O networks with Harvard and the result is below average rating

Or so I thought.

Oprah Winfrey's commencement speech at Harvard University's convocation for the class of 2013 disappointed me. 

She had a chance to be irreverent and unconventional as is her way to approach authors on her book club show.

Throughout her speech, Oprah displayed an obsequiousness toward Harvard that made me squirm. It seemed like she was gratified at being asked to serve as a commencement speech-maker at Harvard, and described the invitation as a morale booster after a year of being in the rating doldrums with OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network).

I thought a turning point in her speech was when she said "Why me? Why choose somebody who hadn't succeeded to address those who are guaranteed to succeed (a.k.a. Harvardies)?" I don't see how she could label herself as "unsuccessful" on the basis of just one flop venture, in an otherwise successful career that made her into a media mogul with billions of dollars in net worth. 

Anyhow, so the turning point in her speech turned out to be a damp squib; instead of expressing silly gratitude to President Drew Faust, Oprah could have gone on to re define what "success" is. Success shouldn't mean getting, as Oprah indicated, a Harvard U "calling card" with which you could make infinite calls into the gateways of the biggest and the best in the world.

What Oprah--naively so--assumes, as I gather from her speech, is that once you study at Harvard, you get to know "everything." Thus her humility in saying "What can tell those who already know it all," sounds affected. This attribution of omniscience to the Harvard tribe ran like a refrain in Oprah's speech.

I feel like the opposite is true: Harvardies and other fellow Ivy Leaguers, at least those from the 90s onwards, know as much or as little of the real world. I recall, NYT columnist (himself a Harvard alumni) Frank Bruni writing that those who typically enter the Ivy League consortium are born into privilege and continue to live through the narrow corridors of privilege till they enter their graves. They ought to, Bruni said, yank themselves out of their comfort zones if becoming more "real" was their goal in life. This means that an Ivy Leaguer essentially learns nothing new, but more and more of the same that have been conferred on them since their birth. Their life experiences remain pretty homogenous till they fall into heterogeneity. 

Oprah should've told the class of 2013 at Harvard that they know nothing and their life of learning commences after the commencement. But who am I kidding? Oprah Winfrey is no Socrates.

Harvard's decision to bring in Ms. Winfrey is a good one as far as it gives Harvard a more popular, lightened-up image, and Ms. Winfrey did deliver some motivating (I wouldn't say inspiring) moments. She even modernized the phrase "moral compass" into "internal GPS" in keeping with our technological zeitgeist.

But, if you ask me, they should have asked Oprah to share the podium with Khadijah Williams, the astonishing graduate in Harvard's class of 2013, the black Los Angelina who hopped from shelter to shelter, school to school, public lavatory to public lavatory, trash can to trash can, along with her mother, and by sheer dint of persistence and merit got into Harvard through a Pre-College for gifted but indigent students program.

Now, she would have had a story to tell. Oprah mentioned Williams in passing, but only as an evidence of her own theory of how hard work pays off. Ms. Winfrey's own story was the piece de resistance of her performance at the commencement. Her story, however, is passe and the "the poor girl from rural Mississippi" doesn't quite touch the hearts of millennials, is my belief.

America has changed drastically from its post-segregation days, since the time she "made it" through hard work. In today's America the poor have not only become poorer and the elite ossified in their inability to relate to anything outside of their own sub culture, but institutions like Harvard are becoming the gatekeepers of privilege and prosperity.

I disliked Oprah's statement that whenever, as the CEO of her own network, she sees a resume with the Harvard credential in it, she thinks, "ah, since she is from Harvard, she must be good." It smacked of servility.

Oprah makes for a poor 21st century O (Othello) in this particular case.

The human farm

My maternal grandfather had a farm. I would spend my summer vacations on his farm and had first hand-sightings of squirrels and a few skinny cows. 

Not much animal was raised on my grandfather's farm, but a lot of fruits were. Prime among the fruits were an orchard filled with juicy mangoes.

I feel like going back in that time and space and keeping a record of the farm's ecology. But unfortunately the farm life was laughed at as unsophisticated back in my childhood days in India.

In today's America, especially urbane America, it's hip to be associated with the farm life, so I regret having missed a chance to be part of the farm life, while I was physically living on a farm.

I have to make do with reading about farm life that others have experienced, and in this Verlyn Klinkenborg is my favorite.

Klinkenborg writes occasionally in the NYT about the animals he raises and allows to roam free on his farm in upstate New York.

I remember what he wrote about his chicken once:

On fair days, I've been letting the chicken have the run of the farm. I come out of the house, and the birds are waiting at the chicken-yard fence like pelihoners in some Russian novel, but with boundless optimism instead of resignation and despair [...] Chicken live in a monocular world, looking at things, one eye at a time [...] What is likeable is the purposefulness of their behavior [...] A hen raking backward through winter's dult is a professional at work. Scratch, scratch, look around for predators and what have we here? A foraging chicken feeds itself by finding surprises everywhere. The world seems perfectly adjusted to their expectations, which is to say that they take the world just as it is.

Oh the joys of having writers write about the particularities of animals, like the chickens' monocular vision, the pigeons' peripheral one and somebody like Annie Dillard comes along to observe the weasel's ahistorical tendencies of living life by the instinct.

Isn't it fun to see farm life mediated by the human eyes?

Civilization and its (ruinous) repetitions

When Sigmund Freud wrote of the psychic discontentments (in Civilization and Its Discontents) we experience when we consent to live our lives according to the rules and boundaries of civilization, he spoke of civilization as something confining, an enemy, as it were, of our natural beings, our tribal instincts.

Freud meant to suggest, I believe, is that civilization is something we settle for though internally we writhe in discontent wishing that we could live a life of our instincts.

As film critic Anthony Lane writes in his excellent review of the movie, The Kings of Summer, civilization may also be something we unconsciously reproduce and repeat as a fundamental structure of living, when we are in the midst of nature.

So used are we to the fact of living inside civilization that civilization has become our instincts.

This is a cause for concern, as is revealed ever so subtly in the film.

The story of The Kings of Summer revolves around a few teenagers who decide to flee their families and go back to nature. They begin to build a makeshift house with drift materials. No sooner than they sit down to observe the daily rituals of life, civilization starts to creep back in:

As they sit at their makeshift dinner, complete with candlelight and alcohol, we realize to our horror (as they do not) that these rebellious souls are already turning into their (conformist) parents. [Joe] even brings along a Monopoly set and one of his father's cigars. Run all you like, the movie suggests; you will never escape.

There is a serious Western artistic tradition of exploring the nagging permanency of civilization and Lane does well to mention Daniel Defoe's 16th century novel, Robinson Crusoe, in this context.

Defoe's hero is shipwrecked on an island of "savages," but instead of adopting to the ways of the savage, he can't help reconstructing the tidy existence of a gentleman farmer despite being alone on a desert isle. But of course, Crusoe wants to leave the stamp of civilization on the isle, in keeping with the spirit of rising imperialism and industrialism of the Western world.  

What about those who seek to escape civilization in the modern world? I think, we are all innately imperialistic, as we go around visiting nature, only to stamp our civilizational imprints on it.  

Lady Macbeth

This is how it was meant to be, at least in Shakespeare's time: Male actors played female characters, and female characters weren't particularly celebrated for their uber-femininity, but for their "characters," i.e. virtues or vices or an admixture of both.

Take for instance, Lady Macbeth, Macbeth's wife and chief-plotter of the plan for Macbeth to commit regicide and become the king of Scotland.

In the play Macbeth, Lady Macbeth does the masculine act of goading her husband to do the evil but necessary thing to fulfill his ambition of power. Macbeth initially shirks from the sacrilege of regicide as well as a violation of the code of hospitality, for the reigning king of Scotland, Duncan, happens to be a guest at Macbeth's castle the night he is murdered by his host.

Lady Macbeth calls her husband a "lily liv'rd man," as it was popularly believed in the Middle Ages that the seat of a man's courage is the liver. 

In the scene above, alan Cummings does a swell job of recreating the moment when Lady Macbeth, asks the heavens to fill her with the steely resolve to go through with the task of pushing Macbeth to murder the king.

I like the line, "come unsex me!"

Hail to the theory of the big bang

A very interesting take on the phenomenal popularity of Chuck Lorre's The Big Bang Theory.

The show, described as the adventures of four Pasadena-based scientists' "quest to navigate the world from a book-smart, yet socially addled perspective with the help of a street-smart, waitress/actress neighbor," has acquired a bit of a cultish status, not just among nerds and geeks, but among the culturally hip as well (meaning, those who swear by Girls and Mad Men).

Some of the show's "virtues", as listed here, are:

1. Sheldon Cooper, played by Jim Parsons, with his "dervishy nerdiness."

2. A prime time TV show where five of the seven main characters hold Ph.D.'s and one is a mere Masters from M.I.T., and the jokes are about derivatives, bosons, Schroedinger's cat and Madame Curie.

3. The accuracy of the nerd oeuvre: The obsession with superheroes, Star Trek, and Star Wars.

4. Finally the masterminds of The Big Bang Theory dares to:

Produce a TV program that plays not a whit to the aspirations of its audience. You might laugh at the characters, pity them or love them, but you don’t want to be them (especially because you might already be them). There are a good amount of pre- and postcoital scenes, but they’re not especially sexy. These are not especially pretty people. [You might have] a problem with Howard (Simon Helberg), the gnomish, dickie-sporting mama’s boy [...] Even Penny (Kaley Cuoco), the bombshell across the hall, often appears rumpled or with a bottle of cheap wine hanging from her like an extra limb.

What Jane Saw

What Jane Saw is an online exhibition that reconstructs, meticulously, like engineers would, the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, as they would have been displayed in an art gallery in Pall Mall on May 24, 1813.

Jane Austen, basking in the success of her stupendously bestselling novel, Pride and Prejudice, visited the gallery, not simply to gawk at the paintings themselves, but also to do some celebrity-spotting.

Austen was an avid celebrity-spotter and would be quite at home today in the celebrity-obsessed TMZ culture.

The online gallery celebrates the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice and is a superb progeny of the marriage between the humanities and technology. As the NYT says of the gallery that used the 3-D modeling software SketchUp, to reproduce paintings based on precise measurements recorded in an 1860 book: 

If the notion of a Wii-ready Austen offends purists, others may be happy to see 21st-century technology harnessed in the service of the Divine Miss Jane.

Recently, scholars like Janine Barchas, Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, and conceiver of the project, have re-introduced Jane Austen as a history-minded, worldly woman, who isn't quite the country mouse writer preoccupied with revealing timeless truths.  

From geek to Greek: A possible journey for Google

The Washington Post recently described Google as a technology "Titan." I'm used to technology "giant."

Dipping into Greek mythology 101, one finds the titans to be a "primeval race of powerful deities," that ruled the earth for a very long time. Unchallenged in their supremacy and confident in the everlastingness of their reign, the Titans came in for the rudest shock of their lives when they lost a war of succession to the Olympians, a race of younger, more powerful and beautiful gods and goddesses.

Thus the naming of Google as a corporate titan is appropriate; it affirms the near-totemic status that google already enjoys as a mega-corporation.

However, if one were to follow Greek mythology to the tee, then the naming is also ominous, for unbeknownst to the namer, it connotes the possibility of Google's fall in the foreseeable future. Who would be the Olympians in the sphere of technology to dethrone Google?

[Certainly not Bing].

Were a fall to happen, then it would be tragic with a fourth dimension--for the deities of Google verse, that is.

I remember reading about the epic demise of the Titans in John Keats' lovely poem, Hyperion.

Hyperion is the only Titan that is yet to fall from power, as the Olympians are taking over. There is a scene in which Hyperion, the about-to-fall king meets the fallen and crushed Titan Saturn. Saturn's fall has taken a deep psychic toll on the once mighty overlord of the mythical universe. Saturn is physically unharmed, but the inside of him is so badly mauled that he can't even get up to go about the business of his daily chores.

Saturn is, in other words, depressed into inertness.

Hyperion tries to inject morale into Saturn, but to no avail.

The tragedy that accompanies a shift in paradigm, especially for those whose paradigm has been thrown out to make place for the new paradigm, echoes hauntingly through the poem.

The Victorian seance

An interview of Arthur Conan Doyle: The film was shot in October 1928 for Movietone News in his garden at his Windelsham estate, with his Irish terrier, Paddy.

Few know about Conan Doyle's deep interest in matters of spirituality; Sherlock Holmes, Doyle's famous detective doesn't show any obvious signs of being spiritual, however, the manner in which he dashes off into corners of reclusivity between bouts of scientific crime-solving, tells us that Sherlock too had his mystical moments.

Conan Doyle was one of those late Victorian males who got drawn to Madame Blavatsky's teachings. Blavatsky, variously known as a con and the mother of modern spirituality, opened an otherwise rational era's--the Victorians were anxious to define themselves as a rational and scientific people, against the superstitious Orientals--eyes to the psychic part of human existence.

Doyle made secret visits to Blavatsky's seance parlors in the London suburbs; in this interview, he bravely defends his views on spirituality.

The Beats did not beat around the bush

The above is a reading list for students attending Allen Ginsberg's class for aspiring poets in 1977 at the "Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics."

The list is comprised of works from the Western literary tradition that, according to Ginsberg, influenced the Beat literary style. 

I took one look at the list and thought, "Oh my God, this list has the entire Western canon!" The OMG expression came off a previously held assumption that the Beats were writing against the canon. 

Didn't the Beat generation seek to subvert cultural orthodoxies? And is the Western literary canon a part of that orthodoxy? 

Ginsberg's reading list seems to both say a "yes" and a "no" to this question. 

"Yes," the Beats wanted to poke holes in institutionalized modes of thinking, and "no" the Western literary canon was not really a part of that mode. Come to think of it, the best literary traditions are always subversive in obvious and implicit ways. By "subversive," I mean going against conventional thinking.

Shakespeare's sonnets, for instance went against the conventions of literary or romantic love of his time, because a good chunk of the sonnets, especially those dedicated to the "dark lady", celebrate the sex appeal of a woman who is dark-skinned and older (a Renaissance older woman would be in her 30s is my guess); her sex-appeal lies in her unconventional looks and her cerebral qualities as well.

Now that's radical.

Next time, when I teach the Beat poets, I'll make sure that I drive home this point to my students--everything is influenced by something preceding it and that nothing, even the newest of all, doesn't combust spontaneously into being.

Man Booker for Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis, the marvelous translator of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, has been awarded the 2013 Man Booker Prize for her Collected Short Stories.

Davis is known for writing some of the shortest short fiction in recent times, and they have been critically acclaimed as, among other things, "sparse", "sly" and "strangely incantatory" in their style.

Here is Davis' story, How Often He is Right:

Often I think that his idea of what we should do is wrong, and my idea is right. Yet I know that he has often been right before, when I was wrong. And so I let him make his wrong decision, telling myself, though I can’t believe it, that his wrong decision may actually be right. And then later it turns out, as it often has before, that his decision was the right one, after all. Or, rather, his decision was still wrong, but wrong for circumstances different from the circumstances as they actually were, while it was right for circumstances I clearly did not understand.

Why we teach?

Why we teach?

For those of us who are in the business of teaching, at whatever levels, it's a question worth pondering.

Gary Gutting, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and a frequent contributor to the Times' The Stone, a forum for contemporary philosophers to discuss issues pertaining to philosophy, writes that for him "teaching is not about the amount of knowledge one passes on, but the enduring excitement one generates."

Gutting is primarily interested in enabling "close encounters" between students and "some great writing."

"What’s the value of such encounters?" He asks, and the answer is that 

They make students vividly aware of new possibilities for intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment—pleasure, to give its proper name. They may not enjoy every book we read, but they enjoy some of them and learn that—and how—this sort of thing (Greek philosophy, modernist literature) can be enjoyable. They may never again exploit the possibility, but it remains part of their lives, something that may start to bud again when they see a review of a new translation of Homer or a biography of T. S. Eliot, or when “Tartuffe” or “The Seagull” in playing at a local theater.

Trailer art

I'm always curious about the evolution of genres.

I thought of the genre of the movie trailer, and found the trailer of a 1983 British film, Educating Rita.

The announcements, I think are too loud, but nothing is really revealed of what the movie might be about.

The voice over exhorts audiences to see the movie primarily because of the actresses' "astounding" debut.

What I really enjoy about movie trailers from today is the subtlety; the trailers are an art form in and of themselves and they recreate for us the film's marrow with a great deal of of finesse.

Watch, for instance, the trailer of the forthcoming Will Smith blockbuster, After Earth:

It's sophisticated.

The mantel of a memoirist

Here is what writer Hilary Mantel has to say about the art of memoir writing:

It's not an easy form. It's not for beginners, which is unfortunate, as it is the place where many people do begin. It's hard for beginners to accept that unmediated truth often sounds unlikely and unconvincing. If other people are to care about your life, art must intervene. The writer has to negotiate with her memories, and with her reader, and find a way, without interrupting the flow, to caution that this cannot be a true record: this is a version, seen from a single viewpoint. But she has to make it as true as she can. Writing a memoir is a process of facing yourself. So you should do it when you're ready (to face yourself).

Robbing the Paris Hiltons: New form of commodity fetishizm

What's common to the following movies?

1. Baz Luhrmann's, The Great Gatsby (2013)

2. Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers (2013)

3. Sophia Coppola's Bling Ring (2013)

4. Michael Bay's Pain & Gain (2013)

It's commodity fetishizm, says, film critic A.O. Scott, and many will agree with him:

Sex isn't hot anymore, lust for goods is:

The real objects of lust in contemporary cinema are not bodies but, well, objects — in particular the luxury brands that form the lingua franca of popular culture from hip-hop to reality television to the pages of Vogue.

It's just that in almost all of these movies, the commodities aren't bought, but stolen. Therein lies the thrill of the new era's commodity fetishizm: to suffer a sense of entitlement, where another's luxury goods is yours by birth right, so why not appropriate them by force?

The watches and the shirts that are at the center of the universe of capitalism

It's the Rolex.

Few can possess it, but almost everybody ought to desire one in her lifetime.

The Rolex featured recently in an episode (I watched a rerun) of the television serial The Big Bang Theory.

Bernadette, having got a job finding the magic pill for yeast infection, in the R & D department of a big pharmaceutical company, gifts a Rolex to her fiance, Howie. Howie is wonderstruck with the object yet a feeling of envy sneaks in. 

The Rolex corrupts his relation with "Bernie" momentarily with a power complex: Will Bernie now become the "man" of the family?

Switching to reality, two of the bank robbers (a pair of Dominicans from Yonkers, New York) who were involved in the biggest bank heist in human history (it was a cyber-heist), photographed themselves with piles of Rolexes after they stole their share and went on a luxury goods buying-spree in New York City.

These two under-enlightened loafers were merely using the commodity as a thing possessed, something akin in their minds to the classy female "pussy," is my guess.

When the commodity is fetishized by those who have no previous context to attach the commodity to, then it's all vulgarly phallic. But fetishized, it is.

Rolex, as I understand, is more than a watch; according to Karl Marx, it's a commodity, that transcends its use-value and acquires magical, near-theological value.

When inanimate things acquire godly powers, then they become commodities, and just as primitive societies worshipped or fetishized objects, so we, dwellers of modern, scientific, times, fetishize commodities. Yet, the act of fetishizing doesn't regress us into the status of "primitives." The more we worship objects, provided these objects are not mere barks of enchanted trees, or the aroma of monkey-brains, preserved in a jar, the more modern and properly civilized we are regarded as.

That is the precise point of Australian director Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, as film critic A.O. Scott, so finely tells us in his discussion of the rising tide of commodity fetishizm in contemporary American movies.

In the novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald was ambivalent about the erotic life of objects, which is a foundation of materialism, excess and greed. That's why Fitzgerald's Gatsby, though he had a life of material excess, is punished with an unattended funeral. Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, the salesman who pined for making it better and bigger every single day of his life, was similarly punished with a thinly attended funeral.

When nobody shows up when you're dead, then it's a sign that nobody cared for you when you were alive.

However, the ambivalence toward the material life is removed from the latest film version of Gatsby.

The Rolex-centered universe is in full panoply through the 3D machinery in Luhrmann's movie. Additionally, and more fascinatingly, the aura of the rolex spreads to shirts. Gatsby enchants both Nick Carraway and Daisy with his collection of the world's "most beautiful" shirts, so beautiful that Daisy cries upon beholding and touching and feeling them.

Sometimes, it's said that Daisy is sexually aroused by the beauty of Gatsby's shirts, and the emotions transfer over onto the collector of those shirts.

I decided to take a look at the famous "shirt scene" from an earlier Great Gatsby (starring Robert Redford as Jay), since the new Gatsby has this scene in 3D and the idea is to enable the audience "feel" the shirts as well, in full, three-dimensional splendor.

Here is the scene:

Daisy is caressing the shirts; in the new Gatsby, she bursts into tears, sobbing into the thick folds of the clothing and saying, "It makes me sad, because I haven't seen such, such beautiful shirts."

A.O. Scott writes that in the novel perhaps the reader could attribute Daisy's tears to other causes as well. And they would be right in their attribution. But in Baz Luhrmann's film, one has no reason not to take Daisy at her word:

One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s points is that "beautiful things in abundance can produce a powerful aesthetic response, akin to the sublime. And the sublimity of stuff, of shirts and cars and Champagne flutes and everything else that money can buy, is surely what drives Baz Luhrmann's wildly extravagant adaptation of Gatsby."

Commodity fetishizm, in other words, is at the center of the film.

Hurray for hora

What's the connection between a monologue on time and death from a contemporary science-fiction movie, The Blade Runner, and an exhortation to Achilles in Homer's epic, Iliad?

It's "hora."

The connection is brilliantly and seamlessly made by Gregory Nagy, Professor of Classical Greek Literature at Harvard University.

Nagy has been teaching a popular class titled "Concepts of the Hero in Classical Greek Civilization" at Harvard since 1978, and now the course, renamed simply, "The Ancient Greek Hero," is available online, as one of Harvard's first massive open online courses (or, moocs).

The decision to teach the heroic ideals of Achilles through a Blade Runner-like modern story was made when Nagy's course went online.

The rain-drenched death soliloquy of Roy Batty is as disparate as it gets from anything redolent of Achilles.

The soliloquy goes thus:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe, [...] attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

Here is Nagy's interpretation:

The tears in rain are a way of comparing the microcosm of the self and the macrocosm of the rain that is enveloping the whole scene, [...] ‘Time to die’—and, for me, a good point of comparison is the word hôrâ, which means the right time, the right place, the seasonal time, the beautiful time. Where everything comes together.

The Professor then links with Homer's Iliad: 

The scene from the Iliad in which Achilles is told of his forked destiny: “You have two choices, Achilles. Either you stay at Troy and fight, and then die young, and then get a glory that is imperishable. Or you go home. And then you don’t die young. You live to a ripe old age, presumably, and you could even be happy. But you’re not going to get the glory. And this glory—I use the word ‘glory’ to translate kleos—is not just glory. It’s the glory that comes from being featured in the medium of Homeric poetry.

Who is Daisy?

Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby has not only revived an interest in Fitzgerald's novel, but it has also revived an interest in the characters of the novel.

Daisy, for instance, remains an enigma; who is she? Don't look to the novel for much help, because in the prose, Daisy is less of a person, and more of an ideal, of all that, not only Jay Gatsby, but most of the romantically aspiring, male youth, of the novel yearn for.

Novelist Benjamin Lythal, whose debut novel, A Map of Tulsa, has a Gatsbyesque plot--in it a man goes home and stages a reunion with his former girlfriend, with disastrous consequences--says Daisy is to Jay Gatsby what Galatea is to Pygmalion (more or less).

To get to this analogy, Lythal quotes Joseph Brodsky's take on Pygmalion (from the essay, "On Grief and Reason"):

His fascination is not with what he sees but with what he imagines it conceals—what he has placed there. He invests her with mystery and then rushes to uncloak it: this rapacity is always Pygmalion’s double bind. It is as though the sculptor found himself puzzled by the facial expression of his model: she “sees” what he does not “see.”

The Jay Gatsby and Daisy relationship is akin to a Pygmalion relationship, in that Jay,

[The lover] is not even sure his beloved really exists but nonetheless craves her tutelage, her authority to see his life and judge it. She is the novel he has tried to write about himself.

Fiery Fierri

20 absurd quotes from Food Network's very own Kid Rock personality, Guy Fieri's new book, Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives: The Funky Finds in Flavortown.

1. [Those] fried green tomatoes, brother that’s a symposium of flavor.

2. Sometimes you pull up to a place and you just know it’s going to be good. Well, as I pulled up to Martin’s my phone rang, and it was Kid Rock’s manager telling me that Kid Rock wanted to talk about Triple D. (We rapped for about a half an hour and subsequently did the Kid Rock Triple D special.) Then I walked into the barbecue joint and met a sunburned fan who had been waiting for me all day. Next we got to chop some wood — I believe they had a Jack Daniel’s-handled splitting maul — light a big smoker, and barbecue a whole hog. If they’d thrown in a little ice cold beer and some Hank Williams Junior, I might not have left — ever.

3. Don’t ever use lighter fluid — it’s un-American. Amateurs, losers, and idiots use lighter fluid. If you’ve bought this book, you are inherently none of those three things, so let’s make sure to teach others the correct way that real pitmasters start a fire. Lighter fluid makes your food taste like crap and is bad for the environment.

4. [Splash] some [rub] around the rest of the hog for good measure. This really doesn’t do a dang thing, but it makes you feel good about things and makes for good drama.

5. Shut the front door, son of Tatum O’Neal, that’s dynamite.

6. [On] the final leg of the Kid Rock culinary cruise, we ended up at the brewery where Kid Rock made Badass Beer. Now if you’re going to call it Badass beer it better be badass, and all I can tell you is the name fits the bill. Just like his music, the dude delivers. Not one to stray far from his roots or waver on his stance to do good for the city of Detroit, when Kid Rock’s Badass producer unexpectedly closed shop in 2012, Rock knew what to do: build a world-class brewery in the heart of the city staffed by Detroiters and supporting Detroit. Opening Summer 2013. Badass Beer: Trouble Has Been Brewed.

7. The name of my competition BBQ team is Motley Cue, so Stretch took my logo, which is tattooed on my arm, and cut it out of metal — then brought it down to my team. We became instant buddies. Then he came out to my birthday with a watermelon catapult… that began the crazy life of Stretch and Guy. When we prepared to do the Guy Fieri Road Show, I asked him if he could construct a twenty-five-gallon margarita machine.

8. At Big Mama’s Kitchen it’s all right ear, right now… or it could been the left ear… one of the most talked about bites, seen across the world is the floppy wonder (can you “ear” what I’m saying’?): the pig ear sandwich. I thought I was gonna die, but I gotta tell ya, it wasn’t as bad as you might think.

9. [The] Parmageddon [has] pierogi, kraut, and sharp cheddar, and then it goes into the meltification machine — it’s outta bounds and so much more than a grilled cheese sandwich.

10. This patio goes off the hook — I think the folks are in a Flavortown food coma.

11. Chef Matt says, ‘Get jiggy with it, have some fun!’

12. One night I was at Mama Cozza’s having dinner with my family, and I’d really not been feeling well all week…one of [the chef's] daughters-in-law drove me to this doctor’s office at 11 pm…and I was better the next day. We call that kulinary gangsta alla Mama Cozza!

13. People who like [haggis] call it spicy, creamy, rich, and buttery — I don’t wanna tell you what I call it… ha ha.

14. My favorite line: ‘Do you get any tater with that gator? James Spader likes gator.’ (Ha ha ha, I kill me.)

15. It was a lightning bolt of an idea in Flavortown that pranked the un-prankable mayor, Guy Fieri.

16. I don’t know if it’s fair to call their Russian dressing Russian dressing — it should be called something sexy, like liquid Moscow.

17. I lay claim to the knuckle sandwich… it’s my brand, my logo, hell, even my tattoo, so when I find out that two dudes in Austin have opened up a sandwich joint and one of their menu items is the knuckle sandwich, I tell you what, they’d better deliver the real deal. (jk.)

18. His seafood is so fresh it’ll slap ya.

19. I sucked at making my Yorkshire pudding before getting schooled by Anne. Now they’re puffy McMagic, not flat McTragic.)… She could feed me beef six ways to Sunday.

20. [They] make a porchetta that you won’t forgetta.

The Gatsby is flat

...and Baz Luhrmann's film, The Great Gatsby is, in the spirit of Fitzgerald's novel, anti-fantasist.

In The Serious Superficiality of The Great Gatsby, Joshua Rothman does a fine plucking out of what precisely F. Scott Fitzgerald's great American classic ought to be truly remembered for, and how director Baz Luhrmann's celluloid rendition of the novel gets it.

The film is "flat," the characters are "flatter" claim many critics of the movie, and Rothman says:

[...] I can’t help but feel that the film’s flatness is a deliberate choice; that what seems like a failure of Luhrmann’s imagination is actually a faithfulness to Fitzgerald’s. The characters are like that in the novel, too; that’s why Lionel Trilling, in “The Liberal Imagination,” compared them to “ideographs.” Flatness, after all, is the state to which all of Fitzgerald’s characters aspire. Even Gatsby, whose life thrums with secret ambition and desire, manages to be the cool man in the pink suit. “You always look so cool,” Daisy tells him. In a moment of admiration, she says that he resembles “an advertisement” of a man.

But the "flatness" is insightful in that:

It might seem as though, if we were to live out our fantasy lives, we would become more creative and expansive; we would be unfettered, alive, and truly ourselves. But “The Great Gatsby” doesn’t think that fantasies work that way. In “Gatsby,” everyone wants to be simpler than they really are. Everyone wants to give himself up to something that will define, constrain, and explain him—to be swept up into a fantasy that’s narrower than the life he really lives. Everyone is a fantasist, and, therefore, an actor, a “beautiful little fool.”

If your mother wasn't a kitchen goddess, would you love her any less?

Reading magazines and newspapers on days like Mother's Day is boring with a capital "B."

There is a plethora of stories whose writers reminisce about their precious mothers in predictable ways.

The most predictable way to give one's mother a seal of approval as the "right" or the "good" mother (and sometimes the "annoying" mother), is to remember her through a culinary lens.

As novelist Jessica Soffer writes in her story of her loving yet non-cooking mother, the "conflation of parental love and cooking" is ubiquitous, in "commercials, films, books," leading us to believe that "mothering can be smeared onto a sandwich, nurturing tucked between the wings of a garlicky roasted chicken."

Soffer's own mother was "stuff that dreams are made of, minus the meatloaf and marble cake," yet the fact that she didn't do the "meatloaf and marble loaf" thingie embarrassed Soffer to an extent that she spun her novel, Tomorrow, There Will be Apricots, around the characters of an older woman and a girl who find solace in the kitchen and in each other. Soffer allowed a perception, that the older woman's character was inspired by her mother, to grow.

Food used to be a trigger for memories of time past, as the madeleine is a window into halcyon days in Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. But today, as intelligent writers like Soffer remind us, it has become a repository of value judgment; in the case of motherhood, it's as though you are barred from loving your mother if she weren't wrapped up in your memory as a veritable kitchen goddess.

I like Soffer's tribute to what her mom really gave her: the fostering of her intellectuality:

The fact that she preferred talking to me while paging through the Times’ Book Review than while stirring a caldron of Bolognese did not mean that she loved me less, was any less motherly.

The horrors of downsizing

Fired is a bad movie with some interesting subtexts.

Directed by Sajit Warrier (his debut film), Fired tells the story of one Joy Mittal, the newly minted CEO of a British company whose offices are in a plush skyscraper in the heart of London.

It's the history of Mittal's rise from manager to CEO that's interesting: The British company is acquired by an aggressive Indian multinational, and Mittal had played a key role in the acquisition. Thus the Indian multinational rewards him richly with the mantle of a "group CEO."

However, the Indian multinational also wants something equally rewarding in return from Mittal; he is asked to help them downsize without taking the blame of being a brutal and unfeeling company. 

Mittal obliges and in the course of one day successfully fires all 123 employees from the company. All the employees are white and British (presumably).

One of the victims of the downsizing is Ruby, a white, sexy seductress (she even speaks accented Hindi), who also has an affair with Mittal (Mittal is a married man) and together they have a child Angela.

The woman feels betrayed and haunts Mittal on his first full day as CEO inside the office. Mittal is trapped inside the building and can't escape to go home to his wife, who is also a victim of Mittal's adultery. The haunting could be a projection of Mittal's guilt at having betrayed his wife's trust and having fired employees en masse. Mittal is also shown to be hooked to antidepressants and the movie hints at the possibility that he hallucinates under the influence of drugs and alcohol. 

The film ends with Mittal going insane and driving himself to death after two gruelling hours of haunting by the ghosts of his victims. The message is got: downsizing not only kills livelihoods but also for the very same reason, takes lives. Both the instrument of the downsizing (in this case Mittal) and the victims suffer the consequences of corporate inhumanity.

Now to dredge up the subtext: For the first time, I'm seeing an Indian multinational as the aggressor. I am guessing that the finger is being pointed at Laxmi Mittal, the Marwari businessman who made it globally as the owner of Mittal Steels, the world's largest steel manufacturing company.

Mittal's rise from being part of a business owning company in Kolkata, India, to becoming a corporate giant known to be the wealthiest British who doesn't hold a British passport yet, is marred by rumors of dubious business practices, but that's pretty Indian, if you will.

It's the role that has been accorded to "India" that took me by surprise. Usually the brutal takeovers are done by American MNC's in a tedious repeat of the imperial theme. In Fired, the trend is refreshingly reversed, though Mittal himself is also "killed" in the process.

The brown-skinned CEO is punished for his crimes of firing white employees.

On the bus?

I've heard that in cities like, Oregon, Seattle, and San francisco, people are likely to look funnily at you, if you're not on a bike or on foot and are always in your car, behind the wheels.

All three cities have superb mass-transit as alternative to driving, giving people the option to not drive when they don't want to. 

According to a study published by U.S. Pirg, a non-profit advocacy group, this culture, marked by a preference for biking, walking and availing of mass transit if available, is spreading from out of the ecology-minded Pacific Northwest to other places like Charlotte, North Carolina, among others.

The downshifting in American driving patterns--fewer Millennials, or the "Internet"-generation, care to be enchanted by the prospects of being "in control" behind their wheels, or care to wait impatiently for their licences--is interestingly enough, noticeable most prominently among the highly-educated, affluent youth of America. 

But this tiny demographic also has an outsized pocket, i.e. is a demographic with the cultural and economic power to induce larger shifts in ways of living. So, the projection is that local governments will be pressured into investing more and more money in the building of infrastructure like mass transit and spend less on highways.

Does this mean that America has to produce a suitable epic to match a growing disenchantment with the "road?" 

Remember Jack Kerouac's epic that was symbolical of a traditional American craving--the desire for unbounded freedom experienced on the highways of the nation, inside a car, behind the wheels?

Perhaps, it's time for something like "On the Bus?"

For a fuller appraisal of the phenomenon see here.

Wither women?

Mahraganat (I may have misspelled it) is a popular form of street music in post-Arab Spring Cairo.

Poor young men from Cairo's poorest areas compose songs that sound like they're straight out of a Bollywood movie, but have real, meaningful lyrics about life and politics.

Politics, according to one of the popular singers is not just about big events like the Presidency (didn't E.M. Forster say the same?), but about the lives of ordinary folks. Politics, the singer says, is enacted every day in the slums where people struggle to keep their body and soul together.

This is all very excellent, but I noticed that this new form of youth-expression in Egypt is plagued by the old virus of segregation. There are no women in the wild gathering of young males, and the commentator says, somewhat discreetly, the women are celebrating "elsewhere."

The poor boy-singer who speaks bravely of life itself as politics, is blithely blind to the fact that separation of men and women too is part of that politics.     

The U.S. army

An eye-opening video on the treatment of women who serve in the U.S. army as "second class citizens" and sexual objects.

But the more astounding revelation from the video is the fact that one out of 5 male army recruits is sexually assaulted by their seniors as well.

The military, by definition, is, as those interviewed in the video say, a culture where power through violent means and conquest are the civilizational norms. Rape, whether it's of a woman or a man, is about that. 

Art of Tino Sehgal

I hadn't heard of Tino Sehgal, till I read about his art on display at the art fair, Frieze New York, in Randall Island.

Sehgal's identity is mind-bogglingly hybrid, but there is a little bit of the Indian in him, buried under the palimpsest of the British and the German.

His art is even more eclectic: Sehgal says his art comes off "constructed situations," where people perform instructions conceived by the artist.

Here for instance, is an art named "These Associations," where a bunch of people run through the length and breadth of turbine hall in London's Tate Modern:

Spectacularum: Perspective on Contemporary Art, discusses the work and it's layered meaning indepthly.

Two disgraces

One by Booker Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, and the other...



...by Pakistani American playwright, Ayad Akhtar. Akhtar's Disgraced won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Prediction

I predict that Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers will win the 2014 Pulitzer prize for fiction.

Fiction is stranger than truth

Chinese-American writer Bill Cheng's debut novel Southern Cross the Dog, is wowing critics, especially those of the South.

The novel is set in the Mississippi of the 1920s and the great Mississippi flood of 1927 is a focal point of the novel's plot. 

Cheng has been able to recreate the texture of the 20s South with such skill that he has been compared to William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, two stalwarts of the Southern literary establishment. And these comparisons have been made by avid readers of Southern literature, especially the Southern Gothic.

Bill Cheng has never visited Mississippi or any of the Southern states. He was born and raised in Queens, New York and now lives in Brooklyn. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College.

Southern Cross the Dog began as a thesis manuscript.

My take on this unconventional, therefore refreshing, instance of an "immigrant" writer writing not about the expected Chinese-American experience, and not having a single Asian character in his novel, is a "bravo!"

Not only is it unusual for Cheng to have written a non-immigrant novel, but also the fact that he undertook to represent the American South, a cultural subject matter about which the Southerner is particularly protective (and possessive), proves his ability to transcend/defy labels.

Recently, an Indian-American novelist, Amit Majumdar, wrote of how fraught the category of the immigrant writer is, and I tentatively agreed, but upon reading of Bill Cheng's venture, I think it's possible for "immigrant" writers to crossover into native territories and represent, if not conquer them.

But then again, what's the big fuss about? If Adam Johnson can write about North Korea (The Orphan Master's Son) without setting foot on North Korean soil, and go on to win a Pulitzer for it, then why should it surprise the world that a Chinese American from Queens should be able to write about a geographical part of a nation in which he was born and raised?

A preview of the novel Southern Cross the Dog can be found here.

The world is in ruins

This Daily Kos comic tells the story of the dark side of Thomas Friedman's premature paen to economic globalization (The World is Flat).

The man above is sitting on the ruins of a collapsed "high-rise stitching station." While the image refers to Bangladesh's worst industrial disaster ever, it could also take our mind back to what Friedman had predicted about the shifting economy in a "flattening" world.

In essence, he had assigned to the developed West the role of doing sophisticated, often hi-tech, idea-work and the ground, or grunt-work of manufacturing, stitching, putting the special crack and scratch-resistant plexiglass screen on the iphone, etc. to the developing world's endless pool of cheap labor.

Such an acute division of global labor would go on to have disastrous human and environmental consequences. Since Friedman, I believe, can't see beyond his moustaches, he couldn't have foreseen this . 

The stitch stations of Bangladesh, just like the assembly shacks of provincial China, housed cheap labor and most of the garment-stitchers were stitching clothes to satisfy the insatiable hunger for bargain clothing in the West.

The pools of cheap labor have turned into cesspools of dead bodies. 

(I just dug out this excellent essay composed by one of my business students (in 2009) in an undergraduate writing class at New York University. I am delighted to see that he had pointed out the dark underbelly of globalization).

Recently Friedman has ceased to sing one-sidedly in praise of economic globalization; he visits the "technology corridors" of otherwise unevenly developed economies like that of India less, and the ruined landscapes more.

But I feel like he still hedges a vital issue.

He reports back from the city of Taiz in Yemen, where the local population is facing extreme water shortage. Yemeni villages are fighting over, in the real sense of shooting guns and missiles.

Friedman attributes the water scarcity to "mismanagement" of various kinds, but I have a sneaky suspicion that the water in Taiz (as well as in other parts of the developing world) is being smuggled out, with the aiding and abetting of the local authorities, by mega corporations like Pepsi, for instance.

It is a known fact that the water resources in large parts of rural India is used up by corporations like Pepsi and Coca Cola.

What explains the remarkably cheap prices at which gigantic 2 litre bottles of Pepsi are sold in the United States?

Like a hanger in a closet

I found this response to a recent study on gay-male closeting to be riveting.

The study entitled, The Social Development of Contingent Self-Worth in Sexual Minority Young Men: An Empirical Investigation of the “Best Little Boy in the World” Hypothesis, was published in the academic journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology.

The response basically says a large majority of Ivy League educated males who also go on to be successful in the world of work, are closeted gay males, who seek to divert attention from their sexual identity by making extra efforts in the academic and professional spheres.

Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald sold the film rights of his novel The Great Gatsby (in the 20s) for a mere $60,000.

Perhaps the price was so flea-marketishly low because it was said that the novel itself was unfilmable as its real power comes less from the plot and more from the prose.

Some feel that The Great Gatsby, as film, would be closest to the spirit of the novel were it to be silent and black and white.

Above is the trailer of one such filmic version of the American masterpiece, made in 1926.

Giving the classics a third dimension

Many might object to the conversion of an F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, an American masterpiece, into a 3D movie.

3 dimensionalizing F Scott Fitzgerald's timeless classic would certainly accentuate the marvels of the external world of material excess into which Jay Gatsby plunges, but it wouldn't, as Maureen Dowd observes, bring to the surface some of the novels' deeper concerns: the decay of souls, the crumbling mythology and the dark side of social mobility.

Indeed, most memorable works of literature internalize conflicts, whereas technology like 3D can only visually dramatize external one's.

Imagine a 3D version of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. I can see the gorgeousness of the sea and the waves reaching out to us via our 3D glasses, but we would remain blind and inert to the inner recesses of Captain Ahab's tortured mind.

How about a 3D peep into Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter? Honestly, having seen and been disappointed by the Demi Moore-dominated morose version of this movie, I can't see any uplift in the visual experience, except for suffering a nightmare or two about a marauding pair of breasts (Demi Moore's) with the letters "A" coming at you.

My point is that excellent literary works are inlaid with a third dimension already; The instrument that is most likely to bring this dimension out are our eyes, unadorned by 3D glasses.

The one novel I can think of that would be a super visual and visceral experience were we to watch a film version of it in 3D, is H.G. Wells' The Time Machine...and all of the Victorian boys adventure novels.

By the way, I was surprised to find that the music of Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby is composed by Jay-Z. Eerie echo of Jay Gatsby?

Agatha the good

There is a saying that it might be strange to see a clothed person shake hands with a naked one: it is like the meeting of two utterly different tribes.

What could then be said of the spectacle of a white South African shaking hands, proverbially speaking, with her black servant during the heydays of Apartheid?

Marlene van Niekerk's novel Agaat, speaks of such a meeting, between Jakkie De Wet, heiress and owner of a farm in the Cape Province of South Africa, and Agaat, a farm hand slash servant whom Jakkie had taken in when she (Agaat) was but a slip of a girl. 

Agaat is black.

The novel spans an entire historical spectrum, ranging from Apartheid to post-apartheid, and the "meeting" between white master and black servant hangs over into an extended relationship between the two: After political normalcy returns to South Africa and the black majority of the nation enters the phase of self-governance, Jakki suffers A.L.S, a degenerative disease of the nervous system. She is now in the keeping of Agaat. Agaat looks after Jakki who is immobile and cannot speak.

Jakki can think, however, and the following are her thoughts caged inside her; her thoughts are now Agaat-centric:

If I could suddenly find my tongue, I'd be able to tell it to you in so many words: All that we could think up to do, you and I, all our lives, was to unbosom ourselves in our inner chamber before the lord. Oh hearken to me, your little girl-child meek and mild, oh preserve me, your bleeding virgin, bless me, woman of your nation, but what did that make him?

Woman

The night was soggy, Houston autumn, frogs like squeeze boxes wheezing in and out. Her neighbors' nakedness seemed sad and enervated. Breasts flat on her chest, a kind of melted look to her flesh, ankles thick on splayed bare feet.

I had scribbled these lines down from the March 26, 2013 issue of the New Yorker. I'm not sure who or what wrote it, but the lines stood out to me as the description of a woman in a bind about her own body.

The salesman dies twice

Death of a Salesman: Willy Loman, for all his fervent dreams of the future and his fierce argument with the past, never, ever, occupies his present. Even as he fights, fumes and flounders, he is sensationally absent from his life, a kind of living ghost. It is existence itself, not success, that eludes him. He inhabits a vast, restless, awful, and awesome isolation, which is both his folly and his tragedy.

Transtromered

Transtromered could be an yet unverified process of falling into a trance upon reading the poetry of Nobel laureate Tomas Transtromer.

When asked if poetry was for entertainment, Transtromer said,

[Poetry] begins in delight and ends in wisdom (quoting from Robert Frost). [Poetry] reclaims an awareness of the world (quoting from Allen Ginsberg). [Poetry] strikes the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts (quoting from Keats) and when power power corrupts, poetry cleanses. 

When asked what he wants to achieve through the medium of poetry, Transtromer said, that in poetry he is seeking a kind of meaning in being present, in using reality in making something of it and not seeking empty calories of superficial entertainment.

And here is Tomas' Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

Strands of (other people's) thoughts

The writing is both charming and infuriating, built of plain prose that blooms without warning into carbuncular vision.

She speaks as if the entire acreage of her skin were a listening device.

Vanishing is a way of life, of coping with the unbearable, of transmuting identity into something more manageable, if anonymous existence. Identity, like so much unwanted history, is a burden to be shed.
Relieved to be excused from love and marriage and all the preliminary and subsequent complications and mortifications that involved.

Fog banks of neuroses, in which even the most inconsequential gesture settles, like a heavy woolen blanket, over an aching heart.

Literature in Russia is not as neutral a commodity as it is in the West.

Josef Stalin was like a Genghis Khan with a telephone; he made midnight phone calls (to end lives).

Gibbons tied up in the ribbons of my memory

This is a book that adorned the bookshelves of a majority of book-loving, a bit of Anglicized, Indians, especially Bengalis.

It probably lay in my father's bookcase as well, but I never got a chance to read Edward Gibbon's famous seven volumes on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (I just checked, it's now available in WalMart, indicating not only a decline and fall in the value of such books in contemporary America, but a total eclipse of it as well).

I carry with me an impression of the book as a "male" book, the product of male cogitation, i.e. greatly worried about things tangential to the minutiae of daily living in Victorian England.

Nonetheless, I am moved by what Gibbons said after he finished writing the book:

I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober, melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken away everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.