Write like you were dead

Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides's speech given at the 2012 Whiting Awards (awards given annually to ten emergent American writers of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays) centers around the idea of writing posthumously.

It's a liberating idea; by this I mean, Eugenides seeks to liberate young writers from the burden of writing under the "usual constraints--of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public, and perhaps especially, intellectual opinion."

All of the above-mentioned constraints, says Eugenides, "represent a deformation of the self":

To follow literary fashion, to write for money, to censor your true feelings and thoughts or adopt ideas because they’re popular requires a writer to suppress the very promptings that got him or her writing in the first place.

Eugenides's models his figure of the posthumous writer on Franz Kafka, who is famous for his refusal to write with an eye to publicity and fame or popularity:

When Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis, in Berlin, he reacted at first with a serenity amounting almost to relief. As his health deteriorated, he became more fearful: “What I have playacted is really going to happen,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. “I have not bought myself off by my writing. I died my whole life and now I will really die.”

To be Kafkaesque is 

To die your whole life. Despite the morbidity, I can’t think of a better definition of the writing life. There’s something about writing that demands a leave-taking, an abandonment of the world, paradoxically, in order to see it clearly. This retreat has to be accomplished without severing the vital connection to the world, and to people, that feeds the imagination. It’s a difficult balance. And here is where these ruminations about writing touch on morality. The same constraints to writing well are also constraints to living fully. Not to be a slave to fashion or commerce, not to succumb to arid self-censorship, not to bow to popular opinion—what is all that but a description of the educated, enlightened life?

Eugenides is one of the few contemporary American writers who cares little for publicity and has an absolutely zero social media presence.

Happiness

Years ago I had seen Todd Solondz's film Happiness. The film is like a rolodex of unhappy Americans, leading a seemingly "happy" suburban life, one in which they have everything that is redolent of what happiness is supposed to be.

However, as the film unravels--heartbreakingly--these are singularly unhappy campers in a land of cosmetic delights.

Happiness lingers in my mind as an exploration of profound unhappiness, and I had thought it to be an extraordinary, expectation-confounding movie.

The one scene that left an indelible mark on my mind was that of a father telling his son honestly that he likes young boys, and consorting with them makes him really happy. He is Bill Mapplewood, a white, upper-middle class (there weren't any significant characters if color) male, a father and husband, living in a sprawling suburban home with all the right accoutrements of happiness.

Bill is also a pedophile. Seen through the eyes of a judging audience, Bill is a criminal--he has sodomized two of his son's school friends. But Bill, as the film implies, is not to be judged. He is to be regarded as someone in quest of happiness.

No moral lesson needs be derived from the predicaments of the Bill Mapplewoods of this world.

These days, instead of subtle, fictional explorations of the real embedded in the seeming, we have blatant documentaries like Roko Belic's Happy.

Happy explores what makes people happy and the subjects of his exploration lurk everywhere, in the poorest neighborhoods of Louisiana to the slums of Kolkata.

In a Huffington Post blog, Belic writes of the inception of the documentary and claims Manoj Singh, a "dirt-poor" rickshaw puller, as one of his inspirations. He mentions Singh in a tone of wonderment.

What makes Singh, leading a sub-human existence "happy"? At the end of the day, when he returns home--a ramshackle hut made of bamboo and plastic tarp--the sight of his son makes his heart leap in joy.

Is Belic suggesting that the likes of Singh are truly happy, their impossible poverty notwithstanding?

Somehow, I'm not quite inspired to see Happy, regardless of its promise to deliver a cute, moral message.

Besides, having just read Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, an exploration of life in Mumbai slum, I'm not ready to ingest such simple-minded truisms like "there is no correlation between material affluence and happiness."

But I wish the documentary well, and there is evidence of it gathering acolytes: Note Belic's input on happiness in the NYT's most recent Room for Debate.

For those interested in demystifying the concept of happiness itself, I'd still suggest the Solondz flick.

In praise of the "slow" and "demanding"

Giles Harvey composes a wonderful paean to Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's 4 and a 1/2 hour long avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach.

But the tribute is really paid to all works of art that are "slow", like Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and consequently "demanding," i.e. cannot be consumed instantly.

According to Harvey such works of art are all the more valuable in an era of distraction and short attention span.

Some moments from the piece:

The thought of spending a month, or several months, with a single work—a “The Magic Mountain” or an “In Search of Lost Time”—is somehow enervating [...] Of course, there is a pernicious logic at work here. Why read a long novel when you can read a short one? Why read a short novel when you can watch a movie? Why watch a movie when you can watch a TV show? Why watch a TV when you catch a minute-long video of a kitten and a puppy cuddling on YouTube? As soon as we start to think of art simply as something to be consumed, discarded, and replaced, we rob it of one of its greatest powers: its capacity to free us from the grip of easier but shallower pleasures.

The experience of witnessing "slow" and "demanding" art works is rewarding:

The payoff is handsome [...] I saw “Einstein on the Beach” over three months ago, but I have hardly stopped thinking about it since; the manically even “Night Train” duet plays on an almost endless loop inside my head.

It can sometimes seem as though modern life has no room for four-and-a-half-hour-long experimental operas or difficult poetry; but this is a mistake. In a world of speed and distraction, the slow, demanding art work is more indispensable than ever, for it holds out the possibility of those elusive commodities: stillness, clarity, and peace.

The shadow and the substance

There is validity in writer Te-Nehisi Coates' observation that the story of the American civil war thus far has largely been a story for white people in which blacks have been passive recipients of the benevolence of their white saviors.

According to Maurice Berger, the tradition of a one-sided story-telling continues in Steven Spielberg's new film Lincoln, which gives a nuanced portrayal of Lincoln but is "almost devoid of images of active black resistance and protest and overall participation in their own cause."

But slaves were crucial agents in their own emancipation, especially through a prolific use of the power of photography, or, as it was known at that time, daguerreography.

Envisioning Emancipation, a book co-authored by Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, explores how black abolitionists (emancipated slaves who championed freedom for their fellow slaves) like Sojourner Truth and Fredrick Douglass, used the medium of photography to fight the intricate battle of changing minds and hearts in favor of emancipation.

A fascinating trivia about Sojourner Truth: She may have been the first black woman to actively distribute photographs of herself. But her self-publicity wasn't of a blatantly narcissistic kind as her portraits were meant to affirm her status as "a sophisticated and respectable free woman and as a woman in control of her own image."

Truth had a supreme critical perspective on the role of image; while she sold her own photographs to raise money for the cause, she said, "I sell the shadow to support the substance."

(Wow!)

Rise of global IQ

Despite the slide in the quality of cultural products overally--from Shakespeare to Fifty Shades of Grey--there has been a perceptible rise in human IQ according to James R. Flynn's book Are We Getting Smarter?

Here are some stats:

The average American I.Q. has been rising steadily by 3 points a decade. Spaniards gained 19 points over 28 years, and the Dutch 20 points over 30 years. Kenyan children gained nearly 1 point a year.

Some interesting observations:

The brains of the best and most experienced London taxi drivers have enlarged hippocampi, which is the brain area used for navigating three-dimensional space [...] modern life gives our brains greater exercise than when we were mostly living on isolated farms.

Death of a sitarist

Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitarist, died at the age of 92 in San Diego, California.

Just as it's difficult to talk about Gandhi, so it is with Ravi Shankar; both are too much of legends.

So I won't waste space describing what a genius Shankar was.

But I do wish there were an Andy Warhol-like figure immortalizing somebody like Shankar in a portrait as snazzy as that of Marilyn Monroe.

Alas, in India, legends are remembered differently--through dour hagiography.

Anyhow, so Shankar, I used to read growing up, had a certain irresistible charm. He successfully used that charm, not only to bowl over major Western musicians, but also the most talented and intelligent of women.

It is apt that he is survived by two gifted women--his two daughters, singer Norah Jones and virtuoso Anoushka Shankar Wright.

Oh and proud to say this: He was a Bengali.

Salute to the spirit, life and music of Robindro Shonkor Choudhury.  

The importance of being finished

Karl Marx had once said of the impermanence of systems that all that is solid will one day melt.

The reverse may be true as well, in a manner of speaking.

Finishing schools have all but "melted" into irrelevance in their birthplace--Europe. With a rising trend in egalitarianism, finishing schools are scoffed at in Switzerland as well.

However, what has melted away in Europe and America is solidifying in emergent economies like China, India and Saudi Arabia.

As Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, an editor at Time Out Beijing, says, learning how to slice bananas into thin slivers with knives and forks, is a hot trend among women of noveau riche families in China.

This skill can be acquired at $61. 

Death of a piano

Played, probed, poked, passed by, dismembered.

By the end it's as if there were no piano on the sidewalk at all.

The death of objects is sadder than that of humans, who at least leaves behind some remains, some reminder of having existed.

Artistic and aesthetic

Philosophy professor Gary Cutting has a thing or two to say about Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes.

He confesses that regardless of their iconic status in the art world, the boxes, and by extension the entire corpus of Warhol's work, does "very little" for him.

In other words, Warhol maybe an artist but he does not necessarily produce aesthetically moving experiences in the minds of many a beholder of his art:

Praise of Andy Warhol often emphasizes the new possibilities of artistic creation his work opened up. That would make his work important in the history of art and for that reason alone of considerable interest. But, as Jerrold Levinson and others have pointed out, a work can be an important artistic achievement without being an important aesthetic achievement. This, I suggest, is how we should think about Warhol’s Brillo boxes.

A museum of the present

MoRUS, or the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space opened yesterday.

MoRUS, as its website says "preserves the rich history of grassroots movements in New York City’s East Village and showcases the unique public spaces for which the neighborhood is renowned."

According to a review, the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space re-conceives the traditional role of the museum by becoming a "shrine" to the "recent radical history" of New York City's East Village:

The radical history ranges from the "1988 riots in Tompkins Square Park, the standoffs with the police and developers over community gardens, the formation of squats, the civil disobedience actions waged by bicyclists for more bike-friendly streets." 

One of the highlights of the Museum exhibits is the famous bicycle-powered generator, which was used to generate electricity during Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in Zuccotti Park.

Imagine this: Most museums are visited by folks who wish to have a glimpse of the past. MoRUS's visitors include people who have been part of the events that are enshrined by the Museum as "history." 

According to Bill Dipaola, a founder of the Museum, visitors include "people who got beat up by police in the park who are going to walk in here. They lost their gardens. They lost their homes. A lot of people didn’t do too well during gentrification.”

Superwoman on the horizon

I absolutely love this video-celebration of what movie critic A.O. Scott calls "Hollywood's Year of Heroine Worship."

Different world of work

What did the American world of work look and sound like forty years ago?

Studs Terkel's book Working tells us all about it.

Terkel, a writer and a radio host, published Working, an oral history of American workers in 1974.

According to Forbes Magazine, Terkel's book is valuable as it archives a part of American history--a world of agricultural and industrial work--that already looks remote:

For better or worse, the world that Studs Terkel captured forty years ago in his brilliant oral history of American workers,Working, no longer exists. His compelling look at jobs and the people who do them now is a time capsule of the agricultural and industrial eras that preceded the Information Age.

 In Terkel’s world, work primarily was about making things and selling them, often disassociated from other interests, values or senses of pleasure. A single job was to be secured for most of one’s adult life, mainly to provide money to put food on the dinner table, albeit at a significant cost to the soul. At work, his interviewees recounted daily humiliations that they faced with supervisors, co-workers and customers. Their most frequent sense of satisfaction was that they made it through another day as one of “the walking wounded among a great many of us.” The delayed gratification of receiving a Social Security check led many to plod on until they no longer needed to bring in incomes at the level that their earlier years required.

Two voices

Listening to Orson Welles give voice to Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer is an experience.

Somehow Orson sounds like the natural choice to read anything by Conrad. He would do a fabulous Marlowe, the narrator of Heart of Darkness.

Two books: One a memoir by Ingeborg Day, a former editor of MS Magazine, and another an erotica by Elizabeth McNeill.

The themes of the books may be separated like heaven and earth are, but as Sarah Weinman unravels, they are penned by the same person.

In her memoir, The Ghost Waltz, Day among other things, grapples agonizingly with her Austrian father's Nazi past. 

As Elizabeth McNeill, Day writes about a grueling, sadomasochistic relationship with a man, which ends after 9 1/2 weeks.

During the time Day wrote the erotica under a pseudonym, she was an editor of the feminist MS magazine. Weinman writes that there is no knowing whether the magazine found out about this "other" Day, but the character in the erotica does have a day job as a New York City editor. She confides that she has no problem keeping her sanity and her day-persona intact, while at night she walks in the shoes of the sex-charged woman:

Throughout the entire period, the daytime rules of my life continued as before: I was independent, I supported myself (to the extent of my lunches, at any rate, and of keeping up an empty apartment, gas and phone bills at a minimum), came to my own decisions, made my choices. The nighttime rules decreed that I was helpless, dependent, totally taken care of. No decisions were expected of me, I had no responsibilities. I had no choice.

I loved it. I loved it, I loved it, I loved it, I loved it.

Ultimately when Ingebor Day is let go of as a MS editor, the reason isn't, Weinman argues, her secret sexual identity, but her anti-semitism. 

Weinman strikes up a fascinating connection between the two books as they are threaded inside the same personality thus:

Reading “Ghost Waltz” and “Nine and a Half Weeks” side by side, Day’s vulnerabilities come shimmering into view. Both books examine the consequences of relationships marked by withholding—be it her lover’s effortless domineering humiliation or her parents’ shutting the door on discussing Herr Seiler’s deep-seated Nazi ties. The absence and emotional deprivation that young Ingeborg detects and learns to live with permeated her adult life, and must have been tied up with her brief but toxic relationship, in which submissive infatuation was mistaken for something more. The pair of books allow us access to Day’s mind, demonstrating her obsessive need for order in the face of extreme emotional chaos. But they also offer insight into a particular moment in history ripe for both a self-excusing memoir of a Nazi past and a self-punishing memoir of sexual obsession. The prolonged social upheaval of the decade threw secrets into the light and enabled the discussion of formerly taboo topics. To pilfer from the title of one of the more popular self-help books of the period, if Day’s book-length confessions enabled her to be O.K., then perhaps we could be similarly O.K. with our own darkest fears and desires.

Before the "Hunger Games"....

...there was real hunger, at least there were masterly attempts at representing the actual human experience of hunger in all its un glamorous details.

Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray's The Distant Thunder (1973), is such an attempt. I recall having seeing the movie with my parents. My parents would not miss any Ray movie, so around the time that this particular Ray movie was released, they dragged the entire family, including us little kiddies and our paternal grandmother, to the theaters.

Everybody knew that the film wouldn't have a long run because the theme--of famine--wasn't "entertaining. So, it had to be seen right away.

The Distant Thunder (translated from the Bengali Oshoni Shongket) did not treat hunger as a trope or metaphor, but as a direct result of, as film reviewer Richard Brody says, the "inexorable and abstract machinery of economics."  

The film is a fictionalized account of the great Bengal famine of 1943, when India became a victim of a war it was part of not by choice but by compulsion.

Colonial India had rich reserves of grain, which Great Britain diverted to its troops in an effort to shore up its war against imperial Japan. At the time of the famine, Japan had invaded Singapore and GBR was on the side of the Singaporeans.

My father said he had faint memories of the famine, but his extended family, being Brahmins, were spared the worst of its effects in the countryside.

We watched the movie, spellbound: My parents were spellbound by the artistic mastery on display on screen, while we were spellbound because there was nothing in this film for kids. It was an altogether joyless movie.

The only person who interrupted the visual experience was my grandmother. She fidgeted and at the end of the film, outside the theater, she said she hated the film.

The Western Canon, graphically

Graphic artists, Huxley King and Terrence Boyce have converted their still-graphic representation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, into an animated graphic.

King and Boyce are among many other gifted artists who have contributed to two volumes of The Graphic Canon, edited by Russ Kick.

The Graphic Canon is just what the title says it is: a collection of classics of Western literature in the form of images.

As reviewer Annie Weatherwax says, so many of us readers have often imagined how a Captain Ahab, in the throes of his monomaniacal pursuit of the whale, or a Hester Prynne, parading in broad view of a judging public with the letter "A" emblazoned across her chest, would look.

Now, the artists of The Graphic Canon have given form to these imagined figures.

Finding a different kind of stillness...

Be still and write... in your head.

Lovely lines

I like to occasionally open my mind to stirring evocations of human, especially female, beauty in literature.

Here is an instance of it from Mark Helprin's new novel In Sunlight and in Shadows:

When she put down her purse on a bench the strap fell over the arm in two perfect, parallel sine waves, as if she were infused with so much beauty it had to find outlet even in her accidents

I feel like I could draw this.

Spielberg's Poetics?

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln

Once upon a time, literature students used to grapple with the question of art and the the accuracy of history. 

In my case, the grappling was grounded in a seminal text on this topic: The Poetics by ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

In essence, Aristotle, sharing the concern of other Greek thinkers that art, or a dramatic representation of reality, could beguile people into confusing representation with the real, made one thing volubly clear: art is a second order dramatization of the reality of history. One cannot and should not go to art for accurate information about the past. 

In light of the debate swirling around Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln, the Aristotelian dictum comes to mind.

Critics have been worrying about the film's "historical accuracy," forgetting what historian Philip Zelikow has thoughtfully pointed out: Spielberg and other artists are not to be burdened with the mantle of a "historian", but accepted as folks who are free to interpret a moment in history according to their particular artistic needs. 

Challenging as it is, Zelikow says, to translate the "tangle of history" into good "streamlined art," Spielberg's (and screenwriter Tony Kushner's) Lincoln has accomplished just what it is expected to--a specific view of that moment in history (the passing of the 13th Amendment through the U.S. Congress).

Normalizing failure

I sometimes wonder if the Buddha took a (calculated or not) risk in turning his back on the certainties and comforts of a princely life, and take up the no-success-guaranteed life of a hearth-less wanderer, heel-bent on understanding the conditions of human suffering.

Was he braced for failure? What if he really didn't attain that ultimate of all the wonders that a human mind could possess--the gift of enlightenment? Would he have roamed the land telling tales of his failure? would those tales have served humanity better in the long run than the extant tale of the infallible mendicant? 

Fallibility is the core principle behind an emergent concept in the field of social development--innovation and progress, in life as in institutions and businesses, can unfold only when risks in these areas are undertaken; and to undertake a risk is to embrace the possibility of intense failure. 

In a global culture where the regnant paradigms of life and success are those of market capitalism--succeed in terms of dollars and cents or perish in shame--failure, as technology and innovation expert Wayan Woda says, is "literally the f-word in development." 

Woda organized the third annual conference called FAILFaire. The idea behind FailFaire is: 

To highlight, even celebrate, instances of failure in the field of social change as an integral part of the process of innovation and, ultimately, progress.

Failure is not only an f-word in development, but also a stinging f-word in culture. It's deemed to be the opposite of success. However, as experts in the world of development show, success is not a smooth linear movement from good to better to best, but a many faceted, non-linear journey an important part of which is failure.

Returning to the Buddha: What if he were to share with humanity his varied experiences, including those where he utterly failed, in making his enlightenment project? 

It's not love, but fate

So says Joshua Rothman in an enlightening account of why we shouldn't confuse the movie version of Anna Karenina (directed by British filmmaker Joe Wright and screen-written by Tom Stoppard) with Leo Tolstoy's novel of the same name.

Anna Karenina the film, according to Rothman, predicates itself on romantic love, whereas Tolstoy's is not a love story: "if anything, it is a warning against the myth and the cult of love." 

I agree with Rothman when he says that it wouldn't have been possible for Tolstoy to conceive of a romantic love story, not because Tolstoy didn't have a romantic bone in his body, but because he had conceived of love as one of the many significant things that, when indulged in without discretion, can have extreme consequences:

Tolstoy, when he wrote the novel, was thinking about love in a different way: as a kind of fate, or curse, or judgment, and as a vector by which the universe distributes happiness and unhappiness, unfairly and apparently at random.

Rothman's reflective piece makes me want to read Anna Karenina--again.

Hybridity par excellence

I remember this actress as simply "Helen" the "cabaret" dancer in pre-Bollywood days of Hindi cinema.

No sooner would Helen appear on the screen--never to act, but always to wriggle her breasts and hip--the movie theater would break out into a cacophony of wolf whistles, emanating from the gruffly mustached lips of male members in the audience.

But Helen is also Helen Richardson, the daughter of a Burmese mother and an Anglo-Indian father, with a rich life-trajectory.

Helen's parents were forced to emigrate from Burma after Japan occupied the country.

In today's day and age, Helen would be a cherished object of diligent study on account of the text-book hybridity of her identity.

Watch her life in this documentary Queen of the Nautch Girls.

Martha Stewart: a second life

"She’s like the Jesus of the craft world," somebody has said of Martha Stewart, who is experiencing a new surge in her fan-base.

At 71, with her company Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia suffering substantial financial losses, Stewart is emerging as the patron saint for entrepreneurial hipsters. Gone are her magazine subscriptions and enter are those that visit her website via smartphone apps.

In a post-recession economy, the 20 and 30 something crowd of sell-your-own-craft have found a pot of gold in Stewart, as her ideas for "re purposing" discarded materials into new useful household articles are gaining enormous traction in Brooklyn through San Francisco. 

Stewart is a site of the intersection of Colonial Williamsburg and Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

In a country with more poor people than in the 26 most impoverished countries in Africa combined, [the affluent's] apathy [to the poor] is a failure not merely of intellectual curiosity, but of moral instinct. Aman Sethi’s first book, A Free Man addresses this vacuum through the narratives of a small group of Delhi’s marginal, manual laborers: construction workers, rickshaw pullers, porters.

The New York Times

City of hoy

In Spanish "hoy" means "today."

The New York Times has featured Kolkata, the erstwhile "city of joy," in its travel section ("36 Hours"), and the impression I get is that the new city of today promises to be different from the city of yesterday.

Brown skin, white masks

A new book by Vijay Prashad, Professor of International Relations at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, has a provocative title: Uncle Swami.

It could be subtitled South Asians, part II, for his earlier book Karma of Brown Folks had discussed the history of the early South Asians immigrants in the US.

Swami is about South Asians in post-9/11 America.

I like the pun in the title, but the book doesn't do the usual "minoritization" of America thing; there is no danger of Sam getting Swami-ized. Excerpts tell me that Prashad is concerned about rising anti-Indian sentiments in the nation.

I'm a little doubtful of the blurb on the cover that hails Prashad as the new Franz Fanon, unless Prashad is accusing brown skin of putting on white masks.

Fiction versus non-fiction

If David Coleman, President of the College Board has his way, he would convert an entire generation of potential "workers"--i.e. 4th through 10th graders in the nation's public schools--into precisely that: "workers".

Coleman's is the leading brain in designing the new English curriculum, or the Common Core Standard, for future K-12 in PS's across the nation. Thus, starting in 2014, when the new Common Core will be in effect, Language Arts teachers will find themselves teaching more non-fiction than fiction.

Coleman's rationale for ushering out fiction and ushering in non-fiction into the curriculum is as follows: 

English classes today focus too much on self-expression [...] It is rare in a working environment, [...] that someone says, Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.

If the above doesn't represent reductive thinking, then I don't know what does; what's scarier is that this kind of thinking springs from the head of the president of the College Board.

Let's look at the non-fiction that Coleman has in mind to produce future workers who can churn out market-analysis with robotic efficiency: historical documents, scientific tracts, maps and other “informational texts” — like recipes and train schedules.

I've always known fiction to encompass all the above and much more. When was the last time one heard of fiction being lumped together as a genre of "self-expression?"

For lack of a better explanation, one has to assume that Coleman has narrow conceptions of both fiction and non-fiction, and probably has little respect for the in-between genre of creative non-fiction.

I support Sara Mosle's corrective. Mosle suggests teaching good non-fiction, not just "informational texts." 

A writer's Thanksgiving prayer

American novelist Anne Lamott, carves out a beautiful Thanksgiving prayer, thanking, primarily her parents for making her into a book-lover and writer.

Lammot's father, Kenneth Lammot was a well-known San Francisco-based travel writer who passed away in his mid-fifties.

The highlight of Anne's "prayer" is a rewriting of playwright Eugene O'Neil's observation that man is born broken; God's grace is the glue: the secondary glue that kept her parents together in their marriage were the children, but the primary "collagen" were "Books and the New Yorker."

Lost in translation no more

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's new film Like Someone in Love, is set in Tokyo, has Japanese actors and a song by Ella Fitzgerald (the movie's title is a gift back to the vocal legend).

If this isn't a "global" product, then what is?

Ian Buruma does an excellent introduction of the movie. In his blog, he reminds us that the globality of it all notwithstanding, a certain Japaneseness inheres in the kind of love that's portrayed.

In a nutshell, the movie is about a young university student who migrates from the provinces to Tokyo to study. She falls into dire economic straits in this most expensive of all cities and resorts to prostitution. One evening she visits the home of a client, who is also a very old ex-professor. She enters his premises expecting the usual, but the old man doesn't want to have sex or anything sexual with her. What ensues is the movie's core, and Buruma aptly names it the "contingency of human intercourse."

So Japanese! And so electrifying that an Iranian has been able to render something like this seamlessly (according to Buruma)

T and I

Remember what Virginia Woolf wondered about?

She wondered about an alternate history--of culture and ideas--if Shakespeare had a sister, and that sister had a "room" of her own to read and write in as prolifically as Shakespeare.

The Western canon would then be predominantly female...though still "white" (Alice Walker came along to suggest the absence of the right color on Woolf's otherwise righteous correction of the gender imbalance in the Western canon).

T and I are women and living in an era that is hopefully gender and color and ethnicity-balanced.

How can you tell?

Well, look above: T and I's room--they have a room of their own, though it's still a work-in-progress and hasn't reached the optimum grandiosity that T plans to confer on it by and by.

Marriage

I am in the process of collecting fictional observations on the institution of marriage.

I don't think one has to reflect on marriage only if one is married. At a certain bare level it's an institution, a framework for organizing society and social/familial ideologies.

Thus it's important to see what folks have said about it.

A few samples:

Happiness in marriage is but a matter of chance. If the disposition of the parties are ever so well-known to each other, or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always contrive to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.

---Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

---Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)

A marriage is like a very sensitive virus that thrives in darkness, in the damp, airtight dungeon of secrecy. It will die upon exposure to the light.

---Karl Taro Greenfeld, Triburbia: A Novel (2012)

Marriage after all was a destination toward which all parents [...] and all daughters journeyed inevitably [...] No matter how high, how low or how middling the stature of the social orbit into which they are born—the fact of [a daughter's] marriage, taking place ideally by the age of twenty-five, becomes registered on the subconscious of both parent and child as an imminence—something that’s as universal as the biological fact of the human body.

---Sharmila Mukherjee, Green Rose: Tale of an Indian Lesbian (forthcoming) 

Digital heedlessness

I like how Frank Bruni attributes a large part of the embarrassment caused to all parties in the "Petraeus affair" to our "precocious devices."

What do our "precocious devices" (where precocity means everything that's electronic, ergo speedy) do to our impulses? They allow them to fly, literally, without the advantage of reflection.

Here's an 18th century suitor in a Jane Austen novel, composing a billet doux for the object of his carefully considered affection:

[He] puts pen to paper, his pace slow, his pauses frequent and the reply — itself written in longhand — probably weeks away. 

The romance that this slow-cooked expression of love produces "had a rhythm that accommodated reconsideration. It had a built-in cooling-off period."

And today?

There sits Anthony Weiner armed with his "precocious device" (no pun intended), experiencing a momentary flaring of his libido:

Cyberspace unleashed him, goading him to boldly go where no would-be New York City mayor should. And cyberspace undid him, creating an indelible record of where he’d traveled, and in what manner of undress. In lieu of eavesdroppers whom he could have disputed, he had digital footprints that he couldn’t deny, and they traced a path not to Gracie Mansion but to political ruin.

The Petraeuses--the digital "family" of decorated army generals, government officials, voluptuous socialites, and lean, brainy female hagiographers--had their little sexy discourses on cyberspace, where there is no "true, dependable privacy" whether we are "tapping or typing" in it: 

The Petraeus drama reflects the enticements and betrayals of our new, disembodied modes of discourse. The come-ons, the flirtations, the stalking, the alleged harassment: all were abetted by the deceptive cloak of cyberspace, and all were immortalized there. It’s a story of people not just behaving badly but e-mailing badly as well.

The message: keep calm and carry on with expressing the flares in your loins, but don't do so on your "treacherous screens."

A pox on hipsterdom

In her book, Irony's Edge, academic critic Linda Hutcheon had elevated irony to the status of a subversive tool--used to challenge hierarchical modes of thinking.

Hutcheon had invested irony with political value.

Another academic, Christy Wampole, not only divests 21st century irony of any creative value, but also sees it as a cultural plague. 

Wampole's representative figure of irony is the "Hipster."

Here is Wampole's scathing criticism of the Hipster mode of ironic living, 

Characterize this

When defense secretary Leon Panetta said he didn't want to "characterize" the electronic communication between Florida socialite Jill Kelly and General Allen, what did he mean?

He added that he "didn't want to do anything," implying thereby that an act of characterizing would be tantamount to doing something.

Doing what?

In a parlance of writing, at least in the parlance that I am familiar with, to "characterize" is to label, or to give something a specific name and ergo an unique identity. Thus to "characterize" would be an active verb in the realm of writing.

I remember asking students in my creative non-fiction class to "characterize" the particular quality of beauty or tragedy (among others) they see in something.

For instance, we would discuss the classic photograph of Marilyn Monroe--the one where she is giving off a full-lipped smile--and students would be encouraged to claim ownership of the beauty that they see and understand in the image through an adjective: how is the image beautiful? Characterize!

No sooner than the active verb of characterizing was released into the classroom, students would generally feel at a loss about what was being asked of them.

But out of the fog would emerge something interesting.

Somebody would squeak out "tragic." That would be a characterizing word indeed, I would assure them. We would go on from there into more specific ways of characterizing the quality of Monroe's "beauty." 

A fab example of a characterizing word is "hard." In her pithy essay on artist Georgia O'Keefe, Joan Didion, nails the quality of the appeal of O'Keefe's painting as "hard." there is a certain "hardness" about her work, claims Didion. 

To "characterize" something, then is to commit oneself to a very specific interpretation in an unambiguous (though complex) way.

When Panetta refused to "characterize" the communication under investigation (as "sexually explicit"--the media's characterizing word of choice), he refused a commitment.

How predictably political of him.   

Re-interpreters

The screenplays of two recent films, Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln and Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, have been written by Tony Kushner and Tom Stoppard respectively.

Good sign--a reinterpretation of timeless classics by writers known for being irreverent (as well as gifted) toward tradition.

A.O. Scott rightly says in his review of Anna Karenina, famous works of literature--and to this might I add famous figures of history like Lincoln and Gandhi--need to be treated not as "sacred artifacts" and paid "anxious obeisance" and pointless "humility," but as "lumps of interesting materials" to be shaped by re-interpreters willing to be "strong" and "striking" in their rendition.

The novel

The Novel

After "Gatsby" and "Catcher"
and Gaddis it didn't look back.
It honed its approach for cell-phone mini-books,

then buffed up, tried on smirks,
and trampled past a bust of Jonathan Franzen.
If this was its coming-out party, it mainly peered in-

ward. It wanted to jostle a reader's heart
into snare-drumming for bit
players on side streets.

Fidgety, bored, it donned cowboy hats
till it grew antennae and crawled
upstairs into your bed.

Putting the poor to sleep...

...doesn't require much.

But this lullaby is beautiful.

Euphemism

I was teaching "euphemism" in class today. We were trying to decipher "euphemisms" in George Orwell's Animal Farm.

I had a list of examples, but had I seen this, this morning before class, I would've been thrilled.

NYT restaurant reviewer Pete Wells slaughters Guy Fieri's new multi-level, 500-seater "joint" in New York City's Time Square.

ny.eater.com re-presents the harshest lines from this x-tremely withering review euphemistically--via "adorable" kittens.

P.s. I can't stand Guy Fieri's TV show and his persona on that show. There's no euphemism for that.

Frank Bruni makes sense when he says that it's not sex or anything physical that drew somebody like General Petraeus to Paula Broadwell, 20 years his junior with a fatless body.

It's old-fashioned narcissism.

Broadwell was excessively worshipful of the CIA chief in the manner that many younger men and women are of their admirable, older-counterparts.

These mighty men didn’t just choose mistresses, by all appearances. They chose fonts of gushing reverence [...] He was having an affair with a version of himself.

Done with the novel

Veteran Philip Roth has declared that he is finished with the novel.

Nemesis will be his last one.

Roth said the following in defense of his decision:

I don’t want to read any more of it, write any more of it, and I don’t even want to talk about it anymore. I have dedicated my life to the novel: I have studied it, I have taught it, I have written it and I have read it. To the exclusion of almost everything else. It’s enough. I no longer feel this dedication to write what I have experienced my whole life. The idea of struggling once more with writing is unbearable to me.

Many say that Roth's break-up, as it were, with the novel, is a sign of his disappointment at never winning the Nobel. 

Can a good painter make a good writer?

Novelist Orhan Pamuk seems to think so, if the same body houses both.

Pamuk is a painter and these are the following things he says the painter in him taught his writerly self:

1) 
Don’t start to write before you have a strong sense of the whole composition, unless you are writing a lyrical text or a poem. 

2) 
Don’t search for perfection and symmetry — it will kill the life in the work. 

3) 
Obey the rules of point of view and perspective and see the world through your characters’ eyes — but it is permissible to break this rule with inventiveness. 

4) 
Like van Gogh or the neo-Expressionist painters, show your brushstrokes! The reader will enjoy observing the making of the novel if it is made a minor part of the story. 

5) 
Try to identify the accidental beauty where neither the mind conceived of nor the hand intended any. The writer in me and the painter in me are getting to be friendlier every day. That’s why I am now planning novels with pictures and picture books with texts and stories

"Good" fiction

[...] Good fiction is about identifying with and understanding people who are not necessarily like us. By nature all good novels are political because identifying with the other is political. At the heart of the “art of the novel” lies the human capacity to see the world through others’ eyes. Compassion is the greatest strength of the novelist.

Orhan Pamuk

Feline tales

Soseki Natsume's I Am a Cat is a satirical novel about the devilish dangers of too much Westernization is narrated by an ultra-smart cat.

Natsume wrote in the Japanese Meiji era which dated from 1862 to 1912.

American democracy

When Alexis De Tocqueville praised American democracy in the 19th century, little did he anticipate the very same democracy would morph into a gallimaufry.

Dracula

Bram Stoker, the creator of Dracula, turns a 165 today. I mention his age in a present continuous tense because I associate Stoker with the count himself, and I can't imagine him to be weighed down by issues of mortality.

Barak Obama, the storyteller

Ron Suskind's analysis of how re-elected President Obama can tell a "story" to Americans that will inspire them with confidence, intersects with important lessons about the art of storytelling itself.

Stories that "sell" these days are told in totally non-traditional ways. In other words, mode, style, form, all have to adapt and adjust to the continually changing contours of that ever-morphing beast called "audience."

Suskind sheds a bit of light on the death of the third-person, all-seeing, all-knowing, omniscient narrator (reminds me of the late Victorian novelists).

When Obama wrote his compelling autobiography at age 33, he was the classic omniscient narrator, omniscient to the extent of re-inventing the truths of his life to suit the needs of a personal narrative that would catapult him into the arc of a presidency.

But after he actually became the president, Obama could ill-afford to play a role the omniscient narrator part of him had helped create. He was at a loss at how to now play the role that others--i.e. the public--"wrote" for him through their yearnings, wants and impositions.

Now, it's time for the omniscient storyteller to become a character himself: To stop writing about "history" and become a shaper of it.

Gandhi once said that real change happens when people become change itself; echoing that call, Suskind asks Obama to be more porous to spontaneity, improvise more, be less calculating, be more receptive to lightning reactions:

Don't tell the story, be the story.

In a writer's words, "show, don't tell." 

The electoral map

The 2012 U.S. Presidential election map is easier, way easier, to read than New York City's subway map.

Nothing labyrinthine about it.

Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac divided 20th century major American writers in two groups: the "taker-outers" and the "putter-inners."

Scott Fitzgerald and Henry James were "taker-outers" who "wrote and rewrote to render a book into a polished gem." Walt Whitman and Thomas wolfe, were, on the other hand, "putter-inners" who "reached out to embrace the whole impossible landscape of American experience to make a mighty book like the Mississippi river in flood."

I think, today, most writers are "taker-outers."

T and I

I burps. It's unwomanly of course, but it's very humanly.

T believes burping is a sign of ill-health. whenever I burps, T asks in a voice of concern, "Are you ok?"

Belching or burping is nothing but a release of gas that may accumulate in one's digestive tracts.

New parents pat little babies so they burp out stored gas.

In a word, it's a healthy outlet of unhealthy air in the human body.

T also sees burping as a sign of one's poor grooming.

But then again, T believes that "boiling" is low-class, whereas "grilling" is a sophisticated cooking method...

On writing

This is the one thing that stays the same: my husband got hurt. Everything else changes. A grandson needs me and then he doesn’t. My children are close then one drifts away. I smoke and don’t smoke; I knit ponchos, then hats, shawls, hats again, stop knitting, start up again. The clock ticks, the seasons shift, the night sky rearranges itself, but my husband remains constant, his injuries are permanent.

Opening lines from Abigail Thomas' memoir Three Dog Life.

An explanation of why this passage is effective:

Thomas’s short sentences create mood. Structurally, she spins an ingenious centrifuge to take readers through the whirlwind of her confusion and despair. Beginning with blunt declarations, she builds momentum with a list and then uses commas to amplify the pace and tension, creating turbulent whitecaps on the flat, sullen surface of her introductory statement.

Writing

Many writers fall prey to the quintessential American notion that bigger is better. They overload their sentences, adding more adjectives, more descriptions, more component phrases, tangents and appositives to form sprawling, syntactical centipedes (like this one) whose many segments and exhausting procession repeat themselves and say the same thing in different ways, with different words, and exhibit an entire ideology: that prose’s sensory and poetic impacts exist in direct proportion to the concentration of words. I know: I succumbed.

Aaron Gilbreath on how to compose prose like Mile Davis composes music.

Nigeria: African Texas

Or so says Adam Nossiter, West Africa Bureau chief for The Times, in his review of Chinua Achebe's memoirs, There Was a Country.

Nigeria is Texan because, "it’s big and loud and brash, a place of huge potential, untapped talent, murderous conflict and petroleum riches."

Nossiter laments that Achebe fails to see the potential of contemporary Nigeria in his new book. Achebe's focus is on the chaos and the futility. He also writes fondly of Biafra, a tiny state that seceded from Nigeria after Nigeria won independence from Britain. In the immediate aftermath of its formation, the fledgling state was however brutally destroyed by mainland Nigeria.

Achebe had worked briefly at Biafra's Ministry of Information.

Zadie Smith's London

Here we are, in the wake of hurricane Sandy, getting fresh insights into the horror of lives inside housing projects in New York City (damp, cold, powerless, dangerous, and overally under the totalitarian thumb of an insensitive government), and there in her new novel NW, British writer Zadie Smith gives us a glimpse of such lives in contemporary London. 

NW is literally the postal code for the most impoverished part of northwest London. The characters of the novel are all raised in a housing project named "Caldwell" in NW, and the narrative unfolds through the eyes of these characters.

According to the NYT, NW is not only reflective of the cultural and social realities of a rapidly hybridizing London, but also of a "modernist anxiety" about time:

The language embodies this anxiety, says the Times--an anxiety about one thing following another, about the ticking of the clock, and the (unnerving) way time leads us toward death.

Leah, one of the characters, who is particularly engrossed in deciphering the mystery behind this linear march of time into the abyss, has a moment of epiphany aboard a bus one day.

Sitting on the bus she stares at an Indian woman’s bindi until she finds she “has entered the dot, passing through it, emerging into a more gentle universe, parallel to our own, where people are fully and intimately known to each other and there is no time or death or fear.”

Resilience over sustainability

We should "roll with the waves" instead of trying to "stop the ocean," writes innovation guru Andrew Solli, in response to, what I believe is the proposition to erect a multibillion dollar "sea wall" around New York, to protect it against future Sandies:  

Unfortunately, the sustainability movement’s politics, not to mention its marketing, have led to a popular misunderstanding: that a perfect, stasis-under-glass equilibrium is achievable. But the world doesn’t work that way: it exists in a constant disequilibrium — trying, failing, adapting, learning and evolving in endless cycles. Indeed, it’s the failures, when properly understood, that create the context for learning and growth. That’s why some of the most resilient places are, paradoxically, also the places that regularly experience modest disruptions: they carry the shared memory that things can go wrong.

“Resilience” takes this as a given and is commensurately humble. It doesn’t propose a single, fixed future. It assumes we don’t know exactly how things will unfold, that we’ll be surprised, that we’ll make mistakes along the way. It’s also open to learning from the extraordinary and widespread resilience of the natural world, including its human inhabitants, something that, counterintuitively, many proponents of sustainability have ignored.

Climate Change

Climate change is to the Republican base what leprosy once was to healthy humans — untouchable and unmentionable. Their party is financed by people whose fortunes are dependent upon denying that humans have caused the earth’s weather patterns to change for the worse.

Timothy Egan

Words

[...] There are all sorts of words for things in other languages that we don't have in English [...] It's like your soul is tongue-tied when that happens, when you have a feeling or experience that you can't explain, because there isn't a specific word for it. If you knew all the languages of the world, you could express yourself perfectly, and all experiences would be understandable to you because you would have a word, a perfect word, to attach to any possible occasion.

---"Breatharians" by Callan Wink

Are you a storyteller?

Novelist Dennis Lehane's advice to aspiring writers who attend creative writing programs:

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you’re capable of and making your words symphonic. But, I worry that writing programs spend too much time on the words and not enough on the story. Faulkner understood story, but he had such astounding technical skill he could seem to abandon it and no one would care. But most students don’t have that staggering degree of technical ability, so they should learn to tell a story first. That’s what it is at the end of the day — storytelling. So my best piece of advice to aspiring novelists — after “Read” — would be, “Don’t think of yourselves as writers; think of yourselves as storytellers.” It removes the pretension and the self-consciousness and a boatload of anxiety.

History Lessons

Novelist Dennis Lehane picks Hampton Sides' HellHound on Trial, as one of the great books he has recently read.

Says Lehane about his choice:

It’s a gripping evocation of a seismic American tragedy — the assassination of Martin Luther King. It speaks volumes about the evil of those who stoke and pervert populist rage for their own ends. Like any great book about the past, it illuminates the present with uncommon clarity.

 The "present" in this case happens to be the perils of history repeating itself, not anymore as a farce (as Marx had said about historical events of the 19th century), but as a beyond-tragedy.

Halloween undone

I just came upon a refreshing refresher on the (historical) origins of the "Zombie."

In an antidote to the spectacularization of the Zombie by Hollywood, Amy Wilentz says that the Zombie was born in the midst of slavery, especially as a response to the excruciating cruelty inflicted by the French in the slave plantations of Haiti.

There is a compelling reason why American parents should prevent their kids from donning "fun" Zombie costumes:

There are many reasons the zombie, sprung from the colonial slave economy, is returning now to haunt us. Of course, the zombie is scary in a primordial way, but in a modern way, too. He’s the living dead, but he’s also the inanimate animated, the robot of industrial dystopias. He’s great for fascism: one recent zombie movie (and there have been many) was called “The Fourth Reich.” The zombie is devoid of consciousness and therefore unable to critique the system that has entrapped him. He’s labor without grievance. He works free and never goes on strike. You don’t have to feed him much. He’s a Foxconn worker in China; a maquiladora seamstress in Guatemala; a citizen of North Korea; he’s the man, surely in the throes of psychosis and under the thrall of extreme poverty, who, years ago, during an interview, told me he believed he had once been a zombie himself.

The World's Mine Oyster

This was the rascally Piston's quip to Falstaff in Shakespeare's early comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor:

Falstaff:I will not lend thee a penny.
Pistol:
Why then the world's mine oyster,
Which I with sword will open.
Falstaff:
Not a penny.

Pistol's comic threat--that he's going to steal if falstaff doesn't loan him money--has over time become a merely conceited proclamation of opportunity.

But Oysters are not to be trifled with anymore. They can't simply be seen as passive repositories of the mythical pearl.

Oysters, as Paul Greenberg, who writes about environmental issues reminds us, play a vital role in protecting the Tri-State shorelines from the violent incursions like the one we saw from Hurricane Sandy.

Yet the "oyster kingdom" has been depleted over years.

Sans the depletion, the Hudson and the East river would not have made such deep and devastating inroads into the low-lying areas of Manhattan and New Jersey:

Until European colonists arrived, oysters took advantage of the spectacular estuarine algae blooms that resulted from all these nutrients and built themselves a kingdom. Generation after generation of oyster larvae rooted themselves on layers of mature oyster shells for more than 7,000 years until enormous underwater reefs were built up around nearly every shore of greater New York.

 Just as corals protect tropical islands, these oyster beds created undulation and contour on the harbor bottom that broke up wave action before it could pound the shore with its full force. Beds closer to shore clarified the water through their assiduous filtration (a single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day); this allowed marsh grasses to grow, which in turn held the shores together with their extensive root structure.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, there is much talk about re-designing the infrastructure in New York City to handle the city's identity as an emergent "Gulf Coast".

But humans have already dismantled the natural infrastructure. Isn't it time for the environment  to become a part of the conversation?

The seer

From the latest "Things I Saw"; drawings by artist Jason Polan:

I'm impressed by the presence of turtles and bats in public places. Americans would shriek at that! The Spaniards obviously have a different, more "European" view of such promiscuous interminglings.

Sandy and Frankenstein

As Time Magazine recently reported, the name given to Hurricane Sandy--Frankenstorm--is an effort to be funny, and to chime in with the spirit of Halloween. 

However, given that Sandy has also been described as a "freakish" storm, a hybrid of two disparate storm systems, I don't think the reverberations of the word "Frankenstorm" are all that funny.

It has literary resonance: I am reminded of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's memorable monster. He shares many of the qualities attributed to Sandy: he is a "freakish" "hybrid" of man and beast. Shelley's misshapen monster bears physical resemblance to humans yet he has no soul; in Shelley's time, the soul was the seat of humanity.

Sandy has no soul--the monstrous terms in which it is being discussed makes its monstrosity evident. 

Finally, Frankenstein, the monster was a creation of a scientist, who was hubristic enough to engineer a creature into being. In this, Victor Frankenstein, the brilliant scientist of Mary Shelley's novel, offended nature. 

Sandy, as Naomi Klein, has indicated, could be a product of geoengineering. Geoengineers 

advocate high-risk, large-scale technical interventions that would fundamentally change the oceans and skies in order to reduce the effects of global warming

In other words, they could be the 21st century's rough equivalents of Victor Frankenstein.

Is hurricane Sandy a hideous progeny of our era's Victor Frankensteins?

Reasons why Obama should win...

The 2012 Presidential elections: 

[...] because he’s a seriously intelligent, thoughtful leader more in tune and in touch with Americans’ lives than his sheltered opponent is. He still has poetry in him, and he still has fight. But this campaign has illuminated nothing so brightly as the limits of his magic, along with shortcomings that he would carry with him into a second term (should he get one) and would be wise to address.

Frank Bruni, NYT