Songs To Grade Papers By

The lifestyle of a humanities academic is generally pretty good. You get a flexible schedule, and lots of time "off" (i.e., to read, do research, and worry constantly about the progress of your career!). And needless to say, you definitely don't have to spend all your days "in a little cubicle" (caution: music).

But one of the hardest parts is grading at the end of the year. The weather is nice, lots of things are happening, and motivation is hard to come by. My fascination with electronic music seems to have blown over, and these days I tend to turn to pop music, especially vanilla-flavored indie rock and upbeat pop anthems. Here are some of the highlights on my playlist lately:

1. Seu Jorge, "Rebel Rebel." The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou was a surealist metafilm rather than a movie. Its most arresting image (after Waris Singh Ahluwalia swimming underwater with a camera, of course) was Seu Jorge doing covers of David Bowie with an acoustic guitar at more or less completely random moments. The Bowie covers are so good, they've released a CD of just those songs, The Life Aquatic Sessions. "A must for all people who like acoustic Afro-Brazilian covers of British classic rock in Portuguese." Three of these songs can be listened to here.

2. Belle and Sebastian, "Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying." A classic, whose relevance at this time of the year speaks for itself.

3. Aqualung, "Brighter Than Sunshine." I'm not quite sure about Aqualung as a whole, but this song has that nice emo, pop-anthemic sound. (Might be a little too syrupy for some people.) You can listen to it here.

4. Rufus Wainwright, "Instant Pleasure." From the lyrics:

You in the traffic for all eternity
How could that speed be where you want to be?
Said don't you really want instant pleasure
Instant pleasure, instant pleasure

Ouch, that hits a little close to home. Still, an immensely entertaining song. (Not that I'm endorsing everything he says here!)

If you're looking for an instant Rufus Wainwright fix, try "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" at his Myspace page.

5. Snow Patrol, "Open Your Eyes." More anthemic pop. Some songs at Myspace (not this one, unfortunately). They are on the same British label that Belle and Sebastian are on.

6. The Decemberists, "The Legionnaire's Lament." This is the greatest Paris song in the English language, bar none. (And yes, I'm including "April in Paris," which has to consider itself to have been bumped.) This song makes me nostalgic for a century I didn't live in (the 19th), and for a series of bloody continental wars I never fought in. You can hear some of The Decemberists here.

7. The Spinto Band, "Oh Mandy." You can listen to this triumphant, euphoric bit of power pop here.

8. Michael Stipe and Chris Martin, "In the Sun." This is a song Stipe wrote in response to Hurricane Katrina. It's brilliant -- as good as the best downtempo songs REM ever recorded. Proceeds from the sales on Itunes go to the relief effort, so it's well worth your $.99. Start here.

9. Allen Toussaint, "Yes We Can Can." Speaking of Hurricane Katrina, I gather this funky rhythm and blues song (think 1960s rhythm and blues, not contemporary R&B) has become a bit of a New Orleans anthem. I think it's a good anthem for lots of things, actually. Incidentally, I first heard about Toussaint on NPR.

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What's the best song on your playlist this week?

Hanif Kureishi on his writing process, and the Brit-Asian Arts Scene

Hanif Kureishi has a piece in last Saturday's Guardian called "Fear and Paranoia." It's a series of reflections on the occasion of the revival of "Borderline," a play he wrote 25 years ago.

Kureishi has lately been a rather inconsistent writer (I haven't liked his recent novels much), but he was a vital part of the emergence of a progressive British-Asian literary 'voice' in the 1980s. This piece is a kind of memoir of those times, and includes some historical background information -- about the Southall Riots, the threat posed by the National Front, and Kureishi's own ambitions as a young, progressively-minded writer.

One part that caught my eye involves Kureishi's account of how he wrote "Borderline," which aimed to document the voices and struggle of the South Asian community in Britain in the late 1970s. But the content of the play may be less interesting to us today than the writing process Kureishi describes:

The play did get written. It also got rewritten. This, I saw, was when the real work began. If I'd had too "pure" a view of the artist, I was soon to learn that aesthetic fastidiousness wasn't a helpful attitude. Max was severe and precise, sending me into a dressing room with instructions to write a scene about so-and-so, with certain characters in it. I rewrote as we rehearsed; I rewrote as we played it around the country; I rewrote it when we opened at the Royal Court, and even after that. This was the first time I'd worked in such a way and it was an important proficiency to develop; it came in handy two years later when I worked with Stephen Frears on My Beautiful Laundrette, and was required to rewrite on set.

I was also ambivalent about the journalistic process. I was full of material already; I had hardly touched on my own experience as a British Asian kid. Why were we interviewing strangers in order to generate material? Yet as we began to talk to people I found these conversations were not chatter; they were serious - some taking place over a number of days - and always moving. I was fascinated to hear strangers talk. It was something like a crude psychoanalysis, as one only had to ask a simple question to be drawn into a whirlpool of memories, impressions, fears, terrors. I was shocked at how much people revealed of themselves, and how much they wanted to be known, to be understood. The community was close and supportive, but the cost of this was inhibition and constraint.

There are two things that seem worth repeating here. One is Kureishi's humility as an aspiring playwright -- rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. The other is his discovery of the value of "hearing strangers talk," which seems important. Another way of saying it is: young writers, you may have a lot to say, but you'll be more interesting when you learn to get outside of yourself.

The second part of the piece gets into the decline of 1980s political theater and the rise of Islamism, which for Kureishi destroyed the vibe:

During the 10 years between the Southall riots and the demonstration against The Satanic Verses, the community had become politicised by radical Islam, something that had been developing throughout the Muslim world since decolonisation. This version of Islam imposed an identity and solidarity on a besieged community. It came to mean rebellion, purity, integrity. But it was also a trap. Once this ideology had been adopted - and political conversations could only take place within its terms - it entailed numerous constraints, locking the community in, as well as divorcing it from possible sources of creativity: dissidence, criticism, sexuality. Its authoritarianism, stifling to those within, and appearing fascistic to those without, rejected the very liberalism the community required in order to flourish in the modern world. It was tragic: what had protected the community from racism and disintegration came to tyrannise it.

I hear you, and nicely put. And I might add that the rise of strong religion hasn't just been a problem in the Muslim community.

Note: I wrote a post on Sepia Mutiny last summer inspired by another Guardian column from Kureishi. It covers some similar ground.

A Balanced Take on Kaavya Viswanathan/Opal Mehta

(Note: I had to resist the impulse to title this post something goofy like "How Kaavya Viswanathan Got Rich, Got Caught, and Got a Licking." This is one of those book titles that almost begs for parody; if you have good ones, I'm always game to hear them.)

This take by Ann Hulbert in Slate on the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal seemed to strike the right note:

The darker moral of her story seems to be that if you succeed by packaging, you can expect to fail by packaging, too—and you alone, not your packagers, will pay the price. McCafferty's publisher, Steve Ross of Crown, has rejected as "disingenuous and troubling" Viswanathan's apology for her "unintentional and unconscious" borrowings from two McCafferty books, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, that she says she read and loved in high school. He's right, it doesn't sound like the whole story. I don't mean simply to let Viswanathan off the hook, but her own book—indeed, its very copyright line, Alloy Entertainment and Kaavya Viswanathan—suggests a broader culture of adult-mediated promotion and strategizing at work. It's a culture, as her novel itself shows, that might well leave a teenager very confused about what counts as originality—even a teenager who can write knowingly about just that confusion. In fact, perhaps being able to write so knowingly about derivative self-invention is a recipe for being ripe to succumb to it. Viswanathan may not be a victim, exactly—she's too willing for that—but she is only one of many players here.

Lots of good points there. Above all, I agree with Hulbert's suspicion that there's more to it than just Kaavya Viswanathan screwing up. (This article in today's Times supports Hulbert's conjecture.)

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There's also another interesting article in Slate by Joshua Foer, on the relationship between plagiarism and memory, which brings up the phenomenon of "cryptomnesia":

Viswanathan is hardly the first plagiarist to claim unconscious influence from memory's depths. George Harrison said he never intended to rip off the melody of the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" when he wrote "My Sweet Lord." He had just forgotten he'd ever heard it. And when a young Helen Keller cribbed from Margaret Canby's "The Frost Fairies" in her story "The Frost King," Canby herself said, "Under the circumstances, I do not see how any one can be so unkind as to call it a plagiarism; it is a wonderful feat of memory." Keller claimed she was forever after terrified. "I have ever since been tortured by the fear that what I write is not my own. For a long time, when I wrote a letter, even to my mother, I was seized with a sudden feeling, and I would spell the sentences over and over, to make sure that I had not read them in a book," she wrote. "It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read become the very substance and texture of my mind."

Psychologists label this kind of inadvertent appropriation cryptomnesia, and have captured the phenomenon in the laboratory. In one study, researchers had subjects play Boggle against a computer and then afterward try to recreate a list of the words they themselves found. Far more often then expected, the researchers found that their subjects would claim words found by the computer opponent as their own. Even if cryptomnesia is a real memory glitch that happens to all of us from time to time, however, it's hard to figure how it could lead to the involuntary swiping of 29 different passages.

Hm, if I were Kaavya Viswanathan, I might claim cryptomnesia!

More on the Immigration Desk Hassle

This is sort of a follow-up to my post earlier in the week on Tunku Varadarajan, Amartya Sen, and racial profiling.

From the Times:

But a business traveler from Germany got my attention when he described what travel to the United States could be like these days. "At the airport, I was questioned very rudely for 20 minutes," he said. " 'Who are you?' 'What are you doing here?' Before unification, I was treated better at the checkpoints going into East Germany."

Whoa. What do we make of a foreign business traveler comparing his arrival in the United States with a pass through the surly gantlet at Checkpoint Charlie before the wall came down?

One thing became clear at this year's tourism council meeting, after all the happy proclamations about travel's global economic impact (leisure and business travel will account for more than $3 trillion in direct spending worldwide this year, for example). We have a problem, and Jay Rasulo, the chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, addressed it in a speech to more than 500 representatives from the world's travel industry.

"The U.S. share of international travel has dropped double digits since 2000, and 35 percent since 1992," he said. "Meanwhile, the global travel market is growing by leaps and bounds."

One reason to treat travelers with respect and dignity that isn't talked about much is pure economics, and it looks like the U.S. is already losing on that front.

The other thing: if even German businessmen feel hassled at the immigration desk, you know there is a real problem.

Trans-speciation: From Margaret Cavendish to China Miéville

[cross-posted at The Valve]

The best thing in China Miéville's The Scar is the character Tanner Sack. Tanner is a prisoner from New Crobuzon (think: London), who is on board the Terpsichoria en route to a slave colony (think: Australia). The ship is hijacked by a particularly terrifying group of pirates from the outlaw city called Armada.

Tanner is a Remade, a person who has had involuntary surgery to reconstruct his body in hybrid form. The Remade are either part-animal or part-machine (one character in The Scar has the upper-body of a human woman attached to a coal-powered iron engine, and tank treads instead of legs).

In the anarchic environs of Armada, Tanner Sack learns to use the tentacles that had been implanted on him as a punishment constructively, and comes to think of himself, positively, as a water-bound being. Eventually, he comes to the realization that to really express himself fully he must in fact have a further operation, and become fully amphibian:

Tanner had thought about it for a long time.

His coming to terms with the sea felt like a long, drawn-out birth. Every day he spent more time below, and the water felt better against him. His new limbs had adapted completely, were as strong and almost as prehensile as his arms and hands.

He had seen with envy how Bastard John the dolphin policed his watch, passing through the brine with unique motion (as he swept in to punish some slacking worker with a brutal butting); and had watched as cray from their half-sunk ships (suspendedat the point of being lost, pickled in time) or the unclear menfish from Bask riding launched themselves into the sea, uncontained by harnessing or chains.

When he left the sea, Tanner felt his tentacles hang heavy and uncomfortable. But when he was below, in his harness, his leather and brass, he felt tethered and constrained. He wanted to swim free, across and up into the light and even, yes, even down, into the cold and silent darkness.

The language here reminds one of the language one sometimes sees with people in the real world who are transgendered: it's only as a person of the opposite gender that they can really feel able to express themselves fully. In some sense, Miéville's marvelous (and, I would add, original) interest in the Remade in The Scar is a way of thinking about the liberating possibilities of radical body modification.

Tanner's desire to have his Remade attributes enhanced in order to achieve full amphibian status is also, in the world Miéville has created, an act of radical political subversion. In New Crobuzon, to be Remade is to be branded forever as a criminal by a sadistic polity, and to be effectively condemned to life as a slave. In Armada, the Remade aren't strange; they are, in a kind of utopian reversal, encouraged to contribute to the society in whatever way their modifications might allow. It's an expression of Miéville's utopian (socialist/Marxist) politics.

But there is a bit of an ambiguity there, as the Remade who didn't choose their form remain in some sense fixed by the bodies that were given them as punishment. And as a floating city composed of boats soldered together, wandering nomadically through the open ocean, Armada isn't a place where personal freedoms in the contemporary liberal sense are necessarily paramount. And indeed, the central plot of The Scar revolves around an attempt by the part of the rulers of Armada to assume absolute authority. At base, there is a tension in Miéville's novel between what I would call functionalist and expressivist ideas about the Remade. With Tanner Sack, Miéville seems to be favoring the expressivist side. But functionalism (a kind of authoritarianism) is perhaps still the dominant in Armada.

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In more specifically biological terms, the trans-speciated status of the Remade reverses the social Darwinism of The Island of Dr. Moreau, where this kind of trans-speciational surgery was an artificial way of forcing animals to climb the evolutionary ladder. In Miéville's utopic vision, trans-speciation enables human beings to enter into multiple evolutionary lines -- and experience life as part octopus or part dolphin (or, in one of the novel's most disturbing chapters, part mosquito).

If Moreau is biologically modernist in the sense that it promotes a concept of evolution that is strictly linear and teleological, perhaps The Scar is postmodernist in that it aims towards a kind of wild multiplicity. (It also calls up the phrase Gilles Deleuze uses -- "becoming-animal" -- though I will leave it to readers who understand Deleuzian thinking to draw connections between D/G and Miéville.)

An important difference between H.G. Wells and Miéville's respective novels might be the presence of natural hybrids in Miéville. In Wells, the monstrosities are purely surgical (and then disciplinary and social) creations.

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A colleague who is an 18th century-ist was reading The Scar along with me, and suggested that there might also be a strong parallel between The Scar and the 17th century utopian text by Margaret Cavendish called The Blazing World (1666), which is about a human woman who is kidnapped by a man who loved her (but was "beneath her station"), and taken out to sea. The boat is taken across the ocean in a freak storm, and the men all freeze to death as the ship is brought towards the North Pole. But the lady is rescued by strange bear-men, and brought to see the Emperor, who is so impressed with her that he marries her and makes her Empress. Here is the passage from The Blazing World where the parallels to The Scar seem most apparent:

The rest of the inhabitants of that world, were men of several different sorts, shapes, figures, dispositions, and humors, as I have already made mention heretofore; some were bear-men, some worm-men, som fish- or mear-men, otherwise called sirens; some bird-men, some fly-men, some ant-men, some geese-men, some spider-men, some lice-men, some fox-men, some ape-men, some jackdaw-men, some magpie-men, some parrot-men, some satyrs, some giants, and many more, which I cannot all remember; and of these several sorts of men, each followed such a profession as was most proper for the nature of their species, which the Empress encourage them in, especially those that had applied themselves to the study of several arts and sciences; for they were as ingenious and witty in the invention of profitable and useful arts, as we are in our world, nay, more; and to that end she erected schools, and founded several societies. The bear-men were to be her experimental philosophers, the ape-men her chemists, the satyrs her Galenic physicians, the fox-men her politicans, the spider- and lice-men her mathematicians, the jackdaw-, magpie- and parrot-men her orators and logicians, the giants her architects, etc. But before all things, she having got a sovereign power from the Emperor over all the world, desired to be informed of the manner of their religion and government, and to that end she called the priests and statesmen, to give her an account of either. Of the statesmen she enquired, first, why they had so few laws? To which they answered, that many laws made many divisions, which most commonly did breed factions, and at last break out in open wars. Next, she asked why they preferred the monarchical form of government before any other? They answered, that as it was natural for one body fo have but one head, so it was natural for a politic body to have but one governor; and that a commonwealth, which had many governors was like a monster with many heads

Perhaps you see where this is going. Margaret Cavendish was a supporter of Monarchy during an era when questions about political authority and the divine right of kings was pretty urgent (I would welcome further comments on Cavendish's politics from those who know more than I). And her interest in the hybrid beings of the Blazing World is in some sense a functionalist one in support of a monarchialist vision: everyone in their place, with the Queen/Empress at the head.

But there is a kind of ambiguity or confusion here too, invoked at the end of the paragraph above. If she's so insistent on imagining a world where a sane monarch rules rather than the parliamentary "monster with many heads," why then populate her world with beings that would ordinarily be seen as monstrous? It seems like the hybrid animal/people she proposes are meant to follow their "natural" function, but notice that the jobs she gives them are more or less arbitrarily connected to the real-world personalities of those animals ("lice-men" are mathematicians?). And it can't escape our notice that a woman who was abducted in a patriarchal system in the real world has, in the Blazing World, been made an Empress -- again, defying "nature."

It's the reverse of the political ambiguity in Miéville. And yet, since both utopic visions contain contradictions that seem to nullify their primary arguments, they end up looking strangely parallel. The colleague who introduced this connection to me says she thinks The Scar and The Blazing World are closer to each other than to The Island of Dr. Moreau, and I agree.

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Some final things:

--An edited excerpt of Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World can be found here.

--I suppose we could also discuss how the role of the Remade in The Scar differs from that in Miéville's Perdido Street Station.

--Or we could talk about the history of fantastic sightings in colonial travel narratives (and the literary texts they inspired (as in Shakespeare's Othello: "anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders").

What the End of a Monarchy Looks Like: Nepal Links

Obviously, these protests are different. Last week, King Gyanendra of Nepal conceded he would have to "return power to the people," and reinstitute the Parliamentary republic that he suspended more than a year ago. No one was satisfied; it looks to me like the 'Kingdom' of Nepal is in its last days.

A quick introduction: as I understand it, Gyanendra's primary motive in assuming absolute power last year was to give him more leverage to fight the Maoists in the Nepali countryside. Wikipedia indicates that the Maoists control 70% of the country's territory. Since Nepal has some very sparsely populated regions, that statistic may not be quite as bad as it sounds (i.e., it accounts for a relatively small percentage of the population), but it's not good. 13,000 people have died in the civil war with the Maoists over the past decade.

In the past three weeks, millions of Nepalis have taken to the streets to agitate for democracy. A Seven Party Alliance (SPA) has been formed, whose primary goal is to remove the king. The protestors have been met with harsh repressive measures, that leading to 15 deaths, and as many as 5000 injured (including quite a number in protests that occurred over the weekend, after the king's announcement). The King's choice to use aggressive policing has probably further weakened any remaining popular support he may have.

I've been trying to explore some Nepali media to get somewhat of an inside look at what's going on there. What do the protestors really want? I gather the democracy parties are collaborating with the Maoists -- do they have a plan for what happens after the king is deposed?

1. The starting point for me here is Global Voices Online, which has a link-filled post here.

2. They link to a blog called Democracy for Nepal, where I read a post suggesting that the leader with the most stature, and who may be a popular choice to take over as President, is Girjia Koirala. (Another name often mentioned is the leader of another party, Madhav Nepal.)

One the same blog, there is a post about the central role of the army in all of this:

Many top brass have sent out feelers to Delhi that if the seven party alliance will play the game, they will ally with the alliance to get rid of the king and fight the Maoists. The army is going to come under the parliament. The parliament may order the army to keep at war, or declare peace. The army does not get to strike any kind of a bargain beforehand. The parliament will command the army. The alliance will give orders to the army. That is how it will happen.

Of course, the author is just speculating here. But it's an important point: protestors get things in motion, but for better or worse it's going to be the army that forces the king to go (and that will dictate how it goes down).

3. United We Blog. This site has some great photographs from the protests, as well as some detailed accounts of what is happening where:

4. Samudaya.org is a news magazine with a number of interesting articles from the past three weeks. Here, an author suggests that the stridency of the current protests may reflect the disproportionate presence of Maoists.

And here is a pretty forceful manifesto, addressed as an open letter to King Gyanendra. (A bit strident for my taste.) And some pictures (warning: some of them are graphic).

5. The Kathmandu Times Here is part of a biting Op-Ed from the Kathmandu Times, in response to the King's statement last Friday:

Currently, Nepal stands at a crossroads. On the right side of it is a new Nepal where people are fully sovereign; insurgency is resolved and the Maoists join the political mainstream; the state is restructured to accommodate the disfranchised populace; and the society makes a peaceful transition towards prosperity. On the wrong side of it is the status quo, where the fundamental issue of sovereignty remains unresolved; the Maoist insurgency continues; state, under the direct control of the king, remains unitary and unwilling to address the issue of widespread exclusion. As Nepal has entered the final stage of the labor pain, the international community, unfortunately, seems to be supportive of the status quo. The international community's euphoric reaction to Friday's royal address is ludicrous, to say the least. It also shows how shallow is their reading of Nepali history and how far removed they are from the present ground reality. The foreign envoys' suggestion to the parties to break with the rebels and to take the royal offer is fraught with two serious problems.

First, it does not address the Maoist insurgency, the main problem of the day. Breaking with the Maoists at this point in time and rejecting their legitimate demand for a constituent assembly means more bloodshed and more chaos for several years to come. Second, it denies the Nepali people their sovereign rights to decide --- through peaceful means --- the future of monarchy. Between three to four million people, who have already hit the streets nationwide, demanding the election to the constituent assembly, didn't suddenly wake up one fine morning and said that they wanted to do away with the monarchy. These people have a painful memory of their history where monarchy has played, time and again, with Nepali people's democratic aspirations. King Tribhuvan failed to live up to his promise of constituent assembly elections in the 1950s. Then, King Mahendra dismissed the first democratically elected government in December 1960. King Birendra gave in to the demands of democracy only after dozens of Nepalis shed blood in 1990. Again in 2004, King Gyanendra sacked the elected government and in 2005 seized absolute power, jailed the political leaders and gagged the press.

6. India's role. Last week, envoys from India went to Nepal to see the king.

India had apparently promised support to Gyanendra if he conceded his absolute power and restored the constitutional monarchy. So after he made the announcement on Friday, within a few minutes the Indian government issued a statement in support of the "twin pillar" policy.

But apparently they didn't anticipate the degree to which popular opinion has solidified against the king. The center was forced to issue a second statement, indicating that they now support whatever form of government the people of Nepal select.

It's a terrible diplomatic miscalculation, but perhaps a predictable one, since Nepal has 'made do' with a monarchy for quite a long time. With terrible poverty and underdevelopment, it seems pretty easy to see why so many Nepalis now want to try something different.

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Note: If anyone can suggest further educational links, I would be grateful. I'm still in the learning phase of my reading about what is happening in Nepal.

Tunku Varadarajan: on Amartya Sen, Racial Profiling

With his weekly column in The Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan is among the most successful Indian journalists working in the U.S. (the only one I can think of who is more influential is Somini Sengupta at the New York Times).

Varadarajan's column is on "Taste," but he has on occasion talked politics, and not surprisingly (this is the WSJ) he leans conservative. Last summer he wrote a column arguing in favor of racial profiling to catch terrorists (here). I didn't find it compelling: racial profiling doesn't make sense to me as a law enforcement strategy. It is, as many many people have pointed out, unconstitutional. It is also ineffective, because terrorists are likely to make an effort to not look like terrorists if they try something on airplanes again. And there are many people sympathetic to the aims of various terrorist groups who do not have Muslims names or Arab, Persian, or South Asian ethnicity. I'm not talking about when brown-skinned men (i.e., people who look like me) are given a little extra scrutiny in the security line at airports. It isn't really a violation of my rights if the screener stops the belt to really stare down my copy of Vikram Seth's Two Lives for a full 30 seconds through the X-Ray. Nor does it put me out especially if the secondary screener gets a little overzealous with the wand.

What crosses the line are intentional administrative policies: unjustified blacklists, or pulling people off planes merely because they look suspicious or they're reading books about Islam. Or detaining 15 year old girls for six weeks because they frequent "Jihad" chatrooms (this happened). Or putting asylum-seekers in immigration detention (aka "jail") for upwards of three years before giving them a fair hearing (this happens relatively often). And so on.

By all accounts what happened to Amartya Sen a few years ago at a London airport fits the description of "extra scrutiny" rather than profiling. Sen records the incident in his new book Identity and Violence; here is Varadarajan's condensed version of the event from this week's column:

Mr. Sen, now a professor at Harvard, was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics for his contributions to the field of welfare economics. He has a CV so seriously good that everyone, surely, knows of his being (in his previous post) the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, the apex of the British academic pyramid. Everyone, that is, except a British immigration official at Heathrow Airport a few years ago who, on looking at Mr. Sen's Indian passport and then at his home address on the immigration form--"Master's Lodge, Trinity College, Cambridge"--asked whether Mr. Sen was a close friend of the Master. This question made Mr. Sen enter into a private contemplation, rather self-indulgent in the circumstances, of whether "I could claim to be a friend of myself." As the seconds ticked away without answer, the immigration officer asked whether there was an "irregularity" with Mr. Sen's immigration status. And can you blame the man? Yet Mr. Sen--in his amused-but-chippy recall of the episode--says that the encounter was "a reminder, if one were needed, that identity can be a complicated matter." Well of course it can, professor. But in the 700-odd years of its existence, Cambridge had never before had a nonwhite head of college. Cannot immigration officers be just as empirical as economists?

Surely Varadarajan must be aware how precarious his argument is here. He is actually suggesting that it's appropriate for Amartya Sen to be asked about "irregularities" in his immigration status simply because the official can't envision him as a Cambridge Don.

Again, this isn't exactly racial profiling in the formal sense. Sen wasn't denied re-entry, or carted off to some room in handcuffs for 48 hours (like, for instance, the world-famous filmmaker Jafar Panahi). And judging from the passage from Varadarajan's column above, he wasn't particularly upset about the incident. But Varadarajan's tone does bother me: "And can you blame the man?" "Cannot immigration officials be as empirical as economists?" Yes, I can blame the man. With those rhetorical questions, it's as if Varadarajan is nodding to his white readership's prejudices, and legitimating them at his own expense: "I could see how you might think that -- we all look the same, isn't it?" It's a rather sad posture.

An Unusual Keynote Address

The feminist blogger BitchPhD was recently invited to give a keynote address at a Women's Studies conference as her blogging persona. It's a brilliant turn for pseudonymous blogging, and in a way makes perfect sense given the content of her talk (which she quite graciously posts in its entirety).

There was a little surprise for me:

A few months into the blog, Amardeep Singh, who keeps a blog of his own, said in passing somewhere that he didn’t want to know who Bitch was, because he preferred to see her as “everycolleague,” and I think that’s right. In the real world, the line between private and public thoughts, especially in the workplace, is fairly definite, if not always clear. But--and of course this is a feminist statement--that line is a false one: after all, professionals are people, and while everyone plays different roles at different times, all those roles are played by one person. Bitch exists to cover up my anxiety about the blurring of my own personal, professional and (as things evolved) political opinions; but because she isn’t a real person, she can be all those things at once.

Well, let me amend that. Part of my argument, of course, is that real people are all those things at once. What I mean to say is that the social structures we’re working and living in define “work” and “life,” or “personal” and “political,” like “private” and “public,” as separate spheres. So it can be very difficult to talk about these categories together, because we’re used to thinking of them as conceptually separate, even if we realize that in our own lives and stories, they overlap. As a persona rather than a person, Bitch *demonstrates* the overlap as well as talking about it, and I suspect that on some level that’s a big part of the blog’s popularity. It’s kind of amazing, if you think about it, to have the same blog linked by both mommy bloggers and the big boy political blogs. Which are, of course, virtually all written by boys--but that’s a different issue.

I'm pretty sure the phrase she's referring to is one that I left in a comment thread on one of her posts, so the fact that it stayed in her mind a year and a half later is pleasantly surprising. Anyway, enough about me: go read the talk.

As for the point she's making about how she can transgress public and private boundaries, it's important -- and it's something you can do on a pseudonymous blog that isn't advisable on a 'real name' blog. With your real name on the sidebar, you can cross that line at times to talk about personal matters, but you have to tread carefully -- to protect both your career and your family.

The larger question might be something like: how can we redraw the line, so that personal life choices and family obligations can be seen as legitimate (as in, non-stigmatized), publicly marked factors in an academic career? (An example of it in action: my own university faculty is currently considering a proposal to require that all faculty who have a child before tenure extend their tenure clocks. This proposal has both advantages and disadvantages...)

In the comments, someone compares her argument about how the personal impinges on the public/professional to a speech by the former president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers. And here is BitchPhd's response:

There's . . . a major rhetorical difference between an argument that essentially throws up its hands and says "we can't change the reality that people make these choices" (Summers) and an argument that says "given that these choices are reality, we need to change the system" (me).

That seems like a really good way to imagine the effect activist pseudonymous blogging might have.

How to Review a Book? A Desi Book Blog Debate

Jai Arjun, Sonia Faleiro, and Chandrahas are having an interesting debate over the ethics and form of a good book review, here, here, and here (and I would recommend you read in that order).

Let's start with Chandrahas's takedown of Kiran Nagarkar's God's Little Soldiers, which is compelling, witty, and awfully snarky:

Here is how a cold wind blows around Zia: "It tore at him, slipped inside his trouser legs, groped at his crotch, ferreted in his armpits and careened into his lungs." This establishes only that the writer knows many verbs and body parts; as a sentence in a novel it is risible. There is nothing very significant about the wind groping at Zia's crotch; one loses faith in a writer if his powers of discrimination are so poor and his emphases so illogical. Here is the best analogy Nagarkar can find to dramatise a particular mental state of his protagonist: "Zia became a rod of uranium-238, inflammable with self-loathing and spite." Elsewhere Nagarkar provides, "There was a manhole in his soul, and he had fallen into it." Who can countenance work like this?

Oh my God, the "manhole in his soul": sounds like Trent Reznor on an off day, I might add. You'll get no argument from me -- that sounds pretty awful.

Then onto Sonia Faleiro, who gives her stamp of approval to Chandrahas and also adds her own philosophy of what qualifies one to write a review, which is in a way tied to ethics:

Because the bottom line is this: You don't review books merely because you like to read. Or because you want free books, a byline, or an outlet for your creative writing. You do it because you understand the history and context of literature, because if asked to explain even one word of praise or condemnation in your review, you can point to the specific piece of prose in the book being reviewed, to back your statement; and because it's a skill you're continuously sharpening. And you certainly never ever review a book written by a friend. Ever.

And Jai Arjun has a nuanced rebuttal, which focuses less on ethics and more on reviewing as an act of writing. He says that though he writes reviews to spec for money, he actually sort of prefers the free-form writing one can do on one's blog. And he doesn't just want to see an opinion about a book, but some evidence of a complex, personal reaction in a review:

Increasingly, it’s this type of introspective “selective review” that I’m becoming more interested in (even as I continue to write the more conventional, comprehensive types for my livelihood). Essentially, I think of a review as a very personal, subjective thing – useful more for providing a new insight, a new way of looking at a book, than to lay down the final, authoritative word on it. (It always comes as a surprise to my friends when I say this, but I don’t believe people should base their book-reading decisions on reviews. I think it’s often more productive to read a good review after you’ve read the book.) And much as I admire, even envy, the writing of many reviewers who have firm opinions and express those opinions extremely well, I’m not very comfortable with reviews that are not, at least to some extent, open-ended.

The idealistic reviewer. I agree with all of this, though I think it really probably applies more to the kind of extended reviews one might find in The New Yorker than to the kinds of reviews that work in your average daily newspaper (whether in India or the U.S.).

Jai continues:

This has logically led to another change in my approach to reviewing: a growing reluctance to write about a book if I haven’t got at least something strongly positive out of it. I dunno, I’m just not that interested in writing negative reviews anymore. I’m no longer as excited by the opportunities they proffer for being clever . . . and on the whole it isn’t worth my time and effort. Too much time would already have been wasted on the book (even if I abandoned it halfway through).

I like this, though I would have to say that a good snarky takedown (or even better, parody) of a spectacularly bad book can be immensely entertaining for a reader. I wouldn't countenance it for a young writer, or with a sincere book that perhaps simply goes awry in some way. But with overhyped celebrity authors and literary dinosaurs, why not let loose? I don't think, in this case, that Kiran Nagarkar qualifies as either overhyped or a dinosaur -- so as much as I think Chandrahas is compelling, I give the edge to Jai Arjun's idealism.

This whole debate echoes, in a certain way, the debate between Sven Birkerts and Dale Peck over 'hatchet jobs' that went down in 2004 (start here).

And finally, if you have no idea who Kiran Nagarkar is, try this piece by Nilanjana Roy. She introduces Nagarkar (and she likes the book that Chandrahas pans, though she only talks about it for two paragraphs at the end).

Is Activism in the Classroom Justifiable? Ajay Nair @ Penn

Two lines in an article in last week's Daily Pennsylvanian have caused a bit of a controversy:

One of the marchers, Penn Asian-American Studies professor Ajay Nair, said he recommended that students in two of his classes attend the rally.

"We've also invited community folks to come and talk about immigration," Nair said. "I've been getting my classes mobilized."

Here is Erin O'Connor's critical reaction at ACTA Online:

As one might expect, the spectacle of a professor working to "get his classes mobilized" was presented by the DP as completely acceptable practice--despite the fact that Nair's behavior is quite ethically questionable, not to mention pedagogically irresponsible. Using the classroom to promote political views is just what professors do; Nair can thus be forthright about it, and the paper can report it matter-of-factly, without surprise or comment.

Of course, it's not quite that simple. Nair is teaching a course called "South Asians in the U.S." this spring. One could easily imagine that a comment on the current immigration crisis could be relevant in a classroom with a strong emphasis on the sociology of a particular immigrant group. It might be appropriate to directly express one's political views if it's on-topic and well-defended

I got this through Tim Burke, who has some reservations about using one's classroom to "mobilize" one's students, but who nevertheless argues that context has to be considered:

Classrooms are spaces of exploration, but they are also spaces of constraint as well. Some subjects dictate certain kinds of gravity and weight by their nature. You don’t open up Holocaust denial in a class on the Holocaust. Perhaps for similar reasons you don’t open up an argument in a course called "South Asians in the US" that all South Asians should be sent home because the US is a white country. There are boundaries.

But yes, I do think that saying you’re "mobilizing" your students is at least a red flag moment that raises a concern about whether you’re really creating a range of possible outcomes, whether you’re teaching in an exploratory and thus empowering manner. The point is to red flag it for the right reasons.

I would never use my classroom to "mobilize" my students, but then all my courses have literature at the center, so it's hard to imagine that this particular situation would arise. The course Nair is teaching is in Asian Studies and is defined by different parameters, so different rules about how to handle politics are likely to apply. Still, though I don't think that political views are by any means always off-limits, I have to agree with Tim Burke (and in this case, with Erin O'Connor too) about the red flag that word ("mobilizes") raises.

Incidentally, in case you're wondering who Ajay Nair is, here is a short profile.

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

Spivak Event Underway

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

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

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

Philly Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

SAWCC Conference: Mixed Messages

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

I'll be moderating this panel:

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

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

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

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