Theorizing Blogging, Theorizing Theory (and a little on Spivak)

[Cross-posted at the Valve; part of the Spivak event]

This post was partially inspired by John Holbo's comment on an earlier post: that he doesn't mind what theorists do, he only wishes they would be humble and honest enough to disown the role of the all-knowing priest. Rather than go to conferences and have big-wigs impart wisdom unilaterally (which is almost always how it works), isn't it better to envision intellectual work as an ongong conversation to which many people might fairly contribute? Non-trivially, John suggests blogging as a model for that kind of conversation. John is (like me) a person who probably identifies as much as a blogger as a critic or teacher, so this merits further exploration.

Two other prefatory thoughts: First, it isn't just about whether or not one can stomach Spivak, or Derrida, or Hardt/Negri, or Zizek. The subtext continues to be the question of theory itself, which needs to be reevaluated and reconsidered. Secondly, I think it's worth addressing the medium in which we're trying to have this conversation, which is remarkably unlike the space of an academic conference or an academic journal.

Here I will propose to use 'blogging' and 'theory' as terms that refer specifically to a practice of writing, not so much an "academic culture" or an ideological framework. And I'll ask: what can blogging (not 'the blogosphere') say to theory, and what can theory say to blogging?

* * *

The qualities that have always attracted me to theory parallel the things that attracted me to blogging two years ago. I wanted a free space to explore ideas, to think through problems in different spheres of life, and to generally give my mind a bit of exercise that teaching alone might not offer. Both blogging and theory can be engrossing and hugely rewarding, though institutionalization and certain bad habits means that both can also be a drag.

For the basic definition of "theory" I'm using today, I'll draw on Jonathan Culler, from Literary Theory: A Short Introduction (the first chapter is online here). Here is Culler on "Theory as Genre":

[Theory is] a body of thinking and writing whose limits are exceedingly hard to define. The philosopher Richard Rorty speaks of a new, mixed genre that began in the nineteenth century: 'Beginning in the days of Goethe and Macaulay and Carlyle and Emerson, a new kind of writing has developed which is neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary productions, nor intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor social prophecy, but all of these mingled together in a new genre.' The most convenient designation of this miscellaneous genre is simply the nickname theory, which has come to designate works that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently belong. This is the simplest explanation of what makes something count as theory. Works regarded as theory have effects beyond their original field.

Culler's somewhat unsatisfying definition echoes Rorty's negative definition. Perhaps it's not an accident; isn't one of theory's essential qualities its undefinability? Theorists are always chasing after other people's dogs.

But undefinability might not always be a bad thing. For one, it parallels what I see as a certain undefinable quality in blogging. At a basic level, I would define blogging as a frequent practice of quasi-public expression, which is as comfortable deflecting the self (borrowing, quoting, linking, and anonymity) as it is in expressing it (i.e., your basic confessional blog post). It is also fundamentally interactive and requires active involvement: one might read a number blogs and be involved in the culture, but it isn't until one actually starts keeping one's own blog that it becomes something qualitatively different from, say, participating in an email listserv or chat room.

A couple of years ago we were considering the possible value of blogging (on Crooked Timber, as I recall) against conventional ideas of academic publication. But at least in terms of understanding what blogging is, that might be the wrong question to ask. Blogging (which is, after all, an idea goes well beyond the walls of academia -- and we academic bloggers tend to accept how it's been defined for us) isn't just a proxy for "publication" in the professionalized academic sense. It's really a much more fundamental approach (in psycho-social terms) to writing.

Why do it? What is, after all, so exciting about these public diaries that are date-stamped? What makes it so addictive? Why has it emerged so rapidly, and why does it appeal to some people so much more than others?

I can't answer all these questions (though I would welcome comments on them), but I might hazard this: perhaps the power of blogging has less to do with the form (i.e., the specific technology of blogging software) than with the ego-investment it seems to encourage. Bloggers create and constantly nurture these public avatars, that are measured, counted, and endlessly evaluated and ranked. One's blogging avatar isn't exactly coterminous with one's natural idea of self, partly because a blog persona has to be much more self-consciously careful and constructed. A similar kind of ego-investment is also present in massive multiplayer role-playing games: my character on the internet is me, but not really. (And as with RPGs, hopefully there is some element of play involved in the propagation of a blogger's persona.)

* * *

Let's take another paragraph from Culler on theory, and see how it might be related to blogging:

The main effects [sic] of theory is the disputing of 'common sense': common-sense views about meaning, writing, literature, experience. For example, theory questions

* the conception that the meaning of an utterance or text is what the speaker 'had in mind'.
* or the idea that writing is an expression whose truth lies elsewhere, in an experience or a state of affairs which it expresses,
* or the notion that reality is what is 'present' at a give moment.

Theory is often a pugnacious critique of common-sense notions, and further, an attempt to show that what we take for granted as 'common sense' is in fact a historical construction, a particular theory that has come to seem so natural to us that we don't even see it as a theory. As a critique of common sense and exploration of alternative conceptions, theory involves a questioning of the most basic premisses or assumptions of literary study, the unsettling of anything that might have been taken for granted: What is meaning? What is an author? What is it to read? What is the 'I' or subject who writes, reads, or acts? How do texts relate to the circumstances in which they are produced?

There might seem to be a contradiction with blogging here, where common sense is said to rule and anything that smacks of obscurantist jargon is readily mocked. But I don't think the contradiction sticks. Though excessive academic jargon is still a problem, the idea that blogging is really a space for the expression of common sense is overstated. It can be used that way, but blogging is at least as much a space where individual writers work out how they see the world as it is an index for popular opinion.

As a practice of writing, blogging demands constant reflection. It's not considered sufficient to simply say that you agree with a certain political party's point of view, and you're done. The most interesting bloggers (one thinks of Tim Burke or BitchPhD) are somewhat unpredictable and ideologically complex: they are trying to think for themselves, and see everything as freshly as possible. As part of blogging's ethos of individualized, autonomous writing, bloggers try not to repeat themselves, or merely echo a party line. (Partisan blogging has become more and more prevalent, and is always threatening to turn blogging into an extension of the corporatized world of mass media-entertainment-news-politics. Perhaps I'm referring to the "spirit of blogging" here more than material reality... A fair objection.)

So I guess I don't think that eclecticism (which is not quite the same as
bricolage) is a bad thing. Going from Culler's non-definition above, it's probably one of theory's constitutive values. Isn't it a core virtue in blogging as well?

In expanding the parallels between blogging and theory (say, in a fully developed essay), one could also get into some theoretical particulars. It might be interesting to revisit the Foucauldian idea of a nexus between power and knowledge in light of the internet's redistribution of access to information. It might also be worthwhile to go back to Derrida and re-theorize the idea of writing as 'supplement' in light of blogging's intensive preoccupation with individualized 'voice' -- ironic, given that this is a medium where writing rules, and voice is relegated to the sad little ghetto called "podcasting." (And we could also talk about "blogger's brevity," but only at the risk of sacrificing it ourselves.)

* * *

A word or two on Spivak, based on the streaming video of Spivak's lecture at UCSB that I watched last night. (I tried my hand at rereading "Scattered Speculations" and "Ghostwriting" and was sadly uninspired.)

The lecture is something else. As Spivak admits towards the end, she didn't really have time to write a script for it -- and some of the anecdotes she tells reveal why: she had just come from the Boundary 2 Conference; she had just come from an indigenous people's knowledge conference in rural South Africa; she had just been having dinner with Catherine Stimpson in New York; she had just been on the phone with Romila Thapar ... and so on. And: the title itself of the talk itself was given to her by the editors of the journal Rethinking Marxism, so that's why she's doing a keynote "On the Trajectory of the Subaltern in My Work": someone else suggested she write about herself, so she did.

The lecture is fairly overrun with Spivak's namedroppy anecdotes. She's gives the impression she's so busy she doesn't have time to actually write anymore. And perhaps she is. But instead of thinking about the lecture with sympathy for the pressures produced by Spivak's lifestyle as an academic superstar, we might consider what it is actually like to sit and listen to this kind of disorganized talk, which is sometimes about her idea of the "New Subaltern," sometimes about secularism and rationality (she goes after Meera Nanda two or three times), and sometimes about her Bengali Marxist intellectual milieu. Through it all, she never pins herself down to a concrete politics or epistemic framework (i.e., "modernity," "postmodernity," or "anti-modernity"). For me, it's the latter failure that's most irritating, though there might be other formal or aesthetic problems with the talk as well.

If you don't have time to sit down and watch the lecture, Spivak covers some related points in this interview with Jenny Sharpe in Signs (PDF). Notice again the constant reference to the fact that she just got off an airplane (this time from Hong Kong, where she spent three months teaching Aristotle in Greek and Dante in Italian, etc. There isn't so much name-dropping, though it's thick with anecdotes).

Arguing off the cuff, Spivak is still doing "theory," but she's doing it in bite-size epigrams, and with a nearly constant reference to herself. I find it tedious to read and to listen to; she's as all over the place as an over-caffeinated celebrity blogger who looks everywhere and sees only signs of herself.

Spivak Event Underway

Just a brief note to my academically inclined readers: the Gayatri Spivak event is underway. The posts so far can be found collated here. Some interesting arguments, including a detailed case by John Holbo that Spivak's theory is an advanced form of kitsch.

I'd also recommend this post by Crojas, which links Spivak's use of the metaphor of "cooking" in Marx's Capital to the way that word was used by undercover agents in the Operation Meth Merchant sting operation.

Maybe something from me on this on Thursday (or perhaps Friday).

Philly Links

I'm trying to get a firmer grip on Philly. We've been back in the area since November, but for various reasons it hasn't translated into a sense of connection to what's really going on in town. I read the New York Times assiduously, but can't really get too excited about the Inquirer (perhaps it would help if they got their own webpage). We've been exploring the parks a bit, but not so much the cultural life downtown and on the main line.

So here's a note to self to bring what's happening in Philly onto my own radar at least:

Philly Future
Philadelphia Metblogs
Changing Skyline
Phillyblog
XPN Blog
Philadelphia Will Do
Phillyist
Philebrity
Politics Philly
Philadelphia Business Journal
Rittenhouse Review
Philadelphia Bicycle News
Philly Skyline
Only Partially Insane
Apt. 2024
SEPTA Google Maps API
Philastudies
Blank Baby

(This was also partially inspired by today's Philadelphia blogger's meetup.)

Narayan's Malgudi Days, with a Discussion of Some Critics

I recently sat in on a colleague's grad seminar -- she was teaching reread R.K. Narayan's Malgudi Days. It was a good opportunity for me to reread this book of book of short stories, and also catch up on some Narayan criticism (mostly accessed through Galegroup's "Literature Resource Center," which requires a library subscription). I must give my colleague Betsy Fifer credit for finding most of the essays I'm referring to here.

Narayan is one of those writers who is widely read and enjoyed by all sorts of people, though maybe not always for the right reasons. Shashi Tharoor criticized him a few years ago for his apparent small-mindedness (I responded to Tharoor recently here). And in my readings this week I've come across a fair bit of criticism as well as some misguided praise from other literary critics.

On misguided praise: Michel Pousse published an essay in Literary Criterion in 1990 called "R.K. Narayan as a Gandhian Novelist," which surveys quite a number of Narayan novels. Pousse interprets the spiritual, anti-materialist sensibility in books like The Vendor of Sweets and Mr. Sampath as evidence of Narayan's essential Gandhianism. It's not a terrible argument -- and there are some early novels by Narayan that might be called Gandhian -- but for the most part Pousse could just as easily call his essay "R.K. Narayan as a Spiritual Novelist," stripping out the specific reference to Gandhi entirely. And if one reads Gandhi (as I do) as an intensely political animal and only strategically mystical, it actually seems more correct to see Narayan (who almost never mentioned politics in his writing after the early 1950s) as actively anti-Gandhian.

[That said, I'm grateful to Pousse because he quotes a critic named W.W. Walsh, who praised Narayan's style as follows:

This complicated cargo is carried on in an English style which is limpid, simple, calm and unaffected, natural in its run and tone, and beautifully measured to its purposes.

It has neither the American purr of the combustion engine nor the thick marmalade quality of British English and it communicates with complete ease a different, an in Indian, sensibility.

I'm not sure I actually agree with this W.W. Walsh about a "different, Indian sensibility" (partly because to Narayan, it is not "difference"). And I don't know about "British marmalade." But Walsh has a way with metaphors, does he not?]

The arguable Gandhianism Pousse praises is also identified -- and criticized -- by V.S. Naipaul in India: A Wounded Civilization. Naipaul isn't opposed to Gandhi in his historical moment, but rather the exaggerated exploitation of the Gandhian myth in independent India. While Gandhi's principles may have succeeded in getting the British to "quit India," when deployed by corrupt and incompetent government ministers in the 1960s and 70s, the name "Gandhi" began to have a somewhat corrosive effect. Though Naipaul's real target is the failure of a political vision, he cites Narayan's novels as epitomizing eveything that's wrong with the India he saw:

Jagan [the protaognist of Narayan's Vendor of Sweets] won his war. Now, blinded by his victory to his own worldly corruption (the corruption that, multiplied a million times, has taken his country in Independence to another kind of political collapse), his Gandhian impulses decayed to self-cherishing, faddism, and social indifference, Jagan seeks only to maintain the stability of his world; he is capable of nothing else. . . . Jagan's is the ultimate Hindu retreat, because it is a retreat from a world that is known to have broken down at last.

For Naipaul, this is all somehow tied up with the corruption of "Hindu civilization" that started with the sacking of Vijayanagar 500 years earlier, a corruption which was continued by the British. Indira Gandhi and the Emergency are all in some sense symptoms of "the great Hindu retreat."

Fortunately, it's pretty easy to dismiss Naipaul's big arguments about India and Hinduism today -- the Emergency turned out to be a blip, and Indian democracy is growing and getting healthier, though it's still far from perfect. But Narayan's specific criticisms of the quietism he sees in Narayan's novels do seem to have some validity.

* * * * *

The above criticisms apply only to Narayan's novels. I believe Narayan's short stories are an entirely different can of worms.

Malgudi Days is a later collection (1975), and it draws from two earlier collections and includes some "New Stories." They are really short (some are just three pages) and crisply plotted. Some of the better stories seem almost like textbook examples of how to write a memorable short story in five hundred words or less: a gesture at characterization and setting, a conflict, and a twist of some kind (often ironic reversal) at the end.

There is a kind of elemental pleasure in reading these stories in close succession, and watching Narayan people his world with tragic shopkeepers, ethical pickpockets, mean beggars, storytellers, anxious college students, and of course, "The Talkative Man." For Narayan, storytelling is deeply concerned with establishing a sense of community, of people completely involved in each other. The story that best exemplifies this constitutive sociality in Malgudi Days might be "The Missing Mail." Here Narayan imagines a somewhat over-social postman, who knows the business of all the residents on his beat. When someone has good news coming to them, he stops and has tea. And he happily stays to give advice when a family is trying to marry off a daughter using newspaper matrimonials and biodata sent through the mail. Here, one particular family has been struggling to find a boy for their daughter, and the postman gives them the advice that leads to a successful match (go to Madras and meet him face-to-face). On the day of the wedding, on the only astrologically viable date that year, he brings the father a telegram saying that his uncle in another village has passed away. But the telegram was dated two weeks earlier! The postman had been sitting on it for two weeks, knowing that the family's knowledge of the death would have ruined the wedding plans. He apologizes, but it's clear that he's done the right thing.

In a very basic sense, "The Missing Mail" is about the value in face to face conversation, and resistance to bureaucracy, professionalization, and the ethic of efficiency. When you know that doing your job correctly will cause someone to suffer, it is better that you consider not doing your job. One of the students in the class talked about this story as a 'fable about the value of face-time,' and that seems like an apt description to me (though Narayan would never have used the term "face-time"!).

Finally, several of the stories deal with art, depicting art as having an almost mystical power and danger to the artist as well as the world. So you have stories like "Such Perfection," where a sculptor who makes idols for temples learns that he shouldn't try and make them too perfectly. Most of these stories end with the artist giving up his ambitions when things don't go as they should.

The story that really stands out in this regard is "The Gateman's Gift." An elderly and retired gateman at an insurance company has taken to making small clay sculptures of the people and places he knows in the town. He sends them to the "Sahib" at his old company (a man he almost never sees, and who has a kind of absolute authority in his imagination). The day after he submits his "masterpiece," he gets a piece of registered mail from the company and he is petrified to open it, assuming the worst (i.e., that his pension has been cut off). He walks about for weeks with the letter in his pocket, afraid to let anyone open it, and begins to go slightly insane. Finally he runs into an accountant from the office on the street who tears open the letter: inside is a check rewarding him for his interesting art-works, and a letter praising and encouraging him.

The way Narayan describes the gateman's approach to making sculptures sounds a lot like Narayan's own artistic process:

[H]e made a new discovery about himself, that he could make fascinating models out of clay and wood dust. The discovery came suddenly, when one day a child in the neighbourhood brought to him its little doll for repair. He not only repaired it but made a new thing of it. This discovery pleased him so much that he very soon became absorbed in it. His back yard gave him a plentiful supply of pliant clay, and the carpenter's shop next to his cousin's cigarette shop sawdust. He purchased paint for a few annas. And lo! he found his hours gliding. He sat there in the front part of his home, bent over his clay, and brought into existence a miniature universe; all the colours of life were there, all the forms and creatures, but of the size of his middle finger; whole villages and towns were there, all the persons he had seen passing before his office when he was sentry there -- that beggar woman coming at midday, and that cucumber-vendor; he had the eye of a cartoonist for human faces. Everything went down into clay. It was a wonderful minature reflection of the world; and he mounted them neatly on thin wooden slices, which enhanced their attractiveness.

The gateman's sculptures are all mimetic, that is to say they directly reflect the world around him. The joy he gets from creating them -- his own creative genius -- is profoundly social.

The gateman's "masterpiece" is a detailed recreation of the insurance company campus where he worked for some thirty years. The only thing about it that makes him nervous is his decision to include an image of himself standing out front; out of humility, he worries that he might be too insignificant to merit a place.

What he's done is use artistic expression not merely as a mirror of the world around him, but as a vehicle for self-fashioning. It's when he does a sculpture of himself that he feels the most exhilarated and anxious about his work: art takes on a kind of power that exceeds the sum of its parts.

It's the danger in art that leads the Gateman to give up his hobby at the end of the story. We might read it as the Gateman's naive simplicity (as an illiterate man dependent on a pension, he dreads receving "official" mail of any kind). But I prefer to see it as Narayan's comment on the difficult responsibility associated with using art to create one's world -- and oneself.

* * * * *

Incidentally, "The Gateman's Gift" isn't a very widely discussed story. For instance, the great critic M.K. Naik, in his essay "Malgudi Minor: The Short Stories of R.K. Narayan," dismisses it in a line or two. But there is at least one essay that takes as its primary focus this one story. Prajapati P. Shah published an essay in Literary Criterion in 1980, called "R.K. Narayan's 'Gateman's Gift': The Central Theme." Shah's reading focused not on the mimetic nature of the Gateman's art, but on his status as a marginalized figure in the socio-economic life of the town. According to her interpretation, the Gateman's transgression is his presumption of a creative role discouraged by the capitalist system which has structured every aspect of his life. It's a little bit Marxist (not surprising given that the essay was published in 1980), and I think there's more than a little truth to her reading, even though it has very little to do with my own.

SAWCC Conference: Mixed Messages

The South Asian Women's Creative Collective (SAWCC) is having a conference at Marymount Manhattan College in mid-May. The conference is called "Mixed Messages," and lots of desi writers, publishers, and yes, bloggers are on the schedule. (Look for Anna, Shashwati, and Amitava on various panels... ) They also have some interesting workshops for writers scheduled -- a screenwriting master class, a writing workshop for teens, and "Writing About Food" with Vikas Khanna (!).

I'll be moderating this panel:

Friday, May 19: Kick-Off Reading and Reception
7PM, $15

Readings by:
Amitav Ghosh (Incendiary Circumstances, Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
Vijay Seshadri (The Long Meadow: Poems, Graywolf Press, 2005)
Sara Suleri Goodyear (Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter's Elegy, University of Chicago Press, 2003)
Moderated by Amardeep Singh (Assistant Professor of English at Lehigh University)

Nice, huh? All three are writers I admire a great deal. Fortunately I am just moderating, or I would be quaking in my boots.

If any of you are going to be around that weekend and want to meet, please do get in touch. It might be nice to do a meetup of some kind on the Upper East Side.

Nightmares on Wax: Flip Ya Lid (MP3)

Ok, so here's a legally downloadable MP3 I've been listening to pretty obsessively for the last few days.

It's from the downtempo/chillout group Nightmares on Wax, working a roots rock reggae sound with a beautiful dubby bass lick. (Note: hope you have a subwoofer).

When I first heard it on XPN last week, I thought it was a remix of an old reggae track. But it looks like they did it live in the studio:

The great thing about that track is that Ricky never even came to do that track; he came to do a different one that didn’t actually make the album. We finished pretty early and went to get some [stuff]. We got back and just knocked this beat together. I was saying let’s do something new, knocked a beat together, and he was freestyling. I said yo just go in the studio man, just go in the booth, and I just pressed the record button, and he freestyled the track. That day we had been talking about social issues and the way things are, between riot police on the street, and this was when all the ASBO stuff had just kicked in, and he was pretty freaked out by it all. So the actual influence of the day and that track is about how people should just calm down and take time out for each other. (link)

And this is what Brainwashed says about the track:

No true roots reggae devotee could possibly pass over the sun-drenched "Flip Ya Lid", with classic toasting, subtly dubby echoes, and a bassline begging for a massive sound system.

Massive is fine, but even headphones and an Ipod is fine on a track this nice.

The Judge as Literary Critic

Hey, I thought that was my job:

In issuing his opinion, Justice Peter Smith said Mr. Brown had indeed relied on the earlier work, "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," in writing a section of "The Da Vinci Code." But he said two of the authors of "Holy Blood," Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, had failed in their effort to prove that Mr. Brown had stolen their "central theme" because they could not accurately state what that theme was.

In fact, Justice Smith said, in a ruling that was at times sharply critical of the plaintiffs — as well as of Mr. Brown and his wife, Blythe, who does much of his research — the earlier book "does not have a central theme as contended by the claimants: it was an artificial creation for the purposes of the litigation working back from 'The Da Vinci Code.' "

I have not read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and I obviously can't say whether the judgment is sound (I do think it's interesting that Brown's wife didn't testify).

While the judge states that Brown is innocent of out-and-out plagiarism, both he and some of the people interviewed in the Times article suggest there is nevertheless a borrowing of some kind:

Mark Stephens, a media lawyer in London, said in an interview that while Random House's victory was practically a foregone conclusion, "what's interesting is that the P.R. machine for Dan Brown and Random House is cranking up to portray this as some famous vindication of Dan Brown."

He continued: "Whilst the decision shows that he didn't infringe copyright, his moral behavior is more, in my view, open to question. It's clear that he used the fundamental themes and ideas of 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail,' and many people will think that morally, Dan Brown owes a debt to Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln."

Tsk, tsk, Mr. Brown. But of course if you were to do the same thing with your next novel, no one would, legally, be able to do anything about it. (But watch out: your fans might rebel, one of these days.)

I'd like to do one of these historico-religious thrillers, postulating a conspiracy around the newly discovered Gospel of Judas. The protagonist of my book would actually be found to be a physical descendent of the Biblical Judas (call him "Henry Iscariot"), who's made it his life's mission to exculpate his infamous ancestor for once and for all. Along the way, he has to fight a sinister billionaire Televangelist who urges viewers to "Kill the Judas in your heart, and accept Jesus." In my book, the Televangelist publishes a book himself, blaming all the world's troubles on Judas (his book somehow shows that the Prophet Muhammed was a descendent, as was Adolf Hitler). And shortly after it's published, Henry Iscariot finds there is a contract out on his life! But it turns out that the sinister minister is himself a descendent from the same family, a branch that has disowned its ancestral identity. They are, as it were, the Judases of Judas! But does the Minister know the truth of his own background? If so, why is he trying to suppress it? And who is trying to kill Henry?

And so on. (Feel free to steal that idea and make millions of dollars.)

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... )

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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.

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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?

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(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.

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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.