Canon Wars Redux

There are many good points made in Rachel Donadio's NYTSBR essay, "Revisiting the Canon Wars." Her argument, which is really more a skeleton that allows her to get quotes from fifteen different academics, is that the issues raised by Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987), the book that started the first strong reactionary thrust in the Culture Wars, are still relevant to humanities academics even now that the dust has apparently settled somewhat. (Or perhaps we've all just become more dusty, I don't know.)

First, there's a great quote from John Searle:

Searle also noted a “certain irony” that the Western canon, from Socrates to Marx, which had once been seen as “liberating,” was now seen as “oppressive.” “Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude,” Searle wrote, “the ‘canon’ served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. ... The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.”

I'm not sure that's true -- the purpose of a Canon, one could just as easily argue, is to create a bourgeois consciousness. Only the earlier generation of "leftyprofs," I think, felt the point was to unmask that consciousness rather than nurture it.

In one sense the debate has been superseded by what's happened in American universities since the 1980s, which is a growing sense that the humanities constitute only a minor component, rather than the core. Other segments of the university -- the sciences, business, engineering -- get the lion's share of funding (they also generate their own funds), and also the lion's share of the university administration's attention. Humanities academics are now in some sense all on the same side -- we have to prove we're still relevant:

All this reflects what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum today describes as a “loss of respect for the humanities as essential ingredients of democracy.” Nussbaum, who panned Bloom’s book in The New York Review in 1987, teaches at the University of Chicago, which like Columbia has retained a Western-based core curriculum requirement for undergraduates. But on some campuses, “the main area of conflict is trying to make sure that the humanities get adequate funding from the central administration,” Nussbaum wrote in an e-mail message, adding, “Our nation, like most nations of the world, is devaluing the humanities vis-à-vis science and technology, so constant vigilance is required lest these disciplines be cut.” Louis Menand, a Harvard English professor and New Yorker staff writer who serves on Harvard’s curriculum reform committee, concurs: “The big question for humanists is, How do we explain why what we do is important for people who aren’t humanists? That’s been tough, really tough.”

It's rare that I see a Louis Menand or Martha Nussbaum quote I don't like, and this is no exception.

The second section of the essay gets into some more specific Canon questions, and brings quotes from Stanley Fish, Philip Roth, Michael Berube, Gerald Graff, Tony Judt, and John Guillory. There is some of the usual to-and-fro over Toni Morrison and identity politics. I think Gerald Graff's point is worth considering:

To some, another question is how to get students to read critically in the first place. “What does it profit progressives to get minority writers like Walker and Black Elk into the syllabus if many students need the Cliffs Notes to gain an articulate grasp of either?” asked Gerald Graff, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has written on the canon wars.

Arguably, the way to make sure students have the tools to interpret great works of literature by Shakespeare and James Joyce and Salman Rushdie is to put more emphasis on interpretive method, not to go back to only teaching Shakespeare. This might be something that conservatives and progressives in the English department could all agree on, if, first, conservatives could be convinced that everything wouldn't be better if the English Department restored its old, Canon-backed "prestige" (most of our students aren't aware that it's gone). As for what "progressives" need to be convinced of, it gets a little more complicated. It's more than just identity politics -- "disciplinary balkanization" might be a more accurate way to describe what ails us.

Video Mashup

Primus, "Welcome to this World" vs. the dance scene (or as Bollywood fans say, "picturization") of Mohammed Rafi's "Jan Pehechan Ho" in the 1966 film Gumnaam (original version here)

Often, it seems like YouTube users get excited about Indian music and Bollywood for the wrong reasons. There's a kitsch factor: look at these stoooopid Indian people trying to rip off Michael Jackson! But I think this is something a little different: the juxtaposition takes the frenetic dance steps and the fact that everyone is wearing masks, and makes it into something slightly ominous.

Dear President [...]

Well, you did it again, President [...]

Your opponents are flummoxed, perhaps even a little humiliated after your latest political demonstration. They thought they had you in a tight spot, but you played your cards carefully, and you showed everyone you know how to use your authority. You used your people well. Yes, you say, you're a little diminished now, but who wouldn't be, after so many years in charge of a large and fractious country?

You certainly know the art of political self-preservation, and you have a talent for putting on a show. You have little interest in democracy, but you have always known how to use the media when it suits you, and the latest incident is no exception. Your opponents call you all kinds of names, but they have always underestimated your talent.

Of course, there are the courts. The lawyers and judges will come after you and your friends -- they have been doing so already -- and you may lose a few important allies along the way. Necessary sacrifices! And yet in the end, judges merely wear robes, and their words of condemnation do not carry force by themselves. (Judges can also easily be replaced, as you have shown.) Justice, in short, is merely a word, a debating point for powerless intellectuals like myself. Unqualified, absolute Power -- that is where you deal.

It comes down to this: you have the support of the military, and the military is everything. The needs of security and the projection of strength carry great emotional force for most citizens. The fact that you have weakened your country's democratic institutions does not particularly worry you. It is doubtful that your citizens will demand their return; democracy can always be sacrificed in the name of security, can it not? The simmering resentment of the masses, in all except extreme cases, can be managed, can it not? (That is what tear gas is for.)

You may win this round -- indeed, by quieting your opponents, it is hard to see how it could be otherwise. You may or may not stay in power much longer yourself, but you have a good chance of seeing a friendly successor continue your policies. If you are as smart as you have seemed to be thus far, you will avoid the disgrace that ended the careers of many of your predecessors.

History, however, will still judge you. It will always be there, staring back at the waste of these years, casting an unblinking eye on the mess you've made.

[Which President, of which country?]

Sameness, what Sameness?

Mukul Kesavan has a column in the Calcutta Telegraph. It is, I think, the first full-frontal attack on the desi blogosphere that I've seen published in an Indian newspaper.

And it's so, so wrong. Let's start at the beginning:

Every English-speaking Indian man between 25 and 60 has written about the Hindi movies he has seen, the English books he has read, the foreign places he has travelled to and the curse of communalism. You mightn’t have read them all (there are a lot of them and some don’t make it to print) but their manuscripts exist and in this age of the internet, these masters of blah have migrated to the Republic of Blog. A cultural historian from the remote future (investigating, perhaps, the death of English in India) might use up a sub-section of a chapter to explore the sameness of their concerns. Why did a bunch of grown men, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, write about the same movies, novels, journeys and riots? Why Naipaul? Why not nature? Or Napier? Or the nadeswaram? Why Bachchan? And not Burma? Or Bhojpuri? And, most weirdly, why pogroms and chauvinism? Why not programmes on television? (link)

First, my biggest complaint with Kesavan's piece is his refusal to name names. The "Republic of Blog" is for him guilty of a mind-numbing sameness, but if he doesn't tell us what blogs he's reading, it's impossible to verify what he says.

Second, why only men? Aren't there lots of Indian women bloggers? Indeed, there are too many to list, so let's just name one good one: Rashmi Bansal's Youth Curry.

Third, why not acknowledge that people are blogging in various Indian languages? In addition to its English "main page," Desipundit links to blogs in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bangla, and Marathi. (Sadly, no Punjabi...)

Then the substantive question -- amongst Indian male bloggers writing in English, is there in fact a deadening sameness? Do people really only talk about, as Kesavan suggests 1) Hindi films, 2) English novels, 3) various and sundry travels, and 4) Communalism? And do the comments on communalism all take a left-center approach (commonly derided as "pseudo-secular")?

Two of the four topics named by Kesavan, English-language novels and communalism, are a little strange coming from him; Kesavan is himself the author of an English-language novel (quite a good one, actually), as well as a book called Secular Common-Sense. (More recently, he published a book about Cricket, Men in White, which I haven't seen.)

I think a quick look at some of the links at the (now dated) Top 100 Indian blogs at Blogstreet.com suggests a great deal more diversity than Kesavan allows. He doesn't mention all the tech blogs (there are LOTS of those, and they get many more readers than even popular general interest blogs like India Uncut), cooking blogs, defense policy blogs, or, for that matter, cricket blogs.

It's true that a lot of what people post on their blogs often isn't that exciting; it's intellectual chit-chat, quick links, and regurgitated news. But I think that chit-chat is, in an indirect way, actually a really important sign of a society's well being. And when the discussions turn to politics, the to-and-fro of conversations (and yes, arguments) that take place on blogs as well as in the mainstream media can be a really important way by which democracy sustains itself. Blogging can be one measure of the health of civil society.

It isn't the end of the world...

Steve Wasserman, former editor of the L.A. Times Book Review, has a long account of the decline of book sections in America's newspapers in the CJR. I think his main goal is to try and make a case for the importance of the book review, but his essay considers in depth the possibility that a serious literary culture will survive the removal or reduction of book review sections at many newspapers.

Even as these sections are declining, good things are happening, and I'm not just talking about blogs. Online sales, for example, give a lot of power to the consumer:

Regional theaters and opera companies blossomed even as Tower Records closed its doors. CD sales might have been slipping, but online music was soaring. Almost ten years later, Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s new general manager, understands this cultural shift better than most and launched a series of live, high-definition broadcasts of operas like Puccini’s Il Trittico and Mozart’s Magic Flute shown at movie theaters across America. His experiment was a triumph, pulling in thousands of new viewers. As Alex Ross reported in The New Yorker, Gelb’s broadcasts “have consistently counted among the twenty highest-grossing films in America, and have often bested Hollywood’s proudest blockbusters on a per-screen, per-day average. Such figures are a timely slap in the face to media companies that have written off classical music as an art with no mass appeal.” The truth is that many people everywhere are interested in almost everything.

Thanks to Amazon, geography hardly matters. It is now possible through the magic of Internet browsing and buying to obtain virtually any book ever printed and have it delivered to your doorstep no matter where you live. This achievement, combined with the vast archipelago of bricks-and-mortar emporiums operated by, say, Barnes & Noble or Borders or any of the more robust of the independent stores, has given Americans a cornucopia of riches. To be sure, there has also been the concomitant and deplorable collapse of many independent bookstores—down by half from the nearly four thousand such stores that existed in 1990. Nevertheless, even a cursory glance at the landscape of contemporary American bookselling and publishing makes it hard not to believe we are living at the apotheosis of our culture. Never before in the whole of human history has more good literature, attractively presented, sold for still reasonably low prices, been available to so many people. You would need several lifetimes over doing nothing but lying prone in a semi-darkened room with only a lamp for illumination just to make your way through the good books that are on offer.

It seems hard to escape the likelihood that conventional literary book reviews are going to continue to decline in the years to come. A few newspapers (NYT, WaPo) will continue to carry them, as "prestige" sections, much the way the major movie studios keep making a few money-losing art house films on the odd chance that one of them might win an Oscar. Most other newspapers are looking at their bottom lines, and choosing to buy their reviews from the Associated Press rather than retain full-time book reviewing staff.

But the decline is largely about money -- the financial woes of major newspapers in the internet age -- not the liveliness of the cultural mix that leads some people to write interesting novels, and other people to buy them and appreciate them. As long as there are some mediating channels that help readers find good new books, the loss of book review sections at newspapers like the Atlanta Journal-Constituion might not be so damaging after all. What exactly those mediating channels will be, and how they'll reach readers -- it's got to be more than just blogs and Amazon reader reviews, I think -- remains somewhat up in the air.

"Vanaja" -- a Telugu Art Film in New York

After running at myriad film festivals all over the world, the Telugu film Vanaja is opening as a commercial release in New York this weekend; it will be opening more broadly around the U.S. in the next month.

Vanaja an art film, which is to say, the director, Rajnesh Domalpalli, doesn't come out of the "Tollywood" world of commercial Telugu cinema (he actually has an M.F.A. from Columbia, and the script for this film was submitted as his Master's Thesis). Domalpalli's primary actors are nearly all amateurs -- people he found on the street. Carnatic music and Kuchipudi dance play important, but not overwhelming, roles in the film, and even there, it appears the characters actually spent months training in these rigorous arts.

This is a film about caste and class relations in a village setting, but Domalpalli doesn't take the familiar route seen in many other films about village life (i.e., villagers are exploited, landowners are inherently evil). Here, the rich people, though they do not always behave sympathetically, are as human and complex as Vanaja herself. I don't want to get too bogged down in plot, but suffice it to say that the romance in the film follows a surprising course.

Throughout, Domalpalli pays very close attention to details, including sets and staging, and the result is a film that feels very natural, yet is full of visual pleasures. The colors are rich, though not unrealistically so, and the acting is much better than one would expect from an all-amateur cast and a novice director.

I'm very curious to know how this film might be received in India, in particular in Andhra Pradesh. Unlike the films of, say, Deepa Mehta, who I've now come to feel makes her movies primarily for western audiences, Domalpalli's Vanaja might actually be popular with Desi viewers. (My mother-in-law, who is visiting us from Bombay, liked it.)

One other thing, the set of cymbals on the right side of the photo above is called a Nattuvangam. (The word of the day is Nattuvangam. Say it. Good.) Though I'm a little confused, because this site defines Nattuvangam a little differently; I gather that "Nattuvangam" refers both to the cymbals and to the act of conducting the dance by playing the cymbals?

Jonathan Letham, on Influence

I missed Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence" when it came out in Harpers back in February. Today he was on my local NPR, and they were discussing the essay. It's a pretty inspired work of cultural criticism, which is at times quite sensitive to the processes by which works of art are brought into being:

Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing. (link)

But Lethem also makes a compelling case that modern copyright law needs to be rethought in certain ways. (There are certain echoes of Lessig's arguments in Free Culture here.)

What Lethem doesn't really address is the real sense of violation that people who consume plagiarized works of art feel when they discover that a book or a piece of music is not what it says it is. There should be more scope for free appropriation than there currently is, especially in this digital era, but I think the limits of that appropriation need to be respected. The concept of authorship may have grown distorted with the advent of what Lethem calls "monopoly of use," but authorship is still there (along with plagiarism as its nemesis), and not just in the minds of literary and cultural critics.

Noah Feldman's Complex Definition of "Secular"

Noah Feldman has a piece on Religion in Schools in the New York Times, focusing primarily on the question of the controversial Muslim-themed charter school proposed in New York, the Khalil Gibran International Academy. Feldman's definition of what constitutes a secular space is a complex one:

The source of the confusion is the mistaken notion that the categories “religious” and “secular” are strictly binary, like an on-off switch. It’s true that some things are inherently religious, like a prayer or a church or a Torah scroll. (It would be impossible to make heads or tails of them without reference to their religious nature.) But it’s also true that many things that are not inherently religious are not inevitably secular either: they can be infused with religious meaning through the intention of a believer. A gymnasium or a warehouse has a perfectly secular use but also can be consecrated by worshipers who invoke God’s name there for purposes of worship. Examples of what you might call “dual use,” such things can be at once secular to one person and religious to another.

The most convincing interpretation of our constitutional tradition is that the government may not engage in or pay for conduct that is inherently religious but may accommodate religion when the steps taken to do so are not inherently religious in themselves. The phenomenon of dual use suggests a helpful way of restating this requirement: the state may expend resources to accommodate activities that are religious in the eyes of the believers as long as those activities can still be performed by the general public that interprets them as secular. (link)

This might seem wishy-washy, but actually I think it makes a good deal of sense. In the end, Feldman does come out against public funding for the Khalil Gibran Academy, as well as a Jewish-themed charter school proposed in Los Angeles.

New Novel About Ramanujan -- "The Indian Clerk"

There's a new novel about the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan by David Leavitt; it's called The Indian Clerk. Leavitt appears to be working with the approach taken by Pat Barker and others, in producing a fiction that is strongly based on actual facts, and which is the product of his own extensive research on the relationship between Ramanujan and the British mathematician G.H. Hardy.

The blog The Elegant Variation recently had an extensive series of posts dedicated to the book, including a long excerpt here and an interview here. I haven't read it yet, though I'll definitely be looking for it the next time I am in a bookstore. Here are a couple of paragraphs, from immediately after G.H. Hardy receives his first letter from Ramanujan in Madras, with several pages of groundbreaking mathematical proofs attached:

Hardy shifts Hermione, much to her annoyance, off his lap, then gets up and moves to his windows. Beneath him, two gowned undergraduates stroll arm in arm toward the archway. Watching them, he thinks of asymptotes, values converging as they near a sum they will never reach: a half foot closer, then a quarter foot, then an eighth… One moment he can almost reach out and touch them, the next—whoosh—they're gone, sucked up by infinity. Now there's a divergent series for you. The envelope from India has left a curious smell on his fingers, of soot and what he thinks might be curry. The paper is cheap. In two places the ink has run.

This is not the first time that Hardy had received letters from strangers. For all its remoteness from the ordinary world, pure mathematics holds a mysterious attraction for cranks of all stripes. Some of the men who have written to Hardy are genuine lunatics, claiming to have in their hands formulae pointing to the location of the lost continent of Atlantis, or to have discovered cryptograms in the plays of Shakespeare indicating a Jewish conspiracy to defraud England. Most, though, are merely amateurs whom mathematics has fooled into believing that they have found solutions to the most famous unsolved problems. I have completed the long-sought proof to Goldbach's Conjecture—Goldbach's Conjecture, stating simply that any even number greater than two could be expressed as the sum of two primes. Needless to say I am loath to send my actual proof, lest it fall into the hands of one who might publish it as his own…Experience suggests that this Ramanujan falls into the latter category. Being poor—as if mathematics has ever made anyone rich! I have not given the actual investigations nor the expressions that I get—as if all the dons of Cambridge are waiting with baited breath to receive them!

Nine dense pages of mathematics accompany the letter. Sitting down again, Hardy looks them over. At first glance, the complex array of numbers, letters, and symbols suggests a passing familiarity with, if not a fluency in, the language of his discipline. Yet how strangely the Indian uses that language! What he is reading, Hardy thinks, is the equivalent of English spoken by a foreigner who has taught the tongue to himself. (link)

Personally I find this type of approach -- using the novel to work as an outlet for research on real historical problems -- very rewarding. Teaching Barker's Regeneration last spring, I found found that students got a lot out of the cross-referencing of actual historical documents (i.e., relating to Siegfried Sassoon and the development of modern psychology) with the literary text at hand.

The Ghosts of Nusrat: Dub Qawwali

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan has a new CD out. While that may seem unlikely, given that he passed away ten years ago, it's true. Italian/British producer Gaudi took old master tapes from the early 1970s in the possession of Nusrat's original Pakistani record label (Rehmat Gramohpone), and reinterpreted them with Dub/Reggae beats. The sound is fresh, if not technically new -- a successful way to bring back the ghost of Nusrat in a recording studio. Dub Qawwali has recently been released on Six Degrees Records; Gaudi was also interviewed by NPR here.

Dub Qawwali is a collection of Nusrat songs that, for the most part, I hadn't heard before, though admittedly my Nusrat collection is hardly definitive. The production quality, for those who pay attention to such things, is flawless, and the sound is "warm" -- mainly because Gaudi used live musicians and vintage analog equipment to create a rich soundscape. It's most definitely not the cheesy Bally Sagoo remix approach, where you get the feeling that the whole thing was put together on a computer by a stoned teenager. Here is how the record label describes the approach:

The use of vintage analogue studio equipment and dub production techniques such as tape echoes, valve amps, Fender Rhodes, spring reverbs, Hammond organ and Moog, characterizes Gaudi's production style, however it is not without its share of 21st century intervention and wizardry… Individual tracks from the original 70's multi-track recordings often contained multiple parts together on them. These had to then be carefully cleaned up in order to make them usable in a way that would enable the composition of these new works. (This included much of the vocal parts which were mixed in the same track as the Harmonium and other instruments!) (link)

So, yeah, the CD sounds pretty good.

The one possible flaw, and it's debatable, might be that the songs on Dub Qawwali are almost too mellow. Nusrat, as videos like this might attest, was at times a frenetic, ecstatic performer, not a chilled out crooner. On the other hand, he did do some 'slow' records -- and there must be a time and place for mellow for everyone.

So it's not rapture, but a different kind of transport, the gentle vocal nurturing of a shared spiritual journey. And healing, and peace: here, Nusrat's voice acts as a kind of salve, easing the pain of existence... Nusrat's ghost.

Apropos of that, one song that Gaudi reworks on this CD, which I had heard before, is the classic ghazal "Jab Tere Dard":

Jab Tere Dard Mein Dil Dukhta Tha
Hum Tere Haq Mein Dua Karte Thay
Hum Bhee Chup Chaap Phira Karte The
Jab Teri Dhun Mein Jiya Karte The

(You can listen to the original, non remixed version here)

"Nawabdin Electrician," in The New Yorker

There's a very interesting short story in this week's New Yorker, by a new Pakistani writer named Daniyal Mueenuddin. It's about an electrician working on a large farm in rural Pakistan, more or less taking care of his business until something dramatic happens. I won't say much about the dramatic thing that happens to Nawabdin (read the story), but here's a teaser to give you a sense of the writing style:

The motorcycle increased his status, gave him weight, so that people began calling him Uncle and asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he knew absolutely nothing. He could now range farther, doing much wider business. Best of all, now he could spend every night with his wife, who early in the marriage had begged to live not in Nawab’s quarters in the village but with her family in Firoza, near the only girls’ school in the area. A long straight road ran from the canal headworks near Firoza all the way to the Indus, through the heart of the K. K. Harouni lands. The road ran on the bed of an old highway built when these lands lay within a princely state. Some hundred and fifty years ago, one of the princes had ridden that way, going to a wedding or a funeral in this remote district, felt hot, and ordered that rosewood trees be planted to shade the passersby. Within a few hours, he forgot that he had given the order, and in a few dozen years he in turn was forgotten, but these trees still stood, enormous now, some of them dead and looming without bark, white and leafless. (link)

In the story as a whole, I think Mueenuddin finds some very congenial ways to convey a poor electrician's point of view. He's got a good sense of comic details, but doesn't depend on them too much. I also liked the ambiguities at the end regarding Nawabdin's character. Any thoughts on this story?

Incidentally, Mueenuddin also has another story online, at the literary magazine Zoetrope. It's quite different from "Nawabdin Electrician"; I think it will be interesting to anyone who has been in a serious cross-cultural or interracial relationship. (I'm happy to discuss that story too.)

Working for the Pat Down: TSA Turban Policy

On their classic album London Calling, the old punk band The Clash had a song with some lyrics that always puzzled me:

What are we gonna do now?
Taking off his turban, they said, is this man a Jew?
'Cause they're working for the clampdown (link)

I get the gist of the song -- it's a critique of the trend of rising fascism amongst British youth in the 1970s -- but "turban"? Quoi?

Anyway, this past week I learned that Sikh travelers with turbans can expect not the clampdown, but the pat-down, as the TSA has changed its security policies yet again. The BBC has the details:

US Sikh organisations have expressed anger over changes allowing airport security staff to "pat down" turbans.

Until now turbans have been searched or removed only to resolve an unexplained alarm from an airport metal detector.

But now security will have greater discretion to inspect turbans so that they can be manually checked for objects such as non-metallic weapons.

However Sikh groups have responded to the new measures by describing them as outrageous and discriminatory. (link)

Personally, I'm not so much outraged as annoyed and worried. I'm annoyed because I'm not sure how this is a rational or necessary change: metal detectors work. You couldn't hide a gun, a knife, or explosives inside a turban without it being pretty obvious. (But the TSA has a long history of irrational policies -- like the restrictions on baby formula, which have caused problems for us several times.)

I'm also worried because I have a feeling the new policies may be deployed selectively and in a non-standardized way at different airports, and according to the whim of individual TSA agents, who may or may not understand what the Sikh turban represents. Some Sikhs will certainly be asked to remove turbans even if there's no positive indication of anything concealed. (I've found that agents at smaller airports, like Manchester NH or Durham NC, are much more strict about enforcing policy than are the agents at bigger airports. At Philly, where the security lines are quite long and the agents are harried, they don't bother to stop you even if you have fluids -- no baby formula or bottled water hassles...)

The Sikh Coalition has been on this, and I got an email from them earlier this week with more specifics:

* A guidance to all TSA screeners nationwide on how to implement the new headwear procedure specifically lists the turban (in addition to cowboy hats and straw hats) as an item that can be subjected to secondary screening. Sikh travelers should therefore expect that turbans will be the subject of secondary screening, regardless of whether a metal detector indicates a metallic object is in the turban.
* The purpose of the secondary screening is to detect non-metallic objects. Therefore from the TSA’s perspective, it is irrelevant whether a Sikh’s turban sets off the metal detector or not.
* If requested, a private area will be provided for a pat-down search of a turban.
* A private area must be offered if a secondary search / pat-down leads to a request that a turban be removed.
* Despite the fact that the TSA guidance lists turbans as an example of headwear that can be the subject of secondary screening, a TSA screener is not required to conduct secondary screening of a turban. The screener can use his or her discretion to determine whether he/she believes the turban could conceal a non-metallic threat item.

People who have friends or family who wear turbans may want to pass the word along, so everyone knows what to expect when they next head to the airport. It might help to know that you're due for secondary screening whether or not you set off the alarm. Finally, it might help to know that you have the right to request the additional screening be done in a private room.

Personally, I'm digging out my old Clash t-shirt the next time I fly.

"The Good Soldier" -- A Bad Novel

Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915) is considered a classic of sorts from the early modernist era. W.H. Auden thought Ford was a great novelist (he had particularly strong praise for Parade's End, which deals with World War I), and so did Graham Greene. From what I can tell, The Good Soldier, which is not a war novel, but a novel about adultery in the British aristocracy, is still widely taught in college classes on British modernism (see here, here, and here); it's also widely cited in the scholarly literature. But it shouldn't be -- this thing is a mess. (Or more politely, "perhaps it's time for a reassessment"?)

One of the oft-repeated chestnuts about The Good Soldier stems from Ford's early relationship as an editor and collaborator of Joseph Conrad. Ford, it is said, aims to use a version of Joseph Conrad's nested narrators with their various, idiosyncratic approaches to the "truth." But if Ford is aiming for a Conradian effect, it's poorly done, to the point of unrecognizability. The Good Soldier has only one narrator, and the multiple points of view that emerge in the text are never fully explained (in Conrad, by contrast, the different narrators are usually in dialogue with one, primary narrator). The narrator in Ford's novel at once knows implausibly much about what his friends and family were thinking at various moments, and far too little -- it seems unthinkable that he could be such a poor judge of character (more on that below). Moreover, instead of creating a sense of suspense for the reader, the unraveling of the story merely creates confusion, as the story slides back and forth chronologically without leading to new insights on why the characters do what they do in the end.

I won't do a detailed plot summary (see Sparknotes for a refresher), but suffice it to say the novel is about two couples, the Dowells and the Ashburnhams, and the narrator is one of the husbands, John Dowell. Florence Dowell has an affair with Edward Ashburnham that goes on for several years, which John Dowell fails to notice for most of that time. (He also fails to notice that his and his wife's flatmate in Paris is his wife's former lover. For two years.) Leonora Ashburnham, on the other hand, notices it right away -- in fact, Edward is a serial philanderer, who is constantly getting himself into trouble over his various entanglements with women of both high and low classes. Leonora hopes (more implausibility) that her husband will reform and come back to her, and Ford keeps insisting that she loves him despite everything. Florence commits suicide, not when she's discovered by her husband, but once she realizes that Edward has fallen in love with some new floozy. And Edward himself also eventually commits suicide, for reasons that never really make sense.

There are numerous things in the plot and characterization of The Good Soldier that defy logic, and there are some major flaws I haven't even mentioned, but what really bothers me about this book is the way it stacks the decks to make its own narrator unreflectively passive -- to the point where he might as well vanish altogether. What Ford really wants to do is celebrate Edward Ashburnham, whose treatment of women by both Edwardian and our own standards ought to make him a clear villain. It might be understandable if Ford had some kind of point to make about sexual addiction, or some kind of Freudian explanation for Ashburnham's behavior. But in fact, he doesn't -- there's strikingly little psychological reflection in this novel, especially if you consider that both Conrad and Woolf were contemporaries, and many of the writers and artists in Ford's circle were by 1915 smelling Freud. In effect, while the The Good Soldier is often read as an exposé of Victorian Aristocratic mores (with their inherent misogyny), it actually celebrates them by making Ashburnham's suicide the "true" tragedy in the story.

What The Good Soldier does have is moments of "brilliant" writing, paragraphs that clearly suggest Ford was, at least temporarily, in control of things after all. Take the following, which comes near the end of the story:

"I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way, so that it may be difficult for any one to find their path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gust of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as it comes. And, when one discusses an affair--a long, sad affair--one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten, and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places, and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story, and that, after all, real stories are best told in the way that a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real."

(Incidentally, Google reveals that Theodore Dreiser quoted the same paragraph near the end of his hostile review of the novel, back in the day.)

When I read the above paragraph, I thought, "yes, rambling -- that's exactly what this damn novel is." At the start the above paragraph seems like a kind of apology; if it seems like I'm doing a bad job, well that's just part of the reality of talking about one's romantic history (or in this case, one's wife's lover's romantic history, since John Dowell has the libido of a bump on a log). While there may be some truth in the idea that memory is rarely truly linear, if this is how the novelist is explaining his method, it falls flat. The reader doesn't want the raw, uncooked reality, but art. It need not be a matter of a conventional beginning, middle, and end -- this is modernism, after all -- but would it be too much to ask for a sense of direction, or perhaps a point? It's entirely possible for a story to be carefully constructed (or crafted) and still "seem most real." Ford Madox Ford doesn't seem to have understood that.

* * *

One final bit of wrongness. This blogger has a quote from one of Ford's many critical essays:

To him, you will address your picture, your poem, your prose story, or your argument. You will seek to capture his interest; you will seek to hold his interest. You will do this by methods of surprise, of fatigue, by passages of sweetness in your language, by passages suggesting the sudden and brutal shock of suicide. You will give him passages of dullness, so that your bright effects may seem more bright; you will alternate, you will dwell for a long time upon an intimate point; you will seek to exasperate so that you may the better enchant. You will, in short, employ all the devices of the prostitute. If you are too proud for this you may be the better gentleman or the better lady, but you will be the worse artist....[T]he artist is, quite rightly, regarded with suspicion by people who desire to live in tranquil and ordered society.

While Ford perhaps starts out with some valid points about the necessity for contour, he goes wrong -- I think, fatally -- when he compares writing a novel to a sort of prostitution. That's just a really sad bit of very bad advice to give an aspiring writer. (Sorry, Peking Duck!)

Brief Review: Ishmael Beah, "A Long Way Gone"

I recently read Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone, after hearing a great deal about it earlier this spring. (Beah was interviewed all over the place, and the book was actually on sale at Starbucks at some point...)

This is one of those cases where the hype is actually on target.

The basics of the story will be familiar to many readers. Beah is a former child soldier, who was displaced from his home and separated from his parents near the beginning of the civil war in Sierra Leone. He was 12 at the time. For several months he, his brother, and a group of friends walked through the jungle fleeing the rebels that had destroyed his village. But as they encounter various kinds of violence along the way, Beah is periodically separated from the group; at certain points he walks through the jungle entirely alone, and forages for food to survive. Eventually, Beah is "recruited" into the Sierra Leonean army, which struggled to keep up with the the RUF rebels throughout the mid-1990s. Beah becomes a soldier who fights ruthlessly, all the while hopped up on speed and cocaine mixed with gunpowder ("brown brown").

What's remarkable about the story is the way in which Beah, who was later removed from the conflict by UNICEF, and eventually adopted by a woman in New York City, manages to preserve a sense of innocence in his account of the darkest chapters of his childhood experiences. Sometimes the naivete of his voice seems a little forced, but for the most part it is quite effective at conveying what is in essence a horrible paradox: Beah was a child who was trained to be a vicious killer.

A blogger has posted an excerpt from the passage where Beah describes his first experience in combat here.

But my favorite passages are actually not the gory, "thick of battle" scenes, but rather some of the quieter moments, as in the following account of the month Beah spent (again, at age 12 -- and this is also before he got involved in combat) walking through the jungle:

The most difficult part of being in the forest was the loneliness. It became unbearable each day. One thing about being lonesome is that you think too much, especially when there isn't much else you can do. I didn't like this and I tried to stop myself from thinking, but nothing seemed to work. I decided to just ignore every thought that came to my head, because it brought too much sadness. Apart from eating and drinking water and once every other day taking a bath, I spent most of my time fighting myself mentally in order to avoid thinking about what I had seen or wondering where my life was going, where my family and friends were. The more I resisted thinking, the longer the days became, and I felt as if my head was becoming heavier each passing day. I became restless and afraid and was afraid to sleep for fear that my suppressed thoughts would appear in my dreams.

As I searched the forest for more food and to find a way out, I feared coming in contact with wild animals like leopards, lions, and wild pigs. So I stayed closer to trees that I could easily mount to hid myself from these animals. I walked as fast as I could, but the more I walked, the more it seemed I was getting deeper into the thickness of the forest. The harder I tried to get out, the bigger and taller the trees became. This was a problem, because it got difficult to find a tree that was easy to climb and had suitable branches to sleep in.

Though Beah wrote these lines as an adult (he apparently started work on the book while studying at Oberlin College), to my eye he's quite good at capturing the way a child might experience life in complete isolation in the jungle. (Not that I've been there or done that!)

I think Beah should consider trying his hand at fiction for the next book.

Will the U.S. India Nuclear Deal Get Nuked?

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is facing the threat of a mutiny from the left parties in his coalition government over the recently-finalized -- but still not finally approved -- U.S.-India nuclear deal, also known as the "123 Agreement."

As he addressed Parliament today, some members of Left parties staged a walk-out, while others made so much noise that MPs who actually wanted to hear what was said had to use their translation headphones. On the right, the BJP has also been critical of the deal, though I tend to think it's more because of political opportunism than anything else: one gets the feeling they wish they'd pulled this off.

Thus far, the Congress Party hasn't seemed seriously concerned about a collapse of the government; no one is yet talking about votes of no-confidence, mid-term polls, or rejiggering the deal to make critics happy.

Are the Communists and others on the left bluffing when they say they will walk away from the Coalition government over this? I tend to think so, though I could be wrong. Indian politics -- with the combination of regional and caste parties in addition to the left/right axis -- is often so complicated, it makes the U.S. system seem laughably simple. Still the Times has a certain wry tone in its summary of where the opposition is coming from:

At one point in Mr, Singh’s speech, the Left parties, which provide crucial support to his Congress-led coalition government, walked out of the house. The Left has opposed the nuclear accord with the United States since it was announced, less over the specific provisions of the accord than over the general principle of closer ties to America.



“We do not share the optimism that India can become a great power with the help of the United States,” Prakash Karat, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), said on Saturday. (link)

(This is where I sniff in Prakash Karat's general direction.)

For those who have kind of let the whole U.S.-India nuclear deal slip past them in recent months, Siddharth Varadarajan has a good point-by-point summary of the agreement here. And the full text of the agreement, released by the U.S. State Department, is here.