Eric Doeringer In the Voice: Bootlegging it in Chelsea

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

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

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

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

Quirky American Art Films and Terrible Bollywood Comedies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technical Difficulties, and How They Were Resolved

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is This India? (Links potpourri)

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

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

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

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

I like the phrase "get their hustle on."

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

* * * *
2. Jabberwock attends a wedding.

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

Start with hilarious:

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

And then biting:

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

Hm, ouch.

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

* * * *
3. Hooch and Hamlet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the whole post, Tamilians and Tamil-watchers.

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

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

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

Travel Writers: India, England, and the United States

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Grandfather

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natural Born Killer: Abu Salem

(Photo by Aijaz Rahi/Associated Press)

Abu Salem, the guy in the yellow shirt above, was recently turned over to the custody of Indian authorities. He's been one of India's most wanted criminals, ever since the early 1990s, when he was involved in a terrorist attack that killed around 250 people, and injured thousands. He remained active in Bombay throughout the 1990s, and became particularly notorious for his widespread extortion and assasination of Bollywood personalities. Since 2002 he's been in jail in Portugal, while India has pursued his extradition.

There's something particularly pathological about targeting movie stars for extortion and assasination. The extortion part of it is fairly predictable -- I suspect anyone who's either rich or glamorous poses an obvious target. But what's unique about Abu Salem is how ready he was to murder people in the prime of their creative success. (Fortunately, two of his most prominent targets, Rakesh Roshan and Rajiv Rai, survived his attacks. Gulshan Kumar was not so lucky. See Rediff's charge-sheet here)

It reminds me a little of the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers, which plays with the cult of the serial killer, implying that in the U.S., flamboyant murderers become impromptu movie stars through the media storm they produce.

Abu Salem was in some sense the opposite -- someone who seems to have been drawn to glamorous and successful people, and who had the means and the will (perhaps tied to a psychotic personality) to destroy them.

It's strange; he has such baby-boy looks. In another life he might have been a movie star himself.

Hullabaloo at the Berkeley Theater

A bit of a blog kerfluffle has sprung up around the recent production of Manjula Padmanabhan's play Harvest at the Berkeley theater. It's the first time since 1914 that an Indian play has been performed at the Berkeley main stage, so this is a big deal in more than one respect.

The two sentence summary of the play is as follows:

A brilliantly comic exploration of the complex relations between developing and developed countries, Harvest stages a grisly pact between the first and third worlds. Set in India in the near future, a desperate man decides to sell his body parts to a wealthy client in exchange for a "Western" lifestyle for his family.

Sounds promising, doesn't it? I'm always up for black comedy. And there's more from this Hindustan Times article:

Chatterjee next will move to the future by directing on campus in November his West Coast premiere of "Harvest," a darkly comic and unsettling tale of globalism and organ harvesting in India written by playwright Manjula Padmanabhan, who will be on campus during the play's run. The Center for South Asia Studies also will host an exhibition on campus of Padmanabhan's graphic art.

After reading a copy of "Harvest" sent to him by a colleague in Australia a few years ago, Chatterjee said he was "totally stunned." The play won the Onassis Award in Athens when it was first performed in the late '90s and was an instant success in academic circles.

"The play is set in the future, at a time when multinational companies have gone to the Third World not for software, minerals or fabric, but to harvest organs for their rich customers in America," Chatterjee said. "It's about India and the gritty Third World reality."

In "Harvest," Om, a just-laid-off breadwinner for a struggling Indian family living in a cramped Bombay tenement, decides to sell his organs to a shadowy company called Interplanta in hopes of reversing his financial plight. Om's family is monitored around the clock, receiving frequent video phone-type inquiries and directives from the supposed organ recipient, an icy young blonde named Ginni. Om's mother falls into a stupor, constantly absorbed by programmes on the TV provided by Interplanta. The family's lives continue to go awry.

William Worthen, chair of UC Berkeley's Department of Theater, Dance & Performance, said he included it in The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, one of the most widely used books of its kind in the United States.

So far, so good. But apparently Manjula Padmanabhan (aka Marginalien) wasn't thrilled by the production; she posted the following at her blog:

The play was -- alas! Yet again! -- NOT what I'd like it to be. However, one great relief for me was that I was able to express my views to Sudipto; and he took it very well -- because I had also, at the same moment that I told him what I thought, also decided that I would NOT interfere with his interpretation. I told him that too.

He has added at least an hour of performance time to the play, including lines, movements and moods that are in no way part of the original. For instance, he has permitted his actors to use a number of Hindi-isms such as "arre", "beta" etc -- which I find very hard to accept because (a) I am not a Hindi-speaker and specifically resisted falling back on ethnic touches of that sort while writing the play (b) the use of Hindi is a reminder that the family would never normally be speaking English and besides the actual words and terms are cliches, utterly colourless in themselves. I far prefer the play to inhabit a language-neutral space by remaining in ONE language, rather than attempting to balance uneasily between two.

Yet, for all that I disliked -- and it was/is a real dislike -- I recognized that this production, being fuelled by students and their youthful energy, had a kind of vulgar logic. The four principal characters were played by South Asians . . . and it seemed very important to them to explore the specific ethnic identities of their characters. It's hard for me to express what I want clearly, but it's something like this: since I don't feel the need to underline the fact that I'm Indian/SouthAsian, it is utterly unimportant -- no, more than unimportant, actually unattractive -- for me to make a big deal about that identity. I want to go the other way -- I want to universalize the experience of being whatever -- Asian/Indian/whatever -- and to explore the notion of sameness-in-otherness. Whereas for this production, what seems to have overwhelmed the tone is the heavy spice of Indianness.

She starts off questioning the director's decision to add a fair amount of material that she herself hadn't scripted. But then she gets into what seems to me to be an ABCD vs. desi-from-desh distinction. But I'm a little confused about what exactly the problem is on the second point; to some extent it sounds as if she might have just been happier to see non-Indians cast in the primary roles, since they would have been less invested in being "ethnic," either in the sense of the actors' self-consciousness or the reception of the play by the audience.

(Here is where I remind the reader that, since I haven't read the script, or seen the play, everything I've said should be taken with a grain of salt.)

Things gets a little anxious when the mother of one of the actresses, and then the actress herself, show up in the comments to protest Padmanabhan's reference to her background.

Finally, another of the actors in the play, Asanwate, has a thorough and, in my view, compelling defense of both the director's choices and the overall approach to the play at the blog Ergodicity. One of the best moments is when he (?) quotes passages from the screenplay, such as the following:

The DONORS and RECEIVERs should take on the racial identities, names, costumes, and accents most suited to the location of the production. It matters only that there be a highly recognisable distinction between the two groups, reflected in speech, clothing, and appearance.

I gather that Padmanabhan's objection is that the director chose to cast along racially appropriate lines, which seems questionable given that she is evidently underlining the "difference" between the "donor" and "receiver" groups. Elsewhere Asanwate makes several other good rebuttals to Padmanabhan's post, including the salient objection that the Hindi-isms she isn't happy about can be justified because the script states that the play is set in Bombay.

Are there lessons here? I'm not sure. On a basic level, I think it's great that a prominent university like Berkeley chose to put on this play. And I also admire Manjula Padmanabhan as an up-and-coming writer to watch.

But a lot of that accomplishment has unfortunately been a bit dampened by this sour blog debate: who needs critics when we tear ourselves to pieces on our blogs?

* * * *
(Incidentally, Harvest still playing this weekend, in case any readers are in the Bay Area, and want to get in on the "drama.")

Fairy Tales and the Religious Imagination: Adam Gopnik on C.S. Lewis

I've tried and failed to get into C.S. Lewis's writings on religion. I read Surprised by Joy as a grad student, and a grad student I'm working with now recently gave me The Abolition of Man. While the latter work didn't do much for me at all, I found Surprised by Joy quite readable, if occasionally puzzling. Needless to say, despite my disappointment with Lewis's essays for grown-ups, the name C.S. Lewis still brings up happy memories, from when I devoured the Narnia books as a child -- completely oblivious to the Christian allegory I was supposed to be imbibing.

This other C.S. Lewis has been a mystery to me -- an avowedly Christian writer whose account of his religious beliefs isn't even especially convincing. In Surprised by Joy, one sees a writer whose imaginative life is apparently animated primarily by fairy tales, but who turns to religion as a way to amplify and order the joy his imaginative worlds give him. One finds passages like the following:

I also developed a great taste for all the fiction I could get about the ancient world: Quo Vadis, Darkness and Dawn, The Gladiators, Ben Hur. It might be expected that this arose out of my new concern for my religion, but I think not. Early Christians came into many of these stories, but they were not what I was after. I simply wanted sandals, temples, togas, slaves, emperors, galleys, amphitheaters; the attraction, as I now see, was erotic, and erotic in rather a morbid way. . . . The idea of other planets exercised upon me then a peculiar, heady attraction, which was quite different from any other of my literary interests. Most emphatically it was not the romantic spell of Das Ferne. "Joy" (in my technical sense) never darted from Mars or the Moon. This was something coarser and stronger. The interest, when the fit was upon me, was ravenous, like lust.

Lewis' account of the role of literature in the development of his religious imagination seems confused. For one thing, since the passion for science fiction and fantasy was so intense, why worry about "Joy" altogether? And since his own imagination is so often the story of Surprised by Joy, why not design his own religion based on the fantastic alternate worlds that had already created and populated by him in his own mind? Why the Anglican framework exactly?

Adam Gopnik's long piece on Lewis in this week's New Yorker clears up many questions. The whole piece is worth reading to people interested in Lewis, but perhaps the final two paragraphs are especially intriguing, as Gopnik bridges the gap between a secular reader's passion for fairy tales (or more generally, for the otherworldly) with the religious believer's investment in them (generally as a stimulant to spiritual growth).

Here is Gopnik from the New Yorker:

For poetry and fantasy aren’t stimulants to a deeper spiritual appetite; they are what we have to fill the appetite. The experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual, is . . . an experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual. To hope that the conveyance will turn out to bring another message, beyond itself, is the futile hope of the mystic. Fairy stories are not rich because they are true, and they lose none of their light because someone lit the candle. It is here that the atheist and the believer meet, exactly in the realm of made-up magic. Atheists need ghosts and kings and magical uncles and strange coincidences, living fairies and thriving Lilliputians, just as much as the believers do, to register their understanding that a narrow material world, unlit by imagination, is inadequate to our experience, much less to our hopes.

The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is, like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images—the street lamp in the snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse—are as much an escape for the Christian imagination as for the rationalist, and we sense a deeper joy in Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the demands of Christian belief into the darker realm of magic. As for faith, well, a handful of images is as good as an armful of arguments, as the old apostles always knew.

Clearly Gopnik sees Lewis as a talented fantasist first, and a Christian distantly second. But what I think is helpful about Gopnik's review essay is the way it links the two rather different modes of writing and thinking about the imaginative world. Secular readers (and readers from outside the Christian tradition) can indeed appreciate Narnia (well, most of the series) as an involving fantasy world, completely separate from its allegorical meaning. And their need for such stories is not very different from the need of religious believers to imagine spiritual significance overlaying material reality. While huge gaps remain between the two kinds of readers, someone like Lewis can act, at his best, as a bridge over the epistemological divide.

[Cross-posted to The Valve]

Rushdie on the Flagging Earthquake Relief Effort

Rushdie has a piece in the November 8 Toronto Star on Pakistan earthquake relief. He makes what I see as a particularly important point about the need to separate the humanitarian effort from ongoing political strife as much as possible:

[T]he people of Kashmir deserve better than they are getting. They certainly do not deserve to be subjected to a kind of "political test" of aid-worthiness. Yet, ever since the day of the earthquake, people in the United States and Europe have been asking me and many others the same politically loaded question:

Will the disaster "help?" Will it enable India and Pakistan to sink their differences and, at long last, to make an end of their long Kashmiri quarrel?

It has been hard to avoid the conclusion that Western attitudes toward aiding Kashmir depend to some degree on the answer to this question being "yes." Alas, the answer is "no."

India and Pakistan are still mired in mutual suspicion, as the saga of the Indian helicopters reveals: India offered them, but Pakistan refused to accept them unless they were flown by Pakistani pilots, which India in turn refused to accept. Meanwhile the quake victims went right on dying.

Moreover, as the recent murder of a moderate Kashmiri politician showed, and as the bombs in Delhi would seem to confirm, there are Islamist groups who remain determined to sabotage any improvement in Indo-Pakistani relations.

As long as those groups find sanctuary in Pakistan, a peace settlement will be impossible.

All of which should be irrelevant to the matter at hand.

Yes. It doesn't matter if it doesn't help the peace process one bit. Our obligation to those in need remains the same whether peace is imminent or war is about to break out.

Up From The Comments: Vikash Singh on Tsunami Relief

Vikash Singh (also see his photos here) recently left quite a comment in response to a post I did last week on my various speaking gigs on campus. I thought I would bring it up to the front for people to peruse:

On the politics of Tsunami Relief

I recently came back from a 5 week Tsunami Relief work in Galle, Sri Lanka. I gave out prescription eyeglasses and looked for cataracts (which was followed by a paid operation upon diagnosis) with the tsunami victims as well as the local population. I cannot speak for other Tsunami affected regions, but in the case of Sri Lanka the following is true:

(1) Unlike other Tsunami affected countries, Sri Lanka had no financial nor numerical limit on the amount of money and the number of NGOs, respectively, which could come into Sri Lanka to give aid in the affected regions.
(2) What followed were numerous NGOs. An NGO works in the following manner: first find an area which needs your help and resources, go to that area, help out and take pictures of such actions, and finally go back to your home country and use the pictures to further fund yourself.
(3) These NGOs, upon entering Sri Lanka, found themselves in areas with numerous other NGOs. There was a lack of coordination by the government and poor organization led to numerous problems.
(4) First the government taxed all goods, even if they were NOT COMPETING with the local produced Sri Lankan goods just to make money. The NGOs when distributing these goods such as sewing machines and boats, due to the language barrier and lack of governmental organization, ended up distributing the goods into the wrong hands. The goods as a result never reached the tsunami victims and instead made their way into the black market via other persons.

In the case of Sri Lanka, I blame the government for the lack of organization which has led to little or no improvement in the situation of the tsunami victims. In other countries where there was a limit on the amount of financial help, like Indonesia, the situation has forced a truce with the separatists and brought about peace. On the contrary, In Sri Lanka situations have remained the same between the separatists Tamil Tigers and the majority Singhala people. Although the creation of the Tamil Tigers can be attributed to a certain Indian political demigod named Indira Gandhi (nee Nehru)....well that's another story.

The Two Movers and the Savvy Sadhu (a short story)

It was a spectacularly large head, nice enough to admire, but rather a liability when moving.

Able and Cable had been struggling to fit it through the door of the apartment for nearly twenty minutes. It had become that dreaded thing, an Ordeal, probably the single greatest challenge to their moving efforts since the day they had been asked to move a giant flying saucer covered with a mysterious viscous fluid. They had finally solved that problem (funny what you can do with a hairdryer!), but moving this head into the apartment posed an almost insurmountable problem.

They had tried half a dozen angles of attack as well as various diagonals. They had tried rotating the head. They had even tried inserting the body first and pulling the appendages, though that turned out not to work either. No matter what they did, the head got stuck, either at the massive, protuberant ears, or the bulbous nose.

It truly was an extraordinarily large head. It occurred to them that the tenant would have a hard time ever leaving the apartment with the head, and they thought about cautioning him about this likely issue. But Able refrained from saying anything (and Cable followed suit), mainly along the lines that it was their job to move the tenant and his possessions into an apartment. After that it was the tenant's business. This particular tenant apparently owned a kind of brace that enabled the head to move around, so perhaps he also owned other contraptions that might make it a bit easier to enter and leave buildings. But if that were the case, why not use the device now?

After they had exhausted every conceivable position, Able and Cable tried using sheer force to get the head through. A shove and a grunt -- but nothing doing. They either ended up damaging the paint in the door-frame, or damaging the head itself. There was already a mark on the left ear and the forehead that they would have to explain later to their boss's boss.

They debated whether the ears were removable; after all, they did seem a little wobbly. But a little tweaking put that idea to rest -- it appeared the ears could only be removed from the inside of the head, and that would be another operation altogether.

Finally, with the hour growing late and their arms nearly exhausted, they decided to remove the muzzle that the tenant had instructed them to place on the head. But they weren't able to get any useful information out of the mouth, only curses and howls of pain.

They replaced the muzzle, and put the head on the ground and stood over it, contemplating. It would be a failure of their mission if they were unable to get the head through the door, would it not? It might even be the end of Able and Cable Movers.

Just then, a wandering Sadhu walked past, and chortled when he saw the massive head at their feet.

"Good sirs, I see you are trying to fit a head through a door! I wish you the very best of luck."

"Well, Mr. Sadhu, actually we are having a great deal of difficulty getting the head through the door. Have you any guidance to offer us?"

The Sadhu approached, and inspected the head and the door frame more closely. Noting the marks on the paint as well as the bruises on the head, he said, "Yes, I see that all too well. Have you tried geometry?"

"Geometry?" Able said. "As in a protratctor and a compass?"

"Yes, exactly. Fundamentally you see, the problem of the massive head in the door is a problem of geometry. First you have to survey the head as precisely as possible, including the relative width from all endpoints. Then, identify the angles of attack that allow you to maximize the use of the door's inherent diagonals. Also, consider the possibility of removing the door from its hinge -- it may give you an additional 3 centimeters. After measuring the necessary angles, you will find the range of angles of incidence that will enable you to get the head through the door."

"But sir, we are just movers! We do not have the necessary tools to calculate the size of object as precisely as your Geometry would demand."

"No problem at all!" cried the Sadhu. He then produced a precise laser measuring device, and a TI-92 graphing calculator. Somehow he had managed to stow both items in the folds of his white cotton dhoti.

Over the course of the next half hour, the two movers and the savvy sadhu measured both the head and the doorway with great precision.

They determined that, indeed, the head should fit through the door if its nose were flattened just a little and the door removed from its hinges, and the head initially inserted at an eighteen degree angle, subsequently to be rotated to 37 degrees after the nose was inside the door (the rotation would solve the problem of the chin). Their calculations complete, Able instructed Cable to squish the nose with his hand, while Able manipulated the head to the exact angle through which it could pass through the door.

It worked! The head was inside the door, and inside the apartment. The only problem was, the nose was a little bloody from the squishing, and the hinges to the door now seemed broken. But neither the bloody nose nor the broken door were the business of Able and Cable. After all, they were only movers; their boss's boss took care of these kinds of trivial details. Their job finished, they thanked the Sadhu and left, planning to celebrate their triumph over beers as the County Line Pub.

The Sadhu stayed a little longer at the doorway of the apartment, looking in. After some time contemplating the door and the head (now disappeared into the darkness of the apartment), he picked up the useless, broken door, and carried it off with him as a tribute to the miraculous power of geometry.

* * * * *

You might be able to tell from this that I spent my weekend moving. We did have help -- both professional and from friends -- loading up the rental truck in New Jersey. But while unloading, it was just my brother, S., and myself. The inspiration for this story was our struggle to get our large-ish couch (41' X 92' X 28') into the new apartment. Our success was indeed a miracle of geometry.

Incidentally, in case you were wondering, no furniture -- or people -- were damaged during our move.

Are Male Feminists Necessary?

I have to say, I like Maureen Dowd.

She's received such a torrent of criticism in the past two weeks by feminist bloggers and academics (see Uma's post) that I'm not really sure I should get into this at all. But I do consider myself a "male feminist" -- though I am sure the jury is out as to whether I (or my feminism) is "necessary."

But here's what I like about Dowd's approach in Are Men Necessary?, beginning with the excerpt at the NYT Magazine, and continuing with her interview on NPR's Fresh Air this past Wednesday.

Her main goal, it seems to me, is to restart a national (even international) conversation about gender relations, careers, dating, and families that has kind of slipped away a little bit in the mainstream media in recent years. Many of the classic problems facing women balancing careers and families in the 1960s and 70s are still there. It used to be a manichean choice -- kids or career -- and while there's less 'tsk tsk' applied to working mothers these days, I gather from friends and colleagues who have kids that it's still quite hard to do as a practical matter.

We may not all agree on the answers to those problems, and we may never agree. (And that may be just fine: these days it seems to me important to respect individual choices on many matters, rather than to prescribe directives that everyone must adhere to, to be feminism-approved.) But whether or not we can actually solve anything, I think we still need to 'go there'.

So as far as encouraging frank discussion, Dowd succeeds. People may quibble with her questionable personal anecdotes (i.e., her own single status), her glamorous upper-crusty life ("gold-lamé gowns cut along the bias"), and some of her data. But if her point is to remind people that the work of feminism isn't over, are we really saying we disagree with that? And while Dowd is generally dismissive of third-wave feminism or postfeminism, her approach is different from classic, second-wave feminism in that it encourages us to address the problems in the context of today's social and economic realities, not some idealized socialist Herland. In that context, anecdotes about dating etiquette, shopping, and so on are in fact pretty relevant.

"The personal is not always political": people say that a lot nowadays, and I tend to agree (I came across it most recently in Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, where it is part of Nafisi's compelling argument against the "politicization of everything" during and after the Iranian revolution). I don't find it useful in my day-to-day life to discuss personal choices -- such as friends who've decided to take a little time off for kids -- in terms of broad ideologies that few women or men can live up to. But I believe we need to continue to approach those choices (and relations between men and women in general), if not with rigid doctrines, at least with an interest in fairness and respect -- to always question whether or not we are doing it right, and whether it might not be possible to do some things better.

* * * * *
As for some of the particular issues. One comes up in Uma's post itself. Uma quotes the following sentence, and describes it as "cringe-inducing":

"Little did I realize that the feminist revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence as they entered the 21st century."

But wait, what's cringe-inducing about that? Isn't the confusion Dowd talks about real? She's not saying that she likes the confusion, or that she prefers a condition of inequality. But what I think her article points to again and again are the many situations that come up where "equality" isn't a sufficient term to describe the complex ways in which men and women find themselves playing different social roles. Those different roles, like the male and female roles in the Tango, are not in themselves inequalities, though they might come to seem that way if we adhered to them too rigidly or used them as stereotypes or formulas.

And Katie Roiphe's critique in Slate has moments where I flat-out disagree:

One of the failures of the feminist movement in the first place was a reliance on easy aphorisms, and the schematic worldview that such aphorisms implied. The famous line, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" did not prove to be a constructive or realistic contribution to the feminist cause. Replacing one set of rigid gender stereotypes with another did not allow women the full range of their desires and ended up sabotaging the movement. Dowd herself criticizes the feminists of the 1970s for imagining a sea of identical, sexless women in navy blazers descending on the workplace. Though she appears to be arguing for a new, more rigorous feminism, she is guilty of precisely the same intellectual fault—starting with the catchy, meaningless title of her book, Are Men Necessary?, Dowd's aphorisms, amusing and pithy in the morning paper along with a cup of coffee, are precisely what the conversation about sexual politics does not need.

First of all, why not breakfast? Why can't the conversation about sexual politics start with some light bon mots over coffee? Why does it always have to be heavy-duty sociology and outraged polemical tomes? I would certainly agree that a book like Dowd's isn't sufficient by itself, but then, I'm not sure whether any one book could be.

Secondly, I don't see Dowd presenting her book as a "new, more rigorous feminism" at all. If anything, she seems to punching holes in the illusion that the original goals of feminism have in fact been achieved. And while she does offer many aphorisms along the way, I don't think she would suggest that any of them can stand, by themselves, for thorough analysis. Aphorisms work best as triggers to get people thinking, not as independent arguments. But isn't it Dowd's goal to get people thinking?

An Open Letter to President Bush Concerning The Treatment of Detainees

Dear Mr. President,

I am writing to express my bewilderment at the White House's plans to veto a bill recently passed by the U.S. Senate concerning the treatment of foreign nationals in U.S. custody.

You recently said, "There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. . . . So you bet we will aggressively pursue them, but we will do so under the law." This seemed right to me, and it seems important to me that you use the words "under the law." The Senate bill, introduced by Republican John McCain, promotes exactly that, as it requires making the U.S. Army Field Manual's guidelines for interrogation of prisoners standard for all agencies associated with the U.S. government.

So why are you opposed to it? Mr. President, why are you threatening to apply your first veto on a bill that simply aims to require the application of the law?

The only explanation I can muster is, you are finessing the word "torture." When you said "we do not torture" a couple of days ago, what you meant was, "we do not do things to detainees that we consider to be torture." Presumably you mean to say you wish to allow the CIA an exemption to use stress interrogation methods, including those involving humiliation and the infliction discomfort as well as non-scarring and non-invasive pain.

So why not just say it? Mr. President, the gap between your statements and policies has never been wider than at this very moment. Have you read George Orwell's novel 1984? It appears to me that what you are engaged in currently with the word "torture" is certainly a form of "doublespeak," as egregious as that engaged in by Bill Clinton when he attempted to finesse the phrase "sexual relations" seven years ago. And when you say, "Any activity we conduct is within the law," cynics might say that that is so because you feel you can define what is the law.

Just recently the Washington Post reported that for the past three years the CIA has operated covert detention facilities in various parts of the world, including eastern Europe and Thailand. These facilities were initially meant to hold high-value Al-Qaeda targets such as Abu Zubaida, possibly indefinitely. Mr. President, I cannot understand why the CIA thought these would be either legal or a good idea. You must be aware of the old saying that "Absolute power corrupts, absolutely." That holds true for Americans as much as for anyone else in the world; it is an extremely bad idea to maintain detention facilities where the administrators have no obligation whatsoever to treat their inmates with dignity.

Relatedly, I cannot comprehend why your office is so resistant to granting alleged terrorists the right to defend themselves openly in a U.S. Court of Law. You recently said, "We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice." Why not give them the opportunity to have "justice" the way justice is normally delivered -- through a fair trial, with the presumption of innocence? Holding individuals in detention indefinitely is not justice at all, but a kind of crime, similar to kidnapping.

Mr. President, I'm disappointed that you do not appear to be aware of the fallout from your policies abroad. Your advocacy of methods of interrogation that at least some people would describe as inhumane looks especially bad considering that the image of the U.S. remains deeply tarnished by the disturbing and graphic pictures that came out of the Abu Ghraib prison facility last year, pictures which we now know were only the tip of the iceberg regarding the mistreatment of detainees. Your position also perpetuates the myth that the U.S. uses torture, which virtually ensures that captured American troops will have such methods used on them in the future.

Finally, it appears to many observers around the world that you either do not mean what you say when you use words like "liberty" and "freedom," or you simply do not know what those words mean. Torture and associated practices are absolutely inconsistent with any fair understanding of human rights in the modern world.

I sincerely hope you will rethink your position. If you genuinely do not mean to advocate any practice that a reasonable person could call inhumane, you ought to support McCain's bill.

Sincerely,

Amardeep Singh

Tsunami and Earthquake: Educational Materials

Yesterday I was the guest lecturer/moderator in a 1-credit Environmental Science seminar being taught this fall by a colleague at Lehigh. The topic was the social and geopolitical fall-out from the Tsunami, particularly concerning India's changing role as a regional power. I referred to the following articles:

On the prospect of a regional alert system

On the UN's response

The Indonesian Government's suppression of the Guerilla movement in Aceh

More on Aceh

Ashutosh Sheshabalaya, on India's overlooked role in providing immediate military aid in Sri Lanka

I know I'm not particularly qualified to talk about these things, but it's an interesting challenge (and a nice change) to do this kind of thing every so often. The students asked good, and difficult questions, many of which involve the structure of disaster relief funding at the UN. For instance, how much do they have budgeted for this annually? What are the prospects of creating a permanent UN "Rapid response team" that is specialized for natural disasters?

It's difficult to have a discussion of the Tsunami this fall without thinking of the South Asian Earthquake, so we talked about that too -- with emphasis on the insufficient aid response. We even got into a bit of discussion on the Avian Flu vaccine issue (containing any outbreak of human to human transmissible Avian Flu would require massive international coordination).

* * * *
And I'm participating in a public seminar at Lehigh on the Earthquake at lunch today (yes -- a busy week!). For that, I'm not going to present an argument (hard to think of anything original to say), but I am offering a slideshow of photos culled from the web, some of them from News sources, and some from amateur photos Flickr.

A working draft of the slideshow is here (6 MB Powerpoint file). Educational use only, please (I will be taking the PPT file down after a few days.)

I tried to balance newsy/informative photos with more emotional photos showing people reacting to events. I was hoping to organize the photos to tell some kind of story, but there are just too many things going on at once, including: raw human suffering; rampant destruction of buildings, roads, and bridges; the large-scale relief effort; political shenanigans; as well as scenes of everyday life as it continues (and must continue) for the people in the affected region.

So the photos are a little chaotic (no single narrative), but perhaps the chaos might be useful in challenging the mass-media's approach to natural disaster -- which tends to emphasize sensationalism (look at these poor people!) at the expense of analysis.