Korean Pig Sty

The King of Pigs (2011) is a South Korean animated drama film, directed by Yeun Sang-Ho.

The film is about violence in South Korean schools and about ways in which the male victims of middle school violence and humiliation grow up to become damaged/dysfunctional adults.

The plot revolves around two young Korean men. One is a disappointed writer and the other is a failed businessman who has murdered his wife out of anger and despair. The two meet and trace the seeds of their dysfunctionality to their days in middle school.

While the film has been compared to The Lord of the Flies, I was reminded of George Orwell's description of brutality and the prevalence of totalitarian authority in English boarding schools. Orwell makes interesting connections between the violence boys were subjected to in the name of discipline (bordering on the sadistic), and the violence the very same boys later inflicted as grown up officers of the British Empire serving abroad in British colonies.

Appropriation

Is this an "integration", "assimilation", or "appropriation"? If it's the last, then why was a similar act of cultural "appropriation" on the part of Ms. Magazine deemed all right in 1972?

Could the representation of the oppressed American housewife in terms of a bawling Kali, an iconic Hindu goddess, be a gesture of liberation?  

Kali in Chains?

Sikh Awearness?

A 2008 Kenneth Cole ad on a wall of the Rockefeller Center. The model is a Sikh (American) named Sonny Caberwal, a lawyer by profession.

Global Lit Texts

"Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom" (1984)



"Slumdog Millionaire" (2008)




Was asked to name a cultural product of recent times that is “global” (as opposed to regional and national). The Pussy Cat Doll and A.R. Rahman co-produced music video, Jai Ho—You are My Destiny, came to mind.

The video is part of the 2008 movie Slumdog Millionaire, considered to be the world’s first truly global masterpiece (I’m not too sure about that).

Richie Rich

Something tells me Richie Rich, the "poor little rich boy" couldn't have grown up to be a Mark Zuckerberg.

Richie was born rich, but he had a not-for-profit mentality.

T and I

I can't believe she did this.

She guzzled a 2 litre bottle of Welch's Grape soda in under two days.

She could've had plain, cool, tap water to quench her thirst.

Tap water? T speaks of tap water as though it were mere raw material, not edible (potable rather) till "cooked"--into ice-water, iced-tea, soda, juice.

It's too primary to be had.

Yet, once upon a time, I did reach out simply to the water flowing from the tap and either filled a tumbler, or the cup of her hand.

T would shudder at the vision of the latter.

T and I: Lessons in Okra

Some veggies are best had frozen than fresh.

Okra is one of them.

T and I cooked okra today. The okra was bought from a nearby farmer's market. No sooner than the slime began to ooze from the okra I thought of Ellen Ripley'r nemesis in Aliens.

T said that American okra is best bought frozen, if the intention is to convert it into an Indian dish.

'Tis no wonder that Paula Deen's recommends the frozen variety in her okra and tomato recipe.

T and I

Eating on a fiery hot day like today isn't just eating, it's like eating fire itself.

Imagine cooking--on fire--on such a day as was today then. Today was a hot day in the city. And T and I bravely cooked in a kitchen which faces the sun.

The heat and the light poured into the kitchen as T cooked. T cooked three dishes, a deliciously dried chicken preparation, a noodle with cabbage and onion, and an onionated-okra.

 

T and I

T and I eat well.

T and I Difference #1

T likes the products.

I is interested in the process.

T has a keen eye for products and can with lightening speed and accuracy differentiate between a good quality product and a not-so-good one.

I can tell a really bad product apart. But I can't tell the shades of grey.

But I can see a process unfolding before her eyes, especially when the process is that of "life".

T sees "life" as a product.

So T doesn't like the present. She likes the past. The past is a formed product that you can see. She likes to leap into a future. The future too is a formed product, a replication of the past.

The present evanesces right under T's nose.

I has learnt to look at the past as a different country.

Migration is a constant.

T and I: Cosmopolitans

T and I are big on identity.

"Who am I?" T asks frequently, with a sweet pout of wonderment.

When T asks such primal-identity questions, I gets transported to a Kim-ish world.

Kim, as in Rudyard Kipling's Kim, born of Irish parents in British India, is orphaned at a young age and makes a living as a vagabond-beggar on the streets of Lahore, in undivided India. He is a white boy in Indian clothing, who speaks street-Hindi.

Kim's Irishness remains occluded till the end, when it's unveiled--to show him as a white, who has only momentarily been in identity-exile.

Post-revelation, Kim gets confused about his identity; looking up to the sky that looks down on Grand Trunk road, he asks, "Who am I?"

T isn't confused about her identity in the least bit. She knows who she is--a cosmopolitan.

When I met T, I liked the idea of a cosmopolitan; by default T got liked by I (one of the reasons behind I liking T).

T says she is a cosmopolitan because she is all worlds at once; T has traveled profusely, and has a bit of the Asian, the European, the American and even the Russian in her.

T varies between saying she is eclectic and she is a cosmopolitan.

T says cosmopolitan is interchangeable with sophistication. A cosmopolitan, she says, is bound to be a sophisticated human.

I says cosmopolitan means having primary allegiance to the planet at large, to all humanity, to their weal, and looking at the world with unprejudiced eyes.

I aspired to be a cosmopolitan for she had a hunch that cosmopolitan is a sneaky version of western.

For Indians to be cosmopolitans they had to first westernize themselves.

Was the fact of T and I's Indian identity just let out?

Doesn't matter, really, for neither I nor T know how to be an Indian.

T and I are cosmopolitan.

T is westernized in a particular way: she speaks American English with an impeccable American accent. Americans mistake her to be one of their own. Indians hear her as their Other.

T is a liminal.

What's I?  

Michael Chabon's dreams

I hate dreams. Dreams are the Sea Monkeys of consciousness: in the back pages of sleep they promise us teeming submarine palaces but leave us, on waking, with a hermetic residue of freeze-dried dust.

Wish I could express the chasm I experience between my dreams and my waking hours this well.

Character

Recently I read somewhere that "personality" triumphs over "character" today.

"We’ve moved from a culture of character to a culture of personality. The etymology of the word character is that it’s deeply etched, not changeable in all sorts of circumstances", says James Davison Hunter, in The Death of Character.


I'm not sure what "personality" is, but my guess is that it is something more fickle than "character". It gives us the power to personalize our ideals and put it in words to suit a variety of contexts.

It is no wonder then that I'm unable to write a "bio" of myself when asked to. "Bios" of today are about personalities and not character.

I have a character which I act out everyday, but it can't be form-fitted into a "bio".

T & I: An Introduction

My series, T & I is an attempt at representing I's life and adventures with T (and vice versa).

I and T are friends. I don't want to nail their relationship to the cross of a name, but would rather just say that it evolves in whichever way it wants to at given points in time.

The title is inspired by Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical The King and I. "I" is Anna, a 19th century British widow, who travels to the British colony of Siam to be a governess to the children and the many wives of the Siamese king.

The adventures are narrated by Anna and is thus tinged with a bit of subjectivity--it is Anna who tells the tales and "sees"/judges the King; the King, along with the Siamese in general, don't have much agency over how they are perceived.

The relationship between Anna and the King is asymmetrical in many ways, especially in the realm of power, race and gender, but it evolves in a linear and predictable direction, into a relationship of love--the king falls in love with Anna, and improbably, Anna reciprocates.

The King and "I" were lovers.

T and I are not. Neither is the relationship between T and I grounded in any kind of asymmetricity.

Both T and I are women, though both T and I are not women in the conventional sense of the term.

There is very little about I and T that could be dubbed "conventional".

Anna and the King are as conventional as white paint on a wall.

Anna and the Siamese King are profoundly dissimilar.

What can a 19th century white woman hailing from the British professional class (Anna's husband was an Imperial bureaucrat) have in common with a patriarchal, polygamous, tyrannical member of the Thai aristocracy?

Yet even more profoundly they were similar--Anna in her subordination to global patriarchy, and the King in his role as sovereign of subordinate nation, were like two peas in a pod of absolute subordination.

It's the subordination, I believe, that bound Anna and the King.

T and I are likewise very different--as different as bitter is from sweet--and yet in fundamental ways, T and I are irrefutably alike.

The blogs that follow from time to time--intermittently, rather than with regularity--might shed light on the differences and illuminate the likeness.

Brainstorming in Jordan

Yikes!

Why did I "yike" upon reading that "brainstorming" as a mode of creative thinking is being introduced in Jordanian classrooms? Because, to begin with, I don't think highly of brainstorming, at least of the institutionalized form of it, in an American classroom setting.

Secondly, it's not that the Jordanians have discovered for themselves the virtue of brainstorming as a learning method. It's being foisted upon them, as it were, by Americans.

I'm not sure how American brainstorming will work in a Jordanian class.

Think Unlimited is an educational non-profit started by two Peace Corp workers, Shaylyn and James Garrett, whose mission is to teach creative thinking and problem solving in Jordanian classrooms.

An afterthought: The American system of K-12 education is excellent and a sophisticated scientific approach has gone into the making of it. However, it can become, at times, too rigidly dogmatic and insistent on prioritizing certain approaches to teaching above other.

"Creative" thinking has, in my opinion, settled into a dogma rather than a real, meaningful and dynamic activity in the American classroom. It's morphed into a trendy thing for teachers.

Nobody can define what it actually is, but an elite corp of decision-makers insist, like propagandists of a particular system, that it's the next best thing in learning to inventing a new alphabet.

At best, the mandate to "think creatively" simply means "be as quirky as you can."

Besides, what's wrong with a bit of rote memory as a learning method?

As a college English Professor, I tinge my ideas of effective learning with a bit of a belief in the virtue of old-fashioned memorizing and re-writing of what's been said by a culture's "best" and the "brightest" (forgive me for, not only, reverting to an Arnoldian dictum in an era of the Internet, but also mis-quoting Matt Arnold).

I believe learners can learn something valuable from a contra-brainstorming exercise now and then, especially what constitutes a "good" thought, a sentence, an idea.

Movies with quirky plots

The New York Film Forum is well-known for selecting interesting movies.

But the stories of two particular films stand out for me for being quantum-quirky:

Silent Chrysanthemum, a 1958 Japanese flick directed by Mitsudo Tanaka tells the story of Yukio, a sensitive girl from a small mountain village. She spends her time gazing out from the terrace, dreaming that her father will someday allow her into the living room. While harvesting mud for a dinner party, Yukio meets a stranger who gifts her with an enchanted form-fitted kimono that transforms her into the most beautiful woman in the world--although he warns her not to sit down, lest she cut off circulation to her brain. Hearing of her beauty Samurai come from far and wide to ogle at her. They also make obscene gestures at her with the handles of their swords. Distraught, Yukio renounces love and flees to Hokkaido, where she embarks on a successful career as a bamboo room divider.

I was left imagining as to why Yukio wasn't allowed into her father's living room. The rest I could understand, including the bit about a tight dress that can cut off circulation if stretched to the limit.

A Frolic in the Hay, is a 1956 Swedish film directed by Sven Ingersoll. The film abounds in existential questions like "How is it that the god who created love also created dandruff?" The hero is one banker, Victor Flynderhorst, who is struggling to reconcile his fear of death with his fondness for open mine shafts. He takes his three grown children in a barn, where they become so engrossed with philosophical questions that they fail to appreciate what is right in front of them--specifically, the fact that the barn is on fire. Unable to cope with the contradictions of ontology, Victor goes mad, and he spends the remainder of the film vainly chasing the English subtitles with a butterfly net.

I really like the question posed above--sears the fact of god's ability to create both the abstractedly beautiful and the tangibly common--in an eloquent sentence!

Haven't seen any of these films, so if you ask me how I came to know of the stories, the answer lies here.

Little Dot

Little Dot was Little Lotta's best friend.

At that time--of my childhood, when I blindly devoured Little Lotta and Little Dot comics--I had no clue that Little Dot's unique characteristic was her obsession with dots. She lived in a veritable Dotland, and saw dots in everything.

Why have children's comic books stopped producing such quirky kids? I'm tired of kid-hero's who are endowed with super powers and are pious embodiments of the forces of "good"--slaying all sorts of "evil".

Come back Little Dot!

Wither Little Lotta?

I was reviving my memories of some my childhood comic heroines/heroes. Little Lotta came to mind.

I used to love the adventures of Little Lotta and am wondering how the chubby little darling who enjoyed food--regular American food--would be perceived today. Would she be shunned as the white Precious of our era?

Would she have to undergo some major gastric-bypass surgery to be fit for the role of children's comic icon today?

Is marriage hegemonic?

"[Marriage] is kind of a lovely thing and a cool thing and a wonderful thing."

So said Paul Singer, a billionaire hedge fund manager and a major donor for the Republican party.

Frank Bruni quotes him to argue that even among the Republicans a pro-same-sex marriage stance is gaining traction.

But what catches my attention is the mindlessness in the rapture. For those for whom it works, marriage is "cool", "lovely", and "wonderful".

But for some, marriage could be a singularly unlovely institution. What should they do? Lament about being "losers"?

No; instead of measuring the success or lack thereof of happiness in their lives through the lens of the success of marriages, they could revel in divorce.

Wendy Paris for instance, does that. Paris writes of her unhappy experience of the institution of marriage. During the time she was married to her husband, whom she deeply loved, she could never find happiness with him, in the sense that they never seemed to see eye to eye on anything.

They were trying to be "married" rather than happy on their own, free-of-social-convention terms.

No sooner than they started talking divorce, happiness and agreement returned into their lives, as did the spirit of cooperation, like ideas on how to raise their son.

In Paris' narrative, marriage ends up, not being villainous or something to be yearned for, but just another way of living together--a specific kind of domestic arrangement, that is.

The coup of her story is what she does with divorce. Divorce is an alternative way of living happily as well; it's not seen as the monstrous, heart-wrenching opposite of marriage, but a specific way of living together and in this sense, quite like marriage

Reading Paris one thinks of marriage as a hegemonic institution that has drowned out the validity of all others, including divorce:

It takes real work to hold the nuances in your head, to remain kind and considerate, to remember why you married in the first place and still push forward to separate. As a culture, we understand that a good marriage takes work. Why not work equally hard to have a good divorce? To paraphrase the 17th-century poet John Milton in his treatise supporting divorce, a key purpose of marriage is joyful companionship; a fraught union violates the point.

Paris' relationship with her husband got better and better, solider and solider, the day the couple hatched the thought of divorce.

The biological market

The vicissitudes of the market now have a biological explanation.

John Coates, a former derivatives trader who retrained himself as a physiologist and neuroscientist, connects the disparate realms of economics and human physiology. He says:

Under circumstances of outrageous success or terrifying failure, our biology can overreact; and when this happens to traders and investors, they suffer an irrational exuberance or pessimism that can destabilize financial markets and wreak havoc on the wider economy.

The "molecule of irrational exuberance" that flood the bloodstream and brains of traders poised to make the proverbial kill (the winning trade) is testosterone, while that of irrational pessimism is the stress hormone cortisol. Under the influence of a high level of testosterone a normally prudent trader can morph into an inexplicable risk-taker. Likewise, cortisol drives traders into a mode of risk-aversion, and in the process, a bear market into a crash.

If human biology effects the market thus, then to ensure greater stability in the market a biological strategy ought to be implemented:

One way to do that would be to encourage a more even balance within banks among men and women, young and old. Women and older men have a fraction of the testosterone of young men, so if more of them managed money, we could perhaps stabilize the markets. We could also look to sports scientists for guidance, for they are the ones with the most skill at managing biology in the interests of performance, at developing a resilience to exuberance, fatigue and stress.

First it was technology, whose ability to change the ecology of the human brain was fiercely argued by Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows. Then neuroscience invaded literary studies, as professors of literature scribbled into contention a connection between cognitive science and literature.

Finally it's the market! The human brain has never been so valorized without being traded on NASDAQ.

Facebook or "FaceBOO!!"?

To be sure, Facebook, Twitter and blogging are truly revolutionary tools of communication and expression that have brought so many new and compelling voices to light. At their best, they're changing the nature of political communication and news. But at their worst, they can become addictive substitutes for real action. How often have you heard lately: "Oh, I tweeted about that." Or "I posted that on my Facebook page." Really? In most cases, that's about as impactful as firing a mortar into the Milky Way galaxy. Unless you get out of Facebook and into someone's face, you have  not acted. And, as Syria's vicious regime is also reminding us: "bang-bang" beats "tweet-tweet" every day of the week.

Tom Friedman echoes a sentiment--about the limits of a "Facebook/Twitter"-based political action-- that had been expressed by Malcolm Gladwell a while ago.

Friedman writes of how the Facebook-inspired Arab Spring fizzled out into a winter of futility and chaos and the protestors who organized the exit of President Hosni Mubarak, could not rally around a single viable candidate for the presidential elections in Egypt. The two candidates--Mohamed Morsi Ahmed Shafiq, of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Mubarak regime--are vestiges of the old order, not a break from it.

Seems like Facebook politics cannot compete with the proven effectiveness of real, "brick and mortar" politics.

But to bemoan the failure of Facebook and Twitter to bring about durable, structural change, is as pointless as raising it to the stature of something more than what it is--mere conduits of (human) communication.

Didn't Karl Marx say "base" and "superstructure?" Where real action is concerned, Social Media is neither base nor superstructure, but a super(fluous)structure without which society won't wobble.

According to John Irving

I get up early. I like to read a little before anyone but the dog is up. I also like to read at night, not in bed but just before I go to bed. I don’t read anything electronically. I don’t write electronically, either — except e-mails to my family and friends. I write in longhand. I have always written first drafts by hand, but I used to write subsequent drafts and insert pages on a typewriter. Now (for the last two books) I write all my drafts by hand. It’s the right speed for me — slow.

Veteran novelist John Irving's response upon being asked where, when and how he likes to read and whether he prefers to read/write electronically.

Yet another question--what category of literary work he likes most--begets an Irvingesque response:

I hate the certainty with which literary works are categorized into one or another “genre”; this tempts me to say that my “favorite” genre is something not easily categorized — such as same-sex foreplay in gardens, with dogs watching at a distance.

via the NYT

Novel

These opening lines in Richard Ford's new novel Canada, promises to deliver a read that's quietly riveting:

In the fall of 1960, when I was 16 and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him.

Dandelion wine

What can dandelions yield?

Grace and beauty of style?

The following description of Ray Bradbury's artistry seems to suggest so:

Wine from dandelions, lowly yet highly evolved, borne by the wind into the last places you’d expect to find them blooming. Exotic, yet common as the soil.

Rarely is a writer compared to a dandelion.

Feminism

Cyntia Ozick's spirited defense of the Orange Prize for fiction--a British literary award given exclusively to women who write in English, brings her to ponder on the meaning of "sexism".

But what I like best in the piece "Prize or Prejudice" is Ozick's reflection on a definition of "feminism" she had once offered:

In an essay titled “Literature and the Politics of Sex,” I once ventured a definition of feminism. “In art,” I wrote, “feminism is that idea which opposes segregation; which means to abolish mythological divisions; which declares that the imagination cannot be ‘set’ free, because it is already free. I am, as a writer, whatever I wish to become. I can think myself into a male, or a female, or a stone, or a raindrop, or a block of wood, or the leg of a mosquito. Classical feminism,” I concluded, “was conceived of as the end of false barriers and boundaries; as the end of segregationist fictions and restraints.”

What is the novel?

Definitions are limiting, but when somebody does put out one--of anything--then they also seem not so limiting, but quite inclusive.

Here is a definition of the novel, provided by William Deresiewicz:

The novel continues to do what it has always done best: compile the atlas of private experience, show us what it feels like to be alive at our particular time and place. Think of Goethe, Austen, Dostoyevsky, Proust. Fiction brings us the news of ourselves, as literature always has and always will. That’s “entertainment,” in its deepest and most satisfying form. That’s pleasure, meaning, passion, glimpses of profoundest truth, the salvation of art. “The Jungle” may have sparked reform, but I daresay “Mrs. Dalloway” has changed more people’s lives.

Stuart Smalley

I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, doggone it, people like me.


---Stuart Smalley on "Saturday Night Live" 


...there, I've been meaning to put the Smalley saying for some time now!

Lexical dark matter

Medupical

Frostitute

Killingry

Phomance

The above is a list of words that are not to be found in any dictionary, however, they are words that can be used to enhance the evocativeness of what one is trying to convey. According to Erin McKean, founder of Wordnik.com such words could be said to belong to "lexical dark matter," a realm in lexiverse that is peopled by words and expressions which remain undictionaried (un-colonized by dictionaries) till the time when there is enough evidence of their usage.

The twentieth-century inventor, Buckminster Fuller used the term "killingry" to connote an entire apparatus for killing, a product of the military industrial complex. "Killingry" is formed by analogy with the word "weaponry."

A logical antonym of "killingry", according to composer John Cage would be "livingry".

"Phomance"? It could mean an incredible romance with Vietnamese food, or, phony romance.

What could "frostitute" mean? A person who sells his flesh for frosting?

We could invent words endlessly, but McKean suggests:

I’m not advocating using or creating new words just for kicks; use of neologisms should be judicious, lest you end up sounding like a bad science-fiction novel. If your new word enhances your readers’ experience, go for it.

Does this mean that I can't use "Islandic" as a substitute for "insular"?

Wondrous excerpts

A list of excerpts from recent works of fiction and poetry:

Once upon a time there was a leper colony in Jamaica (Alice Williams, The Last Warner Woman)

The whole country is in a duel and we want no part of it (Cathy Park Hong, Engine Empire)

All that I have I carry on me (Herta Muller, Hunger Angel)

I was not allowed to have a gun (Benjamin Busch, Dust to Dust)

Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk (Alien Vs. Predator, a poetry collection)

The one clear thing I can say about Wednesday, the worst and most amazing day of my life: it started out beautifully (Rajesh Parameshwaran, I am an Executioner: Love Stories)

---noise background, My getting out or what?! Sergio De La Pava, A Naked Singularity)

For besides beaver teeth, my/love had more pocks on/his face than a watermelon//has seeds (Jane Springer, Murder Ballad, a poetry collection)

It looks like Oz (Bill Clegg, Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery)

Natural and economic disasters

Economics is everywhere. Its omnipresence is so pervasive that it "sucks".

Now, even the world's most famous, end-of-the-world terminologies, that used to have at least a quasi, if not pure, religious connotation, have been co-opted by economics.

The word "deluge", for instance, is now part of the parlance of the much publicized doomsday scenario of an imminent global economic disaster.

What would future deluges and tsunamis of currencies look like? An avalanche of currencies untethered to any nation, and hitting the shores of countries in a state of loose untetheredness, and rendering the economies of nations weaker and weaker.

Who are the Noahs? The Goldman Sachs? And whom will they take aboard their ship? the 1%?

Alternative view of poverty

"If the multigenerational poor are to make the leap out of poverty, it will require a new kind of thinking--reflection." So opined Earl Shorris, the author of the 1968 novel The Boots of the Virgin, about the antihero Sol Feldman, a Jewish bullfighter of little talent known professionally as El Sol de Michigan.

Shorris, however, is not primarily known as a fiction writer. He was a social critic who wrote tirelessly  against the tendency in Western culture to slide toward plutocracy and materialism. He advocated alleviation of poverty, not through skills-for-jobs training programs, but through the introduction of a Humanities-heavy curriculum to the poor, the unemployed, low-wage workers, ex-convicts and addicts.

Shorris is the founder of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, the core of which is overseen by Bard college these days. The curriculum offers the disadvantaged a 10-month curriculum of philosophy, history, art, literature and logic.

In 1997, while researching a book, Shorris interviewed inmates at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, in Westchester County, N.Y. He solicited opinions on why poor people were poor. An inmate told him it was because they lacked "the moral life of downtown," meaning an absence of exposure to "plays, museums, concerts, lectures."

Shorris cites this as an epiphanic moment in his life. Poverty, he argued, was an absence of reflection and beauty, not an absence of money. He compared the experience of the poor with the experience of people chained to the walls of Plato's allegorical cave (in Plato's Allegory of the Cave). Stuck in a cave, Plato's cave-dwellers see shadows on the walls, and assume that is all there is in the world.

Twitter book club

http://twitter.com/#!/1book140: Click on this and enter a book club on Twitter, which has a global following of over 66 thousand and into which, you, the prospective book club member, can pour your book-related epiphanies in 140 characters.

Jeff Howe, the founder of the club, glorified this virtual creation of his in the NYTimes Book Review last Sunday:

[It’s] not much like a book club at all, unless a book club met in a sold-out Madison Square Garden. And nobody left the meeting for a solid month. And they all nattered on endlessly about a single book. If this sounds like a virtual Babel, that’s not far from the truth. This is literary exegesis in 140-character bursts. To wit, “Structure of Sandman ser like a Dickens novel, chars coming/going, sprawling plot, serial but a whole,” Kay Cunningham, a k a @lkayc from Tennessee, writes about Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel “The Sandman,” in the truncated argot of Twitter. (“Ser,” for instance, is short for “series.”) The staccato rhythm of the tweets can, at a glance, baffle and confound. Why would anyone choose to read a book — that last respite for the thoughtful, solitary soul — with thousands of clickety-clacking strangers?

A reader responds to Howe's rhetorical question (in the following paragraphs, Howe says "It's great fun") intelligently, and I quote the letter to the Editor (in the June 2 Book Review of The NYT in full:

I've always loved the novel for providing the reader the inestimable pleasure of entering a fictional world as an escape and deliverance from the problems of real life. Why would I want to open up this exquisite private experience to millions of unknown tweeters, thus diluting and distracting from the very thing reading a book most reliably delivers? The terrifying idea proposed [by Jeff Howe] takes the fad of "sharing" to the lowest level yet.

I agree!

What else can be banned from NYC?

New York City is taking up the cudgels against Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposed ban on the sale of large sugary drinks at restaurants and other places in the city.

The NYTimes solicited the following suggestions from readers: What substances, practices, and persons would they wish to see banned from the city's public spaces, if they had Bloomberg's executive powers. I have highlighted the one's that I would like to be prohibited as well

The list is here:

Car alarms

Crocs

Bad pizza

Lower back tattoos on women

Unemployment

Passing gas on the subway

Pedestrians with umbrellas that are wider than they are tall

Sidewalk preachers

Fedoras

Applying makeup while driving

Lax oversight of expensive city contracts

Movie ads, in subways and on billboards, that prominently feature guns

Investing city pension assets in the secondary security market

Using the East Side Heliport on weekends

Horseback riding

Republicans

Democrats

Children

Dogs

James Dolan

Kenny G.

Patchouli

Psychics

Eating, if you’re fat

Not eating, if you’re skinny

Plastic shopping bags

Cell yell

Traffic enforcement agents’ cars blocking traffic to write tickets

Cheap plastic fluorescent backlit signs

Killing animals in shelters

Lethal ammunition in the firearms of police officers on patrol

Scam sexual enhancement pills at bodega checkouts

Cab drivers asking you what route you want to take and then debating your choice

Waiters and waitresses sharing their personal feelings about chosen menu items

Ugly doors on architecturally significant schools and public buildings

Public nose picking

Jorts

Ketchup at hot-dog stands

Handbags designed to carry dogs

Stopping to converse in the middle of a busy sidewalk

Transit officials who don’t depend on public transportation enacting route changes and fare hikes

Anyone the mayor met at a cocktail party from running a city agency

Sitting in the window of Starbucks with a laptop, headphones and wearing sunglasses during normal, weekday business hours.

Yankees caps in the colors of other teams

Bottled water

Telemarketing calls to cellphones.

Storefront teeth-whitening shops

Grocery store fliers

Sealed windows in office buildings

Motorcycles without mufflers

Large restaurant entrees

Fat shoelaces

Unprovable statistics

Strollers on public transit

Seventh grade

Sex

Fish with bones in them

Getting old

Poverty

Sarcasm

After-shave

News conferences

Stupid laws

Self-financing of campaigns for public office

Doughnuts

Third terms for mayors

Fate

A cluster of sentences that sum up what "life" is in Lorrie Moore's short fiction, Referential:

Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindness and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected twist in the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same way, regardless.Tenderness did not enter into it, except in a damaged way.

Fairy tales become grimmer

The trend--to recast old (timeless, rather) fairy tales into a contemporary mold--fascinates me.

In recent years, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and now, Snow White has been remade into three unique, and going by my personal experience of having seeing Red Riding Hood (she is "little" no more), eminently watchable films.

Snow White and the Huntsman reverses the assassin into the protector as the evil queen's hit man ends up becoming Snow's bodyguard. In Red Riding, the woodsman is also Red's lover and undergoes significant personal sacrifice, including giving up his human identity (he becomes the wolf he is appointed to slay) just so he can be her life-long lover during the day and protector at night.

The 21st century Sleeping Beauty undertakes to participate in a game of self-induced sleep, just so she can eke out a living and pay for college tuition. Beauty is bored with life and offers to put up her young body, if not for sale, then at least for voyeuristic pleasure of her clientele of ageing, wealthy males, who as the saying goes, cannot "get it up" anymore.

What binds the films together is the fact that none of the fairy tales are "fairy-like." They take us back to the older, bleaker moral and physical landscape of the original Grimms Brothers' tales. As A.O. Scott observes in his review of Snow White, these tales were told to scare children into sleep and/or submission, whereas Disney converted them into vehicles of consolation. The chocolate-velvet textures were Disney re-inventions.  

The darker sides of fairy tales have been suppressed by the lightening-up Disney machinery. Now its time for the darker side to come into full-fledged light.

The Internet cometh

The Spoiler by veteran British journalist Annalena McAfee is  a novel set in a London newsroom at the brink of the digital age.

A plot synopsis (peppered with mild judgement) from The New Yorker:

The plot consists of two tales of humiliation. Honor Tait, a war correspondent has been reduced to writing about her declining health--"the wearisome naming and shaming of parts." Her journalistic opposite is Tamara Sim, a tabloid hack who is stuck writing articles with titles like "Top-Ten TV Bad Hair Days." When Sim lands a prestigious assignment to profile Tait for a literary magazine, their paths cross, to disastrous effects for both. 

The novel does a novel turn on the usual "digital dystoipia" generated anxiety: Instead of feeding the anxiety further, she questions its premise and author pillories journalists for their mindless droning on about the "end" of journalism as we know it.

A review of the novel is available here.