An unusually composed Medea

Just finished watching Lars Von Trier's Medea.

From trash poem to welcome sign

Let no one say, and say it to your shame,
That all was beauty here, until you came.

A sign bearing these lines stand in Upper Manhattan's Fort Tyrone Park. They are beautiful, aren't they? asks a visitor as she finds the words to be poetic: they make her feel wanted.

She is then on a mission to track down the source of these lines. Upon Googling nothing shows up. The lines are then discovered to be fragments, carefully chiseled out of a longer early 20th-century poem:

Friend,
When you stray or sit and take your ease
On heath or hill, or under spreading trees,
Pray leave no traces of your wayside meal,
No paper bag, no scattered orange peel,
Nor daily journal littered on the grass;
Others may view these with distaste, and pass;
Let no one say, and say it to your shame,
That all was beauty here until you came.

This isn't a poem of sweet cajoling, but one with a scolding attitude, "grumpy lines" as the visitor calls them. The history of the poem is part of the burgeoning history of trash and trash talk in post-World War I Britain, a time when, liberated by rising economic fortunes and goaded by a desire to cultivate leisure, members of the British working and middle classes took to traveling from the cities to the countryside either in motor cars or on bicycles. The countryside, for so long a pristine habitat reserved for the ruminating walks of the upper class, was seen to be everybody's public space then.

Forced to contend with the despoiling of the countryside, the elite began to express deep chagrin about the litter that the lumpen visitors tended to leave behind.

In his book Landscape and Englishness, David Matless records the backlash against the new tourism which really was a backlash against the violation or a "flagrant breach of the national good form."

So, in short, the two lines that comfort the modern visitor to the Manhattan Park is in essence clipped from a longer trash poem that in class-conscious Britain had issued moral caveats.

Global Citizenship

There was a colorful din of Presentix-aided performances inside the classroom when I had asked my students to do an adult version of a show and tell: "Are You Global"? was the rubric under which each student was to do an engaging (and intellectually stimulating) multimedia presentation of whether or not they were global citizens and what did global citizenship mean to them.

The presentations had been reserved for the last two weeks of a class on the "paradoxes" of globalization. Most walked a fine balance between gravity and levity; concepts of citizenship were revisited, tweaked, defended, attacked, and one performance was particularly memorable because of its casual tossing aside of conventions; the young lady proudly claimed to be global, meaning that she has freed herself from shackles of parochial food habits that her mother, an immigrant from Serbia still clings to in their home in Northern New Jersey. "The smell of roasting pork nauseates me, and it's one reason why my dad, who's a native of the U.S. divorced my mom."

Looking back, I think, two things I wanted to highlight, were lost in the beautiful chaos. Borrowing from a wonderful term I had heard the well-known cultural critic, Gayatri Spivak (utter in her speech on the fate of an aesthetic education in the era of globalization), I had said that to become a global citizen one had to begin orienting one's most ethical of thoughts around the "Other". In the 21st century globalization of the self should ideally start by looking not Eastward, or Westward, inward or outward, but "Otherward." Most must have misheard the word as "[In] other words" and so turned glassy eyes toward me. A Glassy eye in my [pedagogical] experience means "I don't get it" with a dash of politeness.

The other thing I said was that the most global of citizens were not the students themselves, well-traveled, multilingual denizens of the privileged class, or I myself, or people like me, but the refugees, not the traditional immigrants, but the refugees, folks who resettle from their home countries to the United States (or elsewhere) out of a complex web of personal motives and historical factors.

This too went unregistered on the templates of their consciousness.

Two truths and a lie

Novelist Lily King, says that one of her favorite exercises in the creative writing class she teaches, is to ask students to write the first paragraph of a short story. The first two sentences of the paragraph have to be two truths like "my sister has brown hair" and "her name is Lisa"; followed by a third sentence which is a lie, like, "Yesterday she went to prison." Why the "lie"? Because,

It's the lie that brings the story to life, makes it hum. The lie is the steering wheel, the gearshift and the engine. The lie takes your two true sentences and makes a left turn off road and straight into the woods. It slams the story into fifth gear and guns it.

By "lie" King means imagination which allows a novelist to "slip out of the shackles of history." In an interesting piece on the inception of her new, highly regarded novel, Euphoria, based on the life of the legendary American anthropologist, Margaret Mead, King shares the story of her "lies" as she plots the lives of Mead and her two fellow anthropologists, husband Reo Fortune and lover, Gregory Bateson, and runs free into the "jungle" of her imagination.

The stringer's tale

Praised by writer Pico Iyer as a journalist with the verve of a V.S. Naipaul, Anjan Sundaram has been reporting for the New York Times on Africa for a while.

Stringer is about his days as a stringer for AP in the Republic of Congo; instead of the usual gripe against the life of a stringer, Sundaram says something extraordinary about stringing: Astringer, writes Sundaram, makes a better reporter than a full-time foreign correspondent, even though stringers get less than minimum wage and risks her life by living inside say a village that is at the center of a civil war. 

In contrast to a stringer's report, reports by star foreign correspondents are distant, oversimplified and frequently de-contextualized. Star foreign correspondents tend to live away from conflict zones and consequently are rarely in direct touch with those affected by civil and military strifes. They stay for a few weeks in the best hotels in hub cities, that are removed from the scene where events are unfolding.

The reports that emerge from such distant or mediated encounters with the real tell stories that are only seemingly about others, but really are "about ourselves." The "telltale signs" of such stories is

is "a distinct assuredness":

Confusion and vulnerability are stripped away, as are the contradictions and subtleties of life. People and places are reduced to simple narratives--good and evil, victim and killer. Such narratives may be easy to digest. But they tell us only a portion of the story.

Medea: A Bad Mom or A Beleaguered Barbarian?

Recently I saw the trailer of the National Theatre of London’s forthcoming play Medea. First to appear is the back of a woman’s head, lush with dark hair; then comes the distant laughter of children against the background of a dense forest through which the woman, now shown in noire attire literally and figuratively, walks holding the hands of the children. 

The children evanesce leaving the woman alone, stranded. She turns to look at us; her face is contorted with emotions I can best identify as sinister, exuding ominous foreboding. It’s the face of Medea; all the familiar threads of the disquieting, the darkening and the threatening hang loose, waiting to make the fabric of the totality of what we recognize today to be the figure of the Western literary canon’s poster child for the mother from hell. 

The face could very well have belonged to Lady Macbeth the mannish wife in Shakespeare’s great tragedy of Macbeth, who famously taunted her husband’s manhood with the image of herself as the woman who is virile enough to dash the head of a baby suckling at her breast. But Lady Macbeth didn’t have any children; she was merely hypothesizing; one could be certain that had she had “babes” she would not have had the heart to break their heads. Euripides’ Medea, on the other hand, kills her children—all four of them--to earn eternal damnation in the annals of motherhood. 

Yet, Euripides did not conceive of Medea as the sum total of her filicidal instincts. Around the time Euripides composed the wondrous tragedy of this doomed heroine of mythology, the maternal bond between mommy and child was not as culturally fetishized as it is today. How would Medea have been judged back then in the Greece of 3rd century B.C.? 

The first time I had closely read Euripides' Medea, it was as a young English major, in India. The professor who taught us ancient Greek drama, had, in his own way, forewarned us about the pitfalls of reading literary texts out of context. He meant that we just might not be able to access the real kernel of Greek drama, without knowing any Greek and without having any idea of the moral universe to which these plays were literary responses.

To better understand what I read, I took a fast and furious tour of the Greek alphabets; I also did a quick read of Robert Graves' Penguin edition of the Greek myths to get a hang of concepts like oikos, daemon and hamartia, among others. Armed with a fragile, but what at that time, seemed an adequate notion of the Greeks as a whole, I approached the big stars of the Grecian dramatic pantheon, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

What stood out, for me, was the spree of inter-family killings in these plays. To goad a son to kill his own father was a rather routine act of a Greek mother and wife, as is evidenced by Clytemnestra's nagging of her son Orestes to slay his father Agamemnon upon his return to Thebes from the 10-year Trojan War. But the killings in the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles were done for the sake of preserving a higher moral order, in the scheme of which mere familial love paled into insignificance.

So, when I read Medea, I was baffled. In this most celebrated of the tragedies by Euripides, Medea is a woman, who kills her children, not for any higher moral purpose, but putatively to seek personal revenge. The story of Medea goes thus: She is a barbarian—counterpart of the modern foreigner—who’s married to Jason, a Greek and has children with him. They live in the Greek city of Corinth. The play opens with a wrathful Medea, furious at having learned of Jason’s plan to marry Glauce, the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. An angry barbarian female is a threat to national security, and to preempt harm, Creon exiles Medea. The play ends on a note of sad mayhem. Medea knifes her children to death and poisons both Creon and Glauce. Medea then flees to Athens with the bodies of her dead children.

Blood is shed in Medea, but compared to fellow Greek tragedies the number of bodies felled are fewer. However to our very modern bourgeoisie sensibilities, the one momentous act of filicide committed by Medea has the impact of a million slaughtering on the battlefields of Troy. 

As purveyors of modern adaptations of pre-modern literature, we are intolerant of some of the familial acts therein (we have less compunction in approaching Oedipus’ incestuous act with a lighthearted, almost jocular attitude) and relatively forgiving of others (Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his pre-teen daughter Iphigenia is just fine); our somewhat dour sensibility crucifies the slaying by Medea of her children as extreme monstrosity, the product of a psychopathic mind. Emphatically, in our eyes, Medea is a rotten mommy cum psychopath bundled into one, a pin up for motherhood gone horribly awry. 

Witness the frames of references within which the ancient Medea typically pops up—every time there is news of a maternal filicide, in Texas or more recently in Utah, discourses in the media illuminate the horror of the act by invoking Medea. Medea could well nigh be a byword for the cannibal-mom, a woman deranged, scorned, fallen into postpartum depression and a woman who ill-deserves the sacred mantle of motherhood to begin with. Snapped, the Documentary series aired on Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen Network, have women who “snap” because male hypocrisy has reached a critical mass in their lives and they can take it no more. The women who snap go on a homicidal rampage and the ghost of Medea flits across the TV screen like a Tasmanian devil overdosed on anti-estrogen.

Yet, the ancient Greeks would not have beheld Medea as a mad woman that ought to be locked up for good in the attic and from whom the neighborhood children ought to be protected. In light of the cultural mores as portrayed in Greek drama, the cruelty, in itself, ought not to have raised eyebrows—Medea’s slaying of her children is no more or no less scandalous than the inadvertent slaying by Oedipus of his father. 

What, I presume would have aroused the moral chagrin of the literary Medea’s contemporaries, is the fact of her outsider-status, and the fact that she dared to marry a Greek despite being a Barbarian. In the traditional myth of Jason and Medea, the couple’s marriage was not recognized by the state as a bonafide marriage, and it could be surmised that the children of the interracial union were perceived as half-breeds, the mulattos of the time. According to a version of the myth, the children were killed by a mob of furious Corinthians because Medea had killed their king; it could be that the mob fury was a manifestation of a collective xenophobia. 

Perhaps Euripides’ tweaking of the myth was intended to give Medea a bit of agency in sealing her own fate. To make Medea the slaughterer of her own children affirms the fact that she is a barbarian, bound, at the slightest provocation, to deviate from norms of civilization. One can’t help but feel that her filicide in the play is a reflection, not simply of her failed motherhood, but primarily of her barbarism; in other words, what Medea does fulfills an apriori stereotype of her. 

In Euripides’ Medea, the eponymously named heroine is a doubly marginalized figure of the woman and the barbarian, a hyper-second class citizen by virtue of both gender and race/citizenship. In the play, as in life, she would have been judged as such, not on the basis of her maternal instincts.

One hopes that National Theatre’s production of Medea desists from reducing this most fascinating of all female protagonists in Western literature, to one thing or the other, for Medea remains firmly etched in my memory as a study in grief and rage in context. 

The way we live now, tagged and displayed

The above are contemporary objects, that are part of London's Victoria and Albert Museum's Rapid Response Collection.

The objects are historical in the sense that they carry with them a rich social and economic context. A set of Katy Perry "Cool Kitty" eyelashes links, says Corinna Gardner, the curator of the Collection, links one of the world's most famous women with a factory working woman in Indonesia. There is an e-cigarette, and a pair of Primark cargo trousers that were made at the Rana Plaza factory, in Bangladesh, which collapsed in 2013, killing a majority of the garment workers. 

I just loved the story of LUFSIG. LUFSIG is a plush toy made by IKEA and sold in China where the name translated to the Cantonese word meaning "your mother's vagina" and led to large-scale protests.  

Among the vast range of objects are a smart thermostat, a virtual-reality headset, a 3-D printed gun, a carbon-fibre cable that will allow elevators to rise twice as high as they can now, a wearable computer terminal (Motorola, 2013), and Flappy Bird, the mobile game designed by a Vietnamese game developer.

The one heart-breaking item on the list is the anti-homeless spikes labelled the "Spike Stud, 2014, stainless steel." The studs are used to deter loiterers and the homeless from usurping public place to make a temporary home. 

The goal of the Rapid Response Collecting is to demonstrate "how design reflects and defines how we live together today." Says the curator further, "It's about looking into the world to see what's going on." The exhibition will be continually updated and is interested in provoking conversation on timely issues. In other words, the museum is a blog embodied.

The question the Collection provokes is should objects representing the way we live now be curated and stored in Museums for posterity to behold how we lived and why? Perhaps by the time we enter a social phase where the poor and the homeless are shot out of the planet with high tech canon balls, the mere presence of spikes on surfaces will evoke jeers?

The Man Booker Prize

Long List (2014):

TO RISE AGAIN AT A DECENT HOUR, Joshua Ferris (American) (Viking)

THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH, Richard Flanagan (Australian) (Chatto)

WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES, Karen Joy Fowler (American) (Serpent's Tail)

THE BLAZING WORLD, Siri Hustvedt (American) (Sceptre)

J, Howard Jacobson (British) (Cape)

THE WAKE, Paul Kingsnorth (British) (Unbound)

THE BONE CLOCKS, David Mitchell (British) (Sceptre)

THE LIVES OF OTHERS, Neel Mukherjee (British) (Chatto)

US, David Nicholls (British) (Hodder)

THE DOG, Joseph O'Neill (Irish/American) (Fourth Estate)

ORFEO, Richard Powers (American) (Atlantic)

HOW TO BE BOTH, Ali Smith (British) (Hamish Hamilton)

HISTORY OF THE RAIN, Niall Williams (Irish) (Bloomsbury)

A hologram for a venture capitalist

I am interested in any narrative, be it fictional, non-fictional, that portrays the makers and shapers, as it were, of the era that we call "contemporary".

Who are they?

In Greg Jackson's riveting story, Wagner in the Desert, "they" are the "We's", thirty-something men and women, cosmopolitans in their diet, eclectic in their ways of being (i.e. highly transnational, trans-identitarian even), urbane and privileged, in a most 21st century way, in that "they" are not born into wealth, but inveigle themselves into the owners of wealth by being sycophantic "courtiers" in the courts of the new rich class, the venture capitalists.

The narrator compares himself and his friends, vacationing in Palm Springs, California, as Voltaires in the court of Frederick the Great. The story's "Frederick" is one Wagner, who is a billionaire financier, a benevolent despot of our times; in other words, an "angel".

Jackson's says, in an interview about the social and ideological context in which Wagner is set, that though we live in a democracy, we secretly lust for monarchy:

We live in a political era, meanwhile, that saw two families pass the Presidency back and forth for twenty years and that may well see those two families vie again for the Presidency in 2016 [...] the appeal and threat of monarchy are very much alive. And this can only be a failure of democracy. The idea of unilateral leadership—enlightened despotism, benevolent dictatorship, the noblesse oblige of “Downton Abbey” and its spinoffs—appeals to us when collective action seems impossible. We turn to the spectacle of British royal weddings and births, which should be anathema to our civic imagination, because … well, for a number of reasons, surely. But among them, I think, is a kind of relief at the idea of distinction independent of achievement. Achievement is difficult, unstable, ephemeral, often tainted by unacknowledged luck. It is also, always, comparative: measured against other people’s relative lack of achievement or outright failure. Royal distinction, on the other hand, is accorded by birth, isn’t subject to the whims of fortune, and appears to be an end in itself. There is something perversely honest in this, when so much “meritocratic” achievement is just the opposite.

The collective "we" of the story would do anything to please Wagner; they are born to be courtiers. They don't belong to the traditional professions, but to the "arts":

We were a particular sort of modern hustler: filmmakers and writers (screen, web, magazine), who periodically worked as narrative consultants on ad campaigns, sustainability experts, P.R. lifers, designers or design consultants, social entrepreneurs, and that strange species of human beings who has invented an app [...] We listened to U2 and Morrissey and Kyle Minogue, post-ironically, which is to say, exactly, sincerely. We donated to charity, served on the boards for not-for-profits, and shepherded socially responsible enterprises for work. We thought we were not bad people. Not the best, a bit spoiled, maybe, but pleasant, insouciant, decent. We paid a tax on the lives we lived, in order to say in public, I have sacrificed, tithed, given back. A system of pre-Lutheran indulgences. Of carbon offsets. A green-washing of our sins. We were affiliated. We had access.
Wagner in the Desert gives the reader a feeling of unease about the generation in whose custody the well-being of the earth itself has been reposited. The generation who produce nothing substantial but are beholden to the task of monetizing their talents by selling their services to those who invest in tertiary services, is also the generation who have taken up the cudgel of preservation. Have we given over the most sombre of responsibilities to the most flakiest then?

Jackson raises the antennae of discomfort in our minds as we read of these fellows, desperately wanting to be good stewards and simultaneously experiencing revulsion at the thought of the dull life of responsibility that entails. One way to transcend the conflict is drugs. 

After a week-long immersion in drugs and mindless sex, the group is poised to return to their adult lives, and the narrator reflects thus:

We ate the last caps and stems of the mushrooms. We were high, but we weren't courting death. We were just some nobody hustlers in the desert, trying to make a film, trying to read a poem and be present together and save the shards of hearts splintered many times in incautious romance from further communion, trying to keep up with our Instagram and Twitter feeds and all the autodocumentary imperatives of the age [...] We were not heroes. We were trying ways not to be villains.

 They don't get the funding from Wagner. The new age courtiers, we are led to believe, would have to grit their teeth and settle in to a life of endless sycophancy, just to develop an app, to get a film on some obscure economist, get produced, or an installation art project get off the ground and find place in a "prestigious" show. 

Of stones and bones

The relentless analyses of academics, especially International Relations experts notwithstanding, the desire to destroy the Twin Towers and other U.S. buildings of iconic stature, on September 11, 2001, was motivated, not by the terrorists' envy of Western "freedom", but by religious mis-beliefs.

So claims Adam Gopnik in his meditations on the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

Gopnik sees enough evidence in the fliers and tapes made by Al Qaeda on display in the museum to support his claim.

Repeatedly the perpetrators are drawn, like moths to the flame (and like night to the morrow), to the prospect of going directly to heaven and a bevvy of virgins, once they accomplish the task of killing the American Harams. 

I kind of veer in the direction of Gopnik because sometimes it's easier to put a closure on events when the buck stops at a party with clear-cut motives that are graspable. Very often International Relations experts and historians tend to see events in a holistic light, and perpetrators of these events as victims or passive tools of a larger machinery of "history", rather than as agents of something immediate, like a benighted belief system which they actively espouse. 

It's alright to trace the roots of 9/11 and other modern political events of immense magnitude, back to colonialism, but the historicization can be frustrating and endless.

Gopnik thinks the word "freedom" in "freedom tower" is a misnomer; if the original towers were not victims of envy but of religious bigotry carried out to an extremity, then what should be an appropriate name for the new towers? Perhaps "Stones and Bones" is a good choice?

Dazzled to death

Having seen Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the classic Cold War spy tale by John Le Carre, I'm eager to see, A Most Wanted Man, a movie (release date, July 25, 2014), based on another spy novel by the maestro.

But my interest in A Most Wanted Man is mostly piqued by the fact of the actor (sadly no more) Phillip Seymour Hoffman's presence therein.

Hoffman plays the role of the central character, an ex-spy and a tortured soul who has to adapt and adjust to the new geopolitical imperatives of an era defined by 9/11. 

Hoffman is Le Carre's personal choice; the novelist plays an active role in selecting actors for films based on his novels. 

Of Hoffman, Le Carre says the following:

His intuition was luminous from the instant you met him. So was his intelligence. A lot of actors are intelligent, but Philip was the real thing: a shining, artistic polymath with an intelligence that came with a pair of headlights and enveloped you from the moment he grabbed your hand, put a huge arm round your neck and shoved a cheek against yours; or if the mood took him, hugged you to him like a big pudgy schoolboy, then stood and beamed at you while he took stock of the effect.
Phillip took vivid stock of everything all the time. It was painful and exhausting work, and probably in the end his undoing. The world was too bright for him to handle. He had to screw his eyes or be dazzled to death. He went seven times round the moon to your one, and everytime he set off, you were never sure he'd come back, which is what I believe somebody said of the German poet Holderin: Whenever he left the room you were afraid you'd see the last of him. And if that sounds like wisdom after the event, it isn't. Phillip was burning himself out before your eyes. Nobody could live at his pace and stay the course and in bursts of startling intimacy he needed you to know it.

"Dazzled by death" is part of a fabulous characterization of Hoffman as man and and artist, as it brings to mind the figure of the moth. The moth, as Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley said, is drawn to the flame (he says "star" as in "the desire of the moth for the star/Night for the morrow"), almost by instinct. It took half a century for a Virginia Woolf to bring out the dark side of the moth's devotion: death. In The Death of a Moth, a short essay, Woolf ponders on the brief life and imminent death of a moth that veers toward a candle she has lit in her room. She looks at the moth and thinks of how the flame dazzles it to death.

A good way to go, confronted by that which bedazzles.

Welcome to India

My own private American science

President Barack Obama is all for research and development in science and technology in the United States. 

The President dutifully spoke of the significance of investing in this area of human knowledge--the usual "creation of jobs" and "strengthening of the economy."

I'm disappointed, as I expect a guy like the President, who joked about not doing well enough in physics to become the "Science-in-Chief" of the nation, to transcend the economic rationale.

Science is best pursued when its "disinterested", i.e. pursued not to fulfill some direct or tangential, central or peripheral, economic motive, but for the development of humanity at large. Any economic fruit should be borne incidentally.

However, economics is unfortunately the primum mobile of the President's American innovation initiative and of all innovation initiatives globally. According to the NYT, the particular speech, which I believe is a speech representative of a worldwide trend, cleverly conceals from the narrative, a "vital backstory, one that underscores a profound change taking place in the way science is paid for and practiced in America."

The backstory is that "American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise."

Hollywood, a pioneer in disseminating through the guiles of art and entertainment, the "absent" facts of this reality, has been telling us for a long time about the consequences of a privatization of American science. 

Consider, scifi films like The Europa Report and Prometheus, and the most recent, Snow Piercers, among many others.

Gender matters even outside of time..

...Where vampires dwell.

"Everything" says Eleanor, the teen daughter of Clara and the narrator of Neil Jordan's fascinating film, Byzantium, "is cold outside of time". 

There is enormous maternal warmth though, not outside time per se, but within the mother's heart. The film charts the ends to which Clara, the human-turned vampire would go to protect her daughter from harm.

As a "warm" woman and mother, Clara is a misfit in the "cold" zone of atemporality. But neither mother nor daughter travels into this zone out of free choice.

The women are victims of circumstances that through centuries have befallen women who are shown to be a persecuted minority in a world dominated by men. 

Vampirism is a refuge from a predatorial society for mother and daughter. At least being out of time grants them biological transcendence, for biology is the woman's worst enemy in a world where they are primarily food for the male sexual appetite.

Clara and Eleanor are immortal, as is customary of vampires; they are seemingly young but really are 200+ years old. Clara was but a mere wisp of a poor English girl, an orphan, making a living by selling shells and sea cockles during the Napoleonic wars. A brutish captain of the English army covets Clara and sells her into prostitution. He then goes on to repeatedly brutalize her till Clara gives birth to Eleanor and also falls ill with tuberculosis.

Despite a life of inhuman suffering, Clara loves her child and gives her up to an orphanage to protect Eleanor from getting similarly brutalized by nasty men.

In the meantime, however, Clara gets hold of a map that leads to an island where, inside a cave there resides the power of the "faceless" disembodied saint who converts humans into vampires if they are willing to "die". The "death" is a figurative one, a code for immortality and perpetual youth. The map was meant for the captain who had brutalized her because the vampiric legion is an all-male legion open to only men of high-birth. 

By stealing the map from the captain and shooting him in the leg, Clara, by virtue of her "low" birth, her gender and her profession, becomes the quintessential interloper into the brotherhood. She goes to the cave and transforms into a vampire, illness-free, immortal and stuck at the ripe young age of 25ish for eternity.

To wreak vengeance on Clara, the brutal captain rapes Eleanor and infects her with a venereal disease. Clara is flabbergasted by this event; she kills the man and to save her daughter from certain death takes her to the cave.

Eleanor is thus converted to a vampire as well.

The film begins in the present, when mother and child are shown to be fugitives, always on the run, hunted for eternity by the brotherhood. 

With its perceptive gender inflections, Byzantium is a wholly refreshing take on the vampire genre. The teen-pandering Twilight series has all but diluted the woman's place in the universe of vampires, by making them subservient to males. Even Bram Stoker's Dracula, which had a powerful male at the center of the action, reduced women to vessels for the master's life-bequeathing sperms. 

Byzantium has a saucy, sexy, powerful woman, who is confident in her own sexuality, as the ur vampire. From her originates the actions.

In Byzantium, the vampiric demesne is shown to be filled with the same kinds of social biases that afflict the human world. Power is what the members of the brotherhood lust after, not women, but as in human societies through ages, the pursuit of power is peculiarly gendered: Men seek it, men exclude women from it and ultimately men overpower women with it. The disdain which the leader of the brotherhood for Clara doesn't diminish an iota for 200 hundred odd years. This kind of unabated contempt is eye-opening to say the least. As a prostitute, Clara was an outcast in human society; she is also an outcast within the brotherhood. There is no winning (of respect and equality) for the female sex.

One would think that the vampiric domain, being a domain that goes against the grain of everything temporal, would be a domain free of human bigotries. But the brotherhood has a poor opinion of women like Clara and believes that she is undeserving of the noble mantle of a vampire. The stench of male privilege emanates from this brotherhood. Here's an eye-popping instance of this stinky privilege: Between Clara and the Captain who is irredeemably immoral, the brotherhood chooses the Captain because he is a man of some birth and learning (as a result of his status). Clara, on the other hand, is a thoughtful, vivacious woman with a primal loyalty to her daughter. Yet, her gender is an automatic disqualifier.

It's at the very end that Clara expresses her pent-up (for over two centuries) outrage at the utter disrespect she gets from the brotherhood. She tells Savella, the brotherhood's leader, that she has, for 200 years resented the brotherhood's relegation of her to a position beneath the worst of the blood sucking, conscienceless vampires. 

In his poem Sailing to Byzantium W.B. Yeats writes of a man's quest for eternal life; Byzantium is historically the site of timelessness as through time it has survived under various names such as Constantinople and Istanbul (and many prior and in-between) under the ebb and flow of global empires. Symbolically Byzantium is the elemental life that goes on ceaselessly despite the march of history.

Neil Jordan's Byzantium is an old, going-out-of-business hotel in a seaside resort just outside of London. The hotel becomes a metaphorical battlefield--of decisions and unfurling--for both Clara and Eleanor. The story reaches a crescendo and a crisis in this hotel; the owner of the hotel is a man whose mother has just died and left the failing business in his hands. He is a soft male who shows signs of having been ruled by a mother all his life and with the departure of his mother, he is at a loss of how to navigate life. Clara becomes the surrogate mother to this weak man; but the man is highly sympathetic to women and constantly reassures Eleanor that she is safe in his house.

The course of destiny within time has come full cycle in the hotel Byzantium; the hotel is momentarily a brothel, a space of female empowerment of a strange yet potent kind. Clara reigns in the hotel Byzantium till the moment when Eleanor betrays her and all hell breaks loose.

The film ends on a note of triumph for Clara; she defeats the orthodoxy of the brotherhood through guile and perseverance and saves her daughter's life for eternity.

The Gulag Archipelago no more

A place of slavery, degradation and death no more, the Siberia of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's rendition is but a shadow of the past.

Today, the Siberian landmass comprising Russia's Asian hinterland, and the size of the U.S.A. and India put together, is coveted by China.   

Siberia is oil and mineral rich, and very under populated for its size, while China is overpopulated, and being the world's factory, as it were, needs raw materials available aplenty in neighboring Siberia.

Most importantly, the border between the Sino-Russian border that allocates Siberia to Russia, was arbitrarily drawn during the Peking Convention of 1860 when China was significantly weakened by the Second Opium War.

Borders, as put eloquently by Frank Jacobs, are like love and are real only both sides believe in it. China's belief in the immanence of the border is wavering as its fortunes in geopolitics has been tremendously reversed since 1860.

Maps of the world were largely drawn by the Western powers; they are up for redrawing. China could very well bugger Russia with the logic of the same pointy stick that Russia has buggered Crimea with.

And the Pulitzer goes to...

This year's Pulitzer Prize for poetry has been awarded to Vijay Sheshadri for his poetry collection, 3 Sections.

Born in Bangalore, Sheshadri had moved to the United States as a child, attended Oberlin College, got an MFA at Columbia University, and currently lives in Brooklyn while teaching poetry at Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville.

A poem, entitled "Imaginary Number" goes thus:

The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
is not big and is not small.
Big and small are
comparative categories, and to what
could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
be compared?
Consciousness observes and is appeased.
The soul scrambles across the screes.
The soul,
like the square root of minus 1,
is an impossibility that has its uses.

O Shakespeare! My Shakespeare!

Just as Karl Marx's political philosophy has been adapted by diverse nations across the world, and Jane Austen's novel, Pride and Prejudice has been translated into innumerable languages (including Oriya, a language spoken in the East Coast of India), so there is hardly a language into which Shakespeare's plays hasn't been wrought.

Shakespeare has been embraced by Americans, not simply because America was a British colony once upon a time, but also because the plays of Shakespeare lends themselves to adaptation as there is an unsurpassable universality in their kernel. A Shakespearean contemporary had said that Shakespeare is "nature itself."

James Shapiro has edited an anthology of essays on Shakespeare by famous Americans from all fields, including politics and sports, and Shakespeare in America is said to be a terrific read.

I was struck by Bill Clinton's name as the provider of the volume's foreword. Maybe he consorted with the Merry Wives of Windsor!

Casualties of globalization

Dave Eggers has taken upon himself the task of chronicling the changing landscape of an emergent America in the global economy. In A Hologram for the King, we read about the erosion of the culture of manufacturing in this nation; a particular victim is Alan Clay, who has been edged out of the manufacturing competition and cornered into the slot, Eggers disdainfully refers to as "consulting". Consulting, in the eyes of Clay's father, a retired worker for a national railroad company, is a pansy occupation which has emasculated the American labor ethos.

Eggers pitches Clay as a representative American worker, shaped by traditional American middle-class ethos. However, he is still a fictionalized version of the American middle-class man whose entire way of life has been affected by economic globalization.

In Factory Man, veteran journalist Beth Macy, gets the saga of the aforementioned demographic straight from the horse's mouth. The book is a work of non-fiction with the same kind of sublimity achieved by the best works of fiction as Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Aman Sethi's A Free Man, among others.

For me, it's a must read, as I take a keen interest in work that records the histories of the lives of ordinary, sometimes poor, citizens of the globe who contribute toward the globe's changes yet remain invisible and unacknowledged.

The reign of Capital

Yet another book on "Capital"?

Novelist Rana Dasgupta's new work of nonfiction has a punny title, playing on the political and financial significance of the word capital, for the book is both on money and on the presence of new wealth in New Delhi, the capital city of India.

According to the New Yorker Magazine:

In the interviews with rich young Indians that make up much of the unsparing portrait of moneyed Delhi, no telling detail seems to escape Dasgupta's notice. His novelistic talents are matched by his skill at eliciting astonishing candor from his subjects. The best passages are incisive summaries of the human and environmental costs of the elite's wealth and privilege and his persuasive predictions of crises yet to come. Dasgupta constantly seeks to upend conventional wisdom about Delhi, the murky circulation of its money, and the roots of its periodic outbursts of violence, making this one of the most worthwhile in a strong field of recent books about India's free-market revolution and its unintended dire consequences.