Halloween undone

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

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

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

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

The World's Mine Oyster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The seer

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

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

Sandy and Frankenstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reasons why Obama should win...

The 2012 Presidential elections: 

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

Frank Bruni, NYT

No to nostalgia

Why should I want to return

to a time where even when I occupied that time

I wanted to go back to another time

more previous,

and so on, like my head in barbershop mirrors,

endlessly deferring to its own

earlier version. What is the use of nostalgia?

—Jeffrey Skinner, from “Darwin’s Marathon.”

Pumpkin

Since it's pre-Halloween week, I feel obligated to pay tribute to the pumpkin.

Instead of buying a real pumpkin I get an image of it. But my chosen pumpkin has a cute profile.

Sans the Mark Bittman context in which it appeared (another wearisome food-nanny admonition to Americans to cook this nutritious vegetable instead of hollowing it out for candles), looks like an old-world, somewhat charming, gentleman-pumpkin.

What a pity were this lovely pumpkin to be carved and emptied of flesh and seed and made into a placeholder for cheap carbon-monoxide emitting candles.

I prefer a whole pumpkin over one that is cruelly mangled.

I recently read the simile which compared somebody's violently beat-up face in terms of a "Jack-O-Lantern."

This put me off of the idea of a "carved" pumpkin.

Orwell inverted

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, Napoleon, the totalitarian pig says "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." 

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz turns the Orwellian dictum on its head by saying that "Some Are More Unequal Than Others" in America:

While rags-to-riches stories still grip our imagination, the fact of the matter is that the life chances of a young American are more dependent on the income and wealth of his parents than in any of the other advanced countries for which there is data. There is less upward mobility — and less downward mobility from the top — even than in Europe, and we’re not just talking about Scandinavia.

He means to say that inequality, like totalitarianism (where those in positions of absolute political power assume moral superiority above the rest), is not only a moral problem for our society, but a problem of social justice as well.

Unequal distribution of wealth intersects with unequal distribution of political power, as in contemporary America, according to Stiglitz, money holds the key to political power:

The fabric of our society and democracy is suffering. The worry is that those at the top are investing their money not in real investments, in real innovations, but in political investments. Their big contributions to the presidential and Congressional campaigns are, too often, not charitable contributions. They expect, and have received, high returns from these political investments. These political investments, exemplified by those the financial institutions made, yielded far higher returns than anything else they did. The investments bought deregulation and a huge bailout — though they also brought the economy to the brink of ruin and are a source of much of our inequality.

A 21st century Kant

Lucy was Zany

Emmanuel Kant had two aesthetic categories: The sublime and the beautiful. But what are some of the new aesthetic categories of our times? Sianne Ngai identifies these to be "Zany", "Cute" and "Interesting" in his new book Our Aesthetic Categories.

The book is 

[...] About aesthetic judgments: an inquiry into the terms and origins of taste. How do we decide what we feel about the latest Chantal Akerman film or the fiction of Javier Marías, an Alexander McQueen ball-gown or an episode of Breaking Bad? How do we translate into language the sensations of pleasure and displeasure inspired by daily experience — and particularly our experience of art? What kind of conversation are we really having when we say “The Books make beautiful music!” or “The view out the window was picturesque?"

 Next time when I offer judgment on something I see, hear or smell, I'll be sure not to break out into a "That's profound/sublime!" mode.

However, the word "interesting" seems to have lost specificity in my eyes. I've often heard people judge something as "interesting" because they fear a judgmental void. "Interesting" is a placeholder for responses ranging from "vague", "boring" to "abstruse", and "stupid" among others.

Ngai is an English Professor at Stanford University; his book is aimed more at addressing certain anachronistic tendencies in the culture of academia. Professors and scholars continue to subscribe to the aesthetic categories devised by Kant during the time of European Enlightenment. Ngai thinks it's time the academic categories got a little infused by categories from popular culture.

Ideology and geography

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker ponders on the connection between political ideology and geography in America. Here is how he concludes:

[...] The American political divide may have arisen not so much from different conceptions of human nature as from differences in how best to tame it. The North and coasts are extensions of Europe and continued the government-driven civilizing process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that emerged in the anarchic territories of the growing country, tempered by their own civilizing forces of churches, families and temperance.

A Turkish Great Expectations

Orhan Pamuk's newly released novel Silent House is really his second novel.

The Guardian speculates that it wasn't released in the West in 1983 (year of its publication in Turkish) because back then Pamuk may have been considered as a parochial--too Turkish for Western consumption--writer.

But then he won the Nobel Prize in 2006 and rocketed into becoming cosmopolitan and "universal" overnight.

Yet in a review of the novel the NYT compares the novel to Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. The reviewer describes Fatma, the protagonist-matriarch of the novel as a

Turkish Miss Havisham, embittered and trapped in the past, haunting the decaying mansion outside Istanbul where she lives alone with her servant, a dwarf who also happens to be her late husband's illegitimate child.

The review doesn't see anything particularly "Turkish" in the novel. On the contrary, a Western spirit seems to pervade it.

In the vein of Virginia Woolf, Pamuk displays an interest in the consciousness, though he renders the consciousness "

not as a series of thoughts broadcast out into the ozone, like Mrs. Dalloway's but as an imaginary conversation with a specific person who never answers.

Fatma can never forgive her husband and constantly argues with her dead spouse and it's this fight with an unavailable or disinterested interlocutor that makes up the spine of the novel's plot.

Joni Mitchell

"There must be more to living and a lawn to mow" is a song that can open doors to conversations about symbolic thinking: How we talk, often too uncritically, about money as the operative symbol in our lives.

Elections

I like what David Brooks, NYTimes columnist says about going by the polls.

He believes that political junkie's suffer from "cognitive laziness."

Just as the teenage mind naturally migrates from homework to Facebook, just as the normal reader’s mind naturally wanders from Toynbee to Twitter, so the political junkie’s brain has a tendency to slide downhill from policy to polling.

Strategy

The word is frequently used by Presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

He has been chastised in the media for using the word as a red herring--to detract from the real problem of ignorance which lies within himself. He knows little about the world and about current geopolitical realities. But to avoid exposing his state of blank-slatedness in these matters, he uses the word "strategy" forcefully.

Last night Romney couldn't say anything concrete about foreign policy issues, but said he had a "strategy" for global affairs. At one point he said he had a "strategy" for not only solving the problems in the Middle-East, but also in the whole world.

So, he has a "strategy" for the world?

What does that mean?

Nothing.

The word was made famous by George Bush Jr, except that he said "stragety". The action that ensued from the Bush regime is invasion and war.

Regardless of whether a politician uses the word "strategy" or a Bushism version of it, I believe the word itself is an empty, and permit me to say this--a hoax word.

It's a managerial word that implies nothing but a deferral of action, or a form of action that is monolithic and gets botched easily because it doesn't take into account the messy changeability of real situations. Real situations continually evolve and take up different direction at varying points in space and time. No "strategy" can manage and control this.

We could campaign for bidding adieu to "strategy".

Bengal's Charles Dickens

Well, almost.

Sunil Ganguly, a well-regarded Bengali writer from India, passed away.

One of Ganguly's books Shei Shomoi (Those Days/Times) sits on my bookshelf, half-unread. It's a fictionalized account of the nineteenth-century Bengal Renaissance that attends to details of the lives of Bengali aristocrats and the burgeoning middle-class with the fidelity of a Charles Dickens.

As an adolescent I consumed Ganguly's fiction voraciously and felt that he had lost his touch in his later writing. They had got a bit pornographic and pornography doesn't do well in Bengali.

But Ganguly was not just a "Bengali" writer. He was a global writer of his time. In the 60s he was personally hand-picked by Paul Engels, the director of the trailblazing Iowa Writing Workshop, as writer-in-residence.

One of the best works by Ganguly, in my eyes, is Aryaner Din Rattir (Days and Nights in the Forest). I thought it was a fantastic adaptation of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, rendered more fantastic by film maestro Satyajit Ray.

David Mitchell on the imagination

Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience. When you're 10, there is still an outside chance that you might find Narnia behind the wardrobe, that the fur coats could turn into fir trees. The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic are strong and deep. 

There is a Wordsworthian tinge to David Mitchell's account of children and their extraordinary power to imagine stuff into being.

I am reminded of the poem "Ode To Intimations of Immortality" by Wordsworth upon reading Mitchell's view. 

(Never mind the fact that the crux of the poem--the power of the imagination and the terror of mortality wrought into the texture of our lives by experience was totally ruined by the English professor who first brought the poem to my attention in college. She was Indian, a Punjabi married to a Bengali and had a million-page "notes" on the poem that she regurgitated to us in class). 

My own childhood fantasies differ from the sort that Mitchell uses as examples--the magical turning of fur coats into fir trees.

Mitchell grew up under the influence of the C.S. Lewises, while I grew up listening to "ghost" stories. My imagination went berserk in large spaces (the house I grew up in was exceptionally spacious and empty) and I saw shadows flitting across rooms, or imagined trees to be habitations of amorphous ghouls that would jump on me were I to walk under one.

But I don't quite subscribe to the popular notion that experience stunts imagination. The notion of the purity of imagination is a tad romantic to me; I don't see eye to eye with Wordsworth on this either. In my own case, I never was a very imaginative child, but experience has sharpened/heightened my imagination over the years. May I say that experience has been a generative agent in making me into a far more imaginative person than I ever was a s a child.

As a child I avoided trees altogether.

David Mitchell..

...Is a literary figure who is "trending" these days because his novel Cloud Atlas is getting a second life in film form.

So why not follow Mitchell's suggestions on which Japanese author's to read?

Mitchell, a British novelist, has lived in Japan and made a living teaching English there. His caveat (how humility-filled it is!) is "My students taught me more about Japan than its authors, really."

Till the time I make contact with the real Japanese in real Japan, I'd go by Japanese novels recommended by Mitchell.

The Doctor's Wife is a historical novel on the status of women in Japan

Grass For My Pillow looks at Japan's bruised relationship with its post-World War II history

One Man's Justice is about the war

Runaway Horses is the second volume of the tetralogy Sea of Fertility

The Makioka Sisters is a Jane Austen-like guide to navigating the complex and demanding marriage market in Japan

Yet, upon being asked which authors, dead or alive, would he personally want to meet and have a party with, Mitchell surprisingly excludes naming any Japanese authors. He mentions Chekov, Issac Bashevis Singer, Dorothy Parker, Katherine Mansfield and Sylvia Townsend Warner.

For a self-confessed Japanophile, the list looks awfully Europhilic.

A word for your bio...

...if you are good with numbers.

It's "numerate". 

"I’m numerate and nerdy enough to enjoy geeking it out with abstruse financial concept", says Felix Salmon, a financial reporter, of himself.

His first assignment, according to an interview he gave to the New York Times was for the Times. He was not required to write of complex financial concepts with clarity, but to write about an “assiduously cool” bar in the East Village "where the black-clad patrons sipped expensive cocktails and ate tapas while staring at models and other beautiful people."

Salmon is both "numerate" and "literate" if "assiduously cool" is a mark of extreme literacy. 

If “numerate” means somebody good with numbers, then "literate" ought to be somebody who is good with words, no?

Poetry

What You Do

You take a class.

You spend several afternoons trying to get a straight answer from your insurance company.

You learn how to give yourself shots.

They take your blood.

Your mother comes to visit.

You stop having sex.

You drink a lot of water.

You look at your embryos on a computer screen.

You decide to freeze some.

You’re not sure what else you would do. Not freeze them?

You talk lucidly about the surgeon’s son’s chances of getting into a top-tier college during the implantation.

You sort of think, “Why the fuck are we talking about this now?” But you keep talking about it.

You finally get to pee in a bedpan. The nurse pretends to be cool about it, but you can tell she’d rather you held it.

You hold hands.

You like it quiet.

The other couple talks a lot.

You know that this much waiting makes people crazy.

You yourself are crazy with hope.

You go home.

You have fears.

You do the shots.

You wait for the call.

You feel something.

Your mother leaves.

---Carly Moore (poet, a former colleague of mine)

The big bad Wolfe

James Wood's review of Tom Wolfe's new novel Back to Blood is a veritable tutorial on Wolfe-bashing.

Wolfe has staked claims to being a "real" novelist and has distanced himself from those who remain cloistered in "enervating" studies and the "filtered formalisms of postmodern prose."

Wolfe grafts himself into the tradition of celebrated writers who, in their effort to represent reality as it is, have valued a certain journalistic approach to fiction writing. As cited by Wood,

In "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" and elsewhere, [Wolfe] has argued that American fiction since the nineteen-sixties has fallen into sterility and irrelevance, because american novelists are not looking at the world [...] They have retreated into from the traditional calling of writers like Balzac, Zola and Sinclair Lewis, because they have exchanged the labor of reporting for easy fictional games (postmodern self-referentiality) or for a few dull inches of ivory (minimalism, dirty realism). The American novel will be reborn when the novelist gets out onto the street and starts copying. 

Wood appreciates Wolfe's hat-doffing to Zola, but cuts through his observation on the receding of realism from contemporary American fiction.

If anything, American fiction suffers from a glut of realism these days, says Wood. What American fiction needs is "careful artifice" and sufficient "pressure at the level of form and sentence." It is in the department of "artifice" and "form" and "sentences" that according to Wood, Wolfe lacks severely. 

Wolfe is no Zola; at best he is a second-rate Zola and his fiction with their putative adherence to the "real" "reproduces not the real but "realism"--narrative as a set of contrivances and conventions, a style, that, in fact, gets in the way of the real."

Wood believes Wolfe shows immaturity in blindly overvaluing the "real":

His almost religious belief that the novelist's imagination can never rival reality's force results in weak fiction and forceful facts.

Further:

The important details, the one's that make fiction's intimate palpability, cannot simply be scooped up the sidewalk.

Wolfe, according to Wood, produces "weak" fiction by not quite subjecting the "facts" he wants to represent--as objectively as a camera, one guesses--to the artifices of fiction. In Back To Blood, the details of present-day Miami, the city in which the novel is set, are slavishly reproduced and nothing about Wolfe's Miami surprises the reader.

Tom Wolfe likes to champion "ordinary life." But "ordinary life" Wood says is complex, prismatic and contradictory. With his formulaic eye for the "ordinary" and the "real", Wolfe misses out on the real ordinary life that Wood talks about.

Mere energy of "verisimilitude" isn't everything.

T & I: What a pie!

T baked an onion pie, this afternoon. I ate it. The pie tasted just like it looks in the picture above: sumptuous; perfect.

When a Bengali woman bakes a pie, does she complicate her Bengaliness by imbricating it in a certain Americanness?

This is precisely the question that T exultingly raised when she claimed that as a result of her successful baking of an onion pie, she has crossed boundaries of a deeper kind--she can no longer identify herself as a typical Bengali female (in many significant ways, she isn't). How many Bengali women bake pies, or show a proclivity for baking pies?

Norway Mama

The first time I met Norway (outside of my third-grade geography class) was when I heard that one of my more adventerous mamas (footnote: mother's brother) had migrated to Norway. He must have been the world's first Bengali gent to do so.

I remember how everybody laughed at him; real men, it was said, did not immigrate to Norway.

But this mama of mine, not only migrated to Norway, but he also married a Swedish- Norwegian, whose Finnish-Norwegian daughter from her first marriage, he gamely adopted.

I met that very same Mama in the mid-nineties. He had finally emerged out of Oslo and had come to claim his property in Kolkata (his father had passed away leaving behind a sumptuous legacy).

In sharp contrast to the scrawny and potbellied--in short unhealthy looking--native-Kolkatan relatives and friends, the mama appeared like a poster child for good health. He was radiant and almost white (not to mention he exuded a body language that had gayness writ large); not a pale, but a lustrous kind of whiteness hung on him and made the rest of the Bengalis look, well er, typically lacklustre.

(We could have written a sonnett in praise of the glowing mama).

No, my mama had not morphed into a deity in Norway; it must have been the effects of living in a relatively pollution-free environment and eating excellent quality food.

Also, Mama was happy because he didn't have to worry about money. His living was well nigh paid for by the state.

So, when I read that the UNDP lists Norway as the best country (the U.S. was 4th on the list) to live in for the second time in a row, I nodded to myself in silent affirmation. I was reminded of my lustrous mama as living, breathing evidence of Norway's superior quality of life.

However, Norway's delight notwithstanding, few from India have since followed in the footsteps of my mama.

It's human to err...

...Or, as they say, to screw up.

I just found out that I had screwed up my New York Times subscription: I have not eyed the details/fine print and had mistakenly assumed that in order to have free and complete digital access to the Times, I would have to opt for a home delivery of one kind or the other.

I opted for the pecuniarily lowest option--the Weekender (Friday-Sunday).

I was somehow confident that I was paying $15.25 every month for the total package.

...And I had made the mistake of not checking my account online.

One day I visited my account to see if the Times had credited money because of missed papers. What did I find? That for months I am being charged $35. My mistake, for sure: I had mis-assumed and hadn't read the details. I was paying for what one would say the "full-service."

Had I not the "mistake" of being assumptive--which a consumer never must be--I would have saved a considerable amount of money over the past few months.

But of course, I don't expect sympathy for my oversight. It's my mistake and I paid for erring.

Surely I deserve lambasting for this: In America people are held responsible for the mistakes they make and the consequences they suffer as a result of these mistakes. A majority of these mistakes have an economic consequence.

Nicholas Kristoff, a well-regarded humanitarian/Times reporter (ironic), has wisely offered a rebuttal to those who believe--harshly so--that people ought to take responsibility for their own errors:

[...] A civilized society compensates for the human propensity to screw up.

He writes about a friend who chose to work part-time in order to spend more hours on pursuing things that gave him pleasure. Since he worked part-time, making about 13k a year, he opted out of health insurance, as he couldn't afford to buy one.

Somewhere down the line, he contracted cancer, and couldn't pay for his treatment. Upon telling his story, he was boo'ed and jeered. Many--on the side of the Republicans, according to Kristof--called him foolish and stupid enough to make such self-destructive life-choices. Few blamed the system for not caring for one of its own--a citizen whose only fault was not to self-enslave himself to the rigors of full-time work.

Kristof asks us to be a little more civilized:

To err is human, but so is to forgive. Living in a community means being interconnected in myriad ways — including by empathy. To feel undiminished by the deaths of those around us isn’t heroic Ayn Rand individualism. It’s sociopathic. Compassion isn’t a sign of weakness, but of civilization.

I have erred--and paid. This unnatural view of human nature and society has been taken to the next level in case of Kristof's friend.

Greatest Artist of "Our Time": St Lucas

I have a problem with the word "greatest" and the phrase "our time".

Nonetheless I read Camille Paglia's election of George Lucas as the "Greatest Artist of Our Time" with interest.

Paglia sets out to justify her choice, but her justification is a bit diffuse. 

What's clear, however, is Paglia's claim that Lucas' success lies in his marriage of tradition and modernity, or in other words, of art and technology. He is also global in that he 

fused ancient hero legends from East and West with futuristic science fiction and created characters who have entered the dream lives of millions [...]

Paglia goes to the extent of Da Vinci-izing Lucas as she sees glimpses of Leonardo's versatility in the children's graphic books published by the Lucas' production company (The Definitive Guide to the Craft of Star Wars).

Paglia has found a bit of many great artists and visionaries (including the Buddha) in Lucas's art and vision, and one feels that Paglia has composed a hagiography, somewhat canonizing George Lucas in the process.

Women as readers

I don't know much about the symbols/typology that inhere in Renaissance painting on Christian themes.

Yet, the 17th century painting of the Virgin Mary ("The Annunciation and Two Saints" by Simone Martini), distracted from her reading by the entry of the angel Gabriel into her room, tells me something--not about religion, but about women, knowledge and power in the Renaissance--because it is so intelligently put in context by Joan Acocella in her review of The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack.

I had never thought of Mary as a reader, or as a woman who had any role outside of her role as a bearer/vessel of the son of God. But this painting, interpreted differently, grants Mary an intellectual life.

The painting has a remarkable detail: Mary keeps her thumb in her book, as though Gabriel's presence is an intrusion on her private time which is devoted to the reading of a book. She will revert to the book once Gabriel is gone. God's words are secondary compared to the pleasures of a book.

If Mary weren't required to listen to Gabriel's spiel, she wouldn't. But reading is volitional on the part of Mary.

A traditional painting can become provocative, even subversive, if seen through the lens of a detail that isn't accentuated.

Joseph Anton...

Salman Rushdie's 660 page long memoir combines the first-names of his two favorite writers: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov.

The title is in keeping with what I know to be Rushdie's preoccupation--the hybridity that inheres in identity.

According to two reviews, one in the NYT and the other in the Guardian, the memoir is centered around the fracturing of self and identity that Rushdie writes he experienced when the Ayatollah Khomeni issued a fatwa against him for blaspheming the Prophet in The Satanic Verses.

The territory of cinema

Cinema is a territory...it exists outside of movies. It's a place I live in. It's a way of seeing things, of experiencing life. But making films, that's supposed to be a profession.

---French film director Leos Carax, upon being asked to justify his claim that he's "always in cinema." Carax barely makes and rarely watches movies.

His latest film, Holy Motors, is scheduled for a release shortly.

I've been wanting to read the French author Michael Houellebecque for some time now.

He is considered to be one of the best writers on global capitalism and its effects.

Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides expresses Houellebecque's metier best:

[...] He is acute on the subjects of business and the macro effects of global capitalism. His books are the strangest confections: part Gallic anomie, part sociological analysis, part Harold Robbins. He says a lot of depressing un-American things I get a big kick out of.

Stick figure with a rich inner life

Something tells me that Don Hertzfeld's Bill would've pleased Virginia Woolf.

Bill is a compilation of straight lines and circles--in other words a stick figure. But as a beautifully written blurb on the animation It's Such a Beautiful Day observes, Bill belies his sparse exterior by having a rich inner life.

A thought on the Presidential debate #1

On my way to my neighborhood grocery store, I cross a street with two-way traffic and without a walk sign.

Needless to say, I have to keep my ears and eyes open for cavalier drivers.

Today, a young woman in a SUV stood still for more than 40 seconds, allowing pedestrians to cross. Seconds before I acknowledged her courtesy with a wave of gratitude, another driver pushes through with aggression and swerves into the street inches away from my toe.

A courteous driver and a bully of a driver: Who gets abused and whose behavior is deemed normal? The driver behind the courteous one screams "fuck you!" at the latter, to my shock and chagrin.

Having watched the first Presidential debate on Wednesday October 4 the picture of the drivers and the performances of Obama and Romney seem to be a bit analogous.

Romney is the driver who almost crushed my toes and rudely hogged the space at his disposal. Romney did the same in another context. His goal was to hog the limelight (instead of earning it over the evening), and he scolded the moderator. He also seemed anxious to steal time away from Obama.

Obama might have been the courteous driver who stood while pedestrians passed.

Yet, it was Obama who got clobbered by the media as the one who sleep-walked through the debate, and Romney received praises for his aggressive and blunt "style".

Americans look more and more like the surly guy who screamed at the courteous driver. Too impatient, myopic and precariously perched to reward the undeserving candidate.

On Vidia

V.S. Naipaul is a favorite writer of mine.

I get into an acquisition-mode whenever I read something on Sir Vidia and his intellectual-Quasimotoisms.

Here's novelist Teju Cole's reflection on an evening spent in the company of Vidia Naipaul. The setting is an elegant apartment in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the hostess is filthy rich (yet culturally fake, if you read in between Cole's lines).

There is a gentle flow of the best quality claret, and one could conclude that the softer observations that Cole, an African/Nigerian intellectual who isn't bowled over by Naipaul's often anti-African pinpricks, makes are made under the influence of madeira.

Here's a moment:

Dinner was over. We were in conversation, Vidia, our host, and me. He was in a good mood, flattered by the attention. Our host brought some rare books from her collection to show us. They were special editions of Mark Twain’s works, and on the flyleaf of each was an epigram written by Twain and, below each, his signature. The epigrams were typical Twain: ironic, dark. And so we leaned over the old volumes, and Vidia and I squinted and tried to make out the words from Twain’s elegant but occasionally illegible hand. We were sitting side by side, and Vidia, unsteady, had placed a hand on my knee for support, unselfconsciously. I read: “By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.” Laughter. “To succeed in other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.” More laughter. Vidia began, “You know, these remind me very much of…” Ever the eager student, I blurted out, “La Rochefoucauld.” “Yes!” he said, “Yes! La Rochefoucauld.” And with wonder in his eyes, the weight from his hand and arm bearing down on me, he turned his head up to our host, who stood just behind, and said, “He’s very good. He speaks so well, he speaks well.” And, turning back to me, “You speak very well.” In any other context, it would have felt like faint praise. But we’d drunk claret, we were laughing along to long-dead Twain, and I had managed to surprise the wily old master.

Sharper yet is Cole's observation on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a novel that Naipaul attributes the germination of his ambition/desire to write about an emergent world order (post colonial) to:

“Heart of Darkness” was written when rapacious extraction of African resources by European adventure was gospel truth—as it still is. The book helped create the questions that occupy us till this day. What does it mean to write about others? Who are these others? More pressingly, who are the articulate “we”? In the “Heart of Darkness,” the natives—the niggers, as they are called in the book, the word falling each time like a lance—speak only twice, once to express enthusiasm for cannibalism, then, later, to bring the inarticulate report, “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.” Otherwise, these niggers, these savages, are little more than shadows and violence, either in dumb service on the boat, or in dumb, grieved, uncomprehending and deadly attacks on it from the shore. Not only is this primitive, sub-human Africa incoherent to any African, it is incoherent to any right-thinking non-African too. A hundred years ago, it was taken as the commonplace truth; it wasn’t outside the mainstream of European opinions about Africans. But we have all moved on. Those things are in past, are they not?

Xanax President

President Obama’s stylistic strategy during Wednesday night’s debate seemed to be to try to stay right above the rancor, to appear dignified, presidential. The problem with that approach is that the line between dignified and presidential and anodyne and weak is the width of a cat’s hair.

--Charles Blow's assessment in nytimes. The message: ability to be rancorous=sign of confidence.

Frank Bruni's take on Obama's "ambien" performance last night:

He toggled between light and heavy, scathing and upbeat, and demonstrated improved (though not great) control of that annoyed, tight, fake smile that plays so disastrously into his cartoon image as “a wealthy plutocrat married to a known equestrian,” in the inimitable words of Haley Barbour.

Haven't and won't delve into the Republican posts as the vitriol would be too much to bear. Extreme avoidance of the George Wills and the Charles (Sour)Krauthammers.

Empathy

I have been trying to elicit a response from my students for the last few days: What is empathy? It's a concept the younger generation can't articulate beyond saying "empathy happens when you feel for another person."

In a thoughtful article ("Generation Me on Trial"), written in the wake of the suicide of Rutgers Freshman Tyler Clementi and the subsequent trial of Dharun Ravi, psychologist Jean Twenge sees empathy as an ability to put oneself in another's shoes.

Such self-transcendence, argues Twenge, is an impossible task for the current generation to achieve. "Generation Me" suffers from a severe "empathy deficit" primarily because it knows no culture outside that of consumerism, individualism, Facebook and Reality TV. 

I myself struggle to define empathy, though I believe I have experienced it now and then. Its premise is not fountains of innate kindness, but a kind of daily action based on an investment in a particular kind of equality. 

I found an example of empathic action in a recent tribute paid to Goonj, a not-for-profit organization based in India. Goonj donates clothes to the poor and the afflicted.

Empathic action is embedded in the structures and organizational principles of Goonj:

With its empathic approach to alleviation of poverty, Goonj’s stands out work in an age when business-friendly poverty approaches are attracting the lion’s share of attention. 

In being empathic, Goonj is by default nonmarket and nonmonetary in its attitude toward those who benefit from its sartorial donations.

To be conducting actions of kindness outside the perimeter of money and market creates an entrepreneurial culture where 

Those who give and those who receive are equal. From the people who give the clothes, to those who sort and pack them, to the people who receive them, the whole chain is full of respectful links. 

I understand empathy to be assistance that is given in a way that doesn't degrade the receiver of assistance.

Empathy is thus grounded on a consummate respect for the other.

It's in this context of giving and doing that I visualize the notion of empathy most vividly: You give not what you have and can spare, but what the receiver needs. Goonj often finds itself burdened with clothes donated by city dwellers that don't fit into the sartorial needs of the villager where a bulk of the receiving community is located. So, it repurposes or transforms such clothing to make them suitable for use.

It's easy to understand why my students can't talk beyond a meagre stuttering of cliched words like "feeling" and "kindness" when asked to discuss empathy.

It's no wonder...

On friendship...

...Something that Anais Nin said:

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.