Silent Greed

Eric Stroheim's silent film (1924) on America's obsession with money was a 10 hour long odyssey. MGM producers managed to slim it down to an hour and forty minutes.

From The New Yorker ("Critic's Notebook"):

[The film] magnifies one California couple's striving rise and craven fall into an inferno of American madness. [Stroheim] moves Frank Norris's 1899 novel--about McTeague, a gold miner turned unlicensed dentist, and Trina, his best friend's girl, whom he makes his fluttery bride--to 1908 and the years before the liberating agonies of the First World War and Hollywood's universal pageantry. Showing the masses at their most unwashed, Stroheim captures a heaving, struggling, stinking world of rugged labor, precarious comfort, and primitive naivete. the ladder of social mobility goes both ways, and the terrifying decline that ends in one of the greatest of all cinematic set pieces--a struggle over gold, under the hellish sun of Death Valley--is set up by a banal catastrophe, unemployment. In the bare wild, Stroheim saw an old world--but not its evils--end.

Market Fundamentalism

Nicholas Kristof reminds us of a concept that was floated by George Soros some years ago: Market fundamentalism.

A very unique and potent--more likely to become the dominant system of governance globally than other forms of fundamentalisms--kind of fundamentalism that writers like Hamid Mohsin (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) and Hari Kunzru alert our attention to.

[Market fundamentalism] is related to the glorification of wealth in the past two decades, to the celebration of opulence, and to the emergence of a new (global) aristocracy. Market fundamentalists assume a measure of social Darwinism and accept that Laissez-faire is always optimal.

But, as Kristof writes, market fundamentalism is also helixed together with the other kind of fundamentalism and together the two produce a particular kind of dystopic landscape, best represented by Waziristan:

And anyone who honestly believes that low taxes and unfettered free markets are always best should consider moving to Pakistan’s tribal areas. They are a triumph of limited government, negligible taxes, no “burdensome regulation” and free markets for everything from drugs to AK-47s.

The Age of Miracles

There is a reason why Karen Thompson Walker's debut novel The Age of Miracles is scheduled to be released on June 21 (2012).

June 21 is the longest day of the year and the novel, an apocalyptic meditation on the end of the world, predicts that in the aftermath of massive earthquakes that shook Japan on March 11, 2011, the earth will be experiencing slower rotations and 48+ hour days.

The scientific rationale is as follows:

We now know that the massive earthquake that struck that country on 11 March shifted the planet inches on its axis, shortening the earth's day by a fraction of a second. In The Age of Miracles, which is told through the voice of a 10-year-old Californian girl named Julia, an earthquake shakes the planet but causes the opposite effect [...] The earth's rotation slows and days lengthen, first by six minutes, then 12, then 24. As the phenomenon – known as "the slowing" – takes hold, days stretch to 48 hours, and gravity weakens, with birds ceasing to fly and astronauts stranded far from earth.

Maureen Dowd puts Thompson's novel in an emergent literary tradition called "cosmophobia," which is literally a fear caused by a conviction that a cosmic disaster--like collision of stars--is imminent.

But, as Dowd suggests, voicing the skepticism of scientists David Morrison (Senior Scientist at NASA), cosmophobia is just another largely imaginary fear which isn't going to materialize into reality anytime soon, but will generate money for those who pedal it successfully.

Indeed Thompson's novel has struck a pot of gold in both the U.S. and Western Europe, and has fetched her a pre-release advance of 1 million dollars.

It's the process, stupid!

How was Apartheid dismantled? The documentary Under African Skies, tells us of an arduous, complex, non-linear and enormously time-consuming process.

The film shows a sliver of that process, of course--the putting on the world stage of South African music by Paul Simon in his classic music album "Graceland" (1985). I haven't heard "Graceland" but the album is said to represent global music at its best. In the album Simon fused together Western beat with (Black) South African rhythms.

As Tom Friedman writes in his Op-ed piece, "Graceland" also globalized apartheid as a vicious and grossly immoral political system in the process of putting the beauty of Black music from South Africa--banned in South Africa itself--on the world stage.

Friedman reminds us that this musical intervention into the politics of its time was effective in mobilizing International opinion against apartheid, yet the mobilization took place in an era sans social media and the Internet, Globalization, iTunes, and YouTube.

Today, for instance, the South African musicians whom Simon internationalized, would have easily put together a video on YouTube and it would have been an instant "hit." But would the "hit" have generated anything more than just that--a raging popularity of something that excites viewers momentarily?

Means, the fate of apartheid could have remained undecided in an era of instantification and easy ingratiation.

Malcolm Gladwell had similarly reminded us of the fate of the Civil Rights Movement in his controversial  essay Why the Revolution Will not be Tweeted.

Social and political activism is converted into mere, flaccid forms of mass entertainment these days. Recently a Simpsons episode had sky-rocketing ratings because it showed Lady Gaga kissing Marge Simpson. Did this really help the cause of LGBT politics in real ways?

When activism is subsumed under or becomes inseparable from mass entertainment/consumption, then it loses its unique identity, which as Gladwell had insisted, resides in the process of its unfurling and maturing over time.

Berate my professors

The Wall Street Journal writes of Notinmycountry.org, a website dedicated to the exposure and shaming of corrupt university professors and administrators.

Innovative!

Can-abyss alter your palate?

A recent story in the NY Times drew my attention to an alternative cookbook: Elise McDonough's The Official High Times Cannabis Cookbook:

This first-ever cookbook from High Times magazine—the world's most trusted name when it comes to getting stoned—is the deliciously definitive guide to cannabis-infused cooking. Easy, accessible recipes and advice demystify the experience of cooking with grass and offer a cornucopia of irie appetizers and entrees, stoner sweets, cannabis cocktails, and high-holiday feasts for any occasion, from Time Warp Tamales and Sativa Shrimp Spring Rolls to Pico de Ganja Nachos and Pineapple Express Upside-Down Cake. Delectable color photos and recipes inspired by stoner celebrities such as Snoop Dogg, Cheech and Chong, and Willie Nelson will spark the interest of experienced cannabis cooks and "budding" chefs, whether they're looking for the perfect midnight munchie or just to take dinner to a higher level.

I don't expect either "Chopped" or "Sweet Genius," both popular Food Network shows, to have these as "surprise ingredients," though I wish they would!

Mythologies

Sam Anderson re visits an old legend: Roland Barthe's Mythologies:

Barthe's basic idea was that the operation of mass culture is analogous to mythology. He argued that the cultural work previously done by gods and epic sagas--teaching citizens the values of their society, providing a common language--was now being done by film stars and laundry-detergent commercials. In Mythologies, his project is to demystify these myths.

Regal Diaries

The diaries of Queen Victoria can now be read online. The project is a collaboration of Oxford University, ProQuest and the Bodeleian Libraries.

According to The NYTimes:

The diaries, which run to 141 volumes and more than 43,000pages, begin when Victoria was 13 and end 10 days before her death in 1901, at age 81. They cover subjects ranging from the early days of her romance with Prince Albert to her own Diamond Jubilee in 1897, which she recorded as turning the streets of London into "one mass of beaming faces." 

Moments like births of her nine children are also glimpsed at in observations like "Dr. Snow administered "that blessed Chloroform'." Victoria's chief chef was a native from India and her household servants were of the same ethnic ilk, and she has noted "I am learning a few words of Hindustani to speak to my servants [...] It is of great interest to me."

An afterthought: the painting of the young Queen--she does eerily resemble Emily Blunt, the British actress who played the role of the young queen (The Young Victoria)

"Fug" has ceded place to "cu&^"

According to linguist Ruth Wajnyrb's dictionary of slangs, Expletive Deleted, dirty talk cements fellowship within the group doing the talking and obscenity enhances one's vivacity.

This I find to be true, as I have been a half-hearted ear witness to many a dirty talk bonding on NYC subways. My experience tells me that Dominican Republican-American kids hailing from the Bronx specialize in this sort of bonding.

Sex, or adolescent sex, is the richest contributor to their slang.

Wajnyrb discusses ethnic variations of verbal filth. The Arabic and Turkish like elaborate and "surrealist" curses: "You father of sixty dogs."

Bosnians tear apart families: "May your mother fart at a school meeting."

Scots and African-Americans hold actual competitions of verbal abuse.

Here is a prize-winning entry:

I hate to talk about your mother, she's a good old soul,
She got a ten-ton pussy and a rubber asshole.

Wjnyrb's words of wisdom: "Fuck" (pronounced as "fug" by American G.I.'s in Norman Mailer's novel The Naked and the Dead) has ceded first place to "cunt."

Comic reportage

Kushinagar, which appeared originally in French in XXI, no. 13, January/February/March 2011, will appear in English in Joe Sacco’s new collection Journalism, to be published by Metropolitan Books on June 19. Kushinagar is a comic based on Sacco's travels in Kushinagar, a district in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. It's a place of abject poverty yet the people of Kushinagar are animated in their hope of living a life of dignity one day.

More Kushinagar cartoons can be found here.

Guns and doses (of reality)

Some of the best insights come, not from The New Yorker (celebrated) staff writers, but from the readers.

So, I pay the same attention to the letters written in response to stories in the magazine ("The Mail") as I do to the stories.

Here's an excerpt from a letter on the great futility of the debate on gun control and gun-related violence in the U.S.

Firearms are potent objects of power; someone who picks up a gun instantly alters his status and relationship to those around him. They provide a quick fix for those feeling profoundly impotent and without recourse. This alteration is the reason that certain young people, feeling especially vulnerable and powerless in their teen-age years, are attracted to violent gun use. [...] The criminal use of guns is a symptom of larger problems of disempowerment in this country. The answer is not to ban forearms or even regulate them, but to provide the social, economic, and emotional tools that citizens need to feel a sense of control over their lives. Guns have become such strong symbols of violence and supremacy that it is much easier to talk about firearms regulation than to talk about the complex social and racial issues in this country, including Americans' lack of access to adequate mental-health care. The problem isn;t that it is easy to get a gun in America; the problem is that obtaining a gun is easier than getting therapy, or achieving racial equality and financial stability.   

Bodies of enchanting writing

An enthralling passage, describing the execution of Anne Boleyn, from Bring up the Bodies, the third installment in Hilary Mantel's Tudor trilogy:

There is a groan, one single sound from the whole crowd. Then a silence, and into that silence, a sharp sigh or a sound like a whistle through a keyhole: the body exsanguinates, and its falt little presence becomes a puddle of gore.

Bonding Over Proust And Other Matters ...

Chilean director's new film Bonsai, shows a 8-year long love affair where the lovers (heterosexuals) have nothing in common except Marcel Proust's Remembrances of Things Past.

In John Irving's novel In One Person, the protagonist, Bill Abbot wants to be a woman after he has an affair with Elaine Hadley, the daughter of his high school History teacher. Bill steals Elaine's bra and reads "Giovanni's Room" (a 1956 novel by James Baldwin which has the most complex representation of homosexuality till date in Western literature) in them.

Literature sneaks in (like death?) through the back doors and all kinds of nooks and crannies.

Caliban Exiled Into The Library

I'm passionate about literature, yes, but that doesn't mean I'm reading day and night to get through that "list" of "must reads" and "should reads."

I feel that literature and the literary life is like pollen, i.e. wildly dispersed and may enter you in any which way, some obvious, like reading directly and persistently, or the collisions may be singularly amorphous and fragmented.

One of the ways in which wisps of literary intonations are reaching my ears and eyes of late are through reviews of books.

In reviews of John Irving's new novel In One Person, there are interesting mentions of Shakespeare (and Dickens). I read that Irving's novel--the erotic history of a bisexual protagonist--is staged, in essence, as a dark comedy of disguises, mistaken identities and giddy/out-of-the-box erotic trajectories    , much along the line of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. 

However, there's more of Shakespeare in Irving's novel than the adventures of a transgendered (un moored from the fixity of gender) eros. There a bit of The Tempest as well. Ms. Frost, one of the hero(in)e's love interest is akin to Caliban, the banished-to-exile monster in this last of Shakespeare's plays. Caliban, a semantic reconstruction of "cannibal," refuses to convert to the mores of civilization brought upon his island by the outsider-invader, Prospero. As a result of his stubborn refusal to become civilized (in a particular kind of way), Caliban is variously punished.

Ms. Frost is the latter-day Caliban because she refuses to convert to the ideology of "categories" in an all-encompassing kind of way. Born in a "small town" in rural Vermont, Ms. Alberta Frost is an ex-male wrestler Albert, who decides to carry on as a woman in the second part of her life. The "small town" predictably wants to extirpate an unabashed transgender like Ms. Frost (she makes love to men like a woman, yet does not hide her penis from them), but she stays put and lives a life of perpetual banishment. She is condemned to live the life of a librarian in a parochial school.

What amuses me is that punishment for a modern Calibanic figure like Ms. Frost is the library! That inspires me to become a Caliban myself.

Heart of Marriage Equality-Ness

When Allen Ginsberg wrote sardonically about the "Communist scare" in America in the 1960s, in his poem, America: An Open Letter, he unearthed the hypocrisy underlying the fear-mongering.

What if the communists invade America and America becomes a nation of dreaded Communist values? Momentarily Ginsberg slips into the shoes of the anti-Communists and says, "Oh no, when America becomes a Communist nation, god forbid how the poor Native Americans would be free to have equal opportunity to education and how the "Niggers" would be de-negroized and rendered equal citizens along side the white privileged class!"

That was mock-empathy at its best.

Cartoonist Brian Mcfadden does a swell job with a similar kind of mock empathy in his "The Strip". He slips into the "fears" of those who want to deny marriage equality rights to gays and lesbians in America, and emulates their paranoia in light of President Obama's recent declaration that he is "for" marriage equality.

Why Write?

Forget George Orwell's and Joan Didion's exploration of the personal motivations to write (both writers wrote "Why I Write?")

The current era's novelists draw inspiration from myriad sources, none of which needn't be of an intellectual sort.

In Defense of Bisexuality

I remember reading John Irving's The World According to Garp in Kolkata in the 80s and a phenomenal book it had appeared to me then. I was especially awed by Jenny Fields, Garp's mother, because of her powerful eccentricity and self-determining journey through life.

Irving's most recent novel, In One Person, I hear is another tale of celebration of the power of self-determination and sublime eccentricity.

The story is of a bisexual Billy Dean and his desires and of their unequivocal expression and fulfillment. Billy enjoys women, but the best women in the novel turn out to be those who have had been men once upon a time. Such is Ms. Frost, a librarian at Billy's school. Billy is fiercely turned on by the sight of Ms. Frost every time he goes to check out a copy of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations from the school library. Ms. Frost suggests he try a variety of books.

In her younger days, Ms. Frost was Big Al, a 6ft 2 inches tall undefeated wrestling champion. Now he chooses to live as a woman. When Billy finally sleeps with Ms. Frost for the first time, he believes she is a woman. When he returns for more, he knows she is a magnificent woman with a male organ.

The novel is wide-ranging, almost natural, in its spirit of tolerance. Tolerance isn't=anything goes; it's what happens when we face our own desires and choices honestly, whether we act on them or not.

Ms. Frost says it well, when she replies to Billy's query about her sexual identity: Don't make me a category before you get to know me."

Post-Pride and Prejudice

British novelist P.D. James has penned her 21st novel at age 91.

Death Comes to Pemberley--Darcy's abode in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice--draws the characters from Austen's classic and involves them in a tale of murder and emotional mayhem.

The story is set in 1803, six years after Pride and Prejudice was finished (though it wasn’t published until 1813) and presumably when the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy took place. They have two young sons now, and the arrival of a third child is shortly to be announced. But their tranquillity is interrupted one wet and windy evening when an unexpected carriage comes rocketing up the drive.

The style of Death Comes to Pemberley is a loose approximation of 19th-century prose, a sort of modern equivalent, rather than a painstaking imitation. But it’s more than convincing and every now and then, as a kind of homage or reminder, hits the precise, epigrammatic Austen note.

Courtesy The NY Times

A Quote

We evolved in a world where our survival depended on an intimate knowledge of our surroundings. This is still true, but our surroundings have grown. We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth. We skim, we summarize, we skip the fine print and, all too often, we miss the fine point. We know we are drowning, but we do what we can to stay afloat.

Courtesy W. Daniel, Hillis, Physicist, Computer Scientist, Chairman of Applied Minds, Inc.; author, The Pattern on the Stone.

Ideas from TED

A glimpse into some future TED Talks:

Lena Dunham, creator and star of the HBO show Girls. Dunham will discuss the consequences of championing young women as complicated beings, unmoved by marriage or the prospects of owning Manolo Blahniks (footwear that the women of Sex and the City died for).

One consequence according to Dunham is that today's young women, recast in the mold of independent, post-feminist forces with as much agency over their lives as their male peers are, are difficult to buy gifts for.

Malcolm Gladwell critiques the American penchant for reducing all activity to a moral lesson. Drawing a line from Benjamin Franklin to the homilies printed on Celestial Seasoning tea boxes, Gladwell says that even knotty concepts like quantum physics and philology can be rendered attractive to large groups of people if the concepts can be re written as anecdotes involving a cabdriver, a small child or an obscure Flemish botanist. Mr. Gladwell's suggestion: "Start with a personal anecdote [...] and extrapolate to the 18th-century cocoa trade in Malta." 

Geography is History

"The East is a career." This quote from Benjamin Disraeli's 19th century novel Tancred, reappeared as an epigram in Edward Said's celebrated critique of the culture of empire in Orientalism. 


Today in an era of globalization, the East is not only fertile ground for a "career", but also as a geographical place for the post-career, post-work-life retirees of the West to rest their weary bones in.

No, the retired British elderly in Deborah Moggach's novel These Foolish Things, later renamed, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, don't invest in the East as potential burial grounds, but they relocate to Bangalore, India, as a group because they are in an economically distressed state, having variously lost their retirement funds for reasons both global-economic and familial (an elderly couple have lost their retirement savings in their daughter's failed startup).

The British elderly suffer from the millennial fears and anxieties that the elderly in many Western (and now "Eastern") societies suffer from: the closing down of care homes, dwindling pensions and rising life-expectancy.

In the words of the author:

[The novel] came about because I’d been thinking a lot about growing older, about what is going to happen to us all. The population is ageing – for the first time the over 50s outnumber the rest of us – and it’s getting older. Where are we all going to live? [...] Then I had a brainwave. We live in a global age – the internet, cheap travel, satellite TV…when it comes to goods and services it hardly matters where we live. “Geography is history.” Our healthcare is sourced from the developing countries; how about turning the tables and outsourcing the elderly? How about setting up retirement homes in developing countries where it’s sunny and labour is cheap? So I created an Indian whizz-kid called Sonny who sets up a retirement home in Bangalore and fills it with Brits.

The thought underlying "geography is history" acquires new meaning in this context. 

The movie version of the novel has just got released in theatres across the U.S. The locale has been shifted to Jaipur from Bangalore. In the movie, Tim Wilkinson plays the role of a retired High Court Judge, who returns to Jaipur to find one of his gay male lovers, who had been disgraced into an outcast after the love affair was exposed. 

Marilyn Monroe

"Talent is developed in privacy." The best thoughts emanate from the least expected of sources and the element of surprise triumphs the value of the thought itself.

Goethe said this originally, in another form. American actress and famous sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe made this thought into her own and re-expressed it in the above form.

Marilyn Monroe, revamping Goethe's thoughts! That is a bombshell of a surprise, as Jacqueline Rose, suggests in her wonderful uncovering of the "real" Monroe.

But Rose's piece does not aim at surprising readers. On the other hand, she wants to re-acquaint the world with the woman behind the image, a woman who was thoughtful and educated herself constantly, in private, had affinities with the most un-Marilynesque of things.

She adored Abraham Lincoln during McCarthyism, when Lincoln had become an anathema (believe it or not, he was perceived as a "Communist" being an "equal rights"-for-all guy); she was in favor of granting civil rights to blacks and was one of the few white actresses who was liked by blacks of the time. She read copiously, even though she didn't have the opportunity for formal education. 

Monroe was a thoughtful woman and gravitated to men who didn't pay attention to her body, but to her mind. Thus she married Arthur Miller...

All in all Marilyn was a thoughtful woman according to Rose who wishes that she were known more through the books she read and the politics she believed in, rather than through the undergarments and the costume jewelry she wore. 

Humans can emulate nature

Breaking away from the usual mode of anthropomorphic thinking the following asks humans to be less like humans, and more like nature:

Spring is the torrential season. On a bright, blue-skied day in April or May, it can feel as if you’re standing in a river of biological change, whether you’re in Central Park or out in the country. Everything seems to be regenerating — every species of plant, animal and insect — all of them cued to the new light and the new warmth. It’s as though we’re living in three kinds of time at once: geological time, which is too slow for us to grasp, human time, which is just right, and tulip time, which comes and goes in the blink of an eye.
In all this change, we are the unchanging species. We don’t become vernal with new growth. We don’t blossom, nor do we contribute to the clouds of pollen that drift through the air. We don’t shed or nest or den. We are not the green men (and green women) of myth, vegetative humans who live by the cycle of the seasons. We go about our business and our pleasure. Perhaps, about now, the palette of our clothing shifts toward the pale and pastel. To all the beings that are rioting around us, we must seem like a remarkably stodgy species.
New Yorkers like to think of ourselves as 24/7. In fact, as a species we are even busier — and certainly never dormant. But there is also a constancy to us.
In the dark of winter and the light of summer, we remain more or less as we always are, a constancy so characteristic of our species that we don’t even notice it. It is useful. It is productive. But just once it would be nice to be budding out, breaking into leaf, bursting into blossom as the warmth of May approaches.

(Via The New York Times)