Notes transferred (in Stanley Fish's words)

I think these are the words of Stanley Fish, from his book on how to write sentences (and appreciate the gems).

In college I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page.

[To me] these were a handful of words artfully arranged to stop time, to conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimension.

From James Joyce's Araby:

The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.

The sentence is measured, unguarded, direct and at the same time transcendent. It distills a precise mood; radiates with meaning, yet sensibility is discreet. The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.

Only certain sentences breathe and shift about like live matter in a soil.

Not sure who wrote the following:

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in grammatical relation to one another, is the most basic, ongoing impulse in my life.

On days when I am troubled, when I am grieved, when I am at a loss for words, the mechanics of formulating sentences, and of stockpiling them in a vault, is the only thing that centers me again.

Contrasting a sentence is the equivalent of taking a Polaroid snapshot: Press the button, wait for something to emerge.

Notes transferred (on David Foster Wallace)

For some time, I've been transferring notes I had hand-written, on to my blog.

To me, this sort of action is like a potent brain-therapy, as I believe, when I write and rewrite, even when the activity of the rewriting is a mere copying of stuff I had written, my brain cells are enlivened.

Some things somebody had said about the novelist David Foster Wallace:

He has an astounding voice that is "hyperarticulate" and "plaintive." He is self-mocking, diffident, overbearing, needy, ironical, almost pathologically self-aware.

Says Wallace of his own writing voice, "The voice is in your own head; intimacy is an errection of the heart, as the importance of bearing witness bumps up against the danger of trivialization and exploitation."

Writing god

There are, as we know, many ways to express our private thoughts about the divine.

Sometimes, however, they can be too subversive for authorities to bear. Novelist and noted advocate of the freedom of artistic expression, Salman Rushdie, brought to my attention the following way in which Saudi poet and journalist Hamza Kashgari paid tribute to the Prophet Mohammed; he composed three tweets:

On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.
On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.
On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.

Kashgari was promptly jailed by the Saudi monarchy on charges of apostasy and is awaiting "trial."

The contemporary American poet Carl Phillips' way of remembering God is altogether casual and remarkably intimate.

In a prose poem, "Neon," he writes:

Comes a day when the god, what at least you've called a god, takes you not from behind, the usual, but pins you instead, his ass on your chest, his cock in your face, his mouth twisting open, saying lick my balls, and because you want to live, in spite of everything, you do what he says, heaven and earth, some rain, a few stars appearing, harder, the way he tells you to, then not so hard, a tenderness like no tenderness you've ever shown. 

A stark difference in approach to the sacred, but if Kashgari's mere humanizing (or, as they say, "historicizing") of the Prophet begets imprisonment, one shudders to think what he would have been sentenced to had he echoed Phillips'-like sentiments

I like Phillips' evocation better, as god here is an embodied individual, i.e. invested with a body and a personality. He is gay and male, of course (so is Phillips), but he is also fierce.

Kashgari's Prophet is an abstraction and he sounds somewhat deferentially-inclined toward the entity.

Ulysses

I had no idea that somebody had actually attempted to make a film out of James Joyce's Ulysses.

In an interview, novelist Salman Rushdie mentions Joseph Strick's celluloid version of the Joycean epic.

A Chinese corpse bride

"The Cremator" directed by the Chinese Peng Tao 

Censorship, in some form or the other, exists in all countries, with perhaps the exception of culturally progressive nations of Europe and Scandinavia.

Chinese authorities censor films on grounds of violence, sex and nudity. However, films like Peng Tao's "The Cremator" also risk being censored and/or banned because of its subject matter.

"The Cremator" explores the real-life Chinese custom of “ghost marriages — matchmaking for the dead to ward off loneliness in the afterlife, a practice that still occurs in some parts of rural China. The movie follows an unassuming undertaker who helps facilitate ghost marriages for cash in his poor town. When he faces a terminal illness, the undertaker makes his own ghost bride from a pretty young woman’s unclaimed corpse. But real life interjects in the form of his dead bride-to-be’s living sister, and the undertaker has a strange relationship with the sister.

It's love at first sight for me personally when I read of such stories. But for Chinese authorities, the film may be foregrounding superstition that has always been a particular anathema of the Communist establishment in China.

Here is a review of the film, and here is a list of films banned over the years, for a variety of reasons, in the United States.

Lady Lazarus on camera

Sandra Lahire took 9 years to make a film on Sylvia Plath's poems, especially Lady Lazarus and the sumptuous Daddy.

Lahire describes the film as:

A visually woven response to Sylvia Plath’s own readings of her poetry… which celebrates her macabre humour and cinematic vision. A carousel of images in windows, an atmosphere of constant metamorphosis; her poetry as cinema.

I love Plath's voice; it's too rich to be true.

I also believe in how she differentiates finely between "real" and "seeming" dangers to our psychic health. Gentility, she says, poses a far greater danger to our psychic health than does overt displays of anger and violence. Gentility is order and the order is predicated on a certain squelching of subterranean chaos. Gentility can only go so far in keeping the chaos from rearing its ugly head in hidden forms.

Orientalizing Oklahoma

In his 1979 book Orientalism, Edward Said described "Orientalization" as a process, whereby concrete and palpable people and places are transformed, through the act of writing, painting (and in the modern era, via film), into ideas.

The "Orient," wrote Said, in reference to the geographical East/non-West, was less of a geographical reality, and more of a concept imagined by the West, particularly the imperialist West of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

In Orientalism, we see the dark side of rendering real geographies into ideas--they could be then treated like ideas, flung around from text to text and projected on to, thereby creating asymmetrical relationships of power between those who represent and those who are represented.

So when I read of Imaginary Oklahoma, a collection of short fiction on Oklahoma composed by writers who have never visited the place, but have the power to imagine it into existence through words, I thought of the fate of the real Oklahoma as hanging in the proverbial balance--between becoming an idea and then appropriated for other uses.

But I'm wrong, Oklahoma is in no danger of being Orientalized out of contention as a real place. The collection has been praised in the Paris Review as an exemplar of writing space (and time) in an innovative way and making the idea of Oklahoma surprisingly palpable.

The best stories in the collection are those that deal with the ghosts of Oklahoma's bloody past, i.e. the history of the displaced and deceived Indian tribes. The modern state of Oklahoma is conceptualized in these stories as a palimpsest that rests on the other geography, which needs to be seen and felt as well.

Theodore Dreiser's descendants

Theodore Dreiser, popularized as one of America's earliest and best novelist of the "naturalist" school, wrote about the poor and the working class.

Yet, Dreiser's working class-poor were mostly people who left their homes in the American countryside, to have a better life in the cities.

The cities turned out to be hellish, rewarding the vicious, and punishing virtue.

In other words, Dreiser's world was a dichotomous one, with the countryside or small town America perceived as poor but golden, and the cities perceived as dens of corruption.

The 21st century descendents of Dreiser, seem not to care for such dichotomies. Characters in the stories of Frank Bill and Donald Ray Pollock, for instance, live in hell, and can't leave it because it doesn't occur to them to leave.

These hells are not imagined, but are located in the rural areas of the American Midwest. While Bill's hell is mostly in South Indiana, Pollock's is in Ohio. Violence, meth and ruthless poverty mark these places, and the lives of the people therein.  

As Craig Fehrman notes in a recent story, writers like Bill and Pollock, don't romanticize the Midwest, but depict them as they are. The title of Pollock's novel pretty much says that there has never been a "golden" era in the rural Midwest; it's always been hellish.

Fehrman names the emergent genre of fiction as "Country noir." 

Incidentally, both Bill and Pollock are natives of the places they write about and they are factory-workers who took up fiction writing at later ages. They aren't products of creative writing workshops.

While Bill was inspired by Chuck Palhanuik's The Fight Club, and decided to transpose masculine violence from the city to the country, he also makes masculine violence as a way of life in rural America, rather than as a fight back against emasculating forces of consumerism in the cities. 

Study in contrasting cultures

A glimpse of street fashion in the Bronx.

When asked about sartorial inspirations, the young residents of the Bronx scratch the surface of the abysmal present. They are inspired by, they say, figures like Rihanna and Kayne West.

They have little sense of history, ergo the responses lack depth.

The one guy wears "Timbs" all year round and he can't explain his choice, except in terms of a personal, whimsical choice. Sounds more comical than anything.

A glimpse of street fashion in Long Island City, an emergent space for hipster culture. 

These guys speak of drawing inspiration from the 50s, 60s and 70s. One dude even describes the buttons on his coat as "boring," showing an eye for detail and a desire to name details.

The responses are studied; you learn more than what individuals wear; you learn a bit of history as well. 

The second culture is more memorable; the first one will disappear in no time, when the Paul Newman jacket wearing crowd will elbow out the crowd that wear "timbs" all year round and carry mismatching backpacks because "girls like it."

Bollywood-porn

This according to the New York Times' blog India Ink:

There is some evidence that Indians are more actively seeking pornography on the Internet than citizens of many other countries:
New Delhi, population 16 million, was the city with the highest-worldwide percentage of searches for “porn” in 2012. Dallas was the second highest.Google searches for the word “porn,” as a proportion of total Google searches, have increased five times between 2004 and 2013 in India, according to Google Trends. Over that period, India ranked fourth worldwide, after Papua New Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, and Pakistan.
One of every five mobile users in India wants adult content on his 3G-enabled phone, one 2011 study by IMRB concludes, and pornography Web sites rank among the most popular in India. Sunny Leone, an Indian-origin Canadian porn star, became a popular in India after appearing on the “Bigg Boss” house here in 2011.

While the "good" news (for those Indians who measure their superiority/inferiority as a culture vis a vis their neighbors) is that Pakistan still ranks higher than India in the porn-search statistics, the bad news is that this search isn't passive. The deep and rising interest in pornography could be behind what many have dubbed the "rape epidemic" in India.

I'm not surprised by the spike in pornography downloading in India. Indian males have been fond of pornography for a long time, it's only now that technology can track and evince these proclivities and formalize them as cultural practices. 

But what confounds me is how a proposed "banning" of pornography in India would solve the problem of rape. Rape isn't just a sexual or an impious act, it's an act of extreme violence that could happen when women are typecast as an overly submissive species, not just in pornography but in mass culture. 

Pornography is ubiquitous in popular Indian culture. Bollywood, the most hegemonic of all Indian popular cultural forms, is pornographic at its core, as it objectifies women like no other movie industry in the world does. Bollywood-Porn, like other kinds of pornography, divests the female of her individuality, by making her an object mostly that males can variously ogle at, lust after, wolf-whistle into oblivion, imagine as passive receptacles of their seeds, etc. 

The woman in a typical Bollywood fare is an object that exists only to titillate the male organ. 

Sociologist Ashis Nandy had observed years ago that we Indians should not underestimate the power of popular culture, by which he meant Bollywood, to shape our notions of socialization and sexualization. Indians have continued to ignore the effect Bollywood has on the Indian mind and now that sexual crime against women and girls have become a grave social problem, they turn to single out pornography as the sole villain.  

Listen to the song, and if you don't understand Hindi, just study the body language of both the girl and the boy; the scene is deceptively framed within the traditional Indian festival of holi, when Indian males get a chance to freely touch the bodies of females with whom they allegedly "play" holi. But its a pornographic scene; observe the manner in which the relationship between the boy and girl is shown to transform in a few seconds, from being asexual and/or friendly to one of lust and extreme desire. The boy lunges forward and begins to chase the female with such ferocity that it doesn't look like the celebration of spring anymore.


A generation of Indian males are raised to watch this as popular entertainment and you get the picture of what it does to their mind regarding women.

And don't be fooled: "Balam pichkari" has been corrupted from Krishna's time into symbolizing the self-spraying male organ. The male organ has been represented by several objects over time in Bollywood--as a syringe, as a "danda" or a stick, and here as a "pichkari" that wants to wet the object.

Bollywood Jews

As kids we used to watch older Hindi movies from a pre-Bollywood era on television and have a blast, every time the Gargantuan body of comedienne Tun Tun floated onto the screen, to regale audiences with her brand of corny, physical humor.

Tun Tun's jokes fell flat on our ears, but it was her presence we guffawed at, we had a suspicion that she wasn't a "She," but a "He" dressed up as a she. In fact we were convinced that "Tun Tun" was none other than "Mahmood," the fat Charlie Chaplinesque jokester who was a comic staple in Hindi films.

It was quite common for men to do female roles in older Hindi movies, especially from the black and white times, because film acting was looked down upon as a thing that women of "ill-repute" did.

Shalom Bollywood, a new, eye-opening documentary on early Hindi cinema and the role of women therein, tells a riveting story of how it wasn't just men, but young Jewish Indian female dancers, women hailing from Jewish families settled in India, especially in and around the region of Mumbai, who played female roles in Indian movies from the early twentieth century.

I did not know that the famous actress Nadira was a Florence Ezekiel.

Yet another evidence of a strong Jewish DNA in Indian culture.

Going by the mindless and brainless douchebags that dominate today's Bollywood, the Jewish DNA might sound like a joke or a phantom of the past.

Online and offline

A MOOC Classroom

Two studies in contrast between higher education offered online versus that taught in traditional offline classes: MOOC's or Massive Online Open Courses, taught by professors who are leaders in their field (a.k.a those who teach mostly in Ivy League colleges and universities), and the regular classes taught by the brigade of the less-hallowed professors inside brick and mortar classrooms, where real-time and real-space contact between learners and teachers is an intrinsic part of the experience of learning.

A.J. Jacobs, editor at large at Esquire Magazine, shares his experience with MOOC learning, while novelist Philip Roth remembers his Homeroom teacher as a superb mentor who not only taught content, but also shared with his students an inspiring presence.

Both Jacobs and Roth concur, implicitly, that the process of learning is dynamic and will stall if there is no real dialogue or intellectual interaction between students and professors. The MOOC's, says Jacobs, give students from "South Dakota to Senegal" access to Ivy League wisdom, but the Ivy League wisdom is dispensed pretty impersonally. Professors are as inaccessible as the Pope or Thomas Pynchon.

Roth's Homeroom teacher, on the other hand, was highly accessible, much like the figure of Socrates and Roth says that one of the things that stood out about this extraordinary teacher of his was the fact that his talk was always permeated by the "tang of the real."

MOOC professors deliver content remotely, whereas offline professors, at least a few of them, might just end up shaping the learners' outlook on life at large, in ways big and small.

Vice can be virtuous

I don't know too much about gonzo journalism, except that its founder-practitioner Hunter S. Thompson wrote this extraordinary travelogue/report on Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 

The subjective impression of Las Vegas life and the writer's experience of it makes for astoundingly dynamic writing. 

One would imagine that gonzo journalism could never be part of mainstream journalistic practice, though god knows how truly subjective is your avowedly "objective" journalism of today's day and age. 

It would be "way cool" if somebody were to nurture the art of Thompson and attain success. So, I was delighted to get acquainted with Vice Media and its love for doing news the gonzo way. 

The Brooklyn-based company (headquartered in Williamsburg, Brooklyn) recently brokered a contact between the United States and North Korea, the taboo-nation par excellence by arranging the visit of former NBA star and pro-basketball's infant terrible, Denis Rodman to North Korea. Rodman met the dictator who is a NBA fanatic, and said to Kim, "Sir, you have a friend for life."

Vice got a lot of heat for proctoring such an "unpatriotic" meeting, but the videos were instant hits on youtube.

If you look at vice Media's profile, the Denis Rodman kind of news is typical of what the company loves to do. Billing itself as a "global MTV on steroids," and "Time Warner of the Streets," Vice wants to become the largest network for all the young people of the world. 

In an effort to steal the hard-to-get attention of the global Millennials, Vice 

[...] Takes on subjects from political assassinations in the Philippines to India’s nuclear standoff with Pakistan. It showcases the company’s signature brand of gonzo journalism, which it calls “immersionism.” Vice sends its staff members—generally tattooed young reporters in skinny jeans with scruffy facial hair—into dangerous, far-flung places. 

Shane Smith, Vice's CEO and in many ways an embodiment of its wild and edgy spirit calls himself “the poor man’s Hemingway,” and curiously omits mentioning Thompson's name. Smith summarizes his life style thus: 

Bon vivant, storyteller, drunk. Let’s have fourteen bottles of wine at dinner, roast suckling pig, and a story about chopping a dude’s head off in the desert.

Interpret

You'll like this short named Interpretation.

Now interpret it.

Download Yunews instead of YouTube

I like alternative views instead of carping against an established view.

Take for instance what Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, the innovative microcredit lending institution, and Nobel Prize recipient, has to say about, not simply against capitalism:

The profit orientation is only one orientation of a person. The same people who are interested in profit making are also selfless. I am not saying that capitalist theory is wrong. I am saying that it has not been interpreted and practiced fully. The selfless part of human beings has not been allowed to play out. As a result, we created a concept of business based on money-centric, one-dimensional human beings. But real human beings are multidimensional.

Like the Biblical house of the Father with multiple rooms, the metaphorical house of capitalism too has multiple rooms; Yunus points out that the world thus far has focused on opening the door to just one. 

In response to a question about envisioning a world with minimal poverty, Yunus makes a connection with Science Fiction:

People dreamt of going to the moon when they couldn’t even fly. They put the idea in science fiction. People always love science fiction. Look at the popularity of TV shows like “Star Trek”; it lets you feel the sensation of going to other galaxies. Then science always followed science fiction. Although it was fiction, somehow it inspired people. So I encourage people to write social fiction: imagine society where all our present problems remain totally unknown. All the impossible things of today’s world are routine there. At this moment that society looks impossible. It seems there is no way we will ever get there. But our minds will open. If we can imagine, it will happen. If we cannot imagine, it will never happen.

Social fiction! Haven't read that many, and the one that comes closest to the genre Yunus has in mind is Indra Sinha's Animal's People.

Lastly, Yunus asks business schools to introduce an M.B.A in social business.

2013: A Real Space Odyssey

"Second Life" in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

We all know what was done to the swastika--the Hindu sacred symbol--when it was appropriated by the Nazis.

The symbol fell from divine grace and became a byword for genocide and evil.

Not all words and symbols suffer the same disgrace, but they do, in ways, small and big, risk altering into their "other" when hauled out of their originating contexts and put into a radically different one.

Italian artist Filippo Minelli recontextualizes names of Social Network giants like Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube, by ripping them out of their familiar home of the browser and re-painting them on the walls of slums in Mali, Cambodia or Vietnam. 

His goal is not to strip these words, that are gateways into social networks that people enter to enjoy secure interaction and communication with online users across the globe, of their dignity, but to see if they undergo significant meaning-alteration when re-planted in real space and real time. Minelli is especially interested in putting the words in those spatial and temporal realms that are the "detritus" rather than the fragrant flowers of a technology-dominated capitalism. 

In a way, the slums of the world are the absolute "others" of the secure and organized virtual spaces of the online world. Imagine painting the word "Second Life" on the walls of a decrepit and dingy wall of a slum, where not only is another "life" a luxury and a sacrilege to contemplate, but also dangerously redolent of drug-addled escapism from the misery of real time indigence. Remember, the trainspotters in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting? The second lives of these Irish urchin addicts were cocaine trips into oblivion. 

Minelli says his intention behind transplanting social network words from their virtual cocoons into the real world of slums is "to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies."

Here is an excellent guide to what might be philosophically at stake in Minelli's work.

Where, I wonder can the word Facebook be re-painted? 

Jackie and Ann

The 2004 Austrian Nobel Prize winner and agoraphobic, Elfriede Jelinek has written a monologue from the point of view of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The play is Jackie.

The New Yorker Magazine describes the play's heroine as witty, fun, funny, catty, and a paranoid nut job.

Jackie riffs for eighty minutes on the pleasures and horrors of being a Kennedy icon, and on death. Jackie is shown to drag around dummies emblazoned with the names Jack, Bobby and Ari.

Holland Taylor plays the role of former Texas Governor and famous alcoholic Ann Richards, in a new play Ann. Holland has also composed the play.

Richards was governor from 1991 to 1995 and died in 2006. She had once barked at President Bill Clinton, saying "I'm as strong as mustard gas." She is best remembered for her salty, down-home wit, and the play, according to critics, spills over with her indelible gumption, as Texan and tangy as barbecue sauce.

Jackie and Ann, both powerful women, not in the simple sense of being in positions of power, but in the broader sense of displaying the strength and courage of individuality and the humility of being fallible at the same time.

Chilean-American India

Nachiketa is a new Opera; its librettist is well-known Chilean-writer-in-exile, Ariel Dorfman.

Whenever, a writer takes on a "foreign" subject matter, I'm always intrigued, primarily because that's a challenge that's worth taking on. In this sense, an apt predecessor of Dorfman's Nachiketa would be Peter Brooks' Mahabharata.

Nachiketa's story is borrowed from the ancient Hindu text of the Upanishads and modernized:

A little boy goes to Death and asks Death three things: “What is love?” And Death takes him on a trip to India to the child prostitute who wants to kill her own baby. “What is reconciliation?” And Death takes him to Africa to the child soldier who has gouged out the eyes of his best friend and killed his own parents. “What comes after death?” And then Death takes him to Chile or Argentina, where there are two orphans who don’t know whether their parents are alive or dead.

This fish, this fish

I wonder what country singer Faith Hill would have sung if the "fish" had replaced the "kiss."

I envision it to be a high pitched encomium with "This fish, this fish..." 

I'd like songs dedicated to the food we eat; T and I eat good food frequently, and at home, because as I've mentioned in vignettes of "T & I's" life, T is a marvelous cook with the kind of inventiveness and velvet thumb (I imagine the "velvet thumb" to be the culinary equivalent of the horticulturist's "green thumb") that would put the champion chefs on Food Network's "Chopped" show to shame.

So we have adopted as our personal favorite, this fish, which is baked salmon.

The recipe is an adaptation of Bobby Flay's salmon with olive vinaigrette, with merlot as a substitute for the red wine vinegar prescribed by Flay. Also, gone are the olives.

The marinating sauce is comprised of the following:

1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

1/4 cup red wine vinegar

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

2 cloves garlic, chopped

1 tablespoon dijon mustard

1 tablespoon honey

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Oven preheated to 350 degree

Best results are obtained if salmon is left inside the deep sea of marinating sauce for at least 6 hours.

This fish, this fish,
[...] is a perpetual bliss

Quantum mnemonics

What is it?

Not to worry, this isn't an emerging discipline of study and isn't likely to rival Quantum Physics any time soon.

It's a way of thinking through writing about one's past, and has been recently articulated by writer/memoirist Andre Aciman.

Quantum mnemonics is about remembering the past as well as rearranging the facts in words because:

Words radiate something that is more luminous, more credible and more durable than real facts, because under their stewardship, it is not truth we’re after; what we want instead is something that was always there but that we weren’t seeing and are only now, with the genius of retrospection, finally seeing as it should have occurred and might as well have occurred and, better yet, is still likely to occur.

There is no past; there are just versions of the past. Proving one version true settles absolutely nothing, because proving another is equally possible. If I were to rewrite the scene one more time, this new version would overwrite the previous ones and, in time, become just another version among many.

Raising to kill

Two species of birds, the Pheasant and the Chukar Partridge, are beautiful.

They are the residents of regulated hunting grounds scattered throughout the United States.

They are offered a peculiar kind of residency in that while they are raised with care in these "grounds," no sooner than they are released from their playpens, they are hunted down, i.e. become targets for the pleasure-seeking hunters armed with semiautomatics.

I feel its unethical to shoot down sentient beings when they pose no threat or harm to us, but it's beyond unethical when they are raised simply to be killed for sport with weapons that don't give them a chance for survival.

In praise of beautiful women

Male writers have traditionally praised female beauty and some of the paean have reverberated through time.

In Shakespeare's play, Antony and Cleopatra, one of Julius Caesar's Roman courtiers Enobarbus says this while beholding Cleopatra aboard her barge:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety
other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her: that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

In Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, the eponymous hero can't take his eyes off Helen, when he sees her conjured up face:

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

From fretting about the face of Helen launching ships, we may have descended (or degenerated) into joking about beautiful female faces launching, or procreating rather, a thousand "cubist" children.

In a New Yorker review of Danny Boyle's new movie, Trance, critic Anthony Lane isn't impressed by the film per se, but is smitten by the beauty of its heroine, Rosario Dawson.

He is, shall we say, hypnotized by the actresses' perfect facial features:

When the Lord God forbade his worshippers to bow down before any graven image, Dawson's face was exactly the kind of thing He had in mind. No other star can boast of such sculptured features [...]

But Lane isn't just praising the present of Ms. Dawson's beauty; he goes on to envision future vessels for that beauty as well:

When [the other pretty face James McAvoy] and Dawson make love, in Trance, one strong bone structure pressed against another, it's like a clash of major religions. What if they had a family? The kids would be practically cubist.

Science Fiction

Primer (released in 2004) is Shane Carruth's first feature film.

The story goes thus: Two young inventors, Aaron and Abe have a high-tech start-up. They project normal science-geek personas onto the world, but behind their rapid-fire science talk, issued with an air of cool authority, they hide their real invention, which is an anti-gravity device.

The device is conceived as an aid for aviation, but it turns out, Frankenstein-style, into something else--a time machine.

Carruth's arch concern: the endurance of personal identity despite breaks in the thread of consciousness.

The da Vinci codes

I am intrigued by what the makers of "Da Vinci's Demons," say the movie is about on their official website. 

The mini-narrative about Leonardo da Vinci makes him look like a Medieval Prometheus, the Titan who by stealing fire for men from the Gods was said to have enabled progress and civilization of humanity.

Prometheus had fallen in love with humanity. So he risked his life to defy the gods. One could say that Prometheus fought for something larger than himself.

But did da Vinci represent anything more than his own interests, to secure for himself permanent patronage for his art? To imply that the genius of his age was representing an ideology that transcended his needs, is to see the past through the lens of modernity.

Leonardo was indeed a man of the Enlightenment, in the sense that he was in a transitional era, when Europe was moving from "dark" to "light." But did he fight to "set knowledge free" from the darkness of the dominant paradigms of  the Dark ages--those of religion and faith? 

I am certain that da Vinci was a far more ambiguous figure than that of a one-sided man of reason, worshipping single-mindedly at the altar of secular knowledge. Neither do I believe that the "Dark ages" were dominated by religious fundamentalists similar to the Taliban, or were totalitarians. 

Something tells me that da Vinci has been co opted by Hollywood for waging by proxy an ideological battle that is entirely contemporary. 

Gypsies no more

A Roma Woman in Buzescu

Much of contemporary history is the history of mobility and rise, of peoples (and nations) who have been traditionally marginalized and/or persecuted in myriad ways.

The gypsies, or the Roma of Europe, are one such group whose fortunes have risen, at least in the small town of Buzescu in the Romanian capital of Bucharest.

Photographers Karla Gachet and Ivan Kashinsky spent some time in this town photographing the daily lives of those who were once upon a time looked down upon as the lowest class of humans in Europe.

We all know a bit about the history of the European gypsies: Descended from displaced nomads of the ancient landmass of undivided "Hindustan," the Roma have been persecuted by one and all ranging from the beasts--the Nazis--to the putative beauties--the French, who continue to deport the Roma from France, primarily because the stereotype of the Roma is the thief, the foot people who can't be trusted.

Yet after the dismantling of Communism, the Roma of Romania have become multi-millionaires by dealing in the buying and selling of copper.

As the photographic duo show us, The Roma have built magnificent mansions with BMW's parked in the genteel driveways.

However, there is a strange paradox in their lifestyles: Many of the gorgeous rooms in the Roma mansions remain unfurnished and empty and unoccupied because the Roma don't live in them. Like their predecessors, they travel all year round hunting for copper. Even when family members gather together, mostly during events like marriage, death or religious rituals, they do so in the smaller, less opulent rooms. 

Some say that the Roma are nomadic innately and the opulent mansions are mere symbols of their rising economic power. They are trying to change the world's perception of them as poor, raggedy and footloose.

The Roma are essentially deeply traditional people and "modernity" is something they partake in to be conformists, so they don't stand out.

Rhetorical analysis

Part of my job in the classroom is to teach something called "rhetorical analysis."

Simply put, it's a task where the reader gets busy tearing apart an argument she doesn't like. It's the underlying ideology that is torn asunder, however the ideology is so enmeshed with the rhetoric that to get to one, it's important to start with the other.

Stanley Fish shows us how to do a rhetorical analyses of everything, ranging from a political speech, to Sarah Palin's "rogue" memoirs to the rhetoric of the Hunger Games, in his NYT "Opinionator" column.

But I find Fish's analyses to be a bit esoteric, so when I came upon Matt Taibbi's take on David Brooks' "boiler-plate jihad" against the Gay-marriage lobby's recent appeal to the Supreme Court to make a decision on legalizing same-sex, I jumped at it as a good example of rhetorical analysis.

I think Taibbi is particularly brilliant in getting to the heart of the matter in Brooks' rant against the need to legalize same-sex marriage. It's that Brooks' sees marriage as a "constraining" institution, which entails the loss of certain fundamental freedoms that individuals enjoy. He redefines marriage giving it a bit of a narrow scope. I've read opinion upon opinion meted out by this most dourest of conservatives on how marriage is not simply an officializing of a bond between two people who want to spend the rest of their lives together, but also some kind of an "institution" that requires the individual to compromise on unfettered individualism and settle for shared sacrifices. Brooks' does reduce marriage into a non-romantic ideal whose most important function--that's it, a "function" that makes marriage sound mechanistic--is to shore up communal living.

"What's wrong in being fat?"

"Why is fat so onerous?" asks Jim Morrison, the Doors frontman (I almost said front door man!) in an interview above.

Morrison also says some eye-opening truths about food, consumption and the college cafeteria.

Bollywood English

The new Eros International movie English Vinglish takes a look at ESL-lives or the lives of those who are classified as English as Second Language speakers in the United States.

Story:

The story of a quiet, sweet tempered housewife who endures small slights from her well educated husband and daughter everyday because of her inability to speak and understand English. She is resourceful and open-minded but somehow these traits don't get noticed by them. Then one day on a trip to visit her sister in Manhattan she decides to enroll in an English Learners class and meets a host of new people who teach her to value herself beyond the narrow perspective of her family.

Articulation of same-sex love

Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth’s witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming—God grant me the grace to live them—in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night’s impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head.

From James Baldwin's novel, Giovanni's Room

Wondrous, barring the part where the spectre of Giovanni is said to rise up like that of Macbeth's witches! I like the fact that it is less cerebral and a trifle more emotional than Virginia Woolf's professions of similar sentiments to a fellow female lover.

Where are the great one's gone?

As a graduate student I had briefly encountered several luminaries and had taken their classes.

Here is a list of the luminaries I could scratch up from my memory:

1. Denis Donoghue

2. E.L. Doctorow

3. Harold Bloom

4. [....] 

None of them, I suppose match the star power of Vladimir Nabokov who taught at Cornell in the 50s and 60s. 

Anyhow, personally I don't remember anything outstanding happening with any of these Professors while I took their class. Stuff happened to some of my fellow grad students. A friend of mine, for instance, was told by luminary #1 that it's best for her were she to either revert back to high school English or take a long absence from the vanity fair that is life, lock herself up in a dark room, take a vow of silence and contemplate on whatever it is that brought her to believe, even fleetingly, that she was good enough to take on the study of humanities at a high level like this.

Luminary #2 would doze off, I recall, in the middle of his lectures while #3 eagerly rattled on about his close reading of Shakespeare and his inordinate fondness for Sir Falstaff. He was, in fact, Falstaff reincarnated.

There was one luminary whose class I didn't take, but who had the reputation of snatching books from the hands of students and throwing them into the corners of classrooms.

Compared to the aforementioned folks Nabokov should have drilled holes into the walls of his classroom, or done something like that--something moody and out of this world.

But as narrated by Jay Epstein, who remembers taking a course on the novel taught by the author of Lolita, Nabokov merely tried to teach well.

Nabokov would throw a long reading list in which Tolstoy's Anna Karenina would feature prominently. He would, Epstein recalls, ask students not to worry about the historical background and other context-related details accompanying the novels. A novel, Nabokov would say, "is a work of pure invention."

Once Professor Nabokov gave his class a pop quiz in which he asked students to describe from memory the details of the train station where Anna gets off to meet Vronsky. Epstein says he hadn't read the novel, so preoccupied he was with absorbing the sights and sounds of Ithaca's arcadian setting. His mind veered in the direction of a scene of the meeting in a movie version of Tolstoy's classic. Anna was played by Vivien Leigh (male memories are known to give preferential treatment to Leigh), and epstein expertly churned out the details.

The details did not match the details from the original (Tolstoy's novel), yet Nabokov gave Epstein the numerical equivalent of an "A." The legendary novelist hadn't seen or heard of the movie, but he believed that a good novelist generates pictures in the minds of his readers, and these pictures could very well be created by the reader himself.

What Epstein produced was then a picture of the picture, which meant, in the books of Nabokov, that Tolstoy was truly a great novelist and Epstein, the student, was an excellent reader.

Two thumbs up to Nabokov; a mark of the truly great is to have a little less ego...

Viva la Google earth

Fiona Maazel's new novel, Woke Up Lonely, is not only on North Korea, but takes you inside North Korea.

Did Maazel ever visit North Korea? In a recent essay, the writer says, she has never set foot on the soil of this famous, isolation-embodying-one-of-a-kind nation state, yet her novel is filled with vivid descriptions of Pyongyang's topography.

Maazel confesses that she took it all in via Google earth's excellent maps. She even got the street names right!

If you can’t get to a place yourself, spy on it.

But why not write about places you've been to or are familiar with?

That's where Maazel's philosophy comes in: She'd rather write about the unknown, unfamiliar and unknowable, than about the deeply familiar. Maazel defines her subject matter in terms of what interests her, not in terms of what she is most in the know of.

There have been representations of places and people of the unfamiliar world by the "espying" eyes since time immemorial. Pliny the Elder's (ancient Greece) entire geography of what is now considered to be the Americas, was concocted or borrowed from what Pliny had read in others' books or in fantastical maps. 

I remember, the heroine in Out of Africa saying she's been a "mental traveler" all her life and could reproduce an authentic story based in China, without ever having visited China.

However, in earlier eras there was no technological interface between the visitor and the place visited. Google earth maps provide such an interface.

The maps can take you inside as is evidenced by Maazel's "interactive" visit to Pyongyang here:

So there I was at 3 a.m. on a cold December in 2004, on the banks of the Tumen River, on the Chinese side of the border with North Korea, with ambitions to cross over. The sun would be up in less than five hours, but for how dark it was, I’d lost all hope the sun would rise again. It was freezing, and I felt as if I couldn’t see past my own body. As if the hubris and ego of my life were as cornerstones of a dungeon to myself. And yet, being miles from what I knew, in a place where the forlorn would inherit the earth, I had the horrible thought that maybe I belonged there. The sun rose at 7:54. There was an arrangement of stars pretzeled above the southern horizon. I crossed the river untested, but it was just one trial among many.

Feels like she's there doesn't it?