, possibly of a stroke -- though the immediate cause of death was a head wound caused by a bad fall. I'm not the best qualified to write a full appreciation of this amazing and prolific writer -- I've only read Bloodchild and Kindred. Still, I did find a quote from her that I'd like to share, from an article in MELUS. In an interview, someone asked her, "What good is science fiction to black people?" Her response was as follows:
What good is any form of literature to Black people? What good is science fiction's thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what "everyone" is saying, doing, thinking--whoever "everyone" happens to be this year. And what good is all this to Black people? ("Positive Obsession" 134-35)
In these rhetorical questions is a statement of her broad-minded mission. Octavia Butler was as ecumenical and progressive as they come, as far as the politics one finds embedded in her works. But she never used her writing to make narrow kinds of political arguments -- at least, not in the sense of the obvious rhetoric of race, gender, and sexuality that dominates our cultural debates. She either approached it eccentrically (time travel, blood lineage, and slavery in Kindred), or looked ahead a thousand years, to consider parasite/host (alien/human) eroticism. Her writing challenged and provoked all kinds of people, including those who weren't concerned about all the barriers she broke as a black woman sci-fi writer in a field dominated by heterosexual white men.
Incidentally, Octavia Butler is one of the rare sci-fi/speculative ficiton writers whose work really captivates readers who are themselves scientists. Here, for instance, is a biologist's response to the Xenogenesis trilogy.
Multnomah Falls
Multnomah Falls is part of a chain of waterfalls that people go to see near Portland, in the Columbia River Gorge. In the winter, ice builds up near the base of the waterfalls; a couple of weeks ago the mound had grown really huge at this particular spot.
I've posted a high-resolution version of this photo at Flickr.
Portland: City of Books
Somehow I managed to time my trip to Portland to coincide with two consecutive sunny days in February. I’m having a great time so far, thanks to my wonderful hosts from the English Department, University Studies, and the library. At the talk I was happy to run into ‘SeaJay’ from Another Subcontinent, as well as Jeffrey St. Clair, one of the editors of Counterpunch. Thus far I’ve mainly been at the university -– though today I get to go off and do a little sightseeing before heading back east tomorrow.
Last night, I gave my lecture on The Kite Runner and other narratives of Afghanistan in front of about 80 people at the Portland State University library. It seemed to go off pretty well. Unlike some recent talks I’ve done in a crunch, here I was really able to focus on my subject in the days leading up to the talk, and do some quality mulling. (Quality mulling is crucial.)
At the beginning I spent a little time introducing some of the other books about Afghanistan I think people should consider reading –- actually showing Powerpoint slides with pictures of the book covers and descriptions.
The term I worked with in the talk itself was ‘cultural translation’ -– how these writers make Afghanistan ‘real’ to their readers. I used some of the material from my earlier blog post, including the reference to the Shahnamah, and some of the hostile reviews of the novel. I also raised questions of my own about the twin dangers of nostalgic exoticism (‘masala’) and extreme negativity (the obsession with the burqa) that one sees in some of the recent books about Afghanistan. Here I singled out Saira Shah’s The Storyteller’s Daughter as an example of a book that gets excessive in both directions. (You can still read an excerpt from the book here.) In fact, for whatever flaws it may have, The Kite Runner manages to avoid that trap.
I also (probably predictably) alluded to Indian expatriate literature, which I think has a lot in common with these narratives of expatriates returning to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. I brought up Salman Rushdie’s metaphor of the ‘broken mirror’ of the expatriate writer:
To some extent, all of these writers are writing about loss and the hope of recovery (this is especially pronounced in Nelofer Pezira and Hosseini). But they are also benefiting from that same broken mirror (or perhaps prism): the expatriate gains perspective even as she loses a direct window on the texture of everyday life.
I didn’t say this in the talk, but I’ve been struck by the deep connection between the Indian subcontinent and Afghanistan in all of these readings. A number of people who fled Afghanistan in the civil wars went to Pakistan, but quite a number (including Said Hyder Akbar’s family) went to India. And the connection is deep in the Afghan psyche, as this poem by Ahmed Shah Durrani suggests:
Ok, off to do some sightseeing, and maybe stop by Powell's. If it stays sunny, there might even be some pictures!
Last night, I gave my lecture on The Kite Runner and other narratives of Afghanistan in front of about 80 people at the Portland State University library. It seemed to go off pretty well. Unlike some recent talks I’ve done in a crunch, here I was really able to focus on my subject in the days leading up to the talk, and do some quality mulling. (Quality mulling is crucial.)
At the beginning I spent a little time introducing some of the other books about Afghanistan I think people should consider reading –- actually showing Powerpoint slides with pictures of the book covers and descriptions.
The term I worked with in the talk itself was ‘cultural translation’ -– how these writers make Afghanistan ‘real’ to their readers. I used some of the material from my earlier blog post, including the reference to the Shahnamah, and some of the hostile reviews of the novel. I also raised questions of my own about the twin dangers of nostalgic exoticism (‘masala’) and extreme negativity (the obsession with the burqa) that one sees in some of the recent books about Afghanistan. Here I singled out Saira Shah’s The Storyteller’s Daughter as an example of a book that gets excessive in both directions. (You can still read an excerpt from the book here.) In fact, for whatever flaws it may have, The Kite Runner manages to avoid that trap.
I also (probably predictably) alluded to Indian expatriate literature, which I think has a lot in common with these narratives of expatriates returning to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. I brought up Salman Rushdie’s metaphor of the ‘broken mirror’ of the expatriate writer:
It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost. (Imaginary Homelands)
To some extent, all of these writers are writing about loss and the hope of recovery (this is especially pronounced in Nelofer Pezira and Hosseini). But they are also benefiting from that same broken mirror (or perhaps prism): the expatriate gains perspective even as she loses a direct window on the texture of everyday life.
I didn’t say this in the talk, but I’ve been struck by the deep connection between the Indian subcontinent and Afghanistan in all of these readings. A number of people who fled Afghanistan in the civil wars went to Pakistan, but quite a number (including Said Hyder Akbar’s family) went to India. And the connection is deep in the Afghan psyche, as this poem by Ahmed Shah Durrani suggests:
By blood we are immersed in love of you.
The youth lose their heads for your sake.
I come to you and my heart finds rest.
Away from you, grief clings to my heart like a snake.
I forget the throne of Delhi
When I remember the mountaintops of my Pashtun land.
If I must choose between the world and you,
I shall not hesitate to claim your barren deserts as my own.
--Ahmed Shah Durrani
Ok, off to do some sightseeing, and maybe stop by Powell's. If it stays sunny, there might even be some pictures!
Portland, Afghanistan, and Said Akbar Hyder
I'm off later this week to Portland, to talk about The Kite Runner and the recent batch of "going home to Afghanistan" books. The link for the talk is here, in case anyone is in town and wants to come check it out. (If so, do email me offline)
In addition to The Kite Runner (which I blogged about last summer), I also read some other interesting books for this talk. I had earlier read The Storyteller's Daughter and The Bookseller of Kabul; this weekend I plowed through Syed Akbar Hyder's Come Back to Afghanistan and Nelofer Pezira's A Bed of Red Flowers.
I really enjoyed both of the latter books, especially Come Back to Afghanistan, which Hyder wrote after his sophomore year in community college, in Concord, CA (he has since transferred to Yale). Hyder's family is closely connected to the Hamid Karzai government and has played a part in the reconstruction of the country following the fall of the Taliban. Though Hyder was born in India (where his family had fled) in 1985, and had never been to Afghanistan before the summer of 2002, he benefits from fluency in Pashto and Farsi. And there's little time wasted getting to know the country; his family's connections give him a sense of history (myriad connections to the Mujahideen's resistance to the Soviets), as well as direct access to the key events associated with the difficult reconstruction of Afghanistan. Hyder has a lot of interesting things to say about why it's been so difficult for the new government to establish centralized authority, the serious funding problems that beset the country, and the failures of the U.S. military.
One of the issues that comes up is of course the prisoner abuse scandal, which affects Hyder in a very personal way when he meets a civilian CIA contractor named Dave Pessaro. Pessaro investigates an acquaintance of Hyder's named Abdul Wali in the Kunar province, who then dies during "questioning." (You can read the Washington Post's coverage of the indictment of Pessaro here.) Here are two thoughtful paragraphs from Hyder on why he actually isn't as concerned about the prisoner abuse scandal(s) as are many liberals in the U.S.:
I'm not sure what Hyder might say in response to the most recent batch of torture/abuse pictures that have come out, though I imagine the logic here would hold: a lot worse has happened, and even continues to happen (witness the dozens of Iraqi civilians killed by insurgents in Iraq every week). Still, the violence exemplified in the new batch of photos is jarring (and I'm not just referring to the Salon photos; other photos are available on the internet that are even more disturbing).
But back to Hyder -- not half bad for something written by an undergraduate! (Though he did have considerable help from Susan Barton, whose co-authored.)
In addition to The Kite Runner (which I blogged about last summer), I also read some other interesting books for this talk. I had earlier read The Storyteller's Daughter and The Bookseller of Kabul; this weekend I plowed through Syed Akbar Hyder's Come Back to Afghanistan and Nelofer Pezira's A Bed of Red Flowers.
I really enjoyed both of the latter books, especially Come Back to Afghanistan, which Hyder wrote after his sophomore year in community college, in Concord, CA (he has since transferred to Yale). Hyder's family is closely connected to the Hamid Karzai government and has played a part in the reconstruction of the country following the fall of the Taliban. Though Hyder was born in India (where his family had fled) in 1985, and had never been to Afghanistan before the summer of 2002, he benefits from fluency in Pashto and Farsi. And there's little time wasted getting to know the country; his family's connections give him a sense of history (myriad connections to the Mujahideen's resistance to the Soviets), as well as direct access to the key events associated with the difficult reconstruction of Afghanistan. Hyder has a lot of interesting things to say about why it's been so difficult for the new government to establish centralized authority, the serious funding problems that beset the country, and the failures of the U.S. military.
One of the issues that comes up is of course the prisoner abuse scandal, which affects Hyder in a very personal way when he meets a civilian CIA contractor named Dave Pessaro. Pessaro investigates an acquaintance of Hyder's named Abdul Wali in the Kunar province, who then dies during "questioning." (You can read the Washington Post's coverage of the indictment of Pessaro here.) Here are two thoughtful paragraphs from Hyder on why he actually isn't as concerned about the prisoner abuse scandal(s) as are many liberals in the U.S.:
But the prisoner abuse scandal is primarily an American obsession. In the days following Dave's arrest, not a single person sits down to discuss the situation with my father--unless you count Yossef, who, upon hearing the news, comes upstairs and says, "Hey, they announced the Abdul Wali thing." (It's not that nobody cares; it's just a hardening that accompanies the fact that thousands of Afghans died in prisons during teh Communist and Soviet eras.) I wind up working on a piece for the New York Times Magazine about my experience in the interrogation room, and I have mixed feelings about the assignment. Of all the stories I could pick to tell about Afghanistan right now, I'm not sure if this one would even make the top ten.
As horrible as Abdul Wali's story is -- and as deeply as it's affected me-- a single prisoner's death is hardly the worst of what's going on here this summer. Presidential elections, for instance, are scheduled for the fall, but the registration effort is faltering. The UN's elections workers have already pulled out of the province once and have threatened to do so again if affected by even a single act of violence. In Kunar, where landmines are not hard to come by, the dictate gives a single individual the power to disrupt the upcoming vote. Elsewhere in the country three governors have been forced to flee their posts in recent months. My father now sleeps with a Kalashnikov beside his bed so that he can shoot from the window if the compound comes under attack.
I'm not sure what Hyder might say in response to the most recent batch of torture/abuse pictures that have come out, though I imagine the logic here would hold: a lot worse has happened, and even continues to happen (witness the dozens of Iraqi civilians killed by insurgents in Iraq every week). Still, the violence exemplified in the new batch of photos is jarring (and I'm not just referring to the Salon photos; other photos are available on the internet that are even more disturbing).
But back to Hyder -- not half bad for something written by an undergraduate! (Though he did have considerable help from Susan Barton, whose co-authored.)
Auden and China
My post on Auden last week generated some challenging comments on the Valve, which provked me to look a little more closely at the poems Auden wrote after his trip to China.
These were originally included in the book Journey to a War, which was according to biographers mostly authored by Auden's traveling companion, the writer Christopher Isherwood. The book was published in 1939; their travels were commissioned by the publisher. The late 1930s was in general busy with travel for Auden, setting the stage for his final emigration from England (to New York) at the beginning of World War II. In addition to Spain, he also visited Iceland during this period, and passed through New York on his way back from China. Incidentally, though this was clearly an important period for him personally and as a writer, Auden apparently didn't love the traveling all that much. Auden's recent biographer, John Fuller, has the following quote from Auden's diary from the trip:
I think this is a great metaphor for a certain kind of traveler's despair. One could even extend it further: perhaps it's not just the voyage, but the traveler him or herself that is the "illness." One gets over the nausea of dislocation when motion finally stops.
On to the sonnets, which are, as a group, rather tough going. The strongest individual poems in terms of unity of theme and coherence are the first and last, and neither of the two are directly about China. Indeed, it seems quite possible to read them as more about Auden himself than about the place he had visited. Take Sonnet I:
The slightly clueless character at the center of this poem recurs in the first ten or so sonnets. He begins as above -- a person who is always slightly off as regards his politics or his "station" in life. I read these lines as autobiographical and for the most part self-deprecating, though there is a glint of Auden's pride in the gentle phrasing of the last line: "And envied his few friends, and chose his love." As the sonnets progress, he grows older, becoming depressed and less lovable (Sonnet V: "unwanted/ Grown seedy, paunchy, pouchy, disappointed,/ He took to drink to screw his nerves to muder"), before finally achieving a kind of regeneration with a seemingly symbolic boy-figure (Sonnets IX).
The China context, hinted at in Sonnet X, only really comes to the fore in Sonnet XI, with also seems to come closest to a kind of Orientalism. In the vein of many other Auden poems responding to War from the late 1930s, Sonnet XI is a strong injunction to joy and love against the gathering darkness of militarization. Here are the final lines of that sonnet:
The last two lines clearly refer to China (on "Eighteen Provinces," see Wikipedia, and skip down to "The Term in Chinese"; "Hundred Families" refers, I believe to a medieval Chinese text called The Surnames of a Hundred Families). But theme of venerable Chinese tradition and "the quick new West" is fleeting; I don't see it recur in the other poems, most of which focus more on the ambivalence of the British presence in China. See, for instance, the opening lines of Sonnet XVI:
Who exactly Auden is referring to when he says "our"? The most obvious first reading is the English nation, but subsequent lines in the poem raise the possibility that he means specifically the overseas British, such as he encountered in the British colony of Hong Kong. And it might even be more specific (or more intimate) than that, as the "we" becomes "they" as the poem develops. "They," whose vision of the world has been rendered obsolete:
"Freedom's back" is another phrase to puzzle over. A postcolonial reading might focus on the frontal aggression of the stare with which the Englishman is met. But freedom (presumably of the native) is something he can't quite access: it turns its back to him. (There is also, I would speculate, a possible gay subtext here: disapproval might also be a reference to the attitude towards homosexuality he encountered -- and I'll leave "freedom's back" to the reader's imagination.)
Several of the more China-themed sonnets invoke war and tragedy, but only Sonnet XII specifically alludes to genocide: "For we have seen a myriad faces/ Ecstatic from one lie/ And maps can really point to places/ Where life is evil now./ Nanking. Dachau." Note Auden's invocation of the "lie" of political orthodoxies, as contrasted to the truths of modern war represented by "Nanking" and "Dachau."
Ultimately, I don't find a coherent argument to Auden's Sonnets from China. The sympathy for the Chinese victims of the Sino-Japanese War is real, but hardly central thematically. A general tone of mourning and loss of place prevails, but it's hard to say whether that loss is Auden's personal alienation from English life, or a more generalized expression of political dislocation (linked to both British colonialism and its imminent entry into a new world War). Quite possibly, it's both, mingled together ambiguously.
Auden ends the sequence with a move towards Edwardian Liberalism and E.M. Forster: "Yes, we are Lucy, Turton, Philip: we/ Wish international evil, are delighted/ To join the jolly ranks of the benighted/ Where resason is denied and love ignored." (Incidentally, John Fuller, in his 2000 biography of Auden, argues that Auden probably meant "intentional," not "international" evil -- following a line in Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread -- and that this may have been an error of the compositor.) Against loveless spite is an ethos of human decency, personal intimacy, and friendship. If that is Auden's point, one wonders about the real value to us of these sonnets today; perhaps he said it better elsewhere?
Further reading: One scholar who has been working quite a bit on Auden's China sonnets is Stuart Christie, of Hong Kong Baptist University. He has an essay called "Orienteering," which is available here (PDF). I find it helpful. A more recent essay appeared in the October 2005 issue of PMLA (for those who have university subscriptions). I think the earlier essay is the better of the two.
(And a note about online access: I've only quoted bits and pieces of the sonnets here -- trying not to trample too much on 'Fair Use'. For those who don't have access to a volume of Auden, I believe all of the sonnets can be accessed through Google's cache.)
These were originally included in the book Journey to a War, which was according to biographers mostly authored by Auden's traveling companion, the writer Christopher Isherwood. The book was published in 1939; their travels were commissioned by the publisher. The late 1930s was in general busy with travel for Auden, setting the stage for his final emigration from England (to New York) at the beginning of World War II. In addition to Spain, he also visited Iceland during this period, and passed through New York on his way back from China. Incidentally, though this was clearly an important period for him personally and as a writer, Auden apparently didn't love the traveling all that much. Auden's recent biographer, John Fuller, has the following quote from Auden's diary from the trip:
This voyage is our illness: as the long days pass, we grow peevish, apathetic, sullen; we no longer expect, or even wish to recover. Only at moments, when a dolphin leaps or the big real birds from sunken Africa veer round our squat white funnels, we sigh and wince, our bodies gripped by the exquisitely painful pangs of hope. Maybe, after all, we are going to get well.
I think this is a great metaphor for a certain kind of traveler's despair. One could even extend it further: perhaps it's not just the voyage, but the traveler him or herself that is the "illness." One gets over the nausea of dislocation when motion finally stops.
On to the sonnets, which are, as a group, rather tough going. The strongest individual poems in terms of unity of theme and coherence are the first and last, and neither of the two are directly about China. Indeed, it seems quite possible to read them as more about Auden himself than about the place he had visited. Take Sonnet I:
So from the years their gifts were showered: each
Grabbed at the one it needed to survive;
Bee took the politics that suit a hive,
Trout finned as trout, peach moulded into peach,
And were successful at their first endeavour.
The hour of birth their only time in college,
They were content with their precocious knowledge,
To know their station and be right for ever.
Till, finally, there came a childish creature
On whom the years could model any feature,
Fake, as chance fell, as leopard or a dove,
Who by the gentlest wind was rudely shaken,
Who looked for truth but always was mistaken,
And envied his few friends, and chose his love.
The slightly clueless character at the center of this poem recurs in the first ten or so sonnets. He begins as above -- a person who is always slightly off as regards his politics or his "station" in life. I read these lines as autobiographical and for the most part self-deprecating, though there is a glint of Auden's pride in the gentle phrasing of the last line: "And envied his few friends, and chose his love." As the sonnets progress, he grows older, becoming depressed and less lovable (Sonnet V: "unwanted/ Grown seedy, paunchy, pouchy, disappointed,/ He took to drink to screw his nerves to muder"), before finally achieving a kind of regeneration with a seemingly symbolic boy-figure (Sonnets IX).
The China context, hinted at in Sonnet X, only really comes to the fore in Sonnet XI, with also seems to come closest to a kind of Orientalism. In the vein of many other Auden poems responding to War from the late 1930s, Sonnet XI is a strong injunction to joy and love against the gathering darkness of militarization. Here are the final lines of that sonnet:
History opposes its grief to our buoyant song,
To our hope its warning. One star has warmed to birth
One puzzled species that has yet to prove its worth:
The quick new West is false, and prodigious but wrong
The flower-like Hundred Families who for so long
In the Eighteen Provinces have modified the earth.
The last two lines clearly refer to China (on "Eighteen Provinces," see Wikipedia, and skip down to "The Term in Chinese"; "Hundred Families" refers, I believe to a medieval Chinese text called The Surnames of a Hundred Families). But theme of venerable Chinese tradition and "the quick new West" is fleeting; I don't see it recur in the other poems, most of which focus more on the ambivalence of the British presence in China. See, for instance, the opening lines of Sonnet XVI:
Our global story is not yet completed,
Crime, daring, commerce, chatter will go on,
But, as narrators find their memory gone,
Homeless, disterred, these know themselves defeated.
Who exactly Auden is referring to when he says "our"? The most obvious first reading is the English nation, but subsequent lines in the poem raise the possibility that he means specifically the overseas British, such as he encountered in the British colony of Hong Kong. And it might even be more specific (or more intimate) than that, as the "we" becomes "they" as the poem develops. "They," whose vision of the world has been rendered obsolete:
their doom to bear
Love for some far fobidden country, see
A native disapprove them with a stare
And Freedom's back in every door and tree.
"Freedom's back" is another phrase to puzzle over. A postcolonial reading might focus on the frontal aggression of the stare with which the Englishman is met. But freedom (presumably of the native) is something he can't quite access: it turns its back to him. (There is also, I would speculate, a possible gay subtext here: disapproval might also be a reference to the attitude towards homosexuality he encountered -- and I'll leave "freedom's back" to the reader's imagination.)
Several of the more China-themed sonnets invoke war and tragedy, but only Sonnet XII specifically alludes to genocide: "For we have seen a myriad faces/ Ecstatic from one lie/ And maps can really point to places/ Where life is evil now./ Nanking. Dachau." Note Auden's invocation of the "lie" of political orthodoxies, as contrasted to the truths of modern war represented by "Nanking" and "Dachau."
Ultimately, I don't find a coherent argument to Auden's Sonnets from China. The sympathy for the Chinese victims of the Sino-Japanese War is real, but hardly central thematically. A general tone of mourning and loss of place prevails, but it's hard to say whether that loss is Auden's personal alienation from English life, or a more generalized expression of political dislocation (linked to both British colonialism and its imminent entry into a new world War). Quite possibly, it's both, mingled together ambiguously.
Auden ends the sequence with a move towards Edwardian Liberalism and E.M. Forster: "Yes, we are Lucy, Turton, Philip: we/ Wish international evil, are delighted/ To join the jolly ranks of the benighted/ Where resason is denied and love ignored." (Incidentally, John Fuller, in his 2000 biography of Auden, argues that Auden probably meant "intentional," not "international" evil -- following a line in Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread -- and that this may have been an error of the compositor.) Against loveless spite is an ethos of human decency, personal intimacy, and friendship. If that is Auden's point, one wonders about the real value to us of these sonnets today; perhaps he said it better elsewhere?
Further reading: One scholar who has been working quite a bit on Auden's China sonnets is Stuart Christie, of Hong Kong Baptist University. He has an essay called "Orienteering," which is available here (PDF). I find it helpful. A more recent essay appeared in the October 2005 issue of PMLA (for those who have university subscriptions). I think the earlier essay is the better of the two.
(And a note about online access: I've only quoted bits and pieces of the sonnets here -- trying not to trample too much on 'Fair Use'. For those who don't have access to a volume of Auden, I believe all of the sonnets can be accessed through Google's cache.)
A Trio of Outsourcing Articles
1. In the Washington Post, a look at a northern Virginia company called Approva, which has a sizeable BPO operation in Pune. The tone is almost routine: there is little of the defensiveness about American jobs going overseas that we saw in the Outsourcing Hysteria era of 2003-2004. Here, one of the Pune employees of the company goes so far as to suggest that the company's use of BPO streamlines their costs, and has possibly created 100 jobs in the U.S.
But perhaps the most interesting part of the article actually pertains to office decor:
Sounds nice, actually.
2. Another article, in the New York Times, argues that India may not be able to keep up with the spiraling demand for engineers who are "polished" enough to work in BPO:
Though the piece is rich with numbers and statistics, one thing it doesn't consider is what would happen if the growth in outsourcing were to level off. You might have a lot of unhappy Engineers!
3. There was also a second article on outsourcing in the Times yesterday, this one focusing on a recent study indicating that the skill-level of outsourcing work in India and China is rising rapidly. There isn't that much to this piece; most of it is examples from major American companies like Dow Chemicals and IBM on their plans to set up advanced Research and Development units in India and China. Universities in those countries are moving forward rapidly in terms of science and engineering research, and are proving formidable competitors to U.S. research universities.
My favorite quote from this article is a rather ambitious statement from Berkeley's Dean of Engineering:
Now that's optimism!
But perhaps the most interesting part of the article actually pertains to office decor:
Tech firms here have created office parks that would not look out of place in Tysons Corner or Reston, but even in office decor, they strive to bridge the gap between the two cultures. Gupta recalls how the original color scheme for IMC's new offices in Pune was so loud -- even more than so than in the Silicon Valley dot-com boom of the late 1990s -- that he intervened to tone it down. "In the U.S., most of our offices are conservative: white walls, blue carpets," he said. "In India, offices have oranges and pinks and yellows. I was trying to balance the two cultures." Even with Gupta's modifications, IMC still bursts into bright blues and yellows and oranges, from ceiling to floor.
Sounds nice, actually.
2. Another article, in the New York Times, argues that India may not be able to keep up with the spiraling demand for engineers who are "polished" enough to work in BPO:
India’s $23.4 billion outsourcing industry accounts for most of the country’s software and services industry, which makes up nearly 5 percent of gross domestic product. The industry employs 1.2 million workers, has sparked a consumer revolution in India, and is accelerating at more than 30 percent a year.
On the sidelines of the Nasscom meeting, B. Ramalinga Raju, chairman of India’s fourth- largest outsourcing company, Satyam Computer Services, said that India produced three million college graduates every year, including nearly 400,000 engineers. "But most of these are uncut diamonds that have to go through polishing factories, as the trade requires only polished stones," Mr. Raju said.
Though the piece is rich with numbers and statistics, one thing it doesn't consider is what would happen if the growth in outsourcing were to level off. You might have a lot of unhappy Engineers!
3. There was also a second article on outsourcing in the Times yesterday, this one focusing on a recent study indicating that the skill-level of outsourcing work in India and China is rising rapidly. There isn't that much to this piece; most of it is examples from major American companies like Dow Chemicals and IBM on their plans to set up advanced Research and Development units in India and China. Universities in those countries are moving forward rapidly in terms of science and engineering research, and are proving formidable competitors to U.S. research universities.
My favorite quote from this article is a rather ambitious statement from Berkeley's Dean of Engineering:
Some university administrators see the same trend [i.e., the rise of Asian universities]. "This is part of an incredible tectonic shift that is occurring," said A. Richard Newton, dean of the college of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, "and we've got to think about this more profoundly than we have in the past. Berkeley and other leading American universities, he said, are now competing in a global market for talent. His strategy is to become an aggressive acquirer. He is trying to get Tsinghua University in Beijing and some leading technical universities in India to set up satellite schools linked to Berkeley. The university has 90 acres in Richmond, Calif., that he thinks would be an ideal site.
"I want to get them here, make Berkeley the intellectual hub of the planet, and they won't leave," said Mr. Newton, who emigrated from Australia 25 years ago.
Now that's optimism!
Cartoons again: Another Perspective
Manorama Sarasvati has a thoughtful/scholarly response to the cartoons controversy, expressing some sympathy for the Muslim protestors (though obviously not for their violence). Her most provocative point might be this one:
Though I agree with this particular point, I actually differ with Mano on the broader question of how to read the ongoingprotests riots, for reasons indicated in my comments on her blog.
When the larger narrative is articulated, as I have tried to do above, the particular argument that Muslims are overreacting to "just a few cartoons" becomes much more complex because of the context in which it circulates. In fact, the outrage of Muslims does not stem from a response to just a few cartoons, but rather to an entire visual economy which dehumanizes Muslims, and specifically, Muslim bodies, as a means of expressing and visually reinforcing western dominance. We need only to think back to the torture photos for another example in which the argument that the photos were the result of "a few bad apples" seems strangely familiar. It's only a few cases, we were reassured. Muslims have no need to get upset. And after all, there is a cost to freedom. The visual representation of what that cost is, and what it is has historically been, was hardly interrogated. It fit quite well into a narrative that relies on such logic for its continuation.
Though I agree with this particular point, I actually differ with Mano on the broader question of how to read the ongoing
Three Things: California Textbooks, Marriage Law in India, Google China
--There was a story on NPR's All Things Considered yesterday regarding the California school textbook controversy. (See my earlier post here) Seems like a pretty balanced story -- the emphasis is on the growing demands of various immigrant groups to have their views represented, rather than religious extremism. I can't quite figure out why this story ran yesterday in particular, though.
--I was puzzled by the news that the Indian Supreme Court recently ruled that all Indian marriages must be legally registered, in the interest of protecting the rights of women. I support the decision -- but I actually thought this was already the law!
--It's interesting that the Chinese government is defending its censorship of Google China by invoking the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which allows the American government to monitor all electronic communnication conducted in the U.S. In effect, they are saying, "well, the American government spies on its citizens, so we can too." I don't think it's really valid; how can simple monitoring of communications pertaining to possible terrorism compare to outright banning of links to "democracy," "Tibet," and so on?
Everyone is beating up on Google, and they may be right. But it's too bad that the left isn't really taking the Chinese government's point as an opportunity to review the slide in American civil liberties represented by the Patriot Act. The latter was effectively re-authorized by the U.S. Senate last week, with only minor changes regarding libraries and the infamous "National Security Letters." Even with the changes, the government has entirely too much authority to use its powers to conduct information fishing expeditions: investigation without cause for suspicion.
--I was puzzled by the news that the Indian Supreme Court recently ruled that all Indian marriages must be legally registered, in the interest of protecting the rights of women. I support the decision -- but I actually thought this was already the law!
--It's interesting that the Chinese government is defending its censorship of Google China by invoking the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which allows the American government to monitor all electronic communnication conducted in the U.S. In effect, they are saying, "well, the American government spies on its citizens, so we can too." I don't think it's really valid; how can simple monitoring of communications pertaining to possible terrorism compare to outright banning of links to "democracy," "Tibet," and so on?
Everyone is beating up on Google, and they may be right. But it's too bad that the left isn't really taking the Chinese government's point as an opportunity to review the slide in American civil liberties represented by the Patriot Act. The latter was effectively re-authorized by the U.S. Senate last week, with only minor changes regarding libraries and the infamous "National Security Letters." Even with the changes, the government has entirely too much authority to use its powers to conduct information fishing expeditions: investigation without cause for suspicion.
Valentine's Day Music: 2 Top 9 Lists
My list:
1. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Cheek to Cheek (Cole Porter)
2. Hemant Kumar, Na Tum Hamen Jano (from Baat Ek Raat Ki)
3. John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, My One and Only Love
4. The entire early ouevre of the sublime Al Green
5. Velvet Underground & Nico, I'll Be Your Mirror
6. Amadou & Mariam, Mon Amour, Ma Cherie
7. Everything But the Girl, Before Today (Walking Wounded)
8. Bob Dylan, Tangled Up in Blue
9. Magnetic Fields, The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side (69 Love Songs)
S.'s list:
1. Lata Mangeshkar, Kabhie Kabhie (from Silsila)
2. Diana Krall, Peel Me a Grape
3. Kumar Sanu and Kavita Krishnamurthy, Rim Jhim Rim Jhim (from 1942: A Love Story)
4. Mohammed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar, Tere Bindiya (from Abhimaan)
5. Aamir Khan and Alka Yagnik, Aati Kya Khandala (from Ghulam)
6. Sonu Nigam, Saathiya (from Saathiya)
7. Lata Mangeshkar, Pyaar Kiya to Darna Kya (from Mughal-e-Azam)
8. Lata Mangeshkar, Abke sajan saavan mein (from Chupke Chupke)
9. Do You Love Me (from Fiddler on the Roof)
Feel free to share your obscure (or familiar) favorites below...
1. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Cheek to Cheek (Cole Porter)
2. Hemant Kumar, Na Tum Hamen Jano (from Baat Ek Raat Ki)
3. John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, My One and Only Love
4. The entire early ouevre of the sublime Al Green
5. Velvet Underground & Nico, I'll Be Your Mirror
6. Amadou & Mariam, Mon Amour, Ma Cherie
7. Everything But the Girl, Before Today (Walking Wounded)
8. Bob Dylan, Tangled Up in Blue
9. Magnetic Fields, The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side (69 Love Songs)
S.'s list:
1. Lata Mangeshkar, Kabhie Kabhie (from Silsila)
2. Diana Krall, Peel Me a Grape
3. Kumar Sanu and Kavita Krishnamurthy, Rim Jhim Rim Jhim (from 1942: A Love Story)
4. Mohammed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar, Tere Bindiya (from Abhimaan)
5. Aamir Khan and Alka Yagnik, Aati Kya Khandala (from Ghulam)
6. Sonu Nigam, Saathiya (from Saathiya)
7. Lata Mangeshkar, Pyaar Kiya to Darna Kya (from Mughal-e-Azam)
8. Lata Mangeshkar, Abke sajan saavan mein (from Chupke Chupke)
9. Do You Love Me (from Fiddler on the Roof)
Feel free to share your obscure (or familiar) favorites below...
Links: Idolatry, Mrs. King, Brugada Syndrome, DesiBlogging
--Read Tim Burke's thoughtful take on the ongoing anti-Islamic cartoons controversy. In some instances, Burke echoes Juan Cole, and sympathizes with the sense of grievance that many Muslims worldwide feel. But he also has this clear-sighted rejoinder to the apparent theological confusion of the protestors:
--Read Mendi Obadike's somewhat ambivalent response to the death of Coretta Scott King last week.
--Read Brendan Greeley on his experience with a rare heart anomaly known as Brugada Syndrome, in the New York Times Magazine:
(Yikes!)
--Rage, of the blog Brown Out, has an edifying polemic (or maybe an intelligent rant) where he points out the dangers of taking desi blogging too seriously:
Rage points to a possible problem associated with quickie blogging. But it's also to a great extent a problem associated with search engines, which tend to rate blogs quite highly when they are widely linked to and current. I don't know what specifically Rage is thinking of here -- his argument could be stronger if he gave some specific examples -- but he certainly provides some food for blog-thought.
--Oh, and check out Jabberwock's review of Upamanyu Chatterjee's new novel Weight Loss (which looks very twisted and creepy), as well as Pankaj Mishra's positive review of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, in the New York Times. By all accounts, Kiran Desai has nailed it with this one.
Certainly the given religious logic of the attitude toward iconic representations of the Prophet within many Islamic traditions is almost actively contradicted by the riots and protests directed at the cartoons. What is that reaction but idolatry, the mistaking of the human, the temporal, for the divine, the elevation of Muhammed and representations of him to the level of God? Isn’t that one of the clearest and most unambiguous instructions within the Qu’ran and later interpretative traditions, to not mistake the Prophet for God Himself?
That is an argument which will convince no one, because none of this is really about the substance of a belief about iconic representation and idolatry.
--Read Mendi Obadike's somewhat ambivalent response to the death of Coretta Scott King last week.
I'd heard her say that she married a vision, not a man, but before King's death, I'd always imagined that the idea was simply that she knew she was marrying an activist. What I've been sitting with this week is the challenge of recognizing what activism looks like when one is speaking / acting from the position of black lady (or perhaps colored lady). I've been thinking about this question in the context of my own creative work, but it is hitting me differently when I rethink King's life in the context of her own intentions, rather than in the context of her husband's work. Even the writing of this post requires me to think about the politics of engaging with the lady as a political figure. Do I call her Mrs. in the title of this post?
--Read Brendan Greeley on his experience with a rare heart anomaly known as Brugada Syndrome, in the New York Times Magazine:
From my two hours on the operating table I remember nothing, punctuated by a shock of pain so wrenching and intense that it fails comparison with anything else I have ever experienced, then nothing, then another shock comparable only to the first, then nothing. I can confirm that defibrillation does in fact contract all of the muscles in your body so that you lift off the table. In my case, my lungs constricted and I woke up screaming involuntarily. One of my cardiologists told me later that by the third time my heart stopped, they had adjusted the defibrillator and I remained sedated. I think I thanked him.
(Yikes!)
--Rage, of the blog Brown Out, has an edifying polemic (or maybe an intelligent rant) where he points out the dangers of taking desi blogging too seriously:
However, if someone were to begin reading a blog as a primary source for their understanding of a community and/or issues that pertain to it, they could be led astray, especially by folks who are on a soapbox about their perspective, or their authenticity, but don't have much more to back it up than a lot of hours in front of a computer screen and, more often than not, minimal interactions with the subjects of their posts. I know that I've been guilty of the same in the past, and have tried to remedy what I could when I was reminded of the flaws. But others don't do that, and their pieces remain up, virtually unchallenged (especially if it's about community organizations or initiatives, when the principals of those entities seldom have the time to respond to misrepresentation (or no representation) in the media, let alone the blogosphere). Then, the next time that someone searches about agency X or person Y, what they get is a source that is often an under- or even un-researched polemic that hasn't even been seen, let alone replied to, by the person/group in question.
Rage points to a possible problem associated with quickie blogging. But it's also to a great extent a problem associated with search engines, which tend to rate blogs quite highly when they are widely linked to and current. I don't know what specifically Rage is thinking of here -- his argument could be stronger if he gave some specific examples -- but he certainly provides some food for blog-thought.
--Oh, and check out Jabberwock's review of Upamanyu Chatterjee's new novel Weight Loss (which looks very twisted and creepy), as well as Pankaj Mishra's positive review of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, in the New York Times. By all accounts, Kiran Desai has nailed it with this one.
Breaking the Frame: The Fall of Icarus and the Torturer's Horse
I was discussing W.H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" with a student during office hours recently, specifically the question of how to spot irony (the student had missed it). Looking up the poem on the internet, one comes across, first of all, the painting by Bruegel called Landscape and The Fall of Icarus, which inspired Auden. One also encounters Alexander Nemerov's helpful essay in the current issue of Critical Inquiry, which relates the poem to Auden's experiences of the war in China in 1938, and situates the painting in the actual Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.
You can see a large format version of Bruegel's 1558 painting here. And there is a brief bio of Pieter Bruegel the Elder here; it places Bruegel in the context of 16th century Flemish narrative painting, marks his Italian training, and indicates the influence of Hieronymus Bosch.
Make sure you spot the following element of the painting. It's easy to miss:
Those are Icarus's legs.
What should be a story of the spectacular failure of human ambition is represented by Bruegel in a dim corner of the canvas, dwarfed by the scale of a massive landscape, and overlooked by nearly all of the human characters in the painting.
Compare the painting to Auden's poem of 1938:
(Incidentally, to answer the question of how you can prove the presence of irony to readers unaccustomed to poetry, there isn't any easy formula. The most solid -- or most teachable -- approach I can think of hinges on the dissonance between words indicating tone: "leisurely" does not go with "disaster," and "amazing" does not go with "calmly." It's in the gap between words describing a single event that you'll find Auden's irony.)
What's interesting about this poem more generally is the way Auden breaks the narrative frame, implicating the viewer of the painting as well as the reader of the poem in the ethical crisis occurring at the margin. While in the first and third stanzas Auden offers a reflection on the painting itself, in the second stanza he seems to wander off topic somewhat. The Crucifixion was a common enough theme for the "Old Masters" such as one would see in this museum in Brussels. But children skating on a pond? And most importantly, where does he get the "untidy spot/ Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse/ Scratches its innocent behind on a tree"?
These mundane and perhaps contemporary elements from outside the painting extend the theme of social indifference to include the reader in the present day. It's we who, in the face of war and injustice, continue steadfastly on our course as if nothing dramatic is happening, just as the "expensive delicate ship . . . sailed calmly on" in Auden's poem.
Of course, it's quite fair to suggest that Bruegel himself accomplished much the same breaking of the narrative frame in his 1558 painting, though in Bruegel's case at least the marginalization of Icarus is part of a deliberate joke on the viewer. (Where Bruegel makes disaster marginal, Auden reminds us to keep our eyes focused on the margins. And perhaps the idea of an ethics of social concern that is so important to Auden was not in Bruegel's mind, Icarus being a mythical figure.)
In his essay on the painting and Auden's poem at Critical Inquiry, I think Nemerov errs slightly when he argues that Bruegel's gesture is somehow contemporary:
I don't think such strong phrasing is necessary. And I'm also not sure that Nemerov's invocation of Borges's "Pierre Menard" is warranted, though the poem and painting may well be a Mise-en-abyme -- for which a reference to Borges may always be warranted.
Finally, if one were to teach the poem and painting today, one would be sorely tempted to talk about contemporary situations where it seems society continues to fail to address its ethical blindspots. (Auden's disquieting reference to "the torturer's horse" might provide a convenient segué to a comment about Bush administration.) Some might complain about yet another instance of the politicization of literary studies, but in this case the poem itself seems to require it; politicization is embedded into the structure of the poet's own act of reading.
You can see a large format version of Bruegel's 1558 painting here. And there is a brief bio of Pieter Bruegel the Elder here; it places Bruegel in the context of 16th century Flemish narrative painting, marks his Italian training, and indicates the influence of Hieronymus Bosch.
Make sure you spot the following element of the painting. It's easy to miss:
Those are Icarus's legs.
What should be a story of the spectacular failure of human ambition is represented by Bruegel in a dim corner of the canvas, dwarfed by the scale of a massive landscape, and overlooked by nearly all of the human characters in the painting.
Compare the painting to Auden's poem of 1938:
Musée des Beaux Arts
by W.H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
(Incidentally, to answer the question of how you can prove the presence of irony to readers unaccustomed to poetry, there isn't any easy formula. The most solid -- or most teachable -- approach I can think of hinges on the dissonance between words indicating tone: "leisurely" does not go with "disaster," and "amazing" does not go with "calmly." It's in the gap between words describing a single event that you'll find Auden's irony.)
What's interesting about this poem more generally is the way Auden breaks the narrative frame, implicating the viewer of the painting as well as the reader of the poem in the ethical crisis occurring at the margin. While in the first and third stanzas Auden offers a reflection on the painting itself, in the second stanza he seems to wander off topic somewhat. The Crucifixion was a common enough theme for the "Old Masters" such as one would see in this museum in Brussels. But children skating on a pond? And most importantly, where does he get the "untidy spot/ Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse/ Scratches its innocent behind on a tree"?
These mundane and perhaps contemporary elements from outside the painting extend the theme of social indifference to include the reader in the present day. It's we who, in the face of war and injustice, continue steadfastly on our course as if nothing dramatic is happening, just as the "expensive delicate ship . . . sailed calmly on" in Auden's poem.
Of course, it's quite fair to suggest that Bruegel himself accomplished much the same breaking of the narrative frame in his 1558 painting, though in Bruegel's case at least the marginalization of Icarus is part of a deliberate joke on the viewer. (Where Bruegel makes disaster marginal, Auden reminds us to keep our eyes focused on the margins. And perhaps the idea of an ethics of social concern that is so important to Auden was not in Bruegel's mind, Icarus being a mythical figure.)
In his essay on the painting and Auden's poem at Critical Inquiry, I think Nemerov errs slightly when he argues that Bruegel's gesture is somehow contemporary:
But if we focus still more on the figure of Icarus, we can begin to see that the painting becomes, thanks to Auden's poem, not just an allegory of 1938 but something somehow made in 1938, as though it were a surrealist work of the poet's own era.
I don't think such strong phrasing is necessary. And I'm also not sure that Nemerov's invocation of Borges's "Pierre Menard" is warranted, though the poem and painting may well be a Mise-en-abyme -- for which a reference to Borges may always be warranted.
Finally, if one were to teach the poem and painting today, one would be sorely tempted to talk about contemporary situations where it seems society continues to fail to address its ethical blindspots. (Auden's disquieting reference to "the torturer's horse" might provide a convenient segué to a comment about Bush administration.) Some might complain about yet another instance of the politicization of literary studies, but in this case the poem itself seems to require it; politicization is embedded into the structure of the poet's own act of reading.
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