Poison Ivy league

The title of William Deresiewicz's new book on the state of Ivy League education in America invokes the observation made by poet and public intellectual Ezra Pound about 80 years ago. 

In The ABC of Reading, Pound had argued that higher education needn't be mandatory, foisted on everybody, but should be reserved for those who have a genuine desire to know. The rest, he said is "merely sheepherding."

Deresiewicz, a Yale English Professor who was denied tenure at this hallowed Institution of higher learning, damns the current generation of HYPSters, an acronym for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford graduates, for being mere sheep, but of excellent pedigree, not because they have good genes or do any larger good to society, but because they obediently follow the tried and tested path of a meaningless life of "blinkered overachievers."

A majority of HYPSters go into bland careers in finance and/or consulting; according to Deresiewicz they tend to lack curiosity, moral courage, passionate weirdness.

The legion of "excellent sheep" is one of a generation of polite, striving, praise-addicted, grade-grubbing nonentities.

What caught my attention (via this most excellent review of the book) was Deresiewicz's critique of the institutions that have sprung up to be the grazing pastures, as it were, of the "excellent sheep." 

One such institution is an Yale-brainchild, Teach For America. Deresiewicz is suspicious of the motives of those among the sheep who sign up for two years with Teach to do the recommended stint of teaching the "socioeconomically underserved" kids of America:

[They] swoop down and rescue [the unfortunate] with [their] awesome wisdom and virtue [...] [They] do acknowledge their existence, but in a fashion that maintains [their] sense of superiority — indeed, that reinforces it.

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.

Wall Street warriors

Michael Lewis, known for his insightful books on the culture and moral ecology of Wall Street, does something unusual in his new Wall Street chronicle, The Flash Boys: traces the emergence of ethics and fairness in an otherwise corrupt culture of high frequency trading.

The central figure of the book is Brad Katsuyama, who observes that the market does not work fairly for everybody as they are supposed to. Many traders have made this observation but have played along with the discrepancies primarily because their goal is to make money; what is fuzzy and is incidental to the task of making money is mostly left alone by Wall Street folks.

But Katsuyama and his ilk wear separate stripes; as Wall Street insiders they are not simply in it for the immediate financial gratification. They would like to know the big idea on which the trading culture fundamentally rests.

The big idea isn't, however, as Katsuyama finds, not an idea enshrined in the principles of fairness or justice. In his quest for the knowledge of Wall Street's underpinning, Katsuyama is joined by Ronan Ryan, a specialist in studying how electronic signals are transmitted in telecommunications, and John Schwall, who buries himself in the library obsessed with finding out the modalities of a specific kind of stock-rigging called "front running."

The trio, through pooling their interdisciplinary skills and interests, discovered that the market is severely rigged. But unlike those who would keep this knowledge a secret so as to profit from it, the three men decided to set up an alternative stock market that was immune to the kind of rigging the real stock market is vulnerable to.

What sets Katsuyama, Ryan and Schwall apart from the usual trader is their pursuit of knowledge over the acquisition of mere information; the pleasure of satisfying their curiosity triumphed the pleasure of making money. 

The fabulous thing about Capitalism, as argued by David Brooks, is that it rewards in the long run, those who pursue knowledge, or the "skull beneath the skin," as it were, over those who only would be contented to scratch the skin for whatever money they can make in the short run.

There is a moral power in which the kernel of Capitalism and the market is wrapped up, says Brooks, and those who catch on to the moral power are those who are the true champions of Capitalism.

A paradox of Capitalism

Is the rise of what Jeremy Rifkin, calls a post-market economy, an economy that has near-zero cost of production and its driving paradigm is the "Internet of Things."

I'm yet to wrap my brain around the concept of the Internet of things, but have a blurb on the book's content here:

The capitalist era is passing - not quickly, but inevitably. Rising in its wake is a new global collaborative Commons that will fundamentally transform our way of life. Ironically, capitalism's demise is not coming at the hands of hostile external forces. Rather, The Zero Marginal Cost Society argues, capitalism is a victim of its own success. Intense competition across sectors of the economy is forcing the introduction of ever newer technologies. Bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin explains that this competition is boosting productivity to its optimal point where the marginal cost of producing additional units is nearly zero, which makes the product essentially free.
In turn, profits are drying up, property ownership is becoming meaningless, and an economy based on scarcity is giving way to an economy of abundance, changing the very nature of society. Rifkin describes how hundreds of millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives from capitalist markets to global networked Commons.
"Prosumers" are producing their own information, entertainment, green energy, and 3-D printed products at nearly zero marginal cost, and sharing them via social media sites, rentals, redistribution clubs, bartering networks, and cooperatives. Meanwhile, students are enrolling in massive open online courses (MOOCs) that also operate at near-zero marginal cost. And young social entrepreneurs are establishing ecologically sensitive businesses, crowdsourcing capital, and even creating alternative currencies in the new sharable economy.
As a result, "exchange value" in the marketplace - long the bedrock of our economy - is increasingly being replaced by "use value" on the collaborative Commons. In this new era, identity is less bound to what one owns and more to what one shares. Cooperation replaces self-interest, access trumps ownership, and networking drubs autonomy. Rifkin concludes that while capitalism will be with us for at least the next half century, albeit in an increasingly diminished role, it will no longer be the dominant paradigm. We are, Rifkin says, entering a world beyond markets where we are learning how to live together collaboratively and sustainably in an increasingly interdependent global Commons.

Rifkins writes about the shared commons here.

Neighbors from hell

Humans are neighbors from hell. Not only are humans unable to share the planet responsibly with their fellow species, but they are also agents of the planet's imminent destruction.

Such is the claim made by Elizabeth Kolbert in her new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. 

An asteroid collided with the earth and dinosaurs perished 61 million geological years ago. That was the fifth extinction the planet had suffered.

The agent of the planet's sixth extinction is man himself. 

The sixth extinction isn't one large mass extinction of a species in a single fell swoop. It's an ongoing series of extinctions of several crucial species, crucial for the maintenance of the earth's ecological integrity, that would add up to reach a tipping point of a grand scale of irrevocable demise of the planet's environment.

Hurricane Sandy is said to have had a more damaging impact on New York City because of the erosion of oyster beds from the shore lines of Greater New York. In an epiphanic piece, Paul Greenberg attributes the erosion to "400 years of poor behavior on the part of humans." 

Humans have chipped away steadily at the planet's ecological integrity over time. 

Kolbert scalds our "hegemonic ideology" of that "exalts short-term thinking and ignores the true long-term cost and consequences of the choices we’re making in industry, energy policy, agriculture, forestry and politics."

Two excellent reviews of the book can be found here and here.

Fiery Fierri

20 absurd quotes from Food Network's very own Kid Rock personality, Guy Fieri's new book, Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives: The Funky Finds in Flavortown.

1. [Those] fried green tomatoes, brother that’s a symposium of flavor.

2. Sometimes you pull up to a place and you just know it’s going to be good. Well, as I pulled up to Martin’s my phone rang, and it was Kid Rock’s manager telling me that Kid Rock wanted to talk about Triple D. (We rapped for about a half an hour and subsequently did the Kid Rock Triple D special.) Then I walked into the barbecue joint and met a sunburned fan who had been waiting for me all day. Next we got to chop some wood — I believe they had a Jack Daniel’s-handled splitting maul — light a big smoker, and barbecue a whole hog. If they’d thrown in a little ice cold beer and some Hank Williams Junior, I might not have left — ever.

3. Don’t ever use lighter fluid — it’s un-American. Amateurs, losers, and idiots use lighter fluid. If you’ve bought this book, you are inherently none of those three things, so let’s make sure to teach others the correct way that real pitmasters start a fire. Lighter fluid makes your food taste like crap and is bad for the environment.

4. [Splash] some [rub] around the rest of the hog for good measure. This really doesn’t do a dang thing, but it makes you feel good about things and makes for good drama.

5. Shut the front door, son of Tatum O’Neal, that’s dynamite.

6. [On] the final leg of the Kid Rock culinary cruise, we ended up at the brewery where Kid Rock made Badass Beer. Now if you’re going to call it Badass beer it better be badass, and all I can tell you is the name fits the bill. Just like his music, the dude delivers. Not one to stray far from his roots or waver on his stance to do good for the city of Detroit, when Kid Rock’s Badass producer unexpectedly closed shop in 2012, Rock knew what to do: build a world-class brewery in the heart of the city staffed by Detroiters and supporting Detroit. Opening Summer 2013. Badass Beer: Trouble Has Been Brewed.

7. The name of my competition BBQ team is Motley Cue, so Stretch took my logo, which is tattooed on my arm, and cut it out of metal — then brought it down to my team. We became instant buddies. Then he came out to my birthday with a watermelon catapult… that began the crazy life of Stretch and Guy. When we prepared to do the Guy Fieri Road Show, I asked him if he could construct a twenty-five-gallon margarita machine.

8. At Big Mama’s Kitchen it’s all right ear, right now… or it could been the left ear… one of the most talked about bites, seen across the world is the floppy wonder (can you “ear” what I’m saying’?): the pig ear sandwich. I thought I was gonna die, but I gotta tell ya, it wasn’t as bad as you might think.

9. [The] Parmageddon [has] pierogi, kraut, and sharp cheddar, and then it goes into the meltification machine — it’s outta bounds and so much more than a grilled cheese sandwich.

10. This patio goes off the hook — I think the folks are in a Flavortown food coma.

11. Chef Matt says, ‘Get jiggy with it, have some fun!’

12. One night I was at Mama Cozza’s having dinner with my family, and I’d really not been feeling well all week…one of [the chef's] daughters-in-law drove me to this doctor’s office at 11 pm…and I was better the next day. We call that kulinary gangsta alla Mama Cozza!

13. People who like [haggis] call it spicy, creamy, rich, and buttery — I don’t wanna tell you what I call it… ha ha.

14. My favorite line: ‘Do you get any tater with that gator? James Spader likes gator.’ (Ha ha ha, I kill me.)

15. It was a lightning bolt of an idea in Flavortown that pranked the un-prankable mayor, Guy Fieri.

16. I don’t know if it’s fair to call their Russian dressing Russian dressing — it should be called something sexy, like liquid Moscow.

17. I lay claim to the knuckle sandwich… it’s my brand, my logo, hell, even my tattoo, so when I find out that two dudes in Austin have opened up a sandwich joint and one of their menu items is the knuckle sandwich, I tell you what, they’d better deliver the real deal. (jk.)

18. His seafood is so fresh it’ll slap ya.

19. I sucked at making my Yorkshire pudding before getting schooled by Anne. Now they’re puffy McMagic, not flat McTragic.)… She could feed me beef six ways to Sunday.

20. [They] make a porchetta that you won’t forgetta.

Mapping the schmoozing gene

The secret to the success of Russ & Daughters, New York City's iconic store that sells the most delicious smoked fish and other accessories (T and I have availed of it), is "schmoozing."

That's according to Mark Russ Federman, who has written an eponymously titled book on the store and its history.

Joel Russ, a Polish-Jewish immigrant of the early 20th century, opened the store in 1914, after he saved enough money from selling herring on an open pushcart.

When Joel's three pretty daughters came to work at the store in 1935, the store was named "Russ & Daughters."

The book has funny tidbits about Joel Russ:

He had to arrange his daughters' marriages because it was hard for them to date, as they smelled too fishy and were too tired to socialize at the end of an extremely hard day's work. But Joel retained the "right of first refusal" and dismissed potential suitors who were not strong enough to schlep barrels of herring, or smart enough to add up a column of numbers on a brown paper bag. Having ascertained that a certain future son-in-law would look good behind the counter, he would tell his daughter, "fine, you can marry him."

Joel was a non-romantic (as most successful business people reportedly are), and called his wife "Zug" which loosely translates from Yiddish into "Hey you!"

Apart from schmoozing, the business culture of Russ & Daughters has also shown remarkable adaptability and has evolved with the local food culture of the Lower East Side, a locality that is now rife with the culture of hipsterism. 

Now they sell sandwiches with names like Super Heeb, Boychick, Shtetl, The Meshugge. The Super Heeb has Sesame bagel, horseradish cream cheese, whitefish salad, and wasabi-flavored flying fish roe.

In dis-praise of folly

I have, or currently am, living the life, that psychoanalyst and prolific writer, Adam Phillips, recommend we live without further ado.

Phillips says, like fools, we inevitably end up living two lives, one that we fantasize about, the life that could've been and should've been had not we fallen through the cracks of fate and our own missteps, and the life that we actually living.

It's best and in our very own psychic interest of were to live the one life--one that we are living.

As I was saying, I am living the one life I am. No fantasy parallel life or a moaning for one I could've lived, for me.

In 2000, I got a fabulous scholarship to attend a Summer Institute at Cornell University; it was a rare opportunity to study under the tutelage of Hayden White. However, on account of personal reasons, I couldn't follow through. I was in remorse for a long time. For a long time I thought of what could've been had I followed through and actualized the chance that came my way.

Over time, having lived the life I have been graciously granted by fate, I have whipped me psychically into shape, or have tried to do so. I suffer little in the way of pining away for lost chances, because I remember always that the life that beckoned me away from those so-called "golden opportunities" was the real life I was scheduled to live.

In 2000, the one thing that required me to sacrifice the "golden opportunity" was something real and compelling. The "golden opportunity" was just another chance that didn't unfold, nor was it meant to unfold. In hindsight, it looks neither golden, nor worthy of being pined for.

Adam Phillip begins Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life with 

The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?

His answer is a "no."

Phillips writes heretically against the modern notion that we should all be out there fulfilling our potential. Instead of feeling that we should have a "better" life, he says, we should just live, as gratifyingly as possible, the life we have. Otherwise, we are setting ourselves up for bitterness. What makes us think that we could have been a contender? Yet, in the dark of night, alone, we do think this and grieve that it wasn't possible. 

And what was not possible becomes the story of our lives [...] Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless trauma about, the lives we were unable to live.

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.

The making of a book

A video from the prelinger archive: The 1947 video: 

[An] archival documentary from Encyclopaedia Britannica Films reveals how a manuscript becomes a book. Clunky machines mold words out of molten metal, stamp out pages, and trim paper. All the while a team of humans shuttle materials from machine to machine.

If you really want to know a people...

...start by looking inside their bedrooms

When I first read these lines, T sprang to my mind. for this could have very well have come from T and others who believe that to understand social mores one has to do a deep study of a society's sexual mores.

But these are the words of Shereen El Feki, the author of Sex and the Citadel

The daughter of an Egyptian father and Welsh mother, Cambridge-educated immunologist, former science-writer for the Economist, and the current Vice Chair of the UN's Global Commission on HIV and Law, El Feki has " spent the past five years traveling across the Arab region asking people about sex; what they do, what they don't, what they think and why." 

The result is this vibrant and bouncy accounting of sex in a changing Arab world.

El Feki says she wrote the book as a response to the following:

The Arab world [...] once famous in the West for sexual license envied by some but despised by others, is now widely criticized for sexual intolerance. ... And the West, once praised by some in the Arab world for its hard line on same-sex relations, is now seen by many as a radiating source of sexual debauchery from which the region must be shielded.

El Feki is not simply interested in chronicling the reversal in Arab attitude toward sexuality, but she also forecasts a change--not the advent of an "Arab Spring" in the culture's sexual sphere, but a gradual moving away from the "intimate order" of the Arab world, an order deeply entrenched in accepting marriage as the sun of a sexual cosmology. 

Change is coming to Egypt [...] not a sexual revolution, I think, but a sexual re-evaluation, in which people will one day have the education, the inclination, and the freedom to take an unblinkered view of what they were, how they came to be what they are, and what they could be in the years to come. The confidence and creativity of Arab civilization was once reflected in its sexual life. For the first time in a long time, we have a chance to see this again—not by gazing at our past, but by looking to our future.

A review of the book can be found here.

Slapped silly

Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap is, has been, for me a good reading experience. I read the novel, during my long subway rides to and from work, in November 2010, and 7 months later, much of the novel exists on the canvas of my mind as vividly illuminated flotsam.

What I’ve managed to salvage from the 500+ page-long novel is a notion that Tsiolkas is offering readers a bird’s eye view of contemporary, multicultural Australia. Multiculturalism, as seen through the primarily Greek-Australian eyes of the novel’s main characters, is both a boon and a curse for the evolving fabric of a 21st century life down under.

For the Greek immigrants—and being of Greek origin, Tsiolkas writes of them with panache—Australian multiculturalism is nothing but the modern state’s attempt to police both public and private human behavior so as to manage and contain intra-ethnic conflicts, if and when they arise.

Many of the characters in the novel seethe internally at the extremities to which a culture of political correctness has traveled and distorted one’s will to live freely. People are in loathing of being berated, rapped on the knuckles by the local judiciary and even arrested by the police for smoking inside a cab or for making an allegedly racially insensitive remark. Minor domestic actions, like slapping a brooding, recalcitrant child because he is trying to crack open another child’s skull with a cricket bat, become occasions for a major discourse on anti-child offence. 

The excesses of multiculturalism is abhorred, and the excess is foreshadowed best in the beginning, when one of the central male characters, Hector, finds himself waking up on his bed next to his lovely Indian wife, Aisha, wholly dissatisfied and resentful. The experience of his conjugal bed-mating, he realizes, is artificially fabricated, not an expression of his authentic self. He has had to rein in his organic bodily functions, and sanitize his physical being to ensure sexual cordiality between him and his wife. He has had to ostracize a significant part of his physical reality simply to be sexually/conjugally acceptable and/or functional. 

Hector likes to fart, but in the presence of his wife, he has to censor this most natural of his bodily desires so as to keep himself desirable in her eyes:

His eyes still shut, a dream dissolving and already impossible to recall, Hector’s hand sluggishly reached across the bed. Good Aish was up. He let out a victorious fart, burying his face deep into the pillow to escape the clammy methane stink. I don’t want to sleep in a boy’s locker room, Aisha would always complain on the rare, inadvertent moments when he forgot himself in front of her. Through the years he had learnt to rein his body in, to allow himself to only let go in solitude; farting and pissing in the shower, burping alone in the car, not washing or brushing his teeth all weekend when she was away at conferences. It was not that his wife was a prude; she just seemed to barely tolerate the smells and expressions of the male body. He himself would have no problem falling asleep in a girl’s locker room, surrounded by the moist, heady fragrance of sweet young cunt. Afloat, still half-entrapped in sleep’s tender clutch, he twisted onto his back and shifted the sheet off his body. Sweet young cunt, he’d spoken out loud.

His wife makes similar compromises. The absence of authenticity in their marital bonding spills over from body to mind, from outside to essence. Thus Hector and Aisha compromise on mutual truth-telling—if the truth is told, the edifice of the marriage will collapse.

But multiculturalism has not only bred a culture of self-policing; it is also upheld as the inevitable and alternative-less direction in which the destiny of the industrialized Western world—a world that has for ages been hosting within its demesnes the arrival and settling in of migrants from every conceivable corner of the globe—unfolds. Australia has no option but to endorse diversity in order to survive as a modern nation.

As a genuflection to the marvels of accepting diversity as the norm rather than the exception of modern life, the novel creates another male character—that of the very Australian Richie. The characterization of Richie, a young adolescent who comes of age as an openly gay man in a society that’s pretty Grecian (Tsiolkas refers to contemporary Greece—not the mythical Greece of yore—and its practices of rampant sexism) in its intolerance of anything but the purely heteronormative, is, I feel, the most refreshing in The Slap. Richie is gay and sensitive and very intelligent; most significantly, he is loyal as a driven in nail to his friends and is capable of making cardinal sacrifices to protect the sanctity of friendships. He is, in other words, selfless without being naively cacophonic about being so.

Richie, the independent-minded, attuned-to-the global complexity of the world (he realizes he is emerging into a global society, not just an Australian one) gay male is, I believe, Tsiolkas’ best gift to his readers.

The undercity rises?

At the end of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo writes of the death of two horses in Annawadi, the Mumbai slum around which Boo's narrative is woven.

The horses, we learn, are kept by one Robert, the "Zebra Man," who also has zebras and other animals in his keeping.

Every summer, on a Sunday in June, an illegal horse racing event is held on the "gleaming Western Express Highway," a highway, one figures from Boo's book, that divides the part of Mumbai nestled close to Sahar International Airport into two worlds: the "over" and the "under" cities. 

Robert, a deposed slumlord of the "undercity" of Annawadi, makes money by running his horses in this "overcity" race.

Robert's horses are harnessed to a carriage with a pretty facade. However, behind the illusory "forever" of a fresh coating of paint, the carriage is ill-maintained. So, during the course of the race, the wheels come loose and the horses fall from the overpass to their death.

What follows the death of the rickety, underfed, yet exploited horses, elicits the writer's irony. A small group of animal rights activists rally around the horse-tragedy and demand that Robert be prosecuted. The event garners media coverage as well, and Annawadians, strangers to receiving a driblet of civic concern over the death, mutilation, sickness, wrongful imprisonment, and the terror of a cruel police force, are genuinely "bemused" by the attention paid to the dead horses.

The activists manage to take the case of cruelty and injustice (meted out to animals in Annawadi) to the Mumbai police Commissioner and Robert and his wife are eventually "charged under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act for failing to provide adequate food, water, and shelter to their four-legged charges."

Boo notes that with the promise of a conviction "the forces of justice" will have "finally come to Annawadi." 

But, it's just the horses whose death is avenged by the due process of the judiciary.

Karam, his son Abdul, and his daughter, Kehkanesha, long-time Muslim residents of Annawadi, on the other hand, suffer torture in police custody, endless extortion from both the police and petty local officials and pre-trial incarceration, on the basis of fake murder charges leveled at them by Fatima, the "one-legged" enigma and pariah of Annawadi.

Fatima had set herself on fire in a fit of extreme envy against her next-door Muslim neighbors. As Boo unfolds, she begrudged their relative affluence over time and wanted to ruin them. What better way than to set herself on fire and cry "murder?"

Fatima's trick goes overboard as nobody helps douse her third-degree burns and her stint in the local state (free) hospital worsens her condition.

She dies, but not before an official gets her to accuse the Karam's of having set her on fire. 

The family of Karam isn't affluent by any long shot; nobody in Annawadi is. But they are scavengers and had come into some money as a result of diligent scavenging on the part of Abdul of the right kind of trash--plastic and metal. In the market of global capitalism, the price of plastic and metal trash had soared.

The Fatima's next door, which is really the other side of a think wall separating one shanty from another, could not reap the harvest of this market. 

While swift justice befalls the dead horses, the lives of Annawadi's human denizens get emptied by the day of any hope for justice whether earthly or otherwise.

The dead and mutilated bodies of two of the scavenging children, Kalu and Sanjay, remain less than mere statistics, because the police don't keep records of the poor dead in the city of Mumbai. They are to be dispensed like trash.

What goes through the minds of the Annawadi boys like Abdul, upon seeing the spectacle of justice meted out to the horses of Annawadi is expressed in frilless prose by Boo:

They weren't thinking about the uninvestigated deaths of Kalu and Sanjay. Annawadi boys broadly accepted the basic truths: that in a modernizing, increasingly prosperous city, their lives were embarrassments best confined to small spaces, and their deaths would matter not at all. The boys were simply puzzled by the fuss, since they considered Robert's horses the luckiest and most lovingly tended creatures in the slum.

Yet, as Boo implies in her book, the Annawadians too can, if they wanted to, avenge the deaths and injustices that rain on them on a daily basis. Their particular enemy is the local police. The police of modern India isn't a state infrastructure that provides protection to all Indian citizens; it's a private army whose services have to be bought by those who can afford to. 

Boo's modern, or as she insists on the label "globalized," India, is a privatized nation much like modern-day Haiti is. The poor of Annawadi, like the poor of Haiti,can't buy the services of the police, the local government or the judiciary, but they can resist the tyranny of the system through unity.

The horses got justice because the activists persisted through unity. Disunity is the bane, one feels of Annawadians. In the "Author's Note" segment of the book, Boo ponders on why the slums of Annawadi-like places in India don't look the insurrectional video game Metal Slug 3 (there is a video parlor run by a Tamil man in Annawadi; the Annawadi boys play games like Metal Slug 3 regularly). Boo's answer is disunity and at the core of Behind the Beautiful Forevers is the telling of the story of this abysmal disunity.

Here is a sampling of that core:

At Annawadi, everyone had a wrong he wanted righted: the water shortage, brutal for three months now;the quashing of voter applications of the election office; the worthlessness of the government schools; the fly-by-night subcontractors who ran off with their laborer's pay. Abdul was one of the many residents who were angry at the police. Elaborate fantasies about blowing up the Sahar Police Station had become the secret comfort of his nighttimes. But the slumdwellers rarely got mad together [...] Instead powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another [...] In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife createst only the faintest ripples in the fabric of society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. 

I think Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a book on contemporary India, not simply a book on Indian poverty.

How to think Holmesian

Literature has always provided valuable fodder to the human sciences.

The basis of much of Sigmund Freud's theories of psychoanalysis was literary. According to the Freudian scheme of things humans are fundamentally ruled by animalistic sexual drive, and none emblematized this more forcefully than the Greek mythical figure of Oedipus.

If sons display an overt love for their mothers (and by default wish to be in their father's shoes, in a manner of speaking) then they are in the grip of an Oedipal complex.

In her new book that explores the intersection of literature and psychology, Maria Konnikova claims that if we are in the habit of stereotyping, seeking confirmation for our biases and are not prone to question our assumptions, then our brains are in the grip of a Watsonian complex, Watson being the famous sidekick of the legendary Victorian sleuth Sherlock Holmes.

What then are the evidences that our brains are on the side of Sherlock? When we don't just "see" but keenly "observe" as well. When we are attentive, mindful, self-questioning and rational.

According to Konnikova, our brains have both systems--System Holmes and System Watson and we spend most of our time running System Watson, so we jump to conclusions, travel along familiar cognitive paths and bungle when the chips are down.

But it is possible to train ourselves to run system Holmes by practicing the following on a daily basis:

Pay mindful attention, think twice, question your own assumptions, be methodical, and if you're stuck on a problem take time out to let it percolate through your unconscious while you go for a stroll / do some knitting / chase the cat round the house with a Nerf gun. Be aware, above all, of your own fallibility.

Come to think of this, actualizing the System Holmes part of our brains sounds like an uphill task, yet to the owner of that brain, it's "elementary".

Rise of global IQ

Despite the slide in the quality of cultural products overally--from Shakespeare to Fifty Shades of Grey--there has been a perceptible rise in human IQ according to James R. Flynn's book Are We Getting Smarter?

Here are some stats:

The average American I.Q. has been rising steadily by 3 points a decade. Spaniards gained 19 points over 28 years, and the Dutch 20 points over 30 years. Kenyan children gained nearly 1 point a year.

Some interesting observations:

The brains of the best and most experienced London taxi drivers have enlarged hippocampi, which is the brain area used for navigating three-dimensional space [...] modern life gives our brains greater exercise than when we were mostly living on isolated farms.

Different world of work

What did the American world of work look and sound like forty years ago?

Studs Terkel's book Working tells us all about it.

Terkel, a writer and a radio host, published Working, an oral history of American workers in 1974.

According to Forbes Magazine, Terkel's book is valuable as it archives a part of American history--a world of agricultural and industrial work--that already looks remote:

For better or worse, the world that Studs Terkel captured forty years ago in his brilliant oral history of American workers,Working, no longer exists. His compelling look at jobs and the people who do them now is a time capsule of the agricultural and industrial eras that preceded the Information Age.

 In Terkel’s world, work primarily was about making things and selling them, often disassociated from other interests, values or senses of pleasure. A single job was to be secured for most of one’s adult life, mainly to provide money to put food on the dinner table, albeit at a significant cost to the soul. At work, his interviewees recounted daily humiliations that they faced with supervisors, co-workers and customers. Their most frequent sense of satisfaction was that they made it through another day as one of “the walking wounded among a great many of us.” The delayed gratification of receiving a Social Security check led many to plod on until they no longer needed to bring in incomes at the level that their earlier years required.

The Western Canon, graphically

Graphic artists, Huxley King and Terrence Boyce have converted their still-graphic representation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, into an animated graphic.

King and Boyce are among many other gifted artists who have contributed to two volumes of The Graphic Canon, edited by Russ Kick.

The Graphic Canon is just what the title says it is: a collection of classics of Western literature in the form of images.

As reviewer Annie Weatherwax says, so many of us readers have often imagined how a Captain Ahab, in the throes of his monomaniacal pursuit of the whale, or a Hester Prynne, parading in broad view of a judging public with the letter "A" emblazoned across her chest, would look.

Now, the artists of The Graphic Canon have given form to these imagined figures.

A 21st century Kant

Lucy was Zany

Emmanuel Kant had two aesthetic categories: The sublime and the beautiful. But what are some of the new aesthetic categories of our times? Sianne Ngai identifies these to be "Zany", "Cute" and "Interesting" in his new book Our Aesthetic Categories.

The book is 

[...] About aesthetic judgments: an inquiry into the terms and origins of taste. How do we decide what we feel about the latest Chantal Akerman film or the fiction of Javier Marías, an Alexander McQueen ball-gown or an episode of Breaking Bad? How do we translate into language the sensations of pleasure and displeasure inspired by daily experience — and particularly our experience of art? What kind of conversation are we really having when we say “The Books make beautiful music!” or “The view out the window was picturesque?"

 Next time when I offer judgment on something I see, hear or smell, I'll be sure not to break out into a "That's profound/sublime!" mode.

However, the word "interesting" seems to have lost specificity in my eyes. I've often heard people judge something as "interesting" because they fear a judgmental void. "Interesting" is a placeholder for responses ranging from "vague", "boring" to "abstruse", and "stupid" among others.

Ngai is an English Professor at Stanford University; his book is aimed more at addressing certain anachronistic tendencies in the culture of academia. Professors and scholars continue to subscribe to the aesthetic categories devised by Kant during the time of European Enlightenment. Ngai thinks it's time the academic categories got a little infused by categories from popular culture.

Hapless jaws

Back in my undergraduate days, as a mini-Shakespeare buff, I used to carry a very negative image of dogs in my mind.

The Renaissance didn't think too highly of the dog: the same hypothetical dog that would be faithful to a noble person, would be faithful to an abominable villain. 

This meant that a canine has no ability to discern between good and evil, an unbearable lack that the Renaissance mind couldn't take kindly to. 

Today, the dog is a repository of many of the cherished human virtues like loyalty, bravery, etc. It's the shark that could be the 21st century's equivalent of the 16th century dog (though the dog was never considered vicious like the shark is).

As Theo Tait points out in his review of Demon Fish: Travels through the Hidden World of Sharks by Juliet Eilperin, the shark is a much-reviled animal because of "the creatures’ failure to behave in a sympathetic, anthropomorphically pleasing fashion." 

(Indeed, I recall a scene from Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking: Didion has a nightmare of her daughter being attacked by sharks. It foreshadows the ailing daughter's death).

Eilpern's book works to dispel the American myth of sharks as monstrous carnivores. It also tells us that the shark population is shrinking globally. 

The Chinese consumption of shark fin soup has gone up phenomenally, and unlike the cod, herring and the tuna, shark fisheries are of negligible economic value, so little effort is made to protect stocks.

Marilyn Monroe

A new biography of Marilyn Monroe is on the block: Lois Banner's The Passion and the Paradox.

A review of the book has three striking observations about Monroe:

1. There are multiple rumors of who Marilyn really was. I like this one best--she was both a dumb blonde and a bookworm who read Dostoyevsky.

2. Monroe justified promiscuity with the conviction that sex was "an act that brought friends closer together."

3. Marilyn had recurring visions of striding over a supine row of church congregants who peered up her skirt.