Can scholars be stylish?

They are stylish in their choice of cars (Prius) and coffee, and more often than not, in their sartorial selections, but can they write with the grace, verve, and style of a Joan Didion (not a Marilyn Robinson, a self-confessed disdainer of the cult of articulacy)? 

Harvard cognitive scientist and popular science writer, Steven Pinker asks this question in a recent criticism of obtuse writing in academia.

The big steal I got out of Pinker's essay is a reference to a book:

Sword invented the term "zombie nouns" in her funny critique of excessive nominalizations in academic prose.

I intend to use Sword's book on stylish academic prose as a companion piece of the other book on style I adore:

I'd need to stick this one into my harem of books on style and academic prose too!

The vanishing of the "soul" under neuroscience

I had known the name "Crick" to be associated with "Watson" because when we studied biology in high school, we got acquainted with the structure of the human DNA as discovered by "Watson and Crick."

I had the image of a Siamese twin attached at the waist.

That "Crick" had a separate identity of his own and composed an astounding, book called The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search For the Soul was unknown to be, till it was referenced in the illuminating NYT Opinion piece by Erik Parens, an expert in bioethics. 

Parens is appreciative of Cricks scientific approach to an understanding of what it means to be human, but is critical of the one-sidedness of the approach as well.

Published in 1994, Crick's book is evidently on the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy (if "soul" is believed to be the province of philosophy).

Raised in Christianity and the philosophy that we call Platonic, Crick was taught about the impermanence of the body and the permanence and ergo superiority of the soul. The soul, preaches the Platonic Christian admixture, is "real", i.e. more "real" than the body, which is but an illusory placeholder for the soul. Moreover, the soul is capable of reason and freewill on its own.

The scientist in Francis Crick revolted against this notion of the body as illusory and unreal container of the soul, the real seat of our humanity. 

In The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick looked at the body/soul dichotomy through the lens of neuroscience and wrote of the human subject:

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Paren interprets Crick's reduction of the human subject into a well nigh object of atomic and subatomic parts:

“You” think that you are something special, a subject who experiences joys and sorrows, memories, ambitions, a sense of identity and a free will. But that, Crick wants to inform you, is an illusion. “You” are an object. “You” are your body, a collection of nerve cells, albeit enmeshed amidst many other kinds of cells.

Is book banning a covert form of book burning?

In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, books are burned with impunity by the unnamed government of an unnamed nation of the year 2053. 

Discerning readers were quick to see the ghost of totalitarianism in the novel; the Nazis were adept at burning books because books, the repository of ideas and dissidence, were the single biggest threat to Nazi authority.

What ghost of which past are revived in the eyes of our collective historical consciousness (if 21st century Americans have any), when books are banned? Banning, as I see it, is a covert form of burning, just as minimum wage labor in a society with hard core capitalistic principles, is a covert form of slavery.

Books, especially novels, are banished with regularity from k-12 curricula in the United States with mind-numbing regularity. Often times school libraries are asked to "remove" certain books from their shelves. 

A brilliant librarian once made a counter library, hidden from the view of the public, of banned books.

Last week of September this year is the banned books week when we remember this most ignominious of all anti-social and anti-intellectual activities undertaken by school boards across the nation. However, the recent case of book banning was not undertaken by school authorities but by some of the parents and grandparents of kids attending Highland Park schools in the affluent suburb of Dallas, Texas.

Seeds of Nazism/totalitarianism may be embedded not only in governments but also in the general public. 

From my metaphorical observation deck, upon which I perch myself and try to observe society through the mist of half-knowledge and half-truths that filter down to me through the media, I see the emergence of a very tyrannical American public who impose their narrow world views on everything, ranging from foreign policy to family and education, down to how to best care for the self.

Parents and grandparents of children who attend institutions of education for the relatively well-off, whether they be P.S.'s or private schools, are a particularly egregious group in this regard. They have a conviction of what's "good" and what's "bad" for the intellectual nurturing of their wards. 

Grandparents are worse off than the parents, as they are retirees, taking care of their grandkids because the grandkids' parents have divorced, leaving their children behind to be raised by their parents who have the house and the money. As retirees, they have too much time on their hands to meddle into the curriculum choices of the schools their grandkids attend.

The seven books that the consortium of parents and grandparents want the Highland Park school district to erase from their curriculum are as follows:

I know why some of the books may stir controversy in the placid moral and intellectual universes of the so-called children, whom the parents and grandparents are trying to raise in a sanitized world, free of the germs of inconvenient truths of society.

Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha is bound to get the boot with its commingling of purity and prostitution (two sides of the same coin, the second P being more intellectually honest than the first). Which Dallas mind will see the fun in that?

As for Toni Morrison, almost everything she writes is banned from the intellectual diet of American children. Why? Oh, because she has painted a cosmos of slavery where there are no chirpy birds or bespectacled cutsie Harry Potters to come to the rescue of folks who are mindlessly brutalized and rendered unto property. 

No searing portrayal of American poverty will sell in the heartland of unfettered capitalism--Texas. No critique of capitalism will be brooked. So a book on the invisibility of the American poor (too redolent of the invisibility of the blacks before civil rights) will be unpleasant to say the least.

If words like "absolute truth" and "half-Indian" show up in the title itself, even if the title is of a book by Sherman Alexie (a "half-Indian" himself), it's bound to appeal to the imagination of Texan grandparents.

The dog book by Gareth Stein is a mystifying selection in the ban bucket: Apparently, the canine perspective is celebrated when it shows up through the scrim of Disney. Otherwise, it's bad.

Jeannette Walls is brutally honest about the perils of growing up a girl in working class America, so off goes her memoir into the burning pyre.

John Greene? How can this fella who writes young adult romance and who has worked hard over the years through social media and what not, to build a huge fan base of swooning young adults, offend? The plot of some of his novels can be morbid, but offensive?

But overall, the books were banned for having too much sex and such other social taboos in them. Sounds believable? 

I have a sneaky feeling that the books were banned/burnt because they have the capacity to stir a moral fibre of the sleepwalking American youth. Thus they are dangerous.   

Of quantum physics and the heart of darkness

Sir Francis Bacon, the Renaissance Englishman who is credited with the art of a post-Aristotelian classification of knowledge into fields and disciplines, once said, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province".

He had meant that to improve the human condition (an endeavor described by Bacon as his "moderate civil ends") one had to subject everything to intellectual scrutiny.

On the one hand, by declaring "all knowledge" to be one's "province", Francis Bacon had opened up to the lay person, the "generalist", as it were, such hermetic bodies of knowledge as the sciences (back then metaphysics and alchemy with a sprinkling of nascent physics); on the other, he had exposed specialized knowledge to the hazard of being dragged out of context and circulated in a half-baked way in general human discourse.

For instance, as Professors of Philosophy and Physics respectively, at Stony brook University, Robert Crease and Alfred Goldhaber, say, the use of scientific terminologies, like "quantum", pervades general cultural discourses in today's day and age. Non-scientists appropriate scientific words and adapt them to their local cultural chit chat.

The writers, especially, the physics half of the writing duo, I believe, may harbor an ambivalent attitude to such free uprooting of words from their scientific terrains and re implanting them in non-scientific one's. They may interpret the appropriation as a misappropriation.

Thus when Lady Gaga contrasts her notion of the fragility of memory in one of her music videos with the uniqueness of the "atoms and particles in quantum physics," the physicist may be peeved to counter that Lady Gaga's referencing is "inapt" because, "in quantum physics, atoms and particles, unlike memories, can lose their individuality, for any two of the same kind cannot be distinguished from each other." 

The philosopher, however, would rationalize the "inapt" use of scientific terms by the non-scientific community as inevitable:

Every major scientific development has served this function, delivering a stock of new tools for describing aspects of human life. Newtonian mechanics offered novel images of causality and attraction; evolutionary theory gave us ways of discussing survival and fitness.

Besides, as the philosopher would add,

Nothing is intrinsically wrong with applying scientific language metaphorically to human experience. Metaphors are valuable when our experiences are enigmatic or difficult to capture, when existing words don’t fit the situation at hand. Even the incorrect use of technical terms can meaningfully express what we intuit but cannot otherwise say.

The philosopher would point to the perfect marriage of imperfect use of science in the service of the perfect expression of human experience that like physical phenomena, is always innately complex.

But what if the "knowledge" thus appropriated in the Baconian spirit of free-spiritedness, is not from the discipline of science, but from the discipline of the humanities?

I would think that there would be no one to defend or attack the usages, and a deafening neutrality or indifference would ensue.

For, unlike the sciences, the humanities, particularly literature and art, have somehow been perceived in cultures worldwide as everybody's province, including those of scientists and economists (consider the use of literary texts as springboard to launch a treatise on the 21st century global economy in Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century).

It's as though nobody could be bothered to fact check the use and/or abuse of literary references in the non-literary discourses of our cultures, because the humanities is seen since the time of Plato as a flaccid placeholder for everything and anybody can put anything they want in it or take out anything they want out of it, without fear of being rapped on the knuckles for decontextualizing.

While the Stony brook professors pointed out the plusses and minuses of living in a culture "awash in references to quantum leaps, parallel worlds and the uncertainty principle" (including, President Obama's use of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle"), there has been no such discussion of the plusses and minuses of President Barack Obama's reference to the contraption of Islamic fundamentalism called ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), as the "heart of darkness."

While a loose use of the word "quantum" can do some damage to our understanding of it by being propagated as an imprecise concept, a loose use of the core of one of the Western world's most paradigm-shifting of novels, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, won't raise an eyebrow because we assume the descriptor to have no precise historical or geographical province.

Literature is imprecise and cloudy, a cipher, as Plato would have put it--a world of representations not facts, that contribute to the battening of our false consciousnesses anyway.

Yet, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness published in 1899, at the height of European material and territorial exploitation of Africa, is a potent historical document, with a precise geographical referent, despite the metaphorical resonance of the title.

The referent, if one reads the novel closely enough, is so not Africa; it's Europe, or the heart of Europe as signified in the novel itself by the river Thames, and more specifically, Belgium, which is not named but on whose brutal history of colonial rule in the Congo, the novel's idea is based.

Paradigm-shifting literature is a literature of dissent; it opens people's eyes to that which remains hidden by the manipulation of mainstream politics. Today we associate the heart of darkness with anything that is obviously barbaric, but back then Conrad would have liked the reader to see the heart of barbarism in what conventional wisdom took to be the heart of civilization--Europe.

Mahatma Gandhi understood this ironic transposition (I'm not saying that he read Conrad's Heart of Darkness) when he remarked that the "idea" of the "West" is "great". 

In the Heart of Darkness Mr. Kurtz is the European "white" man who turns dark in his soul; it may be simplistic to think that Africa corrupts Kurtz; Conrad says pretty clearly, that all of Europe went into the making of Kurtz.

No one expects the President of the United States, even someone as erudite and intellectually discerning as Barack Obama, to particularize the reference to reflect what Joseph Conrad originally meant (all of Western bungling has gone into the making of the ISIS), but someone ought to say something about the usage of a literary term that's gone so far from its roots as not to be recognized as originating from the Conradian province.

Literary terms, I'm sad to say, has become a spin-off of spin-offs with no record-keeping of when the spin-off began. Today, art terms suffer the same fate as literary one's; the pilfering of the term "surreal" to mean anything that's is beyond rational explanation or merely strange, is too disturbing to contemplate.

The humanities in this sense has dwindled to the status of a temple prostitute, the (in(famous) and sexually exploited temple-women of ancient India whom the whole village had sexual access to, and on whom any male could lay claim during the sexual act.

I mean to say that like the temple prostitute, literature has become communal property with no distinct identity of its own like the sciences have.

Jane Eyre: Know thy context or be conned by the text

I noticed that the newest film adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre has been rated PG-13 for its “chaste passion” and “discreet violence”.

Additionally, Jane is marketed as a "mousy governess" on the poster.

I understand the commingling of passion with chastity—for the heroine, Jane, is an embodiment of chastity (i.e. she will be kissed by nor open her legs to anybody) which tempers the passion she develops over time for her beau, the Earl of Rochester. 

What I don’t quite get is the reference to the “discreet violence”. Does this refer to the burning alive of Bertha Mason, Rochester’s West Indian wife, who is neglected by her husband once he brings her over to England? He enjoys her estate, gets rich off her, and then conveniently decides that she is mad and confines her to the attic of her house.

If the quarantining and subsequent death of Bertha Mason is emblematic of violence that's "discreet", then the whole history of colonial violence, the substructure, upon which the superstructure of 19th century British prosperity lay, is discreet. 

But was this violence inflicted discreetly? Hell no; it was as overtly inflicted as is the modern day violence of a Ray Rice on his fiancee. The choice of the adjective "discreet" could be attributed to the race of the colonial master vis-a-vis the race of the servant subjugated by the former with impunity, back in those days. 

Bertha Mason’s treatment, we know today, is a direct consequence of her race—she was black. 

In the novel, Bertha hardly speaks; she is never seen. Only when the Rochester abode (which is refurbished with wealth from Mason's ancestral sugarcane plantation in Antigua) is up in flames, do we know that the madwoman in the attic is responsible for the arson.

Once the context is read into the novel, the violence done to Bertha hardly remains “discreet”.

Oh, and Jane can by no means be described as "mousy" (the film's poster sums up Jane's journey as a journey of increasing self-confidence). Her reticence is not a sign of her feminine diffidence; it's a pre-Victorian virtue, a virtue that would have been commendable in a young woman back then.

Context matters, else Jane Eyre would belong to the same category of fiction as The Nanny Diaries.

Attaining political nirvana through Moditva

I'd like to grab a copy of this book, called Moditva. The book, conceptualized and executed by the ruling party of India, the BJP, has all the clever slogans used by Narendra Modi since his election campaign.

Just as Russian President Vladimir Putin has successfully manipulated words and messages to make his territorial designs on neighboring sovereign nations look normal, justified, even, Narendra Modi, the Indian Premier, has been able to build a fabulous fan base with his wily aphorisms and alliterative mantras.

The Nazis had historically perfected the art of the effective political speech so as to hold almost an entire nation of exemplary Germans in its thrall. However, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, one hears of the virtue of the alliteratively-delivered mantras that moves into the human brain by dulling it down into an ideal, non-critical receiver of messages. Caesar's nemesis Anthony was smart but he desisted from giving smart speeches to the public, as smart speeches might just trigger off the discerning nerves in the human neurocircuitry.

I am hoping there is progress from Moditva to Modisatva before Modi leaves office.

Some of the best alliterative slogans from Narendra Modi are, "Toilets befor temples" and "Development over deity." He has gone a long way to bolster his secular credentials to erase the taint of the Gujarat riots of 2002 under his stewardship.

Migration

Somebody, I believe it's Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul, who had described the history of the world to be the history of migration.

Some facts of migration published by the Guardian validates the above viewpoint:

Migrants would constitute the world's fifth most populous country.

■ Number of international migrants has increased from around 150 million people in 2002 to 214 milllion.

■ One out of every 33 persons in the world is a migrant.

■ Countries with a high percentage of migrants include Qatar (87%), United Arab Emirates (70%), Singapore (41%), and Saudi Arabia (28%).

■ Countries with a small percentage of migrants include Turkey (1.9%), Japan (1.7%), India (0.4%), Nigeria (0.22%) and Indonesia (0.1%).

■ In 2012, according to the European commission's Eurostat, there were an estimated 1.7 million immigrants to the EU 27 from outside countries.

Parsing the facts of migration and combining them with the turgid history of immigration in nations like Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia, I figure that what's migration to us, in the liberal hemisphere, is slavery in these nations with a "high percentage" of migrants. For all three nations have a sorry track record of luring outsiders just to exploit their labor, free and/or cheap. Already there is hell raised by the U.N.'s Human Rights Watch Commission about the plight of Nepali workers in Qatar, who've helped built the mammoth soccer stadium without getting a penny.

Again, India, with a small percentage of migrants loses out on the opportunity to become a viscerally diverse nation. India's much touted "diversity" is pretty fake, and is largely mediated through consumption. Instead of savoring Mexican food from the restaurants of real Mexican migrants, Indians are limited to eating exotic Mexican fare cooked by Punjabi chefs in fancy Gurgaon restaurants with silly names like "Salsa Salsaa". 

As for Japan, lack of migrants are causing serious labor shortages.

Turkey is only lately playing host to thousands of Syrian refugees; but how are they treating their unfortunate neighbors, displaced by a hideous civil war? Older Turkish males are marrying young Syrian girls of ages ranging from 13 to 20 as their third and fourth wives, literally abducting them into their insidious harems.

Indonesia could do with some infusion of non-Indonesian blood; they missed out on raising a generation of little Obamas because Balinese boys and girls taunted boy Obama as a "blackie" when he went to school in Bali.

Nobody would think twice of migrating to Nigeria barring the Chinese, who are said to be engaged in the nefarious business of land grabbing in the continent of Africa.

I am all for migration; I cannot imagine the dynamism of human history without it. Homogeneity is anti-evolutionary.

Global time of modernity triumphs over "Hindustan" time

HMT watches, marketed throughout my childhood with the jingle, "If you have the inclination, we have the time," will no longer adorn the wrists of Indians.

Hindustan Machine Tools, one of India's largest public sector undertakings (PSU's, an acronym, which the public sector bashers of India had nicknamed "poshu", meaning "beast" in Bengali, were anathema to many in Socialist India because of their under-productivity and inefficiency) has closed shop, finally.

Indian Premier Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurated HMT in collaboration with the Japanese multinational, Citizen, in 1964. Nehru's objective was to supply every Indian worker with a wrist watch, so she/he (mostly he) would value time, understand the importance of being on time and speedy accomplishment of tasks. A favorite quip of Nehru's was "Talk less, work more". HMT, along with other massive PSU's embodied the Nehruvian vision of a modernizing and industrializing India.

Since the opening up of the Indian economy to foreign brands, the sales of HMT watches had plummeted, but one of HMT's domestic competitors, Titan, a creation of the Tata corporation, had tolled a death knell for HMT watches long before foreign brands had.

I wore my first wristwatch in middle school; it was an HMT slim band watch with a tiny round, dial, the smallness and the lunar-shape being indicative of the wearer's gender, of course. It had belonged to my mom. 

My very first wristwatch, which my dad presented to me during my last-year in high school was a Titan. It looked much more snazzier than an HMT, and had Roman numerals, something I totally loved. My father, who was a champion of the private sector, gleamed with delight as he announced the watch to have been made by a private corporation.

Looking back, the Titan had more attention to detail, as I remember the design was slick, and the color scheme reflected harmony. It was a better watch in the department of aesthetics, though I am certain it kept time the same way as its HMT counterpart did. 

Bye, bye HMT.

The biggest loser

The queue to the first Mcdonalds that opened in 1990 in Moscow was phenomenal. However, such a queue was only expected right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a dissolution of Soviet-style Communism.

After all, a bright emblem of Capitalist consumerist modernity had just set up shop in the tattered halls of Communist economy.

Zoom forward to today: President Vladimir Putin is cracking down on Mcdonalds in Russia (there are 208 outlets in Moscow itself), to retaliate against U.S. sanctions over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Yet, McDonalds is no longer a shiny badge of American capitalism; if anything, it's an emblem of Capitalism with a capital C claiming no Cold War-era allegiance with a particular nation. In today's global economy, Capital reigns supreme and Capital will do just about anything to adjust to the conditions of the market in which it operates. It's sole interest is to thrive.

McDonalds, like other mega corporate entities, is highly transnational. The golden arch seeks not to impose anymore, but to blend in with the local.

So, the joke is on Putin, who being a sad relic of the Cold War, uses outmoded Cold War tactics to fight a battle which has no name except, perhaps, "a poor facsimile of the Cold War". Putin also resorts to Cold War propaganda, or a war of words conducted via Twitter, to distract and deceive global attention from his misdoings in Ukraine. the other day somebody wrote of how Putin has revived the culture of Orwellian newspeak/doublespeak, something that the other Vladimir, Vladimir Nabokov, made mincemeat of in his novels.

The Russian Mcdonalds is for all practical purposes very Russian, in that it caters to Russian taste and Russian appetite and most significantly, sources its meat and veggies from Russian farmers. As reported by Quartz, two Russian companies, Wimm-Bill-Dann and Barybino State Farm, have got so successful supplying lettuce and milk to McDonalds, that they registered in the New York Stock Exchange.

By cracking down on the Russian McDonalds, Putin has cracked down on his own. What might he be fighting against? Capital itself? Then there is no winning. In his insistence on wielding the Cold War lance Putin is getting to be the biggest loser.

Dear planet, we're feasting off you as you spiral deathward

Station Eleven is the author's 4th novel. Emily St. John Mandel the writer based in you-know-where, had despaired of finding a publisher for this most dystopian of all American novels because she had surmised the wave for the genre to have peaked and subsided. 

The fiction market is saturated with dystopian novels. Like the literature of the Cold War that expressed a collective anxiety of a nuclear destruction of the world, today's dystopian fiction is dominated by contemporary fears of climate catastrophes, pandemics, and epidemics, among others. However, there have been one too many dystopian novels of late, making, Ms. St. John Mandel, a relative newbie to the genre, anxious about the economic prospects of her book.  

To her surprise, however, no sooner than Station Eleven was completed, it found itself at the center of a minor (three-day long) bidding war, with Knopf snagging the deal with a six-figure advance, an amount that's three times that generated by her three previous novels taken together.

The money is good news because (good) writers deserve to make a living off their products just as app developers. But does the appetite for dystopian, post-apocalyptic fiction tell us something about ourselves and our real-world attitude toward apocalypses? 

Take the recent epidemic of ebola in countries in West Africa. In terms of real action all that Americans could muster were something akin to fear-triggered hysteria of contamination. "Keep the African savages from the borders of our country" was the general collective scream that emerged from the millions of tweets generated by the news of the outbreak. Not much else in the way of empathic action was committed. I can imagine an entire posse of fantasy/post-apocalyptic/dystopian fiction mongerers based in you-know-where, frenetically cranking out plots of a post-ebola world order ruled by an African warlord who is the sole survivor of the viral attack. 

That we are "entertained" by the world-is-coming-to-an-end spectre, is not unprecedented. During major global Wars and conflicts of the past, ranging from World War 2, the rise of fascism, through the Cold War and the ambiguously worded War on Terror, the book and movie market have been traditionally been glutted by visions of the ending of a familiar world order. This is what a market-based economy does: ossifies, and some would say, deflects, real fears of real impending doom, into dollars and emblems of entertainment, thus deferring perpetually the action that's badly needed to stem the tide of the doom.

The planet slowly spins netherwards but the maximum we can do is to convert the descent into subject matter for fiction to be bought, read and "engaged" with at a very nominal level of entertainment.

The one thing that differentiates the 21st century apocalyptic fiction from the Cold War one is the envisioning of a post-.Today's young, educated, readers, the future-conscious, career-conscious and cautious folks that they are, want to plan ahead of time. Thus the dystopian fiction of today, as epitomized by the likes of Ms. St. John Mandel's, tells us repeatedly that the "end" is just a new beginning.

The world of Station Eleven is an emergent, post-present world, one that has been wiped off by the flu virus. It's like a startup cosmos all over again.