A modest proposal: avoid homosexuals

In 1729 Jonathan Swift composed a satirical essay in the Juvenalian vein. It was called A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick.

Swift lashed out against the prevalent Irish policy that led to impoverishment, starvation and famine in the British colony of Ireland. But the lashing out was veiled in heavy sarcasm; cannibalism--a suggestion that the Irish eat their children so they didn't have to feed them--was the Swiftian solution to the problem of poverty in Ireland.

The video entitled The Homosexual Menace is in the Swiftian mode. An egghead of a viewer might just not get the satire and might literally take the video to be an attack on homosexuality.

I had thought that the Swiftian satire was dead. Good to know that it's alive and well.

How to write?

Revision, writes novelist Colson Whitehead, is a cardinal rule of the art of writing:

Revision is when you do what you should have done the first time, but didn’t. It’s like washing the dishes two days later instead of right after you finish eating.

Just as days-old unwashed dishes could get encrusted with food-residue, something that you want to revise out of contention, could stubbornly leach back into your writing. But as the graphic above shows, you can always see the progression from the "I didn't want this" to "yes, this is what I want to say!"

On the whole Whitehead writes a mighty engaging set of rules. I really took to "rule #9":

Have adventures. The Hemingway mode was in ascendancy for decades before it was eclipsed by trendy fabulist “exercises.” The pendulum is swinging back, though, and it’s going to knock these effete eggheads right out of their Aeron chairs. Keep ahead of the curve. Get out and see the world. It’s not going to kill you to butch it up a tad. Book passage on a tramp steamer. Rustle up some dysentery; it’s worth it for the fever dreams alone. Lose a kidney in a knife fight. You’ll be glad you did.

I always wonder about the discrepancy between the books that people write and the lives that they live. Take for instance E.L. James, the scribe that produced the bestselling trilogy of the grey shades of kinky sex.

Take a look at her photograph--yes, she is an amply endowed female with a British face. She must be one of the "effete eggheads" who cut pasted sex-descriptors from the entire oeuvre of western erotica, ranging from the classic to the moronic.

Wonder if the writing would have been less reviled had it come from James' direct experience of and participation in the adventures of sadomasochism/violent sex.

The isles of wonder

There is a strong Shakespearean subtext to the London Olympics opening ceremony.

The ceremonies are on for tonight, Friday, July 27. Famed British film director, Danny Boyle, has "directed" the ceremonies, and it's thus no wonder that the title of the show is "The Isles of Wonder."

I mean, Boyle is known for championing the underdog in his movies; remember Slumdog Millionaire? "The Isles of Wonder" is inspired, as Boyle has said, by a speech made by Britain's very own Shakespearean slumdog, Caliban.

In one of Shakespeare's later plays, The Tempest, Caliban, is a "savage". But he is also the rightful heir to the island, which, has been occupied by Prospero, an outsider from "civilized" Europe.

Prospero has cast Caliban into servitude, and it is in one of his slavish moments of reflection that Caliban says the following about the "Isles":

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. 

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; 

and sometime voices That, if I then had waked after long sleep, 

Will make me sleep again; 

and then in dreaming, 

The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me, 

that when I waked I cried to dream again.

Caliban here refers to magic that Prospero uses to keep the island in his control. Caliban is a recalcitrant fellow who won't be subdued through civilization, so Prospero keeps him spell-bound.

Prospero rules through the spectacle of magic. As Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, an English Professor at Kenyon College, notes, British monarchs, whether fictional or real, have traditionally used the power of spectacle to establish hegemony over the isles especially during times of tension and trouble.

The opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics promises to be an extravagant spectacle with a budget surpassing a billion or so pounds. And Britain is currently in social and economic trouble with extreme budget cuts in essential services, unemployment and tears in the social fabric of the nation. So a spectacle might serve the purpose of projecting unity. Lobanov-Rostovsky notes:

The British can no longer conquer the world with yeomen’s cries of “God for Harry! England and Saint George!” but the world still tunes in to watch their spectacles with fascination. And more important, so do the British. These spectacles allow them to regain their composure after a season of bad news, but also to compose themselves as the Great Britain we know so well, turning the well-worn face of majesty to the world once more.

The cavemen cometh: return of fortitude

As I was reading about a new lifestyle called the "cavemen" lifestyle, I was reminded slightly of Chuck Palhaniuk's The Fight Club.

In The Fight Club we see white-collar, city men, emasculated by a lifestyle that's marked by over-consumption and blind dedication to convenience, reverting to a paleolithic form of manhood.

Men belonging to the managerial and entrepreneurial class are shown huddled inside a dingy, underground, club.

Their objective is to fight one another with their bare fists and bodies, without the mediation of any technology, not even a head or a chest guard or a pair of boxing gloves.

There are no winners or losers, but just pulped up males who don't whimper under the assault because that's how the manly man is shaped--through enduring pain, instead of crying "mommy" at the slightest inconvenience.

The goal was to restore to emasculated men their masculinity which, as the fantasy figure of Tyler Durden claims, has been sacrificed at the altar of "credit cards" and "technology".

The Fight Club was more or less a masculine take on civilization and its discontents.

But what did the fight clubbers eat?

We don't know. What they dispense with are bottles of expensive, gourmet condiments that line their refrigerator shelves.

A new breed of "cavemen" focus less on masculinity, aggression and ludditism and more on food and exercise.

They argue that the human body is adapted to the conditions of the hunter-gatherer societies of the pleistocene. In other words, our bodies are meant to consume food bordering on the raw and the unprocessed, and to activities like walking, running, sprinting and lifting.

Many of the modern day physical and mental maladies happen on account of an unnatural swerving away of our life styles from that which is natural.

The goal of the neo-Paleolithic is to build "fortitude". In the process of building fortitude, the cavemen gain in muscle, leanness and mental peace.

Most of the cavemen make a living from Internet-based professions, while some like Nassim Taleb are in finance.

Their typical diet consist of raw meat or meat from grass-fed animals, some fruit, now and then, avoidance of bread. Their typical exercise consists of hard-core, non-fancy body building with iron balls, rough dumbells and heavy stones, among other implements.

Then they walk a lot. Taleb, who lives in New York City, avoids office-spaces and does his work while walking, often from the Village to Harlem.

They also fast. Some go without food for 36 hours, exercise on an empty stomach and have one large meal every two days or so.

Cavemen insist that the Paleolithic lifestyle, especially their dietary habits are worth emulating because scientific evidence shows that P-men had stronger bodies and better skin. Scientists say this is true--P-men were far fitter than their modern counterparts, but they also had shorter life-spans.

Unlike the members of the fight club, city-based cavemen are not nostalgic about the Paleolithic era, but would like to adopt the Paleolithic diet and mental strength to survive the demands of modern-day living.

The Paleolithic fortitude is what is much sought after.

All this impresses me, but there's something missing in the picture--the women! Where do the women fit in in this hunt for the Paleolithic?

T and I: likes/dislikes

T often queries I, "What is it that you like?"

The assumption is that a person is defined by what she likes. You see so many pretty and cozy websites--little virtual homes--in which people define who they are through a list of things they like or are "inspired" by.

The idea is to help viewers/visitors capture the essence of the person at a glance.

T has a strong virtual presence and everywhere T has a footprint, you will find the footprints to be strong. for framed they are by a list of things that T is or likes.

It's easy for the likes of T to state their likes. For the likes of T have a finite number of likes. You see, the likes of T are the discerning types. They like very precise and distinct things.

It's not that easy for the likes of I to state their likes. The likes of I like an infinite number and variety of things and the liking is often dependent on the particularities of the context in which I encounters what she sees, feels, hears, reads, smells, listens etc (there are exceptions: If I smells foul odor, she dislikes it regardless of context).

But there are a finite number of things that I dislikes: I dislikes mint, dark chocolate, dark chocolate pizza (the one served by Bald Man on Broadway), licorice (and by default aniseed), asafoetida.

Sylvia Plath: and she drew too...

Having recently taught poetry by Sylvia Plath as part of a college course on poetry, I take an inordinate interest in the poetess and was delighted to discover a cache of her ink sketches here.

The cat does look curious. Maybe it's a French attribute--to be curious--that afflicts the feline population of France as well!

World Literature according to Pico Iyer

I like Pico Iyer's description of the advent of the "world" into the Anglo-American literary horizon:

It was as if all the doors and windows of a stuffy Havisham house [traditional Brit lit] had suddenly been thrown open, to admit new sounds, strange spices, tropical colors, new histories and even new ways of telling history: new writers emerging for a new world and a new kind of reader. A generation later, it seems we are witnessing the same thing in American literature. So "world fiction" has joined world music and fusion cuisine as a radically new and liberating feature of our all-over-the-place age of movement and cross-cultural collision and collusion. And these writers from everywhere are not just chronicling, but actively charting, the America of tomorrow. 

Chair man

E.B. White, American essayist par excellence and creator of Charlotte's Web, owned a hundred-and-seventeen chairs at one point in his life. When he decided to move to Maine (from New York City) in 1938, White sold off half of his chairs. It was part of his goal to simplify his life.

T and I: Cooking

T loves cooking. But those who simply love can't always be makers of what they love.

T is an excellent maker of food, not just a passive purveyor of it.

Let's say T's excellence as a cook comes from her investing a passionate interest in the process of it.

It all begins with step one--of germinating recipe-ideas. When T isn't hatching her own eggs, she is busy curating them. 

T garners recipes from diverse sources, ranging from Food Network shows, to the Internet, to her private memories of what her mother did during her days as a kitchen goddess.

Her goal is not simply to follow the recipes with a clerk-like fidelity to copying, but to interpret them in her own way.

In cooking, T is an interpreter, a transformer.

I, on the other hand, passively consumes the palate-pleasing palaces that T creates--not in the air, but inside the oh-so-solid universe of the oven and the skillet. It's not that I cannot cook; I can cook, but I can only cook what she already knows how to cook.

Cooking is not an activity in which I takes as much of a passionate interest as T does.

T is irked by I's disinterested approach to cooking. She tells I that the interest can be generated; T's belief is that an interest has to be cultivated, as nobody can be innately passionate about anything.

I sees the point. But howsoever much she tries, she just cannot seem to cultivate a passion about cooking.

To I The Food Network divas liquefy into gormandizing fat ladies.

T gallantly tries to encourage I in myriad ways. From pop quizzing ("So how would you make the tahini?" T would ask after she has interpreted a pre-existing tahini-recipe in her unique way) to memory-raking ("How did you make the pasta?" T would ask with an "Indian" prefix: Indians boil the pasta T says and then pours the Red Ragu on it--straight off the bottle. I feels considerably anachronistic), to cajoling ("I will be making a gigot d'agneau or a filet de boeuf sauce bearnaise, this weekend, what will you be making?" T queries I whose French doesn't exceed au revoir), she has tried everything in her book to break I's passivity.

But to no avail.

Imperial Mother

A few years ago I had considered writing a short novel entitled "Imperial Mother."

While I never got around to the writing, I have given deep thought to the title.

At a glance it would seem like the title leads to a story of an uber maternal figure that has an imperial disposition. The word "imperial" connotes domination, power, control, rule, and subordination. Thus a mother who is imperial is all these things combined into one.

Yet, I had never contemplated writing a novel about an imperiously-inclined mother. I had thought of the word "imperial" less as a system that dominates and more as an influence that is molding and shaping. At that time, the category of the mother had popped into my head as the best example of an influence that is "imperial".

All parents, I believe, operate as mini-imperial systems in the lives of their children. The parental hegemony is undeniable. But if you happen to be a daughter, rather than a son, then the parent that you might end up being more hegemonized by is your mother than your father. A father rules by example, teaching you this and that in an effort to make the best out of you, but a mother just inheres in you. A father, you would occasionally emulate, or worship even, but you end up internalizing your mommy.

One day, as adult, you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mental mirror and exclaim in mock-horror, "OMG (optional) I've become my mother!"

So when I had conceived the idea of penning a novel called "Imperial Mother" I had penciled in into the list of characters, daughters and mothers (who are, in turn, daughters of their mothers) who live different lives but end up  "becoming" one another in amusing ways.

"Imperial Mother", still churning in my head as a possibility.

One shade of chrome yellow (color of shit)

When it comes to erotic writing, the more explicit it gets – the more heaving, the more panting – the more I want to laugh. Erotic writing is said to have a noble pedigree: the goings-on in Ovid, the whipping in Sade, the bare-arsed wrestling in Lawrence, the garter-snapping in Anaïs Nin, the wife-swapping in Updike, the arcs of semen hither and yon. But it’s so much sexier when people don’t have sex on the page. 

So says Andrew O'Hagan in exposing the inferior quality of erotica in E.L. James' blockbuster, Fifty Shades of Grey.

So how does such shitty stuff sell so much? For one, shit does sell, as evidenced by the huge success of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. Secondly, shit sells because a majority of shit-buyers do not have the discerning and experienced reader's ability to call a shit a shit. 

Symbolic Complex

As I Read about The Society of Saint John the Evangelist monastery in Cambridge, Mass. I was reminded of something Walker Percy said about places and how they are constructed in the seer's mind prior to the actual experience of seeing. 

Percy cites the instance of a typical tourist's experience of seeing the Grand Canyon (in an essay, "Loss of the Creature"). 

Before alighting upon the physical Canyon, the tourist typically has read and absorbed varieties of written and visual representations of the place. 

Thus, when she sees the Canyon with her own eyes, she is unable to have an unmediated/authentic experience. She is either disappointed with the real Canyon because it can't measure up to a preexisting image of it in her mind, or she is elated but the elation is equally mediated by the preexisting hype surrounding the Canyon. 

Percy says that a sightseer is inevitably unable to appreciate the Grand Canyon on its own merit. One sees haplessly through the lens of a "symbolic complex".

The Cambridge monastery isn't as iconic as the Grand Canyon, but as I read its representation I feel like I'm slipping into the symbolic complex already. It's as if the monastery is being slowly but surely branded in my mind as a particular place with a particular selling point.

The specific selling point of the Cambridge monastery is its promise of silence. Described as a "refuge silent enough to hear God's whisper," the monastery is then hyped into an extended embodiment of this alluring silence, a sort of silence which becomes a pricey commodity because it is in short supply in this world.

Situated in the bastion of "secular modernity" of Harvard and M.I.T. the monastery's coordinates are exceptional. Doubly exceptional is its ability to separate the visitor from the secular chatter while she is in the eye of that chatter:

People are drowning in words and drowning in information,” [said Brother Geoffrey Tristram, 58, the superior of the monastery’s order, who used to lead a congregation as a priest] [...] “Words are bombarding us from every side — to buy things, to believe things, to subscribe to things. We are trying to build a place to be still and silent. So many voices around us are shouting. God tends not to shout.

The monastery attunes one to God's voice which is the voice within.

An image of the place has already been implanted firmly in my mind, such that if and when I visit the monastery, I will be expecting to experience this cardinal silence that the monastery has morphed into in my mind's eye. 

By the way, to be able to consume this rare form of silence, one would have to dish out a $100 per night. 

Sentences...

There is a rumor that Condoleeza Rice could be Mitt Romney's vice-presidential nominee. Rice denies this and says she doesn't want to re-enter politics. But as the NYTimes reports, "a barnburner of a speech" Rice gave to Romney's donors a few weeks ago, "apparently created a boomlet of support for her potential candidacy."

As I extrapolate from the report I see the following: "A barnburner of a speech creates a boomlet of support." Alliteration in politics! The English language in connection with politics is going places. Orwell would've been happy. 

Intertextual humor

In The Amazing Spider-Man there is this moment. Spider-Man Peter warns the city mayor that the city is threatened by a predatory lizard (the villain in the movie is half human and half lizard).

The mayor looks at Peter incredulously, and says, "Who do you think I am? The mayor of Tokyo?"

A moment of intertextual humor; the joke is lost on those who aren't familiar with the Japanese monster movie mania. 

However there is more: I am familiar with Japanese monster movies, but I wouldn't be aware of the humor if I didn't catch a glimpse of the same in a scene from Persepolis.

In Persepolis, young Marjane and her grandmother go to a movie theater in Tehran to see Godzilla. Tehran at this time is being bombed by Iraqi warplanes. There is mayhem on screen and real mayhem off screen, outside.

When they walk out of the movie, the grandmother, unimpressed by the celluloid mayhem tells her granddaughter about the "Japanese" and their "crazy" love for mindless monstrosities."

That's when I caught on to the joke--a joke at the expense of a part of Japanese cultural preferences.

Expressions...

Pimping a scrawny ethics to justify the significance?

Show don't tell

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know of grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object being photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in you mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture Nota bene: It tells you. You don’t tell it.

Joan Didion, "Why I Write"

Expressions

I like expressions, and whenever I see one that's thoughtful, I try to jot it down.

I think it is novel, expression wise, to describe ageing in terms other than those which directly implicate the subject--whose age one is discussing--in physical decline.

How about being "lavishly cobwebbed with time?" Movie critic Anthony Lane, known for his writing excellence, uses the expression to categorize movie-goers into two groups: males who are in their twenties, "of unvarnished social aptitude," and males who have been marked by the "cobwebs" of time. While the former group would adore the latest Spidey flick, the latter are most likely to turn away from it.

The visual is remarkable--it's precisely referential in that Spidey's face is lavishly cobwebbed with time, yet ironically, Spidey would appeal to those whose visages are free of time's cobwebs.

A new kind of travel

Innovation is everywhere, and why should the tourism industry be spared the ravages of innovation?

A new kind of tourism is said to be blossoming, especially in New York City, and it's called "immersion" or "experiential travel."

Does this mean that traditional tourism was non-experiential? Not quite; perhaps it was a bit fake in the sense that tourists would prefer to tour a place in the conventional way of putting up in a hotel and doing the recommended sight seeing. The experience could've been a faux experience in the way in which David Brooks describes a typical African Safari to be faux.

Writing about the time when he took his son to an African safari, Brooks reflects on how the American teen chose to live in a ramshackle camp under the guidance of a wise tribal chief, instead of living in a Holiday Inn or a Hyatt Regency hotel. Brooks had argued that experientially speaking there is nothing "really African" about living in a comfortable hotel; to experience a new place is to be prepared to be unhinged from comfort. Comfort and convenience can be bought with money, but experience is priceless and extreme inconvenience is part of it.

In a nutshell Brooks junior was able to experience a real African Safari, not one mediated by an English-speaking guide.

Experiential travel is somewhat along similar lines:

[It] implicitly shuns sightseeing as bourgeoisie pillage [...] and is meant to sink you deep into whatever world you are visiting, pushing a vacation toward anthropology. [...] The experiential traveler does not arrive at Kennedy Airport and immediately go shopping on upper Madison Avenue. She takes a drawing class; she rides the Lexington Avenue line at rush hour, she embeds, and presumably returns to Brussells or Seattle with an impressively nuanced understanding of the differences in commercial enterprise between Fifth Avenue and Broadway in the 20s.  

And the new habitation of choice for experiential travelers is the typical New Yorker's home.

Now I was thinking of inviting Scandinavians to truly experience an immersion in the outer boroughs of the city, not just Manhattan. I am thinking of the Bronx. As I speak, I visualize a Swedish immersion in the Bronx.

T and I: Dill

A lot of planning goes into the making of food in the house of T and I.

T does most of the conceptualizing, the preparation, the choosing, and the final execution.

I does the grunt work, like the fetching of the materials, the chopping, the washing, etc.

Today, T planned a salmon in a lush bed of dill. The dill has been fascinating T for a while. She had heard of it yet had never had it. T had been questing for dill for some time.

I had frequented the local market in search of dill, but the dill had proved to be elusive. The disappointment on T's face had been vivid. Or, you could say, her face had been livid with disappointment.

On July 6, I had nailed the dill! A bunch of dill was bought and stored in the refrigerator. This morning, the dill was chopped; T had watched a video on You Tube to make sure that the dill was chopped the right way.

Ah the fragrance of the dill--dill-icious! The dill smells truly grand, and the apartment is now bathed in scented oil-like fragrance.

T and I can't wait to savor the food tonight...

Japan and the Bronx

The Harajuku Barbie has had a truly global trajectory, if by global we mean a process that is highly non-linear, a random coalescing of cultural fragments that are essentially trans-identarian (transcends the traditional notions of identity and nation).

The Harajuku Barbie is the invention of the Bronx's very own Nicki Minaj, the hip-hop phenom who is also a pioneer in that she is about the only female hip-hop star on the horizon.

Harajuku is indeed a city in Japan but they don't have a particular Barbie from there. The Japanese doll, that looks like an anime, is Minaj's alter ego in her videos.

The inspiration for the Harajuku Barbie is not got from Harajuku but from Gwen Stefani who was notorious for using fake Japanese "Harajuku girls" as background dancers.

Now Matell has a real Harajuku Barbie; each piece sells for $1000.

Fragmenting Marx

Karl Marx, misunderstood in America, as the founder of Communism, is the bette noire of Capitalism.

Yet Marxian observations free-float everywhere in such fragmented forms that often they cannot be traced back to the originator.

The Marxian idiom, "All that is solid melts...all that is sacred is profaned...", like Mona Lisa, continues to be wrenched from its context and used to explain things that have little to do with the process of history.

Author Flannery O' Connor had said something like "in capitalism everything that rises must converge."

In his observation on the direction that the Bronx-born hip-hop has taken in recent times, Brent Staples co opts Marx via O'Connor to explain that operating within the ideology of capitalism, hip-hop has now converged with pop thereby losing its edginess.

T and I: Founders

Of late T has taken to expressing a new kind of ambition.

She says she wants to be a founder.

I has never thought of becoming a founder, but she likes the idea, in the abstract at least.

Both T and I look up people's biographies online--you know, those catchy little bios that tell the world in a nutshell what she/he is about? T calls this self-branding.

T loves to stroll through web pages and her personal hot spot is "About Me." Large number of bios on an "About Me" page have the word "founder" in it.

"X, Y, Z is a horticulturalist, mother, writer, star-gazer, amateur boxer and the founder and CEO of boxmein.com..."

T and I have concluded that not all selves can be worthy of being branded. In an Orwellian mode, all selves are equally brandable, but some selves are more equally brandable than others because they are founders.

Slipping into  a Bronx lingo (which both T and I love, and which T can reproduce with accuracy), T asks, upon reading a bio online: "Who be she?"

I chimes in, "She be a founder!"

"We be founders!" T and I resolve (this is where the lingo degenerates into a Tarzan-speak). It means that before they can dare to brand themselves in the universe, they first have to found something.

What does one have to do to be a founder? Discover something? Nope. It was so in the old world. In the old world--the world that T and I grasped better than the emergent one--a founding had to be unprecedented and in some cases a bit socially useful. One of I's uncles had, for instance, founded the formula for smokeless coal, and went on to patent it. And oh my, that thing did momentarily revolutionalize the world of domestic cooking in Eastern India!

But in the emergent world, a founder is somebody who starts something, like a web-something that specializes in curating transcripts of half-finished chats conducted in virtual space. Or, a founder could be a person who be one that has a tumblr that collects images of things that are in the color yellow/shades of yellow.


Interestingly much of the founding is done on virtual space, according to T's findings. The goal, T says, is to attach one's name to something, anything, to show those who are prowling the virtual world in search of branded-selves, that the person behind these names are doers--they do and like ants they do a hell of a lot outside of their mere professions.

T and I are working their way toward being founders...

Mission Kashmir

Mirza Waheed's new novel The Collaborator was brought to my attention by an Op-ed piece by the author in the NYT.

In the piece Waheed expresses outrage at something that would outrage anybody that is passionate about universal justice and human rights--the discovery of mass graves in India-occupied Kashmir. A majority of the carcasses in the graves are those of innocent young Kashmiri males, who are apparently butchered in the name of suppression of insurgencies.

Waheed has a point when he says that were these mass graves to be found in the backyard of a Middle-Eastern or African dictator, there would be an outcry in the democratic West.

India, however, is not taken to task for such state atrocities because it is the world's "largest" democracy. What a sordid paradox.

The Collaborator is about the lost boys of Kashmir. A review of the novel can be found here.

A biography of Superman

Biographies of fictional characters are rare, however, where comic action heroes are concerned, it is an eminent possibility.

Larry Tye has written a biography of Superman and part of the history of Clark Kent/Superman is also a history of the artistic evolution of the creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Siegel and Shuster, Tye writes, grew creatively along with the popularity of their hero. Starting as a typical fighter for social justice with a hardened body, Superman's "superness" grew with a "steady dreamlike magnification till:

His million-­decibel yell had enough intensity and pitch to topple tall buildings. What if a building fell on him? A tickle at most. His nostrils were super-acute. His typing was super-fast. . . . His gaze was intense enough to hypnotize a whole tribe of South American Indians at once. He could converse with a mermaid in her native tongue and beat a checkers expert his first time playing.

T and I: murderous MD's

T and I's favorite TV show: take a guess...

No, they don't adulate HBO's Girls. They catch it now and then, fleetingly, but Lena Dunham's brinjal-shaped face puts them off.

Neither are T and I interested in fetishizing the Greenpointofview--a world view that emanates from the life style of Brooklyn's famous "hot spot" Greenpoint.

Okay, so T and I love to watch Diagnosis Murder a show with murderous medics running around a hospital in downtown L.A.

When two almost-young women of the 21st century, one of whom is an avowed cosmopolitan and the other a liminal something, begin to fetishize a show from the 90s that is really a hangover of the 80s, then we have a story on our hands, don't we?

T and I: seeding of the clouds

I is impressed by T's prescience.

I had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of a series of "strong" thunderstorms on the fourth of July. It had been predicted in the weather channel as well as by Accuweather.

The temps have been dancing in the mid nineties and I had momentarily morphed into the pied crested cuckoo a bird that craves the rain to come and break a spell of intense heat.

But all along T had confidently predicted that no thunderstorm would appear on the U.S. horizon on a 4th of July. Nature might have its course, but military technology has the power to disperse that course.

The truth of the matter according to T: The nation has the technology to manipulate the weather. July 4th is an auspicious day and in these economically and otherwise forlorn times the nation cannot afford to have its parades rained on on July 4. The skies have to be picture perfect clear; the weather has to be optimum for the backyard grills to sizzle and for the fireworks to dazzle. So, if thunderstorms are part of nature's plan, then technology has to be used to scuttle that plan, at least for the day.

Thus went T's narrative. It could be tentatively entitled "The Seeding of the Clouds."

Today, was a relentlessly hot day. No thunderstorms came; the clouds had been seeded. Sitting in my living room, I hear the fireworks in full bloom.

Hail to thee T.

An update: T says that the technology of cloud seeding is in its nascent stage. Upon hearing this, I shudders. If a technology in its developing stage can knock out "strong" thunderstorms, then what could it not do in its fully developed form?

Another update: I just checked the weather forecast. Several thunderstorms are predicted for this coming Saturday, July 7. Shoot! thinks I; she has apartment-hunting plans for the day. Wished she could seed the clouds away just for Saturday...

A question of freedom

Are we more free when we resist our desires, or when we do what we want? This is the question that governs the narrative of Paul La Farge's short fiction, Another Life.

The desire to differentiate between freedom that only seems so and freedom that is more fundamentally so, is inspired by Rousseau's essay on the origins of inequality. In the essay Rousseau says, "Nature commands every animal and the beast obeys. Man feels the same impulsion, but knows that he is free to acquiesce or resist." 

Makes me re think the status of "acquiescence" in the world as being more than mere passive submission to the status quo. To acquiesce is also to exert a choice. 

A summer of Hasidic cool

These are days of extreme heat and July has just begun.

Were I cacti, I would say, "big deal, heat is a breeze." I am not cacti; neither are the people I know.

There is, however, a way to appropriate the "big deal" attitude of the cacti and not only survive, but also triumph over the summer heat.

How? Turn to Sartor Hasidicus (a self-made pun on Tom Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a 19th century philosophical text on how clothes make the man): If you stroll the streets of Boro Park in Brooklyn in the blistering heat of a New York July, you are most likely to catch a glimpse of men and women, covered from head to toe in heavy black clothing, scooting past you, with not a wee bit of heat-induced botheration on their bodies or faces.

The men and women you catch a glimpse of are Hasidics, an orthodox Jewish group who don't wilt under the sun, as they believe in dressing not with weather, but with "faith" in mind. 

The Hasidic Jews could be the human counterpart of the cacti who also have the cucumbers ability to stay cool in summer.

How do they do that? The Hasidic explanation is deceptively simple: They say that hot and cold is a mental state. I believe in the verity of this claim though it wouldn't sell widely as Americans wilt under the slightest of inconvenience, let alone temperatures in the 90s. 

What the Hasidic Jews say is not the exact equivalent of "don't whine, just withstand." In other words, they don't preach the virtue of fortitude. 

To claim that weather is a state of mind is to suggest that with a slight adjustment of perspective much that is deemed "intolerable" at a glance, could be lived with, especially when that which is intolerable is also unavoidable (like weather). 

The typical Hasidic lets the heat be. They argue that they dress, for their god, not for the weather. When one dresses for god, then one is relieved of many a sartorial and life-style burden. For doesn't god transcend conditions imposed by earthly climate?

A change in perspective empowers the mind. Heat is deflected from the physical to the metaphysical sphere. Quarantined to a state of mind, extremities of weather can be controlled.

The Hasidic state of mind reminds me of a poetic trope prevalent in 19th century Romantic poetry--pathetic fallacy. Under the aegis, as it were, of pathetic fallacy the landscape would take on the hue of the particular mind that would be contemplating nature. So, on a perfectly beautiful day a Wordsworth would be strolling in Wiltshire, and the terrain would turn ghastly or forlorn because Wordsworth would be in a forlorn state of mind.

I remember reading Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" and finding the landscape he evokes to be one in which terror seems embedded. This perplexed me. I figured it out by and by: As he walked through the pretty English countryside, Wordsworth experienced an inner torment; his mind welled up with anxiety brought on by the burdens of an adult life. Oh, how sunny and carefree childhood is, and how scary adulthood is in comparison!

Thus, on a perfectly nice day the weather turns grim because a state of mind has been projected onto the world of external reality and the outside mirrors the inside.

The Hasidic Jews prefer to use the technique of pathetic fallacy in a different way.

Since they owe primary allegiance to a divine entity (which they don't like to represent verbally), and this keeps their mind, sort of, in a temperate state regardless of the weather. In July they project this temperature outside.