The Gray Mounds

Gray mounds by the Schuylkill River, somewhere near Norristown.

Try zooming in here; the vines are cool. Some other (greener) photos from today's bike ride to Valley Forge, too.

Neko Case on Why She Uses Reverb

From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

"It is about Patsy Cline and it is about Roy Orbison, but it's also about sound dynamics and actual physics," she said. "Reverb is the sound of sound echoing in a room, and that reverb goes up or down depending on how loud or soft you sing. It's kind of like the importance of having breathing in between words: You want to hear the space you're in, and reverb makes it more alive, makes it breathe more."

I agree with her to an extent. Records had more reverb on them in the 1960s and 70s, generally because producers generally kept microphones at a certain distance from the vocalist's mouth. Somewhere along the way it went out of fashion as production values improved, and "close miking" became the norm. This record producers' web site has an explanation:

Question number 1 is why use reverb at all?

The reason reverb is virtually a necessity is because of the current practice of close miking. Oddly enough, close miking has not always been the norm. It took innovative producer Joe Meek to discover that putting the microphones much closer than the then accepted distance gave a much more exciting sound. But close miking deprives the sound of its natural reverberation, so the artificial variety is used to compensate.

At this point it is easy to see why we use reverb. But there is more to it than that - reverb just sounds nice. There is some instinct inside us to prefer a luxuriant aural environment, just as we prefer a luxuriantly soft sofa to a hard bench.

Of course, the reverb that we hear on these recordings is artifically produced through effects processing -- not through simply pushing the microphone back six inches. So Neko Case's comment above might be a little... artificial.

(Incidentally, one place where the use of excesive reverb is actually really grating to my ears is old Hindi music. Sometimes Lata Mangeshkar's voice, high-pitched to begin with, is really badly distorted.)

"Except for the reign of the truncheon thing": The Clash, The Brit-Asian, and the Taxi

Harraj Mann was arrested for five hours in Durham, England because he asked his taxi driver to play The Clash's "London Calling" on the way to the airport (via Saheli at Sepia Mutiny News).

My first thought: so maybe the Americans aren't the only hysterical ones after all.

My second thought is to offer the lyrics of "London Calling" in solidarity with Harraj Mann and all the other brown punk rockers out there:

London calling to the faraway towns
Now war is declared - and battle come down
London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls
London calling, now don't look to us
Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust
London calling, see we ain't got no swing
'Cept for the reign of that truncheon thing

CHORUS
The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear
Cause London is burning and I live by the river

London calling to the imitation zone
Forget it, brother, you can go at it alone
London calling to the zombies of death
Quit holding out - and draw another breath
London calling - and I don't wanna shout
But while we were talking I saw you nodding out
London calling, see we ain't got no high
Except for that one with the yellowy eyes

CHORUS x2
The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in
Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear error, but I have no fear
Cause London is drowning and I, I live by the river

Now get this
London calling, yes, I was there, too
An' you know what they said? Well, some of it was true!
London calling at the top of the dial
And after all this, won't you give me a smile?
London Calling

I never felt so much alike, like-a, like-a...

I've asked this question before, but does anyone know what this song is specifically about? I've never quite been able to put my finger on it. There is certainly a general theme of apocalypse, as well as defiance in the face of imminent fascism. Both themes seem to suit Britain circa 1979, an era of the rise of skinheads and the National Front as well as of course Margaret Thatcher, who was not a fascist, though she probably seemed like one if your were eighteen, unemployed, or brown-skinned. It's also not long before the Brixton riots.

But there are some puzzling lines in the song. For instance, what about the "zombies of death"? Is that a reference to drug use (connected to "and we aint got no highs"?) or merely a horror film flight of fancy?

And there are also references to musical fashion -- "phoney beatlemania" in the first verse and "London calling at the top of the dial" at the end -- suggesting that the song might be just a punk manifesto, an assertion of a youth culture stylistic credo. In that sense it reminds me a little of the Nation Of Ulysses, and "N-Sub Ulysses": "Who's got the real anti-parent culture sound"?

Perhaps "London Calling" is just a general smorgasbord of defiance, with no particular thematic unity. Still, I invite any and all interpretations -- come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls.

A Parody of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces

Via Moorishgirl, a parody of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, called A Million Little Lies. There is an excerpt from the book (published already!) at USA Today, and the the funniest bit I thought was at the end:

The combination lock is still dangling from my left earlobe, and it hurts like a [mofo]. I wonder whether Lorraine noticed it, and, if she didn't, whether she's a good psychologist or psychiatrist or whatever. Then again, maybe she noticed it and didn't want to say anything. Maybe she is both maternal and tactful. That is a good combination. That makes me think of the combination lock again, and in some ways I am thankful. I realize that whoever plunged that thing through my lobe could have done worse. Much worse. I've heard stories. I've lived stories. I've made stories up. When I get out of the shower, I think I see a shadow, but I'm not sure. Then I think I see bugs crawling up the wall, and I think the walls are breathing, expanding and contracting, closing in on me, but that's too Lost Weekend, so I ignore it. I cross to the mirror, with a towel hanging loosely at my waist, like a hula skirt. The mirror is fogged up and I am glad because I don't want to see my face. I don't want to look into my own eyes for the simple yet heart-tugging reason that I haven't had the courage to look into my own eyes in many years. I do not want to see The Real Me. The Real Me is a coward. And a liar. But I have my good points, too. My prose, for example. And the way I use "and" repeatedly in very long sentences to create the illusion of breathlessness.

Aaargh! Here come the bugs! I am lost. Here come the Black Men in White, with their Big [Effing] Syringes. Afterward, I wake up and hurl and find my way to The Lounge. I guess I'm early, because I'm alone, and I take a few moments to review my Life of Privilege.

Who am I?

What happened to my hopes and dreams?

When did everything begin to go wrong?

Wait. I am all over the place. Let's focus: Are there three or four key elements in my young, privileged life that shaped me and defined me, and do any of them have the Weight of Tragedy?

Quibbling With Fareed Zakaria on Immigration: U.S. vs. Europe

Following up on our interesting discussion last week of the Immigration enforcement/guest worker program currently in the Senate, check out Fareed Zakaria's Op-Ed in the Washington Post.

He starts by talking about the program in Germany a few years ago to try and lure Indian high tech workers to compete with the U.S. and Silicon Valley. The strategy was to offer what was called a "German Green Card," but it was in fact simply a souped up version of the existing Guest-worker (Gestarbiter) program that had in the past brought millions of Turks to Germany.

The program failed, because Indian high tech workers can smell a fake. But there is a small logical problem in Zakaria's argument. Can you spot it?

Many Americans have become enamored of the European approach to immigration -- perhaps without realizing it. Guest workers, penalties, sanctions and deportation are all a part of Europe's mode of dealing with immigrants. The results of this approach have been on display recently in France, where rioting migrant youths again burned cars last week. Across Europe one sees disaffected, alienated immigrants, ripe for radicalism. The immigrant communities deserve their fair share of blame for this, but there's a cycle at work. European societies exclude the immigrants, who become alienated and reject their societies.

One puzzle about post-Sept. 11 America is that it has not had a subsequent terror attack -- not even a small backpack bomb in a movie theater -- while there have been dozens in Europe. My own explanation is that American immigrant communities, even Arab and Muslim ones, are not very radicalized. (Even if such an attack does take place, the fact that 4 1/2 years have gone by without one provides some proof of this contention.) Compared with every other country in the world, America does immigration superbly. Do we really want to junk that for the French approach?

For me, the flaw here is that he jumps from Germany to France, where there is a very different kind of immigrant problem, which has nothing to do with Guest workers. While some of the French immigrants Arab and African minorities in the Banlieux are sans papieres, quite a number of the kids rioting last fall were in fact French citizens. Meanwhile, the guest workers in Germany have been comparably docile (though I suspect they are nevertheless rather unhappy with the way they are treated by the German government).

The question we need to be asking is why legal immigrants in the U.S. have generally done better at integrating/assimilating, and moving up the social ladder, than their counterparts in Europe. It might have to do with immigration rules, or it might have to do with simple demographic and spatial issues (the spread out nature of American cities means there is less ghettoization). Or perhaps it might just be that America is a more welcoming society... I don't know.

Anyway, Zakaria's heart is in the right place. He ends with the (wise) suggestion that the U.S. needs to expand its legal immigrant pool to satisfy the demand for labor that is currently performed by illegals:

"The income gap between the United States and Mexico is the largest between any two contiguous countries in the world," writes Stanford historian David Kennedy. That huge disparity is producing massive demand in the United States and massive supply from Mexico and Central America. Whenever governments try to come between these two forces -- think of drugs -- simply increasing enforcement does not work. Tighter border control is an excellent idea, but to work, it will have to be coupled with some recognition of the laws of supply and demand -- that is, it will have to include expansion of the legal immigrant pool.

Can't disagree with that. Unfortunately, such a proposal is not on the table; in our xenophobic times, any politican even suggesting it would be committing a kind of political suicide.

Open Call: Gayatri Spivak Blog Event

Jon from Long Sunday is planning an innovative cross-blog discussion of Gayatri Spivak's work for the week of April 17-23.

It's an open call, and I want to extend the invitation especially to readers and fellow bloggers interested in postcolonial literature & theory, feminism, and South Asian politics and culture. The current participants are mainly "theorists" (and theoretical anti-theorists like our friend John Holbo), and it seems like it would be important to have some input from people who have some of the thematic interests I mentioned in the mix as well. Spivak means something different if your interest is tribal/aboriginal rights in Bihar or the Uniform Civil Code, rather than the Labor Theory of Value... if you know what I mean.

Several major Spivak essays are being made available online for the event (go to Jon's site), which are to form the core of the discussion. But I suspect any encounters with Spivak (positive or negative) would only enliven this unusual event.

Note:: If there are any readers who don't have their own blogs, I am always happy to volunteer my own blog space as a venue for guest posts. Please email me if you'd like to participate that way -- all you'll have to do is send me your work via email and tell me how you'd like it presented. (From correspondence I've gotten in recent months and various encounters at conferences, I know there are a significant number of academic readers lurking out there... )

* * *
For my own take on Spivak, hm. I referenced her concept of 'catachresis' positively in a post on Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake from some time ago. But I've also hinted strongly at my frustration with Spivak's style of writing and intellectual idiosyncrasies in this long post from last summer.

I think it might be time to try some new approaches and say some new things: I'm hoping to write a post called "Spivak in Plain English" for the event. Stay tuned!

Realism, Convention, and Ian McEwan's Atonement

(Cross-posted at The Valve)

I've been sitting on a link to this article on realism in the novel by James Wood for awhile (thanks Shehla A.). Recently it came to mind while I was teaching Ian McEwan's masterful novel Atonement in my contemporary British fiction seminar. I was also thinking about what defines something as realism in painting when I visited the Andrew Wyeth exhibit that just opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Below I'll comment on all three, and argue that they all share certain concerns.

* * * * *

Let's start with James Wood, who begins his essay with a pair of attacks on realist fiction, from Rick Moody and Patrick Giles, and then moves on to carefully defend a somewhat updated version of realist fiction, uncoupling it from any presumed ideological orientation or strong philosophical grounding. If some people might find realism to be a dead genre, or worse, a quiet ally of 'phallogocentrism,' Wood argues that it need not be so. First he gives three sentences from Moody:

"It's quaint to say so, but the realistic novel still needs a kick in the ass. The genre, with its epiphanies, its rising action, its predictable movement, its conventional humanisms, can still entertain and move us on occasion, but for me it's politically and philosophically dubious and often dull."

And then the response to them:

Moody's three sentences efficiently compact the reigning assumptions. Realism is assumed to be a "genre" (rather than, say, a central impulse in fiction); it is taken to be mere dead convention, and to be related to a certain kind of traditional plot, with predictable beginnings and endings; it deals in characters, but softly and piously ("conventional humanisms"); it assumes that the world can be described with a naively stable link between word and referent ("philosophically dubious"); and all this will tend toward a conservative or even oppressive politics ("politically and philosophically dubious"). This might plausibly describe a contemporary novel by Anne Tyler or Kent Haruf, but it is almost an exact inversion of the 19th-century realist novel, which was often politically and philosophically radical. Often, and most notably in Flaubert, it overwhelmed the world with words, with elaborations of style, even as it claimed exactly to match word with referent; and often it dealt savagely and pessimistically with its fictional characters.

So the response to the claim that realism is a dead genre is to say that it isn't a genre but a set of conventions. It also need not be understood as adhering to predictability in plot or description -- especially if one invokes someone like Flaubert (or McEwan, about whom more below). And certainly one shouldn't assume anything about a writer's politics either positively or negatively from their style of writing: it's not true that postmodernists are necessarily politically progressive, while realism (socialist realism) was once the province of political radicals and can still be so.

Wood's essay gains something from the fact that he knows the major figures in American postmodernism quite well. He also knows his Barthes, and spends quite a bit of time responding to some of Barthes' major arguments about the "reality effect" -- the idea that any attempt to represent the world realistically is always bound by a set of narrative conventions that can be decoded or unmasked. But unmasking the conventions doesn't necessarily undo their hold over the imagination, nor is it clear that readers can do without them:

There is, I would argue, not just a "grammar" of narrative convention, but a grammar of life—those elements without which human activity no longer looks recognisable, and without which fiction no longer seems human. WJ Harvey, following Kant, long ago proposed the notion of a "constitutive category," something which "though not in itself often the object of experience, is inherent in everything we do actually experience… without it life would be random and chaotic." The four elements of this category are, he suggests, time, identity, causality and freedom. I would add mind, or consciousness. Any fiction that lacked all five elements would probably have little power to move us. The defence of this idea of mimesis should not harden into a narrow aesthetic, for it ought to be large enough to connect Shakespeare's dramatic mimesis, say, with, Dickens's novelistic mimesis, or Dostoevsky's melodramatic mimesis with Muriel Spark's satiric mimesis, or Pushkin's poetic mimesis with Platonov's lyrical mimesis.

To some extent Wood's critique of Barthes rhymes with some Valve-ish critiques of constructivism in cultural studies: just knowing that something is culturally constructed doesn't take us anywhere. And while I can't speak to Muriel Spark or Platonov, I agree with Wood's idea that there are a few basic elements that are to be found in all fiction, though I'm a bit concerned that we can't pin down which four or five elements we think of as absolutely essential.

Critics of Wood might find this to be a suitable starting point: if we don't agree as to which elements are essential, why do we think that anything at all is essential?

* * * * *

(spoiler alert) This brings me to McEwan's Atonement, which is as much a manifesto of a kind of contemporary realist fiction-writing as it is a successful example of it. An imaginative, writerly thirteen year old girl named Briony Tallis, who accuses her older sister's boyfriend, Robbie Turner, of raping another family member. The young man was the son of a servant, who had been sponsored by the family, and educated at their expense. When he's accused of rape, however, the family abandons him and he is jailed. He's released just as the Second World War is beginning, and is drawn into the army.

Having grown up some years later, the accuser attempts to atone for her false accusation, which was in some sense the product of a novelistic imagination that had gotten carried away with itself. In a sense, "atonement" can be read as realism itself: the insistence on fidelity to describing what has occurred as a matter of basic responsibility. But the frame narrative that appears at the end suggests that even that might not really be the case: Briony reveals that even in her careful account of her own crime of accusation, her version of her sister and Robbie Turner's romance has been helped somewhat, happy-ending-ized. But sometimes realism demands too much. She couldn't bear to describe what actually happened to Robbie Turner at Dunkirk, or her sister Cecilia in the Blitz:

How could that constitute an ending? What sense or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn't do it to them. I'm too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining. I face an incoming tide of forgetting, and then oblivion. I no longer possess the courage of my pessimism. . . . No one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel. I know there's always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.

This might seem to be a slightly different issue from the one James Wood raises in his essay, the question of narrative fidelity rather than realism vs. postmodernism. But in fact they are versions of the same question. Briony insists on her right to imagine a happy ending to the lovers' story because it's the only kind of ending that could, in its imagining, actually enable her to atone for her earlier crime. The only way to correct an errant act of the imagination is more imagination, not a turn to a narrow kind of realism.

Broad realism. While the self-reflexive element frames the central narrative in McEwan's novel, it doesn't necessarily displace it or take away from its power. Moreoever, the psychological emphasis -- shifting perspectives, and the use of free indirect discourse -- are merely an expression of what must be understood as a species of realism, psychological realism.

* * * * *

Finally, a brief note on Andrew Wyeth, whose exhibit I walked into yesterday without any expectations. This American realist painter disregarded virtually all of the ideas of 20th century art in favor of a continued emphasis on traditional realistic painting, and an obsessive and careful attention to nature.

But two things struck me when looking at some of Wyeth's better paintings (like "Groundhog Day"). First, in the obsessive attention to natural textures and details one sees in some of the landscapes in the 1940s and 50s are shades of what might be thought of as an abstract sensibility after all. The subject isn't the beauty of nature, it's a big slab of granite. Secondly, many of Wyeth's paintings figure absence -- clothes hanging on a peg, doors that are forbiddingly shut, window frames on sad little houses. In many of these paintings, there is a level of attention to framing and composition -- exactly as one sees in McEwan's novel -- that is of a piece with realism but also goes beyond it in some ways. Especially with the emphasis on framing what isn't or can't be contained in the image itself, Wyeth reminds me of Wallace Stevens: full to the brim with nothingness.

Two Wyeth paintings that do what I'm talking about: here, and here.

Not Passé: An Article About Contemporary Indian Fiction

About a year and a half ago I talked to Mandira Banerjee for a story she was doing on South Asian writers in the U.S. publishing market for a magazine called Indian Life & Style. The article came out a year ago, but it only just went online here.

It's a well-researched and thorough treatment of the current market for desi fiction. There are good interviews with Suketu Mehta (i.e., the omnipresent one) as well as publishing maven Eric Simonoff. There are also some quotes from me at the end.

RIP John McGahern

Irish novelist John McGahern died, at age 71; the New York Times has a detailed obit.

In honor of McGahern, here are a few paragraphs from the novel The Barracks (1962), which I was just flipping through this afternoon between meetings with students. The protagonist, Elizabeth, has discovered she probably has breast cancer:

They droned into the Apostle's Creed. Then Our Fathers and Hail Marys and Glory be to the Fathers were repeated over and over in their relentless monotony, without urge or passion, no call of love or answer, the voices simply murmuring away in a habit or death, their minds not on what they said, but blank or wandering or dreaming over their own lives.

Elizabeth's fingers slipped heedlessly along the brown beads. No one noticed that she'd said eleven Hail Marys in her decade. She had tried once or twice to shake herself to attention and had lapsed back again.

She felt tired and sick, her head thudding, and she put her hands to her breasts more than once in awareness of the cysts there. She knelt with her head low between the elbows in the chair, changing position for any distraction, the words she repeated as intrustive as dust in her mouth while the pain of weariness obtruded itself over everything that made up her consciousness.

She knew she must see a doctor, but she'd known that months before, and she had done nothing. She'd first discovered the cysts last August as she dried herself at Malone's Island, a bathing-place in the lake, not more than ten minutes through the meadows; and she remembered her fright and incomprehension when she touched the right breast again with the towel and how the noise of singing steel from the sawmill pierced every other sound in the evening.

What the doctor would do was simple. He'd send her for a biopsy. She might be told the truth or she might not when they got the results back, depending on them and on herself. If she had cancer she'd be sent for treatment. She had been a nurse. She had no illusions about what would happen.

Pretty dark, eh? But McGahern was into the darkness -- and no solace in the Church, damnit. The final paragraph of the Times obituary pretty much encapsulates his world-view:

Acknowledging that many readers and critics found his work pessimistic, if not depressing, he offered a joke: "My favorite optimist," he said, "was an American who jumped off the Empire State Building, and as he passed the 42nd floor, the window washers heard him say, 'So far, so good.' "

Do I Actually Agree With Arlen Specter On Something?

The New York Times staff editorial on the immigration bill currently in the Senate has it dead on:

The path to citizenship laid out by the Specter bill wouldn't be easy. It would take 11 years, a clean record, a steady job, payment of a $2,000 fine and back taxes, and knowledge of English and civics. That's not "amnesty," with its suggestion of getting something for nothing. But the false label has muddied the issue, playing to people's fear and indignation, and stoking the opportunism of Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader. Mr. Frist has his enforcement-heavy bill in the wings, threatening to make a disgraceful end run around the committee's work.

The alternatives to the Specter bill are senseless. The enforcement-only approach — building a 700-mile wall and engaging in a campaign of mass deportation and harassment to rip 12 million people from the national fabric — would be an impossible waste of time and resources. It would destroy families and weaken the economy. An alternative favored by many businesses — creating a temporary-worker underclass that would do our dirtiest jobs and then have to go home, with no new path to citizenship — is a recipe for indentured servitude.

It is a weak country that feels it cannot secure its borders and impose law and order on an unauthorized population at the same time. And it is a foolish, insecure country that does not seek to channel the energy of an industrious, self-motivated population to its own ends, but tries instead to wall out "those people."

It's a rare moment when I agree with both Senator Arlen Specter and President Bush on something, but I have to say I support their approach to immigration. We'll have to wait and see if sanity prevails. Given that it's an election year, I'm not at all confident that it will.

Links I've Been Sitting On: Writers, Artists, Dancers, Filmmakers, and Coffee Plants

I've been sitting on a bunch of links lately. Thanks to everyone who's been sending in tips and suggestions. Please keep them coming (oh, and also be patient: I've been slow-blogging it lately).

1. Shashi Tharoor on R.K. Narayan in The Hindu. (thanks Tilotamma)

Tharoor revisits a critique of Narayan he wrote about twelve years ago, which went after Narayan's seeming style-lessness:

I was, I must admit, particularly frustrated to find that Narayan was indifferent to the wider canon of English fiction and to the use of the English language by other writers, Western or Indian. Worse, his indifference was something of which he was inordinately proud. He told interviewers that he avoided reading:
"I do not admit influences." This showed in his writing, but he was defiant: "What is style?" he asked one interviewer. "Please ask these critics to first define it .... Style is a fad." The result was that he used words as if unconscious of their nuances: every other sentence included a wrong inappropriately or wrongly used; the ABC of bad writing - archaisms, banalities and cliches - abounded, as if the author had learned them in a school textbook and was unaware that they have been hollowed by repetition. Narayan's words were just what they seemed; there was no hint of meanings lurking behind the surface syllables, no shadow of worlds beyond the words. Indeed, much of Narayan's prose reads like a translation.

I don't know -- while I don't get particularly excited about Narayan, I haven't seen the archaisms and malapropisms Tharoor is describing. One wishes Narayan might have been a little bit broader and more eclectic, perhaps. But his prose is clean and functional. And he tells very captivating, absorbing stories. Naipaul's criticisms of Narayan in India: A Wounded Civilization strike closer to the crux of the problem -- Narayan's turn to mysticism.

And I'm also not sure if Tharoor is really one to talk. The two novels I've read of Tharoor's are lively, to be sure. But they are also highly derivative, and sometimes quite awkward. As in the following cliché-ridden passage from Tharoor's Riot: A Love Story:

"Priscilla," he said huskily, as if he did not know what else to say.
"Lakshman," I replied, tasting the unfamiliarity of those two syllables, as unfamiliar and intimate as the taste at the tip of my tongue.
"I -- we -- I shouldn't be doing this," he said, and I suddenly felt it as if a page was being turned back in a book I wanted to continue reading.
I leaned forward then, intending to muzzle my face in his chest, but I never got there. A look crossed his eyes then, a look of both longing and desperation, and I felt his hands seize my face and raise it to his lips, and then I closed my eyes, and let myself be loved.

At this point, it is likely one will find Tharoor's novel to be a book that is being shut, as one no longer wants to continue reading. I closed my eyes, and let myself be bored.

2. Ruchira (of Accidental Blogger) sent me some links to an Indian artist she recently met in Delhi, named Richa Arora. Arora has some very interesting work, and seems like a promising young painter. Ruchira also has a very thoughtful post about her here.

My mini-comment: the paintings are very architectural, and convey a powerful sense of space. I wouldn't mind having one on my wall. (Maybe next time I go to Delhi...)

3. If you're looking for a botany fix... There was a fabulous story on NPR yesterday about a special kind of coffee plant (the "cafe marron" plant) on the island of Rodrigues, in the Indian Ocean, near Mauritius. The plant was was long thought to be extinct, but about 25 years ago exactly one specimen was discovered on the island. No others could be found, so that one plant has become the focal point for botanists who want to keep it alive and get it to reproduce. They took a cutting to the Kew Gardens in London, and were able to get the cutting to grow. But it took twenty years and steroids to get the London specimen to produce a seed. By inexplicable coincidence, the original specimen also produced a seed recently.

Seriously, try listening to the story -- it's a real botanists' pot-boiler!

4. Suketu Mehta on power machismo vs. power feminism (via Sepia Mutiny news). In this transcript of a recent talk, Mehta reprises some of the arguments he makes in Maximum City, and strongly condemns the recent law banning dance bar girls in Bombay.

I agree: it's a dumb law.

5. A friend in Iowa recently sent me a link about a professional Bharatnatyam dancer who is a turbaned Sikh. Navtej Johar is based in India. He's pretty amazing -- watch some of his moves in Flash video here.

6. I was happy to get some correspondence from the filmmaker Prashant Bhargava, whose short film Sangam has been screened at quite a number of film festivals, as well as on the Sundance Channel. Now I need to see it... Anyone seen this yet?

XPN is your friend; Radio Avant-Gardism reconsidered

In the past few months I've gotten hooked on the University of Pennsylvania's radio station, WXPN.

I listen to it all the time driving up to Bethlehem, between 4 and 6 hours a week. They describe the format as "a colorful patchwork of contemporary rock, folk, alternative country, rhythm and blues, world beat and reggae music genres." I have to admit that there is a little too much folk and alt.country for my tastes. But in amidst a fair amount Son Volt and Emmylou Harris are new bands (the Arctic Monkeys, this year's Franz Ferdinand) and some surprises (as in, the Maytals' amazing collaboration with No Doubt on a remake of "Monkey Man").

The most triumphant set list I can remember was last Monday morning:

Francis Dunnery - Too Much Saturn - Tall Blonde Helicopter
Augustana - Boston - All The Stars And Boulevards
The Cars - All Mixed Up - The Cars
The Redwalls - Build A Bridge - De Nova
Cat Power - Living Proof - The Greatest
The Yardbirds - Over Under Sideways Down - Var-Constantine Rarities
World Party - What Does It Mean Now? - Dumbing Up
Creedence Clearwater Revival/John Fogerty - Who'll Stop The Rain - Cosmo's Factory
Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc - Demon Days

The reason it stood out to me so much was, first of all, the remarkable first song, which grabbed me immediately. Francis Dunnery is a British folk singer who I'd never heard about. But given the course I'm teaching this spring, I was stunned to hear these lyrics to "Too Much Saturn":

I always believed that if I ran off to India
Wore sandals and shaved my head
And used Body shop conditioner, and incense like crazy
I could call myself a spirit head
But I only went to India to look on top
I wore sandals cause I’d smoked all my money
And I shaved off all my hair cause I had the fleas
I’d been sleeping all over
And the Body shop conditioner was a present from a friend
And the incense used to hide the smell
Of the drug den that I lay in

And so I ask myself what my motives are
For this lying need to look so free
And if I tell myself real honestly
What more can I admit to, open up a door
He said I’m gonna find out what I’m here for
He said I’d find out soon
I got too much Saturn and not enough Moon (link)

I'm not thrilled by the astrology-oriented chorus (too much Saturn, etc.), but I'm a sucker for sober demystification. (Incidentally, the song is available on Itunes. Download it if you like catchy British folk pop. You can read the rest of the lyrics at this yoga blog)

Following "Too Much Saturn," every song on the list was interesting in one way or another -- even Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Who'll stop the rain" (which benefits somewhat from being pulled out of its classic rock ghetto... and joins the canon of killer "Katrina" songs...)

* * * *
Why XPN isn't really college radio, but I don't care:

While I might have resented XPN's quasi-corporate approach a few years ago, now I actually enjoy the fact that the DJs are professionals and the playlists are somewhat focused (but not so focused that you don't get the occasional, deliciously schizophrenic pop/rap song from a group like Gorillaz). I DJed at WXDU at Duke for three years, and while I loved my three hour weekly gig, the station as a whole didn't really have a clear sense of focus. The programming staff worked very hard to listen to and review dozens of new CDs every week, but the crush of new music simply overwhelmed us -- and probably most of our listeners. (Here are just some of the CDs I reviewed for WXDU in the spring of 2001.)

It's helpful to play some songs that listeners will be somewhat familiar with along with newer or more obscure music (like Francis Dunnery). It's also helpful that XPN tends to put certain new albums on a rotation for a week -- and then retire them before they get too tiresome. I got to hear plenty of Matisyahu a couple of weeks ago (enough to know that I don't really need a copy of Youth; Live at Stubb's is good enough), but now the station has moved on to another "album of the week."

The stronger emphasis on new music you hear on 'real' college radio helps get exposure for a broader ranger of musicians, but it also means that listeners don't really know what to expect when they tune in. German Electroclash... Javanese throat singers... Twee... Sun Ra... the wild jumps might occasionally please people with very esoteric tastes, but they bore or alienate the majority of listeners. In most college towns I've lived in, I've had the sense that not many people really bother with the more avant-garde sounding college radio. XPN is more user-friendly, and as a result, it has a huge audience and a lively, energizing presence in the Philly music scene.

The Night Lights

This is a night view from Conshohocken, facing west towards Upper Merion. There is some kind of plant nearby, and more factories beyond. The streak of light across the middle of the frame is a highway. And if you look carefully, you can see the Schuylkill River running diagonally through the middle.

Don't be fooled by all the bright lights -- this is a very long exposure (like 15 seconds).

The Layers of History: William Dalrymple's City of Djinns

(Note: thanks to all everyone who wrote in their congrats. Everything went smoothly with the move. No internet at home yet, though.)

William Dalrymple's City of Djinns: A Year In Delhi is exactly the kind of book I had in mind when I was putting together my "Travel Writers" course. It's thick with historical material: everything from 1984 to 1947, to the British Raj, to the Mughals, to Muhammed-bin-Tughlaq, and more. But it's also accessible, and just personal enough that my students found their way into it.

Unlike Sarah Macdonald's book Holy Cow, which is at best an introduction for readers without much background, I would recommend Dalrymple's City of Djinns to Indians, including NRIs as well as readers living in India. Dalrymple knows his stuff, and can find ways to make Muhammed-bin-Tughlaq and the historical writings of Ibn Battuta -- seemingly like dry and dusty topics -- come to life. But these more historical episodes are blended in with more contemporary issues like communalism in ways that are generally pretty seamless.

The earlier chapters deal with more recent events; Dalrymple digs further into the past as he gets deeper into his narrative.

The chapter on 1984 is particularly strong. Dalrymple meets some survivors of the massacre of Sikhs that occurred at Trilokpuri, including the one remaining Sikh family from the neighborhood (who are also profiled in this Express India story). Dalrymple also gets the inside story from a group of Hijras he meets. In both instances, he manages to get really good interviews from people we wouldn't expect to be very forthcoming with a foreigner. It's not quite the level of penetration one sees in Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, but it's pretty impressive all the same: Dalrymple knows enough Hindustani to move independently of translators or mediators, and it makes a world of difference.

The biggest surprise for me in Dalrymple's book are the enlightening discussions of Delhi's architecture. Dalrymple has some provocative insights on the design philosophy of New Delhi, and also comments on many Mughal-era buildings that are scattered around Delhi and elsewhere nearby.

First, on Edward Lutyens' New Delhi. Dalrymple starts by playing up its impressive feel:

To best appreciate New Delhi I used to walk to it from the Old City. Leaving behind the press and confusion of Shahjehanabad -- the noise and the heat, the rickshaws and the barrow-boys, the incense and the sewer-stink -- I would find myself suddenly in a gridiron of wide avenues and open boulevards, a scheme as ordered and inevitable as a Bach fugue. Suddenly the roads would be empty and the air clean. There was no dust, no heat: all was shaded, green, and cool. Ahead, at the end of the avenue, rose the great chattri which once held the statue of George V. Arriving there at hte end of the green tunnel, I would turn a right angle and see the cinnamon sky stretching out ahead, no longer veiled by a burqa of buildings or trees. It was like coming up for air.

This was Rajpath -- once the Kingsway -- one of the great ceremonial ways of the world. It was planned as an Imperial Champs Elysées -- complete with India Gate, its own butter-colored Arc de Triomphe. But it was far wider, far greener, far more magnificent than anything comparable in Europe. On either side ran wide lawns giving on to fountains and straight avenues of eucalyptus and casuarina. Beyond, canals running parallel to the road reflected the surroundings with mirror-like fidelity.

Sounds nice, doesn't it? But what starts out seeming like a comparison to democratic, post-Revolutionary Paris quickly gives way to an awareness that it wasn't exactly the spirit of democracy that drove Lutyens' thinking. Here is Dalrymple on the Viceroy's House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan):

Nevertheless, the more often I came and looked, the more I felt a nagging reservation. This had less to do with aesthetics than with comparisons with other massive schemes of roughly similar date that the complex brought to mind. Then one evening, as I proceeded up the cutting and emerged to find Baker's Secretariats terminating in the wide portico of the Viceroy's House, with this great imperial mass of masonry towering all around me I suddenly realized where I had seen something similar, something equally vast, equally dwarfing, before: Nuremberg.

In its monstrous, almost megalomaniac scale, in its perfect symmetry and arrogant presumption, there was a distant but distinct echo of something Fascist or even Nazi about the great acropolis of Imperial Delhi. Certainly it is far more beautiful than anything Hitler and Mussolini ever raised: Lutyens, after all, was a far, far greater architect than Albert Speer. Yet the comparison still seemed reasonable. For, despite their very many, very great differences, Imperial India, Fascist Italy and Nazy Germany all belonged to comparable worlds. All were to different extents authoritarian; all made much of magnificent display; all were built on a myth of racial superiority and buttressed in the last resort by force.

Just to be clear, here Dalrymple is referring specifically to the Viceroy's house/ Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, not to the entirety of Lutyens' architectural plan.

And while it's a very compelling bit of writing, the fact that Dalrymple does such a hair-pin turn on his estimation of Lutyens' achievement -- first admiring it, and then condemning it as an expression of Imperial arrogance -- makes me wonder. Does scale necessarily convey "megalomaniac" ambitions? Can we really read a politics into the architecture of New Delhi?

Susan Buck-Morss raises a similar question in her book Dreamworld and Catastrophe when she compares the monuments of Stalin's 1930s Soviet Union with the great skyscrapers and monumental architecture that went up in New York and Chicago during exactly the same era. Stalinist architecture is often interpreted as an attempt to awe the tiny individual man into acquiescence: look at what we can do. But why not read the Empire State Building or Rockefeller Center the same way? Buck-Morss shows that Capitalist monuments might not be so different from contemporaneous Communist monuments, which for me makes any simple ideological interpretation of architectural forms a bit doubtful.

Something similar could be said for Dalrymple's interpretation of Lutyens' New Delhi: is it the Baron Haussmann's wide boulevards and the Arc de Triomphe or Albert Speer and Nuremberg -- or both?

* * * *

Another intriguing comment on architecture appears in the chapter where Dalrymple talks about William Fraser, a Scotsman who worked for the British East India Company at the beginning of the 19th century -- when Delhi was still somewhat untamed by the British, and the Raj was still firmly rooted in Calcutta.

Dalrymple benefits from an accident of history: he happens to be married to a descendent of William Fraser, the artist Olivia Fraser (who does the wonderful illustrations in the book, and is a painter in her own right). Through Olivia, Dalrymple gains access to Fraser's letters to his brothers during his time in India -- fascinating material that you won't find anywhere else.

But Dalrymple also discovers that some of the buildings used by Fraser are still around, albeit neglected. The old Residency is now locked up, but interesting to visit nonetheless:

Saddened by the decay and neglect, we began to turn away from the building when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted something which made me stop. At the back of the Residency, the plaster-coveed British masonry rested on a plinth not of brick, as elsewhere in the building, but of mottled pink Agra sandstone. The stonework was broken by a line of cusped Mughal blind-arches. The work was unmistakably from the period of Shah Jehan.

Although the building was locked and deserted, it was still possible to peer in through the old Residency windows. What lay within confirmed the hint given by the plinth. Behind the classical facade lay the earlier frontage of a Mughal pavilion: a double row of blind arches leading up to a central portal. The entire building was erected on the foundations of a much earlier mansion. It all made sense: when the Emperor gave the British the ruins of the library of Dara Shukoh, Shah Jehan's eldest son, they saw no need to knock down the existing work and start afresh; instead they merely erected a classical facade over a Mughal substructure. . . . in public establishing the British presence; but inside, in private, living the life of a Nawab.

Is it just me, or is this Fielding's house in A Passage to India all over again? Compare this description to a passage in Forster's novel:

It was an audience hall built in the eighteenth century for some high official, and though of wood had reminded Fielding of the Loggia de' Lanzi at Florence. Little rooms, now Europeanized, clung to it on either side, but the central hall was unpapered and unglassed, and the air of the garden poured in freely. One sat in public—on exhibition, as it were—in full view of the gardeners who were screaming at the birds and of the man who rented the tank for the cultivation of water chestnut. Fielding let the mango trees too—there was no knowing who might not come in—and his servants sat on his steps night and day to discourage thieves. Beautiful certainly, and the Englishman had not spoilt it, whereas Aziz in an occidental moment would have hung Maude Goodmans on the walls. Yet there was no doubt to whom the room really belonged

Both Dalrymple's version of Fraser's bungalow and Forster's description of Fielding's house are interesting on their own terms -- as descriptions of space and architecture. But they are also of course metaphors for the British Raj as a whole, which built itself on the framework of the Mughals to a sometimes surprising degree (especially early on). And with Forster's obsession with "privacy" in colonial India, and Dalrymple's allusion to the private, Nawab life of British officials, both writers are also hinting at the Orientalist fantasy that made the hybrid Euro-Mughal edifices so appealing: behind the modern, European facade was a desire for the unchecked, authoritarian power that would only be expressed privately (Fraser kept a large harem of Indian women; Forster had dealings with prostitutes procured by the Maharajah he worked for, described in the "Kanaya" memoir).

* * *
To be clear, discussions of Delhi's architecture play only a small part in Dalrymple's City of Djinns. But these were the passages that I found to be most provocative -- new to me -- in a book that is full of interesting material (see Dalrymple's account of partridge fighting, or his conversation with an Indian archeologist on the possible veracity of the events described in the Mahabharata!). Despite some of his recent controversial statements about Indian literature in English (see Kitabkhana for more), Dalrymple is a strong writer who slices through the layers of history to reveal Delhi's dil.

Conshohocken (Moving, Again)

Schuylkill River, Conshohocken, PA

We're moving again -- for the fourth time in three years, if you can believe it. We knew this one was coming; actually our current apartment was only supposed to be temporary, but three months turned into five months as our house-hunt dragged on.

We bought a townhouse in Conshohocken, close to the Schuylkill River and the scene in the photo above. 'Conshy' is a hip little town about 10 miles northwest of Philly. I find it to be an interesting place in transition: it was run down, but now it's being redeveloped and gentrified a bit. It's not as happening as say, Manayunk, but it beats many of the boring, hyper-suburban gated community type places that are scattered around central/eastern Montgomery County -- which were the main areas we were looking (for commuting reasons). Conshohocken, at least, feels like a town.

The house we're moving to is our first. It's a relief to finally 'settle down', though it actually wasn't an especially pleasant experience dealing with a series of strange sellers and rather difficult negotiations. We lost one house we liked in a bidding war and walked away from another when the sellers turned out to be insane (we found them on Craigslist; oh well). Through the process, we learned a lot about how the real estate industry works. While it's now pretty easy to find houses on the MLS database system online without an agent's help, agents can still help you out: they can shield you from irrational or dishonest people on the other end of a major business transaction. Also, for first-time buyers, real estate agents can be invaluable in guiding you through a formidable, complicated process: negotiations, contract, inspections, appraisal, mortgage, and settlement. So don't believe all the hype you hear about disappearing Real Estate agents!

We ended up with a house we're happy with, at a price that was actually within our budget. It's on the top of a little hill in West Conshohocken, with nice views of the surrounding Schuylkill River Valley and the town below. It also has a beautiful kitchen and a walk-out basement with built-in shelves and a desk built into the wall -- a perfect workspace for me. It's also close to SEPTA trains as well as a bicycle trail that goes along the river from Valley Forge to Manayunk.

It will take awhile before the internet is set up there, so blogging may be light for a few days. Til then, enjoy the view (or the larger version at Flickr)