Have cars made us stupid?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angry white men and angry brown men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artificial intelligence

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

The first chapter of the novella can be found here.

The myth of America is now girlhood

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

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

The elusive bug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The startup marriage

A New Yorker Cartoon (September 16, 2013)

The story of homelessness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The handmade's tale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black is the coolest color: Tale of a Chinese lesbian

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

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

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

Sagan would have been 79.

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

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

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

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

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

Shakuntala Devi is a math prodigy from India.

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

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

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

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

Dissolving the "I" in an era of narcissism

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

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

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

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

What does the insect (in love) say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samsa says:

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