Analyze this

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

A writing analyzer software tells me that I write like H.P. Lovecraft.

(Se)same sex

A forthcoming New Yorker cover has Bert and Ernie curled up on a couch, watching the U.S. Supreme Court Justices. 

Lest people look askance at what could be perceived as sexualization of innocence, I'd like to put in my two cents by saying same-sex couples are not just about sex; love has infinite forms.

ReJoyce

I am more impressed by Joyce Carol Oates' serene surrounding than by what she says about her writing routines. 

Somebody might say, "the lady needs some food."

Would Dan Brown or E.L. James say they don't "care" what their royalty earnings are?

But to be honest, if you want to be an excellent writer or philosopher, or intellectual or even a Professor (Oates is one at Princeton), you might have to have the "I don't care" attitude toward numbers. 

But jokes aside, Oates is a magnificent writer and one of America's precious bests.

From real to virtual

The Hunt Library of the State University of North Carolina, has a new library where students can check out laptops and flash drives rather than books.

Reporting on the emergence of digital libraries in college campuses and counties all across the United States, Margaret Rock writes:

In some ways, libraries are doing what they’ve always done: adapting to technology, whether by collecting documents, storing records and videotapes or offering e-books and computer terminals. Today, they’re under pressure to give more and create spaces that connect people to information and ideas.[...] Books won’t fade, but with so many other mediums to explore, libraries, especially those with technology, can enhance skills. Access itself isn’t enough: libraries need to harness the sheer overabundance of information in the digital age and become facilitators to help us sort through the avalanche.

Gay Britons

In light of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down DOMA (Defence of Marriage Act, passed in 1996), it can be said, unambiguously that same-sex love is no longer the Oscar Wildean love that "dare not speak its name."

It's easy to name Oscar Wilde in the same breath as gay-love. Wilde was a courageous spokesperson and carefree practitioner of an amor that risked social wrath and cruel punishment in his days.

What about the quieter Victorian/Edwardian male Britons who were not that courageous, but expressive nonetheless of social relations that were taboo?

Thinking of British novelist, E.M. Forster, made the image of his A Passage to India float up in my mind. That's the novel that Forster is known for in India, where I had my first brush with E,M. Forster.

It took me years to extract the homoerotic theme in A Passage: Who can not but see the deep mutual affection affection between the affable Fielding and the pansy, somewhat neurotic, Aziz? Fielding is a strapping British "lad," with a muscular mien, a no nonsensical approach to approach to living the life of an expatriate Briton in colonial India. Aziz is the fusspot male, very feminine, with a wife that's conveniently dead. 

They chalk up a great friendship that crosses racial and national bars; Fielding is one of the few British males in the novel who does not believe that Aziz molested Ms. Adela Quested. My belief is that Fielding knew of the love that dare not speak its name kind of love that flew through Aziz's vein.

Both Aziz and Fielding acted straight, but were gay.

Later, much later, I came to know that E.M. Forster himself was a homosexual. In denouncing his writing as mediocre, the mercurial Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul said that Forster wasn't a real writer on India, he merely traveled to India to find boys. Naipaul dismissed Forster as an opportunistic homosexual.

Forster's homosexuality made me re read the relationship between Fielding and Aziz in a fresh light. It also made me read his other novel Maurice.

Maurice is without pretence, about the love between two Englishmen in England.

The love in Maurice faces obstructions, but the novel has a happy ending.

Forster wrote about the happy ending:

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood. I dedicated it ‘To a Happier Year’ and not altogether vainly. Happiness is its keynote.

Looking back at the ending of A Passage to India, I don't see a "happy ending." I see a parting between Fielding and Aziz, though they promise to meet again. But the meeting is also implied as impossible, perpetually deferred, as the following words echo through the crisp and cool North Indian air, "Not now, not now, not yet, not yet."

Perhaps it was easier for Forster to foresee a happy union between Maurice and Alec because both were not only gay men in love with each other, but also white British males. In A Passage, on the other hand, Fielding was a Britisher of the then-ruling class, and Aziz was an Indian, conceivable in the role of a subaltern not as an equal partner to Fielding.

Deen, done, gone

Brent Staples is a rare black intellectual who tries to analyse, reasonably so, racism in America.

I remember the wondrous thing he did in his essay, Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space. He had put himself in the shoes of a white female, who is walking the streets of Chicago and New York City, in the late sixties and early seventies, perhaps hurrying home from work or pleasure, late at night. The streets are empty; the lights are dim and she walks alone, but, points out Staple, not quite alone. A big black male is also walking the streets, behind her. He tries to imagine the state of mind this makes her fall into momentarily.

He understands that her insides curl up into a ball of fear, a fear of being attacked by this man, who, by virtue of being big and black, is also a stalker, a mugger, a rapist, not a man of business necessarily, not hurrying home from work like her.

Staples writes from his own experience, of having been that black male, a criminal almost by default and a woman's worst nightmare on dark, empty streets. But instead of accusing that woman and denizens of white America, as racist, pure and simple, he chooses to switch roles, become the perp that he is perceived to be, and calls the woman a victim.

The white woman is a victim of a culture that stereotypes the black male (Staples doesn't touch upon black females) as a dysfunctional, incorrigible, sociopath. The black male is a victim of those stereotypes. 

Staples avoids calling the woman and her ilk racists; individuals, especially individuals who are unreflective when it comes to assessing their own thoughts and actions, Staples implies, become de facto racists in one way or the other, because they are born and raised in a culture that's foundationally racist and genocidal.

Till the time when we make a conscious attempt to unlearn the foundational stories of this culture, embedded in our consciousnesses through generations, we will all be implicated of being racists. 

But the consequences of unconscious racism can be severe, as the case of the killing of black Florida teen, Trayvon Martin, shows. Reflecting on that incident Brent Staples writes in a recent column:

Very few Americans make a conscious decision to subscribe to racist views. But the toxic connotations that the culture has associated with blackness have been embedded in thought, language and social convention for hundreds of years. This makes it easy for people to see the world through a profoundly bigoted lens without being aware that they are doing so.

If Brent Staples were asked to ponder on the question of whether Paula Deen, the now-disgraced celebrity chef and doyenne of Food Network, is racist, he would probably say "yes," she is, but he would also put her in the slot of the unconscious racist.

I would agree with an opinion like Brent Staples'. This would entail a bit of a humanization of the food empress and a less of a monstrosizing of her. Paula is no racist Frankenstein; she is much in the vein of Ms. Daisy, in the movie Driving Ms. Daisy, where Ms. Daisy is a wealthy Jewish southerner who has a black housemaid and a black chauffeur, whom she loves dearly, as she says, but toward whom she also displays attitudes of condescension and patronizing. She does all this as their benevolent employer; Ms. Daisy's racism is diffuse, yet racism it is.

In an interview of Paula Deen, conducted last year in New York City, Paula Deen enacts a Daisy-like moment. Upon being asked about race relations in the American South, Deen summons on stage her black chauffeur and tells the interviewer and the audience that she loves him and sees him like he were her son from a "black" father. The interview takes place on stage and there is a blackboard-like backdrop against which the chauffeur stands. Deen asks him to get visible as he can't be seen against the black board. This is Deen's sense of humor and her sense of humor is peppered with evidences of what Staples would describe as "unconscious racism."

Unwittingly, Paula Deen displays the full spectrum of her Georgian brand of consciousness where it's all right, even funny, to invoke the "invisibility" of the black individual, to reinforce their servant status in the white affluent Georgian household, and to play upon their uncle Tom-ness.

The chauffeur and the very many black house staff and kitchen staff and wait staff in the restaurant businesses that the Deens own, one could easily speculate, evokes the spectre of a plantation legacy.

The fact that Paula Deen is a white southerner complicates her unconscious racism. In the same interview, the interviewer, Kim Severson, who is a midwestern transplant in Atlanta, and who is the lesbian, Atlanta bureau chief of the New York Times, reminds Paula Deen of her personal history as the great grandchild of a slave-owner.

Deen skirts the issue of a foul legacy with a certain kind of cute poeticism that both implicates and absolves her. The absolution, however, is hard to grant. 

The author Michael Chabon has given a lovely account of his unconscious racism and his cosmetic pluralism. Chabon comes clean about his unconscious racism with intellectual honesty. Paula Deen, on the other hand, sublimates her's.

When I heard her speak of her great grandfather and how he was devastated upon losing his land and his son during the civil war, my mind floated back to the voice of somebody like Scarlet O'Hara in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. All that Scarlet could think of when the plantations are up in flames is that these are the beginnings of a new era, the old one having been burnt down. The novel has a poetic ending; one feels that Mitchell mourns the passing away of a way of life. But that was a different time, and these are, as Kim Severson keeps on insinuating in sophisticated yet wry ways, different times, different climes.

Over and over again, Paula Deen, in this interview comes across to me as a fatter, older, more raucously funny, Scarlet O'Hara, who has lost and found her kingdom through staging, what Frank Bruni calls a "bacon wrapped burlesque" of racist transgressions. 

Deen acts coy, walking in on to the stage with a puppy in tow, cries "naivete," whenever accosted by a tough question. Slavery, she says was a "terrible thing," and she's glad it ended, but it also ended the life of her great grandfather, who shot himself when he discovered that he had nothing to feed his 35 freed slaves with. 

An average viewer would find this claim of unemployed slaves sitting on a plantation-owner's conscience with a force to drive him mad, a little hard to digest. But personally, I believe Paula Deen's story of her grandfather's demise. Having read enough of William Faulkner's stories of the horror of the intertwinedness of master and slave, an intertwinedness that gives the white Southerner a better and  a deeper understanding of the black slave than the white Northerner,  I see the point that Paula Deen makes: The black presence was so "intrical" (she meant "integral", is my guess) in the culture of the South that even if the white Southerners were prejudiced, "we didn't see ourselves as being prejudiced." 

The comparison with Faulkner, however, goes only so far. Faulkner writes to show how the "intricality" brutalized both blacks and whites of the South, while Paula Deen, who is no Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Welty, raises this "intricality" to the level of a banal sentimentality.

She does not shed a nano second of tear for the anonymous 35 her great grandfather owned.

Paula Deen is no racist in the sense George Zimmerman is; she isn't going to be yearning for a return of lynching, or secretly fund a Neo Nazi group. Her brand of racism is not violent. It's a peculiar kind of racism that is connected to the pre-antebellum South, when the whites took care of the blacks and the hierarchy was natural and harmonious before the evil Northerner came in from the outside and disrupted a way of life that was fine.

Perhaps the Paula Deens have the plantation subculture in their DNA's. Traces of it erupt in her language though in the most convivial of ways. She isn't comfortable discussing Barak Obama or his universal healthcare plan. But when asked what she would do if she were the president of the United States, Deen says, she would ensure healthcare for everybody, jobs for all and make sure everybody had a piece of land. 

Upon hearing "land," I smelled reparation and "three acres and a mule" echoed in my mind.

P.S. In 2001, author Alice Randall, exasperated with the worshipful status given to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, wrote a sequel, Wind, Done, Gone, where she gave voice to the numerous black servants that Mitchell keeps silent like the proverbial mules of labor.

The intelligent Ms. Severson, who occupies a sexual minority status in society herself, repeatedly tells Paula Deen during the course of the interview that she has the power to change things, to rewrite history, as it were, to reflect the plurality of the modern technological times. Deen doesn't get the message. Change, she confesses in an unguarded moment, is the most difficult thing to affect. When she learnt that she had diabetes and would have to change her way of living, she was resistant for a long time, till she got a "chillin'" call from death. Diabetes had invaded her body and if she wanted to live longer, she realized, she would have to change herself drastically.

When one is personally threatened by a fear of something, then one changes, but if that same person is called upon to affect change in the spirit of altruism then it's a different story. I think, if Paula Deen were to be a black celebrity, an Oprah Deen, or a Paula Winfrey, she would've spoken differently.

No valiance in poetry

Are contemporary American poets "cowards?" 

University of Virginia English Professor Mark Edmundson seems to think so.

Edmundson has launched a 6000 word "jeremiad" against the pusillanimity of a majority of present day American poets in Harper Magazine. 

Heads that roll: Ranging from John Ashbery to Sharon Olds to even Robert Pinsky.

Poets of today are "oblique, equivocal, painfully self-questioning...timid, small, in retreat...ever more private, idiosyncratic and withdrawn," says Edmundson.

What are they retreating from?

From large, cataclysmic public events of today, including political and climatic one's:

Our poets today are too timid to say, “‘we,’ to go plural and try to strike a major note . . . on any fundamental truth of human experience [...] in the face of war, environmental destruction and economic collapse, they write as though the great public crises were over and the most pressing business we had were self-cultivation and the fending off of boredom. All that matters to these narcissistic singers is the creation of a “unique voice.”

Nigerian-American novelist Chimamanda Ngochi had made a similar complaint, albeit in muted tones, against modern British and American fiction writers. The prioritizing of the "unique" voice over everything else, including ideological commitment, has come under much attack lately.

I think that artists shouldn't be the only ones to be blamed for retreating into "little" things; people at large in our times could be best described as "disengaged." Ask about politics and see them grimacing in distaste, as though to cultivate political wills or perspectives or any other form of engagements (there are so many) in things political, were secondary or inferior to cultivating, as Edmundson writes, private taste.

Art carries the baggages, I feel, of the zeitgeist in which it's produced.

Having said that I wanted to try out the truth value of Edmundson's claim that while modern poets are good in their individual ways, they aren't good enough because they "don't slake a reader's thirst for meanings that pass beyond the experience of the individual poet and light up the world we hold in common."

I chose a poem from the New Yorker, one that I liked for its linguistic and small-scale imagistic effects:

Xanthopsia

It wasn’t absinthe or digitalis
in the Yellow House the two of them shared
that led him to layer the chrome coronas
or yellow the sheets in the bedroom in Arles
or tinge the towel negligently hung
on the hook by the door, or yellow the window,
be it distant view or curtain, yolk-lick
the paintings on the wall by the monkish bed.

After going on, a bit abstrusely, I have to say, about what the causes of "his" xanthopsia weren't, the poem ends on a note of what I thought was an answer to the implied question: Did Van Gogh have xanthopsia, and if so what caused it? An extended question on the plethora of chrome or yellow in Van Gogh's paintings: Why so yellow?

I'd juxtapose a few lines from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland with the lines from the Xanthopsian poetic regime:

The Wasteland: The Burial of the Dead
APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering 5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie, 15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

There are abstruse little images here as well, but they get dispersed in the beautiful echoes of history, mythology, past and present. The chiaroscuro of the male figure holding on to Marie, for fear of falling is there for a reason.

It's no wonder that recently Dan Chiasson came up empty handed when he looked around for poems on the Boston bombing. 

The poems he found had oblique references to this seismic event (seismic not in the sense of numbers and scale of destruction, but in the sense of International politics, war strategies, etc: events affect policies, which in turn affect lives), and had comfortably retreated into the intricacies of the private lives and feelings. 

Chiasson then went back in literary history and dug up lines from the fourteenth-century English poem Piers Plowman.

Do judge a book by its cover

I am amazed by the deep thought that often go into the making of a book cover.

I imagine that thoughtful books have thoughtful covers.

Take for instance, the cover of William Gass' new novel Middle C (at first, I had thought it to represent "middle class," and why not? The battered and vanishing middle class is the subject matter of so much discourse in Western media today).

Artist Gabrielle Wilson, had initially proposed a book cover with a half-concealed-by-music sheets-human face on it, to reveal a basic profile of the protagonist Joey, who is an introvert, average intellectual, a University lecturer and an amateur pianist. 

But Joey in his mind, is also a brilliant professor who runs an organization called the inhumanity museum, a dark place full of clippings of news of world catastrophes. 

Wilson was in a dilemma--to show or not to show the other immaterial life that Joey is steeped in on the book cover. She eventually settled for a cover that gives a hint of Joey's real life--a middling, ordinary one, best represented by the piano key of C.

The history of the book cover that stayed is as follows:

I asked piano-playing friends and piano repair shops in New York for a C key, to no avail. I called Steinway & Sons on 57th Street, and they connected me with Anthony Gilroy at their Queens factory. He was perplexed but entertained by the idea of shipping a single key to Manhattan. The next day I received a beautifully hand-carved ivory key, but I discovered that a full-size key is nearly two feet long. I called Anthony again to see if the factory could cut it shorter and add a black C sharp key. I photographed them from above on a giant turquoise Pantone swatch, aiming to give the ensemble a menacing, lonely mood. Once in the jacket layout, I paired it with the elegant, slightly traditional Sackers Roman typeface so as not to distract from the image.

Joseph Campbell and the Star Wars saga

In this interview aired in March 2012, on PBS, Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers discuss Star Wars, and the universal human need for heroes, mythologies and spiritual adventure.

I came to know of this dialogue from reading an interview (in the NYT's Sunday Book Review section) of novelist Dan Brown. 

Brown attributes the inception of his character Robert Langdon to Joseph Campbell. The PBS interview series, says Brown, is the most thought-provoking conversation he had ever witnessed:

Campbell’s breadth of knowledge about the origins of religious belief enabled him to respond with clarity and logic to some very challenging questions about contradictions inherent in faith, religion and scripture. I remember admiring Campbell’s matter-of-fact responses and wanting my own character Langdon to project that same respectful understanding when faced with complex spiritual issues.

Of bugs and mice

During the day / Gregor crawled back and forth / along the walls / and the ceiling, would sound like a line from Dr. Seuss, but these are telling the story of Gregor Samsa, the man-turned-beetle in Franz Kafka's Metamorphossis.

Matthue Roth, a writer and video game designer, has a kid's version of Kafka, My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs.

According to the New Yorker, the kid's Kafka isn't a cross between Shrek and Go The F**k to Sleep, but an engaging children's book in the tradition of Lewis Carroll's, Roald Dahl's, or Neil Gaiman's fairy tales. 

Children may have a more sensible encounter with the Kafkaesque universe than adults, who have known to have been spooked out by the omnipresence of the Freudian unheimleich in our day-to-day living, something that Kafka excelled in bringing out in his writing.

What scared adults--the notion that evil is banal--might just enchant children:

We are sure, as mature people with 401(k)s and digital subscriptions to the Times, that we will never be stalked by an amorous, sparkly vampire, but we are not sure that we won’t be charged and prosecuted for a crime we aren’t even sure we committed. We can tell our children that there is no Big Bad Wolf, but we can’t assure them that they won’t be prevented from reaching their goals by an unseen bureaucracy intent upon burying them in paperwork. In this way—not the bloody, but the banal—Kafka’s work becomes more spooky than the original Brothers Grimm, in which Snow White’s evil queen is forced to dance to death in scalding iron shoes. And though this might be taken as an argument for sheltering kids from Kafka, consider that the urge to avoid feeling fear altogether is stronger in grown-up humans than in small ones. “Grownups desperately need to feel safe,” Maurice Sendak said in 1993, “and then they project that onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are… they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something.” Perhaps Kafka’s works can be best confronted by children, who have that empyrean way of digesting the surreal and decoding symbols, who are braver, in their innocent beliefs, than we can ever be.

No country for old women

Well, I mention "America" because being a market-oriented society, America usually sells a bit of everything to everybody as long as there is a demand (even for the poor there is crack, outsized dreams of making it big someday, and cheap, fatty food to be sold).

So, I was surprised to learn that there is a dearth of playful lingerie for 60 and above women in this nation.

Joyce Wadler does a hilarious turn on this particular paucity in the American market. 

She says she had modelled her middle-life sexuality image on Mrs. Robinson, the older seductress played by Anne Bancroft in the 1967 movie, The Graduate. Mrs. Robinson wore black, lacy bras and panties. At that time Bancroft was a mere 36 and her character may have been in her early 40s. Late thirties to mid-forties was in the cougar-range back then (wasn't that much back). By the time Wadler turns 60ish, the black lace thingie has passed; a 60ish female in 2013 can't be seductive in the lingerie that adorned the body of a 40 something in the 60s.

She has to close page, chapter and book on Ms. Bancroft and peer into the current smouldering images of Victoria's Secrets models. But those women, though vastly younger and stick-like-ier than herself, are not really about the messy act of sex per se. They are always getting ready for sex and wouldn't want to get into tangled limbs and body fluids for fear of wasting the sheen on their amazing hair or the gloss on their pouty lips and the carefully arranged lingerie on their silky bodies.

Besides, as Wadler reminds herself, she doesn't want to look farcical (it isn't clear whether Wadler thinks the VC models are farcical or the notion of she trying to be like them is).

The writing is engaging; which leads me to my usual cross-cultural question? Why can't imagine women from India, in their 60s be playful? 

Obsolescence: Bidding adieu to India's telegraph industry

As denizens of the U.S., we are used to obsolescence: Yesterday's smartphone, we know will become a mere museum piece tomorrow. The furious pace of technology makes sure that obsolescence is like the air we breathe and the microbes we live with--a part of the scene, as it were.

But there might be certain parts of the world, where machinery, gadgets and modes of communication, might still be in use. When I think of India, my birth country, I think of the last few outposts of pre-technology existing side by side with frontiers of modern, cutting-edge technology.

So when I learnt that Indians will no longer be able to send telegrams, I was surprised. Electronic modes of communication are usurping even the last outposts of old-world communication culture, I thought.

A telegram deliverer said that he would miss delivering paper telegrams to houses, and fears that now he will be asked to serve tea and mop government office floors. Workers tied to the old industry would become unemployable junkets.

Hail to thee monarch Bloomberg, mere mayor thou never wert

I learnt this from reading books on English history: Whenever a particular monarch ruled in England for a long period of time, ushering in relative peace and stability, and subjects got used to the tempo of the prevailing reign, a kind of anxiety set in toward the period's "ending."

Thus a sort of darkness seeped into the national psyche (if there is such a psyche) when the era of the first Elizabeth rolled in; likewise, the long reign of Queen Victoria generated a fear of uncertainty lest she died in the 19th century.

Then there are those longish reigns that people can't wait to see the end of, because in many ways such reigns have been anti-people and the leader has been more disliked than liked.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the leader of one of the globe's most complex urban habitats--New York City--has been disliked by many for his monologic brand of leadership--one in which the leader couldn't care less about having having dialogues with others before making a decision--but his reign of 12 years has been one for the books: Bloomberg somehow transcends judging a political leadership on mere economic and other material grounds. The city has got to be a more economically-stabler entity, and the crime rate is phenomenally negligible, but what makes Bloomberg stands out is his tremendous aura.

As Frank Bruni writes, in the context of the forthcoming Mayoral elections, Bloomberg's stature makes every other candidate look small, crass selfish and even buffoonish (like Anthony Weiner).

Bloomberg has managed to emerge as noble:

He’s just brought us bikes. He’s determined to bring us composting. He means to vanquish smoking, he means to vanquish obesity and he’s intent on protecting us from the ever stormier seas, after which he means to vanquish global warming itself.

Michael Bloomberg, in other words, has become a light in and of itself. So much of a light is he on his own terms, that he tried to persuade Hilary Clinton to run for the Mayorship in 2014. The light that he is, he gave a supremely down-to-earth and yet provocative commencement speech at Stanford University. Compared to what he said, the one's delivered by Oprah, Julie Andrews and others, excluding perhaps, Michele Obama, sounded like baubles.

Here is the speech:

Miss Utah's brain-fart

Hard as it is to give impromptu responses to tough social questions at beauty pageants, this particular question would understandably sound like the Sphinx's riddle to Ms. Utah.

In the 2013 Miss U.S.A. contest, Ms Utah wasn't able to solve the puzzle of why women get paid less than men for the same job, though statistically, women are the primary breadwinners in 40% of all American families today.

One reasonable answer: because those primary breadwinners are under-educated, mostly poor (white, black and Hispanic) single mothers from broken homes, who work minimum wage jobs. They are "invisible," i.e. they don't count as "people."

How would folks like Ms. Utah have the key to such national secrets?

So, please, we shouldn't be laughing at Ms. Utah; she's a contestant for a beauty pageant and can't be blamed for the silly quest to find a perfect amalgamation of beauty, brains and social conscience on the part of the pageant organizers. 

A better question would have been: Why do Black women have blonde hair? What does THAT tell about our society?

The beauty pageant contestants aren't quite in the league of Hollywood actresses, like Anne Hathaway and Natalie Portman, who are very educated and highly informed and interested in the world around them.

Sad, that Ms. Utah won't win the crown simply because she said, "Make, education, better."

P.s. In real, psychological terms, what Miss Utah experienced was a "blank." Under a pressure to say the right thing, contestants in highly competitive contexts like the Miss U.S.A. Beauty Pageant, draw a blank in their brains, and what's released as a result is a "brain fart."

It happens to drones in the national Spelling Bee contest as well.

Chinese Farce?

The Chinese government is planning to engineer yet another migration of its population. Within the next few years, China intends to "move" around 250 million people from the countryside to the cities. The idea is to push farmers from self-sustenance to an economy of consumerism.

China hopes that this will give its economy a humungous boost.

Not too long ago, the Chinese, under Mao Ze Dong, were forced to migrate from the cities to the countryside, so as to teach the urban intelligentsia the "lesson" of self-sustenance, because the Mao regime thought of them to be "parasites" living off the labor of the producer-class, including farmers.

As Marx is said to have said, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

Man of steel is part Moses part immigrant

The great thing about comic books is that they not only appeal to children, but when franchised out into the adult world for mass-entertainment, they also speak to adults.

And when adults look at them, they see things that children don't.

In her review of the Zack Snyder-directed Man of Steel, the latest version of the adventures of Superman, movie critic Manohla Dargis sees the flick as a multilayered story. In the manner of William Empson's classic, The Seven Types of Ambiguity, Dargis unearths the myth of a technology- apocalypse, Moses-in-Superman, and Superman as industrial laborer/immigrant saga, among a host of other "ambiguities."

Krypton is facing destruction because it's technologically too advanced. The architecture of the city is sleek and steely reminding us of the sleek and steely structures designed by Zaha Hadid in some of the biggest metropolises of the world. Michael Shannon, the guy who built an underground shelter to protect his family against an impending storm in Take Shelter, plays the destructive villain who would destroy Krypton and earth with all his ill-gotten tech smarts. 

Superman is sent off into the earth in a Moses-type basket. He has Jewish origins as is revealed by his original name. The Moses reference is reinforced when Superman is shown as a burning body on the rooftop of a factory that is set on fire. He escapes unscathed. 

The trailer above shows him as an immigrant, the old-fashioned outsider who comes to these shores and labors away in the old-fashioned industrial-worker role. Zor-El broadcasts to the earthlings, "he looks like you, but he is not one of you." (Now that sounds a bit like Superman is Edward Snowden!)

A Guantanamo for gays

In my novel, The Green Rose, the central character, a lesbian female, dreams of escaping into an island, modelled along the lines of the Greek island of Lesbos, where she can enjoy her romantic trysts with women freely, fearlessly.

There are real islands like Fire Island in New York, similar to the one in my heroine's dream. But Fire Island has a wholly pleasant history of coming into being as a place where gays and lesbians go to chill out.

The islands off Italy's Tremitti Archipelago, a popular abode for gays, lesbians and the transgendered, have, on the other hand, a very dark and violent history.

The islands were once upon a time conceived as an internal exile, a sort of prison camp, for Italy's gay males during Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime in the late 1930s. 

The Fascists, like their German counterpart, the Nazis, considered homosexuality as a crime; both ideologies envisioned creating a race of males that would be complete in its "virility," thus the presence of effeminate males--gay males were thought of as such in wartime Europe--was seen as diluting the virility of the race. 

In 1938, a police prefect on the Sicilian Islands of Catania took Mussolini's anti-gay edict to heart, rounded up around 45 males accused of being homosexuals and banished them to the island of San Domino, in the Tremitis.

Gay men were interned with other political prisoners in small islands throughout Italy, but San Domino was the only island where all exiles were gay males.

Americans avoid race, Indians avoid homosexuality: The case of Rituporno Ghosh

In a recent interview, Nigerian novelist Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, made an interesting observation on how American writers, black or white, skirt around the issue of race.

Adichie feels like fiction writers here either avoid addressing the subject matter of race or they use predictable "tropes" to speak of it. 

One of the predictable tropes is lyricism; a character in Adichie's new novel, Americanah, says that when black American authors write about race, they have to “make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race." 

Perhaps, this avoidance of representing matters of race and racism is part of a larger reluctance to make readers uncomfortable: "In American fiction there is a tendency to celebrate work that fundamentally keeps people comfortable."

Having read Adichie's observation, I realized that every culture has a topic or a subject matter that it would rather not have a frank conversation about. The elliptical references to race isn't just confined to American fiction; it seeps from American culture at large into American fiction. It's a cultural problem.

Just as in America, so in contemporary India. There is a fundamental tendency to avoid speaking of certain subject matters in Indian culture as well. Homosexuality is prime among these. People would either not speak of homosexuality at all, or if needs be, speak of it "lyrically," i.e. in a way that transcends the discussion from a concrete level of physical and sexual reality, to one of poeticism and sentimentality.

Take for instance the discussion of prominent Indian filmmaker Rituporno Ghosh. His death marked the occasion of what Bengalis call a chorcha (discourse) of his art. He was hailed as a "genius" and a fantastic director in the tradition of the trio of Bengali greats, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak. 

The language in which self-proclaimed film ustaads (experts) in India write of the art of movie-making is shoddy, imprecise. Yet within the limitations, a vast majority of the writing on Ghosh kept mum about his homosexuality. It is as if, in the spirit of the American separation of Church and State, it is unconstitutional to mention an artist's sexuality in the same breath as his work.

I had a personal taste of this in a brief conversation about Rituporno Ghosh on Facebook. An India-based female cousin of mine paid a tribute to Ghosh and said that he was a genius (or something along those lines). I added that he was also "gay." A gentleman promptly butted in with "He was a great director; gay or lesbian is useless." He didn't use the semi-colon, for language isn't the metier of Bengali middle-class, balding gentlemen, who have been married and ergo convinced that they are normal, heterosexual males. Neither did he mean gays and lesbians to be "useless" people. In all probability, he meant to say that what does Ghosh's sexuality have to do with the quality of his art?

Next day, my female cousin gave a supportive rejoinder to this comment and wrote that she agreed with what this balding gentleman said; indeed it's "irrelevant" (note: an improvement on "useless") to take into consideration an artist's sexuality when judging her art. Didn't Charles Chaplin have many "characteristics" that would have made us dislike him as a person, but did we consider those "characteristics" when we judged his films as superior?"

Two things emerge from these comments: (1) Homosexuality is a mere "characteristic" in the eyes of my Facebook interlocutors, like womanizing is (Chaplin was a womanizer). What the female cousin meant was that Chaplin's "looseness" of character did not deter us from loving his films. So why should Ghosh's homosexuality?

(2) A consideration of Ghosh's gay identity would somehow tarnish his standing as a filmmaker, which  convinces me that homosexuality is an uncomfortable truth, in the minds of even the relatively more enlightened bunch amongst Indians--the Bengalis.

I felt like I had to talk back at this point. Sexual identity, isn't just a "characteristic," or a virtue or a vice (an index of character), it's an intrinsic part of one's self and ergo that self's expressivity, especially if that self happens to be an acutely sensitive artistic self like Rituporno Ghosh. A mention of him as gay just might enrich our understanding of his art. An artists' perspective matters; there is a theory that had the world's majority of filmmakers been women then the image of women in cinema would have been vastly different from the image of women we are used to seeing on celluloid. Women in film have inevitably been the creation of male directors. If one's gender can impact one's perspective, so could one's sexual orientation.

Perspective matters, and Ghosh's gay perspective must have mattered in the making of the male and female characters in his films. He is said to have portrayed especially strong female characters and is said to have "understood" women better than most Indian (male) film directors. I don't mean to suggest that because a man understands women well means he is gay; I mean to say that Ghosh must have had a significantly different outlook on males and females, on the world at large, because he may have had the perspective of an outsider in the most fundamental of ways. An openly gay male on the Indian cultural scene is a like a lone horse in a cowshed full of cows. It's imminent that the horse will have an unique take on the normative features of the cow-world. 

Ghosh's homosexuality must have given him a privileged perspective, or as William Du Bois, the noted African American intellectual and activist said, a "double consciousness" that permits minorities, sexual or ethnic, to have a distinctive view of things we take for granted.

The discussion on Facebook came to an abrupt halt. I had broached the "gay" topic and shutters were pulled down. Neither Bengali babu nor bibi wanted to take the exchange to the next level.

I felt like a stranger in a wild-wild Western town, stranded alone, all dressed for a fine intellectual conversation with my hands on my bullet-studded analytical guns, but nowhere to shoot my guns at. 

I scoured the Internet for discussions of Ghosh's homsexuality and its impact on his art, but found nothing noteworthy on this topic. There was just one mention of how he "changed forever, the discourse on homosexuality" in the Indian media, but no follow up explanation of how that was accomplished. 

The sexual part had been expectedly lyricized to the hilt.

It seemed like Ghosh had been canonized with a wilful avoidance of the dirty topic of sexuality; suddenly Indians, who are utterly unable to separate the artist from her art in a discussion of the latter, were eager to judge Ghosh's art on its objective aesthetic merit. 

Hermit or thief

Today everybody is asking a question of the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, "Is he a hero/saint or a villain/narcissist?"

I ask a similarly polarizing question of Maine's "North Pond Hermit," Christopher Knight: "Is he a hermit or a thief?"

A bit of a background on Knight: He is a 49 year old resident of Maine and has spent 27 years living in the woods as a hermit. 

He sustains himself by stealing from other people's pantries. Over the last few years, Knight is said to have committed about a 1000 burglaries.

But, as the trooper in the video says, Knight isn't the traditional hermit in that he doesn't live hermetically sealed off from the world. He keeps up with the latest on the Kadarshians and reads People Magazine (how he is able to access these isn't explained).

Residents of North Pond are polarized about Knight's characterization. A portly elderly man calls him a thief because he has stolen other people's property. Knight, he says, steals selectively; peanut butter is his favorite, as are batteries and propane gas tanks. He leaves behind meat that he doesn't like. 

He has never stolen big items or money.

Others hail him as a hermit, who lives a life away from the stink of technology and the industrial bustle. He lives in the midst of nature, though one look at his abode and I could tell he is contaminating nature by bringing in the industrial junk.

A "hermit" is an anomalous label in contemporary America today, as is a "saint". The conditions for the production of hermeticism and saintliness simply don't exist in our society. Besides, what is Mr. Knight doing anyway? He has merely negated an established norm of living and is living off other people's stuff. He should've been a mendicant and instead of stealing, he could've lived off the generosity of other people's spirits. 

I have read of hermits in some of the Indian epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata: They weren't necessarily nice people, but had a disciplined body and mind and throve on the ability of other people to gift food to them. But those were radically different times, before the economy of buying and selling via currencies came into being. The gift of food was given to hermits/mendicants and hermits reciprocated with the gift of good will/blessings. Sometimes, a gift of food was given to a particularly powerful hermit out of a fear of upsetting him and earning a curse. 

The Maine hermit, isn't quite a hermit; he's just a delayed gratification-seeking narcissist who wants publicity, as the portly guy and victim of the hermit's peanut-butter-stealing-spree says.

Can you Beat this recipe?

I never considered Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, to have been a person who made his own cold summer soup.

But here it is, the soup recipe emanating from a dangerous mind (a "Communist" agent, an enemy of the state).

Translated into legibility, it looks thus:

COLD SUMMER BORSCHT
Dozen beets cleaned & chopped to bite size salad-size Strips
Stems & leaves also chopped like salad lettuce
All boiled together lightly salted to make a bright red soup,
with beets now soft - boil an hour or more
Add Sugar & Lemon Juice to make the red liquid
sweet & sour like Lemonade
Chill 4 gallon(s) of beet liquid -
Serve with (1) Sour Cream on table
(2) Boiled small or halved potato
on the side
i.e. so hot potatoes don’t heat the
cold soup prematurely
(3) Spring salad on table to put into
cold red liquid
1) Onions - sliced (spring onions)
2) Tomatoes - sliced bite-sized
3) Lettuce - ditto
4) Cucumbers - ditto
5) a few radishes
__________________________________
for Summer Dinner

Am I deep-reading or not?

Upon reading yet another impassioned argument for "deep reading," I began to wonder about the meaning of "deep reading" itself.

Enough has been said about the gradual erosion, over a period of time, of this intellectual skill. In his book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr famously lamented the loss of his own ability to read deeply because of his addiction to easy skim-reading and gathering of needful information from the Internet.

Writer Anne Murphy Paul pits deep reading against superficial reading, or pragmatic and instrumental reading in which we merely decode words, or read with the end to be informed.

We know what deep reading isn't. Neither writer clarifies to my satisfaction, what precisely the activity of deep reading entails.

In other words, when I deep read a novel, what am I expected to do? Or, how can I tell that I am deep-reading a book.

Do I immerse myself in the details of what I read?

I am currently reading Zadie Smith's NZ. Smith's novel has details of characters and setting galore. Having deep read till chapter 5--and by deep read, I mean having read the book slowly, churning over the details of what I read in my mind--the map of the Willesden neighborhood in which the story mostly unfolds, has been imprinted on my mind with a near-HD precision.

I could say that this has come about as a result of an immersive experience, and the end-result is that I know the local culture of Willesden in the North West Part of London, and I also get a sense of contemporary Britain, because in Smith's writing the local always irradiates out into something larger.

But then I run into a particular character named Annie; Annie is the lone aristocrat in this novel. She lives, not in the ghetto of the council flats of Willesden, but in London's Soho. However, being the descendant of a minor royalty, she lives in a dilapidated multi storied house, the ground floors of which have been rented out to a brothel where whores serve moneyed clients. 

The real estate company that manages Annie's property wants her out and she won't sell; she particularly enjoys the view from her terrace of the Buckingham palace.

But Annie is a druggie, a sort of a junkie that lives subversively, on the "edges," as she says and is literally living among the ruins--her domestic space is a veritable junkyard.

Annie is an ex-lover of one of the novels' main characters, Felix. Felix is the son of Jamaican immigrants and was raised within the council culture; as lovers Felix and Annie lived on drugs, alcohol and in the moment, on the "edge." But of late Felix has contracted the middle-class dream of a stable family, a stable everything and that thing that horrifies Annie--property.

One day, Felix revisits Annie to tell her about his new life and to tell her that he has great expectations of himself and the woman he is living with. He only means to morally instruct Annie: by holding himself up as an example of a decent "British" citizen, marriageable and all, he means to inspire Annie to change. He asks her to settle down.

But Annie explodes in the face of Felix's moral instruction:

It's what people do these days, isn't it? When they can't think of anything else to do. No politics, no ideas, no balls. Get married. But I've transcended all that. Long time ago. eons ago. This idea that all your happiness lies in this other person. This idea of happiness! I'm on a different plane of consciousness, darling. I've got more balls than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I was engaged at 19, I was engaged at 23, I could be moldering in some Hampshire pile at this very moment, covering and recovering sofas with some Baron in perfect sexless harmony. That's what my people do. While your lot have a lot of babies they can't afford to take care of. I'm sure it's all perfectly delightful, but you can count me the fuck out. 

At this instance, another character from another British novels pops into my mind: Mrs. Havisham in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. Annie is a rusty echo of Mrs. Havisham, who is the aristocrat that lives in the ruins of her mansion and has been rendered psychically immobile since the day she was abandoned at the wedding altar. Mrs. Havisham is the ghost of an already-receding British past, but she is also the symbol of a society gone morally bankrupt with a heavy-reliance on wealth to solve problems of morality. 

In Mrs. Havisham Dickens brought out the fraying fibres of 19th century British social fabric--the aristocracy, having fed off the land is rotting into irrelevance and the rising mercantile class is now feeding off of the rot. In Annie, we find a figure of dissent, not a mere symbol of the rot. Annie hates the life she sees growing around her and some distinctly off her. And she wants to be no part of it:

"Not everyone wants this conventional little life you're rowing your boat toward", she tells Felix. "I like my river of fire. And when it's time for me to go I fully intend to roll off my one-person dinghy into the flames and be consumed. I'm not afraid! I've never been afraid."

Mrs. Havisham was afraid. 

It's silly to think of a British novel without thinking of Empire providing a referential scaffolding on which the tradition of the English novel can stand. Least of all can one think of Zadie Smith outside of this tradition. So much of the fug of empire and the British novelistic tradition is built into Smith's oeuvre. In this context, it's safe to say that Annie is a 21st century Mrs. Havisham, ready to fling aside all pretension to have any significant say in the shaping of an emergent, non-insular Europe, where immigrants are a big part of the social, cultural and political landscape. In fact, in NW, the Felixes rise while the Annies sink.

All of Smith's novels thus far speak back and forth with other British novels from the past; she is said to have rewritten a bunch of them.

All my immersion into the details made available on the pages of NW wouldn't have got me this far in my understanding of the larger goals of the novel. I needed to have had come to the novel with this historical consciousness I have accrued over years of being steeped in the Western canon and studies of empire and power.

Simply put, I need to be a deeply read person, acculturated to the signs and cues of Western textual culture, to do a real deep-reading of whatever I am presently reading, which is more often than not a Western book in English.

I just spoke of the act and end result of deep reading a work of fiction; the novel, it's said, creates a cosmos that has to be understood by connecting it to preceding and larger cosmoses. 

The novel is a distinct genre. Perhaps, the other genres don't need a prior acculturation like the one I've mentioned above, and could be deep-read through sheer focus on what's on the page. No reverberations of literary memory need to be felt. 

I feel that Nicholas Carr's definition of the deep-reader comes closest to what I believe deep-reading entails, and why I also believe it's impossible to raise a generation of deep-readers in our time, the brain-altering effects of the Internet notwithstanding.

In a moment in The Shallows, Carr, quoting the playwright Richard Foreman, writes:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

A deep-reader is not just one who reads with careful attention to details and enters through the gateway of verbal felicity created by the writer into the culture of which the writer speaks. A deep-reader is also one who carries within herself the "Western heritage" such that the immersive experience of reading is not simply an experience of seeing what's shown, but also of remembering having seeing them before in a different form.

It's not everyday that a reader comes along, reads Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, and call it a modern day War and Peace sans the peace, without having had an inkling of the Tolstoyan epic itself.   

Suck

Junot Diaz, one of America's most celebrated writers tells his audience that it's important to "suck a lot" before an aspiring writer could be said to have made it creatively.

He would prefer to hold a book that "sucks a lot" in his hand, than a "fucking book in the head" of a genius.

So much advice flows in from so many writers.

From Jeffrey Eugenides came the immortal words, borrowed from Nadine Gordimer, "write like you were dead."

It's all Greek

The above is the image of a homeless woman in Athens, Greek.

The economy in Greece, as well as in other parts of Europe, we are told, is reaching a level of precarity that is unprecedented. Economists predicts that nations like Greece are slipping slowly but surely into long-term poverty that will be very hard to recover from, even when the Euro rebounds.

Not everything Greek is slipping and sliding into disaster though: Take for instance, the mad popularity of Greek yogurt within the United States. A total of 35% of all the yogurt we buy today is Greek, up from a market share of a mere 1% in 2007. 

I was in the yogurt aisle of my local supermarket today and was struck by the monopoly of greek yogurt. even yoplait has a greek yogurt in its kitty. In fact, god forbid, if I didn't want Greek yogurt, I would probably have to go yogurtless.

It's a pity and reflective of the harsh reality of the global economy, that while the brand "Greek" is minting billions, the real Greece oikos--the household or the family in Greek--is falling apart.

What's with this bottle and water metaphor?

I'm used to the saying that the last straw breaks the camel's back. Translated into the lexicon of political protest, it could mean that when oppression reaches a tipping point, even a tiny oppressive gesture can make the "camel" (/people) revolt.

As we know by now, large segments of Turkey's urban population are turning against the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan has gone dictatorial for a long time, but his recent attempt to usurp Taksim Square, Istanbul's equivalent of London's Hyde Park, or New York City's Central Park (though not half as pretty as either of these), in order to build some government-mandated structures in it, triggered off mass-protests.

However, the protesters camped in Taksim aren't using the last-straw-breaks-the-camel's-back metaphor to describe what's brought on these mass-uprisings.

They are using bottles, glasses and water. One young man says that Erdogan's latest step was like the last drop of water that a glass can no longer accommodate. Turkish populace is envisioned as a glass and the stream of oppressive measures have filled it to the brim, thus the latest drop has spilled over into chaos. Another man said that Turkey is like the bottle with the narrow neck and beyond a certain height of the bottle's neck the water being poured splashes out.

I just couldn't visualize what these young men said.  New uprisings spring new metaphors, is my guess.

Of Siren Servers and Agnostic Texts

Siren Servers: 

They are giant computers at the core of any ascendant center of power. They are the equivalent of oil and transportation routes, in that in the past power and influence were gained by controlling these. In our digital era, to be powerful can mean having the most effective computer on a network. In most cases, this means the biggest and most connected computer. The new class of ultra-influential computers come in many guises. Some run financial schemes, like high-frequency trading, and others run insurance companies. Some run elections, and others run giant online stores. Some run social network or search services, while others run national intelligence services.
Siren Servers are usually gigantic facilities, located in obscure places where they have their own power plants and some special hookup to nature, like a remote river, that allows them to cool a fantastic amount of waste heat.
[Siren Servers] calculate actions for their owners that reduce risks and increase wealth and influence. For instance, before big computers and cheap networking, it was hard for health insurance companies to gather and analyze enough data to be tempted to create a “perfect” insurance business, in which only those who need insurance the least are insured. But with a big computer it becomes not only possible, but irresistible.

Agnostic Texts: 

Are neutral texts created to be “agnostic” with regard to student interest so that outside variables won’t interfere when teachers assess and analyze data related to verbal ability. In other words, they are texts no child would choose to read on her own.There are already hundreds of for-profit and nonprofit providers of “agnostic texts” sorted by grade level being used in English classrooms across the country. There is also a lot of discussion among teachers over whether lessons align well with the new standards, but far less discussion regarding which texts are being chosen for students to read and why. In a sense the students, with their curiosity, sadness, confusion and knowledge deficits, are left out of the equation. They are on the receiving end of lessons planned for a language-skills learning abstraction.

The names of two means of unprecedented social control, textbooks and computer systems, fascinate me. Both the words "Siren" and "Agnostic" have Greek origins. While Sirens would powerfully, almost insuperably, lure ancient Greek heroes from their designated paths of heroic activities and glory, agnostics were Greek philosophers famous for skepticism. (Ironically, the agnostic texts adopted in the national k-12 curriculum are meant to douse skepticism and doubt).

Empathy

An odd piece of information came my way: Empathy, an ability and willingness to relate to the emotions of others, increases when the hippocampus--the brain's region that modulates emotional responses--deteriorates. 

Thus empathy, studies show, can often be at its highest level in patients suffering from Alzheimers. Such patients are most susceptible to "emotional contagion," emotional contagion, a term that refers to the way we sense the emotions of others through their facial expressions, tone of voice or body language, and reflect them without being conscious of doing so.

Does this mean that an ability to remember, or be aware of the convergence of the past, present and future in a moment of time, obstructs empathy?

But then again, as we learnt from a story on empathy in the New Yorker, empathy isn't a wholly positive response to conditions of suffering in the world.

I'll take that up later...

Take Shakespeare out of "The Last Lear"

Bengali movie-makers, who make the occasional film in English, have a penchant for ending on the note of a famous Shakespearean soliloquy: "Pray, do not mock me: I am a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less; And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind." The lines are spoken by King Lear in Act 4, Scene 7 of the tragedy of King Lear.

When he says thus, Lear is no longer a king; he has been stripped of his regality and power and is a mere old man, manipulated into penury by evil children.

In 36 Chowrungee Lane (1981), an old school teacher of Anglo-Indian origin, mutters these lines, when she realizes that she has been used selfishly by a ruthless young Bengali couple. The movie was directed by Aparna Sen. In The Last Lear (2007), an ageing thespian, who is a retired Shakespearean actor, repeats the same lines, this time in the booming voice (whose effects are severely undercut by a terrible accent and enunciation) of Indian superstar Amitabh Bacchan. The actor is on his deathbed, having sacrificed himself at the altar of idealism. 

The film is directed by the now-departed Rituporno Ghosh.

The actor, Harish Misra, retires, one presumes, out of disgust for the commercialization of culture and the decline of theatre in the face of the rising popularity of cinema. These are echos of the theme of Merchant-Ivory's beautiful Shakespeare Wallah. 

When the retired thespian is lured out of his seclusion into playing the role of a clown in a movie made by a successful young filmmaker, he unravels psychologically and insists on enacting his own death scene--a crucial part of the movie's climax--instead of allowing a stuntman to do it. His insistence, combined with the young director's constant wheedling of the old actor's ego, results in the tragic death of the actor.

The Last Lear is a movie about the fall of a purist in a crassly commercial culture where he is an obvious misfit.

I am a huge fan of Shakespeare and King Lear is something I could live on were I to be marooned on an island. I resent this haphazard use of this magnificent play in Indian movies. Aparna Sen merely included a few lines at the end, and in Jennifer Kendall's enunciation the Shakespearean lines sounded Shakespearean and right. But Amitabh Bacchan's incorrigible bluster, which is a perfect vehicle for the ejection of Bollywood lines, massacres the tragic sublimity of King Lear's voice. 

There is a scene in which Bacchan plays Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan in Shakespeare's The Tempest. He is awful, and I couldn't catch a single thing he said. There are other shabby attempts to solidify Shakespeare into a subtext. The retired actor is married to a young Bengali woman who compares their mating to that of Othello and Desdemona.

The Last Lear could have been about any artist who has old world ideals of what's real art and what's sham, because the stories attraction lies, not in the life of the actor, but of the lives of three women who are brought together by their personal affections for the actor. The exchanges between the three women constitute the backbone of the movie, with or without the lousy Shakespearean subtext.

Incidentally, there is one moment that stands out in my memory as more ear-catching than all of the lines added up together in the movie. A journalist is interviewing Harish Misra about another stage artist who is no more. His name is Neeraj Patel. When the journalist requests Harish to say something about "him," the thespian rudely interjects, "him" or "her?" Neeraj, Harish says with marked aversion in his voice, was a "bloody homosexual," who "talked like a woman, walked like a woman, and even slept like a woman." The word "gay" isn't used, but a deep-seated homophobia is revealed. It's ironic that a Shakespearean actor who is enlightened in a way only a Bengali bhadrolok, a quintessence of biblio culture and biblio courtesy, can, is also repulsed by homosexuality. After all, Shakespeare like no other artist, teaches us that men could be like women, and women like men, in the wink of a Prospero's wand.

Lesbians can be cerebral

Director Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue is the Warmest Color won the 2013 Palm d'Or, at the Cannes film festival.

The story has a lesbian theme. It's about the developing relationship between two students, one of whom has her hair dyed blue. When she reverts back to the color blonde, the relationship is destroyed.

The film is based on Le Bleu est Une Couleur, a graphic novel by French artist Julie Maroh.

Maroh criticized the liberty the director took with her comic to reduce the love scenes into a spectacle of lesbian pornography.

In her blog, Maroh had to say the following of the controversial scenes:

[It was] a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and [made] me feel very ill at ease. Especially when, in the middle of a movie theatre, everyone was giggling [...]The heteronormative laughed because they don't understand it and find the scene ridiculous. The gay and queer people laughed because it's not convincing, and [they] found it ridiculous. And among the only people we didn't hear giggling were the potential guys [sic] too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.

I am quite taken by the erotic quality of the scene above; the girls weave a gossamer web of eros around Sartre, Bob Marley and philosophy in general. The indication that the girl on the left is turned on by people who take a stand, is clear when she upholds Bob Marley's "Get Up, Stand Up," as a signature song of commitment. I guess, the other girls reversion to being a blonde turns her off for that reason.

I feel like Maroh predicates lesbian love on something cerebral, so that the "heteronormative" don't get away with the notion that only grotesque sex binds same-sex relationships.

Ibsen

A scene from Henrik Ibsen's play The Master Builder.

Ibsen is one of my favorite playwrights, for his uncanny ability to make characters "live" on stage.

Theatre critic, Hilton Als, says the following of The Master Builder, staged currently at the BAM's Harvey Theatre:

Power corrupts, but it can also bore. Like compulsive seducers, the unduly ambitious are the heroes of their own narratives, dogged, ruthless, and full of self-regard. Halvard Solness, the title character of Henrik Ibsen’s 1892 play “The Master Builder,” is a portrait of something, but of what? To say simply that the aging, legendary, but still competitive architect embodies cold determination and raging avarice is to ignore the ways in which Solness shape-shifts in the play’s atmosphere of supernatural realism. For at least half the drama, Solness is his own most interesting idea. He wants to be more than a man, but not a god—that would mean that he wasn’t part of the action. When Solness, who is unhappily married, becomes bewitched by an uncanny young woman named Hilde Wangel, we learn something else about him: within his desire, he is a perverse, lovesick, liminal being [...] Solness is many things at once, although he tries not to be: he represses much of his character in order to become a successful brand—the master architect—in the eyes of a public that’s more fascinated by the myth of heroic male creativity than by its complicated, internal reality.