What do the red ants say?

Sanjay Kak's documentary on the Maoists of India, Red Ant Dream.

The book trailer: A necessary evil?

A book trailer of Gary Shteyngart's Little Failure.

A tsunami of pain

Sonali Deraniyagala's memoir, Wave, has received rave reviews as one of the most touching and artistically meritorious rendering of personal loss, pain and recovery.

Deraniyagala lost her entire family of a husband, two boys, mother and father, in the 2004 tsunami, that was spawned by an earthquake in the Indian Ocean, and hit the Southern coast of Sri Lanka (and other places). 

Ms Deraniyagala, who is an economist at London University and Columbia University, was at that time, vacationing with her family at a hotel overlooking the beach.

In one sweep Deraniyagala lost just about everything that constituted life for her. She survived miraculously by clinging to a tree limb.

Wave, true to the image of a dark wave on the book cover, is a "granular" and "tactile" account of grief, regret and survivor's guilt. 

The memoir has found place in several "top ten books of 2013" book lists. 

The book has moments of familial conviviality as in the following passage:

Squid marinated in lemongrass and lime and chili flakes. Slices of salty haloumi cheese and lamb chops and sausages from Nicos, our local Greek Cypriot butcher…. We’d marinate a leg of lamb for two days in a mix of yogurt, almonds, pistachios, lots of spices, mint, and green chilies…. We’d buy greengages in August. Often they were perfect, not too yielding, but not unripe.

But the conviviality makes for extremely painful read, because they are snapshots of the writers' past, compared to which the present becomes all the more unbearable. 

It seems like Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir in which Didion tries to come to grips with the sudden death of her husband, would fade into a fun and frolic read once one delves into the world of Wave.

Teju Cole has a review of the book here.

Mandela's mandala

Last week was a time for the apotheosis of Nelson Mandela.

The world celebrated his passing away with a lot of beautiful noise.

The average person in every corner of the world had something to say about Mandela. People who don't remember the names of their dead ancestors said they felt moved by the memory of "Madiba".

In Mandela we had a global figure, not a South African one, whose loss was a global, rather than a South African loss. 

But the rendering of Mandela's mandala into a global entity and the ballooning of his legacy into a global one, is a sign not of Mandela's achievements, but of his ineffective, mostly symbolical, life during the years in post-apartheid South Africa.

Such is the argument of the brilliant Czech contrarian, Slavoj Zizek.

Zizek writes that Mandela wouldn't have become an universal hero had he really/fundamentally won the invisible yet potent war against injustice and inequality that he said he had dedicated his life to fighting. 

The dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, like the abolition of slavery in Europe and North America, was in and of itself a singular achievement of Nelson Mandela, but the fact (of history) remains that Apartheid as a system had become unsustainable in an era which came to be defined by Perestroika, Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall, all symbols of freedom, triumph of free market thinking and unification of people divided by artificial "walls". Apartheid increasingly looked and felt like an analog technology in a time of the digital.

According to Zizek Mandela played an active role in surgically removing the cankerous cyst that was apartheid, but wasn't able to remove the "order" which had given rise to a system like apartheid in the first place.

South Africa, as Zizek reminds us, continues to be a deeply troubled society, divided on the basis of race still. After apartheid, the Black elite joined hands with the White elite to practice what would be a structural apartheid (like structural racism in the United States), i.e. where exploitation of the powerless by the powerful is carried on indirectly instead of directly. 

Zizek doesn't blame Mandela for failing to sustain the momentum of a radical emancipatory politics that he was instrumental in ushering into South Africa, but he reminds us that Mandela would not have been thus universally glorified had he really disturbed the dominant global order.

I keep thinking of the brutal, untimely assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. among many others. These leaders did disturb an order, not just dismantle a temporal system. Che Guevara disturbed a dominant global order of capitalist exploitation in Latin America, and we know how his life ended.

Continuity of life isn't innately a sign of ineffectuality for leaders, but Zizek has a point when he says that the reason why Mandela had transcended the local and the specific to become so universally loved and revered is because like Mickey Mouse he had pleased more people than threatened their securities:

If we want to remain faithful to Mandela's legacy, we should thus forget about celebratory crocodile tears and focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to. We can safely surmise that, on account of his doubtless moral and political greatness, he was at the end of his life also a bitter old man, well aware how his very political triumph and his elevation into a universal hero was the mask of a bitter defeat. His universal glory is also a sign that he really didn't disturb the global order of power.

What is "House Work?"

Does giving "emotional support" to a householder (from another) constitute what's defined as "house work"?

Does planning ahead of time and purchasing stuff through navigating a tight budget for the household, constitute contribution toward "house work"?

Or, is just cleaning, in the traditional sense, organizing closets and other kinds of tangible labor that goes into keeping a house as some say, are the only forms of "house work"?

The Case For Filth is a revealing piece of writing and gives lovely responses to the intellectually confounding definition of "house work."

One observation that stands out in my mind is about house work around the task of cleanliness; while cleanliness feels highly organic (my house is "clean" because I am clean"), it really is constructed, as "the relativism of hygiene over time is amazing."

Patriarchy is in India's collective consciousness

Hail to actress and Indian popular culture's prima donna, Sharmila Tagore, for recognizing this vital truth of India:

Traditionally, we as a nation have tended to view a woman either as devi (goddess) or as property of man but never as an equal.Treating a woman as a devi is pretty ingenious because then she has to be on a pedestal and conduct herself according to the noble ideals a patriarchal society has set for her. Women seem to like being on that pedestal and despite their inner urges cling to this ideal of being perfect at great personal cost. So, in spite of the outstanding advancement of both men and women, mindsets have been slow to change. And these mindsets have influenced our cultural spheres, and have been celebrated in festivals like karva chauth, raksha bandhan, Shiv ratri, appealing to a man’s ego in protecting and indulging the women in his family. So it is not surprising that a mass, popular, highly visible media like cinema, particularly Hindi cinema, has perpetuated these cultural myths. 

On contemporary Bollywood's packaging of the woman as "modern", Tagore muses:

They also reduce modernity to a matter of packaging. A modern woman is defined by her westernized attire. She looks modern but when it comes to making informed choices, she chooses the conventional. The moment she is to be presented to society for marriage, her sartorial style undergoes a complete traditional overhaul, because now she is expected to become part of the collective, her individuality discarded for the sake of the community. It is implied that the modern woman who asserts herself and her independence can never bring happiness to anyone, nor find happiness herself. Often, in the first half of a film a lot of new and dynamic ideas are introduced, only to be diluted and compromised in the second half.

But cinema, especially Indian cinema, is largely a passive reflection of social preferences, values and attitudes at large:

Today, in India ‘women’s empowerment’ is a government slogan; it is a feature of every party manifesto. Yet, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Indian women, seemingly protected by law, celebrated by the media and championed by activists, remain second-class citizens, most obviously in rural areas, but in some senses everywhere.

A bit of a slap on the face of the discerning reader

Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap is, has been, for me a good reading experience. I read the novel, during my long subway rides to and from work, in November 2010, and 7 months later, much of the novel exists on the canvas of my mind as vividly illuminated flotsam.

What I’ve managed to salvage from the 500+ page-long novel is a notion that Tsiolkas is offering readers a bird’s eye view of contemporary, multicultural Australia. Multiculturalism, as seen through the primarily Greek-Australian eyes of the novel’s main characters, is both a boon and a curse for the evolving fabric of a 21st century life down under.

For the Greek immigrants—and being of Greek origin, Tsiolkas writes of them with panache—Australian multiculturalism is nothing but the modern state’s attempt to police both public and private human behavior so as to manage and contain intra-ethnic conflicts, if and when they arise.

Many of the characters in the novel seethe internally at the extremities to which a culture of political correctness has traveled and distorted one’s will to live freely. People are in loathing of being berated, rapped on the knuckles by the local judiciary and even arrested by the police for smoking inside a cab or for making an allegedly racially insensitive remark. Minor domestic actions, like slapping a brooding, recalcitrant child because he is trying to crack open another child’s skull with a cricket bat, become occasions for a major discourse on anti-child offence. 

The excesses of multiculturalism is abhorred, and the excess is foreshadowed best in the beginning, when one of the central male characters, Hector, finds himself waking up on his bed next to his lovely Indian wife, Aisha, wholly dissatisfied and resentful. The experience of his conjugal bed-mating, he realizes, is artificially fabricated, not an expression of his authentic self. He has had to rein in his organic bodily functions, and sanitize his physical being to ensure sexual cordiality between him and his wife. He has had to ostracize a significant part of his physical reality simply to be sexually/conjugally acceptable and/or functional. 

Hector likes to fart, but in the presence of his wife, he has to censor this most natural of his bodily desires so as to keep himself desirable in her eyes:

His eyes still shut, a dream dissolving and already impossible to recall, Hector’s hand sluggishly reached across the bed. Good Aish was up. He let out a victorious fart, burying his face deep into the pillow to escape the clammy methane stink. I don’t want to sleep in a boy’s locker room, Aisha would always complain on the rare, inadvertent moments when he forgot himself in front of her. Through the years he had learnt to rein his body in, to allow himself to only let go in solitude; farting and pissing in the shower, burping alone in the car, not washing or brushing his teeth all weekend when she was away at conferences. It was not that his wife was a prude; she just seemed to barely tolerate the smells and expressions of the male body. He himself would have no problem falling asleep in a girl’s locker room, surrounded by the moist, heady fragrance of sweet young cunt. Afloat, still half-entrapped in sleep’s tender clutch, he twisted onto his back and shifted the sheet off his body. Sweet young cunt, he’d spoken out loud.

His wife makes similar compromises. The absence of authenticity in their marital bonding spills over from body to mind, from outside to essence. Thus Hector and Aisha compromise on mutual truth-telling—if the truth is told, the edifice of the marriage will collapse.

But multiculturalism has not only bred a culture of self-policing; it is also upheld as the inevitable and alternative-less direction in which the destiny of the industrialized Western world—a world that has for ages been hosting within its demesnes the arrival and settling in of migrants from every conceivable corner of the globe—unfolds. Australia has no option but to endorse diversity in order to survive as a modern nation.

As a genuflection to the marvels of accepting diversity as the norm rather than the exception of modern life, the novel creates another male character—that of the very Australian Richie. The characterization of Richie, a young adolescent who comes of age as an openly gay man in a society that’s pretty Grecian (Tsiolkas refers to contemporary Greece—not the mythical Greece of yore—and its practices of rampant sexism) in its intolerance of anything but the purely heteronormative, is, I feel, the most refreshing in The Slap. Richie is gay and sensitive and very intelligent; most significantly, he is loyal as a driven in nail to his friends and is capable of making cardinal sacrifices to protect the sanctity of friendships. He is, in other words, selfless without being naively cacophonic about being so.

Richie, the independent-minded, attuned-to-the global complexity of the world (he realizes he is emerging into a global society, not just an Australian one) gay male is, I believe, Tsiolkas’ best gift to his readers.

Have cars made us stupid?

In a New york Times Sunday Review piece, A Stroll Around the World, Pulitzer Prize winning writer for the National Geographic Paul Salopek, blasts the motorization of human civilization, especially in the Global North.

Salopek is on a mission to travel the world on foot, as his goal is to stray off the beaten "paved" path taken by motorists and stroll those paths of the globe that human's have ambulated along since the Pleistocene age.

He struggles to put himself in a "Pleistocene state of mind." Such a state of mind is un recuperable with the advent and subsequent hegemony of the car. 

While strolling through Saudi Arabian deserts, Salopek experiences motorists with "car brain" and thinks of how unsuitable a car brain is for navigating the Middle Eastern terrains. Yet not too long ago, the ancestors of the species saddled with car brains were Bedouins, or nomadic strollers who had a different sense of space and time.

Like drivers everywhere, their frame of reference is rectilinear and limited to narrow ribbons of space, axle-wide, that rocket blindly across the land.

One suspects, Salopek would have prefered to meet the Bedouins on the backs of camels instead of Sheiks inside air conditioned cars.

To the placeholder of the car brain, the earth’s surface beyond the pavement was simply a moving tableau — a gauzy, unreal backdrop for his high-speed travel. He was spatially crippled.

Those with car brains, separated from those with plain brains, have an acquisitive attitude to space:

Cocooned inside a bubble of loud noise and a tonnage of steel, members of the internal combustion tribe tend to adopt ownership of all consumable space. They roar too close. They squint with curiosity out of the privacy of their cars as if they themselves were invisible.

Cars are without a doubt the defining artifacts of our civilization, having reshaped our minds in ways that we have stopped thinking about a long time ago, says Salopek.

Cars, Salopek acknowledges are indispensable and have in history built the middle classes. However, they have also severed a natural and limbic connection humans had developed with both the earth and fellow humans that reach back to the basement of time. 

The internal combustion engine has affected more drastic changes on human culture — flattening it through the annihilation of time and space — than the web revolution. Indeed, the century-old automotive revolution prepared the way for the rise of the Internet, by eroding the capacity for attention, for patience, by fomenting a cult of speed.

I wonder what Nicholas Carr would say to the discovery that a flattening of the brain had already been set in motion before we took on the habit of outsourcing our brain's primordial functions of deep thought and memorizing to the Internet.

Angry white men and angry brown men

Two images expressing identical emotions--of anger and disempowerment. However, one expression of violence is outward, as the hand grasping the key chain with a cross-like emblem, suggests, while the other is internalized.

The fist, a synecdoche of the angry male in a new book called Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, lashes out.

The bearded man in flames, on the other hand, looks inward. The second image represents a man burning up in totality. There is no symbolism here, but a blatant rendition of the fictional Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian man, whose death by self-immolation triggered off the Arab spring in 2010. Bouazizi is the principle character in Tahar Ben Jelloun's New Yorker fiction, By Fire (September 9, 2013). 

In Angry White Men, Michael Kimmel, a Sociology Professor at the State University of New York at Stonybrook, travels the nation and writes of working class white men of America who comprise an emerging class of disenfranchised males. They have lost their jobs, resist integrating into the new economy, have lost families and custody of their children, have impregnated girlfriends, whom they have then cast away as "sluts", and in general feel "betrayed by the country they love, discarded like trash on the side of the information superhighway."

Kimmel categorizes them as members of various organizations of "emasculated" (at the level of feeling) white males, like the KKK, the fringe NRA, The Father's Rights Movement (an offshoot of the Men's Right Movement). 

The men are justified in being angry, according to Kimmel, but they are unable to target the right sources that are responsible for their destitution and disempowerment in the first place--the corporate overlords, who have shipped their "masculine", i.e. manufacturing jobs overseas. The angry white men, rage, instead against women for allegedly "stealing American manhood." The angry white men, pissed upon and passed over by the current American economy, batter wives, blame ex-wives, subject girlfriends to domestic violence. 

There are no collective men in Ben Jalloun's story, but the voice of the main character, an unemployed youth in an unnamed Arab nation, could be said to be a representative voice of rising anger against the state. The story begins on a note of grim despair, with the young man returning home, alone and worried, after having buried his father at a cemetery. The son is struck less by grief than by the impending family obligation that as the oldest son of the family, he now has to fulfill.

The man is a college graduate with a degree in history. He is jobless and identified by the state as either a communist or an Islamist. The young man tries making a living as a fruit vendor, but he is persecuted by the police.

We get a hint that the polity of the nation is about to come apart, the youth are raging against the ruling class that is disconnected from the masses.

Anger is ubiquitous in this society. However, people seem to know who precisely are responsible for this state of affairs--the ruling class and their cronies. At one point in the story, the young man, kicked around by the police wants to speak to the town's Mayor. The Mayor refuses to talk to him. In a scene, the young man, lying prone on the ground because of a police attack on him, wishes he had a gun. If he had a gun, he would smash each and every person in the police department, he thinks. He would smash the government, he thinks. But he doesn't have a gun. 

The thought of the disempowered and the humiliated inevitably turn to violence, whether it be in America or in an Arab nation. But the important question is who should the gun be turned against. The guns of anger among the white males seems to be turned against the wrong target, while the anger among the folks in the story, By Fire, is pinpointed against the state.

In Angry White Men, Kimmel suggests that the average white American male's anger is the anger of a demographic that had taken its privilege for granted--the white male has occupied a position of social power by virtue of being white for years. Manufacturing has been a primary catalyst for the ascendancy of the white male in America, till the tides began to turn and manufacturing got booted out of the nation.

It's not a weakening of their gender-power that the angry white male should bemoan, says Kimmel, but the loss of the white male's class status. Women or "feminazism" hasn't triggered the average white American male's demotion from middle to fringe class; the corporations have.

The average white American man is not encouraged to immolate themselves to make a point, but in the book they are asked to be a little more discerning in identifying their enemies.

It's easy to beat up on the wife, who has suffered the same loss of class status, fallen into poverty perhaps, as her man. But it's hard to beat up on the system, because to beat up on the system would mean being unpatriotic or turning into the dreaded "Communist" which is the worst thing imaginable for a majority of the "plain" American Joes.

Does real patriotism lie in treating capitalism and its new form of ruthless profit-mongering as sacrosanct, or does real patriotism lie in rescuing the nation from the grip of such capitalism?

At the end of By Fire, the young man sets himself ablaze in front of the Mayor's office. There is a national uprising and the President flees the country. One nation, howsoever hobblingly, is on its path to freedom or a sliver of it.

Artificial intelligence

A new novella by Ted Chiang, The Life Cycle of Software Objects, explores the inner lives of objects we categorize as objects of artificial intelligence.

The first chapter of the novella can be found here.

The myth of America is now girlhood

Movie critic Manhola Dargis gives Catching Fire, a place in the film and cultural history of America:

“Catching Fire” isn’t a great work of art but it’s a competent, at times exciting movie and it does something that better, more artistically notable movies often fail to do: It speaks to its moment in time. “The mythic America,” the literary critic Leslie Fiedler memorably wrote, “is boyhood.” One of the things that “The Hunger Games,” on the page and on the screen, suggests is that the myth is changing. Boys (and men) are still boys, of course, including in movies, but the very existence of Katniss — who fights her own battles, and kisses and leaves the boys, only sometimes to save them — suggests cultural consumers are ready for change, even if most cultural producers remain foolishly stuck in the past. It’s unlikely Katniss will lead the real revolution the movies need, but a woman can dream.

The elusive bug

I always thought that the kernel of Franz Kafka's signature classic, Metamorphosis is not the conversion itself, of man into insect, but of the effect the conversion has on Gregor Samsa's family.

Kafka meant to explore the death of love and subsequent ascendancy of alienation in the age of the bourgeoisie-mercantile complex that was European society between late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

No sooner than Gregor Samsa turns into an insect, he becomes a burden on his family; when Samsa was a man he was the breadwinner. His family lived off him parasitically.

Samsa's value in the family is contingent upon his ability to feed it.

Having been brainwashed into accepting unconditional love within the family structure as the universal norm in all societies, I was shocked to read of the sea-change in the Samsa family when their earning son becomes a dependent and injured son. I was saddened by the father's indifference and hostility toward Gregor, at whom he once throws an apple so ferociously that the apple lodged permanently in Samsa's back and damages his mobility.

What was most difficult to bear was the family's final plot to rid themselves off Gregor to cut their financial loss. Additionally, Gregor had become an acute social embarrassment to the Samsa's.

Samsa's death remains un-mourned; his family is relieved when he dies.

Contemporary renditions and re tellings of Metamorphosis harp on the physical fact of the transformation itself.

The book's complexity has been reduced to the materiality of the "bug".

Take for instance a recent interpretation of the Kafka classic for children. The book cover has the picture of an endearing insect. In an era of the cutesy army of "antz", the bug looks like an appealing bait to hook children with.

The adult versions of Metamorphosis are no less focused on Samsa as a near X-man, a mutant that is misunderstood in a culture where the push is to morph into hypernormal and corporatized entities.

Yet the bug of Kafka's universe, like the cats of Haruki Murakami's, is hard to adapt to any visual medium.

The South African choreographer Arthur Pita has recreated Metamorphosis as a ballet. In a 1969 play, legendary dancer, Mikhail Baryshnikov danced away the contortions of Samsa's body when he is in the bug-state.

I can't imagine how Samsa could be played by a dancer. The white swan and the black swan are fine figures to be ballet-ized, but Samsa?

The present view of Kafka's Metamorphosis is sterile and reductive.

A 2012 film version of Metamorphosis, with an insect evoking terror and disgust in the breasts of the characters, promises to be a story of a lunatic asylum, not an authentic reproduction of Kafka's philosophical novel of intelligent pathos:

 

The startup marriage

A New Yorker Cartoon (September 16, 2013)

The story of homelessness

Uncheerful interior, and an air of many people having recently passed through; the floors were like the insides of old suitcases, with forgotten small things in the corners. Bent window blinds; tragic, drooping, bright-green shower curtain; dark hallway opening onto two bare bedrooms. 

The above is a description of the inside of a homeless shelter in South East Bronx of New York City. 

Ian Frazier writes a heart-stopping story on the homeless of this city and as is characteristic of a New Yorker narrative, there are no discernible heroes or villains held responsible for either exacerbation or amelioration of the malaise of homelessness in what is considered to be the nation's most obscenely wealthy and consumerist cities. 

The homeless themselves become characters in a strange landscape that looks and feels like the landscape of the underworld that has no intersection whatsoever, except in the form of paternalism and policies, with the over world. 

Mayor Bloomberg is a frieze-like figure with a pair of blue eyes" that "twinkle" like those of Santa Clause's in the Coca Cola ads from the 1950s, yet says Frazier, Bloomberg is the contra-Claus person, whose eyes turn "icy" when the homeless look into them.

The best parts of the story are the scenes themselves; while on a warm Saturday night, the city itself is "hivelike, humming, fabulously lit, and rocking with low, thrilling, Daisy Buchanan-like laughter," the shelters pose a starkly contrasting picture:

More families came out, accompanied by a woman with a clipboard. People got sorted out into the right vehicles. Kids slept on people’s shoulders, except for a toddler named Jared, who was stagger-walking to and fro. He bumped against the legs of the man who was sweeping and a woman watching him picked him up and said to the sweeper, “Sorry—my bad.” Soon all the passengers were aboard, the vehicles’ doors closed, and the red tail-lights came on. Slowly the buses drove off, followed by the van. Nighttime departures and arrivals occupy the subbasement of childhood memory. The guy sweeping and the muttering man and the woman with the clipboard and the reporter taking notes existed in a strange, half-unreal state of being part of someone else’s deepest memories a lifetime from now. An orange had fallen from a bag lunch and lay beside the curb. The muttering man picked it up and looked at it and rubbed it and put it in his pocket.

The homeless according to Frazier suffer the kind of instability that exiles experience especially when they acquire the status of the fugitive and the unwanted. Yet homelessness has also morphed into an eerie form of institutionalized city-living as well:

Homelessness is a kind of internal exile that distributes people among the two hundred and thirty-six shelters around the city and keeps them moving. In this restlessness, the homeless remind me of the ghostly streaks on photos of the city from long ago, where the camera’s slow shutter speed could capture only a person’s blurry passing. Of all the homeless people who gave me their cell-phone numbers, only two—Marcus (Country) Springs and a woman I talked to briefly named Rebeca Gonzzales—could still be reached after a few weeks had passed. That their cell phones continued to work made them also photographable, and Springs’s portrait accompanies this article.

The handmade's tale

Just as the word "organic" conjures up images of the pure and the pristine in our minds, so does the word "handmade" evoke thoughts of the life cycle of a product as one where the human hand is ubiquitous in all stages of the making.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber, a Professor of archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College, clears misconceptions surrounding the word "handmade" in context of Etsy's recent decision to allow sellers to apply to peddle items they produced with manufacturing partners, as long as the sellers are able to demonstrate the "authorship", "responsibility" and "transparency" that are "intrinsic" to the handmade items.

Etsy's policy has angered buyers who believe that the "machine" part of the policy will taint the purity of human made handicrafts.

Dr. Barber argues that very rarely in the human history of making has anything been made that's a hundred percent "hand crafted."

Etsy’s latest move is entirely in line with the history of handmade goods, a history that is more complicated than the simple term “handmade” implies. The artisans have run head-on into the problem that led to the Industrial Revolution: Making things by hand is slow. Really slow.

Even the handloom that symbolized the tool with which luddites rebelled against the mechanization of European factories in the 19th century, "already had mechanical aids in the form of a complex of wooden bars and thread loops to open the passages for the weft thread to go across the cloth."

The one instance of an entirely handmade item is the fragment of an Egyptian linen from around 2,500 B.C. housed currently at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. 

Fine as silk, 200 threads to the inch, the linen had been hand-split and spliced end to end to make the thread.

Dr. Barber's advice to customers who are migrating from Etsy to Zibbet which claims to have "purer artisanal" interests, is to acquire a sense of history in order to see that the history of the handmade artifact is in itself implicated in that of machines.

Ultimately, it is the human care, effort and ingenuity used to create an object that is important, and not whether it fits the exact definition of “handmade [...] Just because an object includes manufactured parts doesn’t mean it can’t reflect the touch of an individual creator’s hand: the subtly uneven knit, the finger-marked clay, and all the other happy unmechanical surprises of human quirkiness.

Black is the coolest color: Tale of a Chinese lesbian

Following in the footsteps of the French exploration of lesbian sexuality in Blue is the Warmest Color, is a Chinese American one, called Saving Face.

The Pale Blue Dot Should've Appeared on Google's Forehead

I wanted to post a picture of Astrophysicist Carl Sagan not only because he is handsome but also because it's his birthday today. 

Sagan would have been 79.

But then again, it's not simply his birthday that made me search for a picture on Google, but an (glaring) omission on the part of the Google Doodlers to commemorate a famous scientific philosopher's birthday.

Who can forget the paradigm-altering concept of the earth being a mere "pale blue dot", an inconsequential entity in the cosmic scale? 

The fact of the earth's relative inconsequentiality was meant to humble us into seeing how petty the internecine ideological and militaristic warfare between the various tribes of mankind were. 

Is Google's elision of Carl Sagan a sign that the Google Universe is becoming, among other things, Indianized?

Sure the power structure of the globe has shifted and a way in which this shift has manifested recently is the appearance of Shakuntala Devi on Google Doodle.

Shakuntala Devi is a math prodigy from India.

Had Google Universe been operational when America itself wasn't headed in the direction of a pale blue dot on the firmament of global power, then a commemoration of the likes of Shakuntala Devi wouldn't have been conceivable.

But humility is one thing and an Indianization is another. If an Indianization of Google Universe means a forgetting of luminaries like Carl Sagan and a trumpeting of beings like Shakuntala Devi (somebody who built very little philosophy on the platform of mathematics), then I'm not in favor of an Indianization.

I'd rather that Google adopt a more cosmopolitan view in its selection of whom to commemorate.

The pale blue dot should have appeared on Google's forehead to show that Google isn't receding into a coy Indian bride (they have vermilion dots on their foreheads). 

Dissolving the "I" in an era of narcissism

The above is an image of the Budapest Jewish Memorial, made by Gyula Pauer and Can Togay.

The presence of this memorial was brought to my attention by a friend of mine, Bruce Bromley, and Mr. Bromley had the following to say about this unique rendering of a memorial in empty space:

I think of Simone Weil on evil, in her Gravity and Grace (La Pesanteur et la grace), written in 1943, thick in the grasp of a war that she would not outlast:

Monotony of evil: never anything new, everything about it is *equivalent*. Never anything real, everything about it is imaginary. It is because of this monotony that quantity plays so great a part. [. . .] One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
[But] there is no trace of 'I' in the act of preserving. There is in that of destroying. The 'I' leaves its mark on the world as it destroys. (69-70)

What does the insect (in love) say?

The illustration accompanying Haruki Murakami's new story, Samsa in Love (The New Yorker, October 28) is an insect shaped like a human heart, or more specifically, like one of those heart-shaped candy-infested Valentine's day gift boxes. 

A central theme of the story is love. But the exploration of this most quintessential of human emotions is wrapped in layers of mystery.

The first mystery is the identity and the personal history of Gregor Samsa. Murakami, a great re teller of Kafka's themes, introduces Samsa as a human waking up from a strange, yet, by all indications, a lengthy sleep of oblivion:

He woke to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa.

We don't know who he was prior to this moment of awakening. Was he an insect? The last time we saw Gregor Samsa, the poor fellow had metamorphosed into an insect. But Murakami's fellow seems to have had a reverse metamorphosis.

There are hints that Samsa was locked up in his room by his parents, and that the Samsas are an upper class family living in a grand house in a grand part of the city of Prague in Czechoslovakia. Was he locked up because he had become a gigantic insect?

It's impossible to tell, because Samsa wakes up into a cold and abandoned house. When he takes a tour of the house, his own house, he is like a stranger in a city, lost and stumbling through corridors and rooms. He navigates his way into the dining room and the table is laid out, but at the moment of dinner the people had fled, or so Samsa surmises.

The story is about an overwhelming mystery that Samsa can't solve, yet wants to solve. 

A young hunchback woman arrives at the scene, and she is a locksmith. She's come to help fix a lock that had been broken into, she says.

She takes Samsa to be the child of the household and converses with him freely, without any knowledge of the metamorphosis. Or, so it seems.

The hunchback tells Samsa of an upheaval that has plunged the city of Prague into a crisis. Everybody, especially the men, are huddling indoors, not daring to brave the military who have apparently taken over the city.

Samsa listens with awe and wonder to the hunchback and finds his body undergoing certain experiences which he can't name or understand. His male instrument bulges to an extreme and flashes of warm currents courses through his veins.

We understand he is experiencing love--for the hunchback; she is wonderful to Samsa because she is the first female human form he has seen since his awakening.

Is his love, a visceral sexual response to the body of the female?

We are led to believe it is. We are led to believe that Samsa is entering life as we know human life to be, through the gateway of the most primal and "human" of human experiences--the emotion of love.

Samsa likes it; initially he had prefered to have been reborn as a "sunflower" or a "fish", but after experiencing love he is happy he has morphed into a human.

But there are these showers of contextual cues, which tells us that the love that Samsa experiences isn't quite the kind of mindless emotion we have reduced to a cliche in our thinking of it. 

The love appears first when the hunchback starts speaking about things which we take for granted, and to which Samsa is an alien. She speaks of god, locks, keys, fucking, revolution, of the "world falling apart" outside, on the streets.

Samsa wants to know what these are; he wants to unlock the mystery to life and the woman would be his ideal locksmith in this process of unlocking.

Samsa is thirsty for knowing. The body of the woman isn't what fills him up with warmth inside and causes his instrument to bulge. It's the promise of knowing that he falls in love with.

When the woman is done with her task, Samsa asks if he can her again.

The woman, taken aback with the invitation asks Samsa, what would they do if they were to meet.

Samsa says:

Talk...about this world. About you. About me. I feel like there are so many things we need to talk about. Tanks, for instance. And God. And brassieres. And locks.

New cosmopolitanism

Ask Martha Nussbaum, the noted Princeton Humanist (rather, read her books) about cosmopolitanism, and she will tell you that it's a love for the planet.

It used to be that a cosmopolitan would identify her primary affiliation with the globe, or humanity at large, instead of with narrow ethnicities or nations.

Today's cosmopolitans have no national boundaries either, but according to the Dissent Magazine, they pitch their tents in brand-name goods and expensive experiences that can be bought in such global cities as Zurich, New York, (posher parts of) London, Dubai, Shanghai, not in any modicum of shared humanity.

A dismal cosmopolitanism it is.

Coming out of the Wood(y)work

Whatever (cinematic) Woody Allen makes is worthy of watching, especially his off-the-beaten path classic like Sleeper, a low-fi, science fiction farce.

Sleeper came out in 1973.

And the Man Booker goes to a young woman

The 2013 Man Booker Prize for fiction has been awarded to Eleanor Catton for The Luminaries.

Catton is the youngest woman to win the Booker. While the Nobel prizes are awarded to 70 pluses, a majority of the winners and nominees of the world's other prominent literary prizes are getting younger and younger...

Love in time of need

A recent write up in the New Yorker, on American novelist and social activist Jack London fascinated me, because, among other things, the write up posed a poignant question in light of London's obsession with conditions of material poverty and hunger: "In the absence of money, food, heat, or other necessities, can there be love?"

This question interests me because I've been studying representations of poverty and representations of those whom we label the "poor" in texts of all kinds and in multiple discourses.

Love is rarely a part of these representations and discourses, because the conditions that inspire emotions of love are not the conditions of material wretchedness. 

Somehow, in our minds, love is associated with an above-the-poverty-line existence. That is why even when we see irrefutable evidences of love in ghettos, for instance, we dismiss and deride them as not love, but animal lust, the consequences of which are bound to be disastrous--teen age pregnancy, unwanted procreation, disease, and finally that all-American dread of dependency on the state (to feed the products of ghetto love).

But Jack London, an early representer of the American poor in fiction, thought otherwise.

Love in conditions of indigence is the theme of London's best-selling novel, The Call of the Wild. But the hero is a dog, who finds love and expresses it by closing his mouth around one of his master's hands, "so fiercely that the flesh bore the impress of his teeth for some time afterwards."

The master recognizes the (feigned) bite for a caress. 

In London's short story, "Love of Life", the bite, from a wolf, has darker insinuations.

At the end of the story, a famished man and a sick wolf lie down, side by side, exhausted after days of mutual stalking. The man, drifting in and out of consciousness, feels the wolf licking his hand, and thinks of how the wolf is exerting its last bit of energy in an effort to sink its teeth in the food it has been wanting to have for so long.

Like Plato, London perhaps reaches for a higher love, the love for one's fellow being, or a more social kind of love, that flourishes in conditions of material destitution. 

He wrote, that the "very poor can always be depended upon [as] they never turn away the hungry." 

He also implies that it is easier to love the poor back. In one of his stories, the hero is a right-wing man who has to assume the alias of a working-class man to do his fieldwork. He discovers that when he is in his alias, brawling and drinking, he is much looser, warmer, freer, and sexually richer; he abandons himself to his provisional identity forever.

The East is a career

I first came upon the statement, "The East is a career," in an epigraph to one of the chapters in Edward Said's Orientalism. 

It's a quote from the 1847 novel, Tancred, by then British premier and writer of novels of social realism, Benjamin Disraeli.

Disraeli was presiding over the British Empire, that had reached a dizzying height in the mid-nineteenth century.

It's a complex quote, and as unraveled by Said, it suggests that the East at that time in the Western imperial imagination existed as a springboard from which a promising young English lad could launch his career in the Imperial civil or military services, or could launch his career as an entrepreneur as well.

The East, in short, was a passive market to be exploited by and for the benefit of the imperial West.

The East is still a career, I think, and I articulate this position in response to an online discussion on the subject matter of the Study Abroad Program, a program that is becoming a silent imperative for American high schoolers and College students today.

The East is a career for many in the contemporary American military-Industrial complex, especially in two of its more obliquely occupied territories like Iraq and Afghanistan (though I can't imagine a career being launched in the terrains of Afghanistan known for hosting missile launches). 

In Dave Eggers novel, A Hologram For The King, a failed American entrepreneur migrates to the land of an Arab despot somewhere in Jeddah, to reignite his economic dreams. 

The Study Abroad Program was conceived to reignite, not the economic, but the cultural part of a young American's being in the world. 

The Program is premised on the ideal that to adapt and adjust to an increasingly globalizing world (though I can't for the world of me fathom how the world can globalize), young Americans need to experience that world first hand, and the best way to achieve that is to live for a brief period of time in a foreign country.

I think the ideal is an empty one; in real terms it's pure balderdash. Young Americans who do the Study Abroad Program do it as a stepping stone toward a fruitful career. In a global economy everything, including culture, is translatable into money if one knows how to.

How many of the sons and daughters of America's underserved can afford to partake in this most expensive of acculturation programs? The mantle of "global citizenship" can be worn, as it were, only by the children of America's privileged class.

A stint in a foreign country is good for the resume, just as a stint with the Peace Core is. Also, an "immersion" in a foreign culture and language (add to that the value system), sits well with prospective employers in American multinationals who prize multilingual employees anyway. But not all multilingualism is equally valued; Mandarin, for instance, is valued over Hindi, in the corporate corridors of transnational corporations. 

China is a career for many young Americans today as a large number of transnational corporations (they are really American in one form or the other) eye China as a magical market in the way Aladin eyed the magic carpet.

Das Kapital

Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story.

Beggar farm

Filmmaker Suman Mukherjee's new political and social satire, Kangal Malsat, meaning "War Cry of the Beggars", could very well be seen as an Indian version of George Orwell's political allegory Animal Farm.

The story of Kangal Malsat: In the derelict shanties and dark alleys of Calcutta live two warring groups of the nether world. The Fyataroos have the gift of flying and the Choktars practice black magic. Suddenly, the rival groups are joined together in alliance by an ageless duo - a primordial talking crow and Begum Johnson who consorted with Job Charnock and Warren Hastings. Masterminded by the two ancient progenitors of the city and led by the magically endowed rebels, an army of tramps and vagrants launch an uprising against the Communist government of West Bengal. As skulls dance in crematoria, flying discs whiz through the sky, and a portrait of Stalin angrily admonishes the Chief Minister, the Communist government falls. The political transition, however, sees many of the rebels being rewarded with awards and positions in the new government. 

This unrelenting and bitterly sarcastic political film, based on a novel by Nabarun Bhattacharya, landed director Suman Mukhopadhyay in some trouble with the censors.

Here is a trailer of the film:

Sweet tamarind of Bastar

Is a defining feature of the rough jungle terrains of Bastar, a region in Southern Chattisgarh in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India.

Arundhati Roy inhales the tamarind that perfumes the air and looks up at the families of tamarind trees "watching over the villages, like a clutch of huge, benevolent gods." 

The villages she walks through under cover of the canopy of dense fauna are imperilled by the lurking presence of the Bastar police and special ops forces called the Salwa Judum, commissioned by the Central government of India to fight Maoist guerillas and the tribal residents of the village. The Maoists give protection to the tribals.

In Gandhi But With Guns, Roy writes of her experience touring the Maoist strongholds in Central India.

The literary quality of the writing is high, but as essayist and word Jane par excellence, Joan Didion has observed in a different context, language deceives as it is the tool of the articulate who take it upon themselves to express the truths of the inarticulate with the tool.

Language not only deceives, but it also constructs a secondary truth or reality that may be twice removed from the primary one.

Over and above being supremely articulate, Roy writes in English and translates the life-worlds of the Bastar residents and their Maoist vigilantes for a Western audience. Can English do justice to the language of the Chattisgarh tribals who speak a tongue that bear no resemblance to the major Indian languages?

Better perhaps to read this? (down below)

Satnam's Jangalnama is about the Gonds; According to the blog The Middle Stage he writes in Punjabi and revels in a

Depiction of the day-to-day life of the Gonds that Jangalnama touches its greatest heights. Satnam marvellously opens up for us the peculiar innocence, fragility and unworldliness of these people. Many Gonds, he reports, cannot count beyond the number twenty; after they reach this limit they start all over again from one, and finally add up the twenties. How then are they to imagine that around them lie mineral resources worth thousands of crores in the world market, or even to hold their own in small transactions with shopkeepers and moneylenders? Because of their indigence and ignorance, most Gonds do not live beyond the age of fifty, yet they are not particularly exerted by questions of life and death, and do not have extended rituals of mourning for those who pass away. Their sense of time is not of minutes and hours, but rather of day and night, of the coming and going of the seasons. Many have never seen a bus or a train, or any of the wonderful machines which are forged from the iron ore that is extracted from sites beneath their own feet.

2025?

2025 could very well be the title of a new Dave Egger's new novel, The Circle, because the plot is a close echo of the plot of George Orwell's dystopian classic, 1984.

Orwell's totalitarian regime was the government, whereas Eggers' is a tech-behemoth resembling Google or Facebook. The company credo is "All That Happens Must Be Known." It has several Orwellian maxims like, "Secrets Are Lies," "Sharing Is Caring," and "Privacy Is Theft."

According to the New York Times, The Circle

Attempts to use the coming-of-age story of a young woman to create a parable about the perils of life in a digital age in which our personal data is increasingly collected, sifted and monetized, an age of surveillance and Big Data, in which privacy is obsolete, and Maoist collectivism is the order of the day. [Eggers] reminds us how digital utopianism can lead to the datafication of our daily lives, how a belief in the wisdom of the crowd can lead to mob rule, how the embrace of “the hive mind” can lead to a diminution of the individual. The adventures of Mr. Eggers’s heroine, Mae Holland, an ambitious new hire at the company, provide an object lesson in the dangers of drinking the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid and becoming a full-time digital ninja.

America adrift

Two films, A Sandra Bullock-George Clooney starrer and a Robert Redford acted (Redford is put off by the word "star" in connection with actors), Gravity and All is Lost, respectively, are about men and women who are adrift, one in space and the other at sea.

The films seems to reflect, as Maureen Dowd says in her profile on Robert Redford, the national mood, which is that of a nation unmoored.

I am a fan of Hollywood, and an ardent critic of its Indian counterpart, Bollywood. Hollywood has its high and low moments and defects; but from time to time one can hark back on films coming out of this entertainment goliath and claim that in some ways some films manage to mirror the American soul (if there is such a national soul). 

I rarely see a Bollywood movie that deals with the Indian soul in the sense that it catches the national mood in a particular state of anger, melancholia, elation or depression. What Bollywood does is take on an event by the neck, convert it into a crude story, and fling it at the audience with song and dance sequences.

How else does one account for the birth of a movie like Raanjhanaa, which glorifies male obsession for a female object of love? In these times when stalking, brutalizing and raping of women in India are disturbing the national conscience, a movie celebrates a cause of that disturbance.

And, the surprising part is that Raanjhanaa is a big hit in India.

Anyhow, India has been adrift for a long time. Care to make a movie reflecting this, Bollywood?

Pirates of global capitalism

British filmmaker Paul Greengrass's movie, Captain Phillips, has been marked by film critics, including Manhola Darghis, as a story of "global capitalism" more than as a story of a virtuous captain attacked by villainous Somali darkies.

It's the forces of global capitalism that make outlaws out of the Somalis and the American Captain Phillips, a temporary hostage. Both are pawns in a "warfare" that's impossible to define in terms of a conventional warfare, but one can tell that the Somalis are emaciated, underfed, yet armed with stolen automatic weapons, and are interested in laying their hands on a jackpot of food that is ironically on its way to Somalia. The pirates have no affiliation with a nation; they want to seize this opportunity to pull off a heist.

The forces that bring the Somalis and Captain Phillips, who has roots in white and liberal Vermont, in the same space, need to be talked about, hints reviewer Darghis.

The bringing together of such disparate members of the global community also raises a poignant question of responsibility: In what ways, big or small, direct or indirect, are the likes of Captain Phillips responsible for the famine and war in Somalia?

I am reminded of Teju Cole's call for "constellational thinking" in order to respond to the question of responsibility. To understand Captain Phillips' role the dots in the landscape of global capitalism, of which the fugitive Somalis and the white liberal Phillips are residents, have to be connected.

The U.S. Marine rescues the ship and its crew members as we all know from the incident and Darghis says how the film ends with no David in sight, only Goliaths, meaning the muscular security men who are the keepers of the new world order.

Yet globalization had once upon a time promised the emergence of a multipolar world. The title of the film omits naming any one of the pirates as agents of the primary action, but that is to be expected; the world of Western entertainment media is largely unipolar. But Greengrass has made some room for the pirates in the movie, and humanized them somewhat.

As I understand, global capitalism has created a world of enormous economic disparities and the doors to opportunities of participation in the economy of global capitalism has gotten smaller and smaller. The Somali pirates in no way can lay hands on material resources by following the law. Captain Phillips alone makes twice the amount as a merchant navy captain, as a messenger, that is, than all of the Somalis who invade the ship taken together in a year.

Greengrass has globalized the book A Captain's Duty, in which Captain Richard Phillips gives an account of the Maersk Alabama saga.

This acephalous world

What is common to Riken Patel, British/Canadian social entrepreneur, and Sharbat Gula, the Afghani girl, the photograph of whose face on the cover of National Geographic Magazine, launched a thousand emotions in the breast of the Western world?

Nothing barring the color of their eyes.

But something like globalization is common to them as well, though Sharbat has zero notion of globalization and hence can't take advantage of it, while Riken is awash in the art of making it big in the global world.

Globalization separates Sharbat and Riken by an infinite bandwidth of power, placing the Afghani girl in tatters at the receiving and the Western millionaire with a conscience at the giving ends of the bandwidth. 

Patel is the founder of Avaaz, an International human rights advocacy group that harnesses the power and reach of technology to help "organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want." 

Awaaz is the world's fastest growing (till date it has 25 million subscribers, though it was launched as recently as 2005) online activism forum. It's most likely to help women like Gula if they are the receiving end of the injustice spectrum.

I had a tough time tracing the organization back to its founder, and that's one of the other aspects of a global entity like Awaaz. 

I chanced upon the organization's name in a NY Times Op-Ed column by Nobel Peace Prize winner, Bishop Desmond Tutu, who writes of the prospects of genocide looming large on the African horizon. The name struck me as non-Western and I surmised that the founders must be of South Asian origin.

These days, it's not easy to find out who the face behind the .org is, and I was reminded of the description of the networks of power within the circuitry of globalization as "acephalous" or headless. 

From whom does the fountain of grief originate? If somebody were to ask this of the ancient Greek world, the answer would be a pat, "Niobe," as we all know precisely which peg to hang the inconsolable tears that flowed in gushing currents as a result of the deaths of sons and grandsons in the Trojan war, on: the almost eyeball-less eyes of the maternal Niobe.

But were one to ask from whom the fountain of empathy and activism originates in the case of an organization like Awaaz, the answer would be hard to get to fast.

It took me a series of searches online to link Awaaz to Riken Patel.

Isadora Wing turns something like 60ish

Isadora Wing is the funny, vivacious heroine of Erica Jong's memorable book, 

Isadora is in a perpetual state of unzipment, one could say.

Critics are celebrating the 40th anniversary of Fear. Jong writes an essay on it as well. 

A book like Fear would have only been possible in the 70s, an era described by Jong as "thrilling", producing both "startling wisdom" and "banal blather."

Fear has sold over 3 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 40 languages. 

Publishers wouldn't touch Jong's manuscript initially, but it got popular through word of mouth, much like E.L. James' Fifty Shades did, but without the aid of the Internet.

Sex and the ditty

An interesting read in today's New York Times' Sunday Book Review section: A bunch of writers have written on how to best represent sex in literature and on what their first encounter with sex scenes in literature were.

I liked what Nicholson Baker said: His first brush with sex was via a "porno paperback" in 4th grade, and an image struck him, an image of a woman squatting.

"I thought that “squat” was just about the most exciting notion I’d ever encountered" he writes, and adds that "a good sex scene needs thwartedness, surprise, innocence and hair."

When it's Alison Bechdel's turn, she does it graphically:

Chicxulub

Such is the title of a 2004 New Yorker short fiction by T Choraghessan Boyle (T.C. Boyle).

T.C. Boyle writes of his fictional vision in the current New Yorker and mentions Chicxulub in passing.

He says:

There is a daunting power in storytelling and a daunting responsibility too. We each receive the world according to our lights and what the sparking loop of our senses affords us and all I can do is hope to capture it in an individual way, to represent the phenomena that crowd in on us through every conscious moment as they appear and vanish again. I want to be playful and serious, investigative and imaginative, curious and more curious still, and I don’t want distractions. I don’t make music anymore, I don’t write articles or film scripts or histories, I don’t play sports or do crossword puzzles or tinker with engines—it’s all too much. The art—the doing of it—that’s what absorbs me to the exclusion of all else. Each day I have the privilege of reviewing the world as it comes to me and transforming it into another form altogether, the very form I would have wrought in the first place if only it was I who’d been the demiurge and the original creator—the one, the being, the force, whether spirit or random principle, that set all this delirious life in motion.

War and the peace of baked beans

The writer here manages to embed his mother's baked beans recipe in a subtle vitriol against the American tradition of violence.

And in these days of multi-platform storytelling, the curious piece is incomplete without a more-curious mini-comic strip: