SPINE

Sunday, March 31, 2013

The gap

Israeli photographer Natan Dvir shows us a different kind of gap in his photography of gigantic billboards in Manhattan.

One can't miss the chasm in this photograph:


In his own words:
These ads are creating some kind of virtual dream world, a virtual reality, and when you compare it to what happens in reality — there’s a huge difference, sometimes a mind-boggling difference,” Mr. Dvir said. “That kind of lifestyle, that kind of mind-set, is not attainable. But this is how we frame our culture. And our culture says these are the right dreams to have. And I wonder... are they?
Coming from an Israeli culture that values sparseness and frugality as part and parcel of an acceptable lifestyle, Dvir's astonishment is only natural.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Unmarxing Marx


A new book on Karl Marx, Marx, A Nineteenth Century Life, is out and it does well to present Marx as a "figure of the past," a real person, with real human instincts, rather than as Marx the eternal "prophet of the future."

Jonathan Sperber, an University of Missouri scholar, has done well to rescue Marx from the cobweb of iconism. 

An excerpt from a review of the book:
[...] It comes as a shock to realize that the ultimate leftist, the father of Communism itself, fits a recognizable pattern. It’s like discovering that Jesus Christ regularly organized bake sales at his local church. So inflated and elevated is the global image of Marx, whether revered as a revolutionary icon or reviled as the wellspring of Soviet totalitarianism, that it’s unsettling to encounter a genuine human being, a character one might come across today. If the Marx described by Sperber, a professor at the University of Missouri specializing in European history, were around in 2013, he would be a compulsive blogger, and picking Twitter fights with Andrew Sullivan and Naomi Klein.

Sexual diversity

The facts of biology plainly falsify the oft-repeated notion that homosexuality is unnatural. Every species has evolved its own sexual ecology, and so nature resists generalizations. Does humanity’s natural inheritance include homosexual bonds and behaviors? Certainly. This conclusion is reinforced by the growing evidence that our sexual orientation is influenced by both our genes and the environment that we experience in the womb.
A wide, living rainbow arcs across the natural world. Diversity rules in sexuality, just as it does in the rest of biology. This natural variety does not provide ready-made moral guidance. But to claim that the only natural forms of sex and pair bonding occur between unambiguous males and females is to ignore the facts of human biology. Let those who wish for marriage to be “founded in nature” take note: the view outside the Supreme Court is full of life’s beautiful sexual variegation.

--David Haskell, Biologist

Friday, March 29, 2013

Jewishness in India



I remember "Nahoum," a hoary pastry shop tucked away in the din and bustle of Kolkata's "New Market." Later, much later, I learnt that the proprietor of "Nahoum" (a Professor of mine at the University told me the name is a derivative of "Noam") was Jewish. 

I learnt a bit more about the Jewish thread, its inception and its continuity, albeit in a state of great attenuation in both Kolkata and in India at large, from an English tutor in Kolkata. 

The tutor was a Vishwa Hindu Parishad (the "World Wide Hindu Organization") official and secretly confided in his students the Hindu fondness for the Jewish population of India--the latter helped them in firming their position against the Muslims, thereby affirming my belief in the proverb that "an enemy's enemy is a friend."

I was delighted to see the video that documents a discovery of Jewish food in India. The fact of a strong tradition of Jewish cuisine, hybridized into something else as evidenced by the video, and the presence of the remains of a synagogue, both in the beautiful city of Cochin, doesn't surprise me.

If you want to get a deeper idea of the Jewish strain in the coastal city of Cochin, go straight to Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Tyranny of the "social"

When I was growing up (in India), the word "anti-social" was applied to men, especially young jobless men, who were generally violent, i.e. they would go around doing the bidding of the local political mafia.

An anti-social was the rough equivalent of the goonda or the thug.

Anti-socials were, when they weren't burning effigies or breaking windows at the behest of their bosses, "bad" people in a very absolute sense of the term.

We, the "pro-social" one's, avoided them.

In this era of technology, the meanings of pro-social and anti-social have perhaps dwindled down to something despicably narrow. An anti-social is "un-sharing fellow," who likes to keep whatever information she gathers to herself, while a "social" woman is very sharing of the same (though not necessarily caring).

One of the framers of the changing, or shall we say, "evolving" connotation of this word, is Facebook and the master wizard of the "social" Hell Boy, Mark Zuckerberg. 

At least, this is so according to Evegny Morozov, whose well-considered and eye-opening argument against the god-like status granted to technology as a solution-provider to all problems of society, grip me.

In a piece, The Death of the Cyberflaneur, Morozov writes that Facebook assaults "solitude and individuality, anonymity and opacity, mystery and ambivalence, curiosity and risk-taking," by insisting in a one-sided way, that it's better not to pursue anything at all than to not pursue it "socially." 

Mark Zuckerberg posed the following question on a Charlie Rose show, where he appeared with Sheryl Sandberg:
Do you want to go to the movies by yourself or do you want to go to the movies with your friends?
A rhetorical question, to boot, it was answered by him right away:
You want to go with your friends.
Who would dare to say, "No, sometimes, I'd rather pursue something I like, alone."

Such daring, were it to take on a paradigm-effect would harm Facebook's precious "business model."

Sharing, is an implicit prerequisite of this business model. According to Morozov:
Facebook wants to build an Internet where watching films, listening to music, reading books and even browsing is done not just openly but socially and collaboratively. Through clever partnerships with companies like Spotify and Netflix, Facebook will create powerful (but latent) incentives that would make users eagerly embrace the tyranny of the “social,” to the point where pursuing any of those activities on their own would become impossible. [...] It's this idea that the individual experience is somehow inferior to the collective that underpins Facebook’s recent embrace of “frictionless sharing,” the idea that, from now on, we have to worry only about things we don’t want to share; everything else will be shared automatically. To that end, Facebook is encouraging its partners to build applications that automatically share everything we do: articles we read, music we listen to, videos we watch. It goes without saying that frictionless sharing also makes it easier for Facebook to sell us to advertisers, and for advertisers to sell their wares back to us.
"Share or die!" translates frictionlessly into "be social or perish!" but be "social" how? By getting bombarded with messages that the experience of enjoying things alone is a qualitatively inferior experience than doing the same "socially." 

Thinking about what Morozov says, I feel that the word social, as it has effloresced under the aegis of technology, has become constrictive and not such a good thing to be in its adjectival mode.

I'd rather be an "anti-social" than be a "social" in this context. 

Rise and fall

HBO will be airing an interesting documentary today, March 28, 2013: Emmy award winning Alexandra Pelosi's (Nancy Pelosi's daughter) Fall to Grace.

Pelosi's subject is James McGreevey, the ex-governor of New Jersey, who went through a rough and public divorce from his wife after he was charged with soliciting gay sex from an aide. Through all the rough and tumble of this very public process of exposure and perhaps a bit of a crucifixion on the side, McGreevey was re introduced to the world as a closeted gay male.

Today, McGreevey lives in Plainsfield, New Jersey, with his Australian mate Mark O'Donnell and is an Episcopalian with a degree in Divinity (he received that in his early 50's) and a career in social service:

As a recovery specialist who preaches the Gospel, Mr. McGreevey spends much of his time in the Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, N.J., working with women fighting addiction through the nonprofit organization Integrity House. His message: No matter how far you’ve fallen, redemption is within reach.

Pelosi claims she is interested in broken souls and deemed McGreevey to be one. She likes to look inside the lives of those who have fallen after having been in the limelight for a while. 

Indeed, as Pelosi says in her insightful interview, the fall of men and women are far worthier of attention than are the stories of their "rise." The "rise" stories are often formulaic and banal and they are also, with the benefit of hindsight, re constructed to make them inspirational.

The fall stories, on the other hand, are more human.

The title of the HBO documentary on McGreevey has a turn into a parable as well: For those who've read Leonard Kriegel's touching essay, "Falling into Life," will see a "fall" as redemption, or a freedom from certain invisible yet adamantine shackles that hold people back from experiencing their "real" lives--the one's reserved for them to achieve their full human potential.

Clearly, McGreevey's fall isn't the typical fall from the wheel of fortune, but a fall into what was reserved for him as a real and rightful place in this world--a gay man with a deep conscience and desire for social service.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Lovely lines

I know this life cannot be lived without dependencies, micro-webs of ritual and ardor and economies of need that bind us all together. But how do we stand up to loss? And love again without holding something back?
Stirring lines from this week's ode to Modern Love, entitled "The Fear of Surrendering", by Julia Anne Miller. 

Miller tells the story of her life being in a loving relationship and at the same time keeping her "Single Girl's Starter Kit," a storage facility that can accommodate "one single girl’s bed, one set of flannel sheets, one pillow, my grandmother’s afghan, one each of various kitchen utensils, one tool kit, one ladder and one box of love letters from past admirers."

Miller pays $189 a month to maintain the Kit in Brooklyn.

Akin somewhat to a bomb shelter, The Singer Girl's Starter Kit has everything a single girl needs in case she breaks up with her boyfriend. 

With sagacity, Miller describes the Single Girl’s Starter Kit as "the opposite of a hope chest."

Gourmet

In the parlance of some the word "gourmet" or "gastronomy" connotes class; so, if you aspire for gourmet food, you are in essence asking for food with a touch of class. Likewise, a gastronomer is most likely to evoke the image of one who takes pleasure in food--again it's somebody who enjoys the luxury of taking a pleasure in food, i.e. food is a recreational pastime rather than substance to keep body and soul together.

Carlo Petrini, founder and President of Slow Food, an organization that was launched in protest against the opening of a MacDonald's branch in Rome's Piazza di Spagna, rescues both words from the contagion of class.

When one is a Gastronome, Petrini says, she falls into a holistic frame of mind, not simply into a narrow pursuit of food for pleasure:
A gastronomer who is not an environmentalist is just stupid. Whereas an environmentalist who is not a gastronomer is sad. It’s possible to change the world even while preserving the concept of the right of pleasure.
Similarly, gourmet food is food that's not exclusive, but inclusive--widely so--of an entire ecology of agriculture, physics, biology, genetics, chemistry, history, economy, and politics.

The orphan train

The Orphan Train



Children of the Orphan Train
The janus face of childhood is evident in the reality of the storied "Orphan train" and in the fantasy of the glorious "Polar express."

We know about the Polar express, but few remember the nightmare of the Orphan train. I didn't know about this part of New York's history, and came upon it in the context of an online discussion of Caleb Carr's excellent novel of history, memory and individual courage in the New York of the 1880s: The Alienist

The novel, which became a bestseller (and I hear, a deserving one at that) about 20 years ago, is credited with a recreation of 19th century New York with razor-sharp precision and fidelity to the details of the atmosphere of the city back then. 

One of the outstanding horrors of the city in the 19th century was, like it was in London of the same era, the instance of children, abandoned, exploited, neglected, abused, prostituted, unschooled. 
Thus Charles Loring Brace helped start the Children’s Aid Society in New York City in 1853. In addition to doing what it could to bring aid and comfort, food and shelter, clothes and lettering, to as many “underprivileged” children in the city as it could, the Society also did everything it could to do what at the time seemed best for abandoned children in New York: get them out of New York. It was the beginning of the storied Orphan Train, which over the next 75 years relocated a quarter of a million abandoned orphans from the slums of New York to the Midwest.

What can be "newer" than technology?

Same-sex marriage, of course.

Or. at least according to Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito.

The U.S. Supreme Court is turning its attention to the merits of the case on Proposition 8, California's ban on same-sex marriage.

The justices, as exemplified by the words of Alito, are perplexed by what they have been asked to legally and humanely meditate on--the changing nature of the institution of marriage.

In the words of Alito:
Same-sex marriage is very new, [it] may turn out to be a good thing; it may turn out not to be a good thing. But you want us to step in and render a decision, based on an assessment of the effects of this institution, which is newer than cellphones or the Internet? I mean, we do not have the ability to see the future.

Monday, March 25, 2013

From the vault of Walter Pater

Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

From the vault of Nabakov

I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego. 
 —Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Technology: not "disruptive" but "reactionary"

I continue to enjoy Evegeny Morozov's dissenting voice against the blind adoption of innovative technology as the solution to, not just some, but all, social and political problems.

Reminds me of Neil Postman's prescient warning that in the United States, more than in any other developed nation, technology will displace culture. It's now slated to displace politics and even some fundamental substructures of society.

The most recent scandal is the evolving concept of "virtual incarceration," to solve the problem of overcrowding in prisons in the United States.

Morozov also speaks out against the foibles of Big Data here.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

On the road, yet stalled

O

Walter Salles's film On The Road, an adaptation of Jack Kerouac's phenomenal book, receives a two thumbs down in the New York Review of Books.

Reviewer Andrew O' Hagan expresses disappointment at the film's tepid representation of the book's central ethos, that of a slightly camp-seeming social and sexual uplift that came in time to awaken the 1960s.
Walter Salles’s film of On the Road comes to us more than fifty years after the book’s publication. If the novel was a strange hybrid of the truth and its correction—sold to the world as “spontaneous bop prosody”—then the film takes us even deeper into the mysterious waters of veracity. This is a film of a novel that takes the form of a biography of an icon. It wouldn’t have been made this way in 1957, and, indeed, the story it tells is really the story of our own need, the need of modern audiences, to find reality much more interesting than fiction. The film cannot control its lust for the tang of actuality, forgetting what it takes to dream a prose narrative into being. Yes, Kerouac’s novel was very close to his life, but On the Road is really its prose. One might say the prose is the main character. How quickly it was written and under what conditions, who knows, any more than one can say what was really behind the tone of Charlie Parker when the sound came flowing out of his horn?
The film never finds a way to embody the sound. It just can’t hear it and so we watch a kind of beat soap opera, a play in which the visionary travails of the men can only be set against the domestic woes of the women. The rolling Whitmanesque parade and the singsong bebop amping on chords and words and phrases that makes the book what it is, none of this enters the film at the level of its pictures. We have a voiceover that gutters with a sense of low-watt destiny: the poets and their conversation just seem silly, the locations dreary, the women either sluts or drudges, women either bursting with enthusiasm to give out blow jobs in cars at high speed, or women standing with crying babies balanced on their hip.

Indian dystopia


Manil Suri's The City of Devi is probably the first Indian dystopic novel.

It imagines an India in a post-apocalyptic globe; however, the forces that have plunged Suri's world into chaos are the hackneyed forces of terrorism.

Alas, Indians, even when they imagine destruction, imagine it in terms that are no longer considered that hip or relevant.

Anyhow, India and Pakistan are on the brink of a nuclear war in the post-apocalyptic world of Suri's imagining. 

Amidst the (same old) communal riots (between Hindus and Muslims) that convulse India, the heroine, Sarita searches for her physicist husband, Karun.

Their year-old marriage remains unconsummated and Sarita sets out to look for Karun with a pomegranate in her hand, hoping to reignite Karun's libido once she finds him (horror!)

Karun has yet another lover who also yearns for him and wants to win him back to herself. 

Seems like the sought-after Karun is a Bollywood hero and lo and behold, there it is--the key to the secret of why Suri's plot sounds so garish and gimmicky: It's Bollywood stupid! 

According to the New Yorker Magazine:
Suri's take on apocalypse is broadly satirical: a flashy Bollywood superhero ignites the conflict; class lines are firm, even in the dim confines of a bomb shelter; a religious zealot holds thousands in thrall to a gilded beggar girl with a birth defect.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Pretty, dirty and dignified

The short story, Checking Out, by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche (I didn't know if the writer were a she or a he, till I saw a picture of her's) reminds me of the movie Dirty, Pretty Things (2002) directed by Stephen Frears. 

Both narratives have a Nigerian at the center of the immigration saga that unfolds. And both are set in Britain, and show the heartless attitude that Britain shows toward those who arrive at its shores from other worlds.

But what binds the two narratives together, in my eyes is the sublime dignity which form the core of the characters'--the "dirty," yet "pretty" people, who dot the margins of the nations' landscape but have to remain hidden.

In Adiche's story, the illegal Nigerian immigrant Obinze is the son of an University "staffer" back home in Lagos, Nigeria. He has a nice middle-class life, yet wants to have more--he wants to have more choices, he muses--and migrates to the UK in search of a life with a wider arc of choices. Tragically enough he migrates with a 6 month visa, which does not grant him the right to work for a living. So, Obinze works illegally with a fellow Nigerian's ID. 

His first encounter with the dirt underlying the illegal immigrant's experience is the inevitable toilet.

Obinze gets a job cleaning toilets in a real estate agent's office in a London building.

The job goes well till a moment of reckoning arrives:
The toilets were not bad--some urine outside the urinal, some unfinished flushing. So he was shocked, one evening, to walk into a stall and discover a mound of shit on the toilet lid, solid, tapering, centered, as though it had been carefully arranged. It looked like a puppy curled on a mat. It was a performance. He thought about the famed repression of the English. There was, in this performance, something of an unbuttoning. A person who had been fired? Obinze stared at the mound of shit for a long time, feeling smaller and smaller as he did so, until it became a personal affront, a punch to his jaw. And all for three quid an hour. He took off his gloves, placed them next to the mound of shit, and left the building.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Seeing Red


Anne Carson is known for her inscrutable brilliance. Her first well-regarded novel is Autobiography of Red, published in 1998.

According to the NYT 
Red” has become known as one of the crossover classics of contemporary poetry: poetry that can seduce even people who don’t like poetry. It boasts one of the more impressive roster of blurbs you are ever likely to see: full-on gushing from Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Susan Sontag. The book is subtitled “A Novel in Verse,” but — as usual with Carson — neither “novel” nor “verse” quite seems to apply. It begins as if it were a critical study of the ancient Greek poet Stesichoros, with special emphasis on a few surviving fragments he wrote about a minor character from Greek mythology, Geryon, a winged red monster who lives on a red island herding red cattle. Geryon is most famous as a footnote in the life of Herakles, whose 10th labor was to sail to that island and steal those cattle — in the process of which, almost as an afterthought, he killed Geryon by shooting him in the head with an arrow.
“Autobiography of Red” purports to be Geryon’s autobiography. Carson transposes Geryon’s story, however, into the modern world, so that he is suddenly not just a monster but a moody, artsy, gay teenage boy navigating the difficulties of sex and love and identity. His chief tormentor is Herakles, a charismatic ne’er-do-well who ends up breaking Geryon’s heart. The book is strange and sweet and funny, and the remoteness of the ancient myth crossed with the familiarity of the modern setting (hockey practice, buses, baby sitters) creates a particularly Carsonian effect: the paradox of distant closeness.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Be creative and collaborate...and be transparent

I enjoy reading Evgeny Morozov's guest column on the dark side of technophilia.

This weeks column brings to mind something I've been thinking of for a long time--the pervasive use of words with little meaning.

"Creativity" and "collaboration" are two such words that annoy me when used in a mindless way (and used in mindless ways they are).

In the context of technology, Morozov takes on the word "openness." Open, he says, is now a word that has a "lot of sex appeal," yet "very little analytical content." 
Openness is the latest opiate of the (i-pad totting) masses [...] Certified as “open,” the most heinous and suspicious ideas suddenly become acceptable. Even the Church of Scientology boasts of its “commitment to open communication. [...] Openness is today a powerful cult, a religion with its own dogmas. 
Then again,
For many institutions, “open” has become the new “green.” And in the same way that companies will “greenwash” their initiatives by invoking eco-friendly window dressing to hide less-palatable practices, there has also emerged a term to describe similar efforts to read “openness” into situations and environments where it doesn’t exist: “openwashing.”
I feel that like the "openness," "creativity" and "collaboration" have become powerful cults with their own set of dogmas. Be "creative" or perish, yet nobody can with pinpoint precision tell what constitutes creativity and what doesn't.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Two novels I'd like to read


Nadine Gordimer's No Time Like the Present, is a novel I'd like to read because, personally I admire Gordimer's politics and the choices she had made during and after the apartheid era in South Africa.

Under the brutal regime of apartheid, Gordimer, a voice of dissent and a keeper of the "white" conscience of the nation, wrote with great subtlety against the illogic of a minority-rule over the majority. She had foreseen a downfall of such a rule, yet she never sensationalized her narratives of anti-apartheid sentiments.

I like her because of the scene of brutalization she had painted in a certain part of the novel July's People. This was a scene where a donkey, the beast of burden was beaten to unconsciousness by its black master under a scorching July sun, in a barren landscape, merely because the donkey wouldn't or couldn't move. The scene had, without naming names, as it were, shown how a rotten political regime can dehumanize everything and everybody, both perpetrator and victim alike.

Finally, Gordimer braved the dismantling of apartheid and stayed on in South Africa despite warnings of a black-backlash against whites who stayed put instead of migrating to Europe. No Time Like Present is about the complexities of a post-apartheid present in South Africa.





The other novel I'd like to read is Joyce Carol Oates' The Accursed.

Why Oates? Primarily because I've never read her, and also because she is one of the few utterly famous American novelists I haven't read, yet had played around with her name, calling her "Oral Coats" and other funny variants in my mind.

The Accursed, a good representation of which is the picture above, promises an interesting read.

In a NYT review, Stephen King says the following of The Accursed
Joyce Carol Oates has written what may be the world’s first postmodern Gothic novel: E. L. Doctorow’s ‘Ragtime’ set in Dracula’s castle. It’s dense, challenging, problematic, horrifying, funny, prolix and full of crazy people. 
Sumptuous fare, I say.

Subwordsion


I recall reading something on censorship and artistic expression by J.M. Coetzee. He was using a poem where an African National Congress member couldn't directly report on the death from torture, suffered by a fellow ANC activist, during South Africa's regime of Apartheid. 

Ingeniously, he composed a poem on how the prisoner, repeatedly slipped and fell on a bar of soap, till he fell and broke into smithereens, inside his prison cell.

Words, Coetzee says, can help bypass censorship and yet evoke the truth that the writer wishes to convey.

Popular Chinese novelist, Yu Hua, uses a similar linguistic tactic in China in Ten Words, his nonfiction accounting of modern day China.

The ten words are as follows: people, leader, reading, writing, revolution,disparity, grassroots, copycat, bamboozle and Lu Xun (an influential early 20th-century writer). None of these words are banned in China, but they are used subversively by the writer. 

Here is an instance of that indirect journey of subversion that a word like "people" makes in Hua's book: It's a positive word used by the Chinese state very frequently to suggest complete democracy and "people's power." Hua, co opts the word from the bureaucratic lexicon and creates an occasion to discuss the Tienanmen Square incident of June 4, 1989, when the Chinese army opened fire on unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators.

Monday, March 11, 2013

When "healing" becomes a bogus word


Sonali Deraniyagala's memoir Wave, is in the same family of memoirs as Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking and its sequel, Blue Nights, i.e. it is literature of grief.

Like Didion, Deraniyagala writes to make sense of the loss of her family, her husband and two sons and her parents. 

Didion's loss came in the quiet of her domestic setting. In Year she likens the sudden slumping forward of her husband face down on the dinner table on a perfectly normal evening, to the un-foreshadowed slamming of American Airlines flight 11 into the walls of the World Trade Center's North Tower 1 at 8:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001. The two things happen on a nondescript day, and come unannounced; hence the severity of the impact on those the events befall.

Deraniyagala's family falls sudden victim to a natural disaster; the Indian Ocean tsunami spawned by the earthquake in 2004 killed them as they were vacationing in a beach hotel in Sri Lanka. 

Deraniyagala was the lone survivor as she miraculously clung to the limb of a tree. She writes not only to deal with her loss, but also to reckon with what we know to be the survivor's guilt.

A NYT review describes the book as a "somber volume" that explores the complexity of human grief. Grief, as Julian Barnes writes in Flaubert's Parrot, is a permanent resident in the lives of those who suffer loss. It's not easily got out of like one gets out of a tunnel into the sunshine.
You come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick, [...] You are tarred and feathered for life.
Such an image of grief is palpable in Wave, and it makes me want to post the image of the gull tarnished and stunned by the Beyond Petroleum oil spill along the Gulf Coast a couple of years ago.

Ms Deraniyagala is the gull.


Century 21 goes to the moon



Ordinarily, one would laugh at the proposition that you could buy and sell property on places outside the earth.

But this proposition isn't risible or a crack pot scheme anymore; this video demonstrates that entrepreneurs are making money, even if its paper money for the time being, by selling lunar properties.

Ridiculous or ominous?

To me, conceptually, it's a mark of crude acquisitiveness to consider the moon as real estate/ "property," to be bought and sold like the slaves of yore.

The moon-dealer from Nevada, is an Oklahoman, who calls himself a "pioneer," re defining a pioneer as somebody who not only thinks outside the box, but outside the planet as well.

Alas, the white colonizer's acquisitive instincts have degenerated into that of a swindling instinct.

Monday, March 4, 2013

Whither future?

Read this


Learn what the author is all about here

and read this

and then ask questions about America's "future," in context of a "future" that seems poised to be solely governed by what technophiles of today think.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

World according to Mary


Colm Toibin's novel, The Testament of Mary, that re-imagines Mary in light of a humane mother and a "real" woman, instead of a mythical mom who was simply a function of God's grand scheme, has been "trending," along with the controversy surrounding Pope Benedict's resignation.

The novel has been adapted into a play that is currently playing on Broadway. It's a "bold, brazen piece" according to Maureen Dowd of the NYT

The Mary of Toibin's creation is illiterate yet intelligent (a pointer for T that literacy has little obvious connection with intelligence per se), has echoes of Antigone and Electra, and is no "idealized, asexual and docile Madonna, tenderly cradling her son's bleeding body, Pieta-style."

This Mary cannot bear to witness the horror of crucifixion, disapproves of the outcasts that surround Jesus and (most scandalously) misses sleeping with Joseph.

Mary disdains the men who flock around Jesus' drive for power, for she can tell that they are in it, not for love of god, but for the creation of powerful institution by mythologizing the story of Jesus' birth, death and resurrection. She hates the notion of hiding the truth to protect the institution they are building.

Toibin is an (lapsed) Irish Catholic and gay. 

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Mapping the schmoozing gene


The secret to the success of Russ & Daughters, New York City's iconic store that sells the most delicious smoked fish and other accessories (T and I have availed of it), is "schmoozing."

That's according to Mark Russ Federman, who has written an eponymously titled book on the store and its history.

Joel Russ, a Polish-Jewish immigrant of the early 20th century, opened the store in 1914, after he saved enough money from selling herring on an open pushcart.

When Joel's three pretty daughters came to work at the store in 1935, the store was named "Russ & Daughters."

The book has funny tidbits about Joel Russ:

He had to arrange his daughters' marriages because it was hard for them to date, as they smelled too fishy and were too tired to socialize at the end of an extremely hard day's work. But Joel retained the "right of first refusal" and dismissed potential suitors who were not strong enough to schlep barrels of herring, or smart enough to add up a column of numbers on a brown paper bag. Having ascertained that a certain future son-in-law would look good behind the counter, he would tell his daughter, "fine, you can marry him."

Joel was a non-romantic (as most successful business people reportedly are), and called his wife "Zug" which loosely translates from Yiddish into "Hey you!"

Apart from schmoozing, the business culture of Russ & Daughters has also shown remarkable adaptability and has evolved with the local food culture of the Lower East Side, a locality that is now rife with the culture of hipsterism. 

Now they sell sandwiches with names like Super Heeb, Boychick, Shtetl, The Meshugge. The Super Heeb has Sesame bagel, horseradish cream cheese, whitefish salad, and wasabi-flavored flying fish roe.

Goldman (Same)Sex



A few years ago Llyod Blankenfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, made a commercial in support of same-sex marriage.

At that time, Blankenfein said, he had the feeling that he was taking a timely stand on what many consider to be the era's most important civil rights issue in America. Blankenfein was surprised to find that he was a bit lonely out there at that time, but the "virus," as it were, of marriage equality spread and this week, Goldman Sachs was one of more than a 100 corporations that lodged their support for same-sex marriage in two briefs filed with the Supreme Court. 

Historically, corporate America has been a laggard in participation in civil rights movements. It doesn't want to get involved in politics for obvious reasons.

According to Gavin Wright, Professor of American economic history at Stanford University,
[Corporate America] supported a public accommodations law only after sit-ins and boycotts inflicted heavy losses and it became clear that these pressures were not going to fade away as the latest student fad. On employment, even leading textile firms resisted and dragged their feet, certainly not testifying in support of civil rights legislation. But that changed [...] when they found that desegregation actually worked.
Corporations avoided Equal Rights movement and decades ago showed little interest in the Women's Movement. While many companies have joined in Supreme Court briefs in recent years in support of Affirmative Action and diversity in workplaces, the participation came after a long time.

Corporate America no longer wants to lag behind as a socially and politically conscientious entity. 

The world has changed since the time of the preceding civil rights and image counts as does the intricate interconnection between being "good" and being "profitable," at least on the outside. 

"I think people wanted to attach themselves to what may be the last great civil rights issue of our time," remarked Blankenfein (after pocketing a record CEO package this year).