Write like you were dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be Kafkaesque is 

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

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

Happiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In praise of the "slow" and "demanding"

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

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

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

Some moments from the piece:

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

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

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

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

The shadow and the substance

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Wow!)

Rise of global IQ

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

Here are some stats:

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

Some interesting observations:

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

Death of a sitarist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The importance of being finished

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

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

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

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

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

This skill can be acquired at $61. 

Death of a piano

Played, probed, poked, passed by, dismembered.

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

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

Artistic and aesthetic

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

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

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

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

A museum of the present

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Superwoman on the horizon

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

Different world of work

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two voices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before the "Hunger Games"....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Western Canon, graphically

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

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

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

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

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

Finding a different kind of stillness...

Be still and write... in your head.