A pox on storytelling

In 1936 Walter Benjamin wrote something illuminating about the place of storytelling in Western culture. 

Storytelling is alive in traditional societies, he said, but dying a slow death in Western one's. Why? Because Western societies are being consumed by the power of information.

A little context here: Benjamin was writing against the grain of rising fascism, a social system that relied heavily on information and technology to anchor itself in Western Europe after World War I. 

Stories communicate unique truths that lie at the heart of experiences in a relatively unmediated way. An individual would tell a story of survival to another individual, or to a group gathered communally perhaps on the occasion of a death or birth. 

Information, on the other hand, is mediated because it's distributed in a more or less standardized format through technology. In Benjamin's day, the technological apparati used both by the state and business conglomerates would be the mass media.

News of death, especially deaths of soldiers in the war zones of Europe, would be transmitted; similarly stories of survival would be appropriated by the state and transmitted as narratives of triumph or heroism. 

Mourning would cease to be an occasion to share unique experiences in common physical space.

Death in this Benjaminian cosmology occupies not a place of recoil and terror, but one of renewal or creation. People would congregate around the dying or the dead and find new meaning in their lives through sharing their experiences, memories, of or around the dying subject.

The 21st century, an era allegedly of hypermodernity, is an era where storytelling is back with a vengeance. 

As fiction writer Sam Lipsyte says in a discussion of his recent New Yorker story, The Naturals, we are living in a cultural moment where everything is communicated on the back of a story: 

You don’t just buy some jam or a loaf of bread or a chair or a car. You have to hear a whole story about how the product came about, often a tedious tale about how somebody quit the rat race (after making a mint in advertising or data mining or manufacturing weapons) and discovered an old family recipe and then made friends with local farmers and woodsmen. 

The hero of the story is a "free range cultural consultant" which is an euphemism for a storyteller; his job is to help the government build structures in public spaces on the back of stories, as though it isn't just enough to build, the building project from inception to completion has to be wrapped in a story.

Lipsyte's hero rebels against the blind adoption of storytelling as the only vehicle via which the worth of experiences and products can be communicated. He refuses to be a storyteller in the story; consequence? He loses the contract.

But the kind of storytelling that is preponderant in our cultural moment is not the kind of storytelling that Benjamin mourned the loss of. Our storytelling is largely an elaborate sales pitch, of ourselves, our lives, our achievements and of course of the products we consume. 

Today's storytelling is intrinsic to sales and is indistinguishable from information whose effects Benjamin decried not too long ago. When Benjamin said "story" he didn't mean the selling of ourselves/marketing ourselves to the world; he meant seeking new dots of meaning through the telling of them regardless of how spontaneous and messy they sound. 

A person, in Benjamin's vision, might seek hilarity from death, because that is how he specifically experiences death. 

In our contemporary storytelling, we have to narrate events of death in one way and one way only, in a monotonous, monochromatic tone of solemnity. This tantamounts to the selling of death as anti-life.

Lipsyte's hero encounters death--the death of his father. He flies halfway across the country to speak to his dying father after a long interregnum of icy silence between father and son.

Indeed, in a Benjaminian way, the hero becomes the son, the one and unique son of the one and unique father, and experiences meaningful changes within himself, which by the time the story ends, he refuses to share with the readers.

A pox on storytelling.

In (silent) praise of inarticulacy

I doubt if a film like Manakamana will be seen by more than 50 people.

And that is just fine, going by the core philosophy of makers Pachao Velez and Stephanie Spray's Documentary. The philosophy seems to be that the best of thoughts may go unexpressed and thus unheard; the best of things may go unseen and the best of sounds may go unheard.

The film is about the journey pilgrims make to Manakamana, a Hindu temple in a small mountain village in Nepal. Inside the temple resides the goddess Bhagavati.

The temple is in a remote location; over time pilgrims have endured, happily so, the arduous journey to the site. Recently, they have been riding a cable car to and from the temple. The cable car is a technological insertion into nature, but the regular pilgrims are not mesmerized by the cable car. Some mumble the fact that this is the first time in their life that they are aboard a cable car. 

That's it.

The Documentary is not a homage to technology or to many aspects of modernity that we have taken for granted and feel deep lacunae when they go missing from our surrounding.

The Documentary is one that somebody like philosopher and art critic Susan Sontag would have liked: a no-frills-attached registering on our consciousness of a fleeting experience that quietly leaves its imprint on us.

Sontag had cringed at the thought of over-articulation of experiences, at the sight of tourists taking pictures of things they visit and see, at the cultural proclivity to record and note every sensation one experiences when one is in the presence of, let's say, a "wonder", man-made or natural.

The temple of Manakamana is a wonder to its pilgrims. But the pilgrims generally remain inarticulate about the wonder. Because of the cable car and other conveniences, the temple is now visited by outsiders as well. Tourists, the nemesis of a Sontagian universe, take pictures and jot down notes; there is a rock musician who jokes around and expresses cynicism. They are not looking at the temple; in essence with the noise they create, they are looking at themselves. The jokes they sprout, the cynicism they express, the notes and the photographs they take are silent echoes of themselves.

The traditional pilgrims approach the shrine with awe and ardor and leave in awe and ardor. The wonder they experience is left at that, not translated into words or into a narrative.

A conversion table for Britishisms

British politeness is no different from American politeness in that sometimes it's just plain rhetorical.

The Britishers, like their counterparts in the United States, say things they don't really mean.

The following is a conversion table that translates British expressions of politeness into the unpleasant truths which such politeness disguises:

WHAT THE BRITISH SAY	WHAT THE BRITISH MEAN	WHAT FOREIGNERS UNDERSTAND
I hear what you say	I disagree and do not want to discuss it further	He accepts my point of view
With the greatest respect	You are an idiot	He is listening to me
That's not bad	That's good	That's poor
That is a very brave proposal	You are insane	He thinks I have courage
Quite good	A bit disappointing	Quite good
I would suggest	Do it or be prepared to justify yourself	Think about the idea, but do what you like
Oh, incidentally/ by the way	The primary purpose of our discussion is	That is not very important
I was a bit disappointed that	I am annoyed that	It doesn't really matter
Very interesting	That is clearly nonsense	They are impressed
I'll bear it in mind	I've forgotten it already	They will probably do it
I'm sure it's my fault	It's your fault	Why do they think it was their fault?
You must come for dinner	It's not an invitation, I'm just being polite	I will get an invitation soon
I almost agree	I don't agree at all	He's not far from agreement
I only have a few minor comments	Please rewrite completely	He has found a few typos
Could we consider some other options	I don't like your idea	They have not yet decided

New Bengal?

A video that claims to advertise Bengal, an ex-illustrious state of India, as a "melting pot" where "diversity" reigns.

I caught a fleeting, almost ephemeral glimpse of a few Chinese faces. That's "diversity" Indian style.

If this is the "new" Bengal, I want to know what's so new about seeing the same old fat faces who have been strutting the cultural landscape of Kolkata? Ranjit Mullick? Rudraprashad Sengupta? Soumitra Chatterjee? New? Young? Fresh?

And the music: It's abysmal. To be honest, the video doesn't reflect a dynamic or modern Bengal, but the timeless chimera that Tagore created in his fiction--the "Bangala'r Maati and Bangla'r Jol" province that served the poet's imagination well.

The real Bengal, where is it? The mall's? The metro? Where's the business sector? Any new music in the offing? Where's the global Kolkata we so hear of? The sushi dens and the Pizza Huts? They too are legitimate nodes of the Bangla geography aren't they?

Deen, done, gone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am I deep-reading or not?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Havisham was afraid. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Civilization and its (ruinous) repetitions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why we teach?

Why we teach?

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

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

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

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

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

Wither women?

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

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

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

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

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

The U.S. army

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

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

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

Study in contrasting cultures

A glimpse of street fashion in the Bronx.

When asked about sartorial inspirations, the young residents of the Bronx scratch the surface of the abysmal present. They are inspired by, they say, figures like Rihanna and Kayne West.

They have little sense of history, ergo the responses lack depth.

The one guy wears "Timbs" all year round and he can't explain his choice, except in terms of a personal, whimsical choice. Sounds more comical than anything.

A glimpse of street fashion in Long Island City, an emergent space for hipster culture. 

These guys speak of drawing inspiration from the 50s, 60s and 70s. One dude even describes the buttons on his coat as "boring," showing an eye for detail and a desire to name details.

The responses are studied; you learn more than what individuals wear; you learn a bit of history as well. 

The second culture is more memorable; the first one will disappear in no time, when the Paul Newman jacket wearing crowd will elbow out the crowd that wear "timbs" all year round and carry mismatching backpacks because "girls like it."

Bollywood Jews

As kids we used to watch older Hindi movies from a pre-Bollywood era on television and have a blast, every time the Gargantuan body of comedienne Tun Tun floated onto the screen, to regale audiences with her brand of corny, physical humor.

Tun Tun's jokes fell flat on our ears, but it was her presence we guffawed at, we had a suspicion that she wasn't a "She," but a "He" dressed up as a she. In fact we were convinced that "Tun Tun" was none other than "Mahmood," the fat Charlie Chaplinesque jokester who was a comic staple in Hindi films.

It was quite common for men to do female roles in older Hindi movies, especially from the black and white times, because film acting was looked down upon as a thing that women of "ill-repute" did.

Shalom Bollywood, a new, eye-opening documentary on early Hindi cinema and the role of women therein, tells a riveting story of how it wasn't just men, but young Jewish Indian female dancers, women hailing from Jewish families settled in India, especially in and around the region of Mumbai, who played female roles in Indian movies from the early twentieth century.

I did not know that the famous actress Nadira was a Florence Ezekiel.

Yet another evidence of a strong Jewish DNA in Indian culture.

Going by the mindless and brainless douchebags that dominate today's Bollywood, the Jewish DNA might sound like a joke or a phantom of the past.

The 120 Days of Sodom

One feels like if the Marquis de Sade, were to be locked in a bathroom, he would spend his time writing reams of filthy porn on toilet paper scrolls.

Locked up he was, but within the less inglorious confines of the Bastille, under a Royal order initiated by his mother-in-law. De Sade was stuck in the famous prison for 37 days and deprived of writing materials--because any form of writing from an enemy of the state would have been deemed incendiary--de Sade wrote furiously and continuously in tiny scripts on both sides of a sheaf of narrow paper. According to the movie Quills, a beautiful prison laundress smuggles in writing quills, ink and paper to the Marquis.

The 37 days of uninterrupted writing produced the controversial book 120 Days of Sodom, that tells the story of four "libertines" who lock themselves up in a remote Medieval castle with forty six victims, comprised of a motley of boys, girls and virginal women. They are accompanied by a handful of experienced prostitutes who arouse the hosts with their outlandish stories. The hosts in turn seduce their guests into performing grotesque types of sexual acts with them.

The 120 Days of Sodom is a potpourri of what came to be patented as "sadism" thereafter. Despite attempts to elevate the book into the category of "erotica," the book remains steadfastly un erotic according to experts. The maker himself described it as "the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began." 

De Sade's objective was to get back at the regime with extreme verbal debauchery--to shock and awe, as it were, his oppressors before they put him to death.

The Bibliotheque Nationale de France is currently negotiating a price of up to five million dollars to acquire the manuscript and preserve it as French national heritage.

A pox on hipsterdom

In her book, Irony's Edge, academic critic Linda Hutcheon had elevated irony to the status of a subversive tool--used to challenge hierarchical modes of thinking.

Hutcheon had invested irony with political value.

Another academic, Christy Wampole, not only divests 21st century irony of any creative value, but also sees it as a cultural plague. 

Wampole's representative figure of irony is the "Hipster."

Here is Wampole's scathing criticism of the Hipster mode of ironic living, 

Things I see

I love Jason Polan's drawings in the Times' Things I Saw section.

Polan sees things ranging from the downright cute to the whimsical. He never sees anything banal or gross.

That's primarily because he restricts his viewings to the borough of Manhattan and that too the best parts of Manhattan, where you are not only most likely to see pretty people, but also their pretty geegaws.

I imagine a drying up of Polan's inspiration were he to stroll the sidewalks and streets of the Bronx. What would he see?

Based on my personal viewing experience, the object he is bound to stumble upon on a daily basis is this:

On a more rare occasion the above might reappear in this form:

Worthy of being drawn Mr. Polan?

Bone-chilling compliance

A movie of our era, as noted by Frank Bruni.

The story: [...] set during one shift at a fictional fast-food restaurant called ChickWich, it imagines that the manager, a dowdy middle-aged woman, gets a call from someone who falsely claims to be a police officer. [...] The “officer” on the phone tells the manager that he has evidence that a young female employee of hers just stole money from a customer’s purse. Because the cops can’t get to the restaurant for a while, he says, the manager must detain the employee herself in a back room. He instructs her to check the young woman’s pockets and handbag for the stolen money. When that doesn’t turn up anything, he uses a mix of threats and praise to persuade her to do a strip-search. And that’s just the start. [...] The manager’s boyfriend later assumes the duties of watching over the detained employee. Cajoled and coached by the voice on the phone, he makes her do those jumping jacks, which are meant to dislodge any hidden loot. By the time he leaves the back room, he’s also been persuaded to spank and then sexually assault her.

The chill factor: the gullibility of ordinary people. A culture where a politician can run for office by claiming that there exists a form of rape that is "legitimate", and that a woman in the process of being raped can "shut down" or make her eggs immune to the overtures of an invading spermazoid, is a culture where gullibility has become a monstrous liability.

As Bruni says, we have dwindled into people who are willing to "trade the calm of certainty for the disquiet of doubt, or potentially hunkering down to the hard work of muddling through the elusive truth of things. Better simply to be told what’s what."

The voice on the phone is the voice of the slick marketer, slick, emphatic and highly persuasive, with that right amount of affected empathy that bring people to do as he commands.

Enigmatic art

A Marcel Duchamp piece has always been a brain-teaser for me. I confess to carrying a pretty fuzzy notion of the artist in my head.

On display at the exhibition entitled "Ghosts in the Machine" at the New Museum in New York City, is a re-creation of Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even."

A beginner's exclamation: What a subtitle! (The painting is more popularly named "The Large Glass").

A beginner's question: What does the work represent?

Some help from Art critic Peter Schjeldahl:

[Duchamp] presides as an icon for renegade urge to complicate, if not to destroy, conventional notions of what art is and is not. Duchamp never stops intoxicating young artists with his games of logic, which tantalize by falling just short of making ultimate sense. What the work means, in what way, seems within reach but safely beyond grasp, like a dangled cat toy. Your response depends on how much [...] you like to think. Duchamp is, as well, an avatar of ever-popular sex in the head. The assorted mechanical forms, the bachelors, at the bottom of the "Glass" supposedly yearn toward the more sinuous doodads of the bride, above. This arcane fiction has transfixed generations of followers who glory in feeling libidinous while proving themselves super-smart.

One shade of chrome yellow (color of shit)

When it comes to erotic writing, the more explicit it gets – the more heaving, the more panting – the more I want to laugh. Erotic writing is said to have a noble pedigree: the goings-on in Ovid, the whipping in Sade, the bare-arsed wrestling in Lawrence, the garter-snapping in Anaïs Nin, the wife-swapping in Updike, the arcs of semen hither and yon. But it’s so much sexier when people don’t have sex on the page. 

So says Andrew O'Hagan in exposing the inferior quality of erotica in E.L. James' blockbuster, Fifty Shades of Grey.

So how does such shitty stuff sell so much? For one, shit does sell, as evidenced by the huge success of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. Secondly, shit sells because a majority of shit-buyers do not have the discerning and experienced reader's ability to call a shit a shit. 

Intertextual humor

In The Amazing Spider-Man there is this moment. Spider-Man Peter warns the city mayor that the city is threatened by a predatory lizard (the villain in the movie is half human and half lizard).

The mayor looks at Peter incredulously, and says, "Who do you think I am? The mayor of Tokyo?"

A moment of intertextual humor; the joke is lost on those who aren't familiar with the Japanese monster movie mania. 

However there is more: I am familiar with Japanese monster movies, but I wouldn't be aware of the humor if I didn't catch a glimpse of the same in a scene from Persepolis.

In Persepolis, young Marjane and her grandmother go to a movie theater in Tehran to see Godzilla. Tehran at this time is being bombed by Iraqi warplanes. There is mayhem on screen and real mayhem off screen, outside.

When they walk out of the movie, the grandmother, unimpressed by the celluloid mayhem tells her granddaughter about the "Japanese" and their "crazy" love for mindless monstrosities."

That's when I caught on to the joke--a joke at the expense of a part of Japanese cultural preferences.

What is the novel?

Definitions are limiting, but when somebody does put out one--of anything--then they also seem not so limiting, but quite inclusive.

Here is a definition of the novel, provided by William Deresiewicz:

The novel continues to do what it has always done best: compile the atlas of private experience, show us what it feels like to be alive at our particular time and place. Think of Goethe, Austen, Dostoyevsky, Proust. Fiction brings us the news of ourselves, as literature always has and always will. That’s “entertainment,” in its deepest and most satisfying form. That’s pleasure, meaning, passion, glimpses of profoundest truth, the salvation of art. “The Jungle” may have sparked reform, but I daresay “Mrs. Dalloway” has changed more people’s lives.